The argument has moved from the lecture hall to the campaign stage. Islam, its critics say, is incompatible with Western civilisation. It denies that every human being has equal dignity, it refuses freedom of conscience, and its adherents in the West are the vanguard of an “Islamisation” that will end with sharia replacing the constitution. One ex-Muslim debater put the first point in scriptural terms: the Quran calls unbelievers “the worst of creatures,” while the West holds that every person has intrinsic worth. Each claim can be tested against the Quran and against what Western Muslims do.
Human dignity
The Quran grounds human dignity in creation, and extends it to every descendant of Adam.
The verse uses the widest term available, banī Ādam (the children of Adam). Believer and unbeliever, Muslim and Jew, share the honour because they share the origin.
The phrase “worst of creatures” in 98:6 is a judgement on those who rejected the truth after it became clear to them, as the same chapter specifies (98:4), and it concerns their standing before God in the next life. The site’s article on the Quran and the Jews examines the verse in detail. A verdict about moral accountability before God leaves the dignity of 17:70 intact, in the same way that Christian teaching on the damnation of the unrepentant leaves the image of God in every person intact.
Equal justice
Equality before the law, the critic says, comes from Christianity and is foreign to Islam. The Quran commands justice with a rigour that reaches past every loyalty a person has.
The first verse overrides kinship and class. The second overrides enmity. Justice owed to one’s enemies is the hardest form of equality before the law, and the Quran commands it by name.
Freedom of conscience
Sūrat al-Baqarah 2:256 declares that there is no compulsion in religion. The harder question of apostasy law in Islamic legal history is treated at length in the site’s articles on apostasy and freedom and on apostasy in international law. For the question of citizenship, the relevant point is simpler. A Muslim living in a Western democracy is bound by the Quran to respect the religious choices of his neighbours, and by the law of his country to respect them in fact. The two obligations point in the same direction.
The covenant of citizenship
The Quran binds Muslims to the agreements they make.
A Muslim who accepts a visa, residence or citizenship enters an agreement with the society that grants it: to obey its laws and to live peaceably among its people. The Prophet warned that whoever kills a person living under a covenant with the Muslims will not smell the fragrance of Paradise (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3166). The covenant binds in both directions. On the Quran’s own terms, a Muslim who enters a Western country and then works to subvert its constitution breaks a promise God commanded him to keep.
| Principle | Verses | What they say |
|---|---|---|
| Human dignity | 17:70; 49:13 | God has honoured the children of Adam, and made peoples and tribes “so that you may know one another” |
| Equal justice | 4:135; 5:8 | Stand for justice “even against yourselves,” and do not let hatred of a people lead you to be unjust |
| Freedom of conscience | 2:256 | There is no compulsion in religion |
| Keeping covenants | 5:1; 17:34 | “Fulfil your contracts”; “fulfil every commitment” |
“Islamisation” and the Brotherhood memorandum
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others point to a 1991 memorandum written by Mohamed Akram, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, which spoke of destroying Western civilisation “from within.” The document is real and was entered as an exhibit in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial. Its standing is disputed: some researchers treat it as a strategic plan, others as one member’s proposal that never became policy. Either way it records the ambition of a political movement founded in Egypt in 1928, and it is fair to scrutinise any organisation that shares that ambition.
It cannot stand in for the Muslims of the West. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that 92 percent of American Muslims say they are proud to be American, and 89 percent say they are proud to be both Muslim and American. Four in five said they were satisfied with the way things were going in their lives. Those figures describe citizens who have made the covenant and mean to keep it.
Where the real disagreements lie
Some tensions are real. Muslims hold moral positions on sexuality, alcohol and family law that differ from prevailing Western opinion. So do many observant Christians and Jews, and liberal democracies exist precisely to let citizens who disagree on such questions live under one law. A Muslim who votes, pays taxes, obeys the law and argues for his convictions through the ballot is doing exactly what democracy asks of every citizen.
Hirsi Ali closes her story by saying that newcomers who want to become like Americans are welcome. The Quran asks the Muslim newcomer to keep his covenant and to deal justly with people who do not share his faith, every one of them a child of Adam whom God has honoured. On those terms the loyal Muslim citizen is the ordinary case, and the Quran is the reason.