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Pipes goes where he has not gone before

Pipes goes where he has not gone before

Author: Lawrence Auster
Publication: View from the Right
Date: January 17, 2006
URL: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004904.html

When Pope Benedict's important statement that Islam cannot reform itself was publicized recently by Fr. Joseph Fessio, everyone naturally wondered how Daniel Pipes, the leading Western proponent of Islamic reform, would respond. Today he did so, and it's basically a recapitulation of his response to my massive critique of him last year, when he said that "Islam can be whatever Muslims wish to make of it." Now he says that Muslims can re-interpret Islam so as to excise all the bad parts, which just happen to comprise the main body of the faith, and keep the nice parts. Two problems immediately manifest themselves. First, Pipes never considers what arguments orthodox Muslims might use against such re-interpretative efforts. Second, Pipes never considers what might be the real-world consequences for the courageous Muslims who actually attempt to carry out the re-interpretative task that he urges on them. Such lack of seriousness on Pipes's part is not new. What is new is that in support of his reformist argument he engages in what must be seen, by even the most charitable view, as deliberate obfuscation.

Here is a slightly revised version of the comment I posted about this today at FrontPage Magazine:

Pipes says that a radical re-interpretation of Islam is possible, in which the Medinan, warlike part of the Koran is essentially canceled out, leaving only the Meccan, peaceful part of the Koran. As an example of such reform efforts he mentions the work of Mahmoud Muhammad Taha of the Sudan, who, he tells us, died in 1985. Curiously Pipes leaves out how Taha died. He was publicly executed by the government of the Sudan as an apostate, while all his followers were forced publicly to recant his views.

This is what always happens to reformers within Islam, because Islam is what it is. Islam has an unchangeable authoritative structure, going back to the Koran and the hadiths as well as the Islamic schools of jurisprudence of the ninth century based on the Koran and the hadiths. And one of the unchangeable laws of Islam is that apostates must die. Therefore the reform of Islam is humanly impossible.

For Pipes to conceal the fact that his model Islamic reformer was in fact executed for advocating reform is an astonishingly dishonest thing to do. Unfortunately, this is what happens when people commit themselves to an agenda that is inherently impossible, such as creating a "moderate" Islam, or making peace with someone who is inherently an enemy, as we see in the Oslo "peace" process and its ever-more bizarre successors. In order to keep the hope of peace alive, the peacemaker must continually cover up the true nature of the enemy with whom he wishes to make peace.

However, even if Pipes had not concealed the fate of his model reformer, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, Taha's ideas could still go nowhere, as they would involve literally removing everything, including sharia, that has made Islam what it has been for the last 1,400 years. It's time for people to stop indulging Pipes in his fantasy and insist that he come clean. The fact which he, and all of us, must face is that the only way for Islam to stop being jihadist is for Islam to cease to exist. Since we don't have the ability (or desire) to eliminate Islam from the world, our only rational option is to contain and isolate Muslims within the Islamic lands, which we do have the ability to do. We did it for hundreds of years, and we can do it again.


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