Maryam posted her talk at the Global Humanist Conference on her blog.
Have an excerpt to inspire you to go read the whole thing:
No religion looks favourably upon women, gay and lesbians, freethinkers, dissenters, other religions or atheists, and blasphemers, heretic and apostates… Punishing freethinkers is a long-standing and fundamental feature of all major religions. But there is something about Islam primarily because it is the banner of Islamism, a far-Right political movement, spearheading what I call an Islamic inquisition.
Islamists want the far-Right restructuring of societies – concretely this means a Caliphate or Islamic state, the implementation of Sharia law, the imposition of the burka and compulsory veiling, gender segregation, defending Hududd punishments like death by stoning, and the execution of apostates to name a few.
You don’t have to look far to see what Islamism is. The Islamic regime of Iran. The Saudi government. Boko Haram. Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb Ut Tahrir and the Taliban.
And of course the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) which has made tremendous advances over the past few days and months and which continues to shock and outrage humanity with its sheer terror and brutality.
ISIS is Islamism without its palatable wrappings often fed to people in Europe and the West where its manifestations like Sharia courts in Britain and the Law Society’s guidance on Sharia wills (which institutionalises Islamist values) – are portrayed as people’s “right to religion” even by some humanist groups.
If there’s one thing Islamism isn’t, it’s humanist.
if there’s one thing Islamism isn’t, it’s civilized. That should be the guiding principle in responding to it.
You’re right, zuhbandel, but it’s only one instance of a more general case. Fundamentalism is not civilized.
No military force has ever been a democracy internally, nor can one be. And Islam is the militarisation of society on totalitarian lines.
I have visited Iran. The Islamic state apparatus I think tries to rule through minimalist terror: just public executions every Friday after prayers of women condemned by the mullahs for adultery and of whoever for apostasy, blasphemy or whatever. A little terror goes a long way. People keep their heads down and live in the nooks and crannies of social discourse, where it is safest.
The Koran in my view is the original gospel of the fascist variant of totalitarianism, written around 1,300 years or so before ‘Mein Kampf’.
An armed and ruthless minority can control a whole nation, through control of information and education; and selective terror. But they have to be careful not to overdo it.
Of course in any response to Islamism, one must also realize that much of this is perpetuated by the Western nations. Human rights have never been high on the foreign policy agenda. It’s all RealPolitik. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the long sordid history of Western involvement in the region, so I won’t go into detail here.
rbc:
“Of course in any response to Islamism, one must also realize that much of this is perpetuated by the Western nations.”
I suggest you use that line sparingly. It only goes so far. Best to spread it thin rather than chuck it about with abandon.
@5
Seriously? Are you saying that the West has had only minimal impact in the region? Or that such impact has been, if not fruitful, then just benign? Then I suggest you are being rather preposterous.
Islamism is technically the concept that religion and governance should be two aspects of the same thing in the context of Islam.
(The Christian equivalent is Dominionism)
Word / phrase game: Taliban. Mujaheddin. bin Laden. The Shah of Iran. Savak and attendant Nazi torture techniques. Sadam Hussein. The coup overthrowing Mosaddegh. Chemical warfare against the Kurds. Just a few off of the top of me head. Question: what do these things have in common?
RBC, they are topical, is what they have in common.
My point is that though Islam is the current bugaboo, the concept is hardly unique to it.
(e.g. Are you familiar with the history of Tibet and its Buddhist theocracy?)
I agree John. I was responding to Omar. What those things have in common is that they all, at one time or another, were supported by the US as a matter of policy.
And I agree that Dominionism is some crazy shite.
[OT]
Yeah. Regarding the USA’s attempted realpolitik, it’s very notable how they prop such states as Saudi Arabia.
(ISIS has good reason to be grateful to the USA 😐 )
Yeah, that’s the point isn’t it? Those working for human rights must not only confront Islamism, but also Western powers that support it for purely cynical motives. As you mention, Saudi Arabia is a case in point.
@7 John Morales,
Isn’t that a definition of Islam, “Islamism” is really the imitation of Mohammed’s barbarous example, the term is really a propaganda device to distinguish ‘good’ Muslims from ‘bad’ Muslims.
All the commentaries I’ve read claim that there’s no equivalent to the Christian concept of ‘render unto Caesar’ in Islam, so your distinction between ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamism’ is pointless.
