Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (12 page)

Overall, Islam fails four major tests that religions should fulfill:

1. Adherence to the religion must be a personal choice.

2. No religion should demand that those who leave it be killed.

3. A religion must never mandate the killing and subjugation of those who choose not to belong.

4. A religion must be in accord with basic human rights.
⁹⁴

American political scientist Mark Alexander writes that “one of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam as just another one of the world’s great religions.” He states that the fundamental nature of Islam differs very little from despicable totalitarian political ideologies such as National Socialism and communism. Alexander lists characteristics that Islam shares with these ideologies: they use political purges to “cleanse” society of what they consider undesirable; they obliterate “the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and public control”; they subdue people and assign them second-class status; they induce “a frame of mind akin to... fanaticism”; they are anti-Semitic; and they are abusive to their opponents, regarding “any concession on their own part as a temporary expedient and on a rival’s part as a sign of weakness.”
⁹⁵

“In my view” says Flemish Professor Urbain Vermeulen, “Islam is primarily a legal system, a law. The prophet Muhammad has come to indicate the difference (
al-furqan
) between what is allowed (
al-halal
) and what is forbidden (
al-haram
)
.
Islam is not concerned primarily with the detailed content of the faith... but with what the believer must and/or may do or not do.”
⁹⁶

Vermeulen, former president of the European Union of Arabists and Islamicists,
⁹⁷
says Islam is only 10 percent religion, while 90 percent deals with how people have to behave in accordance with Islamic law based on divine revelations Muhammad received when he was a political leader in Medina. While there is no problem with setting rules about how people should pray and how they should fast, Vermeulen says, Islam becomes problematic when it tries to impose—as Allah says it must—Islamic holy law on the whole of society, including on non-Muslims.
⁹⁸
He explains, “In Islam you can’t eat
à la carte,
you have to take the whole menu.”
⁹⁹

“Islam classically demands a political realization, and specifically one in which Islam rules over all other religions, ideologies and competing political visions,” writes Australian theologian Mark Durie. He adds, “Islam is not unique in having a political vision or speaking to politics, but it is unique in demanding that it alone must rule the political sphere.”
¹⁰⁰

The influential twentieth-century Islamic spiritual leader Abul Ala Maududi freely acknowledged that “Islam is an ideology” because it demands that the state be regulated according to Islamic law. “The five pillars of Islam,” Maududi said, “cry out for a State to exist in order for their full establishment to be achieved. This is the nature of Islam as it is an ideology.”
¹⁰¹

Using Islamic prayer as an example, Maududi complained that “today, no ruler in the world treats the prayer as an obligation protected by the state’s law and enforced by the judiciary and police. Rather the principles of ‘free-choice’ and ‘freedom of worship’ are preferred over Allah’s command. This only proves that for the prayer to be fully implemented requires the apparatus of the state which creates the atmosphere where prayer is understood to be an obligation and not optional.”
¹⁰²
Indeed, Islam’s most important goal, its ultimate ambition, is the establishment of a worldly state, a global political empire: the Caliphate, to whose authority all of mankind—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—are subjected.

The fact that Islam is more a political ideology than a religion also explains why theology is not popular in Islam. Vermeulen points out that at al-Azhar, the teaching of philosophy is explicitly forbidden because it “leads the faithful astray from the right path of faith.”
¹⁰³
In Islam, theology and philosophy are widely rejected, as are rationalism and the spirit of free inquiry. These only lead to
fitna,
the Arabic word for a “test of faith” or “confusion.” American scholar Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, writes that “the adage ‘better a 100 years of repression than a day of anarchy’ sums up the dread of anarchy (
fitna
) that lies deep in Islamic civilization.”
¹⁰⁴

Though at the time I was not familiar with the concept, I caused a lot of
fitna
on a 1994 visit to Iran. In those days, I was working as a policy advisor to the Dutch Liberal Party, or VVD. The Dutch embassy in Tehran arranged some meetings for me with local politicians, journalists, and academics. One Iranian official asked me to give a 30-minute talk at a Tehran school for diplomats and military cadets. I accepted on condition that I could speak freely. He agreed.

