by
Jamie Glazov
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew G. Bostom,
the editor of the highly acclaimed
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and of
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. He has published articles and commentary on Islam in the
Washington Times,
National Review Online,
The New York Post, The New York Daily News,
Frontpagemag.com,
American Thinker,
Pajamas Media,
The Daily Caller,
Human Events, and other print and online publications. He is the author of the new book,
Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism. Visit his blog at
andrewbostom.org/blog/.
FP: Andrew G. Bostom, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Congratulations on your new book,
Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism.
What inspired you to write this book about Sharia Law and how is it different from other books?
Bostom: Thanks Jamie!
I became
fascinated (if alarmed) by some excellent polling data reported in the
Spring of 2007 resulting from a collaboration between the University of
Maryland, and World Opinion Dynamics (and wrote about it
here).
The survey sample was quite extensive (encompassing some 4000
individuals) and comprised of face to face interviews in local languages
of Muslims from Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Data from two
questions jumped out at me. The first asked about the strict
implementation
of Sharia law in Islamic countries. Sixty-five percent of Muslims were
moderately or strongly in favor of this proposition. The second was
about desire to establish/re-establish the Caliphate (i.e., a
transnational Muslim superstate, consistent with the borders established
by the
jihad conquests across Asia, Africa, and Europe, from the 7
th through 17
th
centuries). Again, 65% of the Muslim sample was supportive of this
goal. I began to ask myself a series of questions. How has the idea of
the Caliphate been actualized in the past? Why has it survived to this
day? Why is the notion of a Caliphate so popular among Muslims, and what
are implications of its popularity, for Muslims, and non-Muslims? These
questions lead inevitably to Islam’s quintessence, and at the same time
far reaching set of guidelines, the Sharia, or Islamic law.
Thus I began to research and write additional essays on many broad
themes related to the Sharia, which, when combined with other
introductory materials written specifically for the book, including
Andrew C. McCarthy’s elegant Foreword, eventually became
Sharia Versus Freedom—The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism.
But the final and perhaps most important inspiration proved to be a
patient, careful reading of Whittaker Chambers’ autobiographical opus,
Witness.
I discovered that much could be gleaned from Chambers’
witness-martyrdom in the struggle against Communism, sacrificing
himself, as he put it, “a little in advance to try to win for you that
infinitesimal slightly better chance,” and applied to the modern threat
of resurgent Islamic totalitarianism. As described in
the book, Chambers’ own
brief 1947 comparison
of Communism and nascent Islam comported with more extensive,
independent contemporary characterizations (i.e., made from 1920-2001)
by Western scholars and intellectuals who similarly juxtaposed these
ideological systems. I also elucidate in
Sharia Versus Freedom Chambers’
understanding that faith in the Judeo-Christian God was conjoined to
Biblical freedom. The antithetical conceptions of modern atheistic
totalitarianism—epitomized by Communism—and equally liberty-crushing
Islamic doctrines are compared. Specifically, with regard to Islam, I
discuss “hurriyya,” Arabic for “freedom as perfect slavery to Allah,”
and how the God of Islam, the unrelenting autocrat, Allah, engendered,
in Palgrave’s words, Islam’s “Pantheism of Force.”
Unlike other treatments of the Sharia, per se, the book moves well
beyond a few illustrative “shocking” examples of these ancient Islamic
doctrines applied in our era.
Sharia Versus Freedom weaves
together a very detailed, living tapestry which elaborates the
unbowdlerized doctrinal elements of Sharia, while demonstrating the
contemporary popularity of Sharia mandates (i.e., via copious polling
data from representative Muslim population samples, as well as numerous
examples from the legal codes of Muslim societies, and the mainstream
Muslim jurists associations advising Muslims who reside in non-Muslim
societies), and the consequences of its application across space and
time, through the present. The book also elucidates how jihadism, as
well as Jew- and a more general non-Muslim infidel-hatred, are intrinsic
to the Sharia, while dissecting modern Sharia apologetics, which span
the political spectrum. In a final section, the book offers concrete
examples of strategies to combat Sharia encroachment, and concludes
with a discussion of what Whittaker Chambers’ apostasy from
Communism—and the shared insights of contemporary apostates from
Islam—can teach the West.
FP: What is Sharia and why is it relevant to US foreign and domestic affairs?
Bostom: According to the most authoritative
twentieth-century Western Islamic legal scholar, Joseph Schacht (d.
1969), the Sharia, or “clear path to be followed,” is the “canon law of
Islam,” which “denotes all the individual prescriptions composing it.”
Schacht traces the use of the term
Sharia to Koranic verses such as
45:18,
42:13,
42:21, and
5:48,
noting an “old definition” of the Sharia by the seminal Koranic
commentator and early Muslim historian Tabari (d. 923), as comprising
the law of inheritance, various commandments and prohibitions, and the
so-called
hadd punishments. These latter draconian punishments, defined by the Muslim prophet Muhammad either in the Koran or in the
hadith (the
canonical collections of Muhammad’s deeds and pronouncements),
included: (lethal) stoning for adultery; death for apostasy; death for
highway robbery when accompanied by murder of the robbery victim; for
simple highway robbery, the loss of hands and feet; for simple theft,
cutting off of the right hand; for “fornication,” a hundred lashes; for
drinking wine, eighty lashes. As Schacht further notes, Sharia
ultimately evolved to become “
understood [as] the totality of Allah’s commandments relating to the activities of man.” The holistic Sharia, he continues, is nothing less than Islam’s quintessence, “
the Sharia is the most characteristic phenomenon of Islamic thought and forms the nucleus of Islam itself.”
Schacht then delineates additional salient characteristics of the
Sharia which have created historically insurmountable obstacles to its
reform, through our present era.
Allah’s law is not to be penetrated by the
intelligence . . . i.e., man has to accept it without criticism…It
comprises without restriction, as an infallible doctrine of duties the
whole of the religious, political, social, domestic and private life of
those who profess Islam, and the activities of the tolerated members of
other faiths so far as they may not be detrimental to Islam.
Additionally, Schacht elucidated how Sharia—via the uniquely Islamic institution of
jihad war—regulates
the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. These regulations
make explicit the sacralized vulnerability of unvanquished non-Muslims
to jihad depredations, and the permanent, deliberately humiliating legal
inferiority for those who survive their jihad conquest, and
incorporation into an Islamic polity, governed by Sharia.
Thus Sharia, Islamic law, is not merely holistic, in the general
sense of all-encompassing, but totalitarian, regulating everything from
the ritual aspects of religion, to personal hygiene, to the governance
of an Islamic state, bloc of states, or global Islamic order. Clearly,
this latter political aspect is the most troubling, being an ancient
antecedent of more familiar modern totalitarian systems. Specifically,
Sharia’s liberty-crushing and dehumanizing political aspects feature:
open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic
order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties—including freedom of
conscience and speech—enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death;
discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs,
and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments
which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for
adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.
Following violent Muslim reactions to the amateurish “
Innocence of Muslims” video, which depicted some of the less salutary aspects of
Muhammad’s biography, international and domestic Islamic agendas are openly converging with vehement calls for
universal application of Islamic blasphemy law. This demand to abrogate Western freedom of expression was reiterated in a
parade of speeches by Muslim leaders at the UN General Assembly. The US Muslim community echoed such admonitions, for example during a
large demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan, and in a
press release by the Islamic Circle of North America.
