A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Western Anti-Islamism
The situation is not improved by the presence of others in the West who see
Islam and Christianity as locked into an implacable struggle—the mirror image
of the worldview of the al-Qa’ida zealots. Take Pastor Rod Parsley of the huge
World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio, a spiritual adviser to the Republican
presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. Parsley writes:
I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature
of Islam, that we see it for what it really is…. I do not believe our country
can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical
conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do
not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in
part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I
believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can
no longer ignore.
It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher
Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492. Columbus dreamed of
defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by
the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began
America.
Famous evangelist Franklin Graham told NBC news following the September
11, 2001 attacks: “We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God
of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-
Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked
religion.”
Bernard Lewis, the well-known neoconservative scholar of Islam, has raised
the specter that the present demographic trends in Europe may well end up
producing a Muslim Europe. Yet the real figures don’t add up. Other right-wing
commentators brandish the specter of a future “Eurabia.” Alarmists about Islam
bolster their case by pointing to what are genuinely incendiary remarks by a
small group of radical clerics, such as the sensationalist Syrian Sheikh Omar
Bakri Muhammad, once the darling of London shock television:
Why should I condemn Osama bin Laden? I condemn Tony Blair, I

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condemn George Bush. I would never condemn Osama bin Laden or any
Muslims…. We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-
civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and
unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.
Or the remark of Dyab Abu Jahjah, a Lebanese settled in Antwerp, who
denounced the Western ideal of assimilation as “cultural rape,” and aims to bring
all the Muslims of Europe into a single independent community.
Many of the remarks of radical preachers who have taken up positions in
some mosques in the West, especially the UK, are indeed outrageous and
provocative. They make good press, as do extremists in all democratic societies.
Unfortunately, in the middle of a Global War on Terror, such remarks have been
doubly incendiary and can actually have impact on a handful of youthful would-
be violent extremists. Nonetheless, any limits on free speech must carefully and
thoughtfully delineate legal thresholds. But the speech of a small group of
unrepresentative extremists must not be taken to represent the true nature of
Islam in Europe or anywhere else. What is a minor problem must not be
exacerbated into a major problem.
Unfortunately, some Muslims living in psychological despair and ghetto
isolation can be ready recipients for bloated conspiracy theories and exaggerated
interpretations of past Western colonial villainies—events that possess many
elements of truth but lack historical perspective and proportion. At the other end
of the spectrum, we in the West are generally socialized into believing that the
Western colonial experience was essentially positive, benign, and well-
intentioned for colonials; thus, even accurate charges of Western brutality during
the colonial period are often rejected by Westerners out of hand as intemperate,
or marginal. For Muslims to present their historical case regarding the past,
therefore, is not an easy sell in the West; even Western critics of Western policies
are often rebuffed or ignored in the US mainstream press.
What is most disturbing is that we now face quite extraordinary remarks from
an entire class of right-wing ideologists who actually challenge the fundamental
humanity of Muslims—as products of a culture that is fundamentally incapable
of joining global civilization—as if Islam had had no major part in creating it.
Has this kind of charge ever been leveled against any other civilization in the
past? Such language was indeed invoked against Jews during the terrible
nineteenth-and twentieth-century pogroms in Eastern Europe that led to mass
slaughter. And in those cases, of course, it was not mere ethnic discrimination;
entire racist theories were spun about Jews as a culture. Such events are still

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within living memory.
We now hear seemingly serious discussions about whether Muslims are
capable of modernization, whether they have excluded themselves from
modernity, whether basically there is a place for them at all in the West. Fears
are openly expressed that Muslims plan to take over the West demographically;
that they plan to impose Islam; and that a militant Islam will sweep away the
enfeebled Christianity practiced by ineffectual Europeans, who in their heady
liberalism lack any will to resist. Battle lines have been drawn by some and the
banners raised high. Worryingly, there could indeed be a reprise of the Jewish
experience, and Muslims have very much become the new Jews in European
society, in many senses. It is noteworthy that quite a number of Jews themselves
recognize in the current campaigns of Islamophobia hints of the same mentality
and mood of pre-Nazi Germany and the European pogroms; greatly to their
credit, they find it frightening and speak out.

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