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Fitzgerald: A tribute to Ralph Peters

Sep 10, 2006 8:51 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

Ralph Peters is a retired officer who is often sensible about the uses of military force, and he takes a dim view of the Arabs. He is also said to be a scholarly sort, with books in Russian and German in his library (at least, this is what the articles about him unfailingly convey). So why doesn’t he exercise the same caution, and engage in the same kind of mental preparation, in proceeding to make assumptions and utter pronouncements about Islam? This is especially necessary in light of the dreamy idea that Occupied Iraq is not a whit different in its prospects from Occupied Germany or Occupied Japan after World War II — and that all those who claim differently must either be appeasers or Nay-Sayers, when in fact some of those Nay-Sayers want the “Light Unto the Muslim Nations” Project stopped not because they do not worry about Islam, but because they really worry about it.

They worry most not about the “war on terror” but about the likely islamization, through Da’wa and demography, of Western Europe, and having studied the history of Islam, they agree with Reza Afshari and Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina that the sharia and human rights are flatly incompatible with Western values: free conscience, free speech, equal treatment of women and minorities are all impossible under the Sharia, or under a legal system that “takes its inspiration” from the sharia, as the Egyptian legal code does, or as the “new” Iraqi Constitution, which gave in so much to the Islamists, does — infuriating Allawi (he could not have been pleased with the naivete of Noah Feldman et al).
This unwillingness to study Islam — to study first the Qur’an and a few hundred of the hadith, and then the sira, or to immerse oneself in the classic scholarship about Islam (“classic” meaning not the shallow apologetics of the past 40 years, which includes Esposito, Sells, Ernst, et al) — means that no one has a right to utter an opinion about Islam without such study, or at least paying attention to those who have engaged in such study. And that includes those whose instincts and heart may be in the right place, but who have not permitted their minds to follow.

One hopes, in the case of Peters, that he will allow himself the leisure to read — beginning, perhaps, with Bat Ye’or’s The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam and then, perhaps, looking at Muir’s biography of Muhammad (not outdated), at Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim, and at a number of the articles to be found online at www.secularislam.org and www.faithfreedom.org. Ibn Warraq’s essay on the similarities between “Islam and Fascism” should also be studied.

If Ralph Peters is reading too much Schwartz et al in the pages of The Weekly Standard, that might explain the problem. Amir Taheri is the best of their writers on Islam, but even he has to, at times, pull his punches.

He is seemingly unable to sit down with the texts, and is willing to substitute his own anecdotal evidence for facts: a visit to Senegal, his impressions of the marabouts, that sort of thing — no different from what Madeleine Albright or Tom Friedman do when they collect their impressions, or what Paul Wolfowitz did when he learned all about Islam as the dynamic, take-charge, get-out-in-the-field ambassador in Jakarta.

I took note of that inability here at Jihad Watch two years ago, but I was too hopeful that he would start to study, too trusting that he would stop substituting his own anecdotal evidence for the study of Islamic tenets, immersion in Qur’an and Hadith and Sira, and further immersion in the history of Islamic conquest and subsequent subjugation of non-Muslims. Instead, this “author of 21 books” substituted his own travels, his own brief encounters, in countries where he did not know the languages (but he is careful to demonstrate, on every conceivable and some not-so-conceivable occasions, his knowledge of Russian and, especially, German) and in which the Muslims he saw were not in the Arab lands, but on the periphery — countries where specific local conditions had diluted the effect of Islam, had blended it with local easygoing ways and easygoing customs (those marabouts of which he speaks, for example — and of which V. S. Naipaul also writes with far greater keenness in his Among the Believers and Beyond Belief.

Ralph Peters fails to see that where he finds Islam acceptable, or unmenacing, it may be for reasons having to do with the fact that the Muslims he sees are not the full-blooded thing. It would be as if he took the Ahmadi sect — treated as non-Muslims by the orthodox — as representative of Islam, or took Andrey Sakharov as a representative product of Soviet Communism, or Oskar Schindler as a typical member of the Nazi Party. He sees, but uncomprehendingly. What’s more, on those lightning-tours to places where neither English nor German nor Russian (his apparent languages) are spoken, he is an Important Personage. Those to whom he is introduced are those who would not mind meeting this Important American Personage.

