We moved into a new house this week. I had forgotten to call ahead and arrange internet service before moving day, and when I finally applied, I was told the earliest installation date was ten days away. Both my wife’s work and mine depend almost entirely on being online. Our phone hotspots burned through their data almost immediately, so I texted our next-door neighbor, a white American Christian whom I had spoken with only briefly. I explained the situation and asked whether we could use his Wi-Fi until ours was installed. As a thank-you, I offered to pay his internet bill for the month. He apologized and said no.
As someone who grew up as a Muslim in the Islamic world, lived in several Muslim countries, and traveled to perhaps twenty more, I can say with confidence that I would be surprised to find a Muslim who would refuse that request from a new neighbor.
When I was ten years old, I lived in Jerash, Jordan, a city filled with Roman ruins because ancient Gerasa was one of the cities of the Decapolis. We saw tourists constantly. I still remember an Italian tourist who seemed lost. I found him a cab, explained where he needed to go, and paid the entire fare out of the small allowance I had, even though no one expected me to. Hospitality was simply something we were taught to do.
I doubt many cultures can compete with Arabs and Muslims when it comes to hospitality. Knock on the door of a Muslim family and, before they ask why you have come, there is a good chance they will invite you inside, offer you food and something to drink, and only then ask what brought you there. Stop a Muslim on the street and ask for help, and he will never brush you off the way people often do in the West. He may spend an hour with you if that is what it takes to make sure you find what you need.
Last week, during the CAIR summit, several speakers talked about the need for Muslims to spend more time with Americans so that Americans could see how nice Muslims are and thereby combat what they described as “Islamophobia.” I can see why they think that strategy will work.
Last year, I was invited to speak at a synagogue about Islam. Afterward, a Jewish woman objected to what I had said because, as she explained, her daughter had a very nice Muslim friend.
This is where many people in the West become confused. They hear Muslim clerics speak about Islam’s global ambitions, they see what Muslim terrorists do around the world, they remember the beheadings, the persecution of minorities, the grooming and rape gangs, and other acts committed by Muslims. At the same time, they personally know Muslims who are kind, generous, decent people. Faced with that contradiction, many resolve it by separating the Islam of their nice Muslim friends from the actions of violent Muslims and treating the latter as a fringe phenomenon with little or nothing to do with Islam itself.
When a Muslim man stopped two ISIS terrorists in Sydney, his religion was immediately emphasized. He was not “the human who stopped the Muslim terrorists” but “the Muslim who stopped the terrorists.”
The World Beneath the Surface
Muslim “niceness” belongs to a very old social world. Among Arabs, hospitality is tied to karam, generosity, honor, and the way a person presents himself before others. In traditional Bedouin life, that made practical sense. A traveler crossing an arid landscape could depend on the hospitality of strangers for food, water, shelter, and protection. Refusing a guest could have serious consequences. Over time, hospitality became part of the moral code itself. A good man was expected to receive generously, and a family’s reputation was partly measured by how it treated guests.
Islam did not create these customs. The same habits are found among Arab Christians, Druze, and other non-Muslim communities. Anyone who has spent time in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, or Iraq, knows that generosity toward guests crosses religious lines. It is Arab and Mediterranean, not Islamic. The same pattern extends beyond the Arab world. Greeks, southern Italians, Turks, Spaniards, and other Mediterranean peoples have long been known for dense family networks, animated social life, strong guest obligations, and a deep concern for reputation and honor. These societies are not identical, but they share a level of interpersonal intensity that feels immediately different from northern Europe or the United States.
But the same culture that produces extraordinary hospitality also produces problems.
The neighbor who brings you food without being asked also feels entitled to comment on your marriage, your children, or your salary. The family that would empty its savings to rescue a son also believes it has the right to control whom he marries.
This is why I do not think “Muslims are nicer” is quite the right description. They are more relational. Human life is organized around thick personal ties. That can produce warmth, loyalty, generosity, and an astonishing willingness to help. It also produces gossip, intrusion, nepotism, family pressure, emotional manipulation, and a constant concern with how one appears in the eyes of others.
In societies where institutions have historically been weak or corrupt, reputation and relationships become a kind of social insurance. In Jordan, if something goes wrong, you call someone who knows someone; in America, you call customer service. In the Arab world, a friend may spend half a day accompanying you from office to office because that is how problems get solved, while in America there is a form and an appointment.
