My colleague at No Cross, No Crescent is currently debating our fearless leader about the nature of Islam. The idea is that Islam has changed across its millennium and one cannot therefore point to a monolith. As I observe over there, this is bunk; the central doctrines of Islam have remained relatively unchanged, and what they have preserved is precisely what I find most objectionable. Modifications to reject the concept of violent Jihad have been put down with extreme violence. Consider the case of the persecution of the Ahmadiyya. Or, for that mater, the treatment of the Ismailis, a peaceful sect. Read the following.
Ed seems to be working from the premise – and I hope he will correct me in the comment section – that a religion is what people say it is. That the statement that Islam is intolerant can be disproved by a single tolerant Muslim. This is simply not so; millions of catholics ignore the Church’s teachings on contraception, that does not change the fact that Catholic doctrine regards it as a sin.
All doctrines, religious, philosophical or political have essential and inessential, or core and fringe beliefs. You can mess around with the fringe beliefs and still have the same doctrine (though people have died over such differences), you cannot change the core beliefs without it becoming something completely different. The subject of Nazism was raised in the comments; that allows for a very good example to be made. One of the dumber arguments in the US healthcare debate is pointing out that the National Socialists supported socialised medicine. The reason this is drivel is that socialised medicine is a Nazi fringe belief; anti-semitism is a core belief. Nazism without anti-Semitism would be unrecognisable. You can say a similar thing about Marxism; Marxism cannot abandon the idea that there is a historical progression that will end with the inevitable triumph of Socialism without ceasing to be, in any real sense, Marxism.
The same is with religion. Yes there have been endless variants of Christianity. However, none have rejected the divinity of Christ; you cannot abandon that belief and still be a Christian. Similarly, you cannot seriously be considered a Muslim unless you believe in the shahada – that the Koran as the literal word of God and that Muhammad is God’s messenger. And the trouble for our time is that the doctrines of Jihad are rooted deeply both in the Koran and in the figure of Muhammad as recorded in the Islamic canon.
Now here is where I say we have to get real about this. Yes, there are many Muslims who just want to get on and get by, and who are frankly unaware and horrified about the real nature of Islamic doctrine. A while back I attended one of those ghastly ‘experience islam’ events, and I asked the nice young man behind the counter what all the business about ‘death for apostasy’ was about. He – and he really was a nice guy – looked very upset and said it was a horrible perversion made up by bad people. At this point I picked up one of the volumes of Islamic law lying in front of him, flicked through to the bit where is said so in black and white and handed to him. He really looked shocked on reading it.
This is one of those culture clash moments, I think; not just between myself and the young man, but between the gentle and decent Ed and my own rather harder edges. No one wants to be unnecessarily rude, or to unjustly run down individuals, even if they do believe in nonsense.
But it is not our business to flatter Muslim illusions ( I agree with Dawkins – it is insane that people get more heat for their democratic political opinions than their religious beliefs). Our business is to say the truth as loudly as possible and hope that it will make a difference – a difference by helping rally as many of our fellow kafir and letting them know they are not alone and also a difference by helping decent Muslims break out of the mental prison in which they have been stuck. We should show maximum solidarity with those souls making that prison break, and we should always be mindful that we are uniquely fortunate not to be so trapped ourselves, but we should not pretend that their religious is anything else than what it is. You do not help a prisoner by telling him the bars aren’t there.