In my speech to those aspiring diplomats and officers, I strongly criticized Iran’s human rights record. I also argued that the Iranian regime’s policies were not in its people’s best interests, which would be better served if Iran would drop its hostility toward the West and toward Israel. My listeners were outraged by my remarks; some stood up, gesticulating and shouting that I was a friend of the Great Satan (the U.S.) and the Little Satan (Israel). It was not a pleasant experience, but I wondered if my audience really believed the ridiculous slogans they yelled at me, or if the students simply thought they’d get good marks from their instructors by confronting a pro-American, Zionist visitor.

The following day, I was surprised to find I had made the front page of
Iran News.
That same morning, I had an appointment with the Director General of the Justice Department. Like the secret services, the army, and the Defense Ministry, the Justice Department is a stronghold of Iranian hardliners. Besides the Director General, three other Iranians attended the meeting. One of them, a short fat man, introduced himself as a judge. He clearly outranked the Director General, because when he screamed at me, the Director General did not interfere even though he was visibly annoyed. It was quite a performance; as I sat on a couch, the judge stood in front of me and shouted at me in English with a high-pitched voice, occasionally spitting. He said that I had insulted Iran and that my comments were intolerable. “If you ever again criticize our human rights record,” he yelled, “I will have you experience the way we deal with human rights! I will make you an Iranian human rights expert!”

In light of the judge’s threats, I returned to my hotel after the meeting and decided to leave the country at once. An embassy car took me to the airport, where embassy officials accompanied me to the gate. There I waited for almost ninety minutes as Iranian armed guards kept a close watch. They asked for my papers, looked at them, talked to each other in Farsi, and handed them back to me. This happened at least five times. Finally, I boarded my Iran Air flight and left for Istanbul, where I had to change planes on my way back to Europe. Upon arriving in Turkey, I literally kissed the ground, as if I were the pope.

Undeterred by that experience, I later made two more visits to Iran.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Yoke of Ishmael

But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.

—Andrew Jackson

I
n 1981, after finishing high school, I decided to leave the Netherlands and discover the world.

I wanted to go to Australia. That country appealed to me. When I was a young boy I had read a book relating how Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, aboard his ship the
Duyfken
(Little Dove), discovered Australia in 1606, and how Dutch explorers Dirk Hartog, Abel Tasman, and Willem de Vlamingh had made further voyages to New Holland (as Australia was called at the time) and Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania).

My plan was to earn enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Australia and then find a job there, perhaps on a ranch in the outback. So I went to work at Kühne, a gherkin factory in Straelen, Germany, which was only three miles from our home in the border town of Venlo. My job was simple; I had to ensure that every jar of gherkins, which are a kind of cucumber, had the right weight by hitting the last gherkin into the jar. The salary was good, but that was the only nice thing about Kühne. The factory was highly regimented, with German supervisors walking around in gray, brown, blue, or white jackets according to their rank. The higher ranks barked orders at those below them, and the lower ranks barked at me. At the end of the summer I quit.

Since I had not yet saved enough money for Australia, I decided to go to Israel, which was the only foreign country apart from Australia where I could legally work. I felt at home as soon as I landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. The country’s green, clean surroundings felt familiar. I was happy and relaxed, enjoying my first voyage on my own. I have since returned to Israel over fifty times, at least once a year, sometimes even three times. It always feels good to be back there.

I remember being surrounded by tourists, machine gun-toting Israeli soldiers, and an old lady with a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm during my first bus trip from the airport to Jerusalem, which in my opinion is the most beautiful city in the world. After six weeks, I ran out of money and went looking for a job. I did all sorts of things. I worked in a bread factory in Jerusalem, in a kibbutz and a moshav, and in a greenhouse where I loaded crates of flowers onto a truck. I also worked as a beekeeper and I worked on the land, harvesting bell peppers, eggplants, honeydew melons, grapes, and onions.

