The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (10 page)

This recruitment focuses on the Qur’an and other key Islamic texts. Take, for example, the case of Sahim Alwan, an American citizen and leader of the Yemeni community in Lackawanna, New York, and onetime president of the mosque there. He has the distinction of being the first American to attend an al Qaeda training camp. Why did he go? He was convinced to do so by Kamal Derwish, an al Qaeda recruiter. Alwan explained that Derwish taught him that the Qur’an “says you have to learn how to prepare. Like, you gotta be prepared just in case you do have to go to war. If there is war, then you would have to be called for jihad. And that was the aspect of the camp itself, for going to learn how to use weapons, and stuff like that.”
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A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

An Introduction to Islamic Law
by Joseph Schacht; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. This is a weighty book, as eye-opening as it is scholarly: Schacht is a serious scholar who is refreshingly free of the bias that dominates studies of Islam in universities today. A sampling: “The basis of the Islamic attitude towards unbelievers is the law of war; they must be either converted or subjugated or killed.”

Of course, there are some Muslims who are working to bring about change within Islam, but it is difficult to discern their motives. The prominent American Muslim spokesman Siraj Wahaj, for instance, is often presented as a moderate. In 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress. And why not? Not long after the September 11 attacks, he said just what jittery Americans wanted to hear from Muslims: “I now feel responsible to preach, actually to go on a jihad against extremism.”
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Whether his true thoughts are more extreme remains unclear; after all, he has also warned that the United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.”
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He has lamented that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”
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In the early 1990s, he sponsored talks by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey. Rahman was later convicted for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and Wahaj was designated a “potential unindicted co-conspirator.”
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The fact that someone who would like to see the Constitution replaced has led a prayer for those sworn to uphold it is just a symptom of a larger, ongoing problem: The government and media are eager to find moderate Muslims—and as their desperation has increased, their standards have declined. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to find Muslim leaders who have genuinely renounced violent jihad and any intention, now or in the future, to impose Sharia on non-Muslim countries.

Nonetheless, there are enormous numbers of Muslims in the United States and around the world who want nothing to do with today’s global jihad. While their theological foundation is weak, many are heroically laboring to create a viable moderate Islam that will allow Muslims to coexist peacefully with their non-Muslim neighbors. They are to be commended, but make no mistake: This moderate Islam does not exist to any significant extent in the world today. Where Muslims do coexist peacefully with non-Muslims, as in Central Asia and elsewhere, it is not because the teachings of jihad have been reformed or rejected; they have simply been ignored, and history teaches us that they can be remembered at any time.

Chapter 4

ISLAM: RELIGION OF INTOLERANCE

M
uslim spokesmen in the United States have worked hard to present a vision of Islam as benign, open, and accepting—worlds away from the fanatical intransigence of Osama bin Laden and his ilk. PC watchdogs, both Muslim and non-Muslim, have virtually ruled out any dissent from the idea that Islam is peaceful, benign, and tolerant to a degree that will present no problem whatsoever for Western societies. They depict Islam as akin to Judaism and Christianity and, like them, liable to be “hijacked” (through no fault of its own) by “extremists.” Most Americans today accept this as axiomatic—and many would consider rejecting it an act of “racism,” despite the fact that Islam is not a race and most Muslims in the world today are not members of the ethnic group with which they are most often identified, the Arabs.

Guess what?

• Islamic law mandates second-class status for Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims in Islamic societies.
  
• These laws have never been abrogated or revised by any Islamic authority.
  
• The idea that Jews fared better in Islamic lands than in Christian Europe is false.
  

But there’s just one problem with the common view: It isn’t true. We’ve already seen how thoroughly Islam is a religion of war; it is also, profoundly, a religion of intolerance.

PC Myth: Islam is a tolerant faith

Jews and Christians, goes the PC line, lived in harmony with Muslims during the era of the great Islamic empires of the past. When jihad terrorists bombed Madrid on March 11, 2004, commentators unctuously reminded the world that when Muslims ruled Spain, it was a beacon of tolerance where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in peace and harmony. When jihadists bombed synagogues in Istanbul on November 15, 2003, the commentators intoned that the bombings were particularly heartbreaking in a city that for so long had known tranquility among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

This unquestionable dogma of Islamic tolerance has important political implications. It discourages anti-terrorism investigators in Europe and America from monitoring activity in mosques. It helps perpetuate the mistaken notion that Islamic terrorism comes from political grievances and socioeconomic imbalances. European governments with rapidly growing Muslim populations use it to reassure themselves that in old Al-Andalus, Islamic hegemony wasn’t all that bad. European and American politicians and religious leaders woo the growing Islamic communities in their nations, trying to win their political support and assuming that they will assimilate easily and become peaceful, active participants in the political process. Why not? Islam is tolerant and teaches pluralism. What could be a better foundation for participation in Western democracy?

