'72 Black Eyed Virgins': A Muslim Debate on the Rewards of Martyrs

Approximately two weeks prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC a dispute emerged between the CBS network and heads of two Islamic organizations in the U.S. regarding the motivation of suicide bombers in Israel. The dispute was forgotten following the attacks, but in their aftermath, another look at it is warranted:

The Translation Dispute

On August 19, 2001, CBS's 60 Minutes aired a report on the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. Reporter Bob Simon interviewed Hamas operative Muhammad Abu Wardeh, who recruited terrorists for suicide bombings in Israel. Abu Wardeh's words were translated into English by CBS as follows: "I described to him how God would compensate the martyr for sacrificing his life for his land. If you become a martyr, God will give you 70 virgins, 70 wives and everlasting happiness." [1]

Some Muslim leaders contended that the English translation did not match the Arabic and accused CBS of fabricating the quote. Leaders of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a U.S. organization, wrote to 60 Minutes and demanded a retraction, an apology, and time on the show for Islamic scholars to explain the religion's true teachings regarding violence and martyrdom.[2]

CBS News admitted that the English voiceover did not match the Arabic quote, but played an unaired portion of the interview for a Knight Ridder editor who speaks Arabic and for two native Arabic speakers. After viewing the tapes, Hafez Al-Mirazi Osman, Washington bureau chief of the Al-Jazeera television network, stated that in the portion that did not air the interviewee said: "Paradise has many things. It is said it has everything a man would wish for. It has 72 angels… or wives… It has the eternal blessing that people would receive there…"

CBS translated the Arabic term hur 'ayn[3] as "virgins." According to Osman and the other native Arabic speaker, Dr. Maher Hathout, a scholar at the Islamic Center of Southern California, the Arabic word has no sexual connotation or gender. Hathout said that a more appropriate translation would be "angel" or "heavenly being." CBS said its Arabic expert insisted on CBS's translations.[4]

MPAC's Executive Director in Los Angeles, Salaam Al-Maryati, said, "For Palestinians, this is about fighting aggression and occupation, not about opportunities for sexual fantasies." He added that the issue is important to the estimated 7 to 10 million Muslims who he claims live in the U.S., because it confirms their fears that media organizations are intent on defaming their faith.[5]

In a published report, Hathout added, "There is nothing in the Koran or in Islamic teachings about 70 virgins or sex in Paradise. This is ridiculous, and every true Muslim knows that."[6] According to Hathout, "the worst-case scenario is that there is a deliberate spinning of the news. It is very fashionable now to present the Muslims as particularly susceptible to being crazy or blowing themselves up."[7] The Martyr's Reward in Islamic Tradition Maryati's and Hathout's claims aroused the ire of Sheikh Abd Al-Hadi Palazzi, head of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community. Sheikh Palazzi wrote: "The only ridiculous thing is that someone who claims to be an 'Islamic scholar' [i.e. Hathout] makes public statements which prove beyond any possible doubt that he has never read the Tafsir [Koranic commentary] of Ibn Kathir and the Sunan [religious rulings based on the customs of the Prophet] of Imam Al-Tirmidhi, which are basic books for the knowledge of Islam. Unfortunately, this attribution of chairs to ignoramuses seems to be the rule in American Islamic Centers controlled by the fundamentalist network of the Muslim Brotherhood."

According to Islamic tradition, Sheikh Palazzi states there are 72 wives for every believer who is admitted to Paradise, not only for a martyr. The proof is in a Hadith (Islamic tradition) collected by Al-Tirmidhi in the Book of Sunan (volume IV, chapters on "The Features of Paradise as described by the Messenger of Allah," Chapter 21: "About the Smallest Reward for the People of Paradise," Hadith 2687).

Sheikh Palazzi added that it is also quoted by Ibn Kathir in his Tafsir of Surah Al-Rahman (55), verse 72: "It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim that Abu-al-Haytham Abdullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa'id Al-Khudri, who heard the Prophet Muhammad saying: 'The smallest reward for the people of Paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, as wide as the distance from Al-Jabiyyah [a Damascus suburb] to Sana'a.'" [8]

Sheikh Palazzi cites verse 74 of the same Surah, "[The chastity of the black-eyed] was not violated by man nor jinn" to prove that that they are virgins. In addition, the "black-eyed" are mentioned in three other Surahs in the Koran: Al-Dukhan 54, Al-Tur 20, and Al-Waqi'a 20. Women with "downcast eyes," that is, chaste women, are mentioned in three Surahs: Al-Rahman 56-8, Al-Safat 48, and S, 52.

