Author:
Publication: National Review Online
Date: September 23, 2002
URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher092302.asp
Most Americans have a benignly positive
attitude toward religion, one that holds faith to be a good thing
for the commonweal, regardless of sectarian particulars. Norman Rockwell's
famous "Freedom of Worship" painting captures this nicely, while Eisenhower's
remark - "I believe every American should have a religious faith, and I
don't care what it is" - does so a little more clumsily. That tolerant,
pro-religion view has served America well over time, but one cannot help
wondering if our civic piety, allied with political correctness, is blinding
us to some hard questions about Islam - questions upon which the survival
of our civilization depends.
I don't know many non-Muslims who
believe President Bush's politically necessary but theologically nonsensical
proclamation that, "Islam means peace." But there are many more who take
comfort in the belief that the threat to America comes not from Islam itself,
but from an extremist form of the religion espoused by terrorists and their
small but vocal band of supporters. That's certainly the line taken by
the mainstream media, who seem so afraid of sparking American bigotry against
Muslim citizens that they have largely resisted critical analysis of Islamic
writings, practice, and history.
What if they are wrong? What if
the threat is not extremist Islam, but Islam itself? That's the view set
out by author Robert Spencer in his new book, Islam Unveiled, a relatively
short, plainspoken analysis of the Islamic faith and the challenge it poses
to pluralist democracy. Warns Spencer, "The culture of tolerance threatens
to render the West incapable of drawing reasonable distinctions. The general
reluctance to criticize any non-Christian religion and the almost universal
public ignorance about Islam make for a lethal mix."
This is a deeply unsettling little
volume, because it offers scant hope that the West can live at peace with
Islam unless the religion changes radically, and even less hope that that
is possible. Still, the questions Islam Unveiled poses and the answers
it provides are hard to dismiss, and given the urgency of the times, necessary
to ask. As Spencer writes, "This is not in order to incite thugs to attack
Muslims on the street, but to look squarely at what the West is up against."
If Spencer is right, the West faces
a primitive, violent, and fiercely chauvinistic religion whose followers,
to the extent that they are pious adherents to its teachings, cannot be
reasoned with, only resisted. Islam is at its core inimical to democracy
and human rights as we in the West understand them. To expect Muslims to
drop their belligerence toward the West, which has existed since Islam's
founding in the 7th century, is to expect them to jettison core values
of their faith - something for which there is no precedent in Islamic history.
The Koran, writes Spencer, is more
central to the Islamic faith than the Bible is to Christianity. Muslims
believe it was revealed directly from God to the Prophet Muhammad. A pious
Muslim may consult an imam or spiritual leader for guidance, but he will
also read the Koran himself. He will find there many divine instructions
to make constant war on the infidel, who is only to be given the choice
of conversion, slave-like subjugation (in historian Bat Yeor's word, dhimmitude)
- or death. And throughout Islamic history, that's exactly how Muslim societies
have behaved toward non-Muslims, who are by the very fact of their unbelief
not considered innocents in the eternal, divinely mandated conflict.
Undeniably, Christians have in the
past committed many despicable acts in the name of God, but they did so
in violation of scriptural teaching, not in fulfillment of it, as in Islam.
Though the Bible testifies to violence committed at the command of God,
and they the few if any Christians or Jews today believe that this is how
God expects man to live today. "Islam, by contrast, generally rejects the
idea of a historical progression in revelation, and allows little latitude
for allegorical interpretation of the martial verses in the Qu'ran," Spencer
writes. "A book [that claims] literal perfection tends to resist any interpretation
that diminishes the literal truthfulness of any of its statements."
This literalism has profound consequences
for the way Muslims live. Unlike in Christianity, there is no scriptural
mandate for separation of church and state in Islam, making secular democracy
an alien and hostile concept. Women have few rights over and against their
husbands, who may legally beat them, and men in general. (Spencer, quoting
from Islamic sources, demonstrates that Muhammad, considered the ideal
man for all time, treated women cruelly by contemporary Western standards.)
Enslaving infidels and raping infidel women are justified under Koranic
law (and still occur in some Muslim lands). Grotesque punishments for crimes
- beheadings and the like - are not medieval holdovers, writes Spencer;
"On the contrary, they will forever be part of authentic Islam as long
as the Qur'an is revered as the perfect Word of Allah."
Spencer does not believe that Islam
can be tamed. While Muslims in the West live in peace, prosperity and religious
liberty, Christians and other non- Muslims are persecuted, sometimes unto
death, throughout the Muslim world today. Turkey is the only Muslim country
that could be called democratic, and that's a stretch; its example shows
that secularist values can only be imposed on Islamic societies by force,
and will therefore remain tenuous. Because Islam demands death for heretics,
moderate Muslims will always risk their lives by offering more liberal
interpretations of their faith.
And most crucially, in his view,
Islam cannot be other than a religion of violence. "Of course, most Muslims
will never be terrorists. The problem is that for all its schisms, sects,
and multiplicity of voices, Islam's violent elements are rooted in its
central texts," Spencer writes. His final verdict on Islam is sobering,
particularly when one considers the rapidly increasing Islamic presence
in Europe, the cradle of Western civilization: "It would be too pessimistic
to say that there are no peaceful strains of Islam, but it would be imprudent
to ignore the fact that deeply imbedded in the central documents of the
religion is an all-encompassing vision of a theocratic state that is fundamentally
different from and opposed to the post-Enlightenment Christian values of
the West."
To be sure, Spencer's despairing
view is not shared by many scholars, even one as reliably critical of radical
Islam as Daniel Pipes. In his recent Militant Islam Reaches America, Pipes
emphatically denies that radical Islam is the same thing as traditional
Islam. He insists that drawing the distinction and encouraging moderates
within Islamic societies is an imperative for the West, though he offers
scant evidence for this conclusion. And he admits that Muslim moderates
are "weak, divided, intimidated and generally ineffectual. Indeed, the
prospects for Muslim revitalization have rarely looked dimmer than at this
moment... ." One gets the feeling that Pipes would rather light a candle
for the unlikely hope of a peaceful revolution within Islam, not because
the alternative - one-sixth of humanity, many of whom are already living
among us, as implacable enemy of the West - is unrealistic, but because
it is unthinkable.
"Nowadays, nothing seems less tolerated
than what people call pessimism - and which is often in fact just realism,"
says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Is Islam Unveiled pessimism, or realism?
We can only know for sure if we have a serious public discussion of the
issues Spencer raises in this important (but unsatisfyingly brief) book
- issues that stand to be ignored by the media, for fear of trading in
anti-Muslim bigotry. If Islam Unveiled, which is published by Encounter
Books, Peter Collier's imprint, becomes the bestseller it deserves to be,
it will be through talk radio and word of mouth by Americans who believe
that post-9/11, America cannot afford the moral disarmament of indulging
in multicultural platitudes.
Spencer may be wrong - I doubt it,
but I'd like to hear a convincing refutation of his arguments - but he
is asking questions that few others have the courage to. And until we hear
from this supposed vast silent majority of peace-loving Muslims, the answers
Spencer gives go a long way to explain the hatred, violence, backwardness,
and fanaticism endemic to the Islamic world.
(Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions
About the World's Fastest Growing Faith by Robert Spencer (Encounter,
$24.95) 170 pages.)
