They did not fail to see it. They saw it, and they chose their pensions.

There is a particular kind of evil that does not announce itself. It does not kick down a door. It sits in a meeting, reads a file, understands exactly what the file means, and then decides that the safest thing for its own career is to do nothing. It signs off. It moves the paper to the bottom of the pile. It goes home to its own children, tucks them in, and sleeps.

I want to be careful at the very start, because this is a subject where anger is cheap and accuracy is expensive, and I would rather spend the expensive one. So let me tell you what I am not doing. I am not standing outside the gates with a torch shouting about people I have decided to hate. I am working from a document the British government commissioned, wrote, and published. Baroness Louise Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation is not a tabloid. It is not a campaign leaflet. It is the state, under oath to itself, describing what the state did. And what it describes is not incompetence. Incompetence is forgivable. What it describes is choice.

Hold those two things in your head, because the whole argument lives in the gap between them. Incompetence is when you try to protect a child and fail. Betrayal is when you understand the child is being raped and you decide that saying so is bad for community relations. One of those deserves sympathy. The other deserves a name.

The Casey audit gives it a name. It calls what happened in Rotherham, in the state’s own words, a record where the people responsible were, at best, turning a blind eye, and at worst, actively enabling abuse. Read that twice. Actively enabling. That is not my phrase. That is the audit’s assessment of a police force, written by the woman the government sent to find out the truth. And people like Tommy Robinson who the establishment locked away in solitary confinement without a proper trial and without due process for daring to expose this Rape Gang scandal that the government was desperate to cover up.

I keep returning to one number, because it is the number that ends every excuse. In Rotherham, the independent police complaints process eventually examined 265 separate allegations made by more than fifty complainants about how the police handled child sexual exploitation. Two hundred and sixty-five. And after all of it, after the years and the investigations and the eight-year inquiry that followed, the count of officers who lost their jobs was zero. Not one. The Police and Crime Commissioner himself said the process had failed to identify any individual accountability, and that as a result it lets down victims and survivors. But what about corporate accountability or culpability? What about obligations and duties to the public? What about your oaths of office? Is no one accountable simply because you all are guilty?

You cannot get to zero by accident. Accident produces a scatter. Some sackings, some demotions, some quiet retirements, some exonerations. Zero is a pattern. Zero is what a system produces when the system has decided in advance that no one will be held to account, because holding someone to account would mean admitting what was allowed to happen, and admitting what was allowed to happen would damage the institution. So the institution protected itself. It protected itself with the bodies of children.

The oath was the whole point

Every one of these people took on a duty. Not a vague, ambient, we-are-all-responsible duty. A specific one. A police officer swears to serve with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, to protect life and property. A council places its most vulnerable children, by law, into its own direct care, and becomes what the law actually calls the corporate parent. A social worker holds a statutory duty to safeguard. A prosecutor has a duty to bring charges without fear or favour. These are not feelings. They are obligations with a signature underneath them.

And here is the thing about a duty. The whole reason it exists is for the hard day. Nobody needs an oath to do the easy thing. You do not need to swear a solemn promise to help a child who is easy to help, who comes from a stable home, whose parents will show up at the station and make a noise. The oath is there precisely for the child nobody will make a noise about. The girl in care. The girl who has gone missing eleven times. The girl who is, in the language the audit condemns, treated as a difficult teenager rather than a raped child. The oath exists for her, or it exists for nothing.

That is what makes this a betrayal rather than a tragedy. A tragedy is when the storm is bigger than the wall. A betrayal is when the people paid to be the wall step aside and let the water through because standing firm would have cost them something. And the audit is painfully clear about what it would have cost them. It would have cost them the discomfort of recording an uncomfortable truth. It would have cost them a difficult conversation about community cohesion. It would have cost them the risk of an accusation. Set that price against what the children paid, and you understand the exact exchange rate these officials worked with. Their mild discomfort was worth more to them than a child’s body.

The careerist in the meeting

I want you to picture one person, because systems are made of persons and the word system is where accountability goes to hide. Picture the official in the meeting. Not a monster. That is the point. A monster would be easier. Picture an ordinary, mortgaged, middle-managed human being with a pension three years off and a promotion in view, sitting in front of a report that describes children being passed between men for sex.

This person is not stupid. The audit is explicit that the warnings were not subtle. Frontline workers, the audit records, were sometimes overwhelmed by what they were seeing. A health team in Rochdale made over a hundred referrals. Whistleblowers stood up and were, in the audit’s account, met with hostility and the threat of legal action. The information was on the table. The girls were named. The cars were logged. In Rotherham a youth worker handed the police names, addresses, and car registration plates, and was told it was not real intelligence.

So the careerist in the meeting is not failing to understand. He understands perfectly. He is performing a calculation. If I write this down as what it is, the calculation runs, there will be a storm. There will be questions about why my service did not act sooner. There will be a community-relations problem that will land on my desk. There will be a headline with my name near it. Whereas if I file it softly, if I let the words go vague, if I let her be a teenager making poor lifestyle choices rather than a child being raped by a gang, then the storm never comes, and in three years I retire with the dinner and the carriage clock.

He chose the clock. They all, in their thousands of small decisions across a quarter of a century, chose the clock. And the most damning sentence in the entire audit is the quiet one that confirms the calculation paid off. The audit records that survivors watched as people in power who denied their abuse go on to get promotions or take early retirement with no accountability for their actions. The promotion came through. The retirement was comfortable. The arithmetic worked. That is the betrayal in its purest form: not that they did not know, but that they knew, and they had run the numbers, and the numbers told them a child was cheaper than a scandal.

What it cost the people it was meant to protect

We should be concrete about the other side of that ledger, because abstraction is the careerist’s best friend and I will not lend it to him. The audit, drawing on the earlier Jay report, describes what the children actually endured. Girls as young as eleven raped by multiple men. Children doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. Children made to witness brutally violent rapes and told they would be next. Pregnancies. Forced terminations. And then, on top of the abuse itself, a second betrayal, the one that this article is about, where the very people who were meant to be the rescue became another set of adults who looked at the child and turned away.

And it did not end when the abuse ended. Some of these children were arrested for offences they committed while being controlled by their abusers, and carried the criminal records into adult life. The audit notes that survivors have been left unable to get a bank account, or unable to go on their own children’s school trips, because of convictions they received as children while being raped. Sit with the full shape of that. The state failed to protect them as children, then criminalised them for the consequences of that failure, then let the criminal record follow them for decades, while not one of the officials who allowed any of it lost a single day’s pay.

That is not a system that made mistakes. That is a system that, when forced to choose between the comfort of the powerful and the safety of the powerless, chose the powerful every single time, and then protected the choosers.

Why mercy is the wrong response

I am, by conviction, a person who believes in mercy. I believe people can be forgiven almost anything, that the worst of us are not beyond redemption, that grace is the deepest fact about the universe. So understand that it costs me something to say what I am about to say.

Mercy is for the repentant. Mercy is for the person who turns around, faces what they did, names it, and asks to be held to account. That is the one thing none of these officials did. They did not come forward. They were dragged forward, years late, by journalists and whistleblowers and the parents of dead and broken children, every inch of the way resisting. When the truth came for Rotherham, the council’s instinct was not confession. According to the audit’s account, the council sought an injunction to stop a newspaper publishing, and then asked the police to launch a criminal inquiry into who had leaked the information, rather than into the men abusing the children. Faced with the choice between the abuser and the person who exposed the abuse, they went after the person who exposed it.

You cannot extend mercy to a refusal to repent, because there is nothing there to receive it. Mercy offered to an unrepentant betrayal is not mercy. It is permission. It tells the next careerist in the next meeting that the calculation still holds, that the clock is still safe, that a child is still cheaper than a scandal. Every official who walked away with a pension and no accountability is a lesson taught to the official who comes after. The lesson is: you can do this, and nothing will happen to you. Until that lesson is unlearned, in public, with names and consequences, it will be taught again, and there will be more children on the other side of the ledger.

This is why accountability is not vengeance. Vengeance is about the past, about making someone hurt because they hurt others. Accountability is about the future, about making the calculation come out differently for the next person who sits in that meeting with that file. The point of holding the betrayer to account is not to satisfy our anger. It is to put a cost on the careerist’s side of the scale, so that the next time a frightened, mortgaged, pension-counting official looks at a report describing a child being raped, the safe choice and the right choice are finally the same choice.

The line that should follow them

The Casey audit ends with the government accepting, on paper, all twelve of its recommendations. A national operation. A statutory inquiry with the power to compel witnesses. A duty to share information. The machinery of seriousness is being assembled, and that is not nothing.

But machinery is not the thing that failed. Machinery never is. The thing that failed was a human being in a chair, with a duty and a signature and a choice, who decided that the child in the file was less important than the comfort in his own life. No inquiry recommendation reaches into that chair. Only accountability does. Only the certain knowledge that the choice will be found, named, and answered for can change what the next person decides when the next file lands.

So here is the line I would have follow every one of them, the careerist and the council and the constable and the prosecutor who traded a child for a quiet life. You did not fail to see it. You saw it, and you decided your pension was worth more than her childhood. And a society that lets you keep both the pension and your good name has not learned the lesson. It has only filed it, softly, at the bottom of the pile, exactly the way you taught it to.

There is a great deal more to say about how this was allowed to happen, about the concealment that turned a failure into a cover-up, and about the ideology that taught a generation of officials to fear an accusation more than they feared a child’s suffering. Those are the next two parts of this series. But the first thing, the thing that has to be said before any of the rest, is the simplest and the hardest. They knew. And no mercy is owed to a betrayal that has never once asked for it.

Leave a comment

Share

If you value unflinching, historically grounded analysis that mainstream outlets soften or ignore, consider upgrading. Paid subscribers get:

• Several new, full-length articles every week.

  Carefully researched pieces you won’t find elsewhere.

• Full access to the complete premium archive

  Archive of in-depth writing, research, and commentary — all in one place.

• Entry into the subscriber chat

  A private space for serious readers and thoughtful discussion.

A. C. Rosenthal

A.C. Rosenthal is a self-taught writer, researcher, and theologian working at the intersection of history, philosophy, and culture. He is the author of The Carpenter's Son and the Imam's Son, The God that they rejected Isn't Real.

Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it. A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth. A.C. Rosenthal is the author of The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma, The God They Rejected Isn’t Real: Exposing the False Gods of Modern Doubt, and The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son. Further analysis at:

acrosenthal.com/

https://thetwomuhammadscurriculum.thinkific.com/

*The Garden and the Raid

Two theologies of work built two different worlds. One tends what it inherits. The other consumes it and moves on. The qanats of Persia tell you which is which.

In the dry interior of Iran there are tunnels older than Rome. The qanat is an underground aqueduct, dug by hand, that taps the water table high in the hills and carries it by gravity across dozens of miles to fields that see almost no rain. No pumps. No electricity. Some of them have been running for three thousand years, irrigating the same ground, kept alive by the same unglamorous labor in every generation: clearing the silt, holding the gradient, keeping the access shafts open. UNESCO lists the survivors as world heritage, because a working qanat is one of the most elegant pieces of engineering the ancient world produced.

Most of them are silted now. Dry. The fields above them have gone back to dust.

Nobody bombed the qanats. No colonial power filled them in. They failed the way every inherited thing fails when the people who inherit it stop doing the patient, boring work of maintenance. The water did not run out. The willingness to tend it did. And the question of why that willingness drained away, across exactly the territories where one particular system took uncontested hold, is the question this essay is about.

I want to make the argument carefully, because the careless version of it is a slander and I have no use for that one.

What the other side gets right

Start with the strongest case against everything I am about to say, because it is real and it deserves to be stated by someone who is not trying to knock it down.

There was a period when the Islamic world was the most intellectually alive place on earth. The Abbasid translation movement preserved and engaged Greek philosophy while much of Europe was a backwater. Algebra, optics, medicine, astronomy, the words themselves carry the fingerprints. Individual Muslims have been, and are, among the most diligent, productive, future-building people you will ever meet, scientists, surgeons, engineers, scholars, men and women who plant olive trees they will never eat from. Any honest account has to hold that this is true, and that the human capacity for patient work is not parceled out by creed.

So if there is a pattern to explain, it cannot be a pattern in the people. It has to be a pattern in the system the people live inside, and the relationship between a person and the system around them is exactly the thing this essay is trying to get right. Hold that distinction, because everything depends on it.

The theology of the raid

To understand why a civilization tends or consumes what it inherits, you have to look at what it was built to do at the start, because a civilization keeps the shape of its founding logic the way a riverbed keeps the shape of the first flood.

The early Muslim community at Medina was not a community of farmers or craftsmen. It was a raiding community. By the traditional Islamic sources’ own count, Muhammad conducted between twenty-seven and twenty-nine campaigns in the last decade of his life and dispatched dozens more raiding parties under other commanders. The raid, the ghazwa, was not a regrettable footnote that later theology tidied away. It was the central institution, economic and theological at once, and the community needed it to live: the Quraysh caravans were not symbolic targets, they were the lifeblood of a settlement that had not built a base to sustain itself any other way. The Quranic material from the Medinan period is saturated with the logic of it: the division of spoils, the handling of captives, the obligation to fight until the religion is supreme. Surah 8 is literally named al-Anfal, “The Spoils of War,” and opens on a dispute about how to divide the plunder from Badr. Surah 9, the most martial text in the corpus, establishes the jizya as the price a conquered People of the Book pay for tolerated existence.

I am reporting what the text says, not editorializing past it. The classical scholars themselves read these passages this way; they are the ones who named the famous verse in Surah 9 the Sword Verse, and they were not confused about what it meant.

Set that beside the economic theology of the Hebrew wisdom literature, which runs in the opposite direction. Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. Whoever gathers little by little makes it grow. A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children. The entire assumption is that wealth is grown, slowly, by patient honest labor, by the man who plants for a harvest he plans to be alive to see and then plants again for one he will not. Max Weber called the downstream version of this the Protestant work ethic, but the root is far older than Protestantism. It is the idea of work as participation in a creative order, of tending a garden you were placed in.

The garden is tended. The raid is collected. One grows what it eats. The other eats what someone else grew.

The mechanism, not the mood

A founding logic is only a tendency. What turned the tendency into a fourteen-century pattern was a specific legal mechanism, and naming it precisely matters, because this is where the argument becomes structural rather than rhetorical.

The dhimmi system governed the conquered non-Muslim populations, and its most famous feature, the jizya, was not its most destructive one. The destructive part was the suite of restrictions on visible success. In the classical codes, non-Muslims could not build new houses of worship or repair old ones beyond a set standard, were required to wear marking clothing, ride donkeys rather than horses, build no higher than their Muslim neighbors, hold no authority over Muslims, and give no testimony against them in court.

Read that as an economist would, and it resolves into a single function: it caps the upside of the most productive people in the society. The Christian or Jewish merchant, physician, or farmer who became visibly prosperous had thereby painted a target on himself for heavier taxation, harassment, or seizure. And prosperity is a compounding process, surplus reinvested becomes more surplus, the skilled man who trains apprentices becomes an institution. A system that caps the visible success of its most capable producers does not just take a slice. It switches off the compounding at the source. Over generations the capable convert to escape the cap, the wealthy emigrate when they can, the academies and hospitals and workshops that carried the productive tradition decay, and what is left is a society that has consumed an inheritance it built no mechanism to replace.

North Africa is the case that cannot be waved off. From roughly 3000 BC to 600 AD it was among the most productive farmland on earth, the breadbasket of Rome, home to Carthage and to the Christian intellectual tradition of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine. The Roman aqueducts and irrigation works were built to carry large, sophisticated populations. Augustine died in 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo; the Arab conquest was complete by around 700. From there the line bends one way: the aqueducts crumble, the output falls, the intellectual tradition that produced the greatest theologian of the Western church dwindles to a hunted remnant. The water that the Romans engineered and the Persians tunneled for was, in both cases, inherited intact and then allowed to fail. It silts at the same rate regardless of anyone’s beliefs. What the beliefs determine is whether anyone clears it.

The short horizon

Underneath the law there is a horizon problem, and this is the part that reaches past policy into the orientation of a whole culture, which is the level the argument actually lives at.

A raid optimizes for the next target. A garden optimizes for the next generation. The farmer plants the olive tree knowing he will not eat most of its fruit, and he does it because the tree his grandfather planted is feeding him now, and because the culture he stands in treats the inheritance left to children’s children as the mark of a life well spent. That orientation, sustained effort aimed at a future you will not personally collect, is the thing every durable civilization runs on, and it is precisely the thing a logic built around conquest and tribute does not reward. The status in such a system flows to the man who takes, not the man who maintains. The unglamorous work of clearing the channel gets coded as the work of the low, the conquered, the tributary, the kind of work a free man of standing does not stoop to. You do not let a qanat silt if your culture tells you that keeping it clear is honorable stewardship. You let it silt if your culture has filed maintenance under the labor of inferiors.

This is a claim about culture as the carrier of an ideology, not about anything in the blood, and I want to be flat about that because the distinction is the whole ethical spine of the argument. There is no gene for letting an aqueduct fail. There is an incentive structure, transmitted across generations by a theology and a legal order, and the same surrounding system has not managed to condition that orientation out of the communities that kept a different theology, which is the most telling evidence of all and which I will come to.

The objection I have to answer

Here I have to turn the blade on my own argument, because everything above has a shape that a sharp reader will distrust on sight, and they will be right to.

The shape is this. I have an explanation that seems to swallow every possible piece of evidence. A poor Muslim society confirms the thesis: the ideology producing its fruit. A rich one, the Gulf, confirms it too: that is just oil, the modern caravan, extraction not building. A brilliant past, the Abbasid golden age, confirms it: they were coasting on inherited Greek and Persian capital. A peaceful, productive individual Muslim confirms it: he is flourishing in defiance of the system, not because of it. When poverty, wealth, past glory, present peace, and individual excellence all count as confirmation, a careful reader stops asking whether my evidence is good and starts asking whether my theory could ever have come out false. And if the answer is no, they are right to throw the whole thing out, not because they have refuted a single fact but because they have recognized the shape of a claim that cannot lose, which is the shape of every conspiracy theory and every horoscope ever written.

So I owe you the thing that kind of argument never offers: the condition under which I am wrong.

Here it is. My thesis is falsified by a society that enacted comprehensive Islamic law seriously, at full jurisdiction, over generations, and produced durable, self-sustaining, innovating prosperity, the kind that keeps compounding without an external resource windfall and without a productive minority underneath it to tax, with that minority flourishing as genuine equals rather than as tolerated and capped subordinates. Not a golden age living off conquered capital. Not a petro-economy selling a substance it pumps but did not invent the means to use. A garden the system itself grew and kept growing. If that case exists, the argument fails, and I will retract it.

I make the claim with confidence not because I have rigged the game so nothing can enter it, but because I have gone looking for that case and keep finding its absence explained, by the tradition’s own defenders, with the same move every time: the flourishing turns out to be borrowed, or externally funded, or a managed coexistence that held only so long as the minority stayed subordinate. The falsifier is reachable. It just has not been reached. That is a different statement than “nothing could count against me,” and the difference is the whole reason you should keep reading rather than close the tab.

The control group

Which brings me to the most honest data point in the whole analysis, because it holds every variable fixed except the one in question.

The Copts of Egypt have lived under Islamic rule since the conquest of 641, through every grade of the dhimmi restrictions, fourteen centuries of caps, taxes, and persecution that runs to massacre and church-burning in living memory. And they remain, today, disproportionately the physicians, the engineers, the businessmen of Egypt. A community held down by formal disadvantage for fourteen hundred years still outproduces its share of the population.

Same land. Same climate. Same resource base. Same political weather. One variable different: the theology that orients them toward learning, patient labor, and the long horizon. The surrounding system has had fourteen centuries to grind that orientation out of them and has not managed it, because the orientation does not come from the land or the genes. It comes from the tradition they kept. The Copt is the control group, and the control group is still bearing the fruit.

That is also, incidentally, the cleanest proof that this argument is about a system and not a people. If the pattern lived in the blood or the region or the Arabness, the Copts would show it too. They share all of that. What they do not share is the ideology, and they are precisely the ones who escaped the pattern.

The fruit test

There is an old standard for this kind of judgment, and it was not invented for polemics. Every tree is known by its fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree good; you will recognize them by what they produce. It is offered in the Gospels as a tool for telling true from false, and it is a Muslim reader’s own scripture that affirms the Gospel as genuine prior revelation, which is why I am using a standard he cannot dismiss without unsettling his own foundation rather than one imported from outside.

So apply it without flinching, and apply it to the system, not the souls. The fifty-seven member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation hold about a quarter of the world’s population and a fifth of its land, sit atop staggering reserves of oil, gas, and minerals, and have had full modern access to Western technology, capital, universities, and medicine. Set that against the single sharpest comparison in the modern record, and hold the scale of it in your head first: there are more Muslims in the city of Cairo than there are Jews on the entire planet.

Now look at the output. Jewish people are about two tenths of one percent of humanity, and they have won roughly 22% of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded, more than a hundred times their share of the population. The entire Muslim world, a quarter of all the people alive, has won around 1.4% of all Nobels, and in the sciences specifically, physics, chemistry, medicine, across the prize’s entire 123-year history, the count is three or four. Not three or four percent. Three or four people. Salam, Zewail, Bawendi, Sancar. A population you could fit inside one Muslim city has out-produced a quarter of the human race by orders of magnitude on the exact measure a civilization uses to judge its own claim to genius.

That is the fruit test rendered in numbers that cannot be argued with, and the obvious objection makes the point worse rather than better. Someone will say the Jews simply had it easier. They had the reverse of easy. They produced that record while being expelled, ghettoized, and hunted across the same centuries, with no oil, no empire, and for most of it no state. The variable is not ease, and it is not the region or the genes, which the Jews and the Arabs of the Near East largely share. The variable is what a theology of work, time, and patient inheritance produces in the people who carry it across generations, and the same system that caps the productive minority is the one that produced the silted qanat, the crumbled aqueduct, and the closed gate.

Because that is the last piece, and it is the one that locks the others in place. The classical scholars declared the gate of ijtihad, of independent legal reasoning, effectively closed. The system was sealed as finished. Whatever its fruit, it cannot revise the tree that bears it, because the tree has been declared perfect and beyond reconsideration. A garden can be replanted. A system that has forbidden itself the act of replanting can only keep yielding what it was planted to yield.

The verdict

So here is where the evidence lands.

The theology of the raid produced the economics of extraction. Extraction produced the cap on the productive minority, and the cap produced the silted channel, the crumbled aqueduct, the exhausted ground. Exhausted ground produces the one direction people move when they are finally free to move, which is outward, toward the civilizations built on the garden. That direction is the most honest verdict a civilization ever renders on itself, more honest than any of its claims, because it is cast not in words but with the feet, by the people who know the system best from the inside.

And none of that is a verdict on those people. It is the reverse. The man who leaves is not the problem; he is the evidence. He is voting, with the most expensive vote a person can cast, for the garden over the raid, and he is right to. The tragedy is not that he comes. The tragedy is that the system he is leaving sealed its own gate against the only thing that could have let him stay: the freedom to look at its own fruit and replant.

The qanats could be cleared again tomorrow. The engineering still works; it never stopped working. What silted them was never the water. It was a theology that taught its inheritors that tending the channel was beneath them and that the tree they stood under could never be questioned, let alone replaced.

