Wilders on the nature of Islam

In an interview, Geert Wilders challenges National Post columnist Jonathan Kay’s establishment belief that there is a moderate Islam that is distinct from extremist and expansionist “Islamism.” It’s funny how Kay, who seems basically respectful and open to Wilders, even if he’s not ready to sign on entirely to his view, has to keep sounding anti-Wilders notes (“It’s easy to see why many Europeans casually jump to the conclusion that Mr. Wilders is a hatemonger”) to try to get his liberal Canadian readers to pay attention to Wilders’s tough message about Islam.

Speaking to Kay, Wilders makes this interesting and amusing remark:

“I see Islam as 95 percent ideology, five percent religion—the five percent being the temples and the imams. If you would strip the Koran of all the negative, hateful, anti-Semitic material, you would wind up with a tiny [booklet].”

Readers may remember that I have disagreed with Wilders’s statements in the past that Islam is not a religion but only a political ideology.

Now he has moved in my direction. Even if it’s only five percent, that’s enough. I’m not concerned about the percentage. The point is that our side sounds silly when we claim that Islam, one of the world’s major religions, is not a religion. To say that Islam is not a religion is like saying that a rhinoceros is not a mammal.

Sure looks like a mammal to me.

Robert Spencer in 2009 competently explained why Wilders’s idea that Islam is not a religion was wrong, and also why it was understandable:

I disagree with Wilders’s statement that Islam is not a religion. Islam is certainly a religion—a belief-system that, like other religions, purports to relate human beings to the divine. But at the same time, I understand why he says that Islam is not a religion—because the strictly religious aspects of Islam are actually of no concern to unbelievers at all. It makes no difference to me if a Muslim wants to pray five times a day, or read the Qur’an, or believes that Muhammad is a prophet—except insofar as it impinges me as a political program that demands my conversion, subjugation, or death.

About which I commented:

On the question of the correctness of Wilders’s view of the nature of Islam, I would restate Spencer’s argument as follows. Islam is indeed both a religion and a totalitarian political ideology, but the fact that Islam is a religion is practically of no importance to us non-Muslims. What matters to us non-Muslims is how Islam manifests itself to us. And, in that regard, Islam is indeed a political ideology aimed at subduing us under its power. Therefore, while Wilders’s statement that Islam is only an political ideology and not a religion is not objectively correct (since Islam is a religion), Wilders’s statement is practically correct.

This is a good apologia for Wilders’s position. Personally (like Spencer) I prefer saying that Islam is both a religion and a political ideology.

- end of initial entry -

Paul T. writes:

It may well be, as you say, that Jonathan Kay has to “keep sounding anti-Wilders notes … to try to get his liberal Canadian readers to pay attention to Wilders’s tough message.” On top of that, though, Canadian journalists generally who are even glancingly critical of Islam have to worry about being dragged before one of our Human rights Commissions. The CHRC failed to make its charges stick to Mark Steyn, but it looked like a near run thing there for a while, and the expense, trouble and disruption to Steyn’s personal and professional life were very real and seem to have had the surely-intended “chilling effect.”

May 10

Vivek G. writes:

Jonathan Kay wrote in his column:

… As an editor at the National Post, I often rely on three letters to protect my columnists from human-rights tribunals: I-S-M—these being the difference between spelling Islam and Islamism.

The former is a religion—like Christianity or Judaism. The latter is an ideology, which seeks to impose an intolerant fundamentalist version of Islam on all Muslims, and spread the faith throughout the world. Declaring Islamism a menace isn’t controversial. Declaring Islam a menace is considered hate speech.

Firstly Kay commits an error by stating:

” … which seeks to impose an intolerant fundamentalist version of Islam on all Muslims … ”

It actually is:

” … which seeks to impose an intolerant fundamentalist version of Islam on ALL HUMANITY (not just Muslims) … ”

Further, Kay neglects to address the question, why does Islam-ism exist while Christianity-ism or Judaism-ism do not exist?

May 11

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

On the question whether Islam is a religion, the answer is categorically yes, but with an important qualification. “Religion” is an enormous category that contains the most pacific forms of Buddhism on the one hand and bloody, sacrificial cults like those of the Aztecs and Carthaginians on the other. It is important to locate Islam on the spectrum of religions. I suspect that when Western people insist on excluding Islam from the category of religion, they are responding to their gut-level perception that, while Islam might be a religion, it is in type and character so different from the familiar religions, not even limiting the list to Judaism and Christianity, that it sits halfway outside the category. I would hesitate to apply the label “silly” to that perception. To me it seems quite legitimate even though anthropologically unsubtle. To cite a parallelism, one might concede categorically that both Thomas à Beckett and the Supreme Knife-Wielder of Huitztliputztli were priests, but a discussion that ended there without evaluating the extraordinary range of extreme differences would be useless. An interlocutor who kept insisting that, “Well, but they’re both priests,” would strike us as tedious and obfuscating, perhaps as “silly,” would he not? (I think so.)