Al-Azhar University in Egypt, the main authority for Sunni Islamic rulings, also takes "the black-eyed" seriously. Al-Azhar's unofficial website features a religious ruling section, in which the institution's clerics answer questions by readers from all over the world. An Australian Muslim asked the following: "If men [in Paradise] get 'the black-eyed,' what do the women get?"

The answer, provided by the deputy director of Al-Azhar's Center for Islamic Studies, Sheikh Abd Al-Fattah Gam'an, read: "The Koran tells us that in Paradise believers get 'the black-eyed,' as Allah has said, 'And we will marry them to 'the black-eyed.' 'The black-eyed' are white and delicate, and the black of their eyes is blacker than black and the white [of their eyes] is whiter than white. To describe their beauty and their great number, the Koran says that they are 'like sapphire and pearls' (Al-Rahman 58) in their value, in their color, and in their purity. And it is said of them: '[They are] like well-protected pearls' in shells (Al-Waqi'a 23), that is, they are as pure as pearls in oysters and are not perforated, no hands have touched them, no dust or dirt adheres to them, and they are undamaged.'" It is further said: "'They are like well-protected eggs' (Al-Safat 49), that is, their delicacy is as the delicacy of the membrane beneath the shell of an egg. Allah also said: 'The 'black-eyed' are confined to pavilions' (Al-Rahman 70), that is, they are hidden within, saved for their husbands."

"Most of 'the black-eyed' were first created in Paradise, but some of them are women [who came to Paradise] from this world, and are obedient Muslims who observe the words of Allah: 'We created them especially, and have made them virgins, loving, and equal in age.' This means that when the women of this world are old and worn out, Allah creates them [anew] after their old age into virgins who are amiable to their husbands; 'equal in age' means equal to one another in age. At the side of the Muslim in Paradise are his wives from this world, if they are among the dwellers in Paradise, along with 'the black-eyed' of Paradise."

"If a woman is of the dwellers in Paradise but her husband in this world is not of the dwellers in Paradise, as in the case of Asia the wife of Pharaoh, she is given to one of the dwellers in Paradise who is of the same status… Regarding the woman who was married [during her life] to more than one man in this world, and all her husbands are dwellers in Paradise, she may choose among them, and she chooses the best of them. It is said that Umm Salmah asked the Prophet: 'Oh Prophet of Allah, a woman marries one, two, or four husbands in this world and later she dies and enters Paradise, and they enter with her. Which of them will be her husband?' [The Prophet] answered: 'She… chooses the best of them, saying, Oh Allah, this is the best of them that was with me in this world, marry me to him'… Thus it is known that the women of Paradise also have husbands. Every woman has a husband. If her husband in this world is of the dwellers in Paradise [he becomes her husband in Paradise], and if her husband in this world is an infidel, she is given to one of the dwellers in Paradise who is suited to her in status and in the [strength] of his belief."[9]

A Question of Belief

Dr. Hathout described the Koran passages as nothing more than folklore, saying that such descriptions of Paradise aren't meant to be taken literally, just as many Christians do not really believe heaven has "streets paved with gold."[10]

But the question is whether every "true Muslim" knows that "there is nothing in the Koran or in Islamic teachings about 70 virgins or sex in Paradise,"[11] as Dr. Hathout said. Do Muslims living in areas where Jihad has been declared – for example, the West Bank and Gaza Strip – where political correctness is less a factor as it is where Hathout lives, in Southern California, also maintain that "such descriptions of Paradise aren't meant to be taken literally?" Moreover, the more important question is, what do the clerics say?

The death announcements of martyrs in the Palestinian press often take the form of wedding, not funeral, announcements. "Blessings will be accepted immediately after the burial and until 10 p.m. …at the home of the martyr's uncle," read one suicide bomber's death notice.[12] "With great pride, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad marries the member of its military wing… the martyr and hero Yasser Al-Adhami, to 'the black-eyed,'" read another.[13]

Al Risala, the Hamas mouthpiece, published the will of Sa'id Al-Hutari, who carried out the June 1, 2001 suicide bombing outside the disco near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv that killed 23, mostly teenage girls. "I will turn my body into bombs that will hunt the sons of Zion, blast them, and burn their remains," Al-Hutari wrote. "Call out in joy, oh my mother; distribute sweets, oh my father and brothers; a wedding with 'the black-eyed' awaits your son in Paradise."[14]

