-Caveat Lector-
"How Dare You Defame Islam"
Daniel Pipes
Commentary
November 1999
The problem began in January 1989. That was when Muslims living inBradford,
England, decided to do something to show their anger about The Satanic
Verses, a new novel by the famed writer Salman Rushdie that includedpassages
making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. The Muslims, mostly Pakistaniimmigrants,
purchased a copy of the novel, took it to a public square, attached it to a
stake, and set it on fire. Television news showed this auto da f� in
scandalized detail, and pictures of the scene were splashed across the
British media for days, making it a major topic of discussion throughoutthe
country.
In Pakistan itself, after a month's buildup, an unruly mob of some
10,000 anti-Rushdie protesters took to the streets of the capital city of
Islamabad. Marching to the American Cultural Center (a fact significant in
itself), they attempted with great energy, but without success, to set the
heavily fortified building on fire. Six people died in the violence, andmany
more were injured. These events, in turn, caught the attention of Ayatollah
Khomeini, the revolutionary ruler of Iran, who took prompt and drastic
action: on February 14, 1989, he called upon "all zealous Muslims quicklyto
execute" not just Salman Rushdie as the author of The Satanic Verses but"all
those involved in its publication who were aware of its content." Thisedict
led to emergency measures in England to protect Rushdie's person, and to
weeks and months of intense debate among the world's politicians and
intellectuals about the issues of freedom of speech and blasphemy.
When the dust settled, Khomeini had failed in his specific goal of
eliminating Rushdie physically: today, over a decade later, the author is
once again writing well-received books and accepting literary awards. Butif
Khomeini did not manage to harm Rushdie, he did accomplish something farmore
profound: he stirred the souls of many Muslims, reviving a sense of
confidence in their faith and a strong impatience with any denigration ofit,
as well as a determination to take the offensive against anyone perceivedto
be a blasphemer or even a critic. Although Khomeini himself passed from the
scene just weeks after issuing his decree, the spirit it engendered is very
much alive.
During the decade since 1989, many efforts have been undertaken bythe
forces of Islamism-otherwise known as Muslim fundamentalism-to silence
critics. Ranging from outright violence to more sophisticated but no less
effective techniques, they have produced impressive results.
Some early acts of physical intimidation involved the Rushdie case
itself. Translators of The Satanic Verses were stabbed and seriouslyinjured
in Norway and Italy and, in Japan, murdered. In Turkey, another translator
escaped when a fire set in his hotel failed to kill him, but 37 others died
in the blaze. Other acts of violence were designed to punish both Muslimsand
non-Muslims for a variety of alleged offenses.
Egypt alone offers a number of examples. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a
professor of literature who wrote that certain references in the Qur'an to
supernatural phenomena should be read as metaphors, found his marriage
dissolved by an Egyptian court on the grounds that his writings proved himan
apostate. (According to Islamic law, a Muslim woman may not be married to a
non-Muslim.) Another case involved the author of a nonconformist essay on
Islam: he, his publisher, and the book's printer were each sentenced toeight
years in jail on the charge of blasphemy. Farag Foda, an Egyptian
intellectual who expressed scorn for the Islamist program, was shot and
murdered. And Naguib Mahfouz, the elderly and much-celebrated Nobel Prize
laureate for literature, was seriously injured in Cairo when an assailant
knifed him in the neck, presumably in revenge for an allegorical novel
written decades earlier.
Nor has the campaign been limited to Muslim-majority countries. Makin
Morcos, also an Egyptian, was killed in Australia for criticizing the
Islamists' anti-Christian campaign in his native country; Rashad Khalifa, a
biochemist from Egypt living in Tucson, Arizona, was stabbed to death in
January 1990 to silence his heretical ideas. (A member of Usama bin Laden's
gang has been implicated in the latter murder.) Both these incidents sent a
chilling message: you can run but you cannot hide.
Nor, finally, is the campaign in Western countries limited toviolence
or threats of violence against Muslims; it also extends to non-Muslims. In
some cases, purely private matters may be at issue: Jack Briggs, an
Englishman, has been on the lam for years, hiding with his wife from her
Pakistani family who have vowed to kill both of them (even though they are
properly married and even though he converted to Islam to win their
approval). Other cases concern publicly expressed views: Steven Emerson, a
former Senate aide and investigative reporter for U.S. News & World Report,
CNN, and other media, received death threats for Jihad in America, his
award-winning television documentary that drew on the Islamists' own
commercial videos to demonstrate their virulently anti-Semitic and
anti-American views and activities.
Emerson told his story to a congressional committee in 1998, and it
bears quoting at length:
Immediately following the release of Jihad in America, I became the targetof
radical fundamentalist groups throughout the United States (and
internationally) who fiercely denied the existence of "Islamic extremism"and
accused me of engaging in an "attack against Islam." For this
"transgression," my life has been permanently changed.
