Heretic - Ayaan Hirsi Ali Flashcards
My argument is that it is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do, that the violent acts of radical Islamists can be divorced from the religious ideals that inspire them.
Multicultural sensibilities
The fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.
The rational, secular and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age and inherited status.
Self-governing enclaves
In the eyes of the Medina Muslims, we are all heretics, because we have had the temerity to challenge the applicability of 7th century teachings to the 21st century world.
Disavow = deny any responsibility or support for
Identify and repudiate (reject) those parts of Muhammad’s moral legacy that stem from Medina
exogenous = having an external cause or origin
Investment in life before death instead of life after death
The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world is precisely its suppression of critical thinking.
We must no longer accept limitations on criticism of Islam. We cannot, in good conscience, give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.
One of the core principles of Western liberal achievements is critical thinking about all belief systems.
Permissive and pluralistic western society
The US constitution is 225 years old and has been amended 27 times. The Koran is at least 1200 years old. It has never been amended.
Islam conflates politics and religion. 2 concepts forming one identity where the differences become lost.
Can Islam be reconciled with the key imperatives of modernity: freedom of conscience, tolerance of difference, equality of the sexes, and in investment in life before death.
Innovation of faith is one of the gravest sins in Islam, on a par with murder and apostasy. Reform is simply not a legitimate concept in Islamic doctrine.
Protestant Reformation - in October 1517 an obscure but obstinate monk in the Saxon town of Wittenberg wrote 95 theses decrying the Church’s practice of selling indulgences for salvation.
The golden age of Islamic science and philosophy, which predated the European Enlightenment, lies a thousand years in the past.
Islam is content to use the West’s technological products but resists the underlying values that produced them.
Islam is almost entirely decentralised.
Muslims believe in both the superhuman perfection of Muhammed and the literal truth and sanctity of the Qur’an as the direct revelation of God.
What made Islam revolutionary was its scope, extending well beyond theology. It’s “the blueprint of a social order”. In its very name “Islam” means submission. You subsume yourself to an entire system of beliefs.
The social psychology of Islam is that of a persecuted tribe.
From a Muslim Reformer’s perspective, one of the main problems with Islam is that the tribal military and patriarchal values of its origins were enshrined as spiritual values, to be emulated in perpetuity. Among the most crucial features of the tribal system institutionalised by Islam is the concept of honour.
Appreciate the difference between shame and guilt cultures.
Muhammed created a new monotheism fitted to the contemporary needs of tribal society. He is revered as an irreproachable source of wisdom.
Muslims today are taught that the Koran is a complete and final revelation that cannot be changed: it is literally God’s last word.
Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done - question, critique, interpret, and utlimately modernise its scripture - it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.
John Calvin was insistent on the idea of “double predestination”, that God had already chosen who was damned and who was saved.
Muslims must be challenged to engage in critical reflection about their most sacred text. This process necessarily begins by acknowledging both its human composition and its numerous internal inconsistencies. The Koran is not beyond reproach.
Respect for religious beliefs does not require us to suspend our own critical judgement where the Koran is concerned.
Abrogate = to repeal or abolish a law, right or agreement
Intercession = intervention
‘Human reason is a cancer upon Islam’
The belief that this life is transitory and that it is the next one that matters is one of the core teachings of the Koran. Islam must stop fixating on the afterlife.
Purgatory = a waiting room for those who had not fully atoned for their sins on earth and must endure additional purgation before being admitted to heaven.
Allegorical = symbolic
Fatalism = the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable
A submissive attitude to events resulting from such a belief.
There is a fatalism that creeps into one’s worldview when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. This, too, helps to explain the notorious underrepresetation of Muslims as scientific and technological innovators. There was no Muslim Industrial Revolution.
Under Sudan’s Islamic law code, and sharia in general, a father’s religion is automatically the religion of his children.
Sharia formally codifies Islam’s many rules. It governs not just how you worship, but also the organisation of your daily life, your personal behaviour, your economic and legal transactions, your life at home. It even contains rules on what types of blows are permissible when a husband beats his wife.
As a legal text, the Koran reflects its origins in a tribal or clan-based society, particularly on issues concerning inheritance, male guardianship, the validity of a woman’s testimony in court, and polygamy.
The roles of theologian and lawyer are conflated in Islam.
There are principles making it possible for Jews and Christians to exist under civil laws which differed from religious laws. “Render up to Caesar what is Caesar’s”. Whereas Christianity was configured from its inception to co-exist with states and empires alike (if they would tolerate Christianity), Islam from the outset aspired to be church, state and empire.
