Interview in the monthly Swarajya

(Paper version of Swarajya, May 2016)

·        While Swarajya has published articles exposing how Marxist historians hound peers who disagree with them out of academic institutions, we have got news from different sources that you are finding it difficult to get employed even in Belgium. Is it true? If yes, what precisely is the objection of your detractors? Can you name the people who have raised objection to your appointment in a Belgian university? Did you receive regret letters from Belgian academic authorities, explaining why they couldn’t appoint you? Did they communicate verbally to you why they thought you were unemployable?

After giving this matter some thought, I have decided against offering much detail here. Firstly, I am not privileged to know the details of decision-making instances that lead to my own exclusion. Even if sending an official “regret letter”, they would not give in writing the real reason behind their decision (as anyone experienced with job applications knows).

Secondly, eventhough no law was broken, going into this still has the character of an allegation, and that requires proof. Some cases of deliberate exclusion or disinvitation were simply obvious, but my standards of proof are higher than that. Thus, recently I missed an appointment at a Belgian university and in that rare case I was unofficially but fully informed of the details by an insider (of course I was vetoed for reputedly being too embroiled with Islam criticism), but now that this crown witness has died, it would only be my word against theirs; which would not be good enough. So, I simply want to close this chapter. Let’s not bother, everybody has his problems, and these career hurdles are mine. In fact, I have had quite a bit of luck in my life, including help from individual Hindus whenever the need arose (air tickets paid, hospitality etc.), so any fussing about this boycott against me would be disproportionate. Let’s just assume I missed those opportunities because I was not good enough. Or because of Karma, whatever.  

The topic in general is important, though. The Leftist dominance of the Humanities departments in India, often amounting to total control, results from the wilful and systematic “ethnic cleansing” (to borrow Madhu Kishwar’s term) of any young scholar suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies. Exceptions are the people who entered on the strength of ideologically neutral work, or of initially toeing the line, but coming out with pro-Hindu convictions only after getting tenure.

This cleansing of enemies stems from the old Marxist mentality: a war psychology treating everyone with a different opinion as an enemy inviting merciless destruction; and a boundless self-righteousness rooted in the belief of being on the forward side of history. As an ideological wave, Marxism is waning even in India, but that attitude is still rife among the anti-Hindu forces, both in India and among Western India-watchers.

·        We refer to the established historians in India as Marxist historians, not to their knowledge because they look at this country through the Marxist lens of “class conflicts”. You refer to them sarcastically as “eminent” historians. Please explain your choice of words.

“Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial-age personalities, Eminent Victorians.

“Eminence” in this case refers to their position and relative glory. The Communists always made sure to confer position and prestige, as opposed to the Sangh Parivar, which fawns over people with position but doesn’t realize that those people have only acquired their position by toeing the anti-Hindu line. In a way, you have to concede that the Left has honestly fought for its power position. Half their battle was already won by the Hindu side’s complete absence from the battlefield.

One example of the Sangh’s ineptness at playing this game. In 2002, the supposedly Hindu government of AB Vajpayee founded the Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford. The media cried “saffronization” and, as usual, portrayed the BJP as a wily party fanatically committed to Hindu causes. However, the clueless time-servers at the head of the BJP nominated a known and proven opponent of Hindu Nationalism, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, who thus became the poster-boy for “saffronization”. This way, they hoped to achieve their highest ambition in life: a pat on the shoulder by the secularists. That pat on the shoulder, already begged for so many times, remained elusive, but the tangible result was that they too had conferred even more prestige on an “Eminent Historian”, all while denying it to their own scholars (if any).

·        What would you tell your peers who say that the “Out of India” Theory (OIT) is a fringe theory?

Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity. As for the situation abroad: most scholars assume the invasionist paradigm, but only very few also argue in an informed manner for the invasionist theory, not many more than those who argue against it. But anyway, this “fringe” aspect doesn’t impress me at all. When Copernicus put the sun rather than the earth in the middle of the solar system, he was in a minority of one, very “fringe” indeed; but he won the day.

·        What is the evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory?

First of all: that there is no evidence in its favour. Archaeologists have spent a century of well-funded excavations for a trace, any trace, of the Aryans moving into India. Even the invasionists concede that “as yet” no such thing has been found. The new genetic evidence, while still immature, generally goes in favour of emigrations from India and, while leaving room for immigrations too, is emphatically failing to pinpoint an invasion coinciding in time with the hypothetical Aryan invasion.

Meanwhile, the written record emphatically points to an emigration scenario. That the Iranians lived in India and had to leave westwards is reported in the Rg-Veda, a text thoroughly analysed and shown to support an “Aryan emigration” by Shrikant Talageri. It can equally be deduced from the Avesta. Even earlier migrations are mentioned in the Puranas. These are of course very mixed and unreliable as a source of history, but it is a bad historian who discards them altogether. Their core, later fancifully embellished, consists in dynastic lists. Keeping that ancestral information was the proper job of court poets, and they devised mnemotechnical tricks to transmit it for many generations. In this case, it too does convey a basic scenario of indigenousness and emigration.

Finally, there is the linguistic evidence. Many Indians believe the hearsay that it has somehow proven the invasion. It hasn’t. But permit me to forego discussing those data: too technical for an interview.

  

·        Of late, the Marxist historians have revised “invasion” to “migration”. They say that there might not have been a war when the so-called Aryans arrived here, but they have no doubt that the ancestors of today’s north Indians, especially the upper castes, by and large migrated from central Asia into India. In other words, the Marxists say that we Indians were originally not Indians—invasion or no invasion! Does this “revision” satisfy you?

Exasperated at not finding a visible trace of this invasion, conformist scholars have theorized an alternative that doesn’t require such visible remains: a migration under the radar. Often, when they try to give details, they still mean a military invasion rather than a gradual migration, since they bring in the military advantage of horses and chariots to explain how such a large and civilized Harappan population could be overrun by a handful of outsiders.

But even if they genuinely mean a migration, it still amounts to the same scenario as an invasion, viz. the Vedic Aryans came from abroad and the natives took over the language and religion of the intruders. So, anyone who thinks that the migration theory is a breakthrough away from the invasion theory really shows he doesn’t understand the issue. “Migration” effectively means “invasion” but avoids the burden of proof that the more dramatic term “invasion” implies.

