Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith Read online

  ISLAM UNVEILED

  ISLAM UNVEILED

  DISTURBING QUESTIONS ABOUT

  THE WORLD'S FASTEST-GROWING FAITH

  R 0 B E R T S P E N C E R

  FOREWORD BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES

  For S.

  Contents

  Foreword (by David Pryce-Jones)

  Author's Note

  PROLOGUE What Does Islam Really Stand For?

  ONE Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

  TWO Does Islam Promote and Safeguard Sound Moral Values?

  THREE Does Islam Respect Human Rights?

  FOUR Does Islam Respect Women?

  FIVE Is Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy?

  SIX Can Islam Be Secularized and Made Compatible with the Western Pluralistic Framework?

  SEVEN Can Science and Culture Flourish under Islam?

  EIGHT The Crusades: Christian and Muslim

  NINE Is Islam Tolerant of Non-Muslims?

  TEN Does the West Really Have Nothing to Fear from Islam?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Foreword

  MOST PEOPLE IN THE WEST KNOW VIRTUALLY nothing about Islam. A few may visit one or another Muslim country as tourists or perhaps on business, and find that the inhabitants, hospitable and vivacious, seem to be getting on with their lives like everybody else. The events of September ii therefore appeared to come from nowhere. What was this holy war against the United States and the West, this jihad, declared by Osama bin Laden, and how was it possible that to the Arab and wider Muslim world he became an instant popular hero because he had organized the murder of several thousand innocent people in New York and Washington? Westerners in general, and perhaps Americans in particular, had little or no idea that there were Muslims out there who so hated them, and little or no idea either of the causes of that hate.

  In a series of interviews and statements, bin Laden made it clear that in attacking the United States he saw himself as a Muslim doing God's work. And that is the reason why so many Muslims from Beirut and Baghdad to Indonesia cheered and danced in the streets at the news of September ii. Leaders and opinion makers including President George W. Bush, however, were quick to assert that bin Laden was a terrorist pure and simple, whose actions were a violation of Islam rather than a natural expression of it. Islam, these leaders maintained, is essentially a peaceful religion.

  Apologetics of this kind served a useful purpose. At a time of tension and potential backlash, it was right to ensure that innocent Muslims were not held guilty by association. But in Islam Unveiled, Robert Spencer now argues that indeed bin Laden sincerely meant what he said, and that he and the millions of Muslims who admire him find sanction in Islam. Far from being extremists or perverters of the faith, they interpret its tenets correctly.

  From its inception, Islam has been a revealed religion with a text, the Qur'an, which is considered the Word of God and therefore sacrosanct. The Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, and then the caliphs who immediately succeeded him at a time of war and imperial expansion, were simultaneously head of state and religious leader. Down the centuries, and still today, in spite of exposure to nationalism and the formation of a variety of nation states, that combination has remained an ideal form of governance for many Muslims. Islam has never known the separation of church and state which has determined the political and social evolution of the West, leading as it does from absolutism to democracy, from obedience to civil rights and from blind faith to reason. Judaism and Christianity were also originally revealed religions. The Reformation and the Enlightenment were the most well-known manifestations of a long process of rational inquiry that gradually altered the general understanding of the relation between church and state, permitting the concessions and compromises toward those of other faiths upon which a civil society rests.

  For many centuries, absolutism served Islam well enough, and there are great achievements to show for it, such as the science and architecture of the Muslim Middle Ages. Certain of their superiority, Muslims felt they had nothing to learn from the despised and barbarian West. By the time they realized that this was a mistake of historic proportions, it was too late to do anything about it. Stultified in their absolutism, altogether backward, Muslims and their lands were almost entirely overrun by one or another Western empire. This prolonged contact with the West has changed the landscape with such physical features as oil wells and airports and skyscrapers, but only a minority of individuals have adopted Western values and ways of thinking.

  Through the twentieth century, Muslims struggled to regain control of their history from the Western empires. In the outcome they won their independence, but not their freedom. Absolutism remains the rule. Some Muslim countries have religious rulers, others have nationalist and secular rulers, but all (with the doubtful exception of Turkey) are despotisms, in which the rule of law is a matter to be negotiated. Everywhere the secret police and the military are an ominous presence. This is what inhibits the creative energies of Muslims and prevents them doing justice to themselves. Anyone who knows Muslim countries, however, will also be aware that the rigidity of Islamic doctrine conflicts with the actual daily conduct of Muslims. The imam or mullah who comes beseeching for a bottle of whisky or a bribe is a familiar figure, and so is the rabid anti-Western Islamic extremist who asks how to get his son into an Ivy League university. Hypocrisy smoothes the rough surfaces of every society, and perhaps there is more to rejoice in that than to blame.

