From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Mon 11 Nov 2002 - 01:10:15 GMT
Islam's War Against the West: Can It Abide a Secular State?
by Anthony Flew
In his letter inviting me to contribute to this issue of FREE
INQUIRY, the editor referred to "the thesis expressed by Paul
Kurtz, Ibn
Warraq, and others "that the terrorist attacks on New York City
and
Washington, D.C., 'were profoundly religious acts'"; it went on to
say
that I had "made predictions about the likelihood of religious
terrorism
that have proven horribly correct". Indeed I had (1). But why does
anyone pretend that these were not profoundly religious acts when
Usama Bin Laden himself insists that they were? (2)
With the general public the main reason for this pretense is
presumably a nearly if not quite total ignorance of Islamic
teachings.
But any responsible politician in any of those Christian or post-
Christian
countries that since World War II have been subjected to
substantial
immigrations from Muslims must, whatever the extent of their
knowledge
of the teachings of Islam, feel a heavy duty to do all they can to
spread
the conviction - at least among the members and descendants of
those
immigrants - that Usama bin Laden's terrorist war against the
United
States and its allies is radically incompatible with the actual
teachings
of the Prophet Muhammad.
But free inquiry is not a political journal. Our concern here
is, therefore, solely with the truth. And the truth is that whereas
Christianity, for the first three centuries of its remarkable
expansion in
the face of successive persecutions, made all its converts by
peaceful
individual persuasion, Islam already during the later years of the
prophet's own lifetime - from the time of the move from Mecca to
Medina - was gaining most of its converts in consequence of
military
victories (3). And after his death Islam soon showed itself to be -
in
post-Marxian terms - the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab
imperialism. This beginning has had, as we shall see, lasting
consequences for the relations between Islam and all other
religions.
When in 1920 Bertrand Russell visited the USSR - decades
before the Politburo found it convenient to present itself as the
protector
of the Arabs - he discerned similarities between Bolshevism and
Islam:
"Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the french
Revolution with
thise of the rise of Islam"(4); and "Marx has taught that
Communism is
fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind
not
unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet"(5). So Russell
himself concluded: "Mahommedanism and Bolshevism are
practical,
social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.
What
Mahommedanism did for the Arabs, BVolshevism may do for the
Russians"(6).
As a clear, commendably honest, and altogether authoritative
epitome of the totalitarian character of Islam, consider this
manifesto
issued in Leicester, England, on behalf of the Islamic Council of
Europe:
"The religion of Islam embodies the final and most complete
word of God...Departmentalization of life into different atertight
compartments, religious and secular, sacred and profane, spiritual
and
material is ruled out...Islam is not a religion in the Western
understanding of the word. It is a faith and a way of life, a religion
and a
social order, a doctrine and a code of conduct, a set of values and
principles, and a social movement to realize them in history."
[emphasis
supplied]
In this we have a statement that satisfactorily transcends all
differences within and between various Muslim communities,
such as
those between Sunni and Shi'a, or between the so-called
fundamentalists and their opponents. The term fundamentalist is
anyway in the present case peculiarly inappropriate. It is derived
from
the title of a series of tracts - The Fundamentals - published in the
United States in 1909; and it is defined as the belief that the Bible,
as
the Word of God, is wholly, literally, and infallibly true - a belief
that,
notoriously, commits fundamentalist Christians to defending the
historicity of the accounts of Creation given in the first two
chapters of
Genesis. To rate as truly a Christian it is by no means necessary to
be
in this understanding fundamentalist. It is instead fully sufficient
to
accept the Apostles' and/or the Nicene Creed wholeheartedly. But
in
order to be properly accounted a Muslim it is essential to be a
fundamentalist with regard to (not the Bible but) the Qu'ran.
It was his recognition of the truth of those last two heavily
emphasized sentences of that statement made on behalf of the
Islamic
Concil of Europe that provoked the conservative prime minister of
Italy,
Silvio Berlusconi, in the last week of September 2001, boldly to
insist
that "We must be aware of the superiority of pur civilization, a
system
that has guaranteed the well-being, respect for human rights and -
in
contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political
rights."
Just as son as they learned that Berlusconi had uttered these
words, a bevy of European politicians rushed forward to denounce
him.
The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said, "I can hardly
believe
that the Italian prime minister made such statements." The
spokesman
for the European Commission, Jean-Christophe Filori, added: "We
certainly do not share the views expressed by Signor Berlusconi."
Italy's center-left opposition spokesman Giovanni Berlinguer
called the
words of Berlusconi "eccentric and dangerous". Within days he
was
effectively forced to withdraw those politically most incorrect
words.
