“it seems to me to be perfectly rational, healthy, and normal to fear an ideology that is likely to curtail or eliminate my liberties if it prevails.”
(Talk given at seventh Inbarah Conference in Trier , Germany, 4 MAY 2022 by Warraq speaking on behalf of Muslims who no longer believe in God.)
Good afternoon, welcome to the seventh Inarah Conference. My name is Ibn Warraq. I played, as Dr Markus Gross has adumbrated, a modest part in helping launch the Inarah Institute and the attendant Inarah conferences. I fear some of you may now have an irresistible urge to rush for the exit, since I remain, in the words of Lady Caroline Lamb referring to Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
March 15 was designated by the UN as the official day for combating so-called Islamophobia. Even though Christians are persecuted in North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Eritrea, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria and India, there is no such day for combating Christianophobia. Indeed, the very word “Christianophobia” does not exist, whereas “Islamophobia” has entered all the dictionaries of European languages. According to Vatican News [1] 13 Christians are killed every day because of their faith. I do not wish to trade figures, figures that should of course be verified, and are always open to dispute and revision; that is not my major point. What I wish to question is why the UN should consider it its duty to protect Islam from criticism, and Muslims from physical violence but not any other religious group.
We are witnessing an extraordinary moment in the history of Islamic lands. A historic moment which I tried to record in my latest book, “Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind. Atheism and Freethought in Islam.”
We cannot afford to ignore the profound implications of the rise in atheism in the Islamic world. These, largely though not exclusively, young atheists cannot be dismissed as of some fringe fanatics of uneducated rebels. The members of atheist Facebook groups in nearly all the Islamic countries are all Internet savvy, and well-versed in the Islamic sciences (Koran, Sira, hadith, tafsir, and so on), educated with a knowledge of the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, geology and biology. They are well aware of the wider consequences of the Theory of Evolution, and the materialist implications of cosmological theories of the origins of the Universe. They are thus well-placed to critically examine the tenets of the religion they were forced-fed at an extremely young age. Their self-liberation is an achievement all the more remarkable for that, requiring not only alert minds but extraordinary courage, for atheism remains punishable by death in many Islamic countries. Their critical inquiring minds are in admiration of the scientific achievements of the West. As a whole they do not have any ideological reason to hate the West, unlike the terrorists and Islamic Republic of Iran. The ideological foundation of the conflicts in the Middle East are often downplayed, instead we are told it is all about “the oil” or “poverty” or “American imperialism”. It is Islam and its ideology which is responsible for Islamic terrorism. Thus ex-Muslims should be seen as allies to be cultivated, not dismissed as “Islamophobes.”
Islam is not a race
In early 2019, in Britain the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, a cross-party formation of around two-dozen MPs in the British Parliament, tried to institutionalize the definition of Islamophobia in racial rather than religious terms. The APPG, in a November 2018 report titled, ‘Islamophobia Defined,’ proposed the following one-sentence definition of Islamophobia: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ The definition, the result of six months of consultations, was endorsed by hundreds of Muslim organizations, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as several political parties, including Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Conservatives. As the Spectator, a British journal, wrote, “There is wide public support for freedom of speech and it is unlikely to be officially ended by an act of parliament, but it can be chipped away bit by bit. Giving official recognition to the APPG definition of Islamophobia will be a giant step towards an arbitrary police state.” This is an insult to millions of ex-Muslims from different ethnic communities who reject a set of beliefs, rituals and rites, and cast doubt on an ideology. How could they possibly be accused of racism? Islam is not a race.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “phobia” as “Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character. In Psychology, an abnormal and irrational fear or dread which is caused by a particular object or circumstance.” However, it seems to me to be perfectly rational, healthy, and normal to fear an ideology that is likely to curtail or eliminate my liberties if it prevails. If I were gay, lesbian, transgender or non-believer, or simply a woman, I should be more than alarmed, I should be terrified at the thought of Islam becoming the religion of the state where I was living, I would battle Islam with all my might. As a set of ideas, as an ideology, Islam is fair game; one is morally obliged to criticize its beliefs and principles. We are not targeting individuals, individual Muslims; in fact, most ex-Muslims have close relatives and family members who remain Muslim. Far from promoting bigotry, we clearly distinguish between Muslims and Islam. Islam like other religions is fair game for criticizing, making fun of etc. It would be more coherent to coin a new term; perhaps MISOISLAMIC, “hating what is Islamic.“ The Oxford English Dictionary gives „misocatholic“ as “hating what is (Roman) Catholic.“ The prefix “miso-“ comes from the Greek word to hate, and is found in, for example, misanthropy, misogamy, misogyny, misology. In the history of the West, those who have criticized various aspects of Christianity are admired, revered as cultural heroes, and hailed as philosophers responsible for the secularization of the West – from Spinoza, to Camus. They are not labelled and dismissed as “Christianophobes.”
[…]
What an extraordinary avowal: a history “written by infidels for infidels”. What on earth do they mean? Do they mean Muslims should not read it? Why? Because the account in Hagarism is not true? Or more simply, they believe it is true but it is an account no Muslim will find acceptable. Are Muslims not capable of accepting the truth? Must Muslims be always protected from the truth? Why are their sensibilities more important than, say, those of the Christians or Jews? What about Clio, who in Greek mythology, was one of the nine Muses, and the patroness of history? What about objective truth?
Pace Cook and Crone, the implications of their theses are indeed “devastating”. Any research that casts doubt on the traditional Muslim account of the Koran, the Rise of Islam and the life of Muhammad is totally unacceptable to Muslims. The two final letters reveal the enormous gulf between the attitudes to research in Islam and Christianity. The pen-ultimate letter writer, Robin Oakley-Hill, remarked that, “It is hardly fair to characterise western Koran scholarship as neo-colonial given that western academics subject Christianity to far more rigorous- frequently destructive-examination….Perhaps Islam could do with a [Pope] John XXII and some liberation theology”.
Oakley-Hill’s point had been made by John Wansbrough himself over thirty years earlier:
“As a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques if Biblical criticism [the Koran] is virtually unknown. The doctrinal obstacles that have traditionally impeded such investigation are, on the other hand, very well known. Not merely dogmas such as those defining scripture as the uncreated Word of God and acknowledging its formal and substantive inimitability, but also the entire corpus of Islamic historiography, by providing a more or less coherent and plausible report of the circumstances of the Quranic revelation, have discouraged examination of the document as representative of a traditional literary type.”
[…]
If what Puin says is correct, then the consequences are again “devastating”, a fact recognized by R. Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who argued, “To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community”.
In brief, pace Cook and Crone, historians do try to establish what really happened and their research has profound implications for the believer and the religion’s own traditional view of itself. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are particularly vulnerable to the historical sciences, since the validity of their respective dogmas are closely predicated on or anchored in putatively historical events, in a way that Buddhism, for example, is not. The historical Buddha, that is if he is indeed a historical figure, only said “follow my argument”, and if his life proved to be a pious legend, his argument would still remain, and “Buddhism” would not be shaken in its foundations. As Van Harvey [1923-2021], professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, who died recently at the age of 95, said in his classic The Historian and the Believer, the deontology, as the French would say, of the historian, that is to say the moral obligation of the historian as historian and hence the critical historical method “has the profoundest of implications for religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular”.
[…]
Mohammed Arkoun very sensibly replied that such an attitude was unacceptable scientifically, for historical truth concerns the right of the human spirit to push forward the limits of human knowledge; Islamic thought, like all other traditions of thought, can only benefit from such an epistemological attitude. Besides, continues Arkoun, Professor van Ess knows perfectly well that Muslims today suffer from the politics of repression of free thought, especially in the religious domain. Or to put it another way, we are not doing Islam any favors by shielding it from Enlightenment values.
Some Western scholarship has moved from objectivity to Islamic apologetics pure and simple; a trend remarked in 1968 by Maxime Rodinson: “In this way the anticolonialist left, whether Christian or not, often goes so far as to sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim world. . . . A historian like Norman Daniel has gone so far as to number among the conceptions permeated with medievalism or imperialism, any criticisms of the Prophet’s moral attitudes, and to accuse of like tendencies any exposition of Islam and its characteristics by means of the normal mechanisms of human history. Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and simple”.
“ Respect for the faith of sincere believers cannot be allowed either to block or deflect the investigation of the historian. . . .One must defend the rights of elementary historical methodology.”
It is certainly disgraceful that, what Karl Binswanger called, the “dogmatic Islamophilia” of modern Islamicist scholars helped to deny Gunter Luling a fair hearing and destroyed his academic career. German Islamicists are to quote Arabist Gotz Schregle wearing “spiritually in their mind a turban,” practicing “Islamic scholarship” rather than scholarship on Islam. Equally reprehensible has been the imputing of various “suspect” motives to the work of Wansbrough and those influenced by him. Western scholars need to unflinchingly, unapologetically defend their right to examine the Islam, to explain the rise and fall of Islam by the normal mechanisms of human history, according to the objective standards of historical methodology (which relies on conjectures and refutations, critical thought, rational arguments, presentation of evidence, and so on). The virtue of disinterested historical inquiry would be fatally undermined if we brought into it the Muslim or Christian faith. If we bring subjective religious faith with its dogmatic certainties into the “historical approximation process, it inevitably undermines what R. G. Collingwood argued was the fundamental attribute of the critical historian, skepticism regarding testimony about the past.”
Sir Isaiah Berlin once described an ideologue as somebody who is prepared to suppress what he suspects to be true. Sir Isaiah then concluded that from that disposition to suppress the truth has flowed much of the evil of this and other centuries. The first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth. By suppressing the truth, however honourable the motive, we are only engendering an even greater evil.
We are all beholden to all historians for helping us to see more clearly, and more honestly past events that have such an important bearing on present travails. In the words of Albert Schweitzer, “Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances”.
Great article!