In a corrupt society, the dependence on personal relationships can make life feel warmer because someone is visibly stepping in for you. In a just society, the absence of that personal intervention can feel cold precisely because the system is supposed to work without favoritism. One feels more human in the moment; the other is less personal but can serve millions of people who have no connection to one another.
In Arab culture, generosity is meant to be seen. Someone pays for your dinner, a family fills the table with far more food than anyone can eat, and people may argue passionately over who gets to pay the bill because generosity is tied to honor and reputation. The act does good, but it also tells everyone present something about the giver.
American generosity is built differently. Americans give enormous sums to churches, universities, hospitals, food banks, medical research, disaster relief, scholarship funds, shelters, and charities whose beneficiaries they will never meet. The donor may receive no public recognition at all, and the person helped may never know who gave the money. One form of generosity is closely tied to social visibility; the other is detached from reputation and built into durable institutions that continue doing good long after the donor has left the room.
In a religious culture built heavily around visible performance, what matters is not what a person is, but what he appears to be before the community. The woman in hijab is presumed more pious than the woman without it, even though the first may be a prostitute and the second a saint.
I can keep going, quality by quality, and every good quality a Muslim displays will turn out to be either a normal human quality shaped by education, neighborhood, class, national culture, and personal experience, or something with a theological explanation that exposes its true nature. None of those nice qualities has anything to do with Islam.
Are Bad Muslims Bad Because of Islam?
The answer is yes. You can read much of my work, which proves beyond a shred of doubt that the worst acts committed by Muslims, from the beheading of infidels to lying, rape, exploitation, corruption, dictatorship, the oppression of women, child abuse, and so forth, are rooted in Islamic teachings, not merely in descriptive passages but in prescriptive ones.
Yes, All humans have the capacity for evil, we all have within us the ability to justify unspeakable horrors, but most religions restrain human evil, they set moral boundaries, condemning acts of violence, injustice, and cruelty. Christianity commands its followers to love their enemies, forgive those who harm them, and refuse vengeance. Judaism, despite its history of persecution, never formed a doctrine commanding global conquest or the extermination of non-Jews.
Islam, however, does the opposite.
When an ISIS fighter beheads a captive, he is not acting outside the teachings of his faith. He is following the example of Muhammad, who personally oversaw the beheading of hundreds of Jewish men in Medina. When Hamas terrorists slaughter Israeli families, they are not betraying Islam, they are fulfilling the doctrine of jihad, which commands war against non-Muslims until Islam dominates the world.
Unlike Christianity, which calls for self-sacrifice, Islam calls for sacrificing others. Unlike Judaism, which focuses on preserving its own people, Islam commands the subjugation or destruction of all who reject it. A Christian who commits murder is violating his faith. A Muslim who kills an apostate is fulfilling his. A Buddhist who wages war is going against the teachings of his religion. A jihadist who slaughters unbelievers is doing exactly what his religion commands.
Islam is the only major religion that actively commands the atrocities we fear. It is the only faith where genocide, subjugation, and violence are not historical accidents, but divine commandments. It is a mistake to think Islam is just another religion, rather than the most dangerous ideology the world has ever known.
The Individual and the Crowd
A Muslim encountered alone is not the same social phenomenon as Islam activated through a group. Nietzsche described a related dynamic as “herd morality.” In groups, the same nice people you know can adopt a different morality because they begin asking: Who is more committed? Who is purer? Who has compromised? Once righteousness becomes visible, it becomes competitive. Islam intensifies this because piety can be displayed in ways everyone around you can recognize: loyalty to Islam, dress codes, public outrage, sexual rules, attitudes toward outsiders, and the willingness to defend whatever Islam regards as sacred.
If being a good Muslim is constantly communicated through things that can be seen and judged by other Muslims, then religion becomes a social ranking system. The man who condemns criticism of Muhammad more fiercely appears more zealous. The person who defends Islam immediately appears more loyal than the one who hesitates.
The nice Muslim you know privately and the Muslim acting inside a strongly activated religious group can begin to look like two different people. Collective identity converts people back into categories. You are no longer simply John, David, or Susan. You become Christian, Jew, atheist, apostate, Zionist, secularist, unbeliever.
