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IF THE MEDIEVAL WEST WAS OBJECTIVELY INFERIOR TO THE ISLAMIC WORLD, IS IT OBJECTIVELY SUPERIOR TODAY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110

SHOULD HUMAN GOVERNMENTS GIVE PEOPLE THE FREEDOM TO VIOLATE GOD’S LAW? 116

GOD’S POSSIBLE INTERVENTION IN ANY NUMBER OF POSSIBLE TURNING POINTS IN OTHER CIVILIZATIONS 117

COULD HAVE THE MONGOLS SO EASILY CONQUERED THE WEST?. 118

GIVE CREDIT TO AMERICA AND BRITAIN FOR DEFEATING HEGEMONIC THREATS BY DICTATORIAL NATIONS

DOES AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM HAVE A SOLID FOUNDATION?

SO CAN A DOUBLE STANDARD BE DEFENDED AFTER ALL?. 119

MORALLY JUDGING BY USING THE SAME YARDSTICK.. 120

APPENDIX: IS THE QURAN THE WORD OF GOD?

THE RATIONAL CASE AGAINST THE QURAN’S INSPIRATION

INTRODUCTION

HAVE MUSLIMS AND ACADEMIC LIBERALS WHITEWASHED ISLAMIC HISTORY?

Is Islam is a religion of peace? That’s the generally proclaimed politically correct party line. But does Islamic history really bear this out? Do Muslims condemn (successful) acts of imperialism in their own history as much as liberal western intellectuals condemn European and American imperialism in recent centuries? Or is Western imperialism singularly morally condemned because it acted last (and most successfully)? Why does the American liberal and cultural elite apparently fear the American Religious Christian Right working through normal democratic processes politically more than militant Islam’s terrorism, even after 9-11? Why should medieval Catholic Crusaders or Western Imperialists be more condemned than the Arab and Turkish Muslims who invaded and took over vast areas via jihads? Indeed, why are jihads good, but crusades evil? Aren’t all holy wars really equally unholy? Are Muslims historically merely the passive victims of Western and Christian imperialism? Or were they aggressors in the past, and later paid the price for their aggression when the nations they conquered or attacked retaliated? It’s time to unveil generally hidden truths about Islamic history and culture. The powerful solvent of historical truth and evenhanded moral evaluations dissolves many historical claims about Islamic civilization promoted by both Muslims and liberal Western academics. This book makes the case that many intellectuals and historians have whitewashed Islam’s history while blackening the Christian West’s by comparison when the same moral standards are applied to both civilizations.

CHAPTER 1

WERE MEDIEVAL MUSLIMS REALLY TOLERANT WHEN JUDGED BY MODERN STANDARDS?

MEDIEVAL MUSLIM VS. CATHOLIC RELIGIOUS TOLERATION

            Undeniably, medieval Catholicism showed itself extremely intolerant of other religions, as its general treatment of the Jews and wars against Muslims show. But according to the normal historical claim, Medieval Islam was much more tolerant. It did have a system of toleration in place for Christians and Jews (although not officially for pagans so much, which would include Hindus). But this system of toleration simply can't be confused with the systematic religious toleration that came of age in Western culture during the Enlightenment and afterwards, such as epitomized in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

            It’s very unlikely that the Islamic world would have devised this political theory on its own because in orthodox Islam the religious establishment (i.e., "church" in the West) isn't separate in authority from the state, even as a matter of theory. When Jesus told his questioners to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and the things that are of God to God (see Mark 12:17), He revealed a difference in authority, even as Paul acknowledged that the powers that be as had authority derived from God (Romans 13). It's much easier to untangle the church from the state in Christendom, even in Catholic countries, than to separate the religious establishment from governmental authority in Muslim countries. For example, consider the pressure to adopt the Sharia on Muslim countries that are or were officially secular, such as Egypt. The great exception, Turkey, was a result of Mustapha Kemal's persecution campaign against Muslim practices, and was just an imported version of preexisting Western practices and political theory. For example, at least until very recently, a Muslim woman in Turkey wasn’t allowed wear a headscarf to a public/tax-supported university.

MEDIEVAL MUSLIM LEVELS OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION EXAGGERATED

            Now, let's shine a historical spotlight on how Islam dealt with the non-Muslim people it conquered. Muslims and sympathetic liberal academics have sold a bill of goods to many in the West that significantly distorts the past. Although early Islam might have been marginally more tolerant than Medieval Catholicism, the difference is much smaller than generally believed. What does Middle Eastern history actually tell us?

            Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (p. 182) here quotes from and leans on Joseph Schacht's An Introduction to Islamic Law: "Under a treaty of surrender, the non-Muslim is given protection and called a dhimmi. 'This treaty necessarily provides for the surrender of the non-Muslims with all duties deriving from it, in particular the payment of tribute, i.e. the fixed poll-tax (jizya) and the land tax (kharaj) . . . The non-Muslims must wear distinctive clothing [Yellow Stars of David, anyone?--EVS] and must mark their houses, which must not be built higher than those of the Muslims, by distinctive signs; they must not ride horses or bear arms, and they must yield the way to Muslims; they must not scandalize the Muslims by openly performing their worship or their distinctive customs, such as drinking wine; they must not build new churches, synagogues, and hermitages; they must pay the poll-tax under humiliating conditions. It goes without saying that they are excluded from the specifically Muslim privileges.' The dhimmi cannot be a witness against a Muslim [compare slaves in the American South before the Civil War, who weren’t allowed to testify against whites in court—EVS], he cannot be the guardian of his child who is a Muslim."

            According to Warraq, a number of scholars portrayed the condition of the dhimmis too positively in light of the research of Bat Ye'or's work called (in English, 1985), “The Dhimmi, Jews and Christians under Islam.” Jacques Ellul, after reviewing Ye'or in print, received a letter from a colleague who cited respected authorities on Islamic history that didn't portray the plight of the Dhimmis so negatively. But, as Ellul notes, "His criticism, however, betrayed the fact that he had not read the book." Ye'or's works record, as Warraq summarizes, an aspect of Islamic history that has received much less attention than (say) comparable Catholic atrocities. As Warraq summarizes (p. 225): "The works of Bat Ye'or show with ample documentation the massacres of the early conquests; the subsequent humiliations of the dhimmis; the oppressive fiscal system; the looting and pillaging of homes, churches, and synagogues; and the whole punctuated with forced conversions, which made the lives of the non-Muslims such an ordeal."

            Warraq (p. 226) cites Norman Stillman's book (1979) The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Stillman notes that the "jizya and kharaj [special discriminatory taxes] were a crushing burden for the non-Muslim peasantry who eked out a bare living in a subsistence economy." The tolerance the dhimmis received was always precarious and could be withdrawn or restricted on whim, such as when local religious passions rose up or civil wars or famines happened.

The generalization that Muslim societies during the Medieval era and afterwards were "tolerant" is simply false since second class citizenship obviously isn't "broadminded.” Was Jim Crow “tolerant” of blacks since the segregated South (normally) avoided outright ethnic cleansing? For example, Karen Armstrong, the author of "Islam: A Short History," whitewashes Islam’s historical records when she commented in the “Manchester Guardian” back in 2002: "Remember that until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain--a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe." Bat Ye'or's works, such as, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude,” “Islam and Dhimmitude. Where Civilizations Collide,” and “The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam,” reveal the folly in such reasoning. What Bat Ye'or has unearthed on this issue clashes with the standard liberal scholarly paradigm on this subject, which Karen Armstrong (among many, many others) upholds. Perhaps Islam's treatment of religious minorities was marginally better than Catholicism’s on average, but to prove that much solidly would require careful study and documentation. It should never be assumed. In this light, consider using a reasonable, objective approach for researching the controversy: Read two scholarly historical surveys (from opposite perspectives) about anti-Semitism in the Medieval and early modern periods in Europe. Then compare those generalizations with what Bat Ye’or documents in these three books. The crude but objective measure of counting bodies should be done when weighing which political or religious system is more or less tolerant historically.

Obviously, nobody would claim Apartheid was "tolerant" because it didn't (usually) kill blacks en masse. Likewise, the Muslims’ legally discriminatory treatment, punctuated with occasional acts of violence and forced conversions, against the dhimmi wouldn’t be any more “tolerant.” Likewise, what the Palestinians have endured in the semi/formerly occupied territories from the Israelis would count as dhimmitude at times. Irshad Manji's "The Trouble with Islam Today" (such as on pp. 108-110) makes a number of points that shows how much more open to self-criticism Israeli society is than the surrounding Arab society and how such terms as "apartheid" simply aren't accurate when a point-by-point comparison is made. Furthermore, the conservatives in Islam have never repudiated formally and publicly the theology promoting dhimmitude and jihad, unlike the South’s and South Africa’s past political establishments’ formal and public repudiation of the ideology of racism.

CASES WHEN MEDIEVAL MUSLIMS PERSECUTED THE JEWS

Bat Ye'or and even Stillman list forced conversions of Jews, during which they were offered either death or conversion to Islam, as occurring in Yemen in 1165 and 1678 and Aden in 1198. Several happened under the Almohad caliphs al-Mumin (d. 1165), Abu Yaqub (d. 1184), and al-Mansur (d. 1199). The Jews of Tabriz were obliged to convert in 1291 and 1318, and those of Baghdad in 1333 and 1344. In Persia, "forced conversions from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century decimated the Christian and, even more, the Jewish communities" (Warraq, p. 227). The Safavid dynasty of Persia also was very intolerant of non-Shia Muslims. They had great success in forcibly converting others to Shiism. So then, when does using force against people's minds to convert them actually work? Why did it succeed here, but not in other cultures or nations? Perhaps the reason why Islam could successfully force Christians and Jews to convert was by deliberately slowly wearing down their communities over the decades and centuries through the steady, strong political and social pressure. Instead of massacring the “People of the Book” wholesale immediately after they surrendered, Mongol-style, Muslim rulers and their officials merely engaged in systematic discrimination that didn’t cause potentially dangerous immediate revolts when the local Muslims still would have been heavily outnumbered. But as the centuries passed by, and more and more people pragmatically changed their religion to escape the systematic discrimination of dhimmitude, it became easier to simply force the small remaining minority of non-Muslims to convert.

Other persecutions against the Jews took place, such as the 6000 Jews massacred in Fez (Morocco) in 1033. Hundreds of Jews were killed from 1010 to 1013 near Cordoba and other parts of Muslim Spain. The entire Jewish community of around 4,000 in Granada was slaughtered during the Muslim riots of 1066. Robert Wistrich calls this last massacre "a disaster, as serious as that which overtook the Rhineland Jews thirty years later during the First Crusade, yet it has rarely received much scholarly attention." The Jews in Kairouan, Tunisia were persecuted and forced to leave in 1016; they returned just to be thrown out again. In Tunis in 1145, they were forced to convert or leave. In the following decade more fierce attacks on them erupted. A similar set of events erupted in Marrakesh in 1232, when yet another massacre of Jews occurred. As cited by Warraq, p. 228, Wistrich summarizes: "Indeed, in the Islamic world from Spain to the Arabian peninsula the looting and killing of Jews, along with punitive taxation, confinement to ghettos, the enforced wearing of distinguishing marks on clothes (an innovation in which Islam preceded medieval Christendom), and other humiliations were rife."

MUSLIMS IMPOSE SPECIAL DISCRIMINATORY TAXES ON NON-MUSLIMS

            Only dhimmis had to pay the land tax called the kharaj and the poll-tax called the jizya, not Muslims. By applying this economic pressure, such taxes helped to slowly wear down resistance to conversion to Islam among the dhimmi. But to pay this (often) oppressive tax wasn’t the only burden it imposed. Muslims (as described by one Muslim authority's interpretation) could impose on dhimmis an insulting, humiliating rite when they paid the jizya, which was based on the Quran (sura 9:29). This verse reads (Maulana Ali’s translation): “Fight those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor follow the Religion of Truth, out of those who have been given the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” The Muslim commentator al-Zamakhshari (1075-1144) interpreted this passage to mean "the jizya shall be taken from them with belittlement and humiliation. [The dhimmi] shall come in person, walking not riding. When he pays, he shall stand, while the tax collector sits. The collector shall seize him by the scruff of the neck, shake him, and say: 'Pay the jizya!' and when he pays it he shall be slapped on the nape of his neck" (as cited in Warraq, p. 228-29). Because of this Quranic passage and interpretations like al-Zamakhshari’s, conservative Muslims have to deem second-class citizenship for Christians and Jews under Muslim rule to be a revelation from God. And obviously, it’s hard for traditional Islam to “modernize” up to Western Enlightenment standards what’s considered to be God’s revealed will.

            An important primary source describing the restrictions on the dhimmis is "The Pact of Umar" (caliph, ruled 717-20), which Warraq (p. 230) reprints in summary form. Plainly dhimmis weren't equal under the law. If one was appointed to high office despite officially they shouldn’t be, that situation commonly generated great public outcry and complaints, such as in Granada in 1066, Fez in 1275 and 1465, Iraq in 1291, and Egypt often between 1250 and 1517. Many converted to Islam to keep their high government jobs. One Middle Eastern history class source book describes the Granada case in a primary source translated into English. Here the Jewish vizier’s identity helped to cause the aforementioned general massacre of Jews in 1066. (See Bernard Lewis, editor and translator, Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Vol. 1: Politics and War, pp. 123-134).

            In court cases, the testimony of a dhimmi was not recognized against a Muslim. Likewise, in the American South before the Civil War, slaves could not testify against whites. The Muslim could get off scot-free in all such court cases. The dhimmi was often forced to pay bribes to escape adverse unjust judgments. A Muslim could never be executed for any crime against a dhimmi. If a dhimmi was accused of blasphemy against Islam, which was common and also a capital offense, he would have to convert to save his life since his testimony wasn't acceptable otherwise! The accidental killing of a Muslim could condemn the whole local non-Muslim community to exile or death. A dhimmi couldn't marry a Muslim wife, but a Muslim man could marry a Christian or Jewish woman. Could any fair-minded liberals today possibly approvingly label this system as “tolerant” when they would condemn in the harshest possible terms similar or identical acts of discrimination done by whites against blacks in America and South Africa?

TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANS SUFFERED UNDER ISLAMIC RULE ALSO

It’s absurd to claim that the Palestinians, Chechens, Kosovar Albanians, etc., have legitimate grievances but the traditional Christian minorities suffering under Ottoman rule didn't. This conclusion requires the whitewashing and discounting dhimmitude’s actual conditions. A dhimmi under Muslim rule was a second-class citizen who endured numerous personal indignities and discriminatory acts, much like blacks have historically suffered in white-dominated nations. Robert Spencer comments about how often histories of Muslim conquest overlook this problem, including even The Cambridge History of Islam: "Numerous histories and descriptions of the Muslim conquests suffer from the same amnesia. Many of these have a scholarly patina." Bat Ye'or's works have to be read to get "the rest of the story" in order to overcome the myth about how tolerant Islam was. Since conservative Muslims have never repudiated the old Sharia dhimmi regulations; they remain on the books so they can be revived and imposed whenever necessary. Showing that they haven’t been forgotten, in many Muslim countries today various acts of discrimination against Christians are identical to or stem from what the Sharia commands. By contrast, the modern West has moved on from its Medieval roots. Over the centuries, such as shown by Britain’s Toleration Act of 1689 (which granted its formal protections only to Protestant Dissenters), the West slowly developed a systematic political philosophy that grants formal tolerance and political rights to religious minorities. But the legal premise for dhimmitude originates from the conditional suspension of jihad after Muslims militarily conquered Christians and Jews: So long as the dhimmis agreed to accept second-class status under Muslim political rule, literal religious warfare provisionally ended. Furthermore, this condition of semi-tolerance was often very precarious, as shown above. By contrast, Enlightenment, Voltairian, Jeffersonian political philosophy on the subject of equality under the law and religious toleration reflects a much higher order of thinking.

Muslims committed many atrocities and other acts of oppression against traditional Christians. For example, as part of the North African slave trade over the centuries, the Barbary pirates and others took about a million European Christians into slavery. They often were very harshly treated and heavily pressured to convert. Another act of Muslim oppression against Christians was the Turkish practice of levying a "devshirme." Starting with the Ottoman Sultan Orkhan (1326-1359), this “tax” periodically took every four or five years a given set of Christian children into slavery. Estimates of how many were taken vary sharply, from 12,000/year to 8,000/year down to 1,000/year. The fact that many would end up serving the sultan in high positions must be offset against their forced conversions to Islam and being ripped away from their parents home when young. Furthermore, what triggered the Congress of Berlin in 1878? (That is, Russia’s “too” successful war against the Ottomans after Turkish atrocities in the Balkans provoked the czar’s intervention). What happened to the Armenians during World War I and afterwards (1915-1923)? The Armenian genocide served as a model for Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, which killed perhaps 1.5 million out of 2 million displaced by forced marches and other means. Hitler knew the world had a short memory about this genocide: "Kill without mercy. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians." Ironically, just as the Catholic and Protestant Christians were growing more tolerant from c. 1700 onwards, the Muslims were falling off the wagon, and getting much worse.

The improvement in conditions for the Christians under Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century only happened because of outside pressure, as Ye'or points out: "In the 1830's, forced by the European powers, the Ottomans adopted a series of reformed aiming and ending the oppression of the Christians.” The Bosnian Muslims, at the time, strongly opposed these reforms. "They fought against the Christian right to possess lands and, in legal matters, to have equal rights as themselves." Later, the Czar’s stated desire to protect the rights of the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Sultan was a major cause for the Crimean War (1853-56) as well. (See Karsh, “Islamic Imperialism,” pp. 100-101). The British Consul J.E. Blunt in 1860 commented that conditions for Christians were improving in Macedonia: "Christian churches and monasteries, towns and inhabitants, are not now pillaged, massacred, and burnt by Albanian hordes as used to be done ten years ago." Various Islamic laws designed to oppress non-Muslim minorities were now less strongly enforced: "Ten years ago . . . Christian churches were not allowed to be built; and one can judge of the measure of the Turkish toleration practiced at that time by having to creep under doors scarcely four feet high. It was an offense to smoke and ride before a Turk; to cross his path, or not stand up before him, was equally wrong." Similarly, Christian testimony wasn't admissible in the Ottomans’ Islamic courts. This allowed, in one case, a Muslim who murdered another Muslim to get off scot free, since only two Christians witnessed it, and they couldn't testify. In Bosnia in 1861, the consul William R. Holmes commented that the Porte (i.e., the central Ottoman government) didn’t allow the Orthodox Greeks to build churches in Bosnia despite they had the money to do so. Acting consult James Zohrab in Bosnia in 1860 explained what eventually led to anti-Muslim blow back by the local Christians: "The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is intense. During a period of nearly three hundred years they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice of their masters existed." (as in Robert Spencer, “Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West,” pp. 100-101). Bernard Lewis’ positive generalizations about the levels of tolerance and independence provided to “infidel” local religious communities by the Turkish millet system ignores hard historical realities like these. (See Lewis, “What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East,” pp. 33-34). Such hard feelings surely contributed to the genocidal actions that Bosnian Serbs committed against their Muslim countrymen during the recent 1992-95 war in the Balkans.

The British ruled the Christian Palestinians for a generation before Israel declared independence in 1948. In one way, during that time, they wouldn't have been "dhimmis" since the Ottoman Turks were no longer in charge, but that would depend on how much the Western powers overturned the provisions of the Sharia that put the local Christians and Jews into an inferior, second class citizenship. Now if one empire replaces another, isn’t that moral equivalency? Why be harsher emotionally, or spend a lot more time and writing space on denouncing the last conqueror (i.e., the British) compared to the previous one (i.e., the Turks)? The real point of comparison would be to see how the Turks or other resident Arab Muslims dealt with the Christian residents of the area of Palestine and Syria before Allenby's successful invasion in 1917 during World War I.

THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC “TOLERANCE” FOR RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

Robert Spencer in “Onward Muslim Soldiers” (pp. 195-196) notes how dhimmitude still operates, and why the myth of traditional Muslim "tolerance" is costly: "Whatever its causes, the myth of Islamic tolerance has potentially lethal consequences insofar as it diverts attention from the ongoing reality of dhimmitude. Just as jihads are still being waged around the globe today, so also are Christians and Jews discriminated against and treated as second class in many areas of the Islamic world--often in ways that are eerily reminiscent of the chronicles in Muslim Spain and elsewhere. And in accordance with dhimmi laws that mandated that they must bear insults in silence, they have often been reluctant to speak out--whether from fear or some other motive. One Lebanese Christian who also lived in Syria for many years said that in those countries and throughout the Middle East today, 'we [Christians] have become citizens of second rank, almost foreigners in our homeland. We have the clear feeling that we are reluctantly tolerated. Christians in the Near East live in a permanent atmosphere of anxiety. The future seems not only uncertain, but bleak. Listen to the fiery khutba [sermons] delivered in the mosques of most Middle Eastern countries and North Africa on Fridays. Without the Western powers, not only the Jews but also the Christians would be driven into the sea.' He declined to be identified by name in this book for fear of reprisals against his family in the Middle East." That’s indeed "the rest of the story.”

DID THE DHIMMIS IN CYPRUS LIVE PEACEABLY UNDER TURKISH RULE?

It’s amusing for someone to claim that the Muslims and Christians in Cyprus got along just fine before the British hired Turks to help suppress the Greek Cypriots who wanted independence in the mid-twentieth century. Jean-Baptist Tavernier, a seventeenth-century European traveler, said in Cyprus in 1651 that “over four hundred Christians had become Muhammadans because they could not pay their kharaj [a land tax that was also levied on non-Muslims, sometimes synonymous with the jizya], which is the tribute that the Grand Seigneur levies on Christians in his states.” (Bat Ye’or, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam,” p. 78, as quoted in Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 55) Although Spencer in “Onward Muslim Soldiers” (pp. 140-141) is discussing the general subject of dhimmitude, he uses the case of Cyprus to help illustrate the second-class status Christians had under Muslim rule: "It should be obvious to any impartial observer how far this is from modern-day Western ideas of tolerance. . . . . A traveler to Famagusta in North Cyprus in 1651, when the law regarding dhimmitude were still very much in effect in the Ottoman Empire, 'recounts that all the churches there had been converted into mosques and that Christians did not have the right to spend the night there.' [By contrast, Christians had to promise Caliph Umar centuries earlier to let Muslims spend three nights at their churches]. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Famagusta was overrun by Turkish troops in 1974. The Greek population was forced to evacuate and the city was sealed off; no one was allowed to enter. Now the city's many churches are marketed to international tourists as 'icon museums," while the mosques (many of them converted churches) are still in active use. Tourists to the former St. Nicholas Cathedral, now the Lal Mustafa Pasha Mosque, are advised by one tour guide that 'the interior is of course a Muslim prayer hall, the floor being covered with carpets, and all visitors must go around with the Imam.'" Being dhimmis, the Cypriots would have been generally humiliated and discriminated against like any other Jews or Christians under Muslim rule, on a par with blacks under Jim Crow. So if someone wants to discuss various cases of “Christian” intolerance, he should also count up all the Muslim cases of the same sins from prior centuries as well. Once such an analysis reveals the basic moral equivalency between the two faiths concerning a lack of tolerance, both sides should restrain and tame the impulse to judge and condemn the other over this issue.

In today’s world, we harshly condemn second-class citizenship, such as the Palestinians suffer under Israeli rule in the (formerly/semi-) occupied territories or which the blacks suffered in South Africa or under Jim Crow in the American South. So then, why do liberal academics so admire such Islamic "tolerance" as found in their relationship with the dhimmis? Perhaps on average Muslims treated Christians and Jews marginally better than Catholics treated Jews and Muslims during the high Middle Ages. (The Catholics did better on average with the Jews earlier in the Medieval period). But since liberal academics and Muslims have sold educated Westerners a bill of goods on this issue, i.e., an exaggerated view of Muslim tolerance, even for the pre-1700, pre-Enlightenment period, it’s time to correct our general perceptions.

IS THERE ISLAMIC TOLERANCE IN AFGHANISTAN?

As proof that contemporary Islamic intolerance is rooted in its intolerant past, consider the case of a Christian threatened with death in Afghanistan. It’s wrong for Akers to condemn Afghanistan's persecuting a Christian by threatening him with death, and blames that somehow on Bush (as if they wouldn't do similar things or worse if the Taliban had stayed in power). Then she cites Bush’s comment about girls going to school for the first time after the Taliban's removal, and call that being a busybody. Perhaps no governmental leaders should have said anything about Rahman, including Australia's prime minister . . . and let him get executed instead! (Maybe the Good Samaritan might count as a busybody also then!) If the busybodies really do improve things some, we should be willing to admit it, like improving Afghanistan's human rights record from a F- to a D+ or C-. No one make it a goal to raise up Afghanistan’s human rights record to Swedish levels. On this side of the millennium, why be so absurdly utopian? Whether they should have used force, of course, is another matter. Bush's improvements have required force to implement, unlike simple acts of charity, but then government is force, or should have a monopoly on it. Where's all this Muslim "tolerance," by the way?

HOW FREE DO MODERATE MUSLIMS FEEL ABOUT SPEAKING OUT?

Would these “talking head” Muslim professors have any freedom to speak in (say) Egypt, Syria, Iran, and/or Saudi Arabia? They have more tolerance here in the West, ironically enough. Would radical Islamists question the state of their faith if they said similarly questioning things about their own societies’ problems? The Islamic world needs a lot more self-criticism, while the West could use a lot less. Paul Harvey once mentioned one moderate Muslim political leader in Indonesia who, despite being the leader of 30 million Muslims, still felt he was being intimidated by the conservatives. So then, Where are all these moderate Muslims anyway? Do they only live in Western countries where they have freedom of speech, and don't feel so intimidated by the radicals? We need some Muslims of prominence who will serve the same function for Islam that George Orwell, Sidney Hook, Walter Reuther, etc., served concerning the Left in the West: People who are still liberal and/or socialists, but are willing to publicly and clearly denounce the excesses of the extremists of their side of the political fence (in their case, the Communists) and/or to struggle to keep them from taking power (such as Reuther did when he worked to throw Communists out of the CIO). As it has been observed: “Islamic writer Salman Rushdie wrote of these silent Muslims in a New York Times article three years ago. ‘As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?’"

DO MUSLIMS CONDEMN THEIR EXTREMISTS’ ATROCITIES ENOUGH?

