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CHAPTER FOUR - REPLY TO SOME QUESTIONS AND CRITICISMS
After the publication of first edition of this book, and
of articles containing some of its ideas, I have received
some comments to which I will reply here.
4.1 BOTH SIDES OF THE STORY
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"You have been too much influenced by these Hindus among
whom you lived in Benares and Delhi. You haven't heard the
other side of the story."
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"The other side of the story" is not at all unknown to
me: it has been the object of my rather lengthy criticism
all through this essay. It is the people who have been
taken in by the rosy picture of Islam, who know only one
side of the story. When they get to hear this side as well,
it turns out that they just don't want to hear it. After
all, the prospect of having to deal with an increasingly
numerous and increasingly aggressive community under the
spell of Islam is a bit frightening. We would all prefer to
live in a world without the threat of Islamic fanaticism,
but we should not delude ourselves that we are already
living in such a tolerant and danger-free world.
Have I started seeing this side of the story because I
was "influenced"? As a matter of fact, I have spent my
first season in India in Benaras, the centre of Hindu
orthodoxy, withoug hearing the "Hindu fundamentalist"
viewpoint at all. Many people who would later be very
forthcoming with inside information and with strong
opinions, were at first careful not to annoy this foreigner
with viewpoints which they thought he would not understand.
It is only when I had discovered the Hindu viewpoint for
myself, and edpressed my general sympathy with it, that my
spokesmen at Benaras Hindu University would lay their cards
on the table. The "secularist" viewpoint is (was) so
dominant that cultured people did not want Westerners to
associate them with the Hindu cause.
It is a somewhat misdirected criticism, to argue that
somneone says something because he has been influenced by
someone else. Imputing motives or "influences" are an ad
hominen argument which can never replace an ad rem
criticism; it is always done precisely to compensate for the
absence of such proper criticism. I refer to Arun Shourie's
book "Individuals, Institutions, Processes", for a discussion
of the bad habit of giving people a label ("that Naxalite",
"that RSS man", to name a few which he himself has
carried) and then acting as if their
views have been refuted by the label. This labelling is
mental laziness. Ideas should be judged by merit, not by
caste provenance.
A similar attempt to dismiss my conclusions without
dealing with them, can be found in Sarvapalli Gopal's
introduction to his book about the Ayodhy issue, "Anatomy of
a Confrontation". His entire book does not contain any reply
to the main arguments give in my book "Ram Janmabhoomi vs.
Babri Masjid", arguments which have also been brought up by
Indian participants in various instances of the Ayodhya
debate. Instead, Prof. Gopal thinks he can clinch the issue
by calling me "a Catholic practitioner of polemics" who
"fights the Crusades all over again on Indian soil". For
Communists, swearwords are ten a penny, so I grant the
august practitioner of swearology this comparatively mild
exercise in his worn-out old game.
More interesting is his comment, apparently meant to
justify his ignoring my arguments, that "it is difficult to
take serious an athor who draws his historical ecidence from
newspaper reports and speaks of the centuries when there
were Muslim rulers in India as a bloodsoaked catastrophe".
For a scientist, the place where findings are published, or
the name of the author, or any other social circumstances of
their publication, are of absolutely no consequence to the
correctness of their contents. Only for party-line historians
like those of JNU,, who count more on power
positions than on facts to convince people, the argument of
authority is all-important. So, if in my book I have chosen
to analyze at length (and partly repeat) the arguments given
in the course of a debate conducted on the opinion page of
the Indian Express, this does not in any way diminish the
value of these arguments. I cannot help it that a number of the
documents, facts and insights presented by people like Prof.
A.R. Khan, Prof. Harsh Narain and Mr. A.K. Chatterjee, have
been ignored in nicely published books by prestigious
authors like the JNU historians, Prof. R.S. Sharma and Mr.
A.A. Engineer. So I prefer genuine facts published to cheap
paper to the distortions on the shiny paper of Prof. Gopal's
own book.
Is it hard to take seriously someone who considers the
"Muslim period" a blood-soaked catastrophe? That
depends solely on whether the Muslim period was indeed a
blood-soaked catastrophe. European negationists applaud
Hitler's reign and deny its horrors. Indian negationists
eulogize Islamic rule and deny its millionfold murders and
the catastrophe it wrought in Indian cultural, political and
religious life. In both cases, the authentic records tell a
different story. That is no doubt why the negationists
refuse to "take seriously" the numerous authentic records of
the massive destruction wrought by Islam.
