The Devil We Don't Know (11 page)

Gabriel said that the angels had not yet laid aside their arms, and that he had just come from pursuing the enemy. “Allah commands you, Oh Muhammad, to go to Banu Qurayza. I am about to go there to shake their stronghold.” After being divinely inspired even by angels, Muhammad then placed the tribe under siege for twenty-five nights after which they were given the choice to follow Mohammed as Allah's prophet, or lose their lives, property, women, and children. The Jews said: “We will never abandon the laws of the Torah and never change it for another.”
9

Islamic documentation of the senseless attacks on the Jewish tribes revealed details that are hard to believe. For instance, in the middle of this siege Mohammed was concerned about whether the Jews were speaking ill of him, and it was even recorded that Mohammed and his companions approached the Jewish forts and said, “You brothers of monkeys, has Allah disgraced you and brought his vengeance upon you?” According to Islamic sources, the Jews replied, “Oh Abul-Qasim, you are not a barbarous person.” Then, step by step, one can see a desperate Mohammad trying to convince his own Muslim fighters that the angel Gabriel himself was riding a white horse toward Banu Qurayza “to shake their castles and strike terror to their hearts.”
10

Mohammed was keen on not slaughtering Jews without convincing his reluctant followers that all of the decisions to kill the Jews were made jointly with the counsel of others. Mohammed picked a man by the name of Sad who understood what he wanted to do and asked him what he thought should be done with the Jews. Sad said, “I give judgment that the men should be killed, the property divided, and the women and children taken as captives.” Mohammed responded by praising Sad, saying, “You have given judgment of Allah above the seven heavens.”
11
First, it was Gabriel, then Sad, then Allah himself who gave permission for what followed. The Jews surrendered and were detained, then Mohammed ordered trenches to be dug. The Jewish men were brought out in batches of ten or twelve. They were beheaded and their bodies thrown in the trenches. Among them was a man by the name of Huyayy bin Akhtab, who said to Mohammed, “By God, I do not blame myself for opposing you, but he who forsakes God will be forsaken.”
12
Then Akhtab told the men, “God's command is right a book and a decree, and massacre have been written against the Sons of Israel.” Then he sat down, and his head was struck off. The number of beheaded adult males was estimated to be six hundred to nine hundred. The bloody massacre was completed in about two days.

The mass genocide committed by Mohammed was reported in Muslim scriptures not as a sin or as something to be ashamed of, but as a justifiable deed. Then Mohammed and his followers took the massacred men's properties, businesses, and homes. They held the women and the children as slaves. Many of the women became sexual slaves of Muslim fighters, and Mohammed himself chose one of the women for himself, Rayhana, daughter of Amr bin Khunafa. She remained his sexual slave until she died.
13
The mass theft of Jewish property and the sexual enslavement of their women were documented as follows: “So Muhammad began seizing their herds and their property bit by bit. He conquered home by home. The Messenger took some people captive, including Safiyah and her two cousins. The Prophet chose Safiyah for himself.”
14

One does not have to be an authority on human behavior to see how tormented Mohammed must have been after this massacre he conducted to empower and enrich himself and his religion. To reduce his torment, he needed everyone around him to participate in the genocide against the Jews, the only people whom he could not control. An enormous number of verses in the Koran encouraged fighting as an act of obedience and even as a method of worshipping Allah and promised fighters many rewards on Earth and in Heaven, while those who refuse to fight and fled were condemned. Muslims were encouraged to feel no hesitation or guilt for the genocide because it was not they who did it, but Allah himself: “Fight them,
Allah
will punish them by your
hands
and bring them to disgrace” (Koran 9:14), meaning those who kill are innocent of any crime because it was Allah who used their hands. Then Allah, in another Koran verse, confirmed: “when thou threwest [a handful of dust], it was not thy act, but Allah's: in order that He might test the Believers by a gracious trial from Himself: for Allah is He Who heareth and knoweth [all things]” (Koran 8:17). Allah is the one doing the throwing by using Muslim hands to test their will to obey Allah. Those who kill pass the test of Allah.

