On the banning of precisely what?

Submitted by Jascha Kessler (United States), Aug 29, 2007 at 15:08

Daniel Pipes writes in the NY SUN: "Islam is not the enemy, but Islamism is. Tolerate moderate Islam, but eradicate its radical variants." I am afraid he may find himself on the fork of an irresolvable dilemma. Language can betray his intentions.

For example, English offers, like other Western languages, suffixes such as "ism," and "ity." As in Judaism and Christianity. These are large abstractions, but they denote the beliefs to which people of faith(s) subscribe. It is easy enough to write, Muslims subscribe to Islam, not "Islamism."

Notwithstanding, the first two Western creeds do not in their Book exhort supremacy over other persons, whether pagan or godless Buddhism or Confucianism or Taoism by war and murder or terror, though adherents to those faiths have, historically, killed, warred, murdered, oppressed in the name of their faith.

So, when Pipes urges tolerance of "moderate Islamists, or Islamism," he enters a hall of mirrors, or set of contradictory issues, given the Western maturity after many centuries of bloodshed, simply because without the expurgation of many passages of Koran, no solution is possible, as the Wahhabist Saudis, living in this century while living in the 16th century puritanism of that Islam, demonstrate. Not to mention the pure barbarism and savagery of the Talibanists.

If we have freedom of speech in the USA, then the Koran is protected, together with its murderous exhortations. If the Koran is expurgated to comply with our legal system that provides protection of others by punishment of incitement to violence whether in speech or action, is that possible to enact? Until the Koran's sacred, canonical status is thoroughly purged of all suggestion to Muslim that they are militant, successor, superior kind of believer, nothing can be done, I fear. And to do that, scholars and historians must be permitted to establish what words in that book are acceptable in a world that wishes peace and life in the 21st [Western calendar] Century. That means endless litigation. And, as Charles Dickens' Mr. Bumble asseverates, "...the law is a ass - a idiot." And that being perennially so, we are heading into very stormy seas indeed. Who will take a scissors to the Koran? In the end, it may well have to be banned, together with publicly-funded madrassas, as Pipes urges.

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