(The following paper was summarized during the India
Foundation’s India Ideas Conclave in
Goa, 19-21 Dec. 2014. When it started, I felt that the topic was too heady for
the audience, or at least for the intent of the organizers, so I quickly wrote
a second speech comparing the Narendra Modi Government’s performance with the
Hindu agenda, a logical topic for this conclave yet conspicuously missing. But
the chairman of my session insisted that I speak about Islam,
as this would match the other papers well. With this, he can hardly
complain.)
This is
meant to be an Ideas Conclave. It follows that I should not try to please you
with diplomatic niceties or electoral platitudes. Instead, we speakers have all
been invited to brainstorm about hard data and the mechanisms behind them, to
think issues through and fearlessly go wherever logic takes us, and stir your
intelligence with sharp and novel insights. This remains true even for such a
touchy subject as religious intolerance.
Allow me to
start with an anecdote. As you know, Mahatma Gandhi, whatever his faults, was a
staunch Hindu. Yet, when I stayed at the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Foundation in
Delhi, I sat in on a conversation in which these Gandhians were debating
whether Hinduism should continue to exist at all. Some thought it could perhaps
still correct itself, others wanted to cut out the cancer of Hinduism
altogether. And indeed, it is considered normal to question Hinduism’s very
right to exist. Hindus are perfectly used to seeing their religion belittled,
accused and insulted day and night.
Therefore,
it is nothing new if I apply a similar treatment to Islam. Indeed, in this
paper I will argue that the answer to the question why the latest wave of
“Islamist” atrocities has happened, is very simple: Islam. I will show that
Islam itself is guilty. I have been given to understand that the two other
speakers will advocate a different opinion on the same topic, so if you don’t
like my point of view, you still have theirs to comfort you.
The Islamic State
Today, we
get a rare show of religious intolerance in the form of the Islamic State. Even
more than the Taliban, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the new-fangled Caliphate
represents our worst nightmare of Islam. Ever since TV brought its images of
sensational events and acts of war into our very homes, we have not yet been
treated to such explicit intolerance of a type we thought relegated to the
past. While murder remains a fact of life, the formal beheading of (Yezidi and
Assyrian) Infidels and of (Shiite) Heretics has become exceptional, a
throw-back to the witches’ trials and religious wars of centuries ago. While
exploitation remains a world problem, the actual taking of slaves to auction
them off at the slave-market is eerily premodern.
To be sure,
for Indians it is not such an otherworldly fantasy. Their republic was born in
1947 in massacres unleashed by the militants and supporters of the Pakistan
movement, finally killing a million or so and putting many millions to flight,
most of them Hindus (including Sikhs). Many of you will remember the East
Bengal genocide of 1971, where officially 3 million, according to scholars at
least a million, were killed, most of them Hindus. In sheer magnitude, this
death toll completely dwarfs anything that the Taliban or the Islamic State
have done so far.
The grim
advantage that the Islamic State now enjoys, however, is the omnipresence of
internet reporting, which they themselves promote with their youtube videos of
beheadings and other atrocities. Uniquely in-your-face. Another sensational
novelty is the official re-institution of slavery. Numerous victims of earlier
rounds of violence have effectively been exploited as slaves, particularly as
sex slaves (remember Pakistani General Tikka Khan in the Bangladesh war of 1971
justifying his soldiers’ rape campaign openly: “If we cannot hold East Bengal,
we will make sure that the next generation of Bengalis consists of bastards”); but
a formal institution of slavery, complete with slave markets and the official
fixing of auction prices, that is truly a return to the premodern age. This we
hadn’t seen in our lifetimes.
Countries
around the world take an extraordinary interest in the onward march of the
Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The reason is that some of their own
youngsters go there as military volunteers, or in the case of girls, as
volunteers to render sexual services to those warriors. Some come in the news
because they have been recognized on internet videos as executioners or
bystanders during beheadings; others because their death in battle is reported;
yet others because they are disappointed and have managed to get back home. The
authorities are very concerned with what these returning warriors might do in
their homelands, or what the sympathizers who never left but who support the
Islamic State might do.
