GRESHAM AND THE CURRENCY OF ISLAM

Sir Thomas Gresham, who lived from 1519 to 1579, was Queen Elizabeth’s financial advisor. He was so good at it that he paid off all of England’s European debts by playing the Antwerp stock market in Belgium and made himself the richest man in Britain.

But his greatest contribution was reviving the debased English shilling by convincing Elizabeth of the truth of what history calls Gresham’s Law: that bad money, if allowed to exist, will wipe out the value of good money.

The ghastly series of events in the past weeks — two commercial airliners blown out of the sky in Russia on August 24, two buses blown up by suicide bombers in Israel on August 31, the threat to behead two French hostages unless France rescinds its school ban on Moslem head scarves, the threat to behead two Italian women unless Italy retreats from Iraq, the genocide in Sudan, the hideous butchery of hundreds of Russian children in Beslan last week, the car bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta today – make it quite clear that Gresham’s Law now needs to be applied to Islam.

If Sir Thomas were alive today, he would explain that his law pertains to the validity not just of monetary institutions, but political, social, cultural, and economic institutions as well.

All issue their own “currencies” – the measure of their moral worth and practical value. The moral worth and practical value of the currency of Islam has become so debased that it may be unredeemable.

This is the culmination of the refusal of the world’s Moslems to face the degradation of their religion over the last three years, since September 11, 2001.

It no longer matters that there are many Moslems who are “moderate” – any more that there are still plenty of real notes of a currency amidst a sea of bogus counterfeit ones.

It no longer matters that the claim, “Islam is a religion of peace,” has any truth to it, when the countervailing truth that “Islam is a religion of war” is so bloodily obvious to the whole world.

Only the issuer of a currency can rescue it from obliteration – no one from the outside can do it for them.

It was up to England to rescue its money, and if it failed history would sweep it aside. Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had adulterated the shilling by replacing 40% of its silver with base metals. By the time his daughter assumed the throne, the shilling had collapsed.

Gresham told her what to do – call in all the adulterated shillings, melt them down and remove the base metal, then mint pure silver shillings with her imprint. She did so, saving England’s economy and future.

What would Gresham tell Moslems to do to revive the legitimacy of their religion?

It’s not as easy as melting down adulterated coins. But in commemoration of the third anniversary of the Moslem Atrocity of September 11, 2001, we need to be as blunt with Moslems as Gresham was with Queen Elizabeth.

The first question Gresham would ask is the currency of Islam so debased that it can be revived at all? Once the counterfeit currency takes over in circulation, the value of the legitimate currency becomes worthless.

Has Islam now reached this point of moral worthlessness?

In other words: Islamofascist terrorists have shamed and humiliated their religion just about to the point of no redemption. What are non-Islamofascist Moslems going to do about it?

One salvation of Islam lies in Moslem women reinventing their religion.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is from Somalia who was infibulated (gentitally mutilated) as a child and escaped to Holland where she is now a member of the Dutch Parliament.

She has denounced Mohammed as a “lecherous tyrant” and blames the Koran for the sanctioned-by-Allah abuse of Moslem women. Her documentary film, Submission, is a scathing attack of how Moslem men treat their wives and daughters as sub-human.

She is reinventing Islam.

Irshad Manji has written a best-selling book, The Trouble With Islam, calling for an Islamic Reformation.

She is reinventing Islam.

The one silver lining to the black cloud of slaughter in Beslan is that finally, after decades of similar Islamofascist monstrousness, it was too much for many Arab men to morally bear.

“What is the guilt of those children?” Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, Egypt’s highest-ranking imam, demanded to know? “Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?” he asked of the terrorists.

Denouncing the terrorists in a sermon during Friday prayers in the Egyptian town of Benha on September 3, he accused them of “taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Moslems.”

“Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Moslems,” observes Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of the Al-Arabiya TV channel.

In a column published in the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, widely-read throughout the Arab world, he listed attacks carried out by Moslems in Iraq, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

“Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,” he wrote. “The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us.”

