All discussion of religion
must begin by acknowledging that
Islam is different to all other religions
because of the threat of violence to its critics.
All other religions
can be criticised and even ridiculed without fear of violence.
Only with Islam is there a credible threat of violence to its critics.
Muslims can criticise Christianity
without any fear of violence,
but it is an unfair, one-sided debate.
Christians cannot criticise Islam
without an ever-present fear of Islamic violence.
It needs far more bravery to be on that side.
A simple, calm, rational debate between all religions is not possible
because the fear of Islamic violence is always in the background.
Obviously I, like the vast majority
of the world's population, (*)
think Islam is not true.
There is no evidence to support any of its claims about the universe and reality.
I also think it is one of the
two or three
main sources
of violence,
tyranny
and human rights abuse
in the modern world.
However, I am deterred from speaking all of my thoughts
because of the threat of violence.
As a result, on this website
I will freely tell you what I think about Moses, and
I will freely tell you what I think about Jesus,
but I will not tell you what I think about Muhammad.
I never in fact directly criticise Muhammad or the Qur'an.
I link to some sites that may, but I never do myself.
Someday, when Islam is a mature, modern, tolerant religion
and there is no longer a threat of violence,
I will discuss freely what I think about Muhammad and the Qur'an.
Let us hope we see such a day in our lifetimes.
(*) It is often forgotten that
80 percent
of the world's population
(5 billion people)
think Islam is not true.
Kurt Westergaard
drew a
cartoon of the alleged "prophet" Muhammad
which suggested Islam is violent.
To prove him wrong, angry Muslims ..
issued death threats,
offered a $1m reward for his execution,
and organised plots to kill him,
and now he has to live in hiding.
They also
burnt Christian children alive
in protest at the depiction of Islam as violent.
World population of Muslims and infidels.
It is often forgotten that
80 percent
of the world's population
(5 billion people)
thinks Islam is not true.
After 1,400 years of preaching, conquest, genocide and forced conversion,
still only 20 percent of the world's population thinks Islam is true.
The sub-section
"The Doctrines of the Koran"
discusses monotheism.
People like Moses,
Muhammed and St.Patrick
are praised
for introducing monotheism
instead of the native polytheism, paganism and idolatry.
But as Warraq points out,
monotheism is in no sense intellectually superior to
polytheism - indeed it is a backward step
since it is much more violent.
Ch.7
("Is Islam Compatible With Democracy and
Human Rights?")
The sub-section
"Human Rights and Islam"
discusses the almost total incompatibility between
human rights and traditional Islam,
just as
traditional Christianity
is totally incompatible with human rights.
Ch.9
("The Arab Conquests and the Position
of Non-Muslim Subjects")
Criticism of Islam from people I may not entirely agree with
This is a collection of links to other sites.
Do not assume that because I link to a site that I agree with it.
Stephen Schwartz
is a moderate Muslim convert,
very anti-Islamism,
and I like some of his stuff.
There are interesting debates between him and those who take a more critical line of Islam itself:
One thing
Schwartz says,
that sums up why I am inclined to take his critics' line:
"I do not in general respond to comments on Islam by non-Muslims,
except when they are made by apologists for Wahhabism.".
By this argument, I have no right to criticise
the Bible
or the Pope,
and should just stay silent.
What nonsense.
Schwartz is a moderate Muslim,
and if all Muslims were like him it would be fantastic.
But he is still committed to a belief in supernatural things for which there is no evidence.
Christian sites
Obviously, I have nothing in common with
evangelical Christians
like Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson.
They criticise Islam not to promote reason,
but rather to promote a different supernatural belief.
But you have to admire that evangelical Christians
are not afraid of Islam.
If anyone will fight for the freedom to criticise Islam
in public without fear of death, they will.
The D'Souza Follies by Robert Spencer, January 30, 2007
- D'Souza talks rubbish about "traditional values".
He says the right should form an alliance with traditional Muslims,
both sharing conservative "traditional values"
in contrast to
the modern liberal, sexually permissive, atheist West
(which I love).
D'Souza says the right
should stop criticising Islam and the Prophet:
"First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam
for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate
of Islamophobic tracts with titles like
Islam Unveiled,
Sword of the Prophet, (*) and
The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.
