A Proactive Approach to Islam in America

One aspect of the angst that seems prevalent in America today derives from a specific dimension of the war on terror: an increasingly pronounced disconnect between the common sense judgment of the American people vs. the denial and pc-induced blindness of our Beltway and media elites. Specifically, the common sense judgment is that America, the ‘last best hope of mankind’, and advancing Islam cannot peacefully coexist absent major structural and doctrinal reform of Islam. A major conflagration seems to be looming—whether by war with Iran or by catastrophic Islamic terrorist attack in the US—and widespread angst is the result. (That angst is part of what drives the public’s demand for border security and enforcement as the top priority of immigration ‘reform’—another area of disconnect with the Beltway elites made obvious by the hostile reaction to last year’s efforts at immigration reform.)

The historical insignificance of the Muslim population within the US, and the relative absence of militant Islam and related terrorist actions within the US (with the enormous exception of 9/11 and the previous World Trade Center bombing) is not a source of lasting comfort to alert Americans. Nor is the relatively successful assimilation of Muslim immigrants to the US over the past 30-40 years. There is a sense that today’s Muslim immigrants have a different view of what assimilation and the practice of Islam should mean; additionally, the “Fort Dix Six” episode is a sobering reminder that even those immigrants who have lived in this country a long time without incident can be swept into the trend toward greater militancy and hostility to the US system of government.

Americans also know very well that the ‘war on terror’ is a war with militant Islam, or Islamofascism, and it is not going to be over any time soon, regardless of whether liberal Democrats proclaim it to be so. No serious person can think this war is going to be wished away. We can declare the war over, but unless the enemy (which started this war) agrees, it isn’t. And so long as it isn’t, the place and practice of Islam within America is going to be an increasingly hot and sensitive topic.

Moreover, increasing numbers of alert Americans have had their eyes opened to actual life under Islam, through such best-sellers as “Now They Call Me Infidel” by Nonie Darwish; and “Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. These Americans aren’t interested in accommodating teachings that hold that Jews are pigs and should be killed; that infidels should be killed; that gays and lesbians should be killed; that daughters should be subject to genital mutilation and honor killings; that young boys should murder infidels in order to get unlimited sex in heaven. Add to these Mark Steyn’s brilliant “America Alone”, and its chronicling of the disastrous European failure to anticipate the challenge of Islamic immigrants, and the result is a growing body of Americans who want to see US policymakers get ahead of the Islamic problem before we are overwhelmed by it.

The Unique Challenge of Islam/Sharia Law in the US

Americans historically have not been afraid of being overwhelmed by much of anything. The combination of faith in God and faith in what many might characterize as the God-directed or ‘providential’ nature of the US Constitution has generally been strong enough to weather any storm. That faith will no doubt continue, but there is a growing understanding of the uniqueness of the Islamic challenge to our government and way of life.

To be more specific, the US Constitution permits freedom of religion under duly enacted laws, but this cannot be squared with the Islamic requirement that its followers live under sharia law, not secular law. Muslims who embrace sharia law want secular law set aside or at least made subordinate to sharia law. Yet prohibiting Muslims from following sharia law would seem to violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion. This is the essence of the conflict France and other countries are facing now, and the US needs to anticipate and prevent this conflict. France’s failure to proactively protect its culture has made the problem and any resolution much more difficult and costly.

In simplest terms, the American system requiring every citizen to live under American laws, must definitively trump not only the Islamic demand for sharia law, but also the right of Islamic imams to call for murder, terrorism, genital mutilation, etc. Those teachings cannot be permitted in America; they directly encourage committing what America long ago determined to be crimes. The US cannot permit the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to impede the nation’s ability to regulate and punish those who encourage committing a crime. The time to make this absolutely clear is now.

Call to Action

Logic (and hope) suggests that the task of reforming Islam belongs within and will arise from Islam, but caretakers and protectors of American culture, and advisors to US policymakers should not sit on their hands waiting and hoping for the right set of reforms to be implemented. They can and should take steps now that encourage and facilitate the reform process, while providing a structure that will support civility and respect for law while this process goes forward.