“Not all Moslems are terrorists, but the regrettable fact is that all terrorists are Moslems,” notes Rashed.

He points to Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, the famed religious television personality watched by millions who issued a “fatwa” legitimizing the killing of Americans in Iraq.

“How can we believe Qaradawi,” Rashed asks, “when he says Islam is the religion of tolerance while he turns it into a religion of blood?”

Youssef Ibrahim, a prominent Arab businessman and writer in Dubai, realizes that the Moslem world is at a make-or-break moment in history:

From now on 100 million Russians, who were once friends, will hate Moslems. Billions of people around the world will find justification in discriminating against Arabs and Moslems. This is why action is imperative.

Religious schools that produce such monsters, be they in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, must be shut down immediately. Religious police, a factory that protects terrorists, must be abolished in every Moslem country. The so-called ulemas and imams, be they Saudi or Pakistani or Egyptian, such as Yusef Qaradawi, must be banned from preaching.

Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the murders of his children as “an attack on our country.” Actually it was an attack on everything that represents civilization, including Arab civilization. Arab and Moslem leaders should put an end to those advocating criminal behavior in the name of Islam.

Abdulrahman al-Rashed and Youssef Ibrahim are reinventing Islam.

It’s a start and we need to wish these courageous Moslem women and men good luck. If they are to succeed however, there are two fundamental shifts that the religion of Islam as a whole must make.

First is Submission.

“Islam” is the Arabic word for submission – but now this must mean not only submission to the will of Allah, but submission to the moral norms of political freedom established in the civilized world.

This means abandonment of Sharia law and submitting to secular governmental law, the abandonment of death or punishment of any kind for apostasy, the abandonment of an Islamic religious monopoly in states like Saudi Arabia, the acceptance of religious tolerance and freedom – Islam must submit to the modern world.

This will be easier to do for Shias than Sunnis.

Shiism, one of the two main branches of Islam, has a tradition of mosque-state separation. It is in fact Shia heresy to establish a theocracy before the return of the “Hidden” or 12th Imam, the Shia Messiah – which is why the Ayatollahs running Iran are hated as heretics.

Second is Reinterpretation.

This has already been done by those Moslems called Sufis. Sufism interprets the Koran metaphorically, not literally – which results in an Islam not stuck immovably in the 7th century. As I explained last January in Islam’s Anti-Osama :

Just as Jesus advised the Pharisees to seek God in their hearts, not through the robotic repetition of religious laws and rules, so do the Sufis. Just as Jesus preached a philosophy of non-violence and benevolence, so do the Sufis. Sufism teaches that the path to Islamic enlightenment is not through compulsion of any kind, but through a personal ecstatic experience of the Divine.

In order to transform Islam from a religion of war to a religion of peace for real, Sunnis must become Sufis.

Now – what can we do while Moslems attempt to revalue their worthless currency?

For openers, we, from the president on down, should stop referring to this war as “The War on Terrorism.” We cannot effectively fight an enemy we refuse to name. We are fighting The War on Islamofascism.

It is Moslem terrorists we are fighting, not Basque or IRA or Maoist terrorists in Nepal. This is a war against a poison with Islam and it must be named.

We, America, should join forces with Russia to jointly hunt down Islamofascist groups anywhere in the world and pre-emptively kill them. The Russians are going to do this anyway so it would be much better all the way around if we participate.

We should throw out of the country all Wahabbi Imams here on visas preaching Jihad Islam in any mosque in America.

In every forum available to the government, it should be the goal to put Moslems on the moral defensive – to demand they reform their religion, purge it of Islamofascist poison, and submit to civilized norms of religious freedom and equality for women.

All this ego-balm blather about Islam as a “great religion” has to be replaced with tough-love: Islam is no longer a great religion, it is a disgraced religion in the eyes of humanity.

Moslems must be made to realize that their religion is in a mortal crisis. The value of its currency is gone. They must revalue it through submission to civilization, or else it will vanish, like so many religions before it, into the ash-heap of history.

Sir Thomas would have understood.