Forgive him and expose his secular Education in India.
We in India are taught a fraud history which is written by the First education Minister of India Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
Mulana Azad made sure that History of India was twisted and only due to
internet more and more people of India learning about Islam.
We need to Ask Mishra what is taught in India--Fraud History of India and why?
In a saner time and place in human history, Spencer would
be offered the chairmanships of Middle East Studies Depts of the most
prestigious universities the world over, alas we all now what the deal
on those campuses is today.
This amazing analysis, the equivalent of an intellectual 'full-force
gale', demonstrates why the author of this effete New Yorker piece,
along with legions who denounce and defame anyone critical of Islam,
will never agree to open debate on the issue.
They would be blown out of the water.
Thanks for continuing to help the masses understand what's going on.
"...if she hadn't had such terrible personal experiences with Islam, she wouldn't regard it with such a gimlet eye today."
But then, why did Hirsi Ali have such terrible personal experiences with Islam?
"In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law."
That's straight out of the Qur'an. And you cannot alter the Qur'an, a fact too obvious for dhimmi Pankaj Mishra.
..."although one will get two different answers depending
on whether one is searching for what Muhammad actually said and did, or
for what Muslims believe he said and did, as they are not the same
thing." -- headline
What muhammad "said and did" of course ...
The Evil Truth About Prophet Muhammad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb3dqeeC0Us
Oh my, this guy Pankaj Mishra is a true moron. With his
Indian Hindu origin, it is shameful he doesn't know or is ignorant of
the true history of Mughals in India. With his ancestors brutalized,
murdered and converted under the threat of beheading, he doesn't know
that Islam is a vile cult and its leader Mo/allah was a caravan raider,
killer, murderer, pedophile, incest practioner, rapist, genocider,
..etc. With more people like Mishra in India, I see no hope for India's
salvation. Just like Europe, India would be Islamicized in next 50 years
or so unless the Hindus wake up and control mohammadan stronghold of
India's politics.
Shame on Mishra for forgetting his on past and siding with the
criminals of the world who have killed more than 300 million non-Muslims
thtroughout the world, including 80 to 100 million Hindus, Buddhists
and Sikhs in India alone!!!
What came first, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, (and for so many others) the sheer hatred of muhammad or the mind-boggling love of Jesus?
It's the proverbial chicken and egg story, repeated over and over.
Interesting that Pankaj Mishra tries to use Voltaire against Ayann Hirshi Ali:
"In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in
Voltaire - though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church
might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the
"Christianity of love and tolerance." In another respect, however, the
invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize.
Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe's religious minority:
the Jews, who, he declared, "are, all of them, born with raging
fanaticism in their hearts," who had "surpassed all nations in
impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism," and who "deserve
to be punished."
Voltaire despised all organized religions and religious fanatism, but
unfortunately shared the prevailing but unfounded belief of his time
about the dreadful fanatical Judaism and Jews.
However, for a time Voltaire saw Islam as a rather rational religion
without priests and miracles. He, and Gibbon, got this faulty impression
of Islam from Pierre Bayle (dead 1706) who formulated the myth about
Islamic tolerance in such a fascinating way that it lives on to this
day, in spite of the fact that Bayle practically knew nothing about
Islam and its history.
Another influence was Henri de Boulanviellers who wrote a biography
about Muhammad in 1730. Without any knowledge of the Arabic language and
no access to primary sources he also portraited Islam as infused with
reason and without mysteries, and Muhammad as a great statesman and
legislator of a kind nobody in the classical Europe could be compared
with. The book was a hidden attack on Christianity in general and
specifically against the priesthood.
When Voltaire described Christianity as the most rediculous, absurd
and blody religion the world had ever seen, and praised Islam he used
the established tradition and poor knowledge about Islam as a mean to
fight Christianity.
Later in life Voltarire realised that Islam was far from the ideal he
imagined. His play "LE FANATISME, OU MAHOMET LE PROPHÈTE from 1741,
which portrayed the founder of Islam as an intriguer and fanatic greedy
for power, was denounced by Catholic clergymen. They had no doubts that
the true target was Christian fanaticism. However, Pope Benedict XIV,
whom Voltaire dedicated the work, replied by saying that he read it with
great pleasure.
Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional
religions, his religiosity was anticlerical. With his brother Armand,
who was a fundamentalist Catholic, Voltaire did not get on as well as
with his sister. Atheism Voltaire considered not as baleful as
fanaticism, but nearly always fatal to virtue. The doctrines about the
Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as nonsense. As a humanist,
Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, but not necessarily
in a direct way.
Hirshi Ali is right to claim a precedent in Voltaire as far as the
fight against religious intolerance and fanatism is conserned. Voltaire
was not without faults and blind spots but we should honor his valueable
contributions to Enlightentment and the efforts to create the
foundation for a democratic secular state where religion and politics
are seperated. The only type of state that can guarantee religious
freedom. That can guarantee Hirshi Ali is free to denaunce Islam in good
strong words - as long as it last!
Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her thirties, speaks
from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former
co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia,
briefly radicalized by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a
marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim
assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still
hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America....
........................
One of the salient points about Ayaan Hirsi Ali—which Pankaj Mishra
touches on above, even while attempting to debunk it—is that Ali has run
into the same horrific aspects of Islam in so many very different parts
of the world.
Some few of the specifics vary, certainly, by country or region. It
is, for instance, less likely that she would have endured the horrors of
FGM—including infibulation—in some other parts of Dar-al-Islam.
But what is more common are *the similarities*. She was born in
Somalia and spent her earliest years there, was a grammar school girl in
Saudi Arabia, a high-school girl in Kenya, was almost forced into an
unwanted marriage in Canada, was a young adult in the Netherlands, and
now makes her home in the United States.
In all these places she has encountered the violence and barbarity of
Islam—oppression of women, punishment of those considered "un-Islamic"
or "insufficiently Islamic", hatred of Jews, endless calls for Jihad.
Even FGM, which might seem a discretely African phenomenon, is now found
in Kurdistan, in Indonesia—and in Europe.
And the threats against her extend even to the United States, the
heart of the West. The threat may be somewhat less dire here, due to the
(comparatively) small Muslim population and a somewhat lower profile
than she has in Europe—but the threat is still there.
I had the great good fortune to attend her appearance in San
Francisco last month—even here, security was tight, and she has to
retain bodyguards at all times.
Pankaj Mishra is hardly the only one trying to discredit Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She can't, it is true, credibly be considered "a racist". But she is
attacked for not being the right sort of feminist; for supposedly being
too "conservative"; for her sympathy towards Christianity—which even her
atheism is not a sufficient counter, in some quarters—but most of all,
she is attacked for telling the "inconvenient truth" about Islam, which
is too frightening for many, especially liberals, to face.
It is much easier to attack the messenger.
As fine a decimation of an article as I have read in some
time. I mean we're talking dissection here by Spencer of Mishra's
futile effort to whitewash Islam and subtly smear Hirsi Ali. I would be
interested in a response by Mishra but I think he wouldn't dare. If he
says anything he'll probably pull out one or two of those seven or
eight words that liberals use so that they don't have to engage in an
exchange of ideas. Words like "Islamophobe," "bigot," "right-winger,"
"ideologue," "hater" and the like.
http://godofreason.com/new-page-170.htm
The Koran is a Declaration of Open-Ended War against the Kafirs http://newstime.co.nz/quran-8-39-islam-will-dominate-the-world.html
Behind the Veil of Islam: The Grand Jihad
“If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win a hundred
battles; if you know neither your enemies nor yourself, you will lose
every battle.” Sun Tzu – The Art of War
“Both (Antichrist & Islam) Both Desire World Domination” 430 KB
“Turkey As The Antichrist Nation” 582 KB
Eurabia: The Planned Islamization of Europe” 425 KB
Pankaj was born in a small place called Jhansi in 1969.
He went to Allahabad for B.A. & then was picked up by marxists
caders of Jawahar Lal University (JNU)of Delhi in scouting. JNU &
Allahabad are both dens of Torts of Marxism & Radical Islamism. JNU
is a bogus institution set up & created to promote Tort Marxism , a
close sister of Islamism.
Pankaj Mishra is an typical example of fraudulent intellectualism
cultivated in sources where he got his early education combined with
lack of first hand expereince & knowledge of critically important
events of India that happened either before he was born or was too young
(6 years of age) to appreciate. They are the 1).1948 war of India of
J&K; 2). 1962 war of Indo China 3.) war of 1965 of India-Pakistan
4). war of 1971 for Bangladesh.5). The Inglorious Emergency of 1975 ,
crafted by Tort Leftists in Congress infiltration. Whatever he has
learned is through distorted historical texts & in an inabreation of
Utopian Dreams . Alas they only bring forth miseries . Mishra needs to
understand & learn himself first .
Pankaj Mishra is a young writer and Hindu, but a Hindu
who is on the make in the West, and therefore he is quick to distance
himself from anything smacking of what he calls "communalism" and that
means, as those from India can testify, only one thing: Hindus
ostentatiously denouncing anything smacking of what they see, quite
wrongly, as BJP-connected dislike of Islam. But the most advanced,
liberal, and interesting of people. These include Oriana Fallaci (who
spent part of her life reporting on, and denouncing, the Vietnam venture
and those known collectively as "the Greek colonels" and began her
study of Islam by meeting with, spending long hours with, Khomeini,
Arafat, and Qaddafy (and even coming under Israeli fire when she was
spending time with the PLO); unable to deal with this, as he is unable
to deal with the phenomenon of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (surely Islam's worst
nightmare), Pankaj Mishra denounces Hirsi Ali, by associtation, for
being impressed with Oriana Fallaci's "The Rage and the Pride" (which
made such an impression, and had such an influence, in Italy) for a
single phrase she used about Muslmis "breeding like rats."
It includes Magdi Allam, whose life-story, from Egypt to Italy, from
Islam -- which he only reluctantly abandoned, when he understood, he
testifies, to what Islam ineluctably was, for he was tied by filial
piety to his humble, kind, nominally Muslim Egyptian parents. who had
allowed him not only to attend a Christian school, but even to befriend
one of the last remaining Jews, a girl his age, in Cairo.
It includes Wafa Sultan, who has nothing to gain, and everything to
lose, including her life, by her penetrating analysis of Islam in "The
God That Hates" and in her appearances on Al-Jazeera that now require
her to live in hiding.
It includes Ibn Warraq, and Nonie Darwish, and many many others, who
contrary to what the thrusting careerist Pankaj Mishra -- who because he
has travelled and seen some of the obvious outward and visible
differences among Muslims, and noticed that they are not all foaming at
the mouth -- whoever thoought otherwise? certainly not Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
-- thinks he has become an expert on world Islam, and does not have to
read either the great scholars (Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Jeffrey,
Lammens, Tisdall, Zwemer, or many dozens of others), and can afford to
ignore the testimony not only of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but of all the other
articulate apostates whose lives, and works, have been made possible
only because they now enjoy the mental freedom, and physical security
(such as it is), in the West.
Pankaj Mishra may be winning points, so he may think, by his
determination to be an apologist for Islam, but he lacks the keen
perception of V. S. Naipaul -- and curiously, Mishra has written
introductions to two collections by Naipaul, but not of course to "Among
the Believers" or "Beyond Belief."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali can certainly handle herself. But a little
psychobiography of Pankaj Mishra -- Indians in India and America should
feel free to join in -- may be useful, in identifying the promptings
that led him to such an outrageous, offensive, and in the end silly,
missing-the-point review.
quote from the new yorker :
"Nomad" is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers.
Can I say then 'Mr Churchill's remarks are unlikely to earn him many Nazi admirers '
Any comments I might make here would not earn me many muslim admirers
but I'm not trying to flatter or please them , none of us are - we'd
like them to face the truth about their ideology and join the civilised
world
...as the new saying goes, "Muslims are the new Jews."
There is just one problem with this ghastly equation, which trivializes
the mass-murders of Jews in Europe and defames Hirsi Ali: Jews never
carried out terrorist attacks in Europe, and never boasted about how
they were one day going to take over...
Implicit in this elementary fact which PC MC ignores is a principle
which I hope those in the Anti-Islam Movement support: namely, that if any
group -- no matter how large or small, no matter how ostensibly
religious or not, no matter how ethnic or not -- were to do and say what
Muslims are doing and saying (and have been doing and saying for
centuries), we in the Anti-Islam Movement would feel the same about
them.
Let's use more direct language to bring that principle into acute clarity:
If, for example, Jews were doing and saying what Muslims are doing
and saying, we would now have an Anti-Jewish Movement. Or, if
Christians were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we
would now have an Anti-Christian Movement. Or, if Hindus were doing and
saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an
Anti-Hindu Movement. There should be no group in the world immune from
this principle.
I.e., the reason we are not Anti-Jewish (or Anti-Christian, etc.) is
not because of some abstract axiom we hold that could never be
contravened by evidence, but by our adherence to concrete facts. Simply
put, Jews (or Christians, etc.) are not doing and saying what Muslims
are doing and saying -- and, importantly, show no signs either in their
behavior or in their subcultures of ever doing and saying what Muslims
are doing and saying.
Some of us may wish to comfort ourselves with the conviction that
this fact about Jews (or Christians, etc.) reflects an immutable
abstract axiom, but that conviction should not be erected over against
the principle I have articulated and advocate, for the flip side of my
argument is that this principle demonstrates that we are not against
Muslims simply because they are Muslims, or out of some abstract animus
of bigotry or irrational hatred, or (alas) out of some eschatological
blueprint -- but simply because of what they are concretely saying and
doing (and have been doing and saying for centuries).
