Why I hate Islam

 

I’ll start with the reason I wanted to write this in the first place. On twitter, the historian Tom Holland linked to an article which contained quotes from social media of British and French ISIS Jihadists gloatingly discussing the various uses and prices of enslaved Yazidi women in Syria (https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/508868514351185920). It was really grim reading, and part of it had to do with this barbaric discussion happening in language so familiar to anyone who uses twitter and/or facebook, replete with ‘lol’s and cute emoticons. The ease and casualness with which these young people, brought up in modern, secular society, had adopted a mind-set so flagrantly at odds with the latter’s most elementary and valued tenets, was deeply unnerving, if not exactly surprising in the light of what’s been happening in the Levant.

After reading this, I wearily turned to google to try to glean some consensus on the doctrinal basis for the enslavement of women for sex. And as usual, none was to be found; the results were mixed and contradictory. No doubt the majority of Muslims would avow that slavery is ‘un-Islamic’, along with the beheading of apostates, the stoning of adulterers and other medieval practices of which it is nonetheless impossible to find unambiguous disapproval within the Islamic texts: because it doesn’t exist.

Boy am I tired of the phrase ‘un-Islamic’. In these debates it is worthless, if not quite nonsensical. Clearly the few central texts on which the broad range of Islamic practice is based are not self-consistent. There are verses which more or less clearly justify the death penalty for apostates, whilst there are other Islamic texts from the hadith which prescribe mercy and tolerance for non-believers. For one to say of another’s interpretation of Islam ‘that is wrong’ while both are appealing to the authority of Islamic texts to validate their respective positions makes barely more sense than for me to say to a friend that my perception of the colour green is more faithful to the true nature of green than his. It is taking language beyond the scope wherein it is meaningful; two engaged in such an exchange are not exchanging anything: they are merely talking past one another.

It reminds me of that ancient puzzle, the ship of Theseus, in which the abstract design of the ship is retained whilst its material components are replaced whenever they fall into disrepair or ruin. At what point, if any, in this gradual process of renewal does the ship lose its identity as the original ship of Theseus? In the case of Islam, one can ask at what point, in the process of paring away all those (many, many) verses and dogma which are not palatable to modern, liberal Muslims, does Islam cease to be Islam? And the answer surely calls for a look at what fundamentally constitutes Islam, at its ‘original design’ which surely, if anything, is the assumption that the Qu’ran is the literal, perfect word of God. If that is the case, then it must follow that to criticize Islam is to do away with this one cohesive backbone which holds it together. Since its author, the one true God, isn’t around to arbitrate on discussions as to how to interpret his words,  the believer is left with either the impossible task of trying to synthesize an incoherent mess of regressive dogma, or of using his own fallible, imperfect judgment to decide on the best, cherry-picked interpretation of the same that accommodates modern liberal norms, in doing so rendering the whole task futile, for it is to scotch the only thing that holds it together.

Put simply, rather than denounce the marauding fascists that are Islamic State as ‘un-Islamic’, one is much better off cutting to the heart of it and saying ‘they are wrong’. For as well-intentioned as the Muslims that appeal to their own, more palatable version of Islam as the authoritative one in denouncing ISIS surely are, nonetheless they are ultimately operating on the same primitive intellectual level as the malignant drones of ISIS: they are weltering in the same mire of irrational dogma whilst claiming, at least implicitly, to have a direct line to divine authority.

One of the reasons I’ve recently come to despise Islamic doctrine is that the best things you find said about it are that it isn’t as bad as its most obnoxious adherents would have you believe. And so you get palpably nice, morally upstanding and intelligent people such as human rights activist Jamila Hanan writing in-depth textual analyses of the Qu’ranic verses used by ISIS to justify beheading prisoners, in which some scarcely consoling ambiguity is highlighted, one imagines with sweaty brow and a heavy sigh of relief.  Whilst a part of me commends the effort on the part of Muslims to speak out against Islamism and extremism, at least as big a part of me laments that we can’t just throw the dead baby out with the putrid bath water – as indeed, on its own terms, we should be logically compelled to do. ‘Islam’, Jamila tweeted, ‘is a religion that encourages research, discussion, debate. As a Muslim I am compelled to use the intellect + voice God gave me.’ Instead of reiterating the above, I will finish here by noting for the reader as I did to Jamila on twitter that if the debates in which Muslims are engaged in the 21st century are centered around the permissibility of beheadings, and the conditions for and acceptable uses to which non-Muslim slaves may be put, Islam is one ship not worth the necessary toil of preserving.