openpolitics.com

Hirsi Ali suggests that something like 3 percent of Muslims, or around 48 million people, adhere to this form of Islam. Although she does not say so, this number is necessarily inexact since it includes not only the hyperviolent members of ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and sister gangs but others who may hold similarly dim and blinkered views far from the front lines of jihad.

The vast majority of Muslims belong instead to Hirsi Ali’s “Mecca” category, a group she defines as devout worshipers who remain “loyal to the core creed” yet are “not inclined to practice violence.” Lastly there is a small category of what she terms “Modifying Muslims,” people who have come, like herself, “to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.” Hirsi Ali believes that Modifying Muslims can influence the Mecca majority and wean them from the temptations of the literalist, bigoted, and violent Medina creed. To help matters along she proposes a simple plan, picking five tenets of the faith that must be “reformed or discarded”:

• The infallible status of Muhammad and the literal understanding of the Koran

• Giving priority to the afterlife over the present day

• Sharia law “and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence”

• The empowerment of individuals to enforce such laws and customs

• Jihad.

.. Rather than by abolishing or radically modifying the particular points of doctrine she so dislikes, they have done so just as believers in other religions have, by creatively reinterpreting their founding texts, or by quietly ignoring contentious parts.

.. Perhaps one reason for Hirsi Ali’s propensity for taking the actions and beliefs of Islam’s outliers and misfits as somehow exemplary of the religion’s true essence is her unwillingness to suggest any external motivations for their particular madness. These are not hard to find. The many forms of Islamism—a more accurate term than simply “Islam” for the often violent and angry version of the faith that is sadly fashionable today—emerged largely in response to European imperialism. This is not surprising when we consider that between 1800 and 1950 some nine out of ten Muslims happened to fall under aggressively imposed “infidel” rule. Small wonder that most modern Islamist political movements, from the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt in 1928, to Lebanon’s Shia militia-cum-party Hezbollah, to the Salafi-jihadist State of the Islamic Caliphate that is now beheading people in Syria and Iraq, have portrayed themselves as “resistance” movements against dastardly Western domination.

.. It is a fact, too, that such strains of modern Islamism as Saudi Arabia’s rigid Wahhabism developed autonomously and not in response to the West. They are manifestations of a cycle that has repeated throughout Islamic history, whereby puritan sects have periodically erupted from the hinterlands to purge and purify Muslim cities of supposed corruption.

..whereas Christian and Jewish reform evolved over centuries, in relatively organic and self-generated—albeit often bloody—fashion, the challenge to Islam of such concepts as empirical reasoning, the nation-state, the theory of evolution, and individualism arrived all in a heap and all too often at the point of a gun. Muslims have had less time to grapple with the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment, and have done so from a position of weakness rather than strength.

.. such utopian visions are reinforced by the traditional Muslim view of history as a prolonged fall from the brief moment of grace that prevailed in the earliest years of Islam.

.. It is noteworthy that thirty-five years of self-declared “Islamic” rule in Iran have fostered not greater religiosity but creeping secularization, with ever fewer people observing religious rites. The more recent excesses of Islamist terrorism and sectarian rivalry have accelerated a far wider wave of doubt.