“…Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness–not to add a grand convenience–in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap’s satisfaction. ‘I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!’ Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him.
— from “Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens
Reading the Qur’an is one thing. Reading the Qur’an with a full understanding of how Muslims reconcile the contradictions through the long-accepted doctrine of “naskh” or abrogation, by which the later, far more sinister and aggressive verses (from the period when Muhammad, now among his followers in Medina, had no need to pretend to placate the powerful non-Muslims who had resisted him during his Meccan period) replace relatively benign ones. Reading the Qur’an with close attention to the context, so that 5.32 is read along with, 5.33 (something Bush failed to do, no doubt because someone handed him 5.32 but carefully refrained from giving him 5.33), which completely changes the meaning of the initial verse.
Reading the Qur’an requires close reading, an art no longer taught in the schools, not in the universities as it once was, not in the high schools or elementary schools. But it matters. A Qur’anic phrase such as “fi sabil Allah” — “on the path of Allah” as in “jihad fi sabil Allah” (Jihad for the sake of Allah) could well be taken to mean by an English-speaking reader, for an innocuous phrase analogous to the Christian phrase “walk in the ways of the Lord,” so different from the warfare, the razzias and conquest and loot and seized women that Jihad “in the way of Allah” actually implies. And even the very nature of the English and French languages ensures that the translation of the Qur’an into those languages does not convey the full violence of the original Arabic.
And reading the Qur’an is not enough. One must read, as well, some of the Hadith — a few hundred of those deemed “most authentic” by the most authoritative muhaddithin, especially Bukhari and Muslim. This would give one a sense of what Muslims know, what Muslims take as a guide, a guide that helps to provide a gloss on the Qur’an itself. For it is both Qur’an and Sunnah, the latter being a word that roughly means the customs, behavior, attitudes of Muhammad and his companions as revealed in the Hadith, the writings which preserve Muhammad’s sayings and his acts, and even note the occasions on which he remained silent (and those silences are interpreted), and the Sira, the biography or biographies of Muhammad that further flesh out the full meaning of the Qur’an, of the revealed will of Allah. For who better to express that will than the Perfect Man, Muhammad?
Yes, the public should be much better informed about the tenets of Islam, and not only the tenets, but the way in which societies suffused with Islam encourage certain attitudes toward Infidels, toward the use of force, toward the use of reason.
Finally, non-Muslims have a responsibility to find out about the past 1350 years of Muslim Jihad-conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. What did happen to the Hindus of India? What happened to the Buddhist temples, and those of the Jains, under Muslim rule? What does Ibn Battuta say? What happened to the Christians and Jews of the Middle East and North Africa? Was Islamic Spain really, as Maria Rosa Menocal would have us believe, a place of happy and peaceful “convivencia,” or do historians who specialize in the field of Islamic Spain, such as Evariste Levi-Provencal, tell us a different tale?
Yes, the more one knows about Islam, its doctrine and practice, the better off one will be. Those who viewed over the past twenty years the Arab Muslim attacks on Christians and animists in the southern Sudan, attacks never objected to by any Muslim or Arab group, and who over the past three years have viewed the attacks by Arab Muslims on the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur, may find their explanation for such behavior in Islam. Those who remember the Biafra War and the massacres of Christians that preceded the declaration of Biafran independence, and Col. Ojukwu’s Ahiara Declaration of 1969 in which he denounced the “Jihad” by the Muslims of the north, aided by those Egyptian pilots who strafed Ibo villagers at will, will now find the explanation for the Muslim behavior in that war — and possibly an explanation as well for the abandonment of the Nigerian Christians by the Western powers. And one will be able to make sense of the Muslims who attack and kill Buddhist monks and farmers and schoolteachers in southern Thailand. One will be able to make sense of the killings by Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines. One will be able to make sense of the Taliban, and will be able to figure out why they made Hindus were identifying garb during their reign, and why the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not different in kind from all the previous destruction wrought on the artifacts of the Greco-Bactrian civilization of Afghanistan, or the Buddhist or Hindu artifacts there, and in India itself, over many centuries. One would no longer be puzzled by the attacks on those who dare to criticize Islam, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the death threats against two Dutch parliamentarians (forced to sleep at army bases, forced to be surrounded by armed guards), or the similar threats made against publishers and cartoonists in Denmark, or against a leading journalist, Magdi Allam, in Italy. One would begin to understand the ways in which Muslim threats and Muslim attacks in Madrid, the plots aborted as well, from that against the Strasbourg Christmas Fair, to those many averted and only vaguely alluded to, if ever, so as not to scare the Western publics.
