Islam: What the West Needs to Know About Islam By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/14/2007
Frontpage Interview?s guest today is Gregory Davis, the author of
Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He is the managing director of Quixotic Media and producer of the feature documentary Islam: What the West Needs to Know -- which has just been released on DVD.
FP: Gregory Davis, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Davis: Thank you for having me.
FP: So tell us a bit about this documentary.
Davis: The documentary originally came out in 2006 but is now in wider release on DVD. There have been several documentaries done on the subject of terrorism, but none so far that examine the sources of Islamic violence within Islam itself. For the most part, there has been a great effort to keep violence done in the name of Islam and Islam itself separate. In contrast, our movie examines the doctrines and history of Islam with the aim of discovering the roots of Islamic violence and intolerance. We focus on the canonical Islamic texts -- the Koran, hadiths ("reports" of Muhammad's life), and the Sira (or Life of the Prophet Muhammad) -- and how Islam has operated through history. We then move on to the role Islam is currently playing in conflicts around the globe -- from Nigeria, to Sudan, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Thailand, etc. -- as well as international terrorism, and what the future is likely to hold.
FP: Why do you think there is so much that the West actually doesn?t know about Islam? Why the impulse to deceive oneself?
Davis: I think that there are several reasons. The first is a natural if unwarrantable reluctance to face the very uncomfortable reality that there is an entire civilization seeking our subjugation under nothing less than a totalitarian system of government, i.e., Islamic (Sharia) law.
When faced with National Socialism and Communism, the West demonstrated a similar unwillingness to face up to very grim realities. The continued emphasis on a "new world order" in which violence and warfare will be swept into the dustbin of history makes it that much more difficult for people to realize that, far from a coming era of perpetual peace and happiness, we are facing a future of conflict and civilizational struggle.
The second reason I believe is the persistence of the multicultural myth that all peoples, religions, and civilizations are morally equivalent. Despite its manifest absurdity, this idea nonetheless continues to taint just about every public discussion on Islam and throttles any kind of objective analysis of the origins of Islamic violence.
Thanks to multiculturalism, every theory except the obvious one -- that Islamic violence has roots in Islam -- is advanced: that the jihadists are acting out of "frustration" due to "poverty," "disenfranchisement," etc. Such theories are belied by such jihadists as the 7/7 bombers in London, who were native Britons, and the more recent British doctors, who seemed to have plenty to live for in Western society.
And then there is of course someone like Osama bin Laden, a multimillionaire many times over, a father, poet, and animal-lover, who nonetheless is willing to throw it all away in order to follow in the footsteps of Muhammad. The unhappy truth is that the jihadists are, to a great extent, acting from genuine, deeply-held religious conviction.
Invariably, the jihadists are serious, pious Muslims, many of whom recently rediscovered the tenets of their faith. It is an uncomfortable fact for a tolerant society such as ours to acknowledge that sincere religious belief can pose an imminent danger to a society's physical safety. We would be better off discarding "religion" as a term and instead focus on the very real distinctions between religions and their implications.
FP: So what hope exists that there can be a modernization and democratization within the Islamic world? How can this even begin to happen when the extremists appear to be in command in most of its quarters?
Davis: Hope that a "reformation" of Islam will somehow eliminate its fundamental hostility to the non-Muslim world is wishful thinking. The only even modestly successful attempts to "reform" Islam have taken the form of de-Islamization. This was the policy of Attaturk, who in Turkey replaced the cult of Muhammad with the cult of himself.
Throughout Islamic history, the only alternative to the rule of Islamic law is military dictatorship. It is between these two extremes that modern Turkey continues to oscillate.
Democratizing Islam is really a contradiction in terms: one might as well try democratizing National Socialism or Communism. Islam is what it is: a repressive, expansionary, militaristic religious and political system with a mandate from Allah to conquer the globe. Putting it that way almost sounds silly to the Western ear, but this does not deny the truth of it.
The fundamental problem is that the Muslim extremists are not really "extreme" at all -- rather they are the orthodox faithful. By Western logic, Muhammad himself -- who engaged in political assassination, wars of aggression, and massacre --- would qualify as an "extremist." Violence and intolerance are mainstream in Islam, not distortions of its orthodox traditions as they would be in a religion such as Christianity.
FP: But we have many Muslim moderates and reformers who are our allies. We don?t want to alienate them. They are our allies in this struggle. Surely many Muslims are our allies against extremism. What should our strategy be?
Davis: The primary task for Western leaders today is to mobilize their societies to confront the Islamic threat -- it is not to manipulate the Muslim world to develop a fictive "moderate" Islam. The danger of encouraging "moderate" Muslims is that it gives a false signal to Westerners that there can be a long-term modus vivendi between Islam and the West. We must understand that, while there are peaceful Muslims, there is no peaceful Islam. The distinction is capital. Muslims who have rejected Islam's violent injunctions, consciously or unconsciously, have thrown out one of the essential elements of their faith. An analogy would be with the Mensheviks, who rejected the necessity of the violent revolution that their Communist ideology required. The Mensheviks were thus forever trying to square a circle: they remained Communists while rejecting one of Communism's primary tenets. It was inevitable that their illogic would ultimately give way to the more logically rigorous -- and bloody -- Bolsheviks. The same with Islam. Throughout Islamic history, there have been those who rejected Allah's call to violence, but they have never managed to become politically efficacious precisely because their position so obviously contravened Islam's unmistakable teaching on jihad.
