Things Muslims Should Know

Last year some jerk who calls himself Sam Bacile made a semi-amateurish film called "The Innocence of Muslims" and posted it to YouTube. Sometime later some jihadi-takfiris translated it and dubbed it into Arabic, and then re-posted it to YouTube in time to start a riot in Benghazi to (1) commemorate the 9/11 attacks, and (2) provide cover for an attack on the US embassy.

Of course jihadi-takfiri jerks everywhere then instigated violence wherever they could, so as not to be seen to be less committed than their Libyan brethren.

And the people went along with this, because they are unaware of certain things. So, here are some things Muslims should know:

(1) The American government does not have the power to police the self- expression of its citizens. This is because we citizens are not subjects of our government - we are it's owners. We instituted our government to protect our rights, which are given to us by our Creator (Allah). And among those rights is the freedom to say whatever we want, in public, even if it offends our government or it's officials. That protects our ability to organize against whoever is in power, and vote them out of office, should they fail to use their powers properly. To protect our right to political speech, we don't let our government choose what speech to protect, because it might choose to protect itself instead of its people.

The benefit we get is better government than is the case in most majority Muslim countries. And with better government comes a better economy. The price we pay is that we must tolerate a certain amount offensive speech, against everybody, including hate speech by some Muslims against ourselves.

So things like "The Innocence of Muslims" aren't a big deal in America, not because we don't care about blasphemy, but because in order to protect our rights, we ignore such provocations.

If you would like to live in a free society, in which you can worship Allah as you see fit, then we suggest you ignore them, too.

(2) Bacile acted on his own without consulting the American government or the American people. Declaring all Americans or their government officials fair game to attack is tribal, not Islamic justice. While tribal justice may work in isolated areas, it is extremely dysfunctional in the modern world. You would do well to learn about the 1400 years and various schools of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, as a better alternative.

(3) You persist in a false narrative that America and Israel are enemies of Islam. But if you look at the statics honestly, the most likely person to kill a Muslim is another Muslim. And that is forbidden by the Islamic law which you selectively ignore. Yet it is commonly done by the jihadi-takfiris who whip up your anger for their benefit.

American Muslims already know these things. It's time to spread the word.

To be Surveilled or Colonized?

A few months after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began a campaign of undercover anti-terrorism surveillance in mosques, schools, and Muslim neighborhoods, according to NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly in a recent speech given at Fordham University. That surveillance has thwarted 14 terror attacks from that time to the present. On the other hand, one reason the German Catholic and Lutheran churches failed to thwart the rise of Nazism and the deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps was that Nazi informers infiltrated the churches. It's a question of balance.


Balance against the petrodollars funding the attempts by extremist Jihadi-Takfiris and their mullahs and imams to colonize our American mosques, schools, and Muslim neighborhoods. (As if American Islam were any less genuine or authentic than anyone else's Islam.) The Jihadi-Takfiris use methods of agitation-propaganda and provocation learned from atheistic Communism and thuggish violence learned from idolatrous Nazism in order to intimidate or eliminate their opposition within Islam. They function like an organized criminal gang, except that instead of peddling drugs, they are on a Crusade to peddle their narcissistic ideology, to which they themselves are addicted. Against such moneyed, organized, zealous criminal power, the balance of state power is sometimes needed, even welcomed.


But before we get to blasé about it, think of how you would feel if you went on a camping trip with some of your friends, only to find out, years later, that one of them, whom you trusted, to whom you bared your soul, was actually an undercover cop who was reporting your every word.


Our American Muslims need and deserve our care and respect. Maybe sometimes they also need the help of our law enforcement agencies to resist colonization by the Jihadi-Takfiris. But that help should be used  judiciously and circumspectly. Whenever possible, that help should wait for an invitation. And always, that help must respect and protect the privacy and dignity of Muslims who have given themselves to God, and not to the Jihadi-Takfiri idol of God.

You Do Not Have the Right Never to be Offended

Adapted from the poisonous pen of the notorious Right Wing extremist, David Horowitz:


Last fall, a Muslim, named Talaag Elbayomy, attacked a Pennsylvania man name Ernest Perce who had dressed up like Mohammed for a Halloween parade. The attack was caught on film, witnessed by dozens of parade watchers, and verified by a policeman. 

Elbayomy was charged. But when he was brought before Cumberland County Judge Mark Martin, the judge dismissed the assault charges against the Muslim and dressed down the Pennsylvania man for being insensitive to the Muslim religion. Not only did Martin rule in favor of the Muslim attacker, he lectured Ernest Perce for insulting Islam: "Islam is not just a religion, it's their culture. It's their very essence their very being… And what you've done is, you've complete trashed their essence, their being. They find it very, very, very offensive. I find it offensive."


- End of Adaptation.


