Islam's War Against the West: Can It Abide a Secular State?
by Anthony Flew
In his letter inviting me to contribute to this issue of FREE
INQUIRY, the editor referred to "the thesis expressed by Paul Kurtz, Ibn
Warraq, and others "that the terrorist attacks on New York City and
Washington, D.C., 'were profoundly religious acts'"; it went on to say
that I had "made predictions about the likelihood of religious terrorism
that have proven horribly correct". Indeed I had (1). But why does
anyone pretend that these were not profoundly religious acts when
Usama Bin Laden himself insists that they were? (2)
With the general public the main reason for this pretense is
presumably a nearly if not quite total ignorance of Islamic teachings.
But any responsible politician in any of those Christian or post-Christian
countries that since World War II have been subjected to substantial
immigrations from Muslims must, whatever the extent of their knowledge
of the teachings of Islam, feel a heavy duty to do all they can to spread
the conviction - at least among the members and descendants of those
immigrants - that Usama bin Laden's terrorist war against the United
States and its allies is radically incompatible with the actual teachings
of the Prophet Muhammad.
But FREE INQUIRY is not a political journal. Our concern here
is, therefore, solely with the truth. And the truth is that whereas
Christianity, for the first three centuries of its remarkable expansion in
the face of successive persecutions, made all its converts by peaceful
individual persuasion, Islam already during the later years of the
prophet's own lifetime - from the time of the move from Mecca to
Medina - was gaining most of its converts in consequence of military
victories (3). And after his death Islam soon showed itself to be - in
post-Marxian terms - the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab
imperialism. This beginning has had, as we shall see, lasting
consequences for the relations between Islam and all other religions.
When in 1920 Bertrand Russell visited the USSR - decades
before the Politburo found it convenient to present itself as the protector
of the Arabs - he discerned similarities between Bolshevism and Islam:
"Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the french Revolution with
thise of the rise of Islam"(4); and "Marx has taught that Communism is
fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not
unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet"(5). So Russell
himself concluded: "Mahommedanism and Bolshevism are practical,
social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world. What
Mahommedanism did for the Arabs, BVolshevism may do for the
Russians"(6).
As a clear, commendably honest, and altogether authoritative
epitome of the totalitarian character of Islam, consider this manifesto
issued in Leicester, England, on behalf of the Islamic Council of
Europe:
"The religion of Islam embodies the final and most complete
word of God...Departmentalization of life into different atertight
compartments, religious and secular, sacred and profane, spiritual and
material is ruled out...Islam is not a religion in the Western
understanding of the word. It is a faith and a way of life, a religion and a
social order, a doctrine and a code of conduct, a set of values and
principles, and a social movement to realize them in history." [emphasis
supplied]
In this we have a statement that satisfactorily transcends all
differences within and between various Muslim communities, such as
those between Sunni and Shi'a, or between the so-called
fundamentalists and their opponents. The term fundamentalist is
anyway in the present case peculiarly inappropriate. It is derived from
the title of a series of tracts - The Fundamentals - published in the
United States in 1909; and it is defined as the belief that the Bible, as
the Word of God, is wholly, literally, and infallibly true - a belief that,
notoriously, commits fundamentalist Christians to defending the
historicity of the accounts of Creation given in the first two chapters of
Genesis. To rate as truly a Christian it is by no means necessary to be
in this understanding fundamentalist. It is instead fully sufficient to
accept the Apostles' and/or the Nicene Creed wholeheartedly. But in
order to be properly accounted a Muslim it is essential to be a
fundamentalist with regard to (not the Bible but) the Qu'ran.
It was his recognition of the truth of those last two heavily
emphasized sentences of that statement made on behalf of the Islamic
Concil of Europe that provoked the conservative prime minister of Italy,
Silvio Berlusconi, in the last week of September 2001, boldly to insist
that "We must be aware of the superiority of pur civilization, a system
that has guaranteed the well-being, respect for human rights and - in
contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political
rights."
Just as son as they learned that Berlusconi had uttered these
words, a bevy of European politicians rushed forward to denounce him.
The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said, "I can hardly believe
that the Italian prime minister made such statements." The spokesman
for the European Commission, Jean-Christophe Filori, added: "We
certainly do not share the views expressed by Signor Berlusconi."
Italy's center-left opposition spokesman Giovanni Berlinguer called the
words of Berlusconi "eccentric and dangerous". Within days he was
effectively forced to withdraw those politically most incorrect words.
