Islam as Totalitarianism
The religion of Muslims reeks of undemocratic fascism; indeed, every country run by Muslim theocrats is a totalitarian state. Islamic law regulates every aspect of public and private life: it does not differentiate between rituals, legal codes, ethics, and good manners. Islam legislates everything, such as the proper use of toothpicks, the hand with which you wipe yourself after a bowel movement, the sexual habits of married couples, the treatment of slaves, and wedding invitations. Religious duties, such as prayer and pilgrimage, are made into national law; affairs of state such as taxes and warfare are written into the Koran. From the beginning, Mohammed was a religious leader as well as a political force. His breathtaking victories in battle convinced the Muslims that Allah was truly on their side. Early Muslims never suffered the amount of persecution that ancient Christians and Jews underwent, and so Muslims as a whole were never at the receiving end of the corruption and cruelty inherent in a church-state alliance. Come to think of it, many Christians have yet to learn that lesson, despite the brutal repression of Christians at the hands of other religious authorities.
Just as Catholicism has its doctrines of papal infallibility (along with the various embarrassing clarifications, corrections and outright cancellations of papal decrees over the centuries), Islam has its own source for unarguable interpretation of the will of God: the theologians who dedicate their lives to studying the intricacies of Islam. When leading scholars of the various schools of Islamic thought came to a final agreement on an issue, large or small, that agreement was then inviolable. No further interpretation was possible. In fact, around 1100 years ago, the scholars decided that all the essential issues of Islamic study had been settled once and for all. They established a kind of agreement that no one else could possibly interpret Islamic law differently, and that all discussion about the laws would henceforth revolve around the explanation and application of the law. Thus, all possible dissent or alternative interpretations were done away with for good. In fact, the crime of heresy is still punishable by death in Islamic nations. The Koran specifically states:
22.9: "As for the unbelievers, for them garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skins shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods."
47.4: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives."
9.29,30: "Declare war upon those to whom the Scriptures were revealed but believe neither in God nor the Last Day, and who do not forbid that which God and His Apostles have forbidden, and who refuse to acknowledge the true religion until they pay the poll-tax without reservation and are totally subjugated. The Jews claim that Ezra is a son of God, and the Christians say, 'the Messiah is a son of God.' Those are their claims which do indeed resemble the sayings of the Infidels of Old. May God do battle with them! How they are deluded!"
It's not just stuffy fundamentalist overlords that interpret the Koran so strictly. Average citizens become blind with rage when they learn of blasphemy, heresy or progressive ideas in their midst. For example, on May 2, 1996, women cyclists at the Chitgar sports complex in Teheran were attacked by militant Muslims because of the shameful display created by their bicycle-riding. Sports officials at the scene were also assaulted and the complex was ransacked. Scholars said that women on bicycles were "indecent" and "provocative." Last January, the Malaysian government ordered all supermarkets to create separate checkouts lanes for men and women, explaining that this would prevent excessive mingling between the sexes, an issue of great importance to Muslims. And in Cincinnati, Ohio, Carlos Sanders was recently convicted of instigating a riot in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Sanders asserted that mandatory tuberculosis tests were a violation of his Muslim beliefs, so he and his fellow Muslim prisoners killed a guard to show that they were serious about their moral values.
The case of Carlos Sanders is a small example in Islam's long history of using murder as a means of dealing with unbelievers, a history it shares with Christianity. Under Muslim law, atheism is the greatest sin of all - more heinous than murder, theft, rape or adultery - and is therefore punishable by death. The law also demands execution of any Muslim man or woman who decides to convert to another religion. An Islamic scholar of the thirteenth century states: "Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever you find him, like any other infidel." Non-Muslims are forbidden to express their religious beliefs in Muslim nations, and even members of minority Muslim sects are tortured and even executed. Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmadiyya movement have been harassed and slain for their beliefs by fellow Muslims. Muslim thought police regularly detain citizens for minor infractions of Islamic law - if the infuriated citizenry doesn't first tear the transgressor limb from limb. Ibn Warraq cites two shocking examples of religiously driven hysteria in Pakistan: a mob in Karachi stones an abandoned infant to death "on the presumption that it was illegitimate and thus could not be tolerated"; another mob seizes a man and, without proof or trial, severs his hand simply because a mulla (priest of Islam) told them the man was a thief.
The very concept of free individuals with the right to make their own decisions is entirely absent from Islamic theocracies. There is no deciding between right and wrong but rather a robotic following of orders. Ibn Warraq quotes one Muslim thinker:
"The Western liberal emphasis upon freedom from restraint is alien to Islam. ... Personal freedom lies in surrendering to the Divine Will. ... It cannot be realized through liberation from external sources of restraint ... individual freedom ends where the freedom of the [Islamic] community begins. ... Human rights exist only in relation to [Islamic] obligations. ... Those individuals who do not accept these obligations have no rights. ... Much of Muslim theology tends toward a totalitarian voluntarism." |
