Zakir Naik is a citizen and resident of India, and it is from there, as a preacher, propagandist, and polemicist, that he has made his name as the most widely-known Muslim apologist not only on the subcontinent, or in Asia, but in the entire world. The Iranian apostate Ali Sina has dissected Zakir Naik’s meretriciousnes. You can see him at work in many YouTube postings, where he is always shown “defeating” someone – a Hindu, or a doubting Muslim, or even an apostate – and then these people somehow miraculously concede the unrebuttable rightness of “Dr.” Zakir Naik, and not infrequently, a conversion to Islam takes place practically right on the spot. This should remind Westerners of the elmer-gantries who have the blind suddenly see and the halt suddenly throw away their crutches; it isn’t just magicians who have their collaborators scattered throughout their audiences, ready to be “randomly” called on. That’s Zakir Naik.
Recently, at the endlessly fascinating YouTube, I came across Zakir Naik responding to one of those questions from a non-Muslim. And the question had to do with the Golden Rule: How is it, the questioner wished to know, that Muslims are allowed to build mosques freely in London and Paris (and he might have added, everywhere in the world) but that churches and (Jewish) temples are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, and that, furthermore, nowhere in Dar al-Islam is propagation of any non-Muslim religion allowed.
Such a question goes to the heart of Islam, and to the complete absence, in the mental makeup of Muslims, of the notion of the Golden Rule, that there ought to be some correspondence between how one treats others and how one wishes to be treated. This theme, of the absence of a Golden Rule, strikes the apostate Ali Sina, who runs the useful website of and for and by apostates from Islam, www.faithfreedom.org, as the heart of Islam.
But there is more than not having the Golden Rule. There is the absolute unshakeable conviction that Islam is True, the Only True Religion. And how do Muslims know this? Oh, because there are passages in the Qur’an that say so. Look at Zakir Naik quote 3.85: “Islam is the only true religion.” That’s good enough for Zakir Naik, and it’s good enough, one supposes, for the tens of millions of primitives who admire him so, and perhaps it even strikes a cord with the kind of mentally-deficient Spiritual Searchers who might be interested in Islam. Why, my goodness, some may say to themselves, the Qur’an itself says that Islam is the only true religion. What else do we need? Q.E.D.
As Zakir Naik says, in his amazing mathematics, if you have three teachers, and one of them claims that 2 plus 2 is 3, and another claims that 2 plus 2 is 4, and another claims that 2 plus 2 is 6, well – you don’t hire the first one, nor the third one, to teach your children. You don’t, that is, split the difference or allow matters of opinion in the realm of mathematics. And in that leap of massive illogic that Muslim apologists perform so readily, so naturally, so unruffledly, it is exactly the same with Islam. Judaism is like the man who assures us that formula 2 plus 2 equals 3; Christianity like the man who is convinced that 2 plus 2 equals 6. Both arithmetical results are absurd, and by analogy – and what an analogy – both Judaism and Christianity must be false because….well, because Islam, you see, though I’m not quite sure how that was convincingly demonstrated – turns out to be the faith that says 2 plus 2 equals 4.
But the clincher is not the argument by crazed analogy (religious belief being liked to the additions table). Nor is it the fact that in the texts of Islam itself it is claimed that Islam is the only true religion. The Qur’an is uncreated and immutable and the literal word of God, as Muslims not only believe but know (“how do they know? The Qur’an tells them so”). They know this because back in the early seventh-century, in western Arabia, in the Hijaz, over twenty-three years, a man called Muhammad, who turned out to be the Seal of the Prophets and the (true) Messenger of God, received the message, that is, the Qur’an, and that’s it, that proves it, that’s the end of the matter.
Just as we would not allow someone to propagate the notion that 2 plus 2 equals 3 or 6, so it makes no sense, when you are in complete and certain possession of the truth, to allow anything else to be propagated.
And what, for Zakir Naik, is the final and triumphant demonstration of the rightness of not allowing the propagation of any other religion, in lands where Islam dominates, and Muslims rule?
