Mark Steyn: The Mod Squad

Steyn on the World
Tuesday, 06 May 2008
HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review

Last month, during the Vatican’s Easter vigil, Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, converted from Islam to Catholicism. And not for the first time I was reminded of an old joke I modified for America Alone:

A ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?

Answer: The radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures.

Signor Allam is merely the latest mythical “moderate Muslim”. There are, to be sure, millions of Muslims who just want to get on with their lives, raise their families, do their jobs, get a nice house in the suburbs, and practice as much or as little Islam as they can get away with. But there is no “moderate Islam” to provide any institutional support for such individual Muslim moderation, and there is an acute shortage of western Muslims who can plausibly demonstrate to their coreligionists a viable balance between Islam and the western world, and who can act as a counterweight both to the explicitly jihadist radicals and to the lavishly endowed Muslim lobby groups who more discreetly share their aims. Magdi Allam was a key figure in the “Secular Islam” summit held in Florida a year ago, and one of several prominent signatories of the “St Petersburg Declaration” issued at its conclusion. He was by that point being reviled by Tariq Ramadan as a Copt – ie, a Christian – which wasn’t true: On the eve of his 40th birthday, he accompanied his mother on pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet he has now, and very publicly, found Christ, and so retrospectively confirmed Tariq Ramadan’s point – that Magdi Allam was never a credible model for 21st century Islam.

And so it goes. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a phenomenally brave woman but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is an atheist. Irshad Manji is a brilliant dissecter of Islam’s pathologies but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is a lesbian and, thus, to almost all her co-religionists, cannot be any kind of Muslim. Dr Wafa Sultan is the Californian psychiatrist who at huge personal risk intellectually clobbered an A-list Sunni scholar live on Al Jazeera, crushed every one of his arguments, and yet nevertheless lost. Why? Here’s the answer:

“I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew,” Dr Sultan told her interrogator. “I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…”

“If you are a heretic,” scoffed Dr Ibrahim al-Khouli, “there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran.”

In their debate, Wafa Sultan won every point but lost the match. Her innumerable aces only confirmed her opponent’s argument – that to embrace “modernity” (in the western sense) is to lose your faith: Dr Sultan is an incisive intelligent rational woman – and she is no longer Muslim. Signor Allam held out longer than most before concluding that the intellectual straddle required of a “moderate Muslim” is beyond even Larry Craig’s wide stance: “I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a ‘moderate Islam’,” he said, “ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.” The most “extraordinary and important encounter” in his decision to abandon Islam and embrace Christianity was the Pope’s address at Regensburg – the one that prompted Mr Allam’s (former) co-religionists to demonstrate outside Westminster Abbey calling for the Pontiff’s beheading. The newly baptized Christian knows that he will be targeted for murder, but he was already targeted for murder as a “moderate Muslim”, and, as he sees it, it is better to die for truth than for a tortured contradiction.

What the west calls “moderate Muslims”, Islam regards as apostates. Sometimes, as with Dr Sultan, they’re atheist apostates; sometimes, as with Miss Manji, they’re lesbian apostates; and sometimes, as with Magdi Allam, they’re Christian apostates. To Islam, it doesn’t matter which branch of apostasy you opt for: As the Prophet Mohammed puts it, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” All four principal schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree. So do the 36 per cent of young Muslims in Britain who believe apostasy should be punished by death. But, to the west, which branch of apostasy has most appeal to Muslims is an interesting question.

On the one hand, Magdi Allam’s conversion is bad news. It’s bad news for those who are pinning their hopes on a genuine “moderate Muslim” leadership that can provide an alternative to the Saudi-funded radicalization of European Islam. It’s also bad news because it means, in the absence of real “moderate Muslims”, western governments will continue to throw at money at those who merely pose as such – like the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, England, which the city council has deemed one of its approved “partnership organizations”, notwithstanding that at least one sermon therein advocated hurling homosexuals off mountaintops. Apparently that doesn’t disqualify you from government-funded “moderate Muslim” status.

But, on the other hand, it’s good news in that it suggests the most effective strategy against a resurgent, radicalized Islam may be the oldest of all – an evangelizing Christianity.

As I said, that’s the good news – if you’re so inclined. To the cowed accommodationist governments of a largely post-Christian Christendom, it no doubt sounds like the worst news of all.