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The knowledge that would remove our irrational fear of Islam
A man telephoning C-SPAN about the controversy over the Moslem calls to prayer in Hamtramick, Michigan informed the tv audience of certain facts about Islam which he feels are not widely known, but which if they were known would remove the fear and social conflict connected with the spread of Islam in America. He said:
People need to know more about Islam. They don’t know that Allah is just the Arabic name for God, so when they’re calling to Allah, they’re calling to God. They don’t know that all the prophets of the Bible are Moslem prophets as well. So with all the people who are upset about this, there’s a lot of fear and a lot of ignorance out there.I’m amazed at how a person can pick up a couple of half-baked factoids such as the above, assume that they are the unknown “answer” to some great social problem such as the conflict between Islam and the West, and then rush to inform the world of these great truths of which it is in need. When a man’s light is darkness, how great is that darkness! Unfortunately, the belief that a couple of abstract points of similarity between Islam and the West (“Moslems and Christians believe in the same God,” “Moslem and Western parents want good things for their children”) add up to a complete formula for the happy political and cultural interfusing of Islam and the West is not held by just one silly C-SPAN caller, but by virtually all respectable political figures, opinion shapers, and institutions in our country. On the basis of a couple of childishly simplistic slogans, America has set about transforming itself and the world. When an entire nation’s light is darkness, how great is that darkness!
Comments
Those are half-baked factoids? Islam has common roots with Christianity. That is a fact. What you’re saying isn’t clear. The caller seemed to be trying to break the ice, to get some dialog going between Christians and Moslems. If he has to start with “a couple of abstract points of similiarity” that’s at least something you can work from. Posted by: Caprion on May 15, 2004 10:45 PMI was speaking of the spectacular and dangerous illogic of pointing to a couple of common points between Islam and Christianity and concluding from them that Islam and Christianity have a meaningful commonality that would allow them to get along or happily blend with each other. Islam and Christianity, it is said over and over, both believe in the same God. Does this mean that the two religions, and the societies stemming respectively from them, are compatible? No, because apart from the bare fact that they believe in the same God (actually the Islamic notion of God is radically different from the Christian, but I’ll let that pass), _everything_ else about the two religions is utterly incompatible, which is why the two religions have been in conflict for the last fourteen hundred years. It would be like saying that Hmong tribesmen and New Englanders are both made of protons and electrons, therefore there should be no difficulty with Hmong tribesmen immigrating en masse into New England and integrating with the native population. That’s what I meant by a factoid: something which _seems_ like an important fact with large consequences, but which is really meaningless. That which presents itself as an important substantive commonality is in reality nothing more than an abstract or verbal commonality. Yet modern Americans, who live by slogans, mistake the mere verbal commonality for a real commonality. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 16, 2004 12:12 AM |