For anyone trying to follow the journey begun by Abraham, conversion to Islam should recommend itself with compulsive force. It’s the most plausible of the three religions that look back to him.
Near the root of Judaism is the conviction that a single people are chosen by God — a people, moreover, who are hard to join. At the core of Christianity is the belief that a man was God and rose from the dead. Both claims seem to spit in the face of reason. Isn’t it an offence against justice to assert that God specially favours one people in particular? Isn’t it an affront to common sense to hold that a baby was divine, and that a dead man walked from a cold tomb?
Nonetheless, the suggestion that Islam might be preferable to either is objectionable to modern Western minds. It provokes visions of frenzy: failing states, suicide bombers, fanatical mullahs, shrouded women, burning books, oppressed minorities. But it should also conjure images of tranquillity: serene mosques, the circles of dhikr, a certain detachment from the claims of politics, distaste for the extremism within its own ranks of which Mohammed warned, and — until fairly recently — better treatment of religious minorities than Europe’s.
For most of its history Islam has been the most relaxed of the three faiths. It neither aches for the coming of a Messiah nor announces that outside the Church there is no salvation. It offers monotheism for all — a kind of Judaism for the masses. A more profound film about Islam than Geert Wilders’s could be titled not Fitna, but Fitra — namely, man’s primordial disposition, which is made for God. The path to paradise isn’t closed by original sin. Rather, it remains open, but man strays from it in heedlessness and forgetfulness.
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