http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4804
A challenge to Islamic correctness
the American Thinker - September 9th, 2005
Book Review
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims by
Andrew Bostom (Editor); Foreword by Ibn Warraq. 2005. New York:
Prometheus Books. Price $28 (HB).
Jihad is now one of the most widely discussed words in the world's
lexicon. Once regarded as an arcane and academic subject, the 9/11
attacks and the more recent London bombings have brought the chilling
reality of it to every home. Most think it is a form of religious war,
something like the Crusades. This comparison is altogether inadequate,
for the war is only the beginning. Jihad should be seen as a complete
political and economic system that often includes selective genocide and
slavery. All this is presented in exhaustive detail in The Legacy of
Jihad compiled by Dr. Andrew Bostom. It is the one indispensable source
book needed to understand the threat that the world faces today.
There is no shortage of experts who tell us that Jihad really is an inner
struggle against one's own baser instincts— like yoga and meditation in
Hindu and Buddhist traditions. This 'Islamically correct'
explanation—never followed by the Jihadis—is belied both by Muslim
literature and by historical experience. Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406), one
of the greatest thinkers of Islam, if not the greatest, saw Jihad as an
aggressive war of expansion with the religious obligation to convert
everyone. He calls it Islam's 'universal mission':
"The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the
holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of
defense… Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations."
[emphasis added]
According to Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966):
"…wherever an Islamic community exists… it has a God-given right to step
forward and take control of the political authority… When God restrained
Muslims from Jihad for a certain period, it was a question of strategy
rather than of principle…"
We need look no further to understand the so-called 'root causes' of
Jihad.
It is impossible to do justice to such a monumental work in a brief
review beyond noting its main themes. The author begins appropriately
with a hundred-page exposition titled Jihad Conquests and the Imposition
of Dhimmitude. To appreciate Jihad we must understand the concept of
dhimmitude, the state of mind induced by Jihadi terror. According to The
Quranic Concept of War sponsored by General Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan, the
founder of Talibanism:
"Terror struck into the hearts of the enemy is not only a means, it is
the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent's heart
is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved… Terror is not a
means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to
impose upon him." [emphasis added]
This brings up an important point: terrorism cannot be separated from
Jihad, and Jihad cannot be removed from Islam. This is the reality that
we are dealing with. Every Jihadi knows this; it is time others did too.
The book gives a comprehensive survey— many from the primary sources
going back the Quran and the Hadits. It shows how the orthodox view of
Jihad has changed not at all. In the section The Law of War: The Jihad
Majid Khadduri makes the important point that Islam abolished all kinds
of warfare except Jihad.
Should one think that all this is in the past and 'reform' can change it,
here is a sobering reminder by Bassam Tibi in his War and Peace in Islam:
"Though the Islamic world has made many cultural adjustments to the
modern international system, there has been no cultural accommodation, no
rigorously critical rethinking of Islamic tradition."
According to this worldview:
"World peace, the final stage …is reached only with the conversion or
submission of all mankind to Islam."
The book contains a comprehensive discussion of various Jihadi campaigns
spanning the period from the first century of Islam to the present day—
from Spain to the Indian subcontinent. A major bonus is the set of color-
coded maps and other illustrations giving a vivid picture of the
expansion of Islam at the cost of other nations.
Several important documents appear in English for the first time. These
include primary works in Arabic and Persian as well as neglected modern
works in modern European languages by scholars such as Fagnan, Angelov,
and Alexandrescu-Dresca Bulgaru. The work is particularly valuable in
shedding light on the horrific experience of the Balkan nations under
Ottoman rule. This is valuable in understanding the current turmoil in
the Balkans where the Muslims are invariably cast as victims, while all
the blame is placed on the Serbs and the Croatians.
This raises an important but politically incorrect question: how did the
Hindu civilization manage to survive while the mighty empires of Eastern
Christianity, Zoroastrian Persia and the Buddhist kingdoms of Central
Asia crumbled before the onslaught? Even in India, Buddhism was all but
extinguished, while Hindu leaders rose to defend and finally defeat
Islam, though at great cost.
Genocide is often a direct consequence of Jihad though it is glossed over
by 'Islamically correct' historians. The book gives contemporary and even
eyewitness accounts of various genocides from the time of the Prophet to
present day Africa. This includes not only the Turkish massacre of the
Armenians, but also the so-called 'ethnic' conflict in Sudan, which is
the direct consequence of the revival of Jihadism.
Like genocide, slavery is also an integral part of Jihad. In fact most
Islamic regimes were based on slave economy. The Legacy of Jihad has a
sixty-page section on Jihad slavery. It makes for chilling reading.
Particularly disturbing is the revival of slavery and slave trade in
Sudan as a direct consequence of the resurgence of Islam and the emphasis
on Jihad.
John Eibner mentions one particular slave raid in 1987 in which more than
a thousand Dhinka civilians were roasted alive in railway box cars in the
town of El Diein in southern Sudan. (This was repeated in Godhra, India
in 2002 when 57 Hindu pilgrims, mostly women and children, were burnt
alive when the two bogies comprising the ladies' compartments were set on
fire.)
What is disturbing in this resurgence of slavery is the attitude of
international agencies, including the U.N. Eibner notes that the U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan has never publicly condemned the revival of
slavery under Jihad. A decade ago, the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot also
received U.N. support until his 'Killing Fields' became impossible to
ignore.
The documentation is so profuse, much of it recorded by Muslims
themselves, the reader begins to wonder why all this has been kept away
from the public by Islamic scholars and academics whose job it is to
inform. As the great Islamic scholar and critic Ibn Warraq (the author of
Why I am Not A Muslim) asks in his brilliant Foreword: why did it take
Dr. Andrew Bostom, not an Islamic scholar but a medical scientist, to
bring out this monumental compilation? Where were the Orientalists,
historians, Islamic scholars and other sundry academics?
The answer: Islamic correctness driven by dhimmitude.
[Editor's note: Andrew Bostom, author of the book, is a contributor to
The American Thinker. Further information on The Legacy of Jihad may be
found here. The book may be ordered here.]
N.S. Rajaram divides his time between Oklahoma City and Bangalore, India.