RJW @14,
Were it pointless, one could employ ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamist’ interchangeably, no?
It’s a term of recent coinage, but I interpret it as something similar to John’s. A kind of very militant religion joined with political ideology whose primary tools of the trade are violence and domination. Whatever one might call it, it is a real and growing tendency.
@15 John Morales,Well, one doesn’t, does one, for the reasons I explained above @14, it would be very bad politics.
@16 RBC “A kind of very militant religion joined with political ideology”, no, as I explained earlier there’s no separation of religion and politics in Islam, you’re assuming that Western concepts apply to a theocratic totalitarian ideology.
If you take the time to read books written by critics of Islam, you will understand.
rbc@#8:
“Taliban. Mujaheddin. bin Laden…. (etc) Question: what do these things have in common?:”
Gee. Let me guess.
Nixon? Kissinger? Bush snr? Bush jr? No they are all too time-specific.
CIA? No, does not fit all of them.
CIA + MI5? Fits Iran but not the rest so well.
Trouble is, for all of them you need a serious and bloodthirsty division in the local society, say like Sunni-Shia division in Iraq, exploited so skilfully by Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein is in the list! Bingo!
Chemical warfare against the Kurds! Saddam again! Bingo again!
Now we'[re getting somewhere!
To sum up so far: Saddam plays the Sunnis off against the Shias, and rests his regime on the Sunnis. Then gets American help in his war with Iran. (Shias.)
But what originated the Sunni-Shia division in Islam? My first guess is the CIA, But I am not sure enough to lay money on it.
The Pentagon? That’s it, The Pentagon!
But something tells me that Sunnis were brawling with the Shias before the Mayflower set sail.
Let’s go back to the beginning and start all over again.
“Word / phrase game:”
That’s it! ‘Games People Play’, by Eric Berne.’ Slammo’, ‘Uproar’… stuff like that.
‘See what you made me do!’ That’s in the book.
See what (the West) made bin Laden do! Bingo!
Saddam Hussein! Bingo!
Shah of Iran! Bingo!
Anyone else you might mention! Bingo!
Yes they’ve all got Eric Berne. See what we made them do.
QED. That wasn’t so hard after all.
You would understand Islam if only you read The Holy Quran the right way and do understands its actual meanings, Religion is not responsible of Satin act.
I would add :
When asked about terrorism , Sheikh Abu Hamza (Pierre Vogel) responded:{ Who started the first world war ? Muslims ?Who started the second world war ? muslims ?Who sent the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nakazaki ? Muslims ??Who killed more than 100 millions of Indians in North America ? Muslims ??Who killed more than 50 millions of Indians in south America ? muslims ??Who took about 180 millions of African people as slaves and 88% of them died and was thrown in Atlantic ocean ? did Muslims do it ??Who killed about 20 millions of Aborigines in Australia ? muslims ?Who killed thousands of people in Vietnam ? Muslims ?No , They weren’t Muslims …… }And today you can notice that Muslims are always the victims when you look at what is happening in Burma , Yemen , Syria , Iraq , Afghanistan , Chechenia , Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Palestine ……etcBut media ways are controlled by non Muslims even inside Muslims countries that is why they hide all kinds of crimes against Muslims such as burning kids alive in Burma and bombing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan..etc .And they show all crimes done by few Muslims even if it was killing an insect.Subhan Allah! despite of that, Islam is spreading so fast.
No religion looks favourably upon women, gay and lesbians, freethinkers, dissenters, other religions or atheists, and blasphemers, heretic and apostates…
This is not really true. I’m certainly no lover of traditional or orthodox religion, but it’s important to note that there are plenty of liberal religions whose leaders embrace women, gays and lesbians (and bisexuals and trans*people). I personally know many Reform rabbis who also welcome dissenters and atheists and couldn’t care less if their congregants are heretics. I vigorously disagree with these rabbis about their supernatural beliefs. But their behavior – for which they credit their faith – is sometimes more tolerant than ours. We nontheists must be vigilant about the dangers of fundamentalist religion, but we do nothing to advance our cause when we fail to acknowledge the diversity of religious beliefs. (And yes, I’m aware of the argument that liberal religions provide cover for traditional faiths, but that’s not what Maryam was addressing.)