The persistent message in Islamic scriptures is that Muslims, like their prophet, are destined for war and vengeance. It has been prescribed for Muslims, and they cannot run away from it. There is an element of shame directed at anyone who dislikes war: “War is prescribed to you: but from this ye are averse” (Sura 2:212). “Fighting is prescribed for you and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But God knoweth, and ye know not” (Sura 2:216).

Mohammed never got over his anger, humiliation, and rejection by “the people of the book” (which is what the Koran called Jews), whom he emulated and heavily relied on for legitimacy. Even after all of the Jews were driven out of Arabia and even after all of Arabia became Muslim, his obsession persisted until the day he died. The mission he left for Muslims was to go after the Jews who still survived in lands the Muslims had yet to conquer.

As I wrote earlier, Mohammed's message on his deathbed was not for his followers to strive for holiness, peace, goodness, and to treat their neighbors as themselves, but a commandment for Muslims to continue the killing and the genocide against the Jews. That was the last thing on Mohammed's mind before he died. It was the shame and pain that he carried to his grave.

By asking his followers to continue the genocide for him until the Day of Judgment, Mohammed expanded the shame to cover all Muslims and Islam itself. He was not going to sin and go down alone. All Muslims were commanded to follow his example and chase the Jews wherever they went after they fled with their lives, penniless, toward their holy land or to the south to what is now called Yemen. And chase them the Muslims did. Muslims today must continue fighting, to do Mohammed's unfinished business, and they must perpetuate the cover-up of Islam's bloody shame.

After Mohammed's death, Muslims continued their expansion beyond Arabia, conquering great civilizations, Arabizing and Islamizing them by the sword and through a system of taxation that punished non-Muslims. Jerusalem fell into Muslim hands soon after Mohammed died, and that was the Muslims' chance to fulfill Mohammed's death wish. More than one hundred years after Mohammed's death, after Muslims occupied Jerusalem, they chose to erase all memory of Jewish existence, their religion and culture, by building a mosque and calling it Al Aqsa Mosque, right on top of the ruins of Solomon's Temple, the holiest spot of the Jews. The message of Islam was “You and your history are finished.” The same thing was done to the pagans' Qaaba in Mecca, after Mohammed captured and destroyed all of the gods of Mecca and declared it to be the holy land of Islam. When Muslims entered Egypt, Persia, Constantinople, India, and other lands, they did the same thing. Whether the places of worship were churches, temples, or simply holy sites of other faiths, Muslims converted many of these to mosques. The message of Islam became “We do not coexist, we replace.”

Mohammed's decision to practice genocide and violence marked the day that Islam ended as a peaceful religion. Everything that he did in the last ten years of his life was dedicated to expansion through brutal force. There was no honorable justification for Mohammed's mass slaughter of the Jews and many others. That is why a good portion of Muslim scriptures is dedicated to justifying Mohammed's violence. In addition, to totally erase any criticism by his Muslim followers, back then and in the future, Muslims must share this murderous behavior with Mohammed. The persistent bloody message to kill had to cover the hands of all Muslims, angels, and Allah himself.

Mohammed's failure with the Jews of Arabia became an unholy dark mark of shame in Islamic history, and that shame, envy, and anger continues to get the best of Muslims today. It will as long as there are Jews. In the eyes of Mohammed and Muslims, the mere existence of the Jewish people, let alone an entire Jewish state, delegitimizes Islam and makes Mohammed look more like a mass murderer than a prophet. For Muslims to make peace with Jews and acknowledge that they are human beings who deserve the same rights as everyone else would have a devastating effect on how Muslims view their religion and the actions of their prophet.

