Compare and Contrast

1:46 am, 1/18/06

Compare and Contrast
Teeming masses of dozens of Australians have converted to Islam, Tim Blair notes, , primarily for completely insane, cultish reasons.

"There are guidelines for everything. It shows you how to do the right thing, to be nice to people," said Mr Cremer, a former Catholic. "The Bible does this as well, but it has been translated too much, it has been tampered with too much.

"And one major difference with Islam is there is no hierarchy above me, no priests, no bishops, no Vatican.

"Imams (holy men) lead you in prayer. But beyond that it's just you and Allah. You're talking directly to God, that simplifies things."

Mr. Cremer, as a former Catholic, is apparently unaware that Christians who don't accept the Vatican hierarchy typically become "Protestant". Yet the real issue runs much deeper: There are, after all, guidelines for everything, which must be spelled out to Cremer, who, like the others, is apparently completely incapable of locating and aligning his own moral compass.

Mr Cremer was also attracted to rules such as Muslims donating a percentage of their annual income to the poor.

The fact that Islam was a lifestyle rather than a weekend event was appealing too, because it advocated morality in all areas, including politics and work, where he believed morality was sorely needed.

But the former Church of England follower chose to convert in 1999, two years after marrying her now-estranged Egyptian husband. She had admired aspects of the religion, such as its focus on family and respect for elders, which she saw while travelling in the Middle East in 1996.

"For instance, you wouldn't send your parents off to a nursing home. They're looked after in the home by their kids," she said. "(In Muslim homes) wives are doing the chores, while grandmothers are looking after the younger children. Whereas here, you might not see your family from one week to the next.

"If someone's sick within the community, the other girls will bring food to the house. If somebody has a baby, people will bring food and help clean the house.

"Before, I was a workaholic, six days a week, 10 hours a day," she said. "I drank alcohol . . . smoked cigarettes, about a pack-plus a day, partied very hard. Now my days are spent looking after my kids, helping the community, still taking Arabic, Koran and religion classes twice a week."

"And I like the feeling of one big family. We call each other brother and sister and we mean it," she said. "I also like the idea of kneeling five times a day and talking to God rather than once a week or once a year - we see praying as a privilege, not a duty."

"People say they want freedom, they want liberty," [Jeremy Meredith] said. "But the bottom line is people want to know what they can and can't do. They want rules, they want guidelines, something to believe in, something to follow.

"In Islam, there's a rule for absolutely everything - how I eat my food, how I go to the toilet, how I get married, how I lend money."

The tie that binds? These people are so profoundly stunted, in so many ways, that they had to find a religion to tell them what to do, rather than one that agreed with what they already believed. Quit smoking, help the poor, don't cheat people, talk to God, spend time with your family, don't shit where you eat or God will be angry with you. (I'm also a bit confused by the woman who believes that by converting to Islam, her family life will come to resemble that of rural Mediterranean cultures.)

This is a veritable profile in the kind of folks who usually end up locked in a mansion waiting for a comet. If they have to be told that God wants them to spend time with their children, maybe they need that kind of master-slave relationship with God, and good for them if they're happy that way, but "most people" would prefer that they kindly step the hell off.

The line is crossed in a profound way when you go from simply using religion to wind your own moral watch to when you believe that church and law are one in the same, the very core premise of Islamist thought. It is in this way that Islamist governments reduce human beings to worker ants serving the colony, just as with every other totalitarian state in history: There can be no legitimate social contract when one particular party to the agreement is backed by an intangible power against which there can be no recourse, and especially when that one party claims to have the sole capacity to interpret that power's intentions and desires.

There are miles of distance between Islam the Religion and Islamism the Political Ideology, no matter how much Islamist leaders try to blur the lines to seek shelter beneath the West's religious tolerance. One can indeed make the argument that to our libertarian, secular democracy which recognizes the sovereignty of the individual, the prohibitionist, dictatorial, slave-owning Islamists are quite rightly the Infidel and that what should seperate civilization from the barbarians is the core premises about humanity on which our societies are founded. It's an interesting philosophical angle. There is certainly no equivalency, and the proposition needs to be considered that it is morally indefensible, even actively sinister, to pretend that there is.