Fact or "Islamophobia?" (Robert Spence: The Fiction Of Islam As The Religion Of Peace Alert)

When he spoke this week at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said: “In the Middle East, we have seen instead the rise of a group of extremists who seek to use religion as a path to power and a means of domination. This self-appointed vanguard presumes to speak for Muslims. They do not.”

There we are again. The Administration and the mainstream media (both Left and Right) take it as axiomatic that the jihad we see all over the world today represents a perversion of Islam, repudiated by the vast majority of Muslims. The American Muslim advocacy industry, chiefly the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has recently been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case, has quite successfully portrayed any exploration of the elements of Islam that give rise to and justify jihad violence and Islamic supremacism as a manifestation of “hatred,” “bigotry,” “Islamophobia.” Those who do not accept the iron dogma that Islam contains nothing within it that can reasonably be used to justify terrorism are vilified and marginalized.

However, consider for a moment that if the iron dogma is false, the dogmatists are doing a grave disservice to the United States and even to peaceful Muslims. For if there is nothing in Islam that needs reforming, we cannot possibly offer assistance to Islamic reformers. And if Islam is a fundamentally peaceful belief-system, then we need not reevaluate our immigration policies vis-a-vis Muslims entering the U.S. from a national security standpoint, and we need not call American mosques to account for what they are teaching. If we’re just dealing with a few crazies, we need not call upon Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere to perform a searching and honest reevaluation of their beliefs, and decide whether they want to live in a state of conflict with the rest of the international community on an indefinite basis. I suspect that if the question were posed to Muslims worldwide, many would opt for otherwise universally accepted notions of human rights: the freedom of conscience, equality of dignity of women and men, equality of dignity of non-Muslims with Muslims. But we will never know, because Western leaders wouldn’t dare pose the question on those terms. After all, they don’t want to be seen as “hatemongers.”

But there is another aspect to that hatemongering. And that is that the vision of Islam and jihad that the “hatemongers” present today is identical to the one that was universally accepted by academics, including Muslim ones, up until the age of political correctness and Said’s Left-McCarthyite Orientalism swept propagandists like Carl Ernst, Omid Safi, Rashid Khalidi and others into our universities. If this is an unfair picture of Islam, motivated by hatred and powered by selection bias involving the ignoring of peaceful Muslim authorities, that is an exceedingly strange fact. But fact it is. Let us examine, to take just one example, the work of the great Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri, who died earlier this year at the age of 98.

Khadduri was an Iraqi Muslim and a scholar of Islamic law of international renown. I’ve lately been revisiting his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject. Khadduri says this about jihad:

The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world. It refused to recognize the coexistence of non-Muslim communities, except perhaps as subordinate entities, because by its very nature a universal state tolerates the existence of no other state than itself. Although it was not a consciously formulated policy, Muhammad’s early successors, after Islam became supreme in Arabia, were determined to embark on a ceaseless war of conquest in the name of Islam. The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)

Thus the jihad may be regarded as Islam’s instrument or carrying out its ultimate objective by turning all people into believers, if not in the prophethood of Muhammad (as in the case of the dhimmis), at least in the belief in God. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have declared “some of my people will continue to fight victoriously for the sake of the truth until the last one of them will combat the anti-Christ.” Until that moment is reached the jihad, in one form or another, will remain as a permanent obligation upon the entire Muslim community. It follows that the existence of a dar al-harb is ultimately outlawed under the Islamic jural order; that the dar al-Islam is permanently under jihad obligation until the dar al-harb is reduced to non-existence; and that any community which prefers to remain non-Islamic -- in the status of a tolerated religious community accepting certain disabilities -- must submit to Islamic rule and reside in the dar al-Islam or be bound as clients to the Muslim community. (Page 64)

Khadduri is, in Bush’s words, explaining a doctrine that uses “religion as a path to power and a means of domination.” Was Khadduri an “Islamophobe”? A “propangandist”? A practitioner of “selection bias”? A diabolical character misrepresenting the testimony of the texts? Did he ignore Islam’s peacefulness and moderation? Those who level such charges at those who discuss the jihad ideology of Islamic supremacism today should kindly explain how it is that a Muslim scholar like Khadduri (and there are others like him, which I will discuss at another time) could have come to the same conclusions as the “venomous Orientalists” of the 1950s and the “Islamophobic propagandists” of today.

Fair-minded observers, however, should take Khadduri’s scholarship as confirming the findings of those who say today that elements of Islam are giving rise to violence and terrorism today, and that that must be addressed by both Muslims and non-Muslims if there is ever going to be an end to it.

