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;void(0)) . . . ISLAM see: "TERRORISM" see "RELIGION" for other related links Map: Limits of the Muslim world in 1500 A.D. Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth. --Council on American-Islamic Relations Chairman Omar M. Ahmad, speech [July 1998] - A Sage in Christendom By Fouad Ajami _The Wall Street Journal_ May 1, 2006 Bernard Lewis came to the New World in the nick of time. Fate or, more appropriately, history decreed his American journey and the direction it would take. The historian, who will turn 90 in a handful of days, had come to Princeton from London, at the age of 58, in 1974, to do the work of Orientalism which had gained him scholarly renown. But there would be no academic seclusion for him in the years after. The lands of Islam whose languages and cultures he knew with such intimacy would soon be set ablaze. And his adopted country, the bearer of the imperial mantle shed by his own Britannia, would in time make an honored place for him, and all but anoint him its guide into those burning grounds of the Islamic world. He would become the oracle of this new age of the Americans in the lands of the Arab and Islamic worlds. In the normal course of things, America is not a country given to excessive deference to historians and to the claims of history, for the past is truly a foreign country here. But the past quarter century was no normal time, and Mr. Lewis no typical historian. He knew and worked the archives, it is true; and he mastered the languages of "the East," standing at the peak of his academic guild. But there is more to him than that: He is, through and through, a man of public affairs. He saw the coming of a war, a great civilizational struggle, and was to show no timidity about the facts of this war. "I'll teach you differences," Kent says to Lear. And Mr. Lewis has been teaching us differences. He knew Islam's splendor and its periods of enlightenment; he had celebrated the "dignity and meaning" it gave to "drab impoverished lives." He would not hesitate, then, to look into and to name the darkness and the rage that have overcome so many of its adherents in recent times. * * * We anoint sages when we need them; at times we let them say, on our behalf, the sorts of things we know and intuit but don't say, the sorts of things we glimpse through the darkness but don't fully see. It was thus in the time of the great illusion, in the lost decade of the 1990s, when history had presumably "ended," that Bernard Lewis had come forth to tell us, in a seminal essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990), that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of borders and differences.) It was the time of commerce and globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis. The rage of Islam was no mystery to Mr. Lewis. To no great surprise, it issued out of his respect for the Muslim logic of things. For 14 centuries, he wrote, Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand. The new faith conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa old Christian lands, it should be recalled. It struck into Europe, established dominions in Sicily, Spain, Portugal and in parts of France. Before the tide turned, there had been panic in Europe that Christendom was doomed. In a series of letters written from Constantinople between 1555 and 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, imperial ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent, anguished over Europe's fate; he was sure that the Turks were about to "fly at our throats, supported by the might of the whole East." Europe, he worried, was squandering its wealth, "seeking the Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search of gold." But Busbecq, we know, had it wrong. The threat of Islam was turned back. The wealth brought back from the New World helped turn the terms of trade against Islam. Europe's confidence soared. The great turning point came in 1683, when a Turkish siege of Vienna ended in failure and defeat. With the Turks on the run, the terms of engagement between Europe and Islam were transformed. Russia overthrew the Tatar yoke; there was the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula. Instead of winning every war, Mr. Lewis observes, the Muslims were losing every war. Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia all soon spilled into Islamic lands. "Europe and her daughters" now disposed of the fate of Muslim domains. Americans and Europeans may regard this new arrangement of power as natural. But Mr. Lewis has been relentless in his admonition that Muslims were under no obligation to accept the new order of things. A pain afflicts modern Islam the loss of power. And Mr. Lewis has a keen sense of the Muslim redeemers and would-be avengers who promise to alter Islam's place in the world. This pain, the historian tells us, derives from Islam's early success, from the very triumph of the prophet Muhammad. Moses was not allowed to enter the promised land; he had led his people through wilderness. Jesus had been crucified. But Muhammad had prevailed and had governed. The faith he would bequeath his followers would forever insist on the oneness of religion and politics. Where Christians are enjoined in their scripture to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's," no such demarcation would be drawn in the theory and practice of Islam. It was vintage Lewis reading the sources, in this case a marginal Arabic newspaper published out of London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998 to come across a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden. In one of those essays that reveal the historian's eye for things that matter, "A License to Kill," Mr. Lewis would render into sublime English prose the declaration of bin Laden and would give it its exegesis. The historian might have never heard of bin