In my Crisis column this week I review Ibn Warraq's extraordinary new book, Why the West Is Best:
Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy. By Ibn Warraq, Encounter Books, 286 pages, $19.One principal reason why the Islamic jihad is advancing with such confidence around the world today is because its chief competitor, the West, has lost its nerve. The iron and unquestionable dogma of multiculturalism has eaten away at its self-confidence and left only a relativism that walks to the brink of excusing genocide. Instead of defending its principles of liberal democracy and attempting to convince the Islamic world of their virtue and utility, the U.S. and Europe appear to stand for no principle more noble or compelling than majority rule. If, in any given country, a regime takes power dedicated to implementing a vision for society that is absolutely opposed to basic notions of human dignity and human rights, that’s fine with Washington and Brussels, as long as the majority voted for it.
And so the U.S. intervened military in Iraq and Afghanistan only to oversee the adoption of constitutions in both countries that enshrine Sharia as the highest law of the land. This was tantamount to tacit U.S. approval for stonings, amputations, restrictions on the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, and the institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims, since all of this is mandated under Sharia. Anything else, particularly any defense of the humane values of Judeo-Christian and/or Catholic civilization such as was once mounted against the Communist bloc on Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, would have been seen as ethnocentric and parochial.
But now a man of the East who came to the West as a youth and gradually realized that it stood for a vision of the human person and human society that far surpassed anything in his native culture has written a courageous and insightful new book that shows that the West can and should stand for more than mere head-counting, and above all, should stand up for itself: Ibn Warraq’s Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy.
Ibn Warraq is a Pakistani ex-Muslim who writes under a pseudonym as a consequence of Islam’s death penalty for apostasy – and because his previous books have roused the ire of Islamic hardliners. His 1995 manifesto, Why I Am Not A Muslim, was a searing criticism of the brittleness, brutality, and barbarism of Islamic culture; he followed that with a series of scholarly collections that struck at the very foundations of Islamic faith, including The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, What the Koran Really Says, and The Origins of the Koran. His work, however, is not just about what he rejects, but what he accepts: his defense of the West and its values began with the brilliant Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism and now continues with Why the West is Best.
Ibn Warraq writes with an unusual depth, elegance and breadth of erudition, enhanced by an extraordinarily perceptive eye; thus one of the most remarkable and winning chapters of a book that is remarkable and winning throughout is its first, an examination of how daily life in New York City, even in these anxious days, manifests some of Western civilization’s finest qualities: efficiency and sense of responsibility; a love for humanity and its best manifestations, such as music, humor, and intellectual curiosity; a genuine multiculturalism, and above all, a living respect for freedom. “The multifarious interests of free men and women,” he observes, “are mirrored in the extraordinary number of activities available for the enthusiast, the curious, the intellectually and culturally alert….New York stands as a concrete definition of Western civilization in its energy and creativity, its air of unlimited possibility.”
But Ibn Warraq’s notion of unlimited possibility is not mere libertinism. He notes that while “the origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment,” its cultural splendors and the habits of mind it encourages must also be traced to Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and “Judeo-Christianity,” which “added a sense of conscience and charity, tempering justice with forgiveness, and the concept of linear rather than cyclical time, which allowed for the possibility of progress. The Middle Ages brought a deeper synthesis of Athens and Rome with Jerusalem, laying the foundations for the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment, and pluralistic liberal democracy.”...
Ibn Warraq's reasoning is brilliant. But we've got to emphasise that this is not a problem between East and West, there are a lot of cultures in the East we're not at war with. The West isn't really best, there are other forms of life-style that are equally appealing. But Islam is appalling, disgusting, barbaric. That's the message we've got to convey. Islam is an abhorrent Nazi ideology rhat needs to be kept at bay, unfortunately we're not able to crush it.
But the Westerners urgently need allies all over the civilised world. Get rid of the Mahoundian scum!
I've got his book, "Why I Am Not A Muslim."
"Islamophobic Film and Its Jewish Backers"
http://forward.com/articles/150677/
"Why the West is Best also includes a brisk tour through all the flash points of the Leftist and Islamic supremacist critique of the West: racism, slavery, imperialism, and the like. In every case, we find not only that the Islamic world’s record is worse than the West’s,…"
Who do you trust? "Trust" is the best Western culture has to offer. For freedom to be productive, there must be trust, or else all would regress to punishing levels witnessed in all Islamic societies on the globe. There trust is in very short supply.
I sincerely hope all good men and women of conscience born into Islam read this book. It will open a whole new world of enlightenment for them and ultimately a genuine love for freedom.
