Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald considers the particular problems of children born to marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims, and of Muslims confronting the incitements to violence and supremacist imperative contained in the Qur’an, Hadith and Sira:
The question of marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims is vexed and multifaceted. One could write a good deal about the Muslim children of such a couple, once the marriage is over and the mother tries, in every conceivable way, while not wishing to alienate her children, to gently, gently, somehow get them to understand they need not forever remain Muslims. This is extraordinarily difficult given the degree of early brainwashing, the appeal of filial piety, the diseased desire for a system that offers the comfort of Total Regulation, the fear of mental or other kinds of freedom, and the ease with which all the ills of the Western non-Muslims are detected and despised. The child may never fully realize that so much that is good — including those products of that West, the art, music, literature, that the particular Muslim child may enjoy and appreciate — are artifacts that could never have been produced by, nor their creators have arisen within, the world of Islam.
And then there are those children who, born into Islam, knowing very little about it, deliberately will not learn about it for fear of what they might find out. They don’t want to know. “Mom, I’m not going to read it.” They will not read Ibn Warraq. They will not go to Ali Sina’s website (www.faithfreedom.org). They will not study the history of Muslim conquest or the treatment of conquered non-Muslims. They will not read Bat Ye’or. They will not discover for themselves, if non-Arab, the Arab supremacist ideology within Islam. They don’t want to find out.
That is some of them. Then there are the others, who are jettisoning Islam. They are doing so not because they wish to “fit in” with the larger society, but for their own intellectual coherence. It is painful, it is difficult, it is a matter seldom discussed. In many cases they keep secret their own dismay at what they realize Islam is, out of fear of family members, or simply because the whole thing disturbs them. They shouldn’t. They should speak out about Islam. They could tell others born into Islam, and tell that impenetrably stupid group of Infidels who will not understand what is wrong with Islam, a few home truths.
Starting with: This is Islam. And this is your mind on Islam.
Ibn Warraq has managed to make important contributions to the understanding of Western scholarship on early Islam (see, for example, the shortened version of a longer unpublished essay that just appeared in Die dunklen Anfange, along with contributions by Christoph Luxenberg, Pierre Larcher, Claude Gilliot, Gerd Puin, and others at that level — so much for the Fred Donners of this world, plowing their way dutifully through the Muslim furrows, never looking to right or left to consider that just possibly a Western scholar who continues blithely to accept the received Muslim version of Qur’anic history just might not be doing the right thing). Ayaan Hirsi Ali is helping to raise consciousnesses in Holland — with a little help from Muslim murders and Muslim threats that have concentrated non-Muslim minds. She is also a member of the Dutch Parliament. Ali Sina is a one-man multitude, debating endlessly, putting up articles that day after day chip away at Muslim certainties. Azam Kamguian, Irfan Khawaja, and many others, some of whom no doubt do not use their real names, all lead lives in which intelligence has been freed from the mind-forged manacles of Islam. They were their own Houdinis — they freed themselves.
But not everyone can undo those manacles. Some need to read a bit, to reflect a bit. While the psychically and economically marginal, the prisoners and the Spiritual-Searchers of the John Walker Lindh variant (to say nothing of the Weiss/Schwartz variant) will be the Infidels who convert to Islam, those in Islam who leave it — for another faith or none at all — will always be the very best, the most morally and intellectually aware, people born into Islam (through no fault of their own).
Quite a trade. Unfortunately, there are more of the economically and psychically marginal Infidels who are potential converts to Islam than there are those Muslims in the non-Muslim world (which is the only place that jettisoning Islam can take place without fear of retribution) who are sufficiently aware, morally and intellectually, to leave it — not necessarily for something else, but simply to leave it. And numbers count. More of them have to be appealed to: leave that filial piety. Look steadily at what is in not only the Qur’an but also in the Hadith. Look at Muhammad as a model — do you want him as a model for yourself, for your children, your grandchildren? Would you, living in Paris or London or New York in exile from the Muslim world, want that world to follow you into that exile? Would you, an Iranian in exile from the Islamic Republic, want to see Los Angeles really become Teheran, Teheran as it is today? Would you want Paris to become Algiers, or Marrakech? Would you, an Egyptian who could not stand Egypt, and read Magdi Allam in the Corriere with understanding and sympathy, want Rome to become Cairo, subject to what the doctors of Al-Azhar have to say? Do you want to live according to a Total Regulation of Life created more than a millennium ago?
Of course you wouldn’t. Well, pitch in.