{"id":8182,"date":"2015-02-04T08:29:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T16:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8182"},"modified":"2015-02-04T08:29:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T16:29:12","slug":"more-delusional-apologetics-for-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/more-delusional-apologetics-for-islam\/","title":{"rendered":"More Delusional Apologetics for Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

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Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0op-ed<\/a> last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. The whole argument is a tissue of logical fallacies and historical ignorance.<\/p>\n

The author, a professor of history at Harvard, starts by explaining that Christianity was once violent and intolerant, but changed over time, and thus can provide an example for \u201cmodernizing Islam.\u201d But most of his catalogue of Christian violence and persecution is little more than the tu quoque<\/i> fallacy. It ignores the fact that Christian violence was typical of the\u00a0whole pre-modern world, a sad banality of human existence like plagues, war, torture, and famine. The comparison of premodern Christian violence to today\u2019s Islamic terror is as irrelevant as rationalizing modern torture and executions, like the mutilation and beheading regularly practiced in Saudi Arabia, by bringing up the hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering the English used to punish traitors in the 14th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

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More important, such violence and cruelty were a violation and distortion of Christian doctrine, a reflection not of eternal theological imperatives, but of a fallen human nature prone to error and sin. That\u2019s why even during bouts of cruelty and oppression, like the brutal treatment of the New World Indians, there were those who publicly based their opposition to such behavior on Christian belief. In 1511 the Dominican priest Antonio de Montesinos scolded his co-religionists, \u201cYou are in mortal sin and live and die in it because of the cruelty and tyranny that you use against these innocent peoples . . . Are these Indians not Men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as you love yourselves?\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, the anti-slavery movement was similarly grounded in Christian doctrine. In 1791, evangelical Christian William Wilberforce, the driving force behind the British abolition of slavery, preached to the House of Commons, \u201cNever, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labor, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic.\u201d No matter how often Christian ethics were violated over the centuries, they still provided the theological foundations for rejecting violence and intolerance, as happened during the Civil Rights movement in this country, which was led by a Christian minister. And today Christians know that their co-religionists who continue to act violently and intolerantly are being bad Christians.<\/p>\n

This point makes the professor\u2019s argument a false analogy, for there is nothing in traditional Islamic theology that provides a basis for making violence against heretics and non-believers un-Islamic. The professor wants to argue away these inconvenient truths about traditional Islam by arguing that the faith can evolve away from them, just as Christianity did. But again, whereas historical Christian violence could find no scriptural justification, and much to condemn it, Islamic violence and intolerance\u2013\u2013and of course slavery and Jew-hatred\u2013\u2013are not the result of fringe or extremist misinterpretations. Rather, they are validated in the Koran, the Hadith, and 14 centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, all regularly and copiously cited by today\u2019s jihadists and theologians.<\/p>\n

Thus the doctrine of jihad against infidels\u2013\u2013the notion that such aggression is a justified form of the defense of Islam\u00a0and necessary for fulfilling Allah\u2019s will that all people become Muslims\u2013\u2013is the collective duty of those dwelling in the House of Islam. The Koran instructs, \u201cFight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth.\u201d Nor can there be any\u00a0\u201ctolerance\u201d or \u201cmutual respect\u201d for those who reject Islam, especially Jews and Christians: \u201cO you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.\u201d The professor\u2019s dream of a \u201cbroad-minded form\u201d of Islam would require an extensive reinterpretation or rejection of some of Islam\u2019s fundamental tenets.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why one would be hard pressed to find a Muslim theologian in the 16th<\/sup> century scolding the jihadists rampaging through the Balkans, or seizing Christian slaves in the Mediterranean, the way Montesinos or Bartolome de las Casas criticized the brutalities of the conquistadors; or in the 18th<\/sup> century a Muslim arguing like Wilberforce that slavery, explicitly sanctioned by the Koran, was a \u201cscandal\u201d on Islam\u2019s name. More typical are the words of the envoy representing the pasha of Tripoli, who in 1785 justified piracy and slaving in the Mediterranean by telling Thomas Jefferson\u00a0that \u201cit was written in the Koran that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [Muslims\u2019] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find.\u201d So too today, many respected imams and theologians throughout the Muslim world sanction Islamic violence against non-believers, and textbooks<\/a> in schools teach children the same beliefs.<\/p>\n