Laden, but the terrorist from Arabia practically walks out of the pages of Mr. Lewis's own histories. Consider this passage from the Arabian plotter: "Since God laid down the Arabian Peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, eating its fruits and destroying its verdure; and this at a time when the nations contend against Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food. . . . By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions whenever he finds them and whenever he can." Three years later, the furies of bin Laden, and the cadence and content of his language straight out of the annals of older wars of faith would remake our world. There would come Mr. Lewis's way now waves of people willing to believe. They would read into his works the bewildering ways and furies of preachers and plotters and foot soldiers hurling themselves against the order of the West. Timing was cruel and exquisite. The historian's book "What Went Wrong?" was already in galleys by 9/11. He had not written it for the storm. He had all but anticipated what was to come. This diagnosis of Islam's malady would become a best seller. In a different setting, Mr. Lewis had written of history's power. "Make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future." We were witnessing an epic jumbling of past and present. It was no fault of this historian that we had placed our bet on the death of the past. * * * Mr. Lewis has lived a long and engaged life, caught up in the great issues of war and diplomacy and may he be with us as far as the eye can see, as long as life and good health permit. Some of his detractors, with an excessive belief in his talismans, have attributed to the historian all sorts of large historical deeds. For some, he is the godfather of the accommodation of years past between Turkey and Israel. For others, he inspired the Iraq war, transmitting to Vice President Dick Cheney his faith in the Iraq campaign as the spearhead of an effort to reform the Arab world. (It will, of course, help confirm this view that Mr. Cheney is set to speak to a conference today, hosted by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, in honor of Mr. Lewis.) In more recent writings on the historian, George W. Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" in Arab-Muslim lands is laid at Mr. Lewis's doorstep. The president was seen, in one account, with a marked-up copy of a Lewis article. We have come to a great irony: the conservative Orientalist holding out democratic hope for Iraq and its Arab neighbors, while his liberal critics assert the built-in authoritarianism of the Arab political tradition. For Bernard Lewis, there is something now of the closing of a circle. As a young man, he had been on His Majesty's service during the Second World War, working for British intelligence between 1940 and 1945. The young medievalist had been pressed into modern government work, and that experience had given him his taste for contemporary political affairs. This new war is something of a return to his beginnings. For an immensely gregarious man of unfailing wit and personal optimism, a darkness runs through his view of the future of the Western democracies. "In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy." The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which once translated one of Mr. Lewis's books into Arabic, said that his book was "the work of a candid friend or an honest enemy." Either way, the Brotherhood said, it was the work of "someone who disdains falsification." And this, to me and to his countless readers, runs to the core of this historian's craft the aversion to falsification. He has been, always, a man of his own civilization and convictions a fact that accounts for the deep reservoirs of reverence felt for him in many Muslim and Arab lands. In the American academy, he may be swimming against the currents of postmodernism and postcolonial history; he has given up his membership in the Middle East Studies Association, of which he had been a founding member. But countless Arab and Iranian and Turkish readers recognize their tormented civilization in what he has written. They know that he has not come to the material of their history driven by bad faith, or by a desire for dominion. They take him at his word, a man of the Anglo-Saxon world, convinced that the ways of the West today carry with them the hopes of other civilizations. In one of his many splendid books, "Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery," he gave voice to both his fears and to his faith. "It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered." * * * Edward Gibbon once called the historian's "I" the "most disgusting of pronouns." In the main we see very little of that pronoun in Mr. Lewis's work. But in the academy he belongs to the ages. He is the peer, and inheritor, of the great Western scholars of Islam the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), the Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), the Frenchman Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the British Thomas Arnold (1864-1930), and Mr. Lewis's own teacher, Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895-1971). Mr. Lewis took to the East to understand his own world, because, as he tells us, Western civilization "did not spring like Aphrodite from the sea foam." He wanted to get to the mainsprings of Western civilization. I shall set aside the ban on that "most disgusting of pronouns." I came to know Bernard Lewis the year he made his passage to America, on the Princeton campus. I was then at the beginning of my academic career, justifiably obscure and anxious. Mr. Lewis was one of the academic gods. I approached him with awe. But his grace was our bridge. I was of the old world he studied; he was keen to know the name of my ancestral village in southern Lebanon. I told him it was an obscure place without history, and gave him its name. He offered me an invitation to examine his archives, and said that he had the land deeds of that remote hamlet. It has been like this with Bernard Lewis: We travel by the light of his work. He weaves for us a web between past and present, and he can pick out, over distant horizons, storms sure to reach us before long. Mr. Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," forthcoming from the Free Press in July. - The Muslim may show only hostility to infidels when encountered: war against them is a religious duty. Idol-worshippers must always be attacked without more ado, Jews and Christians, however, only after they have ignored a summons, made three times, to accept Islam. After defeat the men are to be killed, women and children to be sold into slavery. Whoever is killed in the Holy War is sure of paradise, as a martyr. In addition, it is permitted to conclude treaties with Jews and Christians, following the example of the Prophet [ ] But the obligation of the Holy War is merely postponed by such contracts, not annulled [ ] --Carl Brockelmann (18681956) _History of the Islamic Peoples_ [1948] - During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?" A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnapping of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles. These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim, colonial empire accumulated by the tsars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions. Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled or misruled half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the non-voting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets. One might have expected that the recently established Organization of the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After a month of negotiation and manipulation, the Organization finally held a meeting in Pakistan to discuss the Afghan question. Two of the Arab states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative of the PLO, a full member of this organization, was present, but abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the Libyan delegate went further, and used this occasion to denounce the U.S. The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread, was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the Soviet invaders. An organization known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began to organize resistance and even guerilla warfare against the Soviet occupiers and their puppets. For this, they were able to attract some support from the Muslim world some grants of money, and growing numbers of volunteers to fight in the Holy War against the infidel conqueror. Notable among these was a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called Osama bin Laden. To accomplish their purpose, they did not disdain to turn to the U.S. for help, which they got. In the Muslim perception there has been, since the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and opportunity to bring salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles there might be in their path. For a long time, the main enemy was seen, with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural allies. Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy. We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility. From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000 all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places. Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary. More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences both for Islam and for America will be deep, wide and lasting. --Bernard Lewis (1916 ) British-born American professor and Middle-Eastern scholar. "Was Osama Right?" _The Wall Street Journal_ [16 May 2007] - - For a millennium, the struggle for mankind's destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the twenty-first century, it may be so again. For, as the Shi'ites humiliate us, their co-religionists are filling up the countries of the West. --Patrick Buchanan (1938 ) American journalist, author, and candidate for U.S. President. In M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 939. Cohan & Major point out: The ultra-conservative Buchanan responds to the hostage crisis and to Moslem immigration into western Europe and North America. Iran subscribed to the Shi'ite wing of Islam. The Iranian Hostage Crisis of 19791981 - - Moslem children at a very early age undergo horrific indoctrination to hate Jews and Christians. We all had to go through Islamic education breeding fear, anger, Jihad and extreme criticism and rivalry of other religions. We were told stories beyond belief about Jews. We were told Jews were hated by God and should be eterminated. ... The mother of a suicide bomber said "Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr's death for the sake of Allah." This woman and many others like her are speaking and living a life that is against the normal impulses of Motherhood. The religious and political indoctrination through tyranny pushed her against herself and her child into insanity. --Nonie Darwish (1949 ) Arab-American writer and public speaker. "Escaping Submission" - Western leaders keep saying after every terrorist attack, 'This is not about Islam.' Sorry, but this is all about Islam. It is about a war within Islam between a jihadist-fascist minority engaged in crimes against humanity in the name of Islam, and a passive Sunni silent majority. --Thomas Friedman (1953 ) American journalist. "Silence and Suicide," _The New York Times_ [12 October 2005] - Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right. But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense. These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion. It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong. The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace. Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals who unceasingly claim to support human rights have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror. Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria which happened in the last few decades or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a faηade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please. The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods. Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession. Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies. Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today. Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand but so far haven't that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates." All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices. Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us. --Tawfik Hamid "The Trouble With Islam" _The Wall Street Journal_ [3 April 2007] Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West. - - The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity. Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval? Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle. It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past. Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show. Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans in fear of radical Islamists would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology? The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation. [...] To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need no so such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us live almost daily from the Middle East. --Victor Davis Hanson (1953 ) American military historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "The Dark Ages Live From the Middle East!" - Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. --Samuel Huntington (19272008) American political scientist. _The Clash of Civilizations_ [1996] The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight. --Jamal Husseini, to the UN Security Council [16 April 1948] In Security Council Official Records, S/Agenda/58, [16 April 1948] p. 19. - Did you ever read the Koran? I recommend it. What the Koran teaches people is aggression; and what we [Christians] teach our people is peace. . . . Christianity aspires to peace and love. Islam is a religion that attacks. If you start teaching aggression to the whole community, you end up pandering to the negative elements in everyone. You know what that leads to: Such people will assault us. --Pope John Paul II [Karol Wojtyla] (19202005) The first non-Italian Pope since the 16th century. (In Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi's _His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time_ [1996].) - The most important battle in the war for Muslim minds during the next decade will be fought not in Palestine or Iraq, but on the outskirts of London, Paris, and other European cities, where Islam is already a growing part of the West. --Gilles Kepel (1955 ) French scholar of radical Islam. Quoted by Ross Douthat in _Atlantic Monthly_ [January/February 2005]. - - The author of the Satanic Verses book [Salman Rushdie], which is against all Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Moslems to execute them wherever they find them. --Ruhollah Khomeini (1900?1989) Iranian Shiite cleric who led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and who was Iran's ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years {EB}. Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of other (countries) so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world ... Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those (who say this) are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured (by the unbelievers)? Islam says: Kill them (the non-Muslims), put them to the sword and scatter (their armies). Does this mean sitting back until (non-Muslims) overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should surrender to the enemy? Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other (Quranic) psalms and Hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. --Ruhollah Khomeini (1900?1989) Iranian Shiite cleric who led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and who was Iran's ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years {EB}. Are we to be trampled under foot by the boots of America simply because we are a weak nation and have no dollars? ... Let the American President know that in the eyes of the Iranian people he is the most repulsive member of the human race today because of the injustice he has imposed on our Moslem nation. Today the Koran has become his enemy, the Iranian nation has become his enemy. Let the American government known that its name has been ruined and disgraced in Iran ... All of our troubles today are caused by America and Israel. Israel itself derives from America; these deputies and ministers that have been imposed upon us derive from America they are all agents of America, for if they were not, they would rise up in protest. --Ruhollah Khomeini (1900?1989) Iranian Shiite cleric who led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and who was Iran's ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years {EB}. Speech [27 October 1964], in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 939. Cohan & Major explain: The Shi'ia fundamentalist Iranian religious leader Khomeini was exiled from Iran after making this inflammatory speech. His return in 1978 sparked the revolution that forced out the Shah in Jan. 1979 and put American interests under immediate threat. - Look at the development of the populations in Europe where Moslems are breeding like Mosquitoes. Every western woman produces on average 1.4 children. Every Moslem woman in the same countries produce 3.5 children. In the year 2050, 30 percent of the population of Europe will be