Now, it could be further argued that what Muslims are saying and
doing (and have been doing and saying for centuries) reflects a strange
and unique essence -- psychologically, sociologically and
spiritually -- that could, and will, never change; but that would be an
ontological question, which should be carefully distinguished from the
pragmatic problem of simply attending, and responding, to the concrete
behaviors and expressions of Muslims.
As the West reawakens to the problem of Islam in the decades of this
new 21st century, we may well find that our pragmatic responses to what
Muslims are saying and doing would, practically speaking, resemble a
response to an ontological essence; but again, that should never
distract us from our attention to the data, and we should never let our
actions be primarily guided by some abstract axiom. Indeed, PC MC today
represents precisely an abstract axiom -- but one which is preventing the West from attending to the data of Muslims in a rational way.
There is no open-ended, universal imperative in Jewish
Scripture calling upon Jews to wage war against non-Jews and subjugate
them under their rule (and the verses from Deuteronomy and Joshua that
are always invoked to claim that there is such an imperative have never
been understood that way by Jewish or Christian exegetes).
The problems here are twofold:
1) The mainstreamers have been fed such a steady diet of bullshit
since the ex-hippies took over about 40 yrs ago that they must detest
Judo-Christianity, the very basis for Western Civilization, and assume
the worst of its scriptures, tenets and teachings.
2) The mainstreamers are so racist -- in the manner of nouveau racisme, the good
racism, of course -- that they must love Islam and assume only the very
best of its scriptures, tenets and teachings. (The vast majority of
Moslems are non-white).
And don't kid yourselves: the mainstreamers own the narrative and the
dialog from the ground up, from kindergarten through grad school, the
law schools and the courts, the newspapers and networks, the government
offices, the legislatures, the corporate HR departments, the board
rooms, the philanthropic funds, everything. Hell, they've even gone
deep into the militaries at this point.
*** 92:8 ***
The fact that one can imbibe a taste of good old fashioned antisemitism in the act only makes it more fun for them.
Whenever I see such discussions there it comes always to
my mind a very serious, I think, issue... the issue of reforming Islam. I
have seen Robert in many places saying that such a thing may be
possible as in the cases of the Mormons in America and Shinto in after
WW2 Japan. To be honest, to me such a thing seems impossible. Concepts
as the division of World to 'dar'ul Harb' and 'dar-ul Islam', that of
'jihad', of 'dhimmitude' , of 'jizya', of the whole rules of 'sharia'
etc are interrelated in a quite 'organic' way to what in Islam is
believed as 'revelation'. That's to say if you detach them from Islam,
there remains no Islam anymore.
How can a passage of Koran which says 'kill the unbelievers unless
they accept to live as some kind of inferior beings and slaves' can be
explained, for example, in a reformed way? By interpreting it as
symbolical? Is it something so possible when Muhammad itself was a
warrior chief? Or how you can present a passage which says 'beat your
wives whenever it is needed', so that it can be considered 'reformed'?
And let not forget: how to feel free to 'play' with such passages given
that they are perceived as God's word uttered through angel Gabriel
himself? Which Muslim could dare such a thing?
Really, if you detach all those concepts from Islam there remains not
even a single reason for its being a different religion. The thing
remaining is an Old Testament kind monotheism. So what reason it could
have for existing, in such a case?
I think this question is the core question about Islam... which it
leads to another immediately appearing question too, about how could
Islam's case may be managed in the coming years of history.
Just this is the reason that sometimes this question leads to logical
conclusions which makes a near future apocalyptic, as to its
dimensions, clash look as inevitable. Of course, it is not something any
sane human being can wish but, nevertheless, it is a thought which is
persistent in mind as an equation's logical outcome, somehow.
I would like to hear some possible alternatives to this 'equation's
solution... if there exist, of course, any such alternatives in some
peoples' minds.
It baffles me why a Hindu Brahmin will become an
apologist for Islam. During Mughal time, the brutalization and
beheadings of Brahmins and priests(who were Brahmins) were their primary
objective. To see one of their own would defend Islam is
incomprehensible. The seculaist modern India has totally lost touch with
her Hindu heritage and Pankaj Mishra is an obvious product. Another
name that competes with Mishra is that of Dinesh D'Souza who is a
christian( I am guessing his religion by his last name, D'Souza). So it
doesn't make much difference whether one is a Hindu or a Christian when
brain washing occurs from an early age!!!
Of course Berman is right [and Pankaj Mishra silly in his
attack on Berman, in his attempt to blacken the name, and limit the
influence of the book, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali]\. Buruma has now gotten his
wish, his ardent desire, his safe-haven of tenure, in the safe-haven of
the United States of America, a sinecure he no doubt owes to Leon
Botstein (or was it George Soros, whose wife helps finance some kind of
arts stuff at Bard?), and now that he's safely taken care of for the
rest of his life he might begin to rethink what he has written about
Tariq Ramadan, and his whole attitude -- and understanding -- of Islam.
But I doubt if he will.
Meanwhile, Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma's good friend, made his
name, and his entire career, from his reporting in the Balkans. And
there his experience provided an almost unique example of a case where
Muslims were, or at least seemed to the superficial to be, the victims
and the Serbs seemed, to some (but not all, not to Peter Handke, not to a
certain Canadian general), the villains. In fact it was much more
complicated and the main thing to understand was the historical context:
the great fear that Izetbegovic, in calling for the imposition of
Shari'a in Bosnia, created among the Serbs, who had been the victims of
the Ottoman Turks, and of the devshirme, and general cultural
degringolade, for centuries, and who were so frightened Serbs that some
-- too many -- were temporarily willing to be led by the likes of
Milosevic.
And the other source for Timothy Garton Ash's understanding of Islam
was that provided by the apologists at St. Antony's College (founded
with money left to Oxford by a Jewish trader from Aden, Anton Besse),
the ones in the Middle East wing of the two-winged place, with Timothy
Garton Ash in the East European, far more acceptable wing. It wasn't
just the likes of the late Albert Hourani (who has been replaced by the
non-Muslim apologist for Islam Rogan), but also such people as Avi
Shlaim, who know nothing about Islam but talk a good anti-Israel game.
And then there arrived, first as a lean lecturer until the Arabs could
buy him a professorship, none other than Tariq Ramadan, and Timothy
Garton Ash thought he was just swell.
I note that Ian Buruma, originally scheduled to be among those who would
offer soft-balls to Tariq Ramadan on his recent royal progress - not
quite, I'm glad to say, quite as royal as he expected -- through the
academic archipelago, appears to have backed out.
I wonder if that was indeed the case.
If he had appeared, and had performed his usual role as apologist,
then the things said by his friend Timothy Gartaon Ash at a certain
debate in London a few years ago, when at a certain opint, according to
eyewitnesses, in the heat of the whole thing, though Timothy Garton Ash
had taken upon himself to be an apologist for Islam, he "lost it" and
admitted all kinds of unpleasant things about Muhammad. And then, just
afterwards, he realized what he had done and, quivering with fear, went
up to everyone he could and begged, or demanded, that all videotapes and
audiotapes of what he had said be destroyed, for fear of what might
happen to him. That incident shows that he perfectly understands the
nightmarish ability of Muslims to intimidate Westerners -- for he,
Timothy Garton Ash, is among them.
I'm still waiting for Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma to discuss
that incident, and in detail. I'm waiting for Ian Buruma to demonstrate
that he has begun to study Islam, and to think about its texts, tenets,
attitudes, atmospherics, and about what the great Western scholars of
Islam (not the espositos, but Joseph Schacht, and Snouck Hurgronje and
Arthur Jeffrey and Henri Lammens and dozens of others) and the most
articulate defectors from the Army of Islam, such as Wafa Sultan, Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Magdi Allam, have written.
He owes this to the people, including himself, who have been misled.
But will he do it?
J'en doute.
The hypocrisy of these people astounds.
Continuing my earlier comments:
Pankaj Mishra's attitude is in line with what the present Prime
Minister of India, Man Mohan Singh also thinks of Islam and Muslims. A
few yeras back he proclaimed that Muslims of India have first right over
country's resources - the comments being made when he was pushing for
quota system for Muslims for bank loans, scholarships, college
admissions etc.
He is another fine India who has forgotten that Mughal emperors,
Jehangir and Aurangjeb beheaded two of the revered Gurus of Sikhism,
Guru Arjundev and Guru Teg Bahadur. The main Gurudwara(Sikh Temple) in
Delhi is known as Gurudwara Shish Ganj where the beheading of Teg
bahadur occured and his head was mounted and publicly displayed(shish
meaning head). It is after this incidence, Guru Teg Bahadur's son Guru
Gobindsingh started the present Khalsa division to drive out the Muslim
invaders from India.
Alas, the memories are short lived - even the Sikh Prime Minister of
India has lost touch with History. When such is the case with the
Prime Minister of India, Mishra and D'souza are only small fries in
comparison - who cares for them!!
Taken from www.jihadspin.org, one among thousands of
websites (run by both Muslims and non-Muslims), where the doctrine of
Jihad, the very essence of Islam, the essence that escapes Pankaj
Mishra in his travels "through Muslim Asia" (yes, an ideology, its texts
and tenets, and their effects on the minds of adherents, is hard to see
if all you see is what is standing before you) is discussed:
Here is the celebrated Iraqi scholar Majid Khadduri, in his 1955 treatise on “War and Peace in Islam”:
Thus the Jihad may be regarded as Islam's instrument for carrying out
its ultimate objective by turning all people into believers, if not in
the prophethood of Muhammad (as in the case of the dhimmis), at least in
the belief of God. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have declared
"some of my people will continue to fight victoriously for the sake of
the truth until the last one of them will combat the anti-Christ." Until
that moment is reached the Jihad, in one form or another will remain as
a permanent obligation upon the entire Muslim community. It follows
that the existence of a dar al-harb is ultimately outlawed under the
Islamic jural order; that the dar al-Islam (Islamic community) are
permanently under Jihad obligation until the dar al-harb is reduced to
non-existence; and that any community accepting certain disabilities-
must submit to Islamic rule and reside in the dar al-Islam or be bound
as clients to the Muslim community. The universality of Islam, in its
all embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process
of warfare, psychological and political if not strictly military.
And in 1996, the Syrian-German scholar Bassam Tibi wrote this:
At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity. Muslims
are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the
world. "We have not sent thee but as a universal (Messenger) to men,
giving them glad tidings, and warning them (against sin), but most men
understand not." Qur'an [[34:28]. If non-Muslims submit to conversion or
subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do
not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them. In Islam, peace
requires that non-Muslims submit to the call of Islam, either by
converting or by accepting the status of a religious minority (dhimmi)
and paying the imposed poll tax, jizya. World peace, the final stage of
the da'wa, is reached only with the conversion or submission of all
mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not
aggression but a fulfillment of the Qur'anic command to spread Islam as a
way to peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not war
(harb), a word that is used only to describe the use of force by
non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not hurub (the plural of harb) but rather
futuhat, acts of "opening" the world to Islam and expressing Islamic
Jihad. Relations between dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and dar
al-harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of
war, according to the Qur'an and to the authoritative commentaries of
Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles
for the da'wa, are blamed for this state of war, for the da'wa can be
pursued peacefully if others submit to it. In other words, those who
resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them. Only when Muslim
power is weak is 'temporary truce' (hudna) allowed (Islamic jurists
differ on the definition of 'temporary').
Spencer writes: ...neither Ayaan Hirsi Ali nor anyone else is talking about
rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them
wholesale, or any such. It is a peculiar leap of logic to say that
because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was
persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist
designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal
aspirations.
The logic of PC MC in this regard is not really peculiar, nor is it a leap.
The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are
by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try
to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing
this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?
Whenever this issue becomes forced into explicit response, the
Anti-Islam analysts usually try to do an end-run around it, by
hypothesizing that many (or most?) Muslims "don't really know their
Islam", or are "lax Muslims who don't really practice it", or indeed may
be "reformists" of one stripe or another. These hypotheses (with no
solid grounding in fact) serve two functions:
1) they attempt to placate the PC MCs, who control the sociopolitical
discussion about Islam in the West, and convince them that we are not
"against all Muslims"
and
2) they reflect a sincerely liberal (or Christian, or often, both)
attitude that is anxiously disinclined to condemn a whole People.
Sometimes, a given Anti-Islam analyst's use of those hypotheses may
reflect #1 and not #2; sometimes vice versa; or sometimes an incoherent
mixture of the two. But it must be asked: Is it not rather illogical
(if not comically preposterous) to suppose that there exist viably
massive numbers of Muslims out there who do not support Islam?
So we see that within the Anti-Islam Movement itself, there is
lurking the same logic that leads the PC MCs "to say that because one
group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a
result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must
be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations."
What differentiates us from the PC MCs is that the latter hold
tenaciously to an abstract axiom that forever forbids us from condemning
Muslims, no matter how massive is the mountain of data that damns them
and their Islam. On our side, however, we have Anti-Islam analysts who
with similar tenacity resist the logical consequence of that mountain of
data which we are able to notice and digest. That logical consequence
is the condemnation of all Muslims. The problem is not the
condemnation, but what we do about it. We will not "round them
up" nor "genocide" them. But we will have to do something, to protect
our societies from them.
And let us not forget that the PC MCs are exceedingly hypersensitive
about this issue. Any negative criticism of Islam or by extension of
Muslims is deemed to be perilously close to the slippery slope that
leads to "rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting
them wholesale, or any such." This too is logical: PC MCs know that if
there is a potential eventuality that is horrible, the best way to
prevent it is to stop it at its source -- and the source of this
horrible potential they envision, "another Holocaust" this time against
poor Muslims, is precisely the thought crimes of saying too many
negative things about Islam and by extension about the Muslims who
support Islam (and how many Muslims don't support Islam?)
