When will Islamic dissidents get the same respect that Soviet
and Maoist refuseniks received?
That was my first thought after dipping into the ongoing debate
over the future of Islam in Europe. On one side you have Oxford
professor Timothy Garton Ash who says Europe needs to find a new
way, a third way to relate to Muslims and vice versa. Garton Ash
has been accused of advocating a kind of voluntary "multicultural
apartheid," a doctrine of separate but equal, one standard for
Muslims, one for the rest of Europeans, and never the twain shall
meet. He and the Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, author of
Murder in Amsterdam, save their harshest words for Islamic
dissidents like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom they accuse of being
counter-productive "Enlightenment fundamentalists," as if
advocating reason, human rights, and religious freedom were an
extremist position. Such self-hating European intellectuals --
whose mantra is "where do we get off criticizing extremists, we
whose fathers were colonizers and Nazis and fascists and Stasi" --
cannot imagine asking Muslims to assimilate into a wicked Western
capitalist society. Neither can they completely support Islam with
its misogynistic tendencies, its homophobia and intolerance, and
the way it treats apostates (i.e., murders them). Thus, a third way
is needed.
Only this proposed Third Way seems an awful lot like Jim Crow,
with laws mandating exclusive beaches, public pools, and hospitals
for Muslims only, to match the private madrassas where young
Muslims are taught prejudice and hatred of the infidel West from
Wahhabi imams and Saudi-funded textbooks.
This Third Way between Islam and the West that Garton Ash and
Buruma tout is reminiscent of the middle ground some intellectuals
sought between capitalism and socialism. Of course, few Muslims
will be interested in any such compromise, especially as their
numbers (and political influence) increase across Europe. And what
Westerner will voluntarily give up his freedom?
My feeling is that the West needs to make a fundamental shift in
the way it views Islam. Not fundamental Islam, not radical
Islam.
Islam.
Our mistake is in regarding Islam as a benign modern faith like
Unitarian Universalism, rather than an ideology with a political
agenda and global aspirations like medieval Christianity, or more
recently, communism.
AND INDEED IT IS this eerie similarity with communism that German
social scientist Ulrike Ackermann examines in a recent essay. The
way Ackermann sees it, "the way we use kid gloves to criticize
Islamism, but refuse to criticize Islam is reminiscent of the way
intellectuals once criticized Stalinism, but not communism," when
there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two. Other
similarities include their murderous dispatching of critics and
political opponents and their antithesis toward freedom,
consumerism and individualism. Both ideologies exhibit
internationalist tendencies. And just as any poor East Berliner who
attempted to scramble over the wall or swim the Spree would be
shot, anyone attempting to leave Islam should expect a visit from
the holy hangman.
More important are the differences. Those who escaped or were
exiled from the Soviet Bloc -- with few exceptions, notably the
apostate Trotsky -- were generally left in peace. Directors who
made films about communism, like Caspar Wrede and his masterpiece
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, were seldom hunted
down and mutilated like Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. When
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about his experiences under Stalinism
he was tossed in the clink and later exiled to the U.S. But when
Salman Rushdie, Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji and Aayan Hirsi Ali write
about Islam they receive the death sentence, one with a billion
possible executioners.
In a recent speech Hirsi Ali called on the West to take Islam as
seriously as it took communism during the Cold War:
Our opponents want to use violence to silence us. They
claim that we are spiritually and mentally unreliable and shouldn't
be taken seriously. Communism's defenders used the same
methods....Despite the self-censorship of many who idealised and
defended communism in the West and despite the brutal censorship in
the East, the battle was won. Today the open society is being
challenged by Islamism.
Not surprisingly, many communist dissidents -- Natan Sharansky,
Vaclav Havel, and Adam Michnik -- supported the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. And once again European intellectuals, many of whom
during the 1980s had reservations about Walesa and Michnik who
seemed to be fighting on behalf of petit bourgeois capitalism, are
lined up on the wrong side of history.
I am all for a third way, a third way in which for every mosque
built in America there is a reciprocal church or synagogue or
branch office of the Secular Humanist Society erected in Saudi
Arabia. For every Saudi-funded madrassa established in London, a
British-funded grammar school opens in Mecca. However, I will not
compromise on some things. I will not accept that death is the
appropriate punishment for converting from Islam to Christianity.
Or that non-Muslims and women should accept second-class citizen
status, and that homosexuals should be executed.
Islam today is identical to Medieval Christianity. Today's imams
stir up their rabble against the infidel the same as medieval
priests stirred up the peasants to go after the village Jews or to
roast a witch or march off on a crusade. Any Third Way will have to
involve modernizing Islam. Otherwise it will remain as backward as
reversible type. Otherwise, I'm not interested.
topics:
Islam, Books, Law, Iraq, Socialism, Communism
