The Chasm
Donald Sensing explains the difference between Islam and Western ideals.

I haven't read or heard any commentary about the most penetrating quote in the president's SOTU speech Tuesday night. It's this one, that came in the penultimate paragraph: "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity."

That sentence defines the chasm between the West generally, including America specifically, and Islam generally, including Arabic Islam specifically. Islam teaches that Allah's control over events of the world and human life is total and complete. There is no human free will, there is only rebellion against Allah or submission to Allah. Yet even rebellion is, somehow, under the controlling purview of Allah. Everything that happens, without exception, is the preordained will of Allah. Bin Laden's sort of self-justifying extremism is not the mainstream of Islam, but neither is it as far removed as we might imagine. Fatalism is a characteristic of Islam. There is no human freedom. Human liberty, especially as Americans think of it, is literally a foreign concept to Islam, expecially Arab Islam.

We say that the defining idea of American liberty is "self evident:" Human beings "are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This claim has no natural fit with Islam. The idea that humans, created by the power of Allah, could inherently possess unalienable rights of their own, which no authority may remove, would require Islam to surrender the idea that Allah enjoys meticulous control over all affairs of nature and humankind. But this notion is lethally dangerous to the defining idea of Islam itself: that Allah has all the power.

Liberty as we conceive it is at the heart of the conflict. For Muslims, the most desirable state of human sociegty is not one that is free, in the Western sense, but one that is submissive to Allah, according to the dictates of Quran. This state of society is dar al Islam, the world of peace. Anything else is the "world of war." Hence, Islam does not use terms such as free or unfree to refer to nations, but at war with Allah or at peace (through submission) to Allah. And because of the deterministic model of Allah, any form of political repression conducted under Islam's banner is seen as Allah's will. Think Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Taliban.

Go read the whole thing. Sensing's blog is always first-rate.