@19. Muhammad Taha :
And those things aren’t terrorism as we know t today and changing the subject won’t make you or Islamism right.
(Btw. On the slavery thing, Arabs were involved in that evil “trade” too you know right?)
Also who flew hijacked jumbo airliners into skyscrapers full of innocent people on 9-11?
Who blew up buses and bar mitvahs and nightclubs and more in Israel – oh and bali and london subways and trains in Spain?
Who fired rockets at innocent civilians and kidnapped and murdered teenagers and rejected ceasefire after ceasefire and peace plan after peace plan in Gaza lately?
Who kidnapped schoolgirls and threatens still to sell them into slavery in Africa and who shoots schoolgirls in the head for trying to get an education in Afghanistan?
Who hijacked an ocean liner called the Achille Lauro and murdered a wheelchair bound Jewish passenger and dumped his corpse into the ocean on live TV?
Who hacked the head off a journalist named Daniel Pearl and decapitated a kidnapped aid worker in Iraq and even brutally murdered a sympathetic idiot who went to help those in Gaza a few or more years ago?
Who is now causing unfathomable miseryand suffering and trying to exterminate Yazidis and Christians and even “fellow” Muslims in Syria and Iraq?
Yeah, that’d be Muslims for ya.
Victims? Hmm .. nothing to with Hamas terrorism against Israel or Chechyan terrorists attacking beslan and the Boston marathon and ISIS-ISIL-IS in Syria and Iraq attacking others and the Taliban in Afghanistan sheltering Osama bin Laden and hosting his terrorist training camps for many years and so on, eh? I don’t think the Muslims are just victims here. I don’t think that’s a fair call at all.
Some of them are, maybe.
A lot of others of them – well, not-so-much.
Do you think that’s a good thing given the oppression and suffering Islam brings and the fact that its actually, I think most of us reasonable scientifically literate folks would say, wrong?
@18 That was pretty hilarious. People are always trying to tie all the world’s ills back to the USA, the UK and Israel.
@19 Arabs still engage in slavery, and Muslims murdered an estimated 70,000,000 Hindus in their conquest of India.
But I doubt you’d even care must less acknowledge that horrible fact.
Islam, as I understand it, is roughly where Christianity was prior to the reformation. It has had its great East/West schism of 1053 in the form of the Shia/Sunni divide, but it hasn’t had its protestant reformation. Islam hasn’t run up against humanist/ layperson right to hold their own interpretations of scripture brought about by holy texts in native languages, or faced its own corruption which caused the Catholic church to have to choose between religious and state authority.
Islam still demands that there is still only one authoritative language for the Koran, Arabic. It does not allow lay interpretation of the Koran or allow individual conscience to compete with doctrine as determined by the priesthood. It still abhors secular states and state authority and claims the right of Islam to rule over secular rulers.
Islam is, in many ways, similar to what he Catholic church was before the reformation. It holds a simple top-down religiously run and regulated organization that inserts itself at every level of the lives of the people, specifically the Caliphate, as the ideal. The Catholic church held similar views before the reformation.
Ironically the Christian Dominionists wish to return to that pre-refomation state. So it seems that Islam isn’t the only major religion that sees that as an ideal organizational and social/religious state of being.
Ahhh … the good old days when the Pope talked and kings trembled, when priest were the center of village life, and every activity was groomed and channeled to profit and empower the church.
Comment submitted:
There’s a reason we have the term ‘fatwa envy’ when talking about some of the more out-there Dominionists. It’s not that Christianity’s holy texts can’t be used to justify the same barbarous acts that are going on in the Middle East; it’s that so few of the followers actually adhere to such interpretations that keep the U.S. from actually being just as miserable a theocracy.
It’s a numbers game–reach a statistically significant proportion of the population of believers who hold to the expansionist, hard-line view of their faith, and you end up with theocratic movements that are willing and able to commit ongoing campaigns of terror. So the question becomes, why do so many Muslims adopt the Islamist version of their faith? At this point, it is impossible to ignore the West’s involvement in subjugating Islamic nations in creating a ready and willing audience for those mullahs seeking to paint the West as the Great Satan.
I honestly don’t know how we’re supposed to undo that; I am fairly certain that more indiscriminate freedombombing isn’t going to do the trick, though.
