Ali-Ramadan debate shows why Islam is a problem for us

A debate in Sweden between the former Muslim, former Dutch politician, and soon-to-be American Enterprise Institute fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the “moderate” but actually pro-jihadist Swiss-born professor Tariq Ramadan inadvertently showed why Muslims of any stripe are likely to be bad news for the West. According to a story by John Lloyd in the Financial Times, reprinted at Ali’s website:

Mr Ramadan said it was wrong to suggest that Muslims were in Europe to proselytise, and wrong to say that Europe had a Judaeo-Christian past.

“Islam is a European religion. The Muslims came here after the first and second world wars to rebuild Europe, not to colonise. It is a mistake to deny complexity. When we speak about Islam we speak about terrorism; you are focusing on the few who are destroying and not the millions who are building. Muslims are in great majority law-abiding,” he said.

So, Ramadan seeks to cancel out Europe as a Christian civilization in order to lay a Muslim claim to it. This is the guy that the University of Notre Dame, once known as a Catholic Christian institution, tried to hire as a professor last year, a plan that was only stopped when the U.S. government thankfully barred Ramadan from entering the U.S. because of his terrorist connections.

But what about the West’s defender and Robert Spencer’s hero, the Muslim apostate Ali?

Ms Hirsi Ali, who has taken an atheist position and lives under secret service protection because of threats to her life, told the annual conference organised by the Axson Johnson Foundation that leaders of Muslim opinion “must discriminate between Islam as it is and Islam as it could be”—and said that Mr Ramadan, whom she described as a “handsome and articulate leader of opinion”, had failed to do so.

“You must start from Islam as it is today. The great number of Muslims believe that the Koran is the absolute word of God; few believe it is a historic document. The number of people who believe the Prophet literally are much more numerous than those who see him as a historical figure.”

Ali’s attack on Islam is based on saying that Muhammad is merely a “historical” figure, meaning that he had no revelation from God, that he made up the Koran and presented it as coming from God. What’s wrong with that? Since her critique of Islam is centered on denying the divine origin of the Koran, logical consistency and balance will obviously require her to deny the divine origin of the Bible as well. She will “defend” the West from Islam by at least strongly implying that the Bible is a mere “historical” document and that Jesus is a mere “historical” figure. Remember, this is the woman who signed the secularist anti-Islamist petition in February saying that the real danger facing the world was not Islam, but “theocracy,” a term that from Ali’s militant secularist perspective means Christianity as much as Islam.

There are all kinds of ways of showing the falsity and danger of Islam without directly denying its divine origin. Hundreds of articles and many books—including William Muir’s great Life of Mohamet—have done so. In my own writings critiquing Islam I have never felt it necessary to deny the validity of Islam as a religion; rather I said that as a religion with a divine commandment to conquer the world, it is a mortal danger to us that we must physically contain within its historic lands. But Ali’s background as a past Muslim and present atheist requires her to attack the Islamic religion as such—which as a matter of logical necessity will require her to attack Christianity as such.

This shows why Hirsi Ali is no bargain for us; and why Muslims, whether they are jihadist, “moderate,” or atheist, do not as a general proposition belong in the West; and why the West must cease all Muslim immigration and initiate a steady out-migration of Muslims back to their native or ancestral lands.

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Robert Spencer writes:

Lawrence Auster:

“Since her critique of Islam is centered on denying the divine origin of the Koran, logical consistency and balance will obviously require her to deny the divine origin of the Bible as well.”

So if I deny the divine origin of the Qur’an, logical consistency and balance requires me to deny the divine origin of the Bible as well?

What kind of logical consistency and balance is that? Can you explain it to me? And can you perhaps also explain how saints and martyrs from St. John of Damascus on up have denied the divine origin of the Qur’an while upholding the divine origin of the Bible?

Don’t you yourself deny the divine origin of the Qur’an while upholding the divine origin of the Bible?

Your position is absurd.

And as for your planned post which will no doubt say that I secretly, or without even realizing it myself, uphold unrestricted legal immigration in the name of diversity, it too is absurd. I know what I believe, and it is not what you say I believe. Continue on your course as you will, but you are spreading falsehoods.

Robert Spencer

LA replies:

Come on, calm down. While I disagree with you on some things, I have no ill will against you, notwithstanding your ill will against me; I have even continued to praise you for your good work (a favor you have never once extended to me). So relax. People might think you’re being, to use your word, “obsessed.”

As for the substance of the issue, if a believing Christian or Jew denied the divine character of the Koran, that would not obviously not require him to deny the divine character of the Bible. But Ali is not a believing Christian or Jew—or haven’t you noticed? She is a committed radical secularist who has already announced her opposition to any strong presence of Christianity in the West. In her case, the denial of the divine origin of the Koran leads both pragmatically and logically to her doing the same to the Bible.

