We Must Acknowledge This: Islam Is Going Through Its Own Dark Ages
I’ve written this before, but the issue you’re doing a nice job of describing really comes down to the “classical liberal dilemma” first posed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies and aptly summarized by the British critic and novelist D.J. Taylor as “how far can we tolerate something that, if tolerated, will cease to tolerate us?” Do we, in the West, have to put up with people whose ideas about how they want to live their lives and how they expect us to live our lives are radically at odds with the most fundamental commitments we’ve made to tolerance, pluralism, treatment of women, separation of Church and State, etc.
And lest anyone think that you or I are imagining our own bogeyman in this characterization of the way in which Islam is practiced by many today, I’ve assembled here a bunch of telling statistics from reliable sources (Pew Surveys, etc.) that reveal the kinds of things that perfectly mainstream Muslims in a variety of societies in today’s world believe:
I strongly suggest that those who rail against Islamophobia take a look at the easily digestible bullet point list of facts in what I wrote and see what they think afterwards. To take one example, anyone who’s a fan of the #MeToo movement — or, even, a fan of the more basic notion that women are human beings worthy of generally equally rights, etc. — needs to come to terms with the fact that, as evidenced by Pew Surveys, more than nine in ten of the world’s Muslims believe a woman’s role is always to oblige and obey her husband. That view of women, in other words, is not some extremist fringe view of fundamentalist jihadists-in-waiting, but rather, a perfectly mainstream Muslim view.
Islam hasn’t always been as backward as it currently is, and at one time in history, of course, represented a far more advanced civilization than medieval Christendom, but just as it isn’t offensive to acknowledge that that period was the “Dark Ages” for Christian civilization, it shouldn’t be offensive to acknowledge that Islam is going through its own Dark Ages today, when hard-line Wahhabi/Salafi strains of the religion that are being exported worldwide by Saudi Arabia are on the ascendancy.
For these reasons and many more that anyone will see by perusing the bullet point list in my other article, being cautious about Islamic immigration isn’t irrational Islamophobia, but rather, rational self-preservation. I’m not in favor of knee-jerk Muslim bans, but I do believe in admitting, from any nation, Islamic nations included, only immigrants who are educated, skilled and/or have gainful employment lined up. This ensures that such immigrants can readily contribute to and easily assimilate into mainstream Western culture rather than living in impoverished Muslim ghettos like the French banlieues, where people get further disaffected and radicalized, resulting in the mind-boggling fact that while Muslims represent around 7.5% of France, they account for about 60%-70% of France’s crime (these statistics have to be approximate and are based on the best estimates of experts because France bans keeping statistics by race or religion).
The bottom line is that before we can have an intelligent and informed debate about immigration and the role of Muslims in our own societies, we need to get real about what Muslims actually believe. Burying the truth in P.C.-stoked misinformation and ignorant smears of Islamophobia and racism does a disservice to us all while just pushing the problem down the road.
