In a recent
posting I related my initial experience in contacting our local Muslim group. Subsequent
to that experience I heard about a lecture which the Muslim Student Association
at MUN (Memorial University of Newfoundland) was sponsoring, entitled Muslim
Contribution to World Civilization, as part of their university event “Islam
Awareness Week”.
The poster for the event indicated the guest speaker was an Imam named Sheharyar Shaikh, “the former President of the North American Muslim Foundation (NAMF) in Toronto, Canada. He is currently the Imam of Masjid Qurtabah and specializes in Qur’anic exegesis with contemporary Islamic thought and modernity.”
Having my own ideas on the contribution made to civilization by Islam, I determined to attend the event and, when given the chance to speak, to deliver the statement which appears below. Bear with me as you read the statement because I know it seems as though I went with a very biased attitude and pre-conceived opinions. At the conclusion of the posting I’ll explain the surprise ending to the story.
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The poster for the event indicated the guest speaker was an Imam named Sheharyar Shaikh, “the former President of the North American Muslim Foundation (NAMF) in Toronto, Canada. He is currently the Imam of Masjid Qurtabah and specializes in Qur’anic exegesis with contemporary Islamic thought and modernity.”
Having my own ideas on the contribution made to civilization by Islam, I determined to attend the event and, when given the chance to speak, to deliver the statement which appears below. Bear with me as you read the statement because I know it seems as though I went with a very biased attitude and pre-conceived opinions. At the conclusion of the posting I’ll explain the surprise ending to the story.
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Muslim Contribution to World
Civilization
Lecture on Islam at MUN Jan
31, 2013
If anyone present would like
an exact copy of my question, I have a number of photocopies with me. Feel free
to take a copy at any point.
The title of this public
lecture is “Muslim Contribution to World Civilization.” I came to this lecture
this evening expecting to hear a re-making of history and a politically correct
version of the influence of Islam. I was not disappointed.
Being a baby boomer my
understanding of Islam was informed by the typical and age-old Western analysis
which has in recent years become strangely twisted mostly by those in our
society who seem to despise their own Western roots. To be specific, my
thinking was aligned with individuals such as Winston Churchill, Theodore
Roosevelt and Andre Servier.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 –
1965) was a British politician known chiefly for his leadership of the United
Kingdom during World War II. He is widely regarded as one of the great wartime
leaders, and was voted the greatest Briton of all time and these are a few of
his words regarding Islam:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays
on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man
as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects
are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of
agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist
wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism
deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and
sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man
as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must
delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be
a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the
faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the
social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists
in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and
proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising
fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered
in the strong arms of science, the science against which it (Islam) had vainly
struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation
of ancient Rome.
[Source: Winston S. Churchill, The River War, First
edition, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), pp. 248-250.]
Theodore Roosevelt was the
26th President of the United States (1901 – 1909). Historians typically rank
Roosevelt among the top five American presidents of all time.
Quote:
Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at
this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa
had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight.
Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.
If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, an on up to and
including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with,
and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe,
Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be
exterminated. Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the
Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has
ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of
Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able
to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor...
The civilization of Europe, American and Australia exists today at all only
because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization
because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel in the eighth
century and those of John Sobieski in the seventeenth century. During the thousand
years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king,
the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the
Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from
the two continents; and today, nobody can find in them any "social
values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the
sphere of Mohammedan influences are concerned. There are such "social
values" today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those
thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what
the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do — that is, to beat back the
Moslem invader.
[Source: Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) p. 70]
André Servier was an
historian who lived in French Algeria at the beginning of the 20th century.
Servier studied well the customs and manners of the North African people,
becoming one of the few French intellectuals who studied in depth the life of Muhammed.
His studies included the Ottoman Empire and the Panislamic movement.
