Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Letter About Islam

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Aug. 30, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

18:13

A Letter About Islam

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	Earlier this month I received an email from a chap in Pakistan who wanted to add a few points to the skeptic discourse on Islam, and it was a really, really informative letter, so I'm going to read it verbatim to you.
	I'm going to keep the chap's name private, because you know how these things are, but I think he makes some really good points and ones that, well, should definitely be discussed.
	He says, Hi Sargon, I wanted to make a couple of points about Islam that I feel should be part of your discourse.
	I hope they will help you better understand Islam.
	The basis of discrimination.
	In the Western world, discrimination has been largely based on race.
	In India, it has been based on caste.
	In both cases, these born in a particular category brought the brunt of a prevalent group.
	But in the case of Islam, at least in theory, discrimination is based on belief, hence harder to grasp and combat.
	Islam is a universalist and expansionist religion, not tied to any geography or race.
	You must communicate this crucial difference between the West and Islam, loudly and clearly.
	In Islam, there is a whole taxonomy of delegitimization and dehumanization.
	Pagans, people of the book, Muslim but wrong sect, Muslim but not pious enough, etc.
	As it turns out, Western languages don't even have a word for belief-based discrimination.
	In other words, there is no religious counterpart of the words racism and sexism.
	This is because religion ceased to be an issue in Western societies long ago, and now when it is under assault from Islam, it lacks the linguistic weapons to fight religious ascendancy.
	Non-Muslims might not be much interested in Islam, but Islam is very interested in non-Muslims.
	Much of the Quran is addressed to non-Muslims.
	Islam actively engages kafir in confrontation.
	It is not a religion for Muslims, but for humanity.
	Just like all have the rights to comment on communism, all have the rights to comment on Islam.
	Too often, Western academia bundles Islam with Christianity, and keeps it in the department of religious studies.
	I believe Islam should be studied in political science departments, alongside ideologies like fascism, communism and capitalism.
	What Islam needs, first and foremost, is secular comment and secular judgment.
	Unfortunately, most Islamic studies departments and universities are staffed by Muslims, making universities little different from madrasas.
	Apostasy and Blasphemy There are two main issues with Islam that Western audiences should know.
	You can't leave Islam and you can't scrutinize Islam.
	Imagine if, during the Cold War, criticising Karl Marx constituted blasphemy.
	Imagine the fear and paranoia in the West, where people would be scared of talking about Marxism and satirising Marx, fearing that a random knife-wielding communist might kill them at any time, anywhere.
	When a regressive talks about Muhammad Ali was also a Muslim, he wasn't a terrorist, just ask if they can imagine any Muslim celebrity leaving Islam and continuing to live their life as normal.
	Islam is like a prison for Muslims.
	You can't leave it.
	Also, Muslims go to China, India, Europe, America and Africa.
	They preach their religion freely, in seminars, on streets, set up mosques and so on.
	Why is the Muslim world closed for non-Muslim preachers?
	Why can't Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist missionaries set up shop in Muslim countries and convert people to their view?
	Muslim lands are essentially locked out of other religions and irreligion, for Islam remains a totalitarian religion, allowing no competitor.
	In the Islamic world, the social contract is not between man and society, but between Muslims and non-Muslims in society.
	The invention of the academic category, the Muslim, is itself problematic.
	It locks people up in their religion, and this is what Islamists want.
	The West should identify Muslims with their country of origin, Bengali, Pakistani, Egyptian, etc., and deal with community leaders of these country-based communities, rather than one grand the Muslim community.
	Another interesting fact is that Islam has little experience living as a minority.
	It always seeks power.
	It ruled India, Spain and Eastern Europe as a minority.
	Now, Muslim minorities find themselves being ruled in India and Europe, hence the anxiety.
	Many of those Islamists who initially opposed the creation of Pakistan had this in mind, that if they are pious enough and organized enough in a united India, they, the minority, can once again rule the Hindu majority of India like the Mugal times once Britain has left.
	One of the reasons Pakistan is so anti-Indian and anti-Hindu is the quashing of this imperialist dream.
	And speaking of imperialism, the West needs to understand that imperialism is not always state-based.
	Non-states can also be imperialistic, and imperialism is not always cultural and linguistic, it can also be religious.
	Assimilation and Postmodernism Postmodernists are suspicious and critical of grand narratives.
	The Enlightenment had humbled Christianity, then postmodernism came and humbled the Enlightenment universalism and deconstructed secularism.
	Apparently, the only grand narrative they are afraid of deconstructing is Islam.
	This is another point worth emphasizing.
	Why are postmodernists afraid to take on the grand narrative, i.e. Islam?
	Also, they say cultural assimilation is genocide.