Then again, once one had tallied the differences, what would be the epistemological—or what indeed would be the practical—status of the formal concession that both Thomas and the Knife-Wielder were priests? I think it would be just that, a formal concession, abstractly justifiable, but not particularly germane to an ethical assessment.

I pose the following question, not as a challenge, but rather in a purely probative way, because I value your judgment: What do people who would like to dissever Islam and the West as far as possible—what exactly do they have to gain by making an insistent point about the formal presence of Islam within the large descriptive category of religion?

LA replies:

Your question to me is odd. The issue is not, “What does one have to gain by calling Islam a religion?”, but “What is true?” At the same time, I also say that Islam critics should stop telling their allies that they must say that Islam is not a religion, because that is the equivalent of telling people that they must go around repeatedly declaring that racoons are not mammals or that peacocks are not birds. A political movement that tries to force its members to conform to such a patent falsehood is not going to get very far. So it appears that I do have a practical aim as well as the aim of being truthful: I don’t want Islam critics to exhaust their energy on a doomed and silly quest.

While I grant your point about the inexactness of the word “religion” which has many different levels and categories within it which need to be articulated, the word religion nevertheless has an agreed upon general meaning: an organized belief system and practice the purpose of which is to bring man into contact with the divine and to inculcate right human behavior. This general definition says nothing about the objective truth or goodness of the deity in which any particular religion believes, nor about the objective goodness of the behavior the religion seeks to inculcate in its followers. As monstrous and evil as the religion of the Aztecs was, it was a religion. As hate-filled and deadly as Islam is, it is a religion.

Now probably the best argument of the “Islam is not a religion” proponents is that as long as Islam is thought of as a religion, it receives First Amendment protections (“Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion,” which makes the defense of America from Islam impossible.

The solution to this problem is not to say that Islam is not a religion, a patently false statement that will never sell, but to state the complicated truth, which is that Islam is both a religion and a political ideology aimed at taking over our society and destroying its liberties, and as such it should not receive First Amendment protections. There are a variety of ways in which this can be approached. But in the long run I think the only effective measure will be a statute or constitutional amendment declaring that Islam, as a political ideology aimed at subverting our liberties, shall not receive First Amendment protections. Best of all would be a constitutional amendment declaring that Islam shall not be practiced in the United States, as I have laid out here. Such an amendment would transcend the First Amendment, while not affecting or weakening the First Amendment in any way other than in relation to Islam. My proposed amendment is sweeping in relation to Islam, but affects nothing besides Islam. This is appropriate, given Islam’s sui generis status as a religion which is also a deadly political ideology.

Thomas Bertonneau replies:

Yours is an adequate answer to the question. I still incline to the judgment that Islam is so anomalous—so sui generis, as you say—that it might require its own descriptive category. But your amendment, which in effect puts Islam in its own category, would be the proper response to the threat.

LA writes:

Kidist Paulos Asrat at her Camera Lucida blog quotes my statement at the beginning of this entry:

Readers may remember that I have disagreed with Wilders’s statements in the past that Islam is not a religion but only a political ideology.

Now he has moved in my direction [by saying that Islam is 95 percent ideology, five percent religion.] Even if it’s only five percent, that’s enough. I’m not concerned about the percentage. The point is that our side sounds silly when we claim that Islam, one of the world’s major religions, is not a religion. To say that Islam is not a religion is like saying that a rhinoceros is not a mammal.

To which Miss Asrat replies:

Mr. Auster is very generous in accepting this move to the right (direction). I, on the other hand, am a little impatient. I see every day in our Toronto streets Muslims inching into our society, whose ideology is clearly intertwined with, and fueled by, their religion. There would be no Muslim “ideology” without Islam.

This is very well said. It is unreal to deny that Islam is a religion and that it motivates and fulfills Muslims in a deep way. The religion and the Holy War ideology are one thing. Without the religion, there would not be the Holy War ideology. The Muslims’ belief in their god, and their commitment to making war on and subduing the infidel, are one thing. This can be most clearly grasped from those passages in the Koran in which it is said that the highest spiritual fulfillment of the Muslim, those moments when he feels closest to and most blest by Allah, is when he is killing the infidel in battle or dying in the attempt. Islam is thus indeed a religion, but it is a religion of war and killing. It is a religion, insofar as it claims to teach a path for man to participate in the divine, but the specific content of this religion is that man participates most fully in the divine in the act of killing infidels. We cannot understand the unique (and uniquely threatening) nature of Islam, without seeing these two sides of Islam together.

This discussion continues in a new entry, “The paradoxical nature of Islam.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 09, 2011 10:06 AM | Send