"...the concept of linear rather than cyclical time"
If I remember rightly, ibn Khaldoun saw history as a recurrent cycle, in which, periodically, poor pastoral nomads from desert or mountain areas swept down on, and conquered rich settled agrarian societies dwelling on the fertile plains. The regimes they set up became, in turn soft and corrupt, to fall prey to the next wave of tough, cunning, fierce and close-knit tribesmen from the marginal outlands.
Sometimes I wonder if some Muslims see the west as some sort of soft-living bunch of plains dwellers with themselves as the next wave of rulers.
First the West need to stop human sacfice to the idol that demand unborn babies to be murder in they mother womb. Since 1973 over 53 million unborn babies where sacfice to the Abortion idol the West workship over GOD(ALLAH).
You have much more to worry about Defender of Pisslam...
Iranian birth rates are very low to the point where their society is in danger. Iranian women refuse to give birth to children under the shackles of Islam. Societal decay seems much WORSE under Islam. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KB24Ak02.html
Afghan men and women have a hard time getting it on. The older afgahni men are so used to their "boy toys" they don't quite get how to get their wives preggers. They think to impregnate the wife, simply do as they did with their boy toys. One Afghani town had to be taught by American doctors on how to impregnate their women. Personally I would have said nothing and let them keep trying and FAILING! LOL
"If, in any given country, a regime takes power dedicated to implementing a vision for society that is absolutely opposed to basic notions of human dignity and human rights, that’s fine with Washington and Brussels, as long as the majority voted for it."
Actually, it wouldn't be fine at all with Washington and Brussels, if that majority happened to be Not Not-White.
Western Civilization has accomplished more than any other civilization in history. The ancient Greeks invented democracy and philosophy. The Romans provided the world with as sound a legal system as ever developed, though English Common Law, another Western phenomenon, is a great rival to Roman Law. The Jewish religious approach set the foundation for an ethical system, the Judeo-Christian ethic, which has no superior and perhaps no peer. The systematic scientific method is a purely Western invention, not to be confused with occasional ingenious technological achievements which certain non-Western societies like those in India and China should indeed be given credit for. Western art, as evidenced by such wonders as the Parthenon, Gregorian Chant, Durham, Chartres and Lincoln cathedrals, Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, Shakespeare, Baroque Art, Baroque, Classical and Romantic music, and French painting in the late nineteenth century, is, at the very least, without any superior and, arguably, superior to all other artistic traditions. Technological accomplishments such as railroads, automobiles, the telephone and its offshoots, refrigeration and air conditioning, airplanes, biomedical engineering, the near eradication of sundry diseases like smallpox, polio and malaria, and the development of computers all are Western in origin. In short, Western Civilization is a wonder, an extraordinary achievement of the first dimension.
Thus what a shame it was in the West that eventually was produced the twin idiocies of political correctness and multiculturalism, which are a prescription for not only mendacity about Western Civilization and shameless pumping up of clearly inferior societies but even for the West's eventual liquidation by inferiors, for instance the Islamic world, a desultory and stultifying world if ever there were one. Welcome to the age in which we live---the Age of Nonsense.
This criticism has been equally valid for the entire time period for any special oil-related deals with the Saudi Arabian Royal Family. No Sharia-influenced government can ever be properly labeled an ally of the Western notion of protection of individual liberty.
Would I be mistaken to say that even Osama bin Laden would have been satisfied with a vote in Saudi Arabia, followed by Islamic majority mob rule? (And eviction of the Royal Family.)
An amoral view of Islam is like that of allowing limited self-rule within an Islamic Zoo, where it is the humans that are on display. Keep the walls high so that the Islamic violence is contained, and allow for escape by those who reject Islam in total.
DOI - abortion is halal under sharia law.
Actually, it wouldn't be fine at all with Washington and Brussels, if that majority happened to be Not Not-White.
Come again? Both Washington and Brussels would like nothing better than to eliminate white majorities wherever they exist, including in their own countries and continents. Whites, the only genuine racial minority group in the world, will soon become a minority in their native Western countries as a result of massive, third-world immigration and UN social engineering. The Brave New World being crafted by the pompous elites who think they have all the answers will make Orwell's 1984 look like heaven on earth.
I think lemon is agreeing with you albeit in the form of a triple negative.
@ Defender of the Indefensible
You're a clown! Abortion in the West could be stopped tomorrow if a law were passed to make it illegal.
But under Sharia's brutal Islamic law, the so-called honor killing of women, female genital mutilation, and the position of women in Islamic society as little less than slaves to their menfolk, goes on. Why? Because Islam has decreed it to be so.