The specific reasons for this logic are many, but the two most important are:
1) we are implicitly condemning not merely a "group", but an entire
People who hail from over 50 countries around the world, who have a
rich culture that goes back 1,400 years, and whose culture is massively
deemed to be a "world religion"
2) this entire People we are implicitly condemning are perceived to
be an ethnic people (or a wonderfully diverse rainbow of ethnic
peoples), and thus immediately and irrevocably the hot buttons of
Reverse Racism are pushed -- for in the PC MC climate, which is dominant
and mainstream throughout the West, one cannot say anything negative
about designated ethnic peoples (or if you do say anything negative,
please say it in exceedingly gingerly terms, say it fleetingly, do not
press the issue, and desist politely -- and we may still allow you to
have your career).
Hugh quotes Khadduri and Tibi as modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist jihad.
Another name may be added, the Indian scholar and political activist
al-Mashriqi, born in 1888, and quite active into the 20th century. He
founded the Khaksar Movement, an Indian Muslim separatist movement.
In one of his writings, al-Mashriqi expressed designs that go far beyond a mere regional concern in northern India: “...we [Muslims] have again to dominate the whole world. We have to become its conqueror and its rulers.”
And in a pamphlet titled Islam ki Askari Zindagi he stated: “The Koran has proclaimed in unequivocal words to the world that
the Prophet was sent with the true religion and definite instruction
that he should make all other religions subservient to this religion
[Islam]...”
Al-Mashriqi also wrote a book called Tazkira which, as Andrew
Bostom described it, “produced a quintessential message of Islam
enshrining the ideals of militaristic nation-building” I.e., it
promulgated and highlighted the supremacist expansionism through
militant means that is essential to Islamic doctrine and Islamic
history.
Incidentally, al-Mashriqi met Adolf Hitler in 1926. In his own account of this meeting, al-Mashriqi wrote:
“I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me. . . I found him very congenial and piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I sent him my Isharat concerning
the Khaksar movement with a picture of a spade-bearer Khaksar at the
end of that book. In 1933 he started his Spade Movement. ”
Hat tip to our former friend Andrew Bostom: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32831
Also see: http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/10/hitler-and-islam_28.html
=Hugh quotes Khadduri and Tibi as modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist jihad."
No, I do not.
I quote Khadduri and Tibi as authorities on the doctrine of Jihad in
Islam, not as "modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist Jihad."
And I would never use the phrase "violent supremacist Jihad" -- the
piling on of adjectives, including the unnecessary "supremacist," is not
something I would ever do.
"Who now remembers the murder of the Armenians?" Hitler
asked as he launched his invasion of Poland the the genocide against the
Jews.
The link between Nazism and violent Islam is well known.
We remember, Adolf, we remember.
@Hesperado
I really don't get your response and I don't agree with you. Islam is
an ideology, i.e. a set of beliefs. I reject Islam because of its
beliefs. Islam is incompatible with universal human rights, it is
incompatible with every persons right to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness irrespective of race, gender and religion. Therefore I
reject Islam.
I am not condemning an "entire people" or an "ethnic people". Islam
is no ethnicity or race. I am not condemning each and every muslim. I do
not even know each and every muslim. Many muslims do not know how to
read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion.
Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name, since they would be
killed by their fellow muslims if they left their faith.
But I do condemn those muslims who preach hatred and jihad against
non-believers. Why do I condemn them? Because they do not tolerate me.
There is a limit to tolerance. I do not tolerate murder, I do not
tolerate theft, I do not tolerate torture, I do not tolerate rape, I do
not tolerate violence and I do not tolerate any people who incite fellow
muslims to murder and violence against non-muslims. This is merely a
matter of self respect and my will to survive.
Regards,
KilianKlaiber
Brilliant article, with the distinct look of
unanswerability to it (speaking under correction - I am not an expert on
the subject).
I have to say, though, that there is always some frustration entailed
on reading this kind of thing. Why isn't THIS in The New Yorker?
I'd love to see an attempt at an answer, but the Pankaj Mishras need
never try that on. Just ignoring what they can't answer is preferable,
and all too easily done.
Very few Jews have are obsessed with a hatred of Arabs,
but 300 million Arabs hate Jews mainly because they are Jewish. Because
of the holocaust Jews have escaped to a tiny part of an enormous Arab
land, unfortunately many Arabs were dispossessed. But Arabs were
responsible for slaughtering hundreds of thousands in Sudan/Darfur and
Nigeria, let them not cast the first stone at Israel. There is cruelty
in every part of the world, but the guilt should be distributed evenly.
I quote Khadduri and Tibi as authorities on the
doctrine of Jihad in Islam, not as "modern Muslims who advocate violent
supremacist Jihad."
It may be redundant to you, but pedagogically a little redundancy
never hurts -- particularly in a sociopolitical climate illterate about jihad. And I would never use the phrase "violent supremacist Jihad" --
the piling on of adjectives, including the unnecessary "supremacist," is
not something I would ever do.
Actually, I would pile on another adjective: expansionist.
Each of the three adjectives performs a distinct function: violent refers to the necessary element of violence in the
doctrine of jihad, symbiotically and inextricably linked with the other
ostensibly non-violent ways in which Muslims pursue it, and making those
other non-violent ways a problem where no problem would exist were the
violence forever non-existent. supremacist refers to the premise that guides Muslims to their
conclusion: The premise being that they are the best of all peoples,
because the true God has made them custodians of the absolute truth and
of the way to avoid eternal damnation and win eternal paradise. expansionist, consequently, refers to the conclusion: that Muslims must make Islam dominant throughout the world.
Any one of these without the other two would not pose a great problem for the world:
For example, a group that was violent, but not supremacist or expansionist, would pose only criminal problems, not a problem of warfare.
A group that is supremacist, but not violent or expansionist, may
express pernicious ideas, but if they never harm anyone in the
furtherance of their ideas, and if the surrounding society is relatively
healthy, they will be largely ignored when not roundly refuted and will
certainly not persuade anyone but a tiny minority of unhealthy souls.
Finally, a group that is expansionist, but not violent or
supremacist, may or may not be bad for society. If, for example, the
4-H Club were expansionist, there would be little to object about. Or
if an expansionist group did propose pernicious ideas, they would be
impotent to persuade the body politic in any healthy society -- unless
they used violence.
Which brings me to another important adjective to pile on to jihad:
anti-liberal -- or, for those who recoil at the L word: unjust -- or,
for those who require more beef in their diet: sociopathic.
Respectfully, I would argue that virtually any claim of
unethical or illegitimate Arab dispossession of land is entirely
mythical. The Jews, beginning as far back as the last decades of the
nineteenth century, bought the land from Arab and Turkish landlords, and
ordinarily at exorbitant prices. Other land was won in warfare by the
Jews in 1948 when the Arab Muslim world left no doubt that it would
accept no Jewish state at all. None of this adds up to illegitimate
dispossesion.
Moreover, the Arabs for centuries had done little with the land which
I will here call "Palestine." Nor had they made any significant
attempt to free themselves of their Ottoman Turkish masters. Only
because the Ottoman Empire aligned with the losing side in WWI did the
Arabs finally get their own independent nations, ones which almost
certainly would not have come into existence but for the Allies in WWI
beating the Central Powers and all of which Arab states to this day
remain nations where true freedom is non-existent.
Sorry if I don't feel any sympathy for the Arabs. They deserve the
fate they now experience because they are quite clearly the single most
dysfunctional major people on earth. Pretty damn brutal too, with
others and with each other, though this is regularly glossed over by the
Western elites.
You are barking up the wrong tree. Read "Krieg der
Civilizationen", 1995, by Bassam Tibi. He point out the necessity for
Muslims to demand liberation from the rigors of Sharia and acceptance of
seperation of religion and politics. What more could you ask for from a
critical and reflective cultural Muslim?
The untested assumption that jihad terrorism was caused
by poverty, and that draining the poverty swamp would cause terrorism to
wither, is another beauty, along with "Islam is a religion of peace",
due to George W and his administration's response to 9/11. It was
obvious on that day that the main actors involved in the hijackings were
from privileged backgrounds and it is people from those backgrounds who
would be the ones able to see themselves as rightful leaders and
wielders of power in Islamic countries, and beyond, and therefore seek
to do so, a necessary, although admittedly not sufficient, requirement.
The loony left in the media and in politics can be expected to
indulge in intellectual sleight of hand along these lines. It has been
the failure of those on the conservative side of politics to speak the
truth, and instead sprout rubbish that enabled these falsities to be
accpted wisdom, that is the terrible disappointment.
But it is worth noting that, by 1941, when the mufti
sidled up to Hitler and, soon afterward, began to air his anti-Semitic
rants on the radio, reactionary pan-Islamists like him had to contend
with overlapping groups of liberal Westernizers, Marxists, and secular
Arab nationalists; far from being representative of the larger Arab
world, the mufti was a fast-diminishing figure even in his own small
sphere of influence
Right, the Egyptian monarchists, Nasser's socialists and Sadddam's
Bathists wanted nothing but peaceful coexistence with the Jews!
I remember from reading John Roy Carlson that even those more
enlightened Egyptians--the socialists, the Marxists, the Westernizers,
the secularists--all were determined that the Jews must be stopped from
having a state in the Middle East. Their Arab honor, the health of the
Arab nation, the fact that a successful Jewish state would demoralize
and set back the Arabs or some similar ideas were always expressed.
As for all the competing ideologies, in "The Closed Circle,"
Pryce-Jones talks about how the same group of elites basically ran the
Arab countries and just took turns in power depending on whether they
want to court the West or the Soviet block countries. One person would
call himself the anti-communist while another would call himself the
socialist. In reality, they were both similar autocratic elites out to
get the best deal for themselves from which ever foreign power was
handing out money and weapons.
Ahh, the New Yorker. Back in the 1980's, I got a gift
subscription to the mag. It was full of "My Incredibly Oppressive Irish
Catholic Girlhood" sorts of articles, which all made me think that the
magazine was charging full speed ahead into the year 1968. Even the
cartoons were rather flat and uninteresting.
The prestige print media in America, I propose, is ossified. Its
editors and major writers all seem to be a vast, thundering herd of
[predictably Lefitsh] independent minds who will go plunging over a
cliff rather than open their eyes. This and the quotes from Bawer
elsewhere on JW underscore the need for a newer, more awake journalism
run by others.
Haha
I searched the page immediately for Hugh's comments. I knew he would
enlighten us. As an Indian I can attest to the accuracy of his
statement. Pankaj Mishra is firmly in the tradition of a West-facing
intellectual who pretends to denounce the West while adopting its WORST
ideas (Marxism, socialism). He has disparaged India's economic growth
with usual socialist arguments, arguing for Nehru. He regularly
denounces any support for Hinduism or opposition to Islam or jihad.
The usual. YAWN. Only difference is that hes on the up in the West. So he feels emboldened to continue on this trajectory.
Kilian,
You responded to my argument with a complex bundle difficult to
disentangle, but I'll do my best, by piecing out and numerating your
points:
1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn
an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I
already argued above.
2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream
sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people,
or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason
to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites.
3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
Being illiterate does not prevent a person from being brainwashed. In fact, Islamic culture is not a reading
culture -- it is an oral culture, where most Muslims listen to sermons
or public harangues or the discussions of smaller circles of "learned
men" among them -- not to mention they also assimilate much of their
Islamic worldview through their families as they grow up. The basics of
the Islamic worldview that are causing problems in the world -- hatred
of the other; a feeling of superiority; a feeling of a right or
obligation to take what belongs to others because they are inferior; a
victimization sense of being constantly wounded and attacked because the
world is not Islamic; a gangster mentality that admires violent action
in order redress grievances; etc: all these attitudes can be, and are,
instilled in multitudes of Muslims without those Muslims reading hardly
anything. If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become
dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture.
4) " Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"
I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd
be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are
illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". There are many
more similar hypotheses -- all desperate attempts by sincere-minded
non-Muslims to try to save the Entire People of Islam from our
condemnation. One problem with these hypotheses is: how can you tell
which Muslims are which? How do you discern that a Muslim ia a "Muslim
by name only"? Just because he tells you he likes music and he wears
blue jeans and he says he doesn't like the "Wahhabis" or the "Salafis"?
I'm not going to risk the lives of my fellow citizens on flimsy tests
like these.
5) "since they would be killed by their fellow muslims if they left their faith."
Muslims have been killing Muslims for centuries. A Muslim marked for
death by fellow Muslims is not a reliable indicator of that Muslim's
trustworthiness.
Ipso Facto wrote:
"You are barking up the wrong tree. Read "Krieg der Civilizationen",
1995, by Bassam Tibi. He point out the necessity for Muslims to demand
liberation from the rigors of Sharia and acceptance of seperation of
religion and politics. What more could you ask for from a critical and
reflective cultural Muslim?"
Is that the same Bassam Tibi who wrote: At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity... If
non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can
be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war
against them.
?
If he wrote both statements, obviously the one I quoted cancels out the one you quoted.
Check.
But a little psychobiography of Pankaj Mishra -- Indians in India and America should feel free to join in -- may be useful
First things first, this is a JNU product. JNU is the strongest left-wing bastion in all major Indian universities.
In general, Indian history taught in high schools is cleansed of
Islamic atrocities. In case, the atrocities are mentioned, the
connection with Islamic ideology is never made.
"I have to say, though, that there is always some
frustration entailed on reading this kind of thing. Why isn't THIS in
The New Yorker?"
As a longtime NY subscriber, I couldn't agree more. Robert or Hugh,
if you are reading these comments, why not submit such rebuttals (or
briefer versions, in the form of letters to the editor) to the NY, NYT,
etc?