Pretending that there is a peaceful Islam will only foster further muddled thinking and disastrous policy. Fearing that we will alienate peace-loving (unorthodox) Muslims by properly identifying Islam as violent is a recipe for disaster. As Osama bin Laden has put it, people will naturally favor a strong horse over a weak one. Islam today is showing itself as the strong horse, confident in its purpose and determinedly pursuing it, while the West cannot even bring itself to speak plainly about the enemy. However well-intended, the Western statesmen who insist on "reaching out" to "moderate" Muslims are objects of contemptuous fun to the jihadists, who move from strength to strength while Western governments spin themselves dizzy to avoid the plain reality that Islam is at war with the world.
Publicly affirming Islam as the imperialistic political program that it is, rather than alienating peaceful Muslims, will draw to our side many on the fence and signal to the jihadists that we are through with the political correctitude that is our chief impediment to decisive action. As infidels, we are not going to have much effect on the long-term course of Islam one way or the other; we should concentrate on mobilizing our own civilization, which necessitates a frank discussion of what Islam is -- not what we wish it to be.
We should encourage genuinely peace-loving Muslims to take a hard, unflinching look at their religion and to draw the necessary conclusion: as have prominent apostates such as Ibn Warraq, Walid Shoebat, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They have had the intellectual integrity to acknowledge the violent nature of Islam and to reject it by renouncing Islam in its totality. That sort of courage is a tall order -- apostasy is a capital offence in Islam -- and we in the West should do everything to encourage and protect such acts of conscience. But the half-measure of encouraging peaceful Muslims to take up a "moderate" form of Islam is not only an act of intellectual dishonesty, it is a sure way to foster future acts of jihad. Many of the Islamic terrorists of recent years have been formerly "moderate" Muslims who reawakened to an orthodox interpretation of their faith. The European "youths" responsible for the intermittent riots in France and elsewhere are largely the offspring of "moderate" Muslim immigrants who fled the repression of their native Islamic lands. Trying to foster a "moderate" form of Islam is like trying to foster a "moderate" form of Communism or National Socialism.
FP: What are your thoughts in terms of the Left?s behaviour in the terror war? And how about how the Left recoils from allowing an honest examination of Islam, when for years it has made vicious attacks on Judea-Christian values?
Davis: The defining characteristic of the dogmatic Left is that they will align themselves with any movement that has as its aim the destruction of Western civilization. The Left proved themselves a significant fifth column during the Cold War, less from open advocacy of Communism than from rearguard activity that eroded Western cultural and institutional integrity. The Left are instinctively sympathetic to Islam primarily because they can use it today as a battering ram against the West much as they once used Communism. Recall the Left's silence following 9/11: their dilemma at that time was to reformulate their arguments so as to come up with a way of taking the side of the jihadists without seeming totally insane or provoking a devastating public reaction. It took them a little while, but they finally managed it with variations of "we asked for it" interwoven with sanctimonious condemnation of "all religious extremism." The cult of multiculturalism continues to forestall any serious examination of just what Islam is, what it has done, and what it means to do -- the essential questions that we ask in Islam: What the West Needs to Know. In the DVD, we go directly to the Islamic sources in order to understand Islam from its own point of view -- a violation of the first commandment of political correctitude, thou shalt not ask questions. We do ask questions, the simple but necessary ones that have been so absent from the public discourse on Islam.
Significantly -- and sadly -- it has not only been the Left who have been guilty of intellectual laziness on this issue. Many of the Right have similarly declined to give Islam a hard look. The phrase "war on terror" is an example of this tendency to avoid serious examination of the origins of Islamic violence. A "war on terror" is a war with the primary object of not hurting anyone's feelings; it is a half-hearted war against an unreal enemy. While the Left fail to see Islamic imperialism as a threat to the freedoms they ostensibly cherish, the bias of much of the right is to see "religion" as a natural conservative force in the world and therefore resurgent Islam as a natural ally. Such conservatives are fighting the last war: they correctly diagnose the secular Left, but they fail to realize that Islam is a far older, more determined, and ascendant enemy. They are committing the same error as many Leftists by refusing to draw the necessary distinctions between cultures. The hope of a "new world order" in which conflict of all sorts will happily melt into the past has blinded many to the irreducible hostility of Islam toward the non-Muslim world. The exploding Muslim population worldwide combined with the demographic collapse of Europe mean that the balance of forces are changing very rapidly.
The choices confronting us are not between a maintenance of the old nation-state system, with its uncertainty and occasional violence, and a new era of global peace and prosperity, but between the survival of our civilization and global Islamic hegemony.
Safeguarding our survival and containing Islam, as opposed to building a brave new global regime in which traditional identities are submerged into one, must be the order of the day.
FP: What do readers need to do if they would like to get a hold of this dvd?
Davis: The DVD is available at a number of online retailers. They can visit our website,
www.WhatTheWestNeedsToKnow.com, or go directly to Amazon.com.
FP: Gregory Davis, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Davis: Jamie, it is always a pleasure.