There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims,
and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet."
In other words, D'Souza is saying that an Islamic Reformation,
or an Islamic Enlightenment, should not be allowed to take place,
and Islam and the Prophet must remain forever beyond criticism,
as Christianity and the Church were in the Middle Ages.
D'Souza also says about Islamic countries:
"if they want Sharia, let them have it."
But my point stands that
open criticism of "their religion and their prophet"
is exactly what Islam needs, and far from creating more radicals,
it will create more apostates and moderates,
just as open criticism of Christianity has done over the last 200 years.
Hindu sites
Again, like the Christian sites, I would take the
Hindu sites
with a grain of salt,
since they are criticising Islam not to promote reason,
but rather to promote a different supernatural belief.
Still, they may contain something useful.
Criticising the Qur'an can easily get you killed in some parts of the world,
a useful device to ensure the uncritical propagation of the
meme.
In contrast, criticism of
the Bible
is freely available everywhere in the western world -
because Christians and Jews tolerate
freedom of speech
and freedom of religion.
This is a collection of links to other sites.
Do not assume that because I link to a site that I agree with it.
His captive Jewish wife
Safiyya bint Huyayy
(taken as booty after he
tortured to death her husband
Kinana ibn al-Rabi,
and
killed her father, her brother,
and all her tribe).
See here.
His captive Jewish slave
Rayhana
(taken as booty after he killed all her tribe).
See here
and here.
Incidentally, she and her family are refugees from the
racist mass murderer
Idi Amin.
Her main point is that the
Islamic world needs a Reformation
like the Christian one
that led ultimately to the Enlightenment,
and that the Islamic Reformation must begin
among Muslims in the West and
spread from there.
She calls on non-Muslims to
support the reformation of Islam and not to be cowed by
fear of being called racist.
"But, for all of the threats, there's good news:
I'm hearing more support, affection and even love from fellow Muslims than I thought possible.
Two groups in particular - young Muslims and Muslim women -
have flooded my Web site with letters of relief and thanks.
They are relieved that somebody is saying out loud words they have only whispered,
and grateful that they're being given the permission to think for themselves."
She thinks that
"Muslims in the West ...
are best poised to revive Islam's tradition of independent reasoning.
Why in the West? Because it's here that we already enjoy the precious freedoms
to think, express, challenge and be challenged - all without fear of state reprisal."
Kola Boof
of Sudan
- under threat of death from the Islamofascists and slave traders.
The books of
Khaled Abou El Fadl
are banned by the cowards who run
Saudi Arabia.
Western professor
Denise Spellberg
helped start up Muslim anger about the book, for reasons known only to her.
Angry Muslim fanatics in London
responded by
trying to kill the publisher, September 2008.
Their actions speak more eloquently about Islam
than any criticism of Islam could.
A true Arab hero
- Arab-American psychologist
Wafa Sultan
declares on Al Jazeera television:
"I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew.
I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural"
To the response of her ignorant Islamic cleric questioner, she says:
"Brother,
you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me.
You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern,
whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary,
or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs."
What a hero!
Such delicious disrespect to an Islamic cleric.
She is brilliant on the modern war with Islamism:
"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions,
or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras.
It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages
and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century.
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 other hand.
It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings."
Wafa Sultan, 4 Mar 2008,
takes on an Islamist thug who calls for attacks on the West because of cartoons.
Wafa Sultan says:
"All religions and faiths, throughout the history of humanity, have been subject to criticism and affronts. With time, this has helped in their reform and development. Any belief that chops off the heads of its critics is doomed to turn into terrorism and tyranny. This has been the condition of Islam, from its inception to this day.
...
The Muslims must learn how to listen to the criticism of others, and maybe then they will reexamine their terrorist teachings. When they manage to do so, the world will view them in a better light".
Muhammad's example
(also here),
Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
August 2005.
She calls on the west to help Muslims reform:
"They know that Muhammad calls for the slaughter of infidels;
they know that the open society rightly condemns the slaughter of innocents.
They are caught in a mental cramp of cognitive dissonance and
it is up to the west to support the reformers in trying to ease them out of that painful contradiction.
...
The western cultural relativists, who flinch from criticising Muhammad for fear of offending Muslims,
rob Muslims of an opportunity to review their own moral values.
