The Trouble With Islam
As the ramifications of the London bombings continue to reverberate around the world, Western countries are posing some difficult questions of their Islamic communities.
Islamic leaders unequivocally condemned the attacks perpetrated on the 7th July. The vast majority were deeply concerned about the crimes committed in Allah’s name. They were especially concerned that they were discovered the bombers were among their own youth.
One aspect of their reaction was especially interesting though. The Muslim Council of Britain insisted that Islam had nothing to do with the London bombings. Instead they identified two factors – segregation and alienation – as the driving forces behind these terrible hate crimes. Now clearly something like this has something do with it – because sane people just do not race out to blow up themselves up, right?
Notwithstanding political correctness, why is it Muslim youths in particular are engaging in this kind of hate crime? Unless you argue it is purely coincidental, surely mainstream Islamic leaders need to consider the possibility that, at least in part, Islam may have contributed to the problem.
Irshad Manji is an Islamic commentator who is trying to push her community to seriously engage this question, and to make inroads into cleaning up there own backyard – and she is not mincing words.
She claims Western Islamic clerics are exploiting Islam – not as a sword but as a shield. They’re using the sensitivity of religion to protect Muslims from serious introspection. That, she believes, is doing a favour for nobody.
For her, the crux of the problem stems from the extremist sympathies that draw inspiration from a literalist approach to the teachings in the Koran. Almost all Islamic people accept, as an article of faith, that the Quran is the untouched, immutable word of God. For Irshad, this is the common ground that is shared between extremist and moderate Moslems in Western countries.
“This [Koranic literalism] is a supremacy complex. It’s also dangerous. First because of what it does for the radical fringe, giving them more legitimacy than they deserve. And second because of what it does to the moderates. This supremacy complex inhibits us from asking hard questions about what happens when faith becomes dogma.”
She also argues that Islam’s other unsavoury aspects, such as the treatment of women, and anti-Semitism are not intrinsic to Islam at all, but rather stem from Arab imperialism in the Moslem World. That Arab culture is all pervasive in Islam in the twenty-first century is easy to demonstrate. Even for a Moslem to read the Koran and pray it must be in the Arabic language.
As one could well imagine, Irshad Manji has not won herself many friends within polite Islamic circles. She represents a call to conscience and introspection that is difficult for any person to swallow. But the way to a peaceful future, free from the scourge of terrorism, is going to ask us to pose some of these kinds of hard questions within ourselves. Like the road to heaven, we must enter through the narrow gate even though the way often seems difficult.
GORDON MOYES