Are there two Islams, one warlike and the other tolerant and peaceful? According to the French lawyer and Arabist Anne-Marie Delcambre, this is a Western fabrication to avoid having to face the unpleasant truth: “There is only a difference of degree between Islam and Islamism. Islamism is in Islam like the chick in the egg.”
“There is no good and bad Islam, just as there is no moderate Islam. Moderate Muslims do exist: they are those who ignore part of their faith.”
To avoid accusing Islam of violence and terror, non-Muslim Westerners and some Westernized Muslims have coined the term ‘Islamism’. By this they mean a political, warlike ideology that has nothing to do with true Islam. For them there are two Islams. One is enlightened, open, peaceful, a religion of love, tolerance and peace – and this would be the religion as practiced in peace and quiet by the vast majority. The second Islam, Islamism, is obscure and introverted, sectarian, fanatical and warlike; a political, derailed and sick Islam that cannot be compared with the first, the true, good, moderate, mystical Islam, which is the brother of Christianity and Judaism, and which, through its high degree of spirituality, encourages many non-Muslims to convert.
The invention of ‘the two Islams’ is very practical because it reassures the non-Muslim Westerner about the character of Islam. But it is also a big lie because there is only one Islam. One Islam that does not have two faces, but different aspects. The mystical aspect and the terror are two extremes. In between, there are many facets that have always existed side by side and that all come from the same source: the Koran, understood as the Word of God that revealed itself in Mohammed, who is the great example for all Muslims, no one excepted.
Anyone who reads the Koran must recognize that the commandments of God only call for peace when there is no other option. In Sura 47, verse 35 it says: ‘So do not forsake, nor call for peace, when you have the upper hand and God is with you.’
Anyone who does not adhere to this is guilty of sacrilege. The divine message holds the believer captive, and he does not think he can escape for a moment. As the Islamologist and Turkologist Jean-Paul Roux writes in his book Les ordres d’Allah ‘(The Commandments of Allah’): “Over the centuries, commentaries have been written on these texts, they have been explained, attempts have been made to clear them of ambiguities, but they have never been questioned. All attempts at a liberal interpretation were doomed to failure, whether it concerns the Mutazilites in the 9th century, who argued that the Koran did not come from above but from below, or those of the Ishmaeli Shias, who viewed the Koran as an esoteric scripture. Anyone who used his intelligence, his own capacity for judgment, was bound to fail, even if his conclusions were correct, because it is not possible to know better than Allah. This means that any historical and epistemological study, such as that done in the West on the Bible and the Gospels, is unthinkable and has indeed never taken place.’
This is a serious issue because it concerns whether Muslims are locked into their sacred texts for eternity. Jean-Paul Roux maps out Allah’s commandments: “Should the Muslim in some cases beat his wife, divorce her and repudiate her, forbid women to marry unbelievers, condemn drinking alcohol and gambling, hate Jews, make efforts to impose his religion in every possible way, kill unbelievers? Just as he should be modest, patient and humble, honest, charitable, devoted to his parents? You would say so, because every innovation is reprehensible and amounts to heresy.”
If Jean-Paul Roux, who strives for mutual understanding and certainly does not want to provoke, thinks this way, then we have every reason to be concerned. Because Roux has written about the Mongol Empire, Iran and Turkey, he knows that what he says applies to the entire Islamic world. The danger of Islam lies in its total character: it consumes the entire life of the believer, from the cradle to the grave, and affects all aspects of life. Therefore, there is no separation between public and private or politics and religion. In Islam there is a rule for everything, whether it concerns legal, political or intimate matters.
We are being lied to when it is claimed that Islam is a faith practiced in the private sphere, like Christianity. Islam is faith, law and justice at the same time. The Sharia prescribes to fight or suppress unbelievers, and provides fixed punishments for Muslims for precisely defined crimes (adultery, apostasy, blasphemy, theft, highway robbery, murder and of course drinking alcohol).
