Since September 11, when Muslim terrorists murdered over 5,000 innocent Americans, the media, academics, even the President of the United States, have all been lining up to bestow their praises and defences upon the Islamic faith. President Bush called Islam a “religion of peace” and proclaimed that the terrorists were, in fact, “distorting Islam.” Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that we must remember that “this is a war against terrorism, not a war against Islam.” We are constantly being told to avoid any criticism of their faith and that we must strive to make a greater effort to “understand Islam,” as a film series at University of Toronto urges.
If we make an honest and rational attempt to understand Islam, we see that it is a religion that breeds fanaticism. And that a disproportionate number of practitioners of the Islamic faith hold dangerously extremist ideologies that they aim to impose on the entire world. The nature of the religion is such that it is meant to dominate every aspect of society and control every detail of man’s life.
Zaid Shakir, the Muslim chaplain at Yale University, writes, “We cannot accept the legitimacy of the American secular system, which is against the laws of Allah.” Ahmad Nawfal, of the Jordanian Muslim Brethren, writes, “If Muslims must stand up with the ideology that we possess, it will be very easy for us to preside over this world.” Muslim apologists will likely respond that these views, along with terrorist acts, represent a distortion of Islam and go against the basic teachings of the faith. However, the Koran itself contains declarations like “Fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them… those who reject our signs we shall soon cast into the fire… as to the deviators, they are the fuel of hell”. For all the talk of Islam being a religion of peace, its own scriptures contradict such a view.
“Understanding Islam” itself seems problematic, since the rejection of reason and logic as a means of gaining knowledge is a tenet of Islam. The Koran states that knowledge does not come from independent thought, but rather from divine revelation. Muslim law does not allow men to think freely, but rather demands that they submit to strict religious dogma. Any deviation or attempt at individual thought is punished harshly, such as when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against author Salman Rushdie for criticizing Islam in a novel. The reason for this anti-reason epistemology is simple: once a man has surrendered his capacity for rational independent thought, he is far more susceptible to accepting the other teachings of Islam that would seem preposterous to a rational person.
Given their philosophy, it is no wonder the Islamic world harbours such a deep hatred of the United States and what it stands for. In the World Trade Center, free, proud men of reason and ability used their minds to create wealth so that they could pursue their own personal happiness. Compare this to the images out of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his primitive bearded barbarians dressed in rags squatted in the dirt in caves, waiting for messages from their “prophet” from the dark ages. They sought to destroy America because it stands for everything they hate: capitalism, reason, freedom and modernity.
