Geert Wilders on Islam: Ideology or Religion?

Geert Wilders

(Image from Wikipedia)

Jonathan Kay, editor of the National Post, a Canadian-based newspaper, offers a defense of the controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders in an article titled "Geert Wilders' problem with Islam" (May 8, 2011).

Wilders is "controversial" for such things as his remarks on Muhammad, describing "the Muslim Prophet as a dictator, a pedophile and a warmonger," so I think that we can infer that he doesn't like Muhammad, but he insists that such dislike doesn't extend to Muslims generally: "I don't hate Muslims. I hate their book and their ideology."

Mr. Kay offers a somewhat murky gloss on this point:

[I]n the modern, politically correct Western tradition, hatred expressed toward a religion typically is held on the same level of human-rights opprobrium as hatred expressed toward a race or an ethnicity. But Islam is not really a religion at all, as Mr. Wilders sees it, but rather a retrograde political ideology with religious trappings.

And he adds of Wilders that:

[H]is insistence on the proper distinction between faith and ideology is an idea that deserves to be taken seriously.

I know too little of Wilders to know if he's making such a distinction, but I wouldn't make the distinction myself. Faith -- by which I suppose is meant an authentic religious belief -- includes ideology, if we mean by that term a system of ideas.

I think that we have the right to criticize any ideology, including a religious system of ideas, which are often the most dangerous sort of ideas, as we can see nearly every day in the news.

Geert Wilders: Not a Fan of Muhammed?

Geert Wilders

(Image from Partij voor de Vrijheid)

Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid), had made a name for himself in European politics by calling the Qur'an to be banned as hate speech, which is not quite what the framers of hate-speech legislation had in mind, and has recently had an op-ed piece published in the Dutch magazine HP de Tijd titled "Time to unmask Muhammad" (March 30, 2011). The article is also available at the Freedom Party's website.

This article isn't likely to appeal to Muslims, for Mr. Wilders has nothing positive to say about the founder of Islam, whom he considers as either clinically insane or outright evil -- or both, since Mr. Wilders probably won't allow Mohammad to claim innocence by reason of insanity.

I'm not too keen on medical diagnoses of people long dead -- Paul of Tarsus, for instance, has been labeled an epileptic -- but Mr. Wilders does point to problematic passages in traditions about Mohammad that are considered authentic reports in the Muslim world. For instance, Mr. Wilders notes problematic passages on violence:

The sources describe orgies of savagery where hundreds of people's throats were cut, hands and feet chopped off, eyes cut out, entire tribes massacred. An example is the extinction of the jewish Kurayza tribe in Medina in 627. One of those who chopped off their heads was Muhammad. The women and children were sold as slaves.

And there's sex, too, with a rather young wife:

Numerous hadiths contain testimonies by Muhammad's favourite wife, the child wife Aisha. Aisha literally says: "The prophet married me when I was six years old, and had intercourse with me when I was nine."

Mr. Wilders offers no specific citations to back up these statements, but I've seen the sources myself, so I know that he could support these points with citations that Muslims themselves consider authentic. This presents a problem, as Mr. Wilders points out:

[An] insuperable problem with Islam is the figure of Muhammad. He is not just anyone. He is al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man . . . . The Koran, and hence Allah, lays down that Muhammad's life must be imitated.

The Muslim sources present a complex image of Mohammad, but the portrait offered there includes actions that most people would not consider proper, so modeling one's own behavior after Mohammad's actions in every respect would be highly problematic, to say the least.

If Islam is going to reform itself, as many think that it needs to do, then it will have to deal with these disturbing traditions about Mohammad. But that might be easier than expected, for the rules for determining the "authenticity" of a tradition are somewhat arbitrary from a modern perspective. I recall, for instance, reading that a man who has urinated in an improper fashion cannot be a reputable link in a chain of oral transmission about Mohammad. I suspect that an enlightened examination of many reports considered authentic would lead to their dismissal as inauthentic.

But Muslims themselves will need to do this analytical work . . .

Fitna

Qur'an, Sura 8, Verse 60

The film Fitna depicting 9/11

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've just watched the short anti-Qur'anic film Fitna by Geert Wilders, which one can find online at various places, such as LiveLeak.com, Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch, Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs, and . . . well, you can just Google the word "Fitna" along with the name "Geert Wilders" and find multiple sites online. Update: LiveLeak.com has removed Fitna, but the film has already 'gone viral' at Gates of Vienna.

Though some of the images are graphic and disturbing -- a jumper from the burning World Trade Center, Jack Hensley being decapitated -- the film itself is relatively tame. From the hype beforehand, I was expecting images and words more incendiary toward Islam.

Instead, we see and hear incendiary images and words from Islam.

The technique employed is rather simple. The film shows a violent quote from the Qur'an in both English and the original Arabic, reads it in Arabic, then follows the reading with images of Islamist atrocities accompanied by statements by radical Muslims. This sort of sequence is repeated about five times.

At the end, a hand is shown turning a page of the Qur'an, followed by a blank screen and a ripping sound, as though that page were being torn out, then by a caption stating that "The sound you just heard was a page being torn from the telephone book."

Why a phone book?

No deep message there, I think. Just a way of emphasizing that non-Muslims don't bear responsibility for removing violent verses from the Qur'an. Muslims do.

What's the film's aim? I doubt that Wilders expects Muslims to edit the Qur'an. I think that he instead aims to put Muslims into a bind by depicting Islam as an inherently violent religion and thereby dare them to prove him wrong by responding with reason rather than reacting with threats.

What's the bind?

If they respond with reason, then they have to begin engaging with non-Muslim deconstructions of the Qur'an. If they react with violence, then they serve only to demonstrate his point.

For the committed Muslim who prefers neither horn of the dilemma, pious silence would be the best strategy.

I don't think that we'll enjoy very much of that.