The same view is also evident in news reports in the Palestinian press. Thus, for example, the reporter Nufuz Al-Bakri reported the death of Wail 'Awad as follows: "The mother of Wail 'Awad, from Deir El-Balah, did not plan on holding a second wedding for her eldest son, after his marriage on August 10, 2001 to his fiancée in a simple ceremony attended only by the family. But yesterday was Wail's real wedding day, and the angels of the Merciful married him, together with the [other] martyrs, to 'the black-eyed,' as all around [them] rose the cries of joy that his mother dreamed of on the day of his wedding [to his fiancée]."[15]

Hamas official Ashraf Sawaftah told of a ceremony honoring Izz Al-Din Al-Masri, who carried out the suicide bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in central Jerusalem on August 9, 2001: "His relatives distributed sweets and accepted their son as a bridegroom married to 'the black-eyed,' not as someone who had been killed and was being laid in the ground."[16]

The uncle of Nassim Abu 'Aasi, who died while he was attempting to carry out an attack, said that when the deceased was asked why he was not married, he would always reply, "Why should I relinquish 'the black-eyed' to marry women of clay [i.e. flesh an blood]?"[17]

"This is part of the Islamic belief," Hamas leader Isma'il Abu Shanab once explained to AFP. "Anyone who dies a martyr's death has a reward. If the martyr dreams of 'the black-eyed,' he'll get her."[18]

The Hamas movement educates the children in its schools, beginning in kindergarten, to believe that a martyr is given virgins in Paradise. Jack Kelley of USA Today visited Hamas schools in Gaza City, where he saw an 11-year-old boy speak to his class: "I will make my body a bomb that will blast the flesh of Zionists, the sons of pigs and monkeys… I will tear their bodies into little pieces and will cause them more pain than they will ever know." His classmates shouted in response, "Allah Akhbar," and his teacher shouted, "May the virgins give you pleasure." A 16-year-old Hamas youth leader in a Gaza refugee camp told Kelley, "Most boys can't stop thinking about the virgins."[19]

Along with the media, Palestinian Muslim clerics also help instill this belief. In an interview with the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, Palestinian Authority Mufti Sheikh 'Ikrima Sabri was asked what he felt when he prayed for the soul of a martyr. He answered: "I feel that the martyr is lucky, because angels bring him to his wedding in Paradise… I spoke with one young man, who told me: 'I want to marry the black-eyed women in Paradise.' The next day, he died a martyr's death. I am certain that his mother was filled with joy over his heavenly wedding. Such a son is worthy of such a mother.'"[20]

Sheikh Abd Al-Salam Abu Shukheydem, Chief Mufti of the Palestinian Authority police force, mentioned 'the black-eyed' as one of the rewards of martyrs: "From the moment the first drop of his blood is spilled, he does not feel the pain of his wounds and he is forgiven for all his sins; he sees his seat in Paradise; he is saved from the torment of the grave; he is saved from the great horror of Judgment Day; he marries 'the black-eyed'; he vouches for 70 of his family members; he gains the crown of honor, the precious stone of which is better than this entire world and everything in it."[21] In a Friday sermon broadcast on Palestinian television, Sheikh Ismail Al-Radwan declared: "He is given 72 'black-eyed.'"[22]

"The Americans and the eunuchs at their sides [i.e. the rulers of Arab and Islamic countries]… think that if they kill us, they will win," wrote Dr. Yunis Al-Astal, a lecturer in the Islamic Law Department at Gaza Islamic University, "They do not know that with their weapons they only expedite our arrival in Paradise. We yearn to reach Paradise; it is our abode, and in it are 'the black-eyed,' confined to pavilions, and also there are [women] with downcast eyes whose chastity has not been violated before us by either man or jinn. In contrast, the value of this world in which we live, which they [i.e. the Americans and the Arab rulers] think that they have attained, is in our eyes not worth the wing of a mosquito…"[23]

In an interview with the Israeli daily Ha'aretz,[24] Sheikh Raid Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the most important political and religious leader of Israel's Arab population was asked "Do 70 virgins await a shahid (a martyr) in paradise?" Sheikh Salah replied: "On this matter, we have proof. It is written in the Koran and in the Sunna [the traditions about the life of Mohammed]. This matter is clear. The shahid receives from Allah six special things, including 70 virgins, no torment in the grave, and the choice of 70 members of his family and his confidants to enter paradise with him."