Likely a lot more Muslims protested the cartoons of Muhammad wearing a turban looking like a bomb published in European newspapers recently (i.e., a case in which no Muslims or others died) than the Jordanian bombings by Al-Qaeda that killed their fellow Muslims. Furthermore, when minor Western transgressions provoke Muslim riots, these are far worse than any Christian mistreatment of Muslims after terrorist plots are broken up, as Robert Spencer acutely observes:

That was it, as far as backlash went. The contrast is stark: when cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared in a Danish newspaper, there were international riots, in which several innocent people were killed; when Pope Benedict XVI repeated a medieval emperor’s negative characterization of Muhammad, there were again riots and killings. When a mentally impaired Christian in Nigeria tore a copy of the Qur’an, rampaging Muslims burned ten churches to the ground. But when six Muslims in America were arrested for plotting to kill as many American soldiers as possible, there have been no killings. No mob action. No riots. No mosques have been torched, and no Muslims have been beaten or (with the possible lone exception of Muslim Tatar) harassed. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={81934F11-CD7A-4EFB-B05A-8E5CCED15B88}

The protests in Jordan directed against Al-Qaeda's bombing of western hotels didn't concern atrocities committed against another civilization, but when Muslims suffered radical Islamic terrorism themselves. There's plenty of selective outrage to go around. But it was the United States that (reluctantly but in the end, militarily cheaply) shut down the Serbs in Kosovo and Bosnia when many Americans deemed interventionism there as dubious. Could anyone cite a major or even minor case of a Muslim nation intervening distinterestedly to bail out some Christians or Jews being mistreated by other Muslim nations? Now, does Syria’s intervention during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970’s count? But does anybody seriously think Syria was primarily interested in helping out the Maronites when they intervened? Didn’t the Syrians send in their army into Lebanon in order to grab another piece of real estate, thus make way for a "Greater Syria"? Assad's regime, which (for example) killed on the order of 10,000-25,000 rebels in Hama, didn’t exactly have a humanitarian record. By contrast, what was the obvious strategic need for America under Bill Clinton to stop the Serbs from pounding the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo? Does anyone think American troops entered the Balkans in order to annex parts of what was Yugoslavia as the 51^st state? Sure, perhaps the goal ultimately was to keep the Turks and Greeks from going to war with each other, but that hardly directly helps America’s self-interests directly either. Furthermore, after Syria sent in their army, the Maronites ceased to have the most power in Lebanon. Admittedly, the constitution the French left in place had favored them moderately in a carefully balanced power sharing arrangement among different religious factions. However, it hadn't been adjusted for the changing demographic realities that turned Muslims into a majority in Lebanon. But in the case of the Balkans, America’s political goal was to impose peace while giving all citizens equal rights under their governments, not to annex territory.

CHAPTER TWO

THE HISTORICAL AND TEXUAL ORIGINS OF THE LITERAL DEFINITION OF “JIHAD”

DOES MUSLIM TEACHING ON JIHAD ONLY GO BACK TO IBN TAYMIYA?

The Islamic tradition on Jihad goes back long before and much more extensively than what Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328) taught. Daniel Pipes' documentation of this matter should be decisive in showing this rebuttal is a whitewash or selective reading of history. The Quran itself, the Hadith, Muhammad's own life lived as a general, Muslim actions by the Arabs in the first century after Muhammad's death and the initial invasions by the Turks in the Balkans all show otherwise. There was lots of jihad, even lots of blowback crusades, in the world long before Taymiya walked the earth! Robert Spencer explained (www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016230.php) how entrenched the teaching of jihad is in mainstream Islamic sources, in response to Karen Armstrong’s review of his book “The Truth About Muhammad”: “In fact, as I outline in the book (pages 76-78), Muhammad's earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, traces three stages of development in the Qur'anic doctrine of warfare, culminating in offensive warfare to establish the hegemony of Islamic law by force of arms. That has been understood throughout history by mainstream Islamic teachers (Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, As-Suyuti, Ibn Qayyim) as the Qur'an's last word on jihad.” Further documentation heavy duty documentation about “jihad” in Muslim sources can be found in Andrew Bostom’s “The Legacy of Jihad.”

In the Hadiths, which form part of the foundation for the Sharia law’s prescriptions, Muhammad repeatedly is reported as recommending the cause of violent jihad. When asked about what the “best deed” someone could do besides the decision to become a Muslim, Muhammad replied: “To participate in Jihad (holy fighting) in Allah’s cause.” He also claimed “a journey undertaken for jihad in the evening or morning merits a reward better than the world and all that is in it.” He even warned Muslims who avoided participating in jihad would suffer God’s wrath: “Muhammad was firm about the necessity of jihad not only for himself personally, but for every Muslim. He warned believers that ‘he who does not join the warlike expedition (jihad), or equip, or looks well after a warrior’s family when he is away, will be smitten by Allah with a sudden calamity.” He also those participating in jihad would enjoy a much higher reward in paradise: “There is another act which elevates the position of a man in Paradise to a grade one hundred (higher), and the elevation between one grade and the other is equal to the height of the heaven from the earth. He (Abu Sa’id ) said: What is that act? He [Muhammad] replied: Jihad in the way of Allah! Jihad in the way of Allah!” Another man once asked Muhammad: “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” Islam’s greatest prophet responded: “I do not find such a deed.” (As cited by Robert Spencer, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), pp. 32-33). Any idealistic young Muslim man with violent tendencies and poor material prospects for this life that literally believes such statements and others like them could be inspired to strike against any set of infidels should no qualifiers appear in their context.

In one particularly important hadith that later Muslims repeatedly referred to when discussing the theory of how to wage jihad, Muhammad is reported as offering three choices to unbelievers before attacking them.

It has been reported from Sulaiman b. Buraid through his father that when the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of any army or detachment he would especially exhort him to fear Allah and to be good to the Muslims who were with him. He would say: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war. . . . When you meet your enemies who are polytheists [Muslims call traditional Christians “polytheists” because they believe in the Deity of Christ and the Trinity—EVS] , invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to accept Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting them. . . . . If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the special head tax Christian and Jewish dhimmis had to pay Muslim governments—EVS]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim, book 19, no. 4294, as cited by Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” pp. 35-36).

Notice that this passage not only assumes Muslims would engage in violent jihad, it plainly authorizes aggressive warfare as well. “Jihad” isn’t mainly about the struggle to control immoral desires nor is it only about Muslims defending themselves from attacks by infidels and pagans. Merely being “the Other” (i.e., non-Muslim) is theoretically enough to trigger jihad from Muslims when they believe their military strength exceeds their opponents’. According to another hadith appears several times in the most reliable collection, there’s no built-in limitations on when Muslims may wage jihad against unsubmissive unbelievers: “The Prophet [Muhammad] spoke clearly about his own responsibility to wage war for the religion he had founded: ‘I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform As-Salat ([daily] prayers) and give Zakat [charitable gifts, like tithes], so if they perform all that, then they save their lives and properties from me except for Islamic laws, and their reckoning (accounts) will be with (done by) Allah.’” (Bukhari, vol. 1, book 2, no. 25; see also Bukhari, vol. 1, book 8, no. 392; vol. 4, book 56, no. 2946; vol. 9, book 88, no. 6924; vol. 9, book 96, nos. 7284-7285; as in Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 37). Hence, much like Communism and Nazism, Islam is ideologically an intrinsically aggressive ideology that believes itself authorized to spread its belief system (including the Sharia) over the whole human race by military force when missionary efforts fail; “peace” will only be achieved when Muslim governments rule every square inch of the globe.

Now Islam is an extremely legalistic religion which mechanically regulates many, many small details of daily human behavior in ways that would warm the heart of the most ardent Orthodox Jew. For example, Irshad Manji (“The Trouble With Islam,” p. 23) reports that one popular Islamic teaching warns against “excessive laughter.” Correspondingly, the Ayatollah Khomeini once said there were no jokes in Islam. (Ibn Warraq, “Why the West Is Best,” “City Journal,” Winter 2008, vol. 18, no. 1; http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_snd-west.html). Therefore, careful Muslim legal analysis would be needed for such a central human activity as war against other nations’ infidels. So what do the four principal Sunni Muslim schools of law teach about jihad? Their rulings and interpretations largely compose the Sharia. Although the Maliki, Nanafi, Hanbali, and Shafi’I schools have their differences, all four agree that jihad is important. Their medieval rulings cannot be deemed obsolete by modern Muslim standards because of the generally accepted principle that the “gates of ijtihad” (i.e., free inquiry to discern Allah’s will as found in the Quran and Islamic tradition) closed many centuries ago. It’s not like someone mentioning long-forgotten, obsolete royal decrees by William the Conqueror (who won the battle of Hastings in 1066) in order to characterize contemporary English law. According to Manji, the gates of ijtihad, i.e., independent, creative thought, closed by the twelfth century. Consequently, as she notes (“The Problem with Islam Today,” p. 145), “All types of innovation [i.e., “bida”] became suspect and eventually banned.” Today, the contemporary West’s “chronological snobbery” presupposes all change is good until proven otherwise. By contrast, the Islamic concept of “bida” made the exact opposite assumption: Innovation was bad until demonstrated otherwise. As a result, this profoundly conservative element of Islamic culture helped to freeze into place all the basic, foundational teachings of Muslim law. For since the death of the Hanbali school’s eponymous founder, Ahmed ibn Hanbal in 855, the Sunnis have recognized no one else as a first-class mujtahid, that is, a jurist possessing the authority to originate his own legislation based on the Sunna (i.e., the practices and sayings of Muhammad) and Quran. According to Islamic scholar Cyril Glasse, the tendency of Sunni jurisprudence has been to crank out commentaries on commentaries and marginalia (see Robert Spencer, “Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t,” pp. 81-82). Because the gates of ijtihad closed, as Spencer comments (“Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 38), “Islamic teaching on principal matters has long been settled and is not to called into question.” Although some reform-minded Muslims call for reopening the gates of ijtihad, such as Manji, and the Shi’ites don’t think they ever closed, the leading religious authorities of Sunni Islam, such as the sheiks and imams at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, would entertain opening them no more than the Vatican’s teaching office would reconsider papal infallibility. For example, the Shafi’i legal manual “Umdat al-Salik, translated into English as “Reliance of the Traveller,” which received Al-Azhar’s imprimatur in 1991, spends some 11 pages on “lower,” i.e., literal jihad after briefly contrasting it to the “higher jihad” of struggling against one’s lower self. Even when there’s no caliph, which the Turks abolished in 1924, this apparently up-to-date legal manual says Muslims must still wage jihad. (Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide, pp. 40-41). As this background context shows, the citations of medieval rulings and interpretations of the Sharia on jihad by the four legal schools isn’t an unfair procedure.

Various Muslim jurists before the time of the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (died 1382) plainly taught violent jihad was part of Islamic teaching. Obviously alluding back to the hadith quoted above that offered three choices to infidels before aggressive military action could be commenced, the Malki jurist Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (died 996) proclaimed:

Jihad is a precept of Divine Institution. Its performance by certain individuals may dispense others from it. We Malakis maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them. (As from al-Qayrawani, “La Risala (Epitre sur les elements du dogme et de la loi de l’Islam selon le rite malikit,” trans. into French from the Arabic originally by Leon Bercher, p. 165; as cited by Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide, pp. 38-39).

The Shafi’I scholar Abu’l Hasan al-Mawardi (died 1058) had no problem with jihad waging aggressive attacks against unbelievers:

The mushrikun [infidels] of Dar al-Harb (the area of battle [i.e., the parts of the world ruled by non-Muslims—EVS] area of two types: First, those whom the call of Islam has reached, but they have refused it and have taken up arms. The amir of the army has the option of fighting them . . . in accordance with what he judges to be the best interest of the Muslims and most harmful to the mushrikun . . . Second, those whom the invitation to Islam has not reached, although such persons are few nowadays since Allah has made manifest the call of his Messenger . . . it is forbidden to . . . begin an attack before explaining the invitation to Islam to them, informing them of the miracles of the Prophet [Muhammad] and making plain the proofs so as to encourage acceptance on their part; if they still refuse to accept after this, war is waged against them and they are treated as those whom the call has reached. (Mawardi, “The Laws of Islamic Governance,” Ta-Ha Publishers, 1996, p. 60; as cited by Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” pp. 40).

Shaikh Burhanuddin Ali of Marghinan (d. 1196) wrote in the “Hidayah,” which mainly teaches Hanafi doctrine, also wrote in favor of aggressive, literal jihad:

It is not lawful to make war upon any people who have never before been called to the faith, without previously requiring them to embrace it, because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith, and also because the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war. . . . . If the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us to do so. (Hidayah, vol. 2, p. 140, excerpted in Thomas P. Hughes, “Jihad,” in “A Dictionary of Islam” (London: W.H. Allen, 1895), pp. 243-48; as quoted in Andrew G. Bostom, “The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims,” p. 27).

Ibn Khaldun (died 1406), the great Muslim historian, sociologist, and philosopher, was also a Maliki jurist. According to his summary of five centuries of Sunni Muslim legal analysis and decisions about jihad:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. . . . The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. . . . Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.” (Khaldun, “The Muqudimmah: An Introduction to History,” trans. Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, (New York: Pantheon, 1958), p. 473; as quoted in Bostom, “The Legacy of Jihad,” p. 28).

The general Shi’ite view of jihad agreed with the consensus Sunni legal position. Al-Amili (died 1622), a noted theologian, wrote in the Jami-I-Abbasi, a popular Shi’ite Persian legal manual: “Islamic Holy War [jihad] against followers of other religions, such as Jews, is required unless they convert to Islam or pay the poll tax.” (As quoted in Bostom, “The Legacy of Jihad,” p. 28). Not only do these learned Muslim jurists assume “jihad” refers to military activity in these passages, but they believe Muslims have a duty to engage in aggressive warfare in order to spread their faith. Who can doubt the accuracy of Joseph Schacht’s blunt assessment?: “The basis of the Islamic attitude towards unbelievers is the law of war; they must be either converted or subjugated or killed” (“An Introduction to Islamic Law,” Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982; as cited by Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide, p. 44). Ibn Kaldun didn’t disagree himself about the options for Christians: “It is [for them to choose among] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax [jizya], or death” (as quoted by Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” 54, from Bat Ye’or, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam,” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), p. 296).

Moderately conservative Muslim scholars avoid truly reforming Islamic jurisdiction to fit with modern realities, such as Western domination of the modern state system. The extremely conservative nature of Islamic law in the Sunni tradition binds their hands, so when explaining jihad they look for convenient ad hoc solutions that only nibble at the edges while avoiding the hard issues raised by traditional teaching. They don’t want to recognize truly, for example, how the traditional interpretative principle of naskh makes mincemeat out of a case built using the chronologically earlier “peaceful” Meccan suras of the Quran while ignoring or discounting the later “warlike” Medinan suras. The Al-Azhar conformists, such as Jad al-Haqq in a two-volume textbook, avoids working out the details of how long supposedly temporary truces/treaties should last between believers and what happens after they end. Bassam Tibi comments about the quandary this point leaves Al-Haqq in: “There is no discussion of what occurs after that time, which implies that it is seen as heretical to revise the classical doctrine and that there is no desire to review this doctrine in the light of changed international circumstances. The result is conformity to acquiescence to the new international [territorial nation-state] system, but no effort to alter the classic categories.” Al-Haqq also labors hard to avoid associating the call to unbelievers to become a Muslim (da’wa) with armed jihad (al-musallah) or fighting (qital). His statement that “Islam was not disseminated with the power of the sword” is neither historically accurate nor honest. Tibi plainly perceives the moderately conservative al-Azhar conformists have made only minor superficial adjustments to Islamic law on jihad, not a fundamental reform that recognizes the modern system of sovereign states instituted by the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War (1648):

In short, Muslim states adhere to public international law but make no effort to accommodate the outmoded Islamic ethics of war and peace to the current international order. Thus, their conduct is based on outward conformity [to international law when they join United Nations—EVS], not on a deeper “cultural accommodation”—that is, a rethinking of Islamic tradition that would make it possible for them to accept a more universal law regulating war and peace in place of Islamic doctrine. Such a “cultural accommodation” of the religious doctrine to the changed social and historical realities would mean a reform of the role of the religious doctrine itself as the cultural underpinning of Islamic ethics of war and peace. . . . The [apparent] convergence [of Islamic and international legal traditions] is limited to practical matters and does not reach to basic conceptions of war and peace. . . . Though the Islamic world has made many adjustments to the modern international system, there has been no cultural accommodation, no rigorously critical rethinking of Islamic tradition. (Bassam Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam,” “The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. Terry Nardin: (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), as reprinted in Bostom, “The Legacy of Jihad,” pp. 337-338).

Islamic law hasn’t fundamentally accepted the modern territorial state. It still focuses on the relationship between the community of believers, the Umma, and those unbelievers not ruled by Muslims, in the “House of War.” Islamic conquests are not called “wars” (hurub), but “openings” (futuhat) to the world to Islam’s call to convert. They don’t call the use of force to promote Islam as an act of war, since the call to convert (da’wa) is deemed to be an effort to abolish war after the whole world joins “the house of Islam.” The similarity to the Communist definition of “peace” is obvious (cf. Spencer’s citation of Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” pp. 41-42). Instead, the Al-Azhar University conformists have made minor tactical adjustments rather than serious strategic rethinking of traditional Islamic law. And, as Robert Spencer has observed about the laws of dhimmitude, Islamic laws that temporarily and conveniently gather dust for a period can later be remembered and imposed with a vengeance when other conditions change. (Compare “Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 51).

It's a major mistake for one apologist for Islam to say "most modern Muslims . . . understand their scripture differently today than you would like to accuse them of understanding." Of course, many of them don't know it that well, such as those who feel they have to recite the Quran mechanically in Arabic when they don't hardly understand Arabic! But look carefully at the scholarly journal articles reprinted in Andrew Bostom's "The Legacy of Jihad," such as Bassam Tibbi's. Notice the tortured legalistic contortions or pragmatic expedients that Jad Al-Haqq engages in concerning suspending jihad in today's world. Someone like Qutb, the lead theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood (the author of "Milestones") uses and interprets the Islamic primary sources on (say) jihad or whatever far more authentically than someone like Al-Haqq. This argument is like a liberal Christian's saying, "Well, no one has to interpret Genesis's days literally or John to accept the Deity of Christ." On the basis of this argument about Muslims view of jihad in their primary sources, they (the liberal Christians) have a perfectly reasonable "interpretation" of the Bible as well. But, as we should know, the fundamentalist interpretations of the days of Genesis being 24-hour days and the Gospel of John's denial of Unitarian views of God (as per John 1:1) are a far more correct handling of Scripture than the liberal viewpoint. Similarly, that's why Qutb would beat Haqq, hands down, based on the same fundamentalist religious premises (literal interpretation) applied to Islam's authoritative texts.

Ideas have consequences. All the passages in Islam's primary texts, when taken literally and straightforwardly, using traditional modes of interpretation as sanctioned by the leading authorities in four legal schools of Islam, will generate far more violence on average than people taking the Bible similarly literally. After all, how many traditional Christians (including in places like Mississippi) burn down mosques and kill Muslims every time Christ gets insulted somehow? How many Catholics riots in New York or elsewhere when a picture of the Virgin Mary had dung and pornographic pictures attached to it in a modern art museum in Brooklyn? The right-wing Christians are far more tolerant than the Muslims who rioted, killed, demonstrated, etc. over the Danish cartoons insulting Muhammad, the Nigerian journalist who said Muhammad would like to have married one of the Miss World contestants, or the British schoolteacher who let her class name a teddy bear "Muhammad." Who has more reason to fear?: Do Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens seriously fear fundamentalist Christians will kill them for their atheistic books? Or how about Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's fear of fundamentalist Muslims? The conservative Christians are obviously far more tolerant in practical terms than the Islamist Muslims. After all, Rushdie was specifically targeted by a leading Muslim nation's top leader, and Hirsi Ali knows well that Theo Van Gogh was assassinated for making the independent movie that she wrote the script for.

As Daniel Pipes explains, before quoting the French scholar on the topic, Alfred Morabia, the fundamentalist Islamists who advocate violence shouldn't be seen as marginal extremists today in the Muslim world, especially when they end up running countries (e.g., Ruhollah Khomeini) or major terrorist groups: "For most Muslims in the world today, these moves away from the old sense of jihad are rather remote. They neither see their own [Muslim] rulers as targets deserving of jihad nor are they read to become Quakers. Instead, the classic notion of jihad continues to resonate with vast numbers of them, as Alfred Morabia, a foremost French scholar of the topic, noted in 1993: 'Offensive, bellicose jihad, the one codified by the specialists and theologians, has not ceased to awaken an echo in the Muslim consciousness, both individual and collective. . . . To be sure, contemporary apologists present a picture of this religious obligation that conforms well to the contemporary norms of human rights, . . . but the people are not convinced by this. . . . The overwhelming majority of Muslims remain under the spiritual sway of a law . . . whose key requirement is the demand, not to speak of the hope, to make the Word of God triumph everywhere in the world.' In brief, jihad in the raw remains a powerful force in the Muslim world, and this goes far to explain the immense appeal of a figure like Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001."

Theory of violent jihad among Muslims has mountains of evidence supporting it. Robert Spencer once asked: “[If] any orthodox sects or schools of Islamic jurisprudence that rejected the necessity of jihad warfare in order to institute Sharia.” (http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={585FD8A7-ADD1-438A-8395-B8131F2B25B3}. For example, Majid Khadduri of Johns Hopkins wrote in 1955 that jihad is "an instrument for both the universalization of [Islamic] religion and the establishment of an imperial world state." That was before, as Pipes comments, "political correctness conquered the universities." Where did he get such an idea from? Well, let's consider Pipes' description of the theory and development of jihad legally: "As for the conditions under which jihad might be undertaken--when, by whom, against whom, with what sort of declaration of war, ending how, with what division of spoils, and so on--these are matters that religious scholars worked out in excruciating detail over the centuries. But about the basic meaning of jihad--warfare against unbelievers to extend Muslim domains--there was perfect consensus. For example, the most important collection of hadith (reports about the sayings and actions of Muhammad), called Sahih al-Bukhari, contains 199 references to jihad, and every one of them refers to it in the sense of armed warfare against non-Muslims. To quote the 1885 Dictionary of Islam, jihad is "an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur'an and in the traditions [hadith] as a divine institution, and enjoined especially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims."

HOW MANY BATTLES DID MUHAMMAD HIMSELF PARTICIPATE IN?

Pipes notes that by one calculation, Muhammad himself engaged in 78 battles. How many did Jesus engage in by comparison? Rudolph Peters notes in the authoritative Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (1995) that the allegorical, often mystical Sufi, interpretation of jihad as a personal spiritual struggle of withdrawal from the world, etc., was "hardly touched upon" in premodern legal writings on jihad. For example, consider the four major Muslim legal schools. Do any of them before (say) 1800 define "jihad" to be mainly about fighting one's evil human nature, etc.? The nineteenth century Muslim reformist writings of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan of India simply ignore or discount all the prior centuries' evidence for a literal jihad when developing this spiritual/allegorical meaning. Hence, moderate Muslims who sincerely believe in pushing the delete button on violent jihad within their faith have to be challenged to repudiate publicly what the Quran, the most reliable hadiths, and the early rulings of the four traditional legal schools teach about “jihad.” They shouldn’t be allowed to pretend disingenuously that no primary texts favoring violent jihad exist.

DOES THE OLD TESTAMENT’S WARFARE EXCUSE JIHAD TODAY?

The Old Testament describes Judah’s and Israel’s waging war against neighboring Canaanite nations and others. Does this reality make the Quran’s statements endorsing jihad of little real significance, since most Christians today wouldn’t cite the Old Testament to justify launching modern crusades against Muslims or Jews? After all, the Biblical authorizations to attack would be of very limited value in this regard, for they concerned specific Canaanite peoples, not generic “unbelievers” or “pagans,” as is the case with the Quran’s words when taken at face value. The progressive revelation of the Bible, especially as found in the Sermon on the Mount, reveals that Christians shouldn’t wage war (John 18:36), thus superceding those cases where God directly authorized Israel to wage war. A straight reading of the New Testament shows it teaches outright pacifism, which even the early Sunday-keeping church before the time of Constantine actually largely followed. Turning the cheek simply isn't compatible with military service! Contrast how traditional Christianity spread in its first 300 years with how Islam spread in its first 300 years if one wants to know which religion intrinsically (even by early Catholic standards) was more one of peace. Catholic Christianity was spread largely by persuasion while being a periodically persecuted religious minority within the Roman Empire. By contrast, Muhammad Himself (unlike Jesus) was a general, not just a prophet. He actually lead men in battle. Muhammad’s top lieutenants (the future Caliphs and others) ordered men into battle and bore the sword in the first decades of Islam's existence. Their Muslim armies invaded and conquered the Sassanid (Persian) Empire and took Egypt, Palestine, and Syria (in particular) from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. The also took all of North Africa, Spain, and northern India. So jihad was an intrinsic part of Islam from its founding days, but the Crusades were basically an invention of the 11th century Papacy, over a millennium after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.

Now, where's pacific part of the Quran to overrule the jihadic portions? In the case of the Bible, the dispensationalist interpretative principle is often used to set aside a portion of the Old Testament (i.e., which contains the commands to wage war) based upon a further revelation in the New Testament (i.e., the pacific portion of Scripture). In their case, the moderate Muslims are up against the somewhat similar Islamic doctrine of abrogation (naskh), which teaches that later revelations cancel out earlier ones (as per sura 2:106). Unfortunately for the moderates, the verses of the Quran written later are normally much more warlike and less tolerant than those written earlier. The Medinian "jihad" suras (16, 29, 52, 73, 109) were later, the Meccan "tolerance" verses earlier (with the interesting exception of 2). But the last sura on this subject was the Medinian sura 9, leading Robert Spencer in "Onward Muslim Soldiers" to conclude: "Thus in effect the Qur'an's last word on jihad, and all the rest of the book--including the "tolerance verses"--must be read in its light." This is how the Quran's commentator Ibn Kathir sees it. The Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh 'Abdullah bin Hummad bin Humaid, maintained that "jihad" went through this evolution of meaning in the Quran: Fighting first was forbidden, then permitted, then made obligatory. Nor is this understanding limited to the strict Wahabis. Spencer notes the Pakistani Brigadier S.K. Malik's 1979 book "The Qur'anic Concept of War,” which contained an endorsement from then president Zia-ul-Haq, had the same three-stage schema. To say a literal definition of jihad is merely limited to extremists, past or present, is a huge historical distortion. It's squarely in the mainstream of traditional Muslim legal thought and is easily derived from the primary sources, the Quran and hadiths.

KHOMEINI CITES THE QURAN’S PRO-JIHAD STATEMENTS

The Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, during the controversy after he proclaimed a death sentence (in a fatwa) against the novelist Salman Rushdie for writing "Satanic Verses" in 1989, defended the traditional Muslim understanding of “jihad” as literal warfare. Unlike, say, Saddam Hussein, the past dictator of Iraq, Khomeini was a true scholar of Islam and an authority about its teachings. It’s much more problematic to claim he quoted the Quran out of context or didn’t know what he was talking about than about someone like Hussein. Here, as Ibn Warraq, the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, notes, Khomeini is replying to Western apologists and Muslim moderates by citing the Koran chapter and verse on the subject of the definition of “jihad,” or holy war:

Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. But those who study Islam Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world . . . Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this man that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]. Does this man sitting back until [non-Muslims] overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should surrender to the enemy. Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet} urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.

Warraq goes on to comment: "It is abundantly clear from many of the above verses that the Koran is not talking of metaphorical battles or of moral crusades: it is talking of the battlefield. . . . Mankind is divided into two groups, Muslims and non-Muslims. The Muslims are members of the Islamic community, the umma, who possess territories in the Dar al-Islam, the Land of Islam, where the edicts of Islam are fully promulgated. The non-Muslims are the Harbi, the people of the Dar al-Harb, the Land of Warfare, any country belonging to the infidels that has not been subdued by Islam but that, nonetheless, is destined to pass into Islamic jurisdiction, either by conversion or by war (Harb). All acts of war are permitted in the Dar al-Harb. Once the Dar al-Harb has been subjugated, the Harbi become prisoners of war. The imam can do what the likes to them according to the circumstances. Woe betide the city that resists and is then taken by the Islamic army by storm. In this case, the inhabitants has no rights whatsoever . . . " (pp. 217-218). The author then cites atrocities committed after Constantinople fell in 1453 by the victorious Turkish army.

