Anatomy of a madness, Part 3

I read The Satanic Verses in the winter of 1996-97, unemployed and frozen, and again in the winter of 2014-15, Charlie Hebdo on TV 24/7. The third time was in that magical realist summer of 2020, with a fresh-ish MFA to my name, to study the work as art. 12 August 2022: the author survived.

Anatomy of a madness, Part 3

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

The Western misunderstanding of the Muslim mind is fundamental. Let us return to 1989, to the UK Foreign Office Minister William Waldergrave MP’s exchange with the Iranian Ambassador after Ayatollah Khomeini suborned the murder of British writer Salman Rushdie. Waldergrave recounted:

I remember them saying, “Why’re you making such a fuss about this? This is just one of our apostates and we have to kill him. What’s the problem?” And that was a problem for us. They were perfectly capable of saying, ‘Oh that murderer who came and killed him, we didn’t send him.’ In what sense did they not send him or send him. They’d created the atmosphere in which that person would have come.

Waldergrave was quite correct. Of course the Iranian regime bears culpability, should anyone take up the order and murder, or attempt to murder, Salman Rushdie. But there is a wider, and in my view, more fundamental point here, and that is the Iranian ambassador’s attitude. His obnoxiousness is not simply about his government’s culpability or otherwise, he was also putting this kafir, Waldergrave, in his place. There are two aspects to this dressing down. The first is: how dare you, a kafir government, question the right of an Islamic government to apply the Shari’a wherever it deems fit to do so! The second is another form of the first: how dare you, a kafir, presume to tell me, a Muslim, that I must not kill!

Muslim supremacism, although acknowledged by many in the West, is also mostly misunderstood as a haughty or dismissive attitude on the part of certain Muslims towards the kufaar and everything kafir, e.g., “He is a Muslim supremacist.” This way of looking at it misses that supremacism attaches to being Muslim, rather than to the personality of any particular Muslim. Everything from its being forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry a kafir man, to its being offensive for a Muslim to where an item of clothing belonging to a kafir, to a judge in court necessarily being lenient towards the Muslim and harsh towards the kafir, to a Muslim’s promise, pledge, agreement or treaty with a kafir never being binding, to a Muslim’s life being worth more than that of a kafir, the list goes on. Supremacism lies at the heart of the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim.

It is not a question of whether this or that particular Muslim will or will not murder an apostate, or agrees or disagrees with such a murder. Douglas Murray confronted Abdullah Andalusi over the latter’s avoiding condemning the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.[1] Murray, being well-familiar with Muslim evasiveness, was having none of it and called out Andalusi for his dishonesty and insincerity. Yet Murray made a mistake that critics of Muslims often make: they assume that they are dealing with autonomous individuals. It would be less inaccurate to think of “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger,” as equal to “We are the Borg,” than to think of Muslims as so many individuals each making his or her own autonomous choices. An approximate contemporary Western equivalent is “woke” culture, the collective mind of the cult, and the individual’s willing subordination to it long before physical coercion comes into play.[2]

If you publicly press a Muslim to condemn the perpetrator of a Shari’a murder or attempted murder, he might eventually do so when he judges his evasiveness to be turning counter-productive to the interests of Islam. If you press him to condemn the particular act, he might eventually do that, too. Andalusi ended up doing both of these things, but he will never condemn the act in principle, for Shari’a commands the act, and who carries it out is unimportant, so long as it is a Muslim anywhere in the world. Yet at this point, having shown the particular Muslim to be dishonest, Murray, the intrepid Western critic of Islam, backs down, leaving Shari’a unchallenged, that is to say, exactly when the real battle should be joined.

What William Waldergrave could more usefully have said was, “Salman Rushdie is a British national who acted on British soil and is therefore subject to British legal jurisdiction and no other. If you, or anyone under your order or encouragement should attempt to harm our citizen, you will be dealing with us.” By taking such a stance, he would be placing himself squarely in the path of Shari’a’s jurisdictional presumptions.

The mistake the free world makes with Muslims is to fail to make clear and enforce the terms of their stay in a free country: they are subject to no other jurisdiction than that of the free country, whatever they might maintain in their own heads. We are not interested in what the Shari’a says or doesn’t say, or the extent to which it is or is not compatible with civilised values, or the extent to which any particular Muslim adheres to or does not adhere to it.[3] We are not interested in acknowledging it as having any legal force whatsoever over anyone on our territory, no matter what their religion, and emphatically, we are not interested in negotiating over it or entering into any bargains over it – period. The late Christopher Hitchens was one unequivocal voice in these matters. About Shari’a in Britain, he writes:

It is the principle of equality before the law that really counts. And just look at how casually this sheep-faced English cleric [the Archbishop of Canterbury] throws away the work of centuries of civilisation:

“[A]n approach to law which simply said 'there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts'—I think that’s a bit of a danger.”