It is the very fact that Muslims are so convinced that their religion, or faith, or Total Belief-System, is the right one. The very fact that they are so convinced of this makes them unwilling to extend to the non-Muslims present (natives, or temporary wage-slaves, as in the Arabian Peninsula) in the lands dominated by Islam any of the freedoms that they are so unbegrudgingly granted by non-Muslims to Muslims in lands not yet dominated by Islam.
We pride ourselves on, we prate about “our values.” And what is the “value,” or what are the “values” that we pride ourselves on and prate about, and darkly warn that we must never give up, “for that is what the enemy, the ‘violent extremists,’ want?” The value is Tolerance, and its corollary, held up as not only as a Good but practically, nowadays, as the Highest Good: Diversity. We welcome Muslims, we show them how tolerant we are, how we allow them to build mosques and madrasas here and there and everywhere, all over the capitals of the West, and in the tiny towns, and all over other places too, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where Saudi and Libyan money, working not exactly in tandem, pays for mosques, including some truly impressive ones, and for the most advanced sound systems to carry the muezzin’s azan across such cities as previously Christian Lome, in Togo (where the dictator races his $850,000 Lamborghini – a bribe from Qaddafy to allow Libyan sound systems into every mosque in Lome — back and forth on the 30 km. of paved road that exists).
And the more we Infidels are attacked, the more we tell Muslims how deeply respectful of their religion we all are, though for some reason we never actually require of ourselves that we study the texts of that religion, the tenets of that religion, the history of the behavior of Muslims in the many and vast non-Muslim lands they have conquered, not continuously, but with interruptions and setbacks, and sometimes major defeats or undoings, over the past 1400 years. Surely we should wish to find out what the texts of Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira say. Surely at some point our leaders, the leaders of the increasingly imperiled advanced and “tolerant” world, should stop, and actually read, study, think, thoroughly assimilate, what Islam inculcates and why it is that so many Muslims take this more-than-religion, this Total Belief-System, so completely to heart, what are the elements that encourage its constant reinforcement that amounts to brainwashing, what is it that explains those hideous and terrifying mass displays of fanatical devotion to The Cause of Islam, as in the recent gathering of Hizballah mothers offering up their Hizballah babies, dressed identically as little suicide-bombers in Islamic green, as future martyrs (see here).
And what we must above all stop thinking is that if we tell the world’s Muslims, as Barack Obama did in Cairo in early June, how deeply respectful we are of Islam, that this will have any effect other than that of feeding Muslim triumphalism. For the more we praise Islam, the more Muslims think – if they do not think it simply a trick – that Islam is on the march, Islam cannot be stopped, Islam is now being accepted by the Infidels, who are confounded by the unswervable certainty of its adherents.
We, in the Western world, do not understand the Muslim mind. We don’t, and what is worse, we don’t want to begin to make the effort. We simply can’t allow ourselves to believe that the Muslims think completely differently from the way we do, and that every act by us of tolerance, natural or forced, every attempt to show Muslims that we mean them well, that we will do nothing to inhibit their vast campaign to spread Islam everywhere, is seen by them as weakness. Their campaign begins with the well-financed campaigns that target, for example, black prisoners in the United States and Great Britain, and then other economically and psychically marginal groups or individuals, who may be signed up, no questions asked and very few questions answered. For they do not even need to know much about Islam and, indeed, are carefully kept at first from learning too much about Islam until the Shahada is recited, and the commitment made, and the new convert, or “revert,” is definitively in and informed that he cannot – without great difficulty and sometimes great danger – get out. The campaigns of Da’wa are not to save individual souls, but to bring in more recruits for the Army of Islam, recruits who will blindly follow orders – the orders in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. They will now see the world as Muslims are taught to see it, as divided uncompromisingly between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, between Believers and Unbelievers, that is, Muslims and Infidels. And between the two camps there must exist, Muslims are further taught – this has to be grasped – there exists a state of permanent war, though not always of open warfare. And that war comes to an end only when the world, that truly “belongs to Allah” and to the Believers, the “best of peoples,” is entirely his, and everywhere Islam dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
Look at the last minute or so of the tape above of Zakir Naik. He is convinced that his own unswerving, blind, fanatical faith is the surest proof of its truth. He is convinced that the ability of advanced Western man to be tolerant, to allow other faiths, to entertain other ideas, to even pride himself on this very tolerance – see, if you will, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, or its predecessors, the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France and the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution, is not a source of strength, not admirable, but merely an oblique confession that Western man does not have enough certainty to be worthy of respect, much less worthy of any attempt to tolerate his religions, or his other faiths. And the same goes, in spades, for such non-Western non-Muslims as the Hindus. Think, after all, of where Zakir Naik lives. He lives in India. He is allowed to spout his stuff from deep within a country that has suffered, perhaps more than any other, from Islam and the mistreatment and murder of non-Muslims by Muslims. Yet neither the Indian government, nor the Hindus of India, touches a hair on his head. He walks about, he appears at mass rallies, he records his talks and then has them disseminated, without the slightest worry about being hurt in any way.