The orchard is on record. The fruit is visible. And the gate, the one that could have made it all reversible, was bolted shut from the inside a long time ago.

That is the verdict the evidence has been writing for fourteen centuries. The only open question is whether anyone inside is still permitted to read it.

If you value unflinching, historically grounded analysis that mainstream outlets soften or ignore, consider upgrading. Paid subscribers get:

• Several new, full-length articles every week.

  Carefully researched pieces you won’t find elsewhere.

• Full access to the complete premium archive

  Archive of in-depth writing, research, and commentary — all in one place.

• Entry into the subscriber chat

  A private space for serious readers and thoughtful discussion.

A. C. Rosenthal

A.C. Rosenthal is a self-taught writer, researcher, and theologian working at the intersection of history, philosophy, and culture. He is the author of The Carpenter's Son and the Imam's Son, The God that they rejected Isn't Real.

Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it. A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth. A.C. Rosenthal is the author of The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma, The God They Rejected Isn’t Real: Exposing the False Gods of Modern Doubt, and The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son. Further analysis at:

acrosenthal.com/

https://thetwomuhammadscurriculum.thinkific.com/

A Kenyan mother came home from Jordan in a wheelchair, burned over seventy percent of her body, and died. The movement that built its identity on speaking for women had nothing to say. I wanted to understand why, and the answer is not the one I expected.

I want to start with Mary Kibwana, because once I learned what happened to her I could not stop asking the question this essay is named for, and I think the question deserves an honest answer rather than a slogan.

She was a mother of four. She went to Jordan because the work was there and the money was needed, and the employment agent told her it would be safe. She arrived at a private household in Amman and did not leave it until she left it for the last time: in a wheelchair, with seventy percent of her body burned, flown home to Kenya on a charity flight arranged by people who found out what had been done to her. Two months later she died. She was thirty-seven.

I am not an academic. I have no degree in gender studies or anything else. What I have is a nail gun, ten trades, a stack of primary sources, and somewhere north of 1,300 audiobooks consumed in earbuds while I worked. I read about a subject the way I read about everything, by going to the documents before I let anyone tell me what to think. A carpenter tests whether a joint holds weight before he trusts it. I have spent a long time applying that habit to claims about who is oppressed and who is speaking for them, and I want to be honest about where it led, because I did not set out to write this and I am not enjoying having written it.

Here is what set me off. Mary’s case was documented in the series Why Slavery?, in an episode titled Maid in Hell that followed domestic workers trapped in Jordan’s kafala system. Confiscated passports. Blocked exits. Eighteen-hour days. Harassment, abuse, rape described as ordinary features of the arrangement. No labor law protection, because domestic workers are explicitly excluded from coverage. No union, no ombudsman, no court that will hear the case.

And almost nothing from the movement that exists, by its own account, to speak for women in exactly this position.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming and what I am not, because this is a topic where the careless version is just a culture-war dunk with footnotes, and I am trying to do something more honest than that. So let me start by being fair to feminism, because the thing I am going to ask of it only makes sense if its own claim is taken seriously first.

What feminism actually claims

In its most coherent form, feminism makes a claim that is both simple and serious, and I think the claim is correct.

It says women are full human beings whose dignity, autonomy, and legal standing should be equal to men’s, and that any system which structurally subordinates women to male authority without their consent deserves organized opposition. Stated plainly, that is true. It is also one of the most demanding moral commitments a person can make, more demanding than most of the people who recite it seem to notice. Because a real principle does not come with an ethnic exception, a religious exception, or a geographic one. A woman’s dignity does not shrink because she is in Amman rather than London, because her oppressor cites scripture in Arabic rather than English, or because the tradition subordinating her is not the one Western feminism was built to fight.

If the principle is real, it applies everywhere. If it applies only where it is convenient, it is not a principle. It is a faction.

I am not saying feminists are bad people, and I want that on the record before I go further, because what follows is hard and it would be easy to read it as contempt. It is not. Many of the women who built this movement made real sacrifices for a real good, and the freedoms I watch my own daughters take for granted came partly from that work. The question I am asking is not whether feminists are sincere. It is why a sincere movement applies its principle so unevenly, and what that unevenness reveals.

Subscribe now

Read more

A Jesuit knelt before the descendants of people his order sold. No imam has ever knelt for fourteen centuries of the same crime. The reason is not cowardice. It is architecture.

I want to start with a man on his knees, because everything I came to understand about this began there.

In April 2017, the leader of the Jesuits in the United States stood before a gathering at Georgetown University. In the room were descendants of 272 people his order had sold into slavery in 1838. And the Jesuit Superior, Timothy Kesicki, said this: “Today the Society of Jesus, which helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned.”

He said it on bended knee. One tradition produced a man who knelt. The other has produced no one. I wanted to know why.

This is what I found.

The sale that the Jesuits finally named

The facts of 1838 are not in dispute, and the Jesuits no longer try to make them disappear.

Georgetown was founded by John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States. Through much of its early history the university relied on the labor of enslaved people. In 1838, under financial pressure, the Jesuit priests who ran it sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children to plantation owners in Louisiana. They sold families. They separated people who had lived on the same land for years. They did it to keep the institution solvent, and they did it because the Catholic Church had held, for most of eighteen centuries, that slavery was a morally legitimate institution.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read what follows as a tidy story about Christian virtue, and it is not. The sale happened. The eighteen centuries of toleration happened. There is nothing to be proud of in any of it. The point is not that the Church was clean. The point is what the Church was able to do afterward.

It was able to stand up and say so.

In 2016 a Jesuit scholar at Georgetown, David Hollenbach, published an essay on the Church and modern slavery in La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit journal reviewed by the Vatican. He did not soften the history. He stated plainly that through most of its existence the Church not only tolerated slavery but practiced it, from the era of the early church through Augustine through the American bishop Francis Kenrick writing as late as 1841. The institutional position was that the trade in human beings was not a sin. It was regulated.

And then Hollenbach quoted the historian John Noonan with a line I had to read twice. Noonan wrote that as late as 1860, the Church taught that it was no sin for a Catholic to own another human being.

That is a remarkable thing for a Catholic scholar to publish in a Catholic journal. Not because it is news to anyone who knows the history, but because institutions do not normally talk this way about themselves. Institutions prefer complexity. They prefer context, the passive voice, the long view, the observation that things were simply different then. What Hollenbach did, and what Kesicki did on his knees a year later, was refuse all of that and say the plain thing. We did it. It was wrong. We knew it was wrong by our own stated principles. We did it anyway.

I am reporting what these sources say. I am not inventing a Christian virtue and projecting it backward. The kneeling is on the record. The journal is on the record. The question I could not get past is why this kind of reckoning is so rare that when it happens it is worth examining at all.

The scale of what has not been said

Now hold that posture in your mind, the man on his knees, and look at a history almost no one in the West has heard.

The Dutch historian Martin Bossenbroek, writing on the Ottoman legacy and its denial, documents the Afro-Arab slave trade as a human catastrophe on the order of the transatlantic one. By the census work he draws on, roughly fourteen million Africans were captured by Afro-Arab traders between the seventh and the nineteenth centuries and carried to North Africa, the Middle East, and the western coast of India. Fourteen million. Across twelve centuries. Conducted with the explicit sanction of classical Islamic jurisprudence, which permitted the enslavement of captives taken in war and built an entire body of law around the institution.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying, because this is the part that is easiest to misread and I would rather lose the careless reader than be misunderstood by the careful one. I am not saying Muslims are individuals incapable of moral reflection. They obviously are capable of it. I am not saying the tradition contains no resources for self-criticism. It contains some, and I will get to them honestly. I am making a narrower claim, about institutions and what their own architecture permits them to say out loud.

Here is the number that haunts the comparison. The Catholic Church has produced a kneeling Superior, a Vatican-reviewed journal essay of self-indictment, and an ongoing, contested, imperfect program of reckoning at Georgetown. The Islamic tradition, over a slave trade of greater duration, has produced almost nothing institutional at all.

In 2010, at the Second Arab-African Summit in Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi acknowledged the Arab slave trade. He called it shameful. He said Arab traders had hunted Africans, that they were no better than the Western colonizers, and he asked Africa’s forgiveness on behalf of the Arab world.

He was the first head of state to say it. As far as the record shows, he was also the last. No Arab or Islamic government has made a comparable statement since. No Islamic seminary has convened a council to examine the jurisprudential foundation of the trade and formally rescind the classical permission to enslave captives. No body of scholars has issued a document declaring that fourteen centuries of slaving betrayed the tradition’s highest principles. No imam has stood before the descendants of the people sold through Cairo, Riyadh, and Istanbul and said the words Kesicki said.

The silence is not ignorance. The tradition knows its own history in detail. The silence is something else, and figuring out what was the whole of my question.

Why the church could confess

This is the part that took me longest to work out, and it is the part I most want to get right, because the wrong version of it is just a slur with a footnote.

The careless answer is that Christians are humble and Muslims are proud. That is not true, it is not interesting, and it explains nothing. The real answer is structural, and it sits in the architecture of how each tradition relates its own authority to God’s.

Christianity holds three things that, taken together, make institutional confession possible.

The first is that sin is a universal condition that applies to the institution and not only to the individual. The Church, in its own theology, is a body of sinners. The gap between what it claims and what it does is not an embarrassing accident to be hidden. It is the permanent human condition the whole system exists to address. So when the Church confesses that it taught slavery was legitimate for eighteen centuries, it is not detonating its own legitimacy. It is saying the thing its theology already says about every human being and every human institution.

The second is the distinction between divine authority and institutional authority. Christianity has always held, however badly it has lived it, that the Church is not God. It is, in its own language, the body of Christ, not Christ. Its authority is real but derived and limited. That single distinction creates room for the institution to be wrong without God being wrong. When the Church says it taught a falsehood about slavery for centuries, it is not saying God taught that falsehood. It is saying the Church taught it, the Church erred, and the standard against which the error is measured stayed intact above it. The error is institutional and therefore correctable.

The third is the tradition of prophetic critique from within. The Hebrew prophets condemned Israel from inside Israel, in the name of the God Israel claimed to serve. Christianity absorbed that. It means the person who stands up inside the Church and says we are wrong about this is not automatically a traitor. He may be the most faithful person in the room. The institution has a category for him.

Now run the same analysis on the Islamic tradition, and watch what happens to each of those three load-bearing walls.

In classical Sunni thought there is no comparable gap between divine authority and institutional authority on a question like this. The Quran is held to be the direct, uncreated speech of God. The Hadith records the words and acts of the Prophet, who is the uswa hasana, the beautiful example, the model human being whose conduct is to be imitated. The classical jurists built the law directly on those two foundations. So when the tradition permits the enslavement of captives, it is not, in its own self-understanding, voicing a revisable institutional opinion. It is recording what it takes to be the will of God, documented in the speech of God and the example of the perfect man.

To stand up inside that and say the slaving was wrong is not to say the institution fell short of its principles. It is to say the Prophet’s example was wrong, the Quran’s permission was wrong, and fourteen centuries of scholarly consensus were wrong. In the structure of the tradition, that is not reform. It edges toward apostasy.

And the tradition has explicit machinery for treating novelty as danger. The technical term is bid’a, innovation, and the classical sources are blunt about it. There is a hadith, in the most authoritative collections, that whoever introduces into this affair of ours something not from it has it rejected. There is the well-known line that every innovation is misguidance. A legal tradition that classifies doctrinal innovation itself as error cannot easily reform its position on slavery, because the act of reform is the very category it has labeled forbidden. The standard the Christian appeals to sits above the institution and survives its failure. The standard the Muslim reformer would have to challenge is the foundation.

That is the difference. The Church could confess because its confession is aimed at the institution and leaves the standard above it untouched. A parallel confession in the Islamic tradition would have to aim at the foundation itself. One kneels. The other dismantles.

The honest objection I owe you

Now I have to stop and do the thing I most want to skip, because the argument is not honest without it.

A serious Muslim scholar would read what I have just written and tell me I have rigged the comparison, and on at least one point he would be right, so I am going to say it for him before he says it for me.

He would tell me that the tradition is not as frozen as I have made it sound. He would point out that nearly every Muslim-majority country has, in fact, abolished slavery, and that this happened without the sky falling. He would name scholars who have argued that the maqasid, the higher objectives of the law, point toward emancipation, and that the Quran repeatedly treats the freeing of slaves as a righteous act and a form of atonement, language a reformer can build on. He would point to writers like Jonathan Brown who argue the tradition contains real internal grounds for moving past slavery. He would say, fairly, that “no imam has knelt” is partly a statement about politics and the absence of a single central authority in Sunni Islam, not only about theology. There is no Islamic pope to do the kneeling.

I think that objection lands, and I want to concede the part of it that is true rather than pretend it away. The practical end of slavery across the Muslim world is real. The internal resources for arguing against it are more than nothing. If my claim were that the tradition is incapable of moving, the abolitions alone would refute me.

But that is not quite my claim, and the concession sharpens it rather than dissolving it. There is a difference between ceasing a practice and confessing that the practice was a sin against God’s own standard, on the record, before the people it was committed against. The Muslim world largely did the first. It has not, at the level of its central institutions, done the second. And the reason it has not is the reason I gave: the confession the Church could make leaves its foundation standing, and the parallel confession would have to indict the foundation. You can quietly stop doing a thing the law permitted. It is far harder to stand up and say the law itself, traced to the Prophet and the Book, authorized a sin. The abolitions happened in the register of policy. The reckoning would have to happen in the register of revelation, and that register is the one the tradition guards most fiercely against revision.

So I hold the line, but I hold a narrower and more defensible one because of the objection, not despite it.

What the silence costs

Hollenbach’s deeper argument is that the capacity for confession is not just a moral nicety. It is the precondition for moral authority going forward. An institution that cannot name its own worst act cannot credibly speak about anyone else’s. The Georgetown reckoning, imperfect as it is, gives the Church standing to speak about modern slavery that an institution still in denial would not have.

The Islamic tradition’s silence costs it exactly that standing. When a scholar or institution speaks today about human dignity and the protection of the vulnerable, the unacknowledged debt sits audibly behind the words for anyone who knows the history.

But the steeper cost is internal, and it falls on the people I am least willing to be careless about.

The movements that ended slavery in the West were driven in large part by people working inside the Christian tradition, using its own resources against its own practice. Wilberforce argued that slavery was incompatible with the Gospel he believed. Wesley called it the sum of all villainy. The Quakers organized against it for a century before the politics caught up. They used the tradition against the tradition’s worst expressions, and the tradition had a category that could receive them.

The dissenting voices inside Islam, the ones who say the slaving was wrong, that the kafala labor systems are wrong, that the women sold in the Yazidi price lists deserved better, are not protected by an equivalent category. They operate at personal cost. The scholar who publishes too plainly on this risks the charge of apostasy. And here is the part the Western progressive movement, which prides itself on speaking for the suppressed, has entirely missed. The voices most capable of producing reform from within are the voices the structure is built to suppress, and the West keeps lending its moral energy to the structure rather than to them.

That is the trap, and it catches good people. It is a kind of toxic empathy that flatters every tradition as equally able to examine and reform itself, when they are not equally built for it. Treating that difference as bigotry to be waved away does not protect Muslims. It abandons the Muslim reformers to the machinery alone.

The standard underneath it all

Here is the deepest thing I found, and it is the thing I am most reluctant to say plainly because it sounds like a sermon, and I did not set out to preach one. I set out to test a joint. But the joint held, and I have to tell you where it led.

The reason the Church could kneel and the mosque could not traces, in the end, to two different pictures of God.

Christianity’s central claim is that God entered history, suffered in it, died in it, and rose. The cross is a standard for human dignity set at the highest possible point, because it is God paying an infinite price for people who had not earned it and could not. When the Church failed to extend that dignity to enslaved people, the failure was visible precisely because the standard was visible and fixed above it. The confession was possible because the cross did not fall when the institution did. Kesicki could kneel because there was something above him still standing.

The God of the Quran is sovereign, transcendent, and beyond suffering. He commands rather than bleeds. His love, in the text itself, is extended to those who have aligned themselves with him and withheld from those who have not. That is a God whose standard for human dignity is expressed through law. And a law held to be divinely authorized for fourteen centuries cannot be repealed by an institution that treats the authorization as final, without unmaking the thing that authorized it.

The Christian who confesses his tradition’s slaving is confessing against the God who died for everyone, and the God is still standing when he finishes.

The Muslim who would confess his tradition’s slaving would be confessing against a God whose revealed law permitted it, and there is nothing left standing above the confession to receive it.

One confession is possible. The other is the end of the thing confessing.

This is not Christianity claiming to be clean. It is not. The eighteen centuries are real. The 1838 sale is real. The Superior was right to be on his knees. What Christianity has that the comparison reveals is not a better record. It is a standard that outlives its own failure to meet it, a cross that stands above the Church’s worst behavior and judges it, a fixed point a reformer can appeal to without committing treason against God.

That standard is what made the confession possible. It is what made abolition possible. It is, I have come to think, what made every reform movement the West has produced possible.

And a movement that dismantles it, in the name of liberating people from the only tradition that produced effective liberation movements, is not building something better. It is quietly removing the ground that better things have to stand on.

The Jesuit Superior knelt in 2017.

No one in Riyadh has knelt. No one in Cairo has knelt. No one in Istanbul has knelt.

The people who were sold through those cities have been waiting twelve centuries to hear it.

They are still waiting.

I spent years in these documents the way I spend years in anything, by going to the primary sources and testing whether the joints hold. The historical and textual case underneath this essay, the innovation doctrine, the jurisprudence of captivity, the manuscript evidence, is laid out in full in my book The Two Muhammads. Those of you waiting on The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son will find out where the friendship that started all of this finally led. And for those who want to read the primary sources for themselves rather than take my word for any of it, that is exactly what the Two Muhammads course is built to do.

Keep reading. Go to the documents. Test the joints.

Sources:

Hollenbach, David SJ. “The Church and Modern Slavery.” La Civiltà Cattolica. Georgetown University, Washington DC. [Reproduced with permission.]

Noonan, John T. Jr. “Development in Moral Doctrine.” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 662–677. [Cited in Hollenbach.]

Noonan, John T. Jr. The Church that Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. [Cited in Hollenbach.]

Kesicki, Timothy SJ. Remarks at Georgetown University’s Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope. April 18, 2017. [Cited in Hollenbach.]

Bossenbroek, Martin. “The Ottoman Legacy, Slavery, and Denial.” Fanack: Chronicle of the Middle East and North Africa. October 10, 2024.

Gaddafi, Moammar. Apology at the Second Arab-African Summit, Sirte, Libya. October 10, 2010. [Cited in Bossenbroek.]

Austen, Ralph A. “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade Out of Africa: A Tentative Census.” In Elizabeth Savage, ed., The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. London, 1992. [Cited in Bossenbroek.]

The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma. A.C. Rosenthal. [Appendix G, primary source citations on innovation and doctrinal authority.]

Slaves and Servants in Islam. Primary source compilation. [Project vault.]

Sahih al-Bukhari. Hadith 2697. [Innovation as rejection; cited in Two Muhammads.]

Quran 9:31; 45:23. [Human authority versus revelation; cited in Two Muhammads.]

Leave a comment

Share

Advertisement for "Auction of Souls" (1919), depicting the martyrdom of Armenian Christian women. Public domain.

What twenty-five years of counterterrorism got wrong, and why the founder is the thing nobody will look at

Picture a woman who has had enough.

Her husband has come home with new rules in his head, rules he says the Prophet himself handed down, and she has decided she will not take them secondhand. She is brave enough, or tired enough, to go and ask the man directly. She gets in to see him.

She lays it out plainly. She has cooked his dinner, hauled the water, fed the camels, washed his clothes. She wants to know where, in all of that, the duty ends. At what point in a day may she simply say no to her husband.

He tells her. If her husband were covered head to foot in one running ulcer, and she got down and licked the blood and the pus from it, she would still not have discharged what she owes him.¹ Were it permitted for one human being to bow down to another, he says, he would have commanded wives to bow to their husbands.² And the woman who refuses her husband’s bed and lets him sleep angry is cursed by the angels until morning.³

Then he turns to her and prophesies: “For fourteen centuries, men will quote these very words to settle the question of why a man may beat his wife, and no one will be permitted to ask it again.”

That last line I made up. He never prophesied. Prophecy being, you would think, the one item actually listed in a prophet’s job description, it is a touch awkward that it is the single part of the scene I had to invent. Everything he says before it is in the books, sourced and graded sound, and you will find the references at the bottom of the article. The prophecy is the only fiction, and it is the only part of the scene that has reliably come true. And if Muhammad had said it, the prophesy would have been the only part to his credit. Muhammad did however forbid asking a husband why he beats his wife, but as a command, not as a prophesy. I personally, forbid domestic violence, in opposition to Muhammad’s endorsement.

That is the whole problem in miniature, and it is the problem Ali Siadatan’s recent essay circles honestly without quite landing on.

Siadatan is right that the War on Terror was a strategic misdiagnosis. Naming a tactic instead of an ideology guaranteed that every tactical win would be followed by an ideological rebound. Al-Qaeda was degraded; ISIS emerged. The Taliban was displaced for twenty years and then walked back into Kabul. The Iranian proxy network expanded steadily through two decades of counterterrorism operations. The diagnosis failed because it was built to fail. It was constructed to avoid the conclusion the evidence kept pointing toward.

But Siadatan’s prescription, while far better than the strategy it critiques, stops short of the deepest structural problem. He recommends investing in the battle of ideas, supporting reformist voices, and treating religious freedom as a strategic priority. These are sound as far as they go. The question my book The Two Muhammads presses is whether they go far enough, and whether the system being engaged is even capable of the kind of internal reform those recommendations presuppose.

Naming the tactic was not an accident

Siadatan frames the naming of terrorism rather than ideology as an error made under political pressure. The framing had advantages, he notes: it avoided the appearance of a religious or civilizational confrontation. True, but it understates the depth of the failure.

The avoidance was not merely political cowardice. It was epistemic. The analysts and policymakers who built the War on Terror framework genuinely could not bring themselves to engage the textual and structural question the evidence demanded. They were not simply unwilling to name the ideology. They were, in most cases, entirely unequipped to analyze it. Western secular institutions had spent decades treating religious ideas as a private, largely irrelevant domain. When an ideology rooted in comprehensive religious authority arrived as the security challenge of the era, the analytical infrastructure to meet it was not there.

In The Two Muhammads I describe this as the error of misdiagnosis: “What repeatedly fails in Western analysis of Islamic societies is not sympathy, nor access to information, nor even moral concern. It is diagnosis. The failure occurs earlier than outrage and deeper than disagreement. It occurs at the level where cause and effect are first assigned. Outcomes are observed, violence, repression, emigration, radicalization, legal inequality, but they are persistently interpreted as accidents. They are framed as distortions of an otherwise benign system, or as reactions to colonial history, poverty, geopolitical interference, or cultural trauma.”

Each of those explanations holds a fragment of truth. None addresses the central question: whether these results arise despite the system, or because of it. Until that question is allowed to be asked out loud, every policy response treats symptoms instead of confronting causes.

Radicalization is the wrong word

Siadatan identifies the spectrum of jihad, from intellectual and political to cultural and armed, with useful precision. It helps explain why a strategy focused on the armed dimension kept finding itself surprised by the political and cultural dimensions advancing even as the military one was suppressed.