N.S. Rajaram
---
http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton090905.html
Victor Davis Hanson, private papers - September 9, 2005
The Forbidden History
A Review of The Legacy of Jihad. Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-
Muslims edited by Andrew G. Bostom.
Bruce Thornton
Four years after 9/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus
on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies and government
bureaucracies. Yet the larger intellectual and cultural corruption that
in part made possible many of those misjudgments and mistakes does not
receive the public attention it deserves. The politicizing of the
academy, for example, that accelerated in the sixties had compromised the
study of Islam and the Middle East long before Islamic terrorism appeared
on our cultural radar. Because of this ideological distortion, centuries
of consensus about the aggressive, intolerant, and expansionist nature of
Islam –– an agreement reflecting both the facts of the historical record
and the words themselves of the Koran and Muslim theologians and jurists
–– were discarded in the service of an anti-Western political and
ideological agenda.
In this politicized narrative, the West is the arch-villain of history,
and its primal sins of colonialism and imperialism are the engines of
oppression responsible for all the world's ills. With regard to Islam and
the Middle East, the West's scholars are accused of creating
"orientalism," a collection of degrading myths and stereotypes that
masqueraded as scholarship and provided the intellectual grease for the
wheels and gears of colonial and imperial exploitation. With some few
notable exceptions, the myth of orientalism has corrupted many of the
scholars studying Islam in American and European universities. The result
has been a reduction of history to a melodrama in which a noble,
tolerant, cultured Islamic world had been unjustly attacked by an
intolerant, greedy West addled by Christian bigotry and racist
stereotypes of blood-thirsty jihadist warriors. All the problems in the
Middle East today, in this Orwellian rewriting of history, thus derive
not from anything dysfunctional in Islam or Arab regimes but rather in
the sins of the West and its Middle Eastern minion, Israel.
Among the brave scholars who have worked to correct these distortions ––
Bernard Lewis, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye'or,
Ibn Warraq, to name just a few ––Dr. Andrew G. Bostom has recently been
one of the most tireless. In his columns at American Thinker, Dr. Bostom
has exposed the politicized interpretations, half-truths, and outright
lies that our enemies and their Western enablers have used to obscure the
truth about the struggle we are in. Now Dr. Bostom has compiled an
invaluable collection of primary documents and scholarly commentary
concerning jihad. This compendium shows that Islamic jihad has for
fourteen centuries meant exactly what bin Laden, Zaraqawi, and every
other so-called "Islamic fundamentalist" says it means: a war to compel
the whole world to embrace Islam, die, or live under intolerant,
humiliating restrictions designed to force the unbeliever every day to
acknowledge his own inferiority and the superiority of his Islamic
overlords.
Given the ideological and political corruption of the academy mentioned
above, it's not surprising that a physician has stepped up and played the
role of the child who announces that the academic emperor is strutting
down the street buck-naked. From Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century to
Raymond Tallis today, there is a long tradition of medical doctors
examining and exposing the follies of academics and scholars. After all,
unlike the inhabitants of the ivory tower –– who rarely have to be
accountable for their ideas and so have the luxury of abstract
speculation no matter how fantastic or dangerous –– doctors are grounded
in the very real world of suffering and sickness, where concrete evidence
and practical application have value, and where accountability is
literally a life and death matter. And that is the important point about
the issue of Islam's true nature: understanding it is not rocket science.
One has only to read the historical record, read the words of the Koran
and the hadiths (sayings attributed to the Prophet), and read the
centuries of interpretations in Muslim theology and jurisprudence, to
know that today's jihadists have not "highjacked" or "distorted" Islam
but are simply traditionalists, squarely in line with Islam's historical
identity.
The Legacy of Jihad is organized precisely to show that continuity.
Bostom starts with some examples of the sort of propaganda that has made
his book necessary in the first place. For example, Georgetown professor
John Esposito has called the five centuries before the Crusades an era of
"peaceful coexistence" between Islam and Christendom, one ruined by the
European greed and power-hunger that drove the Crusades. So much, as
Bostom quotes Bat Ye'or, for the "'pillage, enslavement, deportation,
massacres, and so on'" that accompanied the Islamic rampage throughout
the Mediterranean, the Near East, and southern Asia. Or listen to UCLA
law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl saying "'Islamic tradition does not
have a notion of holy war. Jihad simply means to strive hard or struggle
in pursuit of a just cause.'" Bostom exposes such sophistries simply by
quoting Islamic scholars like Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406): "'In the Muslim
community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism
of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to
Islam either by persuasion or by force.'" Or listen to Ibn Taymiyyah (d.
1328): "'Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is
that the religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost,
therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this
aim must be fought."
Complementary to the phenomenon of jihad was the dismal fate of those
conquered peoples, Jews and Christians mostly, who refused to convert to
Islam. Called "dhimmi," they were (and still are in some places)
subjected to a whole host of restrictions and limitations of their lives
whose purpose was to force them to proclaim publicly their humiliation
and their inferiority to their Muslim conquerors. As documented in many
of the excerpts in Bostom's book, the historical details of the lives of
Jewish and Christian minorities living in Muslim lands, the Islamic legal
documents and opinions regarding their status, and the hardships suffered
by dhimmi peoples well into the 20th century and continuing even today,
should explode the widely circulated myth of Islamic tolerance of non-
Muslims.
Bostom continues his own introductory essay with a survey of Islamic
conquest and the accompanying massacres, raids, kidnapping, ethnic
cleansing, devastation, and enslavement that marked the advance of Islam
from Spain to Southeast Asia. Given how obsessive we are over the
European enslavement of Africans, it's eye-opening to read about the
extent of Islamic slave-trading: an estimated 17 million Africans, over
one-and-a-half times the estimated 10 million purchased by Europeans,
were acquired and then forced-march across the Sahara to their masters'
territories, thousands dying along the way, their bones littering the
desert sands. This trade continued for centuries after Europe and America
had ended the slave trade: slavery wasn't formally abolished in Saudi
Arabia until 1962, and continues in Sudan and Mauritania today. And let's
not forget the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into slavery by
Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, or the African men cruelly castrated
to provide eunuchs for harems and government service, or the Balkan
Christian boys, perhaps as many as one million, taken from their parents,
forcibly converted, and made to serve the Ottoman regime.
