Not Ready: America, Islam, and the Price of Finality Ali R. Rahimi

On November 3, Michigan sent Abdul El-Sayed to the United States Senate, the first Muslim to sit in that chamber. I did not vote for him. Let me say at once what my objection is not. It is not the peaceful Muslim who prays, fasts, raises his children and pays his taxes; he is my neighbor, and his rights are mine. Nor do I claim to know the inside of Senator El-Sayed’s heart; a man’s wife covers her hair, and from that cloth alone I convict no one. My objection is simpler and, I think, more serious: America is electing firsts faster than it is learning facts. A republic that cannot describe the doctrine carried by a political movement — its sources, its duties, its view of the end of time — is not being tolerant. It is being uninformed. One good man in the Senate does not repeal an ideology, and one senator’s biography is not an answer to fourteen centuries of doctrine. The question is not whether a Muslim can be a good American — he can. The question is whether America understands what political Islam asks of its adherents when it stops being private faith and becomes public program.

America has been here before, at the very beginning. In March 1786 — not in legend, in the written record — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson sat in London with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, ambassador of Tripoli, and asked why his state made war on a young nation that had done it no injury. The answer they sent home should be taught in every civics class: it was founded, he said, on the laws of their Prophet; it was written in their Koran that all nations which had not acknowledged their authority were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to make war upon, to plunder and enslave, and every Muslim slain in that warfare was sure of Paradise. I know the Barbary wars were also about tribute and ransom; piracy was a business. But the business clothed itself in doctrine, and the doctrine told the corsair that God approved the ledger. Two and a half centuries later we have reversed the error: where Adams heard the doctrine too plainly, we refuse to hear it at all. We call every inquiry bigotry and every answer an infomercial.

So let us look at the doctrine itself, at face value, the way I tried to lay it out in my book America’s Trojan Horse. Begin with finality. Islam proclaims Muhammad the Seal of the Prophets: the last messenger, bearing the final and complete revelation, superseding what came before. Christianity, for all its dogmas, produced competing churches and, in time, a Reformation; Islam’s claim is structured to end the conversation — after the final message, there is nothing left to negotiate with heaven. Then join to that finality the doctrine of Ma’ad, the resurrection and judgment: history itself has a fixed ending, every deed is recorded, every account will be settled. A believer may hold this privately and be a gentle soul. But a movement that carries both — final revelation and final judgment — into politics has no internal reason to compromise, because compromise can be reclassified as betrayal of God.

Upon that foundation sit the working orders. Amr bil Ma’ruf — enjoining what is right. Nahi an al-Munkar — forbidding what is wrong. In the mosque of the heart these are conscience. But the tradition does not stop at the heart: the famous ladder runs from the hand, to the tongue, to the heart, and the hand means enforcement. A doctrine that commands the believer to forbid wrong will, wherever it gains confidence or power, eventually police the street, the school, the wife, the daughter. Add the tactical doctrines — taqiyya, protective concealment under pressure, and khud’a, the ruse sanctified by the saying that war is deception — and you have the complete operating system: a closed truth, an eternal audit, a standing order to enforce, and permission, in defined circumstances, not to show your hand. I do not say every Muslim runs this program; most human beings run their religions the way they run their lives, by habit and decency. I say the program exists, it is written down, and a serious country reads the manual of any movement that seeks power inside it.

Where, then, is the line? Exactly where a free republic must draw it: at conduct. Prayer is protected; prayer used to obstruct a public street, to announce who owns the neighborhood, is a claim of power and must meet the same permit, traffic and safety laws as any march. A killing done for “honor” is murder with a motive, not a culture with a defense. The mutilation of a girl’s genitals is a crime for which American law expressly refuses religion and custom as an excuse — and it should refuse, in every state, without apology. Belief may go where it will; the hand stops at another person’s body, another citizen’s street, another woman’s life.

Take the covering of hair, because it is the point where sentiment most quickly replaces thought. Compulsory hijab is not modesty; it is religious dogmatism wearing modesty’s clothes. The history is older and stranger than the slogans. Veiling did not begin with Islam: Persian queens veiled in elegance centuries before anyone in Arabia had heard of the God we now discuss, and Assyrian law once required the veil for respectable women and forbade it to slaves. Nor does the Qur’an, read plainly, command the covering of hair: the word hijab in the text is a curtain in the Prophet’s house, and the verse so often cited instructs women to draw an existing head-cloth across the bosom. The hair rule is an inference, hardened by jurists into law — which is precisely my point. What men inferred, states now enforce: in Tehran a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in custody over strands of hair. In America a woman may cover or not cover, and I will defend her legal right either way. But I will not call a doctrine enlightened because its adherent holds a diploma, and I will not pretend that a rule born of ancient patriarchy becomes progressive when it is worn by a psychiatrist in Michigan. Judge the claim, not the résumé.

