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COMMENTARY
March 4, 2006
Clash of whats?
Sometimes I am brought up short by the clarity and courage with which someone else -- with more to lose than I have -- states a truth. I am a Catholic Christian, who often dismisses “secular humanists”. But I’m in awe of people like Canada’s Irshad Manji, the “Muslim refusenik”, who had the courage in her book The Trouble with Islam to directly confront the horrors done in Allah’s name -- in, as she put it, “Pick a country, any Muslim country.”Another is Wafa Sultan, an Arab woman practising psychology, now living in the States. A self-professed “disbeliever in the supernatural”, she has posted essays on the Internet in Arabic, including research into the fate of women under various Islamic regimes. She has willingly and ably confronted Muslim fanatics on Arab TV, most recently on Feb. 21st, when she debated Dr Ibrahim Al-Khouli on Al-Jazeera. A transcript and video clips with English subtitles were made available this week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (“Memri”) -- an indispensable institution, based in Israel, that distributes hard information and accurate translations of documents from the Arab world. (It is useless to condemn it as “Zionist” -- everything Memri publishes is sourced and checkable.) With great bravery, Dr Sultan confronts the “tu quoque” (“you too”) arguments of the apologists for Islamic terror -- refusing to let them change the subject from what they have done, said, and approved, to misty rhetoric against Zionists, Yankees, Imperialists, Crusaders. Boldly on Al-Jazeera, last week, she said what our Western politicians, media flaks, and academic celebrities won’t say, from cowardice in its many forms. Excerpt: “The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. ... It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on the other. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.” The sparkling TV host interrupts to ask if Dr Sultan insinuates the clash is, “between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims”. Dr Sultan replies, “Yes, that is what I mean.” The host reminds her that this phrase, “clash of civilizations”, came from Samuel Huntington, not Osama bin Laden. Dr Sultan reminds him that Islamic books and curricula, going back to the Koran, are full of calls for “fighting the infidels”. When her opponent, Dr Khouli, claims he never offends people, Dr Sultan reminds that among other things he calls Westerners “al-Dhimma” (i.e. the Muslims’ natural slaves), that he routinely compares them to apes and pigs, that he calls Christians “those who incur Allah's wrath”, and so forth. He asks if she is a heretic. Dr Sultan says, he can call her what he likes. He continues, “If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran!” She replies, “These are personal matters that do not concern you. ... Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me.” And after the usual banter about Zionism, she notes that since the Holocaust, the Jews have made the world respect them by their work and knowledge, not their crying and yelling. “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church.” Likewise, though professing Muslims turned ancient Buddha statues into rubble, “We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a mosque, kill a Muslim, or torch an embassy.” Since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, many thousand other barbaric acts have been reported, around the world, each one performed explicitly in the name of Allah. This is fact, not prejudice, and our refusal to make Islam an issue plays directly into the fanatics’ hands. It is not our business to “define Islam”, as so many Muslims aver. It is the Muslims’ duty to define it, in such a way that we will not mistake it for a sword held to our own throats. For when it is presented as a sword, it becomes our business. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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