To be sure, it doesn’t much matter who came from where. The so-called adivasis (a British term coined in ca. 1930) or “natives” of Nagalim in the Northeast have settled in their present habitat only a thousand years ago; which is fairly recent by Indian standards. So, ironically, they are genuine “immigrants” or “invaders”, yet no Indian begrudges them their place inside India. Many countries have an immigration or conquest of their present territory as a proud part of their national myth: Madagascar, Romania, the Siberian part of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc. If the Indo-Aryans, or indeed the Dravidians (theorized to have come from Iran or even Central Asia), had really immigrated, that would then have been a pre-Vedic event, at least 3500 years ago, and that time-span ought to have been enough for integration into the national mainstream.

So this Homeland debate ought to have been a non-issue, only of interest to ivory-tower scholars. But different non- or anti-Hindu forces decided to politicize it. Abroad, these were the British colonialists, White supremacists in the US and Europe, and among them the Nazis, who considered the AIT as a cornerstone and eloquent illustration of their worldview. Inside India, first of all the Christian missionaries, then followed by the non-Brahmin movement, the Dravidianists, Nehruvians and Ambedkarites, followed in turn by their Western supporters. The AIT was used to break up Indian unity and pit upper castes against lower castes, non-tribals against tribals, and North-Indians against South-Indians. After this massive politicization, the partisans of Indian unity finally decided to give some feeble support to the fledgling Out-of-India Theory (OIT). Yet, scholars rejecting the OIT because of its alleged political use have no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for government policies.

·        On the one hand, the unaffiliated or apolitical Indian student loves your theories; your passages are quoted widely in debates on ancient Indian history. On the other, you do not seem to get along well with the so-called right-wing historians of this country either. You have written a blog against them. Please comment.

Well, I have nothing but good to say about some Indian researchers, both naturalized ones like Michel Danino and natives like Meenakshi Jain or Srikant Talageri. But then, there are others too. Certainly the name PN Oak rings a bell? In the second half of last century, he spread all these theories that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple; that the Kaaba was built by Vikramaditya as a Shiva temple; that the Vatican (originally the Roman “Poets’ Hill”) is really “Veda-Vatika”; that my mother tongue, Dutch, is the language of the Daityas (demons), etc. The bad thing is that numerous Hindus have run away with these stories, and even some NRI surgeons and engineers of my acquaintance believe in diluted versions of the same. In a less extreme manner, this disdain for historical method is widespread among traditionalist Hindu “history-rewriters”. They frequently put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder.

Many of these rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, their time had come. I know, for instance, that many of them have sent in proposals to the ICHR. None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any student writing a thesis knows that before you can develop your own hypothesis, you first have to survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found or theorized. But these traditionalist history-rewriters just don’t bother about the rest of the world, they are satisfied to have convinced themselves. Their horizon is not larger than an internet list of like-minded people.

In itself, it is no problem that their knowledge and method leave much to be desired. People can learn. Unfortunately, they are too smug to do that. They actively misinform Hindus by claiming that the Aryan Invasion Theory has long been discarded. They also do a lot of harm to the bonafide historians with whom they get juxtaposed. So it is true that I have lost patience with them.

·        Since the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014, has there been an effort to revise the subject of Indian history in academic curricula, which, many in India believe, is politically motivated? Has the Government of India approached you with the request of being a part of any such initiative? If yes, how is the project going?

No, there has been no such request at all. However, I myself have sent in an application to the Indian Council of Historical Research, but that has run into technical difficulties, mainly to do with my foreign passport. So, the situation is and remains that institutionally, I have nothing to do with the Indian history scene.

The version of history taught by the Nehruvians was politically motivated. The feeble Hindu attempt to counterbalance this (“saffronization”) in ca. 2002 was confused and largely incompetent. Humbled by this experience, the BJP today is not even trying to impose its own version. Contrary to the Nehruvians’ hue and cry, allegations about the BJP’s interference in history-teaching or more generally in academe are simply not true.

Here we are only talking of changing some lines in the textbooks, and even that seems a Himalayan effort to the BJP. Yet, what is really needed is a far more thorough overhaul. Except for some scholars without any power, nobody is even thinking about this very needed long-term job.

·        If no, could the reason be that RSS-affiliated historians and you are not particularly fond of each other and this government is influenced by the Sangh?

Any Sangh-affiliated historians would not need me to arrive at their positions or to devise a policy if called upon to do so by the present Government. But again, I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting the distorted history propagated by the Nehruvians. I would welcome it if it happened, but so far the BJP, still begging to be recognized as “secular”, only has its eye on “development”.

I am happy to report that there are some as yet insignificant private initiatives, though. Once they achieve results, there will be more to say on them.

·        Would you say or agree that the Government of India, regardless of the political party that runs it, would be uncomfortable appointing or commissioning an academic who is perceived as being anti-Muslim?

Certainly.  Though it never had any problem with anti-Hindu candidates to even the highest post. Long ago, it even managed to appoint to the chair of the Constitution Commission, no less, a man who had expressed his outspoken aversion to both Hinduism and Islam: Dr. BR Ambedkar.

·        Does the genesis of your problem with anti-left historians in India lie in the fact that on the issue of Babri Masjid, if you do not agree with the left, you do not agree with the right wing either? If it is something else, please explain the problem.

On Ayodhya, there has never been a conflict with any non-Left historian. To be sure, I have my disagreements on some minor points, but they have never been the object of a controversy. So: no, on Ayodhya I may have minor and friendly differences of opinion with “right-wing” historians, but no serious quarrel. In that debate, the long-standing quarrel has been with the Eminent Historians, their supporters in media and politics, and their foreign dupes. They were on the wrong side of the history debate all along, and it is time they concede it.

In the case of the Eminent Historians, it is also time for the surviving ones to own up their responsibility for the whole conflict. The then PM, Rajiv Gandhi, was on course towards a peaceful settlement, allotting the site to the Hindus and buying the militant Muslim leadership off with some typically Congressite horse-trading. Not too principled, but at least with the virtue of avoiding bloodshed. It is the shrill and mendacious declaration of the Eminent Historians in 1989, amplified by all the vocal secularists, that made the politicians back off.

Not only have they falsely alleged that no Rama temple ever stood on the contentious site: their more fundamental lie was to bring in history at all. Ayodhya belongs to the Hindus not because it was their pilgrimage site a thousand years ago, nor because of “revenge” for a temple destruction effected eight hundred or five hundred years ago, but because it is a Hindu sacred site today. No Muslim ever cares to go to Ayodhya, and in spite of being egged on by the Eminent Historians, enough Muslim leaders have expressed their willingness to leave the site to the Hindus. This whole controversy was unnecessary, but for the Nehruvians’ pathetic nomination of the Babri Masjid as the last bulwark of secularism.