Explaining the details of just one incident-to pick among a whole
series-will help you understand the changes I have been forced to endure.One
morning, in late 1995, I was paged by a federal law-enforcement official.
When I returned the call, this official immediately instructed me to head
downtown to his office and specifically directed me to take a taxi rather
than my car. The urgency in this person's voice was palpable. When Iarrived
at the office, I was ushered into a room where a group of other
law-enforcement officials was waiting. Within minutes, I found out why Ihad
been summoned: I was told a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists hadbeen
assigned to carry out an assassination of me. An actual hit team had been
dispatched from another country to the United States. The squad, accordingto
the available intelligence, was to rendezvous with its American-based
colleagues located in several U.S. cities. Compounding the jolt of beingtold
about this threat was an additional piece of information: the assassination
squad had been successfully able to elude law-enforcement surveillance.
I was told that I had limited choices: since I was not a full-time
government employee, I was not entitled to 24-hour-a-day police protection.
However, I could probably get permission to enter the Witness Security
Program under the right circumstances. But the prospect of being spirited
away and given a new identity was not acceptable to me-especially sincethat
would afford the terrorists a moral victory in having shut me down.Frankly,
however, the alternative option was not that attractive either-being on my
own and taking my own chances. And yet that for me was the only effective
option.
While Emerson remains doggedly on the trail of Islamists, especially
those among them who support terrorism, he has for four years been forcedto
live at a clandestine address, always watching his movements. Like the case
of Rashad Khalifa, murdered in Tucson for his views, the case of Steven
Emerson suggests that, despite the Constitution's guarantees of freedom of
religion and freedom of speech, when it comes to Islam, unapproved thinking
can lead to personal danger or even death.
Still, were force the only weapon in the Islamists' arsenal, their
accomplishments would be limited. In the West, at least, violence and
physical intimidation can achieve only so much. But, contrary tostereotype,
Islamists are hardly all wild-eyed hit men and suicide bombers; in Western
countries, many of them are quite at home with computers, well-versed inthe
latest lobbying techniques, and adept at the game of victimology.Energetic,
determined, and skilled, they employ the tools not of physical but ratherof
intellectual intimidation. Their aim in doing so is to build an inviolate
wall around Islam, endowing it with something like the sacrosanct status it
enjoys in traditionally Muslim countries.
Islamists of this latter stripe make full use of every recourse
available to them in the laws and customs of the Western liberaldemocracies
themselves. A few examples will illustrate. In France, Marcel Lefebvre, a
renegade Catholic bishop, was fined nearly $1,000 under French law for
declaring that when the Muslim presence in France becomes stronger, "it is
your wives, your daughters, your children who will be kidnapped and dragged
off to a certain kind of place as they exist in [Morocco]." In Canada, a
Christian activist handing out leaflets protesting the Muslim persecutionof
Christians was accused by Muslim organizations of "inciting hatred," found
guilty of breaking Canada's hate-speech laws, and sentenced to 240 hours of
community service and six months of probation time in jail. At the United
Nations, the decidedly nondiplomatic epithets "blasphemy" and "defamationof
Islam" have become part of normal discourse, serving as convenient
instruments for shutting off discussion of such unpleasant matters asslavery
in Sudan or Muslim anti-Semitism.
In the United States, where the concept of freedom of speech
issturdier
than elsewhere, the First Amendment still prevents the government itselffrom
fining or jailing anyone for offensive speech. But, relying on the ethos of
political correctness that has resulted in such abridgements of First
Amendment freedoms as university speech codes and other restrictive
practices, Islamists seek to win what sanction they can to censor others.
Thus, they have recently sponsored an innocent-sounding Senate resolution
entitled "Supporting Religious Tolerance Toward Muslims." This resolution
states as a fact that "Muslims have been subjected, simply because of their
faith, to acts of discrimination and harassment that all too often have led
to hate-inspired violence," and concludes that criticism of Islam, though
legal in the strict sense, is morally reprehensible ("the Senateacknowledges
that individuals and organizations that foster such intolerance create an
atmosphere of hatred and fear that divides the Nation"). Should this
resolution pass, and there is every reason to expect that it will, anyone
with anything negative to say about Islam or Islamism can expect to be
accused of fostering a hate crime.
Who, in the American context, is behind this campaign of mentalintimidation
and of what, in a journalistic context, would be called prior restraint?
Among the many candidates, the leading one is surely the Council onAmerican-
Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based institution founded in 1994.
CAIR presents itself to the world as a standard-issue civil-rights
organization, whose mission is to "promote interest and understanding among
the general public with regard to Islam and Muslims in North America and
conduct educational services."