We could change the situation vis-a-vis abortion, but you and your immoral slaves to Allah refuse to stop so-called 'honor' killings, or stop little girls having part of their labia cut off with a razor and no anesthetic, or restore women to their rightful place in society.
Get back to juggling your tiny balls in the air! Clown!
Well done Spence , WELL DONE IBN !!
I am very very proud to have a signed copy of Ibn's "Leaving islam, Apostates speak out" in which he wishes 'me' all the best!.Goddess bless him..and all the rest of you fighting this good fight.P.S. I for one hang my flag around those ancient two 'Western' principles:
"When in Rome do as the Romans do" and
"Sticks and stones can hurt but words can never."
Good Afternoon,
It is humbling that I can defend my good faith against the taint that has has been scribed here.
There is nothing wrong with Islam and the test of time has proven this factor.
The West (where I had been borne) is showing the huge signs of corruption, which is there for all to see. Youngsters in fact do not know how to handle or what to do with their "freedoms" resulting in the riots and pathetic livelihood that most single mothers live, they are in dire and desperate need of any hand that will guide them and bring them in a respectful, proper and disciplined manner; this need not be Islam, but others do (albeit to a less) reasonable job like Buddhism, Mormons, Hinduism and to a far lesser extent; Christianity.
The single biggest trouble with the world today is the spread of Western culture which has seen fit to erode valuable disciple of children, parents, towns, cities, and country in terms of false economy, putting slow kill drugs in water, infertility into polio vaccine, false money
economics, loaded my favorite part of the world with false leaders (who are slowly getting what they deserve after coersing with you), in an attempt to suck the life of Islam...but the opposite is happening.
Any thread, ANY thread that you chose to examine is tainted with western hands that makes it worse...Western society has done nothing to help humanity, only to help itself.
Your man Ibn is in it western style profit that's all, entry for him to Jannat is a long way away.
Dee Walid
Spartan seeks Athenian.
warhorse@bell.net
"putting slow kill drugs in water, infertility into polio vaccine"
Do you have any evidence of this? Or is this just another of those paranoid conspiracy theories that Islamists subscribe to. The wild rumors spread by mad Mullahs in northern Nigeria a few years ago about the polio vaccine causing infertility actually lead to a resurgence of the disease. So unless you have any concrete evidence that the polio vaccine causes infertility then your reckless fear mongering could be leading to hundreds of kids being crippled by a disease that they should have been protected against.
"Any thread, ANY thread that you chose to examine is tainted with western hands that makes it worse...Western society has done nothing to help humanity, only to help itself."
Whilst were on the subject of diseases, child mortality has been declining for a long time in both the west and east, albeit it is still common in sub-Saharan Africa. This is largely thanks to germ theory, and the subsequent importance placed on hygiene and the invention of vaccines which have largely eradicated many diseases, all a product of western civilization. On a related note, why do you think your wearing clothes made of cotton? For most of Human history cotton clothing was quite expensive, the kind of thing that Kings or Princes might wear because it can be washed on a daily basis. The common folk would usually wear clothes made of felt or wool, which could only be washed once or twice a year without the clothes shrinking and being damaged, as a result their clothes were often infested with all sorts of disease spreading parasites. Due to the industrial revolution and the resulting mass production of cotton you could now walk into a remote village in the African congo and the villagers will be wearing cotton clothing. Don't even get me started on electricity and modern medical surgery...
Tangential:
I think that one should intersperse references to Judeo-Christian culture with the use of the phrase Biblical culture.
My thought is this, while accurately descriptive, the phrase Judeo-Christian culture does not identify, by itself, the thing which makes it distinct from other religious cultures, to wit, the Bible.
When one makes reference to Biblical culture or the Biblical cultures, it is a clear causal identification which is easily differentiated, in the plural from the Koranic cultures.
Surely many if not most of the key differences between those groupings are traceable to their literary doctrinal basis embodied in their respective principal book. And it's not a bad idea to summarize that in an identifying phrase.
RE:"First the West need to stop human sacfice to the idol that demand unborn babies to be murder in they mother womb..."
First? Really? Here is a short lesson in love and mercy for you.
We try to leave such decisions to the woman and her doctor. And if it means that the fertilized egg is to be aborted, we try to ensure that the woman is safe from the likes of your inclination. You may not realize it, but we value personal liberty to this extent and beyond. In contrast muslims will stone a woman in such circumstances to death (courtesy of merciful allah and his followers!). We realize that women, as a rule, do not want to terminate pregnancies except under the most dire circumstances. Even then, it is emotionally traumatic to them. We try to provide them comfort during this time of suffering and help them so that they can resume normal life.