Previously, the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference
(subsequently renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation [OIC])—the
largest voting bloc in the UN, which represents all the major Muslim
countries, and the Palestinian Authority—had sponsored and actually
navigated to passage a compromise U.N. resolution insisting countries
criminalize what it calls “
defamation of religion.” Now the OIC—via its Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu—is
calling
for a specific ban on speech allegedly impugning the character of
Islam’s prophet, which he termed “hate speech.” Ihsanoglu accompanied
his
demand with a thinly veiled threat of violence should such “provocations” recur:
You have to see that there is a provocation. You
should understand the psychology of people who revere their prophet and
don’t want people to insult him,…If the Western world fails to
understand the sensitivity of the Muslim world, then we are in
trouble…[such provocations pose] a threat to international peace and
security and the sanctity of life.
Though the language of the OIC “defamation of religion” resolution
has been altered at times, the OIC’s goal has remained the same—to
impose at the international level a Sharia-compliant conception of
freedom of speech and expression that would severely limit anything it
arbitrarily deemed critical of, or offensive to, Islam or Muslims. This
is readily apparent by reading the OIC’s supervening “alternative” to
both the US Bill of Rights and the UN’s own 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, i.e., the
1990 Cairo Declaration, or Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam.
The opening of the preamble to the
Cairo Declaration repeats a Koranic injunction affirming Islamic supremacism (Koran 3:110, “You are the
best nation ever brought forth to men . . . you believe in
Allah”); and its last articles, 24 and 25, maintain [
article 24], “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia”; and [
article 25] “The Islamic Sharia is the
only source
of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the
articles of this Declaration.” The gravely negative implications of the
OIC’s Sharia-based Cairo Declaration are most apparent in its
transparent rejection of freedom of conscience in Article 10, which proclaims:
Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is
prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his
poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion, or to
atheism.
Ominously,
articles 19 and 22
reiterate a principle stated elsewhere throughout the document, which
clearly applies to the “punishment” of so-called apostates from Islam,
as well as “blasphemers”:
There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Sharia.
Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia.
Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and
propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil
according to the norms of Islamic Sharia.
Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be
exploited or misused in such a way as may violate sanctities and the
dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical values or disintegrate,
corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith.
Existing mainstream Islamic institutions and their ongoing efforts in
North America are facilitating this global Sharia agenda, as evidenced
by the following:
- Data (compiled here)
from an April 2001 survey performed by the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) revealed that 69 percent of American Muslims in America
affirmed that it was “absolutely fundamental” or “very important” to
have Salafi (i.e., fundamentalist Islamic) teachings at their mosques,
while 67 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “America is an
immoral, corrupt society.” Another poll
conducted in Detroit-area mosques during 2003 found that 81 percent of
the respondents endorsed the application of Sharia law where Muslims
comprised a majority of the population.
- The trial involving the Texas Holy Land Foundation’s funding of terrorism revealed
an internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991. Written by
an acolyte of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Brotherhood’s major
theoretician, lionized Qatari cleric, popular al-Jazeera television
personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council — the document,
entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for
the Group in North America,” is self-explanatory: “The Ikhwan [Muslim
Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of
grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from
within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the
hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is
made victorious over all other religions.”
- A scholarly study
by Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi published in The Middle East
Quarterly, “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques,” looked at 100
mosques randomly selected across the U.S. in order to test the
hypothesis that Sharia adherence within mosques (including, among many
other factors, gender separation, clothing, male facial hair, jewelry,
strictness on shoulder-to-shoulder alignment during prayer, etc.) would
correlate with incitement to jihadism. This key summary finding was highlighted
by the authors: “51 percent of mosques had texts that either advocated
the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or
advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount
importance to a Muslim; 30 percent had only texts that were moderately
supportive of violence like the Tafsir Ibn Kathir and Fiqh as-Sunna; 19
percent had no violent texts at all.” Thus, 81 percent of this
statistical sample representative of U.S. mosques were deemed as
moderately (30 percent) to highly (51 percent) supportive of
promulgating jihadist violence to impose Sharia.
- A provisional inquiry, “Shariah Law and American State Courts,”
evaluated 50 appellate court cases from 23 states that involved
conflicts between Sharia and American state law. There were examples of
American judges accepting “input” from Sharia in rendering judgments,
included an odious, widely publicized New Jersey ruling that
upheld Sharia-sanctioned marital rape. Appellate court intervention was
required to reverse this ruling in July 2010: Western legal norms
prevailed over Sharia — with the presiding judge soberly concluding that
the Muslim husband’s “conduct in engaging in nonconsensual sexual
intercourse was unquestionably knowing, regardless of his view that his
religion permitted him to act as he did.” Completely ignored at the time
of these New Jersey proceedings was the fact that marital rape is not
recognized as criminal, but rather is sanctioned by a fatwa of the
Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America. (see below) Moreover, David Yerushalmi
provided another clear, didactic example of the need for American Laws
for American Courts (ALAC) legislation to block such efforts. He
described in brief an appellate court decision from Maryland, cited in the Center for Security Policy Study, where:
The court enforced a Pakistani Sharia court’s
judgment of custody in favor of the father even though the mother had
argued that she was not provided due process because had she gone to
Pakistan to contest the case, she could have been subject to capital
punishment for having a new relationship with a man not sanctioned by
Sharia.
Yerushalmi then summarized the salient facts of the case and appellate court ruling*, as
follows:
The Maryland appellate court ruled that since the
woman could not prove she’d be executed had she gone to Pakistan to
litigate custody in the Pakistan Sharia Court, which is a national-state
court in Pakistan, her failure to go to Pakistan and take the risk of
execution precluded her from making the void as against public policy
argument. ALAC would have provided the Maryland appellate court the
legislative clarity to have reversed the lower court’s outrageous
decision (emphasis added).
- Investigations
of textbooks widely used in the New York City area Islamic schools, as
well as the Islamic Saudi Academy of Fairfax, Va., discovered the
promotion of Sharia supremacism, including sacralized disparagement and
hatred of non-Muslims, especially Jews. When questioned for a New York Daily News story
in 2003, Yahiya Emerick, head of a Queens-based non-profit
curriculum-development project for the Islamic Foundation of North
America, defended the language in these books, denying they were
inflammatory. Emerick opined, “Islam, like any belief system, believes
its program is better than others. I don’t feel embarrassed to say that.
. . . [The books] are directed to kids in a Muslim educational
environment. They must learn and appreciate there are differences
between what they have and what other religions teach. It’s telling kids
that we have our own tradition.”
- The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America’s
mission statement maintains that the organization was, “founded to
provide guidance for Muslims living in North America. . . . AMJA is a
religious organization that does not exploit religion to achieve any
political ends, but instead provides practical solutions within the
guidelines of Islam and the nation’s laws to the various challenges
experienced by Muslim communities. ” It is accepted
by the mainstream American Muslim community, and regularly trains imams
from throughout North America. Notwithstanding this mainstream
acceptance, AMJA has issued rulings which sanction the killing of apostates, “blasphemers,” (including non-Muslims guilty of this “crime”), and adulterers (by stoning to death); condoned female genital mutilation, marital rape, and polygamy; and even endorsed the possibility for offensive jihad against the U.S., as soon as Muslims are strong enough to wage it.
- Finally, as reported
by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Islamic Circle of North
America (ICNA), one of the largest mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations,
in its 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book, openly acknowledges being the American branch of a global jihadist phenomenon referred to as the “Islamic Movement.” The 2010 Hand Book observes
that branches of this movement “are active in various parts of the
world to achieve the same objectives. It is our obligation as Muslims to
engage in the same noble cause here in North America.” These efforts will culminate in the (re-)creation of a transnational Islamic superstate, the Caliphate,
under Sharia law — the united Muslim ummah (community) in a united
Islamic state, governed by an elected khalifah in accordance with the
laws of Sharia.
FP: Tell us about Sharia courts in the United Kingdom and their significance.