But the word radicalization carries a buried assumption that needs to be dug out. It implies deviation from a norm. It implies a stable, moderate center from which extremists depart. Western policymakers have spent twenty-five years searching for that center, funding it, amplifying it, praying it would hold.

In The Two Muhammads I argue that this misreads the architecture: “The language of ‘radicalization’ obscures this reality. Radicalization implies deviation from a norm. What actually occurs is reversion to precedent. The system does not radicalize; it reasserts. It does not innovate; it remembers.”

The groups Western analysis labels extremist are not operating outside the system’s grammar. They are operating inside it, with the hedging removed. They discard delay. They discard ambiguity. They treat command as command rather than suggestion. They cite the Quran, the hadith, the prophetic example, the inherited legal categories preserved by mainstream jurisprudence. They do not claim innovation. They claim fidelity. And the tradition, read honestly, cannot entirely disown them, because the man in the scene above is not a distortion of the tradition. He is its source.

This distinction matters enormously for Siadatan’s prescription. If radicalization is deviation, the cure is to strengthen the moderate center. If what we are watching is reversion to precedent, then the moderate center is not a stable destination toward which pressure can be sustained. It is a temporary condition produced by external constraint, and it relaxes the moment that constraint does.

The constraint problem

This is the most important structural observation in the whole debate, and the one Siadatan gestures toward without fully developing. He notes that the ecosystem that produced September 11 did not vanish after twenty years of counterterrorism; in many respects it grew. He attributes this to the failure to fight the battle of ideas. Correct, but that battle faces an obstacle his recommendations do not fully reckon with.

Much of what looks like moderation within Islam is not reform. It is constraint. In The Two Muhammads: “Much of Islam’s apparent durability in the modern world is routinely misread as evidence of adaptability. In reality, what is often being observed is not reform but constraint. The system has not revised its foundational commitments; it has been circumscribed by forces external to its authority, secular constitutions, international law, military deterrence, economic dependency, and demographic dispersion. These forces do not alter doctrine. They suppress its application. The difference becomes visible the moment constraint weakens.”

This is not pessimism. It is diagnosis. The difference between reform and constraint is the difference between a system that has changed and one that has merely been fenced. Reform alters trajectory. Constraint only delays outcome. When the fence comes down, a reformed system keeps walking its new direction; a constrained one reverts.

The post-September 11 period is a near-perfect laboratory of this. The Taliban was removed, fenced by Western military presence, watched for twenty years. The moment the fence came down, it resumed its default posture within weeks. Not because it had radicalized in the interim. Because nothing internal had changed. It had been constrained, not reformed.

Why reform fails from the inside

Siadatan calls for greater support for reformist voices, and the recommendation matters. I do not dismiss it. But it has to be paired with an honest account of why internal reform keeps failing to gain structural traction, or it becomes another round of well-meant investment in a process the system’s own architecture prevents from succeeding.

And here is where the people must be separated from the machine, because this is not a claim about Muslims. It is a claim about a structure. There are reformers of real courage inside these societies, men and women who risk everything to argue for a different reading, and I hold their bravery in the highest regard. Many of them see the problem more clearly than any Western analyst, because they are standing inside it. The tragedy is not that they lack courage or sincerity. The tragedy is what they are up against.

The obstacle is this: reform requires the capacity to name error without threatening authority. In a system where authority is grounded in divine revelation mediated through a prophetic exemplar whose actions remain legally operative, naming error means naming the source. That, the tradition will not permit. As I write in The Two Muhammads: “Evolution requires the capacity to name error without threatening authority. Islam lacks that capacity because its authority is not contingent. It is final. To revise it would be to admit that finality was premature. Such an admission would dissolve the system’s claim to divine perfection. As a result, correction must be externalized.”

This is why reformist voices so consistently end up isolated, marginalized, or forced to hide the implications of their own arguments. They are not facing bad actors who hijacked a peaceful tradition. They are facing the system’s own internal logic, which treats revision of foundational authority as a category of disobedience rather than a legitimate form of inquiry. Reform is permitted right up until it touches the mechanism that sets direction. The moment it does, it is not debated. It is reclassified.

What the Cold War analogy gets right, and what it misses

Siadatan invokes the Cold War as a model for ideological competition done right. Radio Free Europe. Broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain. Ideas eroding the legitimacy of communist ideology over decades. The contrast with the post-September 11 silence is damning and accurate.

But the analogy has a limit worth naming. Marxist-Leninist ideology could be undermined from within because it was a human construction that had promised outcomes it could not deliver. When people behind the Iron Curtain met the gap between promise and reality, they had an internal mechanism for reading that gap as a failure of the ideology rather than a failure of their own faith. The ideology could be falsified.

A divinely revealed, permanently closed system handles falsification differently. When outcomes disappoint, it does not conclude the doctrine was wrong. It concludes that the believers were insufficiently faithful, that enemies intervened, or that God is testing his people. As I write in The Two Muhammads: “This is why suffering within Islamic societies is so often spiritualized rather than interrogated. Hardship is framed as test. Injustice is framed as destiny. Failure is framed as insufficient faith. These framings do not arise because the system lacks compassion, but because compassion itself is subordinated to obedience. Once suffering is moralized, the pressure to correct its source dissolves.”

This does not make the battle of ideas futile. It means it needs a different theory of change than the one that beat Soviet communism. Broadcasting liberal pluralism into Muslim societies plants seeds, but it does not by itself create the internal mechanism by which those seeds can grow into structural reform. Something more is required.

The structural contribution Christianity can make

Siadatan’s fourth recommendation, treating the spread of religious freedom and alternative beliefs including Christianity as a strategic priority rather than a humanitarian afterthought, is the most important and the most underappreciated of his four. It is also the one that engages the structural problem most directly.

Not because Christianity is the West’s preferred religion or because missionaries deserve protection. Because it is structural. Christianity is a genuinely different model of how revelation, authority, and conscience relate. Its founder refused coercive authority at the origin. His kingdom, he said plainly, was not of this world, and so his servants would not fight. Taken to its most literal and extreme expression, Christianity does not produce morality police or conquest doctrine. It produces the Amish and the Mennonites, communities known for a principled refusal to kill even under compulsion.

Set that beside the scene this essay opened with. Two founders. Two ceilings. When you push each faith toward its most literal extreme, you arrive at opposite destinations, and the destination is set by the man at the origin.

That contrast offers something secular broadcasting cannot: an alternative comprehensive account of God, revelation, and human authority. Secular liberalism can tell a person he has rights. Christianity can tell him why, and anchor the answer in a narrative about God’s own self-limitation in the face of human freedom. That is a different order of challenge to a system built on submission and command. The reports of underground Christian networks and spreading scripture in Iran that Siadatan cites are not human-interest filler. They are evidence that inside a society governed by comprehensive Islamic authority, individuals are actively hunting for a different account of the relationship between God and conscience. That search is the most promising thing happening in the battle of ideas, and it is happening almost entirely without Western strategic support.

The honest assessment

Siadatan ends with a call for the West to move past narrow counterterrorism and confront the religious and ideological drivers of the conflict. Exactly right. But confronting them honestly means admitting something his piece approaches and does not quite land.

The thing being confronted is not simply a political ideology weaponized by bad actors. It is a comprehensive authority structure that does not authorize the internal reform mechanisms Western engagement strategies assume are available. It trades correction for continuity, revision for preservation, moral appeal for command authority. As I write in The Two Muhammads: “That bargain has allowed it to endure. It has not allowed it to escape itself.”

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of accuracy. The West lost twenty-five years to a misdiagnosis. The prescription for the next twenty-five needs to be built on an honest account of what is actually being engaged. Not terrorism. Not extremism. Not radicalization. A system with a specific architecture, specific texts, specific authority structures, and specific internal constraints on the possibility of self-correction.

Go back to the woman at the start. For fourteen hundred years she has been told that her question, the simple where-does-it-end, is itself the sin. Nobody radicalized the man who answered her. He was the standard, and the standard was set at the source. Until the West is willing to look at the source instead of everywhere but, it will keep funding a moderate center that exists only as long as someone holds the fence, and keep being astonished, every time the fence comes down, that the system remembers exactly what it always was.

Understanding that architecture is not the whole solution. But it is the necessary beginning of one. And it is the conversation Western policy has spent a quarter century refusing to have.

The sayings in the opening scene are drawn from the hadith literature and are not invented (the closing “prophecy” is the single exception, and is flagged as such in the text):

¹ The ulcer and pus: narrated by Anas b. Malik and by Abu Sa’id al-Khudri; recorded in Ahmad’s Musnad, al-Nasa’i, Ibn Hibban, and al-Hakim; graded sahih by al-Albani (Sahih al-Jami’ no. 3148, no. 7725).

² Prostration to the husband: same hadith family, narrated by Anas b. Malik (Ahmad, al-Nasa’i).

³ The angels’ curse on a wife who refuses: Sahih al-Bukhari 3237 and Sahih Muslim 1436.

The framing dialogue is a dramatized reconstruction built around these authenticated sayings, not a verbatim transcript of a single narration.

If you value unflinching, historically grounded analysis that mainstream outlets soften or ignore, consider upgrading. Paid subscribers get:

• Several new, full-length articles every week.

  Carefully researched pieces you won’t find elsewhere.

• Full access to the complete premium archive

  Archive of in-depth writing, research, and commentary — all in one place.

• Entry into the subscriber chat

  A private space for serious readers and thoughtful discussion.

Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it. A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth. His book The Two Muhammads is available now. Further analysis at acrosenthal.com

A. C. Rosenthal

A.C. Rosenthal is a self-taught writer, researcher, and theologian working at the intersection of history, philosophy, and culture. He is the author of The Carpenter's Son and the Imam's Son, The God that they rejected Isn't Real.

acrosenthal.com/

https://thetwomuhammadscurriculum.thinkific.com/

Article 1 of 6 on Slavery: Turkey Is First in Europe for Modern Slavery. The EU Calls It a Candidate Country.

Turkey Is First in Europe for Modern Slavery. The EU Calls It a Candidate Country.

Slavery and the Silence Around It: Part One of Seven

“Be angry, and do not sin.” (Ephesians 4:26). The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:20). So what do we do with it?

We do what James said next. We are quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. We go to the primary sources. We count carefully. We report what we find.

Here is what we found.

In 2023, the Walk Free Foundation published its Global Slavery Index, the most comprehensive attempt to measure the prevalence of modern slavery across every country on earth. The methodology is rigorous, the data is compiled from hundreds of sources, and the results are expressed as a rate per thousand of population so that large and small countries can be compared fairly.

Turkey ranked fifth in the world.

Not fifth in its region. Not fifth in the developing world. Fifth on earth, behind only North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, and Saudi Arabia. On any given day in 2021, an estimated 1.3 million people were living in conditions of modern slavery inside Turkey’s borders. Turkey has the highest prevalence of modern slavery in the entire Europe and Central Asia region, and it sits among the countries taking the least action to address it.

The European Union has been negotiating Turkey’s accession candidacy since 1999.

Those two facts belong in the same sentence. They have not been in the same sentence in any official EU communication. That silence is not an oversight. It is a policy choice, and the policy choice tells you something important about how Western institutions actually process information about Islamic governance when the information is inconvenient.

Before we examine why that silence exists and what it costs, we need to understand what we are actually measuring, where it comes from, and why Turkey’s position on that index is not a statistical anomaly but an institutional inheritance centuries in the making.

The Ottoman Inheritance

To understand what is happening in Turkey today, you have to understand what Turkey has always been.

At the height of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century, an estimated twenty percent of Istanbul’s population of five hundred thousand were slaves. The types of slavery were varied and comprehensive: military slaves in the Janissary corps, harem slaves in the Sultan’s household, domestic slaves in elite homes, agricultural slaves in the fields, and concubines whose entire lives were organized around the sexual and reproductive requirements of their owners.

The sources of those slaves were equally comprehensive. War captives from campaigns in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Christian boys levied from Balkan villages under the Devshirme system, converted to Islam, and trained as soldiers or administrators. African slaves brought across the Sahara through trans-continental trade networks. Caucasian women, specifically sought for the Imperial harem system based on their perceived physical beauty.

The Devshirme system deserves particular attention because it illustrates the specific character of Ottoman slavery most clearly. Under this system, Ottoman officials conducted periodic levies of Christian boys from subject populations in the Balkans and Anatolia. Boys between the ages of eight and eighteen were selected, forcibly separated from their families, converted to Islam, and trained either for the Janissary military corps or for administrative positions in the imperial bureaucracy. The most capable were educated in the palace school and could rise to positions of extraordinary power. Grand viziers, military commanders, and senior administrators were regularly drawn from this enslaved class.

This is the detail that Western histories of the Ottoman Empire most consistently soften. The boys could rise to positions of power, therefore the system was not so bad. The logic is identical to saying that because some enslaved people in the American South learned trades and achieved relative comfort, the institution of chattel slavery was not so bad. The forced separation from family, the compulsory conversion, the removal of identity and choice at the most formative years of a human life, these do not become acceptable because the institution that imposed them also offered, to the exceptional few, a path to advancement within its own hierarchy.

The Islamic jurisprudential framework that underwrote these practices was not incidental to them. The Quran permits the taking of slaves from among captives of war and from populations that have not submitted to Islamic authority. The Hadith literature is extensive on the permissibility and regulation of slavery, on the rights of owners over enslaved persons, and on the spiritual merit of manumission as a voluntary act of piety. Islamic law did not prohibit slavery. It organized it, regulated it, and in significant ways legitimized it as a permanent feature of the social order rather than a temporary expedient to be phased out.

This is not a hostile reading of the tradition. It is what the classical jurists wrote down. The Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools all treat slavery as a legally permissible institution. The debates among them concern the conditions under which it is permissible, the rights and obligations it creates, and the circumstances under which manumission is required or recommended. None of them argue for its abolition as a matter of Islamic principle, because the sources on which they draw do not argue for its abolition. The Prophet owned slaves. His companions owned slaves. The first four caliphs owned slaves. The tradition that treats Muhammad’s example as the model of perfect human behavior cannot, without significant internal contradiction, declare that example wrong on this point.

The Ottoman Empire did not practice slavery despite being an Islamic empire. It practiced slavery in the specific forms and with the specific legal justifications that Islamic jurisprudence provided. The Quran and the Hadith supplied the framework. The empire supplied the scale.

The abolition timeline tells the story of how deeply embedded the institution was. The slave trade from Africa was not abolished until 1847, and even then enforcement was inconsistent and largely cosmetic. A royal decree emancipating all slaves, white and black, was not issued until 1882. Turkey did not ratify the 1926 Slavery Convention until 1955. By comparison, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and ownership of persons in 1833. The United States abolished slavery in 1865. The Ottoman Empire, the seat of the Islamic caliphate, was still issuing emancipation decrees in 1882 and ratifying international anti-slavery conventions seventy years after the American Civil War.

This is not ancient history. It is the institutional inheritance of the state that is currently ranked fifth in the world for modern slavery prevalence and first in Europe.

What 1.3 Million Looks Like

The Walk Free Index is careful about its definitions. Modern slavery, in their framework, covers forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, human trafficking, and other situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power. It does not count poverty. It does not count poor working conditions. It counts the specific condition of a person whose freedom of movement and self-determination has been removed by force or coercion.

One point three million people in that condition, in a country of eighty-four million, translates to approximately one in every sixty-five people. That is not a marginal phenomenon. That is a systemic feature of the social and economic landscape.

The Index also notes a specific pattern in the countries with the highest prevalence. They tend to be conflict-affected, they tend to have state-imposed forced labour, and they tend to have weak governance. Turkey fits two of those three criteria directly. The third, conflict, it exports to its neighbors rather than experiencing internally, as the Kurdish population of northern Syria discovered when Turkish-backed forces arrived in Afrin in 2018 and the demographic engineering began.

So who are the 1.3 million? They are not an abstraction. They are specific categories of specific people whose lives have been organized around other people’s economic interests and whose ability to refuse or leave has been removed.

They are Syrian refugees, approximately 3.6 million of whom are currently in Turkey, significant numbers of whom have been pushed by desperation and legal vulnerability into exploitative labour arrangements from which they cannot practically exit. Turkish law permits Syrian refugees to work legally only in the province where they are registered, a restriction that creates structural coercion: move for better work and lose your legal status, stay and accept whatever terms your employer offers. The International Labour Organization has documented widespread wage theft, excessive hours, child labour, and physical coercion in agricultural and textile sectors employing Syrian refugees. The legal framework that was supposed to protect them has become the mechanism of their exploitation.

They are women trafficked from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa into Turkey’s substantial commercial sex industry. Turkey functions as both a destination and a transit country for human trafficking. Women are brought in under false promises of domestic work or hospitality employment, have their documents confiscated, and are held through debt bondage and threat of violence. The US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report has consistently rated Turkey as a Tier 2 Watch List country, meaning it fails to meet minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making sufficient efforts to do so.

They are agricultural workers, primarily seasonal migrants from Turkey’s Kurdish southeast and from neighboring countries, working in conditions of debt bondage in the hazelnut, cotton, and tobacco harvests of western Turkey. The business model is well documented: labour contractors advance money to workers at the beginning of the season, the debt grows through inflated charges for accommodation and food, and workers find themselves unable to leave until the debt is repaid, which by the arithmetic of the arrangement it frequently never is.

They are children. Child labour in Turkey’s agricultural sector is extensive and well documented. Human Rights Watch has reported on the use of Syrian and Kurdish child labour in the hazelnut harvest specifically. Children as young as six work in fields during the school year, a fact that the major chocolate companies sourcing Turkish hazelnuts have been aware of for years and have not resolved despite repeated public commitments to do so. The hazelnut is the most heavily used nut in the global confectionery industry. It is in the chocolate bar in your kitchen.

The Turkmenistan connection extends the picture further. Anti-Slavery International’s research documents a direct pipeline of forced labour cotton flowing from Turkmenistan through Turkey into global fashion supply chains. Every year during the cotton harvest, the Turkmen government compels doctors, teachers, dentists, students, and government workers into the fields under threat of job loss or punishment. That cotton moves to Turkey, which has invested heavily in Turkmenistan’s textile industry through holding companies like Calik Holding, and then enters global supply chains through Turkish manufacturing. The shirt tagged Made in Turkey that you purchased last year may carry forced labour from two countries simultaneously.

The EU knows about this. Anti-Slavery International has published on it. The May Commission report documents it. The supply chain accountability frameworks exist. The political will to apply them to a NATO member and EU candidate state does not.

The EU’s Accession Arithmetic

It is worth spending a moment on what EU candidacy actually requires, because the gap between the stated requirements and Turkey’s actual position is not a matter of degree. It is categorical.

EU accession requires candidate countries to demonstrate compliance with what are called the Copenhagen Criteria, established in 1993. These require stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities. They require a functioning market economy. And they require the ability to take on the obligations of EU membership, including adherence to the EU’s legal framework on human rights, labour standards, and anti-discrimination.

Turkey has been in accession negotiations since 1999. In that time it has moved not toward those criteria but away from them. Press freedom in Turkey ranks among the lowest in Europe. Erdogan’s government has jailed more journalists than any other country in the world in multiple recent years. The rule of law has deteriorated sharply since the 2016 coup attempt, after which more than 150,000 people were detained, dismissed, or suspended, including judges, academics, military officers, and civil servants, in a purge whose scale and speed made judicial process impossible. Kurdish political parties have been suppressed, their elected representatives jailed, their municipalities placed under government-appointed trustees. The opposition candidate who won the Istanbul mayoral election in 2019 had his victory annulled and was forced to stand again, winning by a larger margin, before Erdogan’s government accepted the result.

Against this background, the EU has not suspended Turkey’s candidacy. It has described the accession process as frozen, a diplomatic formulation that means Turkey remains a candidate, continues to receive pre-accession funding, and retains the symbolic and practical benefits of candidate status, while the EU avoids the confrontation that formal suspension would require.

The reason for this avoidance is not subtle. Turkey hosts approximately 3.6 million Syrian refugees. In 2016, the EU paid Turkey six billion euros under the EU-Turkey Statement to prevent those refugees from moving into Europe. The payment was described as support for refugee management. It was in practical terms a payment to a country that ranked fifth in the world for modern slavery to continue hosting people who were, as we have seen, significantly represented in that country’s modern slavery statistics.

The EU is not confused about Turkey’s human rights record. It publishes annual progress reports that document, in careful bureaucratic language, the deterioration of press freedom, judicial independence, minority rights, and civil society space. Those reports sit alongside the accession candidacy as though they described a different country. They describe the same country. The institutional decision to maintain the candidacy despite the reports is not an oversight. It is a choice about which facts are allowed to have consequences.

The Suppression You Are Not Supposed to Name

Here is the question that Western institutional discourse cannot bring itself to ask directly: is Turkey’s position on the slavery index connected to the system of governance that Turkey practices and the civilizational inheritance from which that governance draws?

The Walk Free Index notes that Turkey is among the countries taking the least action to respond to modern slavery. This is not a failure of awareness. Turkey has ratified international conventions. Turkey has a functioning legal system. Turkey has government ministries with portfolios that include human rights. What Turkey does not have is a tradition of grassroots civil society movements that challenge the state on these questions from the bottom up and are permitted to survive.

The women’s rights movements that drove slavery abolition in the West emerged from a specific civilizational context. They required the freedom to organize, to publish, to protest, to petition. They required institutions that treated conscience as a private matter not subject to state enforcement. They required a legal tradition that recognized the individual as the fundamental unit of moral concern rather than the community or the umma. None of those prerequisites are reliably present in Turkey, and under Erdogan’s AKP government they have been contracting rather than expanding.

When Turkish feminist organizations protest, they are dispersed. When Turkish journalists report on human trafficking, they face legal jeopardy. When academics publish on minority rights, they lose their positions. The Istanbul Convention on violence against women, which Turkey had championed, was withdrawn by presidential decree in 2021. The reason given was that it threatened family values and promoted homosexuality. The women who had organized for years to build that protection framework had no institutional recourse.

This is the pattern that Western progressives who march for Palestine and chant about liberation cannot bring themselves to examine. The movements they belong to, feminism, LGBTQ advocacy, bodily autonomy activism, secular humanism, atheism, did not emerge under Islamic governance. They could not have. Unorthodoxy is suppressed there. Not marginalized, not underfunded, suppressed. The grassroots organizing that produced every progressive social movement of the last two centuries required soil that Islamic governance, in its classical and its contemporary forms, does not provide.

Atheism did not grow into a movement under the Ottoman caliphate. Feminism did not incubate in the harem. Gay rights did not emerge from a legal tradition that treats homosexuality as a capital offense. Every one of those movements owes its existence to a civilization built on the premise that individual conscience is sacred and that the state’s authority over it is limited. That premise has a specific historical address. It is not Istanbul. It is not Riyadh. It is the tradition shaped by a theology that distinguished between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men, and that insisted the individual soul answers to God directly, without the mediation of a state apparatus that claims to speak for Him.

The progressives who are currently most vocal about dismantling that tradition while celebrating the tradition that would have suppressed them at birth are not making an argument. They are making a confession. They are confessing that they do not understand where they came from, what produced them, or what would happen to them if the civilizational balance they are disrupting were to tip the other way.

Turkey is first in Europe for modern slavery. The EU is still processing the accession application. The progressives are still marching.

