1

The Rushdie Affair

Before 14 February 1989

In 1280 C.E. there appeared in Baghdad a remarkable book written in Arabic by a Jewish philosopher and physician Ibn Kammuna. It is usually known by the name of Examination of the Three Faiths. It is remarkable because of its scientific objectivity and its critical attitude toward Judaism, Christianity, and above all Islam. “Deism bordering on agnosticism permeates the little volume.”⁸

The prophet Muhammad is described as someone unoriginal: “We will not concede that [Muhammad] added to the knowledge of God and to obedience to Him anything more than was found in the earlier religions.”⁹ Nor is the Prophet perfect: “There is no proof that Muhammad attained perfection and the ability to perfect others as claimed.” People generally convert to Islam only “in terror or in quest of power, or to avoid heavy taxation, or to escape humiliation, or if taken prisoner, or because of infatuation with a Muslim woman.” A rich non-Muslim well-versed in his own faith and that of Islam will not convert except for some of the preceeding reasons. Finally, Muslims seem unable to provide good arguments—let alone proofs—for the prophethood of Muhammad. How did the Muslims take to this skepticism? The thirteenth century chronicler Fuwati (1244-1323) describes the events occurring four years after the publication of the treatise.

In this year (1284) it became known in Baghdad that the Jew Ibn Kammuna had written a volume ... in which he displayed impudence in the discussion of the prophecies. God keep us from repeating what he said. The infuriated mob rioted, and massed to attack his house and to kill him. The amir ... and a group of high officials rode forth to the Mustansiriya madrasa, and summoned the supreme judge and the [law] teachers to hold a hearing on the affair. They sought Ibn Kammuna but he was in hiding. That day happened to be a Friday. The supreme judge set out for the prayer service but as the mob blocked him, he returned to the Mustansiriya. The amir stepped out to calm the crowds but these showered abuse upon him and accused him of being on the side of Ibn Kammuna, and of defending him. Then, upon the amir’s order, it was heralded in Baghdad that, early the following morning outside the city wall, Ibn Kammuna would be burned. The mob subsided, and no further reference to Ibn Kammuna was made.

As for Ibn Kammuna, he was put into a leather-covered box and carried to Hilla where his son was then serving as official. There he stayed for a time until he died.¹⁰

Fuwati’s narrative exemplifies how throughout the history of Islam ordinary Muslims, and not just so-called fundamentalists, have reacted to putative insults to their religion. Two comic examples come from India. The American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, got into difficulty while American ambassador to India (1961-63), when it became known that he had named his pet cat “Ahmed”—Ahmed also being one of the names by which the prophet Muhammad was known. When the Deccan Herald in Bangalore published a short story entitled “Muhammad the Idiot,” Muslims burned down the newspaper offices. As it turned out, the story had nothing to do with the Prophet but with a crazed man who bore the same name. More recently, ten Indians were jailed in the Gulf emirate of Sharjah for staging a Malayalam drama called The Ants That Eat Corpses, that, according to the authorities, contained remarks against Muhammad.

Muslims who dared to criticize were branded heretics and usually beheaded, crucified, or burned; I discuss the plight of some of them during the Golden Age of Islam in chapter 10. Here I shall confine myself to comparatively recent examples of criticism of Islam by Muslims.

Many of my examples are taken from Daniel Pipes’ excellent book, The Rushdie Affair Pipes describes those groups of Muslim writers and thinkers who were punished for their heretical works and those who escaped without retribution for their error. Before describing his tragic fate, I shall look at some of the startling criticisms Dashti leveled at some of the Muslims’ most cherished beliefs in his classic Tiventy-Three Years. Although the book was written in 1937, it was only published in 1974, and probably in Beirut, since between 1971 and 1977 the regime of the Shah of Iran forbade publication of any criticism of religion. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979 Dashti authorized its publication by underground opposition groups. His book, whose title refers to the prophetic career of Muhammad, may well have sold over half a million copies in pirated editions between 1980 and 1986.

First, Dashti defends rational thought in general and criticizes blind faith since “belief can blunt human reason and common sense,”¹¹ even in learned scholars. Rational thought requires more “impartial study.” He vigorously denies any of the miracles ascribed to Muhammad by some later, overeager Muslim commentators. Dashti submits the orthodox view that the Koran is the word of God Himself, that it is miraculous by virtue of its eloquence and subject matter, to a thorough, skeptical examination. He points out that even some early Muslim scholars, “before bigotry and hyperbole prevailed, openly acknowledged that the arrangement and syntax of the Koran are not miraculous and that work of equal or greater value could be produced by other God-fearing persons.”¹²

Furthermore, the Koran contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. These and other such aberrations in the language have given scope to critics who deny the Koran’s eloquence.... To sum up, more than one hundred Koranic aberrations from the normal rules have been noted.”¹³

What of the claim that the subject matter is miraculous? Like Ibn Kammuna, Ali Dashti points out, that the Koran

contains nothing new in the sense of ideas not already expressed by others. All the moral precepts of the Koran are self-evident and generally acknowledged. The stories in it are taken in identical or slightly modified forms from the lore of the Jews and Christians, whose rabbis and monks Muhammad had met and consulted on his journeys to Syria, and from memories conserved by the descendants of the peoples of “Ad and Thamud.” . . . In the field of moral teachings, however, the Koran cannot be considered miraculous. Muhammad reiterated principles which mankind had already conceived in earlier centuries and many places. Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Moses, and Jesus had said similar things. . . . Many of the duties and rites of Islam are continuations of practices which the pagan Arabs had adopted from the Jews.¹⁴

Dashti ridicules the superstitious aspects of much ritual, especially that which occurs during the pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad himself emerges as a shifty character who stoops to political assassinations, murder, and the elimination of all opponents. Among the Prophet’s followers, killings were passed off as “services to Islam.” The position of women under Islam is examined and their inferior status is admitted. The Muslim doctrine of God is criticized. The God of the Koran is cruel, angry, and proud—qualities not to be admired. Finally, it is quite clear that the Koran is not the word of God, since it contains many instances that confuse the identities of the two speakers, God and Muhammad.

Dashti died in 1984 after spending three years in Khomeini’s prisons, where he was tortured despite his age of eighty-three. He told a friend before he died: “Had the Shah allowed books like this to be published and read by the people, we would never have had an Islamic revolution.”¹⁵

Ali Abd al-Raziq, a sheikh at the famous Islamic University of al-Azhar in Cairo, published Islam and the principles of Government in 1925.¹⁶ In this book, al-Raziq argued for a separation of religion and politics since he sincerely believed that this was what Islam really preached. Such a view proved unacceptable, and al-Raziq was tried by a tribunal of other sheikhs who found him guilty of impiety. He was dismissed from the university and forbidden from holding any religious post.

Another graduate of al-Azhar was the Egyptian man of letters Taha Husayn.¹⁷ He was also educated in France where he acquired a skeptical frame of mind. Inevitably on his return to Egypt, he submitted her outworn traditions to severe criticism. Husayn’s views also proved unacceptable to the religious establishment and he was forced to resign from public posts. In his On Pre-Islamic Poetry, Taha Husayn had written that the fact that Abraham and Ishmael appear in the Koran “is not sufficient to establish their historical existence.”

In April 1967,¹⁸ just before the Six-Day War, an issue of the Syrian army magazine Jayash ash-Sha’b contained an article attacking not just Islam, but God and religion in general as “mummies which should be transferred to the museums of historical remains.” In a scene reminiscent of the Ibn Kammuna case, mobs took to the streets in many of the major cities of Syria, and the disorder led to violence, strikes, and arrests.

When the old ruse of blaming the incident on a Zionist-American conspiracy failed to quell the violence, the article’s author, Ibrahim Khalas, and two of his editors on the magazine were court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. Happily, they were eventually released.

In 1969, after the disastrous defeat of the Arabs by Israel in 1967, a Syrian Marxist intellectual produced a brilliant critique of religious thought. Sadiq al-Azm ¹⁹ was educated at the American University of Beirut, received his doctorate in philosophy from Yale University, and has published a study of the British philosopher, Bishop Berkeley. Al-Azm’s devastating criticisms of Islam and religion were not appreciated by the Sunni establishment in Beirut. He was brought to trial on charges of provoking religious troubles but was acquitted, perhaps because of the political connections of his distinguished Syrian political family. Nonetheless, al-Azm thought it prudent to live abroad for a while.

Sadiq al-Azm takes the Arab leaders to task for not developing the critical faculties in their people, and for the leaders’ own uncritical attitude to Islam and its outmoded ways of thought. Arab reactionaries used religious thought as an ideological weapon, and yet, no one submitted their thought to

a critical, scientific analysis to reveal the forgeries they employ to exploit the Arab man.... [The leaders] refrained from any criticism of the Arab intellectual and social heritage.... Under the cover of protecting the people’s traditions, values, art, religion, and morals, the cultural effort of the Arab liberation movement was used to protect the backward institutions and the medieval culture and thought of obscurantist ideology.²⁰

Every Muslim will have to face the challenge of the scientific developments of the last hundred and fifty years. Scientific knowledge directly conflicts with Muslim religious beliefs on a number of issues. But the more fundamental difference is a question of methodology—Islam relies on blind faith and the uncritical acceptance of texts on which the religion is based, whereas science depends on critical thought, observation, deduction, and results that are internally coherent and correspond to reality. We can no longer leave religious thought uncriticized: all the sacred texts must be scrutinized in a scientific manner. Only then will we stop gazing back and only then will religion stop being an obscurantist justification for the intellectual and political status quo.