·        If all the archaeological findings from Ayodhya are arranged chronologically, what story of the disputed plot of land comes to the fore? Did a temple of Lord Rama stand there, which Babar’s general Mir Baqi demolished to build the mosque? Or, did Mir Baqi find ruins on the spot, which were a mix of a dilapidated Muslim graveyard and remains of a temple of an even older generation?

That a Hindu temple was demolished by Muslim invaders is certain, on that we all agree. But there is less consensus around, or even awareness of, the fact that this happened several times: by Salar Masud Ghaznavi in 1030 (the rebuilt Rajput temple after this must be the one of the excavated pillar-bases), by Qutbuddin Aibak’s troops in 1193, and by Mir Baqi on Babar’s behalf in 1526.

What it was that was replaced by Babar’s mosque, is not fully clear. I speculate that in the rough and tumble of the collapsing Delhi Sultanate, Hindus had managed to take over the site and started worship there eventhough the building they used was a mosque imposed on the site. That was exactly the situation in 1949-92, and I think it also applied towards 1526. Babar destroyed a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a Hindu presence at the site, but not the Rajput temple from the 11th century of which the foundations were excavated in 2003.

Was the temple’s demolition just an odd event, or was it the necessary materialization of an ideology, repeated many times and in many places? When Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghori and his lieutenants conquered the entire Ganga basin in 1192-94, they destroyed every Hindu temple they could find. Only a few survived, and that is because they lay out of the way of the Muslim armies, in the (then) forest, notably in Khajuraho and in Bodh Gaya. But all the Buddhist universities, all the temples in Varanasi etc. were destroyed. Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is inconceivable that the Sultanate regime would have allowed a major temple to remain standing there.

So, the narrative propagated by the Sangh Parivar, that Babar destroyed the 11^th-century temple, cannot be true, for that temple was no longer there. When Babar arrived on the scene, Hindus may have worshipped Rama in a makeshift temple, or in a mosque building provisionally used as a temple, but the main temple that used to be there, had already been destroyed in 1193. See, Ayodhya’s history becomes more interesting once you discard the lies of the Eminent Historians as well as the naïve version of the Sangh Parivar.

The controversial part lies herein, that the persistence of the temple all through the Sultanate period would have implied a certain tolerance even during the fiercest part of Muslim rule. In reality, the demolition of Rama’s birthplace temple was not an odd and single event, but a repeated event in application of a general theology of iconoclasm imposed by the Prophet.

·        Was it a temple of Lord Vishnu rather? Or, were they quite a few temples of one or more deities built in different periods by different kings?

In her book from 2013, Rama and Ayodhya, Prof. Meenakshi Jain has detailed all the scholarly evidence and the debate around it, including the embarrassing collapse of the Eminent Historians’ case once they took the witness stand in Court. She shows that the Rama cult has already left traces more than 2000 years ago. Attempts to make Rama worship a recent phenomenon were just part of the sabotage attempts by the Eminent Historians. Also, the site of Ayodhya, though probably older, is at least beyond doubt since Vikramaditya in the 1^st century BC. All indications are that the disputed site was already visited by pilgrims as Rama’s birthplace since well before the Muslim conquest.

So, this was a long-standing pilgrimage site for Rama. Against the utter simplicity of this scenario, anti-Hindu polemicists of various stripes have tried all kinds of diversionary tactics: saying that Rama was born elsewhere, or that the temple belonged to other cults. This Vishnu-but-not-his-incarnation-Rama theory, or the claim of a Shaiva or Buddhist origin, came about as some of those diversionary tactics; they are totally inauthentic and artificial. Alright, among historians we can discuss every possible hypothesis. But from the very relevant viewpoint of Islamic iconoclasm, all these distinctions don’t matter: all those sects were false, leading men astray, away from the one true religion, and therefore they all, and certainly their idols and idol-houses, were to be destroyed.

·        Whatever be the story, which community do you believe has a greater right of ownership over that disputed site?

The community that holds the site sacred. Muslims go through all this trouble to travel to far-away Mecca, why don’t they go on a cheap and easy pilgrimage to Ayodhya instead? It seems they have made their choice. So let us respect their choice, and also the choice of the Rama worshippers who do care for Ayodhya, by leaving the site to the latter. Case closed.

·        Do you hate Muslims or Islam?

No, I do not hate Muslims. They are people like ourselves. Having travelled in Pakistan and the Gulf States, I even dare say I feel good in Muslim environments. And if I desire the liberation of Muslims from Islam, that is precisely because I like them. Suppose you discover that a friend of you still believes in fairy-tales: wouldn’t you consider it your duty to set him straight and confront him with the true story, precisely because he is your friend?

But then, perhaps the writer of the Quran “hated” the unbelievers when he wished them godspeed to hell.

And I do not “hate” Islam either. If a teacher uses his red pencil to cross out a grammatical mistake in a pupil’s homework, we do not say that he “hates” the mistake. He simply notices very dispassionately that it is wrong. The use of the word “hate” in this case stems from an attempt to distort the debate and misrepresent the argument by means of emotive language. The belief that someone heard the word of God, dictating the Quranic verses, is just one of the many irrational and mistaken beliefs that have plagued mankind since the beginning.

·        You have been on record saying at a function in Goa in late 2014 that a general impression must be created that being a Muslim is “uncool”! Representatives of some Islamic countries reportedly walked out of the venue in protest of your statement. Would you explain what happened at that event?

We had been given to understand that it was going to be a Hindu thinkfest where the only constraint on our free discussion was going to be the truth. Satyameva jayate! The offer of first-class airplane tickets (which I refused as unnecessarily luxurious) should already have alerted me to a different agenda: a glamorous diplomatic show. Arriving on-site, and seeing some high-profile Muslim guests from West Asia (what were they doing at an “India Ideas Conclave”?), I proposed the organizers to change the topic from what I had been invited for: the roots of religious terrorism. Thus, an evaluation of the BJP Government’s record from the angle of its Hindu reputation seemed to me an excellent topic that as yet no one was scheduled to talk about. But no, they insisted I talk about the roots of Islamic terrorism, then colourfully illustrated by the frequent video reports of beheadings by the Islamic State, apart from the more usual bomb attacks. Even when I warned them that I was not going to parrot the diplomatic white lies churned out by Obama and Cameron (and, very recently, in my presence, by Narendra Modi speaking in Brussels), viz. that jihad “has nothing to do with Islam”, they still persisted.