The 1.3 million people in bondage are not marching anywhere. They have no one organizing on their behalf. The movements that should be loudest are the quietest. And the civilization that built those movements is being dismantled by the people it produced.

We will return to that silence in the pieces that follow, because it deserves more than a paragraph and it is going to get one.

What the Data Requires

The Walk Free Index is not a polemical document. It is a careful, methodology-driven attempt to count people who have lost their freedom. Its finding that Turkey ranks fifth in the world is not a political statement. It is a measurement.

What the measurement requires is honest engagement. It requires the EU to answer the question of how a country with 1.3 million modern slaves in a population of 84 million qualifies for candidate status on the basis of its commitment to European values. It requires the fashion industry to audit its Turkish supply chains with the same rigor it claims to apply everywhere else. It requires the progressive movements that claim to speak for the oppressed to explain why the oppression of 1.3 million people in a majority-Muslim country produces less outrage than a social media post they disagree with.

And it requires the people who consume those fashion supply chains, who shop the Turkish brands, who buy the chocolate that contains the hazelnuts, who buy the cotton products that may carry forced labour from two countries in a single shirt, to understand that their purchasing decisions are not neutral. They are a vote. They are a vote for the continuation of a system that the institutions they trust have decided not to challenge.

The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. Its institutional inheritance did not.

The 1.3 million are still waiting for someone to notice. And the movements that built their careers on the language of liberation have been remarkably quiet about it.

In the next piece we ask why. Because Turkey is not only first in Europe for modern slavery. Turkey is also doing what Turkey has always done to the people on its borders. And this time, nobody is calling it a genocide.

Sources:

Walk Free Foundation. Global Slavery Index 2023: Turkey Country Study. walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studies/turkiye/

Bianet. “Turkey Comes Fifth in the World and First in Europe in Modern Slavery.” May 25, 2023. bianet.org/haber/turkey-comes-fifth-in-the-world-and-first-in-europe-in-modern-slavery-279279

Anti-Slavery International. “Forced Labour Tainted Cotton: From Turkmenistan via Turkey.” April 5, 2019. antislavery.org/latest/forced-labour-tainted-cotton-from-turkmenistan-via-turkey/

World History Edu. “Slavery in the Ottoman Empire: History and Major Facts.” April 13, 2024. worldhistoryedu.com/slavery-in-the-ottoman-empire-history-and-major-facts/

Human Rights Watch. “Turkey: Syrians in Dire Conditions.” 2022.

US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report: Turkey. 2023.

International Labour Organization. “Syrian Refugees and the Turkish Labour Market.” 2022.

European Commission. Turkey 2023 Report. neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu

Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. No Country Is Immune. 2025. modernslaverycommission.org

* * *

If you value unflinching, historically grounded analysis that mainstream outlets soften or ignore, consider upgrading. Paid subscribers get:

• Several new, full-length articles every week.

  Carefully researched pieces you won’t find elsewhere.

• Full access to the complete premium archive

  Archive of in-depth writing, research, and commentary — all in one place.

• Entry into the subscriber chat

  A private space for serious readers and thoughtful discussion.

This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth.

A. C. Rosenthal

A.C. Rosenthal is a self-taught writer, researcher, and theologian working at the intersection of history, philosophy, and culture. He is the author of The Carpenter's Son and the Imam's Son, The God that they rejected Isn't Real.

acrosenthal.com/

https://thetwomuhammadscurriculum.thinkific.com/

Brother Rachid is right about the conclusion. Just war theory is not a concession to moral weakness. It is the product of serious theological reasoning by people who understood, as Augustine understood while the Vandals laid siege to his city, that love of neighbor sometimes demands the willingness to use force. The pacifist who refuses to defend the innocent is not practicing a higher morality. He is outsourcing the moral burden to someone else and calling it virtue.

But arriving at the right conclusion for incomplete reasons is a different problem than arriving at the wrong conclusion. And Brother Rachid’s argument, for all its energy, leaves the most important question unanswered. Why does jihad keep producing these outcomes, across centuries, across cultures, across every conceivable variation in political circumstance? If we cannot answer that question structurally, we will keep winning individual arguments and losing the longer war.

My book The Two Muhammads is an attempt to answer exactly that question. What follows draws on that analysis.

The Asymmetry Is Theological, Not Accidental

Brother Rachid identifies the historical pattern with precision. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, the cradle of the ancient church, swallowed by conquest and slow strangulation. Western Christianity surviving precisely because it built sovereign states willing to fight back. The map speaks plainly. Where Christians fought, civilization endured. Where they submitted, it died.

But the pattern requires an explanation deeper than “Islam is aggressive and pacifism is naive.” The aggression is not incidental to the system. It is structural. In The Two Muhammads I trace the divergence to the founding narratives of the two civilizations themselves: “Christianity’s founding act is God’s self-sacrifice for the unworthy. Islam’s founding narrative centers on human sacrifice for God, obedience proven through conquest, submission confirmed through struggle, and ultimate assurance of salvation promised most clearly through martyrdom. These are not merely theological differences. They shape moral psychology. They determine whether the highest virtue is self-giving love or loyal obedience, whether power is redeemed through suffering or sanctified through dominance.”

This matters enormously for how we understand just war. Augustine’s framework was not developed as a response to Islamic jihad. It was developed as a response to the universal problem of evil in a fallen world. But when it is brought into contact with a system whose founding texts explicitly authorize offensive expansion until the whole of the earth submits, the just war framework is not debating a rival ethical theory about when force is permissible. It is confronting a system for which force in the service of God’s sovereignty is not a regrettable necessity but a spiritual virtue.

What the Texts Actually Say

Brother Rachid gestures at the doctrine of jihad but does not dwell in the texts. The texts deserve attention, because they are what makes this different from ordinary geopolitical conflict between rival powers.

The Quran’s late Medinan verses, which classical Islamic jurisprudence treats as the definitive final word on relations with non-Muslims, are unambiguous about the mandate. Quran 9:29 commands: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day... from those who were given the Scripture, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” Quran 9:5 extends this to polytheists: “Kill them wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” Quran 8:39 frames the horizon: “Fight them until there is no more fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah.”

In The Two Muhammads I note that classical jurists widely treat these later verses as abrogating the earlier, more restrained passages. The doctrine of abrogation, naskh, exists precisely to resolve the tension between the Quran’s peaceful Meccan period and its militant Medinan period. And the resolution consistently favors the later, harder texts. The instruction to fight until the religion is entirely for Allah is not a fringe reading. It is the mainstream jurisprudential inheritance.

This is not a portrait of a tradition that happened to produce some violent actors. It is a tradition whose most authoritative texts explicitly mandate expansion until submission is universal, and whose legal tradition has consistently treated those texts as operative rather than symbolic. The just war framework is responding to something categorically different from a state pursuing national interest through military means.

Subscribe now

Read more

Seventy-three times over the course of roughly fourteen centuries, Islamic armies or militias or rulers arrived at the villages and mountains of northwestern Iraq and northern Syria with the same intention. They came for people who would not convert. People whose faith was too old, too strange, too stubbornly itself to be absorbed or tolerated. People who venerated an angel they called Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, and who kept their sacred books in a script so ancient it predated Arabic, and who did not eat lettuce, and who did not wear the color blue, and whose marriage customs and dietary laws and prayers were so thoroughly their own that no invading theology could find purchase in them.

Political Islam came seventy-three times. Massacre and forced conversion and enslavement and dispersal followed. The Yazidis have a word for these events. They call them fermans. The word comes from the Persian for royal decree. When a ferman came, the decree was simple: Conversion, enslavement, disappear or die.

Seventy-three times before ISIS, the world did not notice.

I want to sit with that number for a moment before we talk about the seventy-fourth time. Not because the seventy-fourth time was not horrific. It was. Not because the world’s belated attention was worthless. It was not. But because the number seventy-three is doing theological and historical work that gets lost the moment we jump to the news cycle. That number is not a coincidence. It is a pattern that spans more then just the history of the Yazidis, Armenians and Jews. And the pattern has a cause that the world’s belated attention still, in the case of the Yazidis a decade later, has not fully named.

Who the Yazidis Are

The Yazidis are an ancient religious community, indigenous to the Sinjar region of northwestern Iraq, with diaspora communities in Syria, Turkey, Armenia, and Germany. Their origins are debated among scholars, but the most credible accounts place Yazidism as a syncretic tradition drawing on pre-Islamic Kurdish folk religion, elements of Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and, in its later form, Sufism. Their founder figure, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, was a twelfth-century Sufi saint whose tomb in the Lalish valley north of Mosul remains the holiest site in the Yazidi world.

The core of Yazidi theology resists Western religious categories, which is partly why it has been so consistently misunderstood. The Yazidis believe in a God who created the world and then entrusted its care to seven holy beings, the most important of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, whom God commanded to bow to no one but God himself and who refused to bow to Adam. In the Abrahamic traditions, a figure who refused God’s command to bow and was proud before Adam has a specific name and a specific fate. The identification of Melek Taus with Iblis, with Satan, was made by Muslim commentators centuries ago and it stuck. It was wrong. In Yazidi theology, Melek Taus’s refusal was not rebellion but fidelity. He bowed to no one but God because that was what God had asked him to do. He was not cast out. He was entrusted.

The misidentification had consequences that make most of the last fourteen centuries legible.

If the Yazidis worship Satan, then killing them is not genocide. It is piety. It is the elimination of an active spiritual pollution from the face of the earth. The theological framing transformed a vulnerable religious minority into a category of being whose destruction could be justified within the very framework that was doing the destroying. The fermans were not recognized as genocide because the perpetrators experienced them as religious obligation. How comforting.

This is worth naming clearly before we say another word about the seventy-fourth time.

The Shape of the Seventy-Three

The fermans began arriving in earnest in the seventeenth century, though earlier attacks on Yazidi communities are documented from the medieval period. The most thorough scholarly analysis counts at least seventy-three distinct large-scale attacks on Yazidi communities between the early Islamic period and 2014.

Several stand out in scale and deliberateness. Nadir Shah’s campaign in the eighteenth century specifically targeted Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region with mass killings, rape, torture, enslavement, and forced conversion. Ottoman governors conducted repeated campaigns against the Yazidi heartland in the nineteenth century, with organized massacres documented in 1832, 1837, 1892, and 1907. The 1892 campaign under Omar Wahab Pasha killed tens of thousands of Yazidis and destroyed the majority of their villages in the Sinjar, with mass killings, rape, torture, enslavement, and forced conversion. The 1907 campaign, conducted under the governor Fakhri Pasha, was documented by Western missionaries in the region who sent accounts to European capitals describing organized mass murder, rape, torture, enslavement, forced conversion, and the burning of villages while their inhabitants were still inside.

None of these produced a response from outside the region. There was no international law that applied. There was no institution with the standing or the will to intervene. There was not even, in most cases, a name in Western languages for what was happening. The word genocide would not be coined until 1944, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer trying to describe what had been done to the Armenians and what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.

The Yazidis were being subjected to the thing the word was eventually invented to describe, and they were being subjected to it before the word existed and long after it should have applied.

The pattern of the fermans is consistent enough to constitute a methodology. They came when a new power consolidated authority and needed to demonstrate its religious legitimacy. They came when Yazidi communities had accumulated enough visible wealth to attract organized looting under religious cover. They came when religious authorities needed to demonstrate seriousness about the boundaries of the faith community and chose the Yazidis as the demonstration. They came, in other words, not because the Yazidis had done anything. The Islamasists came because the opportunity existed to follow the example, teaching, and commands of the bandit prophet. The unbelieving Yazidis existed, and because they were there, on land that someone else wanted, with a faith that Islam had classified as devil worship, in a state of perpetual vulnerability that generations of surviving fermans had deepened rather than resolved. Islam is the only religion that tries to control those who never chose it, has a death penalty for those who leave it. And the only religion that guarantees paradise to those who follow it, ONLY IF they die while trying to take the life of a non believer. These are uncomfortable facts, but true none the less. The middle east will never know peace while it clings to Islam. Because Islam demands war of those who follow it, until all follow Islam. The difficulty is, that to criticize something that Muhammad did, is to set your own standard of right and wrong higher then Muhammad’s standard. And if Allah endorsed that behavior of Muhammad… Then you are claiming that your standard is higher then Allah’s too. THAT is why these things keep happening. It is impossible to reform these practices (like wife beating) without the reformer claiming to have superior standards to Gods own. THAT is the impasse. What Muslim can criticize another Muslim for doing what the prophet did and Allah endorsed? And the cycle continues. The GOOD people we all know, who happen to claim to be Muslim, are not following the prophets example. They are bad at Islam. That is why they are such kind people.

August 2014

The Islamic State moved into the Sinjar region on August 3, 2014.

The Yazidi community had warning. Arab (kind Muslim) friends in neighboring communities had been calling in the days before, telling them something was coming, urging them to take their families and leave. They tried. The Kurdish security forces, the Peshmerga who had promised to protect them and had shamed them for even considering flight, turned them back at the entrances to their villages. We are here, the Peshmerga told them. You should feel ashamed for trying to flee while we are protecting you. Then, in the early hours of the morning as ISIS arrived, all Kurdish security personnel collectively withdrew from the Sinjar region in an organized, planned withdrawal. They left. The people they had shamed into staying were left to face what was coming.

On the morning of August 3rd, a ten-year-old girl named Faiza woke up to find her family frightened in a way she had not seen before. She asked what was happening. Within hours, ISIS militants had stopped at her village, separated the men, and led her father, grandfather, and uncles away in handcuffs. The last thing her father did before they took him was find her in the crowd and hold her hand. It’s okay, he told her. Don’t be scared. Then they put him in a room with the other men of the village, filmed them, and laughed.

After that day, Faiza later testified, I felt there was no one to protect me anymore.

What happened across the Sinjar region over the following days has been documented with unusual thoroughness. The men were separated from the women and children at checkpoints and in village squares. The older men and boys above a certain age were shot in mass graves. There are more than eighty documented mass grave sites in the Sinjar region. The women and girls were loaded onto trucks and transported to holding facilities in Mosul, Raqqa, and other ISIS-controlled cities. They were catalogued. They were sold.

ISIS published a price list.

A girl between one and nine years of age was priced at approximately $172. A woman between twenty and thirty was priced at approximately $86. Women over forty were priced at approximately $43. The document, published in the ISIS official magazine Dabiq, justified the enslavement in explicit theological terms. The Yazidis were mushrikeen, polytheists, a category of unbeliever that classical Islamic jurisprudence treats differently from the People of the Book. Jews and Christians, under the classical framework, could be offered the dhimmi arrangement, subordination and taxation in exchange for the right to continue practicing their religion. Polytheists, under the same classical framework, were offered conversion or the sword. The re-institution of slavery, Dabiq explained, was not an innovation. It was a restoration of prophetic practice abandoned under Western pressure. The 3 classes of people in an Islamic society are: mushrikeen (3rd class human chattel, no rights), dhimmi (2nd class, dominated peasants with some rights), and Muslims, 1st class citizens with full rights, (unless female).

The theological argument was not invented by ISIS. It was assembled from sources that predate ISIS by a thousand years. Under established Islamic jurisprudence. This was Shariah, and shariah cannot be separated from Islam. Shariah is the fruit of islam and the root cannot deny its fruit, the one produces the other.

More than two hundred thousand Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar. The mountain is steep. The day was hot. Elderly people could not make the climb. People with disabilities who couldn’t walk were left behind or left at the side of the mountain. There are photographs of young Yazidi men choosing which parent to carry because they could not carry both, and photographs of the parent who was left sitting on the side of the mountain to die while the child carried the other one to the top. There are photographs of men pushing parents in wheelbarrows up the mountain. Some people ate leaves to survive. Some mothers kept their infants alive using their own saliva. Some people committed suicide because they saw no way out. Children died. Many children died.

At the peak, two hundred thousand people waited with no food and no water, surrounded by ISIS on every approach, slowly dying in the summer heat. A German-based Iraqi Yazidi activist named Mesa Denai volunteered to join helicopter crews running supplies to the mountain, flying at two thousand meters because ISIS was shooting at them from below. One of the Soviet-era helicopters crashed on the mountain. Mesa survived with a broken leg and broken ribs. He went back to Iraq in a wheelchair. He eventually established a resettlement program in Germany, bringing 1,100 Yazidi women and children out.

One of the girls he rescued was a fifteen-year-old named Lamia who had been blinded by a landmine while escaping, her face disfigured. After surgery saved one of her eyes, she told Mesa: if you want, I would like to speak to the people and tell them about the crimes that ISIS did to my family and to our people. She shared the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize with Nadia Murad, another Yazidi survivor. At the ceremony she said the prize belonged to every woman and girl who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.

Nadia herself was fifteen when ISIS attacked her village. They killed all the men, including her brother and father. They divided the younger girls and traded them on the slave market. She was sold four times. Every time she tried to escape. Every time she was caught. The last man who bought her was an Iraqi doctor who tortured her alongside two other women, one of whom was nine years old. All three were raped by this doctor. All three managed to escape. Before they reached safety, one of the women, Katherine, stepped on a landmine. The last thing Nadia heard was her death scream. Nadia survived. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. She used the acceptance speech to ask the world to hold ISIS accountable. The question of bringing them to justice, she noted, has barely raised a whisper.

An eighteen-year-old named Hala was sold three times. Each owner was worse than the previous one. She was raped, forced to recite the Quran, forcibly converted. She was beaten when she did not cook well enough or clean well enough. She was not allowed to leave, not allowed to speak to anyone, not allowed to use the phone. She contemplated suicide several times. After three years she threw herself into the crossfire of a battle between ISIS and Iraqi forces, screaming that she was a Yazidi girl, and surrendered to the Iraqi army. She was freed. To this day she has not heard from her mother, her father, or her three brothers.

What We Said and What We Did Not Say

The United States government formally recognized the ISIS campaign against the Yazidis as genocide in 2016. The European Parliament passed a resolution. The UN Commission of Inquiry used the word with full legal precision. The designation was correct and the people who worked to secure it did important work.

But there is a word adjacent to genocide that appeared in very few of the official designations and almost none of the press coverage. The word is doctrinal.

The ISIS campaign against the Yazidis was not genocide in the same way that the Holocaust was genocide, driven by racial pseudoscience with no religious sanction in the tradition of the perpetrators. It was genocide in the way that the Armenian massacres were genocide and the way that the Ottoman campaigns against the Assyrian Christians were genocide: driven by a theological framework that classified the target population as a category of being whose existence was a religious problem to be solved.

The ISIS document in Dabiq did not invent its argument. It cited sources. The classification of Yazidis as mushrikeen who fall outside the dhimmi protection is the standard position in classical Sunni jurisprudence. The permissibility of enslaving captives taken in jihad is documented in the hadith collections and developed in the major schools of Islamic law. The specific provision permitting sexual use of female captives is in Sahih al-Bukhari, in the commentary of Ibn Kathir, in Ibn Qudama’s al-Mughni. ISIS did not write new theology. It read old theology and decided to implement it.

This does not mean that mainstream Muslim scholarship endorses what ISIS did. It does not, officially. The vast majority of Muslim scholars condemned the ISIS campaign, many with genuine horror and moral seriousness. Condemning the application but not the validity of the doctrine or the Islamic teachings that call for the violence. Speaking out both sides of their mouths. One side saying its necessary and the other side saying its evil. A necessary evil.

But condemning the application while refusing to examine the source material that made the application possible is a form of intellectual evasion that the Yazidis in the mass graves cannot afford on the world’s behalf.

The question the seventy-fourth ferman demands is not only: why did ISIS do this? The question is why seventy-four distinct organized campaigns to destroy the Yazidis have occurred over fourteen centuries, all perpetrated by actors operating within an Islamic theological framework, all using the same doctrinal justification, the Yazidis as devil-worshippers outside the protection of any religious law, and none of them ever repudiated by that framework from within with sufficient authority to prevent the next one.

The Number the World Needs to Hold

The condemnations came from outside the tradition or from reformist voices within it who do not control the authoritative texts. The authoritative texts remain what they are. They were old before ISIS read them and they will be old after ISIS is gone.

Reforming the theological classification that produced seventy-four fermans would require authoritative voices within the tradition to say, publicly and with the weight of institutional standing, that the classical jurisprudence on mushrikeen was wrong, that the Yazidis are not devil-worshippers, that the enslavement of captives taken in jihad is not a valid religious practice and never was, that the price list in Dabiq was not a legitimate application of prophetic example but a desecration of it. Some Muslim voices have said versions of this. They have not said it with the institutional authority that the tradition vests in its classical sources. And the classical sources have not changed.

The United States government formally designated what happened as genocide. Both the Obama and Trump administrations applied the word. This is noted with appropriate credit. But as testimony from someone present at the State Department reveals, the same US government had earlier deliberately refused requests for air strikes because it wanted political pressure to mount against the Iraqi prime minister. The calculation was geopolitical. The consequence was the beginning of the genocide. Both of these things are true simultaneously. They are the specific texture of how the world tends to respond to the elimination of small, ancient, inconvenient minorities in places that do not have sufficient strategic value to override the calculation.

There are still over eighty ISIS mass graves of Yazidis to be exhumed. Approximately 2,700 women and children taken in August 2014 have still not been recovered. Each number in that figure is a woman or a girl with a name in a language that has been spoken in the Sinjar mountains since before Arabic existed. Each one has a family still looking. Many are believed to be held in a detainment camp in eastern Syria called Al-Hol, held there with their captors. We have, as testimony describes it, abandoned the victims with their victimizers in this camp and thrown away the key.

The people who have the luxury of treating the formal acknowledgment as sufficient are the people who were not in the Sinjar when the seventy-fourth ferman arrived.

Faiza went home to her village in Sinjar nine years after she fled it. She walked the street where she grew up, walked into the house where her family used to eat together and wait for her when she came home from school and play in the backyard. She stood in the room where she and her siblings used to sleep together, wake up together, laugh together. Now it was just four walls. Empty. Fifteen family members had lived in that house. Now it was her, her brothers, and her mother. We used to play in the backyard, she said. Now it’s been nine years. I haven’t seen any of them. Now it’s just this room. Just four walls. Empty.

Her father has been missing for nine years. She does not know whether he is alive or dead. There are eighty ISIS mass graves still to be exhumed. She does not know if his remains are in one of them. She does not know if she will ever be able to give him a proper burial.

The last thing he did before they took him away in handcuffs was find her in the crowd and hold her hand. It’s okay, he told her. Don’t be scared.

She is still waiting to find out if that was true.

Seventy-Four

The people reading this understand what it means to count. They understand what it means to be an ancient minority targeted for elimination by larger forces that justified the targeting in theological terms. They understand what it means to survive the previous attempt and face the next one. They understand what it means to have the word genocide applied to what happened while the search for the missing goes underfunded and the perpetrators go unaccountable.

The Yazidis are not Jews. Their faith is different, their history different, their geography different. But the machinery that produced seventy-four fermans is the same machinery that has been applied to Jewish communities in every country where Islamic political authority has had sufficient power to implement it. The same theology. The same legal classification of the non-Muslim as subordinate, subject to elimination when the political conditions permit. The same world watching and calculating and arriving late with airdrops.

The seventy-fourth ferman ended. The seventy-fifth has not been declared yet. That is not the same as safety. For people who have counted to seventy-four, the absence of an active ferman is not peace. It is the interval between fermans. It always has been.