Sometimes, indeed, this is what CAIR does. In 1997, for example, it
protested when an official at a meeting of a board of education in South
Carolina said, "Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims." At other times,it
has come to the defense of women who have lost their jobs for insisting on
wearing a headscarf, or of men for wearing beards. But these occasionalgood
works serve mostly as a cover for CAIR's real agenda, which appears to be
twofold: to help the radical organization Hamas in its terror campaign
against Israel, and to promote the Islamist program in the United States.
In furtherance of the first goal, CAIR regularly sends out "action
alerts" to instigate dozens or even hundreds of protests, many of themvulgar
and aggressive, whenever anyone dares to suggest publicly that Hamas orother
te rrorist networks operate in the United States, or indeed dares tosupport
those who say such things. When Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston
Globe, protested CAIR's almost successful effort to have Steven Emerson
blacklisted from National Public Radio, CAIR cranked up its letter-writing
campaign ("Dear JEW," went a characteristic missive from a CAIR minion,"How
dare you defame Islam. . . . There is enough Muslim-bashing going on, I am
sure your resigning will not make a difference to our jewish [sic] media")
and, in a bit of raw intimidation, threatened the Globe with legal action.
CAIR's defense of Islamist violence takes other forms as
well:picketing
the Dallas Morning News for revealing the Hamas infrastructure in Texas,
launching a campaign against the Tampa Tribune for uncovering the Islamic
Jihad network in that city. The group has inveighed against the Journal of
the American Medical Association for investigating the medical condition of
victims of terrorism, and against a children's magazine, The WeeklyReader's
Current Events, for publishing material on international terrorism. CAIR
denounced the Atlantic Monthly for publishing an article on Islamistviolence
in Sudan, and a Senate Subcommittee for holding a hearing on "Foreign
Terrorists in America: Five Years After the World Trade Center Bombing."
As for its other goal-promoting Islamism in the United States-CAIR focuseson
the single tactic of trying to silence those who have anything critical to
say about Islam. It attacked the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles for
portraying Ayatollah Khomeini as a Hitler-like enemy of Jews, and it went
after the Reader's Digest for documenting the repression of Christians in
several Muslim countries. When James Jatras, a Senate aide, published inhis
private capacity a stinging critique of Islam ("a self-evident outgrowthnot
of the Old and New Covenants but of the darkness of heathen Araby"), CAIR
took out a full-page newspaper ad in the Washington Times calling for his
dismissal. And when Father Richard John Neuhaus, the distinguished authorand
editor of First Things, outspokenly condemned contemporary Islam's
"resentments and suspicions, alternating with low-grade jihad in the formof
the persecution of Christians, international terrorism, and dreams ofdriving
Israel into the sea," CAIR called on the Catholic Church to "investigate"
Neuhaus, and its supporters sent a cascade of abusive mail accusing him of
being "obviously mentally ill" and "doing the work of Adolf Hitler."
Even lesser provocations than these elicit a barrage of CAIR-inspired
letters that can leave writers and editors feeling isolated and undersiege.
A case in point indirectly involves the Oslo peace process. Beginning inMay
1995, Yasir Arafat, having entered into negotiations with Israel, took to
defending himself before Arab audiences by alluding cryptically to thetreaty
of Hudaybiyah, signed by the Prophet Muhammad in 628 C.E. Dusting off their
history books, American commentators mostly concluded that, in invoking an
agreement signed but then subsequently broken by Muhammad whencircumstances
changed, Arafat was signaling that he, too, did not really mean to keep his
pledge. Arafat's intentions aside, however, it was the suggestion that the
Prophet Muhammad had gone back on his word that aroused CAIR's fury. So
impassioned was the reaction when Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of
U.S. News & World Report, referred in a column to "the doctrine of the
prophet Muhammad of making treaties with enemies while he is weak,violating
them when he is strong," that the magazine ended up printing not one buttwo
apologies.
A flavor of what CAIR and its network of letter writers were capableof
producing on this occasion may be gleaned from the pages of the NewRepublic,
where a similar statement had been made by Yehoshua Porath, an eminent
professor of Middle East history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.This
statement ("Muhammad broke the [Hudaybiya] agreement eighteen months after
its conclusion") elicited, according to the magazine's editors, "hundredsof
abusive phone calls, letters, and e-mail accusing us of defamation of the
Prophet and worse." Among the letters published by the editors, all intheir
original grammar and spelling, one read:
You guys had better watch out, ok? Because this is not going to go onfurther
anymore, ok? You'd better watch out that f*ing Jew . . . tell him where heis
coming from, ok? Because you know mother-f*er bastard, mother-his mom is a
bastard. ok? He can't talk about Muslim shit and you get your act together.
. . all of you. We don't want to hear anymore about this problem, ok? Yougot
that right?
Another was more threatening:
The jews from back in history were the ugly decievers and BLOOD SUCKERS. ..
