Add Bernard Lewis to the Gaffney/Pipes camp
By Ted Belman
In July ’06, Bernard Lewis argued, Bring them Freedom, or They Destroy Us. He acknowledged that Islam understood “equality” but limited it to male believers. In addressing the question of whether western style “freedom” could be transferred to the Islamic world, he looked back to how Islamic society was before the Twentieth Century (Nazism, oil wealth and spread of Wahhabism, Iranian Revolution).
Traditionally, he wrote, “the Sultan had to consult” with the various powers so he wasn’t autocratic. “Wahhabism held that the Muslims had abandoned the true faith in God, thus their decline, and therefore must return to the true religion.” Now here’s the shocker.
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“This pure original Islam is, of course—as is usual in such situations—a new invention with little connection to Islam as it existed in its earlier stages.”
As I understand it Andy Bostom vehemently disagrees with this.
Lewis goes on to note, “… in Turkish schools in Turkey, students get a modern, moderate version of Islam, in German schools, in general, they get the full Wahhabi blast”
Lewis is in effect saying that Islam need not be fixed and immutable, i.e. it can be what you want it to be. But I wonder what is left out or left in the “modern, moderate version”.
He concludes with,
The outlook at the moment is, I would say, very mixed. I think that the cause of free institutions–along their lines, not ours–is possible. One can see signs of its beginning in some countries. At the developing same time, the forces working against it are very powerful and well entrenched. And one of the greatest dangers is that on their side, they are firm and convinced and resolute. Whereas on our side, we are weak and undecided and irresolute. And in such a combat, it is not difficult to see which side will prevail.
I think that the effort is difficult and the outcome uncertain, but I think the effort must be made. Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.“
So according to Lewis, Islam is capable of being moving toward freedom and democracy (but he doesn’t spell it out) and we have to support these progressive forces or perish.
The way I see it is that we have to stop the Islamification of the west. The “moderates’ will have to take sides.
But your positions are not contradictory, – it seems to be more a matter of different semantics. If you read towards the end of the recent interview with Bat Ye’or ( http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=4552#comments ), she also says: “The cowardly European position discourages courageous Muslims who struggle for a democratization and modernization of Islamic thought and societies.”
And she goes on stressing that: “… But — above all — Europeans must decide on their values, their future, and fight for their democratic institutions and against the subversion of their culture. They must recover the control of their own security rather than beg for the protection of jihadists and be ransomed.”
Of course there is no alternative to killing the Islamists like mad dogs. However, to liberate the more or less forcibly enslaved “moderate muslims” from the clutches of Islam in any form, should be our most important future humanitarian project. Only a few “moderates” can be expected to openly take sides as the situation is at present. I’m afraid we will have to do it for them, the way we did it for the Germans.
There is so much wrong in Lewis’ thesis, I don’t know where to begin. I’ll try with some of his claims.
“The Sultan had to consult, therefore he wasn’t autocratic”. This is highly misleading. Turkish sultans were autocratic as they come. Sure, they had advisors, vezirs and other party around them, but so did European medieval monarchs. Sultan’s power was indeed limited somewhat in the 19th century but it was due to intrasigent local Turkish nobility who even had their own private armies, it was hardly a result of some inherently democratic tendencies in islam.
Second, Turkish state schools are highly secular, I doubt they teach islam at all! But even if they do it must be a highly sanitized version, propably without the “sensitive” parts such as Koran 9:5, 8:12, 47:4, 9:29 and many a hadith, i.e. not islam at all. In any case it is irrelevant because only imams can teach islam. And they can not teach anything other then the Quran and the Sunna in their entirety.
“This pure original Islam is, of course—as is usual in such situations—a new invention with little connection to Islam as it existed in its earlier stages.” – This is indeed astonishing to say! What did the early stage islam consist of? How is it different from the supposed “new invention” wahabi islam? Was Quran different in early stages then today? How about the Sunna? Lewis never bothers to explain any of this. We are either expected to take his word for it or Lewis gives an example such as the one of the Ottoman sultan, largely unrelated to islamic texts and doctrines.
But why? Why does Bernard Lewis say these things?
One can not help but thinking, even at a casual glance, that Lewis’ thesis is more of a hope, then a coherent plan for defense. Hope that the other party will see how wonderful and full of joy the western way of life is. But what if they don’t see it? What if “from their point of view the Jedi are evil”?(I watched “Revenge of the Sith” for the third time last night, I simply had to put this in) The hubris of the “democracy is the solution for everything” crowd, to which Lewis belongs to with his heart and soul, simply prevents them from even imagining such an option or indeed a worldview that is the antithesis of their world, the one whose very existence invalidates their whole ideology because it will all of a sudden be clear to everyone that not all people desire freedom and democracy, that not all cultures are equal as the “democratists” repeatedly claimed. This is why the “democratists” can not actually fight against such a worldview because that would mean acknowledging it’s existence and with it that their ideology is false. So instead they choose to simply ignore the parts of islam they are uncomfortable with, those that contradict their thesis and instead set up a strawman(terorism, islamism, radical islam). This is where hope becomes a fantasy, and from this ideological postition come the above claims of Bernard Lewis.
This fantasy of Bernard Lewis et al. is, however, dangerous. Because if the western establishment persists in pursuing it, the result will indeed be the destruction of their countries.