I slam Islam — often. But why? It is not because I hate the color of most Muslims’ skins; I do not hate Buddhism or Hinduism or Zoroastrianism or Yazidist “devil worship,” despite the darker skins of most of these religions’ proponents. It is the color, you might say, of the ideas in the religion. Those notions strike me as morally dark and socially dangerous and super-excessively narrow- and bloody-minded, the ultimate in-group/out-group malignancy.
While individual Muslims may be fine people, Islam itself is not a respectable ideology. And, really, my attitude towards any Muslim is: you have a moral obligation to throw off your nasty religion. But what do we say of Muslims in general, or do about the threat that many, many in their midst present? Well, here it gets tricky.
So, to make my main point, I post, once again, from F. Marion Crawford’s 1887 novel Paul Patoff, regarding the nature of Islam as perceived by two Russian brothers watching group prayer in the Hagia Sofia:
Alexander Patoff stood by his brother’s side, watching the ceremony with intense interest. He hated the Turks and despised their faith, but what he now saw appealed to the Orientalism of his nature. Himself capable of the most distant extremes of feeling, sensitive, passionate, and accustomed to delight in strong impressions, he could not fail to be moved by the profound solemnity of the scene and by the indescribable wildness of the Imam’s chant. Paul, too, was silent, and, though far less able to feel such emotions than his elder brother, the sight of such unanimous and heart-felt devotion called up strange trains of thought in his mind, and forced him to speculate upon the qualities and the character which still survived in these hereditary enemies of his nation. It was not possible, he said to himself, that such men could ever be really conquered. They might be driven from the capital of the East by overwhelming force, but they would soon rally in greater numbers on the Asian shore. They might be crushed for a moment, but they could never be kept under, nor really dominated. Their religion might be oppressed and condemned by the oppressor, but it was of the sort to gain new strength at every fresh persecution. To slay such men was to sow dragon’s teeth and to reap a harvest of still more furious fanatics, who, in their turn being destroyed, would multiply as the heads of the Hydra beneath the blows of Heracles. The even rise and fall of those long lines of stalwart Mussulmans seemed like the irrepressible tide of an ocean, which if restrained, would soon break every barrier raised to obstruct it. Paul sickened at the thought that these men were bowing themselves upon the pavement from which their forefathers had washed the dust of Christian feet in the blood of twenty thousand Christians, and the sullen longing for vengeance rankled in his heart. At that moment he wished he were a soldier, like his brother; he wished he could feel a soldier’s pride in the strong fellowship of the ranks, and a soldier’s hope of retaliation. He almost shuddered when he reflected that he and his brother stood alone, two hated Russians, with that mighty, rhythmically surging mass of enemies below. The bravest man might feel his nerves a little shaken in such a place, at such an hour.
My point is: if an American author of the 19th century could see the nature of Islam and its adherents, and prophesy the dire consequences of interfering in their lands and religion, why have our leaders been unable to accept this not-incomprehensible wisdom?
Are they morons, as we often said of George W. Bush? Are they secret communists, as some say Obama was, hoping to undermine the West? Or are they fools, like most people say Trump is, clueless about the ways of the world?
Whether moronism, subversion, or folly — or some strange hubris — American foreign policy in the Mid-East has exacerbated tendencies in the affected populations of Muslims, and we now find ourselves facing a growing number of Hydra heads, bent on mass murder at the very least.
Why would some Muslims want this? Well, there is no mystery. It is not as if we lack testimony from the jihadists themselves. Repeatedly, Muslim radicals have offered rationales for their actions. Excuses, at the very least. Courtesy of the British rag Mirror, there is even, now, a handy low-brow listicle, “ISIS reveal 6 reasons why they despise Westerners as terrorist’s sister claims he wanted revenge for US airstrikes in Syria.” Here is my synopsis of those points:
1. The West is predominantly non-Muslim; we are “disbelievers.”
2. The West is liberal-tolerant. The same principles that suggest to us that we not discriminate against Muslims migrating to our countries is the reason ardent jihadists hate us!
3. The West has a few atheists — and doesn’t persecute them!
4. For our “crimes against Islam,” unspecified in this accounting, but one would think these [alleged] crimes are somehow distinct from the reasons above and below.
5. For our governments’ “crimes against Muslims,” including drone strikes, bombs, embargoes, etc.
6. For “invading their lands.” This is obviously something different from #5, above. This is surely an idea of territorial sanctity, an idea that conservatives might understand instinctively, but of which (I suspect) progressives possess no clue.