Finally, Bostom concludes his overview with a series of excerpts from
European and Muslim historians on the nature of jihad, and with the
proclamations of modern jihadists and terrorists from around the globe
whose interpretations of jihad are consistent with those of the
historians. Particularly significant, given the distortions surrounding
the Arab world's assaults on Israel, are the comments arising out of a
conference of Muslim scholars and jurists held in 1968 after the
humiliating Arab defeat in the Six Day War: "Repeated declarations,"
Bostom summarizes, "expounded the classical Islamic doctrine of jihad
war, focusing its bellicose energy on the destruction of Israel." Lest
you distrust Bostom's interpretation, he quotes liberally from the
proceedings. Here is Abdullah Ghoshah, Chief Judge in Jordan: "'Jihad is
legislated in order to be one of the means of propagating Islam.
Consequently Non-Muslims ought to embrace Islam either willingly . . . or
unwillingly through fight and Jihad. . . . War is the basis of the
relationship between Muslims and their opponents.'" Likewise the Mufti of
Lebanon specifically characterized the struggle to destroy Israel as a
jihad: "'We do not think this decree [Allah's regarding Palestine]
absolves any Muslim or Arab from Jihad (Holy War) which has now become a
duty incumbent upon the Arabs and Muslims to liberate the land, preserve
honor, retaliate for [lost] dignity, [and] restore the Aqsa Mosque [in
Jerusalem] . . . from the hands of Zionism.'" Notice that not a word is
said about the frustrated nationalist aspirations of the Palestinian
people.
Having laid out the general theoretical and historical overview of jihad,
Bostom goes on to provide both primary and secondary sources that support
his analysis. After listing the verses from the Koran and hadiths
regarding jihad, Bostom gives excerpts from fourteen centuries of Islamic
commentary that quite explicitly detail how imperialistic conquest is
justified and mandated by the Islamic faith. What is striking about this
compilation is the agreement among these commentators concerning the
necessity of jihad, the justice of enslaving and plundering the
conquered, and the humiliating treatment to which dhimmi should be
subjected. And this continuity extends to 20th century commentators who
provide a justification for terrorism. The comments of Ayatollah
Khomeini, for example, explicitly define jihad as violent conflict
divinely mandated to ensure the world's salvation: "But those who study
jihad," he wrote in 1942, "will understand why Islam wants to conquer the
whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in
the future will be marked for everlasting salvation." Or as the Ayatollah
later said in 1979, "Islam grew with blood."
Khomeini's traditional assessment of jihad as a divine mandate to use
force to bring the world into the House of Islam is also consistent with
the writings of Islamic fundamentalism's most important theorist, Sayyid
Qutb (d. 1966). Quoting from the eighth-century writer Ibn Qayyim, Qutb
says, "This legal formulation [regarding the relationship of Muslims to
other groups] is based on the principle that Islam –– that is, submission
to God –– is a universal message which the whole of mankind should accept
or make peace with. No political system or material power should put
hindrances in the way of preaching Islam." And if such "hindrances" do
exist, Islam then "has no recourse but to remove them by force." Hence
this struggle between Islam and the non-Islamic world "is not a temporary
phase but an eternal state." The only way for non-Islamic societies to
co-exist with Islam is if the former "submit to its [Islam's] authority
by paying Jizyah [the poll tax], which will guarantee that they have
opened their doors for the preaching of Islam and will not put any
obstacle in its way through the power of the state."
This continuity over the centuries in the understanding of jihad is
evident as well in Bostom's next section, a series of excerpts and essays
reprinted from the work of modern scholars; the essay by Bassam Tibi,
"War and Peace in Islam," is particularly valuable. His comments on the
possibility of Islam's adaptation to the modern model of interstate
relations based on international law are sobering: "Though the Islamic
states acknowledge the authority of international law regulating
relations among states, Islamic doctrine governing war and peace
continues to be based on a division of the world into dar al-Islam [the
House of Islam] and dar al-Harb [the House of War]. The divine law of
Islam, which defines a partial community in international society, still
ranks above the laws upon which modern international society rests."
Equally informative are the accounts of Muslim conquests that restore for
us the horrendous costs borne by those unfortunate enough to be in the
path of Allah's armies. Bostom provides both modern historical
descriptions and excerpts from accounts contemporary with the events, as
well as a chart and color maps detailing Islamic conquests. This material
is extremely important, for we moderns, incessantly scolded about the
presumed sins of Crusaders and colonialists, need to be reminded how
bloody and devastating was the process by which lands that had been
Greco-Roman, Judaic, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist for centuries became
something else.
All of these studies are illuminating, but a few are worth particular
mention. The great French historian C. E. Dufourcq's description of the
razzia –– the preliminary raids by Islamic warriors to acquire slaves and
plunder and to test a region's suitability for full-scale conquest ––
should be read by anybody tired of hearing about Western depredations
against the "religion of peace." For centuries, town after town in
southern France, Spain, and Italy was plundered, sacked, and looted for
slaves; churches were particularly targeted for the precious articles of
worship they contained. One purpose of such raids was to instill terror
in the inhabitants so that they either would not resist and thus be
softened up for later conquest, or would pay ransom to avoid this
devastation. The 17th-century Muslim historian al-Maqqari is quite
explicit about the intended effect of this terror: "Allah thus instilled
such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the
conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace."
One can't help but think of the modern Europeans who have appeased
today's jihadists because they fear terrorists whose victims add up to a
tiny fraction of the number killed and enslaved in earlier centuries.
For us Westerners who may be ignorant of Indian history, K. S. Lal's work
on the impact of 1000 years of Muslim invasions of India will provide an
important background to current problems such as the status of Kashmir.