Until the source material that makes the fermans theologically possible is repudiated from within the tradition that produced it, with the same authority and permanence that the tradition claims for itself, the Yazidis will keep counting.

And the world will keep noticing only when the number gets large enough and the images get graphic enough and the coverage gets sustained enough that looking away becomes temporarily impossible.

And then the world will move on again.

And the Yazidis will be left with their dead and their missing and their number, still climbing, in a valley in northwestern Iraq where their temples have stood since before any of the traditions that keep trying to destroy them were born.

When it comes to Islam, WE are all Israel. The Yazidi are one of the best examples. Whether they realize it or not.

Where the Story Really Begins: Two Stolen Birthright

To understand Islam you have to go back further than Muhammad. You have to go back to two moments in Genesis where the firstborn son lost everything, and what that loss produced across the centuries.

The first moment is Ishmael. Abraham’s firstborn son, born to Hagar the Egyptian slave, was the heir by every expectation of the ancient world. The firstborn received the blessing, the inheritance, and the covenant promise. But God’s choice fell on Isaac, the son of Sarah, born later, born impossibly, born against all natural expectation. Ishmael was not destroyed. He was sent away. And before he was sent away, God gave Hagar a prophecy about her son that has echoed across four thousand years of history.

Genesis 16:12. He will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.

That is not a curse exactly. It is a description. A character. A destiny. The wild donkey in the ancient Near East was the untameable desert animal, free, ungovernable, answering to no master, surviving in conditions that would kill anything domesticated. It is a portrait of a people who would never be absorbed, never be governed from outside, never be brought under a foreign yoke without explosive resistance. And it is a portrait of perpetual hostility, not occasional conflict, not political disagreement, but structural, ongoing, constitutive hostility toward all their brothers.

The second moment is Esau. Isaac’s firstborn, the hunter, the man’s man, the son his father loved. The covenant blessing that should have been his by birth was obtained by Jacob through deception, and Esau’s rage at that theft never fully left him. When Esau realized what had happened he wept with a cry so bitter the text records it with unusual specificity. He did not simply lose a legal inheritance. He lost the covenant promise, the connection to Abraham’s God, the thread that ran from Abraham through Isaac and was now running through Jacob instead.

What Esau did next is recorded almost as a footnote in Genesis 28:9, and it is one of the most theologically loaded footnotes in the entire Bible. He went to Ishmael and took Mahalath, Ishmael’s daughter, as his wife.

Read that slowly. The son who lost the covenant blessing deliberately joined himself to the line of the son who had also lost the covenant blessing. Two disinherited firstborns, two men whose expected inheritance had been redirected, now joined by marriage. The Edomites, Esau’s descendants, and the Ishmaelites, Ishmael’s descendants, became family. And from that combined inheritance of displacement and desert survival, the Arab peoples trace significant portions of their ancestry.

This is not a racial argument. It is a theological one. The question it raises is not whether Arab people are cursed. They are not, and the Bible is explicit that God heard Ishmael’s cry in the wilderness and blessed him with a great nation. The question is whether the character described in Genesis 16:12 found its most potent historical expression in the civilization that Muhammad built. And the answer, examined honestly against the historical record, is yes.

The Man in the Cave

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 AD into the Quraysh tribe, the clan responsible for maintaining the Kaaba, the ancient shrine at the center of Meccan religious and commercial life. His father died before his birth. His mother died when he was six. He was raised first by his grandfather and then by his uncle Abu Talib. He was, from the beginning, a man who had lost the people who were supposed to define his place in the world.

He was also a man with a sharp and restless mind who had noticed something about his people that troubled him deeply. The Arabs were a scattered, fractional, tribal people with no unifying text, no unifying prophet, no single story that could hold them together across the vast distances of the Arabian Peninsula. The Jews had Moses and the Torah. The Christians had Jesus and the Gospels. The Persians had Zoroaster and the Avesta. The Arabs had nothing equivalent. They had hundreds of local tribal deities, a patchwork of stories and customs that divided them into perpetually warring factions rather than binding them together as a people.

Muhammad was not the first person to notice this gap. But he was the person who did something about it.

He had a habit of retreating to a cave on Mount Hira outside Mecca for extended periods of solitary meditation. He was about forty years old when the experience happened that changed everything. What occurred in that cave is recorded in the Islamic sources themselves, and what the Islamic sources record is not what most people expect to hear.

According to the Hadith of Aisha, preserved in Sahih Bukhari, the most authoritative hadith collection in Sunni Islam, Muhammad was in the cave when something seized him. The Arabic word used describes a violent physical compression, a squeezing, a crushing. He was gripped and pressed with overwhelming force three times, each time to the point where he felt he could bear no more. Then words came.

He fled the cave in terror. The Islamic sources are explicit about this. He was shaking. He was convinced he had been possessed by a demon, a jinn. He ran to his wife Khadijah and told her to cover him, wrap him in a garment, and he trembled beneath it. When he recovered enough to speak he told her what had happened and told her plainly that he feared for his sanity and his life. According to the sources, he considered throwing himself from a cliff. He wanted to die rather than live as a man he believed to be possessed by an evil spirit.

It was Khadijah who talked him back from the edge. She took him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, an elderly Christian scholar, who told him that what he had encountered was the same angel who had come to Moses. It was Waraqah’s interpretation, offered to a terrified man in crisis, that transformed the experience from demonic possession into divine revelation. Muhammad did not arrive at that conclusion himself. He had to be convinced of it by someone else.

Now hold that account next to the prophetic encounters recorded in Scripture and feel the difference.

When the angel appeared to Gideon in Judges 6, Gideon was frightened, but the angel’s first words were peace to you, do not fear, you will not die. The encounter produced a mission, a miracle, a confirming sign, and a man who went on to deliver Israel. He did not become suicidal. He did not need someone else to convince him the experience was divine rather than demonic.

When Samuel heard the voice of God as a child in 1 Samuel 3, he was confused, mistaking the voice for Eli’s. But once Eli helped him understand what was happening, Samuel listened and received a specific, verifiable prophetic message that was fulfilled in exact detail. He did not flee in terror. He did not need to be talked down from a cliff.

When the angel appeared to Mary in Luke 1, she was troubled by the greeting, but the angel’s immediate response was do not be afraid, Mary. The encounter was gentle, specific, and produced a response of willing acceptance. She did not become suicidal. She did not need someone else to tell her she had not been possessed.

When Zechariah encountered the angel in the temple in Luke 1, he was afraid. The angel’s first words were do not be afraid. The encounter produced a specific prophecy about a specific child, fulfilled in verifiable historical detail. Zechariah did not run from the temple in suicidal terror.

When Joseph received dreams in Genesis 37 and Matthew 1, the dreams produced specific actionable guidance fulfilled in exact detail. No terror. No suicidal ideation. No need for a third party to reframe the experience from demonic to divine.

The pattern across every biblical prophetic encounter is consistent. The recipient may be initially afraid. The divine messenger’s first response is almost always do not be afraid. The encounter produces a specific, verifiable mission or prophecy. The recipient is left not destroyed but commissioned. None of them became suicidal. None of them needed a third party to convince them the experience was divine. None of them then produced a revelation that contradicted and superseded the prophets who came before them.

Muhammad’s experience in the cave shares none of these features except the initial fear. The terror was not calmed by the presence of the messenger. It was not followed by a specific verifiable prophecy. It required a third party’s reinterpretation to be classified as divine at all. And the revelation it produced did not confirm and complete the previous prophets. It contradicted them, superseded them, and built its own internal mechanism for superseding itself.

The Sibylline Echo

There is a parallel to Muhammad’s cave experience that is almost never discussed in Christian circles, and it is worth sitting with carefully.

The Oracle at Delphi was the most famous prophetic institution in the ancient world. The Pythia, the oracle, descended into the inner chamber of the temple, the adyton, where she sat above a chasm in the earth. Classical sources describe volcanic fumes rising from the chasm. She chewed laurel leaves. She entered an altered state that ancient observers described variously as divine possession or ecstatic frenzy. The experience was physically overwhelming. The Pythia convulsed. She spoke in ways that were often incoherent. She sometimes emerged from the encounter in a state of physical collapse.

She never interpreted her own utterances. The priests of the temple interpreted them. The experience was raw, overwhelming, terrifying, and completely dependent on human intermediaries to translate it into something usable.

Compare this to Muhammad’s cave experience point by point. Solitary location. Overwhelming physical sensation. Terror so complete it produced suicidal ideation. Complete dependence on a third party to interpret and classify the experience. A revelation that required human mediation to become usable.

The biblical prophets do not fit this pattern. The Pythia does. Muhammad does. That is not a coincidence to be explained away. It is a data point that belongs in any honest comparative analysis of prophetic traditions.

Starting with the Quran

The first thing that surprised me about the Quran when I actually read it was its texture. I had expected something more like the Bible in structure. What I encountered was something quite different, and the difference matters before you can make sense of anything else.

The Quran is not a narrative. The Bible moves through time. It has a beginning, a middle, and an arc. Genesis leads to Exodus leads to the prophets leads to the Gospels. Characters develop. Themes build. The story is going somewhere. The Quran does not work that way. It is organized roughly by length of chapter, from longest to shortest, which means it has no chronological organization at all. You can open it to almost any page and not know whether you are reading an early revelation or a late one, a Meccan passage or a Medinan one, without outside guidance.

That disorientation is not incidental. It has consequences I will come back to.

The second thing that surprised me was what I found genuinely admirable. I want to be honest about this because people who tell you there is nothing worth respecting in Islam are not doing you any favors. They are setting you up for intellectual embarrassment the moment you speak to a serious Muslim who can point to passages they are proud of.

The Quran on God’s absolute sovereignty is genuinely powerful. The weight of divine majesty in the early Meccan chapters, the insistence that there is only one God, that He created everything, that human pride in the face of that is absurd, that the poor and the orphan and the widow matter to God: all of that is real, and there is a reason it spoke to seventh-century Arabia and speaks to hundreds of millions of people today. The Fatiha, the opening chapter that Muslims pray seventeen times a day, is genuinely beautiful. In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. I read it and understood immediately why a man might want to say it seventeen times a day. There is something there.

The Quran’s treatment of Jesus also surprised me. He is treated with more dignity in the Quran than most Christians realize. He is born of a virgin, confirmed by the Quran. He performs miracles, confirmed by the Quran. He is called the Word of God and a spirit from God. He is listed among the greatest of the prophets. The Quran states explicitly that he was sinless. I found that striking. Muhammad, by contrast, is told in the Quran to seek forgiveness for his sins. Jesus is not. The text treats their moral standing differently, and it does so in Jesus’ favor, and most Muslims I have spoken to have never noticed that.

Those are the things I want to credit before I tell you what else I found.

What the Structure of the Quran Actually Means

The disorganized texture I described is not just an aesthetic feature. It is the context inside which you have to understand the doctrine of abrogation, and abrogation is the key that unlocks everything.

The problem is that the Quran contradicts itself. Not subtly, not in ways that require elaborate interpretation to identify. In ways that are direct and mutually exclusive.

There is no compulsion in religion appears in Surah 2:256. Kill them wherever you find them appears in the same chapter, a hundred verses later. To you your religion and to me mine appears in Surah 109. Fight them until there is no more fitnah and until the religion, all of it, is for Allah appears in Surah 8:39. These are not texts that can be held in creative tension the way the Old and New Testaments can. They are instructions pointing in opposite directions.

Islamic theology has a solution to this. It is called naskh, which means abrogation, and it works like this: since the Quran was revealed over twenty-two years, across two distinct phases of Muhammad’s life, later revelations cancel earlier ones when they conflict. The Meccan period, when Muhammad had no political power and the Muslim community was small and vulnerable, produced the tolerant, patient verses. The Medinan period, after the migration to Medina and the formation of a Muslim political and military state, produced the harder verses about warfare, subjugation, and the treatment of unbelievers.

The classical scholars who built Islamic law were not confused about which ones took precedence. Al-Suyuti compiled lists of abrogated verses running to over two hundred entries. He is explicit that the Sword Verse, Surah 9:5, which commands the killing of polytheists after the sacred months have passed, overrides many earlier calls to patience and coexistence. Ibn Kathir, whose commentary is still standard reading in traditional Islamic education today, treats Surah 9 as the definitive final word on relations with non-Muslims. Al-Tabari documents the same conclusion in his monumental chronicle.

These are not extremists. They are the tradition’s own most respected voices. The peaceful verses typically quoted to Western audiences are, in many cases, the ones the tradition itself identified as superseded. That is not a smear. It is what the classical commentators wrote down in their own words.

What I Found in the Hadiths

Moving from the Quran into the Hadith literature is moving from scripture into biography. The Hadiths are collections of reports about what Muhammad said and did. The two most authoritative collections in Sunni Islam are Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and between them they contain thousands of individual reports, each with a chain of transmission going back through named narrators to the companions of Muhammad and then to Muhammad himself.

I want to be clear about what I found credible before I tell you what troubled me. The transmission system is sophisticated. The science of hadith criticism, which evaluates the reliability of each narrator in the chain, is a genuine intellectual achievement. The Muslim scholars who built it were not naive. They were aware that fabrication happened and they developed tools for detecting it. The best-authenticated hadiths went through scrutiny that would be recognizable to any serious textual scholar.

What I found in those hadiths is a Muhammad who is both more human and more troubling than the figure who appears in the Quran alone.

There are hadiths where Muhammad is gentle, generous, and genuinely funny. He forbids the mistreatment of servants. He says the best of men are the best to their wives. He weeps at a child’s funeral. He has favorites among the companions, and his favorites clearly have affection for him. When his wife Aisha reports a piece of his behavior, you can hear a real relationship in the account, a man with quirks and preferences and moments of warmth that feel entirely human.

And then there are the other hadiths.

In Bukhari: Muhammad orders the execution of men who had left Islam. The hadith is explicit and is not a marginal report. It is in the most authoritative collection and is treated as legally binding. Whoever changes his religion, kill him. That is not a metaphor. Islamic law in four of the five major schools uses this hadith as the basis for the death penalty for apostasy.

In Bukhari and the Sira: the account of the Banu Qurayza, the Jewish tribe of Medina whose adult males, somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred men, were executed by Muhammad’s order after surrendering. Their women and children were enslaved. This is not disputed within the Islamic tradition. It is narrated by Ibn Ishaq with a matter-of-factness that suggests no one in the early Muslim community found it unusual. The controversy is not whether it happened. It is how to interpret it.

In Bukhari and the Sira: Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha is placed by the traditional sources at her age of six, with consummation at nine. This is not a Western polemical invention. Muslim scholars have argued about the chronology for decades, with some modernists attempting to revise it. But the traditional sources are clear, the classical commentators accept the traditional account, and the marriage is defended by mainstream figures within the tradition on the grounds that different historical periods have different norms.

I am reporting what the primary sources say. I am not inventing problems. These are the materials.

What the Sira Added

The Sira, the official biography of Muhammad, is primarily Ibn Ishaq’s work as preserved through Ibn Hisham. It is the closest thing Islam has to a canonical life of the prophet, and it is not gentle hagiography. It contains things that a sympathetic biographer would have been tempted to omit.

The most significant thing the Sira added to my understanding was the chronology. Reading the Quran without the Sira is like reading a collection of speeches without knowing when they were delivered or why. The Sira provides the context. It shows you that the tolerant early verses came from a period when Muhammad had no power and needed allies. It shows you that the harder later verses came from a period when he had armies and needed obedience.

The Sira also shows you a man who was a political and military leader as well as a religious one. He ordered raids. He authorized the assassination of poets who mocked him. He negotiated treaties and broke them when it was strategically necessary, with Quranic sanction for doing so. None of this is invented by critics. It is in the primary sources, treated as legitimate by the tradition, and used as legal precedent in Islamic jurisprudence ever since.

The Question That Changed Everything

The question that changed everything for me was not the violence. I could have processed the violence by contextualizing it historically. Plenty of ancient texts contain things that make modern readers uncomfortable, and the Bible is not exempt from that category. The question that changed everything was structural.

In Christianity, the founder is the standard against which the institution is measured. When the church falls short, the accusation is always: you are not living like Jesus. The standard itself is not in question. Jesus did not order raids. He did not arrange marriages with children. He did not authorize the execution of people who left the faith. He was executed by the state, not empowered by it. Everything the church has ever done wrong can be measured against what Jesus actually did and found wanting. The standard holds even when the institution fails.

In Islam, the founder is the standard. When you examine the primary sources and find things that trouble you, you are not finding a gap between Islam and Muhammad. You are finding Muhammad. The hadith about apostasy is not a corruption of the tradition. It is from the most trusted collection in the tradition. The Banu Qurayza massacre is not a later invention. It is in the Sira, narrated with approval by the companion who participated. The marriage to Aisha is not a smear. It is defended by the tradition itself.

This is the structural difference. And it is why the question cannot be resolved by pointing to the beautiful early Meccan verses and saying, that is the real Islam. The tradition itself says those verses were superseded. The tradition itself presents the Medinan Muhammad, the military commander, the political ruler, the man who ordered the execution of apostates, as the model of perfect human behavior, to be followed in all things.

A carpenter tests whether a joint holds weight. I put honest pressure on the joint. I am reporting what happened.

What About My Muslim Neighbor?

Here is the question you are probably already asking, because it is the right question.

The answer requires a distinction that matters enormously. Not every person who fasts during Ramadan has read the Quran. In fact, for many Muslims raised in non-Arabic speaking households, encountering the Quran in their own language for the first time is precisely what causes them to quietly walk away from it. Quietly, because open apostasy under orthodox Islamic law carries a death sentence.

There is a meaningful difference between the orthodox Muslim who understands and applies Islamic doctrine in its fullest sense, and the cultural Muslim who was born into the tradition the way millions of Americans were born into Christianity, inheriting the identity without the theology. The orthodox believer who follows the tradition fully is, by Islamic standards, a good Muslim. By the standards of Western civilization, that same person presents a genuine problem. The cultural Muslim who has never studied the doctrine is, by Islamic standards, a bad Muslim. By the standards of Western civilization, that person is simply a normal neighbor, and often one who, given accurate information about what the tradition actually teaches, wants nothing to do with it.

Collapsing that distinction does not make your analysis sharper. It makes it less accurate. And it costs you the very people most likely to become allies in identifying genuine radicalization.

Your Muslim neighbor is most likely the second kind. Treat them accordingly.

The Deepest Difference

There is one more thing I found that I want to be precise about, because it is the deepest thing.

When I read the Quran’s portrayal of Allah carefully and then went back to the Bible, I noticed a difference I had not been able to articulate before. In the Quran, God’s love is consistently conditional and selective. He loves those who fight in his cause. He loves those who purify themselves. He loves those who are constantly repentant. He explicitly does not love the disbeliever. He explicitly does not love the arrogant. Divine love in the Quran is approval extended to those who have earned alignment with Him. It is not, at any point in the text, described as God pursuing people who have not yet qualified.

The Bible has a sentence the Quran does not have. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It has another. God is love. Not God loves. God is love. Love is not an attribute activated by human performance. It is what He is.

That distinction is not cosmetic. It changes the entire shape of the relationship between God and humanity. In Islam, the relationship is essentially contractual. Obedience is exchanged for reward. Even sustained obedience does not yield certainty of salvation. The system is hierarchical in a way that cannot be closed from the human side. In Christianity, the gap is closed from God’s side, at a cost that is made explicit, through a means that is historical and verifiable and either happened or it did not.

The cross is not a soft conclusion. But it is a coherent one. God does not ask you to perform your way to a salvation whose threshold you can never know. He comes in and pays it himself and shows you the wounds as proof.

Where This Story Ends

My friend and I argued about all of this for years. The arguments were good on both sides. He knew his tradition and I came to know mine. What I want to leave you with here is simpler than the arguments.

I did the reading. I started with a friend who believed the tradition and loved me enough to challenge me with it. I went to the primary sources without an agenda. I took notes over years, not weeks. I wrote three books out of what I found.

And what I found, in the end, was that the questions the Quran itself raises, the questions about who God is, what He is like, whether He pursues us or waits for us to qualify, whether the standard of perfect humanity looks like Jesus or like someone else, those questions have answers. I found the answers in the book the Quran told me to read.

The prophecy of Genesis 16:12 described a wild donkey of a man whose hand would be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, who would live in hostility toward all his brothers. Across fourteen centuries of Islamic political history, that description has found its most consistent and most potent expression in the civilization Muhammad built. That is not hatred of Muslims as people. It is an honest reading of a very old prophecy against a very long historical record.

None of this means every Muslim is your enemy. It means that understanding Islam from its own authoritative sources, rather than from its most comfortable presentations, is not optional for anyone who wants to think clearly about the world they are living in.

Those of you who want to go deeper into the textual and historical questions will find them in The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma. Those of you waiting for The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son will find out where the friendship ended up. Those of you who are somewhere in the middle of your own reading, not sure what to make of it, are precisely where I was.

Keep reading. Go to the primary sources. Test the joints.

Www.acrosenthal.com

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas killed approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel in the single deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, students at universities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia gathered to celebrate. The same mindless drones who belch inclusivity chants and DEI slogans were cheering for the death of the middle east minorities.

They did not gather to mourn over the death of civilians, Not to grieve. Not to cautiously observe. To celebrate death and the hate that united them.

At Cornell, a lecturer told a crowd he found the attack “exhilarating” and “energizing.” At Harvard, thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring Israel “entirely responsible” for the attack before the bodies had been identified. Feminists were blaming the victims of rape. At Sydney and at London and at Toronto, rallies were held, flags were burned, slogans were chanted, and the people attending them were, in large numbers, students and faculty of institutions that have spent decades educating the West about Islam.

I am not interested, for the purposes of this piece, in the politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict. What interests me is the diagnostic question. What does the response of Western academic Islamic studies to October 7 tell us about the state of that discipline? What did the stress test reveal about the thesis that has been its governing assumption for thirty years?

The thesis, stated plainly, is this: political Islam and its violent expressions are fringe phenomena, deviations from an otherwise moderate tradition, produced by political grievance, colonial legacy, and economic deprivation rather than by doctrinal content. The mainstream of the field has held this thesis with remarkable consistency since at least the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, which reframed the academic study of Islam as a project of Western cultural domination and made the critical examination of Islamic doctrine a form of racism rather than a form of scholarship.

October 7 was a stress test of that thesis. Not the first. But perhaps the most revealing.

What the Field Was Built to Prevent

To understand what October 7 revealed, you have to understand what the academic Islamic studies establishment was built, over several decades, to prevent.

It was built to prevent the examination of doctrinal content as a causal factor in political outcomes.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the stated intellectual position of the dominant school within the field. Said’s argument in Orientalism was that Western scholars studying Islam were not doing scholarship. They were doing ideology, constructing a distorted image of “the Orient” as backward, violent, and irrational in order to justify colonial domination. The appropriate response to this distortion, the field concluded, was to treat doctrinal content as largely irrelevant to political analysis and to explain all Islamic political behavior through the lens of Western interference, political economy, and postcolonial grievance.

The result was a field that became structurally incapable of asking the question the evidence kept demanding: whether the outcomes of Islamic governance, violence, repression, legal inequality, the persistent fragility of pluralism, the asymmetric treatment of apostasy and blasphemy and minority rights, arise despite the doctrinal system or because of it.

That question was not merely discouraged. In many of its major journals, leading departments, and most cited figures, it was classified as the wrong kind of question. To ask it was to risk the accusation of Islamophobia, which the field had helped construct as a career-ending charge rather than a substantive intellectual rebuttal. The accusation did not refute the question. It silenced the questioner.