...
this attitude betrays Muslim reformers who desperately require the support
- and even the physical protection
- of their natural allies in the west."
The left-leaning liberals of
PEN,
Ron Chernow
and Philip Gourevitch
have extreme difficulty with the concept, the very existence, of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She defines herself as an ex-Muslim atheist.
She is so wonderfully optimistic:
"Perhaps thinking of the Iraq war, Mr. Gourevitch suggested that a foreign Enlightenment
can't be fast-tracked onto another culture. Ms. Ali replied smoothly that the Arab world
has managed to borrow many things from the West, such as cars and clothing styles,
so she saw no reason why they couldn't borrow values as well."
She understands the west, and the left, so well:
"'My criticism of the West, especially of liberals, is that they do take freedom for granted,'
Ms. Ali responded. She noted that Western Europeans born after World War II are unused to conflict.
'They have lost the instinct to recognize that there can be such a thing as an enemy
or a threat to freedom'".
Two heroes -
Ayaan meets Salman Rushdie.
"Atheists will not help reform Islam"
Some people complain that because ex-Muslims
like Ayaan are now atheists,
they will play no role in the reform of Islam.
But this discounts what happened with Christianity.
It was the
pressure from years of ex-Christian and semi-Christian
deists, agnostics, atheists, dissenters, and freethinkers
of all sorts, that made Christianity liberal and tolerant,
almost as much as any liberal movement within orthodox Christianity.
Christians did listen to ex-Christians and lapsed Christians,
and did change their actions in response.
So that today Christians have a firm belief in freedom of religion
whereas once they opposed it.
So the ex-Muslims, if they are allowed to speak (and live),
will have a major role to play in forging a more tolerant Islam
that we all hope to see.
Submission
The film
Submission,
written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
is the most censored film on earth.
"Fitna"
(and try here),
a short film criticizing the Quran, Mar 2008, by Dutch anti-jihad politician
Geert Wilders
(an atheist, who was in the same political party as Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
There is clear water between me and Wilders:
Wilders has said the Koran "incites hatred" and
"promotes violence" and
should be outlawed in the Netherlands.
The first part of the above seems obviously true, but
I disagree that the Koran should be banned,
on the grounds of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
There are no grounds on which you could ban the Koran
that would not also
ban the hate-filled, bloodthirsty
Old Testament.
Wilders, Apr 2009, says:
"We should also stop pretending that Islam is a religion, sure, it has religious symbols, but it's not a religion. It is a totalitarian ideology and the right to religious freedom should not apply to Islam."
I absolutely reject this idea.
Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of the West.
We should not toss it away lightly.
I would agree with
The Jawa Report on Wilders:
"Geert Wilders appears to be stuck with the same European mentality which wishes to ban any movement that it sees as dangerous or antisocial.
...
What we need in the fight against political Islam are not laws making us less free.
... We didn't ban the CPUSA, yet we won the Cold War anyway."
Fitna is not a bad film, but it muddies the waters,
as Wilders does,
by presenting this as a war with all of Islam.
I deny this.
The situation is not as hopeless and desperate as that.
Only Islamism has to be defeated, not all of Islam.
Here is the film:
Wikileaks:
(Note that for some reason Wikileaks insists on bundling "Fitna"
with an ignorant, pathetic Saudi Muslim reply called "Schism".)
Google Video:
Liveleak:
YouTube:
Dailymotion:
Metacafe:
Downloads:
Sam Harris:
"The problem is not, as is often alleged, that governments cannot afford to protect every person who speaks out against Muslim intolerance. The problem is that so few people do speak out. If there were ten thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each would be radically reduced.
...
The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that
we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it. As Ibn Warraq .. said in response to recent events:
'It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna.
How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism?' "
Taliban kill Dutch troops
in response to Fitna:
"The Taliban were so offended that Wilders linked Islam to violence, that they killed two Dutch troops over it.
Proving definitively that Islam is in no way, shape or form an inspiration for violent actions."
They want to make it illegal to compare
Islam
to
Nazism.
Should it also be illegal to compare Christianity to Nazism?
What Wilders says is incorrect (or at least, grossly simplistic)
but should be legal.
Comment
on the double standards:
"the reason he's being prosecuted is because his critics reacted violently".