ISLAM AND THE STATE
One especially good way of revealing the practical
consequences of Islam's not being "a religion in the Western
understanding of the word" but being instead "a religion and a social
order, a doctrine and...a set of values and principles and a social
movement to realize them in history" is by considering the history of the
creation of Pakistan (7).
When in India during the 1920's M. A. Ansari was promoting the
Nationalist Muslim Party, he did this in the belief that a future whole-
continent state of independent India could be religiously neutral, to the
extent of accommodating both Hndus and Muslims as equal citizens.
But his party failed to win substantial Muslim support. Instead there
was among Muslims in India throughout that decade a general retreat
from the original idea of all-Indian nationalism towards the eventually
realized ideal of the two separate communities of Hindus and Muslims
forming two separate independent states.
The Muslims in fact opted decisively for an exclusively religious
rather than a secular pluralist identity. It proved impossible for Ansari
or anyone else to overcome this Islamic predisposition and to persuade
the majority of Indian Muslims to be willing to coexist with Indian Hindus
in the secular nation state envisaged by Nehru, the leader of the Indian
National Congress. Nehru had declared: "There shall be no state
religion...nor shall the state either directly or indirectly endow any
religion..."
As early as April 1929 the Muslim League founder Muhhamad
Ali Jinnah (8) had opposed that ideal with his Fourteen Points. In these
he had insisted that state neutrality was not enough and that it was
state support that Muslims demanded. This Muslim position had
already been foreshadowed as early as 1870, when varoius imams in
Northern india issued a famous fatwa to the effect that India was Dar-al-
Islam - "Islamic Territory" - in virtue of the positive protection given to
Islamic observance by the laws of the (British) Indian Empire.
When in 1906 the newly elected (classically) Liberal
administration in London took some very small and tentative initial steps
toward the ultimate establishment of an independent, democratically
self-governing nation state in India, it began to discover what it was
extremely reluctant to learn, that a secular, pluralist state grounded in
universal adult suffrage was unacceptable to Muslims.
It was and is unacceptable because it is, apparently, contrary to
the Islamic dhimma (9). Thius excluded all non-Muslims other than
"People of the Book" from any political rights whatever. "People of the
Book" - mainly if not solely Christians and jews - are tolerated as
tribute-paying citizens of an Islamic state, though without any form of
franchise beyond their own religious community.
In the Indian case, the subsequent course of events is fairly
well known. Muslims, having rejected the all-Indian nationalism
espoused by Ansari, were unable to reconcile themselves to the
prospect of citizenship in a secular, pluralist state. In 1940 the Muslim
League, unwilling to tolerate the consequences of the wider franchise
that this required, demanded and was given what amounted to a
constitutional veto. The eventual independence agreement in 1947
resulted, after a huge amount of inter-communal slaughter (10), in the
separation from India of the principal overwhelmingly Muslim areas
other than Kashmir, and the consequent emergence of East and West
Pakistan. Kashmir was retained by India because its hereditary ruler
was a Hindu and Nehru himself was a Kashmiri Brahmin. As for east
Pakistan, it eventually became Bangladesh.
Since then, whereas India has achieved an unblemished record
of democratic self-government, becoming by far the most populous
democracy in the world (11), Pakistan and the two other provinces of
the former British Empire in which Muslims formed a very substantial
majority have not. About Pakistan no more need be said here than that,
at the time of writing, a Pakistani academic was under prosecution for
the capital offence of defection from Islam.
The first communal catastrophe in Nigeria after its
independence was a civil war in which the Muslim and animist majority
suppressed an independence revolt by the Christian Ibo. In the
suppression of this revolt at least a million Ibo lost their lives. When
later, in 1973, a military coup overthrew an administration that was said
to have been outstandingly corrupt even by Nigerian standards, but
which had been elected on an adult franchise that included Christians
and animists as well as Muslims, students at Beyero, Kano and other
universities in the overwhelmingly Muslim part of the country paraded
carrying banners which proclaimed in Hausa, Arabic, and English:
"Democracy is unbelief: We do not want a constitution, We want
government by Qu'ran alone."
The second of those "two other provinces of the former british
Empire in which Muslims formed a very substantial majority" was what
in the days of that Empire was called the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. This
has become by far the worst case of all. For, over many years, forces
of different kinds from the overwhelmingly Muslim north have been
striving by different methods and with different degrees of intensity to
subjugate the equally overwhelmingly Christian and animist south.