In the midst of this dismal verbiage and euphemism, the plain statement— “There’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said”—still stands out like a diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply, and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody. Its principles ought to be just as intelligible and accessible to those who don’t yet speak English, in just the same way as the great Lord Mansfield once ruled that, wherever someone might have been born, and whatever he had been through, he could not be subject to slavery once he had set foot on English soil. Simple enough?  For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin.[4]

Khomeini’s fatwa went out to “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world,” not to Hadi Matar in particular. For Andalusi, as for any Muslim apologist, it is not about the particular perpetrator, the particular victim, the particular act, or the particular precipitating action, in this case the writing of a book. As long as a Muslim never condemns Muslims for murdering, or attempting to murder, non-Muslims, including apostates from Islam, Andalusi remains on the right side of the Muslim collective mind.

Up to about a decade ago, the “scholars” and miscellaneous Islamic apologists could still get away with “interpreting” their way out of the mess into which Islam, as a barbaric system of mind control and oppression, was rapidly sinking. They could, for example, add the toothbrushes, twigs and feathers that Allah had thought too obvious to mention when he told Muslim men to beat their wives. Whatever unspeakable faith-inspired horror any Muslim perpetrates, Maajid Nawaz, e.g., can be relied on to advance that such action stems from only “that interpretation” of Islam. Such apologetics might still be received with relief by the crowd who would lose all hold on reality were it to turn out that there is no such thing as a “moderate Muslim.”

But with increasing numbers of lay Muslims now autonomous individuals rather than mere dependent subordinates, such obfuscation simply will no longer wash. Many lay Muslims realise that they are only “moderate” because the are ignorant about their own religion. The “interpretation” that people like Nawaz seek to salvage is nothing but a state of ignorance in which he would see Muslims forever imprisoned. It is one thing to dupe the naïve kufaar who desperately want to be duped, but quite another for “scholars” to lose credibility in the eyes of lay Muslims.

Sometimes, the need for Muslim ignorance becomes so absurd that it proves too much even for the “scholars” themselves, the elect who owe their privilege to Muslim mass ignorance. One such absurdity that particularly stands out for sheikh Dr Yasir Qadhi is the Shari’a expectation that lay Muslims absorb without question the story of Gog and Magog, simply because it is in the Qur’an, conveyed to them through the mouths of people like Dr Qadhi himself, whom the Shari’a protects from lay Muslim challenge.

The issue of Ya'juj and Ma'juj is actually, for our modern times, I would say, one of the most, if not the most, problematic of the signs of Judgment Day. It has caused many of our youth to question, to doubt. I myself have met people that have actually left Islam, because of these types of tales.[5]

As absurd and apostasy-inducing as “these types of tales” might be, Islam is perfect, may never be questioned, and those who do so must be killed. That would be a lot of killing on top of the Muslims’ already astronomical killing record. Yasir Qadhi is hated amongst Islamic “scholars,” some of whom have openly expressed their wish for him to meet with divine justice. Dr Qadhi can see that the limits of tinkering with the perfect, eternal speech of Allah have been reached, from bracketed interpolations into translations of the Islamic texts, to Maajid Nawaz’s hyper-pluralist “interpretations,” leaving him with either dismissing the increasingly frequent questions, or attempting to construct some kind of semi-absurd compromise that he hopes will be sufficiently palatable to the doubting Muslims to keep them in Islam. In other words, what is left of the ummah after decades of pounding by the kufaar has to be salvaged from complete obliteration.

We have to be honest and frank and not pretend as if this doesn't exist. …We are dealing with the crisis of people leaving our faith. Our own children, our own young men and women. And of the reasons why, is that we are not answering some of these issues that they bring and we dismiss them. I myself have discussed many of these issues with these types of people, and one of them, not the only one, …is Ya’juj and Ma’juj. So we have to be very clear and frank and think critically, even as we look at our tradition. (My emphasis).

In other words, the authority of the elect is under siege. Critical strategic genius is called for here. When Muhammad’s authority was under siege, the Satanic verses came along and boosted his authority to save his religion. When Ayatollah Khomeini’s authority was under siege, The Satanic Verses came along and boosted his authority to make him the saviour of his religion. After centuries of no-one acknowledging that they are the best of people, finally, the fatwa allowed Muslims to walk so tall that their ankles stuck out beneath their trousers, get on talk shows to spout meaningless Arabic incantations with pride from behind beards and niqabs, and still be listened to with respect. Even the Sunni-Shi’a split seemed a thing of the past. It was a high that launched multiculturalism with a vengeance. Oh, what a time it was to be Muslim. That was thirty-three years ago.

