If you had any doubt that the New York Times is going the way of Authoritarian Leftism, which includes whitewashing the nasty bits of Islam, have a look at the two articles that appeared this week—in the same op-ed section.
The first is by Haroon Moghul (click on screenshot below), described as “a fellow in Jewish-Muslim relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and the author of ‘How to Be a Muslim: An American Story’.”
Moghul recounts a time in his youth when he was on the verge of atheism, since he couldn’t personally connect with his faith. Then he took a trip to Medina with his brother, and there he had an epiphany that brought him back to Islam:
In Medina I realized I actually believed all the stories about him. That he buried the least loved of his fellow Arabs with his own hands. That he put two of his fingers together and promised that he and the orphan would be that close in the life to come. That he so loved the vulnerable that God loved him in turn.
Sitting facing his tomb, pilgrims pressing against me on every side, I honest to God missed him. I still feel that way today, as absurd as it might sound. He is a living presence in my life.
This is what William James described as the sort of spiritual experience that turns many people religious. But of course such experiences don’t mean that what you accept is true. If Moghul really accepts “all the stories about Muhammad”, then he must surely accept that Allah, through the angel Gabriel, dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad, that Muhammad flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and back on Buraq the Flying Horse, and so on.
But of course once you develop a personal relationship with Muhammad, you must whitewash all of the bad things he did. In fact, Moghul claims that Muhammad argues do any bad things: that all the killings in which he engaged were merely in defense of his nascent and beleaguered faith:
He was an outsider like me. Being an orphan from age 6 in a very patrilineal, very patriarchal and very tribal society must have been a social death sentence. Muhammad could have reacted by seething with resentment and lashing out at the world. He could have turned on himself. Instead he became a paragon of compassion.
When he first proclaimed prophecy, even his own uncle laughed at him, but he never laughed back. His followers were reviled, beaten and killed. He didn’t strike back. Rather he ran from one town to another, like Hagar at Paran, desperate to find his people refuge. Twelve years into his religious mission, in the year 622, he was forced to flee his native Mecca and arrived a refugee in Medina — but the people who chased him there didn’t leave him be. Not long after finding safe harbor, he was forced to take up arms, time and again, to defend his faith, his community, and himself.
But even as he did, he remained dedicated to building a society that would provide the inclusion he (and his followers) had been deprived of.
Some inclusion! Whatever you think of Muhammad, he certainly was not a paragon of compassion. According to the hadith, and throughout the Qur’an, there is a call for the murder of infidels and apostates, something that Muhammad engaged in repeatedly, murdering innocent people who didn’t directly attack Islam. He was particularly murderous towards the Jews, and loved to raid caravans, which of course involved indiscriminate killing. If Muhammad accepted everything that Gabriel dictated to him, then he was an unkind and vicious man. Just read the Qur’an. Here’s one bit from it:
Surah 9:29: Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.
Such verses occur repeatedly throughout the Qur’an. Muhammad’s goal was to spread his religion, and if that involved killing “infidels,” so be it.
But Moghul sees it differently:
When terrorists struck New York and Washington in 2001 I was horrified, scared and bewildered. The Muhammad I revered bore no resemblance to the Muhammad they claimed. In their view, Muhammad was a conqueror first, a politician and a general second, and a man of faith last, and least.
This is a gross misunderstanding of his life, and an inversion of the message he actually preached. When he had nowhere else to turn, when he couldn’t find anyone to protect his community, then — and only then — did he take up arms to defend his faith.
All I can say here is that “many scholars disagree.” The fact is that, like the Bible, the Qur’an and hadith contain passages extolling both hatred and murder on one hand, and tolerance and compassion on the other. Moghul cherry-picks the “good” bits, and twists the bad ones so they come out as a mere defense of a beleaguered religion.
