Ioannis Gatsiounis reviews the essay collection I edited, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, in Asia Times:
NEW YORK - As the forces of fundamentalism and terrorism continue to ravage Islam from within, Muslims have understandably sought to convey to non-Muslims that Islam is a tolerant religion. Since September 11, there has been no shortage of reminders that the root word of Islam means "peace" or that those advocating jihad against the West are deviant "hijackers".Historians wax lyrical about Islam's "golden age" when non-Muslims and Muslims lived side-by-side in harmony and reassure us that Islam's current crisis is a growing pain, akin to phases other religions have undergone in their early histories. And while a worrying level of ignorance remains - a recent Pew Research Center poll found that only half of Americans were able to identify the Koran as Islam's equivalent of the Bible - education efforts have worked so effectively that many educated non-Muslims have come to believe that unflattering manifestations of Islam are aberrant. Of course these perceptions are rarely based on direct contact with the religion, for, as any outsider who has taken a closer look at Islam can attest, further inquiry produces as many unsettling questions as it does tidy answers.
Why, for instance, are many of the world's most pious and knowledgeable Muslims also the most hostile toward non-believers? Why do non-Muslims face significant discrimination, even in the Islamic world's most moderate nations? (In Malaysia last month for instance, 35 masked assailants dressed in robes attacked and partially scorched a commune led by a Muslim apostate.) This is to say nothing of the rights of women in most Muslim countries. Is it all simply a matter of interpretation (ie abuse for personal or political gain), or does the sustained prevalence of such patterns reveal something inherent about the faith?
Few people want to address this last question openly, lest they be labeled anti-Muslim. But as clear answers to the question of what is ailing Islam in the 21st century remain elusive, the writers of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, including Bat Ye'or, Mark Durie, Muhammad Younus Shaikh, Daniel Pipes and David Littman, among others, are within bounds to tackle the issue head on.
Their premise is that contemporary Muslim rage and intolerance is not historically isolated; and moreover, that it is rooted in the religion itself. This is not an easy idea to swallow, if for no reason other than it contradicts what one wants to believe about the world's fastest growing religion - that at its core it is sane and rational. And there is ample reason to be leery; several of the book's authors are affiliated with Christian and Zionist movements, while some passages come across as hostile and misleading.
Consider the first sentence of the forward written by Ibn Warraq, "Islam is a totalitarian ideology that aims to control the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects; the life of its followers without qualification; and the life of those who follow the so-called tolerated religions [Christians and Jews, which the Koran refers to as People of the Book], to a degree that prevents their activities from getting in the way of Islam in any way."
And yet The Myth of Islamic Tolerance warrants our attention. Any study of contemporary Islam would be incomplete without it. Collectively, the essays expose an unsettling fact: that Islam's famed tolerance of non-Muslims has over the centuries fallen well short of an embrace. It is true that Islam calls for no coercion in matters of faith and that it encourages Muslims to respect the People of the Book (Christians and Jews). But it is also true that the Koran incessantly distinguishes between believer and non-believer and calls for unequal treatment of the two. The most obvious example of this is found in the jizya, or poll tax, which requires dhimmis (protected subjects) to pay for military protection.
Read it all.
From the review:
"Their premise is that contemporary Muslim rage and intolerance is not historically isolated; and moreover, that it is rooted in the religion itself. This is not an easy idea to swallow, if for no reason other than it contradicts what one wants to believe about the world's fastest growing religion."
"This is not an easy idea to swallow" -- surely that is the problem with most of the Western world, and certainly with those who cannot bring themselves to believe that they should work to divide and demoralize Islam (not necessarily openly, but still quite determinedly), but rather if only something -- "poverty" was one candidate, and the current favorite in Washington is "lack of freedom" so that if only "democracy" is put "on track" and we stay "on course" and never ever "cut and run" in Iraq, then it doth follow as the night the day that those Iraqis, being so busy with "democracy," will be just like Atlanta in the 1960s. Atlanta, Americans will recall, billed itself as the "city too busy to hate" an unappealing motto for most of us, but chamber-of-commerce boosters believed it just the ticketfor all those better-living-through-economic-growth true believers.
"some passages come across as hostile and misleading."
As for being "hostile," why should one keep from being hostile to Islam, if it is, as Ibn Warraq says, a totalitarian system of mind-control, itself hostile to free and skeptical inquiry and the rights of individuals to freedom of conscience? Those who have learned about Islam have every right to be hostile to it -- do they not?
And as for some passages being "misleading" -- here the author of the review should really give us a few examples, so that we may judge whether or not we agree that the book contains passages that are "misleading."
"Collectively, the essays expose an unsettling fact: that Islam's famed tolerance of non-Muslims has over the centuries fallen well short of an embrace. It is true that Islam calls for no coercion in matters of faith."
