Andy McCarthy understands freedom, Islam, and sharia with a particular clarity rarely exhibited in Western journalism. His reflections on Turkey, and Islam in general, add greatly to a more mature and accurate understanding of Islam. I have highlighted sections I think especially worth noting.
[...] Like all Islamists, Erdogan [Prime Minister of Turkey] has contempt for Europe and the West. The
objective of Muslim supremacists is to dominate and Islamize them, not
emulate them. . .
In their obsession over not being seen as Islamophobic, in their purblind insistence that aggressive supremacism is not the nature of mainstream Islam, European elites assume that they know Islam better than did such Muslim giants as Atatürk and his contemporary, Hassan al-Banna — the Muslim Brotherhood founder who notoriously wrote that “it is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated” and that Islam sought “to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
It is an unremitting fact that mainstream Middle Eastern Islam is totalitarianism packaged as “religion.” To be sure, critics of Islam can go too far with this point. It is wrong to say, as some do, that Islam is not a religion. The doctrine has a number of spiritual principles — the oneness of Allah, to take a prominent example. There are, moreover, interpretations of Islam that focus only on its spiritual and mystical elements. If such interpretations were dominant, Islam would be of no more moment to us than it would if it were true, as the fiction holds, that Islam is a “religion of peace” that has been “hijacked” by “radicals.”
But the fact is that Islamic supremacism is the preponderant Islam of the Middle East. Yes, it is a religion, but it aspires to be so much more: to control every aspect of life, to impose sharia’s political, social, and economic strictures on civil society. Therefore, the guidelines for religions that pose no threat to free societies cannot be applied to Middle Eastern Islam without putting liberty in grave jeopardy.
In a truly free society, religious liberty is a bedrock. It must be safeguarded from governmental incursions. If, say, the Chinese Communists cared about such things (they don’t), it would make perfect sense to preclude them from integration with Europe until they ceased repressing religion (among other things). And we would have no hesitation about saying so, because Chinese totalitarianism is perceived as a political ideology, not a “religion.” Yet an Islamic society is not free precisely because of its religion — or, to put a finer point on it, because of its dictatorial sharia system, which we inaccurately describe as a mere “religion” due to the spiritual components that adorn its thoroughgoing regulation of non-spiritual life.
I hasten to add that it is no insult to call sharia a “dictatorial” and “totalitarian” system. Devout Muslims believe Allah, omnipotent and omniscient, has ordained sharia as the template for virtuous human life — every detail of that life. In their view, it is profoundly offensive for His creation, to whom He has deigned to give this gift, to disobey. One need not be a believer to understand why sharia-adherent Muslims believe we must all submit. To grasp this, however, is to understand that liberty and sharia cannot share the same space.
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