After every massacre offered up in the name of the Prophet, the same cheap mass is said. A minister appears. A community leader appears. A commentator who has never sat with the Hadith long enough to be embarrassed by it appears. They announce that the killers have nothing to do with Islam, that Islam is peace, that the real wound is Islamophobia, and that the proper subject of police work is the vocabulary of the living. Rinse and repeat.
The corpses are treated as a branding error. The theory on offer is that a faith whose mainstream legal traditions still treat apostasy as a capital offence, blasphemy as an injury to be avenged, and unbelief as a civic disability is only accidentally adjacent to the men who take those traditions seriously.
This is not thought. It is a refusal to look. It is also a slight against those Muslims who have looked, and who discovered that looking can get you isolated, threatened, or worse.
We can argue about origins until the stacks collapse. We can concede, because it is true, that Muslims are not a single mind, that millions in the West already live as ordinary citizens, and that the murderer does not get to copyright a civilization. All of that is true. None of it is the test.
Karl Popper’s point about the open society was never a hymn to niceness. It was a distinction: a society that can criticize its own foundations and let people leave them, against a society that treats criticism as contamination and exit as treason.
The West does not need another amateur dissection of what Islam really is. It needs a public standard for what a Muslim in a liberal country must be prepared to say without a committee of the pious standing behind the curtain.
That standard is the Open Society Test. It is not a demand that anyone become an atheist. It demands that the closed system stop at the courthouse door.
Where are the Muslims willing to affirm the Open Society Test? I am waiting. Here are the eleven:
I am a Muslim, and no one should be punished for leaving Islam.
If this sentence cannot be spoken, the rest is furniture. A religion that claims the conscience in perpetuity, and treats departure as a crime against God and community, is not a private taste. It is a property claim on a mind. The major schools of classical jurisprudence did not stumble into this; they wrote it down.
A Western Muslim who will not disown the penalty has already ranked the codes. The right of exit is the first right of an open society. Without it, every other liberty is rented.
And here the religion of peace acquires its bodyguards. There is no honest census of the people who require permanent security for the crime of leaving, mocking, or even editing Islam, because most of them live without famous names and would prefer to keep breathing. But the public cases are not a rumour.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who announced her apostasy and then wrote as if women were not merely a theological footnote, has spent two decades moving under armed protection. After Theo van Gogh was shot and nearly beheaded 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 were an antique, 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. A Henry Jackson Society survey could already list dozens of people of Muslim background in Europe who had been threatened for speech, and the list was never going to be complete, because completeness would require the frightened to raise their hands.
This is the first article because it is the one that still costs flesh. If leaving is punishable, choice is a slogan. 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 with better stationery. The Open Society Test begins here: say that no one — daughter, son, neighbour, stranger — should be hunted for walking away.
I am a Muslim, and civil law must take precedence over religious law.
Not in conversation with. Not as far as faith allows. Precedence. The instant a parallel jurisdiction is conceded — family rulings that discount a woman’s word, shrink her inheritance, or treat her as a transferable ward — the republic has agreed to be a landlord with a tenant who rewrites the lease. Keep your prayers. Do not keep a veto.
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.
I am a Muslim, and gay people possess the same civil rights that I do.
No one is asking for a fatwa of congratulations. The civic point is blunt: the state is not a purity board for adults' bedrooms. If the text cannot endure that, the text does not get a police force.
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: the conversion of argument into assault. A conviction that cannot survive a joke is not a conviction; it is a protection racket. 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.
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.
I am a Muslim, and terrorism committed in Islam’s name must be confronted intellectually and theologically, not merely condemned ceremonially after innocent people have died.
The press conference of sorrow is inexpensive; it costs nothing to denounce murder once murder has already made the case. What costs something is to name the doctrines the killer did not invent — the traditions about the apostate, the blasphemer, the combatant, the hypocrite, the Jew. If those cannot be specified and rejected, the condemnation is weather.
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.
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 eighth article. Article Eight forbids using grievance as an excuse for violence. This one demands something the record shows is considerably harder to obtain: 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. That is not a metaphor about settlements. It is an eschatology with an ethnic target, footnoted to the two most trusted collections in Sunni Islam.
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 — a useful rhetorical laundering that the movement never bothered to complete 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.
The record is not one-sided, and it belongs in the argument rather than out of it. Jewish communities under Muslim rule in medieval Andalusia and the Ottoman world were taxed and legally subordinate as dhimmis, yet frequently fared better than their counterparts who endured expulsion, forced conversion, and pogrom across contemporary Christian Europe. That history is real.
But nostalgia for medieval toleration is not a substitute for an unconditional, contemporary renunciation of the specific modern material — charters, sermons, textbooks, telethons — that still recruits a fourteen-century-old hadith into a live political program. Say that the Jew is not the enemy scripture promised you. Say it without the word Zionist doing the euphemistic work that “immigrant” sometimes does for other, older words. Then the article on civil law outranking religious law has something to actually mean, because it will have been tested against the one grievance history shows is hardest to give up.
I am a Muslim, and the laws of the democratic country in which I live take precedence over any religious code.
Yes, this repeats an earlier article. Some nails need hitting twice. Dual loyalty is not a smear when a man tells you that God’s statute book outranks the parliament he votes in. The compact is simple: one law, publicly made, equally applied. If that is bigotry, then so is every constitution worth the name.
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 stood on its head. Asking a citizen to accept an open society is not to grind him. To give his daughter the same legal personhood as his son is not to persecute 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 become an exegete, 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 — a snobbery so refined it looks like kindness, the secular mind that will mock Rome by reflex and then discover, 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 walk down a street that isn’t named for the hadith about the tree that wouldn’t hide him?
There are Muslims who already pass this test and do not need a slogan to do it. They are not the problem. The problem is the permission structure that treats their courage as optional and the theocrat’s veto as authenticity. The problem is the official who would rather scold the artist than the man who wants the artist dead. The problem is the superstition that a religion still unable to produce a loud, ordinary, unqualified repudiation of the apostasy penalty, the blasphemy riot, the second-class status of women, and the gharqad tree has nevertheless earned an exemption from the rules that bind every other doctrine.
“This is not Islam” is an argument about a vapour. “I am a Muslim, and no one should be punished for leaving” is an argument about a person — and about the people who still cannot appear in public without protection because someone, citing the noble peace, decided that leaving was a capital matter. 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 about us. And it is past time the West stopped asking permission to remain an open society.
100%
Timely, and well written.
It’ll be interesting to see how this essay is received in the Muslim world.
Assimilation is the key. Multiculturalism divides us.