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 The
Myth of Islamic Tolerance
A review of the book edited by Robert Spencer…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 8/5/05
One of the
greatest impediments in our war against jihadist terrorism
is the misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies about
Islam entertained by many of our public intellectuals. Examples
are easy to find; here's one from the otherwise intelligent
Gregg Easterbrook, Atlantic Monthly contributor and senior
editor at The New Republic, from his recent book The
Progress Paradox: “Most Muslims are good- hearted, peace-loving
people, just as are most Christians and Jews. A small minority
of Muslims are vicious fanatics. But then the Christian
ethos has spawned its share of hideous killers, among them
the terrorist
Timothy McVeigh, and this tell us nothing about the typical
Christian.” The obviously false analogy in the last
sentence--McVeigh didn't kill with the sanction of Christian
theology or belief,
which has no doctrine remotely close to jihad, and millions
of Christians didn't dance in the streets after the bombing
in Oklahoma City--could stand as a textbook example of
this logical fallacy.
Such ignorance--on
display everywhere in the media, especially among those eager
to rationalize away the Islamic roots of the
latest terrorist murder--makes a book like The
Myth of Islamic Tolerance particularly important. Robert
Spencer, in earlier books like Islam Unveiled, Onward
Muslim Soldiers, and the recent
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades),
as well as on his invaluable website Jihad
Watch,
has already done yeoman's work in documenting Islam's fundamental
intolerance, martial aggressiveness, and sanctioning of violence
against non-Muslim infidels. The 58 essays in the current book
attack root and branch the widespread Orwellian myth, recently
given cinematic sanction in Kingdom of Heaven, that Islamic societies
have been historically more tolerant and friendly to minorities
than has been Western culture.
Spencer sets the stage with an overview of the
myth, its political uses, and its refutation by the simple
facts of history and Islamic
jurisprudence and theology. Politically, the myth provides psychic
comfort for jaded Westerners, especially Europeans, who have
made the devil's bargain to accept large numbers of Islamic immigrants
as a source of cheap labor: “European states eyeing the
rapid growth of their Muslim populations console themselves with
tales of old al- Andalus, reassuring one another that Islamic
hegemony not only wasn't all that bad--it was a veritable golden
age.” Thus European and American politicians cater to Islamic
immigrants, whom they believe will assimilate into Western society,
their “tolerant” and “peace- loving” religion
merely enriching the multi-ethnic tapestry.
But as Spencer points out, and as history and
Islamic doctrine show repeatedly, “Islam doesn't accept a position as just
one among a community of disparate religions but must struggle
to make itself supreme.” Unable to prosecute militarily
the divine mandate to expand the House of Islam until it encompasses
the whole world, modern jihadists have been adept at manipulating
the various cultural pathologies of the West. As Ibn Warraq points
out in his Foreword, the old myth of the Noble Savage, the habit
of idealizing more primitive or alien non-Western cultures in
order to castigate one's own, has from the beginning of Western
contact with Islam distorted the understanding of it. Later,
Great Power geopolitical contests reinforced these European idealizations
of Islamic societies, particularly the Ottoman Turks. The result
has been centuries of mythic idealizations that continue to obscure
the true nature of Islam, leading to the strange phenomenon we
see nearly every day: non-Muslim Westerners “hastening,” as
Spencer puts it, “to assure the public that the Islam of
the terrorists is not the 'true Islam,' which is, they maintain,
a benign and tolerant thing.”
Eager to display their sensitivity to and tolerance
of the cultural “other,” apologists
like those Spencer liberally quotes end up arrogantly asserting
that millions of practicing Muslims don't understand their own
religion. But of course the jihadists know what their religion
teaches about non-Muslims: they are categorically inferior infidels,
particularly the “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians, “renegades
who have rejected this final revelation [of Muhammad] out of
corruption and malice and who have exchanged truth for falsehood.” They
are accursed, and as such, it is the duty of every Muslim “to
fight them,” in the words of the Qur'an, “until persecution
is no more, and religion is all for Allah.” In a later
verse this injunction is specifically directed against Jews and
Christians: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the
Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by
Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth,
(even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay
the Jizya [a special tax on non-Muslims] with willing submission,
and feel themselves subdued.” As for those fantasies of
intercultural harmony entertained by many Western multiculturalists,
consider this verse from the Qur'an: “O ye who believe!
Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors.
They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst
you that turn to them (for friendship) is of them.”
As Spencer reminds us, “This is the Qur'an that pious
Muslims cherish and memorize in its entirety; it is for them
their primary guide to understanding how they should make their
way in the world and deal with other people. It is nothing short
of staggering that the myth of Islamic tolerance could have gained
such currency in the teeth of the Qur'an's open contempt and
hatred for Jews and Christians and incitements to violence against
them.” Spencer's survey of the Hadith, the words and deeds
attributed to Muhammed and second in authority to the Qur'an;
the interpretations of the Hadith and Qur'an by centuries of
Islamic jurisprudence; and the writings of modern Islamic radicals
like Sayyid Qutb, the premier theorist of modern jihad, testifies
to a consistent tradition of intolerance towards non-Muslims
and the divine sanction to subdue them to Islam.
