Är det västs fel att vi utsätts för terror?

För att skydda islam kan man konstruera ad-hoc-förklaringar till det som egentligen är ideologiska problem. Tanken på västvärldens kolonialism skulle vara en betydande faktor avhandlas i boken Islam and the Future of Tolerance av Sam Harris och Maajid Nawaz. Så här introduceras frågan:

Now, as to the view that this is how anyone who had suffered imperialism or colonialism would behave: no, it’s not. Entire countries such as India, were colonized. There’s a difference between what’s happening in Iraq with the so-called Islamic State’s attempted genocide of the Yazidi community and how Gandhi acted in India. Let’s take Iraq as a case study and think about it: What does killing the Yazidi population on Mount Sinjar have to do with US foreign policy? What does enforcing headscarves (tents, in fact) on women in Waziristan and Afghanistan, and lashing them, forcing men to grow beards under threat of a whip, chopping off hands, and so forth, have to do with US foreign policy?

Ideologin går snarare att spåra tillbaka till en tid saker och ting såg väldigt annorlunda ut.

I’m not painting the West as blameless. It has much to atone for from the age of imperialism onward—especially the practice of slavery. But as you know, Muslims, too, practiced slavery in Africa, and Western slavers appear to have learned a good deal from them. In fact, Muslims regularly enslaved white Christian Europeans. For hundreds of years, to live or travel anywhere on the Mediterranean was to risk being captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. It is believed that more than a million Europeans were enslaved and forced to work in North Africa by Muslims between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Här resonerar man kring påbud som varit med redan från början:

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn’t hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery—you just put in a few lines like “Don’t take sex slaves!” and “When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don’t rape any of them!” And yet God couldn’t seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth. 

Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises “fresh lobster” as the specialty of the house. Loving lobster, the literalist simply places his order and waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all—perhaps it’s a goose! And, whatever it is, it need not be “fresh” in any conventional sense—for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to the context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence—what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for.

Idag kan arbetslösa ungdomar i avfolkningsområden t.ex. vända sig till nynazismen i ren frustration. Vår regering är inte utan skuld till detta, men när ett illdåd görs i nynazismens namn, ligger skulden främst hos gärningsmannen och hans idéer. Och dessa idéer är inte helt olika islamismens. Både politisk islam och västerländsk nynazism förhåller sig till konspirationsteorin om islamiseringen av väst.

These two groups share a vision, except that for one, it manifests—in its most extreme form—in the terrorist Anders Breivik, and for the other, in the 7/7 jihadist terrorists in London. I was not surprised to learn that Breivik quoted al-Qaeda extensively in his terrorist manifesto. One of these extremes is opposed to a “Muslim takeover,” and the other is in favor of it, but they both subscribe to that divisive, sectarian apocalyptic vision.

Men nynazismen är inte synonymt med väst, och dess baksida kan inte skyllas på islam. Det är alltså inte bara falskt på empiriska grunder, utan även på logiska. Boken finns att köpa på engelska och på svenska.

"I condemn the terrorism that is occurring in London in all of its forms, and I acknowledge that it's inspired by Radical Islam." /Imam Tawhidi