Posted on 09/11/2003 9:31:03 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
On Thursday, “Muslims worldwide will again be watching replays of the collapse of the Twin Towers, praying to Allah.” But they won’t be praying for what you might expect: these Muslims will be asking Allah to admit into Paradise “those magnificent 19,” the September 11 terrorists.
Is this more “Islamophobia” from the Right? Another venomous Orientalist caricature of Islam, begging for a rebuke from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)? Hardly. These are statements from the British radical Muslim group Al-Muhajiroun, which asserts that Muslims worldwide will also be praying on the 11th that the “reverberations” of the attacks two years ago will “continue until the eradication of all man-made law and the implementation of divine law in the form of the Khilafah [caliphate].” In other words, Al-Muhajiroun is calling for the restoration of the caliphate (the last caliph, the successor of Muhammad as political and spiritual leader of Sunni Muslims, was forced to resign by secular Turkey in 1924) and the universal imposition of Islamic law, the Sharia.
Bush, Blair, and Co. are just the enemies of the moment: “What we see before us is merely the collapse of another evil empire (i.e. the USA) just like the collapse of the empires of Pharaoh, Caesar and Nimrod in the past.” The larger, global struggle will continue until Muslims achieve “Izhar ud-Deen, i.e. the total domination of the world by Islam.”
Al-Muhajiroun’s leader, Sheikh Omar Bakri, has repeatedly declared his intention to “transform the West into Dar Al-Islam [the House of Islam]” and establish the Sharia on British soil: “I want to see the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street.” He says that Muslims will convert the West to Islam “through ideological invasion . . . without war and killing.” A key element of this ideological invasion will be a “fifth column which is able to put pressure on the enemies of Islam and to be able to support the Muslim Ummah [community] world-wide.”
Bakri’s goal of Muslim dominance is no innovation. In it, he echoes influential radical Muslim theorists of the twentieth century such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who called on Muslims to “strike hard at all those political powers which force people to bow before them and which rule over them, unmindful of the commandments of God,” and Sayyid Abul A‘la Maududi (1903-1979), founder of the Pakistani radical Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami, who declared about non-Muslims: “Islamic ‘Jihad’ does not recognize their right to administer State affairs according to a system which, in the view of Islam, is evil.”
These views weren’t invented by Qutb and Maududi; they’re rooted in traditional Islamic law. One Muslim legal manual, ‘Umdat al-Salik, mandates that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” There has been no caliph since 1924, but no matter: the same manual also stipulates that “it is offensive to conduct a military expedition against hostile non-Muslims without the caliph’s permission,” but “if there is no caliph, no permission is required.”
This is no museum piece. Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which the New York Times hailed after 9/11 as “the revered mosque, the distinguished university, the leading voice of the Sunni Muslim establishment,” affirmed in 1991 that ‘Umdat al-Salik “conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.” Other manuals of Islamic law contain similar statements of the necessity of armed jihad.
The fact that armed jihad is supported by an elaborate Muslim legal tradition, rather than just a few “out-of-context” Qur’anic verses twisted by radicals, has become the dirty little secret of American public discourse about terrorism — mired as it is in political correctness and multiculturalist cant. But if the war on terror is to be won, the traditional roots of radical Islam in Muslim theology, jurisprudence, and history must be acknowledged and repudiated by moderate Muslims. Radical Islam is not the only way to look at the Qur’an in the Islamic world, but it has demonstrated its potency again and again, gaining followers among Muslims from Indonesia to Nigeria to Britain and the United States. This is in large part because radical Muslims are successful in convincing others that their version of Islam is in harmony with the Qur’an and the Sharia. If they are to be definitively beaten, their defeat must come from their fellow Muslims, on the field of interpretation of Muslim sources. But few are even fighting this battle.
The FBI is now investigating groups in New York, Washington, and Phoenix that may have ties to Al-Muhajiroun. How many radical Muslims and terrorist sympathizers are in the United States? No one knows, because the very question has been ruled politically incorrect. CAIR directs its efforts not to rooting out sympathy for terrorism from the Muslim community, or to constructing a convincing refutation of radical Islam in order to prevent more young Muslims from falling prey to it, but to smearing as “Islamophobic” anyone who dares to inquire about the sources of Islamic extremism.
If CAIR is seriously committed to moderate Islam, it has a chance now to demonstrate that commitment by issuing a statement condemning Bakri and his organization and offering its considerable resources to aid the FBI’s identification of Al-Muhajiroun operatives in the United States. That would at least be a beginning.
Robert Spencer is the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, new from Regnery Publishing.
But CAIR is NOT seriously committed to moderate Islam. They are a political front group whose purpose is to put a "happy face" on Islam-"We're just good Americans like you" - while the Islamists do their dirty work.
They can't speak up because they will be seen as non-muslims by those fundementalist that acutally follow the religion to the letter, thus opening themselves up also to jihad and death.
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