Llewelyn
Morgan, who teaches Classical Philology in Oxford but has never taken a
critical look at Islam's source texts, prefers to take on bloggers. In a recent
piece in the Huffington Post titled ‘Bamiyan, Timbuktu -
Are the Pyramids Next?!’ (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/llewelyn-morgan/bamiyan-timbuktu-are-the-pyramids-next_b_1673750.html?ir=UK+Universities+%26+Education),
he writes : 'If you believe this, the days of the pyramids
are numbered: "According to several reports in the Arabic media",
writes Raymond Ibrahim, "prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for
the demolition of Egypt's Great Pyramids." In actual fact, it seems the
story originated in a spoof tweet. But hey! It's the easiest thing in the world
to find someone somewhere expressing some wacko view or other; and then Mark
Steyn repeats it all, and off we go...'
Unlike Llewelyn
Morgan, Mark Steyn was hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission there
to defend freedom of speech. The reason is that Islamic militants and their
Western dupes are attacking free speech everywhere: the former with guns and
bombs, the latter with litigation and specious arguments.
The pyramids and the sphinx
As for Raymond
Ibrahim: if the story is true, he seems to have fallen for one of the tricks of the internet age, and
should have checked his story more carefully. No, the pyramids are not
scheduled for a blow-up; but his story is nonetheless more realistic than
Morgan would have us believe.
'Let's be
crystal-clear about this right here. The answer to the question in my title is
a mile-high, neon "NO". The pyramids of Giza are under no threat
whatsoever, and neither is any of the rest of Egypt's glorious archaeological
record. This is as radical as the thinking is getting among
anyone anywhere near power in Egypt.'
Well, the
Pharaonic constructions are not entirely safe: the explosion of a bus carrying
tourists to the temples of Luxor (1997) was an attack on all those Pagans
coming to look at the ancient Egyptian gods. Sometimes, a busload of American
New Agers actually come to worship Ra and Hathor, and otherwise, it is still at
Pagan artwork and architecture that foreigners come to gaze, so a stop must be
put to all this international tourism. Fortunately, Mohammed was a businessman,
Egypt needs money, and the tourists won't come in equal numbers just to see the
mosques of Egypt, so Muslims are making a living off their Pagan heritage
(though Mohammed stil preferred to be known on Judgment Day as an idol-breaker
rather than an idol-seller, as the Sufi poet Farid-ud-din Attar said about
Mahmud Ghaznavi, destroyer of Somnath). That is what keeps the pyramids alive.
It is also a
fortunate circumstance that many temples are located away from the population
centres, or have been covered with sand; when the sphinx was laid bare once, it
was treated as an idol by the countryfolk and consequently earmarked for
destruction, as Morgan himself testifies: "The Egyptian Arab historian al-Maqrīzī, writing in the 15th century AD, attributes the loss of the nose to iconoclasm by Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. In AD 1378, upon finding the Egyptian
peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their
harvest, Sa'im al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose, and was
hanged for vandalism.'
If true, this
seems to be representative of the different forces in the field: Islamic
iconoclasm, an idol too big to be destroyed, and soft-Muslim authorities who
were concerned with their national riches. But note that smaller items of Pagan
religion have disappeared from Egypt: what modern European archeologists found,
they had to dig up. Here, both Christians and Muslims conspired to make the
Pagan heritage disappear. Note however that Islam was more thorough about this
than Christianity, which integrated Mithraic beliefs and Greek philosophy into
its theology. Pakistan may sell its Harappan heritage to tourists as ‘5000
years of Pakistan’, but teaches national history to its own schoolkids from
Mohammed the Prophet and Mohammed bin Qasim’s landing in Sindh, belittling
Harappan civilization as part of Jāhiliyya,
the Age of Ignorance.
Timbuktu and Sufism
Morgan alleges:
'Not to put too fine a point on it, Ibrahim is scaremongering, and it comes as
no surprise when he goes on to offer a deeply misleading account of what has
been happening in Timbuktu: "Currently, in what the International Criminal
Court is describing as a possible 'war crime,' Islamic fanatics are destroying
the ancient heritage of the city of Timbuktu in Mali -- all to Islam's
triumphant war cry, 'Allahu Akbar!'" To read that, you'd think that the
only Muslims involved in events at Timbuktu were the ones doing the vandalism.
