The Devil We Don't Know (19 page)

The multicultural trap that is strangling the United States and Western civilization must be invalidated to allow America to breathe. The impossible expectation that we can remain diverse and still live happily ever after needs to be extinguished. That expectation is unrealistic, cruel, and self-destructive. Multiculturalists refuse to acknowledge that the United States, superpower or not, undergoes the same dynamics for survival that all cultures must go through. It needs a cohesive cultural identity to survive. Yet America continues to be used and abused by idealists who have a superficial view of human nature and cultural development. America must never become the victim of an unnecessary experiment.

The United States must expose the devil it knows and the devil it does not know: the good twin and the bad twin of Islamic dualism. Muslims in the West are playing the game of good cop/bad cop with America. While one commits terrorist acts, the other says this has nothing to do with Islam. Yet the truth is that Islam is one and the same. The West must never buy into the propaganda of Islamist groups in the United States. It really does not matter who is hurting Western civilization, the good or the bad side of Islam—the violent jihadists or the stealth jihadists. Even Hitler must have had a good side, from someone's perspective. The devil we know and the devil we don't know are one and the same. America must never get entangled in Islam's orbit of no return.

Will Islam continue to survive and thrive, or will it come crashing down on the weight of its own sword? Chapter 8 will delve into this.

8

House of Cards: The Downfall of Islam as We Know It

Within the DNA of Islam is a self-destructive element: fear of the truth and a constant urge to fight those who value truth. Islam planted its own seed of destruction the day it relied on lies, violence, robbery, slavery, and rape for its expansion. For fourteen hundred years, Islamists have managed to suppress the truth about their religion to the majority of Muslims and have condoned acts of unspeakable injustices, violence, and torture by their prophet that must never be criticized under penalty of death. In the process, they have produced a morally confused and self-destructive culture that is incapable of withstanding challenges through honest debate or criticism. Challenging Islam with the truth brings out the worst in Muslim culture: shame, pride, envy, rage, lies, slander, violence, and terrorist acts. Muslims are educated to believe there is one solution for people who challenge Islam: “If you challenge my religion, I will kill you.”

At its core, Islam is desperate for approval, and, as a consequence, it relies heavily on the outside world, seeking feedback that expresses respect, confirms its legitimacy, and even shows submission to Islam. If that is not received, all hell breaks loose with destructive acts not only toward the outside world, but also, strangely, against itself—Muslim against Muslim. Mohammed himself set the example for this dynamic when he not only destroyed those who rejected him, but also made enemies of Muslims who competed with him.

Toward the end of his life, in 631 C.E., Mohammed actually ordered the destruction and burning of a mosque that had been newly built by a Muslim tribe that lived a few miles north of Medina in an area called Quba. The builders of the mosque invited Mohammed to honor the new mosque with his presence: “O Messenger of God, we have built a mosque for the sick and needy and for rainy and cold nights, and we would like you to visit us and pray for us” (Tabari IX:61). Yet instead of going to bless the mosque, Mohammed commanded his fighters to “go to this mosque whose owners are unjust people and destroy and burn it” (Tabari IX:61). Mohammed's fighters destroyed the mosque while worshipers were still inside, and, as usual, Allah approved of this action in a verse in the Koran (9:107–110) that justified Mohammed's violence against other Muslims. After the destruction of the mosque, Mohammed told the people in the area that they could pray in the mosque he had built there. Mohammed called his mosque “more virtuous” than the one he had destroyed. Although the reason he gave for destroying the mosque was that its builders were unjust rivals, his actual motivation was pure envy, distrust, and a need to be the only person who performed acts of benefit for the community.

This was the example Mohammed set for what his followers should do if they did not like the actions of rivals—even if the rivals were Muslims. As a result, violence between Muslims reached epidemic proportions after Mohammed died. At least fifty thousand were killed in a single war over who would lead the caliphate. At that time, Aisha, Mohammed's widow, and her supporters, believed that Imam Ali was behind the murder of Othman, a companion of Mohammed and the third Caliph after Mohammed's death, and consequently fought Ali, Mohammed's only male blood relative, whose supporters believed he was the one entitled to head the caliphate. These wars and the resulting assassination of Ali were behind the Sunni and Shiite divide in Islam. Wars and assassinations became the destiny of the prophet's apostles (Sahaba), who fought and killed one another to determine the leadership of the growing Islamic empire. They followed Mohammed's advice when he said, “Whosoever of you
sees
an evil action, let him
change
it with his
hand.”
For several generations, every Muslim caliph was brutally killed by fellow Muslims over who should succeed the previous caliph.