Islam has an existential problem. By no will of their own, the Jews found themselves in the middle of this problem. Islam must justify the genocide that Mohammed waged against the Jews. Mohammed and Muslims had two choices: either the Jews are evil subhumans, apes, pigs, and enemies of Allah, a common description of Jews still heard regularly in Middle Eastern mosques today, or Mohammed was a genocidal warlord and not fit to be a prophet of God, a choice that would mean the end of Islam. Then and now, Mohammed and Muslims clearly chose the first worldview and decreed that any hint of the second must be severely punished. Jews must remain eternally evil enemies of Islam, if Islam is to remain legitimate. There is no third solution to save the core of Islam from collapsing; either Mohammed was evil or the Jews were evil.

Any attempt to forgive, humanize, or live peacefully with Jews is considered treason against Islam and Mohammed. How can Muslims forgive the Jews and then go back to their mosques, only to read their prophet's words, telling them they must kill Jews wherever they find them? It does not add up, if someone wants to remain Muslim. As a child, I remember once asking my teacher why we hated Jews so much, and her answer scared me when she angrily answered, “Aren't you a Muslim?” Hating and wishing the destruction of Jews has become synonymous with being a Muslim. Sympathizing with Jews became the ultimate betrayal of Islam. Very early in life I learned my lesson as a Muslim, as do all Muslim children: I learned never to ask that question again.

Instead of allowing religion to serve its followers and humanity, Islam had to dedicate itself to self-preservation above all else. Throughout history, Muslims who saw the great lie and wanted out have also realized, as did the Jews, they could not leave except under penalty of death. Islam, as personified in Mohammed, has never tolerated abandonment or rejection, and the Jews were made an example of, for every Muslim who wanted out.

Whether Muslims like it or not, they must be loyal to Mohammed, just as his fighters were coerced into fighting. Muslims today must close their minds and follow the biggest lie ever perpetrated in human history, a lie that has survived for more than fourteen hundred years and that has caused the longest and most unsolvable international conflict of today. Solving the Islamic-Israeli conflict peacefully simply means ending the legitimacy of Islam. That is why no Muslim leader can dare to seriously pursue peace with Israel without hurting Islam at the core.

Nothing shakes Islam's confidence in itself the way that Judaism and the Jewish people do, as symbolized in the State of Israel. Whether it is the Arab Spring, the current revolution, the previous revolution, Arab kings or presidents, Islamists, socialists, moderates, or radicals, any new leadership that refuses a confrontation with Israel and the West will be condemned for committing treason against Islam and will not last. If the new leadership in Egypt chooses a policy of pursuing peace with Israel, that leader had better be prepared to be the next dictator because he will meet unbearable resistance to peace; he must imprison the jihadists and silence people who support them in the religious community. That was what Mubarak had to do.

Islam's fears of democracy, freedom of religion, and human rights are closely tied to its fear of being exposed. Allowing freedom of religion will end Islam as we know it. That is why every Islamic revolution cannot keep its promise. Islamists spin and spin and come back to where they started. Islam must continue the slander, the lies, and the hateful propaganda against their number one enemy, the Jews, and then against the Christians and any non-Muslims or even Muslims of a different sect.

Arab children in Gaza today are being taught that Yasser Arafat's death was not due to illness, but that Jews killed Arafat. Jews poisoned him, Arabs claim. In the West this kind of propaganda is ignored. But crazy Arab propaganda of today will turn into Arab reality of tomorrow. In a few decades, Islamic history and religious books could very well state as a fact that Jews killed Arafat.

Islamic revolutions today know where they are heading: they are consolidating their power for the purpose of waging jihad, not only against the Jews, but against the rest of the non-Muslim world, especially the West. It would be a fatal mistake for Western nations to think that this is only a war on Israel or that the war concerns a tiny piece of land and that Israel should give land back to its 1967 borders for the sake of gaining peace. Islam is not looking for peace. It is getting ready for a huge confrontation, and the West must stand united with Israel.

The most dangerous Islamic countries that threaten world peace today are Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, and Lebanon, and moving in that direction is Turkey. The foreign policies of these countries are dedicated to rewarding nations and nongovernmental organizations that hurt and boycott Israel and punishing those that do not. Not one of these countries will allow any Muslim nation to make true peace with Israel, and it does not matter how many revolutions they must sustain.

