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For 25 years, CAIR and other American Muslims have, with considerable success, promoted the idea that the prevailing message of 9/11 is that it would be Islamophobic to tar Islam with any semblance of blame for the mass murder on 9/11 carried out by Arab Muslims in the name of Islam. It is statistically indisputable that the vast majority of Muslim American citizens are not in any way currently involved in terrorism or violence; therefore, as we are told, any imputation of fault to Islam would be unfair. We even permitted a mosque to be included in the building that replaced the Twin Towers.
We are also told that any Quranic suras calling for violence apply only to long-past historical contexts and that violent jihad is only permissible in self-defense and even that jihad really means a personal struggle for a deeper spiritual life. Oddly enough, millions of Muslims (including the 9/11 terrorists) have apparently misinterpreted their defining texts for centuries. Was the violent conquest of much of the Christian world, the destruction of tens of thousands of Christian churches and synagogues, the enslavement of millions (probably 14 million mostly European Christians and 10 million Africans) all just pre-emptive self-defense in search of a deeper spirituality or perhaps merely an honest and forgivable misreading of the Quran and the Hadith?
The current attacks on Christians in Africa and on the Yazidis in Iraq, including the forcible taking of young women, must likewise be additional instances of exceptions and misinterpretation. Perhaps the fact that Muslims rioted and their scholars and imams formally protested a violation of the tenets of their creed when Britain outlawed slavery in colonies that were once part of the Arab and Ottoman empires was also a misinterpretation of texts limited to a historical context in which slavery of infidels was not merely permitted but encouraged.
No one fears the likelihood of a Methodist suicide bomber or violent Unitarian extremists, but hundreds or maybe thousands of times a year (a group in Paris tracks such things) a Muslim will kill or attempt to kill non-Muslim strangers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” This in both the Associated Press Handbook and the UK Authorized Police Practice guidebook translates as “my motives are unclear.” However, it appears to have a more specific meaning and a rather clear intent that has somehow transcended the boundaries of some limiting historical context.
Muslims do adapt to Western sensibilities and values when in a minority or otherwise subject to such influences. Pakistan legislated exceptions to Shariah rules of evidence after the international embarrassment of a particular Shariah-driven atrocity (previously discussed here), probably because that nation’s elite have friends from uni back in the UK and many others who have international business dealings. The Saudis (reluctantly?) banned concubinage in the 1970s also due to the adverse perceptions of their Western customers, elite companions and strategic protectors.
Compare that to Afghanistan, a country without a jet-set elite and whose leadership couldn’t care less what the West thinks. The Taliban just outlawed school attendance for girls on the theory that educated women would not be consonant with genuine Muslim values. Yet another textual misinterpretation, no doubt.
Perhaps the lesson is that Muslims may (appear to?) adapt when Western influences are strong, combined with the fact that Islam has absolutely no mechanisms to change, revise or otherwise detach from its many problematic textual foundations, no matter how inapt or ragingly stupid, means that we have to assume that any apparent conformity to Western sensibilities is technically only temporary and that anytime Muslims feel ascendant, the unreformed, real Islam would necessarily re-emerge.
In search of clarity, and to honor the only real victims of 9/11, perhaps it should be a new rite that on this day all Americans without exception affirm that
It is not now nor was it ever right and just to impose a religious belief by force or attack others solely for their beliefs.
It is not now nor was it ever right and just to enslave other persons, to sexually assault women or to reduce any group of persons to lesser status with fewer rights.
As Americans, we hereby renounce and abjure any and all texts, traditions, practices and beliefs that call for intolerance, denial of equality, denial or curtailment of the rights of free speech, curtailment of the freedom of religion or freedom of expression.
Would it be Islamophobic if something along these lines became a common shared practice, and if so, so what?
Discussion (11)
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Perhaps we should print this up on pamphlets to hand out to new immigrants, like they did in Britain. Apparently many just didn't know that assaulting women was wrong. I'm sure handing them a pamphlet caused a moment of epiphany and that the problem will go away.
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I've come a long way in my view of Islam. Without belaboring the iterations, I've reached the conclusion that most Muslims are not radical. They can, however, change their views over time, especially if they feel they are being discriminated against. Therefore, any Muslim has the potential to become radical, just as one can reform (which is much less likely). That fact creates a real dilemma in terms of immigration and assimilation.
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One analyst explained that individual Muslims may not be particularly attached to practices and beliefs but once there is a large enough group to have an imam and a mosque, the imam will ask why they let their daughters dress like the slutty infidel girls and why their sons hang out with non-believers. Identity will be stressed. And it is effective. Every prayer contains some reference to struggle and eventual victory not over sin but over other people. Watch the crowds of mostly Muslims who listen to Douglas Murray debate and notice the discomfort when he discusses the obvious and their pronounced inability to even hypothetically criticize anything in their texts or history. Soviet Marxist theorists were more flexible and less defensive.
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This makes me want to revisit Turkey. The language remains intriguing. Though my impressions are almost certainly outdated, Turks’ main preoccupations seemed to be inflation, unemployment, and Kurds. But beer was available everywhere.
I think only once have I met someone overseas with a wildly mistimed, wrong-end-of-the-telescope view of the past. This was a guy in South America who believed that by the terms of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Falkland Islands had devolved, in the absence of a Spanish empire, to Argentina. Sure. You bet. Good luck with that.
As for 9/11, I can do without remembrances. Face it, we lost that one. We blew it. And we’re still blowing it. Some time ago on these pages I wrote that warfare has no customer-service dimension. Boy was I wrong. American wars have nothing but customers and they are all always right. It is a principle of American warfare, and diplomacy, that everybody’s a winner. Everybody’s just gotta be. The very idea that anyone could be our enemy - or that any enemy ought to be on his knees, begging for mercy and receiving none - is intolerable.
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CAIR is actually an acronym. Constantly Agitating Islamic Radicals.
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