The suicide attackers who carried out the September 11 attacks also believed that 'the black-eyed' were one of the rewards awaiting them in Paradise. The letter of instructions found in Nawwaf Al-Hamzi's car mentioned 'the black-eyed' twice: "…Don't show signs of uneasiness and tension; be joyful and happy, set your mind at ease, and be confident and rest assured that you are carrying out an action that Allah likes and that pleases Him. Therefore, a day will come, Allah willing, that you will spend with 'the black-eyed' in Paradise… Know that the gardens [i.e. Paradise] have been decorated for you with the most beautiful ornaments and that 'the black-eyed' will call to you: 'Come, faithful of Allah," after having donned their finest garments."[25]

'The Black-Eyed' and Sexual Relations

Are "the black-eyed" available for sex? Some evidently think they are. The Israeli media reported on a suicide bomber caught before he managed to carry out his mission; he was wearing a towel as a loincloth to protect his genitals for use in Paradise.

The question of sexual relations was also brought up in an interview that Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi gave to the Egyptian weekly Aakher Sa'a. To the question "What is the meaning of the Koranic verse 'And we will marry them to the 'black-eyed?'" Tantawi replied, "This verse heralds to faithful believers that in the world to come, Allah will set 'the black-eyed' to serve them, so that they will have wives, along with the righteous women from this world."

Getting straight to the point, the interviewer asked, "Do people in Paradise have sexual relations?" "This issue is known only to Allah," said Tantawi. "It is enough that we know that Paradise offers [everything] to satisfy the soul and gladden the eye. Regarding other, private matters, only Allah knows. It is enough for us that the Koran says, 'It has [everything] to satisfy the soul and gladden the eye, and in it you have life everlasting.'"[26]

In a review of the Egyptian press in the London daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the veteran Egyptian journalist Hasanain Kurum explained that Sheikh Tantawi knowingly gave a vague answer to the question, so as to avoid a scandal like the one created a few years previously by the late author and journalist Muhammad Galal Al-Kushk. Al-Kushk wrote, "The men in Paradise have sexual relations not only with the women [who come from this world] and with 'the black-eyed,' but also with the serving boys." According to Kurum, Al-Kushk also stated, "In Paradise, a believer's penis is eternally erect."[27] *Yotam Feldner is MEMRI's Director of Media Analysis.

by James George Jatras The cultural schism between the Western and Eastern halves of European Christian civilization marked principally by their respective religious traditions, Roman Catholic and Protestant in the West and Orthodox in the East, may or may not prove fatal. One issue stands above all others in determining the outcome: the Islamic resurgence that has rapidly come to mark the post-Cold War era. For the East, which borders on the Muslim world, the problem continues to be, as it has been since Islam first appeared in the seventh century, primarily one of direct, violent confrontation, which today stretches from the Balkans to the Caucasus, and throughout Central Asia. For the West, on the other hand, the problem today is primarily internal, a result of ideological confusion (which in many instances leads to active collaboration), coupled with demographic infiltration.

Last year, the county board of Loudoun County, Virginia, just a few miles down the road from the federal capital, granted a zoning variance, over vigorous local opposition, to facilitate the construction of a new Islamic academy. The institution is one of a number being constructed nationwide, and it will cover some 100 acres, include elementary, middle, and high schools, feature an 800-bed dormitory, and grace the rolling hills of the Virginia horse country with a 65-foot mosque dome and an 85-foot minaret.

County residents opposed the academy on a variety of grounds, notably the loss of tax revenue on land that was otherwise zoned for business uses and the security threat posed by the school, either from Muslims who would be attracted to the county or from the possibility that anti-Saudi Islamic groups might see the academy as a tempting target. But the critics' central issue--and the one that highlights Western incomprehension of the phenomenon in question--was the character of the Saudi regime, which, according to the school's bylaws, exercises total control, to the extent that the school is part of the structure of the Saudi Ministry of Education: an establishment of a foreign sovereign on American soil. Indeed, the Saudi ambassador is ex officio chairman.

Predictably, as soon as Saudi Arabia and Islam became the issues, progressive opinion responded that rejection of the school would be intolerance of "diversity." One county resident displayed a crescent and star in the window of her home to show symbolically that "Islam is welcome here." The ever-vigilant Washington Post weighed in with an editorial blasting opposition to the school as "religious intolerance" and "the worst kind of bigotry" on the part of retrograde denizens of the Old Dominion. "Ugly statements that have been made in public meetings on the issue have run the range of mean-spiritedness," sniffed the Post, "with some residents asserting that the school should be rejected because 'the Saudis execute their own people who convert from Islam.'"

