Do We Really Want Any Criticism of Islam to be a Hate Crime?

I'm going to speak up while it's still legal.

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Allāhu Akbar—But to What End?

Religion has a body count. Christianity, now a haven of charity and forgiveness, was once a butcher’s block—crusades, witch pyres, and inquisitions that etched Torquemada’s name in blood. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, “Christianity’s early fanatics were as savage as any jihadist, their faith a bludgeon for conquest” (Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 2010, p. 234). Yet, through reformations, enlightenments, and secular struggles, it was tamed, its claws clipped by reason’s edge.

Islam, by contrast, remains a caged beast, its doctrine unyielding, its reformers crushed by theocratic steel. And the West? We’re paralysed, equating Christianity’s buried sins with Islam’s living ones in a craven spasm of moral equivalency.

This isn’t nuance; it’s fear—fear of the “Islamophobe” brand, fear of truth itself. We mutter platitudes while cities burn, betraying the reason we claim to worship.

The Religion Lab recently discovered that Islam is 30% spiritual, 40% conquest, and the rest a big lump of misogyny.

A crude formulation? Certainly. But a bludgeon, not a scalpel, is required when dogma's crust is centuries thick. Truth doesn’t glide in on silk; it kicks the door down with muddy boots, demanding we take a look.

The 30% Spiritual

Islam has a soul, and it’s no trifle. Millions pray five times daily, fast through Ramadan, and give alms with hearts cracked open to God. Their devotion feeds the hungry, moves the weeping, and weaves a moral tapestry. Sufi mystics, with their ecstatic dances, rival Blake’s visions, what theologian Seyyed Hossein Nasr calls “a spiritual path to divine unity” (The Heart of Islam, 2002, p. 45). This is real, undeniable, a wellspring of meaning. But sincerity is not an argument.

No amount of prayer or poetry can veil the truth: Islam’s doctrinal core, as wielded by its clerics, isn’t a quiet quest for truth but a dominion blueprint.

The 40% Conquest

Christianity was born among slaves and martyrs; Islam emerged from conquerors’ camps. Muhammad wasn’t just a prophet—he was a warlord, and his successors were not priests but generals. Within a century, Islamic caliphates stormed three continents, from Spain to India, not with pamphlets but with blades.

Historian Hugh Kennedy writes, “The early Islamic state was a military juggernaut, its expansion fueled by jihad as divine mandate” (The Great Arab Conquests, 2007, p. 66).

The Qur’an is blunt: over 100 verses urge fighting unbelievers. “Slay them wherever you find them” (2:191) isn’t “love thy neighbour.” Jihad, despite Western whitewashing, means holy war, not yoga or the self-improvement notes you scrawled in your Walmart notebook.

Bernard Lewis notes, “Jihad is a legal obligation, not a metaphor” (The Political Language of Islam, 1988, p. 72). From Tours to Vienna, Europe braced against this sacred imperialism. That’s not phobia—it’s history, stark and unyielding.

The Big Lump of Misogyny

Islam’s gender code flares like a torch at a witch hunt. Qur’an 4:34 greenlights wife-beating. A woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s. Sons inherit double what daughters receive. Saudi women gained driving rights in 2018; Iranian women can’t dance.

In Afghanistan and northern Nigeria, girls are barred from school by bullets, not ballots. This isn’t a rogue sect—it’s mainstream law, preached in mosques, printed in textbooks.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, writes, “Islam’s traditions chain women to a gendered prison” (Heretic, 2015, p. 112). The West had its patriarchs, but centuries of secular critique dragged it forward. Islam, claiming perfection from the start, resists. What can’t be questioned can’t be changed, and the cost is paid in bruises and barred classrooms.