The facts of Islamic theology and historical practice render delusional the professor\u2019s statement that Muslims must learn \u201cthat religious texts arose in a particular context and must be reinterpreted in the new context of modernity.\u201d But this reduction of spiritual truth and meaning to the material world of time and social change is a habit of modernity that finds no warrant in Islamic theology. Unlike the Christian Bible, which is the product of an ongoing spiritual inspiration of humans existing in time, the Koran is the pre-existing, uncreated, eternal word of Allah, dictated to Mohammed. It is perfect as written, just as the life and sayings of Mohammed provide the perfect, timeless guide for every dimension of life, including law, economics, politics, and family life. The role of interpretive exegesis or allegory in traditional Islam, then, is vastly less significant than it has been in Christianity. Any Muslim today who desires to reinterpret, say,\u00a0jihad, or relations with non-Muslims, or illiberal shari\u2019a law, will thus find it difficult, if not impossible, to change the plain meaning of the scriptures as understood consistently by Muslims for 14 centuries.<\/p>\n

These problems leave the professor\u2019s article an exercise in false historical analogy. Nor does it help that he makes misleading statements,\u00a0like his claim that Islam can be reconciled with democracy, and that \u201csuch reformations have been institutionalized successfully in several countries with significant Muslim populations, such as Turkey and Tunisia.\u201d Tunisia maybe, but this \u201creformation\u201d is only a few years old, and has a long way to go before it can be called \u201cinstitutionalized,\u201d let alone \u201csuccessful.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Turkey, despite nearly a century of aggressive secularization and de-Islamizing of society, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan it has been moving away from reconciliation with modernity towards an Islamist state. Prime Minister of Turkey for 11 years, and now the new President, Erdogan has called democracy a \u201ctrain\u201d you \u201cget off\u201d once you reach your \u201cdestination,\u201d has jailed more journalists than any other country, has said,\u00a0\u201cYou cannot be both secular and a Muslim! You will either be a Muslim, or secular! When both are together, they create reverse magnetism. For them to exist together is not a possibility,\u201d and was a follower of Necmettin\u00a0Erbakan, the prime minister who founded the Turkish equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood and began Turkey\u2019s turn away from Western liberal democracy and back to a more traditional Islamic view of the social-political order. The example of Turkey makes exactly the opposite point the professor wants it to.<\/p>\n

Ignoring the theological foundations that militate against a \u201creformation\u201d of Islam or even its coexistence with modernity is a form of myopia akin to Obama\u2019s refusal to say \u201cIslamic extremism\u201d or his claim that \u201cno faith teaches people to massacre innocents.\u201d Nor does it help those Muslims who sincerely want to find some way to reconcile their faith with a world that these days is more intimately interconnected than ever. The tenets of Islam make their job hard enough, but we don\u2019t make it any easier by indulging our \u201cwillful blindness,\u201d as Andrew McCarthy calls it, to truths that offend our ideological prejudices or do not serve our political interests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com<\/strong><\/p>\n

URL to article: http:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/2015\/bruce-thornton\/more-delusional-apologetics-for-islam\/<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2015 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine It\u2019s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal\u00a0op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[123,225,59,842,22,230],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-27Y","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8244,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/make-the-isis-caliphate-a-jihadist-kill-zone\/","url_meta":{"origin":8182,"position":0},"title":"Make the ISIS Caliphate a Jihadist Kill Zone","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 27, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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Despite the enmity between these two species of jihadism, both pose serious threats to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine ","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/isis-427x350.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8475,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/progressive-academics-shocked-that-their-creatures-turn-on-them\/","url_meta":{"origin":8182,"position":1},"title":"Progressive Academics Shocked That Their Creatures Turn on Them","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"When the cult of sensitivity begins to eat its children. by Bruce S. 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