The Islamic dream to return to the caliphate—which Muslims envision as the ultimate ideal of a peaceful and blissful Islamic political system—has no basis in reality. It never existed during Mohammed's time or any other time after his death. The caliphate had a bloody history of pitting Muslim against Muslim, sect against sect, and engaging in revolutions and counterrevolutions, all in the name of Islam. That was then, and it is still the same way today—the Islamic political system remains dysfunctional. Sunnis and Shiites blow up each other's mosques today in Iraq and other areas; Saudi Arabia discriminates against Shiites and burns their Korans. The Islamic caliphate was never a peaceful and just state.

Another factor that promoted rivalries, hatred, and violence among Muslim sects was a hadith by Mohammed. In it, he made a prediction that caused further divisions and accusations of apostasy between Muslims: “Seventy-two of the seventy-three Muslim sects will go to hell; only one of the sects will be in Paradise; it is the majority group” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 3.40.4580). Mohammed never named that sect, but his prediction had devastating repercussions in Muslim relations, because each sect truly believed that the others would go to hell. Then and now, every sect of Islam accuses the others of apostasy, thus deserving to be killed. The result is an Islamic culture of no compromise and “I alone against the world.”

Yet despite the hatred and animosity Muslim sects feel toward one another—and this is the paradox of Islam—all Muslims feel an obligation to present an image of unity, no matter how they feel toward one another. While instilling divisions and commandments to correct one another and reject the other's sins, Mohammed also commanded his followers to kill anyone who causes disunity: “Whoever creates disunity in the Islamic community, kill him” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 3.40.4744). Mohammed did not clearly define disunity and left it in the hands of Muslims to be judge, jury, and executioner of those whom they believe are causing disunity among them. Thus, many Muslims today feel justified in interpreting calls for Western-style democracy in the Muslim world as causing disunity among Muslims. Because there is no central authority in Islam to decide matters of who is causing disunity and who is not, the commandment to kill Muslims who cause disunity can be interpreted by any sect as justification to act against the other. The bottom line is that this lack of clarity and conflict in what Mohammed commanded has caused a mess inside Muslim society, especially in its political system, leading to lawlessness and turmoil up until the present. Demonstrations, violence, and deaths continued to take place in Tahrir Square for months after the revolution.

Islam's internal conflict emanates from Mohammed's own personal struggle at its inception. Islamic literature has documented in great detail how Mohammed suffered from bodily spasms, twitching, visions, uncontrollable lip movements, severe abdominal pains, sweating, fear, and anxiety, all of which led him to have suicidal thoughts. Mohammed's foster mother, Halima, brought him back to his biological mother and told her that he was possessed. When Mohammed was an adult, he suffered doubts about his own sanity, but his first wife, Khadija, told him that these were signs of his prophethood.
1

This description of what Mohammed suffered from in his early life and adulthood was taught in Islamic studies classes that I took in school, but the way his symptoms were explained to us was different from how a psychiatrist would diagnose them today. What we learned was similar to what Mohammed's wife told him: that he was communicating with the angel Gabriel, who brought him the words of the Koran from Allah. Muslims all around the world today still believe this to be the truth behind Mohammed's symptoms, fears, and anxiety.

Incredibly, Mohammed himself was not at peace with his own message. He was not optimistic about the future of Islam and Muslims: “the Messenger of Allah [Mohammed] observed: Verily Islam started as something strange and it would again revert [to its old position] of being strange just as it started, and it would recede between the two mosques just as the serpent crawls back into its hole” (Sahih Muslim B1 N0270).

In this hadith, Mohammed foretold that the end of Islam would be strange, just as its beginning had been, because it would shrink back to the limited area it had come from—between the two mosques of Mecca and Medina. Could that prediction by Muhammad be a sign of the inevitable demise of Islam? Will Muslims ever understand that Islam and sharia should not be a part of government? Will the Tahrir Square revolutionaries and their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries finally learn that their enemies are not the Mubaraks, the Assads, or the Gaddafis, but the seventh-century political system that still rules them today? Will Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia reject sharia and send it back to where it came from, to the two mosques in Mecca and Medina? Only time will tell.

