On the Muslim Question

It is explicit that in the aftermath of September 11 Islam has become a perilous challenge to the West's prevailing ideals and security. In ‘On the Muslim Question’ Anne Norton (1954), an American professor serving as the chair of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, tends to destroy the mainstream attitudes and concepts of the west in the post-9/11 context of perceiving Islam as a living enemy of the West and its ideologies. Islam is seen by the West as a prominent obstacle that seeks to oppose their holistic principles such as democracy, women's liberation, freedom of expression, equality, and human rights. According to the author, all Western countries discriminate against their Muslim residents, especially immigrants from Muslim countries, and openly insult them by rising the extremely protective screen of modern secularism and human rights.

History is testimony to the fact that, in contrast to Christians and Jews who live more secular in mainstream areas, Muslims live in public expressing their religious principles. Their public life is dominated by religious dress codes, public speech, religious symbols and the call to prayer. Westerners are concerned about the rise of Islam and the resulting shift in cultural values and cultural transformation. This is why Islam is problematic for western countries and their ideologies. In this prominent book, Anne Norton has addressed these key issues by examining the true history of terror, the misunderstood values of Islam, and questioning the western perspective.

In the first part of the book, the author explains the eminent Muslim questions through six chapters (Freedom of speech, sex, and sexuality, women and war, terror, equality, and democracy). She scrutinizes how Muslim society is short-changed when it comes to equality, democracy, the role of women in society, and perspective regarding modern values and its institutions. She argues that the speed and pace of the modern world are unlike anything Muslim experienced before. ‘Without exaggeration, we can say that the amount of change across five years in the twenty-first century possibly equals to one hundred years before the eighteenth century. In this part, the author has put forward debatable examples for each issue, such as Komnae’s command on the death of Salman Rushdie and the case of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who created the film “Submission”. When Muslims found this film insulting their religion Van Gogh was killed by Muslim fanatics.

The second part of the book (In the western street) analyses the difficult history of multicultural Europe and the burden of the holocaust. By the four chapters, he goes through the true history of Europe and its stand among the other continents, the concept of 'Islamofascism', and its behind. In the last chapter, she states that Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” theory, where he argued that difference based on religion and culture will be the major source of conflict, is not enough to explain the nature of the present conflicts

The author, on the other hand, not only misunderstands the problems of combining large-scale unskilled immigration with a costly social security system, but she also claims that the condition of Muslim immigrants in Europe is similar to that of Jews in the nineteenth century. There is no room for doubt that, the title of this book is a direct reference to Karl Marx's classic treatise, "On the Jewish Question". In this work, Marx opined that Jews would not have to give up their religion to be emancipated and become complete citizens. As shown by the migrants in the US, most of whom are devoutly religious as well as loyal citizens of a neutral state.