The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (9 page)

Always remember, “peaceful coexistence as equals in a pluralistic society” isn’t one of the choices.

In another hadith repeated several times in the collection of traditions that Muslims consider most reliable, Muhammad says that he has been “commanded to fight against people” until they become Muslim, and that those who resist risk forfeiting their lives and property: “The Prophet spoke clearly about his own responsibility to wage war for the religion he had founded: ‘I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform
As-Salat
(prayers) and give
Zakat
, so if they perform all that, then they save their lives and properties from me except for Islamic laws, and their reckoning (accounts) will be with (done by) Allah.’”
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It’s not just Muhammad’s opinion. It’s the law.

Okay, so Muhammad was commanded to fight against people until they became Muslims or submitted to Islamic law. And the Qur’an teaches warfare. But that doesn’t mean Muslims have taught all this, right? Didn’t we see in chapter two that certain portions of the Bible aren’t taken literally by most Jews and Christians? Isn’t it the same with Islam? Aren’t you just cherry-picking embarrassing verses in an attempt to make Islam look bad?

In a word: no. The unpleasant fact is that violent jihad warfare against unbelievers is not a heretical doctrine held by a tiny minority of extremists, but a constant element of mainstream Islamic theology. Islam is preoccupied with legal questions; indeed, Islamic law contains instructions for the minutest details of individual behavior, as well as regulations on the structuring of government and relations between states. It also contains unmistakable affirmations of the centrality of jihad warfare against unbelievers. This is true of all four principal schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence, the Maliki, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Shafi’i, to which the great majority of Muslims worldwide belong. These schools formulated laws centuries ago regarding the importance of jihad and the ways in which it was to be practiced; however, that doesn’t mean that these laws are ancient history and have been superseded by more recent rulings. It is a commonly accepted principle in the Islamic world that the “gates of ijtihad,” or free inquiry into the Qur’an and Islamic tradition in order to discover Allah’s rulings, have been closed for centuries. In other words, Islamic teaching on principal matters has long been settled and is not to be called into question. (To be sure, there are reform-minded Muslims today who have called for a reopening of the “gates of ijtihad” so that Islam can be reinterpreted, but so far these calls have gone unheeded by the most important and influential authorities in the Islamic world.)

Therefore, barring a general reopening of the “gates of ijtihad,” which seems extremely unlikely, these rulings will remain normative for mainstream Muslims. All four principal Sunni schools agree on the importance of jihad. Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 996), a Maliki jurist, declared:

Jihad is a precept of Divine institution. Its performance by certain individuals may dispense others from it. We Malikis maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (
jizya
), short of which war will be declared against them.”
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Likewise, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a Hanbali jurist who is a favorite of Osama bin Laden and other modern-day jihadists, proclaimed:

Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought. As for those who cannot offer resistance or cannot fight, such as women, children, monks, old people, the blind, handicapped and their likes, they shall not be killed unless they actually fight with words(e.g. by propaganda) and acts (e.g. by spying or otherwise assisting in the warfare).”
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The Hanafi school sounds the same notes:

It is not lawful to make war upon any people who have never before been called to the faith, without previously requiring them to embrace it, because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith, and also because the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war…If the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax, it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.”
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Shafi’i scholar Abu’l Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1058), who echoes Muhammad’s instructions to invite the unbelievers to accept Islam or fight them if they refuse, also agrees:

The mushrikun [infidels] of Dar al-Harb (the arena of battle) are of two types: First, those whom the call of Islam has reached, but they have refused it and have taken up arms. The amir of the army has the option of fighting them…in accordance with what he judges to be in the best interest of the Muslims and most harmful to the mushrikun…Second, those whom the invitation to Islam has not reached, although such persons are few nowadays since Allah has made manifest the call of his Messenger…it is forbidden to…begin an attack before explaining the invitation to Islam to them, informing them of the miracles of the Prophet and making plain the proofs so as to encourage acceptance on their part; if they still refuse to accept after this, war is waged against them and they are treated as those whom the call has reached.
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Proof that none of this is merely of historical interest is another Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. The manual,
‘Umdat al-Salik
(available in English as
Reliance of the Traveller
), was declared to conform “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.”
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After defining the “greater jihad” as “spiritual warfare against the lower self,” it devotes eleven pages to the “lesser jihad.” It defines this jihad as “war against non-Muslims,” noting that the word itself “is etymologically derived from the word
mujahada
, signifying warfare to establish the religion.”
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‘Umdat al-Salik
spells out the nature of this warfare in quite specific terms: “The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” There follows a comment by a Jordanian jurist that corresponds to Muhammad’s instructions to call the unbelievers to Islam before fighting them: The caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.”
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Also, if there is no caliph, Muslims must still wage jihad.
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These laws have been well known for centuries to those who suffered because of them. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a Greek monk and theologian (today revered as a saint by the Orthodox Church) who was imprisoned for a time by the Turks, remarked trenchantly about Muslims: “These infamous people, hated by God and infamous, boast of having got the better of the Romans [i.e., Byzantines] by their love of God…They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil…and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves of them.”
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PC Myth: Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists

This, of course, is the mother of all PC myths about Islam. Yet its persistence and resilience in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, both from Islamic theology and today’s newspapers, is not simply due to naïve multiculturalism and cynical duplicity. Even the Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb, one of the twentieth century’s foremost advocates of violent jihad, taught (without a trace of irony) that Islam is a religion of peace. However, he had a very specific kind of peace in mind: “When Islam strives for peace, its objective is not that superficial peace which requires that only that part of the earth where the followers of Islam are residing remain secure. The peace which Islam desires is that the religion (i.e. the law of the society) be purified for God, that the obedience of all people be for God alone, and that some people should not be lords over others. After the period of the Prophet—peace be on him—only the final stages of the movement of Jihaad are to be followed; the initial or middle stages are not applicable.”
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In other words, Islam is a religion of the peace that will come when everyone is Muslim or at least subject to the Islamic state. And to establish that peace, Muslims must wage war.

Just Like Today: Chechen jihadists cite Islamic law on jihad

I
slamic legal treatises enjoining jihad do not gather dust on the shelf. Jihadists use them to convince recruits that they need to fulfill their responsibility as Muslims by waging war against unbelievers. One example of this came in late 2003 from the Shariah Council of the State Defense Council (Majlis al-Shura) of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. In its underground publication
Jihad Today
, the Sharia Council published an article titled “Jihad and Its Solution Today.” In it three of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence were cited to argue for jihad against the Russians in Chechnya:

First, what is Jihad?

Hanbali School defined it as spending power and energy in the war in the way of Allah by personal participation, property, word, etc.

Maliki School considers it a war (a battle) of a Muslim with a Kafir (an infidel) who has no treaty, to exalt the Word of Allah, or who trespassed on the territories of Muslims.

Hanbalis say that this is a war against Kafirs (the infidels), unlike an armed fight with the Muslims bordering on being rebels, or brigands or robbers for an example. (Mugni-Muhtaj, vol. 6, page 4).
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But what about moderate Muslims?

As I have demonstrated in the first three chapters, Islam is unique among the religions of the world in having a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers. However, many will claim that even by marshalling this evidence, I am trying to make people think that every Muslim is a terrorist, and that your Arab or Pakistani convenience store clerk is secretly plotting the violent downfall of the United States. Some will even say that I am trying to incite violence against that convenience store clerk and other innocents.

This is, of course, arrant nonsense, but it does indicate that some clarification is needed. In the first place, the fact that warfare against unbelievers is not a twisting of Islam, but is repeatedly affirmed in the Qur’an, the Hadith, the example of Muhammad, and the rulings of every school of Islamic jurisprudence, does not make every Muslim a terrorist.

There are several principal reasons for this. One is that because the Qur’an is in difficult, classical Arabic, and must be read and recited during Muslim prayers in that language only, a surprisingly large number of those who identify themselves as Muslims have scant acquaintance with what it actually says. Although the media establishment continues to interchange the words “Muslim” and “Arab,” most Muslims worldwide today are not Arabs. Even modern Arabic, much less classical Qur’anic Arabic, is foreign to them. They often memorize the Qur’an by rote without any clear idea of what it actually says. A Pakistani Muslim once proudly told me that he had memorized large sections of the Qur’an, and planned to buy a translation one day so that he could find out exactly what it was saying. Such instances are common to a degree that may surprise most non-Muslims.

Up until recent times, other cultural factors have also prevented Muslims, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from acting on or even knowing much about Islam’s actual teachings on how to deal with unbelievers. That is changing, however: In those areas and elsewhere around the world, Muslim hardliners, though not always financed by Saudi Arabia, have made deep inroads into peaceful Muslim communities by preaching violent Islam as the “pure Islam” and calling Muslims back to the full observance of their religion.
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