Islam and Terrorism (8 page)

Remember, Muslims declared jihad worldwide, but every Muslim is using a different strategy. One is using guns and bombs, and another is using words and lies to increase the numbers of Muslims worldwide. The method makes no difference; they are both sincere Muslims, and
it is one jihad according to the Quran—jihad against the enemies of Allah who resist the spread of Islam worldwide.

What amazes me is the audacity of these people. They hung the American flag over their centers, schools, mosques, and Islamic institutes. They posted signs saying, “God Bless America” or “United We Stand.” In the meantime their fellow Muslims in the Middle East were burning American flags and posting signs supporting bin Laden and his act of terrorism on America.

In all fairness some “wishful thinking” Muslims really did support America at this time. But other Muslims were doing what was simply expedient at the moment. They are a good example of Islamic politics in non-Islamic lands. These Muslims will lie and say things they do not believe at any moment as long as doing so would help Islam. Their loyalty is to Islam, not to the nation where they are living.

N
ATIONAL
L
OYALTY

I know that many people will disagree with me by saying, “There are many American and European Muslims who are loyal and sincere to their countries. After all, these countries have been their homes for many years.” I would like to address this comment by pointing out that Islam does not believe in the national organization of non-Islamic peoples or any countries that do not follow Islamic law.

In Islamic law there are only two types of nations—a nation that is of the house of Islam or a nation that is of the house of war. We all know that America and most of the European countries are not of “the house of Islam,” meaning they do not live by the Islamic law; therefore, they are the “house of war.”

Any good Muslim who is living according to Allah’s law
and the Quran will never choose loyalty to their citizenship over loyalty to Islam. This is not personal opinion; this is 100 percent Islamic law.

A good example of this is the way Egyptians, Algerians, Sudanese, Saudis, and many others deny their citizenship and loyalty to their countries when they became members of one of the fundamentalist movements. These movements teach their members, “Islam is your flesh and blood.”

All of the fundamentalist movements in the Arabic countries prohibit their members from serving in the military or defending their countries. They believe they should not support apostate and infidel countries that do not apply Islamic law to the whole country.

Shokri Moustafa, a person you will learn much more about later in the book, took this principle to an even higher level. His movement prohibited its members from working in any government job.

Muslims who have any sense of loyalty to Islam will have a hard time justifying loyalty to their country if that country is not Islamic. The true Muslim believes that the whole world is his home and that he is commanded to submit the world to the authority of Islam. A sincere believer of Islam will not die for a patch of dirt called the homeland, but he is willing to die for Islam and Islamic holy places.

When you see Palestinians fighting and dying, understand that non-Muslims or shallow Muslim Palestinians are fighting for the land, but true Muslim Palestinians (Hamas) are passionate because they are fighting the enemies of Allah and defending an Islamic holy place, i.e., the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Muslims believe that the Dome of the Rock is the third most important holy place in Islam.
⁴
The prophet
Muhammad told his followers that Allah miraculously transported him from the Arabian Desert to this place in Jerusalem and anointed him as imam to lead prayers for all of Allah’s missionaries and prophets who came from heaven that day. After the prayer the prophet Muhammad said he went to heaven to meet with Allah. (This is known as the Miraculous Night Journey [
Al-Asrah waal MahRag
].)

Groups of Palestinians are fighting the same enemy for different reasons. One group is fighting for some land that they can call home and establish a government—perhaps a communist government, according to George Habash’s leadership. Habash has a Christian name, but he is not Christian; it’s just his name. Another group wants the land so it can establish a socialist government according to the mind-set of the former renovation engineer and businessman Yasser Arafat.

The final group is the die-hard Muslim Palestinians who look at the other two groups as betrayers who abuse the name of Palestinians to gain power. This group is the Hamas movement, founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

T
ELLING
T
RUE
F
ROM
F
ALSE

At this point I think you will be able to do a much better job of telling true from false when you see what amounts to Islamic propaganda in the media.

Chapter 6

HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER ISLAM

Balancing Respect With Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion

M
USLIM FUNDAMENTALISTS ARE
in constant battle with writers, authors, and other media figures who express their opinions openly in the free world. Many people have sacrificed their lives because they had a different opinion than that of Muslim fundamentalists.

For example, on January 7, 2015, radical Muslims attacked the French satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
and killed twelve editors of that magazine for their satirical depictions of prophet Muhammad.

I strongly believe that the free world must not practice self-censorship in the face of threats and intimidation from any group in the world, including Muslims. Free people must not limit human rights because of those who want to impose their understanding of Islamic law upon the whole world. Freedom of speech is worthless if it is not exercised. But I believe that we should have enough respect not to hurt religious feelings in a reckless way. What the West views as freedom of speech, the Islamic world perceives as an intentional insult to their beliefs, and usually even the most moderate Muslims will react in an emotional way to this.