Similar to Islamic invasions everywhere, the incursions were accompanied
by massacres, pillaging, depopulation, enslavement of women and children,
and the destruction of temples and idols. Such exploits are celebrated in
the pages of Muslim historians, as in this description of the attack on
Thanesar: "The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously that the stream
was discolored, and people were unable to drink it." This aggression
continued under the Turks. And like the earlier invaders, these brutal
wars were justified as part of the divinely sanctioned jihad: in the
memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, the "narrative of Jihad
is laced with quotations from the Quran in dozens which shows that he was
.. . . a scholar of Quran and Hadis [hadiths] and no simple secular
warrior."
As excerpt after excerpt in The Legacy of Jihad makes clear, Islam's
expansion was accompanied by the fate Dimitar Angelov describes for Asia
Minor and the Balkans under Turkish attack: "The ruination of entire
cities, the massacre, deportation, and enslavement of thousands of
inhabitants –– in a word, a general and lasting decline in the
productivity of the country." This history, moreover, is constantly
ignored in analyses of current conflicts involving Islamic states, which
endlessly catalogue the Western crimes that presumably explain and often
rationalize Islamic terrorist aggression. For example, we constantly hear
about the "occupied West Bank" as the obstacle to peace between Israel
and her Arab neighbors. Yet the ancient Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria
were conquered and occupied by Islamic armies, their Jewish and Christian
peoples compelled to live as humiliated oppressed subjects. I fail to see
how it is just that lands taken in a defensive war by the peoples whose
ancestors occupied them for centuries, are now to be restored to the
peoples who initiated the conflict and whose ancestors occupied those
lands as conquerors.
This valuable book raises an important question: can Islam reform itself
and discard the ideology of jihad? Can jihad be redefined to mean an
inner spiritual struggle, or defensive war, or the effort to propagate
Islam through peaceful means, as many apologists claim today? Attempts to
reformulate the doctrine of jihad have been going on for a century, but
with scant success, for such redefinitions fly in the face of centuries
of orthodoxy. On this issue, the words of Clement Huart, though written
in 1907, are still pertinent today: "The reformers of Islam may be right
[that jihad is not holy war]. The intention of Mohammed, in what he said
of jihad, may have been misunderstood and misrepresented. But into this
question we do not desire to go. For what we are considering is, what
Mohammedanism is and has been –– that is, what orthodox Mohammedanism
teaches concerning jihad, founding its doctrine of a certain definite
interpretation of those passages in the Koran which speak of jihad. Until
the newer conceptions, as to what the Koran teaches as to the duty of the
believer towards non-believers, have spread further and have more
generally leavened the mass of Moslem belief and opinion, it is the older
and orthodox standpoint on this question which must be regarded by non-
Moslems as representing Mohammedan teaching and as guiding Mohammedan
action." The widespread support among Islamic peoples everywhere for
terrorist jihad shows that Huart's comments are as true today as they
were in 1907. The Islamists are not "distorting" Islam, but rather the
reformers and so-called "moderates" are.
Given that the academic study of Islam is so politicized, we are
dependent on those like Andrew Bostom who make available for us the
truths necessary for understanding the nature of the conflict with
Islamic terrorism. Even fiction can on occasion be more useful than
corrupted scholarship: Arabel, by Alexandra Paris, is a gripping tale of
just how bio-terrorism could come to America, one that takes seriously
the traditional spiritual motives of the jihadists; it very well could be
to the so-called war on terror what Raspail's Camp of the Saints is to
the problem of Europe's suicide-by-immigration.
If we are to prevail in the war against Islamic jihad, we need to know
the facts of history and understand the motives of our adversaries and
not reduce them to our own materialist prejudices. Andrew Bostom's The
Legacy of Jihad does precisely that.
---
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19406
The Legacy of Jihad
By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 9, 2005
Review: The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-
Muslims, edited by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, Prometheus, 759 pp.
It is only fitting that Andrew G. Bostom's massive collection, The Legacy
of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, appears in time
for the fourth anniversary September 11, 2001, for no other collection
since then has so well explained the theology and philosophy behind those
Islamic attacks on America.
The leaders of the free world have taken pains since late 2001 to explain
that Islam is a religion of peace. But in this far-ranging, 759-page
collection of Muslim and non-Muslim eyewitness accounts, scholarly Muslim
theological treatises and superb historical surveys, it appears that
Islam has actually practiced a grisly jihad campaign against non-Muslims
from its earliest days, in the hope of satisfying the Prophet Mohammed's
end goal: forcing the "one true faith" upon the entire world.
The somber tone of this monumental work -- graced in its midsection by
a chronological summary of the first 500 years of Muslim conquests,
including color-coded maps and Islamic art -- is set by the cover, a 19th
century-Islamic painting entitled "The Prophet, Ali and the Companions at
the massacre of the prisoners of the Jewish tribe of Beni Kuraizah." As
its name suggests, the art depicts the slaughter of 600 to 900 Jewish
men, who were led on Mohammed's orders to the market of Medina, where
they were beheaded and their corpses buried in trenches dug for that
purpose. Their wives and children were then enslaved.
After viewing these accounts, histories and art works, it is hard to
continue to believe that radical Islamists are in fact all that radical.
Rather, in the most logical way, this collection shows that September 11
was not an aberration, but that Islam at its core seems a faith bent upon
the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims.
Indeed, as many commentators here suggest, when one group of Muslims
assumes responsibility for jihad warfare -- the only righteous kind of
war, in the Islamic view -- the rest of the umma (Muslim community) is
relieved of this fard, or religious duty. Thus, if radical Muslims
believe they act on behalf of all Islamdom, Islamic traditions also
confirm that they do.
Bostom opens with a 124-page survey of jihad conquests and the
imposition of dhimmitude -- the sociopolitical subjugation of indigenous
non-Muslim peoples vanquished by jihad campaigns. The essay is the book's
longest section and serves as an excellent guidepost for readers to
determine which parts might most interest them.
Beginning in the time of Mohammed himself, Bostom refers readers to the
early 20th century work of the late Columbia University professor Arthur
Jeffrey, who belittled as "the sheerest sophistry" attempts in some
modern circles "to explain away all the Prophet's warlike expeditions as
defensive wars or to interpret the doctrine of Jihad as merely a
bloodless striving in missionary zeal for the spread of Islam.... The
early Arabic sources quite plainly and frankly describe the expeditions
as military expeditions, and it would never have occurred to anyone at
that day to interpret them as anything else...."
