Born Muslim, Part Four
August 29, 2010 9:46 AM
In my last article, I wrote about the distinction between pro-American and anti-American Muslims. Of course, there must be many Muslims who are sometimes pro-American, those who harbor significant anti-American feelings (the recruitment pool for our enemies) or those who are wondering whether they should be anti-American, but aren't. Today, I will address those Muslims who are definitely pro-American, why that is so important, and what, more precisely, that means. A good starting point is a reference to a subject rarely mentioned either in the "mainstream" media or the blogosphere: the American Enlightenment.
This Wikipedia article is a good introduction to the American Enlightenment. To get right to my point, almost all conservatives, Libertarians, Objectivists, and even some of the less irrational "Liberals" are all in agreement with the ideas and political consequences of the American Enlightenment: "an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance…" These ideas brought about the Three C's I have written about: Capitalism, the Constitution, and the (US dollar) Currency. Another term for this package of ideas is "classical liberalism," not to be confused with the so-called liberalism of the Bolshevik fellow-travelers and welfare state Big Government "liberals."
All over the world there are Muslims who admire what the American Enlightenment has brought to the world. Some of these people, like the former Pakistani author Salman Rushdie, are genuine heroes. In the USA there are many Americans and immigrants who were born Muslim and who came here specifically because of the opportunities that the American Enlightenment created for everyone. These Muslims or former Muslims are not being given the pro-American Enlightenment intellectual support they need and deserve, while the Bolsheviks and their anti-American allies are continuously bombarding them with anti-American propaganda through the "mainstream" medial and in all levels of government-funded schools and universities.
The Enlightenment was a world-wide, but especially European intellectual and cultural movement. As with all such vast, sweeping historical developments, its supporters and detractors were inconsistent. There arose a movement called the Counter-Enlightenment: in France, Germany, and other such places, Enlightenment ideas were distorted and led to guillotine-frenzied massacres and, later, the madness of Nazism and Fascism. Therefore, I refer most specifically to the American Enlightenment to point to what I mean by pro-American.
Most of the billion and one-half Muslims on this planet are well aware of the prosperity and opportunity which resulted from the American Enlightment, but one of the greatest misfortunes of our current time is that the ideas of the American Enlightenment are rarely presented coherently, consistently, or confidently. Instead, the ideas most commonly, in fact relentlessly, presented to the Muslims of the world are the ideas of Bolshevism or of another ideology altogether, the ideology of Salafism.
As I understand it, the word "salaf" in Arabic means a predecessor, one who came before. Salafism is the name of a movement whose ideas attempt to be identical to the ideas of the first three generations of Muslims, those who had mostly grown old and died before the year 800 C.E. (A.D.) In other words, Salafism is an eighth century ideology being propagated across the planet as an ideological plague.
Those belligerent, intolerant, fanatical Muslims whom we now call Islamists, Islamofascists, Islamo-Nazis, Islamic Fundamentalists, and so forth, are a product of the Salafist movement. Their point of reference are the passages in the Qur'an and the Hadith (tradition) which promote violence against women and infidels.
The first politically powerful of the Salafists were probably the Saudi kings who occupied Mecca and Medina in the year 1803; Saudis are still primarily under the influence of a local salafist-like movement called Wahabbism. Violent jihad against infidels is a prominent characteristic of Salafism.
To those Muslims world-wide who are being seduced, recruited, and deployed as gunmen and suicide bombers by Salafism, what alternatives are being offered by us Americans? There is Conservatism, of course, but that is primarily a religious Judeo-Christian movement. There is the popular culture of the "mainstream" media, which I sum up by calling it "airheadism." There is the warmed-over "if-it-feels-good-do-it" amoralism of the 1960's. There is the "pragmatism" of American businessmen and politicians like Bush, which rejects ideas altogether; and, of course, there is the lethal ideology of Bolshevism and the watered-down pap of Bolshevism's "liberal" sidekicks.
A good example of the result of the lack of consistently presented pro-American ideas is the tragedy of Major Nidal Hasan, United States Army. His pro-American Muslim (or ex-Muslim) parents came to the USA, where Nidal was born, and both worked tirelessly to an early death running a successful, busy restaurant in Virginia. Nidal, desperate for a set of values to which he could commit himself completely, ended up accepting Salafism promoted by a Salafist imam, and perpetrated a horrifying massacre of his US Army colleagues. His trial is still pending.
In Part Five, I will write more about Salafism and its followers and, what can be done to present the ideals of the American Enlightenment more consistently.