Bostom: A December 2, 2010
Pew poll documented strong support for hadd punishments in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria:
About eight-in-ten Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan (82%
each) endorse the stoning of people who commit adultery; 70% of Muslims
in Jordan and 56% of Nigerian Muslims share this view. Muslims in
Pakistan and Egypt are also the most supportive of whippings and cutting
off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery; 82% in Pakistan and 77%
in Egypt favor making this type of punishment the law in their
countries, as do 65% of Muslims in Nigeria and 58% in Jordan. When asked
about the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion, at
least three-quarters of Muslims in Jordan (86%), Egypt (84%) and
Pakistan (76%) say they would favor making it the law; in Nigeria, 51%
of Muslims favor and 46% oppose it.
Ominously, such irredentist attitudes are shared to an alarming
extent by an important Muslim immigrant community in the West—British
Muslims. For example,
a poll
of six hundred British Muslim college students revealed that one-third
support killing in the name of Islam, while forty percent want to the
Sharia to replace British law.
And Sharia indoctrination of British Muslim youth begins well before college entry. A BBC Panorama
investigation
has revealed the presence in Britain of forty “weekend schools”
attended by some five thousand Muslim children aged 6–18. These schools
teach the British Muslim youth who attend them, for example, traditional
Islamic motifs of Jew-hatred and mutilating Sharia punishments—as per
the Saudi National Curriculum—under the rubric of “Saudi Students Clubs
and Schools in the UK and Ireland.”
The BBC revelations validate prescient warnings made almost two
decades earlier by the late respected British scholar of Islam, Dr.
Mervyn Hiskett, in
Some to Mecca Turn to Pray (the title deriving from the poem
Hassan’s Serenade
by James Elroy Flecker [d. 1919]). Hiskett noted then (i.e., in 1993)
the prevailing opinion among leaders of the British Muslim community
that unless Muslim immigrants to Britain were allowed unrestrained
access to Islamic law, Sharia, in all aspects, Britain was to be
regarded, Dar-al-Harb, or the House of War, that is, the target of
jihadism. Citing what he characterized as “a more urbane but some may
consider ominous statement of the Muslim intention to brook no
opposition,” Hiskett quoted
Zaki Badawi
(d. 2006), a Muslim scholar and former director of the Islamic Cultural
Center, London, who was made an honorary Knight Commander of the
British Empire (KBE) in 2004, and also appointed by the Duke of Castro
as a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I. Incidentally
Badawi, an Egyptian Muslim, never became a British subject although he
had lived in the country for more than thirty years and had received all
manner of honors there. Badawi opined,
A proseltyzing religion cannot stand still. It can
either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. Islam
is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners
of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole humanity will be one
Muslim community, the “Umma.”
The “urbane,” “moderate” Muslim Badawi’s “vision” for British
society—so recently deemed unthinkable—now seems eminently plausible, as
Britain appears well on its way to full integration into the
obscurantist Muslim
umma, rife with traditional Islamic Jew-hatred, and all other aspects of Sharia-sanctioned, totalitarian barbarity.
Hence 16-years later (circa 2009), there were sixteen main
Sharia courts
around Britain, located in Birmingham, Bradford, and Ealing in West
London. These institutions were “complemented” by more informal
Sharia-based tribunals—the think tank Civitas
asserting that up to eighty-five tribunals currently exist in Britain.
A window into the mindset of these Sharia courts and tribunals was
provided during a public discussion of the issue of marital rape.
Crowing with pride (in a March 2010 interview), president of the
Islamic Sharia Council in Britain, Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed,
maintained,
No other Sharia council can claim they are so diverse
as ours because other Sharia councils, they are following one school of
fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence]. Ours is diverse—we are hanafi, shafii,
hanbali . . . we have Bangladeshi . . . we have Pakistani, we have
Indian, we have Palestinian, we have Somali scholars on our board.
Of course since Koran
2:223
states that women are “tilth” to be “cultivated” (or “plowed”) by men,
contemporary mainstream, institutional Islam sanctions marital rape. Not
surprisingly then, as reported in the
UK Independent (October 14, 2010), Sheikh Sayeed, affirmed this view during his March 2010
interview
with The Samosa. Sheikh Sayeed was in fact responding to an inchoate
effort at modernizing the contracts which govern Muslim marriages in
Britain. The good sheikh, representing Britain’s main Islamic Sharia
court, promptly
published a rebuttal of the contract, which included a statement on sexual abuse. He opined in the March
interview:
Clearly there cannot be any “rape” within the marriage. Maybe “aggression,” maybe “indecent activity.”
He further
rejected
both the characterization of nonconsensual marital sex as rape, and the
prosecution of such offenders as “not Islamic.” Sheikh Sayeed, who came
to Britain from Bangladesh in 1977, also brazenly expressed his Sharia
supremacism and accompanying disdain for Western, that is, British law,
stating
“to make it exactly as the Western culture demands is as if we are
compromising Islamic religion with secular non-Islamic values.”
Sayeed
reaffirmed
these sentiments to the UK Independent: “In Islamic Sharia, rape is
adultery by force. So long as the woman is his wife, it cannot be termed
as rape.”
Michael Nazir Ali (1949–) was the first bishop of Raiwand in
Pakistan’s West Punjab (1984–1986), who emigrated to become the first
non-white diocesan bishop in the Church of England. During September
2009, he gave up his English Bishopric to work full-time in defense of
beleaguered Christian minorities, particularly within Islamdom. Nazir
Ali
commented aptly
(during August, 2011) on this dangerous proliferation of Sharia courts
in Britain from his unique, firsthand perspective on the impact of the
Sharia in the Indian subcontinent, and now in his adopted British
homeland with its burgeoning population of Muslims émigrés from that
vast region:
To understand the impact of Sharia law you have to
look at other [i.e., Islamic] countries. At its heart it has basic
inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between men and women.
The problem with Sharia law being used in tribunals [in Britain] is
that it compromises the tradition of equality for all under the law. It
threatens the fundamental values that underpin our society.
But for those (
like Bill O’Reilly)
who naively—and smugly—proclaim such phenomena are absent within the
Muslim communities of North America, consider the mainstream Assembly
of Muslim Jurists of America’s (AMJA’s) response to the specific query,
“Is there a such thing as Marital Rape?” AMJA opining on this question,
issued
fatwa number 2982 on May 30, 2007, by the AMJA Online Jurisprudence Section, which stated:
In the name of Allah, all praise is for Allah, and
may peace and blessing be upon the Messenger of Allah and his family. To
proceed: For a wife to abandon the bed of her husband without excuse is
haram [forbidden]. It is one of the major sins and the angels curse her
until the morning as we have been informed by the Prophet (may Allah
bless him and grant him peace). She is considered nashiz (rebellious)
under these circumstances. As for the issue of forcing a wife to have
sex, if she refuses, this would not be called rape, even though it goes
against natural instincts and destroys love and mercy, and there is a
great sin upon the wife who refuses; and Allah Almighty is more exalted
and more knowledgeable.
An ocean apart from Britain—now a recognized Western hotbed for
“Islamic fundamentalism”—the same Sharia-sanctioned misogynistic bigotry
prevails in a mainstream North American clerical organization openly
advising US and Canadian Muslims.
FP: Why the denial about Sharia amongst Islamic
Studies professors, the mainstream media, the Left in general, etc? How
do you explain it?
Bostom: Unfortunately, denial about the Sharia is
not confined to the Left, or the Left-dominated academy, and includes
conservative luminaries—from well-known journalist “pundits,” to
policymakers and academics. But the academic Left is particularly
illustrative of this ubiquitous problem.
