The Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam Revisited

by EDWARD CLINE

…Ibrahim writes: “Worse, offensive jihad is part and parcel of Islam; it is no less codified than, say, Islam’s Five Pillars, which no Muslim rejects.” In sum, it is either-or: repudiate Islam entirely, or submit to the whole palimony of irrationalism that is Islam, including the imperative of jihad. The one incontrovertible problem with Islam (aside from the untenable claim of Allah’s existence) is its dependence on violent conquest, or the initiation of force. This renders the creed absolutely inconvertible to a pacific doctrine. That is its unarguable dead-end.

Ibrahim goes to the nub of the conundrum that faces “moderate” critics of Islam:

Worse, offensive jihad is part and parcel of Islam; it is no less codified than, say, Islam’s Five Pillars, which no Muslim rejects. The Encyclopedia of Islam‘s entry for “jihad” states that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated.” Scholar Majid Khadurri (1909-2007), after defining jihad as warfare, writes that jihad “is regarded by all jurists, with almost no exception, as a collective obligation of the whole Muslim community.”

Even that chronic complainer Osama bin Laden makes it clear that offensive jihad is the root problem: “Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue… Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam… Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”

Or, as Ayn Rand might have put it: “You can’t have your mystic of muscle and deny him, too.” He is either the source of Islam’s potency, or he isn’t. And if he isn’t, whither Islam?

Andrew McCarthy, in his Family Security Matters article, “Obama’s Betrayal of Islamic Democracy” (May 13^th) remarks that it is difficult for “moderate” Muslims to “democratize” Islam: “As we have seen time and again, however, this is a very hard thing for moderates to do.” McCarthy sympathizes with them.

It is hard for “moderate” Muslims to do because it would entail repudiating Islam altogether, and then they would no longer be “Muslims,” moderate or otherwise. Islam is already a “democratic” system; once it attains hegemony wherever it reigns, that is pure “democracy” or majority rule in its original, unadulterated, and un-sweetened sense. Because “democracy” means “majority rule,” that democracy would be represented by the Islamic Ummah, or the collective.

Is there such a thing as “moderate” Nazism, or “moderate” Communism? Or “moderate” totalitarianism? The “extremists” of Islam despise “moderate” Muslims because they know that Islam practiced consistently, that is, practiced root and branch, gives them political power. A “moderate” form of Islam, were such a thing possible, would deny them that power. A “moderate” form of Islam would be an emasculated form of it and no longer “Islam.” The “extremists” or “radicals” know this, if the “moderates” don’t.

Walid Shoebat, in his Pajamas Media column of May 18^th,”Islam vs. Islamism: A Case for Wishful Thinkers,” tasks Pipes, and, indirectly, McCarthy, as well, on not only the terminology of Islam vs. Islamism, but the core means and ends of Islam, which cannot be conveniently divorced from the ideology. After making hash of Pipes’ statistical argument that not all Muslims condone violent jihad, and after citing Muslim authorities, dead and alive, on the legitimacy of jihad as central to Islam’s existence, he quotes another authority on jihad and the establishment of a global caliphate by violence and stealth:

What about Al-Ghazali, the famous theologian, philosopher, and paragon of mystical Sufism whom the eminent W. M. Watt describes as “acclaimed in both the East and West as the greatest Muslim after Mohammed, and he is by no means unworthy of that dignity”? Scholars like Pipes know the truth, yet completely ignore it. Al-Ghazali said:

One must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a year… one may use a catapult against them when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…. If a person of the Ahl al-Kitab [People of The Book-Jews and Christians, typically] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked…. One may cut down their trees/…One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide…they may steal as much food as they need.

Shoebat writes that Pipes “even went as low to claim that Muhammad was a ‘Muslim not an Islamist’ and even distinguished him since, ‘Islamism represents the transformation of Islamic faith into a political ideology.’”

By switching Muhammad from “Islamist” to “Muslim, Pipes must then answer a crucial question: Is Islam defined by its founder or by Mr. Pipes? Muhammad defined Islam as “Al-Islamu deen wa dawla” (“Islam is a religion and a state”). Pipes then must remove the “and” to substantiate his false case.

