Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in the Free Press, takes apart the Economist’s recent claim that the far right and Islamism are the two small extremist groups that we have to worry about, while Islam itself “poses no serious danger”.
The claim that Islamic extremism and the far right are equally balanced poles on either side of a sensible middle, exemplified by the Economist, is easily disposed of – especially if, like Hirsi Ali, you see, from bitter experience, little distinction between Islam and Islamism. States like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have spent billions of petrodollars exporting their brand of hard-line Islam, while, on the other side of the Sunni/Shia divide, Iran still finances a vast international web of subversive groups across the west, targeting Jews and other enemies of the Islamist world view. By comparison the efforts of the far right are fringe and minimal while, as surely most reasonable observers have realised by now, the far greater internal threat to our liberal democratic world comes now from the hard left.
As for Islam itself being no problem here in the UK….
…take The Economist’s own polling, which is the part of its cover package that ought to have determined the tone of the leader and did not. The magazine commissioned a survey of British Muslims for this issue. It found that 33 percent believe Islamic principles should guide public life, laws, politics, and government; that 29 percent would give sharia some role in British law; that 20 percent think Islamic teaching should prevail over the law of the land where the two conflict; that 32 percent consider violence justifiable against those who insult the Prophet Muhammad, a proportion that rises to 41 percent among Muslims under 35 and falls to 25 percent among their elders; that 52 percent think homosexuality is wrong; and that 76 percent want the deliberate damaging of a religious text to be a criminal offense.
The Economist’s own reporters record that counter-extremism researchers estimate about one British Muslim in five to hold Islamist sympathies. As mentioned, British Muslims are 6.5 percent of the population of England and Wales. One in five of that share is approximately 1.3 percent of the general public, that is, some 775,000 people. The Economist editorial was titled “The Good News: Few Muslims Want to Subvert European Democracy.” I do not know what the word “few” means in the editorial vocabulary of this magazine, but it does not, in ordinary English, mean 775,000. If another poll commissioned by The Economist had found that 775,000 members of any other identifiable British community were committed to imposing a legal order incompatible with liberal democracy, that finding would not have been casually labeled “good news.”
Also…
Take ex-Muslims. Apostasy, in the classical vocabulary of Sunni jurisprudence, carries the death penalty; every one of the four Sunni schools of law is on record to this effect. In modern Europe, the sentence is not carried out by the state, but the social sentence is severe. The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, founded in 2007, gives many of its members pseudonyms because they cannot show their faces without risk. Its founder, Maryam Namazie, has lived under continuous protection for years. The number of Europeans who have quietly left Islam is, by every credible estimate, in the millions; the number who feel safe enough to say so publicly is a small fraction of that. Any other confessional community subjected to the same treatment would surely command The Economist’s attention. These are Europeans. The Economist is failing the very community it purports to serve.
The doctrinal current The Economist minimizes is not a fringe. It is a confident, literate, professionally successful movement that has captured a great deal of the institutional apparatus catechizing the next generation. It has been telling that generation, in perfectly clear terms and with perfectly authentic textual citations, that Islam must conquer the world, that Jews are the most hostile of humanity to the believers and must be exterminated, that women are subordinate by divine decree, that apostasy is treason against the community, and that homosexuality is a crime against nature and God. These teachings are drawn from canonical texts: the Quran, Muhammad al-Bukhārī, Sahih Muslim, the classical commentaries, the fatwa of the most venerated jurists. The movement’s operational genius is that it does not distort the sources. It cites them. The so-called mainstream scholarship spends its time explaining that the sources do not mean what they plainly say, and every young Muslim who reads them for himself can see that this “mainstream” is doing visible interpretive labor while the literalist is only pointing. In a tradition that venerates submission to the text, the pointer wins that argument.
The effective counterstrategy is not, as The Economist implies, more interfaith dialogue and firmer condemnation of the far right. It begins with the courageous efforts that a small number of Muslim reformers have made, at great cost to themselves: people such as Faraj Fūda, assassinated in Cairo in 1992; Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭāhā, hanged in Khartoum in 1985; Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, forced into exile from Egypt in 1995 and dead in 2010; Khaled Abou El Fadl at UCLA; Namazie in London; and others. It is their efforts to reform their faith, to emphasize interpretation over a literal application of holy texts that, however authentic, make demands no God worth worshipping would command, and their right to argue for reform, that need support. This is the argument that has to be made, because it is the only argument that respects the intelligence of the young Muslim who has read the sources and drawn the plain conclusion. It is also the argument that the Western commentariat, including The Economist, has consistently declined to support.
If the trouble with Islam is doctrinal, then the pretense of two symmetrical extremisms participates in the very evasion “mainstream” Muslim scholarship has been performing for multiple generations. It not only falsifies the nature of the crisis, it grants a false equivalence the imprimatur of The Economist, and enshrines it in the language of liberalism.