And while we are dealing with the negationist reaction
to my first book about the Islam problem in India, there was
also a review in The Telegraph by Manini Chatterjee. She
thought that my "very bad book" was marred by miserably
tentative terminology, like "maybe" and "possibly". In the
case of party-line history-writing, that would indeed be a
grave shortcoming. Once the party has decided on what
history should look like, a historian is no longer supposed
to confront conflicting testimonies, to calculate
probablities, to make allowance for the uncertainties
inherent in most historical research. That is why the
Marxist participants in the Ayodhya debate have always been
so cocksure in their statements: for them there can be no
doubt whatsoever, and no amount of inconvenient testimony is
going to shake them out of the absolute certainly of their
foregone conslusions.
Incidentally, Mrs. Chatterjee finds my writing
"suspiciously similar" in style and contents to that to the
essayists in the first volume of "Hindu Temples, What
Happened to Them". Never mind, the is not the first one who
suspects that I don't exist and that Koenraad Elst is only a
pen-name for some "Hindu communalist" writer. Let me take
this opportunity to confirm that I exist. Mrs. Chatterjee
should know that it is indeed quite possible for a non-Hindu
to independently arrive at the same conclusions as
accomplished Hindu intellectuals like Harsh Narain, Ram
Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Jay Dubashi and Arun Shourie. If the
information flow from India to the outside world was not so
completely in negationist hands, many more Western scholars
would have come out with similar views.
This is not the place for repeating the Ayodhya debate,
so for the full presentation of evidence for the Ayodhya
temple, submitted by the VHP scholars by me have been
incorporated), I refer to the Voice of India publication
"History vs. Casuistry". The "evidence" submitted by the BMAC
will be harder to come by, as it was not exactly fit for
publication.
A last word about this "influence" allegation, which was
also levelled against me by a collegue when I didn't display
any knee-jerk reaction of indignation after the demolition
of the Babri Masjid. My position, that a Hindu sacred place
should simply be left to the Hindus, will be shared any
unbiased person: it is a natural insight not needing any
"influencing", to approve a community's right to its own
traditional sacred places. That is merely the simple view,
which a child can understand. The opposite is true of the
"secularist" view, viz. that the Hindus had no right to
transform the architecture at their own sacred place, and
that the Muslims do have rights over the Ram Janmabhoomi
which they would never concede (nor be asked to concede) to
anyone in the case of, say, Mecca. That view is based on
double standards which are only acceptable to people who
have undergone some "re-education", some ideological
conditioning or "influencing".
4.2 MUSLIMS VS. ISLAM
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"But I know some Muslims, and they are not fanatical at
all."
And: "But I've been to Turkey, and people there are very
friendly and hospitable, and they have nothing to do with
fundamentalism. You confuse the mass of Muslims with the
small minority of fanatics." And: "But in indonesia, Islam
is very different. You confuse the war-hungry mentality of
West Asia with the essence of Islam, which is very open."
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Me too, I know some Muslims who are not fanatical at
all. And I have had quite a good time in Muslim countries,
starting with Pakistan. But this has not convinced me that
Islam is a benevolent and tolerant religion.
We need not travel to Islamic countries to see how
decent people whose membership of the Muslim community
offends no one, can suddenly turn fanatical when Islam is at
stake. All these Islamic demonstrators in our streets, who
demanded Rushdie's death, and who told interviewers in so
many words: "He must die, we will kill this Satan", were
mostly very nice people when you talk to them in their
coffee-houses. When the Japanese Rushdie translator was
killed (summer 1991), spokesmen of the Japanese Muslim
community said: "Whoever has killed him, whether Muslim or
non-Muslim, at any rate it was his deserved punishment
ordained by Allah." (Japanese public opinion has reacted
very sharply against this statement of moral, if not actual,
complicity in the murder) Yet, I had never heard of
Japanese Muslims behaving in a less civic manner than their
compatriots. Very nice people can turn vicious once a
strong belief is at stake, especially the self-righteous
belief fostered by Islam.
It is obviously true that many people in Muslim
countries have good qualities. In countries yet unspoiled
by consumerism, it is normal for people to be friendly and
hospitable, they don't need Islam for that. For nomadic
peoples, like the Turks until a few centuries ago,
hospitality was a vital necessity, and this tradition has
remained even after conversion to Islam. In fact, as
nomadic traditions were strongly present in Mohammed's own
cultural surroundings, hospitality is indeed highly valued
in Islam: not because Allah decreed it, but because Mohammed
had never known otherwise. Friendliness and hospitality owe
nothing to Islam, but are human values cherished by most
cultures.
