The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (30 page)

Christianity is at the heart of Western civilization. It has formed who we are as Americans, and influenced Europeans and others around the globe for even longer. Like it or not, it has even formed those who reject the Christian faith. Christianity also shares key moral principles with Judaism—principles that pervade the West but do
not
universally carry over into Islam. These principles are the fountain from which modern ethicists have drawn the concept of universal human rights—the foundation of Western secular culture.

Yeagley observes, “The Cheyenne people have a saying: A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground…. When Rachel denounced her people, she did it with the serene self-confidence of a High Priestess reciting a liturgy. She said it without fear of criticism or censure. And she received none. The other students listened in silence, their eyes moving timidly back and forth between me and Rachel, as if unsure which of us constituted a higher authority…. Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?”

Why indeed? The ultimate end result, as Yeagley points out, is defeat: People who are ashamed of their own culture will not defend it.

That’s why telling the truth about the Crusades, Christianity, and the West is not a matter of cultural cheerleading or religious apologetics. It’s an essential element of the defense of the West against today’s global jihad.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.; Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005. Here is a book that everyone in the Western world—non-Catholic as well as Catholic—should read. It vividly illustrates how many features of Western life and thought originated in the Catholic Church, and puts to rest the PC notion that all religious traditions are morally equivalent.

Part III

TODAY’S JIHAD

Chapter 15

THE JIHAD CONTINUES

H
ere’s a test. Which of these two statements is from the eleventh century, and which from the twenty-first?

“O God, raise the banner of Islam and its helper and refute polytheism by wounding its back and cutting its ropes. Help those who fight for jihad for your sake and who in obedience to you have sacrificed themselves and sold their souls to you…. Because they persist in going astray, may the eyeball of the proponents of polytheism become blind to the paths of righteousness.”
¹

“We ask Allah to turn this Ramadan into a month of glory, victory, and might, to hoist high in [this month] the banner of religion, to strengthen Islam and the Muslims, to humiliate polytheism and polytheists, to wave the banner of monotheism, to firmly plant the banner of
Jihad,
and to smite the perverts and the obstinate.”
²

Islamic scholar Ibn al-Mawsilaya wrote the first paragraph late in the eleventh century. The al Qaeda Sheikh Aamer bin Abdallah al-Aamer wrote the second in 2004.

Guess what?

• Islam has not reformed or changed its traditional doctrines of jihad warfare.
  
• Modern-day jihad groups are working to restore the caliphate as a means to further their war with the West.
  
• These groups despise democracy as a Western import at odds with the caliphate and sharia.
  

If you failed the test, don’t worry. After all, the two paragraphs are extremely similar to each other—and that is no accident. Modern-day jihad movements consciously pattern themselves after the jihad warriors of old, and frequently invoke their memories. “During the month of Ramadan,” Dr. Fuad Mukheimar, secretary-general of the Egyptian Sharia Association, wrote in 2001, “a great Muslim victory was won over the Crusaders under the leadership of [Salah Al-Din] [Saladin] Al-Ayubi. His advisors counseled him to rest from the Jihad during the month of fasting, but Saladin insisted on continuing the Jihad during Ramadan because he knew…that fasting helps to [achieve] victory, because during Ramadan the Muslims overcome themselves through fasting, and thus their victory over their enemies is certain. Fasting gives them determination, heroism, and will-power…Saladin replied to his advisors, ‘Life is short.’ Allah learned of [Saladin’s] loyalty and the loyalty of his soldiers, and gave them a decisive victory. They took the fortress of Safed, the greatest of the Crusader fortresses, in the middle of the month of fasting. [Saladin] conquered the lands of Al-Sham [Greater Syria] and purified Jerusalem of the tyranny and defilement of the Crusaders.”
³
Mukheimar also referred to the Battle of Badr and other historic battles to try to rouse modern-day Muslims to imitate Muhammad and Saladin and wage jihad for themselves.

This is a principal reason why jihad terrorists routinely refer to American troops as “Crusaders.” In their view, the War on Terror, which began for Americans on September 11, 2001, is only the latest installment of a conflict that has continued for over a thousand years.

What are they fighting for?

This conflict, in their view, is destined to end with the hegemony of Islam. In the words of Osama bin Laden, jihad warriors the world over are fighting, “so that Allah’s Word and religion reign supreme.”
⁴
This involves the re-establishment of full Islamic law in Muslim countries and above all, the restoration of the caliphate.