A man alone has to explain why he believes something, in a crowd, everyone else’s certainty becomes part of his evidence. He can repeat what the group believes and feel less personally responsible for examining it. Muslims in groups see solidarity with other believers as a religious obligation. A Muslim can regard a morally corrupt Muslim as closer to him than a morally admirable non-Muslim. The reason is that one shares the sacred identity and the other does not.
A Muslim who barely practices his religion can suddenly become fiercely defensive of it when an outsider criticizes it. He may drink, rarely pray, ignore sexual rules, and know very little theology, yet react with extraordinary anger to an insult against Muhammad. That apparent contradiction makes sense once you understand how Islam is not only a religion, it is a citizenship, an identity.
The absolute majority of Muslims support Hamas. Forget the recent polls showing that almost 42% of Muslims in America support Hamas; many of those interviewed were probably afraid of ICE. Any Muslim, nice or not, religious or not, will support Hamas, except for the seven individuals who still identify as Muslims but are considered infidels in the eyes of Muslims anyway. On an individual level, if you ask them, they will use the occupation to explain their support for Hamas. But in a group setting, they support Hamas because of Islam.
Nietzsche once wrote that “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” A Muslim alone still has to live with his own judgment, his own doubts, and the consequences of what he believes. Inside a group, those restraints are gone. The crowd supplies certainty, rewards conformity, and turns excess into proof of loyalty. Ideas that would sound extreme coming from one person can become normal once everyone around him repeats them. The individual begins to borrow his moral confidence from the group, and once that happens, the group, especially an Islamic group, makes fanaticism a virtue.
Love Muslims. Hate Islam.
Most of the Muslims you meet are not walking around performing taqiyya. They are not actors pretending to be kind while secretly plotting against you. If your Muslim neighbor is decent to you, he is probably decent to you because he is a decent human being. His kindness is real. The mistake begins when you take that kindness and turn it into a theological argument for Islam.
The West has become so crippled by kindness and cultural relativism that the religion of the terrorist is omitted, and the religiously motivated act of violence is absorbed into the generic category of “terrorism,” alongside cartels, organized crime, and human trafficking. Islamic movements and Muslims who exploit Western freedom and democratic institutions in order to advance a destructive Islamic project are discussed without any attention to the religious doctrine motivating them.
The kindness of a Muslim friend tells you something about the friend, it tells you nothing about how Muslims believe that Muhammad is the moral model for mankind, or how Sharia must take over liberal democracy, or anything about the apostasy laws, the nature of jihad, women and non-Muslims under Islamic law, or how Islam can never coexist with a constitutional order built on freedom of conscience.
Islam must be judged by what it teaches, not by the nicest person who happens to belong to it. Islam is not only a collection of private beliefs about God, prayer, fasting, and the afterlife. It is a political ideology that contains rules about government, war, taxation, criminal penalties, family regulation, and rules governing Muslims and non-Muslims. Once Islam takes over a society your nice Muslim friend will be irrelevant.
Individually, Muslims differ enormously, but institutions, mosques, Islamic organizations, religious parties, activist networks, and clerical authorities, funded by Islamic nations, bring Muslims together. That is when what you see as “nice” is deemed by Islam as “bad,” and at that point these enclaves will be full of nice Muslim individuals and a very bad Muslim group.
When the West assures Muslims that Islam embodies Western values, it does not strengthen the humane Muslim against destructive Islam. It strengthens Islam against the human beings enslaved by it. When politicians insist that every criticism of Islam is an attack on Muslims, they merge the person with the ideology, protecting the ideology without providing any additional protection to the individual, who is already protected by Western law.
Defend the Muslim as a person and hate Islam as a set of ideas. Defend the Muslim citizen against discrimination, and refuse every attempt to convert that protection into immunity for Islam. Make it impossible to punish a Muslim for being Muslim, and equally impossible to punish someone for criticizing Muhammad, the Qur’an, Sharia, or Islamic history.
Love your nice Muslim neighbor, but to survive you have no option but to hate Islam.
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This is republished with permission by the author. The original can be found here.
Danny Burmawi is an author, political commentator, and founder of the Ideological Defense Institute. His book, “ISLAM, ISRAEL AND THE WEST: A Former Muslim’s Analysis,” can be ordered here. Subscribe to his newsletter here.
