Robert Spencer - Islam: Religion of Bigots

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Islam: Religion of Bigots
by Robert Spencer

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance, proclaimed President Barack Obama during his appeal to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4, 2009. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Even during what is generally considered to have been the Golden Age of Islamic tolerance, it is more accurate to say that non-Muslims were tolerated as second-class subjects rather than respected as equals under Islamic regimes. They were regarded as dhimmis, whose residence was conditioned on their submission to humiliating regulations that ensured their subjugation to the Muslim population. They had to pay an onerous special tax (jizya) mandated by the Quran (9:29), for example, and wear special marks identifying their second-class status.

Moreover, unlike Christendom, whose leaders have issued apologies for past mistreatment of Jews and condemned the scriptural justifications for that mistreatment, authorities in the Muslim world from Muhammads day to this have never thought twice about referring to Jews as apes and pigs (cf. Quran 2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166), or regarding them as destined by Gods will for destruction. These are some of the salient facts that Obamas charitable view obscures at a time when prominent Muslim leaders including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the worlds most prominent Muslim cleric, are calling on the faithful to finish the extermination of the Jews that Hitler began.

In countries where Muslims are a small minority, such as the United States, there is a surface plausibility to Obamas claim. Muslim groups have so far accommodated themselves to a democracy whose secular faith is one of diversity and tolerance. But in countries and communities where Muslims constitute a national majority, the face of Islam looks quite different. In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the possession of Christian Bibles; no Christian or Jew is allowed to enter the cities of Mecca and Medina lest their footprints defile Islams sacred sites. As the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places, Saudi Arabia has a unique status in the Islamic world. One aspect of this status is that Mecca and Medina are realizations of Muhammads command to remove all but Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula. Mecca and Medina represent the aspirations of the Muslim world, the vision of a quintessential Islamic society: one in which there are no non-Muslims.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, conversion from Islam to Christianity is already punishable by death, in accord with Muhammads command. In Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Nigeria, and even Obamas beloved Indonesia, religious minorities Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and non-believers face harassment and often violent religious persecution. These persecutions are carried out by jihadist Muslims who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions. In short, in the Muslim world itself, which since 9/11 has been increasingly swept up in the tide of Islamic supremacism, the creed of Muhammad reveals itself to be a religion of bigots rather than, as President Obama would have it, a religion of peace.

There is a theological foundation for Islamic bigotry. The Quran calls the Jews and Christians who reject Muhammad the most vile of created beings (98:6). It says that the polytheists are unclean (9:28), and since it claims that Jews consider Ezra the Son of God the way Christians consider Jesus the Son of God (9:30), and that it is not befitting for Allah to take a son (19:35), in Islamic theology, Jews and Christians are as much polytheists as are Hindus and hence just as unclean.

Religious Genocide

In March 2013, the Egyptian Islamic scholar Abdullah Badr demonstrated how such a belief can work out in practice when he explained that Christians disgusted him, saying that it was not a matter of piety, but disgust. I get grossed out. Get that? Disgust, I get grossed out, man, I cannot stand their smell or I dont like them, its my choice. And they gross me out; their smell, their look, everything. I feel disgusted, disgusted.

That disgust has combined with imperatives derived from Quranic injunctions to slay the polytheists wherever you find them (9:5) and to subjugate the People of the Book (9:29) to play out in Islamic history in the cleansing of entire regions of their non-Muslim populations. Eliminating other religions, as per Quran 8:39 (fight...until religion is all for Allah) and making sure that any non-Muslims who remain are conquered and submissive, is the overarching goal of jihad. As an Iranian Bahai observed to V. S. Naipaul in the course of his travels through the world of Islam, These Muslims are a strange people. They have an old mentality. Very old mentality. They are very bad to minorities.

The transformation of Constantinople following its conquest in 1453 illustrates the effects of Muslim bigotry. Before the Muslim conquest, Constantinople had been the center of Eastern Christianity and the second city of all Christendom, as well as the chief rival to the splendor and authority of Rome. Its Hagia Sophia cathedral, built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was the grandest and most celebrated church in the Christian world until the construction of St. Peters in the Vatican. As recently as 1914, Constantinople still boasted a population nearly fifty percent Christian. Today, as a result of the religious persecution of Christians, the city is now 99.99% Muslim.

After the 1453 Muslim conquest, the Hagia Sophia Cathedral, like so many other Christian churches before and after, was transformed into a mosque. After Turkeys secularization, the mosque was converted into a museum by the secularists, and is now about to be transformed into a mosque again. While secular Turkey did not enforce Islamic law, it saw a depoliticized Islam as essential to the Turkish identity at the expense of the Christian population. In Tur-Abdin in southwest Turkey in 1960, there were 150,000 Christians; today, there are just over two thousand. The rest have fled in the face of Muslim hostility and harassment.

Occasionally, Muslim authorities found it politically expedient to draw explicitly on the genocidal passions Muhammad had inspired, and used them to arouse the fury of the populace against the dhimmis, who were bringing Allahs disfavor upon the larger community. In a harbinger of the Armenian catastrophe that would take place in Turkey twenty years later, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid initiated a series of bloody strikes against the restive Christian Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1895. The Armenians had made the mistake of embracing Western notions of human rights, and of beginning to question their dhimmi status. According to Lord Kinross, historian of the Ottoman Empire, at the point of a bayonet, the Armenians were offered the choice between death and forcible conversion to Islam. The genocide that the Muslim Turks subsequently conducted during World War I was a manifestation of the same jihadist strain in Islam, and led to the murder of a million and a half Armenians.

In Turkey itself, the Christian population has declined from 15% in 1920 to 1% today. In Syria, the Christian population has declined from 33% to 10% in the same span. Since the Turks occupied northern Cyprus in 1974, churches have been despoiled of their icons, which have flooded the market in Greece. The Turks have taken over many churches for secular uses, and even tried to convert the fourth century Christian monastery of San Makar into a hotel. Christian Cypriots are forbidden to come near the building, much less enter it.