Iranian Lessons in Dhimmitude

After a report of local female MPs being advised to avoid shaking hands with an Iranian agricultural delegation, MPs Jo Luxton, Rino Tirikatene, and Kieran McAnulty (who has demonstrated some confusion about Islam in the past – see my essay on ‘Double the Quota’, July 2017) protested about such submission to Muslim will and their concomitant disregard for our customs.

Golriz Ghahraman is an Iranian-born member of parliament for the Green Party.  She responded to our MPs' protest by telling them – and us – not to interpret Islamic culture.  This supremacist conceit now burdens Ghahraman with a reputation of defending Islam against New Zealand’s interests – a crypto-Islamic adept. 

I emailed the following letter to her.

Dear Ms Ghahraman

Not a Muslim? Then Don't Try to Interpret Islamic Culture¹

Your opinion piece in Newshub (23 February) raises issues that go beyond the simple understanding of an alien culture.
Perhaps the most obvious is that when travellers enter a foreign country they should, as best they can, avoid behaviours that may offend the native population.  Visitors to Middle Eastern countries go to some lengths to accommodate this, with exceptions becoming rather newsworthy.  It should also apply to foreigners who visit New Zealand.  Of all religions, it seems members of Islam have the greatest difficulty in understanding this.  The failure of the Iranian delegation to accept Western mores in a Western country goes deeper than mere disrespect or ignorance, something I will refer to later. 

‘…don’t try to interpret Islamic culture' 

Imposing this form of taqlid² has its modern root in Said’s Orientalism, influenced by notions of cultural equivalence and primitivism.  It suggests that an objective and philological understanding of foreign cultures is not possible from an external world-viewpoint.  My understanding is that its equivalent does not occur in Islamic countries, where it will be dictated by the national and religious Weltanschauung.

I don’t want to overstate the arrogance of your injunction.  But when we see Muslims themselves denying the Islamicity of groups such as Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Hizb ut-Tahrir when their actions are evidentially based on Islamic scriptures and doctrines, is it not fair for us to ask “what gives them the right to interpret the Islamic culture of those groups”?  Moderate Muslims may well disagree with the fundamentalists, but this they must know – the fundamentalists are doctrinally correct and the moderates are, by those doctrines, heretical.  Moderate Islam cannot exist in parallel with Islam.  Examples that do are transient, fragmented, deracinated, disparate, and powerless against the lethal supremacy of Islam.  Arguments that Islam is diverse are not valid; differences that separate its sects, nationalities, tribes and cultures are overwhelmed by what unites it – the ummah, the Koran, tawhid, five pillars, and enmity for dar al-harb and the determination to bring its citizens into submission to the will of Allah. 

Iranian Culture

As an Iranian you may wish to defend your countrymen’s practices, but how much of these are Iranian and how much its Arabic Muslim conqueror’s?  Do you think Iran’s former Minister of Women’s Affairs Manaz Afkhami would have expected to meet such objections in what was Iran’s most progressive recent period?  You belong to a progressive political party yet you defend the behaviour of members of the world’s most conservative religion. Your party’s policies support diversity and respect for multiculturalism, yet you yourself appear to see this as one-way.  Your party seeks radical change in your host country yet you appear to not approve of modernisation in your own.

Islamic Culture

The message in your essay is mixed.  On the one hand you condemn the Iranian regime for oppression, yet you support practices of the same conservative Muslims who brought the regime to power.  Iran is an excellent example of the final phase of Islamic conquest.  It is a pseudo-democracy in an authoritarian theocratic state which persecutes religious minorities and executes apostates and homosexuals as required by its doctrines.  The government’s despotic nature is a consequence of Islam and its inability to rule a modern state with its seventh-century rules.  This same problem is manifest in almost every Muslim-majority state.

Compare this with Western nations.  On almost every index of civilisational values and moral principles, it is states based on Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman and liberal democratic principles that succeed.  Muslim-majority states are saved from being at the bottom by virtue of two things, oil revenues and African states.  There is good reason for this.  Islam is incapable of change.

The real issue for the West is the rapid introduction of Islamic values into Western countries.  The lack of reciprocal respect by both visiting and resident Muslims is an indication of Islamic supremacism, that the West must integrate with Islam.  To counter this, and to support Western values against the disproportionate criticism it is receiving from both outside and within, it is essential that people are aware of Islam’s fundamentally different moral code, and its incompatibility with Western ethics.

For this reason, it is vitally important that we in the West hold to account Islamic mores when they are imposed on the West.

Yours sincerely

Chris Slater

¹ http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2018/02/golriz-ghahraman-not-a-muslim-then-don-t-try-to-interpret-islamic-culture.html

² Arabic, the principle of emulation of those with religious authority, imitation, conformity to legal precedent. Contrasts with ijtihad, using critical thinking and independent judgment to solve problems.