In chapter 5, I turn to the new phenomenon of Muslims who have discovered Islam's biggest lie and are leaving Islam in large numbers. How Islam is treating them is not a pretty story.

5

Exodus: The Rise of Islamic Apostasy

Throughout the history of Islam, many Muslims have tried to understand, examine and reexamine, reform, adapt to, and live within Islam in peace, but most have failed. The majority have succeeded in molding themselves to the state-enforced institution of religion, with a mental image of their faith that is different from the reality of what is written in their scriptures. They live and die in the mental prison that is the Islamic state without ever realizing that religion is a matter of choice and a personal relationship with the creator.

Yet accepting life in the Islamic state was never easy for some, especially for intellectuals and free thinkers. The Islamic educational system has been especially brutal with free thinkers, forcing many to lead double lives and share their real views with only a few trusted friends. Whenever they address their work or their writing to the general public, it must always meet Islamic requirements as much as possible. The Islamic state dreads the influence of free thinkers and shields its citizens from them. It controls the impact of other faiths on its citizens by blocking their access to other religions and ideologies. Saudi educational institutions are not even allowed to teach philosophy, which encourages students to think freely for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

A poem attributed to the dean of Arabic literature, Taha Hussein (1889–1973), illuminates this dilemma. The original in Arabic, which was eloquently and beautifully written, was posted on the Internet a few decades after Hussein's death and is widely available on several Arabic websites. During his life, Hussein was accused of being an apostate (one who has renounced Islam and/or no longer believes in it, which is a capital crime under Islam). Despite the accusations of apostasy, the Egyptian government has always denied that Hussein actually converted to Christianity. The reason for the denial was probably to discourage copycats, because Taha Hussein was greatly admired all over the Arab world. Below is Hussein's poem about the Allah of Islam:

I thought you were the misleader, who guided whomever you wished

O harmful nourisher, who humbles arrogance and pride.

O mighty warrior, who subtly and cleverly conceals himself.

You cut off thieves' hands and stone women's bodies,

You establish justice by the sword, for your justice comes through the shedding of blood.

O creator of the fighters, tell me, where is the God of the weak?

If you were the creator of all, you wouldn't have forbidden some of them from surviving.

What, perchance, have you reaped from this killing except destruction and annihilation?

Was I worshipping a butcher, who crushes innocent livers?

Or was I worshipping a devil, who sent us the seal of the prophets?

I considered that the Garden was for the mujahideen, and the strong would live there,

With dates, grapes, figs, and rivers of wine for the pious.

It was the best refuge for hungry people living in the heart of the desert,

With beds of precious sapphire, and houris singing.

We, the lovers of the believers, came and answered the call.

May Allah reward you through us, for behold how Allah is the best rewarder.

Is your Garden strictly fighting, screaming, and sex?

You restore the previously married houri's virginity, and congratulate the newlyweds.

Was I worshipping a pimp, who plays with the minds of fools,

Or was I worshipping a devil, who sent us the seal of the prophets?
1

Hussein was never physically attacked after denying his secret apostasy, but many other prominent writers and journalists have paid with their lives because of rumors that they left Islam. Egyptian novelist and Nobel Prize–winner Naguib Mahfouz survived an assassination attempt by stabbing after he was accused of apostasy. Egyptian journalist Farag Fouda was not as lucky and was killed by an Islamist vigilante in 1992. Neither of these men had announced that he had left Islam, but they were judged to have done so, based on their writings.

Many other prominent activists across the Muslim world have also been killed due to accusations of apostasy in the recent decades. In 1985, the government of Sudan executed Mohmoud Mohammed Taha, a Sudanese author and thinker; Egyptian American Rashad Khalifa, a biochemist, was stabbed to death in a Tucson, Arizona, mosque in 1990; and Ghorban Tourani, an Iranian convert to Christianity, was abducted in Iran and murdered in 2005 for the crime of apostasy. In 2007, two Muslim converts to Christianity in Turkey who ran a Bible bookstore, Nicati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, were tortured for hours, then beheaded.

