aded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.
Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.
Surely the point of holding a Secular Islam Summit is to advance the cause of an Islamic enlightenment – to reach out to those Muslims appalled by what they see being done nowadays in the name of Islam, and who might perhaps be inspired by the example of Muslims with the courage and vision to argue that Islam can exist in a modern secular world side by side with other religions and beliefs: Muslims who “affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience”. Whether such a movement is feasible is of course open to question, but it’s not going to be helped by articles such as this, which see Islam itself as the problem. All it’ll do is antagonise the kind of Muslim it should be trying to attract.
As she outlines at the start of her article Chesler has her own reasons for believing in the “barbarity of Islam” (I wonder if that’s her title, or one that the Times imposed: whichever, it wasn’t a smart move), and much that she says is spot on, but it doesn’t seem to me to advance the cause at all. Nor do I think we in the West are in any immediate danger of being “overrun by Sharia”. Still, I suppose it’s a sign of some kind of progress that I can now read articles in the Times that I find too harsh on Islam.
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