There is no doubt that the vast majority of Muslims do not wage active jihad and Salman Rushdie certainly understands this fact. But, is he capable of convincing this majority to address Islamic texts that support violent jihad? It is not likely and the continued passive stance held by Muslims concerning jihad terror will continue to remain a silent defense for the jihadists. From the Gulf Daily News:
LONDON: Novelist Salman Rushdie has urged the "silent majority" of Muslims to speak up to prevent their culture being hijacked by extremists."If it goes on being silent, then its culture and religion will be hijacked by the extremists and it will be very difficult to go on saying 'that's not us.' ... You've got to speak up,"' Rushdie said in an interview with the BBC World Service.
Rushdie said he believed the majority would speak out.
"Maybe it takes something as horrifying as the bombings in London to make people break ranks," Rushdie said, referring to the July 7 attacks in which four suicide bombers killed 52 subway and bus passengers in London.
"But I think there's a lot of evidence that there's a great deal of soul-searching and rethinking going on," he said.
"There's something seductive - especially for young men - to get involved in a world where you can just be angry for a living and your anger is its own justification."
hijacked...yeah, right
To rethink something one must first thing something. And soul-searching presupposes something in the soul to search.
So, what has been thought? What is in the soul of Muslims that causes such consternation? Does it have something to do with core beliefs in Islam, jihad, sharia, the glorification of martyrs so richly expressed in the Hadith? Have the 7/11 bombings caused Muslims in Britain to rethink accepting sharia as a worthwhile political goal, or jihad as a legitimate religious obligation, or martyrdom on the battlefield for Allah as a wonderous path to paradise?
Or is this 'rethinking' just more "we are not terrorists, but..." talk?
More from Sam Harris' "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the future of Reason"
"Life under the Taliban is, to a first approximation, what millions of Muslims around the world want to impose on the rest of us. They long to establish a society in which women will remain vanquished and invisible, and anyone given to spiritual, intellectual or sexual freedom will be slaughtered before crowds of sullen, uneducated men. This, needless to say, is a vision of a life worth resisting."
Rushdie is one of those people who is born into Islam, but knows little about it. He was raised by a secular family, schooled in England. None of his wives have been Muslim; the latest is a beautiful Hindu. He began life as a perfectly convenitonal fellow, with left-wing views -- see "The Jaguar's Smile" -- no friend of America, distaste for Israel. Not, in his set, an original thinker. Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina and a good many others who have made the leap, must regard Rushdie with a mingling of sympathy and intellectual contempt.
Now he thinks, or seems to think, that the world's Muslims will rise up to show that -- Islam is not Islam. But Islam is. And even more so today now that the wherewithal is there (the OPEC money), and the distribution of Muslim texts and tenets and attitudes and atmospherics, through those technological advances that brought the voice of Khomeini from Neauphle-le-chateau to the lowliest village in Tehran, that bring videocassettes of beheadings of Infidels, or staged "atrocities" attributed to Infidels, to every corner of the Muslim world, and the Muslim outposts now deep within Infidel territory.
He sounds like that other handful of people who are Muslims and know something is wrong but cannot dare to allow themselves to understand that there was always something terribly wrong with Islam, that it is right there in the Qur'an and the Hadith and Sira, and that somehow they remained unaware, or didn't want to believe, didn't want to think that people took it seriously, and themselves accepted a version of history, the history of Muslim "greatness" and Muslim "tolerance" that was far from the truth, a truth of conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims that even today, a man like Kanan Makiya, handing back with a look of evident distaste and a word that expressed disgust, one of Bat Ye'or's books on the treatment of dhimmis to someone who had suggested he read it and lent it to him -- even he cannot bring himself to see what Islam is, for it would mean, he thinks, turning on his own pious grandmother, his own ancestors, his own past. Oh no it wouldn't. And it would not mean, unless he wants it to mean, as so many Arabs do, that they themselves call into question the entire business of Uruba, Arabness, if they turn their backs on Islam.
Rushdie's appeal will meet with as much response as that resume-building (for its careerist organizer) "Muslim March Against Terror" that was called for last mid-May, and resulted in about two dozen people, most of them non-Muslims, showing up in Washington.
More and more Infidels, without any help from their governments, or their newspapers (one more reason why The New Duranty Times and The Boston Globe are now trimming staffs yet again -- readers find what they offer so at variance with what they perceive, that they are giving up, and turning to the Internet, permanently), are finding out about Islam. The Globe, for example, may carry the most preposteous of Muslim exercises in apologetics, that carefully avoids any mention of the actual contents of Qur'an and Hadith, in order to attack Governor Romney's recent proposal to monitor mosques -- but that proposal has been wildly popular, and no one of any sense has joined to condemn as the Globe editorial was quick to condemn. The silence about Romney, the silence that expresses approval, is telling.
Rushdie may or may not find out what the "real" Islam is all about. But why not go all the way? Why not, at long last, really sit down and read the texts, see what is in them, and then imagine what primitive people (for most people everywhere are primitive, so the texts that they go to matter) would naturally make of them, or can easily be made to make of them. And history shows that that is exactly what they did make of them.
No surprise. Except possibly to Salman Rushdie. But reading, and writing, are not his forte.