DOES THE MUSLIM DOCTRINE OF JIHAD MAKE MUSLIM NATIONS LESS PEACEFUL?

The basic ideological/theological reason why Muslim societies engage in more violence on average than non-Muslim ones comes down to the ideology of jihad. The West/Christendom has rejected the notion of (military) crusades having any religious legitimacy, but many, many in the Muslim world uphold what’s some Muslims will also label the 6th pillar of Islam called "Holy War." Now if what the Quran itself has to say on the issue and various hadiths are consulted, the Khomeini interpretation of the term wins hands down upon any reasonable exegesis of the texts in question. It's the purest Muslim propaganda to maintain it only means the struggle against the self’s wrong desires, etc. As Sohail H. Hashmi notes in the “Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion,” by "the final years of the Prophet's life," it came to be that "jihad clearly meant the struggle to propagate the Islamic order worldwide." Even Stephen Swartz, a convert to Islam, in his book, “The Two Faces of Islam,” admitted that "military jihad cannot be written out of Islam. The prophet Mohammed himself led armies." Despite claiming things have changed, Noah Feldman in “After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy” still wrote: "For more than a decade after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, many Islamists sought to emulate the Iranian model by Islamizing their own countries through the revolutionary transformation of violent jihad." Hence, for Muslims to follow in Muhammad’s personal example, just as Christians walk in Jesus’ footsteps is no surprise, as Robert Spencer writes in “Onward Muslim Soldiers” (p. 276), "The Prophet's example invites legions of his imitators to take up arms themselves today." Ideas have consequences. So the ideology of jihad does when the primary sources themselves (Hadiths and the Quran) are examined, not merely what modern Muslim apologists and their multiculturalist, pluralist, liberal Western sympathizers have written.

The young American Muslim scholar/theologian interviewed for the recent PBS series on Islam and America at the Crossroads, who wants to argue that jihad is about fighting one's personal evil desires (or some such other watered down definition), presents a whitewash. Such an interpretation of the Muslim ancient authorities (i.e., hadith, the Koran, the Sharia, early legal decisions/arguments of the four Islamic legal schools, etc.) is academically dishonest. It’s like Christian liberals’ interpretation of the Genesis flood as a local flood in the Middle East only, their claim the days of Genesis 1 aren't literal days, or deny the Gospel of John teaches the Deity of Christ. I bet the chief philosophical theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, would have a much more convincing use of the primary sources than the moderate Muslims would have, for example.

Conservative Islam’s fundamental error has been to chain itself to seventh century Arab tribal values by not being able to seriously change the Sharia since the gates of ijtihad closed. By contrast, Western culture, because it didn't (say) tie itself to Catholic canon law and what was taught in the early Catholic writings, was able to innovate and adapt in ways that conservative Muslim culture intrinsically prevents itself from doing (i.e., "bida," the bias towards all innovation being assumed to be evil a priori).

The error of the moderate Muslims is that most of them don't want to publicly attack head-on the parts of the Sharia that are in error by modern Western values, such as equality under the law for religious minorities and the intrinsic evil of (non-defensive) religious warfare. The conservative Islamists, such as Qutb and Khomeini, will win any battle of citations from the Quran, the Hadith, and the rulings of the jurists found in the Sharia on the points in contention with the moderate and liberal Muslims. Hence, the moderate Muslims who claim these primary sources of religious authority don't teach violent imperialistic jihad, the oppression of women, and systematic discrimination against religious minorities (as dhimmis) are either ignorant or disingenuous. It would be like a modern liberal Christian claiming, "The Bible, the early Catholic writings, and Catholic canon law never teach that wives should obey husbands and never say that gay sex is evil." In this regard, the "modernist" Christian liberals are much more honest than these moderate Muslims who take advantage of Western ignorance about the Islamic texts to characterize them in ways which simply aren't true, as their Islamist opponents would willingly point out to them.

It's fine to say there are lots of moderate Muslims. But they may compose a "silent majority" because they know they are on ideologically shaky ground since the Islamists (not to be equated with terrorists overall) would get the better of the argument on textual grounds about what jihad means and the necessity of present Muslim governments to impose the Sharia in Allah's sight. Much like the liberal Christians, the moderate Muslims are letting modern Western Enlightenment thinking control their interpretation of their primary texts, which simply isn't honest, even if their views may be pragmatically sensible and humane compared to the Islamists'. Likewise, orthodox Muslims’ intolerance of differing religious views among other Muslims themselves differs little from the mentality of the Medieval Church concerning heretics in its midst. For example, the great Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali (1058-1128) asked about philosophical opponents in his culturally very influential work, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”: “Do you then say conclusively that they are infidels and that killing of those who uphold their beliefs is obligatory?” He responded that they should be pronounced infidels for three reasons: 1. They said the world had eternally existed, rather than being created. 2. Allah doesn’t know particular things, only general universal terms/concepts. 3. There was no resurrection of the body. Thus, killing these heretical Muslims, the medieval Muslim philosophers who exalted ancient Greek philosophy’s ideas over the Quran’s revelation, was obligatory under Islamic law! (Robert Spencer, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades),” p. 95.) How different is this mentality from what drives jihads?

So then, it's now time to examine some theory and methodology. After all, ideas have consequences. Furthermore, facts without theory (or interpretative context) are useless. It's necessary to consider in advance what values and assumptions that are brought to bear when examining someone's claims to truth. Here are three key questions that liberal academics and intellectuals who like to whitewash Islam should be made to specifically answer:

1. Do you believe that people getting and upholding certain ideas will act upon them?

2. Do you believe that people with certain religious ideas will act upon them in this life?

3. Do you believe that the Bible and the standard and/or literal interpretations made of it (such as in the early Catholic writers) are as apt to produce violence and terrorism as the standard and/or literal interpretations of the Quran, the hadiths, and the early rulings of the four traditional Islamic legal schools (i.e., the Sharia)?

Point three can bear some more explanation. Evil human nature is found in all places at all times, true. But it's plainly worse in some political systems/civilizations compared to others: Compare totalitarian socialism with democratic capitalism, for example. Another interesting, if less airtight, historical political comparison to make would be to measure Protestantism up against Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Likewise, a straightforward interpretation of the primary standard religious texts of Islam are far more apt to produce violence from its believers on average compared to the founding documents of Christianity, given equal amounts of religious zeal and knowledge a priori on both sides. Moderate Muslims are like liberal Christians: The former have to ignore and deny the plain meanings of texts the conservative Islamists like Qutb and Khomeini cite for literal jihad, just as the latter ignore or deny the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, His actual resurrection, the literal meaning for the days of creation, etc. That is, as Warraq put it ever so cleverly, "There are moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate." The moderate Muslims who deny that the normal interpretation of their religious texts encourage violent jihad are either ignorant or dishonest. So allegedly moderate Muslims and Western liberal academics need to muster their available heavy duty academic artillery, using facts and logic, not ad hominem abuse and arguments from authority, against critics of Islam as Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Irshad Manji, Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq, and Robert Morey, if they wish to refute them.

CHAPTER 2

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY IMPERIALISM, CONQUEST, AND EXCUSE-MAKING: WHY ARE JIHADS GOOD, BUT CRUSADES EVIL?

IS MUSLIM AGGRESSION WRONG ALSO?

Should past Muslim aggression be morally condemned like Western imperialism is? Let’s consider now equal opportunity imperialism, selective outrage, excuse-making, and double standards when comparing the West and the Islamic worlds concerning their respective histories of military conquest. A true Christian has to agree that invading other countries and conquering them is wrong, by whatever means this is done. Someone can't both love his enemy yet also kill him on the battlefield (Matt. 5:43-48). In a world ruled by the sword, Christians have to reject the use of force against others (Matt. 26:52), even when it's ostensibly done for someone else's good.

Given these spiritual realities, are some cases of imperialism "better" than others? Was Islamic imperialism more moral or had better (say) economic or political effects than Western imperialism? If a given piece of land was taken (i.e., stolen) by a succession of conquerors over the centuries, is the last one to take it somehow less moral than any of the prior takers? On what basis do we get all hot and emotionally indignant against the last one to conquer a given piece of real estate, but then pass over in silence, with nary an emotional ripple, or make just perfunctory comments against, all prior acts of conquest and/or imperialism? Is selective outrage morally justifiable? Or is it merely evidence of a double standard’s operation? Someone may argue the “Christian” West had a higher level of knowledge than the Islamic world, which then makes them more responsible and thus guilty. But that’s fundamentally dubious because the former’s people for many centuries had little or no access to the Bible and that both civilization’s people were entirely or rarely called truly to salvation.

SHOULD MUSLIMS BE TOLD TO FORGET PAST MISTREATMENT BY CHRISTIANS?

It has been argued that “past atrocities are the same morally as present ones is not useful for solving the world's problems. Those abused recently are still alive and willing to do something about it." Therefore, since (say) the actions taken by America and Great Britain that helped create the State of Israel which displaced the Palestinians happened more recently than (say) the Ottoman Empire’s conquests or atrocities, the former is worthy of more criticism than the latter. But first of all in reply, don't Muslims chronically bring up cases in which they were mistreated in the past by the West/"Christendom"? If a Muslim wants to talk about nineteenth century European imperialism or the Crusades, should he be told, "Arguing that past atrocities are the same morally as present ones is not useful for solving the world's problems"? If they want to spend a lot of time talking about all this mistreatment, why can't the West's apologists spend their time in turn talking about past acts of imperialism and jihad by Muslims, whether during the initial invasions in the first two centuries after Muhammad's death or during the period of Ottoman expansion from the 14th century onwards? If the Muslims have long memories, why shouldn't the (traditional) Christians have equally long ones also? Even George W. Bush backed up from using the word "crusade" to describe the war on terror after 9-11 because of Muslim protests: Although he seriously professes evangelical Christianity, he surely didn't mean it literally, as a religious war, but was surely using the term generically, as in the phrase, "a crusade against drugs." (Here's an interesting thought experiment: Suppose W. Bush had carefully chosen a different word, as a deliberate PR manipulation, and had said that we (or the Muslims) need to launch a "jihad" against terrorism: What would have Muslims who condemned his use of "crusade" then had said in response then?) So aren't Muslims simply obsessed with the Crusades? The Crusades against Islam ended over 700 years ago, but they certainly aren't forgotten. Yet, on the other hand, how many Turks or Muslims in general feel any guilt about the Armenian genocide, which in a bare generation before 1948, killed twice as many Armenians as there were Palestinians displaced from the modern state of Israel's land? So if Muslims can't be told to forget past mistreatment, why should (traditional) Christians either (except perhaps by appealing to their own principle of forgiveness)?

Now, this argument in principle is most useful for a Catholic apologist: Suppose a liberal agnostic or atheist academic said, "I don't believe in the Bible and Christianity because of the Inquisition and Crusades." Suppose someone replied back, "Arguing that past atrocities are the same morally as present ones is not useful for solving the world's problems. Those abused recently are still alive and willing to do something about it." After all, the victims of the inquisition are long since dead, and the Catholic church, at least for the time being, has abolished (or transformed) the "Holy Office." What matters then is, "What happens to you after you die? Could Intelligent Design be correct? Could the Bible be inspired by God?" Should secular critics of Christianity be similarly rebuked?

A comparison between the Palestinians’ present plight and the Armenian genocide is worth some further analysis. The latter killed roughly 1.5 million people during the general period of 1915-1923, and the Armenian population of Anatolia ceased to exist at that point. If this is now unimportant because it occurred 90 years ago, could the same be said about an event that occurred a little less than 60 years ago in 1947-49 that killed far fewer people and was likely much less a product of deliberate government policy (i.e., that of Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, and the Haganah)? When should we adopt "historical amnesia" about such things, and say they no longer matter? How long should it take? Should the Muslims be told to forget about European imperialism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries then since, well, that's so "yesterday" also? How many Muslims alive today actually lived in colonies ruled by the Western powers? If Jesus doesn't return in the next thirty five years, would we say then that the displacement of 650,000 Arabs in 1947-49 is no more important than the Armenian genocide is presently? But then again, if Jesus is going to return in about ten years, and the "Great Catastrophe" isn't going to be reversed by the kingdom of God, should we get so emotionally worked up about this problem compared to other great or greater atrocities or human rights violations? For example, the problem of female genital mutilation, honor killings, and the general oppression of women would constitute far greater human rights problem than whatever the Israelis have done to the Palestinians over the decades. Yet how much attention and condemnation do those problems generate, whether by Muslims themselves or by Westerners? Selective outrage and double standards should be condemned: Jeane Kirkpatrick's analysis still holds in that sense ("Dictatorships and Double Standards.") Obviously, these Armenian dhimmis did end up dead, not alive under a second class citizenship, as had been their lot in prior centuries. Presently the Palestinian Arabs are alive under a system (if in the semi/formally occupied territories) that leaves them alive but effectively like "dhimmis" with a second class citizenship: Should they be grateful then that the Jews treated them better by letting them live and multiply compared to how the Turks treated an initially larger group of Armenians a mere three decades earlier? Should the Israelis be praised for their level of “tolerance” in granting the Palestinians second-class citizenship, much like the Muslims gave to Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain? Or is second class citizenship fine when Muslims today give it to Christians and Jews, but evil when Jews give it to Muslims?

HAVE THE MUSLIMS ALWAYS BEEN VICTIMS OF WESTERN AGGRESSION?

Western imperialism and Islamic imperialism should be systematically compared to see which was worse overall. An earlier starting point (such as 632 A.D.) for this data set (the history of political relations between the West and the Arab and/or Muslim world) will make the Muslims much more into the "bad guys" and "Christendom" into the "good guys” than a 1798 starting date does. Were the initial Arab invasions any more justifiable in theory than (say) the Mongols' attacks on China and the Ukraine? Weren’t the early Muslims just one more set of barbarian nomads over the millennia that sought to plunder wealth from richer neighboring civilizations? Were the Muslims of the Middle East after Napoleon invaded Ottoman-held Egypt mere hapless victims of military stronger adversaries of the West? Or did they get their "just deserts" or "blowback" from prior acts of Imperialism committed by themselves? Did the history of the Middle East begin in 1800 or 1900? By ignoring all prior acts of Islamic imperialism and starting with an arbitrarily chosen date to begin with when only the Europeans were acting aggressively, the Muslims in the Middle East may appear to be solely or mainly victims. But what’s wrong with changing the starting date for this historical analysis? How aggressive were Muslims against the West and other cultures (like Hindu India) between Muhammad’s death (632 A.D.) and the last siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Empire (1683)? Why doesn’t any of that history count equally in the balances? The history of the Middle East, or the general clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity, didn't begin when Napoleon invaded Egypt.

The "victimology" paradigm for Muslim/Western relationships over the centuries, as well as a c. 1800 starting date for the analysis of the same, simply has to be rejected. For most of the past 1400 years, the Muslims were on the offensive rather the defensive through various jihads and other attacks. Even the Crusades were arguably a counter-attack, since the Byzantine Empire was on the ropes strategically after their legions were demolished by the Seljuk Turk horse archers at Manzikert (1071). Could one also say the Muslims attacked to obtain "economic and strategic advantages" also in prior centuries, not merely out of religious ideology? Likewise, when Cortez attacked the Aztecs in Mexico, he and his men did it for "God, gold, and glory," and not necessarily in that priority order!

Bernard Lewis, in “The Muslim Discovery of Europe” (the title of which, incidentally, appears to be an unacknowledged sly retort to Edward Said's “Orientalism”), describes throughout the book the general utter ignorance or obsolete knowledge Muslims normally had of the West's history and culture until after about 1820. For example, he comments (p. 168): "An eighteenth-century Ottoman knew as much about the states and nations of Europe as a nineteenth-century European about the tribes and peoples of Africa--and regarded them with the same slightly amused disdain." But, unfortunately for the Turkish Muslims, the Europeans posed a far greater military threat to them at this time than the tribes of Africa posed to nineteenth-century English Victorians. The Muslims’ sense of complacency and ethnocentrism was especially dangerous when their enemies in the West had (finally) become stronger than the Islamic world was politically and militarily. Furthermore, it can be readily shown that the Western scholars of past centuries did far more research in the customs and beliefs of other civilizations, including those they had conquered, than Muslim scholars in equivalent positions had done. For example, compare the half a dozen reports written on China by Jesuit missionaries starting with Mendoza’s Histoire in 1588 until 1672 with what Muslims produced in any given 80 year period before 1700 on “Christendom.” (See Stanley L. Jaki, “The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin,” p. 19, for the specific European authors of histories and reports on Chinese culture; cf. p. 22, for a slightly later but very influential one). The Islamic world’s sense of religious superiority, indeed, their ethnocentrism, stemmed from the doctrine of jahiliyah, “the Age of Ignorance,” or period of moral darkness that filled the world before Islam arrived. As Manji explains: “The charade is, Arabs have assumed that the various non-Arab peoples they’ve conquered were also morally ignorant. The conquered have effectively been taught that because the Koran attributes darkness to the pre-Islamic period, all wisdom prior to Muhammad carries the weight of blasphemy and applies to every Muslim, outside of Arabia no less than inside.” She cites V.S. Naipaul as noting that Arab cultural colonization was more successful than Western was while recounting his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia: “No colonization had been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith. . . . . It was an article of the Arab faith that everything before [it] was wrong, misguided, heretical; there was no room in the heart or mind of these believers for their pre-Mohammedan past.” (as in Irshad Manji, “The Trouble with Islam Today,” p. 141). In this context, contrast the contemporary curriculum of the stereotypical Saudi-supported Islamist madrassas that teach only or mainly the Koran with that of past medieval Roman Catholics who studied what the pagan Greek and Islamic philosophers taught, such as shown within the pages of Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” Who is more ethnocentric? Who was less ethnocentric?

WESTERN IMPERALISM AS PAYBACK FOR EARLIER JIHADS BY TURKS AND ARABS

Because historical amnesia about Western/Islamic relations is cultural blindness, a c. 1800 starting date for analyzing their relationship must be rejected. To pretend all the prior centuries of conflict didn't exist and isn't relevant to post-1800 events may be an effective pretense so Muslims could claim to have been primarily victims of the West, but it isn't a fair analysis. Furthermore, and most importantly, if Muslims are obsessed with condemning the Crusades, such as blaming them for many of the historical problems between "Christendom" and the Islamic world, they obviously reject a c. 1800 starting date for analyzing this historical relationship themselves. So why should a Western apologist confine himself or herself either? For example, it's necessary to examine the events preceding the history of unequal treaties between the Ottoman Turks and the Western powers (including Peter the Great's Russia) that really began with Carlowitz (1699). Then look back at all the Ottoman expansionism that characterized the Turkish empire’s prior centuries, including two major assaults on Vienna (1529 and 1683). Western Imperialism is merely the chickens coming home to roost against the Islamic world for their acts of conquest in prior centuries. Since here there’s moral equivalency, why should the Muslims "whine" about the blowback then if Americans shouldn’t “whine” about 9-11? For example, during the Greek revolt against Turkish rule in the early nineteenth century (c. 1821 for this quote), one of the Ottoman beys if Arta admitted the reasons for the ferocity of the struggle when the Greeks attempted to get their independence back: "We have wronged the rayas [dhimmis] (i.e., our Christian subjects) and destroyed both their wealth and honor; they became desperate and took up arms. This is just the beginning and will finally lead to the destruction of our empire." (as quoted in Andrew G. Bostom, "The Legacy of Jihad," pp. 69-70). So then, the British-French Sykes-Picot secret agreement for dividing up the Ottoman Empire was an agreement by several empires to punish another empire for throwing in their lot with Germany during World War I. Did the Turks really want to give independence to the Arabs in the early twentieth century any more than they had to the Greeks in the early nineteenth?

Consider now the perspective of Bernard Lewis, perhaps the Western world's greatest scholar on the subject of Islamic history. His long view of history gives him a historical insight easily overlooked by those focusing on the great European Imperialist drive of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

The response of European Christendom to the first great jihad had been the Reconquest [of Spain/Portugal] and the Crusades. The response to the second wave of Islamic advance culminated in the expansion of Europe which has come to be known as imperialism. It began, not surprisingly, as the two extremities of Europe, in countries which had themselves been subject to Muslim rule--in the Iberian Peninsula and in Russia. It subsequently spread until it engulfed almost the whole world of Islam. (“The Muslim Discovery of Europe,” p. 33).

Along these same lines, he once said:

The Muslim attack on Christendom . . . has gone through three phases. The first is from the beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond. . . . After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part, but not all, of the [European] territory they had lost. . . . They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom. Notably they failed to recapture the Holy Land. . . . That was not the end of the matter. The Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time not conducted by Arabs and Moors, but by Turks and Tartars. . . . Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and rapidly. They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing farther into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers from when they had come. From this phase of the European counterattack [the late 16th century] a new term was invented: imperialism. When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism. When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was . . . . In our own time, we have seen the end of that [period of European] domination [of the Middle East]." (As spoken at the American Enterprise Institute’s March lecture; then quoted in R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., "Will We Always Have Paris?," American Spectator, July/August 2007, p. 79).

Obviously, in the light of Lewis’ historical generalizations here, if we observe the struggles of the Spanish (until 1492 in their homeland) and the Hapsburgs of Austria Hungary against Islam (Vienna was besieged in 1532 and 1683), the European response to Ottoman Turkish aggression wasn’t about something that occurred only during the early Middle Ages. Rather, the second great jihad (by the Turks) continued right into the early modern period. The various Balkan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as by the Greeks (1821-29), were merely attempts by conquered peoples to regain what Wilson would call their “right to self-determination.” The various Balkan Wars and 19th-century Russia's wars against the Sublime Port were often about conquered traditional Christian nations opportunistically seeking freedom from "The Sick Man of Europe." (But even the first Crusade mostly was a response to the Turks' victory at Manzikert in 1071, and Byzantium's ensuing loss of Anatolia, that caused Constantinople to plead for help from their culturally backward schismatic Catholic cousins). Of course, when the Europeans entered areas in Asia and Africa that weren't traditionally Muslim, they obviously weren't retaliating against anything the Ottomans had done in prior decades and centuries, but were just another set of conquerors on the march, much like the Muslims had been during the two great jihads. But if the specific historical events are broken down decade by decade and century by century concerning the wars of the Ottoman Empire, rather than just making a broad generalization about nearly 1400 years of Islamic history, Bernard Lewis' generalization still does indeed hold, that the initial impetus for European imperialism had its beginning in being a response to the great Turkish jihad. But then, the West’s response flowed well past boundaries of the Islamic world, to say the least.

So then, do any Muslim academics and intellectuals condemn routinely and publicly blast in their home countries their own civilization’s dark history of military conquest, jihad, and the oppression of religious minorities and women? To generalize, Western intellectuals are much too self-critical of their own civilization’s failings; Muslim academics rarely self-critical enough. Where are all the Muslim “Noam Chomskys”? As the Palestinian Dr. Eyad Saraj told Irshad Manji, “We need a lot more self-criticism.” Palestinian society is far less self-critical than Israeli society, and Western society in general, despite Palestine’s Arabs have their own deep cultural flaws, which Dr. Saraj pointed out: “I know we have a lot of psychopathology. It’s a male-dominated society, there is no role for women, there is no freedom of expression, there is a heavy atmosphere of intimidation. . . . This is a tribal structure in which dissent is seen as treason. We have not yet developed a state of citizenry, within all the Arab countries, in which people are equal before the law.” (Irshad Manji, “The Trouble with Islam Today,” p. 137).

What caused the Greek revolt (1821-27) against the Ottomans? What later led to the Congress of Berlin? Various Christian nationalities in the Balkans wanted self-determination and independence from Turkish rule. After the Turks butchered thousands of Bulgarians, the Russians intervened (1877), and soon imposed the Treaty of San Stefano upon the Sublime Porte. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro all received independence under this treaty. The Austrians and British didn't like this result, nor did the Turks exactly appreciate it, so at the Congress of Berlin the other great powers frustrated the Russian design for a big Bulgaria even though their army had approached Istanbul's outskirts. To think this outcome had nothing to do with pre-1800 acts of conquest by the Ottoman Turks is ridiculous. These countries wouldn't have sought independence then if they hadn't been conquered by the Muslims in prior centuries. Anyone informed of this (previous) history before c. 1800 would have to admit, "Christendom was the victim of the Islamic world before the West later became the victimizers of the East."

MUSLIM ARMIES ALSO COMMITTED ATROCITIES

But now, how did the Muslims actually treat the areas they conquered? Many are aware of what Crusaders did after they took Jerusalem from the Muslims, with all the blood flowing in the streets. But a similar scene erupted in Constantinople when that city fell (finally) to the Muslims in 1453. Sir Steven Runciman describes the Sultan Mehmet granting the Muslim soldiers three days to pillage: "They poured into the city. . . . They slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets. . . . But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profits" (as cited by Warraq, “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” p. 218). Of course, who actually slaughtered more of whom (the Crusaders taking Jerusalem or the Muslims taking Constantinople) may not be clear historically. But a priori there is no cause for the Muslims to celebrate their moral superiority concerning the treatment of captured cities after they had resisted. The Muslims, whenever they wanted to, could easily suspend religious tolerance for their would-be dhimmis of the People of the Book.

Ibn Warraq's book, “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” pp. 218-19, describes similar Muslim atrocities earlier in their history, during their first major invasion of the Middle East:

The patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem (634-638 A.D.) saw the invaders [i.e., Muslims during their first main jihad] as "godless barbarians" who burnt churches, destroyed monasteries, profaned crosses, and horribly blasphemed against Christ and the church." In 639, thousands died as a result of the famine and the plague consequent to the destruction and pillage. After the death of the Prophet (Muhammad), the caliph Abu Bakr organized the invasion of Syria. During the campaign of 634, the entire region between Gaza and Caesarea was devastated; four thousand peasants--Christians, Jews, and Samaritans who were simply defending their land--were massacred. During the campaigns in Mesopotamia between 635 and 642, monasteries were sacked, the monks were killed, and Monophysite Arabs executed or forced to convert. In Elam the population was put to the sword, at Susa all the dignitaries suffered the same fate. We are better informed of the conquest of Egypt by Amr b. al-As, thanks to the 'Chronicle of John,' Bishop of Nikiu, written between 693 and 700. For John, the Muslim yoke was 'heavier than the yoke which had been laid on Israel by Pharaoh.' As Amr advanced into Egypt, he captured the town of Behnesa, near the Fayum, and exterminated the inhabitants: 'whoever gave himself up to them {the Muslims] was massacred, they spared neither the old, nor the women or children.' Fayum and Aboit suffered the same fate. At Nikiu, the entire population was put to the sword. The Arabs took the inhabitants of Cilicia into captivity. In Armenia, the entire population of Euchaita was wiped out. Seventh-century Armenian chroniclers recount how the Arabs decimated the populations of Assyria and forced a number of inhabitants to accept Islam, and then wrought havoc in the district of Daron, southwest of Lake Van. In 642, it was the town of Dvin's turn to suffer. In 643 the Arabs came back, bringing 'extermination, ruin, and slavery.' Michael the Syrian tell us how Mu'awiya sacked and pillaged Cyprus and then established his domination by a 'great massacre.' It was the same ghastly spectacle in North Africa: Tripoli was pillaged in 643; Carthage was razed to the ground and most of its inhabitants killed. Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran presented a similar spectacle.