ISLAM AND THE STATE
One especially good way of revealing the practical
consequences of Islam's not being "a religion in the Western
understanding of the word" but being instead "a religion and a
social
order, a doctrine and...a set of values and principles and a social
movement to realize them in history" is by considering the history
of the
creation of Pakistan (7).
When in India during the 1920's M. A. Ansari was promoting the
Nationalist Muslim Party, he did this in the belief that a future
whole-
continent state of independent India could be religiously neutral,
to the
extent of accommodating both Hndus and Muslims as equal
citizens.
But his party failed to win substantial Muslim support. Instead
there
was among Muslims in India throughout that decade a general
retreat
from the original idea of all-Indian nationalism towards the
eventually
realized ideal of the two separate communities of Hindus and
Muslims
forming two separate independent states.
The Muslims in fact opted decisively for an exclusively religious
rather than a secular pluralist identity. It proved impossible for
Ansari
or anyone else to overcome this Islamic predisposition and to
persuade
the majority of Indian Muslims to be willing to coexist with
Indian Hindus
in the secular nation state envisaged by Nehru, the leader of the
Indian
National Congress. Nehru had declared: "There shall be no state
religion...nor shall the state either directly or indirectly endow any
religion..."
As early as April 1929 the Muslim League founder Muhhamad
Ali Jinnah ( had opposed that ideal with his Fourteen Points. In
these
he had insisted that state neutrality was not enough and that it was
state support that Muslims demanded. This Muslim position had
already been foreshadowed as early as 1870, when varoius imams
in
Northern india issued a famous fatwa to the effect that India was
Dar-al-
Islam - "Islamic Territory" - in virtue of the positive protection
given to
Islamic observance by the laws of the (British) Indian Empire.
When in 1906 the newly elected (classically) Liberal
administration in London took some very small and tentative
initial steps
toward the ultimate establishment of an independent,
democratically
self-governing nation state in India, it began to discover what it
was
extremely reluctant to learn, that a secular, pluralist state
grounded in
universal adult suffrage was unacceptable to Muslims.
It was and is unacceptable because it is, apparently, contrary to
the Islamic dhimma (9). Thius excluded all non-Muslims other
than
"People of the Book" from any political rights whatever. "People
of the
Book" - mainly if not solely Christians and jews - are tolerated as
tribute-paying citizens of an Islamic state, though without any
form of
franchise beyond their own religious community.
In the Indian case, the subsequent course of events is fairly
well known. Muslims, having rejected the all-Indian nationalism
espoused by Ansari, were unable to reconcile themselves to the
prospect of citizenship in a secular, pluralist state. In 1940 the
Muslim
League, unwilling to tolerate the consequences of the wider
franchise
that this required, demanded and was given what amounted to a
constitutional veto. The eventual independence agreement in 1947
resulted, after a huge amount of inter-communal slaughter (10), in
the
separation from India of the principal overwhelmingly Muslim
areas
other than Kashmir, and the consequent emergence of East and
West
Pakistan. Kashmir was retained by India because its hereditary
ruler
was a Hindu and Nehru himself was a Kashmiri Brahmin. As for
east
Pakistan, it eventually became Bangladesh.
Since then, whereas India has achieved an unblemished record
of democratic self-government, becoming by far the most
populous
democracy in the world (11), Pakistan and the two other provinces
of
the former British Empire in which Muslims formed a very
substantial
majority have not. About Pakistan no more need be said here than
that,
at the time of writing, a Pakistani academic was under prosecution
for
the capital offence of defection from Islam.
The first communal catastrophe in Nigeria after its
independence was a civil war in which the Muslim and animist
majority
suppressed an independence revolt by the Christian Ibo. In the
suppression of this revolt at least a million Ibo lost their lives.
When
later, in 1973, a military coup overthrew an administration that
was said
to have been outstandingly corrupt even by Nigerian standards,
but
which had been elected on an adult franchise that included
Christians
and animists as well as Muslims, students at Beyero, Kano and
other
universities in the overwhelmingly Muslim part of the country
paraded
carrying banners which proclaimed in Hausa, Arabic, and English:
"Democracy is unbelief: We do not want a constitution, We want
government by Qu'ran alone."
The second of those "two other provinces of the former british
Empire in which Muslims formed a very substantial majority" was
what
in the days of that Empire was called the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
This
has become by far the worst case of all. For, over many years,
forces
of different kinds from the overwhelmingly Muslim north have
been
striving by different methods and with different degrees of
intensity to
subjugate the equally overwhelmingly Christian and animist
south.
Most recently and most scandalously, the northern authorities
have
been permitting if not positively encouraging brown-skinned
Muslims
from the north to enslave blacks, and particularly Christian Blacks
in the
south (12).
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