Defending Exactly What?

Muslims are quick to express their exasperation at the West in general for mis-labelling Islam, for insisting that Islam is responsible for the prevailing situation which sees decidedly Muslim fanatics - having dedicated their lives to prosecuting Islamic (Islamist) jihad, in a strenuous effort to obliterate as many of the perceived enemies of Islam as possible - as representing Islam.

Great, outraged umbrage is taken at the expression "Islamofascism" and Muslim academics daintily point out that fascism as a political expression is relatively new in origin, whereas Islam is an ancient and respected religion, not a political movement. A weak claim, at the very least. Islam is one of the world's great religions, and its adherents are numerously represented, but it is also a political way of life.

One which has been subverted by hate, a burning detestation of other ways of life that have been successful in embracing a kind of modernity that Islam has eschewed. In the process, creating a social, political, scientific, technological backwardness in Muslim countries, struggling to keep up with the strides made by non-Muslim countries in advancing their economic futures.

Religion as a man-made construct in the belief of a superior and enlightened non-human existence that orchestrates the lives of humans, can be a force for good and has proven in the past to be a unifying social force to enable people to live in harmony with one another. On the other hand, it is also a tool that has been used successfully in the past to ensure estrangement between peoples.

Which makes it rather more than a trifle disingenuous for Muslim academics and clerics to claim that Western news media and self-serving politicians have chosen to identify Islam as a source of evil, intent on destroying Western influence for the purpose of re-installing an Islamic renaissance throughout the world. When the simple fact is that it is Muslims themselves, choosing to present as warriors of Allah, doing his bidding in a holy jihad, who make the news.

The monologue of hatred and bloodshed is an Islamist-inspired travelogue, presenting throughout the world as a menace that must be resisted and defeated. Bellicose threats of annihilation of others, the inflammatory rousing of religiously-devout and impressionably restless young Muslim men to fulfill their duties to Islam as fanatical warriors is of Islamic derivation, not Western.

One such as Mobashar Jawed Akbar who scornfully lashes the West for its fascination with "Islam and the West" in an attempt to come to terms with what is occurring on the world stage, on the basis that Islam is a religion and the West a geography cuts no ice when it is Islamic fundamentalists themselves who make the link between Islam and the West; it is from them that the term derives to describe the Muslim struggle.

The influence, power and ascendance of the West that appears so grating to the sensibilities of insecure Muslims, furious that Islamic influence waned after its great period during the Caliphate when Islam encouraged the acquisition of knowledge and the perfection of art and literature and industry and agriculture and trade has become the target of Islamist jihadists. The geography of the West did not create that antipathy for the purpose of engaging in a war of attrition.

Islam became too stridently devotional, too dedicated to statism and fundamentalism, shedding its curiosity, its inquisitiveness and sense of empowerment through social, scientific and educational advancement. Call it what you will, but if scholarly Islamic clerics and academics wish to ensure their religion be held in the respect it deserves and which they so ardently desire, it is incumbent upon them to take measures to defeat the rogues among them.

Those whom they airily term the "Fasad", the ill-doers among them. Who threaten to become legion, through aggrieved disaffection. Surely, Islam is failing them by not imbuing in their consciousness the true message that Islam is purported by its high-minded defenders to represent. The simple fact of the matter is, while the academics declare that Islam sturdily rejects murder, its terror contingent energetically commits wide-scale murder.

Quoting scriptures selectively to demonstrate that Islam stimulates its followers to goodness cannot belie reality. And that reality is that, though some verses indict those who would commit murder, other verses encourage believers to understand that murder in some signal circumstances is not only permitted, but is downright proper to the occasion.

Overt crimes such as murder are not condoned, we are informed, yet they can be punished by such kindly adverse-intervention punishments as "execution, crucifixion, maiming or exile". Convincing the non-Muslim of the kindliness of such religiously-inspired punishments for malefactors misses the point, however.

Telling us that the Koran recognizes the existence of different faiths, and that it is Allah's prerogative, not Islam's followers, to be the judge, does not alter the reality of influential clerics in mosques the world over taking it upon themselves to charge their followers to remain separate from others, to disdain those who do not recognize Islam.

Which, in and of itself, is no crime, but does set the stage for isolation and fear and suspicion. Harking back to a time when the Sultanate gave sanctuary to Christians and Jews in Spain recalls an imperfect history, but one which did, in some large part, present a shining picture of potentials, now long defunct.

Claiming that justice and equality express the soul of Islamic belief gives no comfort at a time when the world sees horrors otherwise expressed in situations of mass murder, of dreadful, ongoing crimes against humanity, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, the Philippines and elsewhere in the world.

Perhaps it's past time for influential Muslim clerics and academics to recognize that reality, to stop blaming liberal democracies and to collectively take steps to combat the carnage taking place in the name of Islam.