So they got what they had bargained for. I detailed the justification for all of the IS’s actions from the Quran and the Prophet’s precedents. The reaction of the Hindu audience was very warm and enthusiastic. Finally someone who didn’t try to shift the blame to the victims, as the Nehruvians always do. A few foreigners were not so happy, and neither were the BJP organizers. They had preferred a diplomatic lie to the truth, so I had spoiled their show, intended to prove how nice and “secular” those ugly Hindu Nationalists really were.

On the panel there was also the advocate of “moderate Islam”, Sultan Shahin. I liked him as a person, and I also understand that the stand he took was risky. For Muslims, it is more dangerous to stray from the orthodox line than for non-Muslims to even criticize Islam. I have to knock on wood here, given the attacks on the Satanic Verses translators and the Danish or French certoonists, but still Kafirs (Pagans) have more leeway than Muslims who risk being treated as apostates. So, I concede the bravery of “moderate Muslims”. But all the same, they are wrong.  They are probably being truthful when they swear that they themselves would never countenance such terrorist violence. But that is because of their normal inborn human feelings, not because of (but rather, in spite of) their later conditioning by Islam. They try to reconcile their human tolerance with the religion they have been taught by their beloved parents. It is humanly understandable, and I sympathize with them, being myself an apostate from my home religion, Catholicism. But alas, I cannot spare them the difficulties inherent in outgrowing your native religions. And I can testify that the end result is worth these steps on the way.

As Taslima Nasreen has said: “What the Muslim world needs is not moderate Muslims but ex-Muslims.”

Making Islam uncool? I have been part of a massive walk-out from the Church. For intellectuals, the decisive reason was the dawning insight that Christian belief was irrational. But for the masses, it was mainly that it was no longer cool to be a believer. People started feeling embarrassed for still being associated with this untenable doctrine, and are none the worse for having left the beliefs they were brought up in. I wish Muslims a similar evolution, a similar liberation. I do not wish on them anything that I have not been through myself.

·        How do you view the recent terrorist attack on Belgium? To what extent is migration from Islamic countries responsible for terrorism on European soil?

As Ché Guevara said, a Guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In this case, the Jihad fighters had found safety and comfort in the Muslim community. So the demographic Islamization of some neighbourhoods in Brussels (due to our own silly policies) has indeed played a role. But I expect you to retort that there were also other factors, and that is true.

·        How do you react to the Muslim refrain that the terrorists in their community are a creation of America and NATO’s flawed foreign policy and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc?

It is simply not true that Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb took to Jihad and iconoclasm in reaction to British colonialism or American bombings. They were inspired by an older source, viz. the Prophet’s precedent, Islam. However, it is true that many contemporary Jihad fighters have indeed been fired up by a specific circumstance, viz. Western aggression against Muslim countries.

Assenting to Quranic lessons about Jihad is one thing, but actually volunteering for the frontline of Jihad it quite another. In most people, it needs a trigger. The illegal invasions of Iraq or Libya, or footage of an Afghan wedding bombed from American jets, provided such a trigger. I am very aware that being bombed is just as unpleasant for wedding guests in Kandahar as for commuters in Brussels or Mumbai. Right now, even little Belgium has five bomber planes in Iraq as part of the US-led war effort against IS. These bombers must already have killed, along with some Jihad fighters, more civilians than were killed in the terrorist attacks in Brussels.  

In Belgium, I have drawn some attention with my defence of the Syria volunteers: young Muslims grown up in Brussels or Antwerp and going to fight for the Islamic State. Our politicians call them “monsters”, “crazy” and other derogatory names, but in fact they are pious idealists. They may be misguided in their beliefs, and I dare say they are, but they do have the courage of their conviction. Without any pressure on them, they volunteer for putting their lives on the line in the Syrian desert. You cannot deny them bravery and self-sacrifice.

The Western invasions and bombings in Muslim countries have brought nothing but misery, and I have opposed them all along. What the Muslim world needs, is not more civil wars, sectarian wars, foreign military interventions, which all serve to polarize the minds, to freeze them in existing antagonisms. What it needs is a thaw. Here again, I speak from my own experience: the post-war climate of peace and prosperity in Europe has allowed a genuine cultural revolution, an emancipation from the stranglehold of Christianity. The Muslim world will only evolve if it attains a modicum of peace and stability.

Note that the military interventions have nothing to do with Islam criticism, nowadays slandered as “Islamophobia”. On the contrary. Without exception, all the politicians ordering interventions in Muslim countries have praised Islam, calling it “the religion of peace” that is being “misused” by the terrorists. Not a single word of Islam criticism has ever crossed their lips. A legitimate Islam critic like the late historian Sita Ram Goel has never harmed a hair on the head of a Muslim. Islamophiles such as these politicians, by contrast, have killed many thousands of innocent Muslims.

·        How would you advise Indians to fight terrorism?

Security measures and repression are not my field nor my favourite solution, but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. So I want to spare a moment to praise the men in uniform who risk their lives to provide safety. However, this approach won’t go very far and won’t provide a lasting solution if it is not accompanied by a more fundamental ideological struggle. That is what I am working on.

Read more!

Politicians praising Islam? Non-Muslims, seek shelter! And Muslims, too!

 

 

Islamophilia

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has launched the term “Islamophobia”, which was immediately adopted by the US, the EU, academic bodies like the American Academy of Religion, and then the media and the chattering classes in the West, in India and elsewhere. Its users translate it as “hatred of Islam” but it really means “fear of Islam”. It treats warnings against the threat Islam poses to rival convictions as well as to freedom and democracy as a psychic disease on a par with claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces) or arachnophobia (irrational fear of spiders). It is an excellent way to poison the debate by declaring your enemies insane. In reply, we will coin the term “Islamophilia”. Being more generous and open-minded than our opponents, we have not chosen a psychiatric term to designate them. Like francophilia, “love of everything French”, it is merely a descriptive term: love of Islam. We consider this love irrational, but do not include an intrinsic irrationality in the term chosen. Someone who whitewashes Islam or shields it from criticism is an “Islamophile”.

