Textbook Jihad in Egypt (Beheading lessons for Muslim youth)

A "mock beheading" video located at radical Sheikh Abu Hamza's website (www.shareeah.org ), which featured three young Muslim boys who pretended to behead a fourth 1, has elicited the appropriate public revulsion. But little fanfare, let alone outrage, has accompanied the release of a detailed study of Egyptian children's textbooks, whose inculcation of anti-infidel hatred is potentially far more damaging. 2 For example, explicit sanctioning for jihad-related beheadings is provided in a seemingly pedestrian manner,

"Studies in Theology: Tradition and Morals, Grade 11, (2001) pp. 291-92 ...This noble [Qur'anic] Surah [Surat Muhammad]... deals with questions of which the most important are as follows: 'Encouraging the faithful to perform jihad in God's cause, to behead the infidels, take them prisoner, break their power, and make their souls humble - all that in a style which contains the highest examples of urging to fight. You see that in His words: "When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Then grant them their freedom or take a ransom from them, until war shall lay down its burdens.'"

"Commentary on the Surahs of Muhammad, Al-Fath, Al-Hujurat and Qaf, Grade 11, (2002) p. 9 …When you meet them in order to fight [them], do not be seized by compassion [towards them] but strike the[ir] necks powerfully.... Striking the neck means fighting, because killing a person is often done by striking off his head. Thus, it has become an expression for killing even if the fighter strikes him elsewhere. This expression contains a harshness and emphasis that are not found in the word "kill", because it describes killing in the ugliest manner, i.e., cutting the neck and making the organ - the head of the body - fly off [the body].' "

Although chilling to our modern sensibilities, particularly when being taught to children, these are merely classical interpretations of the rules for jihad war, based on over a millennium of Muslim theology and jurisprudence.3 And the context of these teachings is unambiguous, as the translator makes clear:

"[the] concept of jihad is interpreted in the Egyptian school curriculum almost exclusively as a military endeavor… it is war against God's enemies, i.e., the infidels… it is war against the homeland's enemies and a means to strengthening the Muslim states in the world. In both cases, jihad is encouraged, and those who refrain from participating in it are denounced."

Teaching Egyptian school children anti-infidel jihad hatred is clearly a long, ongoing , and ignoble tradition even within the modern era. As the scholar E. W. Lane reported after several years of residence in both Cairo and Luxor (initially in 1825-1828, then in 1833-1835),

"I am credibly informed that children in Egypt are often taught at school, a regular set of curses to denounce upon the persons and property of Christians, Jews, and all other unbelievers in the religion of Mohammad.”4

Lane translated the prayer below from a contemporary 19th century text Arabic text, containing a typical curse on non-Muslims, recited daily by Muslim schoolchildren:

“I seek refuge with God from Satan the accursed. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O God, aid El-Islam, and exalt the word of truth, and the faith, by the preservation of thy servant and the son of thy servant, the Sultan of the two continents (Europe and Asia), and the Khakan (Emperor or monarch) of the two seas [the Mediterranean and Black Seas], the Sultan, son of the Sultan (Mahmood) Khan (the reigning Sultan when this prayer was composed). O God, assist him, and assist his armies, and all the forces of the Muslims: O Lord of the beings of the whole world. O God, destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion. O God, make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families, and their households and their women and their children and their relations by marriage and their brothers and their friends and their possessions and their race and their wealth and their lands as booty to the Muslims: O Lord of the beings of the whole world.”(Emphasis added.) 5

The seminal modern scholar of Islamic civilization, S.D. Goitein, warned more than a century later, in 1949, speaking of the Arab world generally, in particular Egypt:

“Islamic fanaticism…is now openly encouraged…writers whose altogether Western style (was mentioned earlier) have been vying with each other for some time in compiling books on the heroes and virtues of Islam…What has now become possible in educated circles may be gathered from the following quotation from an issue of the ‘New East’, an Arab monthly periodical describing itself as the ‘organ of the academic youth of the East’[emphasis added]:

‘Let us fight fanatically for our religion; let us love a man-because he is a Moslem; let us honor a man- because he is a Moslem; let us prefer him to anyone else-because he is a Moslem; and never let us make friends with unbelievers, because they have nothing but evil for us.’6

And a decade later, in 1958, Lebanese Law Professor Antoine Fattal, perhaps the greatest scholar of the legal condition of non-Muslims living under the Shari'a, lamented,

"No social relationship, no fellowship is possible between Muslims and dhimmis...Even today, the study of the jihad is part of the curriculum of all the Islamic institutes. In the universities of Al-Azhar, Nagaf, and Zaitoune, students are still taught that the holy war is a binding prescriptive decree, pronounced against the Infidels, which will only be revoked with the end of the world..." [Emphasis added]

Sadly, almost fifty years after Fattal made his observations, the sacralized hatred of jihad is still being inculcated as part of the formal education of Muslim youth in Egypt, the most populous Arab country, and throughout the Arab Muslim, and larger non-Arab Muslim world. We in the West must press our political and religious leaders to demand that such bellicose, hate-mongering "educational" practices be abolished in Islamic nations, under threat of severe, broad ranging economic sanctions.