Sadiq al-Azm’s book is important and deserves to be better known, but as far as I know it has not been translated from the original Arabic. More recently, Sadiq al-Azm has very courageously defended Rushdie in an article in Die Welt des Islams 31 (1991).

Another attempt at reforming Islam from within also ended in tragedy. Sudanese theologian Mahmud Muhammad Taha²¹ tried to minimize the role of the Koran as a source of law. Taha felt it was time to devise new laws that would better meet the needs of people in the twentieth century. To propagate his principles, Taha founded the Republican Brethren. Religious authorities in Khartoum did not take kindly to Taha’s ideas and in 1968 declared him guilty of apostasy, which under Islamic law, carries normally a punishment of death. His writings were burned, but Taha himself managed to escape execution for seventeen years. He was tried again, and was publicly hanged at seventy-six years of age in Khartoum in January 1985.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary Muslim mentioned by Pipes is the Libyan leader, Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi,²² whose public statements on Muhammad, the Koran, and Islam amount to a blasphemy far greater than anything discussed so far. Qaddafi confined sharia to private matters; his own ideas were promulgated in the public domain. He changed the Islamic calendar, mocked Meccan pilgrims as “guileless and foolish,” criticized the prophet Muhammad, and claimed that his own achievements were greater than those of the Prophet. In general, he showed extreme skepticism about the truth of the Koran and even about the details of the life of the Prophet. Though religious leaders found Qaddafi anti-Islamic and deviant, and condemned his “perjury and lies,” there were no calls for his death, nor were any of his writings banned. In fact, if the CIA had their wits about them, they could reprint and freely circulate the Libyan leader’s blasphemous thoughts on Islam, and let the fundamentalists do the rest.

Two other skeptics²³ also doubted Islam’s ability to provide any solutions to modern-day problems. In 1986, a Cairo lawyer, Nur Farwaj, wrote an article criticizing the sharia, the Islamic law, as “a collection of reactionary tribal rules unsuited to contemporary societies.” Also in 1986, Egyptian lawyer and essayist Faraj Fada published a pamphlet under the aggressive title of NO To Sharia. The work argued for the separation of religion and state because Islam could not provide the secular constitutional framework necessary for running a modern state. Fada’s polemical essay enjoyed great success, rivaling in popularity the writings of the dogmatic Sheikh Kashk. It was translated into Turkish, Persian, Urdu, and other languages of the Islamic world.

One other work published before February 1989 deserves mention. In L’Islam en Questions (Grasset, 1986), twenty-four Arab writers reply to the following five questions:

1. Does Islam retain its universal vocation?

2. Could Islam be a system of government for a modern state?

3. Is an Islamic system of government an obligatory step in the evolution of the Islamic and Arab peoples?

4. Is the “return to Islam,” the phenomenon that is observable in the last ten years in the majority of Muslim countries, something positive?

5. What is the principal enemy of Islam today?

It is clear from the scholars’ replies that a majority of these Arab intellectuals do not see Islam as the answer to the social, economic, and political problems besetting the Islamic world. The majority of the respondents fervently advocate a secular state. Nine writers give an emphatic and categoric no to question 2, “Could Islam be a system of government for a modern state? ” Another six are equally emphatical in favor of a secular state. Even those writers who answer yes to question 2, do so very tentatively in responses hedged with qualifications such as, “provided rights are respected,” or “as long as we have a modern interpretation of Islam,” etc. Almost all of them find the “return to Islam,” a negative phenomenon, and consider religious fanaticism as the greatest danger facing all Muslims. One of the writers in the above book is Rachid Boudjedra, novelist, playwright, essayist, communist, and self-confessed atheist. He makes scathing remarks²⁴ about religion in Algeria and assails the hypocrisy of the majority—eighty percent—of the “believers” is his figure—who only pray or pretend to pray in the month of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting; who go on pilgrimage for the social prestige; who drink and fornicate and still claim to be good Muslims. To the question “could Islam be a system of government for a modern state?” Boudjedra unequivocally replies:

No, absolutely not. It’s impossible; that is not just a personal opinion, it’s some-. thing objective. We saw that when Nemeiri [head of the Sudan] wanted to apply the Sharia: it didn’t work. The experiment ended abruptly after some hands and feet were chopped off.... There is a reaction even among the mass of Muslims against this sort of thing—stoning women, for example, is hardly carried out, except in Saudi Arabia, and extremely rarely.... Islam is absolutely incompatible with a modem state.... No, I don’t see how Islam could be a system of government.

It is not generally known that Boudjedra has had a fatwa pronounced against him since 1983, and that despite death threats he remains in Algeria, trying to carry on as normally as possible, moving from place to place in heavy disguise. To compound his “errors,” in 1992 Boudjedra wrote a ferocious attack on the FIS, the Islamicist Party, that was set to win the elections in 1992, exposing it as an extremist undemocratic party, and even comparing it to the Nazi party of the thirties. Boudjedra has nothing but contempt for those who remain silent and those who are not only uncritical of the Islamicists, but who also pretend to see something “fertile” in their regression to medieval times. The fatwa of 1983 leads naturally to the fatwa of 1989.

After 14 February 1989

Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew “of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie’s] kind of statements would be explosive.”²⁵ That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm’s previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.

Some writers included condescending asides about understanding the hurt felt by the Muslims, who were urged, in some cases, to beat up Rushdie in some back alley. A respected historian, Professor Trevor-Roper even gave the tacit approval to the brutish call for the murder of a British citizen: “I wonder how Salman Rushdie is faring these days under the benevolent protection of British law and British police, about whom he has been so rude. Not too comfortably I hope.... I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer.”²⁶

Nowhere in any of these articles is there any criticism of the call to murder. Even worse, a recommendation was made that Rushdie’s book be banned or removed from circulation. Astonishingly, there was no defense of one of the fundamental principles of democracy, the principle without which there can be no human progress, namely, the freedom of speech. One would have thought that this was one principle that writers and intellectuals would have been prepared to die for.

Will that “closet hooligan” Trevor-Roper wake up from his complacent slumbers, when those “poor hurt Muslims” begin demanding the withdrawal of those classics of Western literature and intellectual history that offend their Islamic sensibilities but must be dear to Professor Roper’s heart?

Will these Muslims start burning Gibbon, who wrote: “[The Koran is an] endless incoherent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.” Elsewhere Gibbon points out that “the prophet of Medina assumed in his revelations, a fiercer and more sanguinary tone, which proves that his former moderation was the effect of weakness.” Muhammad’s claim that he was the Apostle of God was “a necessary fiction.”

The use of fraud and perfidy, of cruelty and injustice, were often subservient to the propagation of the faith; and Mohammad commanded or approved the assassination of the Jews and idolaters who had escaped from the field of battle. By the repetition of such acts the character of Mohammed must have been gradually stained.... Of his last years ambition was the ruling passion; and a politician will suspect that he secretly smiled (the victorious impostor!) at the enthusiasm of his youth, and the credulity of his proselytes.... In his private conduct Mohammad indulged the appetites of a man, and abused the claims of a prophet. A special revelation dispensed him from the laws which he had imposed on his nation; the female sex, without reserve, was abandoned to his desires.²⁷

What of Roper’s beloved Hume who wrote:²⁸ “[The Koran is a] wild and absurd performance. Let us attend to his [Muhammad’s] narration; and we shall soon find that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, and bigotry as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.” Hume also refers to Muhammad as the “pretended prophet.” It should be clear to everyone by now that the notion of the Koran being Muhammad’s performance and his narration is totally blasphemous.

What of Hobbes who thought that Muhammad “to set up his new religion, pretended to have conferences with the Holy Ghost in form of a dove.”²⁹

What of The Divine Comedy, the greatest poem in Western literature. “See how Mahomet is mangled! Before me Ali weeping goes, cleft in the face from chin to forelock; and all the others, whom thou seest here were in their lifetime sowers of scandal and of schism; and therefore are they thus cleft.”³⁰

In his notes to his translation of The Divine Comedy Mark Musa sums up Dante’s reasons for consigning Muhammad to Hell: “[Muhammad’s] punishment, to be split open from the crotch to the chin, together with the complementary punishment of Ali, represents Dante’s belief that they were initiators of the great schism between the Christian Church and Mohammedanism. Many of Dante’s contemporaries thought that Mahomet was originally a Christian and a cardinal who wanted to become pope.”³¹

Carlyle and Voltaire also had harsh things to say about the Koran and Muhammad, but in 1989, Western apologists of Islam were busy either attacking

Rushdie, or churning out works of Islamic propaganda and not expressing their criticisms of the faith. By explaining away “Islamic fundamentalism” in terms of economic misery or in terms of notions such as “loss of identity,” “feeling threatened by the West,” or “white racism,” these apologists legitimated barbaric behavior, and inevitably shifted moral responsibility from the Muslims onto the West. “The problem is not Islam,” the argument goes, “but the extremists who have hijacked the Koran. Islam is a tolerant religion and the Ayatollah Khomeini is not following the true spirit or principles of Islam. What he has so obscenely applied in Iran is not truly Islamic, it is a grotesque caricature. Islam has always tolerated dissent.”