So although some were disenchanted with Byzantine rule, and so helped or didn't actively oppose the early Muslim armies, that’s no proof on the whole later on that Islamic rule necessarily made things any better for their conquered subjects.

Describing the first Muslim invasion of part of what then was considered to be India, the Sind, Warraq documents still more harsh treatment meted out by the Jihadists: "The Muslim army took three days to slaughter the inhabitants [after the port of Debal was taken]; thereafter [the Muslim commander] Qasim became more tolerant, allowing many to continue their professions and practice their religion. This called down a rebuke from his superior, Hajjah, the governor of Iraq, who complimented him for his victory, but who ordered him to follow the Koranic injunction [in 47.4] that says, "O True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads." He told Qasim: "My distinct orders are that all those who are fighting men should be assassinated, and their sons and daughters imprisoned and retained as hostages." Later Qasim did as he was told, for when he took the town of Brahaminabad, he had all the men in the military classes beheaded, a total or 6000 or (other sources) 16,000 fighting men. During the later invasion of India, from 1000 A.D. on, other atrocities followed at the hands of Mahmud of Ghazni.

IS SOMEBODY’S IMPERIALISM OR CONQUEST MORALLY SUPERIOR TO SOMEONE ELSE’S?

Now, in response, some could point out that the two great empires that ruled the Middle East in the year 600 A.D., the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) and Sassanid (Persian) Empires, had conquered their way to power also. The Byzantine rulers, as good Orthodox Catholic Christians, treated poorly the (dissident Christian) Monophysites, who generally lived in the rural areas outside the large cities in Egypt and Greater Syria. So for one conqueror to replace another in the seventh century A.D. makes neither superior to the other. But if we admit moral equivalency among the Arabs, the Turks, and the Europeans who subjugated the former two during in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then all the emotional rhetoric directed against the last has to be dropped. Or, alternatively, an equal level of invective should be directed against the Arabs and Turks for their prior centuries of aggressive conquests. Likewise, did the Arabs really suffer more under British and French rule than did they did under Turkish rule in the twentieth century? Is there a statue of limitations on imperialism? If so, how many centuries have to elapse before it kicks in? Does its length vary from place to place for purely arbitrary reasons emotionally? Do the West’s critics mostly only get upset at whoever took a particular piece of real estate last, while passing over all the other prior thefts as morally irrelevant to their current political goals or ideologies? In this light, think about Jeanne Kirkpatrick's criticism of the Left's double standards about Communist dictatorships as opposed to right-wing authoritarian ones in her book "Dictatorships and Double Standards."

Does the end that justifies the means when a true Christian examines anti-colonialist guerrilla and terrorist movements? That is, isn’t it wrong to shift from Biblical values to secular ones when deeming they would produce more good ultimately despite causing so much evil initially? Suppose someone argues that coercive tactics should be used on terrorist suspects by reasoning, "the greatest good for the greatest number will be produced by waterboarding terrorist suspects who are withholding information that could prevent thousands of people from dying from a nuclear bomb’s explosion." How does that differ from reasoning, "the greatest good for the greatest number will be produced by liberation front X’s gaining for their nation self-determination by any means necessary, because then fewer people will die or be impoverished by the new government than by the old colonialist one"? If someone has emotional sympathies for anti-colonialist liberation movements, but none for waterboarding terrorist suspects, that person isn’t using Biblical, non-worldly values to equally condemn all wrong uses of force even when ultimately more good would result than evil from them. Does "the end justifies the means" justify all movements seeking self-determination for their nations, but not for questioning coercively terrorist suspects, eh?

Furthermore, was European imperialism actually worse in its effects on average people than conquests in prior centuries? Are all cases of imperialism equally bad or worse when compared and contrasted with what preceded or replaced them? Let’s focus on the case of British ruled India. Why was Nirad Chaudhuri candidly willing to admit: “No Indian with any education and some regard for the historical truth, ever denied that, with all its shortcomings, British rule had, in the balance, promoted both the welfare and happiness of the Indian people.” Why was he willing to make such a concession? V.M. Tarkunde explains specifically how India benefited from British rule:

India was then [before c. 1750] a country of despotism, injustice and near anarchy, and the bulk of the people welcomed the law and order established by British rule. Although British rule in India ceased to have any progressive potentiality by about the beginning of the present century [c. 1900], its initial impact on the country was highly beneficial. Due to the exhilarating contact with the spirit of freedom, rationalism and human dignity represented by British liberal thought, a belated Renaissance began to develop in India. It took the shake of a movement against religious superstition and in favor of such social causes as abolition of Sati [i.e., the custom of killing widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres], legalization of widow remarriage, promotion of women’s education, prevention of child marriages and opposition to the custom of untouchability.

Warraq observes that the rule of law, that law’s nature, and parliamentary democracy, were also cultural legacies of the British Raj. (See “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” pp. 208-209, for these quotes). So then, it’s a major error to think all cases of imperialism are morally equivalent in their effects, even though unchristian violence lies at the foundation of all wars of conquest. After all, which case of imperialism promoted the welfare of average people in the areas they conquered better: The British in India or the Mongols in China? Case closed!

Suppose someone cited various British massacres in Kenya as one of many possible atrocities committed by Western imperialists in order to indict them. But does mentioning these atrocities answer this question: How many massacres occurred in Kenya before the guys in red coats showed up? Consider the equivalent unqualified statement in response by Warraq (“Why I Am Not a Muslim,” p. 219) concerning some early Arab Muslim butchery when first invading what’s today Israel: “During the campaign of 634, the entire region between Gaza and Caesarea was devastated; four thousand peasants—Christians, Jews, and Samaritans who were simply defending their land—were massacred.” Is his making this point "unfair," "biased," "racist"? Should this incident make any of today’s Muslims feel guilty? If tit-for-tat atrocities in the history of Islam and “Christendom” can be easily enumerated, are any Muslims or Western liberal academics really being intellectually honest or fair with the historical evidence when focusing only on the West’s atrocities to the exclusion of the Islamic world’s?

Now, in the case of British rule over India, they surely did a much better job of ruling that nation than a restored Moghul (i.e., imperialist Muslim) state would have: The British abolished suttee, slavery, and female infanticide. They also suppressed the Thugee cult and much of the banditry in the countryside. There were also major infrastructure improvements, such as the building of very high quality railroads (better than the American West’s). True, someone could argue like Daniel R. Headrick, “The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940,” and say it would have been better for the general welfare of the Indian people had the British spent less on railroads and more on irrigation projects (pp. 194-195). It’s unlikely Islamic imperialism (i.e., the Moguls) would have done as well as the British for average Indians, even when it came to irrigation projects. Even Headrick admits the irrigation projects that the Moguls had built fell into neglect in the eighteenth century as their power declined (p. 173). The official mainstream Muslim approach would be to mistreat the Hindus as contemptible pagan idolaters who weren’t even worthy of official dhimmi status. In practical terms, of course, they had to treat them better than the Sharia would teach. It’s unlikely standard nineteenth-century British racism typically would have yielded equally bad attitudes, if the two forms of ethnocentrism could be measured and compared somehow empirically.

Let's examine now the case of Algeria specifically. Now, what prior history just might have encouraged the French to invade Algeria in 1830? Why do American Marines sing a song about the shores of Tripoli and the halls of Montezuma? The Barbary pirates of north Africa, although they were under the nominal control of a Turkish Bey, or governor, nevertheless pretty much did as they wanted. Their acts of piracy and of enslaving others brought much misery upon those Europeans unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches. One recent estimate states the Corsairs of Barbary took a million people into slavery over the centuries. So then, as part of this revenge cycle, the European powers eventually tired of paying tribute to these pirates. After all, President Jefferson of the upstart United States refused to. One of them ultimate decides to stop paying “protection money,” but conquers the pirates' homeland instead. Blowback, or payback, indeed!

IS THERE A STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON (REVERSING THE RESULTS OF) IMPERIALISM?

Now, if the conqueror successfully assimilates the conquered to the religion, language, and/or culture of the conqueror over a period of decades or centuries, does that legitimize the conquest to the extent it takes place? Does that turn "is" into "ought"? For example, the United States took about half of Mexico in a war (1846-48) President Polk went out of the way to provoke through a deliberately arranged clash in a disputed border area between Mexico and the recently annexed state of Texas. This war occurred after the French invaded Algeria in 1830. In that case, Muslims and others would say that to send the Colons (French settlers) of Algeria packing for home and to give Algeria independence were good policies in the 1960s. No doubt similar sentiments exist concerning (say) the white farmers of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the Portuguese in Angola or Mozambique, and the Zionist Jews in Israel/Palestine. By contrast, no serious minds in the United States today publicly demand the return of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas to Mexico. Is the difference from Algeria because America managed to make most of this area generally English-speaking through its settlers until (say) the past 40 years?

In a clash between a European imperialist power and a native imperialist power, why should the latter be seen as morally superior? The Zulus entered South Africa after the Dutch Boers had. When the Zulus encountered the British at Isandlwana and then (famously) at Rorke's Drift, two imperialist conquering empires clashed. Such as shown by their treatment of the Hottentots through a virtual extermination campaign, the Zulus should not be deemed the general moral superiors of the British, although local British colonial officials (in the immediate case) were guilty of having provoked this war in 1878-79. (See Lawrence James, “The Rise and Fall of the British Empire,” pp. 257-258).

THE ARAB AND TURKISH CONQUEST OF ALGERIA AND NORTH AFRICA

But wasn’t Turkish rule over the Arabs and Berbers the result of conquest also? Didn’t the British, such as through the efforts so famously of Lawrence of Arabia during World War I, merely take advantage of the Muslim Arabs’ resentment against rule by the Muslim Turks? (Although, as Karsh points out, very few Arabs were nationalists inclined to revolt against Ottoman rule during most of World War I, unlike the case for the restive European nationalists in the Balkans before the war. See “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” pp. 132-33). Likewise, wasn't (nominal) Turkish control of Algeria also imperialism? Consider Kedourie’s interesting analysis (1992) on previous conquests in Algeria’s past: "It is true that the French invaded Algeria, but so did the Arabs and Turks before them. It is true that the colonized the country and appropriated large tracts of land, but so did the Arabs and Turks before them. The French were no doubt guilty of great misdeeds, but were theirs greater than those of their predecessors? In the time of the French there were undoubtedly oppression and poverty, but was the Algeria of the corsairs, or the one which came into being in 1962, an exemplar of freedom, prosperity and justice? How many Algerians, one wonders, as now sighing for the days of the French, such as they were." Now ponder the perspective of Kateb Yacine (1929-1989), the Algerian writer who rejected Arab and Islamic cultural imperialism over Algeria, and defended staunchly the native language of Berber: "Our armed struggle ended the destructive myth of French Algeria, but we have succumbed to the power of the even more destructive myth of Arab-Islamic Algeria. French Algeria lasted 104 years. Arab-Islamic Algeria has lasted thirteen centuries! The deepest form of alienation is no longer the belief that we are French, but the belief that we are Arabs. . . . There is a sacred language, that of the Koran, used by the rulers to prevent the people from discovering their own identity" (as quoted by Warraq, “Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 208, p. 212). For Islamic is intrinsically a less universal religion than Christianity since Muslims who can’t read the Quran or pray the obligatory prayers in Arabic are in an intrinsically greatly inferior position to Arab believers, unlike (say) Christians who can’t read or speak Greek, the original language of the New Testament. For example, Taslima Nasrin, a doctor and feminist writer thrown out of Bangladesh, asked her mother that if Allah was all-knowing, He should know Bengali so: “How come I have to pray in Arabic? When I want to talk to Allah, why do I have to use somebody else’s language?” Her mother responded that in the Hadiths it’s written that when a person dies, two angels will ask him or her questions in Arabic. If the answers aren’t in Arabic, she told her daughter, the grave will squeeze that person hard. Irshad Manji, “The Trouble with Islam Today,” pp. 139, compares the position of the Muslim world concerning the authority of Arabic to the past Catholic practice of performing the mass in Latin only, a monopoly long since broken even by Catholicism itself. Warraq points out that the replacement of Berber in Algeria by Arabic and the replacement of prior religious beliefs by Islam was the result of imperialism as well. Consequently, he observes (p. 199): “Bowing toward Arabia five times a day must surely be the ultimate symbol of this cultural imperialism.” It’s time for Muslims themselves to make their beliefs about the proper languages for prayer, the direction of prayer (kibla), and the language for the common people’s reading of Scripture to be as universal as their God claims to be.

WERE THE WESTERN IMPERIALISTS REALLY LESS IGNORANT THAN THE MEDIEVAL MUSLIM JIHADISTS?

            Now, someone could say, "Well, the Brits had the Bible. They should have read Matt. 5, and stayed home." But, we know a certain god of this world has blinded and deceived the whole world (II Cor. 4:3-4; Rev. 12:9). And very few people have ever been able to take literally Jesus' injunctions to love one's enemies and to turn the cheek, outside of the Peace Churches, such as the Friends/Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, etc., and some other scattered, assorted groups. To anyone who has to rule and police, what Jesus said won't sound practical. Hence, this is an excellent argument that true Christians would make up only a tiny minority of the world’s overall population, since they couldn't be in positions of political power and wield force against criminals or invading armies. Notice that the false church was much larger than the true church, as revealed by a comparison of Revelation 18:1-9 to Rev. 12:6, 13-17.

            Furthermore, the "superior knowledge" argument that makes the European imperialists more guilty has another problem: How much does ignorance really excuse in God's sight? We know this argument has a good foundation (John 9:40; 15:22; Luke 12:47-48). But on the other hand, everyone has to eventually measure up to faith in God and to agree to full obedience to God's law, which is an absolute standard that applies to all people in all cultures at all times. As Paul told the heathen gentiles in Athens: "Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31; cf. II Pet. 3:9). Those who never heard of the seventh-day Sabbath, for example, such as most Chinese and Asiatic Indians, are nevertheless still guilty of violating it despite having far less access to the Bible compared to most Americans or Europeans, who nevertheless violate it (on a per person basis) about as much.

            So then, should we devise a "sliding scale" of relative merits based on relative knowledge--or an implied double standard? For example, if Americans humiliate and psychologically torture (say) 100 prisoners in Iraq that should be just as emotionally denounced as (say) 1000 prisoners being physically tortured in Saudi Arabia? The "relative knowledge standard" argument naturally leads to greater atrocities (as per the body count) hardly ever receiving any attention (i.e., airtime and ink) compared to smaller ones by less popular nations. Hence, what gets more attention and denunciations: A certain few days in Hama, Syria under Al-Assad senior? Or the present low-scale intensity guerilla war between Israel and the Palestinians? The number of people killed in the former situation (10,000 to 25,000) still massively exceeds the number of Palestinians killed in the present Intifada. That ratio also ignores how many of the latter were under arms compared to the former city's inhabitants. Another most interesting comparison could be made between the amount of attention, including the number of United Nations resolutions passed, between the numbers of people mistreated in Tibet by China (by various means, including from sending in Chinese settlers) versus Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. It's much easier to push around (or economically ignore through boycott) tiny Israel than a nation of 1.2 billion people which is (for all intents and purposes) impossible to successfully invade, which wields a United Nations veto, and which businesses throughout the world rush in to trade with and invest in. But then, do the masters of Tiannamen Square really know less morally than say the Israeli paramilitary architects of the gruesome aftermath of the battle for Deir Yassan in 1948? (And what about the Jews massacred by the Arabs in 1948 at Hebron, Kfar Etzion, Hadassah Hospital, Safad, etc.?) Are the supposedly less responsible, therefore, less guilty, people REALLY as ignorant of what's moral when dealing with unarmed people as their apologists claim they are? Are the Saudis, when torturing people, really unaware of the moral dubiousness of what they are doing? Why was it common for the German Nazis who actually had the jobs of killing the Jews to get drunk a lot? That point needs to be carefully pondered

HOW AN IMPERIALIST POWER CAN DESTROY FUTURE CRITICISMS OF ITS ACTIONS!

People normally only complain about, resist, and/or counterattack the imperialists/conquerors who presently or recently caused them problems. So therefore the presently oppressed normally ignore history before the current/most recent controversy since they have forgotten about when their ancestors were the conquerors/oppressors in bygone centuries (such as the Turks or Arabs or Chinese during their periods of expansion as empires). Consider in this light V.S. Naipaul’s comment (New York Review of books, January 31, 1991, as quoted in Warraq, “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” p. 198):

I have to stress that I was traveling in the non-Arab Muslim world. Islam began as an Arab religion; it spread as an Arab empire. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—the countries of my itinerary—I was traveling, therefore, among people who had been converted to what was an alien faith. I was traveling among people who had to make a double adjustment—an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might almost say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves.

True, Naipaul doesn’t recognize how fundamentally arbitrary the adoption of one culture over another can be to unanalytical, average people, which intrinsically makes the level of alienation less. His generalization here also doesn’t recognize the historical difference between the places where Islam initially was spread by the sword (Iran and Pakistan) and by conversion (Malaysia and Indonesia). Nevertheless, despite these qualifications, are we willing to condemn Islam’s earlier conquests with the same passion brought to bear against the West’s later conquests? Is this time difference a reasonable basis for objecting to some situations of conquest/imperialism more than others?

This rationalization has a most interesting consequence: It inadvertently puts a premium on Mongol/ethnic cleansing style military tactics and successful "Borgian" assimilation successes. Consider in this light the complaint by the nationalist/skeptical Algerian Berber above. The Muslim Arabs over a period of centuries successfully managed to change the culture of the areas they conquered from having (say) Greek-speaking Catholic Christians to Arab-speaking Muslims, thereby eliminating the resistance that could have continued. Neat trick, eh? For example, the (formerly) Orthodox Christian Greek-speaking peasantry in Anatolia converted to Islam in the decades and centuries following the Byzantines’ loss to the invading Turks at the crucial battle of Manzikert (1071 A.D.) This process of assimilation received its final capstone in the aftermath of World War I when the Turks ethnically cleansed certain coastal areas of Greeks, although I believe a population exchange of a similar magnitude went the opposite direction.

Hence, we need not give back Indiana to the Indians because they were either driven out, killed by diseases inadvertently spread by whites from the Old World, or killed in combat: There are no native people presently being oppressed! (They have full equal rights under the law, which may not be much of a compensation, admittedly, for the land they lost). So therefore we may keep what we stole! The Spaniards need not recompense any Moors since they drove out the Muslims after completing the Reconquista in 1492. None of them remember it personally. That doesn’t keep some Muslims from wanting to reconquer that territory, despite their aspiration’s obvious present unrealism. Or perhaps the group being driven out or killed, such as the millions of Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Sudetenland, etc., in 1945 by the Red Army or the (Communist) governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia, was deemed guilty of causing similar or worse atrocities in the recent past, so they deserve no compensation or right of return. And once the refugees in question are settled in an area with people of a similar ethnic background, the old resentments largely fade or at least cause less trouble than the present Palestinian/Zionist Jew imbroglio. Unlike the post-World War II German case, the Palestinians’ "brother Arabs" (beside Jordan mainly) wouldn't let them resettle among them as citizens, but kept them penned up in refugee camps as a bargaining chip against the Jews. Rich Saudis ironically would rather import infidel Catholic Filipinos to do housework for them instead of their brother Muslim/Arab Palestinians! It's not that Palestinians couldn’t find jobs elsewhere in the Middle East. Overall, refugees resettled in areas with people of a similar culture normally end up mostly acquiescing to their losses, a result happening from most of the other population exchanges of the past century which aren't going to be undone, such as between India and Pakistan.

On the other hand, if the conquerors/imperialists either aren't sufficiently successful in assimilating the conquered or in killing off or driving away their subject people, they should be made to hand over their ill-gotten gains to whomever most recently before them took/stole that area they live in, such as the French handing over Algeria to the local Arabs/Berbers. Since nineteenth-century style Western Imperialism wasn't around long enough to assimilate or ruthless enough to kill or drive out all the natives, these invaders deserve to be expelled in retaliation, such as the Colons in Algeria or the white farmers in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. To so rationalize some acts of imperialism way more than others requires some degree of historical amnesia to work!

DOES IGNORANCE EXCUSE BOTH WESTERN AND ISLAMIC CIVILIZATIONS?

Does a culture's low economic and/or social development excuse its sins? Suppose it's argued, "Well, those poor benighted Muslims, they don't know better than to be intolerant of political opposition, to oppress women, to have slaves, to uphold authoritarianism, to invade other countries, etc. Their society hasn't modernized enough yet and they're at a lower stage of development. So we shouldn't judge or condemn them harshly for all their human rights violations." Pim Fortuyn, the openly homosexual Dutch politician who publicly criticized Muslim intolerance and advocated putting limits on Muslim immigration into Holland for that reason and was assassinated, correspondingly made the colorful comment that "Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that isn't the case with Islam." As already observed above, Scripture reveals that ignorance is a factor that reduces people’s guilt (John 9:39-41; 15:22), but obviously not completely (Romans 1:18-25; 2:9-16; 3:23; Acts 17:30). But now the tables can be dramatically and abruptly turned! This two-edged sword now cuts up the left-winger wielding it! Suppose someone argued back, "Those poor ignorant benighted nineteenth century and earlier Europeans and Americans: They didn't know better than ‘at their economic and social stage . . . [than to do] things like hang witches, murder [their] native [aborigines], own slaves, and [to] treat women as chattel.’" If ignorance excuses Islamic civilization’s preset sins, it likewise excuses the West’s past atrocities! After all, uncalled people who simply don’t understand or accept the teachings of Scripture would deem pacifism impractical when there are criminals to arrest and invaders to repel, thus making imperialism hard to cast aside as well.

THE WEST DISCOVERS SOLUTIONS TO ITS COLLECTIVE SINS

But why is the present Muslim civilization's guilt actually worse than the early nineteenth-century West's? In regards to human rights, they can learn from the West’s present example! They don't have to figure it all out from scratch themselves. The nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans had no other superior civilization to imitate that was at a higher stage of social/political/economic development. To illustrate further, in matters of technology, education, industrial development and political/military organization, the Japanese in the generation after the Meiji Dynasty’s restoration in 1868 progressed much faster than the Europeans had in previous decades and centuries since they could just copy the West’s practices.

The West figured out an antidote for its own problems, such as (for example) creating an antislavery movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Eventually the West forcibly imposed this cultural value on the more benighted regions of the world, such as in India and East Africa, where slavery had been independently practiced before the Western imperialists arrived. For example, under the British Raj in 1860, the Indian rulers of Patiala, Jhind, and Nabha agreed to outlaw formally female infanticide, sati, and slavery. (Lawrence James, “Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India,” pp. 326-27). Although the “Christian” transatlantic slave trade swallowed up 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Sahara engulfed an estimated 17 million people from the seventh to nineteenth centuries. As Robert Spencer commented, since the Muslim world never developed its own native abolitionist movement, “When the [Islamic] slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but through British military force.” (See “Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t,” p. 97). Even today, the Sudan and Mauritania still openly practice slavery while many in Niger still flout its ban on the peculiar institution. Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman in 1970, and Niger (theoretically) in 2004. Islam’s actual historical record, and the present practices of Muslims enslaving black Africans in the southern Sudan, destroy the emotional impetus driving the grievances and mythology of the racist Black American Muslim movement of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad.

Likewise, despite all of feminism's excesses and problems that need correction, the West’s reforms still greatly improved the treatment of women. Enlightenment political ideology helped to curb problems such as witch hangings/burnings. The practical issues posed by the earlier multiplication of churches after the Protestant Reformation helped to disestablish or at least defang the state churches of Europe. But where in the Muslim world, or China, India, Japan, or Africa, before c. 1800 were there large numbers of people or major writers and rulers feeling guilty over (say) owning slaves or mistreating women? The West eventually slowly stumbled its way into figuring out how to fix its own problems. What evidence is there these other civilizations ever would have done the same (if they even have yet) without having the West to copy? Where's the Muslim “Wilberforce” that wanted to abolish slavery in the Muslim world? Where’s the Muslim “John Stuart Mill” concerned about the oppression of Muslim women? Where’s the Muslim Voltaire so concerned about tolerance and political repression? Similarly, did Muslim civilization ever produce a "Las Casas" concerned about the mistreatment of the dhimmis, who criticized his fellow Spaniards during their days of imperial rule and conquest over the New World’s Indians? That is, the West even during its worst excesses could be more self-critical about its rule than the Muslims were about jihad and the discriminatory treatment of the dhimmis. This essay makes no attempt to make a general survey of how all religions have treated all peoples throughout history. Rather, it targets specific false generalizations often made by Islam’s apologists, such as Islam supposedly being a "religion of peace." Islam arguably is less a religion of peace than Catholicism!

Now what Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey after World War I on religious issues is deeply problematic: As an irreligious man, he dealt with Muslims in ways like what liberal ACLU activists would want to do (or are doing) to traditional Christians here today, or like the European and Latin American anti-clericals who excessively attacked Catholicism’s rights and privileges in prior decades. For example, why should Muslim women in Turkey be banned from wearing headscarves in government buildings and state universities? Why should all Muslim preachers read sermons issued by the state religion ministry? (See Robert Spencer, “Religion of Peace?,” p. 171 for the last point). But the West unquestionably inspired him in the reforms that he imposed; they weren't his original inventions. Since Islam lacks the kind of separate organization of religion that paralleled the state that was found in medieval Europe, it’s much harder for Muslims to disentangle their religious establishment from the political state.

ARGUMENTS THAT WHITEWASH ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION’S SINS ALSO WOULD EXCUSE THE WEST’S

Let's take some examples of arguments used whitewash Islamic civilization's problems that Muslims and secular liberal academics would reject as terrible howlers if adopted by Catholics or defenders of the West. For example, if World War I's terrible and needless death toll is said to be (traditional) Christianity’s fault despite this war wasn’t started for religious reasons, why isn't the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's a failure of Islam then? Suppose someone claims the conflicts between Chinese and (Muslim) Malays in Malaysia are economic in nature, and thus not the fault of Islam. In response, someone could write off the Troubles in Northern Ireland as the result of economic discrimination by the Protestants versus the Catholics, the results of Medieval/Early Modern English imperialism, or the (secular) IRA’s nationalist quest for “One Ireland.” They would not be the “fault” of traditional Christianity then. Likewise, to the extent Muslims discriminate against women because they are perpetuating seventh-century Arabian customs, Islam has been said not to be at fault because these customs originate from the pagan Arabian tribal customs. Similarly, another Muslim apologist, an actual Muslim, explained away a certain war or atrocity by saying political motives, not religious ones, caused it. Suppose someone says past Western sins, such as the mistreatment of women, slavery, imperialism, and dictatorial governments, occurred at a lower stage of socio-economic development, so Islamic civilization’s similar sins at a similar level of modernization in more recent decades shouldn’t be denounced. If ignorance (i.e., a lower level of social/political/economic development/modernization) excuses Islam's present human rights violations, it also excuses the West's past sins. Yet, how many leftist intellectuals get upset about the West’s past sins, and couldn’t bear to stop heatedly denouncing them? Critics of the West either would have to either stop condemning the West's past sins or start condemning Islamic civilization's present ones with equal force, passion, and vehemence. And when moral equivalency confronts us, the natural response should be to pull back, and say the harsh denunciations should be dropped even as sin shouldn't be condoned or denied (cf. John 8:3-11; Matt. 7:1-5; Romans 2:1-3). What's your choice? So all these scholarly whitewash arguments for Islam merely make the West’s intelligentsia into codependent enablers, who hinder Islam from reforming from within, by muting criticism of Islamic civilization’s problems and so ruthlessly hating their own civilization’s sins without any sense of balance and proportion.