But it is not just on the say-so of Western scholars that Bostom
concludes, in the words of Mordechai Nisan, that the "praxis" of Islam
was by the 1990s to "extend the Muslim presence and role into the heart
of Western civilization, after having constituted within the Muslim lands
themselves a formidable strategic world position."
His arguments rest on the words, works and deeds of Muslims themselves.
America would benefit if our leaders would pay close attention to
Bostom's conclusions and the works on which they are based.
According to Maliki jurist Ibn Abi Zayd al Qayrawani (d. 996), "Jihad
is a Divine institution. Its performance by certain individuals may
dispense others from it. We Malikis maintain that it is preferable not to
begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to
embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They
have either the alternative of converting to Islam or paying the poll tax
(jizya), short of which war is declared against them."
Hanbali jurist Ibn Tamiyyah (d. 1328) also supports the jihad: "Since
lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the
religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost, therefore
according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be
fought." The Hidayah of Hanafi Shaikh Burdanuddin Ali of Marghinan (d.
1196) intones,
It is not lawful to make war upon any people who have never before been
called to the faith, without previously requiring them to embrace it,
because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call
infidels to the faith, and also because the people will hence perceive
that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of
taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this
consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the
call, in order to save themselves from the trouble of war.... The Shaafi
jurist al-Mawardi (d. 1058) writes in the Laws of Islamic Governance,
The mushrikun [infidels] of Dar al-Harb (the arena of battle) are of two
types: First, those whom the call of Islam has reached, but they have
refused it and taken up arms. The amir of the army has the option of
fighting them... in accordance with what he judges to be in the best
interest of the Muslims and the most harmful to the mushrikun.... Second,
those whom the invitation to Islam has not reached, although such persons
are few nowadays since Allah has made manifest the call of his
Messenger...it is forbidden to begin an attack before explaining the
invitation to Islam to them, informing them of the miracles of the
Prophet and making plain the proofs so as to encourage acceptance on
their part; if they still refuse to accept after this, war is waged
against them and they are treated as those whom the call has reached.
And Maliki jurist and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), so often quoted
as a peaceful, likewise adopts a warlike tone: " In the Muslim community,
the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the
[Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam by
persuasion or by force.... The other religious groups did not have a
universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them,
save only for purposes of defense....Islam is under obligation to gain
power over other nations."
In addition to this far-reaching opening summary, the book provides the
juridicial texts, historical accounts, scholarly analyses and eyewitness
excerpts elucidating the jihad rationale as formulated by Muslim sources
and highlighting the global consequences of that philosophy for more than
13 centuries.
In part two, for example, Bostom collects many jihadist teachings in
the Qur'an, such as Qur'an chapter 9, verse 29: "Fight those who believe
not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been
forbidden by Allah and his apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of truth
even if they are the people of the book, until they pay the Jizya with
willing submission, and fell themselves subdued." These Qur'anic
teachings fill two pages of text.
But Bostom does not stop there. He devotes his third chapter to the
classical and modern teachings of Qur'anic commentators on Chapter 9,
verse 29, some such as Al-Suyuti (d. 1505 CE), appearing in English here
for the first time. Al-Suyuti writes:
Fight those who don't believe in God nor in the Last Day [Unless they
believe in the Prophet God bless him and grant him peace] nor hold what
is forbidden that which God and His emissary have forbidden [e.g. Wine]
nor embrace the true faith [which is firm and abrogates other faiths,
i.e., the Islamic religion] from among [for distinguishing] those who
were given the Book [i.e., the Jews and Christians] until they give the
head-tax [i.e., the annual taxes imposed on them] (l'an yadinl) humbly
submissive, and obedient to Islam's rule.
Also commenting on the Qur'anic chapter 9, verse 29 are al-Zamakshari (d.
1144), al Tabari (d. 923), al-Beidawi (d. 1286), Ibn Kathir (d. 1373),
Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) and al-Azhar, al-Muntakhab Fii Tafsir al-Qur'aan
al-Kariim, 1985. Let no one say that Bostom has taken these teachings out
of context, for the classical and contemporary commentators interpret
this passage of the Qur'an in precisely the same way as it appears.
In chapter four, the last in section two, Bostom focuses on jihad in
the Hadith, with commentary from Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, as
translated by the Muslim Students' Association of the University of
Southern California.
In Bostom's third, 110-page section, classical Muslim theologians and
jurists opine on jihad. These writings span the entire history of Islam,
beginning with 8th century commentators and continuing to 20th century
contemporaries. Bostom has gleaned writings of Malik B. Anas (d. 795)
from the Muwata, for example, Averroes (d. 1198) from the Bidayat al-
Mudjtahid, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) from The Muqaddimah, as well as a 1915
Ottoman Fatwa.
Here, too, Bostom includes several works translated into English for
the first time. For example, the renowned Sufi master al-Ghazali (d.
1111) writes, "One must go on jihad (i.e. Warlike razzias or raids) at
least once a year... one may use a catapult against them [non-Muslims]
when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children.
One may set fire to them and drown them." The marriages of slaves, al-
Ghazali continues, are automatically "revoked. One may cut down their
trees.... One must destroy their useless books." This belies the all-too-
common notion that Sufism is peaceful.
Similarly, Ibn Qudama (d. 1223), writes, "Legal war (jihad) is an
obligatory social duty (fard-kifaya); when one group of Muslims
guarantees that it is being carried out in a satisfactory manner, the
others are exempted." Almost everywhere, the author is belligerent. "It
is permitted to surprise the infidels under cover of night, to bombard
them with mangonels [an engine that hurls missiles] and to attack them
without declaring battle (du'a)."
Al-Hilli (d. 1277), likewise, writes on the traditions concerning the
tax on certain infidels, who have not been enslaved or murdered. The
Persian scholar Muhammad al-Amili (d. 1621) has been translated from
Farsi concerning Jihad holy war: "Islamic holy war against followers of
other religions, such as Jews, is required unless they convert to Islam
or pay the poll tax."
