Is Islam irreconcilably anti-American?
Like all forbidden questions, it must be asked. For if Islam is irreconcilably anti-American, we had better be prepared to act before, not after, its ascendancy in American politics places it in a position of unconstitutional political power.
Our nation was founded on the principle of liberty. Prominent among our freedoms is that of religion. The Founders were religiously diverse, but not so diverse as to include, among themselves, religions outside the Jewish and Christian traditions.
Hindu-Buddhist writings had no influence on the authors of the Federalist Papers. More than that, today’s exotic interpretations of religious freedom were not written into the founding documents. Yoga, Wicca, and even native American (Indians) traditions contributed nothing substantial. Most importantly, anti-Christian philosophies such as vehement atheism were anathema. No doubt, the very suggestion of Satanism would have been abhorred had it been raised.
It is one thing to permit false religions, but it is a very different thing to allow them to infect the culture and our political structures. Even though Satanism is permitted, no practice of human sacrifice, no matter how sincerely held as a religious belief, is permitted. Even polygamy as a religious doctrine is forbidden, and the territory of Utah was not admitted as a state until its Mormon inhabitants relinquished it.
There is no precedent for permitting any and all claimants to be licensed under the First Amendment. What about Islam?
Few Americans understand the central doctrines of the Muslim religion. Those doctrines include certain teachings that would be illegal to practice in the United States. Polygamy is one, and the tenets of sharia law introduce many more.
Beyond the official doctrines of Islam, however, there are cultural practices that are unambiguously un-American. An underreported practice involves arranged marriages, which, if a small child refuses to obey, often result in the murder of the child by her own parents and brothers. In the Middle East, these murders may be committed in public, to the applause of onlookers, without legal penalty.
According to a Fox News report, two Muslim parents of a seventeen-year-old girl are accused of trying to send her to Iraq to marry an older man whom she has never met, or failing that, to kill her.
Ihsan Ali, 44, and his 40-year-old wife, the victim's mother, Zahraa Ali, are charged with second-degree attempted murder, second-degree attempted kidnapping, first-degree attempted kidnapping, and second-degree domestic violence assault in Thurston County [Wash.].
Though it is most certainly true that not all Muslim parents are murderously radical, there can be no doubt that the cultural influences of Islam are present in American Islamic communities and organizations. Those influences are not simply academic.
We have all heard that some Christians are secular-minded, “go to church on Sunday” types who have no deeply held Christian beliefs. Undoubtedly, there are many mosque-attending Muslims who are much the same regarding Islam, paying lip service but eating and drinking in violation of the Koran when they can avoid the opprobrium of fellow Muslims.
Indeed, there are some mosques in the U.S. in which imams and worshipers actively cooperate with American authorities in detecting Islamic extremists and thwarting them. Hooray.
But there are polls that indicate that even Muslims who would never resort to religious violence, nevertheless quietly applaud those who do. There are also those who bow to peer pressure and strongly discourage their offspring from assimilating into American society and culture.
It is in such cases that so-called “honor killings” may occur, almost always of females, usually daughters. This is taking the concept of family honor to a lethal extreme. Muslim daughters must behave in a certain manner (what would the Muslim neighbors think?), or be killed to restore the family’s honor. It has a disturbing degree of sympathy among too many Muslims and, most disturbingly of all, among non-Muslim multiculturalists who say we should not interfere. “Who are we to say that they are wrong?”
Unfortunately, there is a strong Muslim presence in certain communities, in which assimilation into American culture is resisted, often with religious fervor. Europe has a similar and growing problem.
The United States Constitution has proven resilient, but it has not been without its crises. Introduction into our nation, our culture, and our laws of a foreign tradition that the Founders would have rejected bears with it the promise of a future crisis for which we should make ourselves ready. If it catches us unprepared, we will wake up one morning to discover that in some communities, sharia law is enforceable, and the U.S. Constitution is not.
