Or rather, more like: "Decaf (but slightly real coffee, please)".
In terms of the long-term threat of Islam and what the West needs to do to wake up to it, I speak of an analyst who shows refreshingly incorrect knowledge of mainstream Islam, yet who (as inevitably seems to happen), retracts his clear-eyed talons in order to hedge his bets on Muslims in general.
The analyst is someone I hadn't heard of before yesterday: Gabriel Said Reynolds, an academic scholar of Islamic theology and history. The person who glowingly recommended him was a Christian chatter on Paltalk who has been showing signs for a while of a healthy antipathy to Islam; however, from years of experience of disappointment in this regard, I wasn't about to go along with this praise without doing a little investigation on my own. The Christian chatter assumed that Gabriel Said Reynolds is a Muslim scholar, and that would be somewhat reasonable because of the "Said" in his name (and often we see these converts to Islam sporting names that are a grotesque hybrid of Arabic and European). As far as I was concerned, if Reynolds was a Muslim, then we ought not expect anything from him on the subject other than a tissue of lies (either baldfaced lies, or varying degrees of cleverer forms of taqiyya, all the way up to the styles & wiles of the
"Better Cop" Muslims).
I soon learned from a little Googling that Prof. Reynolds is apparently a Catholic theologian with a home base at Notre Dame University and has published books on Islam at Yale University Press. I.e., he's a solidly mainstream academic. From years of bitter experience, I knew this augured ill for any chance that he'd buck the politically correct inhibition, so dominant throughout the mainstream, on any honest appraisal of Islam. This was doubly so when I breezed over a headline about how in 2017, he was "tapped by Vatican for Catholic-Muslim dialogue on religious extremism" (which would have been fine under the semi-Islamo-savvy Pope Benedict XVI, but bodes ill under his Papal replacement, the Marxist Islamophile, Pope Francis).
Well, I was largely (albeit guardedly) refreshed by an essay he published in
First Things, a Catholic newsletter-cum-journal presided over by Richard John Neuhaus, a rather well-known Catholic priest and sociopolitical conservative (I remember seeing him a few times as a guest on the old
Firing Line debates, always on the side of William F. Buckley). Up until today, I hadn't bothered to familiarize myself with Neuhaus's stance on Islam, so I thought I'd look him up. A Google search yields a few promisingly substantive
articles in this regard. So far, I've only read a 1998 essay, "Islamic Encounters" which indicates he is at least across the middle line toward Islamorealism. Among other heartening facts, he notes in his essay that he was chastised by CAIR for his review of Bat Ye’or’s "important new book recently published in this country,
The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude". So far so good (especially that he likes Bat Ye’or’s book); though he just had to follow that with a politically correct spasm:
To be fair, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) should not be taken to represent contemporary Islam.
Neuhaus, needless to say, offers not a shred of justification for this sweepingly generous claim about "contemporary Islam".
I look forward to reading one or two further essays of his (particularly one revolving around Pope Benedict's notorious speech in 2006 which sparked violent riots and attacks among Muslims in various places around the world). But let us return to Prof. Gabriel Said Reynolds.
His
essay in
First Things, published in June of 2014 under the title,
"I am a Christian, and I will remain a Christian": What We Can Learn from Meriam Ibrahim, is about the infamous case of a Sudanese woman whose father was Muslim but who grew up as a Christian and then married a Christian man and because of this, was sentenced by the Sudanese government to the crime of adultery (
zina) -- because under Sharia law, a Christian marriage is not recognized -- and sentenced to death under the Islamic crime of apostasy (
irtidad). Professor Reynolds pulls no punches about Islam in his dispassionate description of the key points:
From the perspective of Islamic law, individuals ...who are born Muslims can never legally enter into another religious community. Their rejection of Islam, however, amounts to apostasy: a crime against God and the Prophet Muhammad which is punishable by death.
As Prof. Reynolds points out, this capital punishment for apostasy stems not directly from the Koran, but rather from the hadiths, one of which he quotes, straight from the camel's mouth (Mohammed):
“As for he who changes his [Islamic] religion, kill him.”