When George Bush spoke to the American people after the bomb attacks of 11 September 2001, he told them to assemble in their churches, their synagogues and their mosques. He made it a point to emphasize that the Muslim Americans too were part of the nation. The revenge invasion of Afghanistan that he was planning, would merely be a “war on terror”, not a war on Islam. Meanwhile, American politicians fell over each other to be seen visiting mosques or celebrating Iftar parties. No, this was not a war on Islam, eventhough American and British soldiers were killing Muslims in Afghanistan and later in Iraq by the thousands. Every next bombing in or invasion of Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Mali and again Iraq would be accompanied by vows of: “Islam is the religion of peace”, “Islamic State (of Iraq and al-Sham) is not the true Islam”, nay, “IS are monsters, not Muslims”. George Bush, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, François Hollande, all the killers of Muslim civilians (say, Afghan wedding parties) and of fighters for organizations explicitly invoking Islam, have praised Islam to the skies and refrained from criticizing Islam or giving any quarter to critics of Islam. When a Western politician starts praising Islam, Muslims had better seek shelter.

One of the striking things about these Islamophile leaders is their breath-taking pretentiousness. Whereas IS commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a doctor of Islamic Studies, Islamophiles like Cameron with his pompous “monsters, not Muslims” statement are simply zeroes in Islamic theology and law. Al-Baghdadi can win hands down in any dispute before an Islamic court. Everything IS has become notorious for, from kidnappings and rapes through slave-takings to executions of dissidents and unbelievers, has been prefigured in Mohammed’s own conduct. The new Caliph knows that the cornerstone of Islamic law, recognized by every single Islamic jurisconsult or judge, is the Prophet’s precedent behaviour. What Cameron is saying, effectively comes down to asserting that “Mohammed was non-Muslim”, or even: “Mohammed was a monster”. Mind you, I have not said it, but the British Prime Minister has implied it.

 

Media bias

The media, in their vast majority committed to shielding Islam from criticism, will connect the dots in a simplistic and thoroughly wrong manner. They report on the frequent killings of Muslims by Western soldiers and drones, and on the other they promote and highlight the thoroughly false notion of Islamophobia, so they pontificate that “Islamophobia has caused increasing international violence against Muslims”. On the contrary, Islamophilia is the professed conviction of the leaders who kill Muslims. By contrast, critics of Islam like Raimundus Lullus, Voltaire, the late Sita Ram Goel, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, including ex-Muslims like the late Anwar Sheikh, Taslima Nasrin, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan, have never harmed a single Muslim. Even mass-murderer Anders Breivik, the darling and lonely trump card of the Islamophiles, strengthens our case: while not actively an Islam critic, he was at least a quoter of Islam critics (though he reckoned his own act would be used by the Islamophiles to discredit them by association, which he considered good as he wanted to eliminate the “illusion” of reasonable and democratic methods in favour of the violent option) and the killer of 77 people, but he had spurned the easy option of throwing a bomb into a full mosque and instead  pointed his machine gun at juvenile multiculturalists of the Norwegian Labour Party. So, even his grisly case confirms that Islam critics don’t kill Muslims while Islamophiles do.

This applies even to India: Jawaharlal Nehru presided over the state that was forced to wage war with Pakistan over Kashmir in 1947-8, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee faced down Pakistani invasion in 1965 c.q. 1999, and Indira Gandhi waged the Bangladesh war in 1971, killing many Pakistani Muslims in the process; yet none of them can be quoted as ever criticizing Islam, while some if not all of them have actually praised Islam. For none of the Western or Indian leaders concerned, it can credibly be argued that they didn’t mean what they said in favour of Islam. All of them had to operate in and were groomed by a climate of Islamophilia. Both the so-called “secularists” in India and the multiculturalists in the West combat and criminalize any sign of Islam criticism. Even the “Hindu nationalist” party BJP, to which Vajpayee belonged, has never criticized Islam. Those numerous secularists who allege that the BJP hates islam are welcome to quote a statement of that tendency from the BJP party paper; I at least have never seen one.

Every single medium considers itself an objective vantage-point from which to evaluate all the other media. So, they all say that “the media” except themselves are anti-Islamic and spread a negative view of Islam. This is another make-believe: the media are not anti-Islamic by any means, they shield Islam from criticism as much as they can and they impose on all inconvenient facts about Islamic movements the best possible spin. Yet it is true that nonetheless, the media do spread a negative view of Islam in spite of themselves, viz. in their raw reporting. What impact does a newspaper editorial in praise of Islam have, when the next page reports on kidnappings and forced conversions by Boko Haram or slave-takings and beheadings by the Caliphate? The public knows by now that “haram” and “caliphate” are Islamic terms. It can read for itself that the first thing Boko Haram did with the kidnapped girls was to forcibly convert them to Islam; clearly they are not “monsters without religion”. So the negative influence of the media on the public’s perception of Islam is not due to media bias, on the contrary, it is only due to reality peeping through in the news reports.  

 

Casus belli

The Islamophile leaders do not just happen to kill Muslims, both fighters and civilians (“collateral damage”), they do so specifically for Islamophile reasons. According to US Foreign Secretary John Kerry, one of the reasons for sending bomber airplanes to Iraq to fight IS, is to eliminate the “distortion of Islam”. In reality, the Islamic State is giving a truthful picture of what Islamic doctrine stands for. It emulates the Prophet’s behaviour, a model for all Muslims. Not just the “fanatics” but all deliberate Muslims sanctify the Prophet as the “perfect man”. So, no distortion there. Yet, Islamophiles propagate the notion that “IS is not the true Islam”. They like to drown the fish by claiming that there are many schools of Islam; but none can show us an Islamic school where it is taught that “Mohammed was wrong”.

Publicity-conscious Muslims have even tried to support them by issuing a statement condemning IS. Here at last was proof from the horse’s mouth that the real Islam is a religion of peace after all; or is something wrong with this idyllic picture? Caliph al-Baghdadi will have no trouble repudiating this statement in a court of Islamic law nor in the court of reason. For instance, among the reasons cited why IS does not live up to the standards of real Islam, is its practice of slavery. But it is easy to show that Mohammed took and sold slaves, and that Mohammed took a captive Jewish woman into his harem after massacring her male family members. IS’s practice of enslaving non-Muslims, selling them or using them for sexual gratification is nothing but an emulation of Mohammed’s model behaviour, by definition valid in Islamic law. What the Muslim spokesmen are saying, or at least what they want the silly Islamophiles to believe, is that Mohammed himself was a bad Muslim, a “monster”. The abolition of slavery was imposed from outside on the Muslim world, principally by Britain, and was not abolished in the Arabic heartland of Islam until 1962. The peculiar institution was only reluctantly done away with in Muslim society, and the Caliphate is merely reviving an institution intrinsic to Islam – as the authors of this statement fully well know. But they have no second thoughts about fooling the non-Muslim Islamophiles, especially because these are only eager to be duped.