Muhammad @#19 “Who took about 180 millions of African people as slaves and 88% of them died and was thrown in Atlantic ocean ? did Muslims do it ?”
Well, yes they had a big hand in it..
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In the African slave trade which brought the founding populations of black people to the Americas, African blacks engaged in tribal warfare at the local level would raid opposing villages, take prisoners, and on-sell them to (commonly Arab) slave-traders. They in turn took them to sea ports and on-sold them to English and other European sea captains engaged in the ‘triangular trade’ Africa-Caribbean-US-Africa…As they did in SE Asia, Arab traders spread Islam from the coastal African ports to the hinterland. If the Arabs had had decent ocean-going ships, they probably would have cut the Europeans out and shipped the slaves to the Americas themselves, for much greater return on their investment.
.
An aside: One of the finest Christian songs, the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ , was written by John Newton, one of the Christian sea-captains involved in the trade, whose exceptional conscience eventually got the better of him. He abandoned his last slave-voyage after setting sail from Africa, turned his ship around and took all the slave cargo back and set them free. He never went slaving again.
But he did write a magnificent song. He was an exceptional man.
@19 Muhammad Taha,
(1) Most of the numbers you quote should be halved, some even reduced by 90%
’20 Million Aboriginal people in Australia’ is complete drivel.
(2)The followers of which religion started the jihad in the 7th century and attacked Europe, the ME Central Asia and South Asia and killed millions?
(3)Tamerlane killed proportionally more of his fellow Moslems than the infidels ever did.
(4) Muslims stopped attacking Europe and became ‘peaceful’ only after the West gained an overwhelming technological and military advantage over Islamic societies.
(5) “And today you can notice that Muslims are always the victims”, often they’re murdered by other Muslims.
(6) As to slavery, Muslims enslaved millions of Europeans from the 7th until the early 19th century. De facto Slavery is still practised by the Gulf States, foreign workers in Qatar are treated like slaves by their employers.
(7) I’m not defending Western policy, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan were war crimes and America’s support of Israel is morally repugnant, but let’s get some perspective, Muslims aren’t the eternal victims.
(8) Islam is not resurgent, Muslims are fighting a losing battle against modernisation.
RJW @#26:
“Most of the numbers you quote should be halved, some even reduced by 90%
’20 Million Aboriginal people in Australia’ is complete drivel.”
.
Agreed. They were hunter-gatherers, not farmers. Captain Cook in 1777 estimated the entire continental population at around 1 million, and I think that was on the assumption that the coastal environments he saw were continent-wide.. Later anthropologists reduced that to around 300,000. Modern Aboriginal activists favour Captain Cook’s figure (ironically). But 20 million is around the size of the modern total population, based on agriculture, modern infrastructure; the works. Far too high, IMHO.
[20 million/ 300k ~ 70: Muhammad T. is out by around 2 orders of magnitude.]
Omar at @18 – that was a serious overuse of verbiage to say nothing at all. Do you have anything to say with respect to my point?
If I wasn’t being clear, any strategy to contain Islamism must certainly confront the fact that the West has played a huge role in fomenting much of it, arming it, and providing monetary and diplomatic cover. The US trained and armed the Mujahideen because it was politically expedient to do so in a proxy war against the Soviet. bin Laden learned his chops at that time, and the Taliban was largely an direct descendent. The US funded and armed Sadam Hussein because it was politically expedient to do so to contain Iran. The fundamentalist turn in Iran was largely a reaction to the US backed (and I would say instigated) coup against the popularly elected Mossadegh in Iran because he threatened Western economic interests and failed to clearly align with the West during the Cold War. And these examples aren’t one-offs – the represent a pattern and practice of US foreign policy (and of the West more generally). To simply deny this via some sort of attempted snark is absurd.
rbc @#28: “Do you have anything to say with respect to my point?” [which is I take it @#10: “What those things have in common is that they all, at one time or another, were supported by the US as a matter of policy.”]
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As others on this thread have pointed out, Islam from its outset has been an aggressive and intolerant religion. And I have maintained for years that what we call ‘democracies’ are in fact elected oligarchies. The great virtue of constitutionally elected government of whatever kind is that it gives people a way of getting rid of an unpopular regime without having to resort to civil war.