Even more dishonest is the continuing attempt to exonerate Islam itself—especially by using phrases such as “Islamic fundamentalist,” “Muslim fanatic,” and so on.

The term “Islamic fundamentalist ”is in itself inappropriate, for there is a vast difference between Christianity and Islam. Most Christians have moved away from the literal interpretation of the Bible; for most of them, “It ain’t necessarily so.”³² Thus we can legitimately distinguish between fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist Christians. But Muslims have not moved away from the literal interpretation of the Koran: all Muslims—not just a group we have called “fundamentalist”—believe that the Koran is literally the word of God.

The preceding examples of mob riots show that ordinary Muslims very easily take offense at what they perceive to be insults to their holy book, their prophet, and their religion. Most ordinary Muslims supported Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie.

Muslim moderates, along with Western liberals and the woefully misguided Christian clergy, argue in a similar manner, namely, that Islam is not what Khomeini has applied in Iran. But the Muslim moderates and all the others cannot have their cake and eat it too. No amount of mental gymnastics or intellectual dishonesty is going to make the unpalatable, unacceptable, and barbaric aspects of Islam disappear. At least the Islamic “fundamentalist ”is being logical and honest, given the premise that the Koran is the Word of God. Khomeini’s actions directly reflect the teachings of Islam, whether found in the Koran, in the acts and sayings of the Prophet, or the Islamic law based on them. To justify the call to murder implicit in the fatwa on Rushdie, Iranian spokesmen examined the details of Muhammad’s life. There they found numerous precedents for political assassinations, including the murder of writers who had written satirical verses against the Prophet (discussed in chapter 4). Khomeini himself responds to the Western apologists and Muslim moderates:

Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.

But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world.... Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]. Does this mean sitting back until [non-Muslims] overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should surrender to the enemy? Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.³³

Khomeini is quoting directly from the Koran and is giving practically a dictionary definition of the Islamic doctrine of Jihad. The celebrated Dictionary of Islam defines jihad as: “a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Quran and in the Traditions as a divine institution, enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims.”³⁴

If the Koran is the word of God, as Khomeini and all Muslims believe, and its mandates are to be obeyed absolutely, then who is being more logical, Khomeini or the Muslim moderates and the Western apologists of Islam? Q.E.D.

A similar dishonesty is discernible in the sad attempts by modernist Muslim intellectuals—male and female—to pretend that the “real Islam treats women well”; that no contradiction exists between democracy and Islam, between human rights and Islam. (See chap. 7 for further discussion of these discrepancies.)

The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? inquired John Esposito, an American Islamicist at Holy Cross University, in a book of the same name published in 1991. The book is based on the same dishonesty as soft-core pornography. Despite its apparently daring title, it promises more than it can deliver, and we know in advance what its answer will be without opening the book. We know perfectly well that, since the Rushdie affair, the Oxford University Press would never have accepted a book that dared to criticize Islam, nor would Mr. Esposito have cared to incur the wrath of the entire Muslim world. What Esposito and all Western apologists of Islam are incapable of understanding is that Islam is a threat, and it is a threat to thousands of Muslims. As Amir Taheri put it, “the vast majority of victims of ‘Holy Terror’ are Muslims.” One writer from a country ruled under Islamic principles recently pleaded, “You must defend Rushdie, because in defending Rushdie you are defending us. ”³⁵ In an open letter to Rushdie, the Iranian writer Fahimeh Farsaie points out³⁶ that in focusing solely on Rushdie, we are forgetting the unhappy lot of hundreds of writers throughout the world. In Iran alone, soon after 14 February 1989, “many people, i.e., authors and journalists, were executed and buried in mass graves together with other political prisoners because they had written a book or an article and expressed their own views. To mention just a few names: Amir Nikaiin, Monouchehr Behzadi, Djavid Misani, Abutorab Bagherzadeh.... They followed the bitter fate of their young colleagues who had been kidnapped, tortured, and shot a few months before in a dark night: two poets called Said Soltanpour and Rahman Hatefi.”

When we compare the evasive and sycophantic statements of Western apologists such as Edward Mortimer and Esposito, who blamed everything on Rushdie, with the following declaration by Iranians, we realize the cowardliness and dishonesty of the apologists and the courage of the Iranians.

It is now three years since the writer Salman Rushdie began living under the death threat voiced by Khomeini, and yet no collective action has been taken by Iranians to condemn this barbaric decree. As this outrageous and deliberate attack on freedom of speech was issued in Iran, we feel that the Iranian intellectuals should condemn this Fatwa and defend Salman Rushdie more forcefully than any other group on earth.

The signers of this declaration, who have shown in many different ways their support for Salman Rushdie now and in the past, believe that freedom of speech is one of the greatest achievements of mankind, and point out, as Voltaire once did, that this freedom would be meaningless unless human beings had the liberty to blaspheme. No one and no group has the right to hamper or hinder this freedom in the name of this or that sanctity.

We emphasize the fact that Khomeini’s death sentence is intolerable, and stress that in judging a creative work of art no considerations are valid other than aesthetic ones. We raise our voices unanimously in the defense of Salman Rushdie, and remind the whole world that Iranian writers, artists, journalists, and thinkers inside Iran are persistently under the merciless pressure of religious censorship, and that the number of those who have been imprisoned or even executed there for “blasphemy” is not negligible.

We are convinced that any tolerance shown toward the systematic violation of human rights in Iran cannot but encourage and embolden the Islamic regime to expand and export its terrorist ideas and methods worldwide.³⁷

Signed by about fifty Iranians living in exile.

They, at least, have understood that the Rushdie affair is more than just foreign interference in the life of a British citizen who has not committed any crime under British law, that it is more than just Islamic terrorism. The Rushdie affair involves principles, namely, freedom of thought and expression, principles that are the hallmarks, the defining characteristics of freedom in Western civilization—indeed, in any civilized society.

A considerable number of other writers and intellectuals from the Islamic world very courageously gave their total support to Rushdie. Daniel Pipes has recorded many of their views and statements in his book. In November 1993, in France appeared another book, Pour Rushdie, in which a hundred Arab and Muslim intellectuals gave their support to Rushdie and freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, contrary to what many had feared, as a consequence of the fatwa, books and articles criticizing Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran have continued to be published. One book mocks the Prophet;³⁸ another refers to the Prophet as a child molested ³⁹(alluding to Muhammad’s nine-year-old bride, Aisha). One philosopher thinks of Allah as presented in the Koran as a kind of cosmic Saddam Hussein.⁴⁰ Critical thought has not been silenced.

It was perhaps understandable but disappointing that so few academics in the field of Islamic studies supported freedom of expression. However, I think it was also rather hypocritical of them to stay aloof from the fray because a mere glance at the bibliography of any introductory book on Islam reveals that some of the recommended reading is, in many cases, blasphemous. We can find a neutral example in scholar Gibb’s Islam, a short introduction to the faith of Islam published by Oxford University Press. As the first entry on his list, the late scholar cites R. A. Nicholson’s A Literary History of the Arabs, which contains this blasphemous sentence, among others: “the Koran is an exceedingly human document.”⁴¹ Another book by Nicholson mentioned in the bibliography is The Mystics of Islam, which contains this passage: “European readers of the Koran cannot fail to be struck by its author’s vacillation and inconsistency in dealing with the greatest problems.”⁴² I counted seven other books in Gibb’s bibliography that would be disapproved of by a Muslim. More recently, Rippin in “Muslims, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices” has listed about thirty-five books “For Further Reading,” at least fifteen of which, in my view, would be considered offensive to Muslims. Almost all the great scholars of the past—Noldeke, Hurgronje, Goldziher, Caetani, Lammens, and Schacht—express views that would be unacceptable to Muslims, but we cannot study Islam without referring to the scholarly works. What is encouraging is the fact that most of these works were still available in 1993, and some have been reprinted recently. And perhaps most ironically of all, you can buy them from the Islamic Bookshop in London and be served by a Muslim girl wearing the traditional head scarf beloved by fundamentalists!

Certainly, if academics wish to continue to work unhindered, they will have to defend academic freedom and freedom of expression. They should not inconsistently and hypocritically criticize Rushdie when they themselves are writing or recommending blasphemous works. Rushdie’s battle is their battle also.

Trahison des Clercs

This book is first and foremost an assertion of my right to criticize everything and anything in Islam—even to blaspheme, to make errors, to satirize, and mock. Muslims and non-Muslims have the right to critically examine the sources, the history, and dogma of Islam. Muslims avail themselves of the right to criticize in their frequent denunciations of Western culture, in terms that would have been deemed racist, neocolonialist, or imperialist had a European directed them against Islam. Without criticism, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified in its totalitarian, intolerant, paranoid past. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality, and truth.

Western scholars and Islamicists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam. Some, as I shall show, have even abandoned any attempt to achieve objectivity, to aim at objective truth.