THE WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY APPROACH TO REFUTING LIBERAL ARGUMENTS APPLIED TO LIBERALS’ EXCUSES FOR THE ISLAMIC WORLD’S SINS

As a general principle, let’s consider a test for the apologetic political and historical arguments made for Islam in light of the “William F. Buckley” (WFB) technique for refuting many liberal arguments. Although it’s simple in principle and it doesn’t require deep expert knowledge of a subject to execute, it can produce truly devastating rebuttals: 1. Take a particular liberal argument that’s vulnerable to this technique due to its form (i.e., organization) and inconsistency with other positions liberals uphold. 2. Insert conservative counter-examples for the liberal specifics. 3. Observe liberals would find that recast argument totally intolerable or absurd based on their own ideology. For example, recently Karl Rove used this method in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal concerning the U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s speech that said a “wise Latina woman” likely could make better judicial decisions than a white man. As Rove observed, if the words “wise Latina woman” and “white man” were switched in that speech, and a white man had spoken them instead, his public career in politics would be over. But, of course, she’s going to get a “pass,” because liberals uphold a double standard concerning racist comments when minority group members make them.

Now, let’s apply this technique to a standard series of arguments made to whitewash Islam’s history and human rights record. For example, it has said that it’s unbalanced to attack the Islamic world’s problems so much, such as in this essay: “I would like it if you spread your criticisms to the rest of the world's societies throughout history rather than focusing on Muslim ones.” But now, let’s apply the WFB technique, insert a different counter-example, and turn around this argument for a response: “I would like it if you spread your criticisms to the rest of the world's societies throughout history rather than focusing on [modern Israeli] ones.” After all, isn’t it unbalanced when with little prompting someone can give easily a passionate speech denouncing modern Zionism lasting some 60-90 minutes, but if the same person is reminded about the far worse atrocity of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians during and after World War I, it’s quickly dismissed as a problem that occurred too many years ago to be given much weight.

So then, can the Muslim apologist come up with an argument that says this essay pays too attention to the Muslim world’s past and present human rights problems that can’t be refuted using the WFB technique? How was this argument replied to? The response was that the Palestinian Arab refugee problem still exists and also threatens the peace of the world presently, but the Armenian genocide is no longer a problem, and therefore it doesn’t warrant much attention. But this fig leaf of an argument barely covers up the nakedness of the bias being committed. After all, much like Muslims generally are fixated about the Crusades that ended over 700 years ago, liberals and leftists in general are typically obsessed with the past sins of the West and “Christendom.” They condemn with passion the West’s imperialism and past treatment of black slaves, the ethnic cleansing of the Indians, the oppression of women, etc., with gusto despite those problems are “in the past” as well. So then, why should the Armenian genocide be dismissed as irrelevant since it is in the past, but the West’s past imperialism is a continually source of passionate emotional condemnations? Either both should be condemned with passion today, or neither. But of course, if both sides accuse each other of bias, and say each other is unbalanced in his criticisms about past human rights violations, and neither side intends to change: Well,we might as well as call it a day, drop that particular charge, and hit the beach.

Of course, I have own separate reason for focusing heavily on the Islamic world’s sins. In this context, consider Rush Limbaugh’s response to the general national media’s liberal bias and their charges about his conservative bias is, “I am equal time!” This essay focuses on the flaws in a prevailing scholarly consensus about the Islamic world’s problems that labors mightily to whitewash, minimize, and deny them, while amplifying the same problems in the West’s history. It aims merely to provide some balance in perspective against the prevailing paradigm that upholds the opposite viewpoint.

Let’s now apply the WFB technique to this standard apologetic argument for Islam, which attributes Muslims’ atrocities and human rights problems to something other than their religious identity or motivations, but to some other motivation, personal identity, cultural inheritance, or role in society. For example, it was argued that the 1683 siege of Vienna by the Ottomans had nothing to do in causing later nineteenth century imperialism, but was simply a geopolitical rivalry between the Habsburgs and the Turks. It is argued that it is an error to call such wars “jihads,” even when Muslim leaders may use the term to get an advantage. But, of course, the Turkish Sultan Mehmet IV proclaimed a jihad in the July of 1683, and then his grand Vizier laid siege to the city with 150,000 men. Should we doubt Mehmet’s sincerity, that he wasn’t fighting for Allah also, not just for his empire’s territory and prestige? Correspondingly, on the other hand, often anything traditional Christians or Catholics do that’s wrong, is disproportionately blamed on their religious identity solely or mainly. This kind of argument also dismisses the idea that people can be seriously motivated by religious beliefs, which is a standard misconception secular people have about religious people in general. Furthermore, orthodox Marxists will deny that people are motivated by ideas rather than by economics and the material organization of society. This argument also assumes that governments and people can’t have multiple motives for their policies and actions. But can’t sometimes self-interest and religious motivation favor the same decisions? Hence, suppose a would-be Catholic or traditional Christian apologist chose to blame any and all atrocities and wars waged by his fellow believers on their national identity or desires for power and gold. For example, then the Catholicism of Cortez and Pizarro shouldn’t be blamed per se for anything they did against the Aztecs and Incas, since they were motivated by mainly by the desire for gold, glory, and land, not the desire to convert the natives. “Catholics,” as “Catholics,” didn’t kill the Indians, but greedy, land hungry, glory-seeking Spaniards did. So then, if Western history was consistently reinterpreted in the same way, wouldn’t liberal academics and Muslims denounce it as an outrageous whitewash? So why then do these same people accept these same kinds of bad arguments when used to whitewash Islamic history?

Let’s apply the WFB tactic again to another argument used to whitewash Islam while simultaneously darkening the West’s record: Liberals passionate denounce how religious minorities, women, slaves, etc., were treated in the past by the West 150 years ago. Well, now, Islam not only had these problems back then, but also has them right now. If the liberals are really concerned about human rights, why aren’t they denouncing the Islamic world’s sins (past and present) with the same level of seething rage, outbursts of fury, and righteous indignation that they reserve for the West’s? Much like Sotomayor’s “wise Latina woman” comment, why does the Islamic world get a pass?

Ibn Warraq has written a book-length rebuttal (“Defending the West”) against Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” which among liberal academics is the leading source of the idea that Western criticisms of Islam are “racist.” (Robert Irwin’s “For the Lust of Knowing” is another general attack on Edward Said’s general viewpoint). So let’s now apply the WFB technique again here, in order to blow to bits the general view drawn ultimately from Said’s claims. Clearly, both Christianity and Islam accept people of any nationality, race, and ethnicity as adherents. So can any criticism of Christianity as Christianity, no matter how unfair, how wrong, how ignorant, how stupid, ever be “racist”? Are Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, “the new Atheists,” “racist” for attacking Christianity? Can any Muslim criticisms of Christianity ever be deemed to be “racist”? Likewise, could any Christian criticisms of Islam ever be “racist”? If not, then no criticism of Islam per se, no matter how unfair, how wrong, how ignorant, how stupid, can ever be “racist.” After all, criticisms of a RELIGION as a religion, such as its ideas, teachings, and theology, aren’t per se criticisms of a particular ethnic group or race. This laughable misdefinition of the word “racism” apparently holds most liberal academics in the field of Islamic history in its grip. This redefinition is obviously designed to shut down and shout down conservative Christian and Jewish criticisms of Islam as a religion. So then, when the WFB technique so easily blows up standard liberal and Muslim apologetical arguments about Islamic history and human rights problems, shouldn’t we adopt a general suspicion about all the general conclusions that liberal academics draw in this discipline of study?

WHEN A RELIGION’S ADHERENTS ACT OUT OF NON-RELIGIOUS ECONOMIC OR POLITICAL MOTIVES, IS THEIR FAITH GUILTLESS THEN?

If a religion’s adherents act immorally out of economic or political motives, and/or from following traditional tribal customs, does that mean their religion is innocent? Suppose a Catholic apologist adopted a version of this argument for his own purposes: Could Muslims and/or agnostic liberal academics accept the consequences? For example, stereotypically, the Conquistadors who successfully invaded and destroyed the Aztec and Inca Empires were motivated by "God, gold, and glory." Suppose a Catholic apologist said, "The Conquistadors acted primarily out of a desire for wealth, not out of a desire to persecute (i.e., stop) Indians engaged in (in the Aztec situation) human sacrifices and cannibalism." So if Pizarro and Cortez, and the non-clerical Spaniards who followed in their wake in the decades following their conquests, were mainly motivated by the desire for silver, gold, and land, does that mean Catholicism isn’t responsible for the exploitation and enslavement of the Indians by the Spanish? Of course, we have some exceptions here, such as the work by Las Casas and many in the Dominican order to put some restrictions on how much the Spanish Creoles could exploit the Indians. The Spanish crown ended up in the ironic position of, after having sent out its settlers and soldiers to conquer the Indians, of becoming their (at least officially) main protector of the native population against the worst acts of brutality and exploitation by the Creoles. But that still leads to the question: If Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia are in conflict against their more financially successful Chinese neighbors out of envy or the desire for (their?) wealth, isn’t their faith failing to restrain their actions? Is it even being used to justify their actions? Are they bad Muslims for failing to obey the Golden Rule, which appears in Chinese philosophy but not in the Quran?

Suppose a traditional Christian apologist said, "World War I [1914-18] doesn't represent a failure of Christianity because that war was fought for nationalistic and political reasons. After all, it had no religious causes, unlike for the beginning phase of the Thirty Years War [1618-48]." Could even Catholicism’s responsibility for the Spanish Inquisition be similarly excused? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Sixtus IV in 1478 authorized Catholic rulers to name inquisitors. But when they were so severe, such as dealing with the Marranos, the apparent Jewish converts to Christianity, Sixtus IV felt the need to interfere: "But the Spanish crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give up, and the efforts of the Pope to limit the powers of the Inquisition were without avail." Furthermore, financial motives arose that favored prosecution, since the Inquisition would confiscate the condemned heretic's property. So then, suppose we said the Spanish Inquisition was more about the political and financial goals of the early modern Spanish state's monarchy than about enforcing religious uniformity in Spain for purely doctrinal reasons? (That judgment might not be wrong on balance, pending further research). So then, does the failure of the Inquisitors to turn the cheek, to love their neighbors as themselves, etc., represent a failure of Christianity? Or can we just blame the Spanish monarchy, even though they were good Catholics, since the Church’s hierarchy had its misgivings and its monarchs may (?) have acted largely out of non-doctrinal financial and political reasons?

So what part of a person's and/or culture's identity do we blame when they sin? If we blame power politics as motivated by an evil human nature, then we can't morally judge and condemn the "Christian" West’s sins any more than any other civilization's. For example, if we blame terrorism on something in Arab culture that's separate from their religious identity, then this apologetic technique could easily be used to whitewash the sins of Protestants and Catholics throughout the centuries. And could religiously skeptical academics and Muslims accept that result? Suppose, for example, we blamed the Crusades in part on a desire by semi-barbarian "Franks" to raid the wealth of and take land from a superior and richer civilization in the Middle East? (This characterization is at least partially true). So then, could all the nasty things that traditional Christians did in this or that situation be blamed on their economic motives or ethnic identity as separated from their religious identity, thus letting Christianity off the hook?

So then, if the Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia fail to treat their Chinese neighbors fairly, is that a failure of Islam? Is it a failure of Islam to subordinate Muslim women so harshly in many cases? If it's said, "No, they aren’t," then to be consistent all sorts of actions by traditional Christians down through the centuries could be similarly excused, at least in part, including the Crusades, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Conquistadors, and nineteenth-century European imperialism, perhaps even the Spanish Inquisition. Can Muslims live with that? Could liberal academics accept that consequence? This method of excusing Muslims or Islam could be adopted by traditional Christian apologists as well. Just say their faith's adherents acted out of financial or political motivations, not religious ones. The latter would just plug in different atrocities, failures, or sins, and, voila, Christendom/the West is off the hook as well!

WHY A “CULTURAL” EXPLANATION DOESN’T EXCUSE ISLAM AS A RELIGION FOR OPPRESSING WOMEN

An apologist for Islam will claim the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban are or were aberrations, that this stems from traditional Pashtun tribal codes or Arab culture being imposed on them, not Islamic values. But what in the Quran, Hadith, or Sharia would has restrained the Taliban against treating women so harshly? If we blame traditional tribal culture for Islam’s mistreatment of women, then why don't we blame traditional European culture rather than the Church for the witchcraft trials in the Middle Ages? Likewise, there’s the claim about past medieval European women being treated as chattel just like today’s Muslim women in many nations are.

But now the actual history of western European family structure in the medieval period needs examination when equating the oppression of past Western women with present Muslim women. To be more specific, just how mistreated were Medieval Western European peasant women compared to present-day Muslim women? Female peasants as adults in Western European villages actually had a lot of freedom to choose their own mates. Since their parents didn’t put them into arranged marriages as prepubescent children, a very common practice in much of the Islamic world even today, it’s problematic to claim Western peasant women were merely "chattel." Furthermore, in cases like Renaissance Italy, the richer married Patrician women also still owned their dowries. James Q. Wilson, in The Moral Sense, pp. 200-207, usefully describes the differences between Western European and other family systems, and the consequences for the former’s eventually giving women more freedom and respect. For example, Pope Alexander III confirmed through decretals the consensual theory of marriage, under which a man and woman of the proper age agreed to marry each other. He elsewhere also rejected parental consent as being necessary, which reduced the influence of family, clans, and lineages on the selection of marriage partners. Also, if the church wanted people to be able to choose to become celibate nuns, monks, and priests, the church had to allow individuals to reject arranged marriages in order to go into the regular or secular clergy. The general rhetoric here that condemns the West’s past treatment of women clearly needs qualification. For once society outside of the elite discards arranged marriages of young children, much of the worst oppression of women necessarily goes by the wayside eventually.

As opposed to pursuing Western feminists’ recriminations over the distant European past, let’s turn now to what the Sharia and/or conservative Islam presently imposes on Muslim women. According to their religious teaching, men generically are better than women, in part because they are expected to support them financially (Quran, 4:34, Rodwell translation): “Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God hath gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient.” A son’s inheritance should be twice the size of a daughter’s (Quran, 4:11). One man’s witness in court is worth the same as two women’s (Quran, 2:282). Each man may have up to four wives lawfully, or have slave girls (Quran, 4:3). Because it’s so hard for a polygamous husband to treat his multiple wives equally without jealousy developing, polygamy inevitably lowers the average level of marital satisfaction as well. A Muslim man may also marry non-Muslim women, but Muslim women may not marry unbelievers. By contrast, how many husbands could one Muslim woman have? Child marriages, which inevitably lead to much older husbands dominating their teenage or younger wives, are common in the Islamic world. This practice of statutory rape (when it concerns girls under 16 being forced into arranged marriages) is sanctioned even in the Quran (65:4), where it includes girls who haven’t yet menstruated. No less than four male witnesses are required to convict a man for rape (Quran 24:13), which means in practice none ever will be. Consequently, as Robert Spencer notes, “Men can commit rape with impunity: As long as they deny the charge and there are no witnesses, they will get off scot-free, because the victim’s testimony is inadmissible.” Worse still, all charges of rape by a woman are tantamount to a public admission of adultery. Many women who were raped end up in prison themselves, after being charged with committing adultery. Perhaps 75% of women imprisoned in Pakistan are in fact rape victims convicted under such kangaroo court proceedings. (See generally Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), pp. 67-76). Today in Saudi Arabia, women may not drive, appear in court without a man representing them, or go abroad without getting permission from a male guardian. In one recent court case, a married couple’s marriage was arbitrarily annulled by a judge, thus immediately requiring the two to live apart under the desert kingdom’s strict gender separation laws. In another case, King Abdullah pardoned a rape victim who was convicted and sentenced to lashes and jail time. What was her “crime”? She was in a car with a man who wasn’t her relative. (Donna Abu-Nasr, “Ordeal illustrate Saudi legal flaws,” Detroit News, January 21, 2008, p. 9A). Now, suppose an apologist for Catholicism said much of the mistreatment of women in Medieval Europe stemmed from Germanic or traditional customs, and wasn’t intrinsically part of Catholic Christian teaching. Wouldn’t liberal feminists hysterically denounce that reasoning?

According to Muslim teaching, husbands may beat disobedient wives (Quran, 4:34): “But chide those for whose refractoriness ye have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them (in the Dawood translation, ‘beat them’); but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them.” (See also these hadiths with similar teachings: Abu Dawud, book 11, no. 2141, 2142; Bukhari, vol. 7, book 77, no. 5825; Muslim, book 4, no. 2127). On his Web site, Robert Spencer carefully examined sura 4:34’s key phrase. The key word in Arabic is وَاضْرِبُوهُنَّ, “waidriboohunna.” So many of the various translators of the Quran render it in ways Muslim moderates find uncomfortable: “Pickthall: “and scourge them,” Yusuf Ali: “(And last) beat them (lightly),” Al-Hilali/Khan: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful),” Shakir: “and beat them,” Sher Ali: “and chastise them,” Khalifa: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them,” Arberry: “and beat them,” Rodwell: “and scourge them,” Sale: “and chastise them,” Asad: “then beat them.” All the inserted parentheses here show these translators were often embarrassed enough by the verse’s straightforward meaning to insert some editorializing and/or commentary. Although Laleh Bakhtiar translates the key phrase as “go away from them,” why should we believe all these other translators before her got it wrong? Asad does cite traditions in which Muhammad forbids the beating of women, but these obviously conflict with those hadiths which accept the practice. In his commentary Ruhul Ma’ani, Sheikh Syed Mahmud Allusi presents four reasons for when a husband may beat his wife: “If she goes out of the house without a valid excuse,” “if she refuses to beautify herself for him,” if she denies him sex after he requested it, and if she won’t perform ritual ablutions or pray. Consider then the implications of Muhammad’s own personal example in this controversy. If he is an (Quran 33:21) “excellent example of conduct”, his personal example is normative for Muslims in the same way Jesus’ is for Christians (cf. I Peter 2:21; I John 2:6). Despite she was his favorite wife, Aisha did report that Muhammad once struck her for a minor offense. He went out one night after thinking she was asleep. She then followed him secretly. After Muhammad spotted her, “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?” The claims that Quran 4:34 refers to mere “tapping” or something equivalent not only discounts hadiths allowing for wife beating, but to be proven would require a systematic examination of the historical interpretation of this text by past classical and present conservative commentators on the Quran, and systematic language studies of how the Quran and Arabic elsewhere use this word. Moderate Muslims’ denials that this verse doesn’t authorize wife beating don’t constitute sufficient proof by themselves.

So if conservative Muslims can easily cite the Quran, the Hadiths, and/or the Sharia (Islam’s traditional law), in order to mistreat or discriminate against women in various ways, what are the general implications for marital behavior by Muslim husbands when they live in the cultural/ideological matrix shaped by them? Because of the legally inferior status that women have in many Muslim countries, and the entrenched social practice of arranged marriages (i.e., women forced to submit sexually and otherwise to near strangers in many cases), the average state of marriages in Muslim countries would be worse than Western ones, although the lack of reliable statistical data on abuse makes this qualitative comparison rather difficult to prove. What’s the likely origin of qualitative problems in many Muslim marriages? Since the just-married husband and wife often hardly know each other, they emotionally and psychologically aren’t prepared to comfortably become so physically intimate with one another so abruptly. At this moment, the Muslim groom also is likely obsessed over whether or not his bride is actually a virgin. Routinely the wedding guests will wait around until the couple display a bloodstained sheet after their (often reluctantly performed) act of consummation is completed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (“The Caged Virgin,” p. 24) analyzes the first act of marriage’s poor emotional circumstances and its consequences: “This compulsory coupling is in fact a socially sanctioned rape as well as a blatant denial of the worth of the individual. A marriage is never simple, but a Muslim marriage begins at the very outset with a sign of mistrust, followed by an act of force. It is in this atmosphere of mistrust and force that the next generation of children is born and brought up.” Having reviewed how this marital environment often produces deep emotional and psychological problems, are any statistics available to illustrate the levels of abuse in Muslim nations’ marriages? For example, Spencer (“Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 71) cites an Amnesty International report saying that the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that over 90 percent “of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually—[including] for offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal.” It’s naïve to conclude that the relative rarity of divorce in Muslim countries compared to developed Western nations proves the former’s relative level of marital satisfaction exceeds the latter’s when social conformity and family pressures help keep bad Muslim marriages together more than equivalent relationships would be preserved in the West.

The custom of child marriage is naturally associated with physical abuse, as Spencer (“Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 69) notes. Consider carefully the potential psychological dynamics of a large age/experience gap between a husband and wife, and its consequences in practical terms on marital power relationships. A much older adult husband may discipline his much younger dependent wife when she disobeys him the same way he’d spank one of his children. He won’t naturally see her as a soul mate and equal companion in life worthy of deep respect, but as a child who mainly needs to learn from him. Just like arranged marriages, this practice is common in the Muslim world. Over half the teenage girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married. Legally in Iran a girl aged 9 may marry with parental consent, and aged 13 without, but boys have to wait until age 14. The Ayatollah Khomeini said that marrying a girl before she menstruated was a “divine blessing.” After all, he himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. He also advised fathers: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.” In Iran, pedophiles sometimes have exploited these low marriage ages by marrying poor provincial girls, using them, and then abandoning them. Suppose Muslim men ask themselves “WWMD?” (see sura 33:21) concerning child marriage and how they should follow their ultimate Prophet’s own personal example. They may recall that Muhammad himself “married” Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha when she possibly was six years old before waiting to consummate their relationship when she was nine. True, this union’s obvious, politically transparent end was to solidify his alliance with the man who later became his successor, the first caliph. Nevertheless, by present standards, wasn’t then Muhammad a pedophile? (Spencer, “Religion of Peace?,” p. 187; “Politically Incorrect Guide,” p. 69). Spencer here also cites Andrew Bushell, “Child Marriage in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “America,” March 11, 2002, 12, as saying: “In Egypt 29 percent of married adolescents have been beaten by their husbands; of those, 41 percent were beaten during pregnancy. A study in Jordan indicated that 26 percent of reported cases of domestic violence were committed against wives under 18.” Plainly marriages between such physically unequal partners is a recipe making for a low quality of marital satisfaction larded up with plenty of abuse.

The Hadiths have other harsh strictures for women, such as requiring Muslim wives to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands: “Allah’s Messenger said, ‘If a husband calls his wife to his bed (i.e., to have sexual relations) and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” (This hadith appears in many other places besides Bukhari, vol. 4, book 59, no. 3237). Al-Ghazzali, the great orthodox eleventh-century Islamic theologian, similarly affirmed: “She [the Muslim wife] always puts her husband’s rights ahead of her own and that of her family. She is neat and clean and is always prepared to let him enjoy her sexually.” (As quoted in Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam,” pp. 24-25). Consequently, this stipulation became entrenched into Islamic law (‘Umdat al-Salik, m11.9): “The husband is only obliged to support his wife when she gives herself to him or offers to, meaning she allows him full enjoyment of her person and does not refuse him sex at any time of the night or day.” According to Islamic law, husbands may forbid their wives to leave the home and to not leave their home city without their husbands or unmarriageable kin accompanying her, unless it’s an obligatory journey such as the hajj to Mecca. (See ‘Umdat al-Salik, m10.4, m10.3; this Shafi’i legal manual, endorsed by the highly prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, is available in English as “Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law”: Amana Publications, 1994, translated by Nuh Ha Mim). Al-Ghazzali also confirmed this teaching: “The well brought up woman . . . doesn’t leave the house, except with his [the husband’s] definite approval, and [only] then dressed in unattractive old clothes.” (As quoted in Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “The Caged Virgin,” p. 25). Consequently, according to Amnesty International, Saudi women who walk alone or in the company of men who aren’t their husbands or close relatives, risk arrest for prostitution or other “moral” offenses. (See generally Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide, p. 71). Good Muslim women clearly have impositions placed on them by their religious authorities equivalent contemporary Christian authorities would consider almost unthinkable.

Irshad Manji in "The Trouble with Islam Today" and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in "The Caged Virgin" usefully describe how Muslim women are oppressed, although both uphold views on sexual morality that conservative Christians must reject. Pre-existing "culture" shouldn’t be used to rationalize, excuse, and/or justify the treatment of women in the Muslim world. This apologetic method operates by selectively picking out of someone's cultural identity one attribute of several. Islam is then excused by blaming pre-existing culture, which ignores Islam’s failure to change pre-existing culture while it even helps to perpetuate the worst abuses. For example, for many, many centuries Islamic culture in Egypt and neighboring lands accepted and promoted female genital mutilation despite it isn’t a specifically commanded Islamic ritual in the Quran or Hadith. One Islamic legal manual (‘Umdat al-Salik, e4.3), however, says circumcision is required “for both men and women.” Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantai, the sheikh and grand imam of Al-Azhar University, called this anatomical butchery “a laudable practice that [does] honor to women.” Tantai’s position is perhaps the closest equivalent to a “Pope” that Islam produce, for it makes him the highest earthly religious authority for around a billion Sunni Muslims. He’s obviously oblivious to this custom’s barbarity, which is transparently designed to strip a woman of sexual pleasure. (See Spencer, “Politically Incorrect Guide,” pp. 76-77). Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the autobiographical book "Infidel," was herself a victim of “female circumcision.” According to the 2005 Demographic Health Survey, about 95% of Egyptian women have been victimized by female genital mutilation. This human rights problem intrinsically beats anything the Zionists have done to the Palestinians since 1948. To its credit, the Egyptian government has recently begun to seriously attack “female circumcision,” but it faces deep entrenched opposition to change. Well, better late than never!