  Ernest Renan, who founded the study of comparative religion more than a century ago, thought that Islam was the engine of this spiritual and temporal despotism, describing it as "the heaviest chains that ever shackled humanity." Robert Spencer follows in that tradition. To him, the concept that the Qur'an is a perfect book leads to anti-intellectualism. Certainly there have been no Islamic Renans; and exegesis of the sacred text as practiced by Christians and Jews would be blasphemous. The result, as Spencer puts it, is that "bigotry, fanaticism and plain ignorance are rooted in some of the central tenets of Islam." There is no scope for questioning the absolutism inherent in the faith and its accompanying Islamic society, or for reforming the injustices deriving from it.

  One unequal relationship postulated by Islam is that between men and women, and another is between master and slave. Robert Spencer may sound polemical on these topics, but he is only reporting the reality. Women in Islam are victimized by the Sharia, or Islamic law, which privileges men in numerous social and legal instances, and in some countries they are further victimized by customs such as polygamy and female circumcision. As for slavery, it still survives in a few Arab countries including Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Mauritania.

  A third unequal relationship goes back to the origins of Islam, when Muslims conquered other peoples, then put them to the sword, converted them or offered them the choice of becoming dhimmi, that is, second-class citizens suffering social and financial impositions that did not affect Muslims, but protected by the state in return. The assumption of Muslim superiority and dhimmi inferiority underlay the rightful ordering of the Islamic world. In the modern age, however, such an assumption evidently became absurd. Twin reactions have followed in the House of Islam: self-pity at finding itself in such backwardness, and hatred of those thought to be responsible for it. Inflamed by this mindset, Muslims all around the perimeter of the Islamic world are fighting their neighbors of other religions-Hindus in India, Communist and Buddhist Chinese, Jews, Christians in a score of countries, and pagan animists in Africa. In this light, it i
s wishful thinking to bracket Islam and peace.

  It is, or ought to be, an unarguable and universal truth that Muslims and their neighbors should meet on equal terms. Should Muslims instead follow the likes of bin Laden and other extremists, insisting on inequality and the enforcement of absolutism, they will have to be resisted, if need be militarily. Muslims themselves will have to find the way out of this dilemma of their own making. Elsewhere I have called for the Muslim equivalent of an Andrei Sakharov and a Solzhenitsyn, brave and challenging thinkers who showed their fellow Russians how to escape from the dead end of absolutism, to democratize and modernize.

  Robert Spencer doesn't see much prospect of such an eventuality. He tends to believe that the West has so lost confidence in itself and its spiritual, cultural and political values that it is defenseless before violence-in which case absolutism will triumph and the Muslim fantasy of superiority will come true. In its own lively style, this book puts down a strong and significant marker to what lies ahead, as Islam and the rest of the world strive to come to terms.

  -David Pryce-Jones

  Author's Note

  NO SYSTEM OF TRANSLITERATION FOR ARABIC names is entirely satisfactory. English simply is not equipped to render the subtleties of the Arabic alphabet. I have chosen "Muhammad" and "Qur'an" over "Mohammed" and "Koran" more or less arbitrarily, following the more common usage of the present day. My other choices are no more systematic, but they generally have the advantage of being common. The sources I quote often use quite divergent spellings, which I hope will not try the reader's patience too much. Most often the differences are no more serious than the employment or omission of a terminal "h." Also, the verse numbers in the Qur'an, and its various English translations, are not standard. But the passages quoted can usually be found within a verse or two of the number given.

  What Does Islam Really

  Stand For?

  BY NOW EVERYONE HAS HEARD THAT "Islam means peace." Everyone up to and including the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain has been saying so ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet open the pages of Islam's holy book, the Qur'an, and you find statements like this: Slay the pagans wherever you find them. Such commands inspire people like Amir Maawia Siddiqi, the Pakistani son of a small businessman, to take oaths like this: "I, Amir Maawia Siddiqi, son of Abdul Rahman Siddiqi, state in the presence of God that I will slaughter infidels my entire life.... May God give me strength in fulfilling this oath."'

  The dissonance between the prevailing conventional wisdom and the Qur'anic injunction to slay "pagans" calls for a deeper investigation into Islam's commitment to peace, and it encapsulates a set of larger problems with the West's perceptions of Islam.

  Most Americans got their first taste of contemporary Islamic terrorism at the Munich Olympics of 1972, when Muslim terrorists murdered Israeli athletes. But at that time observers, both Western and Middle Eastern, assured us that this attack had nothing to do with true Islam, that it was simply another skirmish in the protracted war between Israel and Palestine. We have heard this line again since then. In 1979, Muslims stormed the U.S. embassy in Iran and took fifty-two hostages. Once more we were advised that this had nothing to do with Islam, but instead was an expression of the rage that Iranian citizens felt toward the American government for its support of the hated shah. When a Muslim suicide bomber blew up a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and killed 241 Americans, news analysts again explained that this had nothing to do with Islam per se; it was another purely political matter.

  Over and over, the counterpoint between violence and exculpation has been repeated: when Muslim terrorists threw the elderly, wheelchairbound Leon Klinghoffer to his death off the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985; when militant Muslims first bombed the World Trade Center in 1993; when they killed nineteen American soldiers in the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996; when they bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; when they bombed the USS Cole in 2000. Each time that Muslim terrorists struck, Americans hastened to assure themselves and the world: We know this is not real Islam; we know these terrorists are hijacking the religion of peace.

