We Need to Talk About Islam

Over the last few months, I have had an occasional exchange with a faithful reader on the subject of Christianity specifically and religiosity more generally and I am in fact working on yet another response to said faithful reader (soon, I promise!). Our discussion has been good humoured and thoughtful and conducted with mutual respect. That’s the way it ought to be. I can disagree with the opinion held by a person, but once I attack the person themselves or begin to appeal to emotion rather than logic, I lose all relevance.


On the other hand, I have had some discussions (admittedly on twitter) with some self-professed ‘moderate’ adherents of the Islamic religion. These discussions have not gone so well. I have spoken before about the difficulty of discussing Islam openly and have also pointed out some of the atrocities for which Islam must accept blame, but my twittering interlocutors seem to feel that my point of view is unreasonable if I either attack their beliefs or suggest that Islam must be held accountable for some of the actions performed in its name.

There are in the world today, a large number of atrocities committed in the name of Islam. Suicide bombings, female genital mutilation and honor killing are all committed in the name of Islam, which is not to say that they are exclusively Islamic, but they are certainly predominantly so. Nineteen of the twenty worst terrorist attacks in 2016 were committed by groups associated with Islam, many of them deliberately targeting civilian populations.

Despite all this, there is a tendency, especially in the west, to consider muslims as a persecuted minority and worse than this, there is a tendency by moderate muslims to excuse these acts, either by justifying them in terms of the circumstances, blaming them on intervention from the west or claiming that the people responsible are not “real muslims” so that it’s nothing to do with Islam.

This approach is less than helpful. The people committing these acts undoubtedly consider themselves muslim and, despite hysteria in the west, most of these acts are committed in muslim majority countries with muslim people as the victims. The only people that can really make a difference in these cases are other muslims, both by openly and unequivocally denouncing these acts and by denouncing them in terms of their religion.

None of this is to say that the moderate muslim population currently supports terrorism committed in their name - they do not - but typically their denunciations focus too much on the western perception of Islam and too little on the atrocities committed by the perpetrators. This leads to a general hesitance is associating the attack with Islam and a chilling effect of media opinion critical of Islam. There are many examples of this, but I’ll focus on one.

On Friday, 13th November 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or more accurately Daesh) launched a coordinated series of attacks on the city of Paris. Nine Daesh/ISIL attackers, targeting six separate locations carried out the attack. The attacks targeted large groups of civilians at theaters, shopping districts and sporting events and were designed to inflict the maximum number of casualties. They attacked with assault rifles, grenades and suicide vests. The net result was that 137 people died and 368 were injured, the deadliest attack on France since WWII.

In the aftermath of the attack, there was of course a great deal of reporting and over the next several days a large number of opinion pieces appeared. The opinion pieces deplored the attack and deplored Daesh, but almost universally they equivocated on the subject, drawing attention to the danger of a backlash against peaceful muslims. The Australian ABC website ran at least six such opinion pieces in the week after the attack; one worried about the effect on refugees, a couple exhorted us not to engage militarily, another report worried about the backlash against muslims in France and an article appeared praising (almost beatifying) Waleed Ali for a speech where he seems to claim that if we just love each other more, then Daesh will go away.

Perhaps my favorite line in all of these comes from an article that concedes early that “It is obvious that the attacks are crimes” as if there were some possibility that they were not. The same article spends some time railing against tightened security measures and blames the attacks on “intelligence failures”. It also notes that “the global war on terror has caused countless deaths and cost billions of dollars - yet there is more terror than ever before”. Tellingly, the article does not use the word muslim and uses the word Islam only once - in reference to “France bombing Islamic State” - even though the linked article, demonstrating that “there is more terror than ever before”, highlights that most terrorism is committed by Islamic attackers.

It seems that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, we are afraid or embarrassed to point out that the common link threading most terror attacks is Islam. Most perpetrator are Islamic, most victims are Islamic and most attacks occur in Islam majority countries, but we resile from labeling them as Islamic attacks or Islamic terror.