But of course it was Islamic buildings that they were attacking. Ansar
al-Din, the al-Qaeda-affiliated zealots in northern Mali, consider the traditional
Sufi practices of Timbuktu to be heretical. What Ibrahim is doing is treating
the most extreme voices of Islam as representative of the whole religion, to
the extent of implying that the Sufi Muslims of Timbuktu aren't really proper
Muslims at all.'
Islam has its
roots in general human nature, partly accepting it (e.g. patriarchy or “male
chauvinism”) and partly going against it. When turning against it, the religion
found itself unable to wipe out all undesirable human traits, though it tried.
The worship of saints and their shrines or graves came naturally to the people,
and though Mohammed tried to uproot this
tendency, it came back. The Wahhabites in Arabia, and their contemporary
followers like al-Qaida and now in Mali the Ansar al-Din, try to emulate the
prophet in wiping out all traces of idol-worship, including the worship of
Mohammed himself (whose house was destroyed by the Wahhabites) and of the Sufi saints.
There is in effect a grey area of ‘Islamic idol-worship’, e.g. worship at Sufi
graves, the Moghul school of painting (the paintings were not worshipped, but
just to make sure, strict Islam prohibits all depictions), and ‘Muslim music’
(Mohammed, who must have had a nervous impairment, couldn’t stand the sound of
music, so that serious Muslims like Aurangzeb and Ayatollah Khomeini did indeed
prohibit music), etc.
Al-Qaida and
other ‘fanatics’ are quite right: their prohibitions are Mohammed’s own, they
are by definition loyal to the ‘essence’ of Islam. But as a matter of history,
we have to concede that many nominal Muslims, both among rulers and among
commoners, did allow or practise this ‘Islamic idol-worship’, giving a certain
Muslim legitimacy to these practices though they were against the prohibitions
of the Prophet.
Llewelyn Morgan
is in tune with the reigning delusion, viz. the postmodern distrust of ‘essentialism’.
He touches on the heart of the matter by making an issue of the “essence” of
Islam. Postmodernists including most Islam-watchers and media people abhor the
idea that Islam has an “essence”, an unchangeable core. Problem for them is
that practically all Muslims do accept the idea of such an essence. ‘Islamic
extremism is against the principles of Islam’, or so the so-called moderate
Muslims claim. This may be right or wrong, but at any rate presupposes that
there is an essence of Islam. Moderates and extremists may have differences of
opinion on just what constitutes the essence of Islam, but they agree on the
principle that there is an essence to Islam.
Morgan is right
when he observes: 'Islam is a very broad church, with no central organizing
authority (like a Pope, say) to fix doctrine. As in other religions, there's a
tendency for different traditions within the religion to claim themselves as
the uniquely authentic face of Islam, and al-Qaeda and their allies make that
claim in a particularly uncompromising and brutal way.’
Well, there is
a centre, acknowledged by all Muslims, viz. Islamic scripture. But we agree
that there is no institutional
centre, no Congregation of the Faith as exists in the Catholic Church. This pluri-centrism
is not always a virtue. In the Catholic Church they say: Roma locuta, causa finita, ‘when Rome has spoken, the matter has
been decided’; so when Rome decrees a reform, it has the force of law
throughout the Catholic world. By contrast, if a Mufti (jurisconsult) gives a
reformist fatwa, another Mufti can give a counter-fatwa re-establishing the
orthodox position. Reformers of Muslim society, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, bewail
this pluri-centrism as a factor of Islamic conservatism. But conversely, the
bright side is that Ansar al-Din’s interpretation of Islam is not the only one.
According to Morgan: ‘But there's a further point: if
Raymond Ibrahim treats the Sufi of Timbuktu as not proper Muslims, he's in
effect adopting the viewpoint of al-Qaeda. What a stunning victory for
extremists this is, that people across the US and beyond are being encouraged
to accept al-Qaeda's distorted ideology as the truth!'
Well, truth.
Raymond Ibrahim is one of those who don’t believe that Mohammed heard God’s
voice or that the Quran is anything other than what the Prophet’s all too human
mind made up. So any version of Islam, al-Qaeda’s or Morgan’s own or another,
is bound to be false. What is truthful here is at most the interpretation of Islam as meant or not meant by Mohammed, and in
that respect, al-Qaeda is very close to the truth as Islamically conceived.