Some Islamicists have themselves noticed the appalling trend among their colleagues. Karl Binswanger⁴³ has remarked on the “dogmatic Islamophilia” of most Arabists. In 1983 Jacques Ellul⁴⁴ complained that “in France it is no longer acceptable to criticize Islam or the Arab countries.” Already in 1968 Maxime Rodinson had written, “An historian like Norman Daniel has gone so far as to number among the conceptions permeated with medievalism or imperialism, any criticisms of the Prophet’s moral attitudes and to accuse of like tendencies any exposition of Islam and its characteristics by means of the normal mechanisms of human history. Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and simple.”⁴⁵

Patricia Crone and Ibn Rawandi have remarked that Western scholarship lost its critical attitude to the sources of the origins of Islam around the time of the First World War. John Wansbrough has noted that “as a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques of Biblical criticism it [the Koran] is virtually unknown.”⁴⁶ By 1990, we still have the scandalous situation described by Andrew Rippin:

I have often encountered individuals who come to the study of Islam with a background in the historical study of the Hebrew Bible or early Christianity, and who express surprise at the lack of critical thought that appears in introductory textbooks on Islam. The notion that “Islam was born in the clear light of history” still seems to be assumed by a great many writers of such texts. While the need to reconcile varying historical traditions is generally recognized, usually this seems to pose no greater problem to the authors than having to determine “what makes sense” in a given situation. To students acquainted with approaches such as source criticism, oral formulaic composition, literary analysis and structuralism, all quite commonly employed in the study of Judaism and Christianity, such naive historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being approached with less than academic candor.⁴⁷

Accompanying an uncritical attitude toward Islam goes a corresponding myth of its superiority: its greater tolerance, its greater rationality, its sense of brotherhood, its greater spirituality, and the myth of Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver. It is worthwhile examining the reasons for the uncritical attitude to Islam to see how the myths arose. I shall begin with very general reasons and then move on to more specific historical ones.

1. The need and desire to see an alien culture as in some way superior is as great as the need to see it as inferior, to be enchanted as much as to be disgusted. Familiarity with one’s own culture does indeed breed contempt for it. Children finding their friends’ house so much nicer, and adults in a foreign land finding that “they” do everything better are but examples of the same attitude. A person will always have a natural tendency to turn a blind eye to those embarrassing aspects of the culture that he or she admires; the stranger in a strange land will see what he or she wants to see for personal, emotional, or theoretical reasons. Margaret Mead found “confirmation” for her theories of human nature in Samoa. What she wrote in Coming of Age in Samoa, “was true to our hopes and fears for the future of the world.”⁴⁸ True to our hopes, maybe, but not true to the facts.

As Russell said, “One of the persistent delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others.... [Some writers] tend to think ill of their neighbors and acquaintances, and therefore to think well of the sections of mankind to which they themselves do not belong.”⁴⁹

2. Despite appearances to the contrary, the majority of the people of Western Europe and the United States retain religious beliefs, even if they are vestigial. According to a Gallup poll, only 9 percent of Americans identify themselves as either atheist, agnostic, or of no religion at all. In France, only 12 percent of all those interviewed declared themselves atheist. It is not surprising that

for the sake of comfort and security there pours out daily, from pulpit and press, a sort of propaganda which, if it were put out for a nonreligious purpose, would be seen by everyone to be cynical and immoral. We are perpetually being urged to adopt the Christian creed not because it is true but because it is beneficial, or to hold that it must be true just because belief in it is beneficial.... Religion is gravely infected with intellectual dishonesty.... In religion it is particularly easy to escape notice, because of the common assumption that all honesty flows from religion and religion is necessarily honest whatever it does.⁵⁰

On the whole, Western society in general and the media in particular are totally uncritical of religion. To quote Richard Dawkins, there is the widespread belief that

religious sensitivities are somehow especially deserving of consideration—a consideration not accorded to ordinary prejudice.... Even secular activists are incomprehensibly soft when it comes to religion. We join feminists in condemning a work of pornography because it degrades women. But hands off a holy book that advocates stoning adultresses to death (having been convicted in courts where females are decreed unfit to give evidence)! Animal liberationists attack laboratories that scrupulously use anesthetics for all operations. But what about ritual slaughter houses in which animals have to be fully conscious when their throats are cut? ... The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify his faith and you infringe “religious liberty. ”⁵¹

The uncritical attitude to Islam and the genesis of the myth of Islamic tolerance must be seen against the general intellectual background of Europe’s first encounter with non-European civilizations especially in the sixteenth century—the Age of Exploration—when the notion of the “noble savage ”was first fully developed. Of course, even prior to the discovery of the Americas, the Greeks and the Romans had the corresponding myths of a “golden age” and the virtuousness of the barbarians. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is but a variation of the idea of a golden age of simplicity and natural virtue putatively enjoyed in an unspoiled, ecologically sound wilderness by our ancestors.

In his Germania, written in 98 C.E., Tacitus contrasts the virtues of the Germans with the vices of contemporary Rome, the noble simplicity of the Teutonic culture with the corruption and pretentiousness of Roman civilization. Significantly, as an “ethnological treatise it was singularly incoherent,”⁵² but it worked well as a morality tale. Montaigne, Rousseau, and Gibbon all felt its influence.

Perhaps the real founder of the sixteenth-century doctrine of the noble savage was Peter Martyr Anglerius (1459-1525). In his De Rebus Oceanicis et Orbo Nove of 1516, Peter Martyr criticized the Spanish conquistadors for their greed, narrow-mindedness, intolerance, and cruelty, contrasting them with the Indians, “who are happier since they are free from money, laws, treacherous judges, deceiving books, and the anxiety of an uncertain future.”

But it was left to Montaigne, under the influence of Peter Martyr, to develop the first full-length portrait of the noble savage in his celebrated essay “On Cannibals” (ca. 1580), which is also the source of the idea of cultural relativism. Deriving his rather shaky information from a plain, simple fellow, Montaigne describes some of the more gruesome customs of the Brazilian Indians and concludes:

I am not so anxious that we should note the horrible savagery of these acts as concerned that, while judging their faults so correctly, we should be so blind to our own. I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, to roast it by degrees, and then give it to be trampled and eaten by dogs and swine—a practice which we have not only read about but seen within recent memory, not between ancient enemies, but between neighbors and fellow-citizens and, what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion—than to roast and eat a man after he is dead.⁵³

Elsewhere in the essay, Montaigne emphasizes the Indians’ enviable simplicity, state of purity, and freedom from corruption. Even their “fighting is entirely noble.”

Although Montaigne, like Tacitus and Peter Martyr, possesses only rather dubious, secondhand knowledge of these noble savages, his scant information does not prevent him from criticizing and morally condemning his own culture and civilization: “[We] surpass them in every kind of barbarity.”

The seventeenth century saw the first truly sympathetic accounts of Islam, but the most influential of these, those of Jurieu and Bayle, served the same purpose as those of Tacitus, Peter Martyr, and Montaigne. Let us hear Mr. Jurieu:

It may be truly said that there is no comparison between the cruelty of the Saracens against the Christians, and that of Popery against the true believers. In the war against the Vaudois, or in the massacres alone on St. Bartholomew’s Day, there was more blood spilt upon account of religion, than was spilt by the Saracens in all their persecutions of the Christians. It is expedient to cure men of this prejudice; that Mahometanism is a cruel sect, which was propagated by putting men to their choice of death, or the abjuration of Christianity. This is in no wise true; and the conduct of the Saracens was an evangelical meekness in comparison to that of Popery, which exceeded the cruelty of the cannibals.⁵⁴

The whole import of Jurieu’s Lettres Pastorales (1686-89) only becomes clear when we realize that Jurieu was a Huguenot pastor, the sworn enemy of Bossuet, and he was writing from Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Jurieu is using the apparent tolerance of the Muslims to criticize Roman Catholicism; for him the Saracens’ “evangelical meekness” is a way of contrasting Catholicism’s own barbarity as demonstrated on St. Bartholomew’s Day.

Pierre Bayle was much influenced by Jurieu and continued the myth of Islamic tolerance that persists to this day (see chap. 9). He contrasts the tolerance of the Turks to the persecutions of Brahmins carried out by the Portuguese in India, and the barbarities imposed on the Indians by the Spaniards in America. “[The Muslims] have always had more humanity for other religions than the Christians”: Bayle was a champion of toleration—was he not himself made a victim of intolerance and forced to flee to Holland?

For Jurieu and Bayle in the seventeenth century, Turk was synonymous with Muslim; thus, Turkish tolerance turned into Muslim tolerance in general. The two writers showed no knowledge whatsoever of Muslim atrocities: the early persecutions of Christians and Jews; the massacres of Hindus and Buddhists in the early conquest of the Indian province of Sind; the intolerance of the Almohads; the persecution of the Zoroastrians, especially in the province of Khurasan. The Frenchmen even seem unaware of the slaughter of Christians in their beloved Turkey at the fall of Constantinople, when the streets literally ran red with blood—there was not much evangelical meekness in evidence then. Nor do the thinkers refer to the inhumane system of the devshirme in operation in contemporary Turkey.

Many religious minorities escaping Catholic or orthodox persecution sought and found refuge in Turkey: Jewish refugees from Spain after their expulsion in 1492 and 1496, the Marranos, Calvinists from Hungary, and others from Russia and Silesia. But these emigrants were there on sufferance, tolerated as second-class citizens. I discuss these questions more fully in chapter 10; however, I should like to add that it was quite fraudulent of Jurieu and Bayle to talk of Muslim tolerance in general on the basis of their scanty knowledge of Islamic history, because the religious situation varied enormously from century to century, in country to country, from ruler to ruler. One thing is certain: There never was an interfaith utopia.

