The Future in the Face of Militant Islam
“Understanding and Meeting the Challenge”
By Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo (Director, The Barnabas Fund)
Reviewed by Gordon A.D. Zubrod, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Middle Dist. of PA
Video: www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev120507a.cfm
Recently, Patrick Sookhdeo, a scholar and lecturer in Islamic history and the Director of the Barnabas Fund, an organization that monitors the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world, spoke at the Heritage Foundation in a talk sponsored by the DeVoss Center for Religion and Civil Society. Explaining the essential argument of his most recent book, Global Jihad, Dr. Sookhdeo presented an analysis of the theological sources of militant Islam and the apparent incapacity of the secular West to understand conflict in theological or philosophical terms.
Dr. Sookhdeo explored whether violence and cruelty toward, and domination and subjugation of, the non-Islamic world is central to the very nature and ethos of Islam; whether the will to power is hard-wired into Islam's DNA. A parallel issue was whether the West, with its secular bias, was capable of knowing its enemy or effectively facing the challenge before it. Dr. Sookhdeo put the issue in stark terms: For the West, is there something worth fighting and dying for?
Turning first toward Islam, Dr. Sookhdeo considered the oft-repeated claim that Islam is a religion of peace, and noted that those Muslims who make this claim are on the losing side theologically. The key hermeneutic principle of Koranic interpretation is that the later supersedes the earlier. During Mohammad's stay in Mecca prior to his expulsion, he spoke of peace and rapprochement between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. After his flight to Medina, where, in addition to his role as prophet and spiritual leader, Mohammad assumed the roles of political leader, military leader, and lawgiver, he became an implacable advocate of violence toward infidels. Thus, the Muslim advocate of violence stands on solid hermeneutic ground.
Also deeply embedded in Muslim consciousness is the Arab “holy history,” the first 100 years of Islam in the seventh century, when the entire Arabian Peninsula embraced Islam and Mohammad's followers successfully waged war from Egypt to Syria, from North Africa to Byzantium. From this emerged the Muslim belief that if they were faithful to the Koranic mandate, God would permit them to win every battle. Later religious leaders, faced with the colonization of 90% of the Islamic world by the West and the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate in 1922, concluded that God had punished Islam for its accommodation of Western ideas and ways. In that sense, Sookhdeo argues, the current jihad against the West is the Islamic version of the Protestant Reformation.
Dr. Sookhdeo contends that the preferred Islamic solution lies in the earlier European solution to its own religious wars: the Enlightenment, with its respect for reason, individual conscience, commercial and religious freedom, and human rights. This, he believes, is the area for critical engagement with Islam. Unfortunately, the West, neglecting solid theological or philosophical bases for engaging Islam on the plane of ideas, has abandoned its own values and beliefs in the name of a multi-culturalism that has subordinated the core values of Western civilization to Islamic demands for the institution of sharia law and Islamic consciousness for all Muslims living in the West. It is this fundamental failure to grasp the essence of Islamic thought and to appreciate the strengths of Western ideas that has made the survival of Western civilization an open question in our day.