Very well spoken in both your posts, Hesperado,
but we are told, by Muslims and Islam-defenders again and again that:
There is great diversion and division among Muslims. And indeed, in
effect, assured that there are diverse, indeed many versions of Islam.
So what we need is:
- knowledge, information about the most prominent Islam-versions.
- knowledge as far as possible about the declared or hidden real unity,
loyalty of the vast majority of Muslims behind the Ummah, in which are
hiding definitely Islam-versions that are anti-democratic. These must be
discarded by Muslims in favor of our constitutions and laws when in
contradiction with Islamic Divine laws by Muslims in order for our
society to trust them.
"Is that the same Bassam Tibi who wrote:
"At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity... If
non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can
be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war
against them."
?
If he wrote both statements, obviously the one I quoted cancels out the one you quoted.
Check."
I think you have to apply the principle of abrogation here. He could
have written both statements years apart and then the latest cancels out
the former. Even Allah allowed to correct himself, unfortunately to the
worse, but Tibi seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
The latest article I could find from Tibi is from March 2007. This quote seems relevant to our discussion:
"Tariq Ramadan presents Orthodox Islam as Euro-Islam presumably with
the intent to deceive. But I say there can be no Europeanising of Islam
unless Salafist concepts like Sharia and Jihad are abandoned through
cultural-religious reforms, and this goes too for the vision of
Islamisation through Da'awa and Hidjra. Only an Islam that is in tune
with the fundamentals of cultural modernity (democracy, individual human
rights, civil society) and embraces pluralism deserves to be defined as
Euro-Islam. And furthermore, the concept of Euro-Islam applies only to
Europe, in other words unlike the earlier universal vision of
Westernising the world - the world of Islam included – it is not
universalism."
Tibi seems here to reject the spread of Islam by any violent means.
On the other hand I am a bit worried about his narrow level of
tolerance when it comes to an atheist apostate like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Quoted from the same article:
"Despite this call to de-personalisation, I'll allow myself two
comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, around whom this debate
is revolving, to its detriment. What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an
affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam. When,
for instance, she claims that our prophet and our holy book, the Koran,
are a fiction, she insults all Muslims and puts a smirk on the faces of
all historians of Islam. Of course, Hirsi Ali has every right to turn
her back on Islam in the name of religious freedom and this is what she
has done. But she should not abuse the religion just to score points
cheaply for herself."
Rejecting all religions and their Holy Scriptures as fiction is not
an insult and not an abuse of the religion or the believers. It is quite
simply the legitimate positions of atheists and agnostics and in the
name of freedom of religion such positions should be respected or
ignored and not cause irrational ad hominum attacks.
Tibi has a lot to learn about tolerance, he is clearly unable to
control his emotions and be rational when Islam is rejected as a
fiction. Most of the Christians have learned to be tolerant but it took
several hundred years of hard fighting by the rationalist and humanists
to get that far. For hundred of years critique or rejection of the
Christian dogmas was a risky and often deadly enterprise, and it still
is in Islam. Tibi is not helpful in making Islam more tolerant and open
to critique - and that he may be criticised for.
Tibi is attempting the impossible: To clean Islam of all the
barbaric, aggressive, supremacist, racist and nasty stuff, and still
claim what is left is Islam. ;-)
Link to article by Bassam Tibi: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1258.html
In Sanskrit Mishra's first name Pankaj means a lotus. In
fact, the word's literal meaning is "mud-born". It is clear that Mr.
Mishra is still stuck with his head in the mud and has deliberately
chosen to stay there. In doing so he will not gain the respect of
muslims as he might have hoped. To them, he remains a filthy kafir after
all. To us kafirs, he is just plain stupid.
Re: Bassam Tibi
I think it is quite possible that Bassam Tibi wrote both. He is a
forthright critique of traditional Islam. "If non-Muslims submit to
conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully.
If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them.". This is
not something he advocates. It is something he describes and criticises
as orthodox Islam.
On the other hand Bassam Tibi is someone who really wants to reform
Islam. So here is what he wishes: "Only an Islam that is in tune with
the fundamentals of cultural modernity (democracy, individual human
rights, civil society) and embraces pluralism deserves to be defined as
Euro-Islam."
Bassam Tibi is one of those very few muslims who really do want to
change Islam and make it compatible to western values. He is in fact an
ally and not a foe just like Irshad Manji.
"The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims..."
"1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn
an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I
already argued above."
No I am not condemning a people. I am talking about a set of ideas, an ideology. I am not condemning a nation, race, people...
" 2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream
sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people,
or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to
do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people
of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites."
Oh yes you did say this and you repeat it again. The vast majority of
muslims are an ethnic people? Oh, yes, so muslim Persians, Pakistanis,
Turks, Arabs, Indians, Indonesians all have a common language and
heritage? Please check the facts. A muslim is someone who believes:
"There is no god but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger." That's it. This
has nothing to do with ethnicity.
"3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
... If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become
dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic
culture."
Why do you put words in my mouth? I never said such a thing. I said
that many people are born muslims and have very little knowledge of
their religion. They have not read the quran or hadith because they are
illiterate. I know a "muslim indonesian" who is married to a German! She
apparently doesn't know her religion, because Shariah forbids women to
marry non-muslims. There are many muslims who are not well educated and
they have no sound understanding of their religion. This is just a
statement of fact. Just like there are many many catholics who do not
know the doctrines of their church or reject some of these doctrines,
like the prohibition of premarital sex or homosexual sex. I do not
condemn these people. Why should I?
"4) " Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"
I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd
be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are
illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". "
Again putting words into my mouth. I didn't say "most muslims are
illiterate", I said many muslims are illiterate. Check the facts,
illiteracy in muslim countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, ... is in high.
You may not know many muslims. But, here in Germany, we have lots of
them. Many of them do not follow the commandments of their prophet. They
drink alcohol, they have premarital sex, they do not pray five times a
day, they eat pork, they reject warfare for Islam, yes and some muslims
disguise their true disbelief, because they are killed by fellow
muslims, if they leave the faith.
I don't reject these people. I reject the ideology called islam.
Bassam Tibi calls himself a muslim. Why should I reject Bassam Tibi? I
don't reject him but he is a muslim. This proves that I do not reject
each and every muslim.
You conclusion that if you reject Islam you must reject each and every muslim is thereby proven wrong.
"You conclusion that if you reject Islam you must reject each and every muslim is thereby proven wrong."
I agree completely with your conclusion and reject the claim made by Hesperado as inconsistent.
Hesperato makes the classical mistake not to distinguish between the
metaphysical level and the empirical level - between the theoretical and
practical level.
The word "Islam" is not unambiguous and the word "Muslim" even less so and to a certain degree an unknown.
I agree with Robert Spencer who explains his position in this simple way:
"Islam is not a monolith, and never have I said or written anything
that characterizes all Muslims as terrorist or given to violence. To
call attention to the roots and goals of jihad violence within Islamic
texts and teachings, and to show how jihadists use those texts and
teachings, says nothing at all about what any given Muslim believes or
how he acts."
The historian Bat Ye´or explains in this interview the core problem in Islam:
Question: Daniel Pipes' slogan is "Fundamentalist Islam is the enemy;
moderate Islam is the solution." But do you think there is hope for
change?
Answer: I know moderate and brilliant Muslims, but I do not know of a
school of thought, represented by teaching and publications, followed by
millions of Muslims, called "moderate Islam."
Everyone hopes for a change, including Muslims. I never say "never."
But I think that changes will emerge if we start discussing these issues
instead of hiding them under the carpet, and if we take measures to
protect ourselves and become aware of language manipulation, like, for
instance, pretending that jihad means peace and justice.
We should also support secular and modernist Muslims who are also
targeted and hope desperately for our help and encouragement."
(Quoted from article in Dallas Morning News 'Time of jihad', June 18, 2005).
Case closed!
Pankaj Mishra is, as noted above, a young and thrusting
careerist. After an undistinguished education in India, this arriviste
arrived in the West (he now "divides his time" between India and London,
or is it London, New York, and India? I forget) and along the way,
upthrustingly married the daughter of a former editor of the TLS,
Ferdinand Mount. He kept trying to be published, kept being turned down,
and then finally managed -- self-prommotion and aggressive agents are
wonderful, aren't they? -- to wangle a large advance for the long and
unreadable "The Romantics" (lots of supposedly colorful crowd scenes at
train stations, so I'm told). His outstanding characteristic is a
complete humorlessness, which belies the smiling photo of himself that
you can find on-line. Let's leave it at that.
Kilian Klaiber quoted my comment in which I quoted him and responded -- Me: "The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims..." Klaiber: "1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" " Me: You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to
condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens
up, as I already argued above."
-- then responded:
"No I am not condemning a people. I am talking about a set of ideas, an ideology. I am not condemning a nation, race, people..."
This is an obtuse response by Klaiber. In the quote of mine he
himself reproduced, I already explained that I assume he may very well
not be condemning an entire People: Me: You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people.
I then went on to clarify that what a person thinks they are
doing is one thing, but sometimes the logical consequence of their
related positions lead to the conclusion they claim to disavow -- they
lead there, that is, if the person wants to maintain coherence: "But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
The problem opens up, because Islam is the cherished culture and
self-identity of an entire People -- Muslims. The phrase "an entire
People" does not necessarily designate an "ethnic" People: it simply
designates a collective who are unified by a culture -- in this case, by
Islam. After we acknowledge this elementary fact, we can get into the
wondrous diversity of Islam that would somehow militate against
considering them to be one "entire People". Aside from the fact that
the "diversity of Islam" is a premise (and conclusion) often used by the
defenders of Islam, it also needs to be cogently argued to be
persuasive in its function as a way to save some? many? most? Muslims
from our condemnation. (However many Muslims get conceptually saved
through this argument, one gets the sense that it has to be enough of a
large number to assuage the anxiety of people like Klaiber and comfort
them with the thought that they are not condemning an entire People: one
wonders how many is enough to fulfill that function of assuaging that
anxiety?).
Klaiber goes on to demonstrate his obtuse reading skills. Again he
quotes an excerpt from my comment where I quote him then myself: Klaiber: " 2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race." Me: I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream
sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people,
or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to
do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people
of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites."
Klaiber responds:
"Oh yes you did say this and you repeat it again. The vast majority of muslims are an ethnic people?
Oh, yes, so muslim Persians, Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Indonesians all have a common language and heritage?"
Klaiber needs to read more carefully. 1) I didn't say "a common
language and heritage"; and 2) I said "an ethnic people of one sort or
another", not a unified block of one ethnic people. Muslims represent a
worldwide community of people unified by Islam, and most of whom are
"ethnic" of one sort or another in the sense that PC MC designates. That's the fact I was referring to.
Klaiber adds:
"Please check the facts. A muslim is someone who believes: "There is
no god but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger." That's it. This has
nothing to do with ethnicity."
We are discussing two distinct things here. Surely Klaiber can pat
his head and rub his stomach at the same time; surely he can entertain
two distinct notions about one entity at the same time? Here are the
two:
1) Muslims are unified by the ideology of Islam.
2) Muslims are represented by a worldwide diversity of ethnic peoples.
What happens because of these two facts, given our PC MC culture in
the West, is that the perniciousness of #1 is obfuscated and
whitewashed, because #2 makes the PC MC anxious to avoid condemnation,
since it is a commandment in PC MC never to condemn, or even criticize,
what they designate as "ethnic people". It is, in fact, the PC MCs who
confuse the two points above. And I see that Klaiber does so as well --
as do many I have been noticing in the Anti-Islam Movement. Yet
another indication that the wall between Those Who Have Woken Up to the
Problem of Islam and the PC MCs is not necessarily an impermeable
barrier.
Next example of Klaiber's obtuseness:
Again, he quotes an excerpt from my comment: Klaiber: "3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion." Me: ... If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become
dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic
culture."
Klaiber responds:
"Why do you put words in my mouth? I never said such a thing."
Then immediately he goes on to say such a thing again!
" I said that many people are born muslims and have very little knowledge of their religion. They have not read the quran or hadith because they are illiterate."
I precisely said in the quote of mine which Klaiber reproduced above that not reading the Islamic texts does not preclude the Islamic brainwashed mindset. And Klaiber goes on to speak of not reading -- i.e., illiteracy -- as somehow precluding the Islamic brainwashed mindset.
Klaiber goes on to offer anecdotal evidence:
"I know a "muslim indonesian" who is married to a German! She
apparently doesn't know her religion, because Shariah forbids women to
marry non-muslims. There are many muslims who are not well educated and
they have no sound understanding of their religion."
His Muslim Indonesian acquaintance may not know that Sharia forbids
Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men, but that doesn't mean she
hasn't imbibed and assimilated into her brain numerous other aspects of
the Islamic mindset of various facets of fanaticism and irrationality.
(Secondly, is he sure this "German" is a non-Muslim?)
Klaiber then goes on to state the mantra of the superimposition of Western culture onto Islamic culture:
"Just like there are many many catholics who do not know the
doctrines of their church or reject some of these doctrines, like the
prohibition of premarital sex or homosexual sex."
No, Muslims are not "just like" Catholics in this regard. The degree
and nature of the erosion of belief and the secularization of Catholics
(and Christians in general) in the West over the past 300 years is a
thousand times more advanced and profound than what goes on in the
Muslim world. The Muslim world has not experienced even one-thousandth
of what the modern West has undergone in terms of a break down of the
past, of religion, of pre-modern mores. For Klaiber to glibly compare
the two as equivalent demonstrates an ignorance of massive proportions.
Our next quote from Klaiber illuminates my parenthetical rhetorical from somewhere above, when I wrote -- (However many Muslims get conceptually saved through this
argument, one gets the sense that it has to be enough of a large number
to assuage the anxiety of people like Klaiber and comfort them with the
thought that they are not condemning an entire People: one wonders how many is enough to fulfill that function of assuaging that anxiety?)