Al-Qaeda’s view of idolatry may not be the only one, but they are entirely
truthful when they assert that their interpretation of Islam follows the
Prophet, and not some innovator during Muslim history. Today and in the West,
it may be possible to find a TV Imam giving a modernist interpretation, but
most Islamic courts will, if asked, uphold the ‘al-Qaeda interpretation’ and
fail to find Islamic grounds to condemn al-Qaeda’s anti-idolatry campaign.
Al-Qaeda and the Ansar al-Din are faithfully walking in the footsteps of
Mohammed himself when they condemn the veneration of graves and shrines as
crypto-idolatrous.
Morgan and his
ilk are very annoyed that a group like al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Din shows us what
real Islam is. They would rather espouse a’moderate Islam’, which in reality
can be analysed as partial Islam compromising with un-Islamic human nature and
modern influences. Those who are serious about Islam try to weed out these
compromising human and modernist elements.
Ayodhya
Next, Morgan
refers to an important source of information: 'The comments under my blog on
Timbuktu told a similar story. Someone came in with a link to Ibrahim's
article; others encouraged me to read polemics by Hindu nationalists such as
Sita Ram Goel's Hindu Temples – What
Happened to Them, which seeks to prove that Muslim rulers in India
systematically destroyed Hindu shrines.'
The late Sita
Ram Goel (1921-2003) was a Master of History from Delhi University. His
two-volume book is entirely scholarly, full of references to original sources.
It is far less deserving of theterm ‘polemics’ than Morgan’s article. Goel's
list of about 2000 cases of temple destruction and presentation of the Islamic
theology of iconoclasm, as well as of numerous contemporaneous Muslim sources
on effective Islamic iconoclasm in India, is more than Llewelyn Morgan can
handle. The philosopher of science Karl Popper defined a scientific statement
as one that can be falsified. Well, to start with, Goel in his book (1990-1991,
second edition 1997) gives some 2000 falsifiable claims of Islamic temple
destruction. More than twenty years have elapsed, yet none of these 2000 has
effectively been falsified by Morgan and his friends, though they are numerous
and well-funded. Nor has the qualitative part, Goel’s presentation and
discussion of the Islamic theology and history of iconoclasm, been refuted.
According to
Morgan: 'That brought me back to where I started with this whole issue, the
Buddhas of Bamiyan. One way that
the Taliban and their sympathizers sought to justify the destruction of the
Buddhas was to claim it as payback for the
demolition of the Baburi Mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu hardliners in 1992… On the other side, numerous Islamist
terrorist attacks on Indians have claimed the destruction of this mosque as
their motivation.'
As Morgan certifies, the Babri Masjid has by
now been avenged numerous times. It started with the attacks on hundreds of
Hindu temples throughout South Asia in the days after the demolition, and
twenty in the UK alone. Ever since, these revenge operations have been piling
up, to the extent that realistic observers have started suspecting that
something else was the matter. These attacks after 1992, and the far more
numerous ones before 1992, obviously have a deeper root than the Babri Masjid's
'martyrdom'. But the Indian ‘secularist’ ruling class has, by making the
Ayodhya issue far more difficult and far more important than it really
deserved, really asked for these numerous Islamic ‘revenge’ operations.
Still according
to Morgan: ‘An intense and polarized debate continues to this day about Ayodhya,
what was there before the mosque was built by the Moghul emperor Babur, and
what (if anything) happened to Hindu buildings on the site, and it was an issue
of great interest to Sita Ram Goel.'
It is true that
Goel was interested in Islamic iconoclasm, but not that ‘an intense and
polarized debate continues to this day about Ayodhya’. Firstly, the Allahabad
High Court has decided the matter,
largely in the Hindu side’s favour (30 September 2010), after a thorough
perusal of the Court-ordered diggings by the Archeological Survey of India; and
secondly, the BJP as the main political conduit for Hindu activism has pulled
its hands off the Ayodhya controversy
after the demolition in 1992. After the Court verdict, the secularists widely
hoped that the Muslims would rise in revolt, but they didn’t think the Babri
Masjid worth more trouble. They had chosen for ‘moderation’, much to the dismay
of the secularists. Touching wood, we dare say that calm prevails among Indians
on the Ayodhya front.
‘Extreme Hindu
nationalism, like the ideology of al-Qaeda and the paranoid theories of certain
US commentators, is very interested in history, but deals in radical historical
simplifications--for example, the idea that Islam is a religion hard-wired to
destroy the religious monuments of its opponents. That is simply a false
account of what happened, historically, when Islamic peoples encountered
non-Islamic [peoples].’