In point of correction to the Post's sarcastic quotation marks, the 1997 U.S. Department of State Report on Human Rights Practices states the following about Saudi Arabia:
Freedom of religion does not exist. Islam is the official religion and all [Saudi] citizens must be Muslims. . . . Conversion by a Muslim to another religion is considered apostasy. Public apostasy is considered a crime under Shari'a law and punishable by death.

So which is more "ugly" and "mean-spirited"--the fact that the Saudis do indeed behead those who abandon Islam or that Loudoun citizens have been tactless enough to take note of that fact? One witness before the county board testified that her daughters, who are U.S. citizens, have been prevented from leaving Saudi Arabia for over 13 years because, as women, they may not travel, even though the elder one is now an adult, without their Saudi father's permission. The girls have been forcibly converted to Islam and can only look forward to their eventual marriage, for which their consent is at best a formality.

Fawning by Loudoun County authorities extended even to a blatant disregard of the county's own laws. A Loudoun ordinance defines a private institution as one that is neither funded nor controlled by any government: On both counts, the Loudoun Islamic academy falls. Yet the county board rejected testimony by a former board member-the author of the relevant ordinance--that the academy was not a private institution. No matter. Today, neither Loudoun County, nor the Commonwealth of Virginia, nor the United States would be able to create and run an educational institution based on any religious doctrine. But a foreign government-a government that is every bit as bigoted, intolerant, and ugly as the Post wrongly accused the school's critics of being-may do so.

Especially illuminating in the Loudoun controversy was the position of local Christian social conservatives, who stayed neutral or even supported the academy. In the dimmer recesses of the American Christian mind, the only concern was what precedent denying the variance might set for private Christian schools, or the availability of public vouchers. The importation of Shari'a into a once-Christian commonwealth seemingly registered not at all in evangelical minds blissfully unaware of Islamic aims. But as Bat Ye'or wrote in The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam,

The Islamist movement makes no secret of its intentions to convert the West. Its propaganda, published in booklets sold in all European Islamic centers for the last thirty years, sets out its aim and the methods to achieve them. They include proselytism, conversion, marriage with logical women, and, above all, immigration [emphasis added]. Remembering that Muslims always began as a minority in the conquered countries ("liberated," in Islamic terminology) before becoming a majority, the ideologists of this movement regard Islamic settlement in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere as a chance for Islam.

The element of willful blindness in Western perspectives on Islam cannot be overestimated. So deeply embedded is the notion that all religions are fundamentally the same that evidence to the contrary is simply wished out of existence. When the Ayatollah Khomeini states that Muslims have no alternative . . . to armed holy war against profane governments, . . . the conquest of all non Muslim territories. . . . It will be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Koranic law in power from one end of the earth to the other . . . such utterances are as little heeded as were similar statements by Lenin during the Cold War. After all, Khomeini is a known fundamentalist." Surely, his statements cannot be held against the moderates, the "mainstream" who represent "real Islam," whose beliefs and values are not so different from ours--can they? The contention that Khomeini and his ilk are in fact Islam's historical "mainstream" not only is dismissed but is considered evidence of a dangerous "Christian fundamentalism," which is every bit as bad as the Muslim variety, probably worse. The growing number of Muslims in America (Islam, according to some claims, has already overtaken Judaism as the nation's largest non-Christian religion) and the irrefutable presumption of Muslim peaceableness have set the stage for Islam to become both a social and political force. Under the Clinton administration, Islam has made major strides to join denatured, humanized Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in their semi-established status as kindred denominations of a single American civic creed, symbolized by Hillary Rodham Clinton's sponsorship last year of the Eid al-Fitr end-of-Ramadan celebration at the White House.

Likewise, the idea that Islam shares an Abrahamic pedigree with Christianity and Judaism, that we are all, in the Islamic phrase, "peoples of the book," is now almost universally accepted. But suppose that, during the early Christian era, a pagan philosopher from Athens had claimed to have received a vision from a divine messenger to the effect that Zeus/Jupiter, the Greco-Roman "father god," was the one and only God -in fact, was the same God the Father worshipped by the Christians; that the Christians had corrupted their Scriptures to hide the fact that Jupiter had been worshipped by Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus; that only the self-proclaimed prophet's recitation of his own vision was authoritative; that the rites and sacred places of the Olympian gods (the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Delphic Oracle) had always pertained to Jupiter alone and indeed had been established by earlier Abrahamic prophets; and that those who had surrendered their will to Jupiter were commanded to wage holy war under his thunderbolt symbol on "Infidels" who resisted the divine will. Is there any doubt that Christians then would have rejected the supposed kinship of the new teaching to their own faith as quickly as today's Christians rush to accommodate Islam?