Even in the seventeenth-century Turkey so admired by Bayle and Jurieu, the situation was far from rosy. Here is how the English ambassador at Constantinople described the scene in 1662:

The present vizier has in no way diminished the tyranny or the severity of his father, rather he has surpassed him by his natural hatred of Christians and their religion. As to the churches which were burnt down here two years ago at Galata and Constantinople, the site was bought at an exorbitant price from the Great Sultan by the Greeks, Armenians and Romans, but without permission to build anything in the style of churches, nor to practise rites and religious services. But these religions being too zealous, not only have they built edifices in the style of churches, but there celebrated, almost publicly, their holy services. The vizier has taken advantage of this welcome opportunity to demolish and raze to the ground their churches, something he has done with much malice and passion. He condemned the principal culprits to heavy prison sentences, except my chief dragoman.⁵⁵

One scholar summed up the situation in the “tolerant ”Turkish empire: “For strategic reasons the Turks forced the populations of the frontier region of Macedonia and the north of Bulgaria to convert, notably in the XVI and XVII centuries. Those who refused were executed or burnt alive.”⁵⁶

Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, published at the end of the seventeenth century, inaugurated the eighteenth-century vogue for the pseudoforeign letter, such as Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), Madame de Grafigny’s Lettres d‘une Peruvienne (ca. 1747), D’Argen’s Lettres Chinoises (1750), Voltaire’s “Asiatic” in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), Horace Walpole’s “Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien-Chi, at Peking” (1757), and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), in which Lien Chi Altangi pronounces philosophical and satirical comments on the manners of the English.

Thus, by the eighteenth century, the noble savage was simply a device to criticize and comment on the follies of one’s own civilization. The noble savage is no longer a simpleton from the jungle but a sophisticated and superior observer of the contemporary scene in Europe. By emphasizing the corruption, vice, and degradation of the Europeans, eighteenth-century writers exaggerated the putative superiority of the alien culture, the wisdom of the Chinese, Persian, or Peruvian moralist and commentator. The European authors were not really interested in other cultures for their own sake; in fact, they had very little knowledge of these civilizations.

Against this intellectual background, we can understand why the eighteenth century so readily adopted the myth of Muhammad as a wise and tolerant ruler and lawgiver, when it was presented as such by Count Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722). Boulainvilliers’s apologetic biography of Muhammad appeared posthumously in London in 1730. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this book in shaping Europe’s view of Islam and its founder, Muhammad; it certainly much influenced Voltaire and Gibbon.

Boulainvilliers had no knowledge of Arabic and had to rely on secondary sources; thus his work is by no means a work of serious scholarship. On the contrary it contains many errors and “much embroidery.”⁵⁷ Nonetheless, Boulainvilliers was able to use Muhammad and the origins of Islam as “a vehicle of his own theological prejudices,” and as a weapon against Christianity in general and the clergy in particular. He found Islam reasonable; it did not require one to believe in impossibilities—no mysteries, no miracles. Muhammad, though not divine, was an incomparable statesman and a greater legislator than anyone produced by ancient Greece.

Jeffery has rightly called this work “a bombastic laudation of Mohammad in the interests of belittling Christianity.” Hurgronje calls it “an anti-clerical romance, the material of which was supplied by a superficial knowledge of Islam drawn from secondary sources.” A little tar from Boulainvilliers’s brush can be detected in Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.⁵⁸

George Sale’s translation of the Koran (1734) is the first accurate one in English. Like Boulainvilliers, whose biography of Muhammad he had carefully read, Sale firmly believed that the Arabs “seem to have been raised up on purpose by God, to be a scourge to the Christian church, for not living answerably to that most holy religion which they had received.”⁵⁹

The attitude of Voltaire can be seen as typical of the sentiments prevailing throughout the entire century. Voltaire seems to have regretted what he had written of Muhammad in his scurrilous and—to a Muslim—blasphemous play Mahomet (1742), which presents the Prophet as an impostor who enslaved men’s souls: “Assuredly, I have made him out to be more evil than he was.”⁶⁰ But, in his Essai sur les Moeurs (1756) and various entries in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, Voltaire shows himself to be prejudiced in Islam’s favor at the expense of Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. Like Boulainvilliers and Sale, both of whom he had read, Voltaire uses Islam as a pretext to attack Christianity, which for him remained the “most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.”⁶¹ Like many eighteenth-century intellectuals, Voltaire was a deist, that is, “he believed in the existence of God; while opposing revealed religion—miracles, dogmas, and any kind of priesthood.”

In his “The Sermon of the Fifty” (1762), Voltaire attacks Christian mysteries like transubstantiation as absurd, Christian miracles as incredible, and the Bible as “full of contradictions.” The God of Christianity was a “cruel and hateful tyrant.” The true God, the sermon continues, “surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough.” Nor could he have inspired “books filled with contradictions, madness and horror.”⁶²

By contrast, Voltaire finds the dogmas of Islam simplicity itself: there is but one God, and Muhammad is his Prophet. For all deists, the superficial rationality of Islam was appealing: no priests, no miracles, no mysteries. To this was added other false beliefs such as Islam’s absolute tolerance of other religions, in contrast to Christian intolerance.

Gibbon was much influenced by Boulainvilliers in particular, but also by the eighteenth-century Weltanschauung with its myths and preoccupations, in short, what we have been examining throughout this chapter. By the time Gibbon came round to writing his History (the first volume of Decline and Fall came out in 1776), there was, as Bernard Lewis puts it, “a vacancy for an Oriental myth. Islam was in many ways suitable.” But what happened to the previously mentioned Chinese, who also managed to fascinate Europeans? Here is how Lewis sums up the situation in the latter half of the eighteenth century:

Europe, it seems, has always needed a myth for purposes of comparison and castigation.... The eighteenth-century Enlightenment had two ideal prototypes, the noble savage and the wise and urbane Oriental. There was some competition for the latter role. For a while the Chinese, held up as a model of moral virtue by the Jesuits and of secular tolerance by the philosophers, filled it to perfection in the Western intellectual shadowplay. Then disillusionment set in, and was worsened by the reports of returning travellers whose perceptions of China were shaped by neither Jesuitry nor philosophy, but by experience. By the time Gibbon began to write, there was a vacancy for an Oriental myth. Islam was in many ways suitable.⁶³

What Bernard Lewis tells us about Gibbon is applicable to almost all the writers on Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “[Gibbon’s] own imperfect knowledge and the defective state of European scholarship at the time hampered his work and sometimes blunted the skepticism which he usually brought to the sources and subjects of his historical inquiries.... The Muslim religious myths enshrined in the traditional biographical literature on which all his sources ultimately rest were more difficult for him to detect, and there are failures of perception and analysis excusable in a historian of the time.”⁶⁴

Gibbon, like Voltaire, painted Islam in as favorable a light as possible to better contrast it with Christianity. The English historian emphasized Muhammad’s humanity as a means of indirectly criticizing the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ. Gibbon’s anticlericalism led him to underline Islam’s supposed freedom from that accursed class, the priesthood. Indeed, the familiar pattern is reemerging—Islam is being used as a weapon against Christianity.

Gibbon’s deistic view of Islam as a rational, priest-free religion, with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver, enormously influenced the way all Europeans perceived their sister religion for years to come. Indeed, it established myths that are still accepted totally uncritically by scholars and laymen alike.

Both Voltaire and Gibbon subscribed to the myth of Muslim tolerance, which to them meant Turkish tolerance. But eighteenth-century Turkey was far from being an inter-faith utopia. The traveler Carsten Niebuhr recalls that Jews were treated contemptuously. Another British ambassador describes the situation in Constantinople in 1758: “The Great Sultan himself has shown us that he is determined to maintain and enforce his laws, those concerning clothes have often been repeated and with remarkable solemnity.... A Jew during his sabbath was the first victim; the Great Sultan, who was walking around incognito, met him, ... and had him executed, his throat was cut on the spot. The next day, it was the turn of an Armenian, he was sent to the vizier.... A universal terror has struck everyone.”⁶⁵

Another ambassador in Constantinople in 1770 writes that a law was passed whereby any Greeks, Armenians, and Jews seen outside their homes after nightfall were to be hanged without exception. A third ambassador writing in 1785 describes how any Christian churches that were secretly repaired by the Christians were dismantled by the Turkish authorities because of protests by Muslim mobs.⁶⁶

Carlyle’s account of Muhammad in Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) is often considered the first truly sympathetic portrait of the Islamic leader by a Western intellectual. According to Professor Watt, Thomas Carlyle “laughed out of court the idea of an impostor being the founder of one of the world’s great religions.”⁶⁷ Laughter is no substitute for argument, and valid arguments are singularly lacking in Carlyle’s essay. Instead, we are presented “violent exclamatory rhetoric,”⁶⁸ and wild mumblings about “mysteries of nature.” What “arguments” there are are fallacious. Muhammad cannot have been an impostor. Why not? It is inconceivable that so many people could have been taken in by a mere trickster and insincere fraud. His genuineness lies in the success of his religion—truth by numbers. Carlyle parades the total number of Muslims, which he takes to be 180 million, in front of our eyes to impress us and imply falsely that Muhammad could not have persuaded so many to embrace a false religion. But Muhammad only persuaded a few thousand people—the rest have simply followed and copied one another. A large number of Muslims blindly follow the religion of their fathers as something given. It is absurd to suggest that the vast majority have examined the arguments for and against the sincerity of Muhammad.

To assess the truth of a doctrine by the number of people who believe it is also totally ridiculous. The number of people who believe in Scientology is increasing yearly. Is its truth also growing year by year? There are more Christians worldwide than Muslims—is Christianity more true than Islam? When a book entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein was published, Einstein remarked, “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!” The converse is also true.

“But, at least, an insincere man could not have been so successful, leaving aside the truth of what he preached.” Again, an obviously fallacious argument. How do we know Muhammad was sincere? “Because otherwise he would not have been so successful.” Why was he so successful? “Because he was sincere”? A patently circular argument! According to an anecdote, L. Ron Hubbard bet Arthur C. Clarke that he could start a new religion; the former therapist then went out and founded the religion of Scientology. It is especially difficult to know how much of their own mumbo jumbo charlatans believe. Televangelists; mediums; gurus; the Reverend Moon; the founders of religions, cults, and movements—there is a bit of the Elmer Gantry in all of them.

Like his predecessors, Carlyle had a superficial knowledge of Islam—we can safely say that as a piece of scholarship, his essay on Muhammad is totally worthless—but, unlike them, he used Islam as a weapon against materialism and Benthamite utilitarianism. Deeply perturbed by the mechanistic world that was emerging because of the Industrial Revolution, he had to resort to the comforting myth of the wisdom of the East. Like Flaubert’s Bouvard, Carlyle longed for and expected from the Orient the regeneration that would wake the West from its spiritual paralysis. Carlyle adumbrated certain ideas that were to reappear throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The historian saw Islam as a confused form of Christianity, a bastard kind of Christianity, shorn of its absurd details. Where Dante and his contemporaries had seen Islam as Christian heresy, and as something inferior, Carlyle saw it more positively: “Mahomet’s Creed we called a kind of Christianity; ... I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead!”⁶⁹

Carlyle’s actual portrait of Muhammad is but a reformulation of the idea of the noble savage but in religious garb: as someone in direct touch with the mysteries of existence, life, and Nature; full of mystical intuition of the real nature of things denied to us in the skeptical, civilized West. “A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light: of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.... The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature’s own heart.” Elsewhere, Carlyle describes Muhammad as “an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him.”⁷⁰

The Scottish essayist sees the Arabs in general as active but also meditative, with wild strong feelings, and they possess that supreme quality “religiosity.” Their religion is heartily believed. What is most important is sincerity, not truth—it hardly matters what is believed as long as it is believed with a fierceness that goes beyond mere reason. “The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than the truths of [an insincere main].”⁷¹

Russell and others have seen in Carlyle’s ideas the intellectual ancestry of fascism. Carlyle’s fascism can be seen not only in his uncritical adulation of the strong leader, but also in his sentimental glorification of violence, cruelty, extremism, and irrationalism, in his contempt for reason: “A candid ferocity ... is in him; he does not mince matters.”⁷² It is astonishing that anyone took any of Carlyle’s drivel seriously. But it is equally sad that Muslims peddle this nonsense as a separate pamphlet, as a kind of seal of approval to show that a European takes their Prophet seriously. It is also surprising, since a careful reading of the chapter shows Muhammad in less than a flattering light—he is not always sincere, his moral precepts are not of the finest, he is by no means the truest of prophets, and so on. Above all, this chapter contains the famous insult to the Koran: “A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement; most crude incondite—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.”⁷³ Or us through Carlyle!

The publication of this chapter as a separate pamphlet has meant that most Muslims have been consciously or unconsciously protected from the extraordinary following chapter on “Hero As Poet,” where Carlyle takes back everything positive he ever said about Muhammad. The historian advises us that first, one would have to be at a fairly primitive stage of development to believe in prophets. Second, Muhammad “speaks to great masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there with good and with evil strangely blended.”⁷⁴ Third, Muhammad’s impact wanes:

It was intrinsically an error that notion of Mahomet’s, of his supreme Prophethood: and has come down to us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity and simulacrum; no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and become obsolete.... Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was conscious of was a mere error; a futility and triviality.⁷⁵

And the fourth and final blasphemy: “His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that God wrote that!”⁷⁶

Many of the European apologists of Islam of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no proper acquaintance with the Arabic sources; most had only a superficial knowledge of their subject. They used Islam as a weapon against intolerance, cruelty, dogma, the clergy, and Christianity.

Many European apologists of Islam of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a far greater knowledge of Islam and were, by contrast, devout Christians-priests, missionaries, curates—who realized that to be consistent they had to accord Islam a large measure of religious equality, to concede religious insight to Muhammad. They recognized that Islam was a sister religion, heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian ideas; and Christianity and Islam stood or fell together. They knew that if they started criticizing the dogmas, doctrines, and absurdities of Islam, their own fantastic structure would start to crumble and would eventually crash around them. They perceived a common danger in certain economic, philosophical, and social developments in the West—the rise of rationalism, skepticism, atheism, secularism; the Industrial Revolution; the Russian Revolution; and the rise of communism and materialism. Sir Hamilton Gibb writes of Islam as a Christian “engaged in a common spiritual enterprise.”⁷⁷ But let us beware of skepticism: “Both Christianity and Islam suffer under the weight of worldly pressure, and the attack of scientific atheists and their like,” laments Norman Daniel.⁷⁸

Hence, Christian scholars tend to be rather uncritical of Islam, a tendency arising from a wish not to offend Muslim friends and Muslim colleagues. A writer might offer explicit apologies for penning something that might be offensive to Muslim eyes, or use various devices to avoid seeming to take sides, or avoid making judgments about the issue under discussion. Professor Watt in his preface to his biography of Muhammad provides an example of this maneuvering: “In order to avoid deciding whether the Quran is or is not the Word of God, I have refrained from using the expressions ‘God says’ and ‘Muhammad says’ when referring to the Quran, and have simply said ‘the Quran says.’ ”⁷⁹ Bernard Lewis has remarked that such measures have tended to make the discussions of modem orientalists “cautious and sometimes insincere.”⁸⁰ That is putting the matter kindly. Professor Watt is a devout Christian who does not believe that the Koran is the word of God. Even more shocking is the way in which the work of great Islamicists has been amended so as not to offend Muslim sensibilties, “without changing” the meaning of the text, we are assured. As Richard Robinson said, “Religion is gravely infected with intellectual dishonesty.”

The Christian scholar Watt was curate of St. Mary Boltons, London, and Old St Paul’s, Edinburgh, and an ordained Episcopalian minister. By common consent, he is the greatest and one of the most influential living Islamic scholars in Britain and, perhaps, the West. Professor Watt and Sir Hamilton Gibb saw skepticism, atheism, and communism as the common enemies of all true religion. They followed Carlyle in hoping for spiritual inspiration from the East. Here Watt assesses the state of religion: “Islam—or perhaps one should rather say, the East—has tended to overemphasize divine sovereignty, whereas in the West too much influence has been attributed to man’s will, especially in recent times. Both have strayed from the true path, though in different directions. The West has probably something to learn of that aspect of truth which has been so clearly apprehended in the East.”⁸¹ (Notice how the East has the last word. Has the East nothing to learn from the West?)

Throughout his article “Religion and Anti-Religion,” Professor Watt can barely disguise his contempt for secularism. “The wave of secularism and materialism is receding,” notes Watt⁸² with approval. “Most serious minded men in the Middle East realize the gravity of the problems of the present time, and are therefore aware of the need for a religion that will enable them to cope with the situations that arise from the impingement of these problems on their personal lives.” Watt then goes on to discuss the work of Manfred Halpern, who

speaks of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, together with movements like Fidalyan-i Islam in Persia and Khaksars and Jama’at-i Islam in Pakistan, as neo-Islamic totalitarianism, and points out their resemblances to fascism, including the National Socialism of Germany under Adolf Hitler. From a purely political point of view this may be justified, and the resemblances certainly exist. Yet in a wider perspective this characterization is misleading. It is true that these movements sometimes “concentrate on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the power of their charismatic leader and the solidarity of the movement,” ... and that “they champion the values and emotions of a heroic past, but repress all free critical analysis of either past roots or present problems.” Yet political ineptitude and even failure do not outweigh their positive significance as marking a resurgence of religion.... The neo-Islamic mass movements, far from being tantamount to national socialism or fascism, are likely to be an important barrier against such a development.

Watt’s wonderful euphemism for fascism is “political ineptitude”; he asks us to overlook this fascism, and asks us instead to admire it for its “positive significance as marking a resurgence of religion.” Watt’s support for what Amir Taheri calls “Holy Terrorists” is worth pondering. It must not be forgotten that the Muslim Brethren was a terrorist organization whose founder made no secret of his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. After the end of the Second World War, Hassan’s Muslim Brethren launched a series of attacks on civilian targets; cinemas, hotels, and restaurants were bombed or set on fire, and women dressed incorrectly were assailed with knives. The group also launched a series of assassinations.

Yes—we are asked to overlook this in the name of religious resurgence.

Watt reveals even more disturbing qualities—a mistrust of the intellect and a rejection of the importance of historical objectivity and truth: “This emphasis on historicity, however, has as its complement a neglect of the truth of symbols; and it may be that ultimately ‘symbolic truth’ is more important than ‘historical truth.’ ”⁸³ In “Introduction to the Quran,” Watt seems to have a very tenuous grasp on the notion of truth; indeed, objective truth is abandoned altogether in favor of total subjectivism:

The systems of ideas followed by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others are all true insofar as they enable human beings to have a more or less satisfactory “experience of life as a whole.” So far as observation can tell, none of the great systems is markedly inferior or superior to the others. Each is therefore true. In particular the Quran is in this sense true. The fact that the Quranic conception of the unity of God appears to contradict the Christian conception of the unity of God does not imply that either system is false, nor even that either conception is false.

Each conception is true in that it is part of a system which is true. Insofar as some conception in a system seems to contradict the accepted teaching of science—or, that of history in so far as it is objective—that contradiction raises problems for the adherents of the system, but does not prove that the system as a whole is inferior to others. That is to say, the Quranic assertion that the Jews did not kill Jesus does not prove that the Quranic system as a whole is inferior to the Christian, even on the assumption that the crucifixion is an objective fact.⁸⁴

In this astonishing passage of intellectual dishonesty, Watt performs all sorts of mental gymnastics in an effort to please everyone, to not offend anyone. Leaving aside the problem of the vagueness of Watt’s terminology—terms like “experience of life as a whole,” “conception,” “Quranic system”-we can now understand why British Islamicists have been so uncritical of Islam. The non-Muslim scholar, continues Watt, “is not concerned with any question of ultimate truth, since that, it has been suggested, cannot be attained by man. He assumes the truth [my emphasis], in the relative sense just explained, of the Quranic system of ideas.” Under such conditions, the scholar is not likely to be critical of anyone’s “belief system” as long as it meets his or her “spiritual needs.”

The attitude here exemplified by Watt was brilliantly exposed and attacked by Julien Benda in his classic Betrayal of the Intellectuals, whose French title I took as the motto to this section. Benda wrote:

But the modem “clerks” [intellectuals] have held up universal truth to the scorn of mankind, as well as universal morality. Here the “clerks” have positively shown genius in their effort to serve the passions of the laymen. It is obvious that truth is a great impediment to those who wish to set themselves up as distinct; from the very moment when they accept truth, it condemns them to be conscious of themselves in a universal. What a joy for them to learn that this universal is a mere phantom, that there exist only particular truths, Lorrain truths, Provencal truths, Britanny truths, the harmony of which in the course of centuries constitutes what is beneficial, respectable, true in France.⁸⁵

Watt would add a Muslim truth, a Christian truth, and so on; or as he put it in Islamic Revelation, “Each [great religion] is valid in a particular cultural region, but not beyond that.”

Benda was trying to combat the rise of nationalism in the twenties, as was Russell in his “The Ancestry of Fascism,” which brilliantly demonstrated that the abandonment of the idea of objective truth leads to fascism. For Hitler the conception of science as the pursuit of truth, objective truth, was meaningless. Hitler rejected or accepted doctrines on political grounds.

The fever of nationalism which has been increasing ever since 1848 is one form of the cult of unreason. The idea of one universal truth has been abandoned; there is English truth, French truth, German truth, ... Rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species, not only in ages in which it easily prevails, but also, and even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.⁸⁶

Karl Popper also attacks moral and intellectual relativism as the main philosophical malady of our time, and his comments are pertinent in this context—one even has the impression that Popper is replying directly to Watt. Popper begins by looking at one deceptive argument that is often used in defense of relativism a la Watt. Quoting Xenophanes, Popper agrees that we tend to see our gods, and our world from our own point of view—we tend to be subjective. But it is going too far to conclude that our own particular historical and cultural background is an insurmountable barrier to objectivity:

We can, in stages get rid of some of this bias [or subjectivity], by means of critical thinking and especially of listening to criticism.... Secondly it is a fact that people with the most divergent cultural backgrounds can enter into fruitful discussion, provided they are interested in getting nearer to the truth, and are ready to listen to each other, and to learn from each other.... [It is also important not to take] this step towards criticism, for a step towards relativism. If two parties disagree, this may mean that one is wrong, or the other, or both: this is the view of the criticist. It does not mean, as the relativist will have it, that both may be equally right. They may be equally wrong, no doubt, though they need not be. But anybody who says that to be equally wrong means to be equally right is merely playing with words or with metaphors.

It is a great step forward to learn to be self-critical; to learn to think that the other fellow may be right—more right than we ourselves. But there is a great danger involved in this: we may think that both, the other fellow and we ourselves, may be right. But this attitude, modest and self-critical as it may appear to us, is neither as modest nor as self-critical as we may be inclined to think; for it is more likely that both ... are wrong. Thus self criticism should not be an excuse for laziness and for the adoption of relativism.⁸⁷(my emphases)

Apart from its sentimentality and laziness, such a view as that espoused by Watt has logical consequences that Watt himself would not accept. If there is total incommensurability between “religous beliefs,” then it is sheer arrogance to talk of higher and lower religions. As I ask later in chapter 10, why is monotheism seen as something higher than polytheism? Why not allow equal intellectual respectability to the Church of Scientology or the Bahais or the Moonies; the cults of Reverend Jones, the Children of God, or any of those cults discussed in Professor Evans’s Cults of Unreason? Watt can no longer legitimately use the terms “inferior” or “superior,” or even, for that matter, “true.”

Furthermore, there is extraordinary condescension implicit in such an attitude. Watt is treating Muslims and Christians as imbecile children whose beliefs in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy must not be questioned because they do them no harm, but do bring them comfort. “It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth,” wrote Russell.

Time and again Watt tells us that what is important is “symbolic truth” and not historical truth. But both Muslims and Christians themselves explicitly reject this. J. L. Thompson has pointed out that “many Old Testament scholars have been inclined to believe that not only is history central to the message of Israel, but that an acceptance of the historicity of Israel’s early traditions, particularly those about the biblical patriarchs, is essential to Christian faith, even, that belief in the resurrection depends directly on the historical facticity of the promise to the patriarchs.” Roland de Vaux has asserted several times that the task of scientifically establishing the historical foundations of these biblical traditions is of the utmost importance, “for if the historical faith of Israel is not founded in history, such faith is erroneous, and therefore, our faith is also.” De Vaux maintains that if faith is to survive, the close relationship between religious history and objective history must be maintained. He claims that to reject the historicity of Israel’s “religious history” would be to question, in an ultimate way the ground of faith itself.”⁸⁸

An example similar to Watt’s doublethink comes from another Western apologist of Islam, Norman Daniel, who writes:

It is essential for Christians to see Muhammad as a holy figure; to see him, that is, as Muslims see him. If they do not do so, they must cut themselves off from comprehension of Islam. This does not mean that they must assert that Muhammad was holy, or even perhaps, think that he was so, it is possible not to accept as true the fact alleged by Muslims, that God spoke through Muhammad, but yet to judge the resulting situation as though it were true. If people believe it to be true, that will not make it true, but their actions will be the same as they would have been, if it had been true.... But if some such spiritual and mental borrowing does not take place, no further progress is possible.”⁸⁹

As Rodinson remarked truly, understanding has given way to apologetics. Daniel also seems unable to grasp the notion of objective truth. Daniel and Watt and, in France, scholars like Louis Massignon have all emphasized the common spiritual struggle in which all monotheistic creeds are engaged. Even the Vatican Ecumenical Council conceded in 1962 that Islam had given mankind important truths about God, Jesus, and the prophets.

In view of the arguments developed earlier, it is not at all surprising that Christian and Jewish religious leaders joined hands and closed ranks to condemn Rushdie without scarcely a murmur against the un-Christian call to murder. The Vatican’s semiofficial mouthpiece, L‘Osservatore Romano, criticized Rushdie more roundly than the ayatollah. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York urged Catholics not to read the book, while Cardinal Albert Decourtray of Lyons called The Satanic Verses an insult to religion. Meanwhile in Israel, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Avraham Shapira, wanted the book banned: “One day this religion is attacked, and the next day it will be that one.”⁹⁰ More recently, but in the same vein, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Carey, expressed his understanding of the hurt feelings of the Muslims, since Rushdie’s book “contained an outrageous slur on the Prophet.”

What will Dr. Carey make of the outrageous slur on Jesus Christ contained in the Koran? The Koran explicitly denies the crucifixion; in fact, in the words of Rice, “There is not one cardinal fact concerning the life, person, and work of the Lord Jesus Christ which is not either denied, perverted, misrepresented, or at least ignored in Mohammedan theology.”⁹¹ As the Muslim World put it, “Islam is, in a sense, the only anti-Christian religion.”⁹² Will Dr. Carey forgo his vicarious pleasure at this punishment of atheists and wake up from his dogmatic slumbers when Muslims begin slashing paintings depicting the Crucifixion in the National Gallery? After all, every crucifixion, in whatever form, is an insult to Muslims and denies the veracity of the Koran, which remains, for all Muslims, “the Word of God Himself.”

As the Economist said, “Rabbis, priests and mullahs are it seems, uniting to restrain free speech, lest any member of their collective flock should have his feelings hurt.... The Rushdie affair is showing not just that some Muslims do not understand the merits of free speech. It shows that many Western clerics do not either.”⁹³

This unexpected support from Christian and Jewish clerics was gratefully received in Iran: “[They] have understood the conditions and objectives of these colonialist efforts to negate divine values and to insult the divine prophets.”⁹⁴ Muslims paid Christians back for their support: in Istanbul one had the extraordinary spectacle of Muslims joining hands with Christians to protest against the showing of The Last Temptation of Christ.

By the 1920s, left-wing and liberal intellectuals in the West had begun to feel decidedly uneasy about European colonialism and imperialism. As Russell remarked, “A rather curious form of this admiration for groups to which one does not belong is the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subject nations.”⁹⁵ Any criticism of Islam or Islamic countries was seen as a racist attack, or worse, as a Western-Zionist conspiracy. Just to see the influence of Roman law on Islamic law was now, to quote Patricia Crone,

considered ethnocentric and offensive to Islam; and though Greco Roman influences are likely to be somewhat less offensive than Jewish ones, it is only in the the field of Islamic art, science and philosophy that the classical Fortleben is nowadays discussed without circumlocution or apology. (All three fields are of course considerably more marginal to the Muslim self-definition than theology and law.) As the old-fashioned Orientalist has given way to the modem historian, Arabist or social scientist with a tender post-colonial conscience and occasionally more substantial interest in maintaining Muslim goodwill, both the inclination and the ability to view the Werden und Wesen of the Islamic world from the point of view of the Fertile Crescent have been lost, and Islamic civilization has come to be taught and studied with almost total disregard for the Near East in which it was born.⁹⁶

By the mid-1960s and early 1970s, there was a growing minority of Muslims in western Europe, and in the interests of multiculturalism, we were taught that each civilization is its own miracle. Multicultural workshops arose in schools and universities, where even the thought of a critical attitude was an anathema. I discuss cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and their disastrous consequences more fully in chapter 17. Suffice it to say here that in such a climate “criticism” was equated with racism, neocolonialism, and fascism.

The wake of the Rushdie affair bears striking parallels to the situation in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, when left-wing intellectuals were reluctant to criticize either the theory or practice of communism—there was, as Russell pointed out, “a conspiracy of concealment.”⁹⁷ When Russell’s courageous book criticizing Soviet Russia and Communism in general first came out in 1920, it met with hostility from the left. V. S. Naipaul’s Amongst the Believers got a similar reception from intellectuals and Islamophiles, because the author dared to criticize the Iranian Revolution and, subtly, Islam itself.

George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Robert Conquest have all pointed out the lies left-wing intellectuals swallowed about Lenin, Stalin, and Communism so as not to play into the hands of reactionary forces. In modern parlance, truth was less important than political correctness. Such a climate held criticism and debate taboo: “any critical utterance was regarded by the worshipers as blasphemy and crime.”⁹⁸ There was also, in Koestler’s phrase, an unconditional surrender of the critical faculties.⁹⁹

Again, without pushing the analogy too far, one might compare Sartre’s attitude to Stalin’s forced labor camps to Foucault’s stance on Khomeini’s atrocities. Sartre¹⁰⁰ thought the evidence for the labor camps should be ignored or suppressed in order not to demoralize the French proletariat. Foucault, writing in October 1978, enthused over the events in Iran, “which recalled something that the West had forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crises of Christianity, namely the possibility of a ‘political spirituality.’ ”¹⁰¹ An Iranian girl wrote an eloquent letter complaining of Foucault’s fatuous admiration for Islam:

After 25 years of silence and oppression do the Iranian people only have the choice between the Savak [the Shah’s secret police] and religious fanaticism? Spirituality? A return to the popular source of Islam? Saudi Arabia is gorging itself at the same source. Lovers’ heads and robbers’ hands are falling. For the Left in the West.... Islam is desirable—but elsewhere. Many Iranians like me are confused and in despair at the idea of an Islamic government. [These Iranians] know what they are talking about. In the countries surrounding Iran, Islam is sheltering feudal or pseudo-revolutionary oppression. Often in countries like Tunisia, Pakistan and Indonesia, and in my own country, Islam, unfortunately, is the only means of expression for a muzzled people. The Liberal Left in the West should realise what a dead weight Islamic Law can be for a society that is desirous of change, and ought not to be seduced by a cure that is worse than the disease.

Foucault wrote an incomprehensible “reply”—incomprehensible in that his reply did not address itself to any of the charges leveled against the Left’s romanticizing of Islam. Later, after Khomeini had seized power, and even more heads (in their thousands) were falling, Foucault was unrepentant and unapologetic and refused to criticize Khomeini’s “political spirituality.”

It is worth noting the recurring theme of hatred of the West in the writings of fellow travelers of Communism and Islam, like Foucault (“something that the West had forgotten”), and the age-old myth of Eastern spirituality, “political spirituality.” Indeed, the self-hatred displayed by Western intellectuals deserves a chapter of its own—their self-abasement is truly astonishing. They criticize the West and its values in terms that would be denounced or repressed, condemned as “imperialist,” “racist,” or “colonialist” if they were applied to Islamic civilization. All the while, these intellectuals earn nice salaries from Western universities.

It would be fitting to end this section with the case of Roger Garaudy. At one moment Comrade Garaudy was the official philosopher of the French Communist party and an important member of the party’s political bureau. One English critic has described him as “formerly witchfinder general, now dispenser of extreme unction, in quick succession, champion of Stalin and defender of the Khruschevite faith.”¹⁰² After the Communist party expelled Garaudy for factionalism, the classic Stalinist converted to various causes. He first flirted with “Marxist Humanism,” then finally converted to Islam—from one form of totalitarianism to another—not such a big step after all. One hopes for him that this is truly his final resting place, for the penalty for apostasy in Islam is death.

Given their uncritical attitude, it is hardly surprising that Islamologists are accused “by reformers and secularists of supporting and encouraging conservative and fundamentalist forces in their resistance to change.” Professor Bernard Lewis continues: “I have often heard such charges, with anger from strangers and with anguish from friends, and I must admit that they are not entirely unjustified, since some of the fundamentalists are clearly of the same opinion.” Having conceded that much, Lewis takes it all back by claiming, “the coincidence of views between Islamologists and Islamic fundamentalists is apparent, not real, and the reformers’ accusations of complicity in reaction arise from a failure to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive statements.”¹⁰³

But it is quite clear for reasons I have already discussed throughout this chapter that scholars like Watt, Daniel, and Esposito are more apologists than objective historians. Watt expressly rejects the possibility of objectivity. Norman Stillman describes Watt’s justification of the murder of between 600 and 900 Jews of Qurayzah by the Muslims under Muhammad as “as strong an apologetic defense of Muhammad’s conduct on this occasion as might be expected from any devout Muslim.”¹⁰⁴ Watt also goes beyond the descriptive when he describes in triumphant words al-Ghazali’s encounter with Greek philosophy, an encounter “from which Islamic theology emerged victorious and enriched.”¹⁰⁵ It is clear where Watt’s allegiances lie. Professor Lewis himself is clearly moving beyond the descriptive to the realms of the prescriptive when he advocates a “Christian remedy” to the problems of the contemporary Middle East, in other words, the separation of the church and state.¹⁰⁶

Another disturbing development in recent years explains the uncritical attitude of Islamicists toward Islam. A British university dismissed one scholar from his academic post as lecturer in Islamic studies because of pressure from the Saudi Arabian sponsors, who decided that they did not like the way he was teaching Islam.¹⁰⁷

An Algerian friend, a well-educated Muslim who is not particularly religious, came across Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian while looking through my books. He pounced on it with evident glee. As I learned later, he apparently considered Russell’s classic to be a great blow to Christianity; at no time was my friend aware that Russell’s arguments applied, mutatis mutandis, to Islam. I often wondered if I were to substitute the word “Allah” every time I used the word “God” (Allah simply being Arabic for God), would my friend be startled from his self-protecting cocoon? For example, in this passage from Nietzsche I have simply substituted “Allah” for every occurence of “God.” Would my friend find this altered version more shocking than the original? “The concept of Allah was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny Allah, we deny the responsibility in Allah: only thereby do we redeem the world.“And what of Nietzsche’s “God is dead”? It becomes “Allah is dead.”

This is but an absurd fantasy to bring home to Muslims, in any way I can, the fact that they cannot remain oblivious to intellectual, scientific, and social developments in the West; these have implications for everyone. Muslims cannot hide forever from the philosophical implications of the insights of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach, Hennell, Strauss, Bauer, Wrede, Wells, and Renan. Hume’s writings on miracles are equally valid in the Islamic context—even Muslims attest to Jesus’ miracles. The Koran contains references to various Old Testament and New Testament figures: Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Jonah, Enoch, Noah, and Jesus, to name but a few. What of the rise of the critical method in Germany in the nineteenth century, and its application to the study of the Bible and religion in general? When biblical scholars say that Jonah never existed or that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, then, implicitly, the veracity of the Koran is being called into question.

Can the Koran also withstand the onslaught of Western scientific thought? What of Darwin and the theory of evolution that were to deal such a decisive blow to the biblical account of man and creation? Both the Bible and the Koran talk of Adam and Eve. Many Christians have accepted the results of science, adjusted their beliefs accordingly, and are no longer committed to the literal existence of their biblical parents. Muslims have yet to take even this first step.