Compare this treatment with that of Kurt Westergaard, who the other day was almost murdered, and perhaps his five-year-old granddaughter would also have been murdered, in his own home, near Aarhus, in Denmark. And the world’s Muslims have not issued declarations of horror. They have not marched, signed petitions, or claimed that the would-be murderer deserved death. They can point to nothing, nothing at all, in the texts or tenets of the Qur’an that could serve as authority for such denunciation. And they do not denounce, but some Muslims, indeed, have praised to the skies the attempt to murder Kurt Westergaard. What does that prove? Oh, for Zakir Naik it just proves how splendid, and how very very true, is Islam. The more Islam shows its intolerance and hatred of non-Muslim creeds, the more the truth of Islam is proved.
Is that something that non-Muslims can begin to grasp? Those, of course, who live in Muslim-dominated countries, certainly grasp it. Bishop Joseph of Pakistan certainly understood it, and as an act of martyrdom, he immolated himself some years ago, as a protest against all of the unspeakable daily cruelties visited by Pakistani Muslims, never punished but often protected or supported by the Pakistani authorities, against the Christians of Pakistan. Hindus who live in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, know the truth of how Muslims think. So do non-Muslims who have had to endure, and try to survive, the decades-old genocide of Christians in the southern Sudan. So do the Christians in Iraq, now that their former “protector” Saddam Hussein is gone. His “protection” merely reflected not his great tolerance for non-Muslims, but his calculation that the Christians never constituted a threat, whereas the Shi’a Arabs did. And some of the Christians – such as Tariq Aziz – were useful to the state, especially since they constituted such a large part of the professional class of doctors, engineers, and teachers. There is no Muslim-dominated country, not even Turkey, not even Tunisia, where non-Muslims can rest easy. There is no non-Muslim country in the world where Muslims do not enjoy equality of rights with Muslims, despite atrocity after atrocity committed by Muslims, and defended or explained away by other Muslims. Even in the midst of Great Britain, or France, or other countries, Muslims make the most outrageous demands for changes in everything from school curricula to the workplace rules, and openly demonstrate and proclaim their hatred for this or that aspect of the Infidel nation-state that has accorded them the great privilege of settling within it, far from the Muslim misrule that is an as-yet inevitable but still-unrecognized result of Islam itself.
Look again, one more time, at Zakir Naik. Whenever you now run across people who prate about “our values” and about “tolerance” and about “Interfaith this” and “Outreach that,” play them these three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of Zakir Naik. Ask them to begin to put aside childish things, and among those childish things, the belief that “everyone is the same” and “all religions teach the same thing” and “we all want the same thing.” That belief is so much unexamined idiocy.
And the time for examinations is at hand. We’ve had plenty of time to study. The subject of the examination can hardly come as a surprise. It is this: Tolerance and Intolerance in Islam and in the Modern West.
I will soon be passing out the Blue Books. Please write only on one side.