Wael B. Hallaq,
former James McGill Professor of Islamic Law at McGill University (and
currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia
University), has
acknowledged that a “fundamental feature” of traditional Islam’s resurgence,
is the constant and consistent popular call to
restore the Sharia (which he identifies as “the religious law of
Islam”). . . . The call dominates the discourse of modern Muslims, and
the tracts, pamphlets and books expounding this call are legion.
Hallaq further
maintains that,
During the past two and a half decades, this call has
grown ever more forceful, generating religious movements, a vast amount
of literature, and affecting world politics. There is no doubt that
Islamic law today is a significant cornerstone in the reaffirmation of
Islamic identity, not only as a matter of positive law but also, and
more importantly, as the foundation of a cultural uniqueness. Indeed,
for many of today’s Muslims, to live by Islamic law is not merely a
legal issue, but one that is distinctly psychological.
However, being a champion of the “postcolonial,”
pseudo-academic drivel popularized by the late Edward Said,
Hallaq,
as an axiom, of course blames Western imperialist bogeymen, almost
exclusively (if mindlessly) for this intrinsic Muslim—and Islamic—Sharia
“revival” phenomenon. When also lamenting the extent to which such an
Islamic revival could adopt “indigenous modernism,” Hallaq, rather
perversely, again
indicts so-called Western colonial “hegemony”—
not the intrinsic totalitarian nature of the Sharia itself.
How does one explain the persistence and breadth of Hallaq’s mindset,
which extends, albeit less commonly, to those on the political Right?
Robert Conquest,
the preeminent scholar of Soviet Communist totalitarianism, in his
elucidation of Western vulnerability to totalitarian ideologies,
wrote
that democracy itself is “far less a matter of institutions than habits
of mind”—the latter being subject to constant “stresses and strains.”
He then notes the disturbingly widespread acceptance of totalitarian
concepts among the ordinary citizens of pluralist Western societies.
Many in the West gave their full allegiance to these
alien beliefs. Many others were at any rate not ill disposed towards
them. And beyond that there was . . . a sort of secondary infection of
the mental atmosphere of the West which still to some degree persists,
distorting thought in countries that escaped the more wholesale
disasters of our time.
But
Conquest
evinces no sympathy for those numerous “Western intellectuals or near
intellectuals” of the 1930s through the 1950s whose willful delusions
about the Soviet Union, “will be incredible to later students of mental
aberration.” His critique of Western media highlights a cultural
self-loathing tendency which has persisted and intensified over the
intervening decades, through the present.
One role of the democratic media is, of course, to
criticize their own governments, draw attention to the faults and
failings of their own country. But when this results in a transfer of
loyalties to a far worse and thoroughly inimical culture, or at least
to a largely uncritical favoring of such a culture, it becomes a morbid
affliction—involving, often enough, the uncritical acceptance of that
culture’s own standards.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich delivered a singularly astute and courageous
address July 29, 2010. Reactions to that speech across the political spectrum (
here,
here,
here, and
here) whether immediate or delayed, illustrate the contemporary equivalent of what Conquest appositely characterized as
mindslaughter—a
brilliantly evocative term for delusive Western apologetics regarding
the ideology of Communism and the tangible horrors its Communist
votaries inflicted. What did Newt Gingrich have the temerity to discuss?
In defiance of our era’s most rigidly enforced cultural relativist
taboo, Gingrich provided an irrefragably accurate, if blunt,
characterization of the existential threat posed by Islam’s living,
self-professed mission—to impose Sharia, its totalitarian, religio-political “law,” globally.
With vanishingly rare intellectual honesty and resolve, Gingrich
described
how normative Sharia—antithetical to bedrock Western legal
principles—by “divine,” immutable diktat, rejects freedom of conscience,
while sanctioning violent jihadism, absurd, misogynistic “rules of
evidence” (four male witnesses for rape), barbarous punishments (stoning
for adultery), and polygamy.
Sharia in its natural form has principles and
punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying
basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore
imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an
act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the
Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens and Jerusalem and which
has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can
hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would
impose it.
Moreover, Gingrich
warned about efforts—deliberate, or unwitting—to represent Sharia as a benign system.
So let me also be quite clear that the rules are
radical and horrific. I think again it’s fascinating that even when
people go out and do polling and they say to, for example, Muslims in
general, do you believe in Sharia, they don’t then explain what Sharia
is. Sharia becomes like would you like to be a Rotarian and it sounds
okay.
Gingrich’s frank portrayal of the existential threat Sharia
represents—whether or not this totalitarian system is imposed by
violent, or nonviolent means—was accompanied by a
clarion call for concrete measures to oppose any Sharia encroachment on the US legal code.
Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal,
religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence. But in fact
they’re both engaged in jihad and they’re both seeking to impose the
same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a [radical]
imposition of Sharia…The fight against Sharia and the madrassas in
mosques which teach hatred and fanaticism is the heart of the enemy
movement from which the terrorists spring forth. It’s time we had a
national debate on this. One of the things I’m going to suggest today is
a federal law which says no court anywhere in the United States under
any circumstance is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for
American law.
Reminiscent of Conquest’s earlier
assessment
of Leftist apologists for Communism—and anticipating reactions to his
own speech, albeit from “See No Sharia” cultural relativists not
confined to the Left—Gingrich also
wondered,
How we don’t have some kind of movement in this
country on the left that understands that Sharia is a direct mortal
threat to virtually every value that the left has is really one of the
most interesting historical questions and will someday lead to many
dissertations being written.
The ensuing vitriolic, if predictable, attacks (
here,
here,
here, and
here)
on Gingrich, and/ or anti-Sharia state legislative initiatives his
speech tacitly endorsed (i.e., in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee),
mirror analogous diatribes from Western Communist sympathizers and
witless sycophants during the Soviet era. Past as prologue, George
Orwell
trenchantly characterized
this particular aspect of Western pro-Communist mindslaughter, and the
attitudes it engendered toward those deemed “rabidly anti-Communist.”
The upshot is that if from time to time you express a
mild distaste for slave-labor camps or one-candidate elections, you are
either insane or actuated by the worst motives. In the same way when
Henry Wallace is asked by a newspaper interviewer why he issues
falsified versions of his speeches to the press, he replies: “So you
must be one of those people who are clamoring for war with Russia.”
There is the milder kind of ridicule that consists in pretending that
reasoned opinion is indistinguishable from an absurd out-of-date
prejudice. If you do not like Communism you are a Red-baiter.
FP: As regular Frontpagemag.com contributor David
Solway observes in his endorsement of your book, “…some heretofore
immaculate scholarly figures come in for their lumps.” One of those
critiqued is the neoconservatives’ ultimate sage of Islam, Bernard
Lewis. What are your specific criticisms of Professor Lewis, and how do
they relate to the book’s thematic presentation?
Bostom: Now 96 years old and still active, multiple
deserving tributes to Bernard Lewis’ career as a scholar, and public
intellectual, were written in celebration of this remarkable
nonagenarian (see
here and
here, for examples), coinciding in 2006, with his 90th birthday. I began expressing my concerns with Lewis’ scholarship in a
lengthy review-
essay (for Frontpage) on Bat Ye’or’s seminal book
Eurabia—The Euro-Arab Axis,
published December 31, 2004. Over the intervening years—in the wake of
profound US policy failures vis a vis Islamdom at that time, and
subsequently, till now—this disquietude has increased considerably. As I
demonstrate in
Sharia Versus Freedom,
Lewis’s legacy of intellectual and moral confusion has greatly hindered
the ability of sincere American policymakers to think clearly about
Islam’s living imperial legacy, driven by unreformed and unrepentant
mainstream Islamic doctrine. Ongoing highly selective and celebratory
presentations of Lewis’s understandings—(see
this
for example) —are pathognomonic of the dangerous influence Lewis
continues to wield over his uncritical acolytes and supporters.
