Greg here. My erstwhile employer – National Review – has for the most part shown itself on the wrong side of the Islam question, generally supporting a D’Souza-esque interpretation. A piece in NROnline today, however, “Islamic Apologetics” is encouraging. It picks up on the Armstrong-Spencer Financial Times tangle and generally sorts things out pretty well. One hopes we will see more of the author, Raymond Ibrahim (editor of The Al-Qaeda Reader), in NRO’s pages in future.
Ibrahim writes:
Islamic apologist extraordinaire Karen Armstrong is at it again. In an article entitled “Balancing the Prophet” published by the Financial Times, the self-proclaimed “freelance monotheist” engages in what can only be considered second-rate sophistry.
The false statements begin in her opening paragraph:
Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure.”¦ The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy.
This is just an obvious error of fact. Armstrong and others try as a routine to tie European sentiments toward Islam to the Crusades, but in fact, “people in the west” had something of a “dim” view of Mohammed half a Millennium before the Crusades. As early as the 8th century “” just a few generations after Mohammed “” Byzantine chronicler Theophanes wrote in his Chrongraphia:
He [Mohammed] taught those who gave ear to him that the one slaying the enemy “” or being slain by the enemy “” entered into paradise [e.g., Koran 9:111]. And he said paradise was carnal and sensual “” orgies of eating, drinking, and women. Also, there was a river of wine “¦ and the woman were of another sort, and the duration of sex greatly prolonged and its pleasure long-enduring [e.g., 56: 7-40, 78:31, 55:70-77]. And all sorts of other nonsense.
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Having distorted history, she next goes on to distort Islamic theology:
Until the 1950s, no major Muslim thinker had made holy war a central pillar of Islam. The Muslim ideologues Abu ala Mawdudi (1903-79) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), among the first to do so, knew they were proposing a controversial innovation. They believed it was justified by the current political emergency.
Even better than a “major Muslim thinker,” Allah himself proclaims: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger [i.e., uphold sharia], nor embrace the true faith, [even if they are] from among the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay tribute with willing submission, and feel themselves utterly subdued” (Koran 9:29). Mohammed confirms: “I have been commanded [by Allah] to fight against mankind until they testify that none but Allah is to be worshipped and that Muhammad is Allah’s Messenger” (Bukhari B2N24; next to the Koran, the second most authoritative text in Islam).
This and countless other Koranic verses and oral traditions of Mohammed, not to mention the course of conquest the first “rightly-guided” caliphs followed, have given Islam’s jurists and theologians cause throughout the ages to reach the consensus “” binding on the entire Muslim community “” that whenever the Muslim world is militarily capable, it must go on the offensive until it subsumes the entire world. Moreover, this world-view was postulated well before Armstrong’s blame-all “” the Crusades “” ever took place.
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In fact, Qutb was a staunch opponent of those apologists of Islam in his day who were “” just like Armstrong “” trying to reinterpret jihad into a defensive movement. Nearly half a century ago, Qutb wrote:
As to persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic jihad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war”¦ they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim”¦ Can anyone say that if Abu Bakr, Omar, or Uthman [the “rightly-guided” caliphs] had been satisfied that the Roman or Persian powers were not going to attack the Arabian penninsula [in the 7th century], that they would not have striven to spread the message of Islam throughout the world?
During the reign of the “rightly-guided” caliphs, Islam burst forth from Arabia as far west as Spain, as far east as Afghanistan through the sword alone.
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Moreover, if writers like Spencer are guilty of quoting Koranic verses “that are hostile to Jews and Christians” that may well be due to Islam’s pivotal doctrine of abrogation “” verses revealed later in Mohammed’s career (all the violent and intolerant ones such as 5:73, 5:17, 9:5, and 9:29) supercede and annul any contradictory verses revealed earlier, such as Armstrong’s 29:46 and most of the other peaceful ones which apologists try to make the cornerstone of Islam.
Finally, if books like Spencer’s focus on the violent side of Islam without devoting enough attention to Islam’s more “positive” aspects “” is that not only natural? Let us be perfectly clear: Most people in the West interested in learning more about Islam had their interest piqued by the 9/11 attacks, perpetrated by a Muslim group “” al Qaeda “” who insists that Islam informed its actions. Westerners are primarily interested in how Islam affects them, as non-Muslims. So it should be understandable if books written about Islam in the West focus more on that which concerns it “” jihad “” than on Islam’s more peaceful side.
Armstrong’s lament that “there is widespread ignorance of Islam in the west,” and that we should rectify this by developing a more “balanced” and “nuanced” understanding of the Koran is as ridiculous as asking Muslims living in Palestine and Iraq to overlook the “Crusader” presence there and instead consult the Bible itself to see how many portions of it accord with peace and justice. (Indeed, such a proposition is worse than ridiculous, since the Bible comes nowhere near to theologically justifying violence against the “Other” in perpetuity as found in the Koran.
In the final analysis, Armstrong’s historical and theological “discrepancies” (to be polite) are baffling “” particularly her many oneline sentences that simply defy historical fact: “Muhammad was not a belligerent warrior.” “The idea that Islam should conquer the world was alien to the Koran”¦” “Muhammad did not shun non-Muslims as “˜unbelievers” but from the beginning co-operated with them in the pursuit of the common good.” “Islam was not a closed system at variance with other traditions. Muhammad insisted that relations between the different groups must be egalitarian.”
Not too shabby, I’d say. Why not email NRO (letters@nationalreview.com) and tell them that they’re on the right track?