It’s great to be a guest at a kibbutz, but I would never want to live there. I disliked the collectivism, and it didn’t help that the kibbutz did not pay wages, just room and board. I worked for just one week at Yad Mordechai kibbutz near Ashkelon, on the border with Gaza, then stayed for half a year on the Tomer moshav, thirteen miles north of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, on the West Bank. While a kibbutz is a collective agricultural community, the farms in a moshav are individually owned, meaning that I got room and board in Tomer but also earned a few dollars. Working the fields near the Jordan River, I could see the Kingdom of Jordan on the other side. In fact, the Jordanian capital Amman was closer to the moshav than Jerusalem was.

Israeli border patrols often passed by, looking for armed Palestinians who occasionally infiltrated from Jordan. When there were nighttime infiltrations, the Israeli air force lit flares to illuminate the intruders, who were subsequently shot.

For a teenager this was all very exciting. But I did not realize that I was witnessing a skirmish on the frontline of a war that had been raging for fourteen centuries. It is the war between the jihadists of the
Umma
and the valiant defenders of the non-Islamic world. The heroes of this war form a long line, from Charles Martel to the army of Constantinople to John III Sobieski to the vigilant Israeli soldiers patrolling around the Tomer moshav.

After Muhammad’s death in 632, the Muslims chose a leader in accordance with a command issued by their prophet: “
Bani Israel
(the children of Israel) were ruled over by the Prophets. When one Prophet died, another succeeded him; but after me there is no prophet and there will be caliphs and they will be quite large in number.”
¹
Named after the Arabic word
khalifa,
which means “successor,” the Caliph was to replace Muhammad as the
Umma’s
supreme leader, with all the powers of Muhammad but without the attributes of prophecy. The Caliph’s duty was to maintain the realm of Islam and extend its power and territory, but he had no mandate to change the ideology.

The first three Caliphs—Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman—had been companions of Muhammad, early converts to Islam who had accompanied their prophet on his
hijra
from Mecca to Yathrib. The same goes for Ali ibn Talib, the fourth Caliph, who was Muhammad’s paternal cousin and son-in-law. By the time of Ali’s accession in 656, Islam’s warriors had conquered all of north Africa, the Near East, and Persia. However, Ali was murdered in 661 and succeeded as Caliph by the son of Abu Sufyan, the erstwhile Quraishi leader who had initially opposed Muhammad but later surrendered Mecca to the Muslims. Abu Sufyan’s son became the first Caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled the
Umma
until 750.

The murder of Ali and the accession of the Umayyads mark the great schism in Islam between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Venerating Ali as a saint, the Shiites (from the Arabic word
shia,
meaning “faction”) did not recognize the Umayyads. To this day they regard Ali as the first Caliph, disputing the legitimacy of his three predecessors because they had not been close blood relatives of Muhammad.

The Shiites are dominant in Iran and southern Iraq. They represent about 15 percent of all Muslims worldwide, while the Sunnis comprise most of the remaining 85 percent. The Shiites have religious leaders, called ayatollahs, who are a kind of Islamic bishop. There are no ayatollahs in Sunni Islam, which has no religious hierarchy, though the secular authorities in Islamic countries sometimes appoint a
mufti
(“wise civilian”) or
Sheikh
(“wise old man”) as a spokesman for the religious community.

From the Umayyads, the Caliphate descended via the Abbasid and the Fatimid dynasties to the Turkish Ottoman dynasty. The Ottomans ruled over most of the Islamic world, including Arabia, until the end of World War I, when the victorious Allies dismantled their empire. On March 3, 1924, Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, alias “Atatürk” (Father of the Turks), abolished the Caliphate and founded the secular Republic of Turkey. “Islam, this theology of an immoral Arab, is a dead thing,” declared Kemal.
²
He was wrong. Two days later the title of Caliph was claimed by Hussein bin Ali, the Emir of Mecca. In 1917, after the ousting of the Turks, he had become King of Hejaz, the province encompassing Mecca and Medina.

Hussein, a direct descendant of Muhammad, was the hereditary leader of the Banu Hashim, the Hashemite clan of the Meccan Quraishi tribe. By claiming the title of Caliph, he indicated that he aimed to unite all Muslims under his leadership. Hussein’s claim, however, did not make much of an impression. Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, a chieftain from the Arabian city of Riyadh, marched on Mecca, defeated Hussein, and annexed Hejaz to Saudi Arabia. Hussein fled to Palestine, where the British had installed his son Abdullah as emir of Transjordan. Later becoming King of Jordan, the cautious Abdullah wisely decided not to claim the Caliphate. Abdullah’s great-grandson, Abdullah II, is the present Hashemite King of Jordan.