As we have seen, the caliph was (in Sunni Islam) the successor to Muhammad and the leader of the Muslim community; Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkish government abolished the caliphate in 1924. Islamic theology makes no distinction between the sacred and the secular, and for Sunni Muslims the caliph was something like a combined generalissimo and pope, although he never wielded anything comparable to the pope’s spiritual authority. Michelangelo’s patron, Pope Julius II, earned the dubious honor of going down in history as the “warrior pope;” by contrast, the overwhelming majority of the Prophet’s successors were warrior caliphs.

Many modern jihad groups date all the woes of the Islamic world to the loss of Muslim unity that resulted, in their view, from the loss of the caliphate.

That was when our heartaches began

This exhortation from the international Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir indicates the depth of anguish jihadists feel at the loss of the caliphate, which they attribute to Kemal Ataturk, an “English agent”:

It was a day like this 79 years ago, and more specifically on the 3rd of March 1924 that the kuffar [unbelievers] were able to reap the fruits of their tireless efforts of plotting and planning, which they had expended for more than a hundred years. This happened when the criminal English agent, Mustafa Kemal (so-called Ataturk, the ‘Father of the Turks’!) announced that the Grand National Assembly had agreed to destroy the Khilafah [caliphate]; and announced the establishment of a secular, irreligious, Turkish republic after washing his hands from responsibility of the remaining Islamic lands which the kuffar occupied in the First World War.

Since that day the Islamic ummah has lived a life full of calamities; she was broken up into small mini states controlled by the enemies of Islam in every aspect. The Muslims were oppressed and became the object of the kuffar’s derision in Kashmir, Philippines, Thailand, Chechnya, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Palestine and other lands belonging to the Muslims until what happened to the Muslims became the subject of studies and statistics. Thousands were killed, millions dispossessed and the honour of tens of thousands has been violated amongst other calamities. Anyone who reads the papers or hears the news always finds the Muslims under a state of oppression, humiliation and killings; and this is prevalent in every report.

Indeed, the ummah [global Muslim community] is not in a situation as she used to be under the banner of Islam, when she used to be ruled by the Khilafah state that united the Muslims. She was not divided as we see today by borders drawn up by the kafir colonialists or dispersed by oppressive laws of residence. The Muslim used to travel from one corner of the Muslim lands to another without anyone asking him who he was or describing him as a foreigner. When the Khilafah existed the Muslims witnessed the power of Islam through the power of the Khilafah. They led the word under the banner of the Khilafah that applied Islam and conveyed it as a message, guidance and light to the world. However, where is the Khilafah? It existed in the past, but it was destroyed and suspended as a system….

Those were critical nights in which the political entity of the Muslims was destroyed. At that time the Islamic ummah was supposed to raise its sword in the face of this treacherous agent who changed Dar al-Islam into Dar al-Kufr and realized for the kuffar a dream they had wished for a long time. However, the Islamic ummah was overwhelmed, in the worst state of decline. So the crime took place and the kuffar tightened their grasp over the Islamic lands and tore it up into pieces. They divided the one ummah into nationalities, ethnicities and tribes; they tore up the single country into homelands and regions in which they established borders and barriers. In place of a single Khilafah state they established cartoon states and installed rulers as agents to carry out the orders of their kuffar masters. They abolished the Islamic Sharee’ah from the sphere of ruling, economy, international relations, domestic transactions and the judiciary. They separated the deen from the state and confined the Islamic deen to certain rituals, like those in Christianity. They worked to destroy the Islamic culture and uproot the Islamic thoughts to plant in their place western thoughts and culture.

Only one thing will fix this problem

A new caliph and restored Islamic unity are the only things that can repair these wrongs. Allah willed, says the Hizb ut-Tahrir document, “that the Islamic ummah should reawaken again and revive from her decline and realise that her rescue is only by the re-establishment of the Khilafah.”
⁵

When jihad fighters streamed into Iraq in 2003, eager for a showdown with American troops, Mullah Mustapha Kreikar, leader of the Muslim terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, placed their struggle in a larger religious context (from his safe haven in Norway): “The resistance is not only a reaction to the American invasion, it is part of the continuous Islamic struggle since the collapse of the caliphate. All Islamic struggles since then are part of one organized effort to bring back the caliphate.”
⁶

The intellectual father of all modern-day Muslim radicals, the Egyptian Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), decried the end of the caliphate because it separated “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.” Al-Banna characterized the end of the caliphate as part of a larger “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all [the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation, power and means of propaganda.”
⁷
Al-Banna founded the first modern jihad terror organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

John Wesley on Islam: