No matter how much Muslims despise it, the truth is that ISIS has grown out of their religion

Robert Fulford: No matter how much Muslims despise it, the truth is that ISIS has grown out of their religion

Robert Fulford
Friday, Feb. 27, 2015

A militant topples an ancient artifact in the Ninevah Museum in Mosul, Iraq in this image made from video posted on a social media account affiliated with the Islamic State. AP Photo

It offends many Muslims that their religion is connected automatically to the terrorism and cold-blooded massacres that are currently creating chaos in Iraq, Syria and Libya. They believe that terms like “Islamic terrorism,” “Jihadism” and “Islamo-fascism” carry an unfair implication that all Muslims are likely to support such crimes.

“Stop saying these words, they hurt,” a Toronto imam, Hamid Slimi, urged the federal government at a recent conference. He’s the former chairman of the Canadian Council of Imams, currently at work on a global campaign, Muslim Messengers of Peace.

Everyone can sympathize with law-abiding, peace-loving Muslims when they feel accused by implication of atrocities committed far away by people with whom they have no real connection except their religion. But the connection is not as distant as they might like to think.

Recently ISIS has brought further disgrace on itself by adding vandalism to its atrocities. In Mosul, Iraq, its followers burned 8,000 books they found in libraries. “These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,” according to one ISIS soldier on the scene. “So they will be burned.”

ISIS believes in exhibiting evidence of its ability to obey passages in the Koran literally and thus purify the world. Piles of books were burned in the streets, proving to everyone the spiritually powerful work ISIS does. And Islamic State soldiers used an electric drill to attack a major archaeological site, the huge sculpture of a mythical beast at the Nergal Gate at Nineveh. Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraq parliament’s security committee, said that ISIS “considers culture, civilization and science as their fierce enemies.”

How did they arrive at that belief? Their leaders are not, we should understand, crazed psychopaths. Nor has anyone the right to say (as Barack Obama did) that they are not Islamic.

“What ISIS Really Wants,” by Graeme Wood, a richly informative article in the current Atlantic, describes ISIS theorists as articulate Islamic scholars with carefully considered beliefs, one of which is that the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, is a new caliph ruling over a new caliphate.

Interviewing several of them, Wood found that these believers are learned human beings, curious and intellectually alive. A conversation with them about their ideas felt like a graduate seminar, he reported. Rather to his horror, he was tempted to like them.

What would make such people turn against the civilization they studied in universities? Their version of Islam is clearly extreme but it is Islam nevertheless. No matter how much Muslims despise it, ISIS has grown out of their religion.

Islam demands agreement with the literal truth of its sacred writing. It insists that it is the only true faith and frowns on any divergence from its basic principles. Shariah law, used in the strictest Islamic regions, follows totalitarianism by uniting state and religion in the control of individual lives. This way of thinking provides a seedbed for dictatorship and stony ground for democracy.

“Lead by example,” the Toronto imam also said in that same speech. He meant government should change its language to avoid insulting Muslims. But in fact leading by example is the story of intellectual life in the West during recent centuries.

Christians realized that they could not live by Biblical teachings from long ago. With great difficulty, and often in defiance of authority, intellectuals sought objective truth and religion listened to science.

Christians have been revising their religion ever since Martin Luther founded the Protestant Reformation by defying the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century. Perpetual reform has become a way of life. In 2013 Pope Francis started his papacy by pushing toward still more reforms.

In the 19th century the school of thought called Higher Criticism spent decades investigating the Bible to determine when and where it was written and who might have been the authors. It treated the Bible as a text created by humans. Scholars had to face the rage of church officialdom, but in time they prevailed.

For generations Christianity has been constantly criticized by its own different branches, which in the process learned to live harmoniously. Judaism exists by constantly challenging its own beliefs; different interpretations of text exist peacefully within one faith community.

Are Christians, Jews and secularists allowed to criticize Islam, even to suggest that it open itself to free inquiry? Apparently not: A taboo running through our culture suggests that frank discussion of Islam is Islamophobia. But in a period when forms of Islam are shaking the world, honest criticism is a necessity. Good-hearted multiculturalism should not prevent us from speaking the truth.