Islam and its Discontents

ISLAM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
by Ibn Warraq with Lynn Chu

To understand what happened to America on September 11, 2001, one must first understand Islam. Islamic fundamentalist ideology poses a long term threat for the Western democracies. This will become increasingly clear as the United States pursues its war against terror in the Middle East. Accurate information about Islamic theology and ideology is critical to America's quest. But unfortunately, the spate of books on Islam published for the U.S. market since the events of September 11 have been written, by and large, by Islamic apologists. In the words of one professor of Islamic History, they are "sugary nonsense," meant to exonerate Islamic theology from any responsibility for those events.

To pretend that Islam has nothing to do with September 11 is to willfully ignore the obvious and to forever misinterpret events. Without Islam, the long-term strategy and individual acts of violence by Usama bin Laden and his followers make little sense. The West cannot fail to understand that it is confronted with Islamic terrorism. It needs to take seriously the ideological component of Islamic theology. If it fails to do this, it will be condemned to repeat past mistakes and allow similar catastrophes to occur.

Temporizers argue that Islamic fundamentalism is the problem, not Islam itself. The latter, so the argument goes, is a great world religion of peace and tolerance, while the former is an aberration of the true Islam and confined to a few God-intoxicated fanatics.

Although there may well be moderate Muslims, Islam, as a world religion, a philosophy of life, and a political ideology, is not moderate. In fact, I believe that there is no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. At most there is a difference of degree, but not of kind. I sympathize with Western intellectuals and politicians reluctant to be seen as condemning all who were born into the Islamic faith. It is certainly true that many individuals raised in Islamic households today are predominantly secular in their outlooks, and are not avid practitioners of Islam. Western intellectuals and politicians have valid pragmatic concerns about not unduly alienating moderates, or insulting anyone's relatives. It is certainly politic not to tar everyone in a particular category with a broad brush.

Unfortunately, however, impoliteness to other cultures is such a powerful taboo in contemporary Western societies today, the result has been to suppress the truth about Islam.

No one wants to seem "prejudiced" against any religion—privileged in Western society—or "intolerant" of other cultures. The charge of "racism," no matter how irresponsibly bandied, is so radioactive today that intellectuals and politicians will do anything to avoid it. Yet Islam is, in fact, a dangerous ideology. The fact that it is also a religion, or a "culture," only makes it more dangerous, not less so. Islam cannot be viewed as simply another culture to be tolerated as one tolerates unusual prayer practices or different cuisine. Islam is an ideology that preaches a virulent and implacable hatred of the West. As such it will always breed anti-democratic rage and fanaticism.

With precise textual references and examples, I have shown in my books that all the tenets of so-called radical Islamic fundamentalism are directly derived from the Qu'ran, the Sunna, and the Hadith. This is not, as critics rush to say, a superficial word game played by taking passages from the Qu'ran out of context. Quite the contrary. Rather, the more deeply one studies Islamic history and theology, the more apparent the basic radicalism of Islam becomes. Islamic fundamentalism is not an outlying, oddball sect of Islam. Islamic fundamentalism's totalitarian construct comes directly out of the basic and defining texts of Islam. The Muslim jurists who have formulated this construct practice a mainstream form of their ancient theological craft. Western apologists, in a gesture of otherwise laudable politeness, like to say that questionable passages can also be found in the Bible and other Judeo-Christian texts. It would be nice if these passages were in fact comparable, and it would be nice if, as such intellectuals like to imply, the two religions had comparable histories of evolution, sectarian competition, and reform.

But Judeo-Christianity and Islam are not comparable, either textually, historically or theologically. Islam is a blueprint for repressive totalitarianism. Judaism and Christianity are not.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has undergone continuous dilution, reformation, modernization and change over the past several thousand years and is now fully compatible with Western principles of freedom and democracy. Islam has not. With far greater logic and scholarly coherence than the so-called moderate or liberal Muslims, the fundamentalists have made Islam the basis of a radical utopian ideology that aims to replace Capitalism and Democracy as the reigning world system.

Radical Islam's supporters are also quite savvy about using the impulses and taboo mindsets of today's Western civilized democracies, particularly their academic intellectuals, against the West—in particular the anti-American, anti-war, self-hating, anti-consumerist, anti-globalization impulses of the Left. Islamists consciously exploit these self-defeating impulses in the conduct of their war on the West. The Koran teaches them to use deceit, sophistry, and any other corrupt or murderous means to conduct jihad.