Moghul goes on, spreading the whitewash thickly with his Trowel of Peace:
On the occasion of his birthday, we Americans would do well to study Muhammad’s life: He preached and attempted a politics of tolerance, which is not what people of faith are associated with today. Muslims could stand for re-examining his life, too. Muhammad is called a “rahmah,” a mercy. He is often addressed as “habib Allah,” the beloved of God. If these are not words our communities are associated with, we should take a long look in the mirror and wonder why.
But let us remember, too, that Muhammad approved of slavery and that his dictates were certainly not ‘inclusive’ of women, whom he saw as lesser beings who must obey their husbands. He married a 6-year-old girl and then raped her three years later. That has led to Islam’s widespread practice of older men taking child brides. He approved of men being able to have sex with female slaves and captives, even if they were married. And of course the inequality of women, derived from both the Qur’an and the hadith, has been enshrined in sharia law. Here’s some of the Qur’an’s misogyny:
Surah 4:34: Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance—[first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally] strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever exalted and grand.
Surah 4:12 And for you is half of what your wives leave if they have no child. But if they have a child, for you is one fourth of what they leave, after any bequest they [may have] made or debt. And for the wives is one fourth if you leave no child. But if you leave a child, then for them is an eighth of what you leave, after any bequest you [may have] made or debt. And if a man or woman leaves neither ascendants nor descendants but has a brother or a sister, then for each one of them is a sixth. But if they are more than two, they share a third, after any bequest which was made or debt, as long as there is no detriment [caused]. [This is] an ordinance from Allah, and Allah is Knowing and Forbearing.
I wonder how Moghul reacts to stuff like that.
Now in ignoring the bad stuff about Muhammad, Moghul is not behaving much differently from, say, Jews who accept the Old Testament but ignore the bad stuff (like killing your kids if they curse you, as well as those who pick up sticks on the Sabbath). But the Islam-ignorant reader may be forgiven for thinking that, as a Muslim (and like the unctuous Reza Aslan), Moghul’s take on Muhammad is accurate. Further, Moghul is engaged in “building bridges between Jewish and Muslim communities,” an admirable endeavor.” But there wouldn’t be as much of a need to build bridges if a hatred of Jews wasn’t built into Islam. And that’s partly the fault of Moghul’s hero—Muhammad.
But the second piece, by Mustafa Akyol is worse, for it’s a prime example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, in which, by definition, Muslisms who kill or persecute others for blasphemy aren’t practicing “real Islam”. (Click on the screenshot below to see the Big Whitewash). Akyol’s piece can also be used to excuse Islam of bearing any responsibility for the perfidies of ISIS or of those who, like the Charlie Hebdo murderers, strike down “blasphemers” in the name of Allah.
Although extremist Muslims throughout the world kill or try to kill blasphemers, apostates, and atheists (Asia Bibi, Theo van Gogh, and Avjit Roy are three examples, not to mention the Charlie Hebdo staff), Akyol dismisses this as a perversion of “true Islam” because the Qur’an doesn’t contain any verses that explicitly call for the murder of blasphemers. After recounting some of the instances of trying to kill blasphemers, including the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Akyol says this:
Muslims who support such violent or oppressive responses to blasphemy are missing two important points. One is that it is them, not the blasphemers, who are defaming Islam, by presenting it as an immature tradition that has little room for civilized discourse. The second point is that their zealotry is not as religiously grounded as they think.
To see this, one must look at the Quran — the most fundamental and only undisputed source of Islam. Most notably, throughout all of its 6,236 verses, it never tells Muslims to silence blasphemy with force. It tells them only to respond with dignity.
So if Akyol is right, and I will take his word that the Qur’an doesn’t tell Muslims to kill blasphemers, why are all the countries in the world that make blasphemy a capital crime Muslim-majority nations? Why the violence and murders after the publication of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, or the baying for the blood of Asia Bibi in Pakistan? How did Islam get so perverted?
Well, first of all, although the Qur’an doesn’t call for the murder of blasphemers, it does call for the murder of infidels. It doesn’t take more than a few neurons to make a connection between those who reject Islam and those who slander it or question the veracity of Muhammad. Further, apostates, simply by virtue of leaving the faith, can be and have been accused of blasphemy.