What motivates the Islamic militants?
It is but
normal that we feel an urge to do something about these atrocities committed in
the name of Islam. Often our actions do not match our emotional revulsion,
though. The initial talk of “bringing our girls back” in the case of the hundreds
of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in early 2014 has petered out,
and at this time they have not been brought back. At any rate, any thought of
either remedying a condition that has just arisen, or preventing that it can
happen again in the long run, raises the question: why do the mujahedin do all this?
For the mujahedin themselves, it is very simple:
they do this in conformity with the commandments of Islam. If we take 11
September 2001 as a cut-off date, we have had since then hundreds of
testimonial videos in which suicide-bombers and other terrorists set out the
Islamic reasons for what they are about to do. When Mohammed Bouyeri killed
Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, he not only added a death threat to apostate
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a paper pinned in Theo’s corpse, but also explicitated that
Islam made him do it. Statements by terror movements such as Boko Haram, Hamas,
the Taliban and Islamic State are very explicit about their Islamic motivation.
The first thing Boko Haram did when it abducted the schoolgirls, was to
forcibly convert them to Islam.
By
contrast, our politicians, both Indian and Western, assure us that these
atrocities have extraneous causes and are foreign to Islam. Thus, it is said
that these are unemployed youngsters, often high-school drop-outs, losers in
our society who see risking their lives in military operations as a shortcut to
becoming important or at least someone respected. Yes, that is the route to
success or at least to a meaningful life which marginalized young men have
always chosen. But then why do non-Muslims not do the same thing? Why do they
settle for less than becoming beheaders? And why do we also find well-to-do
Muslims among the mujahedin, such as
the late lamented billionaire Osama bin Laden?
No matter
just how exactly the politicians and their media allies beat around the bush,
about one thing they are all in agreement: it has nothing to do with Islam. Out
of the dozens of big names I could quote here, let me settle for the eloquent
judgment of British PM David Cameron: the Caliphate warriors are “monsters, not
Muslims”. And since these warriors only want to emulate the Prophet, Cameron’s
words amount to saying: “The Prophet was a monster, not a Muslim”. Mind you, I
would never say such a thing (indeed, even in the secrecy of my thoughts I
don’t consider Mohammed a “monster”), but Cameron comes very close to asserting
just that.
Unfortunately,
Cameron and many of his ilk don’t respect Muslims. Personally, I take Muslims
seriously: if they say Islam made them do it, I take them at their word. But
Islam-lovers like Cameron or US Secretary of State John Kerry overrule the
Muslim perpetrators’ own testimony when it does not suit them. They have
invested heavily in a rosy picture of Islam, and they are willing to lie and
even to kill for it.
Yes, they
are ready to kill Muslims in order to uphold their delusion. Indeed, John Kerry
has said, justifying the armed attacks on the Caliphate, that one of the US war
aims was “remedying the distortion of Islam” which he imagined the Caliphate’s
orthodox Islam to be. This leads us to the paradox that Islamophiles are ready
to kill Muslims in order to defend Islam.
What must not be done?
Several
false trails are abroad, are even popular, nay, even espoused with firmness and
fanaticism, which are given as solutions for religious intolerance.
The violent
approach is at any rate the wrong one. Islamophile Western politicians have,
between them, killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Somalia, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Mali and Syria, all while making statements calling Islam “great”
and a “religion of peace”. Their only justification towards the Muslim world is
that they are merely killing “monsters, not Muslims”, a lie which no sane
Muslim will swallow. What the Muslim world needs, is a thaw. The present
polarization, aggravated by every new Western intervention, freezes men in
their beliefs and prejudices. In order to grow, they need some peace and
stability. By contrast, the Western interventions in Iraq and Libya have only
destabilized these countries, engendered a plethora of warring militias, and
enthroned sectarian rivalries culminating in the Islamic State.
