Was the Independent having a laugh when it ran a piece at the weekend entitled The truth about whether Islamic values are compatible with Western values?
Certainly, many of its readers thought so. Over 700 people commented on the piece written by Atif Rashid, a young British Ahmadiyya Muslim writer and speaker on religion. I’ve not had time to read all the comments, but the general consensus among those I did read was that Rashid was away with the fairies.
And who can blame them? Early in the piece, Rashid made this claim:
Islam from its very outset advocated for complete freedom, justice and democratic values.
And he concluded:
The Prophet Mohammed declared all men were free – no one being superior to another except by way of righteous conduct. He further took great steps to abolish slavery and liberate women across the Arab world whose status as chattel was widespread. This was long before similar battles were won in the West against unjust slavery and for the liberation of women.
In other words, Islam isn’t just compatible with Western values; it started to espouse and establish them long before western democracies. Islamic and Western values are one and the same, and they have been for longer than you could possibly imagine.
One man who will undoubtedly be spitting tacks over Rashid’s article is the Tunisian writer Salem Ben Ammar, who last years was quoted here as saying:
To hell with democracy! Long live Islam. These two competing political systems are antithetical to each other. You can’t be democratic and be a Muslim or a Muslim and be a democrat. A Jew can’t be a Nazi and a Nazi can’t be a Judeophile.
Islam is the brain and the spinal fluid of all Muslims. Outside its path, there’s no salvation for them. Now, it’s rather hard to imagine Muslims abandoning Islam to embark on the democratic path. They’ll be the first to take advantage of benefits in the West, right up till the day when they become masters of the political game and with democratic legitimacy be able to impose the dictatorship of Islam and put to death individual and collective freedoms. It won’t be an Islamic republic that’ll see the light of day … that’s just an optical illusion as in the case of Iran … it’ll be a caliphate to govern the Muslim Reich, the Ummah.