The intrepid Fjordman writes to notify us that "in an essay in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten yesterday, Muslim reformist Bassam Tibi explained his decision to leave Germany after 44 years. The article has been translated to English and reposted at the Gates of Vienna blog."
Fjordman continues:
Tibi makes many valid points regarding the cowardice and censorship in Europe these days, and he should be given credit for consistently criticizing those Muslims who are pushing for the gradual implementation of sharia in Western lands. I hold him in higher esteem as a thinker than some other self-proclaimed reformists such as Irshad Manji.However, he states that Muslims, in order to live in Western countries, have to renounce Jihad and "give up" sharia. This is certainly a brave thing to say, but exactly how does he propose to do that in real life, given that, as he himself readily admits, only a minute fraction of those calling themselves Muslims would agree with such radical views? And even if such a transformation took place, could the resulting religion be called Islam anymore? Since there are dozens, probably more than one hundred, verses calling for Jihad, some of them explicitly violent, in the Koran, and even more references in the hadith, doesn't this mean that Muslims have to renounce large parts of the Koran, the hadith and the personal example of Muhammad in order to achieve this? Even if that could be done, which I seriously doubt, the result could hardly be recognized or described as "Islam" in any traditional sense of the word.
Moreover, Tibi is one of those calling for Euro-Islam and a "Europeanization of Islam." I don't see how this can be done theoretically and theologically, and see few if any practical indications that this is happening. On the contrary, as Bat Ye'or warned already in the 1990s, "I do not see serious signs of a Europeanization of Islam anywhere, a move that would be expressed in a relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism...we are light years away from such a development...On the contrary, I think that we are participating in the Islamization of Europe, reflected both in daily occurrences and in our way of thinking."
And this is happening with the active participation of the European Union, cleverly hidden from European citizens beneath a veil of meaningless words and phrases:
German Intellectuals Betray Europe
My problem is that I believe in the European idea and take it very seriously. To me free thinking is a blessing to the cultural modernists — and not negotiable. Out of this the German intellectuals create a postmodern censorship and denial of the works of inconvenient dissidents. Just like the citizen only exists within the law, so does German freedom of thinking only exist on paper, not within the political culture.
As a citizen I want to belong to a society, get a cultural membership without denying my many identities, and not die as a stranger "with immigrant background". We strangers, whether professors or unskilled workers are always outside the door in Germany. Defenseless toward our enemies, defiant towards our friends: that's not what Europe promised.
Islamic Scholar Warns U.S. of 'Two-Faced' Muslims
A leader of the small worldwide Muslim reform movement is warning the West against wishful thinking as the U.S. government promotes an intensive dialogue with Islam. "The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other," Bassam Tibi said Tuesday in an interview with United Press International.
"First, both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them. The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam – or 'House of Islam' – to the entire world," explained Tibi, who is also a research scholar at Harvard University. "This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought, a concept developed by Immanuel Kant," an 18th-century philosopher.
Germans may regret ignoring 'prophet' in their midst
Bassam Tibi is among Germany's foremost political scientists. And he says that even now the European elites don't have a clue what they are up against. Dr. Tibi, a Muslim born in Syria, is persona non grata there. He's not too popular in Germany either, where he has been accused of inciting Islamophobia. "It is most disturbing to see how writers who try to warn about the totalitarian character of Islamism are defamed as racists," he says. "This wrong-headed political correctness prevents any honest discussion about the subject."
I asked Dr. Tibi how many of Germany's 3.2 million Muslims share his progressive, secular views. "Maybe a few thousand," he said.
"Europeans Have Stopped Defending Their Values"
When it comes to Islam, there is no freedom of opinion in Germany. Organized groups in Islamic communities want to decide what is said and done here. I myself have been dropped from numerous events because of threats. Even the comparatively moderate Turkish organization DITIB says there are no Islamists, only Islam and Muslims -- anything else is racism. That means that you can no longer criticize the religion.
Accusing somebody of racism is a very effective weapon in Germany. Islamists know this: As soon as you accuse someone of demonizing Islam, then the European side backs down.
Muslims have to give up three things if they want to become Europeans: They have to bid farewell to the idea of converting others, and renounce the Jihad. The Jihad is not just a way of testing yourself but also means using violence to spread Islam. The third thing they need to give up is the Shariah, which is the Islamic legal system.
SPIEGEL: How many of the 3 million Muslims living in Germany would agree to these demands?
Tibi: A few thousand perhaps.
