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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William Dalrymple is right on the Caliphate’s details, but his liberal framework is wrong

 

 

On 13 July 2014, The Guardian published an opinion article by the well-known historian of Moghul India, William Dalrymple: “The ISIS demand for a caliphate is about power, not religion.” We have heard this tune numerous times, literally and in so many words: whatever happens in the name of Islam, our progressives declare that “it is about power, not religion”. But the question, “whose power?”, brings back the Islamic factor. It is a religious conviction that seeks to increase the power of its incarnations in organizations or states.

Moreover, the contrast between power and religion makes sense in some denominations of Christianity, and will sound like a familiar truism to British readers, but it does not apply to Islam at all. Unlike Christ, whose kingdom is quoted as “not of this world”, Mohammed did claim and finally acquire power. Islam is not about personal salvation, but about founding a state and imposing a law system. If ISIS did not seek political power, it would not be a vanguard of Islam.

The article’s subtitle says more about the actual contents: “The self-anointing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi taps into jihadi nostalgia for a golden era of Islam.” Al-Baghdadi is the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS: al-Sham = the Levant), who has just transmuted his jurisdiction in the Islamic State tout court, and declared himself Caliph.

As was to be expected, Dalrymple’s attention is not on the actual events, nor on the events which the ISIS protagonists explicitly refer to, but on his beloved colonial period. He starts out with a colourful depiction of the deposing of the last Ottoman Caliph, Abdülmecid (Abdulmajid) II, in 1924. Since the last Caliph’s descendents show no interest in the job, it has been lying vacant till someone has dared to claim it. Whereas the Ottoman Caliph had become a Western gentleman avidly reading Western thinkers all while filling the seat of a premodern Islamic institution, al-Baghdadi goes about in black robes and his only literature is the Qur’an and the Hadiths.

We have little against this summary of historical facts: “The restoration of the caliphate has been a dream of Islamic revivalists since at least the 1950s, when Hizb ut-Tahrir began calling for its resurrection. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar went as far as claiming for himself one of the caliph's traditional titles, Amir al-Mu'minin, the commander of the believers; the restoration of the caliphate was often mentioned by Osama bin Laden as his ultimate goal. But al-Baghdadi is the first Islamic leader since Abdülmecid to take the title, which, for many Muslims, distils deep millennial dreams of a great, just, pure multinational empire of faith – the nearest thing the Islamic world has ever seen, so the Islamists will insist, to heaven on Earth. Nostalgia for this lost world is directly associated with the golden age of early Islam, when under the leadership of the first four caliphs – the successors [of Muhammad] – Islam expanded from the Hejaz out through the Levant to borders of Sindh in the east and southern France in the west.”

The usual characters struck by a divine calling have more often claimed to be the Mahdi, the leader of the Muslims during the ultimate confrontation with unbelief before Jugdment Day. So, in a way, the present development constitutes an improvement: “Caliph” is a more mundane title without Apocalyptic pretences. Still, it means the leader of the whole Muslim world, no less.

We also tend to agree with Dalrymple when he writes: “Yet, beyond this first century, the history of the caliphate is far more troubled, bloody and contested than many realise. For most of Islamic history the title of caliph has been disputed by a succession of Muslim leaders who were anxious to give sacral legitimacy to conquests already achieved (…). As ever in the Middle East, religion is a useful mask assumed by the powerful as a way of holding on to power.” But in this case, there’s a snake hiding in the grass. The Caliphate has later on been used as a tool for power by rivaling warlords, true; but the institution itself came about as a fist against the unbelievers, giving a veneer of political legitimacy to the Islamic hold over its flock and oppression of the unbelievers. The institution Caliphate can only be abused for personal ends after existing at all, and its very existence is as a weapon of Islam against unbelief.

We helpfully learn that the Ottoman Caliphate, born in 1517, was challenged by the Moghuls from 1579, when Moghul emperor Akbar declared himself “khalifatu'l-zaman”, the caliph of his time, and “khalifa” remained one of the imperial titles of the Moghuls right up to 1858, when the remnants of the empire were dissolved. Some eccentric millennial Islamist mystics have also declared themselves caliph before being declared heretical and falling from power.

Al-Baghdadi will probably fit the mould of one of these examples, namely as leader of a short-lived break-away state, soon to be reabsorbed by one of the bordering “Sultanates”, i.e. states pledging allegiance to Islam but without the ambition to unite all Muslims and represent Islam. Then again ISIS may “mark the beginning of a permanent new jihadistan which will succeed in establishing itself on the map”. While it is too early to tell what will become of this endeavour, Dalrymple it quite right in observing that “it cannot but have great resonance through the Islamic world, (…) It will inevitably attract jihadis from across the globe to the ISIS banner.” Indeed, hundreds of European-born enthusiasts, including some converts, are fighting in the ranks of ISIS.

So, by and large, this article of Dalrymple is OK. But in the very last sentence, he spoils it all by declaring: “It is no comfort that the terrible tragedy of Iraq is entirely a mess of our own creation.” No!

We can agree that the interventions in Iraq by Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair and George W. Bush were very ill-inspired. Saddam Hussein was bad, but as we now know, his regime had its advantages too. It protected the minorities, whereas the Anglo-American intervention will be remembered by history for causing the massacre or flight of the Christians and the internecine fighting between Shi’ites and Sunnites. Secondly, it guarded the borders of Iraq. Not that these late-colonial lines on the map are worth fighting for, but we notice that Bill Clinton went to war over protecting the borders of the Yugoslav province of Bosnia, and that John Kerry is now pleading for the losing cause of Iraqi unity. So, yes, the West misbehaved badly in Iraq. In order to evolve and to outgrow Islam, the Muslim world needs a thaw, not this polarization (with the West as well as internally) that only strengthens backwardness and fanaticism. Whereas we critics of Islam plead for peace in and with the Muslim world, it is the flatterers of Islam in the Western capitals who have wanted these interventions and brought about the death of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. 

But “the terrible tragedy of Iraq” is not “entirely of our own making”. The ethnic division between Arabs and Kurds, the Islamic division between Sunna and Shi’a, the religious division between Muslim and Christian (not to speak of Mandaean, Yezidi and a few others), these have all been in existence for more than a thousand years. Over and above the human bloodthirstiness, Middle-Eastern fanaticism and cruelty are older than the Western intervention. Do blame the West for many things, but the problems plaguing the Muslim world are mostly of its own making.    

 

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