Another argument of an apologetic nature goes something like this: "Ah, but Islamic fundamentalism is like any other kind of fundamentalism, one must not demonise it. It is the result of political, and social grievances. It must be explained in terms of economics and not religion." This is demonstrably false. U.S. foreign policy, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and economic poverty are essentially irrelevant as causes or motives for September 11 or any other objectives of radical Islam.

There are enormous differences between radical Islam and any other kind of modern fundamentalism. It is true that Hindu, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalists have been responsible for acts of violence, but these have been confined to particular countries and regions. Islamic fundamentalism has global aspirations: the submission of the entire world to the all-embracing Sharia, Islamic Law, a fascist system of dictates designed to control every single act of all individuals. Nor do Hindus or Jews seek to convert the world to their religion. Christians do indulge in proselytism, but no longer use acts of violence or international terrorism to achieve their aims.

Only Islam treats non-believers as inferior beings who are expendable in the drive to world hegemony, as explicit Koranic dogma. Islam justifies any means to achieve the end of establishing an Islamic world.

Islamic fundamentalists recruit among Muslim populations, they appeal to Islamic religious symbols, and they motivate their recruits with Islamic doctrine derived from the Koran. Economic poverty alone cannot explain the phenomenon of Islamism. Poverty in Brazil or Mexico City has not resulted in Christian fundamentalist acts of international terror. Islamists are against Western materialism itself. For Islamists, the choice is clear: Islam or jahiliyya, a term which has been redefined to mean war against Europe and America, the modern industrialised societies in which man is under the dominion of man rather than Allah. They totally reject the system of values of the democratic West, which they feel is poisoning Islamic culture. This is not a question of economics. It is an entirely different world view and one which Islamists wish to impose on the whole world as a basic tenet of their religion. Sayyid Qutb, the very influential Egyptian Muslim thinker, said that "dominion should be reverted to Allah alone, namely to Islam, that holistic system He conferred upon men. An all-out offensive, a jihad, should be waged against modernity so that this moral rearmament could take place. The ultimate objective is to re-establish the Kingdom of Allah upon earth..." (E. Sivan, Radical Islam, New Haven, 1985, p. 25.)

If I am indeed right, that Islam itself is a large part of the problem, what are the consequences? What can be done? What needs to be done? By whom? Answering these questions straightforwardly are our only hope of beating Islamic terrorism in the long term. The situation is certainly more complex than a simple battle between good and evil. The solution is not to beat the hell out of all Arabs and Muslims, but neither is it to pretend that Islam had nothing to do with it. That would be to bury one's head in the Sands of Araby.

There is a strong taboo in the West on the free discussion of Islam. One of its causes can be traced directly to the pernicious influence of Edward Said and the Saidists. It is unfortunately necessary in this day and age to state one's personal credentials to examine Islam in a free and frank manner. As one born into the faith, I do have these credentials. The taboo infects even some of the works of two scholars whom I personally admire very much, Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes. In my opinion, their analyses are seriously flawed, since they miss the essential point that Islam itself is the problem, not economic poverty or U.S.foreign policy, and they decline to reply to or to neutralize the specious arguments often used by Muslims and their apologists to deflect any criticisms of Islam. The central doctrines of Islam led to the attacks of September 11 (Jihad), and today create and enforce the inhuman conditions that prevail in the Islamic world, which includes the maltreatment of women and non-Muslims. The only long term answer that will combat Islamic terrorism will be to bring about an Islamic Reformation.

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Robert Irwin once observed in the Times Literary Supplement, upon hearing that twenty-five publishing houses had refused to take David Caute's novel because it might offend Muslims and hence put their staff in danger, that one did not have need of ayatollahs in the West since cowardly publishers were doing their jobs for them. The Salman Rushdie Affair should have alerted western intellectuals that there was something amiss, when publishers could no longer criticise Islam without fear of physical reprisals. Why have so many intellectuals failed to respond to this threat to their freedom of expression: political correctness leading to Islamically correct behaviour, unwillingness to criticise non-western cultures, the fear of playing into the hands of the racists, etc.?

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Edward Said in my view is the Godfather of a Third World intellectual mafia. This mafia practices intellectual terrorism, and it is one of the reasons that western intellectuals, particularly academic Islamologists, are reluctant to criticise Islam. Said has had a deeply pernicious influence on the study of Islam in the West. Not only did he teach an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity ("O, it is the fault of the wicked Western-Zionist conspiracy...") but he managed to convince prominent Western intellectuals that any criticism of Islam must be invalid if it comes from a Westerner, to be dismissed as "Orientalism." Edward Said's role, and the role of Saidists (the groupies and sycophantic followers of Said who swallow everything from his oracle whole) in Islamic Studies departments in Western universities has been pervasive, aping as it has the fashionable sub-Marxism of the academic world that arose in the 1970's and gained various foothold in the new "disciplines" that received funding as such at that time. Said and the Saidists have given encouragement and an air of prestige to Islamic fundamentalists. One hopes it was only inadvertent.

