Andrew Bostom Islam

ANDREW BOSTOM: TIME TO END THE CHARADE AND CALL IT JUST ISLAM…….

Sunni meets Shiia, but it’s still Islam

The Tundra Tabloids, as most who read these pages know, confronted the OIC’s secretary-general, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, when he came to Helsinki. In a seminar sponsored by UPI-FIIFA, Ihsanoglu, made the following statement to a question concerning what can be done about “Islamism”:
“I don’t know what you mean by eh…this person asked me, “What is the alternative to Islamism?” I don’t know anything called Islamism, I know Islam, in fact I don’t know what Islamism is.”
This is the very essence of what Dr.Andrew Bostom describes in his most recent article posted on his blog, which dissolves the notion behind the West’s use of the euphemism of “Islamism”. Any Muslim leader will tell you that there is no such thing as Islamism, moderate Islam, hardline Islam, extremist Islam, radical Islam, just Islam, nothing more. KGS

Vía Atlas Shrugs

Islamism or Islam?—Islamist or Islamic?

November 12th, 2009 by Andrew Bostom

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan (with his colleague, Iranian President Ahmadinejad): “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it”
During the autumn of 1843, in the heart of Istanbul, Turkey, Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat, witnessed the punishment mandated by the Shari’a, i.e., Islamic Law for apostasizing from Islam. He described this abhorrent spectacle as follows:
“An Armenian who had embraced Islamism [emphasis added] had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was condemned to death according to the Mohammedan [Islamic] law. His execution took place, accompanied by details of studied insult and indignity directed against Christianity and Europeans in general. The corpse was exposed in one of the most public and frequented places in Stamboul [Istanbul], and the head, which had been severed from the body, was placed upon it, covered by a European hat.”
Layard’s narrative demonstrates how in mid-19th century parlance, “Islamism” and “Islam” were synonymous, and meant to be equivalent to “Catholicism,” “Protestantism,” and “Judaism”—not to “radical” or “fundamentalist” sects of any of these religions. Moreover, through at least the mid-1950s, scholars devoted to the formal study of Islamic doctrine and history were still referred to as “Islamists.”
Turkey’s current Prime Minister Erdogan, commenting in August, 2007 on the term “moderate Islam,” frequently used in the West to describe his ruling political party, the AKP, stated, “These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”
Erdogan’s displeasure is ironic, even somewhat humorous, given the contemporary Western apologetic obsession to recast the terms “Islamism,” and “Islamist,” to denote, exclusively, “radical” or “immoderate” Islam, and its adherents. But the irony of Erdogan’s ire aside, artificial distinctions between “Islamism” and Islam, “Islamist” and Islamic are logically incoherent, obfuscating irrefragable truths about living Islamic dogma, and its modern manifestations.
The 1990 Cairo Declaration, or “Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam”—not Islamism—was drafted and ratified by all the Muslim member nations of the Organization of the Islamic—not Islamist—Conference (OIC), a 57 state collective including every Islamic nation on earth. The OIC, currently headed by Turkey’s Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, thus represents the entire Muslim ummah (or global community), and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations.
Read it all here.

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