HVK Archives: Review of 'Why I Am Not A Muslim' (part III of VI)
Review of 'Why I Am Not A Muslim' (part III of VI) - The Salisbury Review
Antony Flew
()
1996 Spring
Title: Turning away from Mecca
Author: Antony Flew
Publication: The Salisbury Review
Date: Spring 1996
Review of 'Why I Am Not A Muslim' (part III of VI)
(Why I am not a Muslim, Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1995 $25.99.
(UK Agent, 10 Crescent View, Loughton, IG10 4PZ).)
(This review was published in The Salisbury Review, Spring 1996. The
quarterly is published from London)
This book was written by a man who was raised in a totally Muslim
environment in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. But he has since moved to
one of the NATO states which have since World War II been accepting mass
immigrations from such countries. Why I am not a Muslim is apparently the
first book of its kind to have appeared in the English language.
Ibn Warraq arranges his abundant materials on no obvious principles. He
begins with a chapter entitled 'The Rushdie Affair', which deals mainly
with the maltreatment of dissidents within the Islamic world and the
failure of so many Western Islamicists to adopt a properly critical
approach to their subject. This is followed by four chapters on 'The
Origins of Islam', 'The Problems of Sources', 'Muhammad and His Message'
and 'The Koran'. Then, when we might have expected to go on to the
development of the Hadith and the Sharia, we have instead two chapters on
'The Totalitarian Nature of Islam' and 'Is Islam Compatible With Democracy
and Human Rights?' After that we have seven chapters on such various
Islamic topics as 'Sufism or Islamic Mysticism' and 'Taboos: Wine, Pigs and
Homosexuality' before reaching a 'Final Assessment of Muhammad' and a final
chapter on 'Islam in the West'.
The pseudonymous author makes no pretensions to being himself a
professional Islamicist. But all his materials about the doctrines and
history of Islam are drawn from the works of Western scholars and so - as I
am assured by one of them - we can take the book to be factually reliable.
It does, therefore constitute an invaluable compilation. Unlike
professional Islamicists who are alive and working today, this author is
not afflicted with inhibitions from offending either Muslim friends or
Muslim regimes.
Although he does make the crucial point that all true Muslims are as such
fundamentalists, and that this term should not be applied only to the
Ayatollah Khomeini and his like (p. 11) he does not either make it
adequately or insist upon it consistently. The term 'fundamentalist',
which was coined in 1920, derives from the title of a series of tracts -
The Fundamentals published in the United States from 1910 to 1915. It has
since been implicitly defined as meaning a person who believes that, since
The Bible is the Word of God, every proposition in it must be true; a
belief which, notoriously, is taken to commit fundamentalist Christians to
defending the historicity of the accounts of the creation of the Universe
given in the first two chapters of Genesis.
On this understanding a fully believing Christian does not have to be
fundamentalist. Instead it is both necessary and sufficient to accept the
Apostles' and / or The Nicene Creed. In Islam, however, the situation is
altogether different. For, whereas only a very small proportion of all the
propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments are presented as
statements made directly by God in any of the three persons of the Trinity,
The Koran consists entirely and exclusively of what are alleged to be
revelations from Allah (God). Therefore, with regard to The Koran, all
Muslims must be as such fundamentalists; and anyone denying anything
asserted in The Koran ceases, ipso facto, to be properly accounted a
Muslim. Those whom the media call fundamentalists would therefore better be
described as revivalists.
This conceptual truth not only places a tight limitation upon the
possibilities of developmental change within Islam, as opposed to the tacit
or open abandonment of one or more of its original particular claims, but
also opens up the theoretical possibility of falsifying the Islamic system
as a whole by presenting some known fact which is inconsistent with a
Koranic assertion. Unfortunately Ibn Warraq fails to emphasize this point
and to bring out its implications consistently. Thus, even on the page
immediately following that on which he argues that all true Muslims must be
fundamentalists, he goes on to argue that, because "the vast majority of
victims of 'Holy Terror' are inhabitants of Islamic states, therefore
"Islam is a threat to thousands of Muslims " (p. 12: emphasis original).*
(* The reviewer has not presented Ibn Warraq correctly. The sentences he
quotes from p. 12 relate not to fundamentalism but to a book, The Islamic
Threat: Myth or Reality?, by the American Islamicist John Esposito. The
book, Ibn Warraq says, is "based on the same dishonesty as soft-core
pornography.. What Esposito and all Western apologists of Islam are
incapable of understanding is that Islam is a threat to thousands of
Muslims. As Amir Taheri puts it, 'the vast majority of victims of 'Holy
Terror' are Muslims'." Here the word 'Muslims' has a double meaning,
namely, that all believing Muslims being fundamentalists, they threaten
with death the Muslims who try to dissent. The implication is that if
believing, Muslims were not fundamentalists, many born Muslims may choose
to dissent.)
Why I am not a Muslim gives readers abundant excellent reasons for not
becoming or remaining Muslims and also makes a compelling case for the
conclusion that Islam is flatly incompatible with the establishment and
maintenance of the equal individual rights and liberties of a liberal,
democratic, secular state. It thus provides further support for Mervyn
Hiskett's more particular contentions about the threat to British
traditions and values arising from our rapidly growing Muslim minority.
To his suggestions as to how an administration with vision, backbone and
truly conservative principles might counter this threat - by, for instance,
insisting that the criminal law must be applied equally to all, including
Muslims and non-whites inciting to murder - we can now add another. For
this threat might be slightly reduced if some individual were to write a
much shorter, persuasive book deploying all the good reasons for not
becoming or remaining a Muslim.
Attempts to get the present book into public libraries would also be
worthwhile. They would force the opposition to choose between allowing it
to become more widely accessible and providing evidence of the reality of
the Islamic threat to freedom of expression.
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