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald: Clash of civilizations? Yes and no:
"Bassam Tibi epitomizes the confusion caused by clash of civilizations talk, and the difficulties to which it gives rise. Tibi is a Syrian, married to a German, who is Muslim in name only. And he has many virtues. But imagination is not among them. When he posits only two possibilities -- Europe becoming thoroughly islamized, or Islam becoming Europeanized -- he shows that limited imagination. When he offers the possibility of Islam becoming Europeanized, he fails to discuss what that would mean. Would it mean simply Muslims wearing Western dress? Throwing out the hadith? Throwing out the hadith and the sira (going beyond the Ancient Mariner, would Tibi have them stoppeth two of three)? Throwing out all of the sira, and all of the hadith, and then in addition throwing out traditional conclusions of the interpreters of the Qur'an -- in a kind of reverse abrogation, in which all the softer verses are now kept and the harsher ones removed, instead of the other way around as mainstream Muslim Qur'an commentators now have it? Just how is this to be done? Who would do it? A committee? What committee? And how would it acquire sufficient authority to command belief from -- Believers?"
SPIEGEL: How many of the 3 million Muslims living in Germany would agree to these demands?
Tibi: A few thousand perhaps.
This fella Tibi is not only a honest man. He is also an optimist.
How many members of Parliament would agree to these demands? A few perhaps? That's being optimistisch.
Bassam Tibi has said some good things, but I sometimes wonder if he won't, after a hopefully long life, die a Christian.
He makes a very salient point about the pacifistic orientation of European enlightenment thought, doubtlessly thinking of Kant's book _Perpetual Peace_. Kant had behind him a hitory of dynastic wars; and before them the memory of the Thirty Years' War in Germany. Even more important, he had a millenium or so of Christian ethics behind him, even if he pretended that his "rational" or "natural" ethics were not informed by Lutheran Christianity.
Further, Kant's vision of a concert of free republics guaranteeing European peace informed Bush's decision to topple Saddam Hussein--only Bush extended the Kantian vision beyond the Northern Atlantic world. Bush essentially bought into a commonplace of recent political science which posits a "democratic peace" (Democracies don't fight each other--and never mind the American Civil War, the War of 1812, the Swiss Sonderbund War, or the South African War of 1899-1902). The reasoning ran that functioning democracies in the Islamic world would tame the jihadi fires and open the way for a permanent Israel-Falastin peace.
Yet the European peace movement of a century ago (the pre-World Wa One one)saw Kant's vision as impossible to implement beyond a Europe that did not include Russia and Turkey. Perhaps that admittedly racist era was wiser; not in its racism, but being aware that there are some cultural prerequisites for creating a string of democratic states among whom international war is next to unthinkable.
The last paragraph of the piece is an excerpt from an article I put up here on October 9, 2005 [the link is in the article above]. Now that Bassam Tibi has apparently changed his position from what it was 16 months ago, has realized that the very idea of a "Europeanization of Islam," always a forlorn hope, is in fact an impossibility (the texts of Islam do not change, and there is no fiddling with the uncreated and immutable Word of God in the Qur'an, nor with the life and sayings of Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil). And he demonstrates this not only in his increasingly anxious remarks about the Islamization of Europe (even more anxious than those of Bernard Lewis, from whose eyes, possibly, the scales have fallen) but also in his decision to leave Europe for the United States. What I wrote, 16 months ago, need not be changed one whit, but the time of its composition, and the full text, need to be given lest I be accused of being a little harsh on Tibi.
I'm re-posting the article below so that the last paragraph, quoted above, may be read in its proper and mitigating context:
"The phrase "clash of civilizations," made famous by Samuel Huntington, is misleading. In Huntington's formulation (he owed an unacknowledged good deal to Adda Bozeman, who taught at Sarah Lawrence in the days when Kurt Rausch taught painting to well-bred young women and Randall Jarrell was taking notes for "Pictures from an Institution"), there are the Sinic, the Orthodox, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Western, and so on. And these are all potentially clashing. But this is nonsense. There is only one clash that counts: that of Islam with all of non-Islam. If, in the future, China and America were to go to war, it would not be because the former is "Sinic" and the latter "Christian" or "Western" or somesuch, but because of perceived Great-Power rivalries -- for China and America are now part of the same civilization, the shared, modern, universal civilization, with disagreements at the edges, but nothing like the clash between Islam and all Infidels. In fact, a war between China and America would be about power, and thus no different from, for example, the rivalry, ending in war, between Germany and England in the pre-1914 period.
It is interesting to note, meanwhile, that Arab and Muslim analysts around the world tend to prefer the phrase "clash of civilizations" -- because it avoids the truthful description of the conflict as one motivated by a belief-system, the belief-system of Islam. And it also gives the impression that America or "the West" or Western Christian or Western post-Christian civilization are the enemy, while in reality the global Islamic jihad is as much directed at Hindus and Buddhists, and the Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, and the non-Muslim black Africans, as it is against the much more powerful, and therefore more dangerous, United States of America.