Not that Khadduri saw it coming, at least in 1955. In the same book, he wrote that the jihad ideology had largely fallen into desuetude:

The Muslim states, however, are quite aware that at the present it is not possible to revive the traditional religious approach to foreign affairs, nor is it in their interests to do so, as the circumstances permitting the association of religion in the relations among nations have radically changed....the jihad [has] become an obsolete weapon...Islam has at last accepted, after a long period of tension and friction with Christendom, its integration into a world order which, although originating in western Europe, now tends to encompass the entire world. (Pages 295-296)

Those assertions were much truer in 1955 than they are in 2007. Today we are dealing with a global movement that is doing all it can “to revive the traditional religious approach to foreign affairs,” and who vehemently reject the idea that “the jihad [has] become an obsolete weapon.” They are explicit opponents of the “world order” which originated in western Europe, and posit Sharia as an alternative to it. Note that Khadduri doesn’t say that Islamic sects and schools have rejected jihad and reformed the doctrines that mandated Islamic supremacism. Rather, he says that these doctrines were set aside in practice. And now they are being taken up again, fifty years after Khadduri was ready to pronounce them dead -- and now many Western analysts, ignorant of history, think that only we introduce Western ideas into the Islamic world, they will be widely adopted.

In fact, those ideas have long been present, and today’s global jihad represents a rejection of them, not a manifestation of ignorance of them. Hugh Fitzgerald has frequently pointed out at Jihad Watch that Saudi oil money, massive Muslim immigration into the West, and the revolution in communications technology have made this reassertion possible. I would also add that the Khomeini revolution in Iran has encouraged jihadists in numerous ways, not least by demonstrating that they can capture a state and hold power.

But Bush’s address is just the latest example of the fact that Western leaders are largely ignoring all this, and continuing to make policy based on fictions. Karen Hughes is reading John Esposito and Reza Aslan instead of Majid Khadduri and those who confirm his analysis. The negative consequences of this will only grow more obvious as time goes on.

Both the Left and the Right in the West, as President Bush's address to the Islamic Center in Washington shows, prefer to believe the fiction Islam is a Religion Of Peace. In truth, as Robert Spencer points out, if we read the writing of the modern mainstream Islamic thinker Majid Khadduri, a very different picture emerges in front of us. Islam is a religion of jihad dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic world state and the complete destruction or subjugation of ALL non-Islamic communities. The attacks in London carried out by Muslim jihadists therefore represent, not a perversion of Islam as deluded Western elites think, but rather the effectuation of its essence. There can be no true co-existence between the Muslim and the infidel. At best, there can be a temporary truce but that is all. Islam and now the jihadist manifestation of it known as Islamofascism, has waged a war against the West for over 1400 years. Denying the truth about Islam's dark side will in fact, leave us poorly equipped in being able to overcome and defeat it.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

The truth of the matter is that it's a race against time for Islam. Either Islam starts reforming itself, or its adherents face not only annihilation of its most violent members (a great many apparently), but possibly the outlawing of Islam itself. Certainly isolation is not out of the question. If a nuclear bomb or some other wmd goes off in some western city, how long can the civilized world allow Islamic countries to indoctrinate and spread their evil virus around the globe?

I hope Muslims realized that the worldwide banning of their religion might become a reality if their violence persists. It might come to a them or us situation in which case millions of innocent people will be slaughtered along with their murderous fellow practitioners.

There we are again. The Administration and the mainstream media (both Left and Right) take it as axiomatic that the jihad we see all over the world today represents a perversion of Islam

Here we are again, is right.

If by spouting this pap Bush can divert the miserable Dems from their Bush/US-hating rhetoric, and keeps the Islamofascists from having another "This Crusade..." soundbite to piss off their lunatic head-smacking mobsters, he's doing exactly the right thing.

These writers don't seem to understand that the rhetoric they want will achieve NOTHING of value--nothing.

...and now many Western analysts, ignorant of history, think that only we introduce Western ideas into the Islamic world, they will be widely adopted...In fact, those ideas have long been present, and today’s global jihad represents a rejection of them, not a manifestation of ignorance of them.

Excellent analysis. Yet I think our leaders will simply continue to refuse to acknowledge it, because it goes so much against the grain with them, until it is way too late.

the Left and the Right in the West, as President Bush's address to the Islamic Center in Washington shows, prefer to believe the fiction Islam is a Religion Of Peace.

Perhaps they prefer to propagate the fiction of peaceful Islam, as a way of jamming the Salafist message of intifada in the West and jihad in the Moslem world.

Islam has not always and everywhere been violent, as the essay pauses to allow Khadduri to say before going on. Indonesia and East Africa are two examples. Khadduri himself was nearly persuaded, in the 50's of the Arab Nationalists, that there was another way forward for the old Moslem societies. It was the Arab states' failure to expel the Jews of Israel from the Hijaz, their utter prostration, denudation, and final defeat in the Six Days' War of 1967 that opened the door to the throwbacks.

This has always, but always, been about the Moslems' uncontested (except by Israel) assertion that nobody but they could erect a state in the Holy Land -- never mind that the British and French took the whole region from the Turks and owned it outright in 1919 by right of conquest.

I hope Muslims realized that the worldwide banning of their religion might become a reality if their violence persists.

If the Germans had any courage, they'd classify it a cult.....Fear must have them frozen...... Pansies.....

If by spouting this pap Bush can divert the miserable Dems from their Bush/US-hating rhetoric, and keeps the Islamofascists from having another "This Crusade..." soundbite to piss off their lunatic head-smacking mobsters, he's doing exactly the right thing.