Reluctance to take on such a project, even among the most courageous of our front-line thinkers, is not hard to imagine. Islam has many centuries’ headstart on American ideals, and many elements of American tradition would seemingly argue against venturing anywhere near a topic that could be considered ‘religious reform’ of something that has been around for millennia. But the handwriting is on the wall. Everything that gave rise to the American experiment, and everything that has sustained or can sustain American exceptionalism in mankind’s long journey ‘up from the swamps’ is directly threatened by militant, unreformed Islam. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are not and could not be the product of Islam or the Koran, and can never be reconciled with sharia law. So either (1) the American ideal or Islam must be triumphant via armed conflict, or (2) there must be sufficient visible reform of Islam to enable peaceful coexistence.

We must not wait for an Islamic terrorist to level an American city in order to conclude that there is evidence that we need to do something. In the still relative calm of post-9/11 America, there may be time to outline a path to peaceful coexistence in the US and perhaps the wider world. But it will take the full intellectual, moral and spiritual resources of our best thinkers to sort this out and get it moving.

The First Amendment obviously is a barrier to many direct governmental actions to address this challenge, and effective long term strategies may ultimately have to propose an actual amendment to the Constitution to provide more flexibility for governmental solutions. But well in advance of the interminable slog involved in amending the US Constitution, there are non-governmental steps that could be taken.

The balance of this essay discusses a possible first step: the “Pledge”.

Step One: The Pledge

A problem for non-Muslims interacting with Islam is that there seems to be no clear hierarchical structure to it—no Pope or definitive religious authority with whom to try and forge a path of peaceful coexistence. Sunnis, Shias, ‘Wahabists’—to many non-Muslims there can seem to be as many versions of Islam as there are ayatollahs and imams. And while the non-Muslim world is forever assured by the media and the elites that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ and the vast majority of Muslims are ‘moderates’ and not extremists, non-Muslims look in vain for a way to be assured that these are reliable facts and not delusional wishes.

To encourage the institutionalization and moderation of Islam would not require anyone to embark on a theological debate or to analyze and dissect every nuance of Islamic doctrine. It requires only expertise on American values, and basic expertise on motivating human behavior. To wit—American values make clear that religion in America does not:

• Incite, approve or condone the murder of those whose religious faith is different or of those who have no faith

• Incite, approve or condone the murder of those who renounce their religious faith

• Incite, approve or condone the murder of family members who have violated religious tenets

• Incite, approve or condone the murder of anyone based on sexual orientation

• Endorse or permit polygamy

• Approve or permit the genital mutilation of women before or after they are married

These and perhaps other points could be arranged into a voluntary “Pledge to Adhere to American Values” made available to all mosques in America (as well as churches and synagogues). Those mosques and imams who sign the Pledge can be afforded coordinated and extensive publicity for having done so, and their imams commit to preach and teach only in a manner consistent with the Pledge. Moderate Muslims are thereby given a means to affirm their moderate status by worshiping only at mosques that have signed the Pledge. Those mosques and imams who have signed the Pledge are also thereby given the means to organize themselves into identifiable associations of mosques and Muslims who support and share American values.

Make no mistake—introducing a Pledge would be viewed by many as an unprecedented intrusion into religion, and howls of protest from both left and right could be expected, and even among voices in Judeo-Christian constituencies. But serious students of American history know that the American aversion to intrusion (particularly governmental intrusion) into religion is borne of the Founders’ spoken and unspoken reverence for Judeo-Christian values as underpinning the US Constitution and permeating US law. Judeo-Christian values in a sense were and are the higher law from which America’s founding documents and principles were derived. It would be unnatural and irreverent for Americans to allow their government to turn the tables on the religious values on which it was built.

