There are two modern ways to make war on a religion without getting your shoes dirty. One is to send drones and sanctions in the name of peace. The other is to send adjectives and stereotypes in the name of civilisation. Erasmus Ikhide picked the cheaper option, opened his laptop, and called the result “Islam goes off the cliff”. In his story, Islam is a kind of belief system that drags two billion people over a ledge. In reality, the only thing that tumbles spectacularly is his logic… or semblance of it.
What he offers is not critique. It is itinerant circus. Islam is cast as the villain, the weapon and the corpse all at once. Real tragedies are dragged on stage as props. Western power walks through the scene in a white robe, clutching a holy book and a certificate of innocence, while five centuries of bloodletting and slavery are told to wait quietly backstage. History is allowed to appear only when it cooperates.
His opening stunt is to turn Ilhan Omar into a repulsive character. He describes her as a “racialist baying for blood”, a kind of tribal general in a blazer who longs to impose Sharia on the unsuspecting downtown, Minnesota. It sounds funny, childish, dramatic and even senseless! It also has the serious problem of being unsupported by anything except venomous stench of phobia.
Here the first basic rule of honest writing already fails.
When a writer accuses a public figure of being a “racialist baying for blood”, there are only two honest paths. Either you lay real evidence on the table, or you admit you are just hurling mud and hoping it sticks. In Ilhan Omar’s case, no such evidence appears. Her life story is not a mystery.
She fled a civil war as a child, passed through a refugee camp, resettled in the United States, went through public schools, worked as a community organiser, served in a state legislature and now represents a congressional district under the same constitution that makes Trump a tenant in the Whitehouse. Her record is full of discourse on health care, student loans, foreign wars, policing, climate and immigration. Her opponents dislike her positions on Israel, American wars in Muslim lands and the way she speaks about power. That is politics. What you do not find is a speech calling for Muslim domination of white people, a manifesto declaring non-Muslims subhuman, or a policy proposal that denies rights based on ethnicity.
Thus, the charge of “racialist” does not arise from her words. It arises from a stereotype. Black. Somali. Headscarf. Critical of American gangster foreign policy. Put these in a certain imagination and you get a ready-made villain. Instead of answering her arguments line by line, critics turn her into a tribal warlord in a suit and congratulate themselves for bravery. If anyone wants to persist with that label, the burden is simple. Produce a sentence where she declares any race inferior by nature, a line where she demands blood for skin colour, a law she sponsored that discriminates by ethnicity. Without that, the accusation is not analysis. It is what it is. Bullshit! In other words, what is on trial in this first act is not Ilhan Omar. It is the ease with which a Black Muslim woman can be turned into a monster simply by pressing copy on old colonial reflexes.
From there Ikhide graduates from one hijab in Minnesota to an entire civilisation. He hears a chant, “Death to America”, and decides that Islam has become a death cult and Muslims have lost their minds. Instead of asking where the phrase came from, how it is used, or what those who shout it think they mean, he treats three English words as a theological confession.
Reality, unfortunately for his argument, is less obedient.
The same laziness appears in the outrage at the slogan “Death to America”. In English it sounds like a threat to families, and many ordinary Americans hear it that way. The phrase, though, did not come out of a vacuum. It grew out of a very specific history in Persian and Arabic speaking societies. It belongs to people who watched foreign coups topple their elected governments, who endured decades of sanctions that punished ordinary citizens for decisions taken by elites, who saw their region turned into a theatre of invasions, drones and proxy wars.
Countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan did not become rubble by mystical accident. In that context people reached for a slogan. It is … well … unpleasant. It is not subtle. It is a political scream. Leaders in those societies have said again and again that what they mean is death to an arrogant policy that bombs, occupies, props up dictators and then calls the resulting anger barbarism. They speak of bringing down a system of domination, not burning families in their homes in Kansas.
Even within Iran the phrase has passed into casual speech. Taxi drivers joke about “death to traffic” when the roads choke. In other words, the formulation has come to mean “may this oppressive thing disappear from my life”. One can insist that the slogan is worrying, that it feeds fear, that it deepens misunderstanding. That is a fair criticism. What is not fair is to pretend that each time a crowd chants it, what they are really saying is “let us slaughter Christians in shopping malls”. To insist on that reading is to erase the history that produced the anger and to turn a political protest into an invented religious edict.
You can dislike the slogan, complain about its rawness, and still admit that a political scream is not a divine fatwa. To refuse that distinction is not courage. It is propaganda in monkey jacket.
Ikhide’s trick, at this point, is to pretend that only Muslim anger ever turns ugly. Western anger, in his world, drops bombs, starves populations and flattens cities yet somehow remains a ritual of civilisation. Muslim rage is a proof of savage religion. Western rage is evidence of moral clarity.
From there the conversation in Ikhide’s piece tries to perform a moral hara-kiri. Islam, we are told, must be saved “from itself”. As if the religion is an incurable disease. As if it sits outside history in its own special category of violence. At that point one has to ask a simple question: who conquered and carved Africa, Asia and Latin America over the last five centuries. Who is responsible for western world wars one and two? Who is responsible for nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Who is responsible for the discovery and production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Who is behind Halabja tragedy?