Muslim intellectuals throughout the history of Islam have had to endure mental bondage and limitations on their freedom of speech and expression due to Islamic laws on apostasy and blasphemy. A well-known example today is the British writer Salman Rushdie. Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran accused him of both apostasy and blasphemy and publicly issued a fatwa of death against him. One can only imagine how such threats hinder learning and constrict the thinking and self-expression of Muslims and their educational institutions and limit their exposure to non-Islamic arts and sciences. A quick comparison between the number of Arab and Jewish recipients of Nobel Prizes tells us a lot about the deteriorating state of learning in the Muslim world.

Many Muslim writers have recently been accused of not having the proper Islamic beliefs and of being hidden enemies of Islam who must be punished for what was termed
intellectual apostasy
by Sheikh Yusus Al-Qaradawi, a top Islamic theologian. Qaradawi warned that much of their writing demonstrates a lack of faith and

hypocrisy [which] is more dangerous than open disbelief. Intellectual apostasy is always propagated night and day. We feel its relentless and ruthless effects on our society. It needs a wide scale attack at the same level of strength and thinking. The positive religious obligation here is for Muslims to launch war against such a hidden enemy, to fight it with [the] same weapon it uses in waging an attack against the society.
2

Accusations of apostasy and blasphemy are among the worst “crimes” within Muslim society, whether the country is considered “radical” or “moderate” by Western standards. Such accusations always arouse extreme anger, emotional outbursts, and vigilante justice against the “traitor,” who is accused of betrayal and of dishonoring Islam. Islamists often use such accusations against political opponents, to intimidate free thinkers, to reject new ideas and reforms, as a weapon to silence dissent, and to keep citizens under control.

The roots of such attacks go back to Islam's origin. Mohammed was obsessed with rejection, not only by Jews, Christians, and others, but he especially hated and severely punished Muslims who abandoned Islam and said, “If someone changes his religion, then kill them” (Bukhari 26/339; Hadith 461). Mohammed was merciless with those who abandoned him personally. When, toward the end of his life, he conquered Mecca, where he originally came from, he ordered the execution of ten people, six men and four women, for abandoning Islam. He commanded that the ten must be killed regardless of any plea, even if they held onto the holy Qaaba curtain, which no one should be killed under. The message was that there should be no mercy for those who reject Mohammed.

In another instance, members of an Arab tribe by the name of Uraina suffered unspeakable torture at the hands of Mohammed when they left Medina, claiming they could not tolerate the climate (what they really meant was they could not tolerate Islam). Mohammed then sent his men after them, and they cut the people's hands and feet, branded their eyes with heated irons, and left them in the hot desert to slowly die (Bukhari, V2B24N577).

Contrary to what many Muslims claim—that Islam was spread peacefully—Mohammed forced Islam on others. Islamic historians have documented that Mohammed and a follower by the name of Abul Abbas entered Mecca triumphantly, looking for Mohammed's enemy Abu Sufian. When they met Sufian, Abbas asked him whether it wasn't time to acknowledge that there is no God but Allah? When Sufian's answer was yes, Abbas asked whether it wasn't also time to acknowledge that “Mohammed is his messenger” to which Sufian answered, “That I doubt.” Then Abbas raised his sword as a threat to sever Sufian's neck and forced Abu Sufian to give
shahada
, which means affirming that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger. Stories of this kind are never told to Muslims as proof of forced Islamization but as positive Islamic stories of triumph.

Western scholars who studied Mohammed have found that certain events in his early childhood can explain his fear of abandonment, which is clearly conveyed in Islamic writings. In Mohammed's infancy, Mohammed's mother gave him up to a foster mother, who later returned him to his mother. Yet soon after his mother took him back, she died. Mohammed's grandfather then took him in, but he also died a few years later, and his uncle raised him until adulthood. Mohammed then married a wealthy but much older woman, who died after about a decade and a half of marriage. His first wife was a great influence in interpreting his visions and the voices that he heard as proof of his prophethood. The abandonment, rejection, and deaths in Mohammed's early life are well documented in Islamic history, but Muslims have never interpreted these as the root cause of his violence later in life against apostates, Jews, Christians, and his own tribe when it rejected him.

