Is Bostom going wobbly?

(Note: See update with Andrew Bostom’s correction below.)

As I’ve said to Andrew Bostom himself, he does not write articles about Islam, he compiles vast collections of scholarly quotes about Islam, his compilation in today’s FrontPage Magazine being 3,200 words long. But that is not the major problem with this piece. The major problem is that after 3,200 words of scholarly quotes demonstrating the total program of Islam aimed at the construction of a world-wide caliphate under Islamic law and using the murder of innocents as a weapon, at the very end of the article Bostom, without any warning, turns around and quotes a former British jihadist named Hassan Butt who argues that Islam can change itself, poof, just like that, and get rid of its 1,400-year-old theology—in short, that Muslims, while remaining Muslims, can learn to stop “jihading” and love the West:

Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I’d like to term the Land of Co-existence. And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

I am shocked. Bostom’s consistent, passionately expressed opinion over the years has been that because of the divinely authorized and absolute nature of Islamic teachings, Islam cannot be reformed, and that the only “solution” to the Islam problem is that Muslims leave the faith and become apostates, like Bostom’s model former Muslim, Ibn Warraq. But now Bostom approvingly quotes the very type of pollyannish, escapist statement he has always contemptuously scorned, that Islam can somehow “refashion” its divinely authoritative and unchangeable doctrines so as to eliminate what is at the core of those doctrines—sharia and jihad. Is Bostom—one of the handful of principled scholarly Islam critics in the West, indeed, the most hard-line member of that tiny group—losing his nerve?

UPDATE: Andrew Bostom informs me that he did not intend to endorse either Butt’s statement that the West is a sphere of “co-existence” with Islam or his statement that Islamic doctrines can be reformulated. Dr. Bostom’s intention was rather to show that by calling for Islam to be reformulated, Butt was acknowledging that Islam in its existing form is indeed dangerous and unacceptable, a fact to which Western leaders such as Bush and Blair close their eyes. Bostom says he added the quote at the last second before the article was submitted and regrets the lack of clarity.

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Scott in PA writes:

Is Bostom going wobbly? I wouldn’t say so from that one quotation. I believe he’s quoting Hassan Butt because he’s one of the few “moderates” who does indeed blame Islamic theology for the history of violent jihad. Therefore, the theology itself must be “revised” and “refashioned.” (Personally, I think the chances of this happening are nil.) Hassan Butt stands in contrast to most Islamic apologists who are noted for saying that the “true” understanding of Islam is peaceful and that the violent jihadists are “misinterpreting” the canonical texts. This distinction is what Bostom hopes will “prove clarifying.”

LA replies:

But Bostom has always dismissed people who say that Islamic doctrine is the problem but that Islamic doctrine can be changed.

Ben W. writes:

Regarding Bostom’s approving quote of the Muslim moderate regarding the pacification of potential Jihadists “whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I’d like to term the Land of Co-existence.”

This presupposes that the West is a set of countries for unconstrained immigration (small or large) in which culture and race don’t matter as long as immigrants stay peaceful.

But what if America is NOT conceived to be a nation of inter-mingled cultures and races? Why would I care to have Muslim neighbors? Do I need images of Muslims in sight, the smells of their food before me, the architectures of their minarets in view? It does not depend on how peaceful one is if the culture is different that attacks my senses of sight and smell.

Is in fact America to be thought of as a “land of co-existence”? That is liberalism par excellence!

Ben W. continues:

I have a friend, whose neighborhood has been transformed by a large influx of Hindi families. His own family is constantly surrounded by this “foreign culture” such that they feel daily as if they are living in a foreign land. These Hindi neighbors are nice and polite (not Jihadists) but nevertheless everyone else is made to feel as if they have become foreigners in their own country.

From recent articles, I see that Californians have come to feel the same way with the massive influx of Mexicans.

Americans are becoming “strangers in a strange land.”

Peter H. writes:

It seems to me that this is another example of the “disconnect” you’ve written about previously, in which some authority on Islam presents the mountain of evidence that Islam is, essentially, jihad and sharia, then draws a conclusion that is much more benign, like “radical” Islam represents only 10-15 percent of Muslims or, in this case, that Islam can reform itself.

I certainly value Bostom’s contributions and hope he is not “going wobbly,” but his conclusion in this article is alarming.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 02, 2007 09:08 AM | Send