In contrast, Islam was in no way a material or even immaterial influence on the American founding. It just wasn’t a factor. And so Americans as a whole are waking up to the fact that Western civilization’s clash with Islam, while not new to world history, is new and unprecedented in American history (the US fight with the ‘Barbary pirates’ was really the first clash with Islam, but the scale of the clash today and the breadth of awareness of what constitutes the substance of that clash is exponentially larger). So it may take new and unprecedented action—even an ‘intrusion into religion’—to forestall an ‘us or them’ conflagration.

The Pledge is consistent with American values, and except for various versions of unreformed Islam, there is no organized religion in America that would be unable from a doctrinal standpoint to sign on to the Pledge. If organized religion of any kind won’t renounce the barbaric behaviors banned by the Pledge, American society can decide that such a group or body of thought is not entitled to be considered ‘religion’ in America.

To the gasping observer that recoils at the idea that any society could be so presumptuous as to decide what is considered religion—why can’t we? It is a simple yet profound matter of societal self-preservation.

So what is to be done about those mosques and imams who refuse to sign the Pledge? First, they also are to be publicized, continuously. More important, law enforcement authorities should be allowed to place them on a watch list, and if witnesses or other surveillance indicates there is preaching that includes incitement to overthrow the US government, the imams are to be arrested and prosecuted and, where appropriate, jailed or deported, and their mosques closed.

A side benefit of a publicized Pledge is the broader awareness it spawns of the doctrines of Islam that are repugnant to American values. Many Americans currently asleep in the stupor of political correctness and moral relativism may finally wake up to just how antithetical Islamic doctrine is to the culture Americans are used to living in. And the content of the Pledge may give backbone to practicing Muslims who are inclined to more traditional and peaceful forms of piety but who have been bullied by militants into silence or acquiescence. A result could be even more progressive reform of Islam, derived from within Islam.

The Pledge is a proactive path to enable peaceful coexistence of practicing Muslims within American society and under American constitutional law; the status quo is almost certainly a path to conflict. The American constitutional system separates church and state; Islam treats church and state as inseparable, and the unreformed doctrine of that church is in direct conflict with American laws and norms of behavior.

Even if the Pledge stirs up emotions, think about the argument of the Islamic objector: “I demand the right to continue to preach murder of those who do not believe as I do”. The attempt to camouflage and dress up this argument in principle: “I demand that the US stay out of my religion” ultimately won’t wash because of the content of the Pledge. Again, if organized religion of any kind won’t renounce the barbaric behaviors banned by the Pledge, American society can decide that such a group or body of thought is not entitled to be considered ‘religion’ in America.

As for the ‘slippery slope’ fear associated with opening up the idea of defining religion in America, society simply has to be confident enough to build a clear barricade around the slippery slope. To be specific, the issue to be addressed is unreformed Islam vs. American values. Judeo-Christian faith traditions are not threatened by American values; they are the source of American values. But even if the activity of formulating and publicizing the Pledge ends up tempting future US legislative bodies to tinker further with defining religion in ways that are offensive to Judeo-Christian teachings, that’s a risk that has to be taken in order to deal firmly with the mortal threat that unreformed Islam now presents.

Summary

Doing nothing to resist the movement of unreformed Islam in the US is paving the way for American cultural suicide and, indeed, to the destruction of the very idea of freedom to worship God as one chooses. An ad hoc, reactive response to creeping Islamization in parts of the US—e.g., special airport prayer rooms; taxi drivers with dispensation to refuse to transport alcohol—may put out a short-term fire with some combination of traditional American compassion and the spirit of compromise, but the momentum of special accommodation can create an ever-more demanding special interest group that is wrapped in the cloak of religion but is antithetical to American values. The time to be proactive and get ahead of the curve is now. The Pledge is just a first step. Tougher immigration controls, tighter citizenship requirements, unification around the English language, and better education in Western civilization—all coordinated with and linked to the content of the Pledge can all be elements of an agenda that encourages the institutionalization and moderation of Islam in America and the world. Success will go a great way toward assuring the future of civilized society.

Paul Gable

Written in 2007; posted January 12, 2009