You are such a lost soul. You run around ascribing the most convoluted reasons for why some mythical "Bush" person is doing all sorts of brilliant things that no one can see or hear, and that often are directly opposite to what he does say and do.

He's not "spouting pap" for some "super duper, double dog" secret genius reason. He spouts pap because he's a liar, a traitor, and, like his old man, a cynical manipulator. Pap is the only thing he says.

People like you made other, much more extreme administrations in history possible (think of the European theater)

You are such a lost soul. You run around ascribing the most convoluted reasons for why some mythical "Bush" person is doing all sorts of brilliant things that no one can see or hear, and that often are directly opposite to what he does say and do. He's not "spouting pap" for some "super duper, double dog" secret genius reason. He spouts pap because he's a liar, a traitor, and, like his old man, a cynical manipulator. Pap is the only thing he says. People like you made other, much more extreme administrations in history possible (think of the European theater)

I love how people like you simply INVENT things to complain about.

Please, point out where I said ANY of the BS you claim about me--about "super secret" whatevers.

Let me guess--you're one of those who's going to make Hillary president by supporting Duncan Hunter and no one else, right?

I can always spot you fantasy-lost fools--you're always calling other people "Traitor!" as you do in this post.

You'd be funny if you weren't doing the Democrats' dirty work for them.

today’s global jihad represents a rejection of them, not a manifestation of ignorance of them.

They've been fighting them for centuries, of course they know about them.

If they didn't know what we stand for, and against, they wouldn't be trying to kill us. But they do, they are, and they always will.

Islam has not always and everywhere been violent...Indonesia and East Africa are two examples.

Any cult that will kill you if you leave it is manifestly a violent cult.

With respect, I don't believe that the examples of Indonesia and East Africa as examples of benign Islam stand up to scrutiny. The East Timorese have certainly had trouble enough with their Islamic neighbour. I'm not up on 19th Century East Africa, but the Mahdi's army that sacked Khartoum and was later destroyed by the British doesn't support a picture of peaceful East African Islam

Islam is pretty much the same fanatic deathcult everywhere. Nor should we allow that its remotely Israel's fault that the hardliners are gaining ground - death and jihad are hard-wired into the Quran and ahadith.

There is no such thing as "Islamophobia" just like there is no such thing as "homophobia"

If a phobia is "An extreme and unreasonable aversion or fear of some object, concept, situation, or person.", then America's aversion to Islam is far from "unreasonable".

Islam has rendered powerless non-Muslim communities it conquered and try to destroy them. Those with a memory of Muslim subjugation know the danger they represent and try to resist them fiercely. Just ask the Serbs.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

“If by spouting this pap Bush can divert the miserable Dems from their Bush/US-hating rhetoric, and keeps the Islamofascists from having another “This Crusade...” soundbite to piss off their lunatic head-smacking mobsters, he’s doing exactly the right thing.”

Well, at least you imply GWB is lying, by calling it pap.

Since nothing short of a Bush/Cheney resignation would appease the Rats, & EVERYBODY knows that; it is clear GWB’s “islam is swell” comments were not made to “divert” the Rats.

And saying kind, if fictitious, words about the enemy has never been a winning strategy, nor will it appease the terrorists & their sympathizers. Our enemy already has motivation to attack us, & GWB's words only encourage them.

So, how can he be “doing exactly the right thing”? Sounds like you thing GWB can do no wrong, even in spouting pap?

The President should speak the truth, even if it is painful to some. His words are believed by many, enemy & friend.

Either he is lying about islam, or he is as blind as Nevell Chamberlain.

These writers don't seem to understand that the rhetoric they want will achieve NOTHING of value--nothing.

As Islamists acquire sophisticated weapons, they become more dangerous to us, not less. Thus, it is in our interest to provoke them into dropping the veil of dishonesty as soon as possible. Keeping them mollified so that we can knock off the radicals while they are mass producing more in their madrassas is a very hazardous strategy, especially when we are borrowing money to do it.

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and call things as they are. Bush didn't have the guts to do it. Doing so would not only have exposed Islam for what it is, it would have similarly brought out the left when we were in a better position to deal with that mortal threat as well, a threat that is growing by similar mechanics.

So, how can he be “doing exactly the right thing”? Sounds like you thing GWB can do no wrong,

I'm so bored with that lame, lame, LAME phrase from a certain sect of FReepers--"You think Bush can do no wrong," which comes out whenever someone doesn't agree with the bombthrower contingent around here.

At your next "Hunter-Tancredo '08" meeting, why don't you folks come up with a new one?

Whenever anyone around here doesn't personally insult Bush a dozen times a day, you people call it "thinking he can do no wrong."

What a bunch of bores you guys are. Get a new tune, willya?

Go ahead. Call me a Bushbot. I’ll wear the tag proudly. I believe he’s been a great president and I believe his judgment is exactly right on the issue of Islamic extremism.

As someone else said, we all tend to be bots of one sort or another.

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