Mohammed elevated himself to an even higher status than Allah. This is reflected in the laws of Islam, which do not automatically carry a death penalty for insulting Allah, but do carry a death penalty for anyone who criticizes Mohammed, whether the person repents or not. In that sense, Muslim scholars in general agree that apostates must be made an example of before the general public, whose members are vulnerable to corruption by the apostates' views and who might be led away from believing in Mohammed and Allah. A prominent Moroccan scholar, Sheikh Abdul Bari Az-Zamzamy, described the danger:

Apostasy causes a total disruption and confusion in the Muslim community, and thus, a severe punishment [death] was set for it to deter anyone from thinking of it. It was originally put into force following the Jewish conspiracy against Islam. The details of that conspiracy were simply mass conversion to Islam and then mass apostasy. The main ill aim was to cause confusion and to lead people astray. Thus, the punishment was set as a precautionary measure to stop all these offenses.
3

Mohammed's anger and merciless violence against those who rejected him forced almost all of Arabia to convert to Islam so that he would spare their lives. As soon as Mohammed died, however, a large majority (about 70 percent) of the people of Arabia quickly abandoned Islam. This was disastrous news for Mohammed's caliphs (those who succeeded Mohammed in commanding the Islamic state), who were preparing to pursue Mohammed's plan to conquer wealthy neighboring civilizations such as Egypt and Persia. Before Mohammed died, he had sent letters to the Byzantine emperor and the Persian king, warning them, “Islam Taslam,” meaning they should embrace Islam to be safe. Incidentally, before 9/11, Osama bin Laden demanded the same from the United States; following in the tradition of Mohammed, he told Americans to accept Islam or suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, the Western news media did not understand the meaning of the threat.

The apostasy of the majority of the tribes in Arabia led Mohammed's successors to wage several brutal wars, called “
ridda
wars”—meaning “apostasy wars”—which lasted for two years. The followers of Mohammed won the wars and succeeded in bringing all of the Arabian tribes back to Islam by the force of the sword. Mohammed's successors could never have been able to conquer and expand throughout the Middle East without first unifying Arabia itself. Through killing and torturing apostates, Islam was able to grow. Islam's very survival relied heavily not only on violent jihad toward the outside world but, more important, on the death penalty for apostasy; on the commandment to lie, exaggerate, and slander; and on giving conflicting and dual answers to Islamic controversies and embarrassments.

The Islamic sword is literally being held to the neck of every Muslim. Beheading by the sword is the preferred manner of execution in Saudi Arabia today for those who commit the crimes of apostasy, adultery, and many other sins forbidden by Islam. The Saudi flag itself proudly exhibits the Islamic sword as a symbol that threatens the use of force in spreading Islam outwardly and keeping Muslims in line inwardly.

Not only is the legal right to kill apostates given to Islamic governments, but Islamic law allows Muslims to execute apostates unofficially by delegating this authority to individuals or groups that can operate with impunity and with no oversight from the government. This works well for Islamic governments that want to appear respectful of international human rights laws. Such a trick is known to all Muslims in so-called moderate Muslim countries, which still kill and threaten apostates in many creative ways that can be even more torturous than government executions. Muslim parents are often forced to execute their own apostate children, and, if they refuse, their own lives are threatened.

The same dynamic works in the concept of violent jihad, where Muslim governments play the same game. They try to appear to be against terrorism against the West, but they coddle and protect terrorists and finance and encourage terrorist groups to attack the West. Yet if the West asks them whether they are “with us or against us,” their answer is always “We are with you and against terrorism.” Such duplicity was made clear to the West when bin Laden was living in Pakistan with the knowledge and protection of the authorities. The U.S. government and the media do not fully expose the duplicity of Islamic governments in supporting terrorist groups; they only blame al Qaeda. This leaves the majority of the American public in the dark about the depth of the threat the United States is facing.