Boreal

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Foreword

A fear of Islam is a legitimate fear, not a phobia. It is a rational fear of the irrational. The most visible manifestation of this fear-inducing irrationality is the believer who seeks martyrdom in suicidal attacks because of what is allegedly written in a book in Paradise, the contents of which were revealed by an illiterate who claimed to be an intimate of the Author.

Fear is what non-believers who get close and personal with the Koran and Allah’s unrestrained visceral hatred and cruelty for their kind will experience, for that is the intent. It is a fear nourished and amplified by the Author’s demands of believers when it comes to dealing with those for whom He has nothing but contempt: from avoiding them, to enslaving them, to killing them.

Islamophobia looks at the lifetime of people who believe they have a God-given license to kill unbelievers and Muslims, whom Allah warns can't be trusted, and at the people who would dismiss purpose-driven atrocities committed by modern-day holy warriors as nothing to be worried about.

We are facing an increasingly bloody and violent future made even bloodier by Islamic rituals and scriptures that condition believers, from childhood onward, not only to accept that killing unbelievers is a good thing, but to enjoy and celebrate their slaughter.

Militants rejoiced as Canadians were beheaded.

Abu Sayyaf extremists rejoiced as they watched two Canadians being beheaded in the jungles of the southern Philippines, said a still-shocked Filipino hostage who was freed Friday.

Marites Flor tearfully recalled to reporters the moments when Canadians John Ridsdel and Robert Hall were handcuffed and led away to a nearby jungle clearing to be separately decapitated.

“They were watching it and they were happy,” she said of the militants.

Philippines — The Associated Press, June 24, 2016

Islamophobia, my penultimate layman’s guide to the Koran, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad and Islam in general, is slightly different from my fourteen previous attempts to counter the willful ignorance that will be our undoing.

Be warned, this book pulls no punches in placing in a modern context how a militant, merciless religion born in the depth of the Dark Ages today threatens to undo the Renaissance, which marked the end of the Catholic Church’s dominance in Europe allowing for a flowering of the arts and sciences, and the Enlightenment, which ushered in the Age of Reason.

After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics – to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect the rest of the world – the Islamic world in particular – will follow.

We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones; that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile exception.

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (2007), Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University