Westerners
identify readily with secular Muslims such as Ayaan
Hirshi Ali, member of the Netherlands' parliament and
the late Theo van Gogh's collaborator in a film
attacking Islam's treatment of women, or with the
Canadian Irshad Manji, the lesbian "Muslim refusenik"
who published The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call
for Reform in Her Faith. But they have something to
learn from the letter that Mohammed B pinned with a
knife to van Gogh's corpse after he murdered him with
knife and pistol on November 2.
The text can be
found at FaithFreedom.org, along with
commentary by informed readers.
"An Open Letter
to Hirshi Ali" opens a window into the great theological
conflict of our times. Most Western readers would stop
after the first 10 lines, for it begins with paranoid
Jew-hatred copied from Islamist websites and petty
complaints about Ayaan Hirshi Ali's immigration policy.
But the core of the "Open Letter" is an admonition from
a believing Muslim to an atheist apostate, with a unique
exposition of the faith of radical Islam. Some secular
critics wrongly claim that Islam is not a religion, but
only a political ideology, a position I challenged in an
August 10 essay (Islam: Religion or political
ideology?). The "Open Letter" evinces not
merely a religious position, but, however abhorrent, a
profound religious sensibility.
Failure to
confront Islam as a religion, I maintain, is the
Achilles' heel of Western strategy. Ayaan Hirshi Ali has
my entire sympathy, but to her antagonists I accord the
respect due to a lethal enemy. US conservatives applaud
secular Muslims for being reasonable, but at the same
time admire the religious impulse of the American
Christians. One may argue, of course, that Americans
should have a religion while Arabs should not, but the
fact is that they do have a religion. Antagonistic modes
of faith underlie the conflict between the West and the
Islamic world. The assassin Mohammed B, by delivering
this message attached to the corpse of a prominent
figure in European culture, demands that we consider
this antagonism in earnest.
The "Open Letter"
begins execrably, with an anti-Jewish screed based on
misquotes from rabbinical commentary, but soon enough
comes to its core argument, namely the failure of
secularism:
There is one certainty in the whole of
existence; and that is that everything comes to an
end.
A child born unto this world and fills
this universe with its presence in the form of its
first life's cries, shall ultimately leave this world
with its death cry.
A blade of grass sticking
up its head from the dark earth and being caressed by
the sunlight and fed by the descending rain, shall
ultimately whither and turn to dust.
Death,
Miss Hirshi Ali, is the common theme of all that
exists. You, me and the rest of creation can not
disconnect from this truth.
There shall be a
Day where one soul can not help another soul. A Day
with terrible tortures and torments. A Day where the
injust shall force from their [tongues] horrible
screams. Screams, Miss Hirshi Ali, that will cause
shivers to roll down one's spine; that will make hairs
stand up from heads. People will be seen drunk with
fear while they are not drunk. Fear shall fill the
atmosphere on that Great Day.
The lines
above might have appeared in a Sunday sermon by an
old-fashioned American preacher. All religion responds
to the inevitability of death, which means not merely
individual death, but also the death of the cultural
continuity that makes it possible for the individual to
live on in memory. The "Open Letter" elaborates this
theme with verses from the 81st Sura of the Koran, which
portrays a Day of Judgment (stars fall, the sun is
overthrown, hell is lighted, and so forth), and then
continues:
You as unbelieving extremist of course
won't believe in the above described scene. For you
the above is merely a made-up drama piece from a book
like many. And yet, Miss Hirshi Ali, I would bet my
life to claim that you are sweating with fear when you
read this. You, as unbelieving fundamentalist, of
course do not believe that a Supreme being controls
the entire universe.
You do not believe that
your heart, with which you cast away truth, has to ask
permission from the Supreme being for every beat.
You do not believe that your tongue with which
you deny the Guidance from the Supreme being is
subject to his Laws.
You do not believe that
life and death has been given you by this Supreme
being.
Until this point, the "Open Letter"
follows the conventional form of a believer's admonition
to an unbeliever, in terms familiar to Jew and
Christian. But then the writer attaches a challenge born
of existential despair: if you believe so firmly in your
secular view of the world, are you happy to die for it?
If you really believe this, then the
following challenge should be no problem for you. I
challenge you with this letter to prove you are right.
You don't have to do much:
Miss Hirshi Ali:
wish for death if you are really convinced you are
right.
If you will not accept this challenge;
know then that my master, the Most High, has unmasked
you as an unjust one.
The writer invokes
the 94th and 95th verses of the Koran's 2nd Sura,
addressed to false prophets:
[2.94] Say: If the future abode with Allah
is specially for you to the exclusion of the people,
then invoke death if you are truthful. [2.95] And they
will never invoke it on account of what their hands
have sent before, and Allah knows the
unjust.
The "Open Letter" then concludes
with a death threat to Ayaan Hirshi Ali:
"To
prevent that I were to be accused of the same, I shall
wish this wish [death] for you."
If you are so
convinced of your philosophy, asks the writer, why do
you not wish for death? We jihadis, he implies, welcome
death, and if your conviction is as strong as ours, you
should do no less. Westerners should think twice before
despising this line of reasoning. Socrates, after all,
argued that the true philosopher should wish for death
before he drank the hemlock, and he chose the hemlock
over exile because he could exist as nothing other than
an Athenian. I made this point in Socrates the destroyer (May
25), an essay that attracted virtually no readers
because its conclusions are so unsettling. After the
Peloponnesian War, which doomed Athenian culture,
Socrates' existential choice was rather more
understandable.
The presentiment of death (Franz
Rosenzweig's phrase) haunts the Arab mind. A senescent
culture that has fallen behind in every aspect of human
endeavor - economic, scientific, cultural and military -
faces absorption into the hostile world of
globalization. As I wrote on August 10 (Islam: Religion or
political ideology?):
Traditional society is the locus of the
vast majority of the world's billion Muslims. Global
communications and the social freedoms embodied in the
US system threaten the existence of these societies.
For most of the world's Muslims the United States is a
menace, not a promise, threatening to dissolve the
ties that bind child to parent, wife to husband,
tribesman to chief, subject to ruler. Traditional
society will not go mutely to its doom and join the
Great Extinction of the Peoples, blotting out ancient
cultures and destroying the memory of today's
generation. It will not permit the hundreds of
millions of Muslims on the threshold of adulthood to
pass into the world of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll,
and lose the memory of their ancestors. On the
contrary: it will turn the tables upon the corrupt
metropolis, and in turn launch a war of conquest
against it.
Radical Islam stems from
despair in the face of cultural death; precisely for
that reason it bespeaks a ghastly indifference toward
individual death, analogous to the Mut der
Verzweiflung, or courage borne of desperation, that
impels the soldiers of a defeated army toward a final
charge at the enemy cannon. Absolute certainty informs
the faith of the assassin Mohammed B, but it is the
certainty of cultural extinction that makes the death of
the individual the supreme test of faith. Existential
despair inspires the conclusion that better than defeat
is to fight to the death. Peace is to be achieved when
those who hold this view will have had the opportunity
to do so (More killing, please!, June 12,
2003).
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