A false
account? That is a serious accusation. Prof. Morgan’s opponents have made such
accusations against Islam only after gathering lots of evidence. He himself can
start with the book by Goel which he himself mentioned, and prove it wrong.
Let’s say that he begins by proving ten mosques not to have been built on
destroyed temples, and ten accounts of temple destruction (by Muslim authors!)
to be untrue. That shouldn’t be too difficult if he is right.
When Mohammed
started his career, Arabia was a multicultural society. When he had finished
his mission, it had only one religion, viz. Islam. Christians and Jews were at
best banished to Mesopotamia, Pagans were given a choice between Islam and
death. Those who came over in time, “voluntarily”, could only join the
victorious Muslims by destroying their idols and turning their temples into
mosques. If not, we invite Prof. Morgan to present to us ten of the 360 idols
in the Kaaba which, according to Islamic scripture, were destroyed by Mohammed
and Ali. He should not dig them up but show how Muslims still worship them or
allow others to worship them. If he cannot do that, then not he but Sita Ram
Goel stands vindicated.
Bamiyan
According to
Morgan, Buddhism in Afghanistan didn’t suffer all that badly: ‘The Buddhas of
Bamiyan survived, and were celebrated, for 1,200 years among Muslims before the
Taliban and their allies in al-Qaeda destroyed them.’
Some
encyclopedias say that both the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb and the Persian king
Nadir Shah trained their cannon on the Buddhas. Cannon in those days were not
very high-tech, so they only managed to damage the giant Buddhas somewhat, not
to fully destroy them. That’s already two, and some attempts at destruction may
have gone unreported, while of others, we may have lost the chronicles. At any
rate, it seems that Morgan has devoted a whole book to the Bamiyan Buddhas, so we
are curious to read this Latin professor’s refutation of the Nadir Shah and
Aurangzeb accounts.
In nearby
Dunhuang, in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, something similar happened. The
Buddha statues were systematically defaced or beheaded by the Muslims, but
their feet or trunks remained standing – proof enough for Islamophiles to
present it as proof that Islam tolerates Buddha statues. Oh, and no Buddhist
artifacts remained overground and in the population centres once the Uyghurs
converted to Islam.
Indeed, none of
this alters the fact that Muslims have made the smaller Buddhist artifacts
disappear from Afghanistan, the cradle of the Buddha statue. The Taliban,
jointly with the smugglers and black marketeers, did this a second time by
removing from the Kabul museum all Buddhist artifacts which mostly Western
archeologists had dug up. But we wouldn’t mind the artifacts disappearing, if
only the practice of Buddhism had continued. But only foreign tourists kept it
alive, busloads of Japanese and Taiwanese tourists who transmuted into devout
Buddhists once they saw the statues in
Bamiyan. And this ‘idolatry’ is why the Taliban chose to destroy these gigantic
idols.
Marxist support
Morgan then
seeks support from the American Islamic scholar Richard Eaton, a self-described
Marxist: ‘I encourage anyone interested in Islamic attitudes to Hindu and
Buddhist holy places to read Richard M. Eaton's measured, careful analysis, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States,
Part
1 and Part
2. He tells a story of Muslim rulers in India who
for the most part protected non-Islamic shrines, and on the rare occasions they
did otherwise were following a time-honoured tradition within India of
destroying your enemies' favourite temples: Hindus had been demolishing other
Hindus' places of worship for centuries before Islam arrived.’
That is simply
not true. Firstly, even Eaton manages to find only a handful of Hindu cases of
destruction of a temple or abduction of its main idol, a small fraction of the
number of Islamic idol destructions that even he has no option but to admit.
Though his random list of Islamic temple destructions allows for only some 80
campaigns, the number of 80 which Eaton’s followers bandy about, is woefully
inaccurate. Thus, Eaton himself counts as one case the thousandfold temple
destruction in Varanasi by Mohammed Ghori’s troops in 1194, so these “80” cases
really affected thousands of temples.
Secondly, there
is a big difference between the extremely rare Hindu (and perhaps more frequent
Mesopotamian) practice of idol abduction and the frequent Islamic practice of
idol destruction. In the rare cases where Hindu rulers abducted an idol of some prestige, they installed it in
their own temple and continued its worship, all while leaving the victim
population free to install another idol of the same respect the svadharma (own religion) of his new subjects. By contrast, where
Muslims destroyed idols and their
temples, they did not resume worship of the idol or the deity: theirs was an
attack on a religion, and their idol destruction was conceived as part of the
destruction of a religion.
