Talks on Islam

Last evening I gave a talk on the Islam problem to a meeting of Act for America in New York City. My radical message—that Islam simply does not belong in the West—seemed to be received with a fair amount of agreement, or at least not with shock. Some in the audience argued that it ought to be possible to Americanize Muslims, as happened with other immigrant groups.

The other speaker was Andrew Bieszad, a graduate student who has interesting and original ideas on Islam and what to do about it. He emphasized the unchanging dogmatic core of Islam which makes any reform of Islam impossible. He pointed out that according to Islam, human dignity is contingent on being a Muslim, and that the denial of the human dignity of non-Muslims is intrinsic to Islam. He said that Christian evangelization efforts not only can bring numerous individual Muslims out of the darkness of Islam, but perhaps even de-Islamize entire regions of the Muslim world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.

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N. writes:

The other speaker in NYC is correct. Christian evangelism can indeed de-Islamize a region. This is because Islam, in purest form, is an inhumane and even inhuman system for living. Thus any alternative that is more humane and human is attractive, whether it is Christianity, or Buddhism, or secular gnosticism. It is no accident therefore that Sharia not only makes apostasy into a crime punishable by death, but also evangelism by Christians. The early Moslems surely saw the threat Christianity, with its freedom under the Gospel, is to dogmatic, endless-rule-bound Islam.

Islam protects itself from external and internal threats in a variety of ways, but ultimately with the threat of death.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 26, 2010 02:10 PM | Send