One would begin to puzzle out, to figure out, that everywhere, in every Infidel country, the Muslim population has presented similar difficulties, similar worries, similar behavior intent on changing the legal, political, social, and moral institutions of the host country. Nowhere does this population fully accept those institutions or the very ideas that so distinguish the Western world from the Islamic one — whether it be one of those that prides itself on its tolerance, makes a fetish of it, and makes a fetish as well of the welfare-state benefits it provides (such countries as Holland and Denmark and Sweden), or a country that prides itself on its “knowledge” of the Arabs and of Islam, such as France, or even has at times flattered itself that because of its own history it has some special insight, as Spain, or whether that country is Italy or Germany or Canada or Australia or the United States — everywhere.
And if the behavior of Muslims, living now in many different Infidel countries, varying widely in their economic and social arrangements (compare Denmark with the United States, or Holland with Australia), turns out to everywhere cause problems, everywhere to provoke unsettlement, everywhere lead to great expense to monitor and protect against Muslim attacks, everywhere to lead to a situation where many feel greater physical insecurity as a result of such a presence, then surely the problem must be with Islam, and with those who are its adherents.
And if, furthermore, we not only have presented to us the same problems with Muslim communities in quite different Infidel lands, there is another way to compare, and that is to see if this is a general problem with immigrants, or not. But it turns out that no other group — not Buddhists from Vietnam or Cambodia, not Hindus from India, not Bolivian peasants or black African non-Muslims, whether Christian or animist, not any other immigrant group, presents the same kind of problems. No other group bears not merely an alien creed — alien creeds can sometimes be accommodated — but rather an alien and a hostile creed, which remains hostile. For the basis of Islam, as a warring and militant faith, is that Islam must dominate, that the war between Believers and Infidels must go on forever, until such time as the latter finally yield to the former and Islam dominates everywhere, and everywhere Muslims rule. It is not hard to find the extensive textual support for this in the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira. It is not hard to find, in the 1350-year history of Islam, historical evidence that demonstrates, through the activities and behavior of Muslims, that this doctrine is taken seriously and, whenever deemed necessary and possible, will be acted upon.
Of course, for centuries, those simple souls who lived deep within Dar al-Islam, illiterate and largely aware of the Infidels only as a remote possibility, would not be Jihad-minded as Muslims today, who because of three things — the oil wealth (ten trillion dollars since 1973), and the migration (tens of millions of Muslims permitted to settle deep behind what they have been taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines delineating the Dar al-Harb, that is Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels), and finally, the new technologies that make the dissemination of Islam, to the remotest peasant, not only the Five Pillars of ritual worship (shehada, zakat, salat, ramadan, hajj) but the passages that preach, as so much of Qur’an does, and as the Hadith reinforce, Jihad — understood to allow for the employment of non-combat means as well to spread Islam, through the “wealth” weapon, through campaigns of Da’wa, through demographic conquest that is openly discussed, openly seen as the best means of subverting the Infidels, and not only in Western Europe.
Yes, Infidel publics should learn all they can about Islam. But not from the likes of any group with the word “dialogue” in its title, not from those “Mosque Outreach Nights,” not from the army of apologists who are everywhere, not least having infiltrated into some church groups, into the bureaucracies of the E.U. and the U.N., and who are present to reinforce the idea that Islam is merely a “religion” and those who dare to question its tenets are, of course, to be summarily dismissed as “hatemongers.” And when any attempt is made to present the evidence — the evidence from the texts of Islam, the evidence provided by history, evidence accumulated over many centuries, or even just that from the last few decades, or few years, or few months, or few weeks, or few days, of unyielding Muslim hostility to Infidels, and to the entire civilizational legacy of those Infidels — it is not examined, not looked at.
For like Mr. Podsnap, much of the Western world does not wish to know about these Disagreeables. It wishes, like Mr. Podsnap, to snap its fingers, and put those Disagreeables out of sight, out of mind. They will not be noticed, and therefore, they will not exist.
That is how those whose duty it is to protect and instruct us have behaved, and are behaving. For one-third of a century little has been done, almost nothing, to limit the Muslim, chiefly Arab, oil revenues that have made possible the acquisition of major arms (hundreds of billions of dollars worth) and funded arms projects, has provided the “money” weapon that, through bribery and boycotts and a network of Western businessmen eager to curry favor, has been so important to preserving Saudi Arabia’s image as a “staunch ally” even as it becomes, with the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the most malevolent and powerful enemies of the West.
Mr. Podsnap put aside all “disagreeables” for they “offended him.”
For decades now, and still today, those Engagers-in-“Dialogue,” those three-abrahamic-faith boys, those we-all-have-so-much-to-learn-from-one-another enthusiasts —
Podsnaps All.