Is Islam an ‘Insurmountable Obstacle to Freedom, Democracy, Secularism, and Gender Equality’?

Some claim that the West has a ridiculous Islamophobic obsession with Islam. A five-year old but enduringly relevant article asserts this: “Obsession with Islam blinds West to real problems,” by Omer Taspinar, Asia Times, March 13, 2019. Taspinar deplores the fact that Islam is widely seen as an “insurmountable obstacle to freedom, democracy, secularism, and gender equality.”

Taspinar claims disparagingly that the West sees Islam an “obstacle to freedom,” as if this were self-evidently absurd. But Islam is seen by Islamocritics as preventing the exercise of certain rights, the freedoms we now take for granted in the advanced West. There is no freedom of speech in the Islamic world; criticism or mockery of Muhammad or of Islam can be punished, as blasphemy, with prison or even death. There is, similarly, no freedom of religion: If Muslims convert to another faith, they can be sentenced to prison, or, in some Muslim states, executed for the crime of apostasy. There are many restrictions on adherents of other faiths in Muslim countries; these range from forbidding the repair, or building of new houses of worship without express permission, to expelling, as happened in Saudi Arabia, a handful of nurses who quietly sang Christmas carols in their own rooms behind closed doors, to imprisoning Christians found guilty of proselytizing.

Islam is an obstacle to democracy; it has a very different view of a government’s legitimacy from what obtains in the democratic West. In the Western world, a government is legitimate if it reflects the will of the people, as expressed in elections. In the Islamic world, a government is legitimate if it reflects the will of Allah, as expressed in the Qur’an. A Muslim ruler may be a despot, but he must be a good Muslim.

Islam does not admit of secularism. Religion governs every area of a devout Muslim’s life. The faith offers a Complete Regulation of Life, even down to such things as personal hygiene. The Christian division (Matthew 22:21) of “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s” does not exist in Islam.

As for gender equality, it too does not exist in Islam. A husband may “beat” his wife if he fears she may be disobedient. A daughter inherits half of what a son does. A woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man because, as Muhammad says in a famous hadith, “of the deficiency in her intelligence.” A man may take up to four wives; a Muslim wife can have only one husband. A Muslim husband can divorce a wife merely by uttering the triple-talaq; a wife, on the other hand, must return her bride-price or mahr, and provide — as the divorcing husband need not —a good reason for desiring the divorce.

Islam does indeed offer insurmountable obstacles to freedom, democracy, secularism, and gender equality; Taspinar’s dismissal of Western worries is grotesque.

And as if 9/11 was not enough to fuel a civilizational clash, the global financial crisis of 2008 exacerbated identity politics. Times of economic hardship hasten the search for scapegoats. The prolonged recession empowered xenophobic, anti-immigration political parties by unleashing a backlash against the pro-globalization establishment. This rising trend of angry nationalism in the West made Islam, multiculturalism, immigration and refugees easy targets. Political parties that campaigned against Muslim immigration are now in power in Austria, Italy, Poland and Hungary, and they define the contours of public debate in Britain, France and Germany.’

It was not 9/11 alone that fueled a civilizational clash; it has been the steady stillicide of attacks carried out by Muslim terrorists since then; these attacks now number in the tens of thousands, many of them against fellow Muslims deemed insufficient or wrong in their faith. The claim that “times of economic hardship hasten the search for scapegoats” — and Islam was that scapegoat — is unfounded. No one anywhere mentioned Muslims as responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. What “xenophobic anti-immigration” political parties were founded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in the U.S.? None. In the U.K.? None. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-Islam party was founded long before 2008. Geert Wilder’s Freedom Party was founded in 2006, before the worldwide recession. The “Alternative For Germany” Party was founded in 2013, five years after the recession, and after the economic recovery had been complete. That recession does not explain the rise of anti-immigrant — or rather, anti-Muslim immigrant — parties.