In
Sharia Versus Freedom,
I review Lewis’s troubling intellectual legacy regarding four critical
subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the
Sharia on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, sacralized Islamic
Jew-hatred, and perhaps most importantly, his inexplicable 180-degree
reversal on the notion of “Islamic democracy.” Lewis’ rather bowdlerized
analyses are compared to the actual doctrinal formulations of Muslim
legists, triumphal Muslim chroniclers celebrating the implementation of
these doctrines, and independent Western assessments by Islamologists
(several of whom worked with Lewis, directly, as academic colleagues)
which refute his sanitized claims.
Thus when discussing key doctrinal aspects of
jihad, for example, the concepts of
harbi, from Dar al Harb (“domain of war”, i.e., lands not yet conquered and Islamized by the Muslims), or
jihad martyrdom,
Lewis’s analyses are incomplete or frankly apologetic. Lewis ignores
the fact that unvanquished non-combatant “harbis” from outside the
“domain of Islam” were chronically subjected to merciless and murderous
rampages in full
accord with the classical doctrine of jihad—a doctrine major, widely popular contemporary Muslim legists,
including
Muslim Brotherhood “Spiritual Guide” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, still expound
to this day. Lewis also (rather disingenuously) conflates jihad homicide
martyrdom operations—
sanctioned and celebrated
by the Sharia as the noblest path to eternal Islamic paradise—with
Islam’s prohibition against suicide for depressive melancholia. Not
surprisingly then,
unlike scholars
who specialized in the history of the jihad conquests across Asia,
Africa, and Europe—such as Moshe Gil, Speros Vryonis, Dimitar Angelov,
Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, and K. S. Lal—Lewis’s rather superficial
surveys avoid any details of the devastation these brutal campaigns
wrought. As
copiously documented
by both proud Muslim historians and the laments of non-Muslim
chroniclers representing the victims’ perspective, jihad depredations
resulted in vast numbers of infidels mercilessly slaughtered—including
noncombatant women and children—or enslaved, and deported; countless
cities, villages, and infidel religious and cultural sites sacked and
pillaged, often accompanied by the burning of harvest crops and massive
uprooting of agricultural production systems, causing famine; and
enormous quantities of treasure and movable goods seized as “booty.”
The late Orientalist Maxime Rodinson (d. 2004), a contemporary of Bernard Lewis,
warned forty years ago of misguided modern scholarship effectively “sanctifying” Islam:
Understanding has given away to apologetics pure and simple.
Lewis’s bowdlerized
1974 summary portrayal
of the system governance imposed upon those indigenous non-Muslims
conquered by jihad is a distressing, ahistorical example of this
apologetic genre.
Deriving from
Koran 9:29 and its
classical interpretation by Koranic commentators and Muslim jurists, alike, the “pact of subjugation, or “dhimma” (now more commonly known as “
dhimmitude,”
the coin termed by Bat Ye’or) was and remains a discriminatory,
Sharia-based system imposed upon non-Muslims—Jews, Christians, as well
as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists—vanquished by jihad. Some of the
more
salient features
of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished
dhimmis, and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and
restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between
Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal
of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews,
Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus,
wear special clothes; and the overall humiliation and abasement of
non-Muslims. It is important to note that these regulations and
attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred
Islamic law, or Sharia. The
writings
of the much-lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111)
highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative and
prominent feature of the Sharia:
[T]he dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His
Apostle. . . . Jews, Christians, and Majians [Zoroastrians] must pay the
jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]. . . . [O]n offering up the jizya, the
dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and
hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the
mandible]. . . . They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their
wine or church bells . . . their houses may not be higher than the
Muslim’s, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant
horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddler-work is of wood.
He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have
to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even
in the [public] baths . . . [dhimmis] must hold their tongue.
The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized in A. S. Tritton’s 1930
The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, a pioneering treatise on the status of the dhimmis:
[C]aliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for
their buildings, and the mob was always ready to pillage churches and
monasteries . . . dhimmis . . . always lived on sufferance, exposed to
the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob . . . in later
times . . . [t]hey were much more liable to suffer from the violence of
the crowd, and the popular fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing
strictness among the educated. The spiritual isolation of Islam was
accomplished. The world was divided into two classes, Muslims and
others, and only Islam counted. . . . Indeed the general feeling was
that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough for the dhimmis.
Yet over four decades after Tritton published this apt characterization, here is what Bernard Lewis
opined on the subject (in 1974):
The dhimma on the whole worked well [emphasis added].
The non-Muslims managed to thrive under Muslim rule, and even to make
significant contributions to Islamic civilization. The restrictions
were not onerous, and were usually less severe in practice than in
theory. As long as the non-Muslim communities accepted and conformed to
the status of tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were not
troubled.112
As I describe in
Sharia Versus Freedom, the assessments of two other highly esteemed 20
th
century Western Islamologists—Professors Ann Lambton and S. D.
Goitein—who were Lewis’s contemporaries and colleagues, make plain that
his flimsy apologetic on “the dhimma” does
not represent a consensus Western scholarly viewpoint. Brief samples of their conclusions are provided below:
[Lambton] The humiliating
regulations to which [dhimmis] were subject as regards their dress and
conduct in public were not, however, nearly so serious as their moral
subjection, the imposition of the poll tax, and their legal
disabilities. They were, in general, made to feel that they were beyond
the pale. Partly as a result of this, the Christian communities dwindled
in number, vitality, and morality. . . . The degradation and
demoralization of the [dhimmis] had dire consequences for the Islamic
community and reacted unfavorably on Islamic political and social life.
[Goitein]: [T]he Muslim state was quite the
opposite of the ideals propagated by…the principles embedded in the
constitution of the United States. An Islamic state was part of or
coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was mal
al-muslumin, the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not
citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were
outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status
characterized by the term dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a
poll tax specific to them. They were also exposed to a great number of
discriminatory and humiliating laws. . . . As it lies in the very nature
of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and
before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of
legislation in this matter was in existence. . . . In times and places
in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even
complete extinction of the minorities
Lewis’s conception of Islam’s doctrinal antisemitism, and its
resultant historical treatment of Jews, is a sham castle which rests on
two false pillars. These glib affirmations, which amount to nothing less than sheer denial, are illustrated below:
In Islamic society hostility to the Jew is
non-theological. It is not related to any specific Islamic doctrine, nor
to any specific circumstance in Islamic history. For Muslims it is not
part of the birth-pangs of their religion, as it is for Christians… “dhimmi”-tude [derisively hyphenated] subservience and persecution and ill treatment of Jews . . . [is a] myth.
There is
voluminous evidence
from Islam’s foundational texts of theological Jew-hatred: virulently
antisemitic Koranic verses whose virulence is only amplified by the
greatest classical and modern Muslim Koranic commentaries (by Tabari [d.
923], Zamakshari [d. 1143], Baydawi [d. ~1316], Ibn Kathir [d.1373],
and Suyuti [d. 1505], to Qutb [d. 1966] and Mawdudi [d.1979]), the six
canonical hadith collections, and the most respected sira (pious Muslim
biographies of Muhammad, by Ibn Ishaq [d. 761 ]/Ibn Hisham [d. 813], Ibn
Sa’d [d. 835 ], Waqidi [d. 822], and Tabari). The antisemitic motifs in
these texts have been carefully elucidated by scholarship that dates
back to Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid-1880s analysis of the sira and Georges
Vajda’s 1937 study of the hadith, complemented in the past two decades
by Haggai Ben Shammai’s 1988 examination of the major anti-Semitic
verses and themes in the Koran and Koran exegesis, and Saul S.