This merely proves the obvious: that human beings
continue to be human even after conversion to Islam. People
continue to cherish certain values regardless of the
doctrines taught by the religion in which they find
themselves. On top of that, the Islamic doctrine itself has
adopted certain positive pre-Islamic values, and continues
to instil them in its young generations. This is not a
comparative merit vis-a-vis other religious and ethical
systems, but it may be valuable in comparison with the moral
disorientation which befalls ever more youngsters in the big
cities. That is why American policy-makers have some
appreciation for the role of islam in inner-city Black
communities. In the modern world, the alternative for the
parental religion is mostly not another religion, but
nihilism and morel anarchy. Any religion will do to give a
new sense of direction to lost souls, provided its
elementary moral code is emphasized, rather than its
sterile and divisive points of theology.
On the negative side too, Islam is not foreign to human
nature. The negative values which Islam explicitly promote:
(self-righteousness, narrow-mindedness, greed for booty,
disrespect for others people's artistic and religious
treasures), are all defects which may emerge in any human
being. Muslims may believe that Islam was brought from
heaven, but I am convinced that it was produced by a human
being, and that all its positive and negative qualities are
expressions of human nature. The point is that Islam gives
certain negative tendencies systematic support whenever they
are practised in relation to non-muslim people, institutions
or values. The evil present in general human nature is
sharpened and legitimized by Islam, and directed against the
unbelievers in Mohammed's claims at prophethood. This
legitimation of evil tendencies is an original contribution
of Islam (even if it drew some inspiration from the Biblical
Yahweh). It cannot be ascribed to Mohammed's pre-Islamic
cultural milieu.
Most religions, regardless of their metaphysical and
ritual differences, agree on a number of ethical values:
self-control, harmony with our fellow-men, truthfulness,
etc. Islam has adopted some elements of this universal
heritage. Ordinary Muslims will point to these universal
virtues when defending the claim that Islam stands for
important ethical values. But Islam has also elevated to
the rank of religious duty a number of attitudes and
behaviour patterns which are the very opposite of this
world-wide ehtical consensus.
Whatever our judgement of the the Islamic doctrine, it
should be clearly distinguished from our attitude towards
Muslim people. I guess most Muslims will not be too happy
when you say: "I have nothing against you, I only object to
your religion." Yet, even if it is psychologically rather
delicate to take this position, it is nonetheles the correct
position. People cannot help it that they have been born into
the community that pledges allegiance to Islam. They
cannot help it that they have been made to develop an
emotional attachment to that arch-fanatical book the Quran,
and to its author Mohammed. Moreover, many of them have
followed their more humane feelings, and retained from their
religious indocrtrination only some universal ethical rules
and some common life wisdom, quietly putting the more
fanatical parts of Islamic teaching aside. Their effective
religion is strictly not Islam, but a selection of the saner
and more humane elements which Mohammed's followers had
preserved or adopted from universal religion.
But whatever the human qualities of the people in
Turkey, it is undeniable that a substantial number of these
common Muslims (both Turkish and Kurdish) has taken part in
terroizing the Christians (in Kurdistan also Yezidi)
minorities. Even when the secular state founded by Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk accorded protection to the Christians (and
restored some historical churches to them), the common
people kept on harassing the minorities.
Before World War I, Christians formed a substantial
percentage of the population of what is now called Turkey
(if my information is correct, they even formed the majority
in the capital city Istambul). In 1915-18, the Armenians
were massacred. In 1922, when Greece had tried to liberate
the territories with Greek populations on Turkey's West
Coast, all the Greeks were killed or driven out. Since
then, the pressure on not only the remaining Armenians and
Greek-Orthodox, but alo on the Chaldaean and Assyrian
Christians in the South-East, has continued. Ethnic clashes
between Muslim Kurds and Muslims Turks have often ended in a
massacre of the religious minorities. By now, the
Christians form less than 1% of Turkey's population. Many
thousands have fled to European countries, and those
remaining in Turkey have moved to the relative safety of the
metropolis Istambul. When questioned, they are often too
ashamed or too afraid to tell their story. But ultimately,
the truth comes out, and the conclusion is: "We had no
choice but to go away."