That "famed tolerance" is a myth of Muslims themselves -- it has no basis in reality. For those who still accept the myth of Andalucia, for example, invented by Romantic writers (Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, Washington Irving) who were, like Dr. Syntax, In Search of the Picturesque, and found it in a distant time (c. 1200-1492 A.D.) and a distant place (Islamic Spain), kindly begin by reading Andre Bostom's "The Myth of Andalucia" and perhaps then going to Levi-Provencal, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, and others, and compare what those historians had to say, with the schoolgirl (I mean, teacher-of-schoolgirls) gush of the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University, Prof. Maria Rosa Menocal (who fails to list either Levi-Provencal, or Dufourcq, in her scanty and scandalous bibliography).
The review is, of course, good, and in the context of this iron age, brave. But still one should not hesitate to offer a caveat. Or even two.
"Well short of an embrace"
Not at all - islam's treatment of non-muslims has been EXACTLY like an embrace.
Specifically, like a bear-hug.
In a bear-hug, the bear reaches out, grabs hold with its claws and drags its victim very, very close, so that it may try to bite its head off.
That's what islam does to minority religions, too.
Prophet Geoff
According to a report on New Scientist today, the problem may not be so much one of rage or intolerance, but simply stress:
"The stress caused by the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005 was far more keenly felt by Muslim residents compared with other inhabitants, a psychological study reveals.
Sixty-one per cent of Muslim commuters surveyed suffered substantial stress in the days following the first terrorist attacks on the city's transport system – almost double the proportion of stressed Londoners from other faiths.
“One can speculate it could be fear of reprisals and being upset about the misusing of their religion [to justify] terrorism,” says Neil Greenberg, at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, and one of the study team."
Yes, some moslems were so stressed by this 'misuse' of their 'religion' that they felt compelled to copy the attacks the following week. I couldn't geuss what's blocking these people's happy thoughts, but perhaps 'Valium' should feature somwhere in the remedy...
It is so stressful to be the facilitators of suicide bombings.
/sarcasm
The tiny almost impractical amount of "tolerance" that Muslims might have does not come from Islam. It comes from the governing law of the land in the non-Muslim host countries from which they are using to masquerade Islam as a "religion" of "peace." Every Islamic country on the face of the earth is, or has recently been a disaster.
"The stress caused by the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005 was far more keenly felt by Muslim residents compared with other inhabitants, a psychological study reveals.
Sixty-one per cent of Muslim commuters surveyed suffered substantial stress in the days following the first terrorist attacks on the city's transport system – almost double the proportion of stressed Londoners from other faiths.
“One can speculate it could be fear of reprisals and being upset about the misusing of their religion [to justify] terrorism,” says Neil Greenberg, at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, and one of the study team."
-- from a posting above
Take a look at that last paragraph. What gives Neil Greenberg at the Institute of Psychiatry even the right to such an iditoic "speculation" -- that the "stress" felt by Muslims was possibly a result of their "being upset abou the misusing of their religion [to justify] terrorism." What makes him think terrorism -- striking terror in the hearts of Infidels -- is not deeply rooted in Islam, is sanctioned by, promoted by, passages in the Qur'an, stories in the Hadith, many details in the life of Muhammad? Why? On what basis did he make the statement that they must have been upset about "the misusing of their religion"?
Could it not be that they suffer stress because they live among Infidels, and have to keep lying to Infidels, as the evidence grows, as more and more of those Infidels actually begin to read those Muslim texts, and to study the history of Muslim conquest, and they feel their ability to lie plausibly, to continue to snooker those whom they dislike, those whose ways, whose laws, whose mores, whose existence they cannot bear and wish to replace (even as they sense, somehow, that those ways, those laws, those mores, that day-to-day existence, is far better than whatever they had from wherever they, or their parents, came from, and they ardently wish never to be forced back to a Muslim country, even as they work, in direct and indirect ways, toward the islamization of the very Infidel country that they find so pleasant to live in precisely -- if they were honest with themselves -- because it is an Infidel country, free from the madness and total regulation of Islam.
Right on Hugh.
But then there's the added danger of legions of these followers of the religion of peace keeling over from stress induced heart attacks. And then there's also the cost to the health care system (lol.
It is quite unbelievable that anyone still countenances CAIR or the Muslim Association in Britain. Just their showing up should be the occasion of irrepresible snickering.
One of Ali Sina's most recent posts -- I think in the form of a series of e-mails traded with a Muslim journalist working in the UK -- deals in some detail with the personality disorders that are rampant in Islamic society because of the culture of entitlement it cultivates. I understand he's a doctor. Whether he's an MD with some depth of knowledge or not, it's quite insightful and worth the 10 minutes or so it takes to read on faithfreedom.org.
There was an article in the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4421521.stm in April about how "Asian" patients coped with cancer less well than "whites". Apparently the favoured method of not coping was complete denial. Dreadfully simplistic, blacks, Africans and West Indians were left out and no attempt was made to separate Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians within the Asian (which means Indian sub continent, not Chinese, Malaysian or Thai)group. But although the doctors involved in the study had names I associate with Indian Hindus and they were working in Leicester which has a large Hindu population I would be willing to bet money the depressed, powerless, acceptors of "kismet" (there's the give away) were Moslems.
