To quote from the article:
Signatories including Mohammed Abbasi, from the Association of British Muslims, and Amjad Malik QC, president of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, write: "We do not believe the terror group responsible should be given the credence and standing they seek by styling themselves Islamic State. It is neither Islamic, nor is it a state.
The group has no standing with faithful Muslims. (...)
So we believe the media, civic society and governments should refuse to legitimise these ludicrous caliphate fantasies by accepting or propagating this name. We propose that 'UnIslamic State' (UIS) could be an accurate and fair alternative name to describe this group and its agenda – and we will begin to call it that."
These kinds of statements are found not only among members of the Association of British Muslims, but among moderate Muslims throughout Europe and America. The general message is that extremist Muslims have perverted the Islamic faith and hijacked it for their purposes. Their endeavor, so it's said, has nothing to do with true Islam, which is a religion of peace.
It may be worth reflecting on this stance for a moment.
To those familiar with the Koran, it should be rather obvious that the IS, as well as other extremist Islamic groups, are not in the business of re-interpreting and distorting the core dogmas of their belief. Quite the contrary. It is hard to find any aspects of their policy which cannot be directly linked to the Koran or the Hadith. The central message of these holy texts for example, as witnessed by literally hundreds of verses, is to kill, convert, or at best enslave, the infidel.
The IS is driven by true believers. They truly believe in the letter of the scripture. Everything we see the IS doing is spelled out in the Koran and the Hadith. These people are not psychopaths. They are normal people who believe startlingly crazy things in the context of their faith. We have to figure out how to undercut these beliefs in martyrdom and jihad, and that apostasy and blasphemy are offenses deserving of capital punishment.
Happily, a majority of Muslims no longer take their core dogmas all too seriously. That is a good thing. Yet often they seem rather reluctant to identify the source of their moderation. The reason most Western Muslims don't take large parts of their scriptures literally anymore, lies in secular progress and in their religion losing the argument on a hundred front against modernity. We can hope that Islam will follow the path of the Jewish and Christian religions, whose holy books are just as bad, if not worse, than those of Islam, which have been beaten and battered by secular moral progress to the point that they, in most countries, have had to retreat into the realm of personal privacy. Ultimately this path will lead to where the thousands of other religions throughout the history of our species are buried, the mass grave we call mythology.
Unfortunately it is still a long way to go for Islam. The only way to achieve the goal is to empower moderate Muslims and help them transform Islam into a religion that is compatible with the values of secularism and reason. Islam
could perhaps become a religion of peace. The concept of jihad
could perhaps be viewed as an inner spiritual struggle against one's own ego. But as long as moderate Muslims deny that there is any link between their faith and groups like the IS, it is hard to see how we should ever make progress.
Even more disturbing is the fact that this denial is underlined by liberals throughout the West, who echo in on saying that Islam itself is not a problem. Obama himself claimed recently that the IS was not Islamic and that it spoke for no religion. Ironically, the only people who rigorously state the obvious in public are currently either our own crack-pot religious extremists or adherents to nationalistic and diversive points of view, who do not exactly make the best allies.
Our political correctness, it seems, has run amok. We must overcome this state of affairs and be able to call a spade a spade. And we don't have forever time for it. It may be a matter of a few years, or at best a decade or two, until extreme Islamic groups get their hands on nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. We must face our problems directly and relentlessly to avoid what could evolve into truly catastrophic outcomes.
