It’s one of the strangest relationships in politics: progressives and Islam. They have nothing in common yet are best buddies. Go figure.
Progressives are predisposed to secularism, if not agnosticism or atheism. They have little patience for the fervency of Pentecostals or the literalism of Evangelicals.
Yet progressives (or liberals, pick your term) are quick to rally to the defense of Muslims, even though Muslims are inclined toward both fervent religious belief and literalism.
A Pew Research Foundation poll found that only about six in 10 Catholics and Protestants, and not even four in 10 Jews, are sure there really is a god. But nearly 9 of 10 U.S. Muslims are absolutely sure of it.
Fundamentalist Christianity – which gives progressives the creeps – views its scripture as inspired by God. But Islam goes further yet. It views its scripture, the Koran, as the direct, literal message – verbatim – that Allah passed on to Muhammed through the angel Gabriel.
Progressives mock the “holy rollers” and “Elmer Gantries” of Christianity but mobilize at the slightest criticism of Islam, denouncing it as “Islamophobia.” Go figure.
Yet women and gays, two constituencies whose interests progressives tirelessly champion, have fared far worse under Islam than under conservative governors and presidents.
Not even Vice President Mike Pence insists that women be required by law or social pressure to wear head-to-toe burqas and niqabs. Or that they be banned from driving or appearing in public without a male escort. Or that adulteresses be stoned to death. (Nearly nine of 10 Pakistanis and Egyptians favor doing so, according to a Pew survey.)
Nor has Pence called for the death penalty for gays, as 10 Muslim nations do. (Other Muslim nations are willing to settle for harsh prison terms and/or merciless thrashings.)
Progressives sermonize relentlessly on the subject of tolerance, chastising others for lacking it. Homophobia runs neck-and-neck with Islamophobia in the progressive catechism of worrisome sin.
Yet the Pew Research Foundation’s surveys find little tolerance of gays in Islamic jurisdictions. While 60 percent of Americans now view consenting adult homosexual relations as acceptable, a scant 9 percent in Turkey do. Tolerance for gays is even harder to find elsewhere in the Muslim world – only 4 percent in the Palestinian territories, 3 percent in Egypt and 2 percent in Pakistan.
Speaking of the subject of tolerance, the Pew surveys show 50 percent in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country, favoring the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law) on non-Muslims. Fully three-quarters in Egypt favor enforcing Islamic beliefs by government decree on non-Muslims.
Go figure further. Progressives are squeamish when it comes to the death penalty. They blanch at the thought of executions, even in cases like Charles Manson’s.
Islamic jurisdictions, however, are untroubled by such qualms.
Aside from the enthusiastic support for stoning adulteresses to death, there’s landslide support in Islamic countries for capital punishment for any who leave Islam for another faith.
According to the Pew surveys, 66 percent in the Palestinian territories count themselves in this camp.
Elsewhere there’s even greater enthusiasm for the execution of apostates. Fully 76 percent favor it in Pakistan, 86 percent in Egypt.
Progressives embrace “reform” as their watchword – but not necessarily when the word is applied to Islam.
Again, go figure.
The progressive Southern Poverty Law Center denounced Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim himself who seeks to reform his faith, as a hate-mongering Islamophobe. (The SPLC had to pay Nawaz $3.37 million in libel damages for having done so.)
Yet progressive apologists do not hesitate to come forward with sophistries minimizing the rigidly severe doctrines of Islam.
The term “Islamofascist” has long stalked Islam. It dates back to the days when the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, one of the world’s top-ranking Islamic figures, notoriously allied himself and his Palestinian cause with Hitler.
Beyond that connection, “Islamofascism” signifies the mindset that Islam is destined to triumph over and supplant all other faiths, and that Muslims are obligated to dedicate themselves to seeing that this destiny is fulfilled.
There are those who insist, however, that Muslims of such views are “theologically ignorant” of their own faith. One who says so is Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, political commentator and classical-studies academic.
In other words, he faults such Muslims for not believing what he believes they ought to believe, according to the tenets of their own faith. Wills himself is a Catholic. But he’s not shy about offering Muslims his patronizing spiritual counsel, having authored a book entitled “What the Koran Meant.”
The Koran, he declares, contains “a mountain of evidence” that Islam “favors peace over violence.”
Well, maybe so, in his view. But not necessarily in the view of many millions of other Muslims worldwide. They persist in gleaning the very opposite message from the book.
Another academic, Oxford-educated Bernard Haykel (now at Princeton), an expert on the ideology of ISIS, says militant Islamists in fact are hardly ignorant of their own faith. He finds them well-versed in the doctrines of Islam.
It’s nothing unusual to hear militants quoting from memory whole passages of the Koran. Osama bin
Laden regularly launched into lengthy disquisitions on the Koran and various other Islamic tracts.
Haykel does not make a case that Islam’s tenets predispose it to violence. He does, though, make this point: Others may not approve of the militants’ religious views, but those views have as much theological validity “as anyone else’s.”
Haykel adds: “People want to absolve Islam. It’s the ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra.”
If Wills can extract mountainous evidence of peace and goodwill out of the Koran, well, good for him. Not a few Muslims, however, surely will resist having a “disbeliever” like him tell them what their own scripture really means.