Along the
same lines, many Hindus who want to get out of the Gandhian stereotype of the
“meek Hindu” fall into the other extreme, throw their weight around and try to
act tough: “Muslims should be taught a lesson!” While I recognize that in
emergencies, physical methods may be necessary (the Army’s defence of Kashmir,
the police’s re-empowerment in the no-go areas that have come up in places like Mewat or
Moradabad, the organized Hindu self-defence against the rise of Muslim
aggression in West Bengal), they will not go very far and will soon land into
abuses if they are not informed by a more fundamental doctrinal strategy. So,
my focus is to inform an elite capable of understanding Islam as an ideological
problem, essentially as a mistake, and then let these insights percolate to
the masses.
We have no
reason to go down the violent path. We make a clear distinction between Islam
as an ideology and Muslims as human beings. They are its captives, its
abductees, but of course they are people like the rest of us. (This distinction
is always and insistently blurred by the Islamophiles who, no matter how
thoroughly you refute their allegations, go on claiming that Islam criticism
amounts to “spreading hatred against 2 billion Muslims”.) Among your friends there are nice Muslims?
Well of course there are, the indoctrination in Islam sits lightly on numerous
nominal Muslims, who remain human beings after all, and only after that,
succumb in various degrees to the doctrine in which they have been raised. Their
goodness is part of their general human heritage and says nothing about Islam.
In
physicist Steven Weinberg’s words, “good people will do good and evil people
will do evil; but for good men to do evil – that takes religion”. Or in other
words, religion is like alcohol: some drunken drivers reach home safely anyway,
some teetotallers still manage to be a danger on the road, but for most people,
alcohol will affect their driving negatively. In the case of Islam, more followers
than in other doctrines are swayed by it into acts of fanaticism against
others.
Sameness
An
intellectual approach which appeals to post-religious atheists and secularists
is the line that “all religions are the same”, that they all equally lead to
fanaticism and terrorism. This is obviously untrue, and I am confident that I
won’t be contradicted by the numerous victims of Jain terrorism. Nothing in
other religions compares with the wave of Islamic violence that currently
affects dozens of countries.
Note also
the potential for religions to develop, e.g. Christianity gradually renounced
its practice of violent persecution and of slavery, which it voluntarily
abolished after having imbibed the spirit of the Enlightenment. Or consider
Hinduism, which in its early history developed the institution of caste, and
more recently has started eliminating caste. But such evolutions are more
difficult in the case of a religion closely bound up with a law system deemed
to be valid until Judgment Day, as Islam defines its Shari’a. Thus, the Islamic world has never abolished slavery but
was forced to do so by an outside world that had outgrown it. (The antics of
the Islamic State show how this abolition has been but skin-deep.)
The converse
approach is the idea that all religions are good, and true, and noble. And yes,
even Islam, a very late composite of elements from existing religions plus a
few personal innovations by the Prophet, has to contain worthwhile points. But
the fact that no religion equals zero, doesn’t imply that they all evenly equal
one. There may be equality before the law between human beings, but there is no
conceptual equality between doctrines, nor spiritual equality between paths.
Just as in science one theory may be plainly wrong while another one fits all
the available facts, one religion may be a false trail while another, though
still imperfect, may essentially be right.
In
particular, the second of the two points of the Islamic creed, that Mohammed
was the messenger of God, is demonstrably untrue. Most religions don’t think of
themselves as true or not: truth is for philosophy and scholarship, religion is
about devotion and surrender. Yet Islam insists on being the true religion,
while others are false. Alright then, let us judge Islam in terms of truth and
falsehood. There is nothing in Mohammed’s collection of messages, the Qur’ân,
that couldn’t have been said by a 7th-century Arab businessman,
including clumsy superstitions typical of the childhood of mankind. Some parts
may be OK as literature, but there is nothing divine about it. If we keep this
in mind, we have made a great stride out of the confusion arising as soon as
the word Islam is uttered.
What is to be done?
In the case
of the Islamic State’s attraction of youngsters, even from India, authorities
the world over wonder how to deal with it. We should not combat the consequences, viz. the
youngsters’ involvement in jihad, but the cause of this involvement, their prime
motivator, Islam itself. In every generation, some youngsters will not settle
for a syrupy version of their chosen ideology but insist on the radical
version. That radicalism is a normal phenomenon and need not be punished,
unless they have committed war crimes, and in that case, they can be punished
under existing laws.