Several sharia courts are now operational in Britain.
No group is more harmed by sharia than Muslim women - a reflection in part of the patriarchal tribal culture out of which Islamic law emerged.
Iran has the highest per-capita rate of stonings in the world. Under its legal system, judges are allowed to convict a defendant based not on evidence but on a “gut feeling” of guilt.
Cultural relativists prefer to intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. There can be no acceptable cultural defence.
Under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the 7th century.
Irredeemable transgressions. The Koran explicitly urges pitilessness. Self-proclaimed vigilantes.
infraction - violation or infringement of a law
When life is dominated by the fear of small infractions, how little thought can be given to the bigger questions?
Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for sexual minorities.
Some jihadists are hardly uneducated, unskilled or impoverished. Some have been the beneficiaries of the best Western education that money can buy.
Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws make it illegal to declare belief in the Christian Trinity.
We need to recognise that this is an ideological conflict that will not be won until the concept of jihad has itself been decommissioned.
Islam has had schism; it has never had Reformation. The biggest schism was about who should succeed the Prophet as leader of the ummah: the Sunnis wanted to select a caliph (literally a deputy) on the basis of merit, while the Shia insisted on an imam who was a relative of the Prophet.
inimical = hostile or unfriendly
Islam is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life.
The upsure of popular protest that we call the Arab Spring contained within it some of the seeds of a true Muslim Reformation.
Extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them.
Muslim clerics need to acknowledge that the Koran is not the ultimate repository of revealed truth. They need to make explicit that what we do in this life is more important than anything that could conceivably happen to us after we die. It is just a book. Sharia is clearly subordinate to the laws of the nation-states where Muslims live. And they need to disavow completely the concept of jihad.
“Religion is for human beings, not the state.”
I have identified five precepts central to Islam that have made it resistant to historical change and adaptation. Only when the harmfulness of these ideas are recognised and they are repudiated will a true Muslim Reformation have been achieved.
Here are the five areas that require amendment:
- Mohammed’s semi-divine status, along with the literalist reading of the Koran.
Mohammed should not be seen as infallible, let alone as a source of divine writ. He should be seen as a historical figure who united the Arab tribes in a premodern context that cannot be replicated in the 21st century. And although Islam maintains that the Koran is the literal word of Allah, it is, in historical reality, a book that was shaped by human hands. Large parts of the Koran simply reflect the tribal values of the 7th-century Arabian context from which it emerged. The Koran’s eternal spiritual values must be separated from the cultural accidents of the place and time of its birth.
- The supremacy of life after death.
The appeal of martyrdom will fade only when Muslims assign a greater value to the rewards of this life than to those promised in the hereafter.
- Sharia, the vast body of religious legislation.
Muslims should learn to put the dynamic, evolving laws made by human beings above those aspects of Shariah that are violent, intolerant or anachronistic.
- The right of individual Muslims to enforce Islamic law.
There is no room in the modern world for religious police, vigilantes and politically empowered clerics.
- The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.
Islam must become a true religion of peace, which means rejecting the imposition of religion by the sword.
I know that this argument will make many Muslims uncomfortable. Some are bound to be offended by my proposed amendments. Others will contend that I am not qualified to discuss these complex issues of theology and law. I am also afraid — genuinely afraid — that it will make a few Muslims even more eager to silence me.
But this is not a work of theology. It is more in the nature of a public intervention in the debate about the future of Islam. The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world is precisely its suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting here. If my proposal for reform helps to spark a serious discussion of these issues among Muslims themselves, I will consider it a success.
Let me make two things clear. I do not seek to inspire another war on terror or extremism — violence in the name of Islam cannot be ended by military means alone. Nor am I any sort of “Islamophobe”.
At various times, I myself have been all three kinds of Muslim: a fundamentalist, a cocooned believer and a dissident. My journey has gone from Mecca to Medina to Manhattan.
For me, there seemed no way to reconcile my faith with the freedoms I came to the West to embrace. I left the faith, despite the threat of the death penalty prescribed by Shariah for apostates.
Future generations of Muslims deserve better, safer options. Muslims should be able to welcome modernity, not be forced to wall themselves off, or live in a state of cognitive dissonance, or lash out in violent rejection.
But it is not only Muslims who would benefit from a reformation of Islam. We in the West have an enormous stake in how the struggle over Islam plays out. We cannot remain on the sidelines, as though the outcome has nothing to do with us.
For if the Medina Muslims win and the hope for a Muslim Reformation dies, the rest of the world too will pay an enormous price — not only in blood spilled but also in freedom lost.