A lot can happen in thirty-three years. Al-Qaeda, its full official name The Foundation of Jihad, formed in 1988, the same year The Satanic Verses was published. As Allah would will it, the next year, 1989, would be when Muslims, through their book-burning and baying for blood, showed the world that they were once again the best of people, a detail forgotten since the jihad genocide of Christians in the Ottoman Empire between the 1890s and 1917, and the massacres and mass rapes of Hindus first leading up to and in the aftermath of the 1947 Indian Partition, then in the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971. Now Muslims being the best of people is kept in our consciousness through to their never-ending abduction, forced marriage and rape of Christian women in Egypt and Christian and Sikh women in Pakistan, and the full-scale genocide of Christians in Nigeria. The Muslim delusion of power also eked some sustenance out of the Palestine Liberation Organisation after its founding in 1964, and their subsequent spectacular mass murders, which has since morphed into generalised dhimmi and ex-Muslim anti-Zionism. Muslims can at least be credited with partially-successful propaganda.

The 1989 Muslim “renaissance” in the wake of what had become ‘the Satanic Verses affair,’ could not possibly have come at a worse time for Muslims. In the ‘East’, the heartland of Islam, the zeitgeist was moving away from totalitarianism. 1989 would see democratic revolutions sweep Soviet communism from most of Eastern Europe, and shake Chinese communism on Tiananmen Square. The nation-wide dismantling of Apartheid commenced in that year. Complementarily, 1989 was also when the Internet became commercially available, and in that same year, kafir scientists undertook to build a telescope that could look at the beginning of the universe and inspect Allah's handiwork, what became the famous James Webb Space Telescope that Muslim "scholars" are trying so very hard to belittle.

In 1990, while Muslim barbarism was gaining ground, kafir scientists launched both the Human Genome Project and the Hubble Space Telescope. 1990 brought the next fiasco in Muslim geopolitical judgement, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; most of these geniuses threw their weight behind Saddam Hussein (and the ‘Palestinians’) because they could give the finger to the West and Israel. Such impotence counts as “standing up for Muslims,” as does suborning the murder of a writer who would probably be unable to fend off a teenage mugger.

In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving the ‘Palestinians,’ the Ba’athists and its other Arab protégés without a sugar daddy, and the field wide open for another totalitarian power to step into. The Iranian mullahs assumed centre stage in global Muslim terrorism, and jihad mass murder outfits were unleashed upon the world that proceeded to kill vastly more Muslims than they killed kufaar. There are no doubt a great many Muslims who find such slaughtering repulsive, but will remain quiet about it and will not be pressed into speaking out against it, because they know that the Shari’a forbids it. They do not want being Muslim to become even more uncomfortable than it already is. Such people are not given to doubt, question or apostasy. They are too far gone.

Other Muslim accomplishments in 1991 include the overthrow of Somali dictator Siad Barre, the Muslim who united three totalitarianisms into his person by adopting Soviet-style scientific socialism and sporting a Hitler moustache, and precipitated his country’s disintegration into clan warfare and ultimately, of course, the infamous pirates. The Somali penchant for mutilating their little girls’ genitalia continued uninterrupted throughout all this.

It should surprise no one if it turns out that many “silent majority” Muslims secretly admire their children for having the moral courage to walk away from Islam and rebuild their lives on a healthier basis, rather than sink ever deeper into lies and unhappiness. In 1995, the Internet was fully privatised and the World Wide Web was launched. Now everyone had private access to everything that “the people of knowledge” have for centuries hidden from lay Muslims. 1995 was also the year in which Allah granted Muslims the extraordinary blessing of the illustrious lost soul Cat Stevens “reverting” to Islam, an event embraced with wild enthusiasm by his new Muslim brethren, desperate as they were for the smallest bit of validation of their unconvincing faith, even from a troubled, washed-up musician. Ten years after its founding, in 1998, Al-Qaeda chalked up the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. Alhamdulillah, Muslims were great again.