The subsequent essays in The
Myth of Islamic Tolerance elaborate with precise detail the more specific consequences
of Islamic
doctrine for religious minorities living in Muslim countries.
All are valuable and repay careful reading; the Herculean efforts
of David G. Littman over the years to force the United Nations
to acknowledge the abuse of non- Muslims' human rights in Islamic
nations should be more widely known and acknowledged. As important
as these documents are, the 18 essays and presentations by historian
Bat Ye'or offer the most exhaustive and meticulous documentation
of Islamic intolerance and oppression of “dhimmi,” those
non-Muslims subjected not just to a tax (the “jizya”)
but to institutionalized oppression and humiliation, a whole
host of repressive restrictions covering dress, public behavior,
and the practice of their religion. The particulars of dhimmitude
as documented by Bat Ye'or are strikingly similar to the Jim
Crow laws in the segregated South, and served a similar purpose:
to remind Jews and Christians every day of their inferiority
to Muslims, and to reinforce the dhimmi's precarious position,
since the “covenant” by which Muslims allowed the
dhimmi to keep their lives could be revoked at any time, whereupon
the dhimmi could be justly plundered and slaughtered.
As well as documenting this practice in Islamic
history and jurisprudence, Bat Ye'or's essays also detail how
the dynamic
of dhimmitude continues to inform relations between Europe and
Islam today, as seen particularly in the scapegoating and marginalization
of Israel, the one nation comprising former dhimmi who have shaken
off their inferior status and thus challenged the Islamic confidence
in its own divinely sanctioned superiority: “Israel's struggle
is none other than a fight to destroy a dhimmi archetype that
has bewitched the Arab consciousness with a destructive and nostalgic
dream of hegemony, irreconcilable with principles of decolonization
or with the rights and liberties of peoples.”
Indeed, the myth of Islamic tolerance is itself
an expression of the dhimmi mentality already characterizing
many Westerners,
their acceptance of their culture's crimes and inferiority codified
in multiculturalism and currently facilitating jihadist terrorism.
In this regard the late Edward Said's Orientalism stands as one
of the most pernicious and influential peddlers of virulent anti-Westernism,
in this instance one tarted up in the sort of postmodern jargon
that impresses badly educated humanities professors. Said was
the consummate academic hustler, a Westernized Egyptian child
of privilege who invented a Palestinian refugee persona that
gratified the American university's insatiable appetite for oppressed
victims “of color” (see the article by Justus Reid
Weiner in the September 1999 issue of Commentary). The logical,
historical, and philosophical sins of Orientalism have been noted
by Bernard Lewis (reprinted in Islam and the West) and Keith
Windschuttle (New Criterion, January 1999), and to this list
should be added Ibn Warraq's devastating critique. Warraq is
the brave author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, a devastating exposure
of Islam's intolerant and illiberal principles and practices.
His careful demolition of Said's dishonest and intellectually
incoherent book is alone worth the price of The Myth of Islamic
Tolerance.
For as Warraq makes clear, Said's book has indirectly
sanctioned Islamic terrorism by giving an apparent scholarly
justification
for blaming the problems of the Middle East on Western colonial
and imperial sins rather than on flaws in Islam and Arab regimes,
the social, cultural, economic, and religious dysfunctions that
prevent them from accommodating themselves to the modern world.
And it has reinforced among many American intellectuals the bad
habit of cultural self-loathing that leeches away moral support
for any action that would defend America's interests and security.
Finally, Orientalism has contributed to the corruption of Middle
Eastern studies in the West as manifested in the politically
and ideologically skewed “scholarship” that has obscured
the truth of Islam, a sampling of which can be read in Daniel
Pipes's “Jihad and the Professors,” another gem reprinted
in Spencer's book. As Warraq concludes, “Said has much
to answer for.”
The eagerness of Western intellectuals to betray
their professional duty to seek truth, and their zeal for idealizing
a culture which
wouldn't tolerate their existence for five seconds, are both
from the perspective of the jihadists evidence that the West
is a spiritually bankrupt dhimmi culture ripe for submission
to Islamic hegemony. Unfortunately, too many of our leaders who
otherwise understand the nature of the enemy endorse many of
the same myths exploded in this indispensable volume; just listen
to one of Tony Blair's closest aides, in a 2004 report on counter-terrorism:
Britain's strategy should be “to prevent terrorism by tackling
its underlying causes, to work together to resolve regional conflicts
to support moderate Islam and reform and to diminish support
for terrorists by influencing relevant social and economic issues.” Meanwhile
government-subsidized mosques were preaching jihad and creating
the bombers who murdered over 50 Londoners. If we are to prevail
in the struggle against jihad, we must first acknowledge the
truth about the enemy and his motivations. The Myth of Islamic
Tolerance is a good place to start. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
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Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
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