Dec 12 2006
The Islamic Reformation
A few commentators have suggested over the years that the only solution to the problems of the Mideast is for Islam to undergo a Reformation, much like the Christians in the early 16th century. Christianity before the Protestant Reformation was rife with corruption and greed, and, moveover, they had a total monopoly on belief. Parishners could not read the Bible. Indeed, they were told not to. The Church rendered all divine authority to itself, despite the fact that many priests were not themselves well-educated and couldn’t read Latin.
The Church asserted that they were the sole intermediary between God and Man. The Protestant Reformation, of course, insisted that no intermediary was necessary since Christ sacrificed Himself. Christ was the Intermediary between God and Man, not the Church.
Regardless whether you might agree or disagree with Protestantism, one must agree that the Reformation forced the Church and the believers in Christ to change for the better.
Certain commentators, foremost among them being Ralph Peters in his book, Beyond Terror and others, has suggested that an Islamic Reformation is overdue. He furthers states that it must happen from within Islam. Others such as Salmon Rushdie, Ibn Warraq from Frontpage Magazine, and even former Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz said that Islam should undergo a Reformation.
Initially, with the start of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I thought that perhaps external pressure could force Islam to revise itself from within. In a sense, this was one of our goals in the Iraq war, to install liberty in a region of the world that has never known it. In achieving this objective, the very existence of liberty in the Mideast would destabilize the Iranian theocracy and strike terror in the heart of the terrorists.
It was soul searching time for the Mideast.
What I failed to grasp then and what many fail to grasp now is that Islam has already undergone or is still undergoing its Reformation, and it has spread to the entire Islamic Crescent. We are seeing the fruits of it daily in Iraq, in the taunts from Tehran, and in the rubble in Lebanon. We failed to ask this vital question: Why must the Islamic Reformation be a peaceful one?
On 9/11, the image of the World Trade Center collapsing in fire and smoke was broadcast throughout the entire world. We here in America, and even in Europe, were shocked and mourned the lost of so many innocent lives. In the Islamic world, however, we caught footage of Muslims dancing in the street from Morocco to Jakarta and handing out candy. Their reaction to our tragedy was… well… gleeful and, sadly, typical.
If we wanted to reform Islam, we missed the boat.
Ironically, the Islamic Reformation can trace its origins to the Nazi’s and Adolf Hitler. As the Nazi Party developed in the 1930’s, al-Banna, who was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote admiring letters to Hitler and urged his cause. Hitler, in turn, was so impressed by The Muslim Brotherhood that they were enlisted as a secret intelligence arm of the Third Reich.
As World War II wore on, the Third Reich actively recruited and developed Nazi Arab SS divisions and based them in Croatia. They were called “Handjar”, translated as “Sword”, and their plan was the conquest of the Arab Pennisula and then on to Northern Africa. Needless to say, their plan didn’t work out.
Is it so remarkable that Hilter recruited the Muslim Brotherhood for the war effort? Hardly. Both had the same hatred of the West. Both worked tirelessly for the destruction of the Jews. Both detested freedom and liberty. They were a match in purpose and zealotry. (Hitler is just the gift that keeps on giving, ain’t he.) The significant thing about these fascist Arabs, however, was that they were secular, not religious.
After the war, these secular Nazi Arabs morphed in to the Baathist Party. Prominent among them were the Iraqi and the Syrian governments, as well as portions of the Palestinian Liberation Army, which again were secular garden-variety totalitarian governments and terrorists.
Then a strange thing occurred, which perhaps we in the West did not anticipate. During the late 1950’s early 1960’s, many of the Nazi Arabs were in Saudi Arabia, a nation which practiced the most extreme version of Islam. It was there that the Nazi Arabs found religion, and the confluence between Nazism and Wahhabism created a synergy.
And thus, the Islamic Reformation was born under the banner of Jihad.When others are calling our enemies “Islamofascists”, understand that they are being precisely accurate. Isn’t it any wonder that the best-selling book in the Mideast for years now has been Mein Kampf, or translated, My Struggle. Think of all the times Muslim commentators have corrected newsanchors as to the true translation of “jihad”. They say that it really means “struggle” rather than violent war. Indeed, Mein Kampf’s title in the Middle East is “Jihadi“, or “My Jihad“.
Well, they are absolutely right. It perfectly mirrors Adolf Hitler “struggle”. It’s a matter of semantics which the jihadists manipulate ever so well to confused the West, and yet it conveys their exact meaning if we have eyes to see it.
It is nonsensical to say that most Muslims in the Mideast aren’t advocating jihad against the West. First of all, we don’t know that this is a fact at all, and we have mountains of evidence to the contrary. And I think it is very condescending of us to urge our liberal values of tolerance and wishful thinking onto a radical religion that makes no pretense in wanting to destroy the Zionists and the “Great Satan“, America.
The point is, if moderate Muslims exist, where are they? Have we heard a single moderate Muslim stand up and oppose publicly the ideology of the Islamofascists? Is there a moderate left? Actually, we have heard a few Muslims stand up and denounce radical Islam (while simultaneously insisting that we are the source of their aggression), only to turn around and preach radical Islam to full congregations. Others who have denounced Islamofascism tend to be very secular and well-assimilated into American society.
Our political correctnessness blinds us and binds us from saying this, even though everyone knows this is true. I truly hope I am wrong about this, but the voices of the moderate Muslims are remarkably mute for the last five years…
Like in the Protestant Reformation, when Christians wanted to change their faith into a likeness more akin to the early Christian Church and Christ Himself, the Islamofascists want to change their faith to mirror the life of their Prophet Mohammed. They call it the “Method of Mohammed“. They have only brought that “method” to modernity with all its dangerous toys.
