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    Islamophila: A Very Metropolitan Malady
    Islamophila: A Very Metropolitan Malady
    Islamophila: A Very Metropolitan Malady
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Islamophila: A Very Metropolitan Malady

    By Douglas Murray

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    About this ebook

    In this 2013 book (now reissued for the first time) bestselling author and broadcaster Douglas Murray, with trademark wit, delivers an alarming analysis of the post-9/11 world. It is a devastating satire on the climate of fear in the West today. Murray’s analysis is wildly entertaining yet ultimately profound:

    “If absolutely everybody in the world agrees on something – from the President of the United States to most film-stars, pop-stars, Popes, Bishops, atheists, writers, film-makers, brain-boxes and everyone else – then surely they must be right. Well, no. I think they are wrong. Wildly, terribly, embarrassingly and dangerously wrong, “ writes Murray.

    ISLAMOPHILIA shows how so many of the celebrities above, have, at some point chosen to abandon any hope or wish to criticize Islam and instead decided to profess some degree of love for it. Love, that Murray points out in the book, is often irrational and certainly misguided: Murray is not afraid to name and shame, and the book’s tour includes Sebastian Faulks and Martin Amis, Boris Johnson, South Park, Tony Blair, Ridley Scott, David Cameron, Liam Neeson, Justin Bieber, Random House Publishers, the BBC, Richard Dawkins, the Prince of Wales and even George Bush. Yes, George Bush.

    “They may have done this for a range of good and bad reasons. Some of them have to done it to save other people. Some of them have done it to save themselves. Some of them have done it because they are too stupid to do anything else and others because clever people can be really dumb at times.”

    Murray goes on to detail the extraordinary strategic cultural efforts made in recent years to “rewrite the last few millennia of history, minimising and denigrating the impact of actual scientists and promoting the claims of Islamic proselytisers”. And he has fighting words for the version of history depicted by Ridley Scott and others in Hollywood.

    Artists and writers have been caught off-guard, he alleges, “Having poked at empty hornets nests for so many years they have forgotten the courage required to do the necessary poking at full ones.”

    He concludes, “Let’s be clear. For the record I don’t think everybody needs to spend their time being offensive about Islam. Not only is there no need to be offensive all the time, but most Muslims just want to get on with their lives as peacefully and successfully as everybody else. But there is an un-evenness in our societies that needs to be righted...to think that the answer to any criticism of Islam or Muslims is a delegitimizing of critics and an indulgence in self-pity is not to make an advance. It is to pave the way for self-harm. For all of us.

    Where people are telling lies we should not be fearful to correct them. And where people are fearful – and genuine reasons to be so do keep coming along – people should remind themselves of something. Which is that just as bravery in one person instils bravery in others, so cowardice in one person has a tendency to be catching.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDouglas Murray
    Release dateJun 16, 2020
    ISBN9780463033586
    Islamophila: A Very Metropolitan Malady
    Author

    Douglas Murray

    Douglas Murray is an associate editor of The Spectator. His latest publication, The Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller and a book of the year for The Times and The Sunday Times. His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, was published by Bloomsbury in May 2017. It spent almost twenty weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and was a number one bestseller in nonfiction.

    Read more from Douglas Murray

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    Book preview

    Islamophila - Douglas Murray

    ISLAMOPHILIA

    A Very Metropolitan Malady

    Douglas Murray

    Copyright © 2020 Douglas Murray All rights reserved

    No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

    Cover design by: Brett Houston-Lock – Nabu Media Ltd. 2020.

    Table of Contents

    Preface

    Introduction: What's in a name?

    Everything is Islamophobic

    Islamophile politicians: Britain

    Islamophile politicians: America

    A wonderful religion

    The Wright brothers were wrong

    Homage from Hollywood

    The literati

    Islamophilia is no defence

    Unchristian attitudes

    Where are the critics?

    Where are the churches?

    What now?

    About the author

    Preface

    ‘Islamophilia’ came out in 2013 and instantly became Amazon’s Number 1 best-selling book on Islam. Indeed in no time at all it was out-selling the Quran, despite that work’s author having had a 1400-year head-start.