The practical consequence of this over three decades was that Western universities produced generation after generation of students, journalists, policymakers, and government analysts who understood Islam almost entirely through the lens of grievance and politics, with almost no serious engagement with the doctrinal architecture of the tradition. They knew about colonialism. They knew about the partition of Palestine. They knew about Western interventions in Muslim-majority countries. They knew almost nothing about abrogation, the doctrine of jihad as classical jurisprudence defines it, the structural difference between the Meccan and Medinan periods, or what the classical commentators say about the relationship between divine law and human legislation.

They were, in the language I use in The Two Muhammads, trained to observe outcomes while remaining systematically prevented from examining causes.

Subscribe now

Read more

Armenia did not stumble into history. It walked in through the front door.

In 301 AD, the Kingdom of Armenia became the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion. Not a tolerated faith. Not a permitted minority practice. The official confession of a sovereign people. Twelve years before Constantine issued the Edict of Milan. Twelve years before the Roman Empire stopped feeding Christians to things with teeth. Armenia was already there, already committed, already staking its national identity on the confession that Jesus Christ was Lord.

That fact is not a footnote. It is the foundation of everything that follows.

The Armenian people carried that identity through centuries of conquest and pressure and the specific grinding weight of existence as a Christian minority inside an Islamic empire. They carried it through the millet system, through the jizya, through the legal architecture that marked them as permanently subordinate, tolerated but never equal, protected on paper in ways that depended entirely on the goodwill and the political stability of the power above them. They carried it through the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s, through the broken promises of the Young Turk revolution, through the gathering darkness of 1914.

They carried it all the way to the Syrian desert, where the Ottoman state left their bones.

The Armenian Genocide is not simply a historical atrocity. It is a case study in what happens when a specific set of conditions converges. When an Islamic political order under pressure reaches for the tools its own tradition has always kept within arm’s reach. When the tolerance built into the dhimmi system, always conditional, always revocable, finally expires. When a Christian minority that has existed for centuries inside an Islamic empire becomes, in the logic of that empire’s survival calculus, the answer to a question nobody asked them.

The West has not read this case study. Not seriously. Not in the way that produces understanding rather than sentiment. And the consequences of that failure are not historical. They are arriving.

To understand what happened to the Armenians you have to understand what the dhimmi system actually was, not the apologetic version and not the polemical version but the structural one.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence developed the category of the dhimmi, the protected non-Muslim subject living under Islamic governance, as a formal legal framework for managing the permanent presence of Christians and Jews within the Islamic polity. It was not equality. It was never presented as equality. Dhimmis paid the jizya, a poll tax from which Muslims were exempt, as a material acknowledgment of their subordinate status. They faced restrictions on building houses of worship, on public religious expression, on bearing arms, on testifying in courts against Muslims. They occupied a formally second-class civic position that was inscribed in law and reinforced by the daily texture of social life.

Within those constraints, the system offered something real. Legal protection. The right to practice their faith. The ability to maintain communal institutions. A defined, if subordinate, place within the social order. For long stretches of Islamic history, in specific times and places, that protection was genuine. Armenian communities built churches, ran schools, produced merchants and doctors and intellectuals who were economically indispensable to the empires they lived within. The dhimmi framework, at its functional best, produced a stable if unequal coexistence.

But the stability was never unconditional. It depended on a specific set of political circumstances remaining intact. It depended on the Islamic state being strong enough and secure enough to enforce the bargain on both sides, to protect the dhimmis from mob violence and to maintain the legal architecture that gave the relationship its structure. It depended, most fundamentally, on the Islamic political order remaining in a position of unchallenged dominance.

Remove that dominance and the framework does not evolve. It does not negotiate a new arrangement. It collapses. And when it collapses, the Christian minority that existed within it is left not in a renegotiated relationship with its neighbors but in a position that the Medinan legal tradition has a specific and well-developed vocabulary for describing. The enemy within. The collaborator with external Christian powers. The fifth column in a civilization under siege.

That vocabulary was fourteen centuries old when the Ottoman Empire began to die. It did not need to be invented in 1915. It only needed to be activated.

Subscribe now

The Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was dying in the specific way that empires die when they have been built on a theological foundation that cannot absorb the implications of military defeat.

Territory was bleeding away in every direction. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, nations that had been Ottoman for centuries, were breaking free one by one, aided by the Christian powers of Europe who framed their intervention as the protection of Christian minorities under Islamic rule. Each loss confirmed a specific narrative that was hardening inside the imperial imagination. The Christians within the empire were not loyal subjects navigating a difficult situation. They were the advance agents of the Christian powers closing in from outside. Their success, their visibility, their economic prominence were not evidence of useful integration. They were evidence of a conspiracy.

This is the mechanism that the West consistently fails to understand when it looks at the events of 1915. It looks for the immediate cause. The wartime paranoia. The specific decisions of the Three Pashas. The military disaster at Sarikamish that provided the proximate justification for the deportation orders. It finds all of those things and constructs a narrative in which the genocide was the product of a specific political crisis at a specific historical moment, a convergence of nationalism and wartime emergency that produced something unprecedented and unrepeatable.

That narrative is wrong. Not in its facts but in its frame.

The genocide was not unprecedented. The Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896 killed somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians two decades earlier. The same machinery, the same justifications, the same religious mobilization of Kurdish irregulars against Armenian villages, the same framing of Christian minority existence as a threat to Islamic order. The Ottoman state had already learned, in the 1890s, that mass killing of Armenian Christians could be conducted with limited international consequence. What 1915 added was not a new logic. It was a more complete application of an existing one.

And the logic was not invented by the Young Turks or the Committee of Union and Progress or the specific ideological currents of late Ottoman nationalism. It was provided, in its essential structure, by fourteen centuries of a political theology that had always understood the relationship between the Islamic polity and the non-Muslim communities within it as provisional. As contingent on the political conditions that made the arrangement viable. As revocable when those conditions changed.

The dhimmi bargain is not a permanent settlement. It is a temporary accommodation pending the restoration of Islamic dominance. When the empire that enforced the bargain was strong, the Armenians were protected. When the empire that enforced the bargain was dying, the Armenians were available.

The religious dimension of what happened in 1915 has been systematically underplayed in Western accounts, partly because acknowledging it produces conclusions that are difficult to manage politically and partly because the academic framework that dominated Western Islam studies for forty years was constitutionally unable to treat Islamic theology as a driver of Islamic behavior.

But the religious dimension is not peripheral. It is structural.

The mobilization of the killing apparatus in 1915 was not conducted in the language of secular Turkish nationalism alone. It was conducted in the language of religious obligation. Imams in Anatolian villages preached that the killing of Armenians was a religious duty. The Kurdish irregular forces that accompanied the deportation columns and conducted many of the massacres were motivated by a combination of material incentive, ethnic hostility, and religious sanction that the Ottoman state deliberately cultivated. The framing of Armenians as enemies of Islam, as collaborators with the Christian powers seeking to destroy the last great Islamic empire, drew on a theological tradition that had specific and developed categories for exactly this situation.

The concept of the harbinger, the enemy of Islam, applied to a population that had lived as dhimmis for centuries, is not a modern invention. It is a classical legal category that describes what a non-Muslim community becomes when it is perceived as having violated the terms of its protected status by aligning with the external enemies of the Islamic polity. Once that category is applied, the protections of the dhimmi framework are not merely suspended. They are inverted. The protected community becomes a legitimate target. The obligation to leave them in peace becomes, in the most aggressive readings of the tradition, an obligation of a different kind entirely.

That inversion did not require a fatwa from a grand mufti to become operational in 1915. It required a political crisis severe enough to activate the framework that the tradition had always contained. The Ottoman Empire provided the crisis. The tradition provided the framework. The result was a death toll of 1.5 million people and the near-total erasure of a Christian civilization that had existed in Anatolia for longer than Islam itself.

Armenia was, as noted at the outset, the first Christian nation.

That designation carries a specific theological weight within Islamic political theology that Western secular analysis consistently misses. The existence of a Christian nation, a sovereign people whose collective identity is organized around the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord and that Muhammad is therefore not the final prophet, is not, within the framework of classical Islamic political thought, a neutral fact to be accommodated. It is a standing theological challenge. A permanent embodiment of the rejection that the Islamic account of religious history cannot absorb without consequence.

Muhammad’s prophethood, within Islamic theology, is not merely a personal religious claim. It is the organizing principle of a complete political and legal order. To deny that prophethood is not simply to hold a different religious opinion. It is to place yourself outside the framework of legitimate existence that the Islamic political order defines. The dhimmi system is the formal mechanism by which that outside existence is tolerated, provisionally, under conditions of Islamic dominance. But the tolerance is always downstream of the dominance. Remove the dominance and the tolerance has no institutional floor to rest on.

The Armenians denied Muhammad’s prophethood. They had been denying it, politely and within the constraints of dhimmi existence, for twelve centuries before 1915. They had built churches on soil that Islam claimed and maintained an identity organized around a theological confession that Islam regarded as error at best and threat at worst. They had done this under the protection of the dhimmi bargain, which worked as long as the empire that enforced it was strong enough to make it work.

When the empire stopped being strong enough, the twelve centuries of patient theological disagreement became twelve centuries of accumulated grievance. The people who had always said no to the central claim of Islamic civilization were now, in the moment of that civilization’s maximum vulnerability, the most available explanation for its failure.

This is not a coincidence of timing. It is the system working as designed.

What does this have to do with the West in 2025?

Everything. And the West has not noticed.

The West is not in danger of being conquered by an Islamic army. That is not the threat and confusing it with the threat is one of the primary ways the actual threat remains invisible. The mechanism that produced the Armenian Genocide was not military conquest. It was demographic presence, political pressure, ideological framework, and the specific dynamics that emerge when an Islamic political theology that has never genuinely separated the religious from the political operates within a host civilization that has and that mistakes that separation for a universal human value rather than a specific Western achievement.

The dhimmi system has not been formally imported into Western Europe or North America. What has been imported is a population whose most politically activated elements operate within a framework that has the dhimmi logic built into its foundations, that understands the relationship between the Islamic community and the non-Muslim world in terms that are not compatible with the liberal democratic assumptions of the host civilization, and that has demonstrated, in every context where it has achieved sufficient political weight, a consistent tendency to move in a specific direction.

That direction is not toward integration on liberal democratic terms. It is toward the incremental establishment of parallel structures, parallel legal norms, parallel social expectations, that reproduce within the host civilization the essential architecture of a two-tier system. Not because there is a conspiracy. Not because every Muslim in the West is consciously working toward this outcome. But because the political theology that animates the most organized and most activist elements of the Islamic community in the West is the Medinan political theology, the one that has always understood the world in terms of the domain of Islam and the domain not yet governed by Islam, and that has always understood the movement of history as the gradual expansion of the former at the expense of the latter.

The Armenians did not see it coming. They had lived inside the system long enough to mistake the current conditions for permanent ones. They had achieved enough economic success, enough cultural visibility, enough institutional presence, to believe that the arrangement was stable. They had a long enough memory of the dhimmi bargain working tolerably well to miss the signs that the conditions that made it work were expiring.

They were wrong. And they paid for being wrong with 1.5 million lives and the near-total destruction of the oldest Christian nation on earth.

The West is not Armenia. The parallel is not exact and pretending it is would undermine the argument rather than strengthen it.

The West has democratic institutions, constitutional protections, a tradition of free expression and religious pluralism that the Armenian dhimmis inside the Ottoman Empire never possessed. The West has the capacity, if it chooses to use it, to name what it is dealing with clearly, to distinguish between the Muslim neighbor who wants nothing more than to live his life and the political theology that the most organized Islamic institutions in the West are actively advancing, to build a framework for genuine integration that takes seriously both the rights of Muslim citizens and the non-negotiable foundations of the civilization they are joining.

That capacity is not being used. Not seriously. Not with the clarity the situation requires.

Instead the West is doing what the West has consistently done when confronted with the implications of Islamic political theology operating within its borders. It is reaching for the frameworks that make the problem manageable. The radicalization narrative that locates the danger in a deviant fringe rather than in the mainstream of a specific political tradition. The multiculturalism framework that treats all cultural practices as equally compatible with liberal democratic foundations regardless of whether they are. The Islamophobia accusation that has been deployed with remarkable effectiveness to make the accurate description of Islamic political theology more institutionally costly than the theology itself.

These frameworks are not evil. Most of the people operating within them are genuinely trying to prevent real harm to real Muslims who deserve to be treated with dignity and fairness. But they are frameworks that were built to manage a different kind of problem and they are being applied to this one because the alternative requires a clarity that the West’s current intellectual and political culture cannot produce without tearing itself in significant ways.

The Armenians needed someone to name what was happening to them before it was too late to change it. The international community knew. Diplomatic cables documented the massacres in real time. German officers witnessed the deportations and wrote detailed reports. The New York Times covered the killings in 1915 with a specificity that leaves no room for the claim that the world did not know. The world knew. It calculated that the strategic cost of intervention outweighed the moral cost of silence.

1.5 million people died in that calculation.

The lesson of the Armenian Genocide for the contemporary West is not that violence is coming. It is that the conditions that produced the violence are reproducible, that the ideological framework that made Christian minority existence available as a target when political conditions required one is not a historical artifact but a living tradition, and that the West is in the process of making the same category of error the Armenian community made inside the Ottoman Empire, which is to mistake the current tolerable conditions for a permanent settlement rather than for what they actually are, a temporary equilibrium dependent on political conditions that are not stable.

The dhimmi system worked until it didn’t. The millet system provided real protection until the empire that enforced it began to die and needed someone to blame for dying. The Armenians were visible, successful, Christian, and present in large numbers in strategically sensitive regions of a collapsing Islamic empire.

They were everything the collapsing system needed them to be.

The West would do well to read that sentence carefully. Not as a prediction. As a warning about the kind of conditions that make certain outcomes possible. And as an urgent argument for developing the clarity, the institutional honesty, and the willingness to name what is actually present before the conditions that currently make naming it merely difficult become the conditions that make it too late.

Armenia was the first Christian nation. Its people were erased by a political theology that could not absorb their existence once the political conditions that enforced their toleration expired.

The West is not the first Christian civilization to encounter that theology operating at scale within its own borders.

It may be the last one with the capacity to respond differently.

There is a solution on the table, and it would be dishonest to describe the problem this precisely without pointing to it.

The Understanding Islam Curriculum was built for exactly this gap. Not for scholars. Not for seminary students. For the pastor who wants to prepare his congregation to understand what they are actually living alongside, for the church leader who wants to give his people something more accurate than the frameworks the mainstream culture is offering, for the Christian who understands that honest engagement with Islam requires actually understanding it from the inside before engaging it from the outside. Three levels, nine courses, ninety-six sessions. The Alif Level is live now. A church leader license makes the entire level available to a congregation. The curriculum is at acrosenthal.com.

The Armenians deserved neighbors who understood what was happening. So does the West.

The bones are still surfacing in the Syrian desert.

Wind and time keep exposing them. The land remembers what the politics of the last hundred years have tried to forget, what the Turkish state has spent a century and considerable diplomatic capital trying to keep buried, what the Western powers that watched it happen and calculated their interests and said nothing have preferred to remember as a tragedy rather than as a crime with a specific mechanism and a specific theology behind it.

1.5 million people. The oldest Christian nation on earth. Erased not by accident, not by the random violence of a chaotic empire in its death throes, but by the deliberate activation of a political theology that had always known what to do with a Christian minority when the conditions that required their toleration expired.

The bones are still coming up.

The question is whether the West will read them before it has bones of its own to surface.

Leave a comment

A. C. Rosenthal

www.acrosenthal.com

If you read my piece on Lower Saxony a few weeks ago, you already know the outline. A German state’s new Christian religion curriculum mentions Islam more than thirty times. It describes Islam as a sister religion of Christianity. It mandates mosque visits. It requires multi-religious prayer. And it reduces Jesus Christ to five mentions across six years of compulsory schooling. This in a class called Christian religion class.

I want to zoom out. Because the people who dismissed that piece as a story about Germany missed the actual story.

Lower Saxony is not the point. Lower Saxony is the example. The pattern is the point.

The same institutional logic that produced the Lower Saxony curriculum is running in classrooms from Cardiff to Calgary to Canberra. It is not coordinated in the sense of a conspiracy. It is coordinated in the sense that the same assumptions, the same language, the same bureaucratic instincts, and the same institutional incentives are operating across Western countries simultaneously. You do not need a central committee to produce convergent results. You only need institutions that have decided the most sophisticated response to Islamic claims is to validate them rather than engage them honestly.

And you need those institutions to have no principled framework for resisting when the pressure comes.

Let me give you the map.

Wales: They Renamed the Subject Itself

In England, Religious Education is still called Religious Education. In Wales, it is not.

In 2022, the Welsh government renamed the mandatory subject for all pupils aged three to sixteen. It is no longer Religious Education. It is now Religion, Values and Ethics, and it is explicitly designed to be, in the Welsh government’s own language, “pluralistic.” The parental right to withdraw a child from RE, which had existed in British law for decades, was abolished for the new subject. Welsh parents cannot pull their children out of RVE. Attendance is compulsory from nursery through the final year of secondary school.

The subject must now include, alongside Christianity, the full sweep of world religions and, in the government’s specific language, “non-religious philosophical convictions” such as Humanism. Welsh law now explicitly states that teachers must take an impartial approach to teaching RVE that does not require or encourage learners to be religious or non-religious, or to accept a prescribed viewpoint.

Think about what that sentence is actually doing. A Welsh teacher standing in front of a room of children is legally required to be impartial between the claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and the claim that he did not. She is legally required to present the Christian tradition’s central truth claim with no more institutional weight than ethical veganism. The law has not asked her to be fair. It has asked her to be a vendor who does not prefer her own merchandise.

Here is what an RE lesson used to look like in Wales, within living memory: a teacher who believed, or at minimum taught from a position that took belief seriously, walking through the Gospels, the creeds, the meaning of baptism, the significance of Easter. Children left knowing what Christianity actually claimed and why those claims mattered to the civilization they inhabited. They could accept or reject the claims as adults with the information to do so. The subject had a voice.

Here is what an RVE lesson looks like now: a menu. Six religions, Humanism, and ethical veganism, presented with equal institutional distance by a teacher who is legally prohibited from recommending any of them. The children leave knowing that many traditions exist, that all of them make claims, and that no one in authority thinks any of those claims are worth the institution’s conviction.

The name change is not cosmetic. When you strip the word “Christian” from the subject, remove the parental right to opt out, and write institutional impartiality into law, you have not built a more inclusive classroom. You have made an argument. The argument is that no religious tradition is true enough to warrant institutional commitment. That is not a neutral position. That is secular humanism administered as policy.

The menu has no recommended dish. That is the point. The absence of a recommendation is the recommendation.

England: The Pressure Is Building and the Michaela Battle Shows Why

In England, Religious Education retains its legal emphasis on Christianity. All locally agreed syllabuses must reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Britain are mainly Christian, whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions. On paper, Christianity is still primary.

In practice, the gap between the legal requirement and what actually happens in classrooms is widening, and it is widening in one direction. Islam is now the second most studied religion in GCSE Religious Studies nationally, after Christianity. The pressure to expand Islamic content in RE, driven by sustained campaigns around “Islamophobia” concerns and the stated need for Western students to understand their Muslim neighbors, is constant, organized, and coming from multiple directions simultaneously. RE journals, examination board guidance, teacher training programs, and diversity consultants hired by local education authorities have all been pushing in the same direction for years without any comparable organized pressure in the opposite direction.

The asymmetry of pressure is the mechanism. You do not need to capture an institution. You only need to ensure that one side applies consistent pressure and the other does not.

The Michaela case in 2023 and 2024 illustrates where this leads when a school tries to resist it. Michaela Community School, a high-performing secular school in London with a majority-minority student body, introduced a policy in May 2023 banning prayer rituals on school premises after students began organizing group prayer in the schoolyard. The school’s position was that the prayer rituals had fostered division among pupils, produced concerning behavior, and generated a campaign of abuse and online harassment directed at the school and its leadership.

A Muslim pupil sued, arguing the ban was discriminatory and uniquely affected her faith. The High Court ruled in the school’s favor in April 2024.

The school won. But notice what winning required. It required a legal battle that lasted over a year. It required the headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, to endure a sustained social media campaign, organized pressure from Muslim community groups, and national media coverage framing the school as the aggressor. It required the school to justify in open court the proposition that a secular school is allowed to be secular.

A generation ago, that proposition needed no justification. It was the baseline assumption. The baseline has moved.

And the lawsuit itself, not its outcome, is the mechanism. You do not have to win a lawsuit to change institutional behavior. You only have to file one. Most schools in England do not have Katharine Birbalsingh’s nerve, her governing body’s nerve, or her school’s willingness to absorb a year of public battering for the right to maintain a secular prayer policy. Most administrators, when they calculate the full cost, the legal fees, the online campaign, the community relations problem, the staff morale hit, the press coverage, the Ofsted anxiety, decide that a prayer room is cheaper than a lawsuit. Most of them make that calculation quietly, in private, and the decision never surfaces in the news.

That is how the pattern spreads without a conspiracy. It spreads through cost-benefit calculations made by individual administrators in individual buildings across the country, each one invisible, each one rational given the incentives, the sum of them representing a substantial shift in what Western secular institutions are willing to defend about themselves.

Ontario, Canada: The Asymmetry in Plain Sight

Ontario is where I am most personally familiar with the on-the-ground reality, and it is the clearest case study in the pattern because the asymmetry is not hidden. It is written down in government documents.

The Lord’s Prayer has been absent from Ontario public schools since 1988, when the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled it unconstitutional. A state school system should not impose a specifically Christian prayer on children of all backgrounds. On the legal merits, within its own logic, that ruling was defensible. Christianity does not need the state’s endorsement, and the school is not the church.

What has happened since is more interesting than what happened then.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has produced detailed policy guidance requiring school boards to accommodate time-specific Islamic prayers during school hours. The guidance is explicit: schools must accommodate students and staff who need to observe time-specific prayers, including when these occur during class time. Teachers are advised to keep prayer observance schedules in mind when scheduling exams, tests, class outings, and overnight trips. Designated prayer spaces are not merely permitted. They are described in official guidance as appropriate accommodations for large Muslim student populations, with specific reference to Friday congregational prayer.

Read those two things together slowly. The Lord’s Prayer: gone since 1988 as an imposition of Christian practice on a plural school system, unconstitutional, incompatible with the state’s role as a neutral institutional actor. Friday congregational prayer during class hours: accommodated by legal obligation as a human rights requirement, with guidance on scheduling exams around it.

The same institution. The same school system. The same province. Thirty-six years apart. One Christian practice removed as an imposition. One Islamic practice mandated as an accommodation. Both decisions made in the name of the same principle, the state’s commitment to religious neutrality.

I am not arguing the Lord’s Prayer should come back. I am pointing at the asymmetry, and I am pointing at it specifically because it is structural rather than incidental. The logic that removed Christian religious practice from Ontario schools is not being applied to Islamic religious practice. It is being applied selectively, in a direction that reliably moves the institutional center away from the civilization’s Christian heritage and toward active accommodation of Islamic practice.

And the people who point this out are accused of Islamophobia.