Most recently and most scandalously, the northern authorities have
been permitting if not positively encouraging brown-skinned Muslims
from the north to enslave blacks, and particularly Christian Blacks in the
south (12).
TRANSFORMING SOCIETIES - AND THE WORLD
It has long been obvious that the same Islamic predispositions -
an inability to come to terms with state secularism, religious pluralism,
and universal adult suffrage, of which the mirror image is a visceral
longing for the hermetic and exsclusive theocracy of traditional Islam -
has been forming the attitudes of the Muslim immigrant population of
Western Europe, especially Britain, in much the same measure as they
have those of Muslims elsewhere, confronted with democratic pluralism.
A general statement of the Muslim position will be found in Sheikh
Shabbir Akhtar's Be Careful with Muhammed: the Salman Rushdie
Affair (13). This is far more than just a defense of the Muslim stand in
that affair. despite the author's protestations to the contrary, it is
difficult to see it as other than an implicit justification of the Muslims'
right to set up an Islamic theocracy in Britain as being what he
considers to be the only solution to the problem of the Muslim theocrat's
irreconcilable confrontation with secularism. He says:
"Yet one needs to rise above one's ethnocentricity to see what
cultural memories the democracy evokes in the Muslim mind. For
theocracy is as precious to Muslims as democracy is to Westerners..."
I myself have no difficulty at all in understanding "what cultural
memories theocracy evokes in the muslim mind." But, as usual refusing
to heed calls for political correctness, I insist on saying that I have
myself no sympathy whatsoever for the egregious arrogance of this
demand from recent immigrants into my native land. If they truly find
life in a secular state intolerable, why do they not now return to the
Islamic states from which they came rather than demanding that the
host country make radical constitutional changes to accommodate
them?
It is characteristic of a secular, pluralist democracy that all
religious beliefs are tolerated as long as they remain, within reason,
within the limits of personal belief and do not impinge unduly upon
those who do not share those beliefs. Or, to put it another way, while
religious beliefs are tolerated, religious practices and institutions may
not necessarily be accorded the same freedom if they conflict with the
law or constitution of the wider state. But this "live and let live"
approach is apparently unacceptable to many Muslim spokesmen, of
whose attitudes the following quotation is typical: "The implementation
of Islam as a complete code of life cannot be limited to the home and to
personal relationships. It is to be sought and achieved in society as a
whole."
Those words were preached from the minbar of bradford,
England's mosque. A well-known imam in France is reported as
preaching to the effect that, "There can be no government contrary to
what god has revealed" (in the Qu'ran). He concludes that it is the duty
of every Muslim to overthrow every power "which governs in
contravention of that which God enjoins and (to bring about) the
erection of the Islamic state." In more moderate terms, but to the same
effect, Sheikh Shabbir Akhtar says:
"Our inherited (Islamic) understanding of religious freedom, of
the nature and role of religion in society, is in the last analysis being
fundamentally challenged by the new religious pluralism in Britain."
Behind this, too, surely lies the plea articulated by Jinnah, that
Islam must be protected from the consequences of democratic
pluralism.
Perhaps the most direct expression of Muslim defiance of
western-style democracy is the following, uncompromising statement
issued jointly by the two most representative Islamic organizations in
Britain, the Islamic Academy of Cambridge, and the islamic Cultural
Centre of London. This statement insists that the Muslim community:
"cannot commit itself to follow all 'current laws' however antireligious
these laws may become through democratic means" (emphasis
supplied).
Quotations are given to illustrate Muslim attitudes of discontent
with state neutrality towards Islam; a visceral objection to living under
pluralist dispensation; an inability to accept the authority of democratic
decision-making when this conflicts with revelation; and a refusal to
contemplate the possibility of Islam existing simply as a personal belief
system, shorn of its political and social institutions. Such quotations
could be multiplied indefinitely. They are clearly constants of the
Muslim world outlook whether in the context of post-imperial India,
Nigeria, the Sudan, or Muslim settlement in Western Europe.
The nature of this world outlook can be further elucidated by
expounding the views of Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, director of the London
Muslim Institute. He became locally nototious by publicly calling for
Muslims to murder salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, an
indisputably criminal offence for which, since he was an Arab Muslim,
he was of course neither arrested nor prosecuted. Siddiqui is the
moving spirit of an international Islamic tendency inspired by Ayatolluh
Khomeini's Iranian Revolution. The aims of this tendency are set out as
follows:
"...to eliminate all authority other than Allah and His Prophet; to
eliminate nationalism in all its shapes and forms, in particulae the
nation-State; to unite all Islamic movements into a single global Islamic
movement to establish the Islamic State; to re-establish a dominant and
global Islamic civilization based on the concept of Tawheed [the unity of
Allah]."
Nationalism, the nation-state, and democracy for Siddiqui
represent Kufr, literally infidelity but equivalent in modern context to
atheism. Thus the greatest political Kufr in the modern world is
nationalism, followed closely by democracy ("sovereignty of the
people"), socialism ("dictatorship of the proletariat"), capitalism, and
free elections. and "modern Kufr has disguised itself as science,
philosophy, technology, democracy and 'progress.'" On the contrary,
the "political party framework as found in Western 'democracies' is
divisive of the society and therefore does not suit the Ummah" (the
world-wide Islamic community). He concludes that "one Ummah must
mean one Islamic movement, leading to one global Islamic State under
one Imam/Khalifa [Caliph}."
For Siddiqui, "there is no compatibility whatsoever between
Islam and the west" and the Islamic Movement "regards the west as
totally incompatible with Islam." The notion that a Muslim may live
under the government a of non-Islamic nation-state and still practice his
Islam as a personal belief system is apparently unacceptable to
Siddiqui, for "A Muslim can neither live the 'good life' on his own nor
pursue 'personal taqwa' [faithfulness to Allah] in isolation." Dr. Siddiqui
concluded one of his published essays with the following rallying cry,
addressed to his fellow Muslims among whom, one must assume, are
those in Britain:
"Just as the power and influence of kufr in the modern world is
global, so are the bonds of faith and destiny of the Muslim Immah.
History has come full circle. The global power of kufr waits to be
challenged and defeated by the global power of Islam. This is the
unfinished business of history, so let us go ahead and finish it."
The achievement of Siddiqui's aims certainly does not exclude
armed force: "Lightly-armed muttawi [faithful to Allah] soldiers who go
out to fight and die for islam are more powerful than the heavily-armed
professional soldiers who fear death."
Moreover, the odds are in Islam's favor: "with a population of
almost one billion and with infinite sources of wealth, you can defeat all
the powers." It is therefore possible for the Muslims to bring about "the
total transformation of the world."
Dr. Siddiqui is particularly scornful of the compromisers who
have been trying to prove Islam compatible with their secular ambitions
and Western preferences, and contemptuous of those who seek to set
up "a liberal and democratic nation-state with a few cosmetic 'Islamic'
features."
RESISTANCE TO REFORM
The moral from all that british material is absolutely clear. If we
are to understand the nature of islam, and to meet and overcome the
threat that it presents to the entire Western world, we have now to
abandon assumptions that were sufficiently realistic when we were
dealing with earlier threats to that world. Before World War II, for
instance, it was common to speak of the United States as a tri-faith
country.During that war a popular song insisted that the "Siths and the
Jones, the kellys and Cohns" were all equally committed to the war
effort of the U.S.A. That was their country as Americans, regardless of
their present religious beliefs or the countries from which their parents
or grandparents had originated. After that war, President Eisenhower
made a remark that my theologian father thought could only have been
made by an American president: "Everyone must have a religion, and I
don't care what it is." Such indifference was all very well, indeed
properly presidential, at a time when the United States had no
significant number of Muslim citizens.
Certainly it is possible for people professedly committed to
aggressively incompatible religious beliefs to live together in friendly
toleration. But this is achieved only by the more or less conscious and
explicit abandonment of those of their pretended beliefs that would
make such friendly and tolerant cohabitation impossible. So the
possibility of such cohabitation is irrelevant to the question of what the
relevant teachings of the Qu'ran actually are. But because of these
possibilities of friendly cohabitation it was not preposterous for
President Bill Clinton to say in 1994, in an address to the Jordanian
Parliament:
"After all, the chance to live in harmony with our neighbors and
to build a better life for our children is the hope that binds us all
together. Whether we worship in a mosque in Irbid, a Baptist church
like my own in Little Rock, Arkansas, or a synagogue in Haifa, we are
bound together by that hope."
It was not preposterous for President clinton to say this in an
address to the parliament of a country of which almost the entire
population is Muslim. For Jordan - unlike, for instance, Iraq and saudi
Arabia - does have an effective parliament, and its king at that time was
a man who had made peace with israel and succeeded in defeating a
terrorist offensive against his own country (14). But for an account of
the actual teaching sof the Qu'ran and of their great and growing threat
to western civilization it will be instructive to attend to a warning from an
earlier century.