Match that with anything in islam if you will. The answers in the West are far superior. Guaranteed!
RE:"There is nothing wrong with Islam and the test of time has proven this factor."
Here we go again!
The fact is that everywhere islam has gone, it has brought murder, dictatorship, misery and and giant leap backwards into inhumanity. All the arts are killed off including music, sculpture, literature, science, mathematics etc. Mandatory waste of prayer five times a day is imposed. Instead of learning and understanding, rote memory of koran is instituted.
There is everything wrong with islam. The test of time has confirmed this factor over and over and over.
In your monumental ignorance and crass stupidity, you wrote: There is nothing wrong with Islam and the test of time has proven this factor.
Nothing wrong with Islam....??!! Stoning, amputation, 'slay the unbeliever', Jews are descended from apes and pigs, FMG, 'honor' killings, kiddy fiddler for a 'prophet', oh, the list is endless!
You're that special kind of clown from the circus of Islam; you're completely blind to the bleedin' obvious.
@ Dee Walid: "There is nothing wrong with Islam and the test of time has proven this factor."
Test of time proved Islam was powered by African slave trade (still going today), heavy taxation on conquered peoples (dhimmies), and squat on beautiful cathedrals and grandeur of civilizations with their supremacist conquest mosques, where time stops. Islam stopped inquiry into sciences about a thousand years ago (against the Koranic 'scientific' truths), killed in mass genocides whole cultures (from India to Africa today, including Armenian Genocide only hundred years ago, still killing Christians all over Dar al Islam), kills blasphemers and apostates, kills women for family 'honor' (all still going on today), kill innocent civilians with suicide bombings (horror unbelievable but true, reported almost daily), lay waste to the lands they settle (from north Africa and Middle East to Paris banlieus 'no-go' areas, all made primitive by Islam), have nothing of value for export except crude oil and dates, drives the massive boat loads of Moslems fleeing their inbred poverty for European economies (time to reverse this tide?), and capture of tourists on holiday either for ransom or death. You think this is "noting wrong with Islam"? Why you poor deluded soul who hates our Western freedoms... EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH ISLAM.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Incomprehensible, insane Troll alert.
Ignore.
BS meter at 9 and 1/2.
_____________________
To paraphrase Ronald Regan-
FREEDOM IS NEVER MORE THAN ONE GENERATION FROM EXTINCTION.
WE DO NOT PASS IT TO OUR CHILDREN IN THE BLOODSTREAM.
IT HAS TO BE FOUGHT FOR, CHERISHED LIKE A LOVED ONE AND
PASSED ON FOR THEM TO DO THE SAME.
OTHERWISE, IN OUR TWILIGHT YEARS, UNDER SHARIA, WE THE DHIMMI OF THE WEST WILL BE SECRETLY TELLING OUR CHILDREN OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS WHEN CHURCH BELLS RANG, DEMOCRACY AND TOLERANCE FLOURISHED AND GOOD MEN AND WOMEN WERE FREE TO SPEAK THEIR MINDS.
Only 9 and 1/2? Mine exploded.
While resolution of the several different perspectives here, both Western and Muslim, does not seem imminent, the depth of analysis of culture and values is very valuable. Are all parties building from the premise: "How do we create a better World?" At issue is how we get there?
It has been meaningful for me to think back on the 135 year culture/religious war that followed Martin Luther's efforts to reform Catholicism. At the end of the process people became a lot more tolerant of each other's beliefs and allowed people the freedom to investigate truth for themselves and have the freedom of Religion. These same issues are the ones the whole world is now grappling with?
Are we now at a place where "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."? (Or a red pill or a blue pill?)
OPTION 1: To engage in intense deep conflict for a long time to come?
OPTION 2: To break out of the old wine skins of traditional thinking and find very creative new ways of living and working together? New ways where we jointly cheer each other on in the pursuit of righteousness, education, arts and industry? Are the still dissatisfied young Twitter generation in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria looking for something still yet unborn? Is there a similar search going on in many other parts of the Planet?
In the opening of the Third and Sixth Surah's of the Qur'an it states that there will come a time when the Almighty Creator will bring the World together of which "there is no doubt". Is the fact that people from all over the World are participating in this thread proof that such a process is occurring?
I doubt of either side will convince the other to convert to the other side very easily, but we might have better luck setting all of our most cherished beliefs on the table and considering new ways we can fit them together?
@Truthseeker: "Are the still dissatisfied young Twitter generation in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria looking for something still yet unborn? Is there a similar search going on in many other parts of the Planet?"
From your mouth to God's ear. Whether or not religion, a 'greater' peace is coming. ;-)
Can more and more people help make it so? :-)