Honor killings (or “female lynchings”) also are deeply entrenched in Islamic culture despite, again, the core Islamic texts don’t authorize them. Because the Arab Muslim “desert” culture values honor and avoiding shame far more than mercy and individual responsibility, women whose behavior “dishonors” their family may be killed in order to eliminate such blotches on their family’s escutcheon. Because a terrible culture of sexual jealousy rules the mentalities of so many Muslim men, they chronically and obsessively fear their wives’ sexual unfaithfulness. Hirsi Ali (“The Caged Virgin,” p. 24) portrays well their polluted marital atmosphere: A Muslim man’s mistrust of women only intensifies after the wedding day’s sexual union. After penetrating the bride’s hymen, he lacks a ready way to check with certainty his wife’s fidelity. Consequently, he solves this problem by denying her access to the outside world as much as possible and by insisting that she gets his permission before she ever steps outside. Hirsi Ali (“The Caged Virgin,” p. xi) analyzes insightfully the cultural origins of obsessive male sexual jealousy and how their chronic distrust stifles women’s freedom within their families, which then retards Muslim nations from developing economically and socially:

Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values dating from the time the Prophet [Muhammad] received his instructions from Allah, a culture in which women were the property of their fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, or guardians. The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen. Her veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of this stifling morality that makes Muslim men the owners of women and obliges them to prevent their mothers, sisters, aunts, sisters-in-law, cousins, nieces, and wives from having sexual contact. And we are not just talking about cohabitation. It is an offense if a woman glances in the direction of a man, brushes past his arm, or shakes his hand. A man’s reputation and honor depend entirely on the respectable, obedient behavior of the female members of his family.

Consequently, if Muslim women let their men folk down, they may strike back without mercy against “their loved ones” in order to protect their perceived family’s reputation. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated in 2006 that in their nation around one thousand women are killed annually for honor. When Jordan’s parliament in 2003 defeated a provision intended to raise the penalties for honor killings, al-Jazeera reported, “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.” Let’s illustrate “female lynchings” by describing several specific cases. In a 1999 Jordanian case, one brother pumped four bullets into his sister’s head in their living room because she had been raped and thus had “dishonored” their family. Then consider Ali Jasib Mushiji, aged 17, who shot his half-brother and mother because he suspected they were having an affair. He killed his four-year-old sister because he thought this liaison produced her. He told “Time Magazine” (September 2003) that “he wiped out his family to cleanse its shame.” In 2003, one Palestinian Arab girl, Rofayda Qaoud, was killed by her mother to “protect my family’s honor” after her daughter refused to kill herself. Her crime? She became pregnant after being raped by her brothers! (See generally Spencer, “Religion of Peace?,” pp. 195-198). Now, how’s that for “blaming the victim”! Think about the “deterrent effects” such a terrifying custom would have on Muslim women’s behavior where it is commonly practiced, much like lynching didn’t have to be common in the South to sow deep fear and the resulting conforming behavior into many blacks living under Jim Crow.

By contrast with all these strictures of Muslim texts, where is the pro-wife-beating verse in the Bible? What are the Biblical equivalents for the discriminatory teachings found in sura 2:223, 2:282, 4:3, 4:11; 4:34? What about all the Hadiths, alleged sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, that promote wife beatings? A conservative Christian should be aware that Christian men even in the Church of God can abuse Eph. 5:22-24 and I Peter 3:1-6. Well, imagine now how carnal men in the world could abuse these Quranic verses and Hadiths to keep their women in line. In the West, the culture changed concerning the treatment of women, but it largely hasn't in many Middle Eastern countries. Why did this difference develop, if the West used to discriminate similarly? Why did some kind of reform for treating women better first develop in the West, not in the Muslim World? Why has conservative Islam been able to persist or even (in some cases) regress after some modernization/Westernization in their ill-treatment of women? Why not simply admit that Muslim culture is inferior in this area, regardless of the reasons causing it? Why don’t Muslims work to change conditions more, such as by ending female genital mutilation, honor killings, and child marriage? Why do they accept, rationalize, and perpetuate their bad cultural inheritance? Where's their John Stuart Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft? If the West changed their treatment of women, what has held back the Muslim world from doing the same? Although he rejects the Bible as much as he does the Quran, Ibn Warraq usefully summarizes why the Islamic world, due to its treatment of women among other factors, is in a poor position to morally harangue the West (in “Why the West Is Best,” “City Journal,” Winter 2008, vol. 18, no. 1; http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_snd-west.html): “A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine.”

So now let’s examine a much deeper, more serious problem with trying to excuse Islam’s treatment women by this kind of argument, which Hirsi Ali’s comment above about Islam’s source of sexual morality touches upon. Islam incorporated tribal Arab culture, as found in the Sharia, the Quran, the Hadiths, etc., into being an intrinsic, inescapable part of that religion. For example, translating the Quran into other languages and praying the five daily prayers in another language besides Arabic are prohibited or discouraged. By contrast, could someone find a Christian claiming that no one can be a good Christian unless he or she could read Greek and pray in Greek (or Aramaic, Jesus' main language)? For example, the Catholic church was content to preach the gospel in the native Indian languages of Mexico (such as Nahuatl) and Peru (such as Quechua) for about two centuries after the Spanish conquest. (See Nicholas Ostler, “Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World,” pp. 365-377). This difference makes Islam intrinsically a less universal, more ethnically bound religion than Christianity is, and thus ironically more like Judaism. Western Christian missionaries have been criticized for trying to Europeanize or Westernize their Third World converts. How much more should Islamic missionaries be criticized for trying to “Arabize” their converts!

The liberal Muslim writer Irshad Manji, by being an Asiatic Indian whose family fled from Idi Amin's Uganda to take up residence in Canada, can more readily examine with a cold, detached, critical eye the Arab cultural influence on Islam, past and present. In The Trouble with Islam Today (pp. 140-41), she writes about Islam’s deep incorporation of Arab culture:

Seems to me that in Islam, Arab cultural imperialists compete with God for the mantel of the Almighty. The Koran insists that “to God belongs the east and the west. Whichever way you turn there is the face of God.” Why, then must Muslims bow to Mecca five times a day? Isn't that a sign of being desert-whipped? Call me superficial, but desert tribalism can be detected even in what Muslims are often instructed to wear. Millions of Muslim women outside of Arabia, including the West, veil themselves. They accept that it's an act of spiritual submission. It's closer to cultural capitulation. Do you know where Iranian women got the design for their post-revolutionary chadors--the ones that don't let you reveal a wisp of hair? From a mullah who led Shias in Lebanon. Now that's a heavy-duty import. While the Koran requires the Prophet's wives to veil, it never decrees such a practice for all women. Why, indeed, should it? Veils protect women from sand and heat--not exactly a pressing practical concern beyond Arabia, Saharan Africa, and the Australian outback. This means I could wear a turtle neck and baseball cap to meet the theological requirements of dressing modestly. To cover my face because “that's what I'm supposed to do” is nothing short of a brand victory for desert Arabs, whose style has become the most trusted symbol of how to package yourself as a Muslim woman. . . . To parrot the desert peoples in clothing, in language, or in prayer is not necessarily to follow the universal God. [The contrast here with universalizing Christianity as taught by Paul in Galatians 3:28-29 should be obvious--EVS]. . . . These myths have turned non-Arab Muslims into clients of their Arab masters--patrons who must buy what's being sold to them in the name of Islamic “enlightenment.”

At one North American university, when she spoke out about her liberal views on the subjects of gays, God, and the three monotheistic faiths, the local Muslim Students Association's members confronted her by standing during her entire presentation. During the Q and A session, one member caused tension within his own group’s ranks by shouting out (p. 135): "Why the difference in practice? . . . Because Pakistanis are not real Muslims. They're converts. Islam was revealed to the Arabs." Likewise, conservative Muslims repeatedly challenged her spiritual credentials on purely ethnic grounds when criticizing her liberal Muslim views on her controversial TV show. One letter from a "Proud Arab" insulted her liberal views on the "logical" basis that an "Indian peasant" would have no understanding of Islam. Hmmm. What would Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad have thought of this line of argument, had they known about it, before they became Black Muslims? Has Islam really been more free of racism or ethnic pride than traditional Christianity?

Conservative Islam froze into place seventh-century Arab tribal culture into Islam’s DNA, and then attempts to impose it on converts from other nations up to the present day. This resulted from the Sunni view of the Sharia, in which the "gates of ijtihad," or free interpretation of the authoritative texts of Islam (the Quran and the Hadith) for the basis of Islamic law, closed in the ninth century. Hence, conservative Muslims don't feel free to "update" or "reform" their incredibly detailed legal system, which is on a par with the legalistic Talmudic regulation of Jewish daily life. Manji, in "The Trouble with Islam Today," explains this problem in detail. She calls for the opening of these gates, but the imams and sheiks running (say) Al-Azhar in Cairo are no more open to that suggestion than the Vatican is to (say) suggestions that birth control should be legalized and women should be freely ordained as priests. To reform Islam's view of the treatment of women, or their views imposing unequal political treatment on believers of other faiths, for example, would require rejecting a significant part of the Sharia, which is based on the Quran and purported sayings of Muhammad (the Hadith). Hence, the Bedouin tribal values that oppress women (they have to be totally controlled against possibly sexual unfaithfulness in order to keep up their family's good name publicly) are hardwired into Islam's DNA since they form the outlook found in the Quran and the Hadith, as interpreted and generalized in the Sharia.

If a Muslim apologist cites Turkey in response to prove otherwise, it's the lone exception. Furthermore, Kemal merely copied the West, and imported Western ideology into his country. Turkey’s cultural/political revolution wasn't an organic development to Islam. Furthermore, since these other more backward traditional Christian nations don't unify the religious establishment and the state like Islamic societies do, these traditional Christian countries could reform without persecuting religious believers in the anticlerical/ACLU sense, by discriminating against the public expression of religious values in the public square, as Turkey does today. After all, why should that government head scarves in its buildings? Why should its religious ministry determine the content of sermons given in Turkey's mosques?

True, the Middle East has a similar culture to start with compared to other nations in the Mediterranean basin in (say) the year 600 A.D. But it's obvious that Italy has greatly changed, and even countries in the Balkans, Armenia, and Georgia are either much more modernized than, for example, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Taliban-dominated Afghanistan in their treatment of women or by other cultural measures or they are much more reformable on their own. The traditional Christian-dominated nations of the "Pakistani-Peruvian Axis" (Quigley's term) can much more easily shed the dead weight of the pre-modern cultural values enshrined in the Sharia when compared to a Muslim country. It's because of concepts such as "bida," under which Muslims assume all innovations are bad or evil until proven otherwise, and the gates of ijtihad being closed, that the Islamic world could never have organically generated a Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Scientific Revolution on its own. The cultural substrate of Islam was much too hostile and sterile to generate similar fundamental intellectual changes for reform, for kinds of reasons explained well by Stanley Jaki, the philosopher of science.

CHAPTER 4

THE IDEOLOGICAL EXPLANATION FOR WHY ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION PRODUCES DISPROPORTIONATELY MORE WAR AND TERRORISM COMPARED TO OTHER CIVILIZATIONS

WHY ARE MISTREATED MUSLIMS MORE VIOLENT ON AVERAGE THAN OTHER MISTREATED PEOPLE?

Are the Germans thrown out of Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland, etc., during or just after 1945 entitled to wage war, engage in terrorism, etc., to get their land back? How about the Greeks tossed out of Turkey after World War I (1914-1918)? How many Chinese airliners have the Tibetans blown up? Why is it that, in this post-colonialist, post-Cold War era (since 1992), although most Muslims are not terrorists, most terrorists are Muslims? How oppressed were Toronto’s Muslims such as to justify a few organizing a terrorist plot, many or most of whom had been born in Canada? How poor were they, how oppressed were they, how unequal is Canada's GNI, how meddling has Canada's foreign policy been in the past hundred years, etc.? Likewise, does Israel oppress the Palestinians in the semi-occupied territories any worse than (say) Saddam, Assad, and Fahd oppressed their respective nations’ peoples, if one uses the past half century of general conditions as a measuring stick? Is Israel’s recent treatment of the Palestinians as second class citizens any worse than the Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians as dhimmis over the centuries? How much Islamic terrorism (i.e., “blowback”) did the godless Communists in the Soviet Union suffer when it occupied half a dozen Muslim countries in central Asia? Why did America, despite occupying no Muslim countries then, suffer far more blowback than the Soviet Union did? Scott Atran, a research scientist, published in the "New York Times" (2003) his findings that suicide bombers generally had more educated and affluent personal backgrounds (SES). We have to look to religious culture and political philosophy, not just sociological/economic/political administrative causes, for terrorist activities being resorted to more commonly by some people compared those in other civilizations. Lots of mistreated, oppressed, poor people live in this world in societies with greatly unequal incomes that could provoke envy. But not all societies produce equally large numbers of suicide bombers. Such sociological economic/political/military variables (i.e., input) as poverty, income inequality, political oppression, percentage of young men unemployed, recent experience with imperialism/colonialism, family size, experiences with swift and sure retaliation by the victims of terrorism, exported morally rotten media influence, etc., simply don't explain the vast differences in output (i.e., non-state terrorist activities in the post Cold War period since 1992, especially when done internationally by groups far from home) when comparing Islam's record to China's, India's, Latin America's, Black Africa's, etc. Marxist influence, which pervades political science's analytical work still, needs to be rejected when it denies these ideological variables have influence independent of any material means.

Ideas have consequences. The Marxist paradigm that economics drives culture exclusively is simply false. The superstructure of ideology also influences the mode of production. The sociological, materialistic approach has its uses, but it is distinctly limited. It has a secular bias as well. Non-religious people have major trouble thinking faith seriously motivates religious people's actions. This bias needs to be discarded from standard political science analyses of social movements and policy making. Ideological variables may not be easily put into covariant regression analyses, because they have a psychological, mental reality that’s hard to quantify. For example, how can a political scientist quantify appeasement vs. “shift and sure retaliation” as effective deterrents to terrorism? Similarly, to what extent does the West’s cultural decadence and moral rot, as reflected in its media that’s exported around the world, set off opposition by social conservatives elsewhere in the world? A crude means of “explaining” variations in the amount of terrorism for each nation (post-1992), however, would be to set up a covariant regression analysis using all those standard sociological variables about poverty (i.e., per capita GNP, etc.), unequal incomes (i.e., GNI), oppression (potentially quantifiable using Freedom House rankings or Amnesty International reports), recent experience with someone else's imperialism/colonialism, the unemployment rate for males 15-40 (as a stand-in for “angry young men”), etc. As described further below, various social scientists actually have ground out such analyses, to the detriment of the thesis that ignorance (i.e., lack of education), poverty, and economic inequality are the main drivers of terrorism. But then, add in a variable for the percentage of a nation's population that's Muslim (or has strong convictions about Islam’s relevance to politics), and then how much better the fit becomes!

Let's consider another way the ideological variable manifests itself when comparing Islam with other civilizations. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. led movements that deliberately chose to use non-violent methods to gain their political ends. To resort to terrorism and guerilla warfare is an easy option for a mistreated group of people, but these exceptional men creatively chose a more ethical means to gain their political ends. Is it conceivable for widespread political movements using non-violent methods to develop within an (oppressed) Islamic nation? After all, such tactics would have been effective against the Israelis on the West Bank, for unlike the oppressed under Stalin and Hitler, but like the British Raj and the white Southern segregationists, the Zionists weren't going to engage in routine mass slaughters to hold onto power because of their traditions of democracy and constitutional rights.

What specific right-wing Christian religious leaders today advocate specifically religious military crusades? Where are the radical Christian theorists, politicians, and terrorist leaders who are equivalents to Islamist leaders like Qutb and Khomeini? A key point of Spencer's "Religion of Peace" is that all the traditional right-wing religious bogeymen that people like Kevin Phillips and Chris Hedges cite have far less dangerous records and aspirations than the Islamists' do. We have all sorts of Muslim jihadists around the world engaged in terrorist activities of one kind or another based upon their interpretation of the Quran and the Hadith. Christian leaders like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, the late Jerry Falwell, etc. lead no terrorist groups, but simply wish to restore through democratic electioneering 1950's America culturally, minus legal segregation. Even the Reconstructionists certainly aren't looking to create a domestic theocratic bloodbath, as Spencer shows. The empirical evidence of the world today is that the Bible, by itself, simply doesn't inspire the same level of religiously motivated violence by its believers as the Quran’s do.

What about the Buddhist monks who killed themselves to protest Diem's regime in South Vietnam? When they died, they didn't kill others also. How many Muslims have done the same in Palestine and elsewhere? Of course, Hindu civilization has produced both Gandhi and the BJP’s terrorism. But where is the Muslim “Gandhi”? Where is the Palestinian “Martin Luther King”? What major political pacifist figure has appeared in Islam to off-set the actions of Muslim terrorist groups? How much terrorism do about 1.1 billion Indians produce compared to a similar number of Muslims? (And in India’s case, Muslim Kashmiri rebels produce much of its terrorism). A fundamental difference arises here, as Robert Spencer explains (Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, pp. 175, 199):

The frequency and commonality of such acts of violence [by adherents of any religion]--and how close they are to each religion's mainstream--is determined to a great degree by the actual teachings of each religion. Islamic apologists like to point to Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph as examples of Christian terrorists, but there are three reasons why McVeigh and Rudolph are not equivalent to bin Laden and Zarqawi: *They did not even attempt to justify their actions by reference to Christian Scripture and tradition. *They were not acting on mainstream Christian teachings. *There are not large Christian groups around the world dedicated to implementing the same teachings. The difference between Osama bin Laden and Eric Rudolph is the difference between aberrant acts and aberrant teachings. Any human being with a belief system can do abominable things. But abominable acts are more likely to come in greater numbers and frequency when they are encouraged and perpetuated by religious texts and those who teach from them. . . . To adopt [Islamophobia as a useful analytical tool] is to accept the most virulent form of theological equivalence, and to affirm, against all the evidence, that every religious tradition is equally capable of inspiring violence.

Although Spencer is mistaken about Rudolph concerning his first bulleted point above, this comparison still holds overall. As of this writing (2007), for example, the last American abortion clinic bombing happened about ten years ago. (And many of them were deliberately timed to avoid killing people as opposed to destroying unoccupied business property). Hindu civilization produces its share of terrorism, but much less than Islamic civilization, even when the sociological variables are taken into consideration. After all, India is poor, has an unequal distribution of wealth (what country doesn't?), had recent experience with Western imperialism/colonialism, has lots of unemployed young men, etc., etc., etc., but still doesn't produce as much terrorism in percentage terms as the Arab Muslim world. How much terrorism does India produce in percentage terms compared to a few million Arabs in Palestine? A non-quantitative factor such as ideology has to used to explain the difference. (And, of course, Genesis 16:11-12 does also!) Also, are India's tax dollars being deliberately appropriated to fund terrorist activities in India or abroad, such as Iran does today and Libya did in the past? Whether or not an official governmental policy exists in this area also speaks of a crucial difference.

WHY DOES PALESTINE PRODUCE MORE TERRORISM THAN TIBET?

Let’s illustrate how oppressed people with different ideologies can react differently to the same general stimuli of oppression using the case of Tibet. What's happened in the generation or more since the Chinese invasion of 1949, relative to what happened in Israel/Palestine since 1948, as a cause of continuing terrorism by non-governmental groups? How many buildings have the Tibetans bombed in Shanghai and Beijing in recent decades? The remoteness of the United States from the Middle East, or the imbalance in total population between the United States and any Arab country, didn't keep the 9-11 hijackers from attacking on American soil. Have the Chinese have the Tibetans tightly controlled ala internal passports and a veritable wall like the Israelis have built against the Palestinians along the Gaza's border? After all, the Chinese found a way to get to Tibet and control it, right? They even found a way to invade India (northeast Assam) in 1962, which totally shocked Nehru at the time. (Despite being one of the founders of the non-aligned movement of nations, he had trusted Mao too much). What keeps Tibetans from getting around in China, especially if they were motivated by extreme hatred for their national enemy and desired to kill them? (He who has a will can find a way, bad roads or not). How much terrorism do roughly 3.5 million Palestinians produce in the semi/formerly occupied territories? (Including, well, amongst themselves!) If there are about 2.1 million ethnic Tibetans in Tibet itself (World Almanac, 2005), the difference in population hardly explains the difference in the amount of terrorism produced by political oppression, poverty, unequal incomes, colonialism/imperialism, “angry young men,” etc., or any other sociological variable that could be named. After all, why aren't the Tibetans attacking the roughly half million ethnic Chinese in their midst the way the Palestinians attacked Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or Jews in Israel itself? They wouldn't have to travel far to do such suicide bombing then, right? Furthermore, about 4 million fellow Tibetans live in nearby provinces of China. After the latter revolted in 1956 and the revolt spread to Tibet itself by 1959, Chinese troops crushed their rebellion and almost totally suppressed Buddhism. How much “blowback” have these acts of oppression and colonialism by China generated to date from native Tibetans? Human nature is indeed violent, but different cultures restrain or promote this sinful tendency better than others. Since human nature is universally evil, all men have sinned (Romans 3:23), and anyone of any religion can commit evil, does that commonality make Christianity and Islam equal in potentially producing violence from its adherents? Are traditional Christians and Muslims, based on their respective religious beliefs separate from the materialistic, power-seeking desires of most governmental leaders to conquer new territory, equally likely to engage in moral atrocities and wars? This generalization does not hold, for the reasons Robert Spencer elaborates at length in "Religion of Peace" and his "Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)." It's simply blindness to believe all religions, all cultures, all nations are equally politically violent by tradition, or would be equally likely to resort to abominable tactics to gain political freedom. The end doesn't justify the means.

What is it about Islamic culture in general, and the Arab Islamic culture in particular, that produces an extremist minority that so willingly undertakes such disproportionate responses? If Israel's recent war against Hezbollah in Lebanon was disproportionate and thus morally condemnable, the same goes even more for any terrorist activities by the mistreated aimed at the oppressor nation’s civilians. Consider the comfortable middle class or at least working class backgrounds of many of the suspects in the recent terrorist plots exposed in the Toronto area of Canada and in Britain, as well as the prior bombings in London: Why do these people hate their own societies when they themselves personally have experienced relatively little mistreatment in "the House of War"? All these Muslim terrorist plots that keep getting exposed or even become operational in the United States, Canada, Britain, etc., are further evidence of this problem. Some ethnic Albanians, for example, recently wanted to launch an assault on Fort Dix. (Some thanks we got from them for bailing out the Kossovars from the tender mercies of the Serbs, eh?) Just how poor, oppressed, mistreated, etc., etc., etc., are these Western Muslim plotters? Did the Toronto Muslims suffer such terrible agony from having lower incomes than the rich in their country that their envy made them lash out by planning to behead the Canadian prime minister? Remember, Canada is a county that punishes Christians who criticize publicly Muslims too harshly under hate law provisions. A Muslim apologist can’t just stop by claiming explaining that a history of the personal experience of oppression and imperialism motivates all Islamic terrorist activities, when that explanation may fit well (say) the Chechens against the Russians, but obviously doesn’t explain the the Western Muslim terrorist plots as well. Sociological variables alone don't explain why (say) aggrieved Tibetans haven't blown up skyscrapers in Shanghai, but British-born Muslims wish to blow up the Tubes. Islamist ideology correlates much better than poverty, personal experience with oppression, a high GNI index for a given nation, etc., with those who become terrorists. (This scholarly research project has actually been untaken repeatedly, as is explained below). Muslims, on average, are much more apt to resort to political violence, such as revolts, when faced with the same levels of political oppression, poverty, economic inequality, etc., compared with people in other civilizations because of their entitlement mentality, that only True Believers should rule, not infidels or pagans. Of course, their "right" to attack back really doesn't exist . . . if we believe that revealed commandments found in the Sermon on the Mount trump natural law theory.

IDEOLOGY, NOT SOCIOLOGICAL VARIABLES, EXPLAIN WHY MUSLIMS TURN TO TERRORISM MORE OFTEN THAN OTHER MISTREATED PEOPLE

Muslim nations also have levels of violence that aren’t the worst forms of terrorism. For example, governmental forces and/or vigilante groups enforce the Sharia law's provisions on people, such as by harassing women who aren't wearing headscarfs/veils and/or walk in public without a male relative's company, attacks on liquor stores, etc. The activities of the Front for the Defense of Islam (FDI), as led by Habib Mohammad Rizieq Shihab in Indonesia, constitute a case in point. Carrie Nation (1846-1911), famous for her one-woman crusade of chopping up liquor bottles in saloons in the name of Christ, was nothing compared to this guy. According to Bret Stephens (Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2007, p. A18), this vigilante group gets away with an amazing level of lawlessness: “Squads of FPI militants have forcibly shut down hundreds of brothels, small-time gambling operations, discos, nightclubs and bars serving alcoholic beverages. They also have stormed ‘unauthorized’ Christian houses of worship, attacked peaceful demonstrators from Indonesia’s renascent Communist party, trashed the office of the Nation Commission on Human Rights and rampaged through airports looking for Israelis to kill.” If it's a matter of the West's decadence and moral rot that's setting these people off, why don't we find similar tiny minorities of (say) fundamentalist Christians in the United States blowing up Hollywood studios and burning down “adult” book stores? For this reason also, there's much more systematic sympathy among general Muslim populations favoring, rationalizing, excusing, "explaining," etc., etc., etc., terrorist actions that target Western/Christian civilians. Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her autobiography “Infidel” (p. 270) dismisses the explanations for the 9-11 attacked as springing from Muslim frustrations over Israel, Palestine, and the West’s moral decadence, instead saying, “It was about belief.” She attacked articles “about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violence” as being “fairy tales [having] nothing to do with the real world I knew . . . People theorized about poverty pushing people to terrorism; about colonialism and consumerism, pop culture and Western decadence. . . . None of this pseudointellectualism had anything to do with reality.” Hirsi Ali rejected the explanation that the motive for these attacks stemmed from America’s support for Israel and Arab/Muslim frustration over Palestine’s problems. After all, the hijackers on 9-11 weren’t Palestinians, and none of them left letters about Palestine: “This was belief, I thought. Not frustration, colonialism, or Israel: it was about a religious belief, a one-way ticket to Heaven.” (As quoted by Cecil E. Maranville, “A Page on the World Infidel,” World News and Prophecy, September-October 2007, p. 13). So, Why is this tiny minority mostly Muslim at this point in world history? In the post Cold War era, almost all the Third World terrorism inspired by Marxist and (non-Muslim) nationalist ideals have long since ended. Oddball exceptions, such as Nepal's communist guerrillas, still pop up here or there. But since Marxism was plainly revealed to be “the god that failed” after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Marxist ideology no longer inspires many young men to live uncomfortable, dangerous lives while fighting in the jungles, hills, and mountains against their nations’ governments in order to produce many “inevitable revolutions.”

Unless Muslims living in the West are willing to publicly repudiate violent jihad and any intention of imposing the Sharia on Muslim and non-Muslim countries, they should be deemed to be dangerous radicals on the same level as the KKK, neo-Nazis, and Communists. Moderate Muslims have to be told to clean house, and put down and attack Islamist ideology, including by publicly (not merely privately) renouncing any intention of imposing the Sharia on Muslim and non-Muslim nations, including any provisions related to jihad and dhimmitude (which, is based on the legal theory that a subject Christian or Jewish population receives "protection" in return for a suspended jihad). Unfortunately for moderate Muslims, violent jihad is deeply imbedded in their faith’s primary sources (the Quran, the Hadiths, and the rulings of the four legal schools that make up the Sharia before the doors of revelation (“gates of ijtihad”) closed). By comparison, the weight of tradition and primary religious sources favoring religious warfare (Crusades) in early Christian sources is almost nothing, especially before the Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) That's why this ideological variable matters, that Muslims for ideological reasons are far more apt to resort to using force to gain political ends while citing publicly or privately a religious justification. By comparison, the IRA wasn’t interested in imposing Catholicism on the recalcitrant Protestants in Ulster, but wanted “One Ireland” in the name of nationalist ideology, much like nationalist guerrillas engaged in anti-colonialist wars during the Cold War Period. The ideological variable explains why Islam has such bloody borders, to use Huntington's terminology. Muslims are today being mistreated in places where their spiritual or physical ancestors aggressively invaded in the past. When they are being truly mistreated today, it’s often mere blowback, as the chickens of their ancestors’ sins come home to roost some centuries later. That doesn't make it morally right, from a Christian viewpoint, since revenge is evil. But we shouldn't excuse terrorism for this reason when it's Muslims attacking Christians, Jews, or Hindus likewise. Also notice sometimes, such as Bosnia and Kosovo, other (nominally mostly) Christian nations intervened to end the mistreatment of Muslims by the Orthodox Serbs. How many times in recent history have Muslim nations intervened to stop a Muslim nation from attacking a (nominally) Christian one?

