The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (39 page)

In 1992
⁹⁹⁴
, the West mobilized its armies to defend European Moslems who were attacking and were under attack from genocidal neighbors. Bosnia’s future
Moslem
president, Alija Izetbegović
⁹⁹⁵
, had published a Manifesto in 1970 declaring that, “there can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions" and that "the Islamic movement must and can, take over political power as soon as it is morally and numerically so strong that it can not only destroy the existing non-Islamic power, but also to build up a new Islamic one".
⁹⁹⁶
The Serbians living in Bosnia accurately sensed that this was a declaration of war. We ignored Izetbegović’s writings and supported him.

Meanwhile foreign mujahedin—knights of jihad—trickled into the Balkan areas of the former nation of Yugoslavia in June 1992 to fight the local unbelievers.
⁹⁹⁷
These holy warriors were largely Arab veterans of the 1979-1989 war that drove the infidel Soviets out of Afghanistan—the war that brought us Osama bin Laden. And these holy soldiers were reportedly provided with sophisticated weapons and financing by Iran, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia
⁹⁹⁸
.

The use of the “terror” that Mohammed had made central to the militant Moslem meme soon reared its head. The Balkan Mujahideen revived an old technique, one designed to make unbelievers quiver with fear—beheading local Christians then displaying their heads on poles. Sympathetic Moslems around the world purchased videotapes and DVDs of these beheadings and were filled with pride by the sight.

Slobodan Milosevic, the
Christian
Serbian leader in the Bosnian neighborhood, built a legitimate complaint over Muslim violence into an excuse for ethnic cleansing and mass murder. His forces attacked Moslem civilians brutally, raped the women and young girls, rounded up the men of fighting age, packed them in trucks, forced them to dig mass graves, then executed them with a bullet to the back of the head, and expelled the women, the children, and the old from the cities and towns in which they and their ancestors had lived for generations.
⁹⁹⁹
Teams of memes were duking it out with a vengeance. But when the tide of battle turned dramatically against the Moslems and when over a million Islamic civilians
¹⁰⁰⁰
of the former Yugoslavia had been burned out of—or in—their homes, a United Nations force composed primarily of Americans, British, and Russians came to the Mohammedans’ defense.
¹⁰⁰¹
The West committed the lives of over 39,000 soldiers—39,000 young Western men and women
¹⁰⁰²
--for over ten years at a cost of more than six billion dollars
¹⁰⁰³
to end the atrocities perpetrated against Bosnia’s Moslems.

Islam has never developed an equivalent to the West’s protest, free-speech, peace, and human rights movements. [^^how about the democratic revolution in Lebanon and the movements protesting the government in Egypt?] It has never developed a permanent protest industry. And it has seldom, if ever, fought for the rights of others to lead their own way of life.

The fact is that there are many Moslems who long for pluralism, tolerance, and democracy. But they are kept silent by the threat of punishment from those who control the public spaces of Islam. Islam’s “liberals” are silenced by Holy War enthusiasts, by militant nationalists, and by clerics. And, like the poets who fled from Mohammed’s murderous meme-policing in 624 AD, the Islamic “liberals” have been muzzled for nearly 1,300 years.

In the battle between memes within the Islamic community, liberalism has always lost.

In the 11
^th
, 12
^th
, and13
^th
century, a form of Islam flourished in Baghdad, India, and Central Asia that opened the door to an alternative, non-militant Islam. It was Sufism, a mystic interpretation of Islam that emphasized a journey through the inner world rather than the conquest of the world beyond dar el Islam’s borders.
¹⁰⁰⁴
In Baghdad ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani focused on the quest for ecstatic emotions, on summoning those emotions by reciting poetry that praised Mohammed at the top of your lungs, and on practicing kindness and charity.
¹⁰⁰⁵
In India, Chistiya Sufism
¹⁰⁰⁶
also deemphasized wars of conquest and focused on music, poetry, and the care of the poor.
¹⁰⁰⁷
Two hundred years later, the appeal of Chistiya Sufism helped take Islam from a religion that only .2% of Indians believed in to one that was followed by 3.2 million Indians. And many of these Indians were won over by the honey of the Sufi non-violent form of Islam, not by the vinegar of Islamic terror.
¹⁰⁰⁸