Islam is nothing if not a political ideology. The first time Mohammad raised his sword to forcibly convert men to Islam, and abandoned persuasion, that was the inauguration of political Islam. It has not changed since then. Force, coercion, slavery, death, and submission are the sole hallmarks of Islam.

The problem with Islam is that it is a religion. Religion is a primitive form of philosophy that explains existence and purports to give men a moral guide to living. Qua religion, it depends on faith in the existence of a supernatural being, and a form of altruism and collectivism, an altruism that is extended only to other Muslims and the collectivism of the Ummah. One could also argue that jihad represents a special kind of altruism:Jihadas seen as a vehicle of “salvation,” with suicide bombers and plane hijackers acting as selfless and self-sacrificing drones to spread the word of Allah.

Allow me to pose this question: If one removed altruism and pacifism from Christianity, could one credibly call what was left “Christianity”? One could pose the same question about Judaism or Buddhism. Christianity, as a religion, it should be noted, has never been “moderated”; it has only been barred from acquiring political power. That was another unprecedented accomplishment of our Founders.

Pipes, dividing the discussion about Islam into three groups, writes that he belongs in the third group, which views “Islamism” as a “modern extremist variant of the religion, known as radical Islam or Islamism.” He dismisses anyone who views Islam in its totality as succumbing to a “simplistic and essentialist delusion.” This is an implicit disparagement of such survivors of Islam as Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and of such champions against Islam as Geert Wilders. Treating Islam in its “totality” is as correct a way of treating it as it was of treating Nazism or Communism in their particular “totalities.”

Those “totalities” are fundamentally, and incontrovertibly, totalitarian. There is no other way of looking at Islam, either.

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Prominent American Muslim, Umar Lee, leaves Islam: “We were lied to”

By Robert Spencer

Umar Lee, a convert to Islam from St. Louis, was once enough of an Islamic supremacist to write to a rival: “i could cut your neck with the sword of islam and watch you squeal like a bitch like daniel pearl.” In an email exchange with me, heendorsed the death penalty for apostasy.

But now he has left Islam and returned to Christianity. Watch the video; in it he makes many, many important points about how converts to Islam are lied to, and how Islam establishes an empire of fear.

Note especially this, starting at 4:04:

“We can talk about the grievance industry, CAIR, etc., trying to hype up the threat of Islamophobia. Islamophobia is very minor. You want to talk about religious bias? You convert to Christianity in Saudi Arabia, you’re murdered. You convert from Islam in so many Muslim countries, it’s the death penalty. Why are Muslim societies so afraid of missionaries? Why are Muslim societies so afraid of freedom of speech? Why are Muslim societies so afraid of the Gospel? Why are Muslim societies so afraid of the message of Jesus Christ? If you believe Islam is the truth, why don’t you believe Islam can compete in the marketplace of ideas? Obviously you don’t, or you wouldn’t kill people that convert to Christianity and put missionaries in jail.”

Clearly they don’t believe Islam can compete in the marketplace of ideas….

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Turkish Female Journalist Receives Death Threats for Removing Hijab

By Daniel Greenfield

….I FELT FREEDOM WHEN I TOOK OFF MY HEADSCARF”

“During the first years of wearing a headscarf, I used to feel like my head was stuck up inside a nylon bag, and I heard humming. I had those fearful moments when the needles came loose, wondering if the needle would prick my throat. So I would at times take off the headscarf secretly when my mother was not watching. But one day when I got caught by my mother she subjected me to an unforgettably painful beating.

30 years later, when I decided to uncover my head, another battle started. It was very difficult. Radical Islamists got very furious when a covered and well-known writer decided to uncover her head. I heard harsh insults and received death threats.