	If so, why do they tolerate religious assimilation?
	Why is Islam allowed to assimilate its converts and erase the diversity?
	Isn't that a form of genocide?
	Reciprocation.
	Why don't Muslim-majority countries strive for pluralism?
	Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Morocco, these are rich countries.
	Why don't they open up for non-Muslims and celebrate difference?
	Why isn't this liberal generosity reciprocated?
	Turkey was never colonized.
	It was itself the seat of the Ottoman Empire, which built its beautiful cities by stifling the growth of the Arab world in Eastern Europe.
	Will Turkey accept pluralism by inviting Eastern European Christian people it once ruled over?
	Or is post-colonial guilt only for the West?
	Islam and Reform The fight between liberal Muslims and Islamists is not on equal terms.
	Islamists use blasphemy laws and taboos as cover, as a shield, as a trench from which to attack the opposition.
	They can talk about anything, while liberals have to watch their tongue.
	Liberals are extremely restricted in their speech.
	Islamists lace their arguments with Quranic or prophetic authority, knowing full well that liberals can't directly contradict or oppose the Quran or the Prophet.
	So liberals have to work around that obstacle, and in this way lose the force and substance of their argument.
	That is the one and only reason Islamists are winning everywhere.
	The Muslim Left All leftists in the West should ask themselves, what happened to the Muslim Left?
	Who exterminated them?
	Which ideology erased their existence?
	Only by answering this question can we think about reviving left internationalism.
	The Muslim Community The Regressives divide the wider society into far right, right, left and far left, so why not apply these same divisions to Muslim communities?
	Why do they suddenly suspend their judgment and identify Western Muslim population as merely the Muslim community?
	Conclusion.
	Apostasy and blasphemy are two closed valves that need to be thrust open if Islam is to be compatible with Western values.
	Islam needs to move from a paradigm of coercion to a paradigm of choice.
	If we need any diversity, it is within Muslim communities in the West.
	I'd just like to thank the person who sent me this letter.
	This is a lot of food for thought.
	And I think he is deliberately highlighting aspects of Islam that people who don't live under Islamic regimes aren't overtly aware of.
	I mean, I'd never even considered that we don't have a word for ideological discrimination.
	Maybe we should have one.
	Maybe we should have something that specifically shows that this person is just a bigot.
	They are simply not interested in listening to another idea because they have already concluded that this idea is wrong without even hearing it because of the ideas that they hold to.
	I think his points on the Muslim community are absolutely fantastic.
	Because one of the things that I think we risk doing by simply blanket terming any Muslims in the West as the Muslim community is perhaps helping to forge a single universal Muslim identity deeper than what already exists.
	For example, I mean Christians identify as Christians and they recognize other Christians as being Christians, and that gives them a shared bond of sorts, but it seems to be a very weak one.
	I imagine that this shared bond would be a lot stronger between people such as Coptic Christians or Assyrian Christians living under state persecution in Muslim countries.
	I imagine that these Christians see their Christianity as being a much deeper tie than, say, American Christians do with Mexican Christians.
	I don't think we should be encouraging that, especially given, as he says, Islam is an imperialist and expansionist religion, and it is an ideology that is looking for hegemony.
	So forging these communities that are disparate, they come from many different nations with many different cultures and just a single uniting religion, that this, we should no more call them the Muslim community than we should call them the brown community.
	I think this is important because if you go through the Pew data, you can see that Muslims don't all think alike.
	There do tend to be significant regional variations in thought.
	I mean, in the very sort of core of the Middle East, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, it's very, very dogmatic.
	But in areas such as Turkey, Eastern Europe, and North Africa, Muslim opinion is a lot less rigid, and honestly, a lot more progressive and westernized.
	For example, in Eastern Europe, such as Albania, most Muslims don't believe that a wife actually has to obey her husband on everything.
	Most of them don't actually believe in death to apostates.
	I think he makes a very, very good point about how Muslim minorities are not used to being ruled over.
	They are used to doing the ruling.
	And indeed, this is the very story of Islam.
	As it burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and conquered huge swathes of the civilized world, they ruled over non-Muslims as the conquering minority, and gradually over time converted the population of these countries into Islam.
	This is something that is just, I mean, this is how Islam has spread itself.
	And I find it very interesting how he says that it's causing anxiety in Muslims in India and Europe now that they are not the majority and, well, it's causing them anxiety.
	It's causing them to be fearful for their own safety because they can't be sure that they're the ones calling the shots.
	I think this might be a reflection of the character of Islam itself.
