Where Are the Disavowals of Islamist Violence?
Every other religion is expected to disavow its fanatics. Why does this one seem different?
Imagine Catholics were walking into pop concerts and blowing up children. Picture the scene as extremists drive vans into a crowd of people or self-detonate on an underground train while citing the catechism. Play that vision in your mind for a moment: young men shouting the name of the Trinity as they shoot people at random in a shopping mall.
Now imagine an intellectual class rushing to the airwaves to insist that motives remained unclear. Meanwhile, a gigantic voluntary PR machine of global reach kicks into motion on behalf of the clergy, who remain mysteriously quiet about the whole thing. While all this is going on, ordinary Catholics go about their business and the rest of us are encouraged to worry on their behalf about a possible backlash.
If any of this is hard to imagine, it’s because our expectations would run in the other direction entirely. So much so that few in the Church would dare respond in any way other than perpetual contrition – the media and intellectual class nagging them into near madness, implicating them in the terrible actions they neither committed nor condoned.
We would hear other Catholics condemning the fanatics in their midst morning, noon and night. The public disavowal from Catholic priests, politicians, and celebrities would be deafening and unanimous. Every parish newsletter in the country would become a counter-terrorism pamphlet. The Pope would barely get through breakfast before issuing another statement. Nobody would need to ask where the moderate Catholics were, because we would be unable to hear ourselves think over the sound of them. We’d be bored with it, frankly. Here they go again, we’d say. Yes, we get the message: you don’t want any association with it, you condemn it utterly. Duh.
Would anyone say it was bigotry to ask why men invoking Catholic doctrine kept murdering children? Would people on discussion panels and newspaper op-eds insist that the real problem was “Catholicophobia”, a word so obviously absurd you’d have to be drunk on communion wine to say it with a straight face?
Do you really doubt any of this? Westerners are pretty good at apologising and worrying out loud for the sins of the past, after all. We’ve heard practically nothing else for decades. Why would this be any different? And what if we swapped out Catholic for Protestant or Quaker? Nothing changes.
How about Muslims?
Just asking that last question makes this piece controversial in a way every preceding line wasn’t. That should tell us something.
But wait a moment, you say. The comparison is unfair. The Catholic Church has a Pope, while Islam has no comparable figure who can issue a statement. This is true, but it’s not the point I’m making. The disavowal that counts springs from the op-eds and discussion panels, from the ordinary believers and those in the community who speak for them, who simply don’t want these things done in their name.
That’s not to say condemnations don’t exist. Of course they do. The Muslim Council of Britain issues its statement, and the press release goes out. Every serious survey finds the same thing: British Muslims condemn terrorism at least as readily as everyone else. Anyone claiming ordinary Muslims secretly approve of atrocities is not paying attention. But a press release read by no one is different from an organic expression of remorse for acts carried out in your name. You might not share that intuition, and if you don't, the rest of this won't move you. But many people, asked honestly, will recognise it.
The disavowal we’re talking about is the deafening, spontaneous, unanimous reflex we imagined for the Catholics, the kind nobody has to ask for because staying quiet would seem so at odds with the claims of the religion of peace. Nobody polls for that, and I cannot hand you a figure. But you do not need one. You know the difference between a reflex and a press release, and that’s what’s missing from the scene following every terrorist atrocity, the unmistakable sense that ordinary Muslims are impatient to condemn the evils carried out in their name.
This is a very different claim from one that says Muslims should perform some sort of disavowal ritual after every atrocity. Of course not – guilt by religion is grotesque, and we’d never impose it on anyone else. The question is why institutions, media and public culture appear to have no comparable expectation of visible, sustained disavowal from Islamic authority and civil society, a public expression of condemnation from ordinary Muslims through their community leaders and public figures.
John Cleese asked a version of that question recently, to which the broadcaster and author of Win Every Argument, Mehdi Hasan, answered: “Oh STFU you racist unhinged ignoramus.”
This is at least a step up from the accusation of “Islamophobia”, more honest in what it’s trying to do, which is to make the man asking the question sound morally suspect and intellectually defective. Anything but answer the question. One can almost admire the efficiency. Why answer the question when “racist” does the job, and the crowd does the rest? (I covered Hasan's record at more length in a note here.)
The question is never answered because answering it would be to admit that the question is reasonable. And it is reasonable, because we would ask the same of Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists if the most extreme elements were strapping bombs to their bodies.
What explains the anomaly? The radical of any other religion would be disavowed by moderates at no cost, because nothing exists to punish the person doing the disavowing. Not so with Islam.
Consider how much propaganda it takes to make criticism of child marriage feel gauche. Young girls were raped in England, and still are, by groups of men predominantly of Pakistani-Muslim heritage – but saying so makes people wince, because decades of top-down institutional pressure have made plain speaking about obvious evils sound like the real problem.
The concept of “Islamophobia” is just a few decades old, but it has completely changed how we think about a set of beliefs alongside the people who hold them. It has merged these two things in a way that makes the latter a protected entity, so that criticising Islamic ideas now reads as hatred of Muslims themselves. To say that it’s been wildly successful as a way to deflect criticism of Islam is to state the obvious.
Muslims, like everyone else, deserve equal dignity and legal protection. Islam is a collection of beliefs and traditions that should be open to critique like any other. Nobody is arguing that criticism of Marxism is bigotry against Marxists, and we can run the analogy with any other ideology. Only Islam gets a pass.
Which is why today, everyone in public life has reached the conclusion that thinking clearly about Islamist atrocities is bad for community cohesion. It’s a form of moral confusion, of course, but it’s also strangely condescending – as if Muslims need to be held to a different standard. And it’s ordinary Muslims who count the cost of that confusion, since it’s their own dissidents who pay the highest price for speaking in ways we would expect of any other religion. And the more dangerous the question becomes – for Muslims and any of us who dare raise it – the more its absence is presented as proof of good manners.
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