When I came to America, first of all I started to swim to my heart’s content… It was such regret for me not to have done it for so long that I didn’t want to get out of the swimming pool before I swam for two hours every night…

I suffered from vitamin D deficiency since my skin didn’t get enough sunlight by then and this normally causes serious illnesses, weakness and mental fatigue. I sunbathed a lot. Then I tied my hair in a pony-tail and played tennis under the blue sky with my white tennis clothes on. I cannot tell you how good it felt. Then I fulfilled my dream of growing nails and putting on red nail polish, which was a personal remembrance to me. I had met a woman in my trip to Iran who was forced to put her hands into a bag full of insects just because she had put on red nail polish… Whenever I put on red nail polish, I still remember that woman with sadness…

Now I am free and believe that God has no problem with the hair on my head, He will not burn me in his Hell for this reason, He holds us with much more mercy and kindness than we think, and that being “a good person” is much more important than wearing a dark veil.

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Ladies: Think twice before you enter a country ruled by sharia

Conversions to Islam

 

 

By David Solway

An alarming feature of our current sociocultural world is the striking frequency of conversions to Islam across the entire gamut of Western private and public life: prisoners converting to the religion of peace in record numbers; women who crave the emotional comfort and feeling of security that donning the hijab or the niqab purportedly confers; disaffected youth who find purpose and meaning in attending the mosque, often becoming radicalized in the process; African-Americans reacting against Christianity as the white man’s religion and who “associate conversion to Islam with recovering their ethnic heritage”; political figures who, whether secretly or publicly, swear by the Koran, the most conspicuous recent example being the bizarre spectacle ofArnoud Van Doorn, one of the Dutch producers of the uncompromising anti-Islam film Fitna and a former leading member of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, happily and gratefully converting to Islam. Even a Gitmo prison guardproved unable to resist the seduction of Islam. To read only a partial list of notable converts to Islam is chastening.

Such conversions reveal a craving for the collectivist embrace of an explanatory and consoling paradigm, and are a symptom of cultural irresponsibility. Some of these, it is true, remain more or less innocuous, but others lead to the espousal of sanctified violence. Michael Ledeen points out in an interesting article debunking the myth of the “homegrown terrorist” that such people, “motivated by strong ideological or religious beliefs,” have come to identify with foreign doctrines and ideologies that are “anything but homegrown.” The indoctrination they undergo may be learned online, though “more often than not [it] takes place at the feet of foreign teachers and trainers.” They are not to be understood as homegrown terrorists since they have “turned to non-American visions and visionaries.” Reiterating his rejection of the “homegrown” label, Ledeen calls them “converts” who “have taken leave of us to join our enemies.” Of course, the terminology we use may also be a question of semantics. Rudi Giuliani has no qualms about using the term “homegrown,” but he means the same thing as Ledeen. He goes wrong, however, in claiming that a significant number of terrorist attacks come from a “distorted Islamic extremist ideology.” Such attacks are enjoined in the Koran and validated in the Hadith and derive not from some rarefied or ultraist version of the faith but from Islam proper. There is nothing “distorted” (to echo Giuliani) or deviant about them.

“Imagine,” writes former Muslim Bosch Fawstin, “if…we used terms such as ‘Radical Nazism’…and ‘Militant Communism.’ The implication would be that there are good versions of those ideologies, which would then lead some to seek out ‘moderate’ Nazis. Those who use terms other than ‘Islam’ create the impression that it’s some variant of Islam that’s behind the enemy that we’re facing.” He continues by stressing the undeniable fact that Islam “is a political religion; the idea of a separation of Mosque and State is unheard of in the Muslim world. Islam has a doctrine of warfare, Jihad, which is fought in order to establish Islamic (‘Sharia’) Law, which is, by nature, totalitarian. Sharia Law calls for, among other things: the dehumanization of women; the flogging/stoning/killing of adulterers; and the killing of homosexuals, apostates and critics of Islam. All of this is part of orthodox Islam, not some ‘extremist’ form of it.” Many, if not most, converts appear serenely unaware of the central tenets and imperatives of their adopted faith, and never seem to ask themselves the obvious question: was Mohammed, with his program of military conquest and his many sanguinary injunctions, a “moderate Muslim” or an Islamist?…

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