A Call to All Muslims — Will You Take the Open Society Test?

The Nine Statements That, Until Muslims Accept Them, We Will Never Have Peace

After each killing in the name of the Prophet, the same formulaic mass is heard. It was just a few bad apples. Soon, someone who has often never read the Hadith or Koran will be summoned as an expert on Islamic theology to hector anyone who dares suggest that the stated reason the offending Muslim offered for their actions might be taken at face value.

The equation of Islam equaling peace is asserted; we nod timidly, terrified of being called Islamophobic, terrified of questioning the religion that the killers just told us they had acted in the name of.

It is truly madness.

We are told to keep our gaze fixed on the same crude moral and political puppetry - even though the strings are obvious and the characters all speak with one voice, we must treat the show as if it were a documentary.

If we glance sideways or comment on the puppet strings, we commit a modern hearsay based not on scripture but on cowardice and fear.

Our actions are thoughtless; they not only deny the obvious, but refuse to look at what is before us.

It is also a slight against those Muslims who have looked, and who discovered that looking can get you isolated, threatened, or forced to hire security to walk in public.

We can concede that Muslims are not a single mind, that millions in the West already live as ordinary citizens, and that a Muslim murderer does not get to copyright a civilization. All of that is true. None of it is the test.

The famous philosopher Karl Popper’s point about the open society was never a hymn to political correctness or emotionalism. It was a distinction: a society that can criticize its own foundations and let people leave them is superior to a society that treats criticism as contamination and exit as treason.

The West does not need another amateur dissection of Islam. We don’t need more central casting sycophants like Mark Carney grovelling before a Muslim audience - for votes - and telling us that Muslim values are Canadian values.

What we must have is a public standard for what a Muslim in a liberal country must be prepared to say.

That standard is the Open Society Test. It is not a demand that anyone become an atheist or switch religions.

Where are the Muslims willing to affirm the Open Society Test? I am waiting.

Here are the nine articles that Muslims must affirm if they wish to be part of an Open Society.

1. I am a Muslim, and no one should be punished for leaving Islam.

If this sentence cannot be spoken, the rest is unused mental furniture. A religion that claims the conscience in perpetuity and treats departure as a crime against God and community is a property claim on a mind.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who announced her apostasy, has spent two decades moving under armed protection. After Theo van Gogh was shot and almost had his head cut off on an Amsterdam street for the film they made together, a letter promising her the same end was pinned to his body with a knife. She was still walking into rooms with a guard in 2026, and the Dutch state once spent millions a year keeping her alive.

Salman Rushdie was not a convert in the pamphlet sense; he was born into a Muslim family and then wrote a novel. For that, a head of state issued a murder warrant in 1989; a bounty followed, and the open society discovered that a book could put a man into hiding for a decade under British protection.

The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death. Other translators and publishers were attacked. In 2022, after Rushdie had begun to live as though the warrant was forgotten, a man rushed a stage in New York and tried to finish the job; Rushdie lost an eye. The edict had outlived the ayatollah who signed it.

Nor are they a pair of unlucky celebrities. Lars Vilks spent fourteen years under police protection for a drawing and died with his bodyguards in a car crash. Kurt Westergaard survived an axe at his door. Mina Ahadi, Hamed Abdel-Samad, Ehsan Jami, Bassam Tibi, and other reformers or ex-Muslims across Europe have required police details for saying in Berlin or Amsterdam what a citizen is supposed to be free to say in a café or even shout on a street corner.

This is the first article because it is the one that still costs flesh. If leaving is punishable, there is no choice and never could be. If a novelist needs a security detail, an apostate needs a safe house, and a cartoonist needs a panic room, then the peace being advertised is a protection racket that doesn’t involve someone having to say it would be a shame if something bad happened to you.

The Open Society Test begins here: say that no one — daughter, son, neighbour, stranger — should be hunted for walking away.

2. I am a Muslim, and civil law must take precedence over religious law.

I am not saying this cannot happen in conversation. People can have private opinions. But I am speaking of precedence. The instant a parallel jurisdiction is conceded — where family rulings that discount a woman’s word, shrink her inheritance, or treat her as a transferable ward are permitted — it means the Muslim is like a renter who on the first day of occupancy decides that he can rewrite the lease.

3. I am a Muslim, and women must possess the same rights before the law — and the same freedom, dignity, and opportunity in society — as men.

This is not a tribal chant about the West. It is the refusal to treat half of humanity as a doctrinal inconvenience. Male guardianship, unequal testimony, polygyny reserved as a man’s option, the public management of female skin — these are not heritage displays. They are a politics of the body. A community that cannot say women are legal equals has already chosen its century.

4. I am a Muslim, and gay people possess the same civil rights that I do.

No one is asking for a fatwa demanding Muslims offer congratulations for gay marriages or wear pride pins. No Muslim attendance is required at a pride parade full of half-naked, pot-bellied, middle-aged men who love to walk in step down our streets one day of the year.

