On blasphemy and Islamophobia
Although criticizing Islam should be as acceptable as criticizing any other religion, it has become taboo among certain strata of Western academic community.
This essay was inspired by Bertrand Russel’s Why I am not a Christian.1 2 Many of his arguments can equally well be applied to other religions; and just as he proclaimed that he was not a Christian, one must be free to proclaim that one is not a Muslim anywhere in the world. That, however, is not currently the case, and here I am concerned with one aspect that was left out of his essay: violence.
The view, that burning people alive is a bad thing, is probably not a controversial one today, yet it was not always like that. History of Christianity is littered with the corpses of those burned at the stake for a variety of “crimes”, from witchcraft and heresy (cue Giordano Bruno) to sodomy.3 Apparently, the religion that is supposed to have formed the foundations of our morality and ethics considered it perfectly acceptable. Moreover, so did the legislatures of quite a few European countries from the medieval times into the Renaissance. For those of you who are beating the indigenous drums, native Americans were also known to practice this form of “justice”.4
Somehow, as time passed, people decided that this was not the best way to mete out justice. Most people, at least, because well into the 20th century came the Nazis and their local helpers, who returned to the practice; this is well-documented.5 (As an aside, burning Jews alive has a long history. Antisemitism is oh-so original). Somewhat less known is the appetite of the Bolsheviks for the sordid practice—but one does find the evidence, if one knows where to look. Ukhtpechlag (or UPITLag)6 was a Soviet labor camp where my paternal grandfather spent a part of his youth, and where 2.5 thousand people were executed in the first six months of 1938 during the infamous Kashketin' executions. Most were shot, but some—several hundred of them—were hurdled into a barrack that was set on fire; some others were simply buried alive.7
It is easy to denounce the past. The real test of our courage and our morality is where we stand today. A Muslim tourist was burned alive in Pakistan less than two weeks ago. October 7th, where entire Jewish families were burned alive in their houses, was less than 300 days ago (268, as of July 2, 2024).8 19 Yazidi women were burned alive in 2016 for refusing to be enslaved; there were reports of other instances before that. It would appear that the process of evolution undergone by most of humanity left Islam behind. To stand against the ideology that condones and perpetrates such atrocities is no more “phobic” than it is to oppose authoritarian ideologies such as national socialism or communism.
A frequent counterargument is that “that’s not real Islam”. Right. The Taliban, that is denying Afghan women education, that has brought back stoning for adultery—that’s not real Islam; In Iran, they are not practicing real Islam when they rape, torture, mutilate, and imprison women for refusing to wear the hijab or execute victims of rape; Ayatollah Khomeini wasn’t practicing real Islam when he issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie; ISIS, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not really Islamist, and neither were the suicide bombers in Madrid, London, or Brussels; and they certainly don’t practice real Islam in Pakistan... Following this logic, Nazi Germany wasn’t really fascist, and the Soviet Union wasn’t really communist. Unhappy accidents, nothing more. That doesn’t quite work, at least not for the millions of their victims.
It is possible that in a few thousand years, the time will come, when Islam will have evolved past its thirst for blood and its appetite for inhumane and inhuman violence. Perhaps the time will come when Islam has risen above mob instincts to accept, the way many societies have, that people who believe or practice different things need not be thrown from the rooftops to their deaths. When that happens, then we could revisit the question of our attitude to Islam. (Perhaps one feature distinguishing a religion from an ideology is the ability of the former to evolve). Paradoxically, the litmus test for the success of such an evolution will be the freedom to openly declare one’s opposition to Islam, or otherwise criticize it, without the fear of being accused of Islamophobia, of being burned alive, or mowed down with machine guns in broad daylight for drawing cartoons of Mohammed. In other words, we can revisit our attitudes to Islam when it becomes as safe to proclaim that one is not a Muslim as it was for Bertrand Russel to proclaim that he was not a Christian. Only then, and no sooner.
Of course, one mustn’t become the evil one purports to fight. If your idea of fighting communism aligns with that of McCarthy, if your idea of fighting Islamists is to attack Muslim women on the streets of Western cities for wearing a hijab or to burn down Muslim businesses and places of worship in the West, then you are really no different.
As I was preparing this piece, a very good article dealing with Christianity and its flaws, very much in the spirit of Bertrand Russel, came out in Quillet.
Perhaps the most infamous instance was the notorious Jedwabne pogrom carried out by the Poles on July the 10th, 1941. See also, J. T. Gross, Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton University Press, 2001.
Kaneva, A. N. UkhtPechLag: 1929-1938.
One of the guards and one of the inmates related a story of a group of inmates burned alive inside a barrack at Ukhtarka, a river in the region, the sight of many of the mass executions. For more information, see Kashketin executions.
The Kashketin executions are described in second volume of The Gulag Archipelago (Part III, Chapter 13, of the Thomas P. Whitney translation). Interestingly, in Chapter 2 of the same volume, Solzhenitsyn describes another incident of GULAG inmates being burned alive, also in Ukhta, although he notes some difficulty in believing that story. However, he expresses no such difficulties when he shares, at the end of Chapter 3, the story of the UkhtPechLag inmates being buried alive, the final macabre chord in the history of Kashketin executions…