Mick Hartley

The thorny old question: are we just being polite when we talk about Islamism – violent, supremacist, antisemitic to its core – as opposed to Islam? I do it myself, using “Islamism” or “Islamist” to refer to the latest atrocity. But is there really a nice tolerant Islam that can be distinguished from nasty Islamism – or are we just kidding ourselves?

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator:

Islamism, we are told, has nothing to do with Islam. Extremists are impostors. Their violence represents a distortion of a peaceful faith. Western leaders across liberal democracies have insisted on this distinction for more than two decades. In 2001, speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., George W. Bush declared: ‘The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.’ In 2014, Barack Obama declared that ‘Isil is not Islamic’. Theresa May spoke of ‘a perversion of Islam’ after the London Bridge attack. Emmanuel Macron described Islamist separatism as ‘a political ideology’ distinct from the religion itself. Anthony Albanese’s language after the Bondi Beach attack likewise emphasised unity and condemned extremist violence, framing the incident in terms of violent ideology, rather than detailed theological distinction.

Unfortunately for this position, the Islamists are very happy to supply chapter and verse from the Koran or the Hadiths to support their way of thinking. Given that Islam claims to be the final unanswerable revelation, supplanting all other religions, there’s little room for discussion.

Sacerdoti identifies four different frameworks he’s come across in his encounters, on this question of whether Islamism should be seen as an abuse of Islam, an authentic expression of it, or something uncomfortably in between.

One answer treats Islamism as Islam applied without disguise once political power is available. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who later worked covertly with Israeli intelligence to prevent attacks, was the most uncompromising voice I encountered. Sitting with me in my home, he explained that Islam is not primarily a spiritual faith but a political and legal system, and that movements like Hamas are not distorting it but implementing it coherently. In his view, the illusion lies in ‘moderate Islam’, which he described as people already living outside the doctrine while retaining its label. Yasmine Mohammed, a Canadian activist who escaped an extremist upbringing and later a forced marriage, reached a similar conclusion through her own experience, rather than ideology. She argued that Islamism flows naturally from doctrines governing law, gender, obedience, and supremacy when taken seriously. For both, Islamism is not a corruption but a revelation.

Those Muslim countries which practiced “moderate Islam” fifty or so years ago – see any newsreels or photos from Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, to see women in western-style clothes – have, in this view, now been returned to the true Islam, thanks to the petrodollar spread of Saudi Wahhabism and the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lionel Shriver in Spectator Australia takes a characteristically robust view:

The modern confection ‘Islamist’ is meant to wall off the vast Muslim majority – nice, benevolent, friendly Muslims who love their western brothers and sisters and wouldn’t hurt a fly – from the teensy minority of theologically misguided Muslims who are actually dangerous. The intention – nay, the injunction, to journalists and readers alike – is to insulate the friendly Muslims from any stigma that might otherwise attach to innocent adherents of their faith just because so many of their co-religionists keep ploughing vehicles into Christmas markets, flying aeroplanes into tall buildings and blowing stuff up.

Yet if there’s such a hard-and-fast distinction between the friendly Muslims and the extremist sort that we must contrive an entirely different adjective for the latter, why don’t we hear more sorrow from the friendly Muslims after Bondi Beach and 7 October? Or when synagogues are attacked? Wouldn’t the friendly Muslims have an even greater vested interest than secular journalists in distancing themselves from their bad-news co-religionists? How about a bit more passionate disavowal among what we’re always told is a ‘community’? Something along the lines of Joe Biden’s favourite clarion declaration: ‘This is not who we are!’…

And is Islam really a religion of peace? Historically, it’s a religion of conquest. It’s often violent (ask Salman Rushdie); the punishment for apostasy is death. Doctrinally, Islam unabashedly aims for the whole world to become Muslim. Why, supposedly everyone is born Muslim. Eventually the scales will fall from the outsiders’ eyes and they’ll realise they’ve been Muslims all along. But before they get with the programme, the faith is overtly hostile to infidels. Live-and-let-live this ain’t. Sure, most Muslims aren’t stocking up on 1,200 rounds of ammunition, but is there no relationship between Islam and the Muslim extremists who take the creed’s contempt for unbelievers up a level?