Friedman’s broad, straightforward enumeration of Koranic antisemitism in
1989. Moshe Perlmann, a preeminent scholar of Islam’s ancient
anti-Jewish polemical literature, made this summary
observation in 1964:
The Koran, of course became a mine of anti-Jewish
passages. The hadith did not lag behind. Popular preachers used and
embellished such material.120
Notwithstanding Bernard Lewis’s hollow claims, salient examples of
Jew-hatred illustrating Perlmann’s remarkably compendious assessment of
these foundational Islamic sources, and their tragic application across
space and time, through the present, are detailed, with copious
documentation in my
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and summarized in
Sharia Versus Freedom.
Once again, it is illuminating to juxtapose Lewis’s attempt to deny
the existence of antisemitism in Medieval Islam with the conclusions of
his academic colleague S. D. Goitein, based upon the latter’s thorough
philological and historical analyses of the primary-source Geniza
documents (a cache of religious texts, documents, and letters, from
Cairo, Egypt, which sheds light on the condition of Jews during
“classical” Islam). Thus, in the specific context of the Arab Muslim
world during the high Middle Ages (circa 950–1250 CE), Goitein’s
seminal analyses revealed that the Geniza documentary record employed the term
antisemitism,
in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from
the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general.
Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of
“antisemitism” in the time and the area considered here.
Goitein
cites
as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic
Jew-hatred was extant at this time (i.e., up to a millennium
ago)—exploding Lewis’s spurious claim of its absence—the fact that
letters from the Cairo Geniza material,
have a special word for it and, most significantly,
one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature (nor registered in
any Hebrew dictionary), but one much used and obviously coined in the
Geniza period. It is sinuth, “hatred,” a Jew-baiter being called sone,
“a hater.”
Incidents of such Muslim Jew-hatred
documented
by Goitein in the Geniza record come from northern Syria (Salamiyya and
al-Mar’arra), Morocco (Fez), and Egypt (Alexandria), with references to
the latter being particularly frequent.
Pace Lewis’s complete misrepresentation of Islamic antisemitism (as
well as his whitewashing of the creed’s jihadism, and related imposition
of dhimmitude), here is but a
very incomplete sampling
of pogroms and mass murderous violence against Jews living under
Islamic rule, across space and time, all resulting from the combined
effects of jihadism, general anti-dhimmi, and/or specifically
anti-Semitic motifs in Islam: 6,000 Jews massacred in Fez in 1033;
hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Muslim Cordoba between 1010 and 1015;
4,000 Jews killed in Muslim riots in Grenada in 1066, wiping out the
entire community; the Berber Muslim Almohad depredations of Jews (and
Christians) in Spain and North Africa between 1130 and 1232, which
killed tens of thousands, while forcibly converting thousands more, and
subjecting the forced Jewish converts to Islam to a Muslim Inquisition;
the 1291 pogroms in Baghdad and its environs, which killed (at least)
hundreds of Jews; the 1465 pogrom against the Jews of Fez; the late
fifteenth-century pogrom against the Jews of the Southern Moroccan oasis
town of Touat; the 1679 pogroms against, and then expulsion of, 10,000
Jews from Sana’a, Yemen, to the unlivable, hot and dry plain of Tihama,
from which only 1,000 returned alive in 1680, 90 percent having died
from exposure; recurring Muslim anti-Jewish violence—including pogroms
and forced conversions—throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries, which rendered areas of Iran (for example, Tabriz)
Judenrein; the 1834 pogrom in Safed, where raging Muslim mobs killed
and grievously wounded hundreds of Jews; the 1888 massacres of Jews in
Isfahan and Shiraz, Iran; the 1910 pogrom in Shiraz; the pillage and
destruction of the Casablanca, Morocco, ghetto in 1907; the pillage of
the ghetto of Fez, Morocco, in 1912; the government-sanctioned
anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims in Turkish Eastern Thrace during
June–July 1934, which ethnically cleansed at least 3,000 Jews; and the
series of pogroms, expropriations, and finally mass expulsions of some
900,000 Jews from Arab Muslim nations, beginning in 1941 in Baghdad (the
murderous “Farhud,” during which 600 Jews were murdered, and at least
12,000 pillaged)—eventually involving cities and towns in Egypt,
Morocco, Libya, Syria, Aden, and Bahrain, and culminating in 1967 in
Tunisia—that accompanied the planning and creation of a Jewish state,
Israel, on a portion of the Jews’ ancestral homeland.151
Journalist David Warren,
writing
in March 2006, questioned the advice given President Bush “on the
nature of Islam” at that crucial time by not only “the paid operatives
of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the happyface
pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong,” but most significantly, one eminence
grise, in particular: “the profoundly learned” Bernard Lewis. All these
advisers, despite their otherwise divergent viewpoints, as Warren
noted,
“assured him (President Bush) that Islam and modernity were
potentially compatible.” None more vehemently—or with such
authority—than the so-called “
Last Orientalist,” nonagenarian professor Bernard Lewis. Arguably the most striking example of Lewis’s fervor was a
lecture
he delivered July 16, 2006 (on board the ship Crystal Serenity during a
Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles) about the
transferability of Western democracy to despotic Muslim societies, such
as Iraq. He concluded with the statement, “Either we bring them
freedom, or they destroy us.” This stunning claim was
published with that concluding remark as the title, “Bring Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us,” and disseminated widely.
While Lewis
put forth
rather non sequitur, apologetic examples in support of his concluding
formulation, he never elucidated the yawning gap between Western and
Islamic conceptions of freedom—hurriyya in Arabic. This latter omission
was particularly striking given Professor Lewis’s contribution to the
official (Brill)
Encyclopedia of Islam entry on hurriyya. Lewis egregiously omitted not only his earlier writings on hurriyya but what he had also
termed the “authoritarian or even totalitarian” essence of Islamic societies.
Hurriyya, “freedom,” is—as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized “Greatest Sufi Master,”
expressed
it—“perfect slavery.” And this conception is not merely confined to
the Sufis’ perhaps metaphorical understanding of the relationship
between Allah the “master” and his human “slaves.” Following Islamic law
slavishly throughout one’s life was paramount to hurriyya, “freedom.”
This earlier more concrete characterization of hurriyya’s metaphysical
meaning, whose essence Ibn Arabi reiterated, was pronounced by the Sufi
scholar
al-Qushayri (d. 1072/74).
Let it be known to you that the real meaning of
freedom lies in the perfection of slavery. If the slavery of a human
being in relation to God is a true one, his freedom is relieved from the
yoke of changes. Anyone who imagines that it may be granted to a human
being to give up his slavery for a moment and disregard the commands and
prohibitions of the religious law while possessing discretion and
responsibility, has divested himself of Islam. God said to his Prophet:
“Worship until certainty comes to you.” (Koran 15:99). As agreed upon by
the [Koranic] commentators, “certainty” here means the end (of life).
Bernard Lewis, in his Encyclopedia of Islam
analysis
of hurriyya, discusses this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman
Empire, through the contemporary era. After highlighting a few
“cautious” or “conservative” (Lewis’s characterization) reformers and
their writings, Lewis
maintains,
there is still no idea that the subjects have any
right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political
freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of
political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of
freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with
councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming more and not
less arbitrary.
Lewis also makes the important
point that Western colonialism ameliorated this chronic situation:
During the period of British and French domination,
individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and
sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better
protected than either before or after.
And Lewis concludes his entry by
observing that Islamic societies forsook even their inchoate democratic experiments,
In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.
Writing contemporaneously elsewhere, Lewis
concedes that (with the
possible exception
of Turkey), following the era of the French Revolution, 150 years of
prior experimentation with Western secular sovereignty and laws in many
Islamic countries, notably Egypt, had not fared well.