An intriguing aspect of the Islamic terror against the
Christians in Turkey is that it has not stopped with the
state's secularization. In the khilafat period, Islam was
safely in power, and from that position it could show
generosity and ensure the "protection" which the Islamic
state owes its zimmi minorities (except when the caliph
himself declared a jihad against a specified people). But
this generosity and protection should not be exaggerated: at
least in the Balkan part of the Ottaman empire, Christians
lived in constant fear. They were the target of never-
ending terror, in the form of abductions of girls and boys
and all kinds of harassment. It is such harassment at the
local and popular level which has continued in the last
decades and reached the farthest corners of the country.
This process has also been helped by the fact that increased
population pressure and better roads and transport have
ended the virtual isolation in which many Christian
communities in the mountains used to live. Once the contact
with the Muslims became more intense, trouble followed.
Protective measures by the secular government failed to
control the hostility at the popular level.
It is always easy to blame the state and the men in
uniform. But Islamic terror essentially does not emanate
from uniforms and state power, but from a belief system
which even the ordinary people have been fed. That is why a
lot of Islamic terror never gets recorded by human-rights
organizations like Amnesty International. A Christian
Pakastani friend complained to me that Amnesty had not
spoken out against the religious persecutions in his
homeland, even when these are a grim and undeniable reality.
The fact is that much of this persecution and discrimination
is not ordered by the state (the type of culprit with which
Amnesty is familiar), but is a spontaneous attituide among
sections of the Muslim population, egged on by nothing
except the omnipresent Islamic doctrine.
As for Indonesia, let us note first of all that it is a
non-secular and non-Islamic state. It requires its citizens
to be "monotheists", but they can choose for themselves
whether they worship Allah, Jesus, Ganesha or Buddha,
regardless of the very different status which these divine
characters have for their respective followers. Many
Muslims are unhappy that the majority religion is prevented
from making its mark on the polity ( a frustration which
many Hindus in India will understand, in spite of the sharp
difference which would exist between a pluralist Hindu
Rashtra and an oppressive Islamic state). True to type,
some Muslims advocate the separation and islamization of
their heartland, the island Aceh, while others are working
for the islamization of the entire country.
The fact that Islam sits lightly on most Muslims in
Indonesia, has not prevented a hard core to display the
patented behaviour pattern of Islam. In Irian Jaya (West New
Guinea), the Papua tribals are overrun by immigrant Muslims
from Java. Many of them have already been converted by
force or social pressure. In ex-Portuguese East Timor,
which Indonesia has annexed against the United Nations'
will, massacres of Christians or Animist natives by Muslim
immigrants and soldiers have happened on a large scale. In
Bali, the Hindus are not exactly persecuted, but Muslim
immigrants from Java have acquired the positions of power.
By the standards which Indian Muslims use to measure
"discrimination against the minorities", the Hindus of Bali
could claim that they are discriminated against.
Nevertheless, the situation in most of Indonesia still seems
to be much better than in Bangladesh (let alone Pakistan),
and the communities live together rather peacefully. But it
has taken tough rulers to uphold this relatively stable
pluralism.
The impact of Islamic doctrine on Muslim populations is
not uniform in intensity. Many Muslims ignore the Quranic
injunctions to hostility. Some non-Muslims don't need the
Quran for developing self-righteousness and intolerance.
But this doesn't prove that Islam doesn't make a difference.
Some people get drunk and yet drive their cars safely,
others don't drink but are nonetheless a danger on the road;
neither of these special cases can disprove the general
correlation between drunken driving and traffic accidents.
4.3 IMMIGRANTS AND MUSLIMS
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"But your criticism of Islam will contribute to the
increasing animosity in Europe against Muslim immigrants.
You play into the hand of xenophobic and racist
politicians."
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Of course I have nothing to do with racism and
xenophobia, and I have my life-story to prove it. Given the
democratic slump in Europe, I am convinced that a measured
and carefully monitored immigration is necessary. My
hometown is host to people from every country, and I have a
lot of foreign friends, mostly Indian and Chinese. So, I am
not at all against immigrants, and I have personally helped
some to integrate or to get naturalized as citizens of my
country. But my criticism of Islam stands: Islam is
intrinsically separatist and hostile to neighbour
communities.
The position of the "xenophobic and racist politicians"
in Europe is just the opposite. They are against
immigration, but most of them profess to have nothing
against Islam. They say that Islam is quite all right, as
long as it remains in Islamic countries. They want Muslims
out of Europe, not because they think islam is bad in
itself, but because they consider it so foreign to our
culture and value system that Muslim people cannot ever be
integrated in our society.