There is little doubt that Islam's god is the former chief deity of the polytheistic Arab pantheon, stripped of his consorts and offspring-a variation on the moon god common throughout the ancient Middle East, among the Babylonians known as Sin (the Sinai peninsula is probably named after him) and among the Sumerians as Nanna. Among the pagan Arabs, he was usually called simply "the god," al-ilah: Allah. The moon god Allah, whose crescent symbol today caps mosques the world over, headed a pantheon of over 300 lesser divinities, including three daughters called Lat, Uzza, and Manat. In fact, the controversy over The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie centers upon an embarrassing (and historically documented) episode during Muhammad's evolving "revelation" (after his death collected as his Koran-Qur'an, "recitation") in which he admitted the possibility of retaining the three daughter-goddesses under his new dispensation. He later rescinded this idea as having been of false-"satanic" inspiration. Muhammad (the son of Abdallah, "slave of Allah," a further attestation of the deity's pre-Islamic origin) was of the Quraysh tribe, the custodians of the Meccan shrine to the pantheon known as the Ka'bah ("cube"), which houses a black stone (probably a meteorite) that Muslim pilgrims continue to venerate. Pilgrims also perform other pre-Islamic pagan rites such as stoning the devil at Wadi Mina and partaking of the waters of the Zamzam well.

In short, Islam is a self-evident outgrowth not of the Old and New Covenants but of the darkness of heathen Araby. Despite ludicrous historical suggestions to the contrary (such as the idea that the Ka'bah was built by Abraham), Muslim apologists have strained to find evidence in the Bible that a new prophet would arise after Jesus, seeing Muhammad in obvious prophecies of the Holy Spirit (that were fulfilled on Pentecost) or of the Second Coming of Christ. One could find no better refutation of Islam's efforts to appropriate Christian Scripture (here, Matthew 24:27) than that of the 14th-century Byzantine saint, Gregory Palamas, to his Turkish captors:
It is true that Muhammad started from the east and came to the west, as the sun travels from east to west. Nevertheless he came with war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement, murders, and acts that are not from the good God but instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil.

St. Gregory s answer is no less devastating to Islam's self-depiction as a pacific creed. Islam was born in violence, from Muhammad's sanction of raids of pillage and plunder (starting with attacks against his own Quraysh tribe, which initially rejected his revelation) to his savage execution of hundreds of men of the Qurayzah clan (which professed Judaism) and the enslavement and forced concubinage of their women and children. From its inception, first within Arabia and then against all unbelievers, Islam has been unthinkable without its mandate for violence, war, terror--in a word, jihad--itself codified in Muhammad's Koran (notably Sura 9:29). Today, Islamic apologists in America have been quick to latch on to the vocabulary of grievance, denouncing the association of Islam with its violent past (and present) as "stereotyping," "bigotry," and "ignorance." Even American elementary school texts have been rewritten to suggest that once-Christian Egypt, Syria, and Palestine became Muslim because their conquerors were "invited" in; Muslims are quick to remind Christians of the Crusaders' later "aggression," but they do not consider as aggression their own unprovoked seizure of the Christian Middle East.

In the application of jihad, as documented by Bat Ye'or and others, Islam divides the world into two domains, or "houses": the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam), where Islam rules and Shari'a, the law of Allah, has been realized; and the House of War (Dar al-Harb), where the rebellious unbelievers persist in their (or rather, our) lawlessness. In Islamic terms, we unsubdued Christians are harbi, and as such we have no legitimate right to our lands, our property, or even our lives, which by right belong not to us but to the Muslims; that which we now have we enjoy only until Islam becomes strong enough to impose Shari'a. As the highly respected and influential 14th-century authority Ibn Taymiyya explained:
These possessions [i.e., the things taken away from the non-Muslims upon their conquest] received the name of fay [war booty] since Allah had taken them away from the infidels in order to restore them to the Muslims. In principle, Allah has created the things of this world only in order that they may contribute to serving Him, since He created man only in order to be ministered to. Consequently, the infidels forfeit their persons and their belongings which they do not use in Allah's service to the faithful believers who serve Allah and unto whom Allah restitutes what is theirs; thus is restored to a man the inheritance of which he was deprived, even if he had never before gained possession.