Moslems. --Mullah Krekar, Dagbladet [13 February 2006] - The history of Islam in recent times has been one of conflict with the evil machinations of England. Muslims all over the world should unite for a crusade to defeat the Americans and British who are the enemies of religion. It is very fortunate, indeed, that Java lives under the protection of the Dai Nippon Army. Let us, therefore, set up a Muslim volunteer corps on Java, so that it may become the trailblazer in the effort to destroy America and England. --Letter from Javanese Muslims to the Japanese commander-in-chief, in _Djawa Baroe_ [1 October 1943] - - It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judaeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be pushed into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival. --Bernard Lewis (1916 ) British-born American professor and Middle-Eastern scholar. "The Roots of Muslim Rage" _Atlantic Monthly_ v. 266 [September 1990] p.60. Europe will be part of the Arab west, the Maghreb. Migration and demography indicate this. Europeans marry late and have few or no children. But there's strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England. They marry early and have many children. Following current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century at the latest. --Bernard Lewis (1916 ) British-born American professor and Middle-Eastern scholar. In an interview with _Die Welt_ (German newspaper) "Europa wird am Ende des Jahrhunderts islamisch sein," [28 July 2004]. - - ...I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam? --Irshad Manji _The Trouble With Islam_ - Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert's worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil. --V.S. Naipaul (1932 ) Trinidadian novelist and travel writer. I've been aware of madness in the Islamic world. I've written about it. The madness of people who have fallen behind technically, and who do not have the will to make the intellectual effort to catch up. I was aware of the religious hatred, I was aware of the indifference to life. I was aware of the anti-civilisation aspect of the new fundamentalism. But [until 9-11] I had no idea it had gone so far the madness. The idea of their strength is an illusion. Nothing is coming from within. The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can't do is build a plane. What they can't do is build those towers. I think people have spoken much rubbish about that event. The poor revenging themselves on the rich! It's nothing but an aspect of religious hatred. And that is so hard to deal with, or even contemplate. You can deal with the poor striking out, but you can't deal with the threat of a universal religious war. --V.S. Naipaul (1932 ) Trinidadian novelist and travel writer. - Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst: Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity. --Thomas Paine [spelled Pane prior to 1774] (17371809) English-American writer and political pamphleteer. This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades. --Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League [1948] - Radical Islam, which proposes that shari'a law be instituted in every Islamic state, is gaining ground in many Muslim countries, in which groups of Christians are also present. It is evident that the institution of shari'a would render the lives of Christians rather difficult, and their very existence would be constantly in danger. This is the cause of the mass emigration of Christians from Islamic countries to Western countries: Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. [...] The estimated number of Arab Christians who have emigrated from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel in the last decade hovers around three million, which is from 26.5 to 34.1 percent of the estimated number of Christians currently living in the Middle East. Furthermore, we must not underestimate grave recent actions against Christians in some Muslim-majority countries. In Algeria, the bishop of Orano, P. Claverie (1996), seven Trappist monks from Tibehirini (1999), four White Fathers (1994), and six sisters from various religious congregations have been brutally killed by Islamic fundamentalists, although the murders were condemned by numerous Muslim authorities. In Pakistan, which numbers 3,800,000 Christians among a population of 156,000,000 (96 percent Muslim), on October 28, 2001, some Muslims entered the Church of St. Dominic in Bahawalpur and gunned down 18 Christians. On May 6, 1998, Catholic bishop John Joseph killed himself for protesting against the blasphemy law, which punishes with death anyone who offends Mohammed, even only "by speaking words, or by actions and through allusions, directly or indirectly." For example, by saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, one offends Mohammed, who affirmed that Jesus is not the Son of God, but his "servant." With this kind of law, Christians are in constant danger of death. --Giuseppe De Rosa S.I., Christians in Islamic Countries "La Civiltΰ Cattolica" no. 3680 [18 October 2003] - It's ironic. If you don't say Islam is a religion of peace, they will kill you. ... If France just acquiesces to threats and intimidation while allowing radical Muslims to spread their message unhindered, it bodes ill not only for their society, but for the West. --Robert Spencer, on the death threats that led to the cancellation of the French edition of his book, _Islam Unveiled_, in "France's Rushdie Affair", http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10931 [21 November 2003] The evil enemies entered the city [Jerusalem] with a rage which resembled that of infuriated beasts and irritated dragons. They gnashed their teeth in fury, bellowed like lions, hissed like serpents. They had no pity in their hearts but raced through the city, tearing with their teeth the flesh of the faithful, respecting neither male nor female, young nor old, priest nor monk ... but slaughtering all. --Antiochus Strategus 7th century Byzantine writer _Chronicle_, in M.J. Cohan and John Major {ed.