The best of all possible motives

In the ten days since Major Nidal Hasan yelled “Allah is great” and shot bullets into 43 people, Allah’s will has continued working in mysterious ways. Egyptian Muslims poured acid on and stabbed a Christian for entering a Muslim brothel. Forty Ugandan Muslims entered a Christian church and began beating parishioners with metal clubs. Two Pakistani Muslims exploded themselves to kill 18 kafirs. A New York Muslim tried to run over non-Muslims and told police “Muslims will fix this country.” Saudi Islamic law prescribed sixty lashes for a female TV anchor whose segment mentioned sex. A California Muslim at a mall yelled “Allah is power” and tore a crucifix from a fellow-shopper’s neck. And Filipino police found the sliced head of a local teacher who jihadists had kidnapped in October. Without the four FBI foils of Islamist terror attacks earlier this fall, the list might go on.

Walking back the cat, however, Allah’s will itself (i.e. everything that happens, according to Muslims) appears to submit occasionally to reason. In October, the United Nations focused not on fighting religious extremism but on criminalizing negative stereotypes of religions, such as, say, “religions are extreme.” Meanwhile, a Minnesota judge ruled that airport officers who took precautionary action against suspicious Muslims on a Minneapolis flight had to pay the Muslims for their mistake. They would not make that mistake again, and neither would the Army, with its UN-esque anti-stereotyping “equal opportunity” standards. No absurdity, then, that Hasan and his open Islamist sympathies would evade profiling and defamation.

Canadian writer Mark Steyn accuses multiculturalism and its requisite “warm and fluffy” feelings toward all things diverse of warping the West’s sense of proportion. But look deeper and you’ll find its frozen core. There is a cold detachment, for example, in The Nation columnist John Nichols’ question, “Was Major Hasan a cold, calculating Islamic extremist or a deeply troubled man who was about to be dispatched to a warzone…?” Who are we to insert our emotions and judge, he seems to ask? Nichols is like the critic in Voltaire’s satire Candide: “you were in the wrong to shed tears...The author does not understand a single word of Arabic, and yet the scene lies in Arabia.” The anti-Muslim idealogues do not understand a single word of the Quran, and yet they accuse Hasan of terrorism, goes the Nichols line.

Nichols warns us not to jump to conclusions: “There was clearly something wrong with this imperfect follower of Islam. But that does not mean that there is something wrong with Islam.” He jumps to the conclusion that “the incident inspired an all-too-predictable explosion of Islamophobia." But by his own multicultural logic, who is he to judge what constitutes an “imperfect follower”? What is moderate Islam? Can there be a moderate way to believe, as all Muslims do, that Muhammad is the infallible messenger of Allah? Can there be a moderate way to accept, as all Muslims do, the Quran’s opening line: “This Book is not to be doubted,” even while “this book” promotes misogyny, bigotry, and mutiliation? Can there be a moderate way to believe, as all Muslims do, that all happens according to Allah’s will?

Voltaire’s Candide asks similar questions when he realizes that the horrors of the real world differ from the theories and euphemisms of religious philosophers. After his friend is hung, his wife raped, and his life rotting away in slavery, he asks, “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the rest?” And so if Islam is a religion of peace and moderation, what then are the religions of war? If Major Hasan is not a terrorist, who is? And if the majority of Muslims are moderate, what are the majority of Puritans and Evangelicals?

In the face of such cynical questions and aboard a ship fleeing persecution, Candide’s teacher lectures about his theoretical “best of all worlds.” “While he was proving this, a priori, the vessel foundered and all perished…” And so it is in America. While we prove that religion is inherently good and moderate, a US Army major in Texas kills Americans in the name of his religion. Was he simply “an unmarried loner,” columnist Errol Louis asks? Surely, but by no coincidence: it takes an extraordinary woman to wish to spend the rest of her life praying five times a day in Islamic uniform with a suicide-bombing enthusiast. Once again, in a religion in which finding a good, Allah-fearing woman is a jihad in itself, sexually frustrated violence is no abnormality.

The Council on American Islamic Relations was quicker to condemn the Islamophobes than future Major Hasans: “No religious or political ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence.” Can you be forced to praise Allah while your older brother is beheaded by the Somali al-shabab, and be content with CAIR’s detached judgment? Can you watch your mother be stoned before a Taliban tribunal, and be content with CAIR’s certainties? Can you be in the line of fire of a man yelling “Allah Ahkbar” and jump to this conclusion? The Islamophobes are right: the Quran is disturbing, and much of Islam is scary. If Islam is peace, then praise be to Allah: we’ll never see a religion of war.