MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 6 December
2008
What's Wrong With
Islam?
Religion
is the prime mover behind much of American politics, and the cause of lots of
the mayhem around the world. It
needs more discussion and less political correctness.
Jared
Diamond, in his epic study "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed," shows that the deaths of past societies stemmed from their
inability to change their cultural beliefs even when those beliefs were
obviously leading them to oblivion.
Today, fundamentalist religion, primarily Christian, Jewish, and
Islamic, are leading us down that same doomsday path. Recently there's been a spate of serious discussion of this
problem by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher
Hitchins, and religious critiques have shown up in films such as Bill Maher's
satirical "Religulous."
We need to keep this discussion going.
Most
religions are full of irrational nonsense, but Islamic nonsense is especially
deadly. Once again, we were
treated ten days ago to the spectacle of a Muslim suicide attack that killed
178 in Mumbai--India's New York City.
The attack was apparently carried out by the Pakistan-based
Lashkar-e-Taiba ("the army of the righteous") militant Muslim group,
and was probably related to the Indian-Pakistani struggle over Kashmir. The group's main objective is to
Islamicise South Asia. We all need
to inquire into the motivations of these people who regard it as their duty to
murder civilians in the name of proselytizing for their supposed God. We need to ask, for example, why nearly
every recent terrorist attack comes from Muslims, far fewer come from
Christians and Jews, and fewer still come from other religious sects.
What
is it that causes a young man of respectable means (contrary to common belief,
most suicide bombers are not poor) to pack his clothing with explosives and
shards of metal and decimate himself along with scores of innocent bystanders,
and his mother to be promptly congratulated by hundreds of her
townspeople? It's a scene that's
become part of the background noise of our time: Ho-hum, another suicide bombing in some distant land. But as we learned on September 11, the
land is not always so distant.
You
needn't seek far to find the cause of the young man's suicide. Listen to the Prophet Muhammed, from
the "hadith" (the literature of Muhammed's words): "A single endeavor of fighting in
Allah's Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and
whatever is in it."
"Paradise is in the shadow of swords." Or listen to the Koran: "God's curse be upon the infidels." "God is the enemy of the
unbelievers." "We shall
let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate." "Slay them wherever you find
them. Drive them out of the places
from which they drove you.
Idolatry is worse than carnage." And so forth.
Islamic
"holy" books are not the only place you'll find this kind of
bloodthirsty babble; there's plenty of it in Christianity and Judaism, for
example in the story of Abraham and Isaac. But the Koran is filled from end to end with this
stuff. On almost every page, this
book exhorts its readers to despise non-believers, and prepares the ground for
religious conflict. Fundamentalist
(those who believe in the literal truth of their traditional books) Muslims,
being exposed to this violent text every day, are not likely to remain peaceful
for long. Sam Harris, in his
book "The End of Faith," puts it this way: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have
devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."
The
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press organized a survey titled
"What the World Thinks in 2002" in which over 38,000 people around
the world were questioned. One
question, posed only to Muslims, asked whether suicide bombings against
civilian targets are justified to defend Islam, or if on the other hand they
are never justified. Most of you
would, I hope, answer "they are never justified." But not so for Muslims in Lebanon,
Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Jordan, Bangladesh, Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Indonesia,
Uganda, and Pakistan, where majorities or strong minorities of between 82 and
38 percent answered that such bombings are sometimes justified. Even in supposedly moderate Turkey, 20
percent vowed that the intentional mass murder of random civilians was
justified "to defend Islam."
And this poll didn't even include the more devout Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran,
Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian territories.
Most
despised of all by devout Muslims is the heretic. On this score, there seem to be few moderate--in other words
non-fundamentalist--Muslims anywhere on the planet. Where, for instance, were the moderate Muslims when the
Ayatollah Khomeini condemned author Salman Rushdie to death for his supposedly
irreverent portrayal of Muhammed?
Why didn't millions of Muslims publicly denounce this decree? Instead, the book sparked violence
around the world, bookstores were bombed, Muslim communities in Western nations
held book burnings, several people associated with the book were attacked,
seriously injured, and even killed, and many more died in riots in Third World
countries.
The
answer can be found in the Koran.
Muslims were simply following the literal word of their sacred script.
This
fundamentalist insanity is exactly what Jared Diamond is talking about in his
conclusion that cultures cause their own downfall by their inability to change
those beliefs that are obviously leading them to oblivion.