Now, of those six reasons, the fifth is the one we can do the most about. Western nations do not need to attempt to settle every violent dispute in the Mid-East. Indeed, I find this fifth reason utterly compelling. Were America bombed and high-hatted by Muslims the way Americans high-hat and bomb Muslim populations abroad, I know good and well there would be plenty of bloodlust acted upon from here to overseas. I know my fellow Americans. They would seek revenge, and would keep a tally, demanding overkill, not mere tit for tat.
Reasons 1 and 3 are very similar, as are 4, 5 and 6. This indicates, I suspect, the general tenor of the complaints. And certainly the first three reasons are all integral to Islam in a fundamental way. The religion is not known for its tolerance of differing opinions. The Quran itself, in its later, Medina-based portions, is quite clear: the infidels must be killed, enslaved, or at least treated as second- or third-class citizens. Dhimmitude. Slavery. Mass murder. These three are characteristic of Islam-based societies. Look to the long, almost genocidal history of Islam in India, or the recent descent of Lebanon into chaos. Rising European jihadist terrorism does not seem so inexplicable, does it?
But, in the West, it is common for good, peaceful folks to pontificate about how Islam is “just like other religions,” or is “really” a “religion of peace,” or “Christians commit terrorism too.” That latter is especially nincompoopish, as this video argues successfully:
What I’ve been trying to argue since at least 9/12/2001 is this: with Islam such a dangerous memeplex, it is sheer witlessness and folly to stir the hornets’ nest by trying to rule people who have commitments to that meme system. They will resent it. And retaliate. And, grounded upon their own sacred texts, will seek to subvert, conquer, destroy.
Islam spread, initially, by the sword. The Messenger, Mr. M. himself, is said to have died not long after this admonishment: “Muslims should fight all men until they say, ‘there is no god but God.’”*
That is quite a challenge for accepting Western liberalism. Perhaps it will prove to be a bigger challenge than Communism has been so far. We will see.
But first, admit the truth. Do not meddle in their internecine affairs if you can at all avoid it. And perhaps cordon off the Islamic peoples. Not for idiotic market-protectionist reasons, but for reasons of our own survival, to protect our way of life. For Islam is not a loving religion, aiming for peace. It demands conquest. And the more Muslims that congregate in an area, the more pressured and emboldened they become to adopt the entelechy at the heart of Islam: “confident submission.” To Allah. To “God.” And to their interpretation of what this Deity supposedly demands.
twv
* As quoted in Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1991), p. 19.
Wirkman Comment 
Is your objection to Islam in particular or to religion more generally? I find it hard to think of any ways in which historical Islam was substantially worse than historical Christianity.
So far as toleration is concerned, most Islamic societies permitted Christians and Jews to live in their society with no attempt at forced conversion. Compare that to the situation in Spain after the reconquista. The Ottoman Empire, under the millet system, permitted non-Muslim ethnicities to function under their own legal rules–subject, of course, to the superior authority of the Sultan. Under Islamic law, Christians and Jews had to pay a special tax but did not have to pay the Koranic tax obligatory on Muslims–which was larger would depend on the individual, since the former was a fixed amount, the latter a function of wealth and income.
Islam had some features that should appeal to libertarians. Sunni Islam recognized four different schools of law, often each with its own courts, giving at least some degree of choice of law and legal competition. And while the Koranic tax could be given to the ruler for him to distribute, the taxpayer had the option of distributing it himself among the specified categories of recipients or paying a private middleman to distribute it for him. Law itself was in theory, although not always in practice, independent of the state, determined by legal scholars on the basis of religious sources.
In practice, whether Muslim or Christian societies were freer almost certainly varied from time to time and place to place, but I don’t see any pattern that would justify the idea that Islam itself is an unusually wicked or oppressive belief system. The contrary impression seems mostly due to the fact that we are contrasting people who seriously believe in Islam, as many in the past believed in Christianity, to moderns with a much more watered down version of their religion.
My real concern is with what we often call tribalism, the propensity of humans to get nasty when solidifying in-group alliances by encouraging out-group hate. This basic element of human nature yields strange tensions in our value systems, what Herbert Spencer (Inductions of Ethics) identified as the “ethics of amity” and the “ethics enmity.” All religions succeed by increasing in-group solidarity. But how they treat out-groups and individuals is of special concern to me. (The solution to this problem is at the heart of what classical liberalism was all about.)