Mohammed is an example for the believers in everything, but wouldn’t that apply to the passages from his biography in which he sheds blood, takes prisoners and divides the spoils? Martine Gozlan writes in her book Pour comprendre l’intégrisme Islamiste (‘Understanding radical Islam’) about the two faces of Mohammed; one fascinated by the example of Jesus, drawn to tenderness and prayer, and the Mohammed of Medina, the conqueror who occasionally shows his cruel, vindictive side. “No one can obscure this duality of Islam,” she writes. But it is precisely on this point that her analysis is misleading: the two-faced prophet, the two Qurans, Islam and Islamism. Apparently we have to conclude that Islam is double, because we don’t want to see a disturbing part of this religion. That is why it has been chosen to call the bad part ‘fundamentalism’, ‘Islamism’, ‘Salafism’, ‘Wahhabism’. We actually don’t know what these terms mean, but we are willing to do anything to find words that can serve as a scapegoat to relieve this beautiful religion, the religion that is unjustly attacked, smeared and despised.
Holding Islamism responsible for Islam’s violence is practical and very easy. But what to do now with the Quran and the Prophet? Are we going to remove all commandments that are not in accordance with Human Rights? And the Prophet with his two faces, should that become a new Janus head with two faces, each looking in a different direction?
To explain attacks, a look at the life of the Prophet is sufficient. He justified the political murder for the salvation of Islam. And scaring people, practicing terror, was prescribed as a noble method of creating panic among the enemies of the faith.
So it is simply not true to say that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam. For the Muslim of yesterday and that of today, there is only one Quran as there is only one Prophet. The Islamist is just as much a Muslim as the mystic, because both rely on these two foundations. And both foundations, Quran and Prophet, call for battle.
Here on earth the struggle for the victory of Islam must continue as long as the issue is not yet settled. Peace is only an option when victory seems impossible or doubtful. But much more, peace is the reward of paradise, when the whole world is pacified. Of course there is an undeniable ideal of peace, but that is in fact a pacification ideal. Hence it is written about enemies: ‘And if they incline to peace, then you also incline to it’ (Sura 8:61-63). But also read the verse that precedes this (verses 60-62): ‘And make preparation against them/ with whatever strength you can of resistance/ And equipment of horses/ with which to terrify/ God’s enemy and your enemy.’
There is no essential difference between Islam and Islamism, but only one of degree. Islamism is present in Islam like the chick in the egg. There is no good or bad Islam, just as there is no moderate Islam. On the other hand, there are moderate Muslims: these are those who ignore part of their faith.
And therein lies the problem. What is a good Muslim? The one who stigmatizes and kills the unbelievers, the blasphemers and the atheists? Or the one who chooses to read the Qur’an in a Western, Christianized way and is considered a heretic for deviating from the traditional Islamic interpretation?
The ostriches in the West have chosen not to answer this question, and to condemn anyone who dares to say that Islam is not a faith of love, peace and tolerance for hate speech. They feel supported by the Islamic ostriches who find it convenient to present Islam as an idealized religion, while the real Muslims know better. As for the others, a quick re-Islamization will soon put them back on the right path. Moreover, we must not forget that taqiyah, dissimulation, is an integral part of Shia Islam (“Whoever does not practice taqiyah is not a believer.”) Remarkably, taqiyah has also been adopted by the Sunnis, which allows them to present us with an Islam-light to better conceal the true nature of their religion. They are not really lying – they are concealing and obfuscating in order to allow Islam to make territorial gains. The significant advantage of this is that non-Muslims are attracted to this Abrahamic religion, which is presented as related to Judaism and Christianity.
So now we better understand the consensus around maintaining or strengthening the distinction between Islam and Islamism. The unfortunate thing is that these ignorant or dishonest ostriches are not insignificant people. Some hold high positions in the religious hierarchy. Rabbis, pastors, pastors, White Fathers and Jesuits have agreed that there should be a dialogue between religions. So anything that could lead to division is carefully eliminated.
Let’s take a closer look at that idealized Islam. That would be an Islam of philosophers and mystics. But it is simply not true that this is not also an ‘Islam of prohibitions’. No philosopher or mystic has ever questioned the Prophet of the Qur’an. Anyone who talks about an Islam of the Enlightenment as the opposite of legal Islam is talking about an Islam that has yet to be born.
To accept Islam, Europe created the myth of Andalusia, a golden age of the three religions. All the fighting, the humiliating status of the non-Muslims – all that has been carefully left out; so much so that we can safely speak of falsification of history. How else are we to explain the comment of the Jewish philosopher Maimo-nides from 1204 about the Almohads who conquered Spain: “Never before has anyone humiliated, harassed, degraded and hated us as much as they did.”
