Is ‘Extremist Islam’ a Recent Invention?

Many non-Muslims make confident but false claims about women’s rights in Islam. Some of these are tied to views of America’s long incursion in Iraq. There are claims that the United States fought in Iraq in part in order to champion women’s rights in Muslim countries. In fact, the United States went to war in Iraq not to champion women’s rights, but to bring down a dangerous despot, Saddam Hussein, who was in fact more secular than those who succeeded him, and thus more protective of women’s rights. Nor did the United States become the champion of women’s rights in Muslim countries after Saddam was gone. There was no attempt by the American government to make any Muslim country change its treatment of women. Not in Egypt, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Iran, nor in any other of the 50-odd Muslim-majority countries.

Then some Muslims insist that the woes of post-war Iraq are entirely due to the United States, is both unseemly and untrue. The inability of Sunni and Shi’a Arabs to create a successful democratic order is not America’s fault. Nor is the refusal of the Arabs in Iraq to offer the Iraqi Kurds the autonomy they deserve. Unused to democratic rule, and less interested in compromise because for their entire lives they have only seen outcomes where one side emerges the Victor and the other the Vanquished, the leaders now in Baghdad continue to haggle over power. Clearly the Sunnis, who had been favored under Saddam, are unwilling to permanently acquiesce in their loss of political power. And the Shi’a, who at long last possess the power their numbers — they are 65% of the Iraqi population — entitle them to, are unwilling to relinquish that power.

The claim has even been made that the Iraq war led to the creation of “extremist Islam.” Yet “extremist Islam” was not the result, but rather, the cause of the American war in Iraq. Had 9/11 not happened, there would have been no invasion of Iraq. It was believed, wrongly, that Saddam Hussein was a supporter of such terrorists. He was a monster, but ideologically quite different from those other monsters, Osama bin Laden of Al-Qaeda and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State. “Extremist Islam” did not need to be created by Unbelievers; it is as old as Islam itself; its texts are those of the Qur’an and Hadith. If any geopolitical act helped create Al-Qaeda, which in turn gave rise to the Islamic State, it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent creation of the Taliban in the Afghan refugee camps inside Pakistan. It was in Afghanistan that Al-Qaeda was first created by the “Arab Afghans” who had come to help drive out the infidel Russians.

In line with this is the claim that, aside from this extremism, Islam offers them a workable model for human progress. This strains credulity, given the record of wretchedness and despotism and staggering corruption, and civil conflict, even civil war, in so many Muslim countries. How does Islam, with its misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, anti-Infidel hatred, offer a workable model of human progress?

There are, indeed, differences among Muslims in the degree of fervor with which Qur’anic commandments are followed. But the Qur’anic verses are immutable; they remain the same for all Muslims, and for all time. There are differences, for example, in the kind of cover mandated in different Muslim countries. Iran requires the chador, and Saudi Arabia the niqab, and Afghanistan the burqa, while Tunisia and Lebanon require Muslim women to wear only the hijab. But the principle of the need for women to cover, and to dress modestly, remains everywhere applicable to Muslim women. The claim that there are Muslim communities where women enjoy equal rights with men is grossly exaggerated. It would be more accurate to say that Muslim women living in the West have the same rights, protected by the Infidel state, as do men. Muslim states may differ in the degree, but not in the fact, of unequal treatment of men and women.