Does Islam Have Anything to do With Islam?

I have posted recently why Muslim "moderates" fail to persuade me with their disclaimers that Islamist terrorism and murders have nothing to do with Islam,  (I use scare quotes because what Muslim moderate really means  is, "doesn't kill people" when such nonviolent Muslims may be as absolutist and dedicated to total Islamic triumph as the most die-hard, sword wielding ISIS jihadis).

See here and here, for example.

Pat Condell comes to the logical conclusion that what we are being asked to believe is that Islam has nothing to do with Islam, actually.



In August 2002 I posted that "Islam is what Muslims do" (no longer online) because Islam is exclusively a religion of deeds - deeds of merit or condemnation. Sayyid Qutb, Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and the leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, put it this way:

The basis of the Islamic message is that one should accept the shari’ah without any question and reject all other laws, whatever their shape or form. This is Islam. There is no other meaning of Islam.

Sharia is Islamic law. It is the code of conduct that encompasses every aspect of human life and society. Living faithfully as a Muslim means, as Qutb wrote, doing what sharia requires and not doing what it forbids. That is all. There is nothing else to Islam. Islam is not a "personal religion" as Christianity is, according to Muslim jurist Sam Solomon. A Muslim's feelings or intellect matter not a whit in being justified before Allah. Allah is a sort of cosmic Yoda: "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try."



Professor Bala Ambati, writing in Duke University's "Chronicle" newspaper, later echoed my point:

Religions are defined not only by ideals but by realities, not just by their deepest and most beautiful insights, but by their adherents' behavior. . . . When moderate Muslims state terrorist attacks are disconnected from Islam, they ignore the reality that Islamic fundamentalist imperialists act in the name of Islam and Muslims, claiming "true Islam's" mantle from conspicuously absent moderates. . . . Until the realization that theocracies cannot be democracies dawns throughout the Islamic world, saying terrorism is disconnected from Islam is a smokescreen employed to abdicate responsibility to face reality.

Unless the "moderates" can present a more compelling case to 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide on what they mean by true Islam, they will lose the ideological, hence behavioral, war. And right now they are losing.