More important, “true Islam” comes not just from the Qur’an (and who but Muslims believe that was dictated by an angel?), but from the hadith, the sayings and doings of Muhammad as reported, some time after his death, by his followers. You can’t say the Qur’an represents “true” Islam while rejecting the hadith as fables, since the credibility of both is about the same. And some of the hadith are more explicit in urging the execution of blasphemers. Over the years, various schools of Islam have interpreted the hadith as calling for the execution of blasphemers (some schools give non-Muslim blasphemers a chance to live if they convert to Islam). To see a long discussion of these issues, read the Wikipedia article on “Islam and blasphemy.” The punishments for blasphemy are certainly religiously grounded.
In the end, arguing about what version of Islam is “true” is a fool’s errand, just like arguing about which version of Christianity is “true”. Southern Baptists will tell you that “true” Christianity denies evolution and makes abortion murder, while Methodists will take the opposite stand. But both will justify their arguments using Scripture. Scriptures, including the Qur’an and the hadith, are notoriously contradictory and slippery, and you can pretty much use any interpretation of Islam (or Christianity) as the “true” version.
Now Akyol (identified as “a senior fellow on Islam and modernity at the Cato Institute and the author, most recently, of ‘The Islamic Jesus'”), is surely acting from goodwill. He doesn’t want people to be killed and persecuted for blasphemy, and makes that clear in the last three paragraphs of his piece:
At the same time, Muslim opinion leaders should help their societies understand that these laws serve not the honor of Islam, but much more mundane interests — for example, persecuting non-Muslim minorities out of greed or jealousy, or silencing Muslims themselves who criticize and challenge the powers that be.
And all Muslims of good faith should stand up more forcefully for people like Asia Bibi, who is falsely accused of blasphemy. Also, they should tolerate those who really do blaspheme and at most “not sit with them,” as the Quran counsels.
They should walk away, saying, “Peace.”
But I doubt that hard-line Islamists are going to have a V-8 moment after reading Akyol, striking themselves on the forehead and crying, “Oy!* How could I have misinterpreted Islam so wrongly for so long?” No way that’s going to happen. The way to get this whole mess to stop is to remove religion from the world. After all, there can be no blasphemy if there be no gods to insult. That will be a difficult task, although secularism is already replacing Christianity in much of the West, but it’s a task no more difficult than persuading Muslims that they believe in the “wrong” Islam.
There is no “true” Islam, any more than there’s a “true” Christianity. There are just different branches of Islam, many of which happen to think that killing blasphemers is okay. And all of that comes from religious traditions that goes back to the Qur’an and the hadith. The best path to permanently ending blasphemy as a crime involves ending religion as a superstitious belief—and embracing secular morality. For one thing is certain: no rational secular morality would urge the killing of people for religious beliefs—or any ideology or superstition.
Finally, ask yourself this: why on earth did the New York Times publish both of these articles in the same op-ed section, despite the fact that they’re both lame and the second actually mendacious and misguided?
You know why: the Times is trying to show that Islam isn’t any worse than any other faith, and that those who oppose it are misguided. I’ve been pointing at this shift in Leftist media this for a long time, but this shows it starkly: mainstream Leftists newspapers and magazines are getting infected with the Authoritarian strain of Leftism as college kids move into journalism.
The Times’ editor, A. G. Sulzberger, is only 38, and my view (for which I have very little evidence) is that he’s dictating that his paper become a Victimhood Paper to go along with the collegiate strain of “victimhood culture.” The bad side effect of this is that papers like the Times, or magazines like The New Yorker, have become blind to the dangers of religions like Islam, and have become wedded to a form of Leftism that, by overlooking religiously-based oppression and misogyny, is anti-progressive.
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*Of course, no true Muslim would say “Oy!”.
Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola):
Western Kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis):