Moreover, the really racist elements among them are
mostly also anti-Jewish and consequently in sympathy with
the Arabs. The leader of the French anti-immigrant party
Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had pleaded against
French participation in the war against Saddam Hussain, and
has on the whole been cultivating good relations with the
Arab world. He thinks this is necessary in order to make a
civilized deal with the source countries of most French
immigrants, to make them take these immigrants back.
Finally, hard rightist had always felt more at home with
straightforward, regimented Islam than for instance with the
"haggling Jewish money-lenders" or the anarchic,
unfathomable polytheists in the colonies: in sub-Saharan
Africa, the colonial powers used to actively support the
spread of Islam.
Other "xenophobic and racist politicians" do speak out
against Islam, but they don't go to the root of the problem.
They like to point at some barbaric points of islam (public
lashings, amputation, purdah) merely to impress on the
public that the Muslim are a barbaric lot with whom it is
best not to co-exist. They have a very static view of
Islam, by assuming that it is somehow the unalterable
"native culture" of the Turkish and North-African
populations. In reality, those populations have been lured
or forced into Islam, and they may also grow out of it. It
is well worth repeating that a distinction must be made
between Muslims and Islam, between the doctrine and the
people who have been fed the doctrine. Some people in the
anti-immigrant lobby have attacked "the Muslims", but not
one among them has attacked Islam as a doctrine.
If we put a criticism of Islam in the context of the
modern world's need to develop ways of co-existence between
different communities, and specifically the situation of
Muslim immigrants in Europe, let us distinguish first
between a few commonly used terms and concepts.
Racism means the belief that there is a qualitative
inequality between human beings on the basis of their
respective race. This was present in a relatively mild form
in the paternalistic theory of the "white man's burden", the
duty of superior whites to be responsible guardians of the
inferior races, who are "half devil and half child" (both
expressions are Rudyard Kipling's). Racism was present in a
much more strident form in Nazism, which taught that there
were master races, inferior races, and also doomed races
which had to be exterminated. This hard racism was a
materialistic theory, which tried to reduce the perceived
moral and cultural differences between people to biological
factors. Thus, the Jews were not defined as a religious
community, but as a "race", and even converting to another
religion could not alter your genetic Jewishness. Such race
theories are quite marginal in the present European
political context. Most political parties which are called
"racist" by their opponents do not subscribe to a theory of
racial inequality (eventhough citizens who privately cherish
such racist convictions usually vote for them).
The present wave of anti-immigrant feelings in Europe
should more properly be called xenophobia. Xenophobia is
not racism, as it is not based on biological but on cultural
differences. It is often understood as "hatred against
outsiders", and in that case Islam itself is an intense case
of xenophobia. But in the European context, it is the
literal meaning that applies: "fear of outsiders". The
psychology that is catching on in ever wider circles in
Europe today, is that the immigrants are a threat to our
safety and prosperity, not because of their skin colour but
because of their cultural non-assimilation. Anti-immigrant
campaigners contend that cultural assimilation become
difficult once the immigrants are numerous enough to form
islands of foreign culture in our society. Such islands
would then constitute a threat to our social fabric. In the
case of Muslims, it is suspected that they not only have
little motivation to assimilate (as a consequence of their
large quantity), but harbour a positive intention not to
assimilate.
Muslims are not a race, and much less is Islam a race.
A criticism of Islam has nothing to do with anti-Arab
racism. Many Arabs are not Muslims. The Christians Arabs
are heavily persecuted (as Mgr. Teissier, bishop of Algiers,
recently came to testify in Leuven, something which he
significantly refrains from doing in writing), and whenever
they see no other option than to flee the Muslim world, I
think Europe has the duty to welcome these non-Muslim Arabs
without reservation (just like India should welcome all
Hindu refugees, just like Germany accepts all East-Europen
Germans, and just like Israel has welcomed the Jews of
Ethoipia and Russia). On the other hand, many fanatical
Muslims are not Arabs or Turks or Persians, but Europeans.
European converts to Islam like to tell interviewers that
"Islam is all about peace and brotherhood". What this means
in practice became clear when one of the most famous
converts, singer Cat Stevens alias Yusuf Islam, was asked
for his opinion about the Rushdie affair. He said: "If I
see Rushdie, I'll kill him." Fanaticism is not a racial
characteristic, but an ideological position fostered by
imbibing the Quran.
If criticism of Islam is racism, then what about
criticism of Christianity? I don't believe anyone is ready
to call Voltaire and other European freethinkers racists.
