Islam: Tolerating Intolerance

Islam: Tolerating Intolerance?

Excuse me sir, Mr Christian Prime Minister, but while Muslims might be agreed about tolerating you, as a Christian, a Man of the Book, what about me? Have you considered me? Did anybody give a moment’s thought to the atheists, agnostics and assorted heathen who live in and love this country before they invited Muslims to come in?

Islam has utter contempt for unbelievers and teaches that it is an Islamic duty to be prepared to wage war on them, not metaphorical or allegorical war but real and bloody war. How can it be sensible to invite Muslims into Britain and Europe on the understanding that Muslims will rub along alright with people of other faiths? What about those of us who have no faith and despise faith and are despised by the faithful? Don’t we ever get to have a say in this matter? Are our deaths a price worth paying for your interfaith harmony and solving your labour shortage?

I disagree entirely with the absurd and dangerous notion that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. This is a doctrine which has caused no end of problems in the world. However it seems fairly clear to me that people who consider me to be their enemy have got to be at least a little concerning to me. Islam is unambiguous about unbelievers, even if it does vacillate a lot about its stance towards Christians and Jews. Unbelievers and pagans don’t count and don’t deserve any respect, should not be prayed for (even at their funerals) and can get no respite from hell no matter how wonderful their good works may be.

9:84 And never (O Muhammad) pray for one of them who dieth, nor stand by his grave. Lo! they disbelieved in Allah and His messenger, and they died while they were evil-doers.

How can anybody make agreements with people who think you are evil because of your beliefs? Christians have no right to negotiate on behalf of atheists in this matter. Islam has mortal enemies within western societies: homosexuals, pagans, atheists, agnostics, Wiccans, Hindus and feminists. Heterosexual male Christians do not have the right to conclude agreements with Muslims which are based on the ideas of limited religious tolerance towards People of the Book. That is not good enough. Muslims living in Europe must be bound by the law and must not be appointed to positions of power and influence unless they repudiate the hatred and intolerance contained within their faith.

If Islam was a motorbike gang rather than a supposedly adult and mature religion albeit with a reputation for a little bit of extreme prejudice and violence around the edges it would surely be a proscribed organization. There can be no tolerance towards any organization which declares that the penalty for leaving it is death, that its own rules take precedence over the laws of the land and they have a religious duty to wage war against its enemies. Why have the British government and other European governments been so lax about this issue?

I will have no truck with racists and Islamophobes. I do not hate Muslims. I do not dislike Muslims. I do not have any irrational fears about Muslims, just a few rational ones. I get along quite well with most Muslims I meet, and I do meet them almost every day. My quarrel is with those who would make me their enemy, make me the victim of their religious intolerance, perhaps make me the target of their religious genocide. I have no interest in attacking Islam or Muslims but I have the right of self defence. Atheists, agnostics, pagans and heathens of all descriptions have the right to defend themselves against a creed which all but calls for their extermination.

The Qur'an does not tell Muslims to attack and kill non-believers but it tells them how to fight, and that they must fight and when they fight they must show no mercy and that it is the unbelievers who will be the enemy and the unbelievers will be destroyed. This is their religious duty. The book does not tell them to attack but it makes clear their duty to fight once the holy war is declared.

Islam is not the worst religion in the world. It is not the stupidest or the most ludicrous. Islam is safe from those charges as long as Mormonism and Scientology are around. But Islam is surely the most dangerous religion in the world because of its power to incite violence and to draw in millions of fighters to the cause, because Islam is one big united cause to fight. In the past Christianity was responsible for horrendous oppression and orgies of violence. The Islamic world is rightly concerned with the capacity of Christendom to inflict great carnage and the west would be as well to disavow much of the symbolism from the days of the crusades, not least of which is the thoroughly offensive crusader cross which has become the flag of England. My country is not a country of bloodthirsty crusaders, shock troops for the Pope! I wish England had an emblem that was not associated with the crusades. But the days of the crusade are over and gone for good. We will never again see people fighting under the sign of the cross for anything other than the smallest and nastiest of local genocide, and in those cases the forces of America and European countries will be supporting peace and reconciliation not extermination or ethnic cleansing. There will never again be any international alliance of armed Christendom explicitly under such a banner or with a religious motivation. Holy warfare is over. Islam, please accept that.

