Author: Ibn Warraq
Publication: Aseemaa
Date: February 2002
Aldous Huxley once defined an intellectual
as someone who had found something in life more important than sex; a witty,
but inadequate definition, since it would make all impotent men and frigid
women intellectuals. A better definition would be a freethinker, not in
the narrow sense of someone who does not accept the dogmas of traditional
religion, but in the wider sense of someone who has the will to find out,
who exhibits rational doubt about prevailing intellectual fashions, and
who is unafraid to apply criicfal thought to any subject. If the intellectual
is really committed to the notion of truth and free inquiry, then he or
she cannot stop the inquiring mind at the gates of any religion - let alone
Islam. And yet, that is precisely what has happened with Islam, criticism
of which in our present intellectual climate is taboo.
The reason why many intellectuals
have continued to treat Islam as a taboo, subject are many and various,
including:
* Political correctness leading
to Islamic correctness
* The fear of playing into the hands
of racists or reactionaries to the detriment of the west's Muslim minorities;
* Commercial or economic motives;
* Feelings of post-colonial guilt
(where the entire planet's problems are attributed to the west's wicked
ways and intentions);
* Plain physical fear;
* And intellectual terrorism of
writers such as Edward Said.
Said not only taught an entire generation
of Arabs the wonderful art of self-pity (if only those wicked Zionists,
imperialists and colonialists would leave us alone, we would be great,
we would not have been humiliated, we would not be backward) but intimidated
western academics, and even weaker, invariably leftish intellectuals into
accepting that any criticism of Islam was to be dismissed as Orientalism
and hence invalid.
But the first duty of the intellectual
is to tell the truth. Truth is not much in fashion in this post modern
age when continental charlatans have injected Anglo-American intellectuals
with the thought that objective knowledge is not only undesirable but unobtainable.
I believe that to abandon the idea of truth not only leads to political
fascism, but stops dead all intellectual inquiry. To give up the notion
of truth means forsaking the goal of acquiring knowledge. But man, as Aristotle
put it, by nature strives to know. Truth, science, intellectual inquiry
and rationality are inextricably bond together. Relativism and its illegitimate
offspring, multiculturalism, are not conducive to the critical examination
of Islam.
Said wrote a polemical book, Orientalism
(1978), whose pernicious influence is still felt in all departments of
Islamic studies, where any critical discussion of Islam is ruled out a
priori. For Said, Orientalists are involved in an evil conspiracy to denigrate
Islam, to maintain its people in a state of permanent subjugation and are
a threat to Islam's future. These Orientalists are seeking knowledge of
Oriental peoples only in order to dominate them; most are in the service
of Imperialism.
Said's thesis was swallowed whole
by western intellectuals, since it accords well with the deep anti-westernism
of many of them. The anti-westernism resurfaces regularly in Said's prose,
as it did in his comments in the Guardian after September 11. The studied
moral evasiveness, callousness and plain nastiness of Said's article, with
its refusal to condemn outright the attacks on America or show any sympathy
for the victims or Americans, leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth of
anyone whose moral sensibilities have not been blunted by political and
Islamic correctness. In the face of all evidence, Said still argues that
it was US foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere that brought
these attacks.
The unfortunate result is that academics
can no longer do their work honestly. A scholar working on recently discovered
Koranic manuscripts showed some of his startling conclusions to a distinguished
colleague, a world expert on the Koran. The latter did not ask: "What is
the evidence, what are your arguments, is it true?" The colleague simply
warned him that his thesis was unacceptable because it would upset Muslims.
Very recently, professor Josef Van
Ess, a scholar whose works are essential to the study of Islamic theology,
cut short his research, fearing it would not meet the approval of Sunni
Islam. Gunter Luling was hounded out of the profession by German universities
because he proposed the radical thesis that at least a third of the Koran
was originally a pre-Islamic, Christian hymnody, and thus had nothing to
do with Mohammed. One German Arabist says academics are now wearing "a
turban spiritually in their mind", practicing "Islamic scholarship" rather
than scholarship on Islam. Where biblicial criticism has made important
advances since the 16th century, when Spinoza demonstrated that the Pentateuch
could not have been written by Moses, the Koran is virtually unknown as
a human document susceptible to analysis by the instruments and techniques
of biblical critics.
Western scholars need to defend
unflinchingly our right to examine Islam, to explain its rise and fall
by the normal mechanisms of human history, according to the objective standards
of historical methodology.
Democracy depends on freedom of
thought and free discussion. The notion of infallibility is profoundly
undemocratic and unscientific. It is perverse for the western media to
lament the lack of an Islamic reformation and wilfully ignore books such
as Anwar Sheikh's Islam - The Arab Imperialism, or my Why I am not a Muslim.
How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism?
The proposed new legislation by
the Labour Government to protect Muslims, while well intentioned is woefully
misguided. It will mean publishers will be even more reluctant to take
on works critical of Islam. If we stifle rational discussion of Islam,
what will emerge will be the very thing that political correctness and
the government seek to avoid: virulent, racist populism. If there are further
terrorist acts than irrational xenophobia will be the only means of expression
available. We also cannot allow Muslims subjectively to decide what constitutes
"incitement to religious hatred", since any legitimate criticism of Islam
will then be shouted down as religious hatred.
Only in a democracy where freedom
of inquiry is protested will science progress. Hastily conceived laws risk
smothering the golden thread of rationalism running through western civilisation.