With Islam, it worries me greatly. The explicit militancy in the Quran can be cited chapter and verse. My readings of the Quran leave me appalled at its hideous nature. It is an ungainly book filled with ugly, immoral commandments — as well as a lot of hooey.
People do what they do according to the incentives and disincentives of “their situation.” But those situations are best seen not in a reductionist way, but as live influencers from a multitude of sources. Network theory helps, as does some of the recent work in social psychology. It is apparent that Muslims tend to feel some pressure to behave in ways specified in the late-date portions of the Quran (the Medina Islam sections) as opposed to the nicer, Quran-itself deprecated earlier portions (Mecca Islam). But how many evil influences are counter-balanced with better influences depends on many things. I grant all this. Unfortunately, at core some horrifying elements are always there, always tempting, prompting.
You gave some examples of tolerant Islamic societies. But other examples also abound: when Muslims encounter non-Muslim peoples, and their ranks begin to grow, their initial — and sometimes quite persistent — reaction is extreme violence. India and Lebanon are two examples. In India, millions have died in these conflicts. The takeover of Lebanon by Muslims in the 1970s destroyed a civilized country, making it a hellhole. Modern Turkey begins with a genocide, and modern Muslims still won’t fess up to it.
But, I know: Christians had their religious wars, too. And suppressed heretics, persecuted Jews. But my reading of the basic texts of these various religions indicates that Christians have scant scriptural impetus for genocide and forced conversion, while Muslims have a lot of scriptural commands for same. (The anti-semitism in the Gospel of John is a special and weird case, I know.) The Christian conversion of Africa was indeed sometimes quite violent, as the story of Hypatia shows. But the later Muslim conversion of Christian Africa was a lot more violent, and the taxing policies and general approach to “Dhimmies” gave a long-term set of incentives to convert ever-more of the conquered to Islam.
To your point, the wonder is how violent Christians were in contrast to their basic religious injunctions, and how peaceful Muslims have been, based on their very different injunctions. (And Muslims have been quite bad.) My point is not that Muslims are evil, but that the Quran is, and much of Sharia law is (all the brutal Old World crap, against women, gays, loaning at interest). I identify the core memes of the later-in-M’s career injunctions, and am worried.
The dangerous memes at the core of the Quran and the religion as a whole are many. Consider just one: the idea of an afterlife can have anti-life consequences. All religions have this, and, as you guessed, I am opposed to these ideas, not merely because I believe them to be unsupportable, but because I see them as dangerous, uncivilizing. But contrast the paradigmatic way the afterlife idea plays out between Christians and Muslims: in Christianity, believers allowed themselves to be martyred; in Islam, believers are enjoined to die in the cause of fighting for the religion. This latter idea leads directly (if not unproblematically, from a religious point of view) to modern terrorism.
We are not in ancient times, of course. Christianity has been civilized. The Reformation, Renaissance, and especially the post-religious warfare Enlightenment “corrupted” Christianity with civilizing ideas, chiefly of freedom of religion, along with freedom of speech and association.
Islam has not undergone this process, a point made repeatedly by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And its recent struggle with the West has inspired a mass, trans-Islamic retreat to a variety of fundamentalisms that deliberately point back to basic Medina-Islam concepts and injunctions, solidifying the worst elements of old tribal honor cultures.
Honor culture fascinates me. The Iliad, its remnants in the Hebrew Bible, the accounts in cultural anthropology — all very interesting. Honor may have been the first institution that allowed our species to break out of the primordial hunter-gatherer niche. But money and ethical culture are better developments, and honor systems are now atavistic. And Islam was tied with these in the beginning, far stronger than Christianity was, and modern Muslim cultures are still bound with these old cultural norms and habits of thought and practice. This is where the real clash of civilizations now is.
But I counsel caution. My piece, above, was about caution. That was the point I was trying to reiterate. Be careful with old ideas that are poisonous to civilization. And Islam has many, many of them.
That modern leftist multiculturalist intersectiontalism is defending these cultures is, well, the cream of the jest. Libertarians, I understand, are deeply concerned about illiberal reactions to Muslims themselves. For my part, I explore these ideas not only for their intrinsic interest, but also because I try not to be too ideological in support of liberty. All civilization is based on reciprocity rules. In Islam, the basic believer/infidel split ensures that the reciprocity idea will be under-supported.