The situation now is that pious Muslims (not “monsters” but pious Muslims) are being killed by the bombers of Islamophile President Barack Obama and his equally Islamophile allies. Thus, Belgian Defence Minister Pieter De Crem, who sent six bomber aircraft to Iraq, also parroted the line that “IS terrorists have nothing to do with Islam”: the same combination of Islamophilia by conviction with Muslim-killing in reality. Also among the victims are the Yezidi women being used as sex slaves, the Assyrians and Yezidis who formally converted to Islam to save their lives, as well as numerous cases of the fabled “moderate Muslim” among the civilians of the region. Islamophiles have a lot of blood on their hands.

    

 

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Islamophobia, the concept and the polemic

 

The attack against criticism of the Islamic religion continues. Like the Soviet Union of yore, the West along with the Islamic world treats critics of the privileged ideology as madmen suffering from a mental disease, an irrational fear, in this case a new-fangled disorder called Islamophobia. This is modeled on xenophobia, “fear of strangers”, and ultimately on genuine diseases like agoraphobia, “fear of public places”, and arachnophobia, “fear of spiders”. The crusaders (or rather the muhajedin) against this disease are not missionaries who claim to love the people they accuse of being devil-worshippers, they are simpler and more straightforward: they just hate these dissenters. They do not wonder why the “Islamophobes” disagree with the official appreciation, they have no time for such luxuries. They simply try to impose their own hatred on public opinion and on lawmakers, for, like Islam itself, they would like to institute laws everywhere prohibiting criticism of Islam.

 

Marginality

Now, the Islamophobia-hunters dispose of a blacklist detailing who exactly the enemy is: Nathan Lean’s book The Islamophobia Industry. How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, Pluto Press, London 2012 (distributed in the US by Palgrave/MacMillan). It is endorsed by the usual suspects: Mark Juergensmeyer, Karen Armstrong, Tariq Ramadan. Reza Aslan, author of No God but God, speaks of “the multi-million-dollar Islamophobia industry”. These Islamophiles seem obsessed with money, real or imaginary, whereas the real stakes of the Islam debate consist of ideas, so painfully absent from the case they are building, and at any rate from this book.

In the foreword, Prof. John Esposito pontificates about how powerful and rich the “Islamophobes” are.  This he does to conceal the simple fact that the Islamophiles enjoy government and establishment patronage, while “Islamophobes” are marginal and have to set up their own institutions. I, for one, who started publishing critiques of Islam during the Satanic Verses affair back in 1989, have not seen these flows of money in more than 23 years. I can only testify that criticism of Islam brings a writer nothing but ostracism and poverty (unless he is also a well-connected leftist, like Salman Rushdie). This is a struggle of rich against poor, and to make sure nobody misunderstands it: the Islamophiles are the rich, the well-rewarded loudspeakers of the system. This book itself relates without protest how a number of Islam critics lost their jobs because of their stand, while no Islam defender is similarly harassed.

The author himself and some people quoted all make the same point. It starts with the title: “the Islamophobia industry” conjures up a powerful network. In reality, there are a handful of bloggers, of whom some correspond with each other while some are really isolated. There are a few retired professors of Islamic studies, from the days when you could get into those departments without first giving proof of your Islamophilia, like the Dutchman Prof. Hans Jansen and the Belgian Prof. Urbain Vermeulen, who was given a reprimand by his university (subsequently withdrawn) after a media campaign against him. So yes, there are a handful of people, and they manage to convince their handful of readers (still too many for Lean) because their theses are so factual, so rooted in primary material. But in terms of power, they are nothing compared to the establishment of Islam apologists, from policy-makers down to the level of “community organizers” whose job consists in combating the “prejudices” pertaining to the Muslim minority.

 

Phobia

Then the subtitle:  How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. It has oddly fallen to the Right to defend the West against Islam. In the past, the struggle against religion would have been deemed naturally Leftist. In the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibarruri a.k.a. la pasionaria eloquently condemned Islam and the Muslim soldiers fighting on the nationalist side for Christ King. In the Muslim world, the critique of Islam has mostly been voiced by declared Marxists, e.g. the late Aziz Nesin in Turkey and Taslima Nasreen in Bangladesh. But in the contemporary West, the Left has chosen to abandon Karl Marx’s dictum that “all criticism starts with criticism of religion”, so we have only the Right to count on.

It is not so sure that the “Islamophobes” really are Rightists, though. They are against hate, therefore against an ideology of hate; and they are for multiculturalism, therefore against an ideology that is the enemy of multicultural societies. Thus, in 1947, South-Asian Muslims forced the Partition of India on the Hindus, Sikhs and Christians (killing a million and forcing some fifteen million to flee) because they did not want to live in a multicultural society with these others. As his life’s mission, Mohammed himself changed Arabia from a vibrant multicultural society into a monolithic Islamic one. I leave it to the reader to make up his mind whether favouring multiculturalism and opposing hate really constitutes “Rightism”.

Fortunately, that Right doesn’t have to “manufacture” fear of Muslims. The whole establishment including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama may say all they want about Islam being a “religion of peace”, but the public also gets the news items that philter through. These factual reports recount day after day how Muslims commit violence here and then there. The media try to put a harmless spin on it, but the viewers and readers retain the hard facts about Islam. And these facts have been taking place ever since the Prophet Mohammed made a living by attacking caravans, raping and ransoming the women, killing the men and selling the children into slavery. The Right doesn’t have to say this, all it has to do is to quote from Islamic scripture.

                Lean cites film character Prof. John Falconer (A single man, 2009) approvingly: “Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society,” etc., then adds: “But this is about something else. This is about a concerted effort on the part of a small cabal of xenophobes to manufacture fear for personal gain.” (p.14) This reviewer really wonders what personal gain could offset his very tangible losses, but Lean tells him where to look: “Hardline supporters of Israel’s quest to extend its reach into Palestinian territories are often major backers of the pseudo-intellectual pugilism that the Islamophobia industry deploys (… ) Their money – and lots of it – has subsidized massive propaganda campaigns against Islam and bankrolled the work of anti-Muslim naysayers (…) Regardless of their religious or political beliefs, their wallets benefit from such discourses.” (p.11) Well, enough said about the unseen but apparently huge “personal gain” to be made from Islam criticism. But at least we might be told just who the “Islamophobes” are.

