The myth of "real" Islam

The gaslighting of non-Muslims is losing its momentum - and not a minute too soon!

The moment I saw who would be on the panel, I reached out to my friend Inaya Folarin Iman, who was chairing the “debate” and asked if I could join as a speaker. I knew that Taj Hargey, Mohammed Amin, Peymana Assad, Dolan Cummings and Aaqil Ahmed would only serve as propagandists, reinforcing the lie that "real” Islam isn’t a threat to the Western world.

Unfortunately, I was right and the session proved to be nothing but the old shibboleths about how Islam isn’t “what’s being portrayed in the media”, how the people shouting “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing or decapitating people in broad daylight, ramming cars or exploding bombs in crowded venues, or standing outside synagogues to harass Jewish citizens, aren’t acting in accordance with Islam.

Luckily, I got to speak immediately after the speakers (unfortunately, the recording of the audience participation isn’t included in the uploaded video), and explained that, their clichés is no longer going to fly. We’ve had too many underage girls raped, too many fellow citizens blown up, too many Jewish brothers and sisters slaughtered, to fall for the lies anymore. The woken Briton is no longer going to fall for their lies, that they’ve called “Wolf” too many times.

One question occurred to me that I’ve not been able to get out of my head ever since;

Why Are They So Obsessed with Non-Muslim Perceptions?

One question has haunted me ever since: why do they care so much about what non-Muslims think about Islam? If they truly believed their claims, shouldn't their energy be devoted to convincing their co-religionists to abandon illiberal and medieval practices rather than pleading with the indifferent masses that "real" Islam is different?

I regard these enablers of Islamic barbarism—Maajid Nawaz, Mehdi Hasan, Myriam Francois Cerrah, Narinder Kaur, Bushra Shaikh, Abdullah al Andalusi—as even more contemptible than the openly Islamist vermin like Mohammed Hijab, Ali Dawah, or Anjem Choudary. At least the latter group is honest about what the Qur’an and Hadiths teach. The former, by contrast, engage in rhetorical gymnastics that only deceive the gullible liberal desperate to confirm the fiction that all cultures are equal.

If they are convinced of their claims (and I have no reason to think they aren’t), shouldn’t their sole mission in life be to convince and convert their co-religionists to stop with their illiberalism and primitive ways and beliefs, instead of telling people who have no interest in Islamic theology, what “real” Islam is?

What is Islam?

If Islam can mean anything—embracing democracy, gay rights, women’s rights, capitalism, and Jeffersonian liberalism—while simultaneously being an unchangeable doctrine from the Bronze Age, then Islam means nothing. If it can be altered, reconditioned and updated to align with Western, democratic sentiments, and the inconvenient passages, such as stoning adulterers to death, marrying 6 year olds, male-only polygamy, jihad and shaheed (martyrdom), then Islam was never the word of God to begin with, as His words are supposed to be eternal and immalleable.

Furthermore, the entire theology of Islam rests on one single notion:

Muhammad was the perfect being and last prophet, whose examples all Muslims must follow.

In that sense, Islam is absolute. It is also totalitarian. Unlike Christianity, which is inherently a secular religion ("Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s"—Mark 12:17), Islam seeks to dominate every facet of life, from taxation to fashion, from sexual ethics to punishments for thought crimes.

When confronted with passages from the Qur’an or Hadiths, the apologists play the "context" card. But if Islam is the final revelation, why does it require a perpetual PR campaign? Either these injunctions were meant for eternity, or they weren’t divine to begin with.

Or they will insist the text is allegorical, symbolic even—yet these same "symbols" produce strikingly literal results, century after century, across different geographies and cultures.

Inconvenient Verses

They wish you would disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so you may all be alike. So do not take them as allies unless they emigrate in the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and do not take any of them as allies or helpers (Surah 4:89)

O Prophet! Ask your wives, daughters, and believing women to draw their cloaks over their bodies. In this way it is more likely that they will be recognised ˹as virtuous˺ and not be harassed. And Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful. (Surah 33:59)

So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the polytheists wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them. (Surah 9:5)

Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, nor comply with what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth from among those who were given the Scripture,¹ until they pay the tax,² willingly submitting, fully humbled. (Surah 9:29)

I could go on and on. The Quran alone is filled with verses that promote slavery (including sexual slavery, which motivated the perpetrators of the so called “Grooming Gangs”), murder, barbarism, occupation, imperialism, subjugation and chauvinism.

If proponents of “real” Islam want us to believe it’s all peace, brotherhood of man and democracy, I suggest they start with deleting these verses, or convince the 2 billion Muslims worldwide that these no longer apply.

A God That Cannot Communicate

If Islam is eternally peaceful and just, why is it uniquely prone to "misinterpretation"? Why do the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Mullahs in Iran, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Hamas in Gaza, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan (highly recommend my readers to watch “Hotel Mumbai”, if you haven’t already), and Mohammed Hijab’s ilk in the UK all seem to misunderstand it in the same way?

Allah, it seems, is the worst communicator in history.

And why is it that it’s only when exposed to democracy and liberalism that we hear from Muslims that Islam promotes the same ideas? How come these principles never take root in Pakistan, Yemen, or even the more supposedly progressive countries, like UAE?