Klaiber:
"Again putting words into my mouth. I didn't say "most muslims are illiterate", I said many muslims are illiterate."
Ah, so it's not "most", it's only "many". The point is, Klaiber is
using that quantity -- whatever it represents -- as a number
sufficiently large to save those Muslims from his condemnation.
But as I argued, illiteracy by itself does not save Muslims from
being fanatical supporters of the Islamic agenda in one way or another.
And that deserves to be identified, condemned, and quarantined to
protect our societies from it.
Klaiber goes on to invoke another of the Hypotheses of the Saving Diversity of Muslims -- the Hypothesis of the Lax Muslims:
"But, here in Germany, we have lots of them [Muslims]. Many of them
do not follow the commandments of their prophet. They drink alcohol,
they have premarital sex, they do not pray five times a day, they eat
pork, they reject warfare for Islam..."
Two problems with this particular Hypothesis:
1) Again, a Muslim who is lax is not necessarily free of the mental
baggage of Islamic supremacism and fanaticism in other regards dangerous
to us. Indeed, if you scratch beneath the surface of these seemingly
lax Muslims, you will more often than not find the intolerant hateful
mental baggage -- but you have to ask them the right questions, and you
have to do it cleverly and catch them unawares, so they let down their
guard. Or, sometimes provoking them in fits of anger also helps to
unmask the "inner Muslim" beneath the Westernized appearance.
2) We can't discern with sufficient reliability whether any given
Muslim who appears lax is really not a covert operative for terrorism.
The Al Qaeda Manual specifically advises its agents to pretend to be
Westernized. And just as Klaiber notes that there are some Muslims who
"disguise their true disbelief, because they are killed by fellow
muslims, if they leave the faith" -- so too there are Muslims who
disguise their more fanatical Islamic convictions when they are in a
social milieu surrounded by stronger Infidels. The point is, we cannot
tell which seemingly lax (and therefore harmless, theoretically) Muslim
is really harmless, and which is not, with sufficient reliability in
terms of the numbers of Muslims in our midst. The risks from the
dangerous Muslims (and their more or less passive collaborators -- like
Muslims who will never pick up a gun but who refuse to tell the police
information about their cousin Rasheed's late night meetings, etc.) is
simply too high for our society for us to be playing Muslim Roulette
and simply assume that a blue-jeans-wearing ipod-listening
beer-drinking Muslim must ipso facto be harmless. I will not jeopardize
the safety of my society on such flimsy argumentation.
H "divides his time" between "London and India" or "New
York and London and India" or "New York and India." What's next? A casa
colonica in Umbria? A mas in Mougins? Oh, there's no stopping thrusting
young sammy-glicks when they are on the make. We can only observe, but
not, alas, stop them.
I have followed this discussion between Hesperado and
Kilian Klaiber with keen interest. To be honest being confounded and
struggling to understand and decide what my own position is going to be.
Hesperado said earlier:
"The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by
logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to
assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this,
but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is
precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential
identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not
condemning the former?"
I understood this position of Hesperado all along, but stuck to the
strategy of my country-man Geert Wilders to be against Islam and not
against Muslims, or maybe not against "all Muslims" because in a
PCMC-climate it is quite acceptable to be against the extremists; the
Taliban (which NATO fights), the Ayatollahs (suppressing popular
resentment cruelly in Iran), and more and more the Saudi Wahhabi's.
And there you have it, as I tried to say before; the whole discussion is relevant to a few important considerations.
- There is no doubt that a part of self-confessed Muslims is "bad",
anti-democratic, hostile, totally untrustworthy, with low credibility;
the know "bad Muslims", acknowledged even by other Muslims and PCMC
Islam-defenders themselves.
- But these Muslims and PCMC's then go on to "explain" that Islam is a
multi-interpretable religion, and indeed is interpreted in many
different ways. They often then go over the top by stating arrogantly
that the interpretation of the "bad Muslims" is wrong and the peaceful
interpretation is the right one. Many other people, as we saw in the
discussion, hold that many Muslims interpret Islam rather loosely,
rather ignorant, "liberal if you will".
The perplexing problem I see is the use of the word Islam as
presenting a monolithic faith or a faith of many diverse
interpretations. It seems the vast majority of people believes the
latter.
I think we must establish first what Islam is and what Islam is not,
if need be in terms of several presented versions of Islam. We can
accept for now that Islam is a collective name for many different
versions, but keep open the notion that it still in it's essences may be
a single coherent totalitarian ideology.
After getting highly knowledgeable about what Islam is and is not, we
could try to understand first how much unity or division under ALL
muslims in relation to ALL non-Muslims there is. And this pertains very
much to their first and foremost loyalties. When their cherished
unchangeable "Divine" laws conflict with Democracies improvable human
laws, what do the Muslim masses choose?
And this in turn pertains to their trustworthyness to Non-Muslims.
Because if danger in Islamic intentions and unity is perceived (and
logically so) how can Muslims (who chose Islam, as opposed to not
choosing their ethnic race) be trusted not to be part of that danger?
I argue for a mild form of Hesperado's: Consider Muslims guilty until
proven innocent. This is because they already admitted adhering to an
ideology that at least in part can be considered hostile and dangerous
to our tolerant society.
(and in viruscontrol that dangerous part has to be taken well care of).
Although I am fully aware that Muslims could en masse practice
taqqiya, deceit, I still am in favor of asking them to declare, then
provide evidence of, their first and foremost loyalties; to manmade laws
and values or "divine" laws and values when the 2 contradict.
I would like to make it difficult for Muslims to have it both ways;
first, in effect being unified in opposition to all non-Muslims,
sometimes stating this explicitly and often demonstrating this through
their behavior, especially in their protesting behavior. And striving
for Islamic supremacy together and therewith in effect presenting a
danger, and a real blockade to democracy and a real oppression of
religious minorities in Islamic countries.
And second, at the same time, when non-Muslims try to hold Muslims
accountable for what other Muslims SAY AND DO (Hesperado's words), often
justifying it in the name of Islam, denying unity, solidarity, hence
accountability. Instead, very convincingly to Western Democratic
citizens, reverting to a divers, divided multi-interpreted Islam.
I think we must get ever clearer first about what Islam entails or could entail, AND WHAT NOT.
Then proceed vigorously with the unity-loyalty-question for Muslims and control thereof.
And for security's sake evolve to Hesperado's attitude of Muslims
begin guilty until proven innocent. All the while logically explaining
why. And providing reasonable alternatives to Muslims too. In the hope a
part of the ignorant masses of Democratic citizens sees the good logic
for this and is swayed to vote for it.
Forgive him and expose his secular Education in India.
We in India are taught a fraud history which is written by the First education Minister of India Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
Mulana Azad made sure that History of India was twisted and only due to internet more and more people of India learning about Islam.
We need to Ask Mishra what is taught in India--Fraud History of India and why?
Don't confuse this Pankaj Mishra with facts.
In a saner time and place in human history, Spencer would be offered the chairmanships of Middle East Studies Depts of the most prestigious universities the world over, alas we all now what the deal on those campuses is today.
This amazing analysis, the equivalent of an intellectual 'full-force gale', demonstrates why the author of this effete New Yorker piece, along with legions who denounce and defame anyone critical of Islam, will never agree to open debate on the issue.
They would be blown out of the water.
Thanks for continuing to help the masses understand what's going on.
But then, why did Hirsi Ali have such terrible personal experiences with Islam?
That's straight out of the Qur'an. And you cannot alter the Qur'an, a fact too obvious for dhimmi Pankaj Mishra.
What muhammad "said and did" of course ...
The Evil Truth About Prophet Muhammad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb3dqeeC0Us
Shame on Mishra for forgetting his on past and siding with the criminals of the world who have killed more than 300 million non-Muslims thtroughout the world, including 80 to 100 million Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs in India alone!!!
It's the proverbial chicken and egg story, repeated over and over.
"In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire - though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the "Christianity of love and tolerance." In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe's religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, "are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts," who had "surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism," and who "deserve to be punished."
Voltaire despised all organized religions and religious fanatism, but unfortunately shared the prevailing but unfounded belief of his time about the dreadful fanatical Judaism and Jews.
However, for a time Voltaire saw Islam as a rather rational religion without priests and miracles. He, and Gibbon, got this faulty impression of Islam from Pierre Bayle (dead 1706) who formulated the myth about Islamic tolerance in such a fascinating way that it lives on to this day, in spite of the fact that Bayle practically knew nothing about Islam and its history.
Another influence was Henri de Boulanviellers who wrote a biography about Muhammad in 1730. Without any knowledge of the Arabic language and no access to primary sources he also portraited Islam as infused with reason and without mysteries, and Muhammad as a great statesman and legislator of a kind nobody in the classical Europe could be compared with. The book was a hidden attack on Christianity in general and specifically against the priesthood.
When Voltaire described Christianity as the most rediculous, absurd and blody religion the world had ever seen, and praised Islam he used the established tradition and poor knowledge about Islam as a mean to fight Christianity.
Later in life Voltarire realised that Islam was far from the ideal he imagined. His play "LE FANATISME, OU MAHOMET LE PROPHÈTE from 1741, which portrayed the founder of Islam as an intriguer and fanatic greedy for power, was denounced by Catholic clergymen. They had no doubts that the true target was Christian fanaticism. However, Pope Benedict XIV, whom Voltaire dedicated the work, replied by saying that he read it with great pleasure.
Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions, his religiosity was anticlerical. With his brother Armand, who was a fundamentalist Catholic, Voltaire did not get on as well as with his sister. Atheism Voltaire considered not as baleful as fanaticism, but nearly always fatal to virtue. The doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as nonsense. As a humanist, Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, but not necessarily in a direct way.
Hirshi Ali is right to claim a precedent in Voltaire as far as the fight against religious intolerance and fanatism is conserned. Voltaire was not without faults and blind spots but we should honor his valueable contributions to Enlightentment and the efforts to create the foundation for a democratic secular state where religion and politics are seperated. The only type of state that can guarantee religious freedom. That can guarantee Hirshi Ali is free to denaunce Islam in good strong words - as long as it last!
........................
One of the salient points about Ayaan Hirsi Ali—which Pankaj Mishra touches on above, even while attempting to debunk it—is that Ali has run into the same horrific aspects of Islam in so many very different parts of the world.
Some few of the specifics vary, certainly, by country or region. It is, for instance, less likely that she would have endured the horrors of FGM—including infibulation—in some other parts of Dar-al-Islam.
But what is more common are *the similarities*. She was born in Somalia and spent her earliest years there, was a grammar school girl in Saudi Arabia, a high-school girl in Kenya, was almost forced into an unwanted marriage in Canada, was a young adult in the Netherlands, and now makes her home in the United States.
In all these places she has encountered the violence and barbarity of Islam—oppression of women, punishment of those considered "un-Islamic" or "insufficiently Islamic", hatred of Jews, endless calls for Jihad. Even FGM, which might seem a discretely African phenomenon, is now found in Kurdistan, in Indonesia—and in Europe.
And the threats against her extend even to the United States, the heart of the West. The threat may be somewhat less dire here, due to the (comparatively) small Muslim population and a somewhat lower profile than she has in Europe—but the threat is still there.
I had the great good fortune to attend her appearance in San Francisco last month—even here, security was tight, and she has to retain bodyguards at all times.
Pankaj Mishra is hardly the only one trying to discredit Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She can't, it is true, credibly be considered "a racist". But she is attacked for not being the right sort of feminist; for supposedly being too "conservative"; for her sympathy towards Christianity—which even her atheism is not a sufficient counter, in some quarters—but most of all, she is attacked for telling the "inconvenient truth" about Islam, which is too frightening for many, especially liberals, to face.
It is much easier to attack the messenger.
http://godofreason.com/new-page-170.htm
The Koran is a Declaration of Open-Ended War against the Kafirs
http://newstime.co.nz/quran-8-39-islam-will-dominate-the-world.html
Behind the Veil of Islam: The Grand Jihad
“If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win a hundred battles; if you know neither your enemies nor yourself, you will lose every battle.” Sun Tzu – The Art of War
“Both (Antichrist & Islam) Both Desire World Domination” 430 KB
“Turkey As The Antichrist Nation” 582 KB
Eurabia: The Planned Islamization of Europe” 425 KB
Pankaj Mishra is an typical example of fraudulent intellectualism cultivated in sources where he got his early education combined with lack of first hand expereince & knowledge of critically important events of India that happened either before he was born or was too young (6 years of age) to appreciate. They are the 1).1948 war of India of J&K; 2). 1962 war of Indo China 3.) war of 1965 of India-Pakistan 4). war of 1971 for Bangladesh.5). The Inglorious Emergency of 1975 , crafted by Tort Leftists in Congress infiltration. Whatever he has learned is through distorted historical texts & in an inabreation of Utopian Dreams . Alas they only bring forth miseries . Mishra needs to understand & learn himself first .
It includes Magdi Allam, whose life-story, from Egypt to Italy, from Islam -- which he only reluctantly abandoned, when he understood, he testifies, to what Islam ineluctably was, for he was tied by filial piety to his humble, kind, nominally Muslim Egyptian parents. who had allowed him not only to attend a Christian school, but even to befriend one of the last remaining Jews, a girl his age, in Cairo.
It includes Wafa Sultan, who has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, including her life, by her penetrating analysis of Islam in "The God That Hates" and in her appearances on Al-Jazeera that now require her to live in hiding.