As Gary Thomas wrote in his article, “Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror“:
Many of the jihadists are adherents of Salafism, which analysts say is the fastest growing sect in Islam today…
Mary Habeck says that in Salafi view, democratic processes like elections are not only illegitimate, but must be resisted. What they’re saying is that a political process, as espoused by many Islamists, or Salafis, is wrong, and that we have to return to what they believe is the method of Mohammed, which was to struggle, or strive, through fighting. And they argue that political parties, some sort of elections, or things like this, have to be rejected entirely. And anyone who does participate in elections or who attempts to use some sort of political process is in fact sinning, if not outright an unbeliever. So they reject any kind of gradualism, any kind of compromise or any kind of political process in order to impose their vision of Islam,” says Habeck.
Commentators like Bill O’Reilly, whom I generally like and agree with most of the time, have got it wrong when they say off-handedly that the majority of Muslims don’t adhere to jihadist philosophy. We don’t know that. All we do know is the duplicity of Muslim spokesmen feeding us our liberal claptrap while endorsing jihad behind closed doors. The Mideast really isn’t populated with happy little Americans at heart.
And if it is true that the majority of Muslims don’t advocate jihad, they are doing nothing to stop it. Throughout history only a small percentage of the population decide the course of nations and peoples. The rest wait to see the outcome and follow the victorious.
It is even more nonsensical to say that we must reform Islam’s Reformation. Again as Ralph Peters and others have pointed out, it has to take place from within and we are powerless to do it.
Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.“
Though this quote might have been useful to rally people into honorable action, it has an internal contradiction. If “good” men do nothing, they aren’t good, are they? Good, as with evil, is proactive in doing. You either do good or do evil. The inbetween, the fence sitters, the lukewarm are not only not good, by not actively choosing the good, they aid the evil. Half measures avail us nothing, and not choosing evil doesn’t necessarily mean that we choose good. I hope that if I was presented with such a choice, I would choose to do good. But in the end, a man doesn’t know what he will choose until the choice arrives.
The mettle of a man is decided in such moments, the sumation and culmination of his life’s actions.
We don’t choose to do the honorable thing suddenly and dramatically. We choose it day in and day out - and when the dramatic choices finally do come, it has already been decided. A forgone conclusion you might say.
This very choice has been before Muslims for over forty years, and it seems pretty clear which side they have chosen. Choices are made at the individual level as well as on the macro level. And they chose their Reformation of Jihad.
With this past election and the Democrats sweeping into power in both Houses of Congress, our choices are also becoming clear. During their campaigns, Democrats repeated over and over that the United States was not going to cut and run. Yet less than a month after their Congressional victory, Dick Durbin said:
“We have got to start moving American troops, redeploying them out of Iraq, and start bringing them home.”
Obviously, the word “redeploying” isn’t the same as “cutting and running”. It’s a fanciful semantic game, but the words mean exactly the same.
And I think it’s a very dangerous game to play.
See my previous posts:
Obsession: Islamofascism and the West
On War and Peace
Israel and Lebanon: A Lopsided War
See also:
Victor Hanson: The Waiting Game
John Loftus: The Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis, and Al-Qaeda
Michelle Malkin’s continuing watch: A terrorist mall plot
Counterterrorism Blog: EU Strikes Down Terrorist Finance Designation of Iranian…
Jawa Report: American Terror Suspect ID’d in Egypt
Allahpundit: Taliban warlord brags: We cost Republicans the election
Atlas Shrugs: Lunch and More, Avigdor Lieberman
Update 12/19/06:
Jawa Report said:
He goes on to say that such censorship did not happen in the early years of Islam. Perhaps we are going to see a Muslim Restoration movement rather than a Muslim Reformation? The latter is slightly more problematic, since Mohammed himself is said to have proclaimed, “If someone changes his deen [Islamic character] - strike his neck!” [Malik’s Muwatta Book 36, Number 36.18.15]. And, how can you have freedom of speech when it is a capital offense to question Islam? An ahistorical and literal interpretation of the Quran, though, is problematic in another way: much of the apologetics against the more violent verses are historical & contextual.
I think the difference between a Muslim Restoration Movement and a Muslim Reformation is only a matter of semantics. When we had our Protestant Reformation, it served also as a call to return to the early Christian Church, which obviously did not have the Vatican dictating doctrine since it didn’t yet exist. The Protestant Reformation focused on sola scriptura, or “the assertion that the Bible as God’s written word is self-authenticating”.
According to Wikipedia:
The Reformation did not happen in a vacuum, as there were movements for centuries calling for a return to Biblical teachings, the most famous being from Wycliffe and John Huss. It is no surprise that their teachings were later found in the Reformation, as they imbibed from the same source.
The goal of any Reformation, Restoration or Great Awakening is to return believers to the true faith. In the case of Islam, this comes in the form of Mohammed’s mandate for Muslims to conquer the world. Before this Jihadist Reformation, the Islamic Crescent was demoralized and listless following their defeat at the hands of the Spanish, being utterly ejected from Southern Spain and the Iberian peninsula. The revitalization of Islam was only a recent occurrence.
The idea of a Islamic Reformation is not problematic at all. How many religious people do you know selectively read and apply religious texts? If differences are not possible, how do you explain the animosity between the Shiites and the Sunnis, who as far as I know, are reading the same Koran?
Another thing to understand is that Muslims are absolute deductors, not inductors. The “Method of Mohammed” is evidence of this absolute linear deduction. And if one paid attention in logic class, deductions are only as true as the premises upon which the argument is built. Furthermore, even with true premises, because reality consists of more factors than the human mind can comprehend, deduction alone will often lead one to false conclusions. This is how you can have Shiites and Sunnis and have both declaring themselves a part of the true faith.