The current
crisis situation only highlights the more general problem how to undo the impact
of Islam on its followers. But followers of Islam as such must not be punished
either, nor persecuted or discriminated against. This is useless and counterproductive,
as the survival of repressed religions under Communist regimes should teach us,
and it just goes against what we stand for. Freedom of religion should of
course also count for Muslims, let there be no doubt or lack of clarity about
that.
But I do
propose that Islam should be phased out, as should any delusionary belief. The
violent aspects of Islam make this need more pressing, but ultimately it is of
wider application. Indeed, I will draw upon my own experience as an apostate
from Catholic Christianity. I am but a representative of a whole generation
that turned Western Europe from predominantly Christian to predominantly
secular. Changes of religion do happen, even on a collective and continent-wide
scale. There is no reason why they could not happen in the Muslim world.
About the
homecoming of Muslims from their exile, their thraldom to Islam, my thoughts
are admittedly incomplete, and I am only making a beginning here. If all the
secularists in India had not wasted the past decades with defending religions
(except for Hinduism), but instead started deconstructing their favourite
religions, we would have been a lot closer to a solution. But the guilt and at
the same time the ridiculousness of the Indian secularist scene are topics for
another occasion. Fact is, some work remains to be done, and I welcome input from
others. Here, however, are a few stray ideas that may be helpful.
Ideas on apostasy
from Islam
·
The first thing to do is that we ourselves are
clear about the nature of the Islam problem. Before we can even think of
telling the Muslims how we view Islam, we ought to understand it for and
amongst ourselves. Just a few days ago, I saw a TV debate in which a BJP
spokesmen called the Caliphate warriors “heretics”, implying that they do not
represent the true Islam. Sometimes this can be excused as an electoral gimmick
or a diplomatic platitude, to be expected among politicians. But I know from
experience that most Hindus are serious about such pseudo-expert notions. As a
wise Hindu told me, “the typical Hindu always thinks he knows everything about
everything”, and so he will pretend to tell Muslims what “real Islam” is. In
this case, he will tell the accomplished Islamic theologians behind the jihad
movements that they have it all wrong and that these are “heretics”. On the
contrary, all that the Islamic State makes headlines with, has been done by the
Prophet himself, who started wars of conquest, took hostages, ordered rape, took
and sold slaves, had his critics murdered or formally executed, and
discriminated between Muslims, other monotheists and real Pagans. Everything
the Caliphate does, can be justified if brought before an Islamic Court, unless
the judges are willing to state that Mohammed’s behaviour was un-Islamic and
illegitimate. You cannot find a single Islamic Court, Mosque or Madrassa where
it is held that “Mohammed was wrong”. The typical Hindu attitude to Islam is “under-informed
but over-opinionated” wishful thinking. So we will have to convince them and
other non-Muslims about the true nature of the Islam problem first.
·
Telling Muslims what we think of Islam is
intellectually quite alright, but humanly we have to keep in mind that it is
delicate to offend people’s cherished convictions. It should only be done, as
it were, in self-defence. There is no need to “attack” Muslims with your
opinions, it is only when they themselves give you as valid their own (or at
least, Islam’s) opinions, that you may counter them. Only when they take the
initiative to call your religion false, should you respond by questioning their
own. This is but a matter of politeness and sensitivity, but also a premise of
the eternal dharma: speak gently, and only confront others with a harsh truth
when they ask for it.
·
When we approach the Muslim community, let us keep
in mind how Christianity imploded in Europe. Since the 18th century,
an elite of freethinkers left the Church but had little influence among the
masses. After the Industrial Revolution, a large part of the working class also
left the Church. But the real breakthrough took place around 1970, a generation
after World War 2, when education was democratized and nobody who had gone to
school could take the defining dogmas of Christianity (hereditary sin as the
cause of mortality, Jesus as sole incarnation of God, virgin birth of Jesus,
salvation from sin and mortality through Jesus’ death and resurrection)
seriously anymore. It was no longer cool to be Christian, the defining beliefs
were ridiculed. As soon as enough people had left the Church, the force of
conformism, of doing like the others, which had so far retained people inside
the Church, now started working inversely. Those with little conviction, who
had only gone because of the neighbours, now stayed away because of the
neighbours. So now only a marginal percentage goes to church. This is what will
have to be achieved regarding Islam.
