The Question Of Islam

It is the best of faiths, it is the worst of faiths. It is the faith of tolerance, it is the faith of hate. Opinions of Islam in the world could hardly be more diverse or more opposed.

However many times one hears it said that Islam is not a unitary phenomenon - that the Sufis are as different from the Salafists as chalk is from cheese - almost everyone, after pronouncing this caveat, proceeds to speak or to write as if Islam were a unitary phenomenon. This is the great achievement of the Islamists: they have turned the nastiest imaginable form of their religion into the only one that counts for non-Moslems - and for an increasing number of Moslems too. It is as if the Spanish Inquisition had been made the sole legitimate representative (to use the cant term of the 1960s and 70s) of Christianity.

The claims that Islam has in its history been religiously tolerant are difficult to disentangle in an honest fashion. Without an axe to grind, you would hardly even consider the question. Islam is a religion but Moslems are people, and their conduct may not always have been what religious enthusiasts would have wanted them to be, or believed were religiously required. Then again, what is religiously required has been a matter of dispute: and extremism has not always prevailed over pragmatism.

Calvin wanted to and tried to establish a theocracy and even put to death other Protestants

Wrong on both counts.

Dr. McGrath points out "how deeply the myth of 'the great dictator of Geneva' is embedded in popular religious and historical writings," and points to the work of Balzac and Huxley as examples of writers who made assertions without any historical facts supporting them, but who nevertheless seem to have had more influence in the shaping of the modern view of Calvin than the facts of history. [emphasis mine] ⁷ The Genevan reformer was "denied access to the city's decision-making machinery. He could not vote; he could not stand for office."⁸ In fact, he still had little power over his own church affairs!
Was Geneva A Theocracy?
by Michael Horton

...This is the great achievement of the Islamists: they have turned the nastiest imaginable form of their religion into the only one that counts for non-Moslems - and for an increasing number of Moslems too. It is as if the Spanish Inquisition had been made the sole legitimate representative ... of Christianity.
The claims that Islam has in its history been religiously tolerant are difficult to disentangle in an honest fashion. Without an axe to grind, you would hardly even consider the question. Islam is a religion, but Moslems are people, and their conduct may not always have been what religious enthusiasts would have wanted them to be, or believed were religiously required. Then again, what is religiously required has been a matter of dispute: and extremism has not always prevailed over pragmatism.
...But what is the moral of this history, if there is one? It is certainly not one of the immemorial goodness and tolerance of the western tradition and the immemorial wickedness and intolerance of the Islamic one. I suppose a Martian, on reading this story, might come to the conclusion that human beings were a bad lot, and that he had better leave Earth as soon as possible.
...But there is another moral to the story, and I do not think it is one that is encouraging about Islam as a force in the modern world. For many centuries, the record of Islam was probably no worse, and might even have been better, than the western one, at least in point of religious tolerance (the Jews of the Maghreb in the Sixteenth Century certainly thought so). Unfortunately, this is a pretty dismal standard to measure anything by. There was, in fact, plenty of room for the Islamic record to be as good as or better than the western one, and still be very bad. Between dhimmitude and death, who would not choose dhimmitude? But that is not to say it was an enviable or morally defensible fate.
...In other words, the moral of Professor Stora’s book is that Islam, whatever its past glories, achievements, strengths and even tolerance by comparison with extremely low standards prevailing at different times elsewhere, has no means as yet of dealing with the modern world in a constructive fashion, and perhaps (though here it is impossible to be dogmatic) never can have such a means without falling apart entirely. I leave it to the experts to decide.

Theodore Dalrymple in his usual penetrating brilliance. Very educational!

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