It is worthy of note that Ibn Taymiyya is particularly revered by the Wahabi sect, which is the ruling doctrine of Saudi Arabia; students at the Saudi-controlled Loudoun Islamic Academy will no doubt receive benefit of his wisdom. But Ibn Taymiyya's sentiments are not unique to him. On the contrary, Bat Ye'or quotes comparable passages from Islamic sages of many eras and locales, from the time of Muhammad to the present day.

Surveying the long history of the Islamic assault on the Christian world, it is sobering to consider how close the latter has come to annihilation on more than one occasion. In the initial offensive during the first decade after Muhammad's demise, Christendom lost its birthplace in the Levant, with the front of the East Roman Empire only being stabilized at the approaches to Asia Minor. Meanwhile, the Arab armies swept west from conquered Egypt, subduing the whole north coast of Africa and crossing into Visigothic Spain in 711. They were finally stopped by the Franks under Karl the Hammer at Poitiers in 732, the centenary of Muhammad's death. The conversion of the Turkish tribes to Islam in the ninth century lent jihad renewed impetus; the erosion and final collapse of East Roman power opened the eastern door to Europe in the 14th century, and the Ottomans were turned back only at the gates of Vienna in 1683. The site of the first high-water mark at Poitiers and the later one at Vienna are only some 700 miles apart -so narrow has been Christendom's brush with extinction!

The Turkish defeat at Vienna marked the beginning of two centuries of remission during which European technology, particularly military technology, seemed to have resolved the contest between the Cross and the Crescent decisively in favor of the former. During the 19th century, the Christian nations of the Balkans--the only conquered Christian lands since the Spanish reconquista in which the Muslims had not yet reduced the indigenous population to a minority, as they had in Egypt and Syria, or eliminated them utterly, as in the Maghreb--cast off their Muslim masters, and by the end of World War I, most of the Muslim world (with the exceptions of the Arabian heartland itself and of a truncated Turkey which had adopted the modernizing, secular ideology of Kemalism) was subject to European rule. But at the very time that Europe achieved its military and geopolitical advantage, the moral and religious decline that culminated in the autogenocides of 1914 and 1939 had become evident. Having found in their grasp places their Crusader predecessors had only dreamed of reclaiming Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople - effete and demoralized European governments made no effort to re-christianize them and, within a few decades, meekly abandoned them.

The moral disarmament of contemporary post-Christian Europe is now nearly universal. If, in the more remote past, Bourbon France had made common cause with the Sublime Porte (the scandalous "union of the Lily and the Crescent") against Habsburg Austria, the arrangement at least had the virtue of cynical self-interest: Catholic France was hardly expected to praise the sultan's benevolence as part of the bargain. But by the 1870's, Disraeli's obsession with thwarting Russian ambitions in the Balkans prompted the Tories' unprecedented depiction of Turkey as tolerant and humane even in the face of the Bulgarian atrocities. Even so, Britain's Christian conscience, prodded by Gladstone's passionate words, was sufficient to bring down Lord Beaconsfield's government in 1880.

After World War I, with the installation of nominally "pro-Western" governments in many Muslim countries fashioned from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the West seems to have convinced itself of the existence of benign Islam. Indeed, the promotion of "moderate" Muslim regimes--especially those willing to make peace with Israel, and, even better, those that have a lot of petroleum--has become a linchpin of U.S. global policy. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, the Gulf states, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nigeria, Indonesia, and a few others have become the darlings of U.S. policy, valued as supposed bulwarks against "fundamentalism" of the Iranian variety (Iran itself having lately been a member of the favored assembly). Operationally, this means not only overlooking the radical activities of the supposedly "moderate" Muslim states--for example, Saudi Arabia's and Pakistan's support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (whom even the Iranians denounce as dangerous fanatics), and assistance by virtually all Islamic nations to the thinly disguised radical regime in Sarajevo-but also a consistent American bias in favor of the Muslim party in virtually every conflict with a Christian nation. The most prominent exception to date has been a pro-Armenian tilt in the Nagorno-Karabakh question, a function of Armenian-Americans' early cultivation of Congress, but this anomaly will undoubtedly soon shift to Azerbaijan's favor under the combined pressure of the Turkey/Israel lobby, of residual Cold War antipathy for Russia (seen as Armenia's main protector), and of American oil companies fixated on an energy El Dorado in the Caspian Basin.

