Before 9/11, my knowledge of Islam was quite limited. Through an “Early Middle Ages” course I’d known of its conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries and its ongoing conflict with the Byzantine Empire, and, as a modern European historian, I thought I was pretty well informed with respect to the conflict between the Europeans and the Sublime Porte, and the long decline of the Ottoman Empire and with rise of the various “Arab” states out of the chaos of the First World War. I’d tried to read the Koran in college around the same time I’d read the Indian and Chinese religious classics (after having been through the Bible), but found it a slog and gave it up as a bad joke. I knew beyond that mostly the romantic stuff — FitzGerald’s Omar, Burton’s Thousand and One Nights, the mythology of tolerance and learning (but in the back of my mind lingered a suspicion about that based on the whole Spanish Reconquista and constant warfare in the East, highlighted by Lepanto and the two sieges of Vienna).
Hoo, Boy! was I naiive. I had little clue. So, after 9/11, I reread the Koran — and was rather shocked at the utter nastiness of the thing. And, I read everything I could about Islam, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or’s several works on the Dhimmi and Islam, John Julius Norwich on Byzantinum, Bernard Lewis, Patai, Habeck, Irwin, a couple of Teaching Company courses on the Crusades, and on Byzantium, Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower, and much more that does not come immediately to mind.
Fundamentally, our forebears who abhored Islam — Mahometanism as they called it — were fundamentally correct about it – it’s a damned dangerous indeology that brooks no reform or compromise.
I suspect the decision to whitewash Islam after 9/11 was well-intended, to protect the more or less average Moslems in this country — and the countries in the Middle East with whom we needed to get along for oil — from the consequences of a really thorough, objective understanding of Islam, its history, intolerance, backwardness, and ideology of world domination. Had that understanding been widespread among the American people in 2001 and 2002, and had the political pressure on the government been based on that kind of an understanding, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan would have had “surrender or die” ultimata with the probable result that Iraq would have surrendered, former Iranian cities would be radioactive glass parking lots, Pakistan would have surrendered its nukes after Iran was nuked, and Afghanistan would have gone more or less the way it did – the Taliban defeated quickly – but without the sanctuaries in Pakistan to retreat into, they would have faded into a low level of banditry. World might well have been better off.
Islam should be treated with precisely the respect it deserves. Its barbarism and misogyny should be absolutely rejected. Its adherents should be informed that their practices are simply unacceptable in the West – if they want to live in the West, they can worship as they choose, but must otherwise assimilate and follow the rules of civil society. Islam’s pretensions to world domination and to conquest must be met with firmness and a demonstrated willingness to resist its encroachments with overwhelming force.
We must not let Abu Grab be our Amritsar Incident.