The accusation is the other mechanism. The social cost of naming the asymmetry is high enough that most people who notice it say nothing. Most people in school board meetings, most trustees, most curriculum consultants, most principals who observe the Friday prayer guidance and remember 1988 do not say what they are thinking out loud. The asymmetry accumulates in silence, protected by the social cost of naming it.

That silence is documented, too. It just does not make it into the policy papers.

Australian Priest stabbed by Muslim immigrant, just following his Quran. Priest loses his eye.

Australia: Growth Without Accountability

The Australian situation is harder to document at the curriculum level because education is administered state by state and the most visible changes are happening gradually enough that no single data point looks alarming in isolation. The pattern only becomes visible when you step back.

Start with the money. The Victorian government’s 2023-24 state budget committed funding to build and upgrade low-fee Catholic and independent schools, with $30 million allocated specifically to Islamic schools. That is not inherently wrong. Government funding for non-government schools is standard in Australia and has been for decades. The number matters not in isolation but in combination with the trajectory.

Islamic schools are the fastest-growing segment of Australia’s non-government school sector. Between 2006 and 2020, the number of Islamic schools in Australia roughly doubled. Enrollment in Islamic schools grew at a rate far exceeding both overall school enrollment growth and the growth of Islamic schools’ nearest non-government comparators. Government capital funding is following that growth without any proportionate public debate about what the curriculum inside those schools actually teaches, whether the version of Islamic identity being cultivated is compatible with liberal democratic civic norms, or what the long-term consequences of a parallel school system organized around a total religious identity actually are for Australian social cohesion.

This is not the same as asking whether Muslim children deserve schools. They do, the same as every other child. The question is the one Australia is not asking: funded by whom, accountable to whom, and to what educational standard regarding civic values, the treatment of non-Muslims, and the formation of democratic citizens. Every other religious school sector in Australia that receives government funding answers those questions in a regulatory environment that evolved over generations of public negotiation. The Islamic school sector has largely been exempted from the sharpest version of those questions by the same institutional instinct visible everywhere else: it is more comfortable to accommodate than to apply consistent standards.

Victoria also has formal government policy on multifaith prayer rooms in public schools. Schools may provide a space for prayer with specific policy guidance, including supervision requirements. A generation ago this was not standard infrastructure in Australian public schools. It is now official policy, normalized not through debate but through policy accumulation, one accommodation at a time, each individually justifiable, the cumulative effect becoming visible only when you lay the timeline flat and ask: what changed, in which direction, and why.

The honest answer is: Christian practice in Australian public schools has contracted steadily under pressure from secular legal challenges and the evolving concept of state neutrality. Islamic practice has expanded steadily under accommodation frameworks built on human rights language. The contraction and the expansion are happening simultaneously, in the same institutions, under the same governments, and the net direction of travel has a name even if the institutions decline to say it out loud.

The Mechanism Behind All of It

Here is the thing that ties Lower Saxony to Wales to Ontario to Victoria.

None of these outcomes required malice. None required a conspiracy. None required a single administrator who woke up one morning and decided to undermine Christianity in Western schools. Each individual policy decision, viewed in isolation, can be defended on reasonable-sounding grounds. Plurality is good. Inclusion is good. Accommodation is good. Hurt feelings should be avoided. Community relations matter. No single actor along the way said: I am going to use this curriculum to undermine Christian civilization. What they said, individually and in sequence, over years and across institutions, is: the most sophisticated response to Islamic presence in our schools is to accommodate it, validate it, and present it as equal to or integrated with everything else we teach.

The problem is that Islam itself does not make that offer in return.

This is the fact that Western institutions keep refusing to look at directly. The Quran does not present Christianity and Islam as sister religions. It presents Christianity as a corrupted version of an original revelation that Islam has now correctly restated. The Quran explicitly says Jesus was not crucified. It explicitly says God does not have a son. It explicitly says that the People of the Book who believe otherwise are in error. These are not the views of Muslim extremists. These are not contested interpretations at the margins of the tradition. They are what the Quran says, in plain text, in passages that have been standard in Islamic education for fourteen centuries.

When Western institutions describe Islam and Christianity as sister religions, they are not describing the actual relationship those two traditions have with each other. They are making a specific theological claim. It is Islam’s claim. The Quran’s claim is that the two traditions share a common origin which Christianity distorted. The institution that teaches this as neutral pedagogy has not remained neutral. It has taken a side. It has taken Islam’s side, using Islam’s own theological framework, and it has taught that position to children as if it were the generous, inclusive, cosmopolitan conclusion that thoughtful people naturally reach.

It is not. It is a two-thousand-year-old argument. The institution has resolved it without telling anyone that it was ever in dispute.

What Susanne Schröter, the German Islam scholar, identified in the German Green Party motion as the lawfare strategy of the Brotherhood, gaining control of institutional discourse without open conflict, is visible across all four of these countries not because Brotherhood operatives are sitting in every curriculum committee in Cardiff and Toronto and Melbourne. It is visible because the institutional logic of Western bureaucracies, which rewards accommodation and punishes resistance, reliably produces accommodation wherever consistent pressure is applied against institutions that have no principled framework for resisting it. You do not need to control the institutions. You only need to apply consistent pressure in one direction while the other side is either silent, disorganized, or afraid of the cost of speaking.

The people who suffer most from this, as I said in the original Germany piece and will keep saying because it keeps being true, are the liberal Muslims. Seyran Ateş said it about Germany: the proposals will strengthen Islamists, not liberal Muslims. The same is true in Wales, Ontario, and Victoria. The version of Islam being embedded in Western institutional life is not the progressive, reform-minded, theologically reflective version. It is the conservative, identity-politics version that treats accommodation as a one-way street, that defines the headscarf as a civilizational symbol, and that treats interfaith dialogue as a venue for da’wa rather than genuine exchange. Every time a Western school board validates that version as the official Islam for public consumption, it actively undercuts the ground that Muslim reformers are trying to stand on. The reformers are trying to argue that Islam does not require the coercive institutional architecture. Western governments keep building the architecture and calling it inclusion.

What the Pattern Requires

The response to this pattern is not panic. It is not hostility toward Muslim students or Muslim families or Muslim neighbors. Most of the Muslim parents sending their children to Ontario public schools are not orchestrating anything. Most of the Muslim students at Michaela who started praying in the schoolyard were teenagers doing what teenagers do when they feel a social current. The Muslim students sitting in Welsh RVE classes are not the problem. They are learning the same nothing that their Christian classmates are.

This is not a story about individual Muslim people. It is a story about institutional failure, and the failure has a specific shape.

Western educational institutions have decided that the most sophisticated response to religious diversity is theological neutrality: presenting all traditions as equally valid options without privileging any. What this looks like in practice is the Welsh RVE classroom, the Ontario Human Rights Commission guidance, the Victorian prayer room policy, the Lower Saxony “sister religion” curriculum. The institution stands at what it imagines is the center, equidistant from all claims, validating none.

But theological neutrality is not actually neutral. It is a position. It is the position that no religious tradition can make truth claims that other traditions are obligated to take seriously. That is, in fact, a secular humanist position dressed in procedural language. The institution is not neutral between Christianity and Islam. It is neutral between both of them and secularism, which means secularism wins by default in every room where the institution operates.

And applied consistently, that position would require Islamic content in schools to be presented the same way Christian content is: as one option among many, examined critically, held at arm’s length, not protected from challenge. Applied consistently, it would mean Friday prayers get the same institutional response as the Lord’s Prayer got in 1988. Applied consistently, it would mean the Quran’s explicit claim that Christianity is a corrupted religion gets the same curriculum treatment as Christianity’s explicit claim that Jesus is the only way to the Father. It would mean the growth of Islamic schools is subject to the same curriculum accountability scrutiny as Catholic schools.

It is not being applied consistently. It is being applied selectively. And the direction of the selection is not random.

The people who can interrupt this pattern are not politicians, although politicians matter. They are parents who know what the Quran actually says about Christianity and who can therefore recognize when a school curriculum has resolved that argument in Islam’s favor without announcing what it was doing. They are teachers who understand the difference between genuine pluralism, which requires honest engagement with theological disagreement, and the institutional cowardice that masquerades as pluralism by refusing to let any tradition speak in its own voice.

They are Christians who understand the Islamic Dilemma well enough to name it when they see it in a curriculum document. Who know that “sister religions” is not a generous description. Who know what five mentions of Jesus in a Christian religion class means. Who have read the books and done the homework and are therefore, finally, equipped.

That is what this Substack exists to produce.

Lower Saxony is not a German problem. It is a Western problem with a German address this week. Next week it will have a different address. The week after that, another one. The examples will keep coming because the pattern that generates them has not changed.

Save this piece. You will need it.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

www.acrosenthal.com

An opportunity to test my book against a pro-Islam book, came in the most ordinary way. A Muslim lawyer, …confronted with the core arguments of my work, did not engage them directly. Instead, he dismissed them as old and already answered, and pointed me toward a set of books that, in his view, settled the matter. So I read them, and this is a response to the book: “Murder in the Name of Allah”, and it must be understood as such: not as a general reflection on Islam, but as a direct engagement with a specific attempt to stabilize a deeply contested issue through a particular interpretive framework. The book does not begin recklessly, and that is precisely why it deserves to be taken seriously. It does not deny the existence of difficult passages. It does not pretend that the historical record is free of violence. Instead, it proceeds with a measured confidence, asking the reader to reconsider how those passages are being read. This is the 3rd of a response to 3 books I’ve read from Mr. recommended reading list.

The claim, as Mirza Tahir Ahmad states it in multiple forms throughout the book, is that the meaning of Islam has been steadily corrupted by minority elements — fanatics and ulema with a lust for power — and that the roots of modern Islamic militancy are political rather than textual. The Qur’an, read as a whole and in context, does not sanction violence against non-combatants. The prophetic model, properly understood, reflects restraint rather than coercion. Where Muslims have acted violently, the cause lies not in the text but in its misinterpretation, misuse, or removal from context.

At first, this feels not only plausible but satisfying. Each difficult element is addressed rather than ignored. Each passage is explained rather than dismissed. The effect is cumulative, and the conclusion — that Islam, at its core, does not compel belief — appears to arise naturally from the method. The reader is left with the impression that what seemed like tension was, in fact, misunderstanding.

That impression holds only as long as the question stays at the level the book defines for it. The moment it shifts, the stability begins to give way.

I. The Origin and Stakes of the Book

Murder in the Name of Allah was not written in a vacuum. The book is a translation of Mazhab Ke Nam Per Khoon, originally written in response to the 1953 anti-Ahmadiyya riots in Pakistan — riots instigated in large part by Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and the Jama’at-i-Islami. Hundreds of Ahmadis were killed, their mosques burned, their community targeted by organized mob violence sanctioned by religious authority. The book was, in its original form, a response to an act of communal murder committed against its author’s own people in the name of Islamic law.

This origin is essential context. It explains why the book is as passionate as it is, and why it is structured to argue that violence in Islam’s name is always distortion and never doctrine. The conclusion was not reached through neutral inquiry. It was reached through suffering. That does not make it wrong. But it does mean that the argument is not designed primarily to examine the tradition with detachment. It is designed to defend the Ahmadiyya community against the tradition’s most violent conclusions — while simultaneously claiming that those conclusions were never authentically Islamic in the first place.

That is a significant structural tension. And it is one the book never fully resolves.

II. Context as Explanation vs. Context as Constraint

The book’s primary method is contextualization. Verses that appear to sanction violence are tied to specific historical circumstances: persecution, broken treaties, armed aggression. The claim is that once context is restored, the appearance of general permission dissolves. What seemed like an open-ended command to fight is revealed as a conditional response to a particular threat. The reader is invited to conclude that the text’s apparent harshness is always historically bounded.

This method is not without genuine merit for individual passages. The problem is the assumption it carries: that explaining why something occurred automatically determines whether it continues to function as a model. It does not. In a tradition that preserves the Prophet’s actions as normative precedent, the relationship between historical context and ongoing legal authority is not resolved by the fact of contextualization alone. It requires a separate mechanism — a principle of limitation that the tradition itself recognizes as binding.

The tradition developed precisely such mechanisms. The doctrine of naskh — abrogation — arose as an internal recognition that not all material functions equally, and that a system claiming coherence must decide which parts govern in cases of tension. As one survey of the doctrine notes, classical scholars such as al-Nahhas, Ibn al-Jawzi, and al-Suyuti accepted only around twenty genuine cases of abrogation in the Qur’an; others claimed far more. But the existence of the doctrine itself is the significant point: the tradition did not rely on context alone to resolve competing directives. It developed formal rules to determine which directives govern.

The principle of abrogation of an older verse by a new verse in the Quran is an accepted principle of all four Sunni madhahib, or schools of fiqh, and was an established principle in Sharia by at least the 9th century.

— Wikipedia, Naskh (tafsir), citing classical jurisprudential consensus

The book’s contextual method bypasses this mechanism entirely. It treats context as self-limiting: once a reader understands the historical situation, the normative scope of the verse is assumed to contract automatically. The juristic tradition did not operate this way. Understanding context was the beginning of the legal analysis, not its conclusion. The question that followed was always: does this context limit the ruling in a way the tradition’s own methods recognize as binding?

That question the book does not answer.

III. The Abrogation Problem and the Meccan/Medinan Divide

The specific tension the book most needs to address is the relationship between the Meccan revelations — generally emphasizing patience, persuasion, and freedom of conscience — and the Medinan revelations, delivered after Muhammad had established political and military authority. The verse at the center of the book’s moral argument, Qur’an 2:256 — “There is no compulsion in religion” — is a Medinan verse, but it reflects the ethos of the earlier period. The later martial verses, including the passage frequently called the Sword Verse (9:5), were revealed in the final period of the prophetic mission.

Classical scholars debated whether 2:256 had been abrogated by later martial verses. This was not a fringe debate among extremists. It was a disagreement among recognized authorities of the highest standing:

Scholars differed concerning 2:256. Some said it has been abrogated by 9:73 for the Prophet compelled the Arabs to embrace Islam and fight those that had no alternative but to surrender. Other scholars said that 2:256 had not been abrogated concerning the People of the Book. It is only the infidels who are compelled to embrace Islam.

— al-Nahhas, citing Ibn Abbas, as recorded in classical tafsir literature; quoted in Middle East Quarterly

The Sword Verse itself — 9:5, commanding fighting against polytheists — was cited by some classical scholars as abrogating over one hundred verses of patience and tolerance. The precise scope of that abrogation remained contested, and it would be dishonest to present the maximalist view as universal. But the existence of this long-running scholarly debate within the tradition is itself the most important data point. It demonstrates that the tradition’s own scholars, working with the same texts and the same methods, did not unanimously reach the peaceful conclusion the book presents as obvious. They disagreed — sometimes sharply — about which verses govern, and they developed formal machinery to work out the answer.

Murder in the Name of Allah proceeds as though this machinery does not exist, or as though its outputs are all clearly on one side. They are not.

IV. The Misinterpretation Thesis and Its Structural Problem

The book’s organizing claim — that Islamic violence is always the result of misinterpretation rather than doctrine — rests on a prior assumption: that there exists a recoverable “true” reading of the tradition that the ulema have systematically corrupted. This assumption drives the entire argument, and it is exactly the assumption that does not survive scrutiny when placed against the structure of Islamic jurisprudence.

For the misinterpretation thesis to hold, the following must be true: the jurists who developed and codified the legal schools — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali — must have applied the tradition’s own methods incorrectly to arrive at rulings that permit religious coercion under specified conditions. But these scholars were not ignorant of the verses emphasizing freedom of belief. They processed those verses through the formal interpretive mechanisms of usul al-fiqh and arrived at conclusions that incorporated them without treating them as absolute overrides. To call that misinterpretation requires a standard of correct interpretation that is never made explicit in the book.

Without such a standard, “misinterpretation” functions as a rhetorical category rather than a jurisprudential one. It means: the conclusion I disagree with. That is not a method. It is a preference.

Statements that there is no compulsion in religion and that jihad is primarily about internal struggle and not about holy war may receive applause in university lecture halls and diplomatic boardrooms, but they misunderstand the importance of abrogation in Islamic theology. For many learned scholars and populist leaders, such notions are or should be risible.

— Middle East Quarterly, ‘Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam’

This is not a charitable framing of the reformist position, and it should be taken with appropriate skepticism. But it identifies something real: the gap between the reading the book offers and the reading the tradition’s own interpretive mechanisms have historically generated. That gap cannot be closed by asserting that the tradition erred. It requires explaining how the error was made, by what criterion it is an error, and what authority that criterion carries within the system being corrected.

V. The Irony the Book Cannot Name

There is an irony embedded in Murder in the Name of Allah that the book cannot quite name without undermining its own argument. Mirza Tahir Ahmad explicitly targets Maulana Maududi as a primary exemplar of the violent misuse of Islamic authority. He is not wrong that Maududi’s influence contributed to the persecution of the Ahmadiyya community. The 1953 riots, which inspired the original Urdu text, were substantially organized by Maududi’s political apparatus.

But Maududi was also, as noted in the earlier audit of his work on apostasy, one of the most authoritative Islamic scholars of the twentieth century. His statement that the Muslim scholarly community was unanimous on the capital punishment for apostasy for twelve unbroken centuries prior to Western influence is not a fringe claim. It is a historically documented characterization of the juristic record. The book cannot both dismiss Maududi as a politically motivated distorter of Islam and take seriously the tradition he draws on to reach that conclusion.

Put another way: the book argues that the tradition has been misused by powerful ulema for political ends. That is true. It also argues that the tradition, properly read, yields a consistently non-coercive Islam. What it cannot explain is how a tradition capable of being so thoroughly and consistently misused for fourteen centuries in the same direction failed to generate any binding corrective from within its own methodology — until modernity arrived with Western liberal values and provided the moral framework the correction now requires.

If the tradition’s methodology was sufficient to produce the correct reading all along, why did it not do so? And if it was not sufficient — if external moral pressure was required — then the argument is no longer about recovering what Islam always taught. It is about revising Islam in light of values the tradition did not originally generate.

VI. What the Book Actually Accomplishes

None of this is to say that Murder in the Name of Allah fails entirely. It does not. It demonstrates that a coherent, non-violent reading of Islam is possible. It demonstrates that such a reading can be grounded in the text. It demonstrates that the prophetic biography contains examples of restraint, mercy, and refusal to coerce. These are not trivial demonstrations.

What the book does not demonstrate is that this reading is structurally secured within the tradition in a way that overrides alternative readings drawn from the same sources through the same methods. The appeal to interpretation does not eliminate the problem. It relocates it — from the level of the text to the level of authority.

And at the level of authority, the argument becomes thin. It assumes that the morally preferable reading should prevail. It does not demonstrate how that preference becomes binding on a tradition that has its own mechanisms for determining which readings prevail, and those mechanisms have not consistently produced this preference.

Closing the Escape Hatch: A Synthesis of All Three Works

Now that all three works by Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad — Murder in the Name of Allah, The Truth About the Alleged Punishment for Apostasy in Islam, and Apostasy in Islam — have been examined under the framework of The Two Muhammads, the question is no longer whether individual arguments within them succeed on their own terms. The question is whether the structure they rely on can withstand sustained pressure once those terms are forced into alignment with the system they claim to represent.

What emerges from that pressure is not a simple disagreement over interpretation. It is a shift that becomes visible only when the argument is followed all the way to its end, rather than accepted at the point where it feels most comfortable.

The Common Structure

Each of the three books proceeds through a recognizable sequence. First, the Qur’an is established as the primary authority, and its most clearly stated principles — freedom of belief, absence of compulsion, divine rather than human judgment — are brought to the foreground. Second, the hadith and juristic tradition are acknowledged but managed: their scope is narrowed, their applications contextualized, their conclusions attributed to historical distortion rather than methodological outputs. Third, the conclusion is presented not as a reform proposal but as a recovery: what Islam truly teaches, once the distortion is removed.

The sequence is internally consistent. Within each book, it holds. The problem emerges when the sequence is placed against the operating structure of the system it engages.

The System That Was Not Consulted

Classical Islamic jurisprudence — usul al-fiqh — is not a system of isolated proof-texts. It is a methodology for deriving binding rulings from the interaction of Qur’an, authenticated Sunnah (hadith), scholarly consensus (ijma’), and analogical reasoning (qiyas). Within that methodology, general Qur’anic principles do not automatically override specific prophetic rulings. The specific governs how the general is applied; the Sunnah specifies what the Qur’an leaves general. This is not a later corruption of the original message. It is the operating principle that Imam al-Shafi’i formalized in ar-Risala in the early 9th century and that all four Sunni schools have accepted as foundational.

The three books, taken together, quietly displace this methodology without announcing that they are doing so. They elevate the Qur’an to exclusive interpretive authority over the hadith rather than treating the two as mutually specifying. They treat juristic consensus as historically contingent and therefore reversible, rather than as binding within the system’s own logic. They apply context as a self-limiting principle rather than as the beginning of a formal analysis of scope. The result is a reading that is morally compelling and textually defensible at the level of individual citations, but not structurally secured within the tradition it is invoking.

The Three Choices That Cannot Be Avoided

Once this is seen, the argument in all three books resolves into the same unavoidable set of options.

If the hadith that support legal penalties — including the capital punishment report in Sahih al-Bukhari 9:83:17 and Sahih Muslim 16:4154 — are accepted as authoritative, then the conclusions drawn from them across twelve centuries cannot be dismissed without explaining why the method that produced them failed according to its own standards. That explanation is not provided in any of the three works.

If those hadith are treated as non-authoritative, or as conditionally authoritative only when they align with prior Qur’anic readings, then the Prophet’s transmitted words and actions have been removed from their traditional role as a source of binding law. That removal is a consequential theological decision. It is not announced as one.

If the juristic consensus that codified the resulting rulings is treated as historically contingent and therefore reversible, then the principle of ijma’ — binding scholarly agreement — has been weakened beyond the point at which it can function consistently as a source of authority. A consensus that can be set aside whenever its outputs conflict with a preferred reading is not functioning as consensus in any jurisprudentially meaningful sense.

In each case, the conclusion is preserved only by altering the structure that would otherwise generate a different outcome. The three books present this alteration as clarification. It is, in fact, reconfiguration.

The Question That Remains

That reconfiguration may be necessary. It may even be what the survival of Islam as a humane tradition requires in the modern world. The Two Muhammads does not oppose reform. It insists only that reform be honest about its own nature. A proposal for what Islam could become, written in the grammar of what Islam was, is not a historical argument. It is a theological one.

And theological proposals deserve theological scrutiny — which means they must answer the question they have so far avoided: if the tradition’s methods, applied faithfully for fourteen centuries, produced the conclusions these books are trying to overturn, what principle governs the correction? Where does that principle come from? And why does it carry more authority than the methods it is displacing?

Until those questions are answered, the argument functions as advocacy rather than analysis. Compelling advocacy, in many respects. Advocacy grounded in genuine moral conviction and, in the Ahmadiyya case, in genuine suffering. But advocacy nonetheless.

The Two Muhammads asks a narrower and more precise question: are the Muhammad of the Qur’an and the Muhammad of the transmitted tradition the same figure, built from the same historical material, yielding the same authority? The answer the source-critical evidence suggests is no — they are not the same figure, and the transmitted Muhammad carries with him a constructed authority that the historical record cannot fully sustain.

