Many moons ago, I wrote of the difficulty of actually identifying the “moderate”, “peaceful Muslims” we’re constantly assured are the “vast majority”. If they are, it often seems, they’re keeping their heads down.
This is not to deny that there are peaceful and moderate Muslims. They may well even be the (apparently silent) majority. But what the real issue seems to be is not finding peaceful Muslims, but finding a peaceful Islam.
This may seem contradictory, but, as Christopher Hitchens bluntly reminded Waleed Aly, what really mattered was not what Muslims did, but what Islam taught. If you still find that difficult to comprehend, then compare the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception and abortion with the actual birth-rate in ultra-Catholic Italy. Unless Italians are extraordinarily celibate, they’re clearly not following the Church’s teachings.
So, the teachings of Islam are not to be confused with the peaceability or otherwise of Muslims – because Islam’s teachings are far from “peaceful”.
In The Perils of NonViolent Islamism, her fourth book in English, [Egyptian-born Yemeni Elham Manea] the University of Zurich political scientist, author, activist, and consultant offers a warning to the West.
In Manea’s view, “nonviolent Islamism” is the basic building block that leads to violent jihad. And our misreading of that reality can lead to real harm.
Yet this is the very conversation that we’re prevented from having in the West.
Manea believes that repressing dissent can easily turn into repressive practices. “Cancel culture” may indeed be our “Islamism.”
Nonviolent Islamism’s insidious nature is one of Manea’s most important points. Westerners have been hopelessly gullible in their choice of “smiling and patient” Saudi-funded Muslim Brotherhood/Salafi representatives as their go-to experts on both Islam and Muslims.
As Manea relates, in her parents’ native Yemen, she was “taught to ‘hate’, Jews in particular, and that it was right to deceive infidels”. This is a key point too many gullible Western leftists in particular overlook. The Islamic practices of allowable deception might cause some unhinged conspiracy theories on the right, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not very real. Scholars like Raymond Ibrahim have written at length about such practices as taqiya and kitman. International relations scholars have warned that for some Islamic states, taqiya has become their default policy towards the West.
“One cannot combat an ideology and fundamentalism by working with the very groups that promote that ideology,” [Manea] writes. Further, Western cultural relativism and doctrines of “multiculturalism” has served us and freedom-loving Muslims very, very poorly.
Both hardcore and softcore Islamism must be “challenged and confronted … we need to dismantle the structures and the system that spread(s) this ideology and its radicalized form of Islam.” That means we must adopt significant changes in Islamic schools, mosques, youth groups, and camps; we must retrain paid imams who work in the prison system.
“Not only do we need to fight criminal organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. We must also deal with the nonviolent form of Islamism: the ideology and its fundamentalist reading of Islam… security measures… alone are futile. They do not solve the problem. They do not tackle its roots or structure.”
Manea insists that Western governments must “fight them as you fight your own fundamentalists, fascists, and racist groups.”
That’s the great hypocrisy of the left. Attitudes such as racism (especially anti-Semitism, but also towards blacks (often called Abed, “slaves”, in Muslim slang), sexism of the most brutal kind, and violent religious intolerance, which would (rightly) set off a cacophony of condemnation if expressed by the right, are condoned, nay celebrated by the left if expressed by Muslims.
Manea understands and criticizes how Islamists operate in the West. What begins as “reasonable requests for religious accommodations” soon entails the following:
“Muslim pupils and students need to eat halal food in the cafeteria. They need a prayer room in the school. They want to leave classes during the times of prayer throughout the day and on Fridays. They organize ritual foot washings in the bathrooms. For swimming classes, the genders must be segregated and girls must wear a burkini. School trips are frowned upon or reduced… to just one to ensure girls would participate. Classes should also be gender segregated. Muslim pupils are not allowed to play with non-Muslim pupils in the playground and vice versa.”
Few people pay a higher price for the West’s gutlessness than Muslims themselves.
Muslims themselves are on the front lines of this battle against “Islamist” fascism. Muslim-on-Muslim violence and warfare yields a far higher body count than does Muslim-on-infidel warfare. Muslims are blowing up Muslim civilians, including women, children, and the elderly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and in other Muslim-majority countries.
Muslims are the first victims—and they are also the bravest of dissenters who cannot understand why Westerners, who already live in greater freedom, do not support heroic Muslim struggles against totalitarian fundamentalism in Muslim-majority countries.
For example, the 2017 Marches of Muslim Imams against Terrorism in Cologne, Germany and in Paris each attracted only 100 people. Muslims Manea spoke with said they had their jobs, and even their lives, threatened if they attended.
In Australia, Imam Mohammad Tahwidi, who argues in his The Tragedy of Islam, that Islam must be reformed from within, is vilified and attacked by mainstream Muslim organisations. Tahwidi especially criticises Islamic texts and fundamentalist Islamic indoctrination. The non-Muslim leftist establishment refuses to even countenance such “hate-speech”.
Westerners are berating and blaming themselves for colonialism and white racism as having led to violent jihad. Such Westerners do not understand that Muslim leaders in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia also perpetrated these practices as well as practiced both religious and gender apartheid.
Cultural and secular Muslims are increasingly crying out to be freed from the shackles of fundamentalist Islam – shackles the Western left seem determined they should keep.
Manea personally remembers a far more tolerant Muslim society in Morocco, Egypt, and Yemen, one in which women were not veiled or segregated. She writes about a diversity among Muslims, both in her lifetime and in times gone by, which she misses and longs to see again.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
One could also point to Australian political aspirant Emma Eros. Although Eros was publicly – and unfairly, I thought – humiliated by Milo Yiannopoulos, she has stood as a candidate for One Nation in NSW.
There’s our moderate Muslims. They deserve our support, not being undermined by a left that marches in lockstep with hateful Islamists.
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