DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: THE "DEATH CULT"

Exploring Islam's 'Death Cult'
Muslims must find a way to remove the cancer infecting their religion.
By Michael Hirsh

July 7, 2007 - It is the question at the back of many people's minds as they absorb the frightening details of the terror plot in Britain. Yes, we understand that many Muslims are angry—about the Iraq War, about Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and the usual list of grievances. But there are many people, in many different societies and cultures, who are angry about many things. Would any other culture or religion produce a group of doctors and professionals who apparently deemed it morally correct to kill innocent people in large numbers? Has something gone wrong with Islam itself, or at least the culture it has produced?

To merely pose that question, of course, is to play with political dynamite. But it must be asked. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that “a death cult” …“has taken root” in Islam, “feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.” The conservative commentator Cal Thomas also used a cancer metaphor in comments that provoked an outcry from the U.S. Muslim community in recent days. “How much longer should we allow people from certain lands, with certain beliefs to come to Britain and America and build their mosques, teach hate, and plot to kill us?" Thomas asked. "OK, let's have the required disclaimer: Not all Muslims from the Middle East and Southeast Asia want to kill us, but those who do blend in with those who don't. Would anyone tolerate a slow-spreading cancer because it wasn't fast-spreading? Probably not. You'd want it removed."

Even in the United States, where Muslims are far more assimilated into Western society than they are in Great Britain or Europe, 26 percent of younger Muslims say suicide bombing can be justified under some circumstances, according to a Pew Research survey released in May. The question of whether modern Islam has been contaminated, or twisted out of shape, is even on the minds of some Arab leaders. “We used to talk about the extremists coming from the poor or desperate people,” says a high-ranking Muslim diplomat. “Then, after 9/11, we had to face the fact that it was middle-class Arab men, too. Now with this British plot it's not just middle class but also doctors. It's very strange. I don't know where this will take us.” Indeed, it is fair to ask: how many sensitive, intelligent scions of cultured families might have been stopped in their tracks if the Islamic social culture that nurtured them had vehemently said “no” to the direction they were headed in?

The Muslim communities in both Britain and America have vociferously denounced the U.K. plot. “These people are not from us and we are not from them,” said a statement by the Association of Muslim Health Professionals. And it bears mention: homicidal rage of the kind we see in the British case is still very much a rare phenomenon in the Muslim world. Nor is the Koran or Islamic teaching uniquely permissive of violence; the Jewish and Christian God of the Old Testament is, let's face it, a bloody-minded dictator, inflicting wholesale destruction of cities and other cruel and unusual punishments. Finally, over the long run Islamic history has been dominated more by relative peace and prosperity than by jihad. “When I look back at Islamic history over the last few centuries, there was a long period of comparative stability from 1400 onward, in which there was a kind of understanding that Islam deplored anarchy,” says Richard Bulliet, a noted scholar of the Arab world at Columbia University.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Exploring Islam's 'Death Cult'