It includes Ibn Warraq, and Nonie Darwish, and many many others, who contrary to what the thrusting careerist Pankaj Mishra -- who because he has travelled and seen some of the obvious outward and visible differences among Muslims, and noticed that they are not all foaming at the mouth -- whoever thoought otherwise? certainly not Ayaan Hirsi Ali? -- thinks he has become an expert on world Islam, and does not have to read either the great scholars (Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Lammens, Tisdall, Zwemer, or many dozens of others), and can afford to ignore the testimony not only of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but of all the other articulate apostates whose lives, and works, have been made possible only because they now enjoy the mental freedom, and physical security (such as it is), in the West.
Pankaj Mishra may be winning points, so he may think, by his determination to be an apologist for Islam, but he lacks the keen perception of V. S. Naipaul -- and curiously, Mishra has written introductions to two collections by Naipaul, but not of course to "Among the Believers" or "Beyond Belief."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali can certainly handle herself. But a little psychobiography of Pankaj Mishra -- Indians in India and America should feel free to join in -- may be useful, in identifying the promptings that led him to such an outrageous, offensive, and in the end silly, missing-the-point review.
"Nomad" is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers.
Can I say then 'Mr Churchill's remarks are unlikely to earn him many Nazi admirers '
Any comments I might make here would not earn me many muslim admirers but I'm not trying to flatter or please them , none of us are - we'd like them to face the truth about their ideology and join the civilised world
Implicit in this elementary fact which PC MC ignores is a principle which I hope those in the Anti-Islam Movement support: namely, that if any group -- no matter how large or small, no matter how ostensibly religious or not, no matter how ethnic or not -- were to do and say what Muslims are doing and saying (and have been doing and saying for centuries), we in the Anti-Islam Movement would feel the same about them.
Let's use more direct language to bring that principle into acute clarity:
If, for example, Jews were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an Anti-Jewish Movement. Or, if Christians were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an Anti-Christian Movement. Or, if Hindus were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an Anti-Hindu Movement. There should be no group in the world immune from this principle.
I.e., the reason we are not Anti-Jewish (or Anti-Christian, etc.) is not because of some abstract axiom we hold that could never be contravened by evidence, but by our adherence to concrete facts. Simply put, Jews (or Christians, etc.) are not doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying -- and, importantly, show no signs either in their behavior or in their subcultures of ever doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying.
Some of us may wish to comfort ourselves with the conviction that this fact about Jews (or Christians, etc.) reflects an immutable abstract axiom, but that conviction should not be erected over against the principle I have articulated and advocate, for the flip side of my argument is that this principle demonstrates that we are not against Muslims simply because they are Muslims, or out of some abstract animus of bigotry or irrational hatred, or (alas) out of some eschatological blueprint -- but simply because of what they are concretely saying and doing (and have been doing and saying for centuries).
Now, it could be further argued that what Muslims are saying and doing (and have been doing and saying for centuries) reflects a strange and unique essence -- psychologically, sociologically and spiritually -- that could, and will, never change; but that would be an ontological question, which should be carefully distinguished from the pragmatic problem of simply attending, and responding, to the concrete behaviors and expressions of Muslims.
As the West reawakens to the problem of Islam in the decades of this new 21st century, we may well find that our pragmatic responses to what Muslims are saying and doing would, practically speaking, resemble a response to an ontological essence; but again, that should never distract us from our attention to the data, and we should never let our actions be primarily guided by some abstract axiom. Indeed, PC MC today represents precisely an abstract axiom -- but one which is preventing the West from attending to the data of Muslims in a rational way.
The problems here are twofold:
1) The mainstreamers have been fed such a steady diet of bullshit since the ex-hippies took over about 40 yrs ago that they must detest Judo-Christianity, the very basis for Western Civilization, and assume the worst of its scriptures, tenets and teachings.
2) The mainstreamers are so racist -- in the manner of nouveau racisme, the good racism, of course -- that they must love Islam and assume only the very best of its scriptures, tenets and teachings. (The vast majority of Moslems are non-white).
And don't kid yourselves: the mainstreamers own the narrative and the dialog from the ground up, from kindergarten through grad school, the law schools and the courts, the newspapers and networks, the government offices, the legislatures, the corporate HR departments, the board rooms, the philanthropic funds, everything. Hell, they've even gone deep into the militaries at this point.
*** 92:8 ***
The fact that one can imbibe a taste of good old fashioned antisemitism in the act only makes it more fun for them.
How can a passage of Koran which says 'kill the unbelievers unless they accept to live as some kind of inferior beings and slaves' can be explained, for example, in a reformed way? By interpreting it as symbolical? Is it something so possible when Muhammad itself was a warrior chief? Or how you can present a passage which says 'beat your wives whenever it is needed', so that it can be considered 'reformed'? And let not forget: how to feel free to 'play' with such passages given that they are perceived as God's word uttered through angel Gabriel himself? Which Muslim could dare such a thing?
Really, if you detach all those concepts from Islam there remains not even a single reason for its being a different religion. The thing remaining is an Old Testament kind monotheism. So what reason it could have for existing, in such a case?
I think this question is the core question about Islam... which it leads to another immediately appearing question too, about how could Islam's case may be managed in the coming years of history.
Just this is the reason that sometimes this question leads to logical conclusions which makes a near future apocalyptic, as to its dimensions, clash look as inevitable. Of course, it is not something any sane human being can wish but, nevertheless, it is a thought which is persistent in mind as an equation's logical outcome, somehow.
I would like to hear some possible alternatives to this 'equation's solution... if there exist, of course, any such alternatives in some peoples' minds.
Meanwhile, Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma's good friend, made his name, and his entire career, from his reporting in the Balkans. And there his experience provided an almost unique example of a case where Muslims were, or at least seemed to the superficial to be, the victims and the Serbs seemed, to some (but not all, not to Peter Handke, not to a certain Canadian general), the villains. In fact it was much more complicated and the main thing to understand was the historical context: the great fear that Izetbegovic, in calling for the imposition of Shari'a in Bosnia, created among the Serbs, who had been the victims of the Ottoman Turks, and of the devshirme, and general cultural degringolade, for centuries, and who were so frightened Serbs that some -- too many -- were temporarily willing to be led by the likes of Milosevic.
And the other source for Timothy Garton Ash's understanding of Islam was that provided by the apologists at St. Antony's College (founded with money left to Oxford by a Jewish trader from Aden, Anton Besse), the ones in the Middle East wing of the two-winged place, with Timothy
Garton Ash in the East European, far more acceptable wing. It wasn't just the likes of the late Albert Hourani (who has been replaced by the non-Muslim apologist for Islam Rogan), but also such people as Avi Shlaim, who know nothing about Islam but talk a good anti-Israel game. And then there arrived, first as a lean lecturer until the Arabs could buy him a professorship, none other than Tariq Ramadan, and Timothy Garton Ash thought he was just swell.
I note that Ian Buruma, originally scheduled to be among those who would offer soft-balls to Tariq Ramadan on his recent royal progress - not quite, I'm glad to say, quite as royal as he expected -- through the academic archipelago, appears to have backed out.
I wonder if that was indeed the case.
If he had appeared, and had performed his usual role as apologist, then the things said by his friend Timothy Gartaon Ash at a certain debate in London a few years ago, when at a certain opint, according to eyewitnesses, in the heat of the whole thing, though Timothy Garton Ash had taken upon himself to be an apologist for Islam, he "lost it" and admitted all kinds of unpleasant things about Muhammad. And then, just afterwards, he realized what he had done and, quivering with fear, went up to everyone he could and begged, or demanded, that all videotapes and audiotapes of what he had said be destroyed, for fear of what might happen to him. That incident shows that he perfectly understands the nightmarish ability of Muslims to intimidate Westerners -- for he, Timothy Garton Ash, is among them.
I'm still waiting for Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma to discuss that incident, and in detail. I'm waiting for Ian Buruma to demonstrate that he has begun to study Islam, and to think about its texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics, and about what the great Western scholars of Islam (not the espositos, but Joseph Schacht, and Snouck Hurgronje and Arthur Jeffrey and Henri Lammens and dozens of others) and the most articulate defectors from the Army of Islam, such as Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Magdi Allam, have written. He owes this to the people, including himself, who have been misled.
But will he do it?
J'en doute.
The hypocrisy of these people astounds.
Pankaj Mishra's attitude is in line with what the present Prime Minister of India, Man Mohan Singh also thinks of Islam and Muslims. A few yeras back he proclaimed that Muslims of India have first right over country's resources - the comments being made when he was pushing for quota system for Muslims for bank loans, scholarships, college admissions etc.
He is another fine India who has forgotten that Mughal emperors, Jehangir and Aurangjeb beheaded two of the revered Gurus of Sikhism, Guru Arjundev and Guru Teg Bahadur. The main Gurudwara(Sikh Temple) in Delhi is known as Gurudwara Shish Ganj where the beheading of Teg bahadur occured and his head was mounted and publicly displayed(shish meaning head). It is after this incidence, Guru Teg Bahadur's son Guru Gobindsingh started the present Khalsa division to drive out the Muslim invaders from India.
Alas, the memories are short lived - even the Sikh Prime Minister of India has lost touch with History. When such is the case with the Prime Minister of India, Mishra and D'souza are only small fries in comparison - who cares for them!!
Here is the celebrated Iraqi scholar Majid Khadduri, in his 1955 treatise on “War and Peace in Islam”:
Thus the Jihad may be regarded as Islam's instrument for carrying out its ultimate objective by turning all people into believers, if not in the prophethood of Muhammad (as in the case of the dhimmis), at least in the belief of God. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have declared "some of my people will continue to fight victoriously for the sake of the truth until the last one of them will combat the anti-Christ." Until that moment is reached the Jihad, in one form or another will remain as a permanent obligation upon the entire Muslim community. It follows that the existence of a dar al-harb is ultimately outlawed under the Islamic jural order; that the dar al-Islam (Islamic community) are permanently under Jihad obligation until the dar al-harb is reduced to non-existence; and that any community accepting certain disabilities- must submit to Islamic rule and reside in the dar al-Islam or be bound as clients to the Muslim community. The universality of Islam, in its all embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political if not strictly military.
And in 1996, the Syrian-German scholar Bassam Tibi wrote this:
At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity. Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world. "We have not sent thee but as a universal (Messenger) to men, giving them glad tidings, and warning them (against sin), but most men understand not." Qur'an [[34:28]. If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them. In Islam, peace requires that non-Muslims submit to the call of Islam, either by converting or by accepting the status of a religious minority (dhimmi) and paying the imposed poll tax, jizya. World peace, the final stage of the da'wa, is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not aggression but a fulfillment of the Qur'anic command to spread Islam as a way to peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not war (harb), a word that is used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not hurub (the plural of harb) but rather futuhat, acts of "opening" the world to Islam and expressing Islamic Jihad. Relations between dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of war, according to the Qur'an and to the authoritative commentaries of Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the da'wa, are blamed for this state of war, for the da'wa can be pursued peacefully if others submit to it. In other words, those who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them. Only when Muslim power is weak is 'temporary truce' (hudna) allowed (Islamic jurists differ on the definition of 'temporary').
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/father-uncle-held-in-honor-killing-of-indian-couple-asha-saini-and-yogesh-kumar/19517217
...neither Ayaan Hirsi Ali nor anyone else is talking about rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such. It is a peculiar leap of logic to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations.
The logic of PC MC in this regard is not really peculiar, nor is it a leap.
The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?
Whenever this issue becomes forced into explicit response, the Anti-Islam analysts usually try to do an end-run around it, by hypothesizing that many (or most?) Muslims "don't really know their Islam", or are "lax Muslims who don't really practice it", or indeed may be "reformists" of one stripe or another. These hypotheses (with no solid grounding in fact) serve two functions:
1) they attempt to placate the PC MCs, who control the sociopolitical discussion about Islam in the West, and convince them that we are not "against all Muslims"
and
2) they reflect a sincerely liberal (or Christian, or often, both) attitude that is anxiously disinclined to condemn a whole People.
Sometimes, a given Anti-Islam analyst's use of those hypotheses may reflect #1 and not #2; sometimes vice versa; or sometimes an incoherent mixture of the two. But it must be asked: Is it not rather illogical (if not comically preposterous) to suppose that there exist viably massive numbers of Muslims out there who do not support Islam?
So we see that within the Anti-Islam Movement itself, there is lurking the same logic that leads the PC MCs "to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations." What differentiates us from the PC MCs is that the latter hold tenaciously to an abstract axiom that forever forbids us from condemning Muslims, no matter how massive is the mountain of data that damns them and their Islam. On our side, however, we have Anti-Islam analysts who with similar tenacity resist the logical consequence of that mountain of data which we are able to notice and digest. That logical consequence is the condemnation of all Muslims. The problem is not the condemnation, but what we do about it. We will not "round them up" nor "genocide" them. But we will have to do something, to protect our societies from them.
And let us not forget that the PC MCs are exceedingly hypersensitive about this issue. Any negative criticism of Islam or by extension of Muslims is deemed to be perilously close to the slippery slope that leads to "rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such." This too is logical: PC MCs know that if there is a potential eventuality that is horrible, the best way to prevent it is to stop it at its source -- and the source of this horrible potential they envision, "another Holocaust" this time against poor Muslims, is precisely the thought crimes of saying too many negative things about Islam and by extension about the Muslims who support Islam (and how many Muslims don't support Islam?)
The specific reasons for this logic are many, but the two most important are:
1) we are implicitly condemning not merely a "group", but an entire People who hail from over 50 countries around the world, who have a rich culture that goes back 1,400 years, and whose culture is massively deemed to be a "world religion"
2) this entire People we are implicitly condemning are perceived to be an ethnic people (or a wonderfully diverse rainbow of ethnic peoples), and thus immediately and irrevocably the hot buttons of Reverse Racism are pushed -- for in the PC MC climate, which is dominant and mainstream throughout the West, one cannot say anything negative about designated ethnic peoples (or if you do say anything negative, please say it in exceedingly gingerly terms, say it fleetingly, do not press the issue, and desist politely -- and we may still allow you to have your career).