In part this is due to the natural instincts of most western nations to be tolerant and welcoming of others. Despite the media narrative, most people are not racist and in fact most people are positively welcoming of other nations. Australia, the UK, Canada and the US are among the most tolerant countries in the world. More than that, there is a strong social imperative in those countries not to be *seen* as racist and hence we have a reluctance to call out even the most blindingly obvious falsehoods if it paints us in the wrong light.

This is not about to change any time soon. In my own criticisms of Islam, which I consider fairly mild and grounded in established fact, I am often accused of racism or Islamophobia and those who criticise more stridently than me (and there are plenty of them) tend to be labeled as fascist or worse and are thus ignored by the mainstream media. Indeed I have come to the conclusion that anyone that writes widely on the subject of Islam must first accept that any mainstream career will be impossible if they are to maintain any level of honesty.

The solution therefore, must lie with those who claim themselves to be moderate muslims. We hear of these people often and most particularly following an attack or atrocity of some sort by Islamic groups. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks for example, there were several denunciations of Daesh, most of them in terms of “these are not Muslims” or “this is not Islam”. While I admire these sentiments, it’s not enough and too often seems aimed at distancing Islam from the groups rather than denouncing the atrocities and those that commit them.

Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, and most other religions is rooted in a series of ancient texts written by ancient men for an ancient world. The texts suffer both for being ancient and therefore difficult to relate and understand in a modern world, and for being ambiguous and at times self-contradictory. In 2:109 for example, the Quran exhorts muslims to “Forgive and be indulgent (toward Christians and Jews) until Allah give command.” whereas 9:29 suggests that muslims should “Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah.” For this sort of reason, arguments that “it’s not really Islam” don’t really hold much water with the Jihadists. Islam does not have a central authority, so the various fatwas[1] issued condemning violence are often countermand by yet another fatwa from a Mufti more sympathetic to the jihadist position on violence.

This makes it difficult for moderate muslims to argue from a religious point of view, although it remains a worthy endeavor to do so. Those that are committing atrocities are unlikely to pay much heed, but the message might well get through to those wavering.

A further effort that should be made by moderate Muslims - one that is not currently being made - is to acknowledge that there is a problem with Islam. Too often the first response is to emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with Islam, it’s just bad people. This is complete tosh. Islam is involved in so many of these incidents that it is inescapable that there is a wider problem with Islam itself. This doesn’t mean that Islam is intrinsically wrong, just that there needs to be widespread changes to the way it is viewed and especially by its adherents.

The tendency to deny that the problem lies with Islam also causes far too much prevaricating when simple facts are made clear. It’s a fact that the vast majority of terrorist incidents are related to Islam, it’s a fact that most honor killings are done in the name of Islam, it’s a fact that most FGM is done in the name of Islam. Denying this or prevaricating or claiming that it’s not really Islam is not only unhelpful, but will tend to shut down discussion. Especially discussion with non-Muslims.

My belief in Islam is as strong as my belief in any other religion, which is to say it is completely nonexistent, but I am not foolhardy enough to believe that there will be a magic disappearing of religion any time soon. There will be religions and religious people with us for some time to come. That includes Islam and we need to talk about it.

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Edited to move this portion in italics from top of post to bottom of post 8th February 2017

With this article almost complete, news is coming in of a terror attack on a mosque in Quebec. There are several people killed and injured and it appears that there were two or three shooters. Names have not been released, nor have motives and social media is ablaze with speculation. Some are reporting that the attackers are muslim and shouted Allah Akbar, some are reporting that the shooters are Quebec nationalists. Nothing much is clear.

Apart from this short addition, I won’t be updating the post as I don’t believe that this incident has any bearing on what I have to say. No matter the circumstances, the shooting is a tragedy and should be mourned as any terror attack should be mourned.



[1] In Islam a ‘fatwa’ is a ruling on a religious matter issued by an acknowledged expert (Mufti)

Photo courtesy Kipp Jones from Atlanta, US (Harmattan) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons