In the talk I identified the rise of militant political Islam as posing a major challenge to post-Enlightenment liberal societies. This was disputed in a number of chat entries, most of which claimed that fundamentalist Christianity was a greater threat.

For example David Sanderson said:

We are far more threatened by radical Christianity, which is especially apparent in the USA. Muslims are small minorities in Western countries and are much more threatened than they are threatening.

and that:

These readings by Peter of the Bible and the Koran are frankly ridiculous. it would be perfectly easy to choose passages from the Bible that are incompatible with liberal democracy.

Opening Response

There is a video on YouTube of a speech given to the American Humanist Society by Sara Haider, a young American from a Pakistani Muslim background.

Haider defected from Islam, making her an apostate, an offense punishable by death according to all the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and codified as such in the law of a dozen countries. She founded the Ex-Muslims of North America, a mutual support group for people who followed the same path.

In her speech, she states that she expected hostility from Islamic groups. What astounded her was that she received equally virulent hostility from her erstwhile colleagues on the progressive left, who denounced her with terms like ‘house Arab’, ‘Uncle Tom’, and most sinister ‘Native Informant’.

How do we account for this – especially given that the Left has traditionally been favourably disposed towards secularism?

The answer is that nowadays leftists – at least those who embrace the identarian ideology – view Islam not as a creed with tenets that people might accept or reject, but as an oppressed identity. So someone who defects from it is seen as a traitor to that identity, to be scorned.

The problem with this, apart from the attempt to deny agency to people like Haider, is that it becomes very difficult to have an honest discussion and debate about these tenets, as reflected in Islam’s canonical scriptures: the Quran and the Hadith – accounts of the words and deeds of Mohammed.

So, if we look at these tenets, how does Islam compare with Christianity and Judaism in terms of their compatibility with post-Enlightenment liberal societies? I recommend everyone read this article by the Egyptian-American Raymond Ibrahim, which I regard as definitive.

Defenders of Islam often refer to the violent texts in the Old Testament. But here is the distinction: the Old Testament verses are about what occurred in the ancient world. They are descriptive accounts of past events, not prescriptive commands to be followed in all times and places.

The ‘sword verses’ in the Quran, on the other hand, that among other things call on Muslims strike terror into the hearts of the kafir (non-believers) and to fight to make Islam the universal religion and subjugate all rival belief systems, are framed without temporal and spatial constraints. They are as obligatory for Muslims today as they were in the seventh century. 

Furthermore Muslims are enjoined to take Mohammed, who launched scores of campaigns of military conquest, as the supreme exemplar of conduct. The Christian New Testament, what that well-known Australian fundamentalist Fred Nile calls the ‘new Covenant, superseding the old’, is completely free of calls to violent action. So Christians may act violently, but they cannot legitimately claim to be acting in the name of Jesus. 

The other problem with Islam is that it does not envisage – indeed cannot envisage – any separation of secular and religious spheres. There is nothing analogous to the verse in the gospel of Mathew to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’, making it possible for an American Christian to honestly subscribe to the establishment clause in the First Amendment.

This has major implications. In the talk I mentioned the fundamentally different conceptions of human rights in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. The former is framed in universal terms, in the latter all rights are subject to Islamic Sharia. Chalk and cheese.

We can see the conflicts and tensions this engenders in a growing number of European countries with large Muslim populations, such as the emergence of scores of Sharia Courts in the UK that take a fundamentally different attitude to the rights of women, for example, to the civil courts.

The identarian ideology renders most of the Left incapable of honestly thinking about and debating these matters. Far from supporting defectors like Haider, they vilify them. 

In the UK Mariam Namazie, head of the British Council of Ex-Muslims, has repeatedly face ‘no platforming’ on university campuses, including a truly ugly incident at Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London, where her meeting was disrupted and attendees subjected to death threats. 

Amazingly, the disruption and attempted no-platforming was backed by the college feminist and LGBT clubs. How weird is that! This underscores, to me, that far from being progressive in any meaningful sense identarian leftism is profoundly reactionary.

Everything is up for debate. Click anywhere on the article, or select some text, to simply add a comment, or use the menu at the top right if you want to go to town with a full article, or to cite a relevant resource (article, website, whatever). As the discussion unfolds, use the View sub-menu to view it in various graphical formats, or the Updates sub-menu to be notified of new items or changes.