Concerning the jihad warfare in India, Ziauddin Barani (d. 1357) writes
in the Fatawa-i Janandari,
The Muslim king will not be able to establish the honour of theism
(tauhid) and the supremacy of the Islam unless he strives with all his
courage to overthrown infidelity and to slaughter its leaders (imams),
who in India are the Brahmans. He should make a firm resolve to
overpower, capture, enslave and degrade the infidels. All the strength
and power of the king and holy warriors of Islam should be concentrated
in holy campaigns and holy wars; and they should risk themselves in the
enterprise so that the true Faith may uproot false creeds and then it
will look as if these false creeds had never existed because they have
been deprived of their glamour.
Bostom turns next, in his 117-page Part 4, to ten Jihad overviews by
important 20th century scholars. Clement Huart writes on the law of war,
Nicolas P. Agnides on the classification of persons under Islamic law
(which appeared in Mohammeden Theories of Finance from Columbia
University Press in 1916) and John Ralph Willis on the jihad ideology of
enslavement. Several of these works appear for the first time in English.
These writings are no easier to dismiss than the classical Islamic
works themselves, for the modern historians also rely heavily on
classical jurists and commentators, as indicated in a bevy of footnotes
gracing the final pages of each essay. Fagnan's "Jihad or Holy War
According to the Malikite School," published in Algiers in 1908, rests
for example on the work of Sidi Khalil (d. 1365-1366), as elucidated by
several Muslim commentaries. Edmond Fagnan writes,
The holy war conducted each year on the most dangerous front, even if
there is risk of an attack by bandits, constitutes, just like the visit
of the Ka'ba..., a duty of showing solidarity, which is incumbent upon
every free male who has attained the age of puberty and is of sound mind
and body....
In the case of a sudden invasion, holy war becomes a personal
duty, even for a woman or for the neighbors [of the believers who are
being attacked] if they (i.e. The latter) are too weak, as well as for
those who hold the title of imam.
According to Roger Arnaldez, whose essay "Holy War According to Ibn Hazm
of Cordova" was published in a French collection in 1962, what interests
this Andalusian classicist about the past "is a privileged moment of
history at which the law eternally intended by God was revealed in
universal and definitive formulations. Despite the most obvious evidence,
the commandments given to the Prophet are not, in his view, relative to
the Prophet's time.... These commandments, rather, are valid as such for
all times."
W.R. W. Gardner's essay, "Jihad" appeared in the 1912 edition of the
acclaimed scholarly journal, Moslem World. He observes,
The question of what jihad is cannot be settled by reference alone to the
etymology of the word jihad.... The Koran plainly teaches in many
passages,.. the duty of fighting for the Faith or 'in the way of God,' by
using the world qatala, and El Zamakhshary, commenting on 2.186,7, says,
'Fighting in the way of God is jihad for the glorifying of his word and
the strengthening of the Religion.' And whatever may be the etymological
meaning of the word jihad, there can be no gainsaying the fact that it is
sometimes used in the Koran in the sense of warlike actions, a warfare
for the sake of the Faith. And when one asks what the teaching of
Mohammedanism is concerning jihad, the word is employed in this latter
sense.
After presenting a 500-year chronology and maps, Bostom moves on to his
final three sections -- on jihad campaigns in the Near East, Europe, Asia
Minor and on the Indian subcontinent; jihad slavery and Muslim and non-
Muslim chronicles and eyewitness accounts of jihad campaigns. These in
many ways outshine everything that the editor presented earlier, for
here, he clearly elucidates the ravages of jihad campaigns as experienced
by their victims.
The sixth section, on Jihad campaigns, begins with an essay by
Demetrios Constantelos, which collects eyewitness accounts of Greek
Christian and other early observers of jihad. Damascus fell in 635,
Jerusalem in 638, the same year as Antioch, and in 646 Alexandria became
an Arab possession. The coastal areas of Palestine, Cyprus, Egypt and
Syria swiftly followed. Sophronios of Jerusalem describes "the sword of
the Saracens" as "beastly and barbarous...filled with every diabolic
savagery."
Clearly, the Arab conquest was very violent as well as decisive.
Constantelos reports on Sophronios: advancing Saracens left behind them
"a train of destruction and havoc, with bloodshed everywhere and
abandoned human bodies devoured by the wild beasts of Palestine's
deserts. He writes of the 'villainous and God-hating Saracens,' who run
through places and capture cities, who reap or destroy the crops of the
fields, who burn down towns and set churches on fire, who attack
monasteries and defeat Byzantine armies, winning one victory after
another." John of Nikiu in about 700 C.E., likewise described the terrors
of the Arabic Muslims. The Islamic conquest "put to the sword all that
surrendered, and they spared none, whether old men, babes or women."
But that was only in the beginning. Bloodletting continued on every
continent the Muslims touched. Aram Ter-Ghevondian describes the Armenian
rebellion of 703, as related by such sources as Ibn-al-Athir and a 10th
century Arab author named Muhammad ibn-Abdullah-ibn-Aasam-al-Kufi as well
as Byzantine historian Theophanes. In one instance in about 705, the
Muslim leader Muhammad "massacred, enslaved and wrote a letter to the
nobility (Ashraf) who are called freemen (ahrar), gave guarantees and
promised to give honors. Hence they gathered in their churches...and he
ordered to encircle the churches with fire-wood, closed the doors on them
and burnt all of them."
C.E. Dufourcq describes "The Days of Razzia and invasion" in a 1978
chapter that first appeared in a French collection on daily life in
medieval Europe under Arab domination (another, now in English for the
first time). After dominating Iberia, the Arabs transversed the Pyrenees
and ravaged lands north of the foothills. In Aragon's Segre Valley,
squadrons explored the Ariege River. Before 720 they attacked Narbonne,
from which they carried off church riches and many slaves. They were
driven back from Toulouse in 721 but in 725 attacked Carcassone. Other
targets included the Rhone Valley, Nimes, and Viviers (a place still
called Les Sarasins), Macon and Chalon, and Autun (which "has never been
able to return to its former state since that destruction"), Dijon and
Langres. By 731, the Arabs were 100 kilometers from Paris. They burned
all the Bordeaux churches in 732. Fortunately, Charles Martel stopped
them not far from Poitiers.