[T]he imported political machinery failed to work,
and in its breakdown led to the violent death or sudden displacement by
other means of ministers and monarchs, all of whom had failed to replace
even the vanished Sultanate in the respect and loyalties of the people.
In Egypt a republic was proclaimed which in some respects seems to be a
return to one of the older political traditions of Islam—paternal,
authoritarian Government, resting on military force, with the support of
some of the religious leaders and teachers, and apparently, general
acceptance. Perhaps that is an Islamic Republic of a sort.
Moreover, Lewis viewed this immediate post–World War II era of democratic experimentation by Muslim societies as an
objective failure
(again, with the possible exception of developments, at that time, in
Turkey), rooted in Islamic totalitarianism, which he compared directly
(and unabashedly) to Communist totalitarianism,
noting their “uncomfortable resemblances” with some apprehension.
I turn now from the accidental to the essential
factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society,
tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism,
perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political
tradition. . . . Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and
democracy are identical—attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of
Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of
the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or
capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to
justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the
fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and
apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the
reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West…[T]he political
history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. . . . [I]t was
authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no
parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or
communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the
history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject
owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by
the Holy Law…Quite obviously, the Ulama [religious leaders] of Islam are
very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer
examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups
profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all
questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every
respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the
contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both
groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of
belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against
an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an
exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a
collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory
of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic
division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two
necessarily opposed groups, of which—the first has the collective
obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious
parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the
content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of
the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist
creed as “There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet” was laying his
finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for
the faith—a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian
enemy—might well strike a responsive note.
Six decades after Lewis made these candid observations, there is a
historical record to judge—a clear, irrefragable legacy of failed
secularization efforts, accompanied by steady grassroots and
institutional re-Islamization across the Muslim world, epitomized, at
present, by the Orwellian-named, “Arab Spring.” The late P. J.
Vatikiotis (d. 1997), Emeritus Professor of Politics at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), was a respected scholar of the
Middle East, who, contemporaneous with Lewis (a SOAS colleague), wrote
extensively about Islamic reformism throughout the twentieth century,
particularly in Egypt. Focusing outside Turkey and Pakistan on the Arab
Middle East (i.e., Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, and Iraq), Vatikiotis
wrote candidly
in 1981 of how authoritarian Islam doomed inchoate efforts at creating
political systems which upheld individual freedom in the region:
What is significant is that after a tolerably less
autocratic/authoritarian political experience during their
apprenticeship for independent statehood under foreign power tutelage,
during the inter-war period, most of these states once completely free
or independent of foreign control, very quickly moved towards highly
autocratic-authoritarian patterns of rule. . . . One could suggest a
hiatus of roughly three years between the departure or removal of
European influence and power and overthrow of the rickety plural
political systems they left behind in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and the Sudan
by military coups d’etat.
Authoritarianism and autocracy in the Middle East may be unstable
in the sense that autocracies follow one another in frequent
succession. Yet the ethos of authoritarianism may be lasting, even
permanent. . . . One could venture into a more ambitious philosophical
etiology by pointing out the absence of a concept of ‘natural law’ or
‘law of reason’ in the intellectual-cultural heritage of Middle Eastern
societies. After all, everything before Islam, before God revealed his
message to Muhammad, constitutes jahiliyya, or the dark age of
ignorance. Similarly, anything that deviates from the eternal truth or
verities of Islamic teaching is equally degenerative, and therefore
unacceptable. That is why, by definition, any Islamic movement which
seeks to make Islam the basic principle of the polity does not aim at
innovation but at the restoration of the ideal that has been abandoned
or lost. The missing of an experience similar, or parallel, to the
Renaissance, freeing the Muslim individual from external constraints of,
say, religious authority in order to engage in a creative course
measured and judged by rational and existential human standards, may
also be a relevant consideration. The individual in the Middle East has
yet to attain his independence from the wider collectivity, or to accept
the proposition that he can create a political order.
Unlike Vatikiotis, Bernard Lewis has ignored these obvious setbacks. Remarkably, Lewis, as evidenced by his current
volte-face
on the merits of experiments in “Islamic democracy” has become a far
more dogmatic evangelist for so-called Islamic democratization, despite
such failures!
Consistent with Lewis’ admonition, “Either we bring them freedom, or
they destroy us,” the US military, at an enormous cost of blood and
treasure, liberated Afghanistan and Iraq from despotic regimes.
However, as facilitated by the Sharia-based Afghan and Iraqi
constitutions the US military occupation helped midwife—which have
negated freedom of conscience and promoted the persecution of non-Muslim
religious minorities—“they,” that is, the Muslim denizens of
Afghanistan and Iraq, have chosen to reject the opportunity for Western
freedom “we” provided them, and transmogrified it into “hurriyya.” Far
more important than mere hypocrisy—a widely prevalent human trait—is the
deleterious legacy of his own Islamic confusion Bernard Lewis has
bequeathed to Western policymaking elites, both academic and
nonacademic.
FP: The final section is entitled, “How Do You Solve
a Problem Like Sharia?” Please summarize how you address this pressing
question, and your conclusions.
Bostom: On May 12, 2011 a US Army “
Red Team” issued an
unclassified report
which sought to explain the burgeoning rash of murderous attacks (which
over the next 15-months escalated even further, still) by Afghan
National Army (ANA) members on US and other NATO troops. The most
salient point remained blatantly ignored throughout the feckless conduct
of our mission in Afghanistan, till now, as exemplified, glaringly, by
current US Forces Afghanistan commander General John Allen’s heinous
August 23, 2012 remarks. General Allen maintained that
Ramadan fasting, combined with operational tempo during the summer heat,
were the drivers of these most recent killings of his own troops by
Muslim ANA soldiers! Contra Allen’s willful blindness, the Army’s Red
Team
report inserted (as item 40), this definitive comment amongst 58 other comparatively trivial
recommendations:
Better educate US soldiers in the central tenets of
Islam as interpreted and practiced in Afghanistan. Ensure that this
instruction is not a sanitized, politically correct training package,
but rather includes an objective and comprehensive assessment of the
totalitarian nature of the extreme theology practiced among Afghans.
Unflinching, honest education on Islam, absent any delusive, or
manifestly disingenuous cultural relativist prattle about the creed, and
its totalitarian religio-political law, remains the most important
defense in our armamentarium against encroaching Sharia. Properly
explicated and understood, the threats posed by Sharia supremacism,
both foreign and domestic, may then be confronted rationally.
Ex-Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers (
circa 1947)
compared the violent fanaticism of the twentieth century’s secular
totalitarian systems adherents, to the votaries of Islam. The modern
totalitarians expressed “new ideas” which were “violently avowed,”and
“the hallmark of their advocates was a fanaticism unknown since the
first flush of Islam.”
Sharia Versus Freedom
demonstrates that Chambers’s passing comparison has doctrinal and
historical validity, which comports with serious modern assessments by
other former Communist and non-Communist intellectuals alike (i.e., in
chronological order, by Bertrand Russell [1920]; G.K. Chesterton [1921];
Arthur Koestler [1928]; Jules Monnerot [1949]; Bernard Lewis [1954];
Karl Wittfogel [1957]; Ernest Gellner [1991]; and Maxime Rodinson
[2001]). Sociologist Jules Monnerot made very detailed and explicit
connections between pre-modern Islamic and twentieth-century Communist
totalitarianism in
Sociologie du Communisme.