The United States of America and European countries have been consistently backing beleaguered Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, Kuwait and elsewhere in recent years. Making out that the west is conducting a crusade against Islam and Muslims is absurd and insulting to the many men who have been killed defending Muslim men, women and children in war zones. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are not Christian puppet regimes, they are democratic regimes consisting of Muslims. Despite all the efforts of terrorists/insurgents/resistance fighters to induce Americans to attack mosques by using them as firing positions the US military has been extremely restrained. If the plan was to wage war upon Islam a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles would have made Arabia a smoking ruin and Mecca so radioactive it would glow. It is absurd to portray the west as the enemy of Islam. If Muslims ignore the west the west has no interest in attacking, defeating, subduing or keeping down the Muslim world. It is not western oppression that is keeping the Islamic world backward it is the stultifying effect of Islam, endemic corruption and the debilitating effect of unearned riches generated by the windfall of oil. There is little that is better designed to make an individual or a country morally weak than the curse of inherited wealth, while America’s own supplies of oil are truly vast America has not simply sold off the oil to other people and lived off the money, American oil has fuelled American industry, oil revenues have been reinvested into infrastructure and industry. In contrast in the Islamic world oil revenues have bought palaces, limousines, fighter jets and the temporary services of foreign workers to do the bulk of the real work.

The Islamic world hasn’t invented anything new and exciting for over six centuries. Communist regimes in one human lifetime were responsible for more innovation than the Islamic world produced in the last millennium. Secular Jews have invented and discovered more in the last 150 years than the Islamic world has ever produced, and probably more than they ever will. If Muslims have a chip on their shoulder and a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority it is well deserved. The Japanese in one year produce more innovation than the entire billion plus Muslims manage in a century. But nobody is doing any of this progress, science and innovation to spite or annoy Muslims or Allah. Nobody is keeping Muslims out of the universities or libraries or laboratories of the world in any deliberate policy of doing down the Islamic world or trying to prove the inadequacy of the Arab people. Nobody is trying to hobble the Islamic world. The wounds to the intellect are entirely self inflicted. The secular world of science, industry and progress is open, there are no barriers, just allow yourselves to think freely and clearly and you can join in and enjoy the riches of the modern world. Religious prejudice is bad for business so business does not indulge in it.

Islam as a way of life practiced by a community which is keeping itself to itself is no threat to anybody outside. It is a threat to its own children of course, especially its girls, but that is another matter. Islam cannot expect to be accorded the protected status of a self-contained harmless religious minority when it has a political agenda of world domination. Any person, nation or organization which has plans on world domination is political and so is no longer able to count upon the protection normally granted to religious minorities when its agenda is to become the one and only persecuting majority.

There has to be a distinction between a religion and a political movement. Islam as a religious practice is not a threat to the west but Islamism certainly is. Islamism is not about private religion it is about expanding the influence of Islam in a political context, creating Islamic states or one single Islamic state. Such a state would be theocratic, which in reality means a tyranny justified by calls to divine authority which can never be challenged. Theocracy is inherently totalitarian, the total submission of humanity to dogmas which cannot be challenged which arose in the imagination of an illiterate Arab who plagiarized Jewish and Christian teaching shamelessly to give him a divine mandate for his personal and political ambitions.

If you are Muslim and you find these words offensive I suggest you go and read about the life of Joseph Smith, a man who did the very same trick, a man who set out to become the white American Muhammad. Perhaps you will be able to be detached enough from that story to begin to see how religions and cults are formed by remarkable men with powerful imaginations and how they attract and maintain sincere followers.

Islamism has nothing to do with practicing religion, it is a political cause, it is a conspiracy designed to overthrow all existing governments. It is treason. No country has the right to let its own regime or people fall into the hands of theocratic barbarism. Resisting this is the duty of every citizen and every state.

Why should the west treat Islam as a small, precious and tender flower when it clearly has the potential to be a pernicious weed that chokes off everything else in the garden? Which Islamic countries have state-provided religious education for religious minorities? Islamic countries sometimes allow certain other religions a limited presence, especially Christianity and Judaism, but no Islamic country does anything remotely like what the west has done in allowing the building of mosques and even providing state funds for specifically Islamic schools.

Why should Islam get a free ride in religious studies education? Nobody ever stands up and tells it like it is and declares Islam to be what it is:

Repressive

Dogmatic

Aggressive

Precious and effete (oh don’t mock us, we can’t take it, and we must kill you)

Backward

Anti-scientific

Anti-democratic

Anti-Semitic

Bloodthirsty

Afraid of women

Afraid of sex

Afraid of humanity and human decency

Anti-human

Murderous

All of those characteristics are inherent in the design of the religion. It is absurd to suggest that it is a distortion of Islam to show it as warlike and intolerant, you only need to look at the Qu’ran and read what is right there in the text, multiple times. Islam has been set up in such a way as it can be tolerant when it is in a minority or sharing power and intolerant and tyrannical when it has all the power or can see a way to seize it. The upshot of this is there are millions of Muslims living peaceful lives who have no desire or intention to impose their will on others but they are ensuring that their children accept this faith which has within it the potential to see all of humanity enslaved in a way that would make Big Brother seem like a beneficent democrat.

