THE SUBMISSION OF ISLAM
[The original version of this ran in 2005]
Today, September 11, 2012, we commemorate the eleventh anniversary of a day of Islamic infamy. A day that will remain an indelible moral stain on the Islamic religion, and an acute moral embarrassment to all the world’s Moslems.
The Atrocity of 9/11 was performed in their name, claimed by its perpetrators to be justified by Allah.
Imagine if a group of terrorist Christians committed a hideous atrocity of like magnitude upon a Moslem population in the name of Jesus Christ. The entire world Christian community would experience an explosion of revulsion. There would be no dancing in Christian streets, no attempts to excuse or justify it, nothing but a wholesale rejection of the disgusting claim that Jesus would sanction such an act.
Christians all over the world would join the hunt to find the Christian terrorists responsible and do all they could to bring them to justice.
The world Moslem community has done no such thing with regard to Al Qaeda. There are individual Moslems who have done so, and there are Moslem groups who pretend to, but there has been nothing remotely close in the Moslem world compared to what it would be in the Christian.
Yes, there are plenty of “moderate” Moslems. The questions they need to ask themselves are: Why should I participate in a faith that allows its followers such as Osama Bin Laden to disgrace, insult, and humiliate it? Is this a faith that is an impotent loser, or simply doesn’t care about its worshippers? How can Islam today be a faith worthy of worship?
It needs to be made clear that as presently constituted, Islam no longer has a future. It is finished as a world force capable of challenging the West. That is why most Moslems dream of ancient Islamic glory centuries ago.
It needs to be made clear that Islam’s only path to survival, for a Phoenix-like resurrection from the ashes, is submission to Western values.
“Islam” is the Arabic word for “submission,” submission to the will of Allah. From now on, “Islam” must also mean submission to the moral values of the civilized world.
Only by such submission – to freedom of speech and press and religion, free and fair elections, economic liberty, providing women with equal rights, all the standard freedoms we demand for ourselves – will Islam have any prospect of flourishing in the world.
The alternative is for swarms of millions of Moslems to continue living in unfree poverty and hopeless bitterness. It is either-or. For Islam to survive, it must submit. It must be reinvented.
How such a reinterpretation of Islam is to be accomplished by Islamic, primarily Arabic, scholars and leaders is up to them.
All doctrines can be interpreted in a host of ways. A key difference, for example, between Allah and Jehovah, the deity of the Jews and Jesus, is that man was created in the latter’s image and not the former’s.
That is, for Jews and Christians, all human beings have a spark of the Divine. Moslems do not, for they are so far removed from Allah that the Islamic deity has no trace of humanity. A supple Islamic mind should be able to inject an element of the human into the concept of Allah.
This same suppleness will be needed to reinterpret Allah’s approval of slavery, of a man beating his disobedient wife, of killing apostates and infidels, and innumerable other medieval interpretations that have doomed Islam to stay medieval.
It is not our job to save Islam. It is enough for us to explain the new meaning of Submission required to replace our contempt with earned respect.
Rigidity and inflexibility, whether in a physical structure such as a glass, or a social structure such as the former Soviet Union or present-day Islam, renders it fragile. One moment it is unyielding and incapable of change. Subject it to sufficient stress, and the next moment it is shattered into pieces.
Surely it is obvious to a growing number of Islamic intellectuals that their religion as currently constituted stands in grave danger of going the way of the former Soviet Union.
Just as America triumphed over the Soviet Communism, so shall she triumph over Islamic Jihadism. There will be other clashes to come, with other civilizations. The one with China could make this one with Islam look like a cakewalk.
Yet, on this 11th anniversary of 9/11, we should take solace that our values and culture will triumph once again. The nightmare of an Anti-American Pro-Moslem President is soon to end. The Islam that made 9-11 possible and excusable is dying. America, by contrast, will thrive and flourish.