Mohammed's predictions of Islam crawling back like a snake to where it came from were repeated extensively in several other of his hadiths:

“Belief returns and goes back to Medina like a snake.” (Sahih Bukhari V3B30 N100)

“Muslims will be the scum and the rubbish even though their numbers may increase; the enemy will not fear Muslims anymore. This will be because the Muslims will love world and dislike death.” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 37.4284)

“Muhammad's contemporaries were the best Muslims; after three generations, the Muslims will be mainly treacherous and untrustworthy.” (Sahih Bukhari V5B57N2, 3)

“There will be much killing during the last days of the Muslim.”(Bukhari V9B88N183)

“Verily, Belief returns and goes back to Medina as a snake returns and goes back to its hole [when in danger].” (Bukhari V3B30N100)

Mohammed also predicted a large movement of apostates out of Islam:

“Muslims will diminish in number and they will go back to where they started [before Islam].” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 2.19.3029)

“There will be no trace of Islam in some believers.” (Bukhari V9B84N65)

“There will appear in this nation . . . a group of people so pious apparently that you will consider your prayers inferior to their prayers, but they will recite the Quran, the teachings of which will not go beyond their throats and will go out of their religion as an arrow darts through the game, whereupon the archer may look at his arrow, its Nasl at its Risaf and its Fuqa to see whether it is blood-stained or not [that is, they will have not even a trace of Islam in them].” (Bukhari V9B84N65)

Mohammed was so consumed with the survival and legitimacy of Islam that he expressed extreme feelings of fear that Muslims would abandon Islam. Such fears caused him to severely punish anyone who rejected or abandoned him, which drove him into a life of never-ending battle and mass murder. As a result, he did not present a coherent ideology that could produce a stable and peaceful society. Although he demanded unity from Muslims, his actions did not support unity, especially when he destroyed the mosque of his rivals. Even while telling Muslims that Islam would survive to rule the world under a caliphate, he also said that Islam would end after three generations and would eventually crawl back to where it came from. No functioning system can be based on such confusion and conflicting messages, which are rife in the Koran, the Hadith, and, as I have described, the example of Mohammed himself.

Why, then, after Mohammed died, did Arabs hold onto Islam and strive to preserve it through horrific bloodshed? Why did various tribes compete for leadership and kill one another, especially those who abandoned Islam? The answer is simple: Islam gave enormous wealth and power to Mohammed's successors, the caliphs, who followed in his footsteps. Since its inception, Islam has been at war with civilization, bringing down one culture after another. Such civilizations were considered a threat to Arabia's identity and culture, and with Islam, it was the outside world that had to change and adapt to Arabia's language, culture, and religion. Islam became the perfect formula for totalitarian control and submission, which served the Arabian Peninsula well. Arab tribes no longer had to battle one another over scarce desert resources. Arabs no longer needed to travel far to trade in order to survive, because people throughout the Middle East flocked to Mecca to perform the Haj, bringing in wealth from all over the world. Under Islam, the extreme ethnocentric culture of Arabia became immune to the impact of alien religions and cultures when non-Muslims were forbidden from touching the holy grounds of Mecca and Medina. Keeping non-Muslims out is still a priority of Saudi Arabia. When united under Islam, once desert-poor Arabia was set forever.

As a result, Muslim rulers had to preserve the goose that laid the golden eggs: Islam. Yet they soon realized that they could not rely merely on the Koran, with its many contradictions, to rule the new conquered lands, which were not familiar with Arabian culture. To rule effectively, 150 years after Mohammed died, they created a holy decree, sacred laws called sharia. These laws were based on the Koran, Mohammed's lifestyle, and the Hadith, sayings that were still being gathered during that time by several Islamic authorities and sects, who provided both similar and different hadiths. Whenever the caliph needed a specific law, somehow a hadith was found to support it. Some Muslims claim that several hadiths were not correct or Sahih, but they remain in Islamic books because certain laws of sharia were based on them.

Islam's attraction was infectious. Some of the conquered nations found the Islamic legal system beneficial because its laws made it easier for tyrannies to survive if their legitimacy seemed to come from Allah's law itself. Consequently, for fourteen hundred years, both Muslims and non-Muslims in the Middle East have been governed by the most brutal religious, political, and legal system the world has ever seen. Today, the ultimate success or failure of Middle Eastern revolutions relies on accepting or rejecting sharia as the state legal system. So far, not one Muslim country has declared after its revolution that sharia will not be the state law. This means that Middle Eastern revolutions are sadly going to fail once again. Until today, no Muslim country has dared to reject the stranglehold of sharia, especially with Saudi petro-dollars in the equation.