Thirdly, there
are no cases, even Eaton doesn’t cite one, where an Islamic temple-destroyer
(of the pre-Ayodhya-demolition age) cites a Hindu precedent as justification.
When they sought a precedent, they found it among their Islamic predecessors
and ultimately in Mohammed. I already argued this in my review of Eaton’s
theory in 2002 (in my book Ayodhya: the
Case Against the Temple), and haven’t received any attempted refutation
ever since.
Morgan adds a
familiar argument: ‘The crucial point, though, is that these Muslim rulers in
India were never driven by religious fanaticism.’
In India, this
is the classic put-down when the so-called secularists have to admit that
Muslims by their own account destroyed thousands of temples. But the fact is
that Muslims themselves don’t make the distinction between ‘fanaticism’ and
plunder, between religious and economic warfare. This again goes back to
Mohammed, who organized raids on caravans and called them jihād, religious war. So, plunder is Islamically justified, but so
is the destruction of little temples where no gain is expected.
And Mogan
argues further: ‘However, in the context of tension between India and Pakistan,
extreme simplifications of history thrive: Hindus are superstitious
idol-worshippers; Muslims are intolerant idol-smashers. Scrupulous scholars
like Richard Eaton prove that it is just not that simple.’
No, Eaton has
not done that. He has not refuted the
Hindu and Muslim stereotypes, which have a sound basis in historical reality.
But Morgan shows his bias by juxtaposing “idol-worshippers” with
“superstitious”, which are two entirely different concepts, and “intolerant”
with “idol-smasher”, which are nearly synonyms. Of course idol-smashers are
intolerant, but there is no reason why the worship of murtis/statues should be superstitious. It is perfectly possible
for a non-idol-worshipper, indeed for an idol-smasher, to be superstitious.
Belief in Muslim testimonies
Morgan makes his main point again: ‘But, as I
commented at the end of my
blog on Timbuktu, "Ideologues in one
camp have a habit of creating ideologues in other camps, and the argument goes
on and on and on..." That notion was illustrated in glorious technicolor
below the line. Get your head around this logic, in one of the comments: "if
Ansar al-Din, the extremists doing the damage in Timbuktu, claim to be the only
true Muslims, then we have to accept that claim, and regard what is happening
in Timbuktu as Islam attacking non-Muslims." In other words, we must
accept al-Qaeda's analysis of Islam and the world, that they are the only
authentic Muslims and all other Muslims must be forced to follow their creed. That
strikes me as plain bonkers. What on earth compels us to accept al-Qaeda's view
of things?’
Well, again, it
is the truth that can decide this. When Muslims talk about themselves, we have
to believe them. Thus, when Mohammed Atta, Mohammed Bouyeri and hundreds of
other Muslim terrorists declare in their farewell letters/videos that their
motive is Islam, we have to believe them. But when they talk about Islam,
claiming that their own interpretation is the same as Prophet Mohammed’s, we
have to ascertain for ourselves the truth of that claim. And then we find that
Prophet Mohammed’s intention was indeed closer to al-Qaeda’s than to that of the
Sufis, a movement which invokes Quranic authority but was quite unknown in
Mohammed’s day.
But not
according to Morgan: ‘Sufi Muslims are Muslims. Full stop.’ We are inclined to
believe every statement by people about themselves. Since Sufis declare
themselves Muslims, we should take them at their word. But when Sufism began,
it was distrusted by the orthodox and some Sufis ended their lives on the
gallows as heretics. They were takfīr’ed, declared Kāfirs, Pagans. Mohammed did something similar with those who
called themselves Muslims but withheld themselves from warfare: he lambasted
them as Munāfiqīn, ‘hypocites’. They
are the grey area of half-Muslims or soft-Muslims, whom al-Qaeda chooses to
treat as non-Muslims. At any rate, they treat these soft-Muslims’ shrines the
same way they treat the temples of non-Muslims, viz. destruction.
Islam has an
essence, and it is highly questionable whether mysticism satisfies the criteria
to be truly Islamic. Al-Qaeda takes the same position today. But medieval
authorities decided to allow Sufis in because they could render specific
services to Islam, viz. making Islam acceptable to forced converts and even
getting people to convert voluntarily. The good is sometimes the enemy of the
better, and true Islam sometimes comes into conflict with useful Islam. Muslims
may fight this out among themselves, but neither school is well disposed to
real religious pluralism. (Thus, in Pakistan, the Ahmadiyas are persecuted by
the majority Sunnis, but try to undo this persecution by proving that they are
good Muslims, viz. by struggling hard against Hinduism.)