A doctrine that is constantly "misunderstood" in precisely the same manner across centuries, continents, and cultures ceases to be a mere accident and starts to look like the inevitable result of its own teachings. If Islam is the final word of an omniscient deity, why does it need endless revisionism, reinterpretation, and disclaimers from apologists who claim to understand it better than those who have devoted their lives to studying it?

Moreover, if Allah’s message is so easily misinterpreted, what does that say about its divine clarity? Would an all-knowing creator be unable to foresee that his commandments—if they were truly peaceful—would be used to justify mass murder, terrorism, and authoritarian rule? Why is it that no such widespread "misunderstanding" exists within, say, Jainism or Buddhism?

And let’s not forget the sheer absurdity of the argument that only a select few "true scholars" can grasp the real meaning of Islam. If the message of the divine is so complex that only a handful of elite theologians can decipher it, then it is by definition impractical as a guide for all of humanity. It is the height of arrogance to claim that one must be well-versed in medieval Arabic, tafsir, and hadith sciences to grasp basic moral instructions.

This is not just an issue of textual ambiguity; it is a crisis of credibility. The relentless need to reframe Islam, to make it appear palatable in democratic societies, betrays the very premise that it is the immutable, eternal word of God.

55 failures

There are roughly 55 Muslim-majority countries in the world. Only five—Tunisia, Indonesia, Senegal, Malaysia, and Albania—could be described as somewhat democratic. And even these nations lag far behind secular Western societies in cohesion, prosperity, and individual freedom.

They are, by practically every objective measure, some of the world’s worst countries to live freely and thrive in, especially for women and non-Muslims.

Screenshot from libertarian Cato institute’s report on “Freedom in the Muslim World”

Why is it that Islam uniquely produces such outcomes in every single country? The defenders of Islam say it’s nothing to do with the religion, but with colonialism, or Western intervention, or individual venality. Everything but Islam.

When you point out that Hong Kong and Singapore were also colonised, or Turkey, Iran or even Saudi Arabia have never been annexed by a non-Islamic power, people like the ghastly Mehdi Hasan start playing the tu quoque card; “What about Trump?” or “America’s ‘illegal’ war in Iraq” or “Boris ate a cake!”

It’s never Islam for them, even though it’s the only constant in people across different geographies, with different cultures, ethnicities, median age, languages and histories, that will guarantee a backward society, bereft of fundamental right, progress or innovation.

Why is it a guarantee that, the moment Islam reaches critical mass in a society, that society’s cohesion is challenged or, as in the case of Iran, disintegrates? Why is this inevitable?

The Problem of Islamic Migration

Why are Muslims always migrating to non-Muslim countries? Why don’t they migrate to Islamic countries where there are no wars, like Saudi Arabia or United Arab Emirates? And why, as Douglas Murray says, do we never see the boats travelling in the other direction? No one risks their lives to escape to a Muslim country (unless they are jihadists, joining up with the likes of ISIS).

The answer is plain: because Islamic societies are incapable of providing the very freedoms, opportunities, and stability that their own doctrines claim to champion. The West, the supposed "decadent infidel civilisation," is the sole place where Muslims can enjoy the fruits of liberty—ironically, the same liberty their faith explicitly rejects.

Even the wealthiest Islamic nations—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE—are deeply inhospitable to migrants. Gulf states employ Muslim workers from poorer nations under conditions that can only be described as modern-day slavery. There is no pretence of "brotherhood" among the ummah when economic exploitation is the default.

Moreover, if Islam is truly a superior system, why do its adherents so often flee from it rather than to it? Why does Pakistan not absorb Afghan refugees instead of them risking their lives to reach Europe? Why don’t displaced Syrians seek refuge in Mecca or Medina? Do we even need to mention Egypt and Gazans?

It is not just war that drives these migrations. It is the fundamental inability of Islamic societies to provide what even the most flawed Western nations guarantee as a basic standard of living. And still, many who arrive in the West do not assimilate, but demand that their new home bend to the same failed ideology that led to their exodus in the first place.

Conclusion

This relentless PR campaign to convince non-Muslims that "real" Islam is something altogether different is not just quixotic—it is an outright exercise in gaslighting. The sheer effort devoted to persuading indifferent outsiders, rather than reforming the societies that actually live under Islamic rule, reveals the depth of the deception.

If Islam were truly a doctrine of peace, freedom, and democracy, why would it need such an elaborate rebranding effort? Christianity and Buddhism, for instance, do not require endless panels, conferences, and apologetics to convince the world they are benign. Their doctrines speak for themselves. Islam, on the other hand, demands constant spin, reinterpretation, and obfuscation.

More importantly, this deception is not harmless. It actively enables the perpetuation of illiberal, oppressive societies by shielding them from rightful scrutiny. While Western liberals buy into the fairytale of "real" Islam, millions of women, minorities, and dissidents remain trapped under its iron grip.

In the end, Islam does not need defenders in TV studios and opinion columns—it needs fundamental, uncompromising reform from within. And until that happens, no amount of PR will change the fact that the only consistent reading of Islam—the one that keeps resurfacing in every Islamist movement, oppressive regime, and fundamentalist preacher—is the one that its critics have been warning about all along.