Another name may be added, the Indian scholar and political activist al-Mashriqi, born in 1888, and quite active into the 20th century. He founded the Khaksar Movement, an Indian Muslim separatist movement.
In one of his writings, al-Mashriqi expressed designs that go far beyond a mere regional concern in northern India:
“...we [Muslims] have again to dominate the whole world. We have to become its conqueror and its rulers.”
And in a pamphlet titled Islam ki Askari Zindagi he stated:
“The Koran has proclaimed in unequivocal words to the world that the Prophet was sent with the true religion and definite instruction that he should make all other religions subservient to this religion [Islam]...”
Al-Mashriqi also wrote a book called Tazkira which, as Andrew Bostom described it, “produced a quintessential message of Islam enshrining the ideals of militaristic nation-building” I.e., it promulgated and highlighted the supremacist expansionism through militant means that is essential to Islamic doctrine and Islamic history.
Incidentally, al-Mashriqi met Adolf Hitler in 1926. In his own account of this meeting, al-Mashriqi wrote:
“I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me. . . I found him very congenial and piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I sent him my Isharat concerning the Khaksar movement with a picture of a spade-bearer Khaksar at the end of that book. In 1933 he started his Spade Movement. ”
Hat tip to our former friend Andrew Bostom:
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32831
Also see:
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/10/hitler-and-islam_28.html
No, I do not.
I quote Khadduri and Tibi as authorities on the doctrine of Jihad in Islam, not as "modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist Jihad."
And I would never use the phrase "violent supremacist Jihad" -- the piling on of adjectives, including the unnecessary "supremacist," is not something I would ever do.
The link between Nazism and violent Islam is well known.
We remember, Adolf, we remember.
I really don't get your response and I don't agree with you. Islam is an ideology, i.e. a set of beliefs. I reject Islam because of its beliefs. Islam is incompatible with universal human rights, it is incompatible with every persons right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness irrespective of race, gender and religion. Therefore I reject Islam.
I am not condemning an "entire people" or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race. I am not condemning each and every muslim. I do not even know each and every muslim. Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion. Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name, since they would be killed by their fellow muslims if they left their faith.
But I do condemn those muslims who preach hatred and jihad against non-believers. Why do I condemn them? Because they do not tolerate me. There is a limit to tolerance. I do not tolerate murder, I do not tolerate theft, I do not tolerate torture, I do not tolerate rape, I do not tolerate violence and I do not tolerate any people who incite fellow muslims to murder and violence against non-muslims. This is merely a matter of self respect and my will to survive.
Regards,
KilianKlaiber
I have to say, though, that there is always some frustration entailed on reading this kind of thing. Why isn't THIS in The New Yorker?
I'd love to see an attempt at an answer, but the Pankaj Mishras need never try that on. Just ignoring what they can't answer is preferable, and all too easily done.
No it should be distributed justly, not evenly!
It may be redundant to you, but pedagogically a little redundancy never hurts -- particularly in a sociopolitical climate illterate about jihad.
And I would never use the phrase "violent supremacist Jihad" -- the piling on of adjectives, including the unnecessary "supremacist," is not something I would ever do.
Actually, I would pile on another adjective: expansionist.
Each of the three adjectives performs a distinct function:
violent refers to the necessary element of violence in the doctrine of jihad, symbiotically and inextricably linked with the other ostensibly non-violent ways in which Muslims pursue it, and making those other non-violent ways a problem where no problem would exist were the violence forever non-existent.
supremacist refers to the premise that guides Muslims to their conclusion: The premise being that they are the best of all peoples, because the true God has made them custodians of the absolute truth and of the way to avoid eternal damnation and win eternal paradise.
expansionist, consequently, refers to the conclusion: that Muslims must make Islam dominant throughout the world.
Any one of these without the other two would not pose a great problem for the world:
For example, a group that was violent, but not supremacist or expansionist, would pose only criminal problems, not a problem of warfare.
A group that is supremacist, but not violent or expansionist, may express pernicious ideas, but if they never harm anyone in the furtherance of their ideas, and if the surrounding society is relatively healthy, they will be largely ignored when not roundly refuted and will certainly not persuade anyone but a tiny minority of unhealthy souls.
Finally, a group that is expansionist, but not violent or supremacist, may or may not be bad for society. If, for example, the 4-H Club were expansionist, there would be little to object about. Or if an expansionist group did propose pernicious ideas, they would be impotent to persuade the body politic in any healthy society -- unless they used violence.
Which brings me to another important adjective to pile on to jihad: anti-liberal -- or, for those who recoil at the L word: unjust -- or, for those who require more beef in their diet: sociopathic.
Moreover, the Arabs for centuries had done little with the land which I will here call "Palestine." Nor had they made any significant attempt to free themselves of their Ottoman Turkish masters. Only because the Ottoman Empire aligned with the losing side in WWI did the Arabs finally get their own independent nations, ones which almost certainly would not have come into existence but for the Allies in WWI beating the Central Powers and all of which Arab states to this day remain nations where true freedom is non-existent.
Sorry if I don't feel any sympathy for the Arabs. They deserve the fate they now experience because they are quite clearly the single most dysfunctional major people on earth. Pretty damn brutal too, with others and with each other, though this is regularly glossed over by the Western elites.
The loony left in the media and in politics can be expected to indulge in intellectual sleight of hand along these lines. It has been the failure of those on the conservative side of politics to speak the truth, and instead sprout rubbish that enabled these falsities to be accpted wisdom, that is the terrible disappointment.
Right, the Egyptian monarchists, Nasser's socialists and Sadddam's Bathists wanted nothing but peaceful coexistence with the Jews!
I remember from reading John Roy Carlson that even those more enlightened Egyptians--the socialists, the Marxists, the Westernizers, the secularists--all were determined that the Jews must be stopped from having a state in the Middle East. Their Arab honor, the health of the Arab nation, the fact that a successful Jewish state would demoralize and set back the Arabs or some similar ideas were always expressed.
As for all the competing ideologies, in "The Closed Circle," Pryce-Jones talks about how the same group of elites basically ran the Arab countries and just took turns in power depending on whether they want to court the West or the Soviet block countries. One person would call himself the anti-communist while another would call himself the socialist. In reality, they were both similar autocratic elites out to get the best deal for themselves from which ever foreign power was handing out money and weapons.
The prestige print media in America, I propose, is ossified. Its editors and major writers all seem to be a vast, thundering herd of [predictably Lefitsh] independent minds who will go plunging over a cliff rather than open their eyes. This and the quotes from Bawer elsewhere on JW underscore the need for a newer, more awake journalism run by others.
I searched the page immediately for Hugh's comments. I knew he would enlighten us. As an Indian I can attest to the accuracy of his statement. Pankaj Mishra is firmly in the tradition of a West-facing intellectual who pretends to denounce the West while adopting its WORST ideas (Marxism, socialism). He has disparaged India's economic growth with usual socialist arguments, arguing for Nehru. He regularly denounces any support for Hinduism or opposition to Islam or jihad.
The usual. YAWN. Only difference is that hes on the up in the West. So he feels emboldened to continue on this trajectory.
You responded to my argument with a complex bundle difficult to disentangle, but I'll do my best, by piecing out and numerating your points:
1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above.
2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people, or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites.
3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
Being illiterate does not prevent a person from being brainwashed. In fact, Islamic culture is not a reading culture -- it is an oral culture, where most Muslims listen to sermons or public harangues or the discussions of smaller circles of "learned men" among them -- not to mention they also assimilate much of their Islamic worldview through their families as they grow up. The basics of the Islamic worldview that are causing problems in the world -- hatred of the other; a feeling of superiority; a feeling of a right or obligation to take what belongs to others because they are inferior; a victimization sense of being constantly wounded and attacked because the world is not Islamic; a gangster mentality that admires violent action in order redress grievances; etc: all these attitudes can be, and are, instilled in multitudes of Muslims without those Muslims reading hardly anything. If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture.
4) " Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"
I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". There are many more similar hypotheses -- all desperate attempts by sincere-minded non-Muslims to try to save the Entire People of Islam from our condemnation. One problem with these hypotheses is: how can you tell which Muslims are which? How do you discern that a Muslim ia a "Muslim by name only"? Just because he tells you he likes music and he wears blue jeans and he says he doesn't like the "Wahhabis" or the "Salafis"? I'm not going to risk the lives of my fellow citizens on flimsy tests like these.
5) "since they would be killed by their fellow muslims if they left their faith."
Muslims have been killing Muslims for centuries. A Muslim marked for death by fellow Muslims is not a reliable indicator of that Muslim's trustworthiness.
"You are barking up the wrong tree. Read "Krieg der Civilizationen", 1995, by Bassam Tibi. He point out the necessity for Muslims to demand liberation from the rigors of Sharia and acceptance of seperation of religion and politics. What more could you ask for from a critical and reflective cultural Muslim?"
Is that the same Bassam Tibi who wrote:
At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity... If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them.
?
If he wrote both statements, obviously the one I quoted cancels out the one you quoted.
Check.
First things first, this is a JNU product. JNU is the strongest left-wing bastion in all major Indian universities.
In general, Indian history taught in high schools is cleansed of Islamic atrocities. In case, the atrocities are mentioned, the connection with Islamic ideology is never made.
As a longtime NY subscriber, I couldn't agree more. Robert or Hugh, if you are reading these comments, why not submit such rebuttals (or briefer versions, in the form of letters to the editor) to the NY, NYT, etc?
but we are told, by Muslims and Islam-defenders again and again that: There is great diversion and division among Muslims. And indeed, in effect, assured that there are diverse, indeed many versions of Islam.
So what we need is:
- knowledge, information about the most prominent Islam-versions.
- knowledge as far as possible about the declared or hidden real unity, loyalty of the vast majority of Muslims behind the Ummah, in which are hiding definitely Islam-versions that are anti-democratic. These must be discarded by Muslims in favor of our constitutions and laws when in contradiction with Islamic Divine laws by Muslims in order for our society to trust them.
"At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity... If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them."
?
If he wrote both statements, obviously the one I quoted cancels out the one you quoted.
Check."
I think you have to apply the principle of abrogation here. He could have written both statements years apart and then the latest cancels out the former. Even Allah allowed to correct himself, unfortunately to the worse, but Tibi seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
The latest article I could find from Tibi is from March 2007. This quote seems relevant to our discussion:
"Tariq Ramadan presents Orthodox Islam as Euro-Islam presumably with the intent to deceive. But I say there can be no Europeanising of Islam unless Salafist concepts like Sharia and Jihad are abandoned through cultural-religious reforms, and this goes too for the vision of Islamisation through Da'awa and Hidjra. Only an Islam that is in tune with the fundamentals of cultural modernity (democracy, individual human rights, civil society) and embraces pluralism deserves to be defined as Euro-Islam. And furthermore, the concept of Euro-Islam applies only to Europe, in other words unlike the earlier universal vision of Westernising the world - the world of Islam included – it is not universalism."
Tibi seems here to reject the spread of Islam by any violent means.
On the other hand I am a bit worried about his narrow level of tolerance when it comes to an atheist apostate like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Quoted from the same article:
"Despite this call to de-personalisation, I'll allow myself two comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, around whom this debate is revolving, to its detriment. What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam. When, for instance, she claims that our prophet and our holy book, the Koran, are a fiction, she insults all Muslims and puts a smirk on the faces of all historians of Islam. Of course, Hirsi Ali has every right to turn her back on Islam in the name of religious freedom and this is what she has done. But she should not abuse the religion just to score points cheaply for herself."
Rejecting all religions and their Holy Scriptures as fiction is not an insult and not an abuse of the religion or the believers. It is quite simply the legitimate positions of atheists and agnostics and in the name of freedom of religion such positions should be respected or ignored and not cause irrational ad hominum attacks.
Tibi has a lot to learn about tolerance, he is clearly unable to control his emotions and be rational when Islam is rejected as a fiction. Most of the Christians have learned to be tolerant but it took several hundred years of hard fighting by the rationalist and humanists to get that far. For hundred of years critique or rejection of the Christian dogmas was a risky and often deadly enterprise, and it still is in Islam. Tibi is not helpful in making Islam more tolerant and open to critique - and that he may be criticised for.
Tibi is attempting the impossible: To clean Islam of all the barbaric, aggressive, supremacist, racist and nasty stuff, and still claim what is left is Islam. ;-)
Link to article by Bassam Tibi:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1258.html
I think it is quite possible that Bassam Tibi wrote both. He is a forthright critique of traditional Islam. "If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them.". This is not something he advocates. It is something he describes and criticises as orthodox Islam.
On the other hand Bassam Tibi is someone who really wants to reform Islam. So here is what he wishes: "Only an Islam that is in tune with the fundamentals of cultural modernity (democracy, individual human rights, civil society) and embraces pluralism deserves to be defined as Euro-Islam."
Bassam Tibi is one of those very few muslims who really do want to change Islam and make it compatible to western values. He is in fact an ally and not a foe just like Irshad Manji.
"1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
No I am not condemning a people. I am talking about a set of ideas, an ideology. I am not condemning a nation, race, people...
" 2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people, or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites."
Oh yes you did say this and you repeat it again. The vast majority of muslims are an ethnic people? Oh, yes, so muslim Persians, Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Indonesians all have a common language and heritage? Please check the facts. A muslim is someone who believes: "There is no god but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger." That's it. This has nothing to do with ethnicity.