Voltaire criticized Christian doctrine and the power of the
Catholic Church, but no one has accused him of racism
against the Christian community. It so happens that the
same Voltarie was equally critical of Islam, which he
considered the fanatical religion par excellence. In
"Mahomet ou le fanatisme", a theatre play written in defence
of the value of religious tolerance, he uses Mohammed as
model case of relgious fanaticism. Again, no one has
accused entertained the idea, he would have had to
acknowledge that Voltaire's explicit admiration for other
exotic cultures, like India and especially China, made him
immune against any suspicions of "racism" or xenophobia.
The truth is that the cry of "racism" has become a
favourite way of orphaned Communists to recapture the
initiative and continue their old game of putting people
against the wall, for volleys of swearology if not bullets.
Thus, in my country there is an "anti-racist forum" called
Charta `91, in which we find back most Flemist Marxists.
The name is obviously modelled on Charta `77, the dissident
forum in Czechoslovakia against the Communist regime (which
forum included the playwright and later president Vaclav
Havel). The Charta `91 people have the effrontery to try
and capitalize on the moral prestige of Charta `77, while
many of them were personally supporters of the very regime
that used to sent Charta `77 people to jail. They are the
very people who used to cast aspersions on the dissidents,
who ridiculed anti-Communist voices in the West, and who led
movements of which we now officially know that they were
sponsored by Moscow (I remember shrugging off my father's
remarks about Moscow's involvement in the pro-disarmament
demonstration I ws going to; but he was right). For these
exposed Gulag collaborators, anti-racism is the only way to
remain on the offensive and to pre-empt a critical look into
their own record.
As a practised non-racist, I feel free to ignore the
insistent self-advertisement of organized "anti-racism".
The racist attacks on foreigners in Europe are a most
serious problem, but there is no need for "allying with
Stalin to fight Hitler" now: we have to get both out of the
way.
Secondly, "anti-racism" and "multiculturalism" (cfr. the
Indian creed of "composite culture") are an easy cover for
Islamic propagandists and their fellow-travellers to pre-
empt all criticism of Islam. They take heart from some
accomplished facts of confusion between racial and relgious
issues, such as the following. Recently, a British employer
wanted to hire workers but made it clear that he would not
employ Muslims, with reference to the plight of Salman
Rushdie, whose condemnation to a life underground has been
supported by most vocal Muslims in Britain. A pro-Muslim
organization filed a plaint charging him with racial
discrimination. The judge ruled that excluding Muslims is
not a direct act of racism, as Muslims are not a race; but
that it was nonetheless an indirect act of racism, as most
Muslims are effectively non-European. He thought that a
complete acquittal in this case would clear the way for
attempts at racial discrimination under the cover of
excluding the non-racial category of Muslims, so he imposed
a token penalty.
In many European countries racism is an offence
punishable by law, so I expect that the allegation of racism
will be tried in the near future as a way of prohibiting
criticism of Islam. At the level of public debate, there is
already strong pressure tending towads an informal
prohibition of Islam criticism. But it won't work.
Europe has built up a strong tradition of free speech
and freedom of publication, and Islamic attempts to tamper
with that freedom will only sharpen the awareness that no
concessions can be made to these new forms of fanaticism and
censorship. Moreover, the general public and many political
commentators and politicians are vaguely aware of the
intrinsic fanaticism of Islam. In the news, the word Islam
is more often than not mentioned in a context of terrorism,
so the pious claims that islam is tolerant and peaceful at
heart are regarded with healthy skepticism.
What really gives Islam an incurably bad name, is its
treatment of women. No amount of apologetics can convince
modern people that it is right to spend a raped woman to jail
if she cannot bring the four male witnesses which the
shariat requires, and to sentence her, after a long time in
custody, to public flogging for committing adultery or for
falsely accusing a good Muslim of rape. The said sentence
only comes as a matter of clemency, and sometimes the strict
penalty is given: stoning to death. Such things happen in
Pakistan (where 60% of the women brought to trial for sex
offences are cases of "unproven" plaints of rape, according
to a Pakistani lawyer quoted in The Economist) and other
Islamic states, and the world knows it. We have seen on
television how women in Algeria demonstrated against the
attempts to transform the country into an islamic republic,
and how they were attacked by fundamentalist counter-
demonstrators. No one is fooled if some Islamic apologist
explains how Islam has meant a liberation of women. The
women's movement will contribuite a lot to Islam's undoing.