The title of his first chapter dubbed Communism as “The
Twentieth-Century Islam.” Monnerot elucidated these two primary shared
characteristics of Islam and Communism: “conversion”—followed by
subversion—from within, and the fusion of “religion” and state. Citing
Stalin (circa 1949) as the contemporary personification, Monnerot
elaborated on this totalitarian consolidation (“condensation”) of power
shared by Islam and Communism, and the refusal of these universalist
creeds to accept limits on their “frontiers.” He further observes that
to those who did not accept their ideology, or self-proclaimed
“mission,” Communism—and Islam before it—were viewed as imperialistic
religious fanaticisms. Finally, Monnerot (invoking Ernest Renan [d.
1892]) underscores how incoherent Western intellectual apologists for
totalitarianism—whether Communist or Islamic—promote the advance of
these destructive ideologies.
Moreover, the seminal 20th century ideologue of Islamic revival, Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi,
writing in 1960, validated Monnerot’s comparison from a pious Muslim perspective.
A state of this sort [i.e., an Islamic state] cannot
evidently restrict the scope of its activities. Its approach is
universal and all-embracing. Its sphere of activity is coextensive with
the whole of human life. It seeks to mould every aspect of life and
activity in consonance with its moral norms and programme of social
reform. In such a state no one can regard any field of his affairs as
personal and private. Considered from this aspect the Islamic state
bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.
Collectively, these observations suggest that the strategies employed
to thwart some of the dangers of Communist totalitarianism, might also
be applicable to the struggle against totalitarian Islam.
Chambers’s pellucid formulation of the Communist threat—whether
covert or overt—was rooted in his thorough doctrinal and experiential
understanding of Communism. In
Witness he states,
No one knows so well as the ex-Communist the
character of the conflict, and of the enemy. . . . For no other has seen
so deeply into the total nature of the evil with which Communism
threatens mankind.
Mirroring the ex-Communist apostate Chambers, vis-à-vis Communism,
Ibn Warraq, the contemporary Muslim apostate, combines a highly
informed, profound appreciation for his adopted Western civilization,
with a deep understanding of the doctrinal and historical threat Islam
poses to the West. Warraq’s
books and essays have critically examined Islam’s origins, tenets, and history. His scholarly 2003
analysis of apostasy
in Islam—illustrated by extensive, poignant testimonies from modern
Muslim apostates—remains a landmark work documenting this unresolved
global human rights tragedy. More recently. Warraq produced an
expansive,
breathtaking overview
of the West’s contributions to art, literature, and philosophy, which
was combined with a sound debunking of post-modern, anti-Western
charlatanism, epitomized by the sorry “oeuvre” of Edward Said.
Warraq’s insights, and the shared revelations of Muslim freethinkers Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan presented in
Sharia Versus Freedom,
expose the nature of totalitarian Islam, while helping formulate
rational strategies to combat its threats. Their concerns are validated
domestically by accompanying analyses of mosque surveillance data, and
the authoritative advice proffered by the mainstream Assembly of Muslim
Jurists of America (AMJA) to both imams (during formal AMJA-sponsored
educational training programs), and ordinary Muslims (via public
fatwas).
In
brief,
the landmark “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” study provides
irrefragable evidence that 81 percent of this nationally representative
sample of US mosques—consistent with mainstream Islamic doctrine,
practice, and sentiment since the founding of the Muslim creed—are
inculcating jihadism with the goal of implementing sharia here in
America. AMJA’s fatwas and other publications make plain that it too
promotes application of traditional Sharia mandates—antithetical to US
constitutional law—and the seditious replacement of our legal code with
Islam’s totalitarian system, via jihad.
Four specific examples of push back (three suggested; one completed) against domestic the Sharia supremacist agenda, are
discussed:
- Subpoenaing a group of AMJA jurists to testify before Congressman
Peter Kings’ Committee on Homeland Security and have them repeat
verbatim, and then explain, under cross-examination, their Sharia-based,
seditious advice to North American Muslims.
- To combat warped, Islamophilic educational indoctrination at the
high school, community college, and freshman/sophomore major college
levels, families/students should purchase the single volume Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam (also reproduced and available as The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam). The Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam remains
an unequaled—and unbowdlerized—reference work, which includes all the
articles contained in the first edition and supplement of the
nine-volume classic Brill Encyclopaedia of Islam, pertaining, in particular, to the religion and law of Islam.
- A minor, but deeply symbolic edit to the Naval sea burial ceremony
protocol for eligible Muslim members must be performed. Specifically,
the final verse (v. 7) of the Fatiha (the Koran’s brief opening prayer),
has to be eliminated. While the first 6 verses celebrate Islam without
reference to other faiths, v. 7 is an eternal curse upon Jews and
Christians (as confirmed by 13 centuries of authoritative, mainstream
Koranic exegesis, to this day). Thus, uttering v. 7 at a solemn,
interfaith Naval funeral ceremony, attended by predominantly
non-Muslims, especially Christians, is a blatant, gratuitous rejection
of America’s core values of religious tolerance, and an affirmation of
bigoted Sharia supremacism.
- The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2:1 on Thursday, May 26,
2011 (in GEORGE SAIEG, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF DEARBORN; RONALD
HADDAD, Dearborn Chief of Police), that Dearborn, and its police
department, violated the free-speech rights of a Christian evangelist by
barring him from handing out leaflets at an Arab-American street
festival last year. The majority opinion of Justices Moore and Clay
included a keen observation revealing how these judges understood the
sharia-based objections to non-Muslim proselytization which motivated
Dearborn’s attempt to abrogate Pastor Saieg’s freedom of
speech—mainstream Islam’s continued rejection of freedom of conscience:
Saieg also faces a more basic problem with
booth-based evangelism: “[t]he penalty of leaving Islam according to
Islamic books is death,” which makes Muslims reluctant to approach a
booth that is publicly “labeled as . . . Christian.” R. 48 (Ex. A: Saieg
Dep. at 75). Saieg believes that evangelism is more effective when he
can roam the Festival and speak to Muslims more discreetly.
Following the issuance of the verdict, Pastor Saieg’s intrepid
attorney, Robert Muise of the Thomas More Law Center, made these
apposite remarks, which all who cherish our unique Western freedoms must
heed, and support:
Everybody should be pleased. Dearborn is getting a
pretty strong reputation as being the enemy of the First Amendment. As
long as they keep passing these draconian restrictions that violate the
rights of everyone, we’re going to challenge them.
Finally, when opposing jihadism overseas, American policymakers must
radically alter their See No Islam/See No Sharia mindset, and
heed the lessons
of Japan’s World War II era defeat and reconstruction. Central to both
efforts—first defeating, and then reconstructing Japan—was a complete
delegitimization and disenfranchisement of Japan’s religio-political
state religion, post–Meiji Restoration (1868) Shintoism. Our
policymakers
ignored
this paradigm in Afghanistan and Iraq, midwiving illiberal Sharia
states, allied with their axis of jihad co-religionists from neighboring
Pakistan and Iran, against the US.
We have a moral obligation to oppose Sharia which is antithetical to
the core beliefs for which hundreds of thousands of brave Americans have
died, including, over 6600 now, in Iraq and Afghanistan,
combined. There has never been a
Sharia state
in history that has not discriminated (often violently) against the
non-Muslims (and Muslim women) under its suzerainty. Such states have
invariably taught (starting with Muslim children) the aggressive jihad
ideology which leads to predatory jihad razzias on neighboring
“infidels”—even when certain of those “infidels” happened to consider
themselves Muslims, let alone if those infidels were clearly
non-Muslims. That is the ultimate danger and geopolitical absurdity of a
policy
that ignores or whitewashes basic Islamic doctrine and history, while
however inadvertently, making or remaking these societies “safe for
Sharia.”
FP: Andrew G. Bostom, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Jamie Glazov
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/sharia-versus-freedom/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