That brings me to education, where our public language has become slovenly. Education is enlightenment; it is not a diploma. A diploma certifies training. Enlightenment is a discipline of the mind: proportion belief to evidence, let reality correct the premise, hold no conclusion immune. The pilots of September 11 were educated men, trained, housed, assimilated into Western neighborhoods; their minds were not empty — they were sealed. Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine, said it in one line: the greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism. He might have been describing the seminaries of Qom or the politburos of Moscow; dogmatism is one disease with many flags.

Science is the opposite discipline. We do not know the origin of life; we say so, and the honesty is the method. Evolution, which we do know, explains the diversification of living things once life exists. A telescope sits a million miles from Earth and reports what it sees; it does not flatter our ancestors. Against this, set the method of the mullahs: a verse says God subjected the heavens and the earth to man’s benefit, and fourteen centuries later preachers announce that the Book promised Moon landings and Mars. A text that can be fitted to every discovery after the fact predicted none before it. In 1979 crowds on Tehran rooftops swore they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon, and those who could not see were told their hearts were impure. There is the whole epistemology in one night: if you see it, faith is confirmed; if you don’t, you are the defect. A mind trained that way cannot run a laboratory, and a politics trained that way cannot run a republic.

Let one concrete case carry the argument: adultery. Ask what the sources actually say. The Qur’an prescribes one hundred lashes for zina. Stoning to death for the married adulterer rests not on any verse in the Book but on reports of the Prophet’s practice, defended by a “stoning verse” that believers concede is not in the Qur’an. And the proof? Four adult male witnesses who saw the act itself, or a confession that may be retracted — a standard so high that honest conviction is nearly impossible, while the punishment, once triggered, is lethal. Now count the flaws. The accuser who fails to produce four witnesses is himself lashed for slander — including, in strict application, the raped woman who cannot prove force. Women’s testimony does not establish the charge. Pregnancy, in one great school of law, can be evidence against the unmarried woman unless she proves coercion. The same act draws lashes for the single and death for the married, as if the crime were a change of marital status. This is not a system that malfunctioned; it is what law looks like when it is built to display divine severity rather than to find earthly truth. Multiply this one case across inheritance, testimony, apostasy, blasphemy, and you have the legal civilization that political Islam, where it rules, actually operates — in Kabul, in Tehran, and in every proposal to import its norms piecemeal into the West.

None of this is an argument against peace with the world’s nearly two billion Muslims; peace is necessary, and reform — real reform, from inside their own societies — deserves every support a free country can give it: protection for dissidents, refuge for the threatened, amplification for the brave men and women who argue with their own inheritance at risk of their lives. But support requires eyes open. The liberal infomercial, in which Islam is presented as merely a private spirituality offended by questions, is its own kind of deception, and the socialist romance with any movement that opposes America completes the Trojan circuit I described in my book: the horse is wheeled in as tolerance, and what steps out at night is the claim that criticism is hatred and law must bend.

Do our own politicians lie? Constantly, and in their offices. The difference is structural: our liar operates inside a system that can expose him, indict him, jail him, and vote him out — a system whose rules he cannot declare an offense against God to question. That is the whole argument. Democracy has no finality; it is a machine for correction. Dogma has nothing but finality; it is a machine for obedience. America can absorb any number of believers. It cannot absorb, and remain itself, a doctrine that claims the right to be uncorrectable inside the republic.

So my position is the one I have held in print and hold here: freedom, tolerance and trust — with an air of humanity, and with verification, always. Protect persons; interrogate doctrines; judge every public figure, the senator included, by record, words and program, and ask the question an earlier generation asked of divided loyalty in its own idiom: when office and doctrine conflict, which governs? Support the reformer; refuse the infomercial; enforce the law without exception for street, wife or daughter. America is not ready for Islam as it stands today wherever it stands as law. It is ready — it must make itself ready — for Muslims as equal citizens under a Constitution that no revelation outranks.

Awareness is the key that turns all the rest. A citizenry that knows what finality means, what the working orders command, what the tactical doctrines permit, and what the law of zina reveals, cannot be managed by slogans — neither by the mullah’s certainty nor by the network’s infomercial. Knowledge is not hatred; it is the precondition of a peace that does not require blindness.

This is my case, stated plainly, without icing: naked and unapologetic.