The Saudi kings did not claim to be Caliphs either, but since 1986 they have assumed the title of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” realizing that the role of “Custodian” of Mecca and Medina is a traditional role of the Caliph.

The Saudis adhere to Salafism, a movement of Sunnis who attempt to live as much as possible like Muhammad and his earliest companions did, as described in the Koran and the Hadith. They are also called Wahhabists after Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth-century imam who helped establish the first Saudi state. Salafists/Wahhabists want to re-establish the universal Islamic Caliphate, though obviously not under the control of the rival Hashemites.

The Shiites, too, want to restore the Caliphate. They believe Ali’s rightful line did not end with him but went underground. The Shiites are now awaiting an Islamic messiah, known as the “twelfth Caliph,” or the
Mahdi
.
³
He is also called the “Hidden Imam,” because he is said to have already been with them for centuries but that Allah has kept him hidden.

According to Shia eschatology, the
Mahdi
is a descendant of Muhammad and, together with Iesa (Jesus), he will reinstitute the Caliphate and reign for forty years. He will also wage war against Israel and eliminate the Jews. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was at the pinnacle of his power in the early 1980s, many Shiites thought he was the
Mahdi
who would reunite all Muslims. Even some Sunnis hailed him as such.
⁴

Many Muslims demand a new Caliphate because Muhammad himself ordered them to choose a single leader of the
Umma.
Muhammad was clear that the Muslims cannot have two rulers simultaneously: “When oath of allegiance [sic] has been taken for two caliphs, kill the one for whom the oath was taken later.”
⁵
Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, warned that having two leaders would impede Muslim unity: “The Sunnah [the Way of Islam] would then be abandoned, the bida’a (innovations) would spread and Fitna [confusion, chaos] would grow, and that is in no one’s interest.”
⁶

Many Islamic groups explicitly seek to re-establish the Caliphate. Some of these groups, such as Tablighi Jamaat (the Society for Spreading Faith, founded in 1866 in India),
⁷
Ikhwan al-Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 in Egypt),
⁸
and Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation, founded in 1953 in Jerusalem),
⁹
have branches in Western countries.
¹⁰
These organizations want to replace existing political institutions with a worldwide Caliphate.

The goal of uniting all Muslims worldwide, including those living in Western countries, under one political authority is a radical one. Yet “the caliphate is also esteemed by many ordinary Muslims,” Karl Vick of the
Washington Post
noted. He explained, “Muslims regard themselves as members of the
umma,
or community of believers, that forms the heart of Islam. And as earthly head of that community, the caliph is cherished both as memory and ideal, interviews indicate.”
¹¹

In short, the Caliph is the political and military leader of the
Umma
tasked with leading the “nation of Islam” in conquering the world and establishing a global Islamic state. This can be achieved by converting unbelievers through
dawa
(preaching),
¹²
but that is of secondary importance. Islam realizes that most non-Muslims will not voluntarily accept Islamic rule. Consequently, Islam admonishes pious Muslims to prepare themselves for jihad, the holy war to bring the whole world under Allah’s domination.

That is the crux of Islam: it is an ideology of global war. It advocates the incorporation of the non-Islamic
Dar al-Harb,
or “House of War,” into the
Dar al-Islam,
or “House of Submission,” so that the former will cease to exist and the whole world, united under Muslim rule, will become
Dar al-Salam,
the “House of Peace.” Note that
islam
(submission) and
salam
(peace) have the same verbal root, indicating that peace is only possible after the submission of the enemy to the army of Allah.

“It follows,” wrote the Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri, professor of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, “that the existence of a dar al-harb is ultimately outlawed under the Islamic jural order; that the dar al-Islam is permanently under jihad obligation until the dar al-harb is reduced to non-existence.... The universality of Islam, in all its embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political if not strictly military.”
¹³