Islamologie

1. Orientalism and Islamology:

After the medieval Christian pamphlets against “Mohammed the impostor” whose media campaigns ended in the late 19th century, not much has been published schematising the ideological and factual crimes of Islam. Books on, say, “slavery in Islam” are extremely rare: the raw information that could fill such a publication will have to be found in more general publications, in which Islam is only referred to in passing, often without the author’s realising the implications for an evaluation of Islam. It is often said (when introducing “refutations of prejudice”) that people always associate Islam with intolerance; but finding a book specifically devoted to the subject of Islamic intolerance will be harder. How many tens of millions have been killed by Islam simply because they were non- Muslims? Nobody has yet tabulated the figures available to prepare a general estimate. We can only notice that critical research of Islam is not exactly encouraged, and that there is an increasing tendency to self- censorship regarding Islam criticism. In part, this is due to a much delayed reaction against the long-abandoned Christian polemical approach.

2. Church policy:

Christianity has for centuries waged a lively polemic against Islam. Recently, this criticism has subsided. Worse, polemical works by clerics have been withdrawn or kept unpublished (such as, early this century, Father Henri Lammens’ paper arguing that Mohammed’s revelations were a psychopathological phenomenon). One reason is that the Church is aware of the similarity between Jesus’ and Mohammed’s missions, so that a criticism of the foundations of Islam may backfire on Christianity. The second reason is the fear that Christians in the Muslim world would have to pay for even ideological attack on Islam (that is why Church polemists save their sharpest words for harmless religions like Hinduism). This fear also motivates other Church policies, such as the non-recognition of the state of Israel.

3. Anti-colonialism:

One of the ideological guidelines of anti- colonialism was: “Of the (ex) colonised, nothing but good must be said.” Therefore, mentioning the colonialism and mass slavery practised by the Muslims had become undesirable.

4. The enemy’s enemy is a friend: 

Many people brought up as Christians, or as nominal Hindus, never outgrow their pubescent revolt against their parents’ religion, and therefore automatically sympathise with every rival or opponent of the religion they have come to despise. Because Islam poses the most formidable threat, they like it a lot. 

5. Leftism: 

In this century, Islam has come to be advertised as a naturally leftist “religion”. This line has been developed by Muslim apologists such as Mohammed Habib, and they have even taken it as a rationalisation of the irrational claim that Mohammed was the “last after all”, as the “prophet” he had brought the ultimate message upon which no improvement is possible. Sir Mohammed Iqbal, one of the fathers of Pakistan, had claimed that “Islam”. The Iranian Ayatollahs, by contrast, and most of the vocal Muslims after the Soviet-Islamic war in Afghanistan, have restated the orthodox position that Communism is un- Islamic, not only because of its atheism but also because of its rejection of free enterprise; the current claim is that Islam provides a “better” than Communism. 

6. Rightist traditionalism: 

There is also a rightist sympathy for Islam. An obvious point of agreement is of course anti-Judaism. A subtler basis for sympathy is the so- called traditionalist current, which was represented by the converts Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon, and still has a following: it has been idealising Islam and esp. Sufism as the preserver of the age-old philosophia pernnis against modernity. In Russia, some Slavophile anti-Western groups now seek an alliance with Islam against the impending Americanisation of their society. In the U.S., Christian fundamentalists and Islamic organisations are increasingly creating common platforms to speak out against trends of moral decay (abortion, pornography, etc.). Some of these phenomena of traditionalist alliance-building are quite respectable, but they are nevertheless conducive to Islam negationism. 

7. Economic Liberalists: 

Liberalists see Muslim immigration as an endless source of cheap labour and seek to defend them as often as they can. In addition, they support EU membership for Turkey. 

8. Liberal Islam: 

In the Islamic world, it is unwise to attack Islam head-on. Yet, sometimes people in those countries feel the need to oppose Islamic phenomena and campaigns, such as the witch-hunt on un-Islamic cultural remnants, violence on the non-Muslims, extreme forms of gender inequality.

Uitgelicht affiche: West Baltimore – bron