But in 734 or 735 in the Mediterranean, Dufourcq continues, they
attacked Arles and Avignon. From Provence and Italy, sailors attacked
Ostia on the Tiber, and pillaged the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint
Paul. Marseilles was devastated in 838 and again in 848 and 920. From 857
on, the Roman seaboard was attacked annually. In Syracuse in 878, the
Church of the Holy Savior was filled with women, children, the elderly,
the sick, the clerics -- all of them massacred. In 934 or 935, Arabs
slaughtered all the men in Genoa and loaded the city's treasures onto
their ships.
Terrorizing inhabitants was a tool of their trade: As the 17th century
Algerian historian al-Maqqari noted, "Allah thus instilled such fear
among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors;
they only approached them as suppliants to beg for peace."
The Muslim invasion of India was similarly cruel, according to K.S.
Lal. Throughout more than 500 years in the Indian subcontinent, Muslim
invaders killed an estimated 70 million, slaughtering as many as 500,000
to 600,000 at a time. They also took countless millions of slaves, who
were transported to Iran, Afghanistan and later to Europe.
In the Balkans, the people suffered equal savagery, according to a 1956
essay by Dimitar Angelov, also in English for the first time. The
campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and his successor Mahomet II (1451-
1481) in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, and the Byzantine princedom of the
Peloponnisos, were particularly devastating. In 1459, invaders destroyed
the entire harvest and leveled the fortified towns. In 1466, the
Albanians were forced to retreat and fight from inaccessible regions;
whole cities were again ruined. Plundering, arson and repeated attacks
reduced the rich agricultural region to wilderness. Famines and epidemics
ensued.
All this is to say nothing of the incessant slave-taking and the brutal
devshirme tribute; Balkan families were forced to pay a tax in the form
of their eldest or most able sons. Bostom devotes 60 pages to slavery
alone.
Then we come to the eyewitness accounts, which fill five chapters and
nearly eighty pages. According to an 1148 account by Solomon Cohen, for
example, the Almohads swept through Tlemcen in the Maghren, killing all
those in it. All the cities in North Africa were taken: "One hundred
thousand persons were killed in Fez on that occasion and 120,000 in
Marakesh.....Large areas between Seville and Tortosa [in Spain] had
likewise fallen into Almohad hands."
Likewise, a 13th century Hindu account called the Kahandade Prabandha
tells of the invasion of extensive regions, including Malwa, Gujarat,
Ranthamnhor, Siwana, Jalor, Devagiri, Warangal, Ma'bar and Ramesvaram. In
Bhinmal,
Orders were issued clear and terrible: 'The soldiers shall march into the
town spreading terror everywhere! Cut down the Brahmanas, wherever they
may be--performing homa or milking cows! Kill the cows—even those which
are pregnant or with newly born calves!' The Turks ransacked Bhinmal and
captured everybody in the sleepy town. Thereafter, Fori Malik gleefully
set fire to the town in a wanton display of force and meanness.
As Ibn Warraq notes in the forward, Dr. Bostom is the first scholar to
have had translated from Arabic into English the works of al-Bayadawi,
al-Suyuti, al-Zamakhshari and al-Tabari, as well as works by Sufi master
al-Ghazali, Shiites al-Hilli and al-Amili. He also includes
representatives from the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Averroes
and Ibn Khaldun (Maliki), Ibn Taymiya and Ibn Qudama (Hanbali), Shaybani
(Hanafi), and al-Mawardi (Shaafi).
Warraq wonders, "Why did it take a non-specialist such as Dr. Bostom, a
scholar from another discipline -- clinical epidemiology and randomized
clinical trials in medicine -- to discover and have translated for the
first time this primary and secondary source material?"
Ibn Warraq continues: As Bernard Lewis points out in his important
essay, "Pro-Islamic Jews," "The golden age of equal rights [in Spain] was
a myth.... The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth century Europe as
a reproach to Christians." There are those, he says, who contend that
while Dr. Bostom may be right to expose history hitherto simply denied,
this was not the right historical moment to express it. But, as Isaiah
Berlin once wrote, an ideologue is someone prepared to suppress what he
suspects to be true. This disposition to suppress the truth has
engendered much evil.
Bostom's work attempts to set straight the historical record. Let us
hope that Bostom's monumental survey is read in every corner of U.S. and
European government, as well as by the masses who wish to learn the truth
on Islamic doctrines.
---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1729998,00.html
the Times - August 11, 2005
Muslims unite! A new Reformation will bring your faith into the modern
era
Salman Rushdie
WHEN Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, admitted
that "our own children" had perpetrated the July 7 London bombings, it
was the first time in my memory that a British Muslim had accepted his
community's responsibility for outrages committed by its members.
Instead of blaming US foreign policy or "Islamophobia", Sacranie
described the bombings as a "profound challenge" for the Muslim
community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that
"Death is perhaps too easy" for the author of The Satanic Verses. Tony
Blair's decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of
"moderate", "traditional" Islam is either a sign of his Government's
penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Mr
Blair's options really are.
Sacranie is a strong advocate of Mr Blair's much-criticised new religious
hatred Bill that will make it harder to criticise religion, and actually
expects the new law to outlaw references to Islamic terrorism. He said as
recently as January 13: "There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist.
This is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered
[ie, banned] by this provision." Two weeks later his organisation
boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London, commemorating the
liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best
Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.
The Sacranie case illustrates the weakness of the Government's strategy
of relying on traditional, but essentially orthodox, Muslims to help to
eradicate Islamist radicalism. Traditional Islam is a broad church that
certainly includes millions of tolerant, civilised men and women, but
also encompasses many whose views on women's rights are antediluvian, who
think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom
of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views, and who, in the
case of the Muslim diaspora, are — it has to be said — in many ways at
odds with the (Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish) cultures among
which they live.
In Leeds, from which several of the London bombers came, many traditional
Muslims lead lives apart, inward-turned lives of near-segregation from
the wider population. From such defensive, separated worlds some
youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up
their lethal rucksacks.