Most non-specialist observers are broadly aware of the
retrograde and barbaric charcter of Islam. Nonetheless,
governments waver when they are confronted with Islamic
threats and blackmail. Margaret Thatcher has stood by
Salman Rushdie, in spite of the latter's invective against
her (both before and after the fatwa). But John Major
prohibited a manifestation to "celebrate" Salman Rushdie's
1,000th day in hiding, in order not to disturb the
negotiations over hostages in Lebanon. The organizers of
the Books Fair in Frunkfurt had invited the Iranian state
publishing-house to participate, just when the Japanese
Rushdie translator had been murdered, and it was only after
strong protest from the German Writers Association that the
invitation was withdrawn.
The French government accepted a compromise on the issue
of girls wearing a chador in school, which Muslims claimed
as a victory (according to Kalim Siddiqui, speaking at the
6th European Muslim Conference in Genk, April 1992, a veiled
woman "carries the flag of Islam: she makes a statement that
European civilization is unacceptable to us, that it is a
disease, a pestilence on mankind"). In November 1991, it
sacked Jean-Claude Barreau, a top civil servant who had
writen that Islam has been a destructive and regressive
religion. Muslims protested that his book contained
"simplistic opinions" about Islam, and obtained that the
government destanced itself from his views by sacking him.
It is unthinkable that a French government would sack a
civil servant for writing against Christianity, but Islam
has already wrested the privilege of immunity from
criticism. Incidentally, the French government's behaviour
disproves the Indian belief that Muslim appeasement is a
consequence of the desire to win over the "Muslim vote
bank": few Muslims in France were voters, and the socialist
government's hand was not forced by vote politics, but by a
mentality.
In an interview with the leading French newspaper Le
Figaro, Jean-Claude Barreau explains: "This shows to what
extent that which I had felt in advance was true: Islam is a
taboo which you cannot defy unpunishedly. Today, there is
something very disturbing for the foundations of our
Republic, viz. for secularism... It is possible for a top
civil servant to doubt Christ's divinity without creating a
ripple, but it is impossible for him to speak of Prophet
Mohammed... [I have been hit by] not a law, but a collective
and almost unanymously observed taboo. This taboo is not
typical for the Left... I have found out that there is of
course a Leftist pro-Islamism linked with the post-colonial
complex, but also a Rightist pro-Islamism... There has been
strong pressure from Islamic embassies. That this pressure
exists, shows to what extent certain Islamic circles are
incapable of listening to criticism. But there are
dissidents in the Islamic world whom we are not at all
helping with our attitude."
To the question whether democracy was lacking in
aggressiveness, he replied: "Rather, it lacks courage... My
book, it is nothing but the right of intellectual
intervention. But because it concerns Islam, it is deemed
insupportable. There are double standards at work." He
compares with similar topics: "This book is not more
scandalous than those which I have published about
Christianity, about Israel, or about the art of government.
I reaslized I was touching on a taboo, but I didn't know it
was that strong."
Muslims are already a considerable pressure group, but
what really weakens the position of European governments
before Islamic arrogance is the pro-Islamic rhetoric of a
small but noisy section of media people and leftist
political circles. Some of these fellow-travellers of Islam
are well-intending but inconsistent softies: they have not
renounced their young days' habit of mocking Christian
obscurantist customs and irrational beliefs, and yet they
are defending (or asking us to "understand") similar things
in Islam. Some are husbands of Muslim women whose parents,
following Muslim law, insisted on their son-in-law's
conversion: like the ancestors of many Muslim fanatics, they
think this conversion is a superficial thing without any
consequences, but already they feel compelled to defend
Islamic causes. Others are Marxists who have shifted their
focus from anti-Fascist through anti-racist and pro-
immigrant, to pro-Muslim.
The influence of these fellow-travellers will probably
be blown away soon. Their grip on the public arena is weak
compared to that of india's secularists, and is totally
dependent on the public's modest sense of incompetence
regarding Islam and on its concomitant care not to make rash
and unfair judgements. As soon as the facts concerning
Islam become more well-known, not as a general feeling
but as an authoritative opinion equipped with details of
Islamic scripture and history, the game of islam's public relations
offensive will be over. But until then, this vocal section
makes it difficual to speak out freely about the nature of
Islam, and it puts psychological pressure on governments and
police forces, which prevents an effective policy against
Islamic arrogance. Today, there are not many intellectuals
in Europe who say the truth about Islamic fanaticism, partly
out of ignorance, partly for fear of negative press
coverage. Those who do, like John Laffin (The Dagger of
Islam), are given little publicity, or denounced as
prejudiced alarmists.