WHY DOESN’T WESTERN MEDIA DECADENCE CAUSE CHRISTIAN TERRORISM?

The recent controversy over Dinesh D’Souza’s book, “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11,” concerns the degree to which Western moral decadence, especially as found in media sources, cause Islamic terrorism. Robert Spencer replied on-line to such reasoning: “We could be the most moral people on earth and the jihad would continue nevertheless. The Qur'an (9:29) directs Muslims to fight Jews and Christians, not just immoral Jews and Christians. What has changed in the last 25 years is the material ability of Muslims to pursue the jihad imperative. After all, Egyptian jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb was enraged by the immorality of the dancing at a church social in Colorado in the late 1940s; how immoral do you think that dancing really was, compared to today's standards? Yet despite its relative innocuousness, it still enraged him. He would not have been pacified by anything short of full Islamic separation of the sexes, and the covering of women. In other words, he would not have been satisfied by anything short of our islamization.” Hence, to a certain degree, the Islamists’ violent tendencies against the West would still happen even if the West’s Christians (and Jews) were perfectly virtuous, even if they hadn’t engaged in imperialism or had supported Israel, since our mere existence as “the other” is enough to justify theoretically jihad for them. The mere existence of people who aren't Muslims, but are of any other faith, is sufficient excuse to justify jihad or any other aggressive actions by those upholding Islamist ideology. Now conservative Christians in America, much like conservative Muslims, find lots to condemn morally on TV and in movies, music, videos, etc., since sex, violence, and curse words apparently pump up ratings and sales and/or are deemed artistically “authentic” by the creative cultural elite that produces these media products. The conservative Jewish movie critic Michael Medved's "Hollywood vs. America" is a very detailed listing of many, many (now) fairly recent major movies and what bad social tendencies are reflected in them. But, of course, do evil words and images justify terrorist attacks? How many fundamentalist Christians bomb Hollywood studios, modern art museums, adult book shops, or Broadway theaters? Conservative Muslims need to learn some Voltairian/Enlightenment-style tolerance. Their political culture’s general lack of tolerance is a major defect, which reveals the West’s objective superiority in this regard before the millennium begins. The point of a book like Robert Spencer's "Onward Muslim Soldiers" is to document the ideological/theological sources of jihad/Muslim aggression that can't be reduced to sociological/economic explanations. It presents the other half of the story, similar to a book like Coulter's "Slander," that one isn't apt to see printed in the pages of the New York Times or to hear from a liberal academic.

Islamist jihadist ideology is like Communism and Nazism: They are all intrinsically aggressive ideologies intended for "export." The Islamic history that liberal apologists for Islam wish to overlook (excepting the Crusades), from 632 to 1798, proves this. Even if the West behaved perfectly non-imperialistically and wasn't morally degenerate, conservative Muslims would still have ideological motivations for attacking us as "infidels," since they believe all the world should be converted to a Muslim-ruled "Caliphate" government. Notice the historical ideological continuity in the following statements (as quoted in Efraim Karsh, "Islamic Imperialism: A History," p. 1): "I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah"--Muhammad's farewell address, 632. "I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah."--SaLaden, 1189. "We will export our revolution throughout the world . . . until the calls 'there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed all over the world--Khomeini, 1979. "I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad--bin Laden, 2001. Bin Laden's more generic ideological motivations also need consideration, not merely those based on recent political grievances, if liberals are going to cite a terrorist’s propaganda as a primary source. Again, an implied materialistic, non-ideological interpretation of political history must be rejected. Ideas have consequences.

DO POVERTY, OPPRESSION, UNEQUAL INCOMES, ETC., EXPLAIN WHY WESTERN MUSLIMS TURN VIOLENT?

Academic research studies and other careful observations have confirmed that poverty, economic inequality, and/or low levels of education have little to do with why Muslims join terrorist groups. For example, generally using 2003-2004 data, Alberto Abadie, in his heavily statistical exercise, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism,” found that poverty as measured by GDP (or alternatively the United Nations’s Human Development Index and the inequality measurement of GNI), didn’t correlate significantly with terrorist activities once other variables are taken into account, such as linguistic fractionalization, the presence of geographical factors like remote jungle or mountainous areas and/or countries occupying large areas. (A large country that has rather remote, inaccessible “sanctuary” areas is more likely to develop and sustain terrorist groups than one that doesn’t, all other factors held equal). However, he did find that a lack of political rights did positively correlate with terrorism until a particular threshold is reached: The most repressive countries (such as North Korea) have less terrorism than partially free nations like Russia, perhaps because the repressive state apparatus successfully stops more terrorism than it encourages.

Other researchers have found education and affluence positively correlate with those who join terrorist groups. For instance, Marc Sageman, the author of “Understanding Terror Networks,” a psychiatrist once with the United States Navy and CIA, and now at the University of Pennsylvania, found most Arab terrorists to be “well-educated, married men from middle- and upper-class families, in their mid-20s and psychologically stable.” In his study of 172 mujahidin, he found more (three-quarters) to be upper- or middle-class than poor, more married than single, educated than illiterate. Some 90% came from intact families, and 63% had gone to college as opposed to the 5-6% common in developing countries. They normally had serious family and job responsibilities, since 73% were married and a strong majority had children. Three-quarters of them had professional or semi-professional occupations, such as being engineers, architects, and scientists. His research stressed social bonds that were formed with fellow Muslims, such as those formed while having felt lonely and alienated in Western countries, helped draw them into terrorist activities. As the Los Angeles Times reported Sageman’s findings: “With the exception of Persian Gulf Arabs raised mostly in devout households, many extremists became religious as young adults . . . Young Arab men [living in the West] find companionship and dignity in Islam. The social connection usually precedes their spiritual engagement, he says. In mosques, cafes and shared apartments, religion nurtures their common resentment of real and imagined sufferings.” Scott Atran, in “Discover,” noted people with an ideological cause resort to terrorism when they know they can’t win in a fair (open) fight. He emphasizes the suicide bombers’ sanity, high status levels, and education. A surprising number had graduate degrees, well-paying jobs, and solid families which they willingly sacrificed for their cause. One survey (2005) of three Middle Eastern columnists produced by Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) shared their belief that cultural and religious factors caused terrorism, not poverty. The three columnists, Abdallah Rashid Al-Ittihad), Muhammad Mahfouz (the Saudi Gazette), and Abdallah Nasser al-Fawzan (Al-Watan) particularly noted the influence of sheiks inciting young men to join in terrorist operations. Claude Berrebi of Princeton concluded in his 76-page paper, “Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism Among Palestinians,” that participation in Hamas and PIJ terrorist activities that higher standards of living and higher educational levels are positively correlated with participation in these two groups. (See www.danielpipes.org/blog/55 for these references). Clearly, all this evidence shows poverty and ignorance need not drive people into terrorist activities by themselves.

Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova found (as per a public opinion poll done in 2001 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research) that generally the more educated, less impoverished Palestinians favored terrorist activities against Israel somewhat more than lesser educated, more impoverished Palestinians. When comparing a sample of Lebanese Hezbollah members who died violently with a general population sample of the same ages, they found that the former had a poverty rate of 28% but the latter 33%, although this difference was deemed to be statistically insignificant. But the Hezbollah militants were more apt to be better educated than the general population, which was a statistically significant difference. They also note Berrebi’s study (2003) of 285 Palestinian terrorists, which found that less likely to come from impoverished families and much more likely to be better educated than the general Palestinian population. When focusing on 48 Palestinian suicide bombers, Berrebi found their poverty rate to be less than half than that of the general Palestinian population (roughly 14% vs. 32%). They note that Berrebi’s data fits well with Nassra Hassan’s (2001) informed comment: “None [of the suicide bombers] were uneducated, desperately poor, simple minded or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. More than half of them were refugees from what is now Israel. Two were sons of millionaires.” When generally correlating national per capita GDP with international terrorist incidents, they found that no relationship existed between the two variables once the respective national levels of civil liberties were taken into account: “Once one accounts for the fact that poorer countries are less likely to have basic civil liberties, there is no difference in the number of terrorists springing from the poorest or richest countries.” They also found no significant affects from higher illiteracy levels causing more terrorism. After making their general survey, they cautiously conclude: “The evidence we have presented, tentative though it is, suggests little direct connection between poverty or education and participation in terrorism.” (See “The Journal of Economic Perspectives,” “Education, Poverty, and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?,” vol. 17, no. 4, fall 2003, pp. 125-142). Krueger, a professor of economics and public policy at Princeton, later wrote in the introduction to “What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism” (2007) that “Although there is a certain surface appeal to blaming economic circumstances and lack of education for terrorist acts, the evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as an important cause of support for terrorism or of participation in terrorist activities.” Hence, the standard liberal paradigm, that poverty, ignorance, and economic inequality cause the world’s problems, clearly doesn’t explain the origins of terrorism. Hence, it’s sensible to look beyond changes in sociological variables to ideological ones instead in order to account for terrorism appearing in some places much more than others.

THE GREATER IDEOLOGICAL SOURCES FOR MUSLIM TERRORISM

The radical Islamists can find in the Quran, Hadiths, and Sharia, including the standard, traditional ways of interpreting them that will drawn sympathetic responses from their fellow fundamentalists, than any “Christian” terrorist could locate in the Bible, the early Catholic writings before the fourth century, and Catholic canon law. That is, the primary texts of Christianity are far less able to encourage war against unbelievers a priori than Islam's primary texts, including the Sharia's classical jurists before the gates of itjishad closed. For example, the Old Testament texts that commanded Israel to wage war against the Canaanites aren’t left “open-ended” in their actual wording and context, as general purpose texts that could be used as authorization to wage far against any and all infidels, unlike (say) the “verse of the Sword” in the Quran. This is even more clear when the tradition of how these texts have been interpreted over the centuries is considered also, not just in the past century or two. For example, the standard Muslim theological method says the later, more aggressive Medinian suras override the earlier, more pacific Meccan suras when a conflict arises between the two within the Quran. One notorious application of this interpretative principle appeared in the 2007 PowerPoint presentation at Walter Reed Hospital of Major Nidal Malak Hasan, who later killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009 after shouting “God is Great” in Arabic. In slide 35, he wrote: “Example: Jihad-rule of Abrogation In Mecca Muslims were not permitted to defend themselves/fight. There [sic] only job was to deliver the message (peaceful verses) Emigration to Medina: self defense allowed Later verses abrogated former ie: peaceful verses no longer apply Indeed at one point Islamic Empire spanned form [sic] Morocco/Spain to the Border of India/China.” The Muslim hermeneutical principle of abrogation here is called "naskh." It’s somewhat comparable to the way antinomian evangelical Protestants use dispensationalism against various Old Testament laws (see sura 2:106 for the Muslim principle's source). Would typical Muslim foreign students, especially if they can’t speak Arabic fluently, be aware of this theological construct, or the proper exegesis, the tafsir, of the Quran? Would it be like asking the average lay Methodist in the pews what the Trinity is or what dispensationalism means? This theological construct is similar to the importance to the Christian view that the New Testament governs, as the later revelation, instead of the Old Testament when a further revelation of God’s will happened. But, of course, in the Christian case, the New Testament is much more pacific than the Old Testament, while the reverse is true for the Quran when the later Medinian suras are compared to the Meccan. As Spencer comments (“Onward Muslim Soldiers,” p. 146): “Islam has a long-established tradition of interpreting the Qur’an in a way that allows Muslims to justify such violence, and indeed even to think it might be required of them. Christianity—with its emphasis on turning the other cheek, redemption suffering, loving one’s neighbor—and other religions have no comparable tradition. Christian martyrs meet their end by being persecuted unto death, while Islamic martyrs are suicide killers.” Ideological/theological/philosophical analyses are very important in comparing how a civilization's leaders and people react to stimuli in their environment . . . it's one reason why Tibetans have blown up or attacked a lot few buildings in Beijing and East Timorese in Jakarta than Chechans in Russia or Arabs in New York.

Christian societies aren’t "immune” to producing terrorists. But how often are their terrorists acting in the name of the God of the Bible and seeking to impose Biblical law on their societies? For example, the IRA’s past longstanding terrorist campaign to unify Ireland and throw out the British against the wishes of Ulster’s Protestant majority wasn’t done to promote the Catholic faith, but to achieve the goals of a nationalist “One Ireland” ideology. Similarly, various Communist and Marxist rebels and terrorists operating during the Cold War in Latin America acted to promote the creation of totalitarian governments as dictated by their nineteenth-century ideologies. They didn’t seek to impose on their societies Catholic teachings that they had largely or completely repudiated. Non-Islamic, especially (nominally) Christian, societies produce a lot less of non-state terrorism nowadays, especially in the post-Cold War period. Spencer points out that (evil) human nature is universal, but that certain religious traditions' primary texts and their way of being interpreted over the centuries will affect how their adherents behave. A sincere Muslim wanting to follow Muhammad's personal example has far more ideological justification for religiously-motivated violence than the Evangelical Protestant Christian asking, WWJD? Any Muslim, including free-lancers like Sheik Osama bin-Laden, can appeal to much more explosive material in Islam's primary texts (the Quran and Hadiths) and the classical legal interpretations of them in the Sharia than violence-prone Christians could in the equivalent Christian documents (the New Testament, early Catholic writings, Catholic canon law). Other religious traditions have had “holy wars,” but how many have had as voluminous writing and justifications for jihad as Muslims do? Unlike the Pope, conservative Muslims haven't repudiated such legal reasoning formally and publicly. Andrew G. Bostom, ed., “The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims” (2005) documents that conservative Muslims haven’t really changed formally their legal reasonings concerning jihad on moral grounds, but have merely made practical accommodations to the relative weakness of the Islamic world militarily relative to the West. As Bassam Tibi notes in this volume (pp. 334-35), the conservative but mainstream Al-Azhar conformists read scripture in the light of present realities, but the Islamic fundamentalists (such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s al-Banna and Qutb) would like to reverse this procedure, so that true Muslims view reality using the light of the texts. Even using the reasoning of the Al-Azhar conformists alone, as soon as the strategic economic and/or military conditions changed, Muslims could quickly brush aside all the present legal reasonings for the temporary suspension of jihad.

Richard Wike and Nilanthi Samaranayake, co-authors of “Where Terrorism Finds Support in the Muslim World: That May Depend on How You Define It—and Who Are the Targets” based on the Pew Global Attitudes Survey of 2005 found that “support for terrorism is also more common among persons who identify primarily as Muslim, those who believe it is important for Islam to play an influential role on the world stage, and those who believe Islam faces serious threats.” Even after doing a multivariate analysis to check if these variables independently explained support for terrorism or were proxies for other variables still found that “two of the [three] measured attitudes toward Islam also remain significant. The belief that it is important for Islam to play an influential role in the world is positively related to support for suicide bombing in Iraq and confidence in bin Laden. The perception that there are serious threats to Islam is positively associated with support for suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians, as well as suicide bombing against Westerners in Iraq. However, primarily identifying as a Muslim is not significantly related to any of the three dependent variables.” (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/26/where-terrorism-finds-support-in-the-muslim-world). This data partially contradicts the generalization that’s been made that a Muslim’s “personal piety” doesn’t relate to support for terrorism: “Personal piety” isn’t the only kind of ideological construct that can promote terrorism.

It’s necessary to admit the epistemological limitations of secular political science methodology, including even the statistically driven Correlates of War project when it overlooks intellectual, religious, and philosophical ideological forces as moving nations, societies, and civilizations. Consider the category mistake one political science researcher who discounted the hegemonic threat that radical Islam poses by asking the question: “How many mechanized divisions does Osama have?” That question committed the same category mistake using almost the same words that Stalin's question did about the Pope: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” The ideology that discounts ideology as a factor that moves men to action was proven empirically false in the case of the Pope, whose ideology (i.e., Catholicism) brought down Soviet Communism more than any other single person or force. Likewise, this (implicitly Marxist) ideology that makes intellectuals blind to the force of ideology, especially when it is a religion, needs to be challenged when it comes to the threat Islam poses to the West today. Just because it isn't concentrated into any one nation as a "hegemonic threat" doesn't make it any less real, especially when present demographic trends in Western Europe are projected into the future and the tendency for many of the second or third generation offspring of Muslim immigrants to be more conservative religiously than their immigrant parents is considered. That's how we end up with Muslim terrorists in Western countries, such as the British tube bombers and the Toronto plotters. How poor, how oppressed, how educationally deprived, etc., were they? The sociological/materialistic variables simply don't explain the difference in levels of terrorism; an ideological factor has to be considered, but the materialistic/anti-ideological approach of most political scientists helps to keep them from seriously considering that possibility.

John Henry Cardinal Newman, the Anglican priest turned Catholic cardinal, in "The Idea of a University" explained that one of the purposes of a university was to set up a system of checks and balances between the different subject areas/disciplines. Under this system, when zealots concerning the subject of physics, economics, biology, psychology, etc., would make bigger claims for their disciplines than were warranted in promoting human happiness, etc., the other disciplines, with theology as the top guiding the adjustment process overall, would rein them in by presenting other perspectives. For example, economists naturally tend to think the material standard of living is the most important way to rate a society's well being, thus discounting the Christian view that "man does not live by bread alone." Newman raised a key point concerning economics' moral claims (p. 68): "The obvious question which occurs to ask is, what does Religion, what does Revelation, say on the point? Political Economy must not be allowed to give judgment in its own favour, but must come before a higher tribunal." The economist has no final right to decree what ethics or morality should be concerning the purposes of his discipline; that's left for theology to answer. Furthermore, people who carefully study one subject with zeal for years on end naturally tend to develop blinders about the importance of other subjects/disciplines in relationship to their own. As Newman noted (p. 71), they don't have the full picture by themselves in their own field: "Though they speak truth, they do not speak the whole truth; that they speak a narrow truth, and think it a broad truth; that their deductions must be compared with other truths, which are acknowledged to be truths, in order to verify, complete, and correct them." For example, it's an error to think that the COW way of doing political science is the only valid way to do it: Space must be made for theoreticians and others using different (perhaps more deductive) approaches that still can gain truth as well, such as the approach of Sam Huntington in "Clash of Civilizations." It's simply necessary to do some serious theory sometimes, and consider whether one's approach to one's work is really (fully) correct. The secular political science approach of discounting ideas as movers of men is a serious error that needs to be recognized and calibrated for: Otherwise, someone influenced by it asks the mistaken question, "How many mechanized divisions does Osama have?," supposedly as a crushing objection to anyone thinking he (or others like him) is a threat. But Stalin asked a similar question about the Pope, not realizing that it would be a future Pope that would bring down the Soviet system he ruled more than any other single individual. The limitations of the COW statistical method for gathering truth for political science's conclusions have to be admitted. The nations in question also have to be analyzed using intellectual history (such as philosophy, law, literature, and theology) to explain how people of different civilizations react differently to the same or similar (material) forces. By doing theory, and then discovering and admitting the limitations of our methods for obtaining truth, we won't make the mistake Cardinal Newman mentioned, of perceiving a "narrow truth" as a "broad one," or of claiming too much for our methods for (supposedly) getting truth. We’re then more self-aware about our own intellectual strengths and limitations. The Correlates of War Project’s materialistic approach thus causes the radical Islamic threat to be equally mistakenly discounted today, since it is an ideological/religious threat, just as Stalin similarly discounted Roman Catholicism in the past. Can we learn from history in this regard then?

The standard secular political science approach, including the statistically driven Correlates of War project, sees through a materialistic lens that cannot account for such outcomes. Using the exact same methodological blinders, radical Islam is discounted as a threat, for this is mainly an ideological struggle (as undergirded by differential birth rates, religious conversions, and immigration) under which the West could lose (granted present trends projected enough decades into the future), despite its presently enormous economic and military advantages over the Islamic world. Secular people have a very hard time believing seriously religious people actually will DO what they SAY; this assumption permeates liberal/leftist political science analysis of the world. Agnostic and atheistic political scientists upholding a secular worldview have to become self-aware of the limitations of their materialistic modes of explanation. But seriously religious people of different faiths should be able to understand religious people of other religions just might sometimes DO what they BELIEVE (hypocrisy and human weakness not withstanding). Hence, if the Islamic sources of religious authority (the Quran, the Hadiths, and the Sharia) promote aggressive warfare against unbelievers in a generic sense much more than the equivalent Christian ones (the Bible, the early Catholic writings, and canon law), there are practical consequences today from this difference.

The control of radical Islam occurs to the extent any government has implemented or accepted the Sharia law as the basis for its legal system. Hence at least Sudan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia would count, and they are all closed (or nearly closed) societies as well. Countries which partially accept it, such as Pakistan and Egypt, even Iraq under American occupation, that used to be more secular, have a dangerous political trajectory that indicates the diehard conservatives are successfully intimidating those who want a secular basis for law, or the moderate Muslims in general. Any country that accepts the Sharia law will oppress women and religious minorities (the dhimmi) systematically, since conservative Muslims would see that as their political duty under God's law. Moderate Muslims should be challenged to repudiate publicly (not merely privately to friends) the Sharia’s discriminatory treatment of women and religious minorities and its support for literal jihad if they are serious about reform Islam's worse tendencies. The question, “How many mechanized divisions does Osama have?,” commits the same error Stalin did when he asked about the Pope: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” So can secular political scientists and researchers recognize how COW's materialistic/non-ideological/non-religious basis for analysis is affecting their (secular political) analysis of the threat radical Islam poses. Stalin didn't think the Pope was a threat, did he? Likewise, one researcher denies that radical Islam is a threat, based on the same kind of mistaken reasoning. In short, COW (or standard-brand secular political science) is encouraging political scientists to ask the wrong kind of questions. And people who ask the wrong kind of questions are going to get the wrong kind of answers!

Since radical Islam as an ideological threat is spread as a contagion within conservative Islam through conversion, immigration, and population growth, the former doesn't have to have direct state control in all cases to be ultimately very damaging, especially when nukes are becoming increasingly easy to build and acquire. Conservative Islam merely serves as the "ocean" for the “tidal wave” of radicals to develop and gain strength, such as from Saudi Arabia's massive oil wealth supporting its propaganda efforts abroad that promote Wahabism. Ironically, Saudi Arabia has suffered from terrorism in recent years in part as unanticipated “blowback” from its proselytizing efforts for its very conservative sect of Sunni Islam. Islam also grows by both conversion and population growth. Merely sending in enough immigrants with high birthrates into Europe could well lead to (except for when Jesus presumably would come) conservative Muslim takeovers of these countries without firing a shot. By building parallel legal systems that make room for the Sharia for Muslims in Europe, such as for family law, these systems could ultimately be imposed on these countries entirely once conservative Muslims had enough votes as a percentage of the population. To alleviate the kinds of concerns about radical and fundamentalist Islam raised by Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and in Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia,” moderate Muslims should openly and publicly repudiate any desire to impose the Sharia law on majority or (especially) non-majority Muslim societies. To the extent it's taken literally, the idea of replacing English common law (or the Napoleonic Code), along with any nation's democratic constitution, with the Sharia law is every bit as radical as communism, the KKK's racism, and Nazism. Such a change should be equally condemned and equally be a source of sensible active concern as past hegemonic threats such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia once posed.

Let’s mindlessly apply the COW approach by comparing the following two states' material capabilities during their most recent earthshaking conflict. In one corner, we have the USSR, boasting 210 "maneuver" divisions, 1/4th of them tank divisions (c. 1985). In the other corner, we have the Pope, with around 130 Swiss guards. Hmmmm. We'd think the Russian superpower should be able to annihilate the small city-state in about 1 nanosecond. But, as we know now, it didn't quite work out that way . . . Vatican City was the “mouse that roared”! The variables COW keeps track of could not have possibly predicted the Papacy's victory over Soviet Communism. It simply would have asked the wrong questions, such as what states does it control, what are their material capabilities, and can those states be called major powers? That is, a materialistic, non-ideological analysis still misses crucial variables even when it gathers a mountain of data, but still makes the standard Marxist error (at some level) by claiming the superstructure (society's ideology/religion/philosophy) never effects the mode of production (economic organization).

John Paul II served as the vessel for an ideological force that carried to the Poles the belief that that communist system need not be accepted morally or intellectually. After all, he was one of them, and had lived under that system. And he led the Catholic church as an institution in Poland which provided the framework and material foundation for the underground Solidarity movement to undermine the regime's confidence in itself so much that it allowed for free elections for one of the chambers of the Polish legislature. The Papacy, especially a Polish pope, along with the Catholic church provided the necessary foundation to make the aid that the USA funneled to that underground movement effective. (For general documentation of this, see mainly Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, ''His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time,” but also former CIA director Robert Gates, “From the Shadows.”) The Polish Communist government allowed (mostly) free elections in its legislature. Following this signal event, the Communist dominoes came tumbling down, in the Eastern European satellite states (effectively) conquered by the USSR after WWII. Then (following a two year gap), the biggest domino of all came down after the failed coup attempt against Gorbachev. At the barest minimum, the Soviet system came down much faster because of the push a Polish Pope gave to it (and his national identity was crucial to making this happen the way it did, the Poles having already shown themselves to be one of the more restive satellite nations). History only looks "inevitable" when it's looked at after the fact, especially when examined using a materialistic lens (or blinders, as the case may be). After all, how many people in 1970 or even in 1988 would have publicly predicted that Soviet Communism would collapse? After all, wasn't the main liberal/leftist paradigm about Communism was that the West was going to have to live with it permanently, that their economies would grow faster than the West's, that it was better to be Red than dead, etc.?

If someone can accept a theoretical analysis as an explanation for Carroll Quigley's characterization ("Pakistani-Peruvian Axis") in “Tragedy and Hope” of the differences between Third World countries and the developed West, why can’t an ideological cause be accepted here also? The same goes when someone thinks the West’s experiences with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc., when Muslim world historically didn’t have these societal transformations, as an explanation of differences in political culture that make it hard for W. Bush to build stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's simply necessary to do more theory. Researchers have to consider carefully the values and assumptions they use to make analyses for any inconsistencies and use of double standards. Otherwise, all the admirable efforts of meticulously gathering data on innumerable wars is mostly wasted. The policy prescriptions produced by people analyzing huge amounts of data in biased ways can easily be bested by people using better theories but less data. Good "thumb suckers," using far less data, can end up producing better (worldly) policy recommendations or policies, such as shown by Ronald Reagan’s simple right-wing anticommunist views helped to end the Cold War more quickly than a restoration of Détente would have. Herbert W. Armstrong observed that the theory of evolution all came tumbling down when he pointed out the logical fallacy of circular reasoning in the alleged foundational evidence used to “prove” it. It didn’t matter that people armed with Ph.D’s in the biological sciences had far more knowledge of the relevant scientific facts than he had. Here a "biological science thumb-sucker" beat out the relevant Ph.D’s. The same goes for Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," since he offers a generally superior analysis compared to his critics on the matter of Islamic civilization’s “bloody borders.” Huntington did do his homework, and later found statistical sources to back his generalization. Although they have been disputed, a lot more evidence would have to be presented to overthrow them and explain the discrepancies in these other researchers' compilations of data on wars in various parts of the world in recent decades in order to justify rejecting his analysis.