The civic point, still though, is blunt: the state is not a purity board for adults' bedrooms. If the text cannot endure that, it does not acquire legal legitimacy.

5. I am a Muslim, and criticism of my religion is not violence against me. My beliefs are entitled to legal protection; they are not entitled to immunity from scrutiny, satire, disagreement, or offence.

Here is the great semantic fraud of the age: turning argument into assault. Contrary opinion is not violence. A conviction that cannot survive a joke is not a conviction; it is an implicit threat.

Legal protection means you may worship, publish, assemble, and be free of official persecution. It does not mean the rest of us must genuflect before a perfect book, a perfect man, or a history recast as an unbroken compliment.

We must have no more like Samuel Paty. In France he made every effort to have a sober classroom discussion about drawings of Mohammed - he did not show them - and he was beheaded by a zealot who thought his bloody hands were the hands of God.

As a professor, I was fired, and I should be thankful I wasn’t murdered, after the inchoate rage spewed out from faculty, management and students after I told a man in Pakistan calling for the destruction of Israel that Hamas was historically linked to the Nazis and - notably - that if he stood with Hamas, he stood with the Nazis.

The shrieking and pearl-clutching of the Muslim Students Association and a Muslim professor who made his point by publicly repeating the worst Nazi slanders of Jews was deafening.

6. I am a Muslim, and I respect the right of every free person to criticize my religion, to reject it, to satirize it, and even to publish or display drawings of Muhammad. I may answer with words, argument, persuasion, or peaceful protest — but never with threats, intimidation, or violence.

The cartoon is the test because it is trivial. Ink. If ink is war, the faith has declared war on everyone else's ordinary freedoms. The adult reply to a drawing is another drawing, a sermon, a letter to the editor, a shrug. The other reply has been tried, and we remember the murdered more clearly than we remember the explanations.

Any sky daddy needs to be big enough to deal with criticism or a cartoon.

7. I am a Muslim, and no grievance — historical, political, or religious — justifies antisemitism, intimidation, or violence.

The oldest hatred does not become an analysis because it now arrives with a flag and a reading list. Occupation does not license a pogrom in a European street. Medieval wars do not license a knife in a modern city. “Zionist” is not an incantation that turns a mob into a faculty meeting. A politics that requires Jews as its organizing principle is not a politics. It is a relapse.

8. I am a Muslim, and I reject hatred of the Jew as a category, and I will live in peace with the Jew as neighbour and fellow citizen — not as an enemy assigned to me by scripture.

This is not a restatement of the seventh article. Article Seven forbids using grievance as an excuse for violence. This one demands something much harder: an actual renunciation of the specific religious material that keeps regenerating the grievance in the first place.

Hamas’ founding 1988 charter does not merely announce a territorial dispute; its seventh article quotes, as scripture, a hadith recorded in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, in which the stones and trees themselves will call out on the Day of Judgment to expose a Jew hiding behind them — every tree but the gharqad, which alone will stay silent and let him live.

In 2017, Hamas issued a revised document that swapped “Jew” for “Zionist” throughout and announced that its quarrel was with the Zionist project rather than with Jews because of their religion. It was a weak semantic contortion that convinced nobody. The movement never bothered to complete it by actually repudiating the 1988 charter, which, by its own officials’ account, remains on the shelf as a historical record of the movement’s past rather than a text formally torn up.

9. I am a Muslim, and integration is not humiliation. Equality is not persecution. Criticism is not hatred. Reform is not betrayal.

This is the lexicon that has been turned on its head. Asking a citizen to accept an open society does not produce injury. Giving his daughter the same legal personhood as his son is not persecuting him. To laugh at a prophet is not to hunt a people. To say a medieval penalty must die is not to leave the faith. It is to refuse to make other people die for it.

The Open Society Test does not require the unbeliever to leave their religion, and that is its virtue. For a generation, the West has outsourced its spine to people who treat every atrocity as a public-relations problem and every demand for reciprocity as a hate crime.

It is strange how a secular mind that will mock Rome by reflex discovers, when the subject is Islam, a sudden piety about lived experience and community cohesion. Cohesion around what? Around the right to leave? Around the equality of women? Around the legality of a cartoon? Around a Jew’s right to drive down a road and not have his mirror ripped off because he was wearing a kippa?

There are Muslims who already pass this test and do not need a slogan to do it. They are not the problem.

The repetition of the phrase by Muslims and non-Muslims that “This is not Islam” is an argument with a foundation built on air. Our society's foundation must be the bedrock of a committment to openness.

Print the articles. Ask public men to read them. Ask imams to sign them. Ask parties that hunt the vote whether they agree. Those who can say them are fellow citizens in the only sense that matters.

Those who cannot have told you, with a clarity no sensitivity training can improve, that they want the shelter of an open society without accepting its conditions.

That is not a conclusion about God. It is a conclusion built on the idea that we must not be too cowardly to stand up for an open society.

But we must stiffen our backs on this - it is past time the West stopped asking permission to remain an open society.