The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (16 page)

Murder: It all depends on whom you’re killing

Muslim apologists like to quote Qur’an 5:32: “Whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.” However, this oft-quoted verse is not actually the all-encompassing prohibition of murder that it may seem. For one thing, it is addressed to the “Children of Israel” and set in the past; it is not addressed to Muslims. It actually comes as part of a warning to Jews not to make war against Muhammad, or they will face terrible punishment. The point is that Allah warned the Children of Israel not to spread “mischief in the land,” and yet they continued to do so:

On that account We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person—unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them Our messengers with clear signs, yet, even after that, many of them continued to commit excesses in the land. The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter. (Qur’an 5:31–33)

John Quincy Adams on Islam:

“In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind.
THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE
…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.” (Emphasis in the original)

In fact, in light of the Qur’an’s bellicose commands to “slay the unbelievers” (9:5; 2:191), it should be clear that in this case, as in so many others, there is one standard for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. Indeed, the Qur’an stipulates that “it is not for a believer to kill a believer unless it be by mistake” (4:92), but it never makes a similar statement regarding unbelievers.

This led to a predictable double standard in Islamic law. “Killing without right,” according to the Shafi’i school of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence, “is, after unbelief, one of the very worst enormities.” It stipulates that “retaliation is obligatory…against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, no retaliation is permitted in the case of “a Muslim killing a non-Muslim.”
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An Iranian Sufi leader, Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh, who wielded considerable influence in fashioning the jurisprudence of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, wrote
A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
. While arguing for capital punishment if a Muslim is killed, Tabandeh argues against it if the murderer is Muslim and the victim non-Muslim: “Since Islam regards non-Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim…then his punishment must not be the retaliatory death, since the faith and conviction he possesses is loftier than that of the man slain. A fine only may be exacted from him.”
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Universal moral values? Can’t find them.

In his landmark book
The Abolition of Man
, the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) assembled examples of what he called the Tao, or the Natural Law: principles held by people in a wide variety of cultures and civilizations. These principles include “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors”; “Duties to Children and Posterity”; “The Law of Good Faith and Veracity”; “The Law of Magnanimity”; and more. He illustrates the universality of these principles by quotations from sources as diverse as the Old Testament, the New Testament, Virgil’s
Aeneid
, the Bhagavad Gita, Confucius’
Analects
, the writings of Australian aborigines, and many others. Completely missing are any quotations from the Qur’an or other Muslim sources.

This omission may be due to Lewis somehow lacking knowledge of Islam. Yet this is highly unlikely, given when Lewis lived and the role his country, the United Kingdom, played in the Middle East and Asia. Certainly, you would have thought, he could have found illustrations for some of his principles from the Qur’an. The problem for Lewis may have been that Islam simply does not uphold what he calls “The Law of General Beneficence”: One is not to be charitable except to fellow believers. The unpleasant fact is that Islam simply does not teach the Golden Rule.
⁸
Jesus’s dictum that “whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Matthew 7:12) appears in virtually every religious tradition on the planet—except Islam. The Qur’an and Hadith make such a sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that there is no room for any commandment of general beneficence. Unbelievers are to be questioned, suspected, resisted, and fought. That is all. Not tolerated. Never loved.

This is what sets Islam sharply apart from other religious traditions. It is impossible to imagine Sheikh Tabandeh’s unembarrassed justification for punishing those who kill unbelievers less harshly than those who kill believers in any modern religious teaching, other than Islam.

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire.”

Jesus (Matthew 5:21–22)

“Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks; at length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them: thereafter is the time for either generosity or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens…. But those who are slain in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.”

Qur’an 47:4

PC Myth: Islam forbids the killing of the innocent

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, many Muslim spokesmen and Middle East analysts in the West assured us that Islam forbids taking innocent life, and that to the vast majority of Muslims around the world, Osama bin Laden’s murder of three thousand people in the World Trade Center towers was not fulfilling the requirements of Islamic jihad, but a crime against humanity.

Yet Islamic law is not clear-cut in its condemnation of the killing of non-combatants. It prohibits the killing of women and children “unless they are fighting against the Muslims.”
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This has been widely interpreted as allowing civilians to be killed if they are perceived as somehow aiding the war effort. This is one basis for the common assertion that there are no civilians in Israel. Some Muslim leaders have argued for that on the basis that everyone, simply by virtue of being in Israel, is trespassing on Muslim land and is thus at war with Islam. Others, like the internationally famous Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, are more nuanced: “Israeli women are not like women in our society because Israeli women are militarised. Secondly, I consider this type of martyrdom operation as indication of justice of Allah almighty. Allah is just. Through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak what the strong do not possess and that is the ability to turn their bodies into bombs like the Palestinians do.”
¹¹

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

Umdat al-Salik,
translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller into English as
Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law:
Amana Publications, 1994. This is a Shafi’i legal manual intended as a handy guide to Islamic law for lay Muslims. It is endorsed by Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most revered authority: Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy certifies that this book “conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.”
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Chapter 7

HOW ALLAH KILLED SCIENCE

T
he flowering of Islamic culture is the stuff of legend. Muslims invented algebra, the zero, and the astrolabe (an ancient navigational instrument). They blazed new trails in agriculture. They preserved Aristotelian philosophy while Europe blundered through the Dark Ages. In virtually every field, the Islamic empires of bygone days far outstripped the achievements of their non-Muslim contemporaries in Europe and elsewhere.

Or did they?

Well, not quite. Unless copying counts.

Guess what?

• The much-ballyhooed “Golden Age” of Islamic culture was largely inspired by non-Muslims.
  
• Core elements of Islamic belief militated against scientific and cultural advancement.
  
• Only Judaism and Christianity, not Islam, provide a viable basis for scientific inquiry.
  

What about art and music?