This article appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday with the note that it was originally published in The Independent. Click on that link and you will see that it appeared in The Independent back on July 17, a week shy of three months ago. Why is it only being reprinted now? Is the Islamic propaganda machine running short of new material?
Anyway, this is a particularly risible farrago of assorted nonsense. You’d think even the Huffington Post would be embarrassed to publish something like this, but such is the state of the public discourse these days. We’re now supposed to believe that Islam is the mother lode of good ideas, the wellspring of freedom and democratic values.
I’ve often mocked government spokesmen and the mainstream media for insisting the jihad terror has nothing to do with Islam while jihad terrorists routinely invoke the Qur’an and Sunnah to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims. Now Atif Rashid has taken this idea that massive numbers of Muslims misunderstand their own religion a step farther: apparently we are now to buy the notion that every Islamic state that has ever existed and that exists now has misunderstood Islam. If “Islam from its very outset advocated for complete freedom, justice and democratic values,” it is extraordinary that there has never been a single state that has governed according to Islamic law that has ever allowed for “complete freedom, justice and democratic values.” Every Islamic state, from the Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates to contemporary Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and the rest, has misunderstood Islam, and missed the principles that Atif Rashid is here presenting as self-evident.
It’s beyond absurd. It’s cynical and deceptive propaganda offered by someone who almost certainly knows that what he is saying is false, in order to deceive unbelievers into remaining complacent about the jihad threat.
More below.
“Islam Isn’t Just Compatible With Western Values, It Fully Endorses Them,” by Atif Rashid, Huffington Post, October 10, 2016 (thanks to Michael):
Originally published in The Independent
…The core Western values of democracy, freedom and justice can be seen as the bedrock of its civilisation. For practising, informed Muslims, freedom and democratic values are anything but new to them. Islam from its very outset advocated for complete freedom, justice and democratic values.
In reality, the only arguably democratic state in the history of Islam has been Kemalist Turkey, now in its last days. Secular Turkey was founded upon an explicit rejection of political Islam, not upon a development within Islam that allowed for democratic government. There never has been an Islamic humanist democracy in the 1,400-year history of the religion.
It was Islamic injunctions which first spurred the great advancements made during the Islamic Golden Age from the 8th to the 13th century. Many are quick to point out though, how today, Islamic nations seem to have fallen into Dark Age depths. What one would find however, is this being a direct consequence of failing to follow Islamic injunctions faithfully, due to hardline clerical mindsets – as opposed to actually being a result of Islamic teachings.
All right. It’s farfetched enough to claim that every last Islamic state in the world today fails to follow Islamic injunctions faithfully, but every last one throughout history would also have had to have done so if what Rashid says is true. Even if there were “great advancements made during the Islamic Gold Age from the 8th to the 13th century,” and that claim in itself is wildly exaggerated, they never resulted in democratic rule.
From the outset, Islam has always advocated for a democratic form of governance, leaving it to the people to decide how and by whom they should be led.
When? Where? Notice that Rashid offers no examples, because every last Islamic state throughout history has been an authoritarian state.
So any Muslim demanding Shariah Law forcibly be imposed in the West is not only entirely ignorant of Islam but insolent towards the freedom and opportunities Western countries offer – by which they spout their false ideology.
Rashid goes on to offer an exposition of the Qur’an that purports to establish “Islam’s support for a democratic government.” The obvious response to his exegesis is this: why is he apparently the first to have discovered it? Why has no Islamic state ever applied it?
And why does the Huffington Post so assiduously engage in Islamic apologetics? Why is it so intent on making sure that Westerners think Islam is benign in every aspect? What is the endgame here?