It is hardly a surprise that business executives who would sell their grandmothers to Abdul Abulbul Amir for oil drilling rights would see the world as a reflection of their balance sheets, nor is it a surprise that secular, socially progressive opinion is viscerally anti-Christian. What is not expected is that so many Western Christians, Americans in particular, are willing to believe the worst about their Eastern Christian cousins, who, only lately freed from Islamic (and later, in most cases, communist) servitude, are desperately attempting to avoid a repeat of the experience. Today, when all of the Russian North Caucasus is subject to plunder and hostage-taking raids staged from Shari'a-ruled Chechnya, when not just Nagorno-Karabakh but Armenia proper is in danger of a repeat of 1915, when Cyprus and Greece receive unvarnished threats to their territorial integrity on a weekly basis for the offense of purchasing defensive weapons, and when the borders of Serbia are rapidly approaching those of the pashaluk of Belgrade in order to appease America's new friends in Bosnia and Kosovo, organized Roman Catholic and Protestant sentiment in America overwhelmingly sides with non- and anti-Christian elite opinion in its pro-Muslim, anti-Orthodox tendency.

For example, in 1993, statements were issued by a number of Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican spokesmen in the United States urging military intervention on behalf of the Islamic regime in Sarajevo. "We are convinced that there is just cause to use force to defend largely helpless people in Bosnia against aggression and barbarism that are destroying the very foundations of society and threaten large numbers of people," wrote the chairman of the U.S. Catholic Conference, at a time when the Muslim beneficiaries of the intervention were not only impaling Serb POWs on spits but also were slaughtering Roman Catholic Croats by the hundreds in an offensive in central Bosnia. "Mat is going on in Bosnia is genocide by any other name," observed a prominent Baptist spokesman. "The ghosts of Auschwitz and Dachau have come back to haunt us. If we do nothing we are morally culpable." "Those of us who opposed the Gulf War believed that war was not the answer," opined the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, "but today we find ourselves confronted with an evil war, the sure elimination of which may be possible only by means of armed intervention." Thus did the high-minded guardians of the West's Christian integrity give their blessing for NATO to aid the resumption of jihad in Europe. Granted, they were to some extent victims of the melodramatic media coverage that has characterized the Balkan war, but that is not much of an excuse: Who told them to believe everything dished up by CNN?

In a previous article in Chronicles, I have noted that Western anti-Orthodox bias, which I have dubbed Pravoslavophobia, rarely means antipathy for Orthodoxy as such. Most serious Protestants and Roman Catholics often have a fairly positive attitude toward Orthodox Christianity as a morally conservative and liturgically traditional bulwark within the spectrum of Christian opinion. Perhaps it has been so long since Western Christians have had to defend themselves physically as Christians (as opposed to Americans, Englishmen, Germans, etc.) that they just do not understand those for whom it is a current concern.

On the other hand, there are Westerners for whom antipathy is based on the traditional Orthodox character of the front-line states bordering on Islam. Indeed, from this viewpoint, the desire of these countries to avoid not only islamicization but Westernization as well is a major count against them. Though differing in the specifics, the overall attitude toward Orthodox nations today is strongly reminiscent of that of the West toward the East as the dying Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Serbian states faced Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. The West then was explicit: We will help you only if you renounce Orthodoxy and adopt Roman Catholicism. The Orthodox East is being told today that unless they unquestioningly submit to the West's tutelage in political, social, moral, and economic matters--the collective "religion" of the Enlightenment heritage-they again will be thrown to the wolves. In fact, the West will even help the wolves to devour them.

The immorality, not to mention the stupidity, of this should be obvious. Maybe Christians will never come to agreement on doctrinal matters; maybe the East will insist on retaining its distinctive religious and cultural heritage. Whatever happens, the survival of Orthodox Christian civilization in the East should be hardly less important to the West than to the Orthodox themselves, and indeed over the long term, the West's own fate may depend on it. The fact that the West cannot recognize this reality is evident in the forest of minarets going up mainly in Western Europe but also now in North America.

Some Christians see the Muslim influx primarily as an opportunity for evangelization, and indeed we should never neglect to share the Gospel, the only real liberation, with Muslims, who should not, as individuals, be held responsible for the violent system into which they were born and of which they are--perhaps more than anyone else--victims. At the same time, in light of the growing volume of Muslim immigration, Western Christians will soon find out--maybe sooner than they think, given Western birthrates--that confronting the Islamic advance has become, as it has always been for Eastern Christians, a simple matter of physical survival. But by that time, it may be too late for the West as well.

James George Jatras is a policy analyst at the United States Senate. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent any Senate member or office

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