} _History in Quotations_ [2004]. Cohan & Major add: In 614 occurred the great disaster of the fall of Jerusalem to the Persians under the shah, Chosroes II (r.590-628). The churches were destroyed, the relic of the Holy Cross was taken, and the Christian population was killed or enslaved. Holy war (Jihad) is an Arabic virtue, and a divine obligation: the Muslim is always mindful that his religion is a Qur'an and a sword ... the Muslim then is forever a warrior. --l-Azhar magazine, Cairo, the opening article by Ahmad Hasan az-Zayat [August 1959]. - Jihad is the highest expression of Islam. Fighting against unbelievers is an act of worship, one of the most supreme forms of devotion to God. Nothing compares with it in merit or reward. It brings material benefit (i.e. through booty), and spiritual merit. Anyone who takes the path of jihad is guaranteed to be successful: either victory or paradise. Muslim armies in the past spread across the world spreading knowledge of Islam, instilling faith, and crushing the power of evil, so everyone was free to enter Islam. Jihad is essential for the spread of Islam. Fighting against non-Muslims is THE way to call others to God. It was not a contextual response to the needs of the first period of Islam, but is an inseparable part of the invitation to Islam. Jihad is so deeply rooted in the Qur'an and the life and example of Muhammad, that it could not be merely a response to the times in which Muhammad lived. Any position which sets itself up against Islam will, by definition, be violently opposed to Islam, and must be fought against. Evil defined as opposition to Islam is inherently militant. Furthermore, the only response to militant evil is an equally militant good: 'Falsehood fortified must be met with truth ironclad.' When Muslims today define jihad in ways other than described above, this is deception. They are diluting the Qur'an and the Sunnah. They are humiliated by their cowardice. Muslims must realize the true meaning of jihad, and 'feel superior' about their faith. --Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia Against whom should Muslims fight? a) Anyone who stands against the message of Islam and rejects it must become the object of jihad fighting. b) If non-Muslims do not accept the truth of Islam, Muslims are obliged to fight them. c) Whenever the freedom of Muslims to proselytize is inhibited, then the governing authorities must be overthrown. --Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia - - Islam is Allah's religion for all human beings. It should be proclaimed and invite [people] to join it wisely and through appropriate preaching and friendly discussions. However, such methods may encounter resistance and the preachers may be prevented from accomplishing their duty then, Jihad and the use of physical force against the enemies become inevitable --_Islamic Culture_, a Palestinian textbook for 11th grade students and see: The logical reason for executing a person who abandons Islam is the following: There is nothing in Islam that comes in contrast to human nature. Whoever joins Islam after recognizing its truth and after tasting its sweetness and then abandons it is in fact rebelling against truth and logic. Like any other regime, Islam has to protect itself therefore this punishment [execution] awaits the person who abandons it, because he is spreading doubt about Islam Abandoning Islam is a crime that warrants a severe punishment [The phases of punishment are]: Urging [the sinner] to recant immediately Warning him of the implications of his persistence in abandoning Islam, namely warning him that he will be executed. Execute the sinner if he persists in [his decision to] abandon Islam --ibid - Genocide committed in the name of Allah: 3,000,000 Bangladeshi Hindus Killed during the Pakistan-Bangladesh war in 1971. From 1894 to 1896 Abdul Hamid, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, killed 150,000 Armenian Christians. In India, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur along with his disciples was burned to death by the Moghul ruler Aurangzeb in 1675. Another Sikh, Bhai Mati Das was sawn into right and left halves while he was still alive. In July 1974, 4,000 Christians living in Cyprus were killed by Fahri Koroturk, president of Turkey and his Islamic army. From 1843 to 1846 10,000 Assyrian Christians including women and children were massacred by the Muslims. From 1915 to 1918 750,000 Assyrians were killed in the name of Islamic Jihad. In 1933 thousands of Assyrian villagers were murdered by the Iraqi soldiers in Northern Iraq. Since 1990 more than 10,000 Kashmiri Hindus have been brutally murdered by Islamic fundamentalists. Over 280,000 Ugandans killed during the reign of Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979. Over 30,000 Mauritanians have been killed by the Islamic dictators since 1960. In 1980, 20,000 Syrians were murdered under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad, President of Syria. Since 1992 120,000 Algerians have been murdered by the Islamic fundamentalist army. We are the soldiers of God and we crave death - Violence will remain our only path. --statement issued by Islamic Jihad, 1980s - Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it... have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind. --John Wesley (17031791) English preacher and founder, with his brother Charles, of the Methodist movement in the Church of England. "The Doctrine of Original Sin" in _Works_ (1841), ix ----- jihad (noun) 1. A holy war against enemies of Islam, undertaken by Muslims as a duty. 2. Any fanatical crusade for an ideal or principle. | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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