Morgan: ‘But credit where credit is due:
irrational as it is, that comment does capture something essential about the
thinking (for want of a better word) on this issue. Radicals like al-Qaeda want
to provoke their opponents to be equally radical, because they want to create
unbridgeable divisions between peoples, and an existential conflict which (they
fondly suppose) will bring their appalling ideology to world domination.
Commentators who define Islam as essentially incompatible with Western values
are doing al-Qaeda's job for it.’
Again, is this
true or not? Some doctrines are incompatible with ’Western values’ (or simply
with humanism), and some are not; deciding to which of these two categories
Islam belongs, requires something that Llewelyn Morgan has never done, viz. a
study of Islam itself. The question of truth doesn’t arise for Morgan, but it
is crucial. It allows us to discover the many words and deeds of the Prophet on
which al-Qaeda bases its policies; but maybe Morgan can convince the Muslims
that Islam is better off without Mohammed?
Moderation
Morgan claims: ‘Sita
Ram Goel, Raymond Ibrahim and Ansar al-Din are all, in a peculiar way, speaking
the same language, the language of extremes, where religions cannot communicate
peacefully with one another, and complex and diverse faiths are reduced to
crude caricatures. In the words of the Arab Spring activist Iyad El-Baghdadi, "Islamophobes and extreme Islamists are two
peas in a pod. Both invent a radical, extreme sect and call it 'the one &
only true Islam'."’
Arab Spring
activists are in the unenviable position of having to please both sides, so
they have to sell Islamic values to their fellow countrymen and moderation to
outsiders. Whether such a position is conducive to truthfulness, is another
matter. Was Mohammed a moderate? Sometimes he was a diplomat, but mainly he was
a strategist, choosing between compassion and ruthlessness depending only on
his own and his religion’s interests. The thousands whom he killed will not
consider him a moderate, but fortunately for Morgan, these inconvenient
witnesses are dead. History is written by the victors, and so Islam has always
had many public relations agents, even at Oxford.
That is why
Sita Ram Goel drew attention to the ‘mute witnesses’, the destroyed temples and
idols which have been retrieved by archeologists, or of which parts have been
integrated into mosques. They are the witnesses that have survived the attempt
at their annihilation.
So-called
Islamophobes (or so they are termed by liberals incapable of imagining that
someone sane could disagree with their own opinion) want nothing more eagerly
than ‘peaceful communication between religions’. Only, they find that Islam
stands in the way. In their study of Islam, they have, along with most Muslims,
discovered an essence, viz. the precedent behaviour of the Prophet, and they find
that this conflicts with interreligious peace. But the crucial difference
between Goel and Ibrahim on the one hand and al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Din on the
other, is that the former don’t believe Mohammed’s claim and don’t emulate him,
while the latter do. This is a crucial difference, but Morgan tries to paper it
over by merely juxtaposing their names and alleging a similarity between anti-fanatics
and declared fanatics.
‘But we must insist that there is another
language, a precious but undervalued one. It isn't glamorous, and it requires
the kind of laborious hours in the library that Richard M. Eaton put in. It
resists seductively black-and-white explanations of events, and the temptation
all humans feel to demonise what they do not know. It is never going to inspire
young men to pull down a mosque or become suicide bombers. It is fiddly,
unexciting, humane--and true. It is called moderation.’
When a knave
writes a book, he is soon followed by a bunch of fools. That is why Richard
Eaton is applauded by the likes of ex-nun Karen Armstrong and indeed by
Llewelyn Morgan. We haven’t visited Eaton’s library, but we wonder what books
they have there. After all, the Quran itself as well as the traditions and
biography of the Prophet show that few were ever as adept at ‘demonizing’ as
Mohammed. And all Muslims believe that Mohammed was the model man, whose
conduct had and still has the value of
precedent. Fortunately they don’t all put
the beliefs to which they pay lip-service, into practice. This
abstention from (or lukewarmness in) the practice of Islam is called moderation. The less Islam, the
more moderation. We are all for ‘fiddly, unexciting, humane’ culture, and that
is why we hold Islam up to scrutiny.
