the problem is a 'version' of Islam or Islam itself?

Submitted by dlp (China), Feb 1, 2007 at 09:24

Pipes is an excellent commentator on Islam, and the Middle East. He is one of our few beacons of hope in a world of myopic anti-Americanism and political correctness. But I think, perhaps in order to play it safely with the audience - which he anticipated to be hostile to his views - he underplayed Islam's inherent radicalism in this speech:

"Radical Islam derives from Islam but is an anti-modern, millenarian, misanthropic, misogynist, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, triumphalist, jihadistic, terroristic, and suicidal version of it. It is Islamic-flavored totalitarianism."

So the problem is a certain kind of flavour of totalitarianism - i.e. a deviant form of Islam? Hold on. Islam, as Robert Spencer and others have painstakingly shown, has since its inception made no distinction between religion and ideology (or the state); all the seeds of violence exist within the Qura'n and other holy books (hadith and sira), with the world sharply divided into the dar el islam (house of submission) and dar el harb (house of war). Muhammad himself set off the first jihad (holy war, not some form of yoga) 1400 years ago. Why is Pipes saying that the problem is not Islam as a religion but radical, ideological Islam? Its a false distinction.

My second comment is that the applause of the audience when Pipes described how America was viewed as a terrorist state etc was deeply worrying and abhorrent. He was showing the extent of anti-Americanism as a example of the terror we are facing, not to bond with the audience. And yet people just seemed to connect with the mindless left wing nonsense of 'radical' islam's fellow travellers.

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