Oliver Kamm:
"Wilders's populist and nativist politics are exactly opposed to my own views, and entirely beside the point. ...
Mockery and denunciation of what others hold literally sacred will inevitably cause anguish and outrage. And faced with mental suffering on the part of some of its citizens,
a free society must do nothing at all. No one is entitled to restitution for hurt feelings: not now; not ever."
The globalised world of the Internet, with its free speech everywhere,
poses an unbelievable challenge to all religions, but especially to Islam.
It will be interesting to see whether belief in Islam survives through the
21st century.
This is a collection of links to other sites.
Do not assume that because I link to a site that I agree with it.
If you Google
"Mohammed" as at Dec 2007, the top 10 sites in order are:
Anti-Mohammed:
Wikipedia, full of criticism of Mohammed, and information Muslims would like to keep hidden.
Anti-Mohammed:
The Catholic Encyclopedia's criticism of Mohammed.
Anti-Mohammed:
Zombie's fantastic, blasphemous, forbidden Mohammed Image Archive.
Anti-Mohammed:
The Jewish Virtual Library's criticism of Mohammed.
Anti-Mohammed:
Bible Probe's criticism of Mohammed.
Anti-Mohammed:
A parody anti-Mohammed site.
Neutral:
A person called Mohammed.
Neutral:
A person called Mohammed.
Neutral:
A band called Mohammed.
Neutral:
Information about terrorists called Mohammed.
Finally, at no.11,
the Muslim Student Association of the University of Southern California
delivers the first actual pro-Mohammed hit!
This probably represents the world quite well.
80 percent of the world does not believe in Islam,
and 80 percent of the world does not admire Mohammed.
And the infidels that know most about Mohammed
are probably the ones who admire him the least.
So the hits give a good idea what the world thinks of Mohammed.
It's just that this would have been hidden from Muslims before the age of the Internet.
How can Islam survive in such an environment of free-wheeling criticism and free speech?
Eradication of Islam
by Ali Sina
(see also here
and here)
- An Iranian predicts that Islam will collapse rapidly like
communism
when its people are finally allowed to read other ideas.
The Internet now allows such discussion
for the first time in the history of Islam.
Muslim apostates cast out and at risk from faith and family
by Anthony Browne
- The threats against apostates are disturbing,
but look at the optimism:
"One estimate suggests that
as many as 15 per cent of Muslims in Western societies
have lost their faith, which would mean that in Britain there are about 200,000 apostates."
Rather than Islam taking over
Europe,
Europe could be the place where millions of Muslims lose their faith,
just as millions of Christians have before them.
I'm not a fan of their leader,
the anti-American communist
Maryam Namazie,
a secular activist from Iran
who regards
the effort in Iraq as "US state terrorism".
But despite her, their manifesto
is great:
"We are opposed to cultural relativism and the tolerance of inhuman beliefs, discrimination and abuse in the name of respecting religion or culture."
They demand:
"Freedom to criticise religion."
They are against:
"restrictions on unconditional freedom of criticism and expression using so-called religious 'sanctities'."
They also have an intelligent reply:
to the simplistic
Fitna.
"Muhammad's empire of faith has managed to thrive in the modern world for one simple reason:
Muslims have kept Muhammad's dark past a secret.
...
The truth about Muhammad has been one of the world's best-kept secrets.
For centuries, it has been virtually impossible to raise objections about
the character of Muhammad in Muslim countries,
for anyone who raised such objections would .. immediately be killed.
Outside the Muslim world, there has been little interest in Islam ...
But things have changed. Now many people are interested in Islam,
and Muslims aren't able to silence everyone. Moreover, with the advent of the Internet,
it is now impossible to keep Muhammad's life a secret."
Islam will Lose, Mumin Salih, 21 February 2008,
suggests we are only in the early days of a long revolution:
"Over the past fourteen centuries, Islam was never openly challenged or critiqued
...
Even during the last few centuries, when the whole world started to open up to a new age of enlightenment, Islamic authorities managed to seal the minds of Muslims towards any outside views about Islam.
...
For fourteen centuries, Muslims never had a chance to see their religion from any perspective other than their own.
...
Since the introduction of the Internet all that has changed. ...