"3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
... If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture."
Why do you put words in my mouth? I never said such a thing. I said that many people are born muslims and have very little knowledge of their religion. They have not read the quran or hadith because they are illiterate. I know a "muslim indonesian" who is married to a German! She apparently doesn't know her religion, because Shariah forbids women to marry non-muslims. There are many muslims who are not well educated and they have no sound understanding of their religion. This is just a statement of fact. Just like there are many many catholics who do not know the doctrines of their church or reject some of these doctrines, like the prohibition of premarital sex or homosexual sex. I do not condemn these people. Why should I?
"4) " Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"
I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". "
Again putting words into my mouth. I didn't say "most muslims are illiterate", I said many muslims are illiterate. Check the facts, illiteracy in muslim countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, ... is in high.
You may not know many muslims. But, here in Germany, we have lots of them. Many of them do not follow the commandments of their prophet. They drink alcohol, they have premarital sex, they do not pray five times a day, they eat pork, they reject warfare for Islam, yes and some muslims disguise their true disbelief, because they are killed by fellow muslims, if they leave the faith.
I don't reject these people. I reject the ideology called islam. Bassam Tibi calls himself a muslim. Why should I reject Bassam Tibi? I don't reject him but he is a muslim. This proves that I do not reject each and every muslim.
You conclusion that if you reject Islam you must reject each and every muslim is thereby proven wrong.
I agree completely with your conclusion and reject the claim made by Hesperado as inconsistent.
Hesperato makes the classical mistake not to distinguish between the metaphysical level and the empirical level - between the theoretical and practical level.
The word "Islam" is not unambiguous and the word "Muslim" even less so and to a certain degree an unknown.
I agree with Robert Spencer who explains his position in this simple way:
"Islam is not a monolith, and never have I said or written anything that characterizes all Muslims as terrorist or given to violence. To call attention to the roots and goals of jihad violence within Islamic texts and teachings, and to show how jihadists use those texts and teachings, says nothing at all about what any given Muslim believes or how he acts."
The historian Bat Ye´or explains in this interview the core problem in Islam:
Question: Daniel Pipes' slogan is "Fundamentalist Islam is the enemy; moderate Islam is the solution." But do you think there is hope for change?
Answer: I know moderate and brilliant Muslims, but I do not know of a school of thought, represented by teaching and publications, followed by millions of Muslims, called "moderate Islam."
Everyone hopes for a change, including Muslims. I never say "never."
But I think that changes will emerge if we start discussing these issues instead of hiding them under the carpet, and if we take measures to protect ourselves and become aware of language manipulation, like, for instance, pretending that jihad means peace and justice.
We should also support secular and modernist Muslims who are also targeted and hope desperately for our help and encouragement."
(Quoted from article in Dallas Morning News 'Time of jihad', June 18, 2005).
Case closed!
Me: "The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims..."
Klaiber: "1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
Me: You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
-- then responded:
"No I am not condemning a people. I am talking about a set of ideas, an ideology. I am not condemning a nation, race, people..."
This is an obtuse response by Klaiber. In the quote of mine he himself reproduced, I already explained that I assume he may very well not be condemning an entire People:
Me: You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people.
I then went on to clarify that what a person thinks they are doing is one thing, but sometimes the logical consequence of their related positions lead to the conclusion they claim to disavow -- they lead there, that is, if the person wants to maintain coherence:
"But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
The problem opens up, because Islam is the cherished culture and self-identity of an entire People -- Muslims. The phrase "an entire People" does not necessarily designate an "ethnic" People: it simply designates a collective who are unified by a culture -- in this case, by Islam. After we acknowledge this elementary fact, we can get into the wondrous diversity of Islam that would somehow militate against considering them to be one "entire People". Aside from the fact that the "diversity of Islam" is a premise (and conclusion) often used by the defenders of Islam, it also needs to be cogently argued to be persuasive in its function as a way to save some? many? most? Muslims from our condemnation. (However many Muslims get conceptually saved through this argument, one gets the sense that it has to be enough of a large number to assuage the anxiety of people like Klaiber and comfort them with the thought that they are not condemning an entire People: one wonders how many is enough to fulfill that function of assuaging that anxiety?).
Klaiber goes on to demonstrate his obtuse reading skills. Again he quotes an excerpt from my comment where I quote him then myself:
Klaiber: " 2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
Me: I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people, or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites."
Klaiber responds:
"Oh yes you did say this and you repeat it again. The vast majority of muslims are an ethnic people?
Oh, yes, so muslim Persians, Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Indonesians all have a common language and heritage?"
Klaiber needs to read more carefully. 1) I didn't say "a common language and heritage"; and 2) I said "an ethnic people of one sort or another", not a unified block of one ethnic people. Muslims represent a worldwide community of people unified by Islam, and most of whom are "ethnic" of one sort or another in the sense that PC MC designates. That's the fact I was referring to.
Klaiber adds:
"Please check the facts. A muslim is someone who believes: "There is no god but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger." That's it. This has nothing to do with ethnicity."
We are discussing two distinct things here. Surely Klaiber can pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time; surely he can entertain two distinct notions about one entity at the same time? Here are the two:
1) Muslims are unified by the ideology of Islam.
2) Muslims are represented by a worldwide diversity of ethnic peoples.
What happens because of these two facts, given our PC MC culture in the West, is that the perniciousness of #1 is obfuscated and whitewashed, because #2 makes the PC MC anxious to avoid condemnation, since it is a commandment in PC MC never to condemn, or even criticize, what they designate as "ethnic people". It is, in fact, the PC MCs who confuse the two points above. And I see that Klaiber does so as well -- as do many I have been noticing in the Anti-Islam Movement. Yet another indication that the wall between Those Who Have Woken Up to the Problem of Islam and the PC MCs is not necessarily an impermeable barrier.
Next example of Klaiber's obtuseness:
Again, he quotes an excerpt from my comment:
Klaiber: "3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
Me: ... If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture."
Klaiber responds:
"Why do you put words in my mouth? I never said such a thing."
Then immediately he goes on to say such a thing again!
" I said that many people are born muslims and have very little knowledge of their religion. They have not read the quran or hadith because they are illiterate."
I precisely said in the quote of mine which Klaiber reproduced above that not reading the Islamic texts does not preclude the Islamic brainwashed mindset. And Klaiber goes on to speak of not reading -- i.e., illiteracy -- as somehow precluding the Islamic brainwashed mindset.
Klaiber goes on to offer anecdotal evidence:
"I know a "muslim indonesian" who is married to a German! She apparently doesn't know her religion, because Shariah forbids women to marry non-muslims. There are many muslims who are not well educated and they have no sound understanding of their religion."
His Muslim Indonesian acquaintance may not know that Sharia forbids Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men, but that doesn't mean she hasn't imbibed and assimilated into her brain numerous other aspects of the Islamic mindset of various facets of fanaticism and irrationality. (Secondly, is he sure this "German" is a non-Muslim?)
Klaiber then goes on to state the mantra of the superimposition of Western culture onto Islamic culture:
"Just like there are many many catholics who do not know the doctrines of their church or reject some of these doctrines, like the prohibition of premarital sex or homosexual sex."
No, Muslims are not "just like" Catholics in this regard. The degree and nature of the erosion of belief and the secularization of Catholics (and Christians in general) in the West over the past 300 years is a thousand times more advanced and profound than what goes on in the Muslim world. The Muslim world has not experienced even one-thousandth of what the modern West has undergone in terms of a break down of the past, of religion, of pre-modern mores. For Klaiber to glibly compare the two as equivalent demonstrates an ignorance of massive proportions.
Our next quote from Klaiber illuminates my parenthetical rhetorical from somewhere above, when I wrote --
(However many Muslims get conceptually saved through this argument, one gets the sense that it has to be enough of a large number to assuage the anxiety of people like Klaiber and comfort them with the thought that they are not condemning an entire People: one wonders how many is enough to fulfill that function of assuaging that anxiety?)
Klaiber:
"Again putting words into my mouth. I didn't say "most muslims are illiterate", I said many muslims are illiterate."
Ah, so it's not "most", it's only "many". The point is, Klaiber is using that quantity -- whatever it represents -- as a number sufficiently large to save those Muslims from his condemnation.
But as I argued, illiteracy by itself does not save Muslims from being fanatical supporters of the Islamic agenda in one way or another. And that deserves to be identified, condemned, and quarantined to protect our societies from it.
Klaiber goes on to invoke another of the Hypotheses of the Saving Diversity of Muslims -- the Hypothesis of the Lax Muslims:
"But, here in Germany, we have lots of them [Muslims]. Many of them do not follow the commandments of their prophet. They drink alcohol, they have premarital sex, they do not pray five times a day, they eat pork, they reject warfare for Islam..."
Two problems with this particular Hypothesis:
1) Again, a Muslim who is lax is not necessarily free of the mental baggage of Islamic supremacism and fanaticism in other regards dangerous to us. Indeed, if you scratch beneath the surface of these seemingly lax Muslims, you will more often than not find the intolerant hateful mental baggage -- but you have to ask them the right questions, and you have to do it cleverly and catch them unawares, so they let down their guard. Or, sometimes provoking them in fits of anger also helps to unmask the "inner Muslim" beneath the Westernized appearance.
2) We can't discern with sufficient reliability whether any given Muslim who appears lax is really not a covert operative for terrorism. The Al Qaeda Manual specifically advises its agents to pretend to be Westernized. And just as Klaiber notes that there are some Muslims who "disguise their true disbelief, because they are killed by fellow muslims, if they leave the faith" -- so too there are Muslims who disguise their more fanatical Islamic convictions when they are in a social milieu surrounded by stronger Infidels. The point is, we cannot tell which seemingly lax (and therefore harmless, theoretically) Muslim is really harmless, and which is not, with sufficient reliability in terms of the numbers of Muslims in our midst. The risks from the dangerous Muslims (and their more or less passive collaborators -- like Muslims who will never pick up a gun but who refuse to tell the police information about their cousin Rasheed's late night meetings, etc.) is simply too high for our society for us to be playing Muslim Roulette and simply assume that a blue-jeans-wearing ipod-listening beer-drinking Muslim must ipso facto be harmless. I will not jeopardize the safety of my society on such flimsy argumentation.
Hesperado said earlier:
"The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?"
I understood this position of Hesperado all along, but stuck to the strategy of my country-man Geert Wilders to be against Islam and not against Muslims, or maybe not against "all Muslims" because in a PCMC-climate it is quite acceptable to be against the extremists; the Taliban (which NATO fights), the Ayatollahs (suppressing popular resentment cruelly in Iran), and more and more the Saudi Wahhabi's.
And there you have it, as I tried to say before; the whole discussion is relevant to a few important considerations.
- There is no doubt that a part of self-confessed Muslims is "bad", anti-democratic, hostile, totally untrustworthy, with low credibility; the know "bad Muslims", acknowledged even by other Muslims and PCMC Islam-defenders themselves.
- But these Muslims and PCMC's then go on to "explain" that Islam is a multi-interpretable religion, and indeed is interpreted in many different ways. They often then go over the top by stating arrogantly that the interpretation of the "bad Muslims" is wrong and the peaceful interpretation is the right one. Many other people, as we saw in the discussion, hold that many Muslims interpret Islam rather loosely, rather ignorant, "liberal if you will".
The perplexing problem I see is the use of the word Islam as presenting a monolithic faith or a faith of many diverse interpretations. It seems the vast majority of people believes the latter.
I think we must establish first what Islam is and what Islam is not, if need be in terms of several presented versions of Islam. We can accept for now that Islam is a collective name for many different versions, but keep open the notion that it still in it's essences may be a single coherent totalitarian ideology.
After getting highly knowledgeable about what Islam is and is not, we could try to understand first how much unity or division under ALL muslims in relation to ALL non-Muslims there is. And this pertains very much to their first and foremost loyalties. When their cherished unchangeable "Divine" laws conflict with Democracies improvable human laws, what do the Muslim masses choose?
And this in turn pertains to their trustworthyness to Non-Muslims. Because if danger in Islamic intentions and unity is perceived (and logically so) how can Muslims (who chose Islam, as opposed to not choosing their ethnic race) be trusted not to be part of that danger?
I argue for a mild form of Hesperado's: Consider Muslims guilty until proven innocent. This is because they already admitted adhering to an ideology that at least in part can be considered hostile and dangerous to our tolerant society.
(and in viruscontrol that dangerous part has to be taken well care of).
Although I am fully aware that Muslims could en masse practice taqqiya, deceit, I still am in favor of asking them to declare, then provide evidence of, their first and foremost loyalties; to manmade laws and values or "divine" laws and values when the 2 contradict.
I would like to make it difficult for Muslims to have it both ways;
first, in effect being unified in opposition to all non-Muslims, sometimes stating this explicitly and often demonstrating this through their behavior, especially in their protesting behavior. And striving for Islamic supremacy together and therewith in effect presenting a danger, and a real blockade to democracy and a real oppression of religious minorities in Islamic countries.
And second, at the same time, when non-Muslims try to hold Muslims accountable for what other Muslims SAY AND DO (Hesperado's words), often justifying it in the name of Islam, denying unity, solidarity, hence accountability. Instead, very convincingly to Western Democratic citizens, reverting to a divers, divided multi-interpreted Islam.
I think we must get ever clearer first about what Islam entails or could entail, AND WHAT NOT.
Then proceed vigorously with the unity-loyalty-question for Muslims and control thereof.
And for security's sake evolve to Hesperado's attitude of Muslims begin guilty until proven innocent. All the while logically explaining why. And providing reasonable alternatives to Muslims too. In the hope a part of the ignorant masses of Democratic citizens sees the good logic for this and is swayed to vote for it.