Then came the Moslem Indian Emperor Akbar’s
¹⁰⁰⁹
attempt to introduce pluralism to Islam in 1582.
Akbar promoted tolerance toward Hindus, Jains
¹⁰¹⁰
, Zoroastrians
¹⁰¹¹
, Buddhists, and Christians. His pluralist form of Islam was called
Din-i Ilahi
.
¹⁰¹²
Akbar also promoted
sulh-i kull
, "universal peace".
¹⁰¹³
But he didn’t get very far. Akbar’s movement never attracted “more than 19 adherents.”
¹⁰¹⁴
What’s more, orthodox Moslems opposed his policies as a heresy and crushed them when Akbar died in 1605.
¹⁰¹⁵

And Sufism was not always as peaceful as it’s made out to be in the West. In the 1670s, the Moroccan Sufi Lyusi
¹⁰¹⁶
[^^insert islam’s attempt to censor the press of the West] laced into his local sultan, Ismail, demanding that he rule justly. In the process, he called on the Sultan to wage war in a holy cause as Islam said he should...killing as an "obligation to God and his people".
¹⁰¹⁷
In the 19
^th
and early 21
^st
century, some Sufi leaders went from merely insisting on war to organizing armies and leading them in attacks against European occupying forces and against old-line Moslem ruling families.
¹⁰¹⁸
Their justification? They were following the example of combat set by Mohammed. Then came Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis and Salafists, passionate Holy Warriors and missionaries who fanned out around the globe and who condemned the Sufis utterly, labeled them un-Islamic, and outlawed Sufism in one Islamic country after another.
¹⁰¹⁹

Still, this wasn’t the end of Islamic liberalism. In 1876, a reform-oriented cleric in what remained of the Ottoman Empire issued a fatwa—a religious decree—deposing the ruler of worldwide Islam, the Caliph. A new caliph took the old one’s place, a new Sultan who introduced a constitution with a parliament and with guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of speech.
¹⁰²⁰
This move helped pave the way for today’s Islamic-but-secular Turkey. But outside of Turkey, liberal Islam had almost no influence.

Though movements toward Islamic liberalism kept popping up, they were too weak to reach the mainstream. From 1919 to 1924 in India, the Khilafat Movement
¹⁰²¹
supported the idea that Islam should be one global, unified empire ruled by the Ottoman Caliph in Constantinople—the city that Moslems had violently pried from the hands of Christians in 1453 and had renamed Istanbul.
¹⁰²²
As dangerous as a faction dedicated to a global empire may seem, the Khalifat Movement
¹⁰²³
produced some welcome surprises. The leaders of the movement allied with Mahatma Gandhi’s drive for Indian independence from the British.
¹⁰²⁴
And some of the Khalifat movement’s leaders
¹⁰²⁵
may have been Moslem pluralists and modernists, early Moslem “liberals”.

Among them was Abul Kalam Azad.
¹⁰²⁶
Born in Mecca and raised in India, Azad had cultural pluralism in his blood. He was the son of an Arab mother and of an Indian Moslem Sufi of Afghan origins. In 1920, Azad took big chances, bucked the traditionalists, and promoted the concept of Tajdid—of Islamic innovation—instead of traditional Taqliq.
¹⁰²⁷
Taqliq was Islam’s way of hyper-activating the Founder Effect. It demanded rigid conformity to Islam’s 7
^th
century ways, including conformity to Mohammed’s bloody policies. Azad wanted Taqliq to go. In his books Azad reportedly called for an Indian state based on separation of mosque and state, plus a secular, democratic, pluralist government within whose rule all religions and all cultures might coexist.
¹⁰²⁸