Secular Right

A big issue that we have in the “public discourse” today is that we allow Muslims to talk about their religion in a way that we (“we” here meaning the mainstream) would not tolerate from white evangelical Christians (though we do tolerate this sort of talk from black Christians). Yesterday the Christian minority minister in Pakistan was assassinated. Today, in The Washington Post, Eboo Patel responds:

This morning, Shahbaz Bhatti, minister of minorities and the sole Christian in the Pakistani government, was shot to death. Mr. Bhatti had recently campaigned to reform a blasphemy law in Pakistan which calls for the death of those who speak against the Prophet Muhammad.

Undoubtedly, some will say this is Islam. It’s not. It’s murder. Plain and simple.

The Prophet Muhammad made it a clear priority that people of other faiths and traditions would feel safe around him and his companions.

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Through history, Muslims have followed this tradition of protecting those from other faiths and backgrounds.

Ali, the 4th Caliph of Islam and the first Shia Imam, famously wrote a letter to his governor in Egypt reminding him that the population there was made up of those who were his brothers in faith or his equals in creation, and they should all be treated accordingly.

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The Prophet made it clear that people of other faiths and traditions ought to feel safe around Muslims, and that it was a Muslim duty to protect others as they would one another.

It is staggering to see extremists who call themselves Muslims brazenly defy this very clear tradition of the Prophet they claim to follow.

Let’s ignore the blatant whitewashing of what being dhimmi under Muslim “protection” entailed. The teachings of Muhammad are irrelevant. Many of us think that the Muslim religion, like all religions, is a human fiction. Those of us who are not Muslim, the majority of his audience, think that the religion is false in most of its premises. Islam is what most Muslims believe, say, and do. Eboo Patel is not the Muslim pope who can adjudicate this. The fact is that the majority of Pakistani Muslims seem to support, or do not object to, these actions against dissenters from the theocratic consensus. Are they all then not Muslims? The word “Muslim” loses all meaning if that is so.

I don’t care about the “real Islam,” or what “Islam teaches.” All I care is that Muslims stop engaging in active persecution of non-Muslims. All I care is that Muslims march out into the streets and take back their public spaces in nations where they are the majority from the thugs. I’m not holding my breath. Though I’ll take notice when Eboo Patel and his acolytes of the true tolerant Islam go to Muslim majority nations and make clear to them the error of their ways….

We’ve seen the secular face of the revolutions so far (though if the Bahrain popular revolt succeeds I can’t see how it wouldn’t be more religiously inflected), but how long was this going to last? Yemen, the most backward of Arab nations, seems most likely to break the string. Powerful Cleric Joins Protest to Urge Islamic Rule in Yemen:

The cleric, Sheik Abdul Majid al-Zindani, has been on the United States Treasury Department’s list of “specially designated global terrorists” since 2004, suspected of fund-raising for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. His call was a marked contrast to the message of the rebellions that brought down the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and now threaten the rulers of Libya, Bahrain, Oman and, to this point, Yemen, where uprisings have been seen as secular and inspired by democratic goals.

In the past, he has publicly opposed terrorism, if not jihad, or holy war, and his word as a spiritual leader carries considerable political and moral weight in Yemen.

Of course, it isn’t as if Yemen is Tunisia anyhow. So it wouldn’t be much of a change. Probably more a shift from pro-American theocratic society (like Saudi Arabia) to an anti-American one (like Iran).