THE IDEOLOGICAL REASONS WHY AMERICAN TROOPS STATIONED IN SAUDI ARABIA SO PROVOKE MUSLIMS

Why was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia such an unusual provocation to Muslim sensibilities? Why did bin Laden's comments about his motivations include a strong objection to this. The Americans were invited in, of course, by the Saudis. But for what reason? To support a military intervention that later rescued Kuwait’s Muslims from Saddam's clutches, and to keep Iraq possibly from attacking Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf’s oil rich sheikdoms next. Just modern-day power politics, right? But this standard political game had unanticipated consequences. Here it’s necessary to do a cultural analysis that goes beyond economics and the recent history of Western influence in the Islamic world. Muhammad wanted only one religion in the land of the Islamic holy cities Mecca and Medina. Hence, Christians and Jews weren’t allowed to remain in Arabia while openly practicing their religions. Conservative Muslims in theory didn’t wish to extend even the second-class dhimmi level of "tolerance" that infidels received elsewhere after they were conquered. Of course, along with the awful economic consequences of sanctions on Iraq's people, the Persian Gulf War produced two of four stated major reasons Osama bin Laden gave for attacking the United States. These were consequences of America's intervention in saving Kuwait (and the Saudis) from Saddam's Iraq back in 1990-1991. But if one favored the Persian Gulf War, and wanted to have Kuwait rescued from Iraqi occupation, he then has to accept partially this consequence from American intervention there. If 9-11 was partially the price for saving the Kuwaitis from Saddam, was it worth paying then? Should we have left Saddam to do what he wanted in Kuwait and (most likely) soon in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf state sheikdoms? Admittedly, Pat Buchanan's objections to intervening there at the time, back in 1990, looked pretty good then; they look even better today. One intervention, leads to another, right? And the law of unanticipated consequences applies to proposals for military interventions abroad in the name of ambitious nation building projects, as a subset of social engineering in general. Some Muslims objected to America’s rescuing these Kuwaiti Muslims and keeping Saudi Arabia safe from an Iraqi invasion on religious grounds, and look at the consequences.

Does America's support for Israel directly cause Muslim terrorist attacks on America? As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said right after the 9-11 attacks, Israel is hated for being part of the West, rather than the West (or America) being hated for supporting Israel. Arabs can see various ways in which their nations' culture, even after benefiting from all that oil wealth, is politically, educationally, militarily and economically inferior to resource-poor Israel. How much does envy or the fear of freedom stoke Muslim or Arab anger? Admittedly, those variables are hard to quantify and to put into a data set. A Muslim or Arab foreign student would have trouble confessing either even privately to a Westerner, but they are a reality nevertheless. Just as the Right's vice is greed (or materialism), the Left's is envy (or hatred of the good for being the good), so envy and the desire to “escape from freedom” shouldn’t be discounted as minor political matters. “Evil human nature” simply doesn’t explain by itself why Muslim nations are more apt to turn to terrorism than other nations since it’s a universal truth present in all cultures. The variable that needs explanation is why are Muslims, when they aren’t serving in their own government’s security apparatus, are more apt to target civilians for political purposes than people of other civilizations

Evil human nature will encourage nations play power politics by allying with nations of opposing faiths for whatever immediate goal they had against nations dominated by their co-religionists. Efraim Karsh develops this theme at length in “Islamic Imperialism: A History.” For example, the British persistently supported the Ottomans against Russian imperialism in the nineteenth century because they feared the Orthodox Czar's potential designs on India and their line of communication from their home country to their most populous colony much more than the Sublime Port’s launching another jihad. But if the Arabs’ and Ottomans’ jihads aren’t to be blamed on Islam, then European imperialism shouldn’t be blamed on (traditional) Christianity. But in reality, the ideology of jihad played a much more significant role in Muslim expansionism in the seventh to ninth centuries and in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries than Christianity’s missionary impulse had in the eighteenth-nineteenth century European expansion. As Robert Spencer points out (“Onward Muslim Soldiers,” pp. 167-168) concerning the multiple motivations for the earliest Arab jihadists: “The chance for economic gain doesn’t mean that religious motives are not present, especially in an Islamic context, where warfare and booty are legislated by divinities as religious matters. In the seventh century, as in the present day, a variety of motivations coalesced in the hearts and minds of a large number of men; it would be condescending and ethnocentric to discount their explicit avowals of religious motives are a mere cover for what was more important to them. Then, as now, religion was more important to a great many people outside the West than to postmodern, secular Americans and Europeans.” By the time of Napoleon and the French Revolution, the ideology fueling the Crusades had long since been burned out of European culture, such as due to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution, although the missionary expansionistic impulse remained for many individual Europeans.

The theology of literal jihad is much more extensive in the Muslim primary sources than merely what the smallest of the four schools of Muslim law (the Hanbali) teaches. For example, why did the Ottoman Grand Council solemnly decide to declare a jihad against Russia at the beginning of the Crimean War? (Karsh, “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” p. 101). Then consider carefully the writings and enormous influence of these five twentieth century Muslim authors on the subject of jihad. For the Shiites, there's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989). Then there’s these four among the Sunni, the Egyptians Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989), and the Indian Sayyid Abdul A'la Maududi (1903-1979). These men can’t be dismissed as mere kooks, radical fringers, and extremist radicals, because so many have read their writings and take them seriously in the Islamic world. It's laughable to compare them with (say) the present influence of the KKK or the Communists in the United States. They interpreted their Islamic tradition much better than the Muslim moderates, who are like the liberal Protestant Christians: The former have to deny the traditional, straight-forward teachings of the Quran, the Hadiths, etc., in order to sustain their position, just as the latter accept evolution and have to deny the miracles of the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, the conservative Al-Azhar conformists haven’t formally rejected the teaching of jihad and dhimmitude for conquered peoples, but merely have found convenient, tactical “bandages” to avoid making fundamental reforms of traditional Islamic law. All these “bandages” can be quickly torn off should economic and military conditions change that would make formally declared jihads against the West realistic again.

INCONSISTENCIES IN PRACTICE DIFFER FROM STRICTLY FOLLOWING IDEOLOGY

There’s no natural compatibility of Christianity and Islam whenever Muslims take their ideology seriously and attempt to implement in their societies, such as the Sharia law and the standard teachings of Islamic law about the treatment of dhimmis. If they are in some kind of semi-peace or semi-tolerance, such as in Senegal, it's merely because the Muslims aren't being that serious or consistent, like the brandy-drinking Bosnians. True, a number of Muslims drink alcohol (I still remember one of my past five Pakistani roommates buying something alcoholic from me when I worked at Quality Dairy near Michigan State University) shows they aren't following their faith’s formal teachings. In reality, a legal prohibition of alcohol, much like America’s in the 1920's and early 1930's, is what Islamic teaching requires if Muslim rulers unswervingly implemented their faith’s tenets. Similarly, to argue that jihad is mainly about struggling against one's evil impulses is about as shoddy an exegetical exercise in reading the Quran and the Hadiths as attempting to deny the literalness of the first 11 chapters of Genesis or to reject the Deity of Christ in taught in the Gospel of John. The treatment of Christians in Pakistan or the Christians and Bahais in Iran is much more illustrative of what Muslim rule is like intrinsically than what happens in Senegal. For example, in Iran, the tiny minority of Christians (0.4% of the population) find that the printing of Christian literature is illegal, that converts from Islam are apt to be killed, and most evangelical groups have to operate underground. In Pakistan, despite having initially a secular regime, the Sharia law has been increasingly imposed, such as from the Pakistan National Alliance’s influence starting in 1977. The government quickly gave in, and Sharia courts were established and increasingly given more and more authority. Even when the Islamists don't have full political power, they still attempt to impose what they can where they can. Christians do have trouble gaining and holding office in Pakistan because the law of dhimmitude prohibits the rule of non-Muslims over Muslims. Hence, Muslim spokesmen there have pushed for the full enforcement of the Sharia, emphasizing that Christians "should have no voice in the making of laws, no right to administer the law and no right to hold public office." (in Spencer, Onward Christian Soldiers, pp. 206-207, citing Patrick Sookhdeo, A People Betrayed: The Impact of Islamization on the Christian Community in Pakistan). In Pakistan, in the January of 1983, there were no non-Muslims in the two highest ranks of federal government civil servants. Laws of evidence were passed in 1979 to put the Pakistani courts more into line with Islamic law's requirements which prohibited non-Muslim witnesses to testify against a Muslim defendant. In some parts of Pakistan, like the North West Frontier Province, the building of churches can't be done unless they are labeled as "community centers." In other cases, it's hard to get permission, as in Egypt, a seemingly moderate if authoritarian regime that declares that Islam is the state religion. There identity cards will identity individuals as Christians, who are often insulted and ostracized in public. Muslim schools receive funding but not Christian ones, and Arabic may only be taught by Muslims in their schools. Since the Sharia relegates Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims to second-class citizen status, and that law, being deemed to be Allah’s Himself, can’t be reformed by its very nature according to conservative Muslims, any Muslim nation that even only partially accepts it has to discriminate against its non-Muslim citizens.

THE INTRINSIC TENDENCY OF SECULAR MUSLIM GOVERNMENTS TO BECOME LESS TOLERANT OVER TIME AS THEY BECOME MORE ISLAMIC

The cultural trajectory of a formally secular regime ruling over a mostly Muslim population increasingly will fall into a hard-line Islamist position on their governments’ implementing the Sharia, such as in Pakistan. For example, under pressure from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, Sadat before his assassination did promise to implement the Sharia (see Spencer, “Onward Muslim Soldiers,” p. 236). Like the people of other cultures (such as soderweg theory uses to analyze how the Nazis came to power in Germany), Muslims necessarily will work out the ultimate consequences of their formal ideological, philosophical, and religious premises over time, thus driving out ideals born of compromise and inconsistencies. It isn't merely a matter that angry young men with poor job prospects can cause a nation much political and religious grief. Lots of nations in the Third World face similar problems. But they don’t all produce the same levels of terrorism (or sympathies for terrorists) that Muslim societies do. Nor is it a merely a matter of Saudi oil money helping to propagate the teachings of the smallest of four Muslim schools of law. (In the cases of Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran, the provisions of Sharia law likely don’t have important variations from school to school concerning how Muslim governments should treat dhimmis). Rather, there has to be enough bad theological or philosophical tinder left around in their culture that the leaders of hooligans and the underemployed can seize and use to motivate them against others, such as Hitler and the Nazis found they could enflame in the 1920's and 1930's in Germany when getting the Brown Shirts to fight against communist and SDP gangs on the city streets of the Weimar republic. (Shirer in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" does an excellent job of summarizing the historical/philosophical roots of Nazism and why the Germans when hit by the Great Depression voted for totalitarianism while the French, British, and Americans, hit by the same economic disaster, didn't). The intrinsic cultural trajectory of a Muslim nation that's serious about their Islam is ultimately to treat Christians and Jews as second-class citizens. When they pragmatically treat non-Muslims as equals, it's merely by their being inconsistent with their own faith's sources of spiritual authority when believed in and applied literally. It doesn't prove anything intrinsic about Islam's true levels of tolerance that Christians have been allowed to have high office in Senegal or elsewhere. As the leading historian of dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or has written: “The inner logic of the jihad could not tolerate religious emancipation. Permanent war, the wicked of the Dar al-Harb [House of War, the non-Muslim ruled world] and the inferiority of the conquered harbis [dhimmis] constituted the three interdependent and inseparable principles underlying the expansion and political domination of the umma [the Muslim religious community].” (Ye’or, “Dhimmitude: The Jews and Christians under Islam,” p. 99; as cited by Warraq, “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” p. 238). One has to examine the philosophical and theological cultural background and matrix of a nation, and see what it ultimately entails, to do a good analysis of this subject.

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON ON THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: THE WEST VERSUS ISLAM

Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, (pp. 210-11), says a key reason for the violence between Christendom and Islam over the centuries stems from both sides’ shared belief that each had the one true faith that should be spread to the whole world: "Both are monotheistic religions, which, unlike polytheistic ones, cannot easily assimilate additional deities, and which see the world in dualistic, us-and-them terms. Both are universalistic, claiming to be the one true faith to which all humans can adhere. Both are missionary religions believing that their adherent have an obligation to convert nonbelievers to that one true faith." (This general characteristic makes both quite different from the northern Chinese mentality, for example, which is very ethnocentric, and deeply convinced of the superiority of their own culture, but in semi-Buddhist contentment/passivity is content to leave the outside world’s “barbarians” unchanged). Of course, truly pacifistic Christians can avoid this old liberal claim that if someone says he has the Truth that this leads to intolerance and necessarily then to violence against others. But Islam has no equivalent to the Sermon on the Mount that could possibly generally restrain Muslims to (re)consider using violence as a basic principle for spreading their faith. For example, the great late medieval Islamic historian ibn Khuldun (1332-1406) even claimed one of the advantages of Islam had over other faiths was its doctrine of jihad!: “The other religious groups [that is, besides Islam] did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense. It has thus come about that the person in charge of religious affairs in (other religious groups) is not concerned with power politics at all.” But, he said, Muslim rulers are still concerned about power politics because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.” (“The Mugaddimah: An Introduction to History,” trans. by Franz Rosenthal, as quoted by Spencer, “Onward Muslim Soldiers, p. 174). Of course, only a very few Christians of any kind historically have been willing to take Jesus' words about loving ones enemies and turning the cheek truly seriously. The Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, the SDA's, and other (uncalled) Christian groups have to be praised for their willingness to avoid bearing arms in war.

Huntington notes the reticence of moderate Muslims to publicly condemn the approvals of violence by their more extreme brethren. Consider this analogy: If allegedly moderate people on the subject of race in the United States never or rarely condemned the KKK and the neo-Nazis, we would have reasons to doubt their moderation, especially if they still hesitated even after being asked to do so. "Protests against anti-Western violence have been totally absent in Muslim countries. Muslim governments, even the bunker governments friendly to and dependent on the West, having been strikingly reticent when it comes to condemning terrorist acts against the West." Huntington justly concludes (pp. 217-18): "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the United States Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture through the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West." Backing Huntington’s generalization is the neo-con/Bush foreign policy goal of ultimately reducing terrorism by spreading democracy in the Islamic world via nation-building programs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ARE ISLAMIC SOCIETIES MORE APT TO GO TO WAR?

What evidence does Samuel Huntington cite in "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996) that favors his rather notorious generalization that "Islam has bloody borders"? This book is a follow-up to his article in the summer of 1993 in "Foreign Affairs" called "The Clash of Civilizations?" The editor of that journal admitted that Huntington's article stirred up more discussion and debate in three years than anything published in that (high brow) journal since the 1940s. According to this book's back cover, Huntington is "the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University," and also "the chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies." He also was the founder and coeditor of "Foreign Policy," "the director of security planning for the National Security Council in the Carter administration," and "the president of the American Political Science Association." So this guy isn't exactly a fly-by-night crank. He also has written a book-length criticism of multiculturalism, which, given this background, is frankly surprising.

After citing various ethnic/civilizational conflicts and the Cold War lens they were seen through, he notes: "The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts [between major civilizations], however, have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims. While at the macro or global level of world politics the primary clash of civilizations is between the West and the rest, at the micro or local level it is between Islam and the others." (p. 255) Huntington then proceeds to give a long list of specifics, such as the conflicts in what was Yugoslavia (including Kosovo and Bosnia), Cyprus, Greece against Turkey, Turkey versus Armenia, Russia versus Chechnya, Afghanistan, and the Volga Tartars, China's central government versus Muslims in Xinjiang, Pakistan against India over Kashmir, Muslims clashing with minority Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia and minority Buddhists in Bangladesh, Catholic East Timor against Indonesia, the Jewish/Arab Palestine mess, Christian Arabs versus Muslims in Lebanon, the Ethiopian Christian Amharas against the Muslim Ormoros and other Muslim groups, the civil war in the Sudan between the Muslim Arab north and the Christian and animist black south, and the running conflict between the Northern black Muslim tribes and the southern black Christian tribes in Nigeria, which is replicated some in African nations such as Chad, Kenya, and Tanzania.

After giving this long list of specifics, Huntingdon then says: "In all these places, the relations between Muslims and peoples of other civilizations--Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish--have been generally antagonistic; most of these relations have been violent at some point in the past; many have been violent in the 1990s. Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rise as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world's population but in the 1990's they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization." (p. 256)

STATISTICAL, EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR ISLAM’S “BLOODY BORDERS”

Huntington now proceeds to cite statistical evidence from several different sources. So if someone objects to Huntington's generalization (i.e., "Islam has bloody borders"), one has to attack then his sources as unreliable for reasons X, Y, and Z. So then, have they been? One shouldn't attack Huntington's conclusion if his sources have remained unscathed. If the premises (i.e., sources) were allowed to stand, nobody can then complain much about the deduced conclusion. Were these sources left uncriticized because they didn't infer a certain general conclusion from a set of discrete facts (i.e., they didn’t conclude that a certain set of trees makes up a particular forest)?

He cites data from Ted Robert Gurr's article "Peoples Against States" in "International Studies Quarterly" (Vol. 38, September 1994, pp. 347-378). "Muslims were participants in twenty-six of fifty ethnopolitical conflicts in 1993-1994 . . . Twenty of these conflicts were between groups from different civilizations, of which fifteen were between Muslims and non-Muslims. There were, in short, three times as many intercivilizational conflicts involving Muslims as there were conflicts between all non-Muslim civilizations. The conflicts within Islam also were more numerous than those in any other civilization, including tribal conflicts in Africa. In contrast to Islam, the West was involved in only two intracivilizational and two intercivilizational conflicts. Conflicts involving Muslims also tended to be heavy in casualties. Of the six wars in which Gurr estimates that 200,000 or more people were killed three (Sudan, Bosnia, East Timor) were between Muslims and non-Muslims, two (Somalia, Iraq-Kurds) were between Muslims and non-Muslims, and only one (Angola) involved only non-Muslims." (Huntington, pp. 256-57). Huntington's Table 10.1, which uses Gurr's data, notes that in 1993-1994 in "Ethnopolitical Conflicts" that Islam had 11 intracivilization conflicts and 15 intercivilization conflicts, while "Others" had 19 (10 of which were tribal conflicts in Africa) and 5 respectively. Huntington also uses a New York Times article, dated Feb. 7, 1993, pp. 1, 14, that identified 48 locations in which 59 ethnic conflicts were occurring. "In half these places Muslims were clashing with other Muslims or with non-Muslims. Thirty-one of the fifty-nine conflicts were between groups from different civilizations, and, paralleling Gurr's data [i.e., indeed, reproducible evidence!--EVS] two-thirds (twenty-one of these intercivilizational conflicts were between Muslims and others." Third, Huntington cites an analysis by Ruth Leger Sivard which identified 29 wars in 1992. Interestingly, she used the political science empirical evidence study project Correlates Of War’s definition of a war, "conflicts involving 1000 or more deaths in a year," as Huntington explains. Nine of the twelve intercivilizational conflicts were between Muslims and non-Muslims, and "Muslims were once again fighting more wars than people from any other civilization." The source here is her World Military and Socal Expenditures 1993 (Washington, DC: World Priorities, Inc., 1993), pp. 20-22. Are there any learned academic articles in print attacking Gurr’s work, Sivard's book or this New York Times’ article? Did any angry Muslims or various academics rise up to attack them as shoddy, unreliable, biased, etc.? Or did they sail through, unopposed?

So then, after using this specific data from the early to mid 1990's, Huntington triumphantly concludes against his critics: "Three different compilations of data thus yield the same conclusion: In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards." (p. 258) Huntington notes in a footnote on this page that his generalization that "Islam has bloody borders" was a judgment made "on the basis of a casual survey intercivilizational conflicts. Quantitative evidence from every disinterested source conclusively demonstrates its validity." That is, a seat-of-the-pants or "thumb-sucking" generalization turns out to have statistical, reproducible evidence backing it upon further investigation. He notes here that "No single statement in my Foreign Affairs article attracted more critical comment than 'Islam has bloody borders.'"

Huntington cites other evidence favoring "the Muslim propensity toward violent conflict" based on "the degree to which Muslim societies are militarized." Here he leans upon James L. Payne, Why Nations Arm (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 125, 138-39 as his data source, while using 80% of the population as the criterion dividing line for what counts as a "Muslim" or "Christian" country. In the 1980s, he notes, "Muslim countries had military force ratios (that is, the number of military personnel per 1000 population) and military effort indices (force ratio adjusted for a country's wealth) significantly higher than those for other countries." The average force ratios and military effort ratios of Muslim countries were roughly twice of (professing) Christian countries in that decade. This is an empirical way to measure militarism, and (obliquely) how seriously an ideology of jihad (the unofficial sixth pillar of Islam for some Muslims) affects the former. Huntington cites Payne's remark, "Quite clearly, there is a connection between Islam and militarism." For Muslim countries, the average force ratio for 25 nations was 11.8 and the average military effort was 17.7, but for (professing) Christian countries (57 of them) the average force ratio was 5.8 and average military effort was 8.2.

He also cites work by Christopher B. Stone and Wilkenfeld, Brecher, and Moser (eds.) to conclude: "Muslim states also have a higher propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142 in which they were involved between 1928 and 1979. In 25 cases violence was the primary means of dealing with the crisis; in 51 crises Muslim states used violence in addition to other means. When they did use violence, Muslim states used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 38 percent of the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5 percent of their crises, violence was used by the United Kingdom in only 11.5 percent, by the United States in 17.9 percent, and by the Soviet Union in 28.5 percent of the crises in which they were involved. Among the major powers only China's violence propensity exceeded that of the Muslim states: it employed 76.9 percent of its crises. Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny." (p. 258)

So, has the picture changed any over the past decade? Huntington's figures generally use data from the 1980-94 period. So is this Islamic propensity a mere "accident of history"? Or are there deep underlying reasons theologically for Islamic nations and ethnic groups to go to war more often with each other and/or people of other nations and belief systems/civilizations? Importantly, his arguments on the subject of the Islamic world’s greater propensity to wage war can’t be refuted by personal attacks on Huntington. Just because Huntington has some bad ideas on other subjects doesn't mean what he says elsewhere is necessarily wrong: That's "guilt by association." It doesn't deal with his arguments on the point in question, but it's a distraction. It's yet another logical fallacy. David Singer is an atheist--should Christians associate with atheists? Does that render suspect everything he says on any subject, but especially religious ones? If the background and other beliefs of all the authors of all the books a political science researcher has read could be discovered, couldn’t far worse follies be uncovered, like their being Marxists or Communists? By this same argument that’s used against Huntington for having some sympathies with authoritarianism, every book written by a Marxist or Communist should be equally ignored. It's the same as attacking Jeane Kirkpatrick's general foreign policy by noting one place where she was seriously mistaken (by supporting Argentina against Britain in the Falklands War), which doesn't touch the fundamentals in question. Perhaps Huntington had in mind Singapore and Chile when making certain comments about dictatorships and/or third world countries’ ability to develop economically . . . which brings us once again back to Dictatorships and Double Standards, and realpolitik versus idealism, doesn't it?

CHAPTER 5

IS THE WEST’S IMPERIALISM AND THE OPPRESSION OF MUSLIMS THE MAIN CAUSE OF ISLAMIST TERRORISM?

WHAT IS AMERICA HATED FOR? HER VIRTUES OR HER FLAWS?

Is America today hated for its flaws or for its virtues? That is, is (say) the Arab world’s hatred of the United States a result of (say) favoring Israel and having a corrupting moral influence through its dominant media influence (Dinesh D’Sousa’ thesis) in the world today? Or is it a result of the infidel West’s being much richer, having more freedom, and having more influence the Arab world has today? Is not part of this response connected with how humbled the Islamic world is compared to its much more glorious (medieval) past vis-à-vis the West, which America is part of? American popular culture, including the English language, blue jeans and McDonald’s, has such a dominant influence in the world today it’s easy for many to resent it, as the case of the French shows. Obviously, which variable someone cares to emphasize becomes a matter of selective perception, since it’s going to be both.

The problem of envy rears its ugly head once again here, when the Arabs (or Muslims) are forced to contemplate the objective superiority of the West by many measures. How much fear do the Muslim world’s men have in the more conservative states (i.e., Saudi Arabia here) and radicals within the more moderate ones (i.e., Egypt, officially secular here) because the freedom the West’s women have may spread to their own countries? Little will provoke many men’s psychological insecurities more than the idea that they can’t control their women, especially in a culture with strongly defined male/female sex roles which are rooted seventh century tribal Bedouin values that are “hardwired” into Islam’s DNA. The West’s/Israel’s example may undermine their control by giving Arab Muslim women reasons to resist it and an example to copy. How many Saudi women, if educated in the West, not only know that it’s legal for women to drive and walk about publicly unescorted by male relatives alone in America or Europe, but actually experienced it for themselves? What about the freedom to vote, travel abroad, and to testify in court on one’s own behalf? Here the West’s example is very dangerous in practical terms. This may motivate far more hate than (say) one’s empathy for the Palestinians’ plight (i.e., a few mistreated fellow Arabs, who often over the decades were no worse treated by the Zionist state’s government than Arabs were by their own governments) does on a practical basis. (It’s easy to overlook this unnamed motivation if one has never been married).

Envy is another source of “blowback” since America’s and the West’s wealth is a source of hatred as well. It isn’t sufficient, however, since the Mexicans, Nigerians, Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, etc. are poor, historically mistreated by United States and/or Western foreign policy, etc., yet they don't hijack airplanes and blow-up skyscrapers with them or send suicide bombers against Seder gathering(s) and wedding(s). Why do some Muslims do this, but not the oppressed of other cultures/religions? It’s necessary for Westerners to reject the Islamic world’s victimology from various historical grievances as justification for their terrorists’ actions, as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair observed in his “A Global Alliance for Global Values”: “This terrorism, in my view, will not be defeated until we confront not just the methods of the extremists but also their ideas. I don’t mean just telling them terrorist activity is wrong. I mean telling them that their attitude to America is absurd, that their concept of governance is pre-feudal, that their positions on women and other faiths are reactionary. We must reject not just their barbaric acts, but their presumed and false sense of grievance against the West, their attempt to persuade us that it is we and not they who are responsible for their violence.” The West must not give the sanction of the victim to the Islamist terrorists and their Muslim sympathizers, fellow travelers, etc., in order to make them feel more justified in their actions.

APPEASEMENT PROMOTES BLOWBACK