Only Challenging Islamic Supremacism can Reform Islam

By Daniel Greenfield Thursday, June 18, 2009

In Cairo, Obama masterfully laid out the Islamist narrative, evoking a world in which Muslim cultural superiority to Europe and America gave way to European and American physical supremacy over the Muslim world. Like all forms of flattery aimed at Islamic supremacists, this was naturally the worst possible approach to reform Islam.
Reform requires first destroying the myths, and then seeing what is wrong and working to fix it. Instead Western liberals insisting on perpetuating the myth of Islamic greatness overturned by the European and American barbarians. And if indeed Muslims were superior to Europeans, the only reform that is truly justified is the Wahhabi “reform” of turning back the clock of history to Caliphates and strict Islamic jurisuprudence. Certainly not Westernization reforms that would only mean imitation of the “degraded West”.
This perverse logic is the inescapable outcome of supporting the Islamist view of history, it is a logic that dictates more conflict, more violence, more terror and more brutality as the Wahhabi backed elements within the Muslim world look to turn back time and restore “the greatness of Islam that once was”.
No ideology or nation can reform without criticism. To pander to Islam is to strenghten its worst qualities, to affirm its superiority, its righteousness and its appetite for world domination. By contrast only challenging Islamic supremacism holds out any form of reforming Islam.
In the Islamist narrative that Obama endorsed in Cairo, Muslims are the victims of a European world that neglected their greatest gifts and tarred them with unjust accusation. In the true history, Islam was built on half-savage bandits carving out a worldwide empire through the sword, pillaging the cultural treasures of far greater civilizations, and taking credit for the genius of Rome, Greece and India.
Where the Islamist narrative encourages Muslims to revert to type, to see themselves as wronged victims who must rebuild an incorruptible ummah and “civilize” the whole world under Islam, the post-Islamist critical narrative would encourage Muslims to turn their backs on mainstream Islam in favor of more reformist Islamic movements such as the Ahmadis, ruthlessly suppressed by Pakistan’s Islamist Haq regime.
Little wonder then that the Saudi propogated Wahhabi Islam insists on promoting the Islamist myth of a lost glorious empire, or that Obama is happy to take up the narrative. That narrative is the best possible means for perpetuating and increasing Islamic violence, terrorism and expansionism.
Just as the willingness of Western liberals to accept the National Socialist mythology of an innocent wronged Germany reclaiming her dignity and lost territories helped bring on World War II, flattering Islam can only bring on a greater global conflict between Islamists seeking their lost caliphate and those free nations and peoples determined to resist them.
The need by Western liberals to constantly find fault with their own countries and favor with that of the enemy, takes the form of actively collaborating in creating and promoting the artificial histories of victimology that are then used to defend the violence and wars unleashed by that same enemy in pursuit of “justice”.
Furthermore by restraining and even banning criticism of Islam, Western liberals themselves close off the path to Islamic reform. As it stands now, Islam is the only religion both in the West and in Muslim countries that hears nothing but praise about itself, without a word of criticism being tolerated. What better affirmation could there be of Islamic supremacism than that?
Both the Muslim and the Non-Muslim who hear Orthodox Judaism, the Catholic Church, Evangelical Christians, Mormons, and many others routinely mocked and dragged through the mud, while Islam and Muslims are treated as above criticism-- cannot help but draw the conclusion that Islam is superior to all other religions.
It is inconceivable that any religion or ideology could be responsible for ongoing terrorism and violence in dozens of countries around the world, a death toll approaching a million in the 20th century alone, and still be considered above criticism.
The resulting path is not hard to follow. By flattering Islam, we are discouraging the reform of Islam, and ultimately flattering ourselves to death. Treating Islam as superior, will insure that Muslims act superior to us. Pretending that violence is something apart from Islam will only empower Muslims to ignore the consequences of their own actions. And finally accepting the Islamist myth means accepting our own inferiority, which inevitably results in Muslims treating the more compliant of us as Dhimmis and the more independent as Kufirs. The slaughter, the conquest and the wars follow naturally from there.
Only by challenging Islamic supremacism can we defend ourselves and challenge Muslims over their morals, history and future.