Offending Islam

“Islam is one of three Abrahamic faiths and has more in common with Judaism and Christianity than not.”

For the first half of my life, I believed this to be true and would have accused anyone who said differently of xenophobia (the term “Islamophobia” had yet to be invented). My belief was that the god Muhammad wrote so much about is also the G-d of Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yakov. And my stock response to anyone who tried to explain that Islam is, in fact, hostile to Judaism was: How can that be? The patriarchs are no less important to Muslims than they are to Torah observant Jews, la? 

I said and believed these things because I had not yet been exposed to the supremacist beliefs that form the core of Islam. Not “radical Islam,” but Islam as it can be readily understood by anyone who reads the Qur’an word for word and is aware of how those words have been put into practice. Not just during the 7^th century, but during every century since then. Those supremacist beliefs do not allow for the kind of sincere dialogue that the interfaith movement has been advocating for since 9/11 (even if there are a handful moderate clerics who might want that dialogue to bear fruit), and the lip service paid to it by the likes of CAIR (which has been placed on the UAE’s list of organizations linked to terrorism due to it being an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood) only serves to normalize the mistaken belief that the West would not be in conflict with the Muslim world if it had dealt more fairly with that world in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire (the last form of the Islamic Empire). Had that empire not been defeated, it would have continued its policy of expansion and the Islamization of all that it expanded into. But because the Muslim world lost its empire and all the hard power that it made possible, it came to rely on a softer approach to achieving the primary goal of Islam.

The secular, post-imperial reality that now defines the West offends the Islamist and, for Muslims who live in the West and embrace Sharia, the answer to the problem presented by that reality is to form communities that are at least partially beyond the reach of Western civil society. In just two decades, a Muslim enclave in Dearborn, MI, became a supermajority that is capable of passing Shariah-based ordinances, like the one that forbade Christian evangelists from preaching in public lest their words reach the ears of a Muslim in violation of Islamic law. 

In East London, an even larger Muslim majority has established a network of some 89 Shariah councils that decide any and every legal issue that would normally be decided in a court of British law. This may not seem as dramatic as a once American city thumbing its nose at the U.S. Constitution, but the real-world effect of this alternative and opaque system of law is that it can and does deprive the most vulnerable members of East London’s Muslim community of their rights under British law. Conflicts of interest in a community that is defined by equal measures of dependence (women are largely dependent upon men unless they belong to a subset of posh, upwardly mobile Muslim families) and interdependence (many Muslim families are linked or related in more than one way) are just as inevitable. All of this results in a form of segregation that should be given at least some of the attention that is directed toward “institutional discrimination,” “systemic racism,” and the like.

It should also be acknowledged that Dearborn and Islamic London, which have long supported Hamas and Hezbollah, have something other than a cleaving to Shariah in common: both commemorate Ashoura and march in the thousands to remind themselves of the death of their prophet’s grandson at the hands of his enemies, the Umayyads. Once a minor day in the Shi’a calendar, Ashoura was reimagined by the Ayatollahs of Iran to feature messaging that parallels the “imperialist West” with the Umayyads and those who pursue jihad (terrorism) with Husain Ibn Ali, the martyred grandson of Islam’s originator. According to Avril Haines, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, U.S. intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.” 

Ashoura, as it is now popularly commemorated in Dearborn and East London is, in every way, an export of the Iranian regime and a near exact replica of the anti-American and anti-Israel Ashoura staged in Tehran on the first day of the Islamic calendar. And because Shariah is a wedge against assimilation or bridging tradition with secular and democratic values, it is no coincidence that this latest Iranian propaganda effort has been hugely successful in Dearborn and London. And because the objective of this propaganda effort is to spread and intensify anti-Western animus among and in Muslims living in the West, that propaganda effort taken together with Sharia as it is allowed to be put into action in the West should be considered an existential threat to the internal security of any country that has already experienced an Islamist terrorist attack, homegrown or otherwise. 

It should be said in no uncertain terms that the average Muslim is not to be considered an enemy of the West. For it is written, “Let sin be finished from the earth, and evil be no more. My soul will bless God, Hallelujah!” (Tehillim 104:35) These words should inspire us to separate, in so far as possible, the bad ideology from the ideologically possessed and target what possesses them. This dovetails with the Christian verse “Because your fight has not been with flesh and blood, but with Principalities, The Rulers and The Powers of this dark world and with wicked spirits which are under Heaven.” (Ephesians 6.12)

As poetic as these words may sound, they tell us how to fight an enemy that acts through those who will not be aware that they are little more than avatars and disposable vessels. And when caught in a system that limits who and what they might become, they may be hard pressed to imagine a better way and embrace a God who never commanded anyone to conquer the world and place it under the dominion of just one faith. 

The best weapon against any bad idea is a better one and the good things that come from translating it into action. So, when those loyal to the Iranian regime or any Islamist entity spread hatred that is meant to incite violence against Jews, Israel, and the West, we must love ourselves and our way of life in ways that offend and even shock the hateful. Above all else, we must counter their false sense of primacy with the light of civilization. That light is cast by the U.S. Constitution and those who stand by it as much as it is by Britons who have not yet traded their heritage for a place in the post-national order that the new ruling class has been using mass immigration and social displacement to bring about. But this light is cast best by Torah, which commands us to love both truth and peace, but to love the truth best (Zechariah 8) no matter where the truth takes us.