It’s for this very reason that many Christians in the West are pro-Islam. They regard all religions as one, and see an attack on Islam as an implied attack on Christianity as well. I reject their logic as a general proposition that must be true in all cases. But in Ali’s case, it is already true.

Robert Spencer writes:

1. Your ill will toward me is quite obvious, despite your pious denials.

2. I have posted about you twice at Jihad Watch. You have posted about me about 20 times or more at VFR. Obsessed?

LA answers:

LOL. First, that “twice” consisted of lengthy threads at your website that ran on for days with numerous attacks on me. I’ve either replied to your attacks, or, in my more recent postings, I have mentioned you in passing several times, mostly in connection with Ali. You’re right that I consider your calling her a “hero” a significant fact that I’m going to continue to call attention to. But that is no more personal than my criticisms of AEI for hiring her. I am opposed to the elevation of a radical secular leftist by Western conservatives. Your “hero” comment epitomizes that attitude, and that is why I highlight it.

Scott in PA writes:

“Since her critique of Islam is centered on denying the divine origin of the Koran, logical consistency and balance will obviously require her to deny the divine origin of the Bible as well.”

The same sentence that provoked Robert Spencer also leapt off the page at me. There’s no logic to it. It’s Ali’s materialism that leads her to denying the divine in both Islam and Christianity, as well as any other religion.

Further, I don’t know how you can show the “falsity and danger of Islam without directly denying its divine origin.” So God spreads lies? What religion believes that its god errs and spreads falsehoods? Since Muhammad claimed to receive the direct word of God (a qualitative difference with the Christian scribes), any errors in the tenets of that religion are God’s errors. One cannot separate the falsity of the tenets of Islam from the falsity of the God that spread them. That’s the special problem of Islam that Ratzinger mentioned as reported by Fr. Fessio. I believe you commented on that as well.

There are many reasons to criticize Ali, but she is right about this. It’s the reason that Islam can never be reformed.

Finally, I admire both your and Robert’s work immensely, (I cringe at the internecine battle), but you did proffer a couple of howlers today.

LA replies:

First, I don’t see any significant difference between my articulation of the problem and Scott’s. Either way, Ali, in rebelling against her Islamic background, became an atheist, and so she attacks both Islam and Christianity.

Scott writes: “Further, I don’t know how you can show the ‘falsity and danger of Islam without directly denying its divine origin.’ So God spreads lies?”

That’s a good question, and here’s my answer.

On one hand, in my view (and also in the view of such a critical yet balanced student of Islam as William Muir), there is clearly something of a divine origin in Islam. Muhammad had an experience of the divine, which he called Allah, which led him to the idea that there is one God, not many tribal gods, and he inspired this same experience of the divine in his followers. The Koran powerfully conveys, in Sura 8 for example, a sense of Muslims being totally devoted to Allah in war and battle, and how through the Muslims’ total devotion to Allah, Allah’s will seems to be manifesting through everything, and the world becomes filled with holiness. Also, one cannot look at, for example, the Dome of the Rock, or at the Arabic script in a mosque, and not feel the expression of the transcendent.

On the other hand, Islam is mixed with all kinds of primitive and egoistic elements—e.g., the Arab ethos of eternal war against enemies, Muhammad’s obvious manufacture of “revelations” to justify his own convenience, and Muhammad’s lust and cruelty and tyranny which became the model for all Muslims, that render Islam highly toxic and dangerous. It is indeed the very mixture of truth and falsity in Islam that makes it so dangerous, since, without the element of truth, Islam could not be so persuasive to its followers, giving them the mandate and the confidence to impose their cruel and tyrannical system on the world. I’m not saying anything unusual here. Islam is sometimes called a Christian heresy. A heresy is by definition a mixture of truth and falsity.

At the same time, a billion Muslims believe their religion and experience it as the basis of their social and moral order, and it is certainly beyond our ability as Westerners to destroy the religion of Islam. Certainly the approach of Hirsi Ali, of calling Islam a fraud and calling for Western-style feminist equality to be instituted in the world of Islam, would only wreak greater chaos and violence in the Muslim world. That is why I say that our job is not to reform Islam or save the souls of the Muslims, but to save ourselves from the Muslims by rolling back Islam and confining Muslims within their historic lands where they cannot threaten us.

Finally, with all due respect, I have no respect for the attitude of “cringing” at the sight of genuine disagreement among conservatives. Such disagreement is essential, if a genuine conservatism is to replace the liberal conservatism of today.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2006 07:40 AM | Send