·
The magnitude of the task should not be
underestimated. Thus, the comparison with European Christianity’s implosion is
valid but with the nuance that in Europe, the change in worldview was
facilitated by the high degree of individualism, which was both intrinsic to
the culture and reaching a new high in the post-WW2 welfare states. In Islamic
society, family and community ties tend to be stronger, and they in turn tend
to stabilize religious identity. Another reassuring argument among non-Muslims
is that the oil wealth is finite, so that the financing of Islam worldwide by
the Arab monarchies is bound to come to an end. Arabs oil sheikhs know this
too, and they prepare to switch to providing solar power to cold and cloudy Europe
from the Arab desert. Other scenarios may develop, and we cannot count on an
implosion of Islamic finances to solve the problem for us. People like to
believe anything that implies we do not have to actually do anything, but often
wrongly.
·
In the case of Christianity, it is the young who
have convinced the old. Numerous are the families I know, where the first one
to stay away was a rebellious son. Then other youngsters rebelled, and finally
their parents followed suit. Aged people who once were devout Christians, and
who –- you would think -– would take consolation from their faith in their
declining years, openly confide: “Oh, how they fooled us in our youth!”
Similarly, we have to focus on the young Muslims, whose self-liberation from
Islam will then start taking along most of the older people. As for the older
ones who stick to their childhood beliefs: we will just tolerate that, as we
always have, because it is impossible and undesirable to pressurize them out of
their beliefs. Thoughts are free, opinions are perfectly permitted, so if people
insist on believing that the voice Mohammed heard carried a message from God,
well, let them. But such a belief should not be promoted. We should finally get
serious about India’s Constitutional provision that requires the promotion of
the scientific temper. If we expose the Muslim youth to the scientific way of
thinking, they will become sceptical of the defining dogmas of Islam.
·
While in Europe, many people have left religion
altogether, it will be said that Indians are a religious nation, and that the
only alternative to Islam is another religion. Indeed, even in Europe, many
ex-Christians dabble in various alternative religions, including elements of
Hindu-Buddhism. Well, in the case of India, you already have every possible
alternative in place. For Indian Muslims, the alternative religion is all
around them. For most people, the Ghar-wâpasî
(“homecoming”), the return to their ancestral religion, will do. Moreover, it
allows for the introduction of positive ideas and attitudes: far more than a
critique of negatives, these will convince Muslims that there is a better world
outside Islam.
·
Now, more concretely, expose youngsters in their
education and via the general culture to the demythologizing information about
Islam. This can be done not so much by the media which Westerners use, such as Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum or Robert Spencer’s Jihadwatch, but the forums of ex-Muslims
like faithfreedom.org by Ali Sina (pseudonym
of a Canadian Iranian) or islam-watch.org
by Ibn Warraq (pseudonym of a British Pakistani), or work by Anwar Sheikh,
Taslima Nasrin, Afshin Ellian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other ex-Muslims. Respond
positively to the demand of Muslim youngsters to pay more attention in schools
to Muslim thinkers, but then tell them the whole story rather than the streamlined
hagiography, e.g. the racist judgment by Ibn Khaldun on Blacks, or the account
by the Moroccan globe-trotter Ibn Battuta of slavery in the Delhi Sultanate, or
the motto of the Algerian Berber singer Lounès Matoub (murdered in 1998 by jihadis):
Ni Arabe ni Musulman , “neither Arab
nor Muslim”. There is nothing intrinsically Islamic in our Muslims, nothing
they cannot outgrow.
·
Muslims will ultimately have to do it themselves,
they will outgrow their Islam in a natural process. But this process should not
be hampered by any artificial hurdles we put in its way. Let us at least not
give Islam the extra advantages that it now enjoys to prolong its existence.
(More controversial statements came about only during question time. My response there, and to some objections uttered afterwards, will be presented in a forthcoming contribution.)