“Modern Islam Is Already Impossible”
You can not reform a religion. If they are reformed, [the original meaning] is separated from it. Therefore, modern Muslims and a modern Islam is already impossible. If there is no separation between religion and state, there will be no democracy especially without equality for women. Then we will keep a theocratic system. So it will end.” – Adonis Asbar, Syrian poet
We would do well to heed the words of Adonis Asbar, who, as quoted above, presciently warns us that there will be no reformation movement for Islam.
“Therefore, modern Muslims and modern Islam is already impossible.”
Yet the West chooses, imprudently and at our peril, to ignore this glaring reality. We prefer to equate Islam with Judaism and Christianity, as though the scourge of modern man is not Islamic terrorism and the perpetrators are not Muslims; as though Islam did not create the Islamic terrorist; and as though that baseless hatred of the Jew and the State of Israel is not a religiously motivated exhortation of the Quran.
We go on pretending that Muslim demands for Western society to retrofit our traditions in order to accord with the religious whims of a seventh century psychopath are not the blatant manifestations of Islamic imperialism.
In the same way that we hold a rock concert to celebrate the birthday of Nelson Mandela, a man who, as Lee Jenkins wrote in the Backbencher, “pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence including mobilizing terrorist bombing campaigns,” we can also become sophisticated about the brutal and bloody history of Islam and the fact that it really is an insalubrious faith unfit for human beings. Unintelligible to so many of us, and only because we refuse to acknowledge the decline, Western democracy is deteriorating, just as Plato said it would: “Democracy passes into despotism.”
Phocion wrote, “The good have no need of an advocate.”
If Islam is a religion comparable or equal to Judaism and Christianity, why have its apologists spent so much time and energy threatening the Western world into believing such a claim?
The religion proper and the basic tendencies of its adherents should be proof of these claims, but this has not been the case. As I wrote long ago, you cannot honestly judge a religion by its exceptional characters, but only by how it generally affects the masses who follow its precepts.
In this sense, Islam has failed miserably. A long history of Jew-hatred, sectarian violence and backwardness in those countries where Islam the religion has gained preponderance is proof of this fact.
And if there is any sort of phobic disorder finding purchase in the Western world today, it is that prudent fear of our diverse societies descending into the darkness of that same Jew-hatred, sectarian violence and backwardness.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus advised us, “What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.”
Efraim Karsh wrote, “Islam has retained its imperialist ambition to this day.”
This is an aspect of the religion of Islam that has been deceitfully obfuscated and disguised by its apologists. The voluble insistence by advocates of Islamic culture that Western governments should allow Muslim women to wear a veil when being photographed for passports and driver licenses is an example of Islam’s imperialism.
The spectacle of Al Quds Day “parades” (essentially platforms for calls for genocide against the Jews of Israel) in North American cities is an example of Islam’s imperialism.
The request for prayer rooms in places of employment is an example of Islam’s imperialism.
The fact that a sophist like Tarek Fatah is now embedded in Canada’s media and presented as an opponent of Islamic extremism, when in fact his primary concern is the portrayal of Islam the religion as a benign ideology – the very ideology that spawns anti-Jewish extremists – is an example of Islamic imperialism.
The insane proposal that Islam’s Sharia law be included in the Western judicial framework is an example of Islam’s imperialism.
A great majority of us sit back and allow this to happen, without voicing our opposition to this “creeping” religious obtrusion into our Western abode. I’m reminded here of a famous statement by Joseph Wood Krutch, warning against such insouciant complacency: “Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.”
The issue has always been, and will always be, as far as I’m concerned, whether Islam the religion is to blame for all its inconvenient and disruptive political baggage.
I cannot see that Islam was ever intended to be anything other than an imperialistic political movement, the sole purpose of which was to displace all peoples and negate all notions opposed to its nomadic demands.
In his book The Second World War, Martin Gilbert recounts that Federal German President Richard Von Weizsacker declared in 1988 that the German nation “cannot make others responsible for what it and its neighbours endured under National Socialism.
It was led by criminals, and allowed itself to be led by them. It knows this to be true.”
Likewise Islam’s apologists cannot excuse Islam the religion and its “pious” criminals from the culpability both deserve for the extremism they have elicited in every generation since Muhammad’s advent fourteen centuries ago.
They know this to be true, although they are not admitting anything.
Groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda are justifiably proud of the fact that they articulate real Islam and not one of the ersatz versions fabricated by those intellectual contortionists who daily promise us a “modern Islam.”
Because we know that “modern Muslims and a modern Islam is already impossible.”