Quote:
To sum up: the Arab has borrowed everything from other
nations, literature, art, science, and even his religious ideas. He has passed
it all through the sieve of his own narrow mind, and being incapable of rising
to high philosophic conceptions, he has distorted, mutilated and desiccated
everything. This destructive influence explains the decadence of Musulman
nations and their powerlessness to break away from barbarism…[8]
Islam is a doctrine of death, inasmuch as the
spiritual not being separated from the temporal, and every manifestation of
activity being subjected to dogmatic law, it formally forbids any change, any
evolution, any progress. It condemns all believers to live, to think, and to
act as lived, thought and acted the Musulmans of the second century of the
Hegira [8th century A.D.], when the law of Islam and its interpretation were
definitely fixed.
. . .
In the history of the nations, Islam, a secretion of
the Arab brain, has never been an element of civilization, but on the contrary
has acted as an extinguisher upon its flickering light. Individuals under Arab
rule have only been able to contribute to the advance of civilization in so far
as they did not conform to the Musulman dogma, but they relapsed into Arab
barbarism as soon as they were obliged to make a complete submission to these
dogmas.
. . .
Islamized nations, who have not succeeded in freeing themselves
from Musulman tutelage, have been stricken with intellectual paralysis and
decadence. They will only escape as they succeed in withdrawing themselves from
the control of Musulman law.
[Source: Andre Servier - L’islam et la psychologie du
musulman - London. Chapman Hall LTD. 1924, pp.153, 61, 191, 2, 18, Ch XVI,
Preface]
I’m sure that these quotes
are quite familiar to many learned Muslims. No doubt there are many quotes from
other sources which would bolster the claim you made tonight that Islam is a
superior religion which in one way or another has been largely responsible for
much of our current highly advanced civilization.
However, these quotes bring
me a step closer to my question. If, as this lecture proposes, Islam is the
utopian religion which has (to some degree) spawned today’s remarkable society,
can you tell me with which concept of Islam—with the concept of Churchill,
Roosevelt and Servier or with the concept presented in this lecture—do the
following facts and modern realities line up?
1.
There is a
growing epidemic of Muslim persecution of Christians. From one end of the
Islamic world to the other—whether in Arab lands, African lands, Asian lands,
or Sinic lands, wherever Muslims are a majority—the largest non-Muslim
religious group, Christians, suffer untold atrocities. Christian persecution is
one of, if not the clearest reflections of Islamic supremacism. Vastly outnumbered and politically
marginalized Christians simply wish to worship in peace, and yet still are they
hounded and attacked, their churches burned and destroyed, their women and
children enslaved and raped. In 2012, Islamic countries comprised 9 of the top
10 'worst persecutors'. That means 90 per cent of the world’s fiercest
oppressors and persecutors of Christians are culturally, politically and
religiously Islamic. In fact, 38 of worst 50 countries persecuting Christians
are predominantly Muslim. Have they all
misunderstood the Religion of Peace? Are they torturing and murdering their
cousins – the People of the Book – in error and in contravention of quranic
precepts?
2.
Organizations
such as transparency.com monitor and report on worldwide corruption. They
consistently report that Muslim majority countries are the most corrupt nations
on earth. Apparently sharia utopia is a myth. A typical reports indicates 9 of
the 10 least corrupt are
Christian while typically there are no Muslim countries in the top 10.
3.
Five of the
nations ranked least peaceful in the world by the Global Peace Index are Islamic
countries. Note that this Index does not take violence against women and
children into consideration.
4.
Islam’s sharia
law is the institutionalized oppression of women and non-Muslims. Women are
treated abominably, starting with child marriage, polygamy, marriage and
divorce laws, abuse, and honour killing. Islamic law does not accept the full
political and civil equality of non-Muslims. Unlike other mainstream religions,
Islam demands that anyone who leaves the religion and becomes an apostate must
be killed and this is commonplace in Muslim majority nations. Sharia law
demands cruel punishments like beheading for major crimes, cutting off hands
and feet for minor crimes and stoning to death for adultery. Many Muslims are
instructed to perform genital mutilation on their daughters.
5.
Muslim-majority
countries score worst for religious freedom and social hostilities involving
religion. There are 7 countries in the world where the state can execute you
for being atheist. Every single one is officially Islamic.
6.
From an economic
performance perspective, Muslims cannot claim any superiority. One Western
nation, Germany, has a greater GDP than the top nineteen Islamic countries
combined. In the 2009 report by the World Economic Forum, Islamic countries
filled nine of the bottom ten places.