By 2001, the ugly face of 1989 looked almost pleasant against what Muslims pulled that year. Some brothers took an unhealthy interest in aviation and willingly submitted to kafir instructors. Nobody paid any attention until they applied their new-found skills to the glory of Allah. 3,000 successful murders, 25,000 unsuccessful murder attempts, two skyscrapers, one military HQ and four passenger jets later, and we have two new cultural references: ‘9/11’ and ‘Osama bin Laden.’ Muslims moved fast to blunt the West’s response and almost immediately, US President George W Bush blew it by calling Islam a ‘religion of peace,’ a mistake for which the United States and the world pay to this day.

Perversely, especially after 9/11, Islam proved increasingly attractive to the flotsam and jetsam of Western society, the Cat Stevenses and Sinead O’Connors of this world, but one by one they became a liability, serving only to turn Muslims into a laughing stock and highlighting their desperation for validation, any validation. Muslims themselves find Islam unconvincing, and every “revert” provides temporary relief from the nagging suspicion that something is not quite right with them and their perfect religion. Abu Zainab, lists 25 Famous Muslim Converts in his 8 January 2013 post on topislamic.com. Now I would not claim my knowledge of revert world news to be top-tops, but of the twenty-five famous converts, I recognised three names. Another list, published on 13 November 2015 by Dr Alajeel on the even more pretentious lastmiracle.com website, offers The 38 Famous Who Converted to Islam. Of the thirty-eight, I’d heard of five.

A few things struck me about these Muslim “revert” lists: the number of black Americans signing up to become slaves of Allah makes me wonder whether this is a comfort-zone thing; at the end of one list, the “reverts” say,

Hopefully we can be ambassadors of Islam and show humanity that there is an alternative way of life which has come to liberate humans from the oppression and tyranny that exists in the world. But we need to know what Islam is and how best we can convey the message.”(My emphasis).

As critics of Islam might point out, only sociopaths would freely convert to Islam in full knowledge of what it is. Take a close look at Dr Jonathan Brown. All others who convert do so either in ignorance or under duress. Finally, it struck me that smaller religions, especially Buddhism, attract converts, too. Yet Buddhists don’t feel the need to shout their gains from the rooftops. Muslims never tire of stressing, what is it these days, 1.8 billion Muslims (I haven't kept up with Mehdi Hasan of late), yet whenever they gain one convert, it is as if they gained the whole world.

Should they ever, God forbid, actually gain the whole world, that would not overcome the negation side of their negatory supremacist complex: being the best of people and at the same time abject slaves of Allah and his messenger, as well as of the "people of knowledge." Burning books and effigies and baying for the blood of an author makes their supremacy blindingly obvious in their own eyes, yet they cannot shake knowing that the kufaar notch up achievement after achievement, while their ummah remains in a pathetic mess.

With every passing year that this fatwa hangs over Rushdie, Muslims seethe at what registers to them as impotence, the inability to do what a man is supposed to do, spill blood to recover the “honour” of their prophet, but the more time goes by, the more the kufaar learn about Islam and pass that knowledge onto lay Muslims, the more Muslims’ own humanity overcomes their savage faith, and the more they leave Islam. The later the fatwa is carried out, the greater its destructive impact on the supremacism of Muslims. On 12 August 2022, a young Muslim went forth to carry out a murder order issued nine years before he had even been born. The fallout was immediate, with Muslims both emboldened and rattling off lists of the next people they want to kill, and at the same time crying, “Don’t look at us!”

For thirty-three years the cords with which the elect bind lay Muslims in ignorance and obedience have been fraying, so much so that a point has been reached where Muslims are no longer impervious to the judgement of the kufaar. They can no longer stonewall kafir demands that they declare themselves unequivocally one way or another, for or against killing someone who has “insulted their prophet.” Of course, the vast majority of Muslims still maintain that Rushdie must be killed, but silent equivocators can no longer keep silent. Too much of their humanity has come to the surface.

This time, instead of silence, they complain about the kafir demand that they take a public stand. They object, in pained tones, sometimes behind bluster, that they do not have to comment on every single thing (read “religiously-motivated murder that Muslims commit”). But the horse has bolted the stable door off its hinges, and the kufaar, as well as the apostates, are far sharper than Muslims and immediately see right through this fallacy. Firstly, silent Muslims are not asked to comment on “every single thing,” but only on this one particular thing; and second, when did they ever comment on any such thing? Certainly, they are prevaricating, but they are now on the defensive. That’s the point.

It is a far cry from the Muslims' bombast and cocky certainty of thirty-three years ago. Even universal side-kick and Whiner-in-Chief Imran Khan is now openly flip-flopping. For an eastern Muslim, this is remarkable, because the Muslims really under pressure following the murder attempt are those in the West, and they feel it. It weighs heavy on them. It has come to the point where it hurts to be thought of as savages and barbarians. Of course, what else are you if you are not repulsed by one person killing another for “insulting” someone who’s been dead for one-and-a-half millennia? If such an “insult” moves you to want to kill, then there is something seriously wrong with you.