The idea of a tolerant Islam has even been taken up at the United Nations. The Turkish daily
Zaman
reported in March 2005 that at a UN seminar, “Confronting Islamophobia: Education for Tolerance and Understanding,” “the tolerance that Ottomans showed to people of different religions was held up as an example to be adopted even today” and was lauded as a “social model in which different religions and nations lived under the same roof for hundreds of years.”
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It doesn’t seem to have come up at the UN that when the different religions lived under the same roof, one was the master and the others lived as despised inferiors.

The dhimma

The Qur’an calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book;” Islamic law calls them
dhimmis
, which means “protected” or “guilty” people—the Arabic word means both. They are “protected” because, as People of the Book, they have received genuine revelations (“the Book”) from Allah and thus differ in status from out-and-out pagans and idolaters like Hindus and Buddhists. (Historically, the latter two groups have been treated even worse by Islamic conquerors, although as a practical matter their Muslim masters ultimately awarded them dhimmi status.) Jews and Christians are “guilty” because they have not only rejected Muhammad as a prophet, but have also distorted the legitimate revelations they received from Allah. Because of that guilt, Islamic law dictates that Jews and Christians may live in Islamic states, but not as equals with Muslims. One Muslim jurist explained that the caliph must “make jihad against those who resist Islam after having been called to it until they submit or accept to live as a protected dhimmi-community—so that Allah’s rights, may He be exalted, ‘be made uppermost above all [other] religion’ (Qur’an 9:33).”
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While Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims are allowed to practice their religions, they must do so under severely restrictive conditions that remind them of their second-class status at every turn.

This lower status was first articulated by Umar ibn al-Khattab, who was caliph from 634 to 644. According to the Qur’anic commentary of Ibn Kathir, the Christians making this pact with Umar pledged:

We made a condition on ourselves that we will neither erect in our areas a monastery, church, or a sanctuary for a monk, nor restore any place of worship that needs restoration nor use any of them for the purpose of enmity against Muslims.
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This, of course, allowed Islamic authorities to seize churches whenever they wanted. Since testimony of Christians was discounted and disallowed in many cases, it was often enough for a Muslim simply to charge that a church was being used to foment “enmity against Muslims” and then seize it.

The Christians’ agreement with the caliph Umar continues: “We will not prevent any Muslim from resting in our churches whether they come by day or night…. Those Muslims who come as guests will enjoy boarding and food for three days.”
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The agreement also mandates a number of humiliating regulations to make sure that the dhimmis “feel themselves subdued” in accordance with Qur’an 9:29. The Christians promised:

We will not…prevent any of our fellows from embracing Islam, if they choose to do so. We will respect Muslims, move from the places we sit in if they choose to sit in them. We will not imitate their clothing, caps, turbans, sandals, hairstyles, speech, nicknames and title names, or ride on saddles, hang swords on the shoulders, collect weapons of any kind or carry these weapons…. We will not encrypt our stamps in Arabic, or sell liquor. We will have the front of our hair cut, wear our customary clothes wherever we are, wear belts around our waist, refrain from erecting crosses on the outside of our churches and demonstrating them and our books in public in Muslim fairways and markets. We will not sound the bells in our churches, except discreetly, or raise our voices while reciting our holy books inside our churches in the presence of Muslims.

After these and other rules are fully laid out, the agreement concludes: “These are the conditions that we set against ourselves and followers of our religion in return for safety and protection. If we break any of these promises that we set for your benefit against ourselves, then our
Dhimmah
(promise of protection) is broken and you are allowed to do with us what you are allowed of people of defiance and rebellion.”
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All this is still part of the Sharia today. “The subject peoples,” according to a contemporary manual of Islamic law, must “pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)” and “are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with ‘as-Salamu ‘alaykum’ [the traditional Muslim greeting “Peace be with you”]; must keep to the side of the street; may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are forbidden to openly display wine or pork…recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals or feast days; and are forbidden to build new churches.”
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If they violate these terms, the law further stipulates that they can be killed or sold into slavery at the discretion of the Muslim leader.

Dhimmis were also strictly forbidden, on pain of death, to proselytize among Muslims—a prohibition accompanied by a similar death sentence for Muslims who left Islam. Both of these, along with the other provisions of dhimmitude, remain part of Islamic law today.

These laws largely governed the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Islamic states for centuries, until Western pressure brought to bear on the weakened Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century led to the emancipation of the dhimmis. Here and there they were relaxed or ignored for various periods, but they always remained on the books, ready to be enforced again by any ruler with the will to do so.

And from the charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, comes a keen awareness of how to manipulate the myth of Islamic tolerance: “Under the shadow of Islam, it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security. Safety and security can only prevail under the shadow of Islam, and recent and ancient history is the best witness to that effect…. Islam accords his rights to everyone who has rights and averts aggression against the rights of others.”
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Hamas doesn’t exactly spell out the deprivation of rights entailed by living “under the shadow of Islam,” however.