“One day, my professor even had us act out the five pillars of Islam in class…”
— from this article about the teaching of Islam at Butler University
This is a dead giveaway. The focus is on what is hardly doctrine, but essentially, for Infidels, the utterly trivial rituals of worship. They are trivial because they are seemingly devoid of ideological content.
Who would object if some people in some religion or cult pray five times a day? Or once? Or twenty? Who would object to those people prostrating themselves toward Mecca without knowing the significance of this in making Islam a vehicle for Arab imperialism? Who would object, unless they understand the ferocious collectivism of the prayers, and especially of the Friday Prayers, and especially of the sermons (khutbas) at those Friday Prayers? And who would object to the hajj, unless you knew exactly what was done at the hajj, the primitive pagan worship, the throwing of stones at a pillar that symbolizes not merely Evil, but the evil embodied in the Unbeliever. And why should you object to Ramadan? Or to the giving of zakat — but only to fellow Muslims, unless by occasionally giving to Unbelievers that furthers the cause of Islam (see bin Talal’s check ostentatiously handed over to Giuliani just after 9.11.2001)?
No, the “acting out” of the Five Pillars — it’s the kind of thing one would assume might be tried on Third-Graders in their World Religions unit on Islam (and there too it would be unacceptable, but at least, as a pedagogic tool, not out of place). But instead, we encounter it in a college course. This is, among other things, an attempt to focus the attention of students on the trivial and not what matters — not on the view of the world that divides it uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel and requires endless hostility between the two until all obstacles to the spread of Islam are removed. And those obstacles are interpreted to mean any attempt to retain one’s own ways and beliefs, as anything that is other than complete appeasement and abasement. In this way, Dar al-Islam will simply take over whatever still remains of Dar al-Harb, the Domain or House of War, where Islam does not yet dominate, and Muslims do not yet rule, as they ultimately must.
What the teacher does not teach, because he is so busy with this acting out of the Five Pillars, is what is most important. The business of where the Qur’an is to be placed sickens, of course, but is not the main thing.
What is on the syllabus? What does the teacher say? Other faculty members, with heads on their shoulders, should take a much greater interest in what is taught — or not taught — about Islam. And that is true at Butler, at Columbia, at Harvard, and everywhere that, in a display of criminally negligent behavior, administrators and faculty have allowed the apologists to completely dominate the teaching, the transmission, of knowledge about Islam — at the very moment when all of our lives, and certainly all of our policies, depend on an intelligent and widespread apprehension (in both senses) of Islam.
Soviet schools taught children to do all kinds of things in support of the reigning orthodoxy. One was to turn in all those whom the little schoolgirls in braids, and the boys in their caps, had heard making anti-Soviet remarks. Thus the famous story of Pavel Morozov, who turned in his own parents for punishment. There used to be statues to him everywhere; I saw one myself in Minsk.
Now some schools have taken it upon themselves to teach another kind of orthodoxy, and that orthodoxy appears to be that which will encourage a false and dangerous — because utterly misleading — view of Islam. And if done at an early age, it will have an effect.
This kind of propaganda, even if undertaken only by those who are hideously naive (and so a menace to the rest of us, who may have to pay the civilizational price for the naivete and received ideas of others — “all religions are good” or “all people want the same thing” or “if only we understand each other there will be no wars” or “(fill in here the stupidity of your choice).”
I don’t want to pay for the stupidity of others. I’ve already given — at the office, the university, every damn place. I’m tired of it.