There’s no bigotry in challenging Islamic extremism
Posted on July 6th, 2014
Paul Monk Courtesy THE AGE
Uthman Badar talks to press over the controversy surrounding the cancellation of his session on honour killings at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Photo: Edwina Pickles
Have not the Islamophobes already won the day when a person dare not speak on controversial matters because he is Muslim?” asked Simon Longstaff on Twitter last week.
That was a very strange rhetorical question in the circumstances.
He was commenting on the fact that Uthman Badar, spokesman for the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, had had his invitation withdrawn to speak at the Sydney Opera House on the proposition that “honour killings are morally justified”.
Is Longstaff serious? Does he really believe this is a debate worth having? Does he really believe that horror at so-called “honour killings” is Islamophobic?
Suppose it was suggested that there be a public debate on the proposition that wife-beating by white males is perfectly OK”.
Would Longstaff agree this was a topic that called for debate? Would he denounce those who rejected any such debate as exhibiting “aggressive or drunken white male-ophobia”?
Let’s get a little real. If there is a controversial topic worthy of debate regarding Islam and women, it is surely the question: “Can open debates in which Islamic traditions are criticised be conducted without Islamists threatening violence to all concerned?”
Such criticism is not Islamophobia, any more than criticism of child sexual abuse within the Christian churches is Christianophobia”.
And Badar is hardly in a position where he dare not speak on controversial matters”. He freely does so all the time without the slightest hindrance.
It’s high time we got this Islamophobia thing sorted out.
Islam is a religion with a long history, riddled with contradictions and conflicts. In recent decades some of its more wild-eyed proponents have been on the war path, determined to establish whole new caliphates. But even among those who are not jihadists in this sense, there are practices that are, to say the least, controversial.
Neither of those two statements is itself controversial and neither is Islamophobic. But there is a fundamental point at issue that goes beyond them. Islam, merely because it is a religion, can no more claim immunity from criticism or rejection than any other religion, be it Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism or Jainism. It is, however, in our time, more violently resistant than most to both criticism and rejection.
If I state that I am not a Muslim and that there is no possibility of my ever becoming one, that is not Islamophobia.
It has exactly the same status as declaring it is unthinkable to me that I could ever become a Biblical literalist or a flat earther. If I am a Muslim already, however, and come out with the statement that I am renouncing Islam, I can find myself in deep doo-doo.
In between, there is the terrain on which non-Muslims or liberal Muslims criticise old practices and bigotry or violent jihad. These criticisms are too glibly dismissed as Islamophobia by the “politically correct” and can lead to threats of violence by Islamists.
Some years ago I was asked by academics at the University of Melbourne to help draw up a list of speakers for a conference on Islam, Christianity and tolerance.
I urged that Ibn Warraq be invited. He is a former Muslim who, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has written courageously of the extraordinary threats that confront apostates from Islam. His books Why I am not a Muslim (1995), What the Koran Really Says (2002) and the edited volume of testimonies Leaving Islam (2003) are landmark studies in the debate over the nature and future of Islam in a multicultural world.
What was the response? A staff member, who happened to be from an Islamic background, exclaimed heatedly: Inviting him would be a disaster! That man is a fanatic!”
I was stunned at the time and still remain incredulous. I would have thought that such a voice was indispensable to building a society in which people can freely choose whether or not Islam holds any appeal for them – under a secular law that constrains Islamic fervour in the same way and for the same reasons it has constrained Christian fervour.
So here is a topic for Simon Longstaff, the St James Ethics Centre and the Sydney Opera House to hold a public debate on, by all means inviting Uthman Badar to contribute: Those who speak out about abuses under Islam are every bit as deserving of our recognition and protection as religious dissenters in the old Catholic era or human rights dissidents under Communist regimes.
Let Mr Badar speak, by all means, on behalf of Hizb ut-Tahrir. We would be all ears, I’m sure.
No sensible person wants to inflame phobias; but no self-respecting citizen of a free society should bow to intimidation by self-styled “militants” or affect a craven piety in the face of unrepentant sectarian bigotry of the Hizb ut-Tahrir variety.
Paul Monk
July 7th, 2014 at 7:35 am
Islamic extremism must be challenged and foreign faiths must be stopped from taking over the Buddhist civilization of Sri Lanka regardless if they are radical or benign.