The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in
these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the
closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in
which young men's alienations can easily deepen. What is needed is a move
beyond tradition — nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core
concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not
only the jihadi ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the
traditionalists, throwing open the windows of the closed communities to
let in much-needed fresh air.
It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the
Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this
idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will
require, above all, a new educational impetus whose results may take a
generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist
diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking.
It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the
revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not
supernaturally above it.
It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is
the only religion whose birth was recorded historically, its origins
uniquely grounded not in legend but in fact. The Koran was revealed at a
time of great change in the Arab world, the 7th-century shift from a
matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. Muhammad, as
an orphan, personally suffered the difficulties of this transformation,
and it is possible to read the Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal
values in the new patriarchal world, a conservative plea that became
revolutionary because of its appeal to all those whom the new system
disenfranchised, the poor, the powerless, and, yes, the orphans.
Muhammad was also a successful merchant and heard, on his travels, the
Nestorian Christians' desert versions of Bible stories which the Koran
mirrors closely (Christ, in the Koran, is born in an oasis, under a palm
tree). It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply
their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many
ways it reflects the Prophet's own experiences.
However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in
this way. The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text is the
infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse
all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of
7th-century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger's personal
circumstances have anything to do with the Message?
The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands of the
literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron
certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as
a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to
suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th
century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic
Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance that all ideas, even
sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling
of peace. This is how to take up the "profound challenge" of the bombers.
Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam must be modernised?
That would indeed make them part of the solution. Otherwise, they're just
the "traditional" part of the problem.
--
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050912-122024-9420r_page2.htm
Nation/Politics
'An Islamist threat like the Nazis'
By Tony Blankley
THE WASHINGTON TIMES - September 12, 2005
The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as
great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over
Europe in the 1940s.
We cannot afford to lose Europe. We cannot afford to see Europe
transformed into a launching pad for Islamist jihad.
While we in the United States and Europe have vast resources for
protecting ourselves, we have thought ourselves into a position of near
impotence. Beyond the growing number of Muslims committed to
terrorism is the threat from the Islamic diaspora's growing cultural and
religious assertiveness -- particularly in largely secular Europe, where
Muslim cultural assimilation has not occurred.
It is beginning to dawn on Europeans that the combination of a
shrinking ethnic-European population and an expanding, culturally
assertive Muslim population might lead to the fall of Western
civilization in Europe within a century.
This phenomenon, called Eurabia, is viewed with growing fatalism both
in Europe and in America. Such fatalism, however, is premature.
Last November, an Islamist terrorist's butchering of Dutch filmmaker
Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie revealing abuse of Muslim women,
aroused deep fears in Holland and across the Continent.
The public anger, which included the burning of mosques in
traditionally tolerant Holland, is evidence that the European instinct
for survival has not been fully extinguished.
But that survival instinct is threatened by the multiculturalism and
political correctness advocated in media and academe -- and
institutionalized in national and European Union laws and regulations for
half a century.
Europe's effort at cultural tolerance since World War II slowly
morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that
denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense.
If Europe doesn't rise to the challenge, Eurabia will come to pass.
Then Europe will cease to be an American ally and instead become a base
of operations (as she already is to a small degree) against us.
Prepared to murder
What Muslims say and do now is the measure of the political, cultural
and military danger facing the West.
Most other religious developments around the world, such as the
spread of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere, have benign or
nonviolent consequences.
However, the overwhelming political fact deriving from the ferment in
Islam is that, to some degree, some percentage of Muslims are prepared to
murder -- and are murdering -- great numbers in what they feel is their
religious duty.
Many more Muslims are, to some degree, supportive or protective of
these killers. Even more Muslims, while not supportive of such tactics,
share many of the terrorists' religious convictions and perceptions.
Radical currents within Islam drive some Muslims to terrorism and
push others at least to a more adversarial view of their relationship to
non-Muslim nations and cultures in which they live -- whether in Paris,
London, Hamburg, Rotterdam, or any American city.
The resurgence of a militant Islam drove the United States to fight
two wars in Muslim countries in two years, disrupted America's alliance
with Europe, caused the largest reorganization of the U.S. government in
half a century (with the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security), changed election results in Europe and threatened the
stability of most governments in the Middle East.
This resurgence of militant Islam also drove America to pressure
Saudi Arabia to change the way it teaches religion to its children and
others (through madrasses) around the world. It forced America to
pressure Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Somalia, among others,
to change domestic security policies. It prompted America to build a ring
of bases in Central Asia across what used to be the Muslim part of the
Soviet Union.
And we are only four years removed from the September 11 attacks.
Nazi parallels
Radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden are not traditionalists. The
idea of individual jihad -- separating jihadist decisions from the Muslim
community -- is a radical departure. But it is important for recruiting
potential terrorists.
Over the past 30 years, the Muslim population in Europe expanded
rapidly from a few hundred thousand to more than 20 million. Muslims
there and in the United States are arguing over their role in Western
societies: Should they integrate, seclude themselves, or convert the West
to Islam?
Many Muslims in Europe are content to be law-abiding, culturally
integrated citizens. But an increasing number feel some degree of
alienation. Many are beginning to believe that they have a religious duty
not to integrate.
Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all
the "advantages" the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-
fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the
dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful
population increasingly disdainful of their parents' passive habits.
Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed
Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to
the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like
the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually
advancing expedient and radical innovations.
The Islamo-fascist mullahs encourage young Muslims not to turn to
their parents for guidance on choosing a wife (or wives). Nor are young
Muslims to be guided by parental or community disapproval of making an
individual commitment to jihad. They are allowed to drink alcohol, shave
their beards and commit what otherwise would be judged immorality in a
Muslim -- in order to advance jihad.
Postmodern radicalism
In many ways, these radical Muslim fundamentalists are postmodern,
not pre-modern. They are designing a distinctly Western, fascistic
version of Islam that is less and less connected to the Islam of their
Middle Eastern homeland.
Radical Western Islam brings the combative strength and deep faith of
authentic traditions while constantly modifying itself to best attack
liberal, secular European and American institutions.
The radical Islamists are able to rationalize concessions to
modernity with ancient-sounding mumbo jumb