Author: Chris Mooney
Publication: The American Prospect
Date: December 17, 2001
URL: http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V12/22/mooney-c.html
When "Ibn Warraq," the pseudonymous
Muslim apostate, visited the United States after September 11, one of his
first stops was the White House. There, he enjoyed an hour-and-a-half lunch
with President Bush's chief economic speechwriter, David Frum. Though Warraq
confirms the meeting and has told supporters about it, Frum refuses to
discuss it "in any way," perhaps because it suggests that some in the administration
just don't buy the president's claim that Islam is a "peaceful" religion.
Warraq has made a name for himself (and lost the one he was born with)
by becoming Islam's most outspoken critic.
His controversial 1995 book Why
I Am Not a Muslim makes Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses look like bush-league
blasphemy. A dense treatise modeled after Bertrand Russell's famous 1927
essay "Why I Am Not a Christian," the work presents a strident historical,
moral, and philosophical indictment of Islam and advocates not just a firm
separation of mosque and state but outright atheism.
It's also enjoying a vibrant second
life. Since the World Trade Center massacre, Why I Am Not a Muslim has
shot onto Amazon.com's top-25 list of titles on Islam. Traditionally, U.S.
liberals have shown far more interest in creating secular societies, but
much of the interest in Warraq comes from the political right--from the
ideological allies of Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who recently
dubbed Islam a "very evil and wicked religion"; and from conservative,
pro-Israeli Jews like Frum and Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East
Forum, who wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard in 1996 calling Warraq's
book a "quite brilliant...indictment of one of the world's great religions."
WorldNetDaily.com--a Web site that
runs columns from Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan and articles with titles
such as "Jesus Says Pack Heat...The Bible and self-defense"--now sells
Why I Am Not a Muslim through its catalog. The irony of fundamentalist
Christians purchasing this atheistic tome is not lost on Warraq, who comments,
"The Christian right will find my book extremely embarrassing." Indeed,
he makes a similar point in the book:
An Algerian friend, a well-educated
Muslim...came across Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" while looking
through my books. He pounced on it with evident glee. As I learned later,
he apparently considered Russell's classic to be a great blow to Christianity;
at no time was my friend aware that Russell's arguments applied, mutatis
mutandis, to Islam.
In person, Ibn Warraq seems an unlikely
candidate to become Islam's Tom Paine. His previous occupations include
teaching primary school, working as a tour guide, and running a restaurant;
he freely confesses, "I really do not wish to spend my life being a professional
Islam basher." I first met Warraq two years ago in Amherst, New York, while
working for Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazines. (Although my
boss at the time, Paul Kurtz, separately runs Prometheus Books, Warraq's
publisher, I have never worked for Prometheus.) When I next saw him, again
in Amherst, last November, he was convening a meeting of anti-Muslim dissidents
from Iran, Bangladesh, and other Islamic countries. Many of the attendees
came across as starkly angry ("My target is to get rid of Islam," huffed
the Iranian-born activist Parvin Darabi) and more than a little paranoid
(the group held a long discussion on how to prevent Muslims from secretly
infiltrating their ranks). Warraq seemed by far the most moderate, courtly,
and conciliatory person present.
Admittedly, some dispute this description.
Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations says that he
has only skimmed Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim, but observes: "The fact
that his book is being promoted by hate-mongers is interesting." And it's
true that Warraq occasionally takes a taunting tone. But at more than 400
pages of mostly airless prose, Why I Am Not a Muslim is predominantly argument.
As for ad hominems, Warraq remarks at the book's outset that, following
the Rushdie affair, the Muslim world needs to learn to live with such unfettered
speech and asserts his "right to criticize everything and anything in Islam--even
to blaspheme, to make errors, to satirize, and mock."
Those in most Western countries
have the right to criticize their predominant religion (Christianity) in
a way that those in Muslim countries don't; this stems in part from the
tradition of religious dissent that ushered in the Protestant Reformation
and continues to inform Christian scholarly revision. Andrew Rippin, a
Koran specialist who is dean of the faculty of humanities at the University
of Victoria in Canada, says that "what some people call the Reformation
in Islam, the counterpart to the Christian Reformation--that hasn't occurred
yet." Warraq and his ilk hope that such a Reformation will draw fuel from
the work of Islamic revisionists (inspired by the British expert John Wansbrough),
who today find themselves in the delicate position of asserting that the
Koran--which Muslims claim to be the infallible word of God--is actually
a mishmash of oral traditions that evolved over several centuries.
Not all revisionists see themselves
as Warraq's allies. One scholar has called his book "religious polemic
masquerading as scholarship" and worried that it would "raise suspicions
among some Muslims that all revisionist scholarship is motivated by intolerance."
Yet Warraq's basic critique, which
finds something fundamentally (though perhaps not uniquely) intolerant
about doctrinal Islam--rendering it inimical to women's rights, freedom
of thought and expression, and other modern liberties--does not differ
so starkly from the views expressed by Bernard Lewis, the Princeton Islam
guru, in his now-canonical 1990 Atlantic Monthly essay "The Roots of Muslim
Rage." Traditional Muslims believe that their duty is to bring all unbelievers
to Islam, explains Lewis: "Islam was never prepared, either in theory or
in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and
practiced other forms of worship."
So why has Warraq been embraced
by the political right in this country rather than the civil-rights-conscious
left?
Warraq contends that because of
the work of Edward Said and other theorists, the American left has "been
scared of being called colonialists and imperialists" and so has adopted
a guilt-ridden shyness about Islam. Yet liberals in other Western countries
have been more open to his views: Warraq has recently contributed a commentary
to the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian; in October, Australia's
Radio National devoted an entire Religion Report program to interviewing
him. As one Islamic historian put it, "At least until September 11, the
place where it was the most difficult to criticize Islam was in America."
But if the American left is confused
or afraid, Christian conservatives are sowing a whirlwind by circulating
Warraq's atheist tract. WorldNetDaily.com's editor and CEO, Joseph Farah,
admits that when it comes to those Christians who buy Why I Am Not a Muslim
through his site, "I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are shocked."
The secularization and reformation of Islam, after all, will hardly yield
many Christian converts.
Religion thrives in the United States
largely because of church-state separation; Islam in particular has benefited
through this openness. Ibn Warraq's critique, says Rippin, leaves open
the door for a "modernist Muslim thought, the same as within Christianity."
Grappling with a book like Why I Am Not a Muslim may not only make Islam
more tolerant--it could make it stronger.