Sir William Muir's Life of Mahomet, based on original Muslim
sources, appeared in Edinburgh in four volumes between 1856 and
1861. muir's judgment on the life, which was to be repeated over and
over again by subsequent scholars, was based upon a distinction
between its earlier Meccan and later medinan period. In Mecca,
Muhammed was a sincere, religiously motivated seeker after truth. In
Medina, Muhammed the man showed his feet of clay, and was
corrupted by power and by worldly ambitions.
Muir went on th say that so long as the Qu'ran remained the
standard of Islamic belief certain evils would continue to flourish:
"Polygamy, divorce and slavery strike at the root of public morals,
poison domestic life, and disorganize society; while the Veil removes
the female sex from its just position and influence in the
world...Freedom of thought and private judgment are crushed and
ahhihilated. Toleration is unknown, and the possibility of free and
liberal institutions is foreclosed (15)." Muir's final judgment was: "The
sword of mahomet and the Coran [the Qu'ran] are the most stubborn
enemies of Civilization, Liberty and Truth which the world has yet
known (16)."
Anthony Flew is professor emeritus of philosophy, Reading University
(UK)
NOTES
1) They can be found in Paul Kurtz, ed., Skeptical Odysseys
(Amherst, NY; Prometheus, 2001), p. 377. My earlier paper on "The
Terrors of Islam" is included in Paul Kurtz, ed. Challenges to the
Enlightenment (Buffalo, Prometheus 1994).
2) See, for instance, his 1998 interview with al-Jazeera Arab
TV Channel, published in the UK, in The Sunday Telegraph on October
7, 2001.
3) See Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY;
Prometheus, 1995), p. 115, pp. 122-123, and pp. 163-164.
4) The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: Allen and
Unwin, 2nd ed., 1962) p. 7
5) Ibid., p. 27
6) Ibid., p. 74
7) In doing this I am exploiting a comparative advantage. For I
am not only british myself, but my also-British wife was born in Burma,
the daughter of a father serving in the Indian Civil Service, an institution
of which several of my own father's Oxford friends served. My father-in-
law was the first of the senior British officials to say that britain must, as
it soon did, do a deal with the burmese Nationalist leader U Aung San,
despite his period of collaboration with the Japanese, because he was
so clearly an honorable man. The entire surviving family were both
proud and delighted that the memorial celebratum for my father-in-law's
life was attended by the husband of U Aung San's daughter, Daw Aung
San Soo Kyi. She might well have attended herself had she not then
been, as she still is of this writing, under house arrest for the offence of
winning an election.
8) Muhammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), founder of the state of
Pakistan.
9) See Mervyn Hiskett, Some to Mecca Turn to Pray (London:
Claridge, 1993). Hiskett was a lecturer in Islamic studies in the London
School of Oriental and African Studies.
10) There was slaughter of members of the Muslim community
by members of the Hindu "community" and vice-versa.
11) It is a matter of fact, and I believe significant, that the only
provinces of the former british Empire where the population was and is
not White that have matched this achievement are those of the
Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, which had both been under
British rule for over a hundred years and had become enthusiasts for
the game of cricket. As a former prime minister of Barbados said, after
his party had been defeated in a general election: "The religion of my
people is cricket and in cricket the umpire's decision is final."
12) Reliable evidence about this extremely remote and
inaccessible area is hard to come by. But there can be no reasonable
doubt about the fact of the enslaving of several Christian Blacks in that
region. For my friend the Baroness Cox has undertaken several
missions to purchase and thus to free such slaves, and has been
reproached for so doing on the grounds that such emancipatings, in
that nightmare region, actually encourage further enslavings.
13) London: Belew, 1989.
14) His successor shosw every sigh of following in his father's
admirable footsteps. On his visit to london in November 2001 he was
reported as saying: "The events of September 11 were plainly and
simply an affront to all humanity. That is the view of the too rarely
heard Arab majority."
15) I should very much like to know how many of those
Departments of Women's Studies, which it seems are now to be found
on almost if not quite all the university campuses in the USA., students
are required to study the impact upon the lives of women of the
imposition of the Sharia. If, as I suspect, the answer is very few, then
the publication of the findings of research showing this to be the case
would surely have a salutatory effect.
16)Vol. I, pp. 503-06.
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