Bassam Tibi epitomizes the confusion caused by clash of civilizations talk, and the difficulties to which it gives rise. Tibi is a Syrian, married to a German, who is Muslim in name only. And he has many virtues. But imagination is not among them. When he posits only two possibilities -- Europe becoming thoroughly islamized, or Islam becoming Europeanized -- he shows that limited imagination. When he offers the possibility of Islam becoming Europeanized, he fails to discuss what that would mean. Would it mean simply Muslims wearing Western dress? Throwing out the hadith? Throwing out the hadith and the sira (going beyond the Ancient Mariner, would Tibi have them stoppeth two of three)? Throwing out all of the sira, and all of the hadith, and then in addition throwing out traditional conclusions of the interpreters of the Qur’an -- in a kind of reverse abrogation, in which all the softer verses are now kept and the harsher ones removed, instead of the other way around as mainstream Muslim Qur’an commentators now have it? Just how is this to be done? Who would do it? A committee? What committee? And how would it acquire sufficient authority to command belief from -- Believers?
No, there is another way, or many other ways. And the first way is to put a complete stop to Muslim immigration, and to find creative ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens. These two measures would be accompanied by the creation of an environment where the practice of Islam is made not easy but difficult. Meanwhile, authorities would engage in wholesale efforts to explain, both to the population of Europe and to the Muslims in its midst, the real nature of Islam. They would explain why it is encourages despotism (because allegiance is owed the ruler as long as he is a Muslim), economic paralysis (the fatalism of Islam -- just look at the "wake-me-when-it's-over" attitude of the Iraqis as the American soldiers struggle to rebuild, or build, a country that is populated by people who in the main are innately and immutably hostile to Infidels, but want to be transformed by those Infidels into New York -- and in a New York minute), intellectual failure (the cult of authority, the hostility to free and skeptical inquiry) and moral failure (the bland acceptance of the division of the world between Believer and Infidel, and the belief that it is right, it is just, to treat the Infidel, no matter what, as an inferior being and an enemy no matter how generous and open-hearted he may be, for after all he remains an Infidel, and not even to grasp the possibility that Infidel peoples and polities, too, no matter how small, deserve to survive, and to possess rights that do not depend on Muslims).
Then one might engage in efforts to convert the Muslims of Europe -- persistent efforts that would either work in some cases, or drive those who were worried or offended to leave Europe for "safer" regions in the dar al-Islam. Both results are desirable. And both would make it clear just what kind of a "clash of civilizations" is now in the offing.
[Posted by Hugh October 9, 2005 08:30 a.m.]
Europeanizing Islam is like taking the anti-Semitism out of Nazism. Both would be impossible because the adherents of both philosophies would never tolerate such a change-both philosophies would end up being something else.
Like i said before: Europe is already gone. The war is lost. Nothing can be done. So is america. New zealand and australia might stand a small chance.
NOTHING CAN AND NOTHING WILL BE DONE.
So why shouldnt we hold a grudge? Why shouldnt we hate? We are being told on this website that we shouldnt have any hard feelings towards the muslims. Why not? Is it 'better' not to hold hatered towards people? Hatered is the only thing that can save the west.
But no! everybody here is against that! That would be irrational!
And here is how the elites of Europe view those who actually want to protect Europe.
Tony Blair, at Davos....
A bit later, Blair maintains that the division in our debates is not between Left and Right, but between “those who believe in an open world and those who believe in a closed world.”
On one hand, there are “isolationists, nativists, and protectionists,” and on the other — well, others.
He's a fool.
German intellectuals also betrayed and ultimately failed western civilzation, which they truly did not deserve to be born into.
As for the US government we need to legislate into law that officials in the State Department be required to read the (bloody) Kuran in order to understand Islam and the Muslim mindset. That WOULD help--if we could only get our voices heard by some of these people posing as our leaders.
The western world has never been weaker the left wing liberals who sunk us to a level of weaknes i never believed we could fall too.
Our enemies know we are weak and that they are going to be able to take us down the line.
I seee doom for europe.
bff New Zealand won,t be taken over by Islam we are going to become an Asian colony.
They have doubled there population in five years and it is projected to double again by 2020 they will have a bigger popualtion than Maori.
a nation w. more than one system of law isnt really a nation. its at best a confederacy
im for the balkanisation of the world thru nanostates. pop. ceiling of say 300. but there would be only one conflict rez system per state