 

The faces of “Islamophobia”

                We get to learn their names and some details about their careers and affiliation, e.g. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. (Conservative columnist Don Feder said of the latter’s book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t: “If there were a Nobel prize for demolishing inanities, I’d give it to Robert Spencer”, p.207.) Most of the discussion is about their motives, and clairvoyant Lean decides it must be their frustrated need for attention which saw its chance after 11 September 2001. But we get to know nothing about their arguments against Islam. Thus, Dr. Daniel Pipes, a prominent Islam scholar and critic, is alleged to have given and received some money (from the inevitable Zionist money-bags), but his scholarship is not addressed at all.

Indeed, the chief concern of the people concerned, viz. Islam, is simply not discussed. Islam is just a black box, and if ever a statement about it finds any mention, it is without going into the truth of that statement, which would require an analysis of Islam itself. That is a strict no-no to the author, so the reader is required to laugh every possible statement of the “Islamophobes” off as obviously ridiculous.

                On Europe, say on Gates of Vienna or the Brussels Journal, the author is silent, preferring only the more sensational cases of resistance to Islam. Some attention is paid to Geert Wilders, though not to his arguments (and to his trial for racial insults but not to its outcome: full acquittal), plenty to the English Defence League, and to the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. Of course there would have been no Breivik without Islam and the problems it poses; but there is no doubt that he was received by Islam apologists as a god-send. They have all been hiding behind the Norwegian’s broad shoulders, a safe point from which to shoot their arrows at Islam critics. But a year and some months down the line, we can safely say that the hoped-for effect of the Breivik episode failed to materialize. By the Islamic warriors’ endless and newsworthy attacks, killing hundreds in Afghanistan or Iraq, by the degeneration of the “Arab spring” into an “Islamic winter”, by the blasphemy persecutions in Pakistan and stonings in Mali, the population has again replaced Breivik as a bogeyman with the archetypal mujahid, the Islamic holy warrior against the infidels. Unfortunately for the Islam apologists, reality is more persistent than the Breivik blip.

But we appreciate Lean’s testimony to the violence which Islam critics have to face. Thus: “Staging a demonstration against plans for a mosque in Harrow, England, SIOE [Stop Islamization of Europe] activists clashed with brick-wielding counter-protesters. In a storm of fury, the rectangular blocks, along with glass bottles and firecrackers, were hurled airborne.” (p.53) And look at his language on Wilders’ film Fitna: “His flick was chockablock with horrifying images and hateful juxtapositions. Bloodied bodies, dismembered by terrorists, and references to female genital mutilation ran alongside handpicked verses of the Quran. So provocative were some scenes that the ambassadors of 26 Muslim-majority countries called for it to be banned.” (p.175) The author really makes no effort to sound neutral, as a real scholar would, and gives the impression that the call for a ban carries his approval.

 

Christianity

                In America, the strong Evangelical movement also opposes Islam, and the author spends many pages on painting it in the worst light. In 2010, “Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer triggered lurking anti-Muslim sentiment within the crowd. ‘We believe that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator – and by the way, folks, that’s not Allah – with certain unalienable rights’, he roared as the room of white, middle-aged evangelicals erupted in agreement.” (p.97) The partisan doings of the Christian general William Boykin in Iraq in 2003, of course not supported in this by the Government, are discussed at some length. (p.113-115) The Christian subjugation of the American natives with reference to God-given rights to the land as per the Old Testament gets mentioned as proving that Christians are every bit as bad as they themselves allege of Muslims. (p.98)

Well, Christianity has a lot to answer for, but at least it is preferable to Islam in some important respects. As a doctrine, it is a lot more broad-based than Islam, taking in elements from Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, the Jewish tradition, Hellenistic philosophy and Roman law, and this through many erudite writers who thought twice about the book they contributed to Holy Scripture. That is, for instance, why the Crusades, the limiting Just War Theory, and radical pacifism could all be rooted in Christianity. By contrast, Islam is based on the brief and unconsidered utterances of one half-literate businessman, Mohammed.

Moreover, Christianity’s first three centuries were spent as a marginal religion in the mighty Roman empire, so that a doctrine of the separation of Church and State and of obedience to the prevailing law system soon developed. It was not always abided by, but one can always fall back on it, and it has become a cornerstone of modern secular culture. By contrast, Mohammed’s aim was from the beginning to institute a state, governed by Islamic law, and his victories made Islam’s supremacy a matter of course. So, Islam has always been a political religion, seeing State power and Shari’a as one.

 

Racism

Typically, the author tries to expand American racism to include criticism of Islam: “The spheres of Islamophobia and racism overlap greatly. In the last 60 years, in particular, racist language has shifted away from overtly biological prejudices to include a strong cultural component.” (p.96) Even if this opposition to certain cultural traits can be shown to be a prejudice, it is by definition not racism. Islam is not a race, and since the beginning, it was criticized by Mohammed’s fellow tribesmen, who of course shared their race with him. Nowadays, their torch is taken over by numerous people of colour, such as the late Hindu historians Ram Swarup, Harsh Narain, Sita Ram Goel and K.S. Lal, the African novelist Maryse Condé, and most notably by ex-Muslims like the Pakistani-born philologist Ibn Warraq, the Iranian-born law scholar Afshin Ellian and the Somali-born political scientist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Of course, none of them finds mention in this book, which pictures only white Americans so that it can lament how only white Americans are in the picture.

According to the author, “Islamophobes” make a distinction “between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ cultures, the latter of which are marginalized not only because of their ethnic background, but also because of their traditions, beliefs and cultural practices, often described by racists as ‘uncivilized’, ‘backwards’, ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarian’.” (p.97) The words “superior” in “inferior” are meant to make the link with pre-war racism, but are in fact not much in use now. But alright, by definition Christians consider Christianity as superior to Islam, not of course because of the latter’s “ethnic” background, but purely because both the belief system and the ethics of Islam are deemed wanting when compared to Christianity. Human beings have a freedom to choose their religion, and thus the freedom to compare the religions on offer. Of course they will judge the one as unequal to the other, whether superior or inferior, just as a math teacher will see an inequality between “2 + 2 = 4” and “2 + 2 = 5”. That perfectly normal exercise of the power of discrimination has nothing to do with racism, and has been a problem for Islam ever since Mohammed’s fellow townspeople in Mecca rejected Islam. But Lean would like “Islamophobes” to be racist, because he hopes to score with anti-racist language whereas he knows he cannot win against them if the debate is about Islam as a doctrine.