I was very sad when I saw the reaction of the French president, the millions of people in France, and the key leaders from all over the world, who joined the demonstrations to support the actions of the magazine. I did
not hear any of them apologize for the violation of the religious feelings of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. All you would hear was the defense of the freedom of speech, without even considering the freedom of religion.

When
Charlie Hebdo
continued publishing satirical depictions of Muhammad, the Muslim world was outraged, and as a reaction forty-five churches were set on fire in Niger in a weekend of protests. This kind of reaction from the Muslim world was predictable and could have been prevented.

Please note that the real issue is not about making an image of Muhammad; it is about insulting Muhammad. The Muslim world was not necessarily protesting the image; it was protesting the insult. In fact, I used an artist’s drawing of Muhammad on the cover of my book titled
Coffee With the Prophet
. The image was a professional and accurate depiction of what Muhammad looked like according to Muslim sources. This image is not insulting or offensive, and it did not cause any more reaction in the Muslim world than the many other historical drawings of Muhammad that are reproduced in textbooks and on the Internet every day.

M
USLIMS
T
AKING
A
WAY
F
REEDOM OF
S
PEECH
F
ROM
O
THER
M
USLIMS

Even Muslims themselves are not safe from being judged and punished for expressing ideas that go against the opinions of radicals. A good example of this is Dr. Naguib Mahfouz, who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature. Dr. Mahfouz is an Egyptian Muslim, yet radical Muslims tried to murder him in 1994. He was on his way home from work at a university when several men attacked him,
stabbing him with knives. They left him in a puddle of blood on one of Cairo’s streets. Dr. Mahfouz was eighty-three years old when this happened; I am glad he survived.
¹

(Image Courtesy of Sinai Publishing,Cairo, Egypt)

Dr. Farag Foda, shot to death in 1992 by Islamic fundamentalists for writing books exposing their activity.

Another victim of one of the Islamic movements was Dr. Farag Foda, a moderate Muslim who cared about the country’s political survival. He decided to fight the Islamic movement through his writing. He warned Egypt, the Arabic countries, and the world about the dangers of fundamentalist Islam. He wrote:

What kind of time in our history is this? This is the time when if someone asks a question the other party answers him with bullets. Many times I asked myself, What is this that we are going through in our Egyptian history? Are we ever going to snap out of it? Is this the time that if you have an opinion, or something to say, you had better get to know how to use a machine gun first or get your black belt in the martial arts? If they think that this will make us back off or stop, they are terribly mistaken. If they think their actions will scare us, they are wrong! If they think for a second that we will rest our pens from writing or our mouths from voicing opinions, they are expecting the impossible. This is not about courage; it’s about logic.
²

Dr. Foda paid the ultimate price for his opinion. He was shot to death in 1992 by the groups he warned against, but his legacy has been a great inspiration to many Egyptian writers.

T
HE
D
IFFERENCE
B
ETWEEN A
M
USLIM
C
ONVERT AND A
C
HRISTIAN
C
ONVERT

During a visit to Washington, DC, in the winter of 2000, I heard that the Islamic Society at Georgetown University was hosting a rally for American students. The speaker at the rally was an ex-Baptist minister from Texas who had converted from Christianity to Islam. I had never heard of anything like this before.

I immediately started thinking, “What in the world could happen to an American Baptist pastor that would cause him to make a decision like that?”

I took a friend, and we went to this seminar. We sat in the middle of the room, which was packed with about three hundred students. A little less than half of the students were devout Muslims from overseas. The young men had long beards, and the girls wore the
hijab
.

When I laid my eyes on this man as he entered the room, I couldn’t believe what I saw. He was wearing the traditional clothing that Islamic fanatics wear in Egypt. He had the long, white robe and the long, thick beard—all of it. Finally they introduced him as the ex-Christian pastor. They called him Sheikh Yusef.

I listened to this man for almost an hour while he shared a very dry message that showed his tremendous ignorance of Islam and Islamic history. You could almost see it in his face that he was completely lost. He tried hard to convince a young, eager crowd that Islam is the answer to our
world’s problems today. He delivered an absolutely foreign picture, far from the truth of Islam, the same picture that the Islamic group deceived him with, the same picture that the Islamic organizations use to bait Westerners.

After he finished his talk, he gave an opportunity for comments and questions. Mine was the first hand up. After he gave me permission to speak, I started asking him questions.

“How long has it been since you converted to Islam?”

He replied, “Eight years.”

“Good,” I said. “Have you faced any type of persecution here in the US since you made this decision?”