HVK Archives: Review of 'Why I Am Not A Muslim' (part IV of VI)
Review of 'Why I Am Not A Muslim' (part IV of VI) - New Humanist
Ibn Al-Rawandi
()
Sun, 21 Sep 1997 10:56:10 +0500
Title: Islam is religious fascism
Author: Ibn Al-Rawandi
Publication: New Humanist
Date:
Review of 'Why I Am Not A Muslim' (part IV of VI)
(Why I am not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books, =A315 to RPA members).)
(* This review appeared in the NEW Humanist. The place and date of
publication is not mentioned on the photocopy received by us. Nor does the
photocopy give the full name or any other information about the reviewer.)
In one of his early works the traditionalist writer Frithjof Schuon makes
an acute observation about the mentality of Muslims: 'The intellectual -
and thereby the rational foundation of Islam results in the average Muslim
having a curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that
Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply
ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone
should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the
Muslim's power of imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his
mind with the irresistible logic of things.' (Stations of Wisdom) How true
this is will strike anyone who has tried to have a rational discussion on
religion with a Muslim born of Muslim parents and raised in a Muslim culture.
However, that this situation does admit exceptions is proved by the author
of the book under review. Ibn Warraq was born into a Muslim family and
grew up in a country that now describes itself as an Islamic republic. His
earliest memories are of his circumcision and first day at Quran school,
and his fan-lily still consider themselves Muslims. He, however, now
considers himself a secular humanist who believes that: 'all religions are
sick men's dreams, false - demonstrably false - and pernicious.'
Given such views, arrived at against such odds and expressed at such risk,
the pusillanimous attitude of many Western intellectuals to the Rushdie
affair is observed with scorn:
The most infuriating and nauseating aspect of the Rushdie affair was the
spate of articles and books written by Western apologists for Islam -
journalists, scholars, fellow travellers, converts (some from communism)
who claimed to be speaking for Muslims. This is surely condescension of
the worst kind, and it is untrue. Many courageous individuals from the
Muslims world supported and continue to support Rushdie.
For Ibn Warraq support for Rushdie has to be seen as part of a larger war
against the rise of 'fundamentalist' Islam:
For those who regret not being alive in the 1930s to be able to show their
commitment to a cause, there is, first, the Rushdie affair, and, second,
the war that is taking place in Algeria, the Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan, a war whose principal victims are Muslims, Muslim women, Muslim
intellectuals, writers, ordinary decent people. This book is my war effort.
Considering the number of Muslims now resident in Western countries this is
a war toward which no one, who values critical thought, free speech and
democracy, can afford to be indifferent.
This is not a matter of 'the demonisation of Islam', but of simply and
honestly looking facts in the face, something that Muslims and their
supporters are notoriously incapable of doing. It can be predicted now that
the main response of the Muslim community to this book will be to shout
'Apostate', accuse the author of every kind of moral degeneracy, and leave
the facts and arguments he adduces completely unaddressed.
Those facts and arguments concern the wholly human origin of the Quran, the
moral and intellectual inadequacies of Muhammad, the wholly tendentious and
invented character of the hadith, the sexually-obsessed and anti-feminine
nature of the sharia, the Arab empire spread by the sword and maintained by
terror, the persecution of religious and intellectual minorities in that
empire in the name of Islam, the incapacity of Muslims for any kind of
critical or self-critical thought, and the abject intellectual and moral
poverty of Islam vis-a-vis the modern secular West.
The amazing thing is that it has taken so long for such a book to appear
and that it has been left to a non-Westerner to write it, since the
material for its assembly has been around for anything up to a century.
The mealy-mouthed and apologetic character of so much Western scholarship
on Islam springs from the fact that many of these scholars were, and are,
believers, albeit in the rival creed of Christianity. While they might be
willing to show Muhammad in a poor light compared to Jesus, they were not
keen to press the non-historical and non-divine arguments too far, since
they realised that such arguments could just as well be used against their
own cherished beliefs. They preferred a complicity of intellectual
dishonesty with the Muslims in the face of an increasingly sceptical and
secular environment.
Perhaps the must important thing demonstrated by Ibn Warraq is that Islam
is fundamentalist by nature, and not by some peculiar and aberrant recent
development. All Muslims, not just the fanatics, believe that every word of
the Quran is quite literally the word of God, absolutely and unquestionably
true for all times, places, and people, and practically the same goes for
the hadith and the sharia. Anyone who wishes to argue that the fanatics'
interpretation of these elements is wrong and that a far more 'liberal'
interpretation can be made and that is the real Islam, have really only
their own tastes and inclinations to support them. There is no Pope in
Islam, nor any Councils with authority to impose a creed. The fanatic who
thinks that all unbelievers should be killed has just as much authority as
the Sufi who thinks that all religions are true and that even atheists go
to heaven. Both parties could adduce Quranic texts and hadith to support
their positions, and both would be drawing, in their own minds, upon the
immutable word of god. As Ibn Warraq observes: 'Even if we concede that
Muslim conservatives have interpreted the sharia in their own way, what
gives us the right to say that their interpretation is the inauthentic one
and that of the liberal Muslim's, authentic? Who is going to decide what
is authentic Islam?'
