The context for this post has been brewing for quite some time. It came about because I have been spending time researching arguments about Islam to investigate some claims made about that particular religion (see this, for instance).
One of the concepts that people who don’t understand Islam is the notion of taqiyya. Simply put, it is the idea that a Muslim should conceal his faith when he is in a dangerous place surrounded by hostile people. The extension of this has been “Muslims are allowed to lie about their faith in order to impose Sharia law on us.”
Well, there’s a real problem with this argument. First off, the position is unassailable. If you claim Obama is a Muslim but is using taqiyya to deceive the American people, there’s no way to reason that argument out. If you believe he’s deceiving people, there’s no amount of evidence that can put you at ease. I can’t tell you you’re wrong, because it’s not a question of fact. It’s a question of belief.
Of course, there are obvious logical problems with this: if you assume like the author and narrator of the video linked above that all Muslims must strictly adhere to every word of their holy book, then you have to be willing to submit to the same scrutiny of your own belief system and leave no room for interpretation. This will take you down the path of treating women as property, stoning adulterers, and all other Old Testament tracks. If you instead say, “that was a different place and time,” well…. consider the portions of the Qur’an considering the verses in question. They were written during a time when Muslims were in a state of war against non-Muslims, and most Islamic scholars say that to take taqiyya out of the context of war is wrong.
There are segments of Islam today that believe they are in a war with America, but those are just segments. The war in Afghanistan is against that faction (a derivation of the Sunni Wahhabist tradition as formulated by al-Qutb in the 50s), but that isn’t all of Islam. They’re much like Conservative Fundamentalist Christians in terms of extremity of literal interpretation of scripture (e.g. Fred Phelps and his extended family).
But to take things literally is very much a cast of the first stone by Christians, and in that respect, we all fall short.