No human enters this would with such madness already inside them. It is placed there. Your emotions are messed up. They were messed up when you were sent off to madrassa at the age of six. The kufaar are not responsible for your madness. We did not make you what you are. Do not expect sympathy from us because other Muslims are going to kill you for taking a civilised stand. Moreover, we did not invite either you or those killers into our society. Do not expect us to understand your mediaeval sensibilities, let alone accommodate them. We have paid a very high price to achieve our civilisation, and we have no intention of handing it over to savages and barbarians, even if you find that inconvenient.

Far from the kufaar falling down before Muslims in respect, they condemn them as barbarians and savages, actually the Muslims' own terms, promoted with pride.[6] Far from the unbelievers rushing to embrace Islam, that creed repulses them more than ever, all because Muslims refuse to condemn a Muslim’s attempt at murder while they claim a place in our civilisation. No! This will not do. The kufaar have built this civilisation over centuries and are not going to see it reduced to barbarism and savagery, even if it is “the most critical stage through which the umma will pass,” according to Muslim “scholar” Abu Bakr Naji. The kufaar now know enough about Islam and the Muslim ways. There is no doubt left to give Muslims the benefit of. Their scurrying for cover in the face of kafir demands for a clear answer on murder and denying them any opening for escape marks another crack in the once impenetrable Muslim supremacism.

Bizarre as it may seem, lay Muslims do not learn about Islam, they only learn how to be Muslim. This is ordained for them, according to their “scholars,” whom they only hear and obey. Lay Muslims never read up things for themselves, nor do they ever think about what their sheikhs tell them. They memorise and regurgitate. They equate memorising with understanding, and are publicly humiliated every time they are driven to their own Islamic sources, where it is forbidden to them to go. Regurgitation does not impress the kufaar. The Muslims' own sheikhs set them up for such failure and humiliation. This systematic erosion of Muslim pride continued uninterrupted through the 2010s with an unexpected consequence: the emergence of Muslims’ humanity, buried decades earlier during their childhoods in madrassa, and the unmistakeable rumblings of what would soon become a tsunami.

Part 4 concludes/... (I'm sorry, I couldn't fit it all into Part 3)


Notes:

  1. FULL TV DEBATE: Abdullah al Andalusi vs Douglas Murray + others: 'Is Free Speech under threat?' Muslim Debate Initiative Archive, YouTube, 17 Aug 2022 https://youtu.be/LogeIaGNeRs
  2. The free world has yet to appreciate how very fortunate it is that Nazism did not manage to raise a second generation. Bolshevism did, and so in one form or another, plagues the world to this day as it continuously attempts to revive itself in Russia, as does Catholicism in Poland, as does Islam across the globe and as will Chinese Communism long after the CCP has ceased to exist. Yet there are those, even ex-Muslims, who speak of a “battle of ideas.”
  3. Some critics draw up lists of barbaric practices known to be dear to the Muslim heart and propose that we challenge prospective Muslim immigrants for a 'Yes' or 'No' on where they stand on each of these. Apart from the fact that they are never going to get an honest answer out of a Muslim, this is entirely the wrong strategy to pursue. It is not our business to be concerned with a Muslim's attitude towards Shari'a. We need only concern ourselves with a Muslim's attitude towards our own laws. To do otherwise is to acknowledge that Shari'a has some validity within our borders.
  4. Christopher Hitchens, “To Hell With the Archbishop of Canterbury,” Slate, 11 February 2008, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/02/the-archbishop-of-canterbury-s-dangerous-embrace-of-sharia.html. It stands to Maryam Namazie’s great credit that she launched and runs the One Law for All campaign in Britain, yet like the Christians who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that Islam is a religion, Namazie, an ex-Muslim, cannot bring herself to acknowledge that the problem is Shari’a and the Muslims who want it. Instead, all her ire is directed at the British government for making Muslim women subject to Shari’a. Namazie is one of those ex-Muslims who cannot bring themselves to criticise Muslims, and so hide behind “anti-Muslim bigotry,” a euphemism for “Islamophobia.”
  5. Shaykh Yasir Qadhi | The Signs of the End of Times, pt 6 - Ya'juj And Ma'juj, EPIC Masjid, YouTube, 14 Sept 2019 https://youtu.be/snGjDv9woOc
  6. Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass, Translated by William McCants, 2006.