With regard to so-called liberal Islam this manifests in the West chiefly
in the form of 'Sufism or Islamic Mysticism', the title of Chapter 12.
Unfortunately, this is the shortest chapter in the book, a mere six pages,
and has the appearance of an afterthought, since Sufism is only really
dealt with in the first two pages and there inadequately. This is
unfortunate because Sufism has been taken up by many Western intellectuals
for whom real Islam is Sufism, and real Sufism is the Sufism of Ibn Arabi.
This is in fact a ludicrous position, since it amounts to saying that real
Islam is a minority view within a minority view, a view, moreover, that for
most of the history of Islam has been suspected of heresy. What is needed
with regard to Sufism is an in-depth critique of the metaphysics of Ibn
Arabi as expounded in the Works of such contemporary scholars as William
Chittick and Michel Chodkiewicz, together with a sociological survey of the
circus that surrounds such contemporary Sufis as Sheikh Nazim al-Qubrusi;
but that would amount to another book.
Another important achievement of Ibn Warraq is that he explodes the myth of
Islamic tolerance, a myth largely invented by Jews and Western freethinkers
as a stick with which to beat the Catholic Church. Islam was never a
religion of tolerance and it is not tolerant by nature. Despite the way the
apologists would like to depict it, Islam was spread by the sword and has
been maintained by the sword throughout its history, not to mention the
scourge and the cross. In truth it was the Arab empire that was spread by
the sword and it is as an Arab empire that Islam is maintained to this day
in the form of a religion largely invented to hold that empire together and
subdue native populations. An unmitigated cultural disaster parading as
God's will. Religious minorities were always second-class citizens in this
empire and were only tolerated on sufferance and in abject deference to
their Arab/Muslim masters; for polytheists and unbelievers there was no
tolerance at all, it was conversion or death.
These repulsive characteristics are written into the Quran, the hadith and
the sharia, and are an ineradicable feature of the religion. There is no
way that Islam can reform itself and the remain Islam, no way it can ever
be made compatible with pluralism, free speech, critical thought and
democracy. Anyone convinced they already possess the truth have no need
for such things. Although Muslims resident in non-Muslim countries clamour
for every kind of indulgence for their own beliefs and customs, there can
be no doubt that given any kind of power they would impose their own
beliefs and eliminate all difference. In short, as Ibn Warraq describes it
in his Dedication, Islam is religious fascism, and it is only a
feeble-minded political correctness that prevents it from being recognised
as such.
Finally, we should note two further important points made by Ibn Warraq.
First, that Islam never really encouraged science, if by science is meant
'disinterested enquiry'. What Islam always meant by 'knowledge' was
religious knowledge, anything else was deemed dangerous to the faith. All
the real science that occurred under Islam occurred despite the religions
not because of it. Second, how indebted the Muslim world has always been to
the West, not only to the Greeks in the beginning, but particularly in
modem times in knowledge of its own intellectual and cultural history.
These unpalatable, half realised home truths are manifest in the
contemporary Muslim world in the form of a massive resentment and
inferiority complex:
It is a depressing fact that during the Gulf War almost every single Muslim
and Arab intellectual sympathized with Saddam Hussein, because, we are told
'he stood up to the West'. In this explanation is summed up all the sense
of Islamic failure, and feelings of inferiority vis-a-vis the West. The
Muslim world must be in a dire way if it sees hope in a tyrant who has
murdered literally thousands of his own countrymen.
Indeed, and a Westerner can hardly imagine the courage it must take for Ibn
Warraq to say as much.
The problem with a book such as this is that is will most likely never
reach those most in need of it. That is to say young people in general and
young Muslims in particular, those whose minds have not already been closed
by fanaticism. How many libraries will stock it, or dare stock it if they
knew its contents? A hardback at over twenty pounds, published by an
American publisher, is not likely to find its way on to high-street book
shelves alongside all those uncritical, paperback apologies, for Islam that
seem to be appearing in ever increasing numbers. What is needed is more
books like Ibn Warraq's, published by British publishers, at reasonable
prices and with good distribution. But dare they do it?
A minor fault that could be corrected in future editions is that several
important books and authors mentioned in text and notes fail to appear in
the bibliography.
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