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But unfortunately, the elected governments all too often consist of democratically elected people who are not themselves democrats, and who will cheerfully engineer the overthrow of another democratically elected government if it suits them to do so and they can get away with it. (Or support a despot.) Hence Mossadeq; hence Allende. Hence also the US support for Saddam Hussein against the mullahs’ regime in Iran.
But occasionally this lack of principle takes them a tyrant too far. Hence Gulf War 1, when Bush 1 turned on the former US favourite Saddam Hussein. But then, IMHO the western Left (or what Hitchens called ‘the pro-totalitarian Left’) over-reacted, and finished up supporting Saddam Hussein against the US, while protesting mightily that they were doing no such thing.
They soon became reflexively anti-American. Nothing the US did was right or justified in their eyes. Pretty soon everything bad in the world was the fault of the US, which in their view could not take a trick; expressed cogently in your own post @#8.
All some antidemocratic smartarse then needs is to pick one side in the common enough serious and bloodthirsty division in the target Islamic society, say like Sunni-Shia division in Iraq, exploited so skilfully by Saddam Hussein. Then the western antidemocrats in turn side with him, till it suits them not to.
Islam is by its very nature antidemocratic. The Islamic dream is for a world-wide top-down caliphate, for Christ’s sake. But it is able to gull, smooth-talk and convince westerners by the truckload as to its allegedly lily-white ambitions.
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So let’s hear it from you, rbc. In what confrontation with Islamic opponents, has the US been ultimately in the right, and the Islamics ultimately wrong?
Omar
RBC:
“You people fucked up, and ignited the civil war of Sunnis against Shia against Kurds against etc. And we warned you about that.”
OK. You were a warner. But sorry. The conflict between Sunnis and Shias in Islam has been going for around 1,400 years, give or take a year or two. Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror in Iraq just kept the local lid on it for a while. When he was demoted (Allah be praised!) it wasn’t long before a few hundred old scores were being settled. Per day.
By all credible measurements of public opinion at the time in the countries of the CoW, the intervention had popular support in those countries.
We now know the cost in dollars and lives of toppling Saddam Hussein. What we do not know, and can never know, is the cost and consequences of leaving him on his perch. But given his track record and form (Iran, Kuwait, Marsh Arabs…) once he got the idea that there were enough warners like you RBC to put the brakes on the Intervention, he would IMHO have been unstoppable.
After all, his hero and inspiration was Joseph Stalin.
Omar
Yeah…who could have seen that coming? Certainly none of the top echelons of the Bush administration. Just those of us who were paying the slightest bit of attention to anything…
That snippet also jumped out at me.
The occupation after Saddam didn’t manage even that, though terror there was a-plenty.
(Turns out, Saddam was the devil they knew)
James Fallows wrote an excellent article for The Atlantic entitled Blind Into Baghdad re the run-up to the war. I think it may have been later published as a book, but I’m not sure. But it is a extraordinary expose of the Bush apparatchiks, and how they fucked everything up in spite of the good intel they received from the intelligence community. Google it… it’s available for free.
So many apologists here. Let me put it crisply:
What is Islam? Take a look at Islamic societies and countries. They are an expression of the will and preferences of Muslim people. Latin Americans and Asians suffered from colonialism, too. Yet societies dominated by Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism are totally different from Islamic countries.
So whatever Islam is; the argument that all muslim countries are enslaved by their Western-supported stooge leaders and therefore do not reflect the true nature of Islam is mendacious to the point of being insulting.
ISIS, Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. All muslim dominated, some better, some worse. But none of them particularly nice to live if you belong to a religious minority.
Yazdegerd IV @36
Agreed. The question is –“if the majority of Muslims are moderate, why are majority Muslim countries such as they are?” Turkey, once the exemplar of a secular Islamic country appears to be Islamising rapidly, which leaves Indonesia as the apologists last hope.
The singular failure of Muslim majority nations to modernise is due to the nature of the ideology itself.
Indonesia? Indonesia’s not much of a hope.
@38 Ophelia
I’m certainly not optimistic in regard to Indonesia’s chances either, the situation in Aceh is a particularly sinister development. I’m Australian, so the emergence of an Islamist Indonesia would be rather alarming.
Since Indonesia is mentioned, I’ll mention Malaysia.
Malaysia is awful. Just ask regular commenter mirax.
Plus it’s the 3d-largest (in population) country in the world.