Do Muslims Understand Western Debate or Think That You Dominate and Insult to Others to be Right?

Executive Summary

• Muslims have a modality of debate that is not in conformance with western debate.
• We cover how Muslims place dominating others or showing confidence in a place of intellectualism.

Introduction

In reviewing Muslims arguing in favor of Islam, what became apparent very quickly was that they normally were willing to tell any lie to convince the other side. Later I learned that this lying is justified in Islam to the non-believer and is called the taqiyya.

However, it became apparent that Muslims don’t follow a rational model applied by western ideals upon more analysis. They show dominance signals in the debate, which other Muslims pick up on, that is more important than the content of the arguments being made. In this article, I will show an example of this in a debate between David Wood and Mohammed Hijab.

See our references for this article and related articles at this link.

David Wood Versus Mohammed Hijab

The following is a short excerpt of a debate between David Wood, arguing against Islam, and Mohammed Hijab arguing in favor of Islam.

To most western audiences, this debate showed a collected David Wood following western debate rules. Simultaneously, Mohammed Hijab performed a lot of posturing and insulting David Wood to show his debate dominance. The content presented by Mohammed Hijab is complicated to follow as it is disjointed, but another reason being that Hijab continually switches back and forth between Arabic and English. 

The Comments on the Video

The comments on the video by Muslims indicate that Mohammed Hijab won the debate. In fact, he won the debate by such a large margin that he “ended David Wood’s career.”

Notice there is enormous bravado displayed by Mohammed Hijab and insults directed to David Wood, and the crowd keeps clapping. Hijab knows his audience. He knows they will be far more focused on his demeanor and dominance signals than his content. Recall that very few Muslims read the Koran, and Muslim societies are normally very low on the literacy scale. This is not to say that they are illiterate, but these are not cultures that either produce very much intellectual property or spend much time reading. 

In a separate video, David Wood states that you gain respect in Muslim culture not through being intellectual, but through yelling and showing you are strong and dominating others. If you even back down or compromise with a Muslim, they will take that as a sign of weakness. 

Observe his quote at the 53:00 minute mark in the video.

I deal with jihadis, and I found with experience that only tend to respect you if you come at them hard. You tend to think, oh no come at these guys hard they are just going to get upset and flip out. No, what happens is if you come at them and come at their prophet and come at their book, they pay more attention to you. They think, “oh this person is very confident,” he knows we are threatening to kill him and he is still coming anyway, that means he is fearless. Oh my goodness what if he knows the truth.

The Overconfidence of Arabs

It is explained in this video that Arabs have always thought this way. That they have something to teach other societies, but they can’t learn from other societies. The idea of Arab and Islamic supremacy is taught to them from the Koran and Hadith. 

This is expressed in the following quotes.

(on the topic of Muslims) You are the best of peoples ever raised up from mankind. – Qur’an 3:1 10

(on the topic of non-Muslims) Verily, those that disbelieve (in the religion of Islam, the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammed) from among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) and Al-Mushrikun will abide in the Fire of Hell. They are the worst creatures. – Qur’an 98:6

O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for freinds; they are friends of each other. – Qur’an 5:51

I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula. – Sahih Muslim 4366 

Western audiences don’t understand Muslim confidence because we see their societies as drastically inferior in accomplishment. However, most Muslims are going off of what their Imans and other Muslim scholars tell them, but the entire Muslim mindset is still based upon when Islam was a true power in the world, which was back during the four caliphates. This was a time of continual military expansion on the part of Muslims. Muslims continued to be powered up until the mid-1400s.

This is explained in the following quotation.

At the peak of Islamic power, there was only one civilization that was comparable in the level, quality, and variety of achievement; that was of course China. But Chinese civilization remained essentially local, limited to one region, East Asia, and to one racial group. It was exported to some degree, but only to neighboring and kindred peoples. Islam in contrast created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental. For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well-grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power on earth — its armies, at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India, and China. It was the foremost economic power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia it added to them several important innovations from outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and the decimal position numbering system from India.

And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps on bounds, leaving the scientific and technological, and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them. The Muslims for a long time remained unaware of this. The great translation movement that centuries earlier had brought many Greek, Persian and Syriac works within the purview of Muslim and other Arabic readers had come to an end, and the new scientific literature of Europe was almost totally unknown to them. Until the late eighteenth century, only one medical book was translated into a Middle Eastern language. – What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

More on Mohammed Hajib’s Debate Behavior

Why is Mohammed Hijab switching to Arabic and then back to English in the debate? What language is his debate in, Arabic or English? It seems like it is in English, so it makes sense to keep it to English. There are roughly 313 million people who speak Arabic today, which is only about 16.5% of the Muslims world population. So it is not efficient to even speaking to most Muslims. 

Knowing or reading Arabic has nothing to do with the logic or validity of the Koran or Hadith. The documents have been translated. This seems to be a constant Muslim feature of trying to hide things behind a veil of intelligibility. 

However, Mohammed Hajib’s claims that David Wood is ignorant about the Koran because he does not know Arabic is part of Muslims’ broader false claim, which is explained in the following quotation.

No other world religion claims that it can only be understood in one language. Neither is the same level of effort required to explain away primary messages. While the Bible is generally distributed “as is” by various Christian groups, for example, it is rare to find a Quran that does not include voluminous and highly subjective commentary deemed necessary to mitigate politically-incorrect passages.

An additional problem is that apologists want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they declare that (for some strange reason) the “perfect book” can’t be translated and that Allah’s perfect religion thus cannot be understood by most of humanity without a battery of intercessors and interpreters. Then they turn around and blame the reality of Islamic terrorism on this same “necessary” chain of intermediaries by claiming that the Osama bin Ladens of the world have simply gotten bad clerical advice, causing them to “misunderstand” the true meaning of Islam (in the most catastrophic and tragic way imaginable). – The Religion of Peace

And this claim by Muslims and Mohammed Hajib is made even more problematic by the following quotation.

At this point the beleaguered apologist might offer the weak claim that the Quran can only be understood in Classical Arabic, an obscure Quraish dialect which has not been commonly used in over a thousand years and is known only by a few hundred people alive today (generally Wahabbi scholars, who – ironically enough – are accused of taking the Quran ‘too literally’).

Obviously, the reason for this game is that the Information Age is now making the full history and texts of the Islamic religion available to a broader audience – and the contents are highly embarrassing.  Pretending that different meanings exist in Arabic is a weak attempt at self-assurance and saving face. – The Religion of Peace

Observe that each stage is designed to claim that the Koran and Hadith are hidden behind some other secret encapsulation layer. When criticism arises or when Islam is used to justifying something horrible, either the critic or jihadi is taking things out of context, or misinterpreting the Koran, or the critic or jihadi is not an Arabic speaker, or not a classical Arabic speaker, or the individual is either an Islamophobe or an extremist, etc.

Conclusion

Western audiences should understand that Muslims are not part of western culture. They are following Western rules. Muslims are attracted to Europe and other white areas because these are the best places to live, and they have the best welfare systems, which are important to Arabic Muslims in particular as Arabs prefer not to work. The first thing that Muslims do when they arrive in western society is trying to change it to be more Muslim. This is because they do not fit into western society. They have only shown up for Western society’s benefits that their own Islamic societies never have and never would.

Overall, Muslims believe in domination, not intellectualism. They are also not looking for content but looking for signs of dominance between two opposing sides. The side that appears confident and dominant is the side that must be right.