	Given the, and I'm not joking, the innate imperialist desires written into the texts of Islam.
	I can see why they would look at other people and think, well, why wouldn't they do that to us?
	Because Islam is a supremacist ideology, Muslim-majority countries, as he says, do not strive for pluralism.
	They in fact do everything they can to wipe out pluralism and strive for the total political domination of Islam.
	I find his analysis of the argument between liberals, and I think he means progressives, in the West, and Muslims, at least Islamists.
	And I like the fact that he makes the point that they're not on equal terms, and the fact that Islamists use blasphemy laws and taboos as cover.
	And this is very interesting because we have almost given Islam its own blasphemy law in the West by use of the term Islamophobia.
	By simply allowing people to say, no, that's Islamophobic, you are saying you can't blaspheme against Islam.
	You can't criticize it from a non-Islamic position.
	And as the author says, we need to do this.
	Again, this is a way of phrasing it that I'd never really considered, but makes perfect sense.
	It honestly genuinely is like a blasphemy law for Islam, and we need to just start ignoring it.
	If someone says Islamophobia, you should just laugh in their face.
	And just call them a fascist phobe or something like that in response.
	The very fact that they decided to coin a term to describe a fear of an ideology, rather than a fear of a people or anything like that, is very interesting.
	And I think it may have opened the door for us to start going further on this idea.
	And I mean, I'm not suggesting I know what exactly we should do, but I definitely think that this is an avenue that we could pursue.
	Because the thing is that the very existence of an anti-intellectual buzzword like Islamophobia is an amazing defense, and it's one that the regressives will simply play into without even knowing what they're doing.
	They will treat it as if this is a word that means racism, and it doesn't.
	It's nothing of the sort.
	It's not even vaguely comparable.
	And so when someone calls you an Islamophobe, they're saying that there is something you disagree with.
	I mean, okay, yeah, there are loads of things I disagree with.
	I guess by that standard, I am a communist phobe.
	I'm a fascist phobe.
	Hell, I'm a conservative phobe by these standards.
	But by these standards, they are individual phobes.
	They are liberal phobes.
	They are free speech phobes.
	They are afraid of all of these other ideas.
	If I have to be held to account for being in disagreement with a different ideology.
	And on that note, when he says that what happened to the Muslim left, that is an incredibly, incredibly good way of framing the conversation.
	Because I am sick of dealing with progressive twats who will simply call everything on earth right-wing and then stand in defense of Islamism, which is insanely right-wing.
	I mean, it is just such a domineering, authoritarian, religiously based, conservative ideology that we should, whenever discussing anything with a regressive on Islam, frame it in terms of it being right-wing.
	You have to.
	Immediately.
	Go for the throat.
	Say, why are you defending a right-wing ideology?
	that is going to short-circuit their fucking brains because to them the buzzwords of right-wing mean automatically wrong.
	If you can accurately portray Islam as being right wing and how can you not, it is obviously right-wing by any objective measure.
	Any measure that they would suggest that the Christian conservative right is right-wing also directly applies to anyone promoting Islam as a political ideology.
	I also totally agree with the fact that Islam should not be studied as a religion.
	There is, of course, a religious dimension to Islam.
	It's referring to the supernatural, to gods and to jinns and to various other supernatural occurrences.
	But it does have another dimension that is entirely about political science and entirely about the control of a population, the proselytization of Islam as if it was a political ideology, and the control of outsiders because of it.
	Down to literally laws on how much these people should be taxed for simply not calling themselves Muslims.
	I think this, honestly, I can't thank the person who emailed me enough for highlighting these points, because I suppose maybe, you know, I suppose maybe it's just a sort of cultural blindness, but I'd never really considered some of these points this clearly before.
	I suppose I'd already, you know, I'd already known them, but I'd never considered the significance of them.
	And I think they genuinely are.
	And I think that people attempting to call you some sort of racist or sexist or any kind of bigot for simply saying I disagree with an idea or a set of ideas is it's something we need to pursue.
	It's something we can fight them with.
	It's literally we can just get them into the argument of okay why should I be considered some sort of bigot for disagreeing with an idea that we objectively both agree is a terrible idea.
	And I certainly think the most important part is not letting them conflate your criticism of Islam with criticism of people.
	Because Islam isn't people.
	Islam is a set of ideas.
	Islam is a manifesto on how to run a society.
	The people who adhere to it are Muslims.
	They aren't the ideas themselves.
	And they obviously each have their own interpretation of these ideas.
	So the important thing is not to talk about these people.
	The important thing is to talk about the ideas themselves.
	But once again, thank you to the person who emailed me this.
	I think it's very, very insightful.

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