The public tide must turn before we can collectively face the reality of Islam. We can't rely on our public intellectuals, least of all second-raters like Rushdie, whose fame shines far brighter than anything he's produced himself.
But forgetting the fashionable and unreadably stupid authors who make a show in public, and turning to authors of true intelligence, Claudia Rosset, for example, no stylist, in truth, but smart and insightful, we see her work showing up on pages that count in some large sense, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, where readers have not only some cash on hand but some pull in the public intellectual arena. Rushdie, popular in backpockets, isn't going to change the public's perception of Islam, but Rosset might.
Recently the FDD has begun a blog where perhaps movers and shakers read, and where Hugh and others might drop in to hit on those with influence, not those who rely on Rushdie, Armstrong, and Esposito but on people who are truly able to move the public to a greater awareness of Islam. Maybe the readers at FDD have the ear of someone who has the ear of someone in the State Dept.
If it's worth a try, the link will lead you there.
http://fdd.typepad.com/
"Maybe it takes something as horrifying as the bombings in London to make people break ranks..."
Holy cow -- you mean that 9/11 -- that most horrific atrocity wasn't sufficient to prompt Muslims to break ranks...? The deplorable answer is IT WASN'T SUFFICIENT. In fact, the disgusting reality is that the so called "silent majority" were quite ebullient on that day -- they weren't silent -- the vast majority of Muslims CHEERED....
Perhaps there is a visceral and growing realization among the cowards and obscurantists in the West that the charicatures of demonic seracens aren't far off the mark...
We must stop pretending there is any moderation in Islam...
The RoP was 'hijacked' 1350 years ago when profit Mo started raiding carawans and chopped heads off those who did not believe in 'Allah' and the madness of this lunatic...
Salman Rushdie said "But I think there's a lot of evidence that there's a great deal of soul-searching and rethinking going on."
What evidence could this possibly be? We have been impatiently waiting weeks, months, years after the NY and the London attacks, and there has been absolutely NO evidence of true soul-searching or rethinking.
"There's something seductive - especially for young men - to get involved in a world where you can just be angry"
Again, it is not a problem with Islam per-se, it is a weakness of all young men. Except that Methodist young men do not strap homicide belts on, or cut the head off of screaming victims while the video camera rolls. Neither do Hindi young men, or Buddhist young men, or Zoroaster young men. Mr. Rushdie just doesn't get it.
Like our leaders, he doesn't want to get it.
jsla: "We must stop pretending there is any moderation in Islam..."
... and admit to ourselves that the moderate muslim is as mythical as a unicorn.
sheik yer'mami: "The RoP was 'hijacked' 1350 years ago when profit Mo started raiding carawans and chopped heads off those who did not believe in 'Allah' and the madness of this lunatic..."
Amazing how muslims can still hold to the "Moe was the perfect man for all times" line when one compares him to Jesus, a prophet islam recognizes. In his lifetime, Jesus healed. In his lifetime, Moe was a heel. And that personality trait of Moe's comes down to us through to this day in the arrogance, of demand for respect, of calling itself a 'religion', that is faithfully followed by muslims.
cronelius: Nice Sam Harris quote. "They long to establish a society in which women will remain vanquished and invisible, and anyone given to spiritual, intellectual or sexual freedom will be slaughtered before crowds of sullen, uneducated men." That is, they long to force us to live in the 7th Century. And that, in itself, is most definitley worth resisting.
As for poor Salman, he is quite clueless. "'But I think there's a lot of evidence that there's a great deal of soul-searching and rethinking going on,' he said." This is pure fantasy. While Salman may be soul-searching, it is very arrogant of him to even think that others of his 'faith' might be undergoing the same rigorous internal intellectual debate. How much critical thinking does Salman think is taught in the madrassas in the first place?
Salman Rushdie has very much in common with his sister in Islam, Irshad Manji: they both live in cloud-cuckoo-land. In addition, they both call for, and hope for, a reformation in Islam, which they know will never happen, and which neither he nor she have any moral authority in the Islamic world to bring about anyway. She, because she's a lesbian, and he, because he's, well, just plain Salman Rushdie! From a perspective of having moral authority in the Islamic world, the Ayatollah's fatwa just did him in, once and for all, good and proper! Furthermore, they both speak unrealistic drivel about Islam; and they are both determined not to be true to their conscience. And then some!
Irshad Manji said a while back that if she sees that a reformation in Islam is not going to come about, she will leave the faith. Irshad, you might as well leave it sooner rather than later, since it ain't gonna happen! Thing is, though, that she wouldn't want to be in too much of a hurry to leave Islam, since she's making money on her reputation as la femme fatale d'Islam, and will certainly want to continue to do so for a good while yet! Then, as an apostate, when that will eventually happen, if that will eventually happen, she will be able to start over and write about Islam from an apostate's perspective. That way she'll be able to have her cabsa and eat it, so to speak!
As for Salman Rushdie? He apparently likes being the sore thumb of the Islamic world. Period! Does it, perhaps, give him the excitement he craves? Or is he just plain unable to bring himself to apostatize?
Where in the Qur'an does it mention soul searching , or re-thinking anything? Where does it mention soul at all, and above all, where does the Qu'ran mention 'thinking'? Just asking...