7.
Slavery is legal
and is still practised in the Middle East and African countries like Sudan.
8.
Extreme hatred
and anti-Semitism is typical of nearly all Muslim countries.
9.
Strangely,
wealthier Islamic countries do not take in Muslims refugees and migrants from
other countries. There are more than 50 Muslim countries, some of which are
fabulously wealthy (such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Qatar). Why it is that not one
of these countries can accommodate Muslim immigrants?
10.
Islam is the only
religion that requires territorial sovereignty – its laws are laws of the land
rather than laws of the heart as we are accustomed to finding in religion. In
the Western tradition, legality and morality are two different things. In
Islam, they are one and the same. As Muslims press for their laws to become
laws of the land, especially by suppressing criticism of Islam, the clash
between these two systems of thought intensify as we can see in many Western
countries at this very moment.
11.
Academic
achievement in a nation ruled by a superior religion like Islam should be
remarkable, one would think. With a population of over 1.5 billion people,
Muslims, with a population of 1.5 billion people, have managed to win only 6
Nobel Prizes, of which one was a Peace prize to a designated terrorist, Yasser
Arafat. Jews with a worldwide population of about 14 million have won 165
prizes. This suggests from an academic perspective that Muslims cannot claim to
be ‘the best of peoples,’ as emphasized by Muhammed.
12.
Religion as we
have known it has been good for society. It has nurtured morality, strengthened
the family, fostered public service and encouraged social harmony. Islam, on
the other hand, is self-segregating, fosters ideas of Muslim supremacy and
thereby sows seeds of social discord. Even its tradition of charitable giving
is solely for the benefit of fellow Muslims and it utterly destroys the family
through its adoption of polygamy.
13.
To my knowledge,
no Muslim organization has a coherent, active program anywhere to prevent
Muslims under their sphere of influence from believing that jihad is the
Islamic duty to wage war against non-Muslims, even though they denounce as
"racist" and "Islamophobe" anyone who dares to suggest that
some Muslims in our midst might actually subscribe to violent jihad.
14.
Many more inconvenient
facts could be added to this list, but I will end with this quote:
“Saudi Arabia should be the crown of Islam, as it was
its birthplace in the 7th Century. Keep in mind that Saudi Arabia’s Islam
claims to be superior to all other religions. These are the statistics that the
“true religion” spawned for 2000: GNP $232 billion; per capita income $10,500;
infant mortality rate 49.6/1000; literacy rate 63%; and its sole exports were
petroleum and petroleum products. Considering that their clerics claim that the
faithful will be blessed, this is not an impressive showing for 1,300 years of
multiple daily prayers to a deity. The fact is, the royal family of Saudi
Arabia would be riding on camels, rather than in air-conditioned Mercedes, if
it were not for the oil drilling technology of Christian nations. Wherever
Islam is the primary focus of a government, the majority of its citizens
languish in an abased existence. If those same people emigrate to a democratic
society, where the pursuit of happiness is primary and their degree of
religious expression is optional, they are apt to flourish.”
[Source: Jim Croft www.islamreview.com]
I ask again, with which concept
of Islam does the preceding facts and modern realities line up? A general response
will do.
Thank you.
-------------------------------------------
I attended the lecture and it
proved to be quite shallow in substance although the participants for the most
part seemed to be enthusiastic listeners. There was time afforded for questions
but I did not present my lengthy question because very strangely I felt very sorry
for the entire lot of people there: speaker, students and organizers. It seemed
to me a pathetic attempt to provide a satisfactory answer to the subject of the
lecture: Muslim Contribution to World Civilization yet I could sense very
strongly that these people were not only very well intentioned but also
convinced that Islam was the ANSWER. I wasn’t quite ready for that and there
was an element of surprise to the experience which made me re-think my
approach.
I determined to take a different tack.
Stay tuned for my next posting in the continuing saga of Contradicting Muhammed.
I determined to take a different tack.
Stay tuned for my next posting in the continuing saga of Contradicting Muhammed.
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