He comments on Senegal. But why not ask black Africans from Niger, students in France who return to Niger from time to time, what they have to say about the effect of Saudi money and Saudi mosques and Saudi-funded madrasas on the practice of Islam in Niger — where that syncretism, and those marabouts, are on the run, and everywhere now the once-unknown burqa can be seen.

All kinds of people have spent “time in the Muslim world.” Bassam Tibi has, so has Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina, and Azam Kamguian and Irfan Khawaja, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Many intelligent people have not only “spent time” in the Muslim world but were born into it, and raised in it, and finally, upon coming to live in the West and being able to breathe and think freely, have chosen to leave Islam. They do so only after having carefully analyzed what Islam teaches, what they hear being said in the mosques about Infidels, behind those Infidel acts. They know perfectly well the attitudes and atmospherics of societies suffused with Islam. Why does Ralph Peters think that his visits “from Senegal to Sulawesi, from Delhi to Dearborn,” with “no end of vibrant, humane, hopeful currents in the Muslim faith” have given him an understanding and insight superior to that of these articulate, intelligent, thoroughly pleasant and altogether reasonable, and almost always humorful people — not to mention others who offer testimony that can be found, in book form (see Leaving Islam) or at such websites as www.faithfreedom.org?

There is nothing hate-filled and hysterical about any of these people, who are adamant in their implacable opposition to Islam, in their dismay at those Westerners who fall for every bit of taqiyya-and-tu-quoque, who seem never to get their fill of that “dialogue” or never to quite understand why it is that Islam cannot conceivably be reformed — god knows a few people, in the last century, tried, but kept coming up against the reality of the Qur’an and the Hadith, and the figure, or rather Model, of Muhammad.

Why does Ralph Peters think his impressions, “from Senegal to Sulawesi,” are more important and accurate than what these defectors tell us? Why, for that matter, does he think that the Islam analyzed in such piercing detail by Snouck Hurgronje or St. Clair Tisdall or Arthur Jeffery or another hundred people who devoted their lives to studying the subject, are to be so easily dismissed by him, for their views on the impossibility of the reformation of Islam, and their analysis of its suppression of free and skeptical inquiry, and encouragement of the habit of mental submission, are everywhere so evident in their writings, but when others, today, say or write the same things, Peters finds them “islamophobic” and “hate-filled”?

Perhaps Peters will beg to differ. But at least he should be willing to read Ibn Warraq, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ali Sina and many others. And he ought to actually read those books about Islam some of which have apparently (according to my informants) been sent to him, and the contents of which so disturbed him that he immediately lapsed into the “all religions do it” argument that some find so soothing to believe, but others — those who count on them for instruction — will find unacceptable as a response.

I was too kind to Peters when I wrote about him here two years ago. I believed him capable, though a product and participant, apparently, in the Cold War, of being able to learn new and sometimes difficult things. The difficulty comes first in learning the doctrine, and then in seeing how the phrase “moderate” Muslim is distinctly unhelpful, because there is no bright line separating the “moderate” from the “immoderate” Muslim, and the “moderate” in many ways furthers the Jihad — which Peters apparently conceives of only as one involving violence as its instrument, rather than recognizing that jihad fi sabil Allah is the struggle to spread Islam by whatever means are most effective, including the use of the money weapon, campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest. He leaves all this out. In this respect, he is a True Believer in the Administration and in the policy, based on the smug assumption that there is no problem with Islam, but only with those “terrorists” who “hate freedom” — and which has led to tarbaby Iraq, and the squandering of men, money, and materiel, now too obvious to hide.

And while Peters, that ex-military man who is careful to bring journalists to his home to see his library of German and Russian books, which never fail to be mentioned, as if that were a guarantee of something, he appears not, after all, to be such a great reader, such a dutiful student. It was permissible on 9/10/2001 to know nothing about Islam. In the five years since, it has become impermissible for any one to comment on Islam without having studied it first.

And he has not.

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