This is a fragment of a longer article. I have already posted another segment of the same text under the title “On the Great Omar Khayyam and His Struggles With Islam.”
Religious faith, with its rejection of reason, is inherently harmful. In an ideal world, there would be no religious faith, but only religion in the form of traditions, codes of behaviour, philosophical sensibilities and so forth. Those who find such a world hard to envision should reecall the many religions throughout history, from Judaism to Shinto and Roman paganism, whereof faith was a much less central component than it is of, say, Christianity. Yet whereas some religions are worth preserving in such a modified form, others should be completely abandoned. This article is about one such doctrine: Islam.
Now, the moment one criticises Islam, one runs the risk of being smeared as a bigot. Just think of Ben Affleck’s infamous attack on Sam Harris, whose disparagement of the religion he found, or pretended to find, “racist.” Why this absurd level of sensitivity? Part of the problem is the categorization of religions as fundamentally distinct from all other belief systems. One is not, say, Anglophobic for criticizing Fabianism, but one is, supposedly, bigoted for finding fault with Islam. Why? Because religion is an immutable characteristic, an integral part of a person’s identity. It isn’t really, of course – or if it is, then so is political belief, and we’re back where we started. Sure, religion is generally inherited from one’s parents, but so is political belief. Sure, a person’s political beliefs can change, but so can his religious convictions. One study has found that “of the approximately 4.2 million persons from countries characterised by Islam who live in Germany, only about half rate themselves as religious.” This also raises the question whether all those respondents from Islamic backgrounds who had decided that Islam was not good enough for them were, by Ben Affleck’s logic, racist against themselves.
The notion that religion should always be treated with more sympathy and less judgment than worldviews of other kinds deserves to be flatly rejected. I do reject it. If you were raised as a Muslim or a communist, I don’t think that continuing to be one makes you a bad person. If you convert to Islam or communism (or Mormonism, or fascism, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith) at an age when you ought to be mentally mature, that is an immoral act.
Another reason for the equation of criticisms of Islam with hateful attacks against Muslims is the perception that all the culture of Muslim-majority countries can be reduced to Islam. This is, of course, patently false – were it not, Christian Arabs would have nothing in common with their Muslim compatriots. In truth, the Islamic religion is a historical mistake which has crippled and hamstrung these countries for many centuries, and their populations have more of an interest than anyone else in leaving this stifling creed behind.
Time and again, the people most committed to these countries’ freedom, dignity and national consciousness have been among their least religious denizens, and time and again Islam has been an obstacle to the achievement of these goals. The great Atatürk, creator of modern Turkey, and his Kemalist brethren are the best example of this pattern. On page 44 of the compendium Medeni Bilgiler, the matchless statesman writes:
“Turks were a great nation even before they accepted the religion of Islam. After accepting this religion, this religion did not [cause ]either the Arabs, nor [the] Persians […] of the same religion, nor others to unite with the Turks and form a nation. On the contrary, the national ties of the Turkish nation loosened; it numbed national feelings and national excitement. This was very natural. Because the purpose of the religion brought by the Prophet Muhammad was a policy of the ummah, which is above all nationalities and covers the whole.”
To be clear, I do not speak Turkish. I have translated the passage through Google Translate and edited it to make the wording less redundant and ungrammatical. Still, the implication in the second part of the passage is clear: the religion of Mohammad is inherently, not just occasionally, corrosive to national sentiment.