And he goes on to add the pertinent, and ghastly, point:
These declarations shape the doctrine of the traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence: All four Sunni schools, and the standard Shi’ite school, agree that apostates are to be executed...
Followed by this even more ghastly fact, referring to her release from prison only after international non-Islamic pressure on Sudan forced them to let her out:
As her life would certainly be threatened by religious
vigilantes (or by even by her own relatives) in Sudan, she and her
husband and children immediately sought to leave the country.
Ah, but then Prof. Reynolds (like Neuhaus) just had to have a Tourette's twitch of political correctness in the form of a parenthetical coda. Let us repeat that previous sentence, and then restore his parenthetical remark he felt obliged to append:
All four Sunni schools, and the standard Shi’ite school, agree that apostates are to be executed
(although more and more Muslims today disagree).
[bold emphasis added by me]
A number of things to say about this. First, after we roll our eyes to the ceiling in our grief and then facepalm in jaded misery, we note the obvious, that this parenthetical remark is a politically correct virtue-signalling spasm so typical of most of those who are otherwise critical of Islam.
Second, we note that Prof. Reynolds (like Neuhaus) provides not a shred of evidence for this generous claim about "more and more Muslims today".
Third, and most interestingly, his claim raises important questions, some rhetorical, some perhaps not: If, as he claims, any Muslims disagree with their mainstream Islamic jurisprudence found in all 4 schools of Sunni law (and, as he points out, the standard Shi'ite school), on what grounds do they disagree? On non-Islamic, Western grounds? How does that square with their self-identity as a Muslim (= follower of Islam)? Or if they claim to ground it on Islam, how can that be, since all their mainstream schools rule otherwise? If by some implausible means, these Muslims have concocted or cobbled together some alternative Islam that purports to be grounded in some part of Islam, how can that be convincingly argued? And how on Earth could they convince Muslims who want to be mainstream Muslims (particularly when such challenges risk physical punishments, even death)? And why should we take them seriously, since their Private Idaho of their alternative Islam is -- because of its minuscule representation (not to mention its shaky foundations in Islam) -- demographically irrelevant to the broader problem of Islam? And, finally, why do so many Muslims who affect to be in disagreement with such glaringly monstrous aspects of their Islam -- why do they continue to defend Islam using various ploys of sophistry that avoid the kinds of questions I'm asking here, rather than offering up a frank and sincere response?
Of course, Prof. Reynolds' essay is utterly devoid of all these questions, even if their dire exigency inhabits the spaces between its lines, to be noticed by precious few readers in our time.
And wouldn't you know it, our old friend "The Big W" was right on the ball, and deposited this characteristically pithy comment that nailed it:
thebigW says
Feb 19, 2019 at 10:37 pm
” a cult is generally centered around a charismatic leader who demands strict obedience, and there is no such in Islam”
Ahem, there sure as hell is such a thing in Islam, and his name is Muhammad.
How to explain Robert's egregious lapse here? I'm still wondering. Not only does Muhammad qualify as a cult leader, he's probably the Mother of All Cult Leaders throughout history. Is Robert perhaps disqualifying him because he's been dead for centuries? That would be a silly reason to disqualify him; for, unfortunately, Muhammad is still very much alive in the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims around the globe.
At any rate, probably the biggest objection (which Spencer didn't mention) to calling Islam a "cult" is that all the cults we've come to know over the decades have been relatively small, and usually fairly limited in geographical extent (with exceptions -- e.g., Scientology; though even Scientology can't hold a candle to the immensity, both in time and space, and in numbers, to Islam). But that would be singularly simple-minded to conclude that Islam can't be a cult, just because it's too big. Nor does being a cult exclude being a religion: A movement could be both (at least for people who are capable of patting their head and rubbing their stomach at the same time). And this isn't to open that other kettle of fish, the "Islam isn't a religion" meme, about which I've written before.