By the way, American conservatives are right when they call their presidential candidate Herman Cain “a real black as compared to Obama”. (p.99) Obama is what Brazilians would call a mulatto, half-white on his white mother’s side, also the only side on which he has American slaves in his ancestry. Cain, by contrast, is a real descendant of African-American slaves. Obama’s father’s tribe, the Luo, missed the history of Transatlantic slavery, but they may have had something to do with the Arab slave-raids, which used some African tribes to enslave others.

Much is made here, as by Evangelicals, of the question to what extent Obama is a Muslim. No doubt he was first brought up in the religion of his Muslim father and stepfather, and during his primary school days in Indonesia he was registered as a Muslim. Upon returning to America, he lived with his white grandparents and was resocialized as a Christian. Later, in Chicago, he started attending a black church. I for one think he is one of the many ex-Muslims who were roped in by the Protestant churches. For in spite of the Islamic prohibition on conversion out of Islam, Muslims in peripheral zones with limited social control by other Muslims do manage to become Christians. In Indonesia this would probably not have succeeded (and in Pakistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia only at the risk of his life),  but in the US, he could easily get away with it. But I cannot look in his head and have to believe him on faith when he calls himself a Christian. At any rate, it is not “Islamophobia” to have a different opinion on this.

 

Moderate Muslims

 The author, obeying Godwin’s law, brings in Adolf Hitler early on. He shouldn’t have, for “Islamophobic” readers by now all know that the Nazis liked Islam a great deal, that they had Muslim regiments in the Waffen-SS, that the collaborationist Ustasha government of Croatia built a mosque for them in Zagreb (which the subsequent Communist government turned into a pigsty), that the multiculturalist Hitler himself ordered deceased Muslim soldiers to be buried according to Islamic rites, etc. Today, Muslim youngsters in European schools don’t tolerate lessons about the Holocaust or even applaud Hitler for waging the good war against the Jews. By contrast, it was the anti-Nazi war leader Winston Churchill who likened Hitler Mein Kampf to Mohammed’s Quran, a stand later taken over by the author’s bête noire Geert Wilders. If anyone should be called a Nazi (and Lean clearly thinks there should), it is Lean himself.

Then, there is the usual wailing that a minority of extremists spoils the image of a large majority of moderate Muslims. To be sure, they exist, such as the Muslims who alerted the police to prevent cases of terrorism (p.148-149), but they do not prove Lean’s point. First of all, they have this in common with the terrorists, that they all swear by Islam. The much-maligned Islamophobes keep this fact in mind, and Lean holds this against them:  “—the Quran found in Mohammed Atta’s bag contained the same verses that would be preached to Muslims attending worship in the building’s mosque, they believed.” (p.40). Well, of course. From Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 fame) and Mohammed Bouyeri (the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh) to the Palestinian, Afghan and other suicide terrorists, we have literally hundreds of testimonies, in written or videotaped form, of contemporary Muslims stating that Islam and nothing but Islam was their motivation. We have it from many Muslims, including Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, that the Western establishment is wrong in making a distinction between radical and moderate Muslims. And we take these Muslims at their word, while Lean pretends to know it all better than they themselves.

Secondly, even those moderates applaud and quietly help the extremists in actions they themselves don’t have the mettle for, but approve of. Thirdly, in those cases where they really think the extremists have gone too far, they may be guided by a strategy that seems more promising than confrontation, but that has the same Islamic goal nonetheless (e.g. because they count on demography to make a purely democratic transition to an Islamic order possible). And fourthly, where they really abide by policies such as full integration and acceptance of the law of the land, rather than Shari’a, they obey either the influence of modernity or a deeper, more universally human, pre-Islamic layer in themselves. For Muslims are just human beings who have, after all, had to learn Islam; they were not born as Muslims. Indeed, there is nothing about this mistaken belief system that cannot be washed off. As an ex-Catholic myself, I can testify that there is life after apostasy.

 

Conclusion

Mr. Lean, whose world consists of haters everywhere, would like us to hate his book: “I expect that those who view the world in ways that are diametrically opposed to my own will take great issue with what follows. I delight in their protestations. For were they to find my narrative pleasing, I would feel as if I had done a great injustice.” (p.15) Alas, we have every reason to like this book. It proves our point completely. One, the defenders of Islam have to leave the contents of Islam unmentioned, because any serious analysis of the religion would prove the points made by the “Islamophobes”. Two, they have to pick on vulnerable targets, like shrill Evangelicals and narrow-minded military men, but leave the really knowledgeable critics of Islam outside their readers’ horizon. Thus, ex-Muslim critics are not mentioned at all. This slanted presentation is just what we are used to from our debates with Islam defenders in our own daily lives.

                We also have to compliment Lean on letting out truths of which he doesn’t realize the depth. Thus, he writes that one Imam Ossama “Bahloul was skeptical that the political and economic climates of an election year were the only instigating factors for the sudden surge in anti-Muslim hate.” (p.182) And the same thing counts for Islam itself: the surge in Islamic terrorism was not the result of economic factors, and elections don’t even exists in some of the terrorists’ home countries.

 

Disregarding for now that the author is a hater himself (which is but his freedom of opinion), we must appreciate that here, he hits the nail on the head. No matter that so many apologists of Islam mouth the Marxist platitude of the “real” reason being economic (yes, the poverty of that billionaire Osama bin Laden), or that the media blame the electoral fever, here we have an educated Muslim rejecting  these facile explanations. Anti-Islamism is not the result of political and economic circumstances, but of an increasing awareness of Islam’s doctrine and history. This awareness is forced on us by Islam itself, which impresses its presence upon our societies.

Finally, this book should serve as a call to Islam critics to improve their performance. Shrill and panicky warnings against an Islamic take-over are not what the world needs. The degree to which Islam itself is threatened by modernity and by the West should also be considered. Confusion between Islamic doctrine, which is indeed the germ of some dangerous developments, and the mass of Muslims, who are as much the prisoners as the carriers of Islam, is to be avoided. Muslims can’t help it that they were born into Muslim families, and that they associate the natural respect for their parents with a belief in the religion they received from their parents. If we had been born in their societies, maybe we too would have been Muslims. So we should empathize with them and their difficult situation of having believed in a deluded Prophet for decades. After all, we expect of them that they outgrow their religion, which is possible yet fairly hard to do. We should not so much focus on symptoms, such as the veil or the minarets or the “Ground Zero mosque”, but on the Islamic belief system itself. Our attitude to Muslims should be to say: “Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The rest, from their stopping the slaughter of sheep in their bath-tubs to their abandoning of jihad, will then follow from itself.

 

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