. It is importatn that an apology is issued to calm down the MUSLIM allover
the world. WE DO NO WANT TO SEE ANOTHER 19 AMERICANS GO A WSAY IN THA LANDOF
THE PROPHET ,,, DO WE ??????? !!!!!! I am saying this because the Muslims
will never tolerate the actions of the jews agains their religion. And
articels like these contribute in the future loss of life of Anmericans all
over the Islamic world. . . . We are fed up of filthy jews robbing ourlands,
and defaming all HOLY concepts we have. Please, save the lives of few
Americans by issuing your apology.
Which brings me to my own case. In mid-1999, I published articles
inthe
Los Angeles Times and the National Post (Toronto) emphasizing thedistinction
between, on the one hand, traditional Muslims who go quietly about their
business and ask only to be allowed to practice their faith, and, on the
other, radical Islamists with their agenda of transforming society in the
image of their beliefs. In reply, CAIR launched fifteen separate attacks on
me in the space of two months. Many of these, reaching all the way back to
1983, cited random quotations from articles and books in order to indict me
out of my own mouth, or resurrected unflattering appraisals of my work by
others. One bulletin attempted to demolish an article I had written aboutthe
treaty of Hudaybiya-even though, contrary to other American commentators, I
had found that "Muhammad was technically within his rights to abrogate the
treaty." The broadside was titled "Daniel Pipes Smears Prophet Muhammad":
fighting words for many Muslims.
Reverberating through the Internet, CAIR's attacks were also widely
reprinted in Muslim publications, spurring dozens of letters,overwhelmingly
negative, to the two newspapers that had carried my articles. One suchletter
urged me to enroll in sensitivity training (at CAIR, naturally), whileothers
branded me with harsh names ("bigot and racist"), compared me to the KuKlux
Klan and the neo-Nazis, or characterized my writings as an "atrocity"filled
with "pure poison" and "outright lies." More alarmingly, the lettersaccused
me either of perpetrating a hate crime against Muslims or of promoting and
abetting such crimes. And they did not stop short of vague threats: "IsPipes
ready to answer the Creator for his hatred or is he a secular humanist . ..
? He will soon find out."
I do not want to leave the impression that CAIR represents the only opinion
to be found in the Muslim community, either here or abroad. Shaykh AbdadHadi
Palazzi, for instance, secretary general of the Italian Muslim Association
and director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Muslim Community in
Rome, has actually denounced CAIR for falsely claiming to represent the
entire Muslim community while in reality being bent on launching "hate
campaigns against journalists, Congressmen, Senators, and Muslims who
interfere with [its] true terrorist agenda." What is more, Shaykh Palazzihas
commended both me and Steven Emerson for daring to challenge the Islamists;
though he does "not agree with [our] attitude toward Islam in particularand
with [our] secular worldview in general," nevertheless we are to be lauded
for distinguishing "authentic Islam from the counterfeit image presented by
the Islamists"-of whom, the Shaykh pointedly concludes, Muslims themselves
"are the main victims."
But Shaykh Palazzi is one among only a few voices of reason andsanity.
Within the universe of Muslims who speak and write about Islam and its
position in the modern world, the Islamists by far have the upper hand.That
is not only a great tragedy for Muslims, but a danger to the rest of us.For
if the Islamists have their way, any possibility of speaking the truth not
only about them but about Islam itself will be foreclosed. Indeed, to a
certain extent, as in the near-successful blacklisting of Steven Emerson at
National Public Radio, it already has been.
Bernard Lewis, the renowned scholar of Islam and the Middle East, has
noted with asperity that whereas, in this Christian country, an
English-language biographer of Jesus enjoys total latitude to say what he
will and as he will, his counterpart working on a biography of Muhammadmust
look fearfully over his shoulder every step of the way. About my ownwriting,
one correspondent protested to the National Post: "It's is interesting tome
as a Muslim American to hear you, a non-Muslim, speaks about Islam as an
expert without you first consulting with an American Muslim organizationlike
CAIR for an example, to get their opinion about what you are about toprint."
In other words, one is perfectly free to voice an opinion about Islam,
provided that one has vetted its contents beforehand with the
Islamists-roughly the situation that now prevails in Iran.
What the Islamists are demanding, in short, is that the United States
take a giant step toward applying within its borders the strictures of
Islamic law (the shari'a) itself. A basic premise of that body of law isthat
no one, and especially no non-Muslim, may openly discuss certain
subjects-some of the very subjects, as it happens, that CAIR wishes torender
taboo. However absurd this may seem to a casual observer-Muslims, afterall,
make up, at most, 2 percent of the U.S. population-it is a fact that, when
the guard of the democratic majority is let down, determined minorities in
pursuit of anti-democratic aims can sometimes get their way.
Daniel Pipes is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.
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