If that is correct, then the reformist reading in these three books is not wrong to resist the tradition’s most coercive conclusions. But the basis for that resistance is not what the books claim it to be. It is not a recovery of the original. It is a recognition — however partial and unstated — that the original was already composite, already contested, already layered with the interests of those who built the tradition around it.

That recognition is the beginning of an honest conversation. These three books stop just short of it.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

A. C. Rosenthal Author of, The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma

• https://thelawgist.org/dower-mahr/

• https://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/cilj/2016/01/19/in-the-name-of-god-problems-with-pakistans-blasphemy-laws/

• https://www.dawn.com/news/1154251/rise-of-blasphemy-charges-saudi-arabia-iran-indonesia-in-perspective

• https://humanists.international/2016/06/un-must-recognise-the-pernicious-and-illegal-status-of-blasphemy-laws-says-iheu/

• https://raseef22.net/english/article/1074126-torture-in-islam-political-rule-vs-jurists-authority

• https://files.alislam.cloud/pdf/Murder-in-the-name-of-Allah.pdf

• https://idicenter.org/about-us

• amazon.com/author/a.c.rosenthal

This is a different audit than the one written for Apostasy in Islam, though the overlap is not incidental. The two works move across the same territory, but they approach it from slightly different angles, and that difference matters. It matters because the question here is no longer whether a single argument can be answered, but whether the framework laid out in The Two Muhammads survives contact when the subject is approached from multiple directions at once. If the framework is rhetorical, it will bend. If it is structural, it will not.

The book under examination here, The Truth about The Alleged Punishment for Apostasy in Islam, delivered as an address by Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, the fourth Caliph of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, at the 1986 Jalsa Salana in the UK, is the more rhetorically ambitious of the two. It does not merely present an alternative reading. It presents itself as the definitive one: not an interpretation among others, but the interpretation that reflects what Islam truly is, stripped of distortion. That ambition is the source of its persuasive power. It is also the source of its deepest vulnerability.

I. The Move That Everything Else Depends On

The argument rests on something that, at first glance, feels stabilizing. It takes a familiar Qur’anic principle, there is no compulsion in religion, and quietly elevates it until it becomes the controlling lens through which everything else must pass. Hadith, prophetic precedent, centuries of legal reasoning: none of these are denied outright. They are repositioned. They are made conditional, secondary, correctable.

The claim is not merely that Islam can be read this way, but that it must be. That everything else is distortion by “simple-minded ulema” who, as the book’s introduction states, have “not harmed Islam so severely” as by any external enemy. That framing is significant. It does not engage the juristic tradition on its own terms. It dismisses it in advance, clearing the field before the argument begins.

That clearing move is where the weight has to be placed. Because everything that follows depends on it holding. And it does not hold. Not because the principle of non-compulsion is wrong, but because within the system it is engaging, that principle does not carry the authority the book assigns to it by itself.

II. How the System Actually Works, and Why Silence Is Not a Closing Argument

Islamic jurisprudence, usul al-fiqh, is not a system in which general principles automatically govern specific rulings. It is a system of structured methodology for deriving law from recognized sources in a defined order: Qur’an, then Sunnah as documented in hadith, then scholarly consensus (ijma’), then analogical reasoning (qiyas). Within that structure, the relationship between general and specific is not one of simple dominance. The specific governs how the general is applied. The hadith exist precisely to fill the space that general Qur’anic principles leave open.

The Sunnah is a legislative source along with the Qur’an, and the Qur’an cannot be understood without the application of Sunnah. If the Qur’an tells us to pray, the Hadith shows us how.

- Institute of Islamic Banking and Insurance, Islamic Jurisprudence [Fiqh], summarizing classical usul al-fiqh

Furthermore, one of the most foundational maxims of usul al-fiqh holds that “where there is a text from the Qur’an or the Sunnah, there is no room for ijtihad.” Independent reasoning is not licensed to override an authenticated prophetic report. The system was built precisely to prevent that. The Qur’an’s silence on a worldly penalty for apostasy does not, within this system, close the question. It opens the space into which the hadith legally move.

The book leans heavily on that silence, treating it as though it settles the matter. But Mirza Tahir Ahmad was a sophisticated scholar and cannot have been unaware of this basic structural feature of the system he was engaging. Which means the silence argument is not a conclusion. It is a rhetorical position, and one the tradition’s own methodology does not support.

III. The Hadith Evidence the Argument Must Neutralize

The book’s central challenge is not the Qur’an. The book and the Qur’an are largely in agreement. The challenge is the hadith corpus. Specifically, the reports authenticated by the tradition’s own rigorous standards of chain-transmission criticism (isnad) that directly attribute capital rulings to the Prophet. The most authoritative of these appears in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the two collections the Sunni tradition regards as the most scrupulously verified:

The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse, and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.

- Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 83, Hadith 17; also Sahih Muslim, Book 16, Hadith 4154

This is not a weak or isolated narration. Its presence in both collections means it has passed the most rigorous authentication standards Sunni scholarship possesses. For the book’s argument to succeed, this hadith must be displaced. It can be displaced in one of three ways: by challenging the chain of transmission (isnad), by arguing the hadith has been abrogated by a later ruling, or by recontextualizing its meaning so narrowly that it no longer applies to private apostasy. The book attempts the third approach, arguing that such reports concern rebellion and treason, not belief.

But the third approach carries a burden the book does not fully discharge. If the hadith refers only to armed rebellion, why does it specify “one who reverts from Islam” as its category rather than “one who wages war”, a category the tradition treats separately? The tradition had vocabulary for rebellion. It used different terms. The hadith uses riddah: the specific jurisprudential term for apostasy. Narrowing it requires overriding the tradition’s own technical language with a contextual reading the tradition’s jurists examined and rejected.

IV. The Juristic Record and the Problem of Unanimity

The book’s author was aware that the juristic tradition had reached contrary conclusions. He argued that those conclusions were the product of politically motivated distortion by corrupt ulema. That argument has rhetorical force. It does not have jurisprudential force. Because the question is not whether bad actors have misused Islamic law — they have, and extensively — but whether the conclusions the legal schools reached are traceable to the system’s own methodology applied correctly.

They are. The four Sunni schools, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali, each applied their respective methods to the same source materials, processed them through the same hierarchy of evidence, and arrived at the same conclusion regarding male apostates: capital punishment for the unrepentant. This was not a fringe position. It constituted what classical scholarship recognized as ijma’, binding consensus, and it held for over twelve centuries without significant internal challenge until the modern period brought Western legal norms into contact with Islamic scholarship.

To everyone acquainted with Islamic Law, it is no secret that according to Islam, the punishment for a Muslim who turns to kufr is execution. Doubt about this matter first arose among Muslims during the final portion of the 19th century as a result of speculation. Otherwise, for the full twelve centuries prior to that time, the total Muslim community remained unanimous about it.

- Abul Ala Mawdudi, The Punishment of the Apostate According to Islamic Law

Mawdudi was not an obscure figure. He was one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the twentieth century, and his characterization of the pre-modern consensus is broadly accepted even by scholars who dispute the conclusion. Mirza Tahir Ahmad’s response, that the ulema were wrong throughout, requires him to explain how the entire methodology of Islamic jurisprudence misapplied itself on this point for twelve centuries without a single major corrective voice arising from within the tradition’s own framework. That explanation is not provided.

V. The Unacknowledged Methodological Revolution

What the book is actually doing, though it does not state this, is proposing a different rule of interpretive authority. Under the classical system, Imam al-Shafi’i’s foundational work ar-Risalah established the principle that the Qur’an and authenticated Sunnah together constitute the primary legislative sources, and that qiyas and ijma’ operate within, not above, that framework. That structure produced the apostasy rulings the book is trying to overturn.

To overturn them, the book implicitly adopts a different hierarchy: the Qur’an’s general principles take precedence over specific prophetic rulings whenever the two appear to conflict. That is a coherent position. Several modern reformist scholars hold it. But it is not the position of classical Islamic jurisprudence. It is a revision of it. And a revision that does not announce itself as a revision cannot be evaluated honestly.

While the Qur’an lays down broad principles, the Hadith provides practical elaboration and contextual clarification of those principles, thus playing a critical role in the formulation of Islamic jurisprudence.

- Global Journal of Research in Humanities and Cultural Studies, The Use of Hadith in Islamic Legal Theory (Usul al-Fiqh), 2025

The tradition was built on exactly this principle: that the Prophet’s elaborations have normative force because they are elaborations, not contradictions, of the Qur’an. The book needs them to function as contradictions, as distortions to be corrected, in order for the general principle to override them. That reframing is the engine of the entire argument. It is also what makes the argument a reconstruction rather than a recovery.

VI. The Structural Contradiction the Book Cannot Escape

There is a final difficulty the book cannot avoid, and it is one that cuts closer to home than any jurisprudential disagreement. The argument is authored under the authority of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a community that has been formally declared non-Muslim and apostate by the very juristic tradition the book is here attempting to rehabilitate.

Pakistan’s Second Amendment to its Constitution, enacted in 1974, drew on exactly that tradition, the same body of scholarly consensus, the same juristic methods, the same hadith-based reasoning, to declare Ahmadis legally non-Muslim and subject to civil and criminal penalties for practicing their faith. The 1984 Ordinance XX went further, making it a criminal offense for Ahmadis to call themselves Muslim, to call their places of worship mosques, or to recite the call to prayer. Hundreds of Ahmadis have been imprisoned or killed under laws deriving their authority from the same juristic tradition the book invokes as capable of producing better conclusions.

This is not a rhetorical point. It is a structural one. The book cannot simultaneously appeal to the authority and reformability of the Islamic legal tradition as the ground for its argument and remain exempt from that tradition’s conclusions about who counts as Muslim. The ijma’ that produced the apostasy rulings is the same ijma’ that has been weaponized against the Ahmadiyya community for a century. Either that ijma’ carries authority, in which case the book must engage it on its own terms, or it does not — in which case the argument has already conceded the central premise of The Two Muhammads: that the transmitted tradition is not the same as the original.

VII. What the Argument Actually Is

The argument does not collapse. It relocates. It moves from “this is what the tradition says” to “this is how the tradition should be read.” That shift is subtle, but it is decisive. Once the method changes, the conclusion is no longer anchored in the same system. And once that is seen, the moral clarity the argument provides, which is genuine, and compelling, and perhaps necessary, cannot be presented as historical recovery. It must be recognized as theological reconstruction.

That reconstruction may be exactly what is needed. But it should be named for what it is. Because a claim that the tradition always taught what it demonstrably did not teach for twelve centuries is not a defense of Islam as it has been transmitted. It is a proposal for what Islam could become, written in the grammar of what Islam was.

The Two Muhammads does not oppose that project. It insists only that the project be honest about its nature. The Qur’anic Muhammad and the Hadith Muhammad are not the same figure as the tradition was assembled. To use one to correct the other is not to restore an original. It is to choose between two things that were never identical, and to accept the weight of that choice.

The book avoids that weight. But the weight does not go away because it is avoided.

• * * *
  
  In the opening image the text would be considered Blasphemy if taken for a statement of fact. and if declared as believed truth by a Muslim could be seen as Apostasy by many communities. Particularly if the peson saying it was previously seen to be a Muslim

The Arabic text reads: “يسوع المسيح ابن الله المخلص”

Translated to English: “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

A. C. Rosenthal: Author, The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma

• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53379733

• https://www.alislam.org/

• https://files.alislam.cloud/pdf/Apostasy-in-Islam.pdf

• https://theconversation.com/the-politics-of-blasphemy-why-pakistan-and-some-other-muslim-countries-are-passing-new-blasphemy-laws-198647

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apostasy-Answering-Question-Converts-Martyrdom/dp/0332178463

• https://malthouselagos.com.ng/product/crimes-and-punishments-under-islamic-law-2nd-edition-2016-by-yahaya-y-bambale/

• https://qawl.com/?p=2539&lang=en

• amazon.com/author/a.c.rosenthal

This is not the same audit as the one dealing with The Truth About the Alleged Punishment for Apostasy in Islam. The two works move across the same terrain, but from different angles, and that is precisely why this second examination matters. The purpose here is not repetition, but stress-testing. If the framework laid out in The Two Muhammads is merely rhetorical, it will fail under variation. If it is structural, it will hold regardless of how carefully the subject is reframed.

The opportunity to test that came in the most ordinary way. A Muslim lawyer, …confronted with the core arguments of my work, did not engage them directly. Instead, he dismissed them as old and already answered, and pointed me toward a set of books that, in his view, settled the matter. So I read them, and this response is to an additional book i read from the same website. Not selectively, not defensively, but as it was intended to be read: as the strongest available case against my own.

I. The Central Claim and Its Apparent Clarity

The central claim of Apostasy in Islam — published by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and available at alislam.org — is presented with a clarity that is immediately disarming. Islam, it argues, does not prescribe any worldly punishment for leaving the faith. Belief is a matter of conscience. The Qur’an affirms this repeatedly and without ambiguity. “There is no compulsion in religion.” Judgment belongs to God, not to man.

Where reports or rulings appear to suggest otherwise, they are either misunderstood, misapplied, or tied to circumstances that have nothing to do with belief as such — most commonly political betrayal rather than religious departure. At the level of presentation, it is clean. At the level of aspiration, it is coherent. At the level of isolated citation, it is defensible. For a moment, it even feels complete, as though the tension that surrounds the question of apostasy has been dissolved not by force, but by clarity.

That feeling holds only as long as the question remains at the level the book sets for it. The moment the question shifts — even slightly — from “can the text be read this way” to “what gives this reading authority,” the ground begins to move.

II. The Problem the Book Cannot Avoid

The book does not merely offer an interpretation. It offers a conclusion, and that conclusion must stand inside a system that has already been built to produce conclusions of its own. The Qur’an is not the only source within that system, and it never has been. Islamic law, as it has been understood and practiced, is not constructed from scripture alone, but from a layered interaction between the Qur’an, the recorded words and actions of the Prophet preserved in hadith, and the juristic tradition that interprets, reconciles, and applies both.

Where the Qur’an is silent, the hadith speak. Where both require application, jurists decide how that application functions in lived reality. This is not a marginal feature of the system — it is its operating structure. And once that structure is acknowledged, the claim that apostasy carries no worldly consequence cannot rest on the Qur’an’s silence alone. It must account for what the system built to preserve and apply Islam has consistently produced.

That record is not ambiguous. The hadith corpus — including the two most authoritative Sunni collections — preserves the following:

The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse, and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.

— Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 83, Hadith 17; also Sahih Muslim, Book 16, Hadith 4154

This is not a marginal or contested hadith. It appears in both Bukhari and Muslim — the two collections Sunni scholarship regards as the most rigorously authenticated — and it places apostasy alongside murder and adultery as one of three capital offenses. The Ahmadiyya rebuttal must account for this text, not around it.

III. What the Juristic Tradition Actually Says

The book does not deny that the legal tradition treated apostasy as punishable. It cannot. The record is too consistent for that. Instead, it reframes the meaning of the material from which those rulings were drawn. But the juristic tradition that produced those rulings was not composed of careless readers. The four Sunni schools of law — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali — examined the same texts the book references, and they did not reach the same conclusions.

Their positions are a matter of documented legal record:

Apart from the Hanafi leniency toward female apostates, there was a ‘general consensus among the jurists that every apostate, man or woman, should be punished by death.’ This consensus (ijma’) was recorded by classical scholars and remained largely unchallenged in Sunni orthodoxy for centuries.

— Classical and Contemporary Perspectives on Apostasy (Riddah) Punishment in Islam, summarizing the four Sunni schools

The specifics of each school’s position are not in dispute among historians of Islamic law. The Hanafi school prescribed execution for male apostates and imprisonment with repeated physical coercion for women. The Maliki school allowed a repentance period of up to ten days, after which both men and women were to be executed. The Shafi’i school required a three-day waiting period; execution followed for the unrepentant of either gender. The Hanbali school did not require a waiting period at all, though one might be granted as a concession.

The Shafi’i jurist al-Nawawi, one of the most authoritative figures in classical Islamic legal writing, stated the matter without qualification in his Minhaj al-Talibin. Ibn Qudama’s al-Mughni, the definitive Hanbali compendium, treated capital punishment for apostasy as an established ruling requiring no significant defense. The Maliki scholar Khalil ibn Ishaq codified the same conclusion in his Mukhtasar. These are not fringe opinions. They are the operative texts of the schools that have governed Islamic law across continents for over a millennium.

A prominent 20th-century fatwa from Al-Azhar’s Fatwa Council — the most prestigious institution of Sunni learning in the world — described execution as the appropriate deterrent for apostasy, on the grounds that it protects religion and society from destabilization. Al-Azhar did not arrive at this conclusion through ignorance of the Qur’anic principle of non-compulsion. It arrived at it through the same methods of legal reasoning the book invokes — and reached the opposite result.

IV. The Controlled Redefinition and Why It Fails

The book’s primary defense against this record is contextual redefinition. What looks like a rule about belief, it argues, is actually a rule about treason. Apostasy was never the crime; political betrayal of the community was. The legal outcome is left intact in form but stripped of its religious basis.

This move is not without plausibility. It is possible to read the material that way. But possibility is not authority, and the distinction between the two is precisely where the argument begins to fracture. The question is not whether such a reading can be constructed. The question is whether it carries normative weight within the tradition whose authority the book itself is invoking.

It does not, for a reason the book leaves unaddressed. The jurists who built the legal tradition were not unaware of the Qur’anic principle of non-compulsion. They worked with it. They placed it alongside other elements of the tradition — hadith, precedent, the practices of the Companions — and they reconciled those elements according to methods they recognized as binding. The conclusion they reached was not the absence of penalty, but its codification under specific conditions.

To challenge that conclusion is not merely to offer a different reading of a text. It is to challenge the method by which that reading was reached. Scholars like Mawdudi, whose work on apostasy in Islamic law remains one of the most comprehensive treatments of the subject, noted that for twelve unbroken centuries prior to Western influence, the entire Muslim scholarly community was unanimous on this point. That unanimity is not a historical accident. It is the product of the system working as designed.

V. The Deeper Concession the Book Makes Without Acknowledging It

By the time the argument reaches its conclusion, the original claim has been transformed. It is no longer simply that Islam does not prescribe death for apostasy. It is that the mechanisms by which Islam has historically determined what it prescribes must be reconfigured in order for that conclusion to hold.

This is where the Ahmadiyya position arrives at a tension it has not resolved. The book is authored under the authority of the Ahmadiyya community — a community that has itself been declared apostate by the very juristic tradition it is here seeking to rehabilitate. Pakistan’s Second Amendment to its Constitution, enacted in 1974, formally declared Ahmadis non-Muslim. The legal apparatus that produced that ruling is the same apparatus the book is asking the reader to trust as capable of reform from within. The same ijma’ that condemned the Ahmadiyya community to civil and legal exclusion is the ijma’ being selectively invoked to argue that Islam never sanctioned compulsion in religion.

This is not a rhetorical observation. It is a structural one. The book cannot simultaneously appeal to the authority of the Islamic legal tradition to establish what Islam teaches and remain exempt from that tradition’s conclusions about who counts as Muslim. Either the tradition is authoritative — in which case its conclusions about apostasy must be engaged on their own terms — or it is not authoritative — in which case the argument has conceded the central premise of The Two Muhammads without stating that it has done so.

VI. The Unanswered Question

What remains, as the argument progresses, is a shift from demonstration to assertion. The book demonstrates that a non-coercive reading of Islam is possible. It demonstrates that such a reading aligns with widely held moral intuitions about freedom of belief. It demonstrates that the Qur’an contains language that supports that reading.

What it does not demonstrate is that this reading is binding within the system that has historically governed how Islam is understood and applied. The appeal to moral clarity, however compelling, does not substitute for a legal method. To say that religion should not coerce belief is to state a principle. To show how that principle governs competing materials within an established framework is to establish authority. The argument accomplishes the first and leaves the second unresolved.

The distinction at the center of The Two Muhammads is unavoidable here. The historical Muhammad — the figure recoverable through the tools of critical scholarship — can be read in light of the circumstances in which he lived. The transmitted Muhammad, however, is not encountered directly. He is encountered through the hadith and the legal structures that give those hadith normative force. When a report attributed to him meets the tradition’s standards of authentication, it does not remain a historical note. It becomes part of the legal model. A reading that seeks to limit that model must therefore identify a principle of limitation that the tradition itself recognizes as binding. Without such a principle, the limitation is not a rule. It is a preference.

VII. Conclusion: The Choice That Cannot Be Avoided

The argument resolves into a single, unavoidable choice. If the hadith and the juristic tradition are accepted as authoritative, then the conclusions they have consistently produced cannot be dismissed without explanation on the tradition’s own terms. If they are not accepted as authoritative, then the method that has defined Islamic law across fourteen centuries has been set aside — and that setting aside is itself the most significant theological claim in the book, even though it is never stated as such.

It cannot be both. Either the tradition stands with its conclusions, or the conclusions are rejected along with the authority that produced them. And whichever is surrendered determines whether the argument functions as a defense of Islam as it has been transmitted, or as a reconstruction of Islam according to a different rule of authority.

That reconstruction may be morally desirable. It may even be necessary. But it should be named for what it is. To present it as a recovery of what Islam always taught — against the unanimous weight of the schools, the hadith collections, and the juristic record — is not a historical argument. It is a theological proposal wearing historical clothes.

The Two Muhammads is interested in precisely that distinction. Not because reform is impossible, but because reform that does not acknowledge what it is reforming cannot honestly evaluate what it has achieved.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

A. C. Rosenthal

Author, The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma

amazon.com/author/a.c.rosenthal

• https://files.alislam.cloud/pdf/Punishment-of-Apostacy-in-Islam.pdf

• https://humanists.international/2016/06/un-must-recognise-the-pernicious-and-illegal-status-of-blasphemy-laws-says-iheu/

• https://www.dawn.com/news/1154251/rise-of-blasphemy-charges-saudi-arabia-iran-indonesia-in-perspective

• https://qawl.com/?p=2539&lang=en

• https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-where-apostasy-is-illegal.html

• https://hadithcriticblog.com/the-apostasy-hadith-the-case-against-ikrima/

• https://www.amazon.com/TWO-MUHAMMADS-History-Manuscripts-Islamic/dp/B0G4GLDDDP
  

In June 2015, Umberto Eco gave an interview that was widely misread as elitism. What he actually said was more specific, and more unsettling. Social media, he observed, had done something structurally new to public discourse: it had removed the distinction between informed knowledge and uninformed opinion, not by silencing the informed, but by presentin…

Read more

I want to tell you something that almost nobody in a position to say it publicly will say plainly.

Not because it is controversial among people who have actually read the texts. Among the people who have read the texts, it is not controversial at all. It is so thoroughly established that the tradition’s own greatest scholars said it first, said it clearl…

Read more

There is a question that responsible journalism has spent a century avoiding.

Not a fringe question. Not a hateful one. A simple empirical question that any honest person working in the sciences of history, law, or political theory would recognize as legitimate:

When the same pattern repeats across twelve centuries, across dozens of countries, across cult…

Read more

The Audit Amnesty Won’t Run

On October 7, 2023, Hamas murdered 1,200 people. Amnesty International took more than two years to say so. When they finally did, they couldn’t bring themselves to call it genocide. When Hamas does it, the word becomes unavailable. When Israel responds, the word appears in the headline before the research is finished.

That asy…

Read more