It was not Muslim armies sailing from Mecca with the holy Qur’an in one hand and chains in the other. It was a European Christian civilisation that spoke about the cross and civilisation while loading Africans onto ships as slaves, while running plantations where millions worked to death, while splitting continents with rulers and ink. The transatlantic slave trade kidnapped millions. Many died on the way or in the raids, marches and forced labour inside Africa.
In the Congo Free State, run as the private fiefdom of a Christian king, millions perished under forced labour, mutilation and terror. Borders drawn by Christian powers in the Middle East still bleed. Those same powers dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carpet bombed Vietnam, backed dictators across the global South and funded coups from Chile to Iran.
In our own time Gaza has become a concentrated picture of this habit. A besieged strip shattered, entire neighbourhoods erased, tens of thousands of civilians dead, and the bombing endorsed and supplied by the same states that lecture Muslims about human rights. Courts in The Hague are now asked to decide if what we are watching meets the legal definition of genocide. When someone who identifies with this civilisation points a trembling finger and says “Islam must be saved from itself”, one is entitled to ask: from which mountaintop of innocence is this sermon being preached?
Granted, this does not turn Muslims into angels. Muslim rulers have their own history of betrayal, repression and blood. And even that not without western support as the case with almost all Arab rulers. The point is not to reverse the accusation but to expose its imbalance. No major civilisation has clean hands. The honest position is that all of us need moral repair. The dishonest position is to stand on a mountain of skulls built by colonisation, slavery, occupation and total war and then announce that only the other man’s faith requires rescue. This is the heart of the matter. It is not a question of whose book is purer in theory, but of whose memory is shorter in practice.
The same distortion appears in the way honour killing is laid at Islam’s door. A young woman in the Netherlands is alleged to have been murdered by her father and brothers because she is “too Western” and refuses to obey their demands. This is an atrocity. It should revolt any conscience. What it does not become, if you are honest, is a chapter in an Islamic law manual. Honour killing is a horrific cultural disease that predates Islam. It appears in societies of different religions. It grows where patriarchy, tribal culture and a warped sense of shame combine.
Islamic revelation does not instruct fathers to murder daughters for dishonour. On the contrary, the Qur’an describes the pre-Islamic custom of burying infant girls alive as a crime that will be judged on the Day of Judgment. The murdered girl will be asked for which sin she was slain. The Prophet dealt with cases of adultery and infidelity in his lifetime and did not license husbands and brothers to form lynch mobs. He insisted on legal procedures.
If we are going to play the game of “your criminals define your faith”, then Christians would have to accept that Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan and every militia that has slaughtered while waving a cross are Christianity in its purest form. Most Christians rightly reject that. They say, and they are correct, that those people betray the Gospel. Muslims simply ask for the same level of intellectual honesty.
It is remarkable that this even needs repeating. If a deranged man in a cross printed T shirt commits murder, Christians are not summoned to apologise for the Sermon on the Mount. Yet when a village fool shouts “Allahu Akbar” while committing a crime, his sin is posted to the account of two billion people.
At the heart of all this stands a simple question: what does Islam’s actual text say about life and killing. The Qur’an, in one of its most striking verses, teaches that whoever kills a single soul, except in the narrow context of just retribution after a lawful process, is as if he has killed all humanity, and whoever saves a single life is as if he has saved all of humanity. Another passage commands: do not kill the soul that God has made sacred except by right. In the same verse it gives the family of a murder victim a right to seek justice but warns them not to exceed the limits. Life is sacred. Justice must be measured. Revenge cannot become a new crime. Many other verses honour the children of Adam as a whole, forbid aggression and instruct believers to tilt toward peace when the other side tilts toward peace.
Even in war, the tradition sets clear limits. Non-combatants are not to be targeted. Places of worship are to be respected. Crops and trees are not to be destroyed. When a family kills a daughter for “honour”, they are not performing Islam. They are performing their own ignorance and anger while using God’s name as a cover. When politicians and generals drop bombs on civilians and starve a population behind a blockade, then hold up religious or national symbols to justify it, they are also standing in direct violation of this same moral law, whether or not they appreciate that fact.
That is the part Ikhide’s article cannot afford to mention. It would ruin the costume. If scripture itself is a barrier against killing, then the problem is not a bloodthirsty religion. The problem is humans who prefer their own rage to their own book.
Islam does not need to be saved from its scripture. It needs to be saved from those who ignore that scripture when it collides with their rage, their tribe, their thirst for power. The same is true for every faith and every modern ideology that has learned to decorate its violence with noble words. If someone wishes to engage in serious critique of Muslim societies, theology or politics, Muslims should welcome that. Their own book invites questioning and reflection.
What cannot be taken seriously is a one-eyed rant that throws the word “racialist” at Ilhan Omar without proof, turns a political slogan born of historical grievances into a sign of inherent bloodlust, erases centuries of Western violence and then brands culture based crimes like honour killing as Islamic while the law of Islam itself treats them as a crime.
Anyone who claims to seek peace should be the first to reject such caricatures. Truth does not grow in the soil of distortion. Peace does not grow on the back of dehumanising two billion Muslims living on this planet. If the goal is a world in which Afghans, Palestinians, Dutch daughters, Nigerian students, Somalis and Texans can live without fear, the starting point is very modest. Stop calling your own sins civilisation and the other man’s wounds proof of his savagery.
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