Islam's past and present are horrifying, almost too awful to contemplate. Despite what some have said here and elsewhere, it presents no parallel with Christianity, which never animated a program of continental conquest. The Inquisition was a fleeting blot on Christianity's escutcheon, and is regretted universally today. The Crusades were a response to the Muslim penetration of Eastern Europe, a matter which Dr. Pipes would appreciate. That that response was overenthusiastically endorsed by temporal rulers anxious to export their domestic brigands to some faraway place has nothing to do with the religious matter.
Dr. Pipes would have us judge Islam not on its past or present, but on its potential future. Yet the events and trends of the day give us no reason to believe that Islam will become anything other than what it currently is: a brutal, misogynistic, totalitarian code that explicitly obstructs both material and political progress.
Either Islam is impeding the development of the cultures it dominates, or it provides a rationale under which they can refuse to accept their backwardness. In either case, it stands in the way. As practiced and interpreted from its sacred documents, neither of these influences can be corrected. Therefore, the question before us is not whether Islam can be reformed, but whether it can be replaced.
What would replace it?
Whatever religion might supplant present-day Islam -- and it might go by that name -- to make it fit for human consumption, it would have to share the fundamental moral underpinnings of Judaism and Christianity: basically, the Ten Commandments. It would have to inform its adherents that they are not superior to non-adherents, nor possessed of superior rights, simply because they accept it. To become the full moral equal of the other great faiths, it would have to incorporate the ethic of benevolence, the desire to see good in and do good to all men, provided only that they respond in kind: Christ's version of the Golden Rule.
Have I said that it must become Christianity? Not quite. Christianity incorporates certain doctrinal requirements about the divinity of Christ and His purpose in becoming a man. Though illuminating and inspiring, these tenets are not necessary to the detoxification of Islam. (In fact, the Trinitarian assertion was the entering wedge by which Mohammed established his new creed, since the Monophysite Christians among whom he preached did not accept the triune nature of God as proclaimed by orthodox Christianity.) Christ did not come to Earth to proclaim a new Law, but to remind us of the old one. He said so Himself: "I come not to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it."
If Dr. Pipes envisions some other transformation of Islam that would render it a safe neighbor for us of the Judeo-Christian West, he'd better make it explicit. For my part, I doubt that any other satisfactory evolution is possible.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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