Is Islam a Problem?
Before proceeding I should make it clear that I know very little about Islam-the-religion. In the cultural explorations of my youth I gave the Koran a try, but found it perfectly unreadable. The closest I have come to a re-try in the decades since was reading Robert Spencer's 2009 book The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran.
There was nothing about Islam in my formal education. English people of my generation, however, born when the British Empire was still a going concern, took in random commentary from those of our elders who had served in some role, civil or military, in the maintenance of that empire. They generally spoke of Islam with respect, though Churchill was a famous exception.
Reviewing Paul Scott's tetralogy of novels The Raj Quartet some years ago, I made the following observation.
I note in passing here the impression Scott gives — I get a whiff of it in Kipling, too, and in the Flashman books —that the British, especially the military ones, preferred Muslim Indians to Hindus, as being more manly. Doublethink must have been active here, as some of Britain's most prized Indian troops — the Gurkhas, for example — were Hindus. The preference is plain, none the less. Perhaps it was just imperialist fellow-feeling with the subcontinent's previous proprietors, or perhaps it was solidarity between monotheists.
Fortifying that partiality to subcontinental Muslims was the romantic Arabism of British adventurers like R.F. Burton and T.E. Lawrence. Neither of those gents was a convert to Islam, but Burton impersonated one so successfully he undertook the Hajj pilgrimage to the forbidden city of Mecca and somehow talked his way into the Kaaba, the Muslim Holy of Holies, where he made surreptitious sketches of the building's interior. Some of our elders' tales inspired mirth. We dirty-minded schoolboys especially relished an expression said to summarize the sexual preferences of Muslim tribes on India's Northwest Frontier: "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, a goat for ecstasy." **
The limits of my understanding thus confessed, I nurse no hostility to Islam-the-religion. Its scriptures — the Koran and the Hadiths — contain much that is obnoxious, especially where infidels and women are concerned, but the same can be said of Jewish and Christian scripture. If you want to engage with these centuries-old texts, there are passages you should politely ignore.
Christianity? Every Christian Bible includes the Book of Psalms, several of which call down imprecations on God's enemies, often ferociously.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. [Psalm 137: 8-9.]
The Church of England's Book of Common Prayer traditionally included all the psalms. Preparing a revised edition a hundred years ago the bishops wanted to omit those "imprecatory psalms" as being unsuitable for public recitation, but their plan was rejected by The House of Commons in 1928. There are imprecations in the New Testament, too, but they amount to scolding rather than physical threats, as Jesus let fly at Jews for lying, and St. Paul chastises them for persecuting Christians.
Judaism? The late Israel Shahak, an anti-Zionist Jewish academic — he taught chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — caused a fuss with his 1994 book Jewish History, Jewish Religion in which, quoting extensively from the Talmud, he uncovered a vein of imprecatory anti-Gentilism. Shahak is particularly hard on the revered 12th-century Talmudist Maimonides, noting that the sage's book The Guide for the Perplexed instructs readers to kill Jewish infidels — Jesus Christ, for example — with their own hands. Shahak tells us this passage is omitted in modern translations of The Guide.
My point here: If you follow one of the Abrahamic religions but favor a humane, common-sense approach to worldly matters, there are some scriptural passages you should ignore.
Unfortunately not all believers can ignore the obnoxious aspects of their scripture. All three of our faiths contain minorities of intolerant supremacists. I don't see how it can be denied that in Islam today, those minorities are unusually large and malign.
And bold. A common image in the news media of our Western nations today shows great hosts of Muslim men kneeling in ranks and files across major highways to pray, in cities with plenty of mosques they could use. To really drive their point home, a group of Muslims last August gathered for prayer in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, the Church of England's most sacred site. Also in our nations, urban tranquility is being banished by the Muslim call to prayer five times a day, broadcast over whole neighborhoods.
That arrogant supremacism is a problem. It is inherently incompatible with Western civilization and liberal political institutions — the more so now that we are seeing a weird fusion of Islamism with far-left Progressivism in the persons of Zohran Mamdani (U.S.A.) and Jeremy Corbyn (U.K.)
If we can't have the moratorium on all immigration which, sixty years on from Hart-Celler, we are surely due for, can we at least end further settlement by Muslims?
——————————
** John Fortune and John Wells changed the formula slightly for the title of their 1971 novel A Melon for Ecstasy, claiming an Arab source. The novel has nothing to do with Islam: it is about a dendrast, a young man sexually attracted to trees.