You may wonder why the philosopher Avicenna was forced to flee from Turkish Sunnis in the 10th century because of his ideas. And why the great mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj, born in 858, who only advocated love for God to the point of ecstasy, was sentenced to death in 922. The executioners cut off his feet and hands and gave him 500 lashes. He was then crucified. His decapitated body was burned and his ashes scattered. The head, impaled on a lance, was exhibited on the banks of the Tigris for two days. In 1131, Ayn Al-Quzat Hamadani, Persian mystic, was accused of heresy and flayed alive, hanged and thrown into a fire.
It is high time that we stop being treated like idiots who know nothing about Islam’s contributions to the Enlightenment. We are never told that the Greek texts were translated by Christians in the West, from Old Syriac or directly from Greek, and that neither Averroes nor Avicenna knew Greek. We must stop telling us that there is a philosophical, mystical Islam that has been accepted by the majority of Muslims. It’s exactly the other way around. The Muslims will never accept that people move away from the literal reading of Scripture.
I don’t want to hear any more of the lies that are meant to lull us to sleep. Muslims want to accept a disguised Islam, stripped of shocking elements. As the Islamologist Marie-Thérèse Urvoy notes, ‘they know how to connect with the themes that concern Europeans and use the appropriate vocabulary: women’s freedom, her free choice, her rights. Westerners politely remain silent in the face of all that beauty and all that spiritual dignity. Why? Because we are victims of our blame culture, says Urvoy. We blame ourselves for everything and harbor pathological self-loathing. As a result, we despise ourselves and prefer others to ourselves. And Islam in Europe quickly understood that he is the perfect incarnation of the other.
But even the most clever Islamic strategists are careful to talk about abrogating verses and abrogated verses. The abolishing verses, the harshest and chronologically speaking the last revealed, cancel out the softer ones. Furthermore, the verses that are most gentle and merciful refer only to the believers, that is, the Muslims. The Muslim is the brother of the believing Muslim. He definitely does not feel like the brother of the Jew or the Christian. And still less of the atheist or the godless. If it is forbidden to kill (Sura 5, verse 32) it concerns believing Muslims. The next verse (33) clearly confirms this: “But the recompense of those / who oppose God and His Messenger / and strive / to make mischief in the land / is that they should be put to death / or crucified / or have their hands and feet / cut off from either side / or be banished from the land.”
And the love for the Jews is evident in the same Sura 5, verse 64: ‘The Jews say: Allah’s hand is chained. Their hands are chained and they are cursed for saying so. No, but both hands are spread wide in gentleness. He gives as He pleases. That which has been revealed to you from your Lord will certainly increase the rebellion and disbelief of many of them, and We have thrown among them enmity and hatred until the Day of Judgment. As often as they light a fire for war, Allah extinguishes it. Their effort is for corruption in the land, and Allah does not love the wicked.
Far from being abolished, this verse was recently quoted in support of a fatwa from the UOIF (a major Muslim organization in France) that calmed rioting youth in the suburbs late last year. The rules about the Jews had been deleted.
By the way, Sura 5 is the last revealed. Just like Sura 9, this Sura cannot be abolished. This is exactly the opposite of what we are led to believe, in a total disregard of traditional Islamic literature (from the commentary of Tabani in the 9th century to the work of Said Qutb, the great example of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was hanged by Nasser in 1966. The comments are endlessly repetitive and never go in a mild direction.)
But we prefer to listen to the soothing words of our ostriches because we are afraid of what we sense: if Islam is violent, we have to fight it, and we don’t want to do that.
But it is difficult to be completely reassured when we know, says Marie-Thérèse Urvoy, that in the latest version of the charter of the Musulmans de France (an Islamic organization), the right to change religion has been removed, without leading to major protests.
Jean-Paul Roux writes: “The laudable pursuit of humanism or simply the fear of being labeled a racist avoids a delicate issue. Or the truth is distorted, as if it is possible to build something on the basis of lies, even if they are well-intentioned.’ The truth is that there is only one Islam, and that in that Islam the image of the Jew, the atheist and the Christian makes fraternization between them and Muslims impossible. The problem is not Islamism, but the character of Muhammad and the Koran.