The many thousands who are active in various militant Islamist organizations – ISIS, al Qaeda, al Shabab, etc. – and the millions more who tacitly condone such militancy – don’t see a message in the Koran that makes them want to link arms with infidels and burst into a rousing rendition of “Kumbaya.”
British journalist James Snell once noted the oddity of “ecumenical liberals shouting their respect for Islam” when much of the faith’s rhetoric and many of its militant adherents “would happily see them all dead.”
Such militants can be faulted for the views they hold – but not for falsely deriving those views from the Koran. Likewise, the Westboro “Baptist” loonies may be condemned for their hatred of homosexuals – but not for falsely acquiring the attitude from the Old Testament text of Leviticus.
Wills and other progressives may insist that Islam is a religion of peace and keep saying it until they’re blue in the face. But there are Muslims who, just as vehemently, insist it isn’t. To take a famous example, the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
“I spit upon those who make such a claim,” he said.
“The sword,” he added, “is the key to paradise.”
The Ayatollah could – and often did – quote chapter and verse from the Koran to back up his belligerence.
Was the Ayatollah “theologically ignorant” of the minutiae of a religion he had studied for a lifetime? The very title “ayatollah” denotes an august cleric who is deemed by the Shi’ite faction of Islam to have attained an advanced level of insight into the faith’s dogma.
It’s not difficult for such hardliners to pluck out of the Koran passages that reinforce their antagonistic outlooks. Such passages are everywhere. Take 9.123: “O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness ….” “Would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the truth…?” asks 60.1, which adds: “Surely Allah loves those who fight in His way in ranks as if a firm and compact wall.”
Passages of such sentiment abound. Bless those who ignore them and focus on less militaristic verses. But it can hardly be disputed that there are those who opt not to ignore the Koran’s many calls to arms.
Taken at its literal word, the Koran is, from beginning to end, a manifesto against any who resist submitting to Islam. (Islam means “submission.”)
Those who choose another faith or philosophy of life are lambasted throughout the Koran as “iniquitous,” as “losers,” as “hypocrites,” as “mischief-makers,” as “transgressors,” as “deceivers,” as “polytheists” as “diseased,” as “fools,” as “apes” and as “swine.” A paean to pluralism and diversity the Koran emphatically is not.
There are many passages of the Koran that are obscure to those of us who don’t speak Arabic and have never been immersed in the study of Islamic texts. But the overarching themes are easy enough for anybody to grasp.
The Koran from its opening pages sets a tone demanding unquestioning obedience to the faith and hostility toward all others. The book then proceeds to propound this view relentlessly, to the last pages.
It may be said in this respect that the Koran is not all that different from the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament with their own get-with-the-program-or-else edicts.
The Koran’s fire-and-brimstone passages are far more numerous than anything in the book that might be construed as promoting rationalism and enlightenment, two of progressivism’s favorite motifs.
The Koran from the get-go hammers away on an us-against-them theme. It declares in the opening pages (1.5) that Allah has “bestowed favor” on believers, and has “brought down his wrath” on “disbelievers.”
“Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing and there is a covering over their eyes, and there is a great punishment for them,” the Koran goes on (2.7).
“Therefore,” says 25.52, “listen not to the unbelievers, but strive against them with utmost strenuousness….”
The Muslim faithful are urged to deal decisively with any who forsake Islam – “to seize them and slay them wherever you find them” (4.89).
Harsh punishment is, as a general rule, a response progressives abhor. Not the Koran, however. Its pages voice a literal, exuberant refrain promising non-Muslims a most unpleasant comeuppance, in both this life and the hereafter.
The Koran declares (17.97) that the disbelievers will be rounded up come judgment day. “Blind, dumb and deaf, their abode is hellfire.” And if the fire should start to subside, Allah will stoke the flames and “add to their burning.”
“This,” says 17.98, “is their retribution because they disbelieved….”
The Koran declares further on (18.29): “We have prepared for the iniquitous” – meaning “disbelievers” – “a fire…and if they cry for water they shall be given water like molten brass….”
And so it goes. On and on.
No doubt most Muslims strive to live law-abiding, peaceable lives, as most people of other faiths, or those of no particular faith, do.
Yet to some Muslims – and not just a few – their faith is a summons to the battlements. The loathsome Louis Farrakhan is no lone outlier in distilling from Islam a credo that rallies hatred and intolerance to the faith’s banner.
Religion throughout history has incited nasty, bellicose passions. And none more so today than the faith whose trumpet has rallied the likes of the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hizbollah, al Shabab, Boko Haram, Haqqani Network, Abu Nidal, al Badr, al Aqsa, al Nusra, Ansar al Islam….and on and on and on and on.
This is hardly surprising, taking into account that Mohammad was, after all, a military leader at the head of an army and as such never thought of as a prince of peace. In the view of militants, the kingdom he proclaimed for Allah was not just of the next world but of this one too.
Progressives may not like it or agree with it, but the militants of Islam make a case for themselves based on their faith. To insist they don’t is to tell a flat-out lie.
Militants are quick to point this out in recruiting followers.
Yet progressives go on telling the lie, anyway.
Go figure.
