About Muslim apologists

Submitted by Erich W (United States), Dec 23, 2010 at 21:15

I recently listened to Primier Christian Radio's debate between the author of The Third Choice (on Dhimitude) and a Muslim apologist. Perhaps it was Bernard Lewis who said that a Muslim tends to be like a company lawyer arguing for his company at court. The company is right, regardless of the evidence. The scholar who taught me Kurdish did some of his post graduate work in Turkey, and quipped that scholarship does not exist there. That is not really true, but it points to a general truth. Public libraries and university libraries are very poor in Turkey. Love of knowledge for knowledge's sake is not a strong cultural value. Honest, transparent debate with regard to knowledge is difficult to maintain among Muslims. When one is criticized, or when one's religious or national history is criticized, the immediate response is to attack the critic. Honor and shame smother out honest self-evaluation. These controlling emotions also shut down honest evaluation of religious and national history. Perhaps related to this are the abysmal literacy rates in the Arab world. The number of books published in Arabic, and their sales, is shockingly low. The whole culture of literate knowledge by which, through ample documented debate, claims to truth are evaluated, is very weak. Conspiracy theories and distortion of reality for the sake of honor is more common, is it not? A Muslim of course is likely to to be offended by such a criticism, and his response will be to attack similar weaknesses he can identify in America or France. The statistics on literacy and the readiness to criticize and confess national or religious sins--and even the richness of public libraries in these "infidel" nations--proves the point. But in Muslim cultures confession is often impossible, perhaps because there is no Atonement. So, is it fair, and is it profitable, to debate with Muslim apologists? They embarrass themselves more than they know. Is it just a cheap short cut for debate-organizers to invite them? Perhaps scholarly Muslims who believe in self-criticism, open criticism of Islamic history and Islamic interpretation, could be found. Let them defend their religion as their conscience demands, but with honest self-criticism, liberated from all the emotional honor-shame reactions. Then the discussion would be interesting. The problem is that such honest Muslim scholars do not represent the Muslim umma and ulema as it really is. They would, perhaps unintentionally make us more hopeful about their religion than we should be. The apologists, on the other hand, are just false advertisers and dealers in false equivelancies (adolescent nonsense like "well, there are violent Christians too!"). One can only learn about real Islam today by what devout Muslims say to Muslims, as the caller Rashid, the convert from Islam to Christ, said about his own father's teachings as an Imam. What apologists of the Dawa say in debates can be disregarded. How could it be otherwise? They are agents of the very problem being discussed! Muslims need to decide what they are going to do with Islam. Non Muslims need also to decide how they are going to respond to Islamic pressures. These decisions, though, cannot be made together. Dialog is a one way street for representatives of the Ulema, because the Jihad and Dawa are profoundly real. Defense, on our part, must also be one way. The aggressor will not give us good advice on how to defend ourselves. He will not comment on the evils of his system or of his history.

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