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Bernard Lewis is one of the most respected Islamologists in the West, and his recent book "What Went Wrong" was a best-seller. And yet Lewis's desire to appear to be objective and fair towards Islam leads him to contradict himself often. Lewis is frustrating, if endlessly elegant in his oblique politeness, for his refusal to draw conclusions from his own arguments about Islam. I believe that this seriously vitiates his analysis. Daniel Pipes wants to say that it is not Islam itself that is the problem, but some versions of it. In diagnosing 'what went wrong' to lead to the al Qaeda declaration of war on the United States, I believe that this too is misplaced politeness. Both these eminent writers do get it right to point out that poverty, U.S. foreign policy, and the Israel-Palestine question do not explain the events of September 11.

The evidence does not bear out the conventional wisdom that militant Islam is born out of economic depair. The Egyptian social scientist Saad Eddin Ibrahim interviewed Islamists in Egyptian jails and discovered, to his surprise, that the typical member is "young (early twenties), of rural or small-town background, from the middle or lower middle class, with high achievement and motivation, upwardly mobile, with science or engineering education, and from a normally cohesive family." This conclusion has recently been confirmed by a NYPD study profiling likely Islamic terrorists, conducted over the last several years. Young men attracted to jihad were in Ibrahim's study, "significantly above the average in their generation," "ideal or model young Egyptians." In a later study, Ibrahim found that out of 34 members of the violent group At-Takfir w'al-Hijra, fully 21 had fathers in the civil service, nearly all of them middle-ranking. More recently, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service found that the leadership of the militant Islamic group Al-Jihad "is largely university educated with middle-class backgrounds." Typical Islamists are the children of privilege, not poverty or despair. (Daniel Pipes, National Interest. Winter 2002)

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Muslims like to counter any criticisms of Islam with three diversionary tactics enabling them to evade rather than address questions about Islamic dogma. The first tactic is to ask if the critic has read the Koran in the original Arabic, as though all difficulties will vanish once the reader has mastered the holy language and has direct experience, aural and visual, of the words of God, to which no translation can do justice. A knowledge of Classical Arabic is not enough to dispel the obscurities of this most gnomic, elusive and allusive of texts that we call the Koran. Furthermore, all Muslims are not Arabs or Arabic speakers. Even the average educated Arab needs some sort of translation to understand the Koran.

The other tactic is to ignore the textual evidence, and cry, "you have quoted out of context." On the contrary, in all such arguments, it is the Muslims who use citations deceptively and out of context. My studies show me that reading a quote from Islamic texts in its fuller context invariably only reinforces the point being made about Islam's barbarism. For example, the Koran on women, or punishment, or holy war against Jews, Christians or pagans is dogmatically specific and repetitive.

The third tactic is to refuse to listen to any unpleasant quotes from the Koran or about Islam in general, and reply "the Bible is just as bad. What about the Christians during the Crusades?" This is an obvious way to deflect criticisms rather than to answer them, by trying to change the subject.

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It is common nowadays for the apologists of Islam, whether Muslims or their Western admirers, to interpret "Jihad" in the non-military sense of "moral struggle," or "moral striving." But it is quite illegitimate to pretend that the Koran and the books on Islamic Law were talking about "moral crusades." Rather as Rudolf Peters says in his definitive study of Jihad, "In the books on Islamic Law, the word means armed struggle against the unbelievers, which is also a common meaning in the Koran." (R.Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, A Reader. Princeton, 1996, p.1) Apologists of Islam, even when they do admit that these are real battles, incessantly pretend that the doctrine of Jihad only talks of "defensive measures." They try to assert or imply that fighting is only allowed to defend Muslims, and that offensive wars are illegitimate. But this is not the classical doctrine in Islam. The Sword Verses in the Koran have always been interpreted as unconditional commands to fight unbelievers, and these verses abrogated all previous verses concerning intercourse with non-Muslims.

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Every time the Sharia (Islamic Law) has been applied in modern times, as for instance in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the human rights of two groups of people has worsened: non-Muslims, and women. The low status and subhuman treatment of women in Islamic countries stems directly from the principles enshrined in the Sharia, which in turn are derived from the Koran, Sunna ( the sayings and acts of the Prophet ) and the Hadith ( the Islamic traditions). The low status of non-Muslims in Islamic countries is sanctioned by Islamic Law. A non-infidel is destined to live out his or her life as a second-class citizen, subject to a special poll-tax, and subject to frequent physical violence, including wholesale massacres. Bat Ye'or has devoted nearly thirty years of her life documenting the appalling treatment of Dhimmis (non-Muslims) under Islam. The Muslim doctrine of dhimmis is of special relevance to the lot of Christians and Jews in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, and has indelibly influenced Muslim attitudes to Israel.