In 1990, a Pakistani living in Holland published a book,
De Ondergang van Nederland ("The Downfall of the
Netherlands"), about the mistaken Muslim policy of his host
country. he stated that Holland was spending its laudable
tolerance on the wrong people: it gives all the facilities
to a growing Islamic establishment in its immigrant
communities. After demonstrating the intolerant behaviour
of Muslims worldwide, he predicts that "the naive and
mindless Dutch" are feeding a poisonous baby which in a few
decades will devour them and replace their tolerant and
pluralist society with an Islamic republic. Unfortunately,
he too treats "the Muslims" as a static entity, and he
idealizes the Europeans instead of seeing that our level of
tolerance is the result of a historical process which the
Muslims can and should also go through (discarding their
Muslim-ness on the way, like Europe largely discarded
Christianity). Because he took his own assessment of Islam
seriously, and with the Rushdie affair still very much in the
air, he did not want to make his name known, so he wrote
under the pseudonym Mohammed Rasool.
The reaction of the press was most interesting. The
leftist press had nothing but scorn for his message, and
concentrated on the more sensational effort of finding out
the writer's identity. At first they were very sure that it
had to be some fascist racist Dutchman trying to sound more
convincing by adopting an exotic pseudonym. But Mohammed
Rasool gave interviews, wearing a mask that showed enough of
his face to prove that he was not a native European.
Interviewers tried to snatch his foreigners' passport to
find out his name, but he was faster. Finally, after a lot
of detective work, they did find out his real name, and made
it public. If ever Mohammed Rasool gets killed, these
mindless leftist are to blame.
To be sure, he has not been killed yet. He has not
criticized the Prophet himself, and the fair name of
Mohammed is what Muslims are most particular about.
Criticizing the Muslim community or the doctrine of Islam is
less dramatic (Rushdie had not criticized Islam, but had
mocked the Prophet). As the Persian proverb says: you can
make jokes about God, but be careful with Mohammed.
Secondly, the Muslim communities in continental Europe keep
a low profile, in conformity with their Saudi sponsors'
policy of penetrating Europe gently (as opposed to the
Iranian approach). Finally, this Mohammed Rasool was an
unknown fellow in a small language-area, not a prize-winning
English writer. So there was no fatwa to kill this Dutch-
Pakistani warner against the Islamic threat.
But does that prove the opinion expressed by the more
sympathetic right-wing commentators, that Rasool may have a
point but that he has exaggerated the danger of Islam in
Holland? At the moment, Holland has one of the lowest
percentages of Muslims in the European Community, and they
are not making much trouble (except that they took to the
streets to demand Rushdie's death). But that may change
fast: their birth rate is very high, and a continued
inpouring from North Africa is just about inevitable. As
their numbers go up, the Muslims' attitude may change too.
A keen awareness of power equations may be at work: when they
are small and weak,
they are wise enough not to be too troublesome, but when
they become strong, their demands go on increasing; that at
any rate is the Indian experience. Policy-makers should
consider more than only the most optimistic prognosis.
It is mathematically certain that Islam will ultimately
disappear. An artificial belief system imposed by force can
only survive by means of a continued indoctrination. Relax
that, and Islam will wither away fast. With the modern
media and the unprecedented pace of progress, cultural
circumstances can emerge (not by a conspiracy, but by the
laws of the market and similar natural developments) that
will make Islam look like a strange antiquity even to those
brought up as Muslims. So, Islam will certainly go. But
the question is what it can still do in the meantime.
In the Soviet Union, several jihads are on the cards.
Kazakhstan may soon become an Islamic republic, and it has
an advanced nuclear arsenal. The president (chosen in an
election from which Russians were excluded) of the Muslim
Chechen-Ingoosh republic has declared that in order to
obtain independence, his people will use terrorist attacks
against Russian targets including nuclear facilities. He
has been arming several Muslim separatisms in the northern
Caucasus and effectively supporting the separatist violence
in Abkhasia. Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are building their
nuclear strike capability. More than ever, Pakistan will be
the frontline of an impressive block of Islamic states with
nuclear teeth. India will no doubt be the prime target,
Russia will definitely suffer, but Europe too may be put in
trouble by an Islamic upsurge from the inside. We simply
cannot perdict what effect an expected international
conflict in the name of Islam will have on a European Muslim
community that will have become much more numerous and well-
organized.
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