If it wasn’t the real Islam at work in last weeks murders in France, there is no real Muslim, no real Jew, no real Christian.
Funny how the world of oversimplifications turns on its head. A half century ago, the old saw was this: Nothing was responsible for the deaths of more innocent people throughout history than religion. Today’s it’s just the opposite. Religion is not responsible for the death of a single innocent person.
If a person who says he’s a Muslim, who is trained as a Muslim or converted to Islam, who practices as a Muslim and who commits murder in the name of Islam (by yelling Allah Akbar as he fires the shots or wields the meat cleaver), then religion — we are told — played no role in the murders. It was “poverty.” It was “extremism.” It was “backlash against immigrants.” You name it, but it wasn’t Islam. That’s because Islam would never sanction murder. Whoever calls himself a Muslim and murders in the name of Islam isn’t really a Muslim. He isn’t practicing real Islam.
On this logic, there is no such thing as a real Jew, a real Christian, or a real Muslim. Never was and never will be.
Illustrate with Judaism. It so happens that in various New York state penitentiaries, people who were born Jews, educated as Jews, call themselves Jews; people who don tefilin every day, eat kosher food and study the daily Talmud page — and who committed such white collar crimes as fleecing the innocent out of vast sums of money — are convicts. Did practicing Jews commit these crimes? Isn’t it obvious that the answer can be nothing other than an unmodified yes?
Not really. Not if you accept the logic that Muslim terrorists are really just extremists. We would have to say that since the fleecing of the innocent distorts the Torah, the practicing Jewish criminal isn’t a real Jew, isn’t practicing real Judaism, and therefore the Jewish religion and the Jewish community have absolutely no share in the crime or the criminal.
True enough, these practicing Jewish criminals in New York state prisons hardly represent the ideal of Judaism, but what if they did? What if sacred Jewish texts and teachers that legitimized the fleecing of the innocent were extant and popular? Then we would have to say that Judaism, or part of Judaism, was guilty along with the all too Jewish criminals themselves.
As it happens, sacred Islamic texts or Islamic-trained clergy legitimize the murder of innocents. Part of Islam is guilty along with the all too Islamic criminals themselves.
If it is objected that such sacred texts or clergy do not represent the “real” Islam, then the direct implications are twofold, besides the absurdity that for a religion to be valid, to be a “real” religion, all of its adherents must practice it perfectly.
The first implication is this:
Jews have no claim against centuries of Western European Christian persecution. Take, for example, the Crusaders, those medieval Christians who sought to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims; who, along their way across Europe to Palestine, murdered entire Jewish communities. Jews might as well wipe away all those horrible collective memories because “real” Christianity had nothing to do with them; it was just a bunch of renegades at work. The fact that popes approved, incited or tolerated these mass murders was of no consequence. The murderers weren’t “real” Christians and Christianity was wholly innocent. The murderers were merely the medieval equivalent of “extremists.”
If all this make sense to you, you will feel very comfortable exonerating Islam of any role in the murders in France last week.
You will also be entirely comfortable with the second implication of the view that “real” Islam is not represented by “real” Islamic texts or clergy. That implication is this:
Peaceful Muslims, of whom there are countless millions, have no need to seek a humanist, universalist reform from within their own religion. If all the criminal acts committed by practicing Muslims in the name of Islam are really, merely, committed in the name of a purely mythical, “not the real,” Islam, there is nothing to reform!
In fact, Islam is in deep need of internal reform. Only adherents and leaders of Islam can do it. It had no credibility and made no difference when Jews bemoaned the anti-Semitic teachings of the Catholic Church. It took Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s to initiate the historic, humane, compassionate, internal reform of the Church’s teachings. Only the Church itself could do this. Blessedly, Pope John XXIII was followed by several like-minded popes. The world awaits a similar development within Islam.
Until such time, religions and their adherents — warts and all — are responsible for what is done in their name. That is not new. What is new is the dangerous denial that, when it comes to Islam, evil in the name of the religion need not be named, condemned, countered or ostracized. We say, get real.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