So far as today's article about Moslems suffering more stress than the rest of us travelling Londoners is concerned the piece is typical BBC pro Islam propaganda. They didn't print my letter to Have Your Say (again!!!) and of course the people who died and their families are being ignored.
Did Robert notice this part?
"However, the book is full of flagrant distortions and glaring omissions. In its determination to show that Islam is not as peaceful as "apologists" would have one believe, it refuses to disclose that Islam also has a tolerant side, which also can be traced to the Koran and which has inspired fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). It also fails to draw parallels between Islam's history and that of other religions - which would reveal that part of Islam's crisis is linkable to the nature of religion itself.
The book's selective quoting of the Koran would be dangerous reading for anyone who is not familiar with it. That being said, it would be unfair to allege that most of the writers here are quoting out of context ..."
Thanks Hugh for your comments.
You cannot really know how you are helping me to understand this problem.The local book shop is making a fortune from me as I order as many books as I can on the the subject.
In an examination of Islam, why not start from the beginning.
It is well known that in the beginning Islam was a pagan religion and they worshopped rocks.
But more damaging is the history of the so-called Prophet Mohammad (and I am sure he is not at peace). Mohammad was a terrorist from the get go.
He used to raid the Arab Caravans for a living. He created the Koran to enlist converts (72 virgins)to kill on his behalf and capture booty.
Mohammad beheaded many prisoners when he started
60 wars in 10 years.
But if you compare the Koran to the Bible, one
can see that he plagerized the Bible in his sociopathalogical creation of the Koran. Ask Salam
Rusdie, he didn't write "Satanic Verses" to amuse himself.
Waterdragon52: "One of Ali Sina's most recent posts -- I think in the form of a series of e-mails traded with a Muslim journalist working in the UK -- deals in some detail with the personality disorders that are rampant in Islamic society because of the culture of entitlement it cultivates"
It's a great read. He is describing narcissistic personality disorder:
"The danger is in the fact that Muhammad was a pathological narcissist and now a billion people who follow him evince signs of narcissistic personality disorder. This is the danger. It is the narcissism of a billion Muslims that makes the world an unsafe place not the lies that they believe. As narcissists, Muslims are paranoid, have victim mentality, feel humiliated, have explosive personality, are vengeful, lack empathy, are oblivious of the pain that they cause to others, lack conscience, consider themselves superior to others, demand preferential treatments while deny the basic human rights to others, are scornful and abusive of others but expect respect and undeserving recognition, lack self- esteem but are most concerned about their image. It is not that they love themselves, in fact they don't, they are ashamed of themselves but they are in love with their own reflections. What matters to them most is not how they are and how they feel inside but how others see them. The image is more important than true self. Their world is in shambles but they are most concerned to protect the image of Islam. It's all about keeping the appearances."
Ali Sina at faithfreedom.org
RE: Caroline's Post
If you look at it from a spiritual context, all
the narcisstic qualities that you attribute to the Muslims is satanic. When I say satanic, meanlng the complete opposite of the qualities
taught by Christ.
Learjet0450-
NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) is EGO run amock. All personality disorders represent the extremes of normal human traits (see the DSM-IV for the personality disorder spectrum). All other religious traditions are characterized by an awareness that the mental construct of self/EGO is a false construction of thought - which, as a construction of thought, is material and will end upon the material death of the brain. Buddhism and Hinduism are especially strong in this regard and it is my own belief that this is precisely what Christianity (as exemplified by Jesus) is talking about (overcoming of EGO and "resurrection" into a higher ego-less state of consciousness - i.e. "enlightenment"). All the major world religions, in other words, are talking about the same underlying thing - all except Islam - which glorifies every facet of the EGO: Self-definition as Muslim, the "Me" vs "Them" mentality that follows from that and allows them to slaughter others, apparently confident that they are "Right" and will be rewarded for it. Everything that Ali Sina describes. So Yes. In its glorification of EGO, Islam is evil. In fact, glorification of EGO is arguably the basis of human evil - the elevation of the false and the delusional over the true - which is spiritual ignorance.
I should add with respect to my above post - Sufis represent the one facet of Islam that shares many basic insights with other major religions. Admittedly, according to Ali Sina, Sufism has nothing to do with Islam as represented by Muhammed but is more of an "uh-oh moment" by decent folks caught in the path of Islam. It is also my understanding that it represents a compromise of Hinduism and Islam. But whatever is the case about Sufism, it obviously represents much less of a threat to us infidels. So is it reasonable to focus seriously on getting so-called "moderate" Muslims to identify themselves as Sufis? That would obviously be the way to permit Muslims to join the human race without having to take the dangerous path of renouncing their Muslim identity. And imagine the cool T-shirt possibilities! "Hey - Don't look at me! I'm a Sufi!" :-)