What Are They Thinking?

Deny and keep denying.

That’s the tactic some Muslims use today when faced with the chasm between modern human rights standards and the standards of traditional Islam. They also use it to disguise the fact that Islamic law constitutes an open-ended declaration of war against all non-Muslims.

Here are some of the traditional Islamic teachings that we non-Muslims are now being told we have misunderstood due to our cross-cultural insensitivity and inability to read Arabic:

• Wife beating and other forms of misogyny (female circumcision, honor killings)
• Spreading Islam by military conquest (offensive Jihad)
• Humiliation of conquered Christians and Jews (Dhimmitude)
• Muslims should not take non-Muslims as friends
• Mohammed’s nine-year-old wife
• The word “Islam” means “to submit” (to Allah’s will)
• The 9/11 attacks were permissible jihad
• It is Allah’s will for Islam to become dominant everywhere and every Muslim’s duty is to advance this goal; resistance to this imperative is injustice and impiety

The idea is to deny that these teachings are supported in Islamic law and that something is wrong with us if we ever got that impression.

The latest example of this tactic is The Muslim Next Door by Sumbul Ali-Karamali. Mrs. Ali-Karamali has impressive credentials—a J.D. from Stanford, a graduate degree in Islamic law from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

As Kamala points out here, her charm, wit and intelligence are not enough to overcome stubborn facts. You may think that Mohammed’s love life seems wildly out of place on a list of teachings which have serious implications for non-Muslim Americans. Why would it even be there? It’s there because Mohammed is the model Muslim, whose every action and opinion is law. If he did it in seventh century Arabia, it is right today in America.

So, why not say that what he did was right or at least acceptable in his time, but no longer?

Because questioning the appropriateness of using Mohammed’s behavior in seventh century Arabia as a guide for how Muslims should behave today opens the floodgates of reform. Are his commands to slay the unbeliever still appropriate when there are more than a billion Muslims in the world? Are his commands that prohibit gold ornaments, dogs, wine, representational art, pork, friendship with non-Muslims, etc. still reasonable?

I believe traditional Muslims will do everything they can to avoid reform. Here’s why.

Since the defeat of Islamic forces at Vienna on September 11 and 12, 1683, the Middle Eastern Islamic world has shrunk in size and influence. An oil-funded, resurgent, irredentist Islam is trying to reverse that trend. For them, 9/11 is the beginning of payback for 318 years of losses. They want their empire back. They see this war as a defensive effort to overcome and roll back the centuries of loss they have suffered and will continue to suffer as globalization and its attendant secularization force all traditional societies into a defensive position.

The West is defending itself against this effort -- unwilling, even if able, to recall the forces of globalization. What we have is a war in which both sides consider themselves to be on defense.

Real Islamic reform would stop the war. But traditional Muslims think they are winning and see no reason to reform. Soothing words by Mrs. Ali-Karamali, supported in various degrees by John Esposito, Khaled El Fadl, Karen Armstrong, Tariq Ramadan, Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma and many American academic heavyweights are meant to lull us into believing reform is unnecessary. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Geert Wilders, Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Spencer, Pascal Bruckner, Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish, Magdi Allam, Wafa Sultan, Amir Taheri, Brigitte Gabriel and other informed heavyweights from all parts of the political spectrum are not lulled. Some of these disputants met in debate on these issues here.

Mrs. Ali-Karamali evidently hopes we will believe without any evidence whatsoever that her Westernized interpretation of Islamic law will have some effect on the people in the Middle East who actually are in control of the definition of Islamic law and are keeping the war going. They feel besieged and surrounded by the forces of globalization, democratization and secularization in a way Mrs. Ali-Karamali does not and perhaps never has, living in America. She forgets that the colonist does not define the empire.
The tail does not wag the elephant.

But who knows? I could be wrong. Perhaps later she will see the need for the reform that will end up defining the empire. Changed circumstances can change minds. It has happened to colonists in America.

What I cannot understand is why anyone would think that traditional Islam will be successful in America without deep reform. What are they thinking? That America will ever adopt the goal of being more like Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran or Pakistan, the states where Islamic law is most accepted?

Do they really think they can bring a medieval desert society’s standards to 21st century America and no one will notice? Granted, the elites of America and most Western countries seem to be having some problem finding their sense of cultural identity. But do they imagine that the middle and working classes of America, the vast majority of the population, are going to stand still and allow this?

Do they think the women of America are going to surrender all they have gained in the last 90 years? Do they think gay America will welcome a belief that holds them to be criminal because of their sexual preference? Most amazing of all, do they think that a religion that defines itself everywhere as anti-Western and anti-American can be at home here in that hostile form?

It’s possible that an overwhelming sense of cultural superiority and entitlement blinds them to these realities. Without reform, it is inevitable that the violent people in their religion will push non-Muslim Americans too far.

My sense of the situation is that it would not take very much right now.

Originally posted on 5/16/09