Can Islam change?

Picture from 2024 in Yemen.

The conflict between Islam and the rest of the world is no accident, but it has been part of the religion since its founding. So, we should not expect the conflict to be something that will go away by itself. Aggressiveness against dissidents runs deep and requires drastic reforms to get rid of it. The question is whether there is any will to reform at all.

Rudyard Kipling’s well-known poetic stanza “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” need not be true, but significant changes are required and, above all, a willingness to meet.

In the West, thanks to the foundations of democratic society, the way is open for consensual solutions and coexistence. In the East and especially in Islamist-ruled countries, the conditions are the opposite.

This is mainly because the ideology of Islam is based on exclusion and a great deal of pathological jealousy of people who, for more than 1500 years, have been excluded from the Judeo-Christian community and inspired by the successes of Judaism and Christianity, Islam’s founders chose to hijack the theology, history, and portal figures of the two monotheistic ideologies and market everything that sprang from Islam, preaching that only Islam has the correct doctrine.

To succeed in spreading this message and gain a foothold among Arab-Semitic ethnic groups, the founders of Islam realized the importance of demanding above all three things from the worshipers of Islam: submission (Islam means submission), duty to spread Islam and fight Judaism. Certainly, the Quran raves about the children of Israel (45:16, 17:104, 2:47, 7:137), but the originators of Islam came up with the idea that the children of Israel no longer existed. What remained was the Jewish people, who would and must be fought at all costs.

However, the beginning of a different zeitgeist can be sensed in the “Abraham Accord” from 2020 between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. Saudi Arabia was on the same path, but when Iran, through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, staged the largest massacre of Jews, 7/10, since World War II, the Abraham Accord was put on hold.

The problem to this day is that the Quran’s falsification and incitement against Jews, and for that matter, also Christians, still form the foundation of Muslim believers. Unlike Jews and Christians, Muslims have not been allowed to undergo the Enlightenment purification bath away from totalitarian religious dogmas and legal systems.

As long as this (dis)order prevails, believing Muslims will fight against the rest of the world but also within the Muslim world when there is disagreement about the correct interpretation of the Quran and the hadiths, as well as ethnically cleansing all non-Muslim peoples from Arab countries. At the beginning of the 20th century, 40 percent of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. Today, there are less than 10 people. Historian Nathan Weinstock claims that even the Jews of Germany in 1939 were not as thoroughly “ethnically cleansed” as the Jews of the Arab-Muslim world.

Even the population of Christian origin in the Arab countries is greatly decimated.

The cure is tolerance, democracy and freedom under personal responsibility. Can the worshipers of Islam be convinced that Islam is not the correct doctrine but only one of many religious denominations and that religiosity belongs to the private sphere and has no place in the decision-making rooms of society?