January 13, 2009
Posted: 1:52 am
January 13, 2009

WELL-MEANING Western commentators make a grave error when they insist that Islamist terrorists want to drag the Muslim world back to the seventh century.

It's much worse than that.

Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and related fanatics really want to take their homelands (and the rest of the world) back beyond the era of Mohammed - to the grisly ancient days of human sacrifice.

The Prophet sought to purify the idolatrous devotions of his people, to do away with heartless desert cults. He felt the fervor of one living god and shared his illumination. The faith that arose in his wake had epochs of glory and eras of infamy, but it endured.

Now Islam is under assault from within, under attack from nominal Muslims who believe their vision supersedes that of Mohammed. They invoke the name of Allah but behave in the manner of ancient priests whose robes were drenched in blood.

What's the meaning of those beheading videos and suicide bombings, the slaughter of fellow Muslims and the exploitation by pagan cults, such as Hamas, of masses of the faithful as human shields? Why stone 13-year-old girls to death? What's this celebration of blood lust all about?

It's about the threatened collapse of the Middle East back into an age of human sacrifice - the precise sort of gruesome travesty the Prophet inveighed against.

Today's "Muslim" terrorists have nothing to do with Islam's golden ages. They belong to the days of winged devil-gods and stone altars stinking of clotted human blood.

The true enemies of Islam aren't Americans or Europeans or even Israelis, all of whom could not care less what backwater Middle Easterners call their god. The worst enemies of the Muslim faith are the butchers convinced that Allah demands that rivers of blood be shed to praise his name.

The reluctance of many Muslims to speak out against this travesty - this perversion - of their faith has various causes. In North America, it's largely the age-old fear of the new arrival, unsure of his place in a foreign society and wary of alienating members of his immigrant community.

In the greater Middle East, however, the compulsion to remain silent in the face of faith-fueled atrocities is a product of fatalism, of centuries of self-wrought failure and humiliation, and of self-loathing.

In its desert heartlands, Islam became a religion in which outward conformity was more important than inner faith. The obsession with behavioral norms has threatened all major religions from time to time, but Islam (the faith of "submission") became so prescriptive that it blocked the Middle East from joining the modern world.

Westerners care about how things work. Middle Easterners care about how things look.

One profound contrast has to do with dishonor. The archetypal Westerner feels dishonored when he shames his conscience, even if no one else learns of his misdeed. In the Middle East, shame is all about the public space - if no one knows what you did, there's no dishonor. Western literature is rich with figures torn by a crisis of conscience, but there is no Muslim Hamlet or Lord Jim.

Apologists for Islam Gone Wild love to cite the moral and intellectual grandeur of Muslim Cordoba and Granada. But the lasting legacy of Islam on the Mediterranean's shores was an obsession with public honor, with female chastity and macho pride. The inner spiritual life thrived north of the Alps. In the south, you just had to look good.

The outward forms prescribed by centuries of Islamic judges and scholars have become a paralyzing burden. Unable to adapt to the modern world, Middle Eastern Islam's a museum-piece faith. Muslims feel trapped, and they dare not explore why.

This feeling of being cornered, of being humiliated by competitor faiths that evolve and triumph, has led frustrated Muslims into an impulsive rejection of Mohammed's humane principles and purposes.

The blood-cult terrorists piling up corpses in tribute to their darkness-shrouded god have nothing - nothing - to do with the Prophet Mohammed. Their roots go far, far deeper, reaching down into a hellish past of priests with knives and serpent-infested temples.

Track down the terrorist video that made the rounds a few years back in which an executioner licks the blood of his victim from his knife.

That's not piety but cannibalism.

Ralph Peters keeps the Koran beside his reading chair, along with seven Bibles.