As the Egyptian-born child of a Yemeni diplomat, Elham Manea
and her family traveled widely. But their move from Morocco
to Yemen, when Elham was a young teenager, stands out. She
compares it to time travel, leaving a free and 
modern
life for a place where women are veiled and public life is
gender segregated. She was told that art, music, poetry and
philosophy were forbidden, and that her new, true family of
sisters and brothers were other Muslims who believed all this.
She
was taught to ate," Jews in particular, and that it was
right to deceive infidels. When she was told that a husband
is God to his wife, that she would have to sacrifice her blood
family in favour of other true believers, she backed away.
She has been backing away ever since.
In The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism, her fourth
book in English, the University of Zurich political scientist,
author, activist and consultant offers a warning to the West.
In Manea's view, nonviolent Islamism is the basic building
block that leads to violent jihad. And our misreading of that
reality can lead to real harm.
If we continue cancelling politically incorrect ideas and
speech, continue vilifying dissent, and insisting upon the
infinite guilt of the West then, as Russell A. Berman writes
in the foreword to this work, "we should expect the real-world
consequences of this ideology soon to become clearer and rougher."
Manea believes that repressing dissent can easily turn into
repressive practices. Cancel culture may indeed be our Islamism.
Nonviolent Islamism's insidious nature is one of Manea's most
important points. Westerners have been hopelessly gullible
in their choice of smiling and patient Saudi-funded Muslim
Brotherhood/Salafi representatives as their go-to experts
on both Islam and Muslims.
"One cannot combat an ideology and fundamentalism by
working with the very groups that promote that ideology,"
she writes. Further, Western cultural relativism and doctrines
of multiculturalism has served us and freedom-loving Muslims
very, very poorly.
This
battle, she writes, is "the global challenge of the 21st
century."
Both hardcore and soft-core Islamism must be "challenged
and confronted . . .we need to dismantle the structures and
the system that spread(s) this ideology and its radicalized
form of Islam." That means we must adopt significant
changes in Islamic schools, mosques, youth groups and camps;
we must retrain paid imams who work in the prison system.
"Not only do we need to fight criminal organizations
such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. We must also deal with the nonviolent
form of Islamism: the ideology and its fundamentalist reading
of Islam . . . security measures . . . alone are futile. They
do not solve the problem. They do not tackle its roots or
structure."
Manea insists that Western governments must "fight them
as you fight your own fundamentalists, fascists, and racist
groups."
Following in Investigative Project on Terrorism Executive
Director Steve Emerson's footsteps, Manea's second important
point is her description throughout the book of how the Muslim
Brotherhood is structured and organized globally so that it
can indoctrinate successive generations into "radicalized
Islam" or hate ideology, the kind that leads to funding
and perpetrating violent jihad; gender segregation; closed
communities especially in the West; the veiling of women,
child marriage; infidel hatred, especially Jew-hatred, etc.
She calls for defunding all such groups. "Stop mainstreaming
(them). Hold them accountable."
Manea understands and criticizes how Islamists operate in
the West. What begins as "reasonable requests for religious
accommodations" soon entails the following:
"Muslim pupils and students need to eat halal food
in the cafeteria. They need a prayer room in the school.
They want to leave classes during the times of prayer throughout
the day and on Fridays. They organize ritual foot washings
in the bathrooms. For swimming classes, the genders must
be segregated and girls must wear a burkini. School trips
are frowned upon or reduced... to just one to ensure girls
would participate. Classes should also be gender segregated.
Muslim pupils are not allowed to play with non-Muslim pupils
in the playground and vice versa."
Her third important point is that Muslims themselves are on
the front lines of this battle against Islamist fascism. Muslim-on-Muslim
violence and warfare yields a far higher body count than does
Muslim-on-infidel warfare. Muslims are blowing up Muslim civilians,
including women, children, and the elderly in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and in other Muslim-majority
countries.
Muslims are the first victims—and they are also the
bravest of dissenters who cannot understand why Westerners,
who already live in greater freedom, do not support heroic
Muslim struggles against totalitarian fundamentalism in Muslim-majority
countries.
For example, the 2017 Marches of Muslim Imams against Terrorism
in Cologne, Germany and in Paris each attracted only 100 people.
Muslims with whom Manea spoke said they had their jobs, and
even their lives, threatened if they attended.
She provides examples of people who paid a price for challenging
fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran. Sheikh Mohammad
Abdulla Nasr, a religious scholar at Egypt's Al-Azhar, "spent
five years in prison for questioning the rationale behind
following the Sunna . . . which was written two hundred years
after the Prophet Mohammed's death." Mohamed Cheikh Ould
Mkhatir, a Mauritanian blogger, originally faced execution
and spent five years in prison for blasphemy for challenging
the Quranic basis for slavery, a practice which remains legal
in Mauritania. Only an international campaign may have stopped
his execution.
Black African slaves are still held captive by ethnic Arab
Muslims in Mauritania, Sudan, Libya and Algeria, by Boko Haram
in Nigeria. ISIS enslaved Yazidi girls and women, and held
slave auctions when they controlled territory in Iraq.
Ironically, according to Manea, Muslim scholars are blaming
Islamic texts and fundamentalist Muslim indoctrination and
practices for jihad even as Westerners are berating and blaming
themselves for colonialism and white racism as having led
to violent jihad. Such Westerners do not understand that Muslim
leaders in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia also perpetrated
these practices as well as practiced both religious and gender
apartheid.
Manea is now adding her voice to those of us, like Ibn Warraq,
Bat Ye'or, Zeyno Baran and Douglas Murray, who have been challenging
Islamism for years only to be ignored or defamed as racist
Islamophobes.
Most of these voices are either apostates, converts, secular
Muslims, or they are Jews or Christians. Although Manea happily
quotes atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, what makes
her unique is that, like Zuhdi Jasser and my dear friend Seyran
Ates, Manea is not a secularist. She is holding onto the possibility
that Islam as a religion can and must be reformed. In her
view, the way to do so is to follow the peaceful Meccan verses
of the Quran, and re-interpret or pay no mind to the war-like
Medinan verses.
Manea personally remembers a far more tolerant Muslim society
in Morocco, Egypt and Yemen, one in which women were not veiled
or segregated. She writes about a diversity among Muslims,
both in her lifetime and in times gone by, which she misses
and longs to see again.
Manea adds to the conversation by giving us recent examples
of how and why certain European governments have courted "the
Muslim (Islamist) vote": In the 1960s, Belgium's king
needed cheap oil, and in return, allowed for Saudi-funded
mosque-building and imam-training. Sweden's Social Democrats
lost elections, and their way back to power relied on a Muslim
voting bloc, especially immigrants, in exchange for protecting
a segregated life—and in the name of multicultural progress.
Manea, who has written about sharia law and women, has clarified
her position on the Islamic veil. Once, she did not know how
to reconcile freedom of religion with bans against it. Now,
she is absolutely clear that it is the sign and symbol of
political Islam. How one weans indoctrinated girls from wearing
the hijab or niqab is an open question. The fact that America's
Women's March romanticized the veil as a form of resistance
to racism was most disheartening to Manea—to me, too.
In
2007, I participated in the Secular Islam Summit in St. Petersburg,
Fla. It was organized by Austin Dacey and Ibn Warraq; I had
the honour of chairing the opening panel with participant
Tawfik Hamid, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The summit's declaration rejects Sharia courts, opposes penalties
for blasphemy or apostasy; seeks an end to female genital
mutilation, honour killing, and child marriage; and envisions
public discussions without coercion or intimidation. It states
in part:
We insist upon the separation of religion from state and
the observance of universal human rights.
We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance
in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies.
These values do not belong to the West or the East; they
are the common moral heritage of humankind.
We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called Islamophobia
in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation
when they violate human reason or rights.
Based on her book, Manea seems to agree with this declaration.
Perhaps it is time for someone just like her to call for another
gathering and to generate a new declaration to be signed by
Muslims who want a religious reformation of Islam; who believe
this can and must be done; and that it can only be done from
within, by Muslims themselves, who want a spiritual life,
who do not want to break entirely with whatever they prize
in religion, but who do want to denounce fundamentalism, totalitarianism,
infidel hatred, Muslim supremacism, Islamic racism, misogyny
etc.
Secularist Ayaan Hirsi Ali endorsed The Perils of Nonviolent
Islamism as "the book that had to be written on
political Islam . . . [and] a stirring wake-up call to policymakers
on what's really at stake in this conflict." In 2015,
Hirsi Ali called for an Islamic reformation. She wanted to
abolish sharia law and repudiate and nullify certain precepts
entirely. Hirsi Ali accepted the fact that most Muslims will
not leave Islam entirely and that women's rights, minority
rights, and the separation of religion and state may only
come about through a religious reformation.
Manea suggests that the more peaceful, less hateful Medinan
sura be relied upon for such a reformation; the later more
hostile and hateful Meccan sura must themselves be abrogated
or re-interpreted.
I asked my good friend and comrade-in-arms, Ibn Warraq, what
he thinks about dividing the Quran in half and keeping only
the peaceful Medinan sura, as Manea suggests. "I do not
accept the Islamic version of events and cannot take this
suggestion seriously," he said. "There is no such
thing as the Meccan vs the Medinan sura."
I am a religious Jew, albeit a very imperfect one. I would
not want to be totally parted from a religious life, socially,
ritually, but more important, intellectually. I would like
to see someone like Ibn Warraq and Hirsi Ali working together
with Manea to fight what Manea has, correctly, called "the
greatest battle of the 21st century."
Manea has written a moving and persuasive book. It is also
a brave and informative work, one which deserves a serious
readership.