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The only long term solution to Islamic terrorism is to have an Islamic reformation. How can this be brought about? Is it realistic to expect such a reformation in the Islamic world? How can we in the West help?

First, what is a reformation? The U.N. convention, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 enunciates the basic principles of human rights that the world, through the U.N., has adopted as universal international law. This international law is meant to transcend any and all particular cultures or religions. Where this universal law of human rights is breached, international law is supposed to prevail.

Separation of church and state does not imply that religions are free within their realms to violate universal human rights. Islamic states ultimately must accept the basic principle of separation of mosque and state, and implement observance of UDHR principles. They must abandon their tyrannies and establish representative democracies that will defend non-Muslims and respect religious pluralism. Their leaders will have to accept responsibility for all their citizens regardless of religion or gender. In short, they will need to secularize and to encourage critical thought rather than slavish repetition of the Koran. To do so they might study how and why religious reformation and secularization took place in the West. Islam desperately needs to open itself up to criticism, to close its madrassas in favor of secular schools. The democracies of the West need to do everything they can to encourage this turn of events.

There are reasons to believe this kind of reform is entirely possible in Islamic countries. Nowhere in the world do people enjoy living under the grinding tyranny that Sharia Law invariably brings. Thus, the West has reasons for optimism about the possibilities for this kind of massive cultural change.

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The West needs to encourage the development of secular democracies, not tyrannies, in Islamic nations. Multiculturalists need to stop being intimidated by their desire to honor and tolerate Islam and Sharia dogma called upon to exempt those tyrannies from observance of basic principles of human rights. Islamic practices that are not compatible with human rights and democracy and which simply cannot be tolerated in the modern world are, for example, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honour killings.

While Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes are admirable scholars, but can be criticized for excessive politesse, I do not respect the scholarship of the majority such as Karen Armstrong and John Esposito. They are, in my view, apologists of Islam whose sole intention seems to be to whitewash Islam and make excuses for Islamic fundamentalists.

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Ibn Warraq is the author or editor of five well-received books on Islam: Why I Am Not A Muslim (Prometheus Books, 1995); The Origins of the Koran, (Prometheus Books, 1998); The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, (Prometheus Books, 2000); What the Koran Really Says (Prometheus Books, 2002); Leaving Islam (Prometheus Books, 2003). Of particular note are commendations by Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, who called Why I Am Not a Muslim, "an important work," and Daniel Pipes, who said it was, "A well-researched and quite brilliant ... indictment of one of the world's great religions," as well as " [a] serious and thought-provoking book. " Why I Am Not A Muslim has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Telegu, and Persian.

Warraq grew up in a Muslim family in a country that now describes itself as an Islamic Republic, and some of his earliest memories are of his attendance at a Koranic school. His close family members remain practicing Muslims and are unaware of his apostasy and denunciation of Islam. His life has been repeatedly threatened and he has had to live under cover and write under a pseudonym in order to protect himself and his family from harm. Islamic terrorism has put all Muslim writers in fear as they are routinely murdered (Farag Foda in Egypt), attacked (Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt) or forced to hide in exile (Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Abu Nasr Zayd).

Warraq studied Arabic and Persian in the 1960s in England under the tutelege of distinguished Islamologists. The Rushdie Affair and the simultaneous rise of militant and political Islam awakened him to the fact that the freedoms so recently hard won by secularized Muslims, who had benefitted greatly from Western influence and education, were in grave danger from the intolerant creed of Islam. He saw that no one in the West seemed to have the courage or the authority to criticise it.

As an ex-Muslim, he felt it to be his moral and intellectual duty as a citizen to expose the theological and doctrinal roots of Islamic violence and intolerance from Algeria to Afghanistan. Why I Am Not A Muslim (Prometheus Books, 1995) is an unflinching scrutiny of every tenet of Islam. His next three books gathered important and generally inaccessible studies from academic journals little known even to scholars, and translated them into English for the first time. Warraq brings to Islam the same level of objective scrutiny—which he is proud to have learned at Western universities—that Christianity and Judaism have undergone over the last 250 years. Unbound by political correctness or academic politics, Warraq has never been afraid to criticise other scholars whom he feels compromise principles of sound historical methodology in deference to political imperatives.