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Fitzgerald: Why do psychically and economically marginal Westerners convert to Islam?

Mar 5, 2007 9:11 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Why do psychically and economically marginal Westerners convert to Islam?

There is no one reason. There are many reasons.

Islam is wrongly perceived as a vehicle for “social justice.” The fact that a rich Muslim can stand side by side with a poor one at a mosque is misinterpreted. The fact that Muslims are required to offer zakat to fellow Muslims is also misinterpreted as meaning that there is some kind of “sharing of the wealth.”

But one has only to look at the history of Islam, and look at Muslim societies today, to see the extremes of wealth and power. In many Muslim countries the only way to get that wealth is for the rulers and their collaborators to help themselves to the national riches, whether those riches come from oil or smuggling (Syria) or Jizyah from Infidel lands (Egypt, the “Palestinians”). There are no Infidel lands that offer the same kind of gap between rich and poor, the ruler and the ruled, as do Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and other Muslim countries. These great extremes are less obvious in Dar al-Islam in those countries, such as Turkey and Tunisia, that have tried to constrain Islam as a social and political force.
But the presentation of Islam as a kind of pseudo-socialism, a “left-wing” doctrine, is common. Yet in fact it encourages the habit of submission, submission to Allah, submission to the Ruler, whoever he is, provided he can be seen as an observant Muslim. That is what attracts some, based on their own misinformation, to Islam.

A second, and related reason for some to convert to Islam is that Islam is depicted as the belief-system that most accords with, and furthers the interests of, les damnes de la terre, especially non-whites. It is amazing how carefully campaigns are targeted at certain groups — say, black prisoners in America and England — without any countervailing effort by the authorities, or even by Christian groups, or even by black Christian groups, who could and should be funded for such undertakings. They could present the evidence about the history of Arab slavers seizing and castrating black African boys, or about the duration of the Arab slave trade, which began long before, and ended long after (where it did end) than the European slave trade, and the continued, indeed permanent, defense of slavery in the texts of Islam, which can never be overcome, and the continued enslavement of blacks by Arabs, in the Sudan, in Mauritania, and elsewhere, far from any Western reporters. There is so much information about this, but so little attempt to sensibly disseminate it.

Still a third reason for Islam’s appeal is that it is so simple to become a Muslim. You don’t have to learn a thing. You can become a Muslim without knowing a thing about Islam. So eager are Muslims for what are seen as recruits to the army of Islam that it doesn’t matter if those converting or “reverting” know a thing about it, for it is not the saving of their souls that matters. All that matters for most Muslims is to swell further the ranks of Islam. That is why, early on, Islam required only a recital of the Shehada — a single sentence, a single declaration — and then one became a Muslim, and found out later what it was all about. But by that point one had no way to gracefully, or safely, within lands dominated by Muslims, get out of that faith.

A fourth reason is that not only is Islam a faith simple to join (whereas if you wish to become, say, a Christian or a Jew, you have to study, you have to actually learn something about Christian doctrine or Jewish faith) but it is a simple-minded faith, that appeals to the simple-minded. It is not a faith bent on questioning itself. It is the perfect faith for someone who cannot think, and does not like to think, and prefers to have handed to him a Simple and Total Regulation of Life, and a Complete Explanation of the Universe. For all those who need certainty, who cannot stand individual responsibility or moral choice, who prefer to be slaves of Allah — well, Islam is just the ticket, it’s just the thing for you.

But Islam is not a vehicle for “social justice.” It is not the belief-system of non-racists, but the carrier of racism and imperialism: Arab racism, and Arab imperialism. Ask Francis Bok and the Lost Boys, or the black African Muslims in Darfur (400,000 killed, 2.5 million forced to flee their homes) or the 1.8 million black African non-Muslims in the southern Sudan. Or the Ibo and other Christians who vainly resisted the “Jihad” in the Biafra War of 1967-69. Islam inculcates the notion of a permanent division of the world between Believers and Infidels, and the duty of Muslims to pursue, through Jihad, the conquest, not necessarily by miitary means (Da’wa and demographic conquest will do), the Lands of the Infidels, where all obstacles to the spread of Islam are to be torn down, so that the goal that all Muslims share may be realized. No “diversity” but rather a world where “Islam dominates and is not to be dominated” — everywhere.

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