1 Muslim kids stage mock beheading http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39145

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6929 Bostom, Andrew. The Sacred Muslim Practice of Beheading. FrontPage Magazine.com, May 13, 2004.

4 Lane, E.W. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, New York, 1973, p. 276.

6 Goitein, S.D. Commentary, January 1949, “Cross-Currents in Arab National Feeling”, p. 161.

7 Fattal, Antoine. Let Statut Legal de Musulmans en Pays' d'Islam, Beirut, 1958; pp. 369, 372

Islam Faces a New Era
by Munawar A. Anees
1999, Civilization Magazine
While it was widely noted among those who have any interaction whatever with the Christian world, the recent and much-noted millennial milestone in the calendar devised by Pope Gregory VIII stirred little or no passion in the Muslim world. Given the many systems of reckoning the days --Hebrew, Ethiopian, Persian, Coptic, Baha'i, Chinese, Hindu--this sense of being emotionally out of sync with "official" time is by no means uniquely felt by Muslims. Yet the Christian calendar largely governs how we, as a global civilization, view time, technology, and progress.

The onward march of the calendar furthers the "ascent of man" (to borrow the title of Jacob Bronowski's chef d'oeuvre about Western civilization): Slowly but steadily, the human condition leans toward an unwavering commitment to human dignity, liberty, and justice (constructs that are often but wrongly considered to be uniquely Western).

While this great drama is playing out in the cosmic theater, where are the Muslims? Are they actors or mere spectators? Does the possession of a different calendar grant them immunity from the march of civilization?

The Crescent and the Cross

From Dante's Divine Comedy to Samuel Huntington's Islamophobic "clash of civilizations," history is replete with strained relations between Islam and the West. The paradox of the Islam-West nexus, however, is the West's ingenuity in starting the engine of the Renaissance by imbibing the greater part of Greece's intellectual heritage via Latin translations from Arabic texts.

Yet it is pointless for Muslims to write endless critiques of Orientalism without producing an equivalent set of ideas. While the West is armed to the teeth with tools for comprehending the Muslim ethos, where is the Muslim scholarship that can lay claim to a comprehensive perception of Western ideological shifts? Where is the Muslim critique of modernity, postmodernism, structuralism, globalization?

As colonialism continued its decline in the 20th century, the Algerian savant Malek Bennabi and the Indian philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal ignited a passionate quest for Muslim self-identity; Iqbal is today considered to be the spiritual founder of Pakistan. But the legacy of their intellectual fervor has failed to help Muslims form anything like a cohesive polity.

Some observers see signs of a new coherence in the ongoing work on the "Islamization" of knowledge and in a recent venture to develop an Islamic take on science. But on closer examination, these attempts look cliquish and half-baked.

Today's Muslim world is also being betrayed by a similar intellectual passivity regarding the Internet, the dynamo of the next Renaissance. While the French fight an uphill battle to prevent English from laying siege to the French-speaking world via the Net, none of the major Muslim languages plays a major role in this huge knowledge machine. Equally conspicuous is the absence of Muslim countries from one of history's greatest scientific endeavors, the Human Genome Project.

The Challenge of Modernity

Islam is not intrinsically opposed to ideals of justice, equality, and human dignity. It is folly to assume that technological sophistication or economic prosperity need weaken, or run counter to, religious belief.

Meanwhile, at some distance from the ivory tower lies the grim reality of much of the Muslim world: poverty; mass illiteracy; want of basic hygiene and primary health facilities; lack of fundamental liberties of religion and speech; little protection from state persecution. The revolution in Iran raised the hopes of the dispossessed and disadvantaged masses for an Islamic revival; two decades later, we see the movement deteriorating in strength and falling victim to sectarian strife. A few years ago, Malaysia declared a ban on Shi'ite teachings and detained several people without trial for propagating that version of faith. But the perpetuation of such despotic rule can only be achieved at the expense of a systematic corruption of civil, judicial, and police institutions.

Given the current intellectual bondage, and political and economic subservience, of the Muslim world to the West, prospects for the future, either programmed or desired, remain gloomy. An inexplicable fatalism continues to envelop the global Muslim community. It has ceased to move from opinion to knowledge, and no longer employs knowledge for social evolution.

Today, the Muslim world awaits a move in a modern direction, one that embraces new technologies but remains in tune with the universal teachings of Islam. Perhaps Muslim immigrants in the West will ultimately become the catalysts for a major ideological transition for the global Muslim community. Nostalgia for Islam's glorious past may provide comfort to some, but the future demands a mindset open to change.

[reprised from several other FR threads]

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

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