    Then as suddenly as it came it went, and has been unavailable to readers for the last six years.

    I should state that its disappearance had nothing to do with the various reasons I have heard ascribed in the intervening period. The book was not censored. Nor was it in any way banned. Certainly I was not intimidated into having it un-published. The more prosaic reason for its disappearance was simply that the admirable young e-book publishing firm that I wrote it for went out of business, through no fault of my own I might add.

    Over the ensuing years I have fairly regularly been asked about the book’s whereabouts. Since it is an e-book its disappearance has been total, denied even that afterlife printed books have in second-hand bookshops.

    And so, I have decided that I would like to re-issue the book, unchanged, except for this new preface. There are only a couple of things worth adding.

    The first is an apology. To Professor Richard Dawkins. Shortly after this book emerged, I interviewed Professor Dawkins for the release of his memoirs. I sensed that there was something frosty in the air and I had hardly turned on the tape-recorder before he made it clear that he thought I rather owed him an apology. This sentiment came from the fact that he had recently been reading – and enjoying – ‘Islamophilia’ and been surprised, not to mention wounded, to find himself listed here among the ‘Islamophiles’. Although he had become used to the opposite accusation, he thought my mention of him here was uncharitable. I am inclined to agree with him, and only keep the reference in here because while it is unfair, I still find the relevant passage funny.

    The other thing worth mentioning is less amusing, and that is the number of things that have happened since this book was first published. At the time of its first appearance in 2013, Drummer Lee Rigby had just been decapitated on the streets of London. The years that followed saw the rise of ISIS, massacres in many European cities, a suicide bombing at a pop-concert in Manchester and the declaration of a Caliphate across a swathe of Iraq and Syria.

    Perhaps worst – for an author still looking to have the odd laugh – was the massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. After that and the attack on a free speech event in Copenhagen one month later I cannot deny that the desire to laugh at anything Islam-related receded somewhat. For a time it seemed almost blasphemous to find anything funny in the area, not because of the religion but because so many people had been shot for finding things in it to mock. Still I feel rather strongly that the laughter, and the lampooning really ought to go on. There are an awful lot of things that are wrong in the world, and an awful lot of things that could be changed for the better. But the idiocy and supine-ness of a good chunk of powerful and intelligent people is a thing worth continuing to poke fun at even, or especially, if the trend is unchangeable. In any case the target of this little book is not really a religion so much as a group of influential people who think very highly of themselves but who cower like anything before gods that are strange to them.

    So here it is, reissued. I have enjoyed re-reading this jeu d’esprit. Not least because it has given me the chance to remind myself of some grand stupidities that might otherwise have become obscured by time. I hope that you enjoy it too, and that this time the book can hang around for a little while longer.

    Introduction: What's in a name?

    In recent years the world has heard a great deal lot about ‘Islamophobia’. We are told of the existence of ‘Islamophobic’ books, films, cartoons and, of course, people. But it is very hard indeed to nail down what makes something ‘Islamophobic’. Is it ‘Islamophobic’ to refer to something bad in the Koran? Can a Muslim be ‘Islamophobic’? Of the many downsides to ‘Islamophobia’, not the least among them is that nobody seems sure what it means.

    The word is applied to anything which could be deemed offensive to any Muslim, anytime, any place, anywhere. Personally, I think the word is a crock – for a lot of reasons, but not least among them that a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear. There is nothing ‘irrational’ about fearing parts – though certainly not all – of Islam.

    For example, it would be rational to be ‘phobic’ of the 7/7 bombers and the 9/11 hijackers. It is rational to be ‘phobic’ about Islam if you are a Dutch film-maker, or an American ambassador in Benghazi or, as we now know, a soldier in south London. The perpetrators were all people who acted in the name of Islam. They may have been right in believing this, or they may have been wrong. But being ‘phobic’ of such things is a perfectly rational instinct – indeed, one might call it a survival instinct.

    Anyhow, this book is not about that much overused word.

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