It is wrong to assume that because a certain system of beliefs can be categorized as a religion that it is therefore by definition harmless and A Good Thing. That is religious thinking: you don’t object to my religion and I won’t object to yours. Deal? I don’t have a religion but I have the right to live unmolested by religious people. The most precious freedom of them all is the freedom from religion, the freedom to answer the question what is your religion with the strong and clear answer: none. A choice between religions is no more satisfactory than being allowed to choose between hanging and a firing squad.

Religions are not harmless and they are not all much of a muchness. Religions can be nasty, evil, oppressive, dangerous, sinister and murderous. It is not cultural relativism gone mad to think that the Church of England is a less dangerous and sinister religion than one which involves burning people to death in a giant wicker man. Neither is it wrong to see that Islam is also a dangerous religion. Human sacrifice and cannibalism is not the only mark of an unacceptable religion. Genital mutilation (male and female) indoctrination of children, the denial of science, forcible marriage, child marriage, children and wives treated like possessions, the acceptance of slavery and the mandating of eternal conflict until ultimate victory over the human race and universal submission are also unacceptable. Headscarves, girls in trousers, not eating pork, walking round an old meteorite while pretending not to be worshipping the moon and honouring a man who consummated his polygamous marriage to a nine year old girl* (a long time ago and in a land that was rather barbarous) are minor foibles that are relatively innocuous. However there are traits within Islam which should not be acceptable in a liberal secular society. Threatening to kill people who say things you don't like comes fairly high up that list, just underneath actually killing them as a matter of fact.

Islam is more dangerous than other religions because the drive to universality is not a habit that was picked up during a particularly decadent and sinister phase of the religion’s past it is inherent in the text and there from the first. Muhammad himself was involved in spreading his religion by the sword. In contrast Christianity is not based upon the idea of fighting to set up a global Christian state, that is the job of Christ himself. While Catholicism might have been thought to have attempted world domination the reality is quite different. The crusades failed. There were no attempts to unite Christendom and drive the Islamic infidels out of Turkey, the Turks were given up as a lost cause along with the Arabians and North Africans. When the Northern European powers set off to conquer they did not by any means make it obvious that wiping Islam from the face of the Earth was really their primary goal.

The British in India made very small efforts to convert the Indians and indeed there were many conversions of empire builders to Islam. There is still a tradition of Islamophilia in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office which dates from the long history of the British ruling classes rubbing along with Islamic princes, especially from the Punjab and Bengal. Ascetic and monotheistic Islam was far more civilized than polytheistic Hinduism to British eyes, and when the first contact was made the courts of many Islamic princes made European courts look uncivilized and the unwashed pirate-merchants of the East India Company had good reason to look up to the civilized, rich and clean Muslims around them. Several of them converted to Islam and not just so they could have multiple wives, the conversions appear sincere. That is what happens when people come face to face with a dazzling new culture, they often lose their attachment to the old culture. We are nowadays more familiar with this effect with poor peasants and newly arrived immigrants becoming born again Christians. Back in the early part of the nineteenth century it was Islam which had the rich culture, at least it was rich and attractive if you yourself were rich, male and in want of a wife or four.

No imperial European power has ever made a serious attempt to impose Christianity upon a Muslim land, or if the attempt was made it was soon abandoned. The British in India, Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Malaysia accepted Islam as a given and made accommodations with it. So did the French across North Africa. The thousands of missionaries that went out from Britain were largely confined to parts of the world free from the competition of mature monotheistic religions. Christianity talks tough but largely shies away from taking on Islam face-to-face. To the Church of England the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers has always been intended to be allegorical.

What the world would like to know is just how allegorical most Muslims take the calls for the spreading of Islam by the sword to be.

* To be strictly fair Muhammad didn't marry a nine year old girl, he married a six year old girl and by the Arabic lunar calendar she would have been nine years old when he consummated that marriage, which would be less than nine solar years. Is it really an issue of cultural relativism to regard this as acceptable by the standards of that time and that place? By the standards of most times and most places that is unacceptable, and if it happened in Britain today he would be imprisoned for a very long time and treated as a pervert and pariah for the rest of his life.

Which is more wrong, judging Muhammad by the standards of our time or trying to make the standards of all time the standards of a quasi-literate desert dweller from a relatively backward tribe and a pre-scientific era?

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Islam: Tolerating Intolerance?

9:84 And never (O Muhammad) pray for one of them who dieth, nor stand by his grave. Lo! they disbelieved in Allah and His messenger, and they died while they were evil-doers.

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© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited