by Connor Tomlinson, Courage Media
Islam is often called an “Abrahamic faith” but Muhammad commanded Muslims to commit violence against Christians and Jews
Political déjà vu ensues when Syrian Muslim terrorist Jihad Al-Shamie murdered two men and injured three more at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester. Labour’s umpires of liberal multiculturalism continue to condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia in the same breath, implying that an unnamed third party — no doubt the white British — are to blame. Conservative MPs including Robert Jenrick, Claire Couthino, and Nick Timothy instead question the prudence of recreating Middle Eastern PVP maps in Britain’s major cities. It turns out that importing populations from countries where Mein Kampf is on sale at train stations leads to attacks on Jews.
The politicians courageous enough to criticise Islam at the expense of their safety should be commended. But many continue to split hairs between a hypothetical “peaceful Muslim” majority and a violent “Islamist” minority (with the prophet Muhammad presumably falling into the latter category). A week after 9/11, President George W. Bush said: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” In 2014, President Obama declared, “ISIL is not ‘Islamic’. No religion condones the killing of innocents.” In 2017, after the London Bridge attack, former Prime Minister Theresa May said: “The recent attacks are … bound together by the single, evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division, and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam. It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth.” The government’s counter-extremism programme Prevent continues to insist that Islamism “should not be interpreted as a reference to individuals who follow the religion of Islam”.
The attempt to condemn “political Islam” presupposes someone’s comprehensive metaphysical doctrine of good and evil can ever be divorced from their politics. It tries to confine Islam to a purely private matter of, as historian Tom Holland described, “the inner relationship of a believer to the divine”, with no more consequential expression than exotic cuisine and clothing. Those doing so display their ignorance of Islamic doctrine. Such ignorance is by design: a network of da’wah activists, charities, and politicians have laundered Jihadist ideas through British culture and institutions for decades. Naïve liberals have been misled into promoting Islam as a “religion of peace”. One need only read Islam’s core texts to know it preaches violence against unbelievers, and the subjugation of all non-Muslims as second-class citizens under a Caliphate. Islam does not share our liberal, foundationally protestant distinction between neutral public and private spheres. There is no separation of mosque and state.