A Tribute to David Hurley, Former Governor-General of Australia with ‘Enormous Respect for Islam’

General David John Hurley, AC, CVO, DSC, FTSE, served a five-year term as Governor-General of Australia; his term expired several weeks ago, on July 1, 2024. His retirement, laden with honors, recalled to my mind his stout defense several years ago of the role of Islam in Australian society. Hurley championed the importance of “faith in people’s lives” amid a national debate on religious freedom protections.

His fulsome praise of Islam was reported on here:

The former defence force chief, sworn in as Governor-General on July 1, told Islamic leaders at the Perth mosque that he held “enormous respect for Islam” and its contribution to the nation.

Mr. Hurley, a devout Christian, delivered the speech on the weekend in front of an audience including Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Rateb Jneid, a federal Labor MP.

Why did David Hurley have “enormous respect for Islam” and its putative contribution to the nation? He spent a year, three decades ago, in a Muslim Malay village, apparently doing some kind of anthropological field work. What was it he found so impressive about the practice of Islam in that Malay village? Did he not see how the women were kept mostly indoors, and covered by abayas when they went out, always under the thumb of their menfolk? What did he think of the practice of polygyny, sanctified by Islam, which gives a husband the right to take up to four wives? Didn’t it occur to him that this demeaned women? Did he observe, during his year in the village, how Muslim husbands could discipline their wives, “beating” them if they even suspected them of disobedience, behavior justified in Qur’an 4:34? Did he learn that daughters inherited half that of sons, or that the testimony of a woman was worth only half that of a man? Or did all of this escape his observation? Would he be surprised to learn that Muhammad himself justified this latter practice, in a well-known hadith, because of “the deficiency in her [woman’s] intelligence”? One has the feeling that despite the year he spent in the village, David Hurley was not exactly a profound observer of the laws and customs of the Muslims among whom he lived.

Apparently David Hurley was, and remains, unaware of those Qur’anic verses that describe Muslims as “the best of peoples” and non-Muslims, such as himself, as “the most vile of created beings.” Nor did he ever come across the Qur’anic verse that tells Muslims not to take Christians or Jews as friends, “for they are friends only with each other.” Did he have any inkling that in saying their five daily prayers the villagers who were so friendly to him were in fact denouncing the Kuffar – such as himself – seventeen times a day? If the villagers were not hostile to Hurley, that was despite, and not because of, the Qur’anic texts.

In that year Hurley spent living in a village of Muslim Malays, did he never read the Qur’an? Has he read it in the 30 years since, or has he felt he has no need to learn more about the texts and teachings of Islam? Did he not understand the overwhelming significance of that book for Muslims? In showing himself unaware of the contents of the Qur’an, he was not only displaying a disturbing ignorance but given the responsibilities he had as Governor-General up until quite recently, he showed himself to be remarkably incurious.

In addition to speaking of his faith, Hurley revealed details of time spent as the “only white Christian male” in a Malaysian village and how he was “no stranger to Islam.”

“I have a faith and I am a firm believer in faith in people’s lives. And to be visiting a mosque that has represented your faith for well over 100 years is very important for me,” Mr. Hurley said….

Mr. Hurley appears to believe indiscriminately in the worth of “faith” in people’s lives – undifferentiated faith, faith of all kinds, beneficial precisely because it is “faith.” A study of history might lead him to a less sanguine view of “faith.” Religious “faith” can be, and has often been, the source of hatred, persecution, mass murder, wars. No faith has been as bloody as Islam. Tens, and perhaps hundreds, of millions of non-Muslims have been treated with enormous cruelty, been enslaved, and many mass-murdered, by Muslims, over the past 1,400 years. Hurley is unaware not only of the texts of Islam, the Qur’an and Hadith, but is also unaware, apparently, of that long and terrifying history of the Muslim murders of Unbelievers. Study is not his strong suit.