Commenting on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, NR’s editors write, “A religion that commands murder as the punishment for blasphemy offends the God it professes to worship.” I’m not so sure: Murdering blasphemers may offend our God. But it obviously won’t offend a God that commands murder as the punishment for blasphemy. And Islam does precisely that, according to lots of Muslims. In a hair-raising op-ed up at USA Today, Anjem Choudary (a radical Muslim cleric in London) explains:
Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, “Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.”
Choudary’s only quibble with the terrorists is that they took matters into their own hands, rather than letting an Islamic State mete out justice. But that’s just a procedural technicality, and anyway his point is factually incorrect because ISIS — the “Islamic State” — sanctions these killings. So there we have it.
I think we should all stop trying to judge whether these murderous tendencies reflect true Islam. As religious authorities, fundamentalists are at least as valid as moderates, often more so, given their usually rigid adherence to text. Millions of people believe this stuff, and they think they’re Islamic, and they are Islamic in every other way, so let’s please stipulate that these terror acts are a reflection of true Islam. That’s what a lot of Muslims believe, for wholly Islamic reasons, so let’s take them at their word.
The editors do us all a signal service by illuminating the recent comments of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi: “That thinking — I am not saying “religion” but “thinking” — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.”
What Sisi means by “thinking” in this translation is “doctrine,” as in “religious doctrine” (which is clear from his explanation – ”that corpus of texts and ideas we have sacralized over the centuries”). And he is addressing mainstream Muslim scholars. In other words, he thinks that mainstream Muslim religious doctrine is antagonizing the entire world, above and beyond the terrorist extremists who are doing the actual killing.
It is increasingly clear that some of those religious doctrines are going to have to change, because the alternative is eternal conflict. One example: the idea that Islamic law applies to non-Muslims, which is precisely as preposterous as if I were to declare that you are all my slaves.
And by the way, same goes for the elastic hate-speech rules through which American academia is seeking to impose Islamic doctrine on our university students. I have every right to mock whatever prophet I want, and if your religion says otherwise, then you’re just wrong, and if you want to fight about it, then let’s fight.