Well, I must say I haven’t snapped as quick as Mr. Larison. I am constantly amazed by the visceral dislike that most on the Right have for fundamentalist Islam. Sure, a lot of it is about the acts of terror that have been done in its name but it seems to go beyond that. Why, is my question?

Why do good salt of the earth red-staters have such animus for these people? To me, it seems that one would see the similarities, rather than the differences, here. The terrorists are wicked fiends, of course, but your average Muslim strikes me as a man of faith and a man who takes his heritage, both ethnic and spiritual, seriously. These are people who try to live simply and by a code. They despise secularism and atheism and the chaos such ideas (or lack thereof) bring. Why do we hate them? ~A.C. Kleinheider

Hate seems like a blunt way to describe the attitude towards Muslims themselves. If I were asked why I vehemently reject and oppose the influence of Islam and the immigration of Muslims into Western countries, which is what the cartoon controversy in particular centers on, it would be fairly simple. Their piety is not ours, their tradition is not ours, and what counts for virtue among them is sometimes either of dubious value or is plainly vicious by the lights of our Faith. At bottom, Muslims are generally remarkable as the most hostile and destructive heretics the Faith has ever encountered. They are rather like militant Arians, and they tell falsehoods about Christ God and have routinely persecuted those who confess Him. I can understand why Muslims resent those who mock their “prophet.” How much more, then, should I resent and oppose those who mock and deny Christ’s Divinity? A few cartoons have dishonoured their prophet–their entire religion specifically mocks our God. Is that not enough reason to find so little “common ground”?

Dwelling in a sort of Babylon, it is always tempting to idealise the tribes of the desert and the mountains for their simple and generally more upright life. But, if I may be blunt now, to admire men because they live simply and “by a code” reminds me of a line from The Big Lebowski: “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos!” Confronted with men with no coherent or serious code of conduct, such as we see all around us, we are naturally going to recognise those peoples who at least have some reasonably serious code of conduct, whatever that code might require.

Muslims may be pious according to their religion, and most of them may be decent and honourable people, insofar as their religion allows them to be, and they may be good traditionalists in their tradition, all of which may have some real virtue (just as any truths Muslims do know are the workings of Truth Himself among them). However, much that constitutes their religious piety is either insufficient for piety as Christians would understand it or in error. Their doctrine is manifestly false. Muslims qua Muslims must adhere to a belief in a crude, fatalistic deity who does not call all to salvation but who misguides and punishes whom he will. Liberum arbitrium or autexousia as our tradition understands the concept of free will was ultimately rejected by orthodox Islamic theology. Synergy between man and God as the Orthodox Church understands it does not exist in Islamic thought. This has and would have to have a deadening, corrosive effect on the spirits of the people who receive such a teaching.

I cannot say that I hate Muslims (I hate and repudiate the falsehoods to which they submit themselves), and the few Muslims I have met personally fit the description of generally decent and upright people. But pointing up the decency of ordinary Muslims should only redouble opposition to Islam–these are human beings who deserve better, in a spiritual sense, than what they have received from their ancestors. I feel generally sorry for the hundreds of millions of people who groan under the oppression of an offensive cult that has mostly robbed the parts of the world it has inhabited of their cultural and spiritual treasures and suppressed even the appropriate exercise of reason in search of religious understanding. On the whole, the Islamic world has contributed to art, literature and architecture when it has in spite of its religion, and not really because of anything inherent or derived from the revelation itself. For those who understand reason as a means with which to glorify God and to understand what and why we believe, the Islamic marginalisation of reason in its own theological reflection and “exegesis” is a travesty of the created potential of man’s religious life. All of these may not be the reasons why others find Islam and Muslims offensive, but they form the core reasons for my definite and determined opposition.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once make an interesting observation in the concluding pages of Leftism Revisited, which referred to the exceedingly simple creeds, the Enlightenment and Islam, that rapidly took hold in large parts of the world very quickly. He noted their crude simplicity as evidence of their falsity and the actually anti-intellectual nature of both creeds. What the shahadah and “Sapere aude!” lack in sophistication they make up for in the ease with which they can be accepted as the trite slogans that they are. By comparison, the long, slow elaboration of the fullness of Christian doctrine over several centuries pointed to the profundity and richness of the tradition, both as matter of intellectual reflection and as a matter of truth.