The Trouble with Islam

The Trouble With Islam
Sadly, mainstream Muslim teaching accepts and promotes violence.

BY TAWFIK HAMID
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.

But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.

These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria--which happened in the last few decades--or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.

Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies.

Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today.

Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand--but so far haven't--that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."

All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us.

Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.

The Terror That is Islam

As observers of the contemporary world, we construct our own theories and reach tentative conclusions. This blog is a record of my observations and provisional conclusions, viewed through the prism of my biases. Some of these biases are cultural, others academic. My training is broadly in economics and I tend to see the world in terms of what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. I am also an Indian and culturally I am a Hindu/Buddhist.

I am not a card-carrying member of some organization which promotes free-market capitalism even though I am very deeply suspicious of any forms of socialism, and speak quite freely about the evils that communism has been responsible for. I am persuaded that markets work best in most cases and promote human welfare. I think that as an ideology, socialism is an unmitigated disaster. It is my provisional conclusion that much of what ails modern India is due to its socialistic policies. Unless and until that realization dawns on the Indian collective, I am afraid that India’s fortunes are likely to continue to be what they have been—miserable.

My conclusion about the evils of socialism and communism is based both on my theoretical understanding of the subject and on the empirical evidence that socialism leads to material and cultural poverty. I speak quite freely of my conviction and don’t feel threatened for doing so. I don’t get cautioned by well-meaning people saying that I should be careful about airing my views on communism. I mostly live in India and the US, both places where you have some degree of freedom of expression.

However, there is a subject that I touch upon from time to time and it worries many people. They write to tell me that I should not present my views on it because they are afraid that I may come to harm. It is the matter of another set of ideologies called monotheism. I think monotheism is an unmitigated disaster, and more specifically the most recent incarnation of the monotheist ideology called Islam is the most dangerous of the lot.

My position on the monotheistic ideologies arises from both theoretical and empirical grounds. Theologically monotheistic faiths are simplistic, bigoted, myopic, ignorant and at best childish. They are rigid, dogmatic, and intolerant of dissenting opinions. They are anti-humanistic and regressive. They have deep moral flaws and can be lend support to all manner of vicious actions – and they do. They have over the centuries motivated rape, murder, pillage and destruction on a global scale. This is a matter of record, not conjecture. I did not cook up the evidence. The history books are exhibit A. And for exhibit B, check out your daily newspaper. Not a day goes by when you don’t read about another bunch of innocents killed by people motivated by the ideology of monotheism.

The outcome of the conflict between the Greeks and the barbarians is the predictable destruction of the Greeks. That is the way the world works. Peaceful civilizations are by their very nature prey to violent movements. A thousand years of continuous rapacity by the Islamic invaders of India has had its toll. Very large segments of a formerly peaceful population has been converted to a violent ideology. The land itself was violently divided. The division was necessitated by the need to preserve the peace. It was just too bad for those non-Muslims who found themselves in predominantly Muslim areas. They continued to suffer and their numbers consistently saw a downward trend. Note the population trends of non-Muslim peoples in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Indian state of Kashmir. The non-Muslims have been hounded and reduced in just a matter of decades.

Huntington calls it a clash of civilizations. Perhaps he is being too generous. It is not a clash of civilizations. To my mind, there is nothing civilized about the Islamic ideology. It is, as I never tire of reminding everyone, not a civilized way of apprehending the world we live in. It is barbaric, regressive, bigoted, nasty, brutish, and ignorant. Why, some may ask, do I have to put in it such stark unyielding terms? Because I believe that we have a duty to speak out against oppression and barbarism. We cannot be free riders in this game. We are obliged to say it the way we see it. It would be great if I did not have to speak up but if sufficient people hope that others will say what they themselves are afraid to speak of, then we have a conspiracy of silence.

And silence is the greatest weapon that the Islamic ideology has. It has silenced enough people. Over the centuries of oppression, it has succeeded in silencing its critics by simply killing anyone who dares oppose it. A thousand years and they have successfully destroyed not just material objects, they have even destroyed the will in many people to resist. These non-Muslims who have been silenced into compliance are called dhimmis. The dhimmitude of Indians is disturbing, to put is most delicately.

[To be continued.]