  This chorus swelled after September ii. George W. Bush, Tony Blair and virtually every other Western leader insisted that their shadowy foe in this strange new war was not Islam, but terrorism, and that the relationship between the two was only coincidental.

  Among the Western heads of state, only Italy's Silvio Berlusconi was out of step: "We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights andin contrast with Islamic countries-respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its value understanding of diversity and tol- erance."2 But the West, apparently, was aware of no such thing, for Berlus- coni's pronouncement set off an international furor. Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium and president of the European Union, lit into Berlusconi for inciting reprisals from Muslims: "These remarks could, in a dangerous way, have consequences. I can hardly believe that the Italian prime minister made such statements.... Rather than bringing civilisations together, they could feed a feeling of humiliation."3 Berlusconi then backed away from his remarks with the all-purpose dodge that they were "taken out of context."

  Silvio Berlusconi gained an unlikely ally several months later in American evangelist and sometime presidential candidate Pat Robertson. On CNN's Late Edition Robertson said, "I have taken issue with our esteemed president in regard to his stand in saying Islam is a peaceful religion. It's just not. And the Koran makes it very clear, if you see an infidel, you are to kill him. That's what it says. Now that doesn't sound very peaceful to me."

  This, too, elicited outrage. For example, the Washington Post wondered: "Is Mr. Robertson trying to start a pogrom? If so, he's headed in the right direction." A pogrom! There was exquisite irony in the choice of terms. But the Post was more worried about violence from antiMuslim Americans than from Muslims:

  These sorts of words aren't innocent talk-particularly not when broadcast into millions of homes by a religious leader to whom many look for moral guidance. This country has seen several serious attacks against innocent Muslims, and those taken for Muslims, in recent months. That there have not been more is a testament both to the seriousness of law enforcement in responding to attacks and, more important, to the insistence of leaders across the political spectrum-starting with President Bush-that this country is at war neither with Islam nor with its Muslim citizens. Against that backdrop, the Robertson statement is astonishingly irrespon- sible.4

  The responses to Berlusconi and Robertson both stressed the potency of ideas as inducements to action-in this case, Western action harmful to Muslims. But ideas have consequences within the Muslim world as well. What ideas in Islam lead so easily to terrorism? Why is the Islamic religion such a fertile breeding ground for violence?

  The politically correct answer is that all religions, or at least the three great monotheistic faiths, have a murderous edge, perhaps tamed or muted for a time, but always there on the fringes. "There are Jews and Christians who justify violence with reference to their religion," noted the Post.

  That is historically true; but what the Post neglected to mention is that in this day, neither Judaism nor Christianity has any violent organization equaling the al-Qaeda network, or Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad, or Hamas, or any of the myriad other Muslim terrorist groups. The occasional abortion clinic bomber or the Jewish Defense League is hauled out when needed to illustrate Christian and Jewish violence, but they are nothing compared with Osama bin Laden's organization.

  Is the connection between these groups and Islam merely accidental? Does it result from political pressures in the Muslim world? If political conditions were different, might the world be afflicted with hundreds of thousands of Christian terrorists, instead of Muslim ones? Or is there something about Islam itself that gives rise to this sort of thing?

/>   Few have cared, or dared, to deal with this question openly and honestly. The reasons for this curious silence are manifold and revealing. One Middle Eastern scholar was recently quoted in the New York Times as observing that: "Between fear and political correctness, it's not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam."5 Political correctness is one thing, but fear? What are people like this professorwho declined to be identified-afraid of? Professional censure? Disapproval? Firing? No-these anxieties are the luxuries of academics in other fields. Scholars who dare to depart from "sugary nonsense" about Islam have more basic fears.

  The experience of scholar Christoph Luxenberg indicates that such fears are not groundless. Luxenberg wrote a scholarly book suggesting that the Qur'an, the sacred book of Islam, has been mistranslated and misinterpreted by Muslims themselves. His work may be likened to that of the Christian deconstructionists of the Jesus Seminar, who challenge and occasionally attack traditional dogmas in trying to determine whether Jesus actually said and did what the New Testament reports. But there's a crucial difference. According to the New York Times, "Christoph Luxenberg is a pseudonym, and his scholarly tome `The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran' had trouble finding a publisher, although it is considered a major new work by several leading scholars in the field." No scholar of the Jesus Seminar has ever felt a need to hide behind a pseudonym, or even had trouble getting his work published. In fact, in the publish-orperish world of modern academia, it's virtually inconceivable that any professor would even consider using a pseudonym.

  Luxenberg may have been trying to avoid suffering the fate of another scholar, Suliman Bashear, who "argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet." For this his Muslim students in the University of Nablus in the West Bank threw him out of a second-story window 6 Most notoriously, novelist Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini for portraying Muhammad and the early days of Islam in an unflattering light.