The Internet is the first true challenge to Islam because it breaks through all the Islamic security systems.
...
Everything about Islam is now subjected to critical scrutiny, people now ask logical questions and demand logical answers. Everyday, the Internet sheds more light on [Islam] to expose its myths. This shakes the very foundation of the Islamic ideology.
... We are only in the beginning of the Internet age, the process may appear to be slow, but the ball started rolling and more Muslims will wake up to the light of truth and come out to the world of enlightenment".
Suicide of the West
by Theodore Dalrymple,
reviews some pessimistic books,
but then notes that the future is rarely predictable:
"Will these books appear to have been unduly alarmist in half a century's time?
I certainly hope so, and indeed suspect that it might be so.
We have had many perils and predicted apocalypses before.
Islamism, and indeed (in my belief) the whole of Islam,
is potentially very vulnerable to the corrosive effect of the intellectual acid-bath
of rational criticism."
Marxism's Successor
- Theodore Dalrymple on how Islamism may collapse,
and Islam itself too.
Dalrymple's delicious disrespect for the daft ideology of Islamism:
"For the second time in living memory,
we find ourselves obliged by historical circumstances to examine doctrinal philosophies that,
from the abstract intellectual point of view, are not worth examining.
They belong, rather, to the history of human folly and credulity:
which is itself, of course, an inexhaustibly interesting and important subject."
It is, if you think about it, incredible that anybody could believe in nonsense
like political Islamism.
That any young Muslim man
could possibly believe that Islamism could create a better world.
Optimism:
"Diseases of acute onset are apt to be cured quickly: if, that is, they do not kill first.
And in historical terms, our preoccupation with the threat of Islamism is very acute.
There is hope, therefore,
that Islamism will pass from the world stage as quickly as it arrived on it."
And again, in the world of the Internet, more than Islamism may fall:
"Personally, I believe that all forms of Islam are very vulnerable in the modern world
to rational criticism,
which is why the Islamists are so ferocious in trying to suppress such criticism.
They have instinctively understood that Islam itself, while strong, is exceedingly brittle,
as communism once was. They understand that, at the present time in human history,
it is all or nothing.
...
Islamism is a last gasp, not a renaissance, of the religion"
In summary, by even engaging with the globalised world at all,
Islamists are taking a huge risk.
They are risking mass apostasy and the loss of Islamic faith even in their home countries.
It may be that if Islamists wish to protect their faith,
they should leave the West, leave Europe, return to their homelands,
and ban the Internet and all foreign media.
Soviet communism could not survive in the globalised age
of MTV, Madonna, Hollywood, Levis and Coca-Cola.
Islamism, and even Islam itself, will have just as much trouble.
And yet suicidally, Islamists are coming to the West,
and allowing TV and the Internet in their home countries,
which may be the process that will soon (before 2100) destroy their entire
traditional culture and faith.
Far from taking over the world, this may be Islamism's last stand
before its traditional countries are changed forever.
The story of thousands of years of religious terror in a nutshell:
Two sweet, innocent American Muslim boys
are sent to Pakistan by their family
and brainwashed in a Taliban-linked
Pakistani madrassa for over three years.
They resist for a long time
but finally start to believe the nonsense they are taught.
They emerge as hate-filled young Islamist nutcases.
So sad to watch their childhoods taken away.
And this story has repeated for thousands of years as
ignorant old men, of many different and opposing creeds,
all over the world, destroy childhoods
and churn out starry-eyed young believers in (and killers for)
their nonsensical, made-up supernatural ideas.
Trailer for documentary "The Karachi Kids".
From here.
See hi-res version.
"There are people who claim that democracy is incompatible with Islam. But the truth is that democracies, by definition, make a place for people of religious belief. America is one of the most -- is one of the world's leading democracies, and we're also one of the most religious nations in the world. More than three-quarters of our citizens believe in a higher power. Millions worship every week and pray every day. And they do so without fear of reprisal from the state.
In our democracy, we would never punish a person for owning a Koran. We would never issue a death sentence to someone for converting to Islam.
Democracy does not threaten Islam or any religion. Democracy is the only system of government that guarantees their protection."
-
Speech by President George W. Bush in Egypt, May 2008.
Geert Wilders to be prosecuted by Holland for "hate speech".