I find it offensive, and stupid, too. But in a democracy, being offended does not confer the right to commit violence. Yet Judge Martin unlawfully conceded the right to commit violent crime in the name of religion to Elbayomy, and by extension to all practitioners of the religion of Islam.


I doubt that Judge Martin would concede a right of violent redress to equally devout Catholics seeking revenge against members of the Obama Administration who are forcing Catholic organizations to provide insurance coverage for birth control. In other words, Judge Martin is just another knee-jerk, reactionary, Politically Correct "useful idiot" for Islamofacism, who desperately needs to be impeached from the judiciary, and disbarred from the practice of law. It is the job of the judiciary to defend ordered liberty, not to sell it cheap in a vain attempt to appease its despisers.


You do not have the right never to be offended, because if you do, then everyone else has no rights. The whole world must revolve around your sensitivities. And that's wrong.

The Next Christian Martyr?

The government of Iran is about to execute Youcef Nadarkharni for the crime of being a Christian Pastor in a Muslim country. If the mullahs go through with it, he will not be the first Christian martyr, not even in modern Iran, nor will he be the last. Unlike those jihadi-takfiris who murder themselves and as many others as they can find and pretend to be martyrs, we will witness Iranian clerics making a real martyr of a man for the simple reason that he is called to worship the same God as they, but in a different manner — the manner of a Christian.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide is monitoring the case. You can click here to help.

Update 10/1/2011: The Iranian government is changing their story. Now they claim they are going to execute him for the "security-related" crimes of rape and extortion, rather than the crimes of "turning his back on Islam," and "converting Muslims to Christianity," which were the only crimes mentioned in the court documents from his so-called trial. We note here that Mr. Nadarkhani claimed he was never a Muslim before he became a Christian. Look, the bloody-minded mullahs of Iran just want to kill this guy, never mind the precise charges. Kind of reminds you of the Crucifixion, doesn't it?

Update 10/3/2011: Now the Iranian government has added the charge of being a Zionist, which makes him a traitor to the government, one of the most serious charges that can be made against a person in Iran. They are getting really serious about killing this person, this husband, this father. You can tell by the way they are trying to make themselves feel good about it. Where are the protests about this?

If the Iranian government executes Youcef Nararkhani, then they will be cursed by the Blind Chihuahua even more so than they already are. Feel free to tell them so.

When will the War be Over?

While cleaning up my files, I came across this reply to a friend, who wanted to know when I thought the war in Iraq would end.

To me, Iraq is not a war - it is a battlefront in a larger war: The War of Facism-with-an-Islamic-face against Liberal Democracy. It is indeed a world war, which started with the Iranian Revolution and finally caught our attention with the 9/11 attacks.

It is true that the US chose to initiate Iraq as a battlefront, and also true that it was a bad idea to do so (as we can all see in retrospect). But even if we pull out of Iraq, the war will go on against us.

We keep thinking of war in terms of our own culture - jump into a war, fight it full time, get it over with and then get back to normal. Our way of war decends from ancient Greece, in which the soldier-citizens were farmers, and had to get the war over with in time to get back to their fields to avoid starvation.

The horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe thought of war differently. For them, war was something you did part time. You could spend part of any day fighting, and the rest of the time you grazed your horses. There was no "getting it over with," because if there was no more war, then there was no more honor to be won. The Islamofacist style of war descends from that of the horse peoples of the steppe - you work at your job, spend time with your family, and help place a bomb when you have a spare evening.

In other words, there is no Greco-Western ending to this conflict. This is just a phase of Globalization. The Islamofacists fear that their women will become liberated by the influx of Western values, and are fighting it with everything they've got. Ergo, the war will be over when women everywhere actually become liberated. There will be no surrender, just nothing to fight over anymore.

Women are the key to victory. Weapons can at best perform holding actions.

...

I think we all need to take a more global and more long term perspective, before precipitously acting - either to fight more or to fight less. We need to choose our battles more carefully, and fight them less intensively - with more emphasis on social relations than on firefights.

On the day of the 9/11 attacks, one of my neighbors and I put up the Stars and Stripes in front of our houses, and agreed to keep displaying it until the war was over. I guess I'll be keeping it there for a while yet.

Bin Laden is Dead

President of the United States Barack Obama has announced that Usama Bin Laden has been killed in a US raid on a compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan. I'm glad, but I'm not overjoyed. If I could have had my way, Bin Laden would have spent decades imprisoned in the basement of a building in Langley, VA, with only the disembodied voice of his interrogator for company. He could then die the natural death that is often slower and harder to bear than a bullet's impact.

Even now, the Obama Administration is seeing to it that Bin Laden's body is handled according to Islamic custom. I think this is far above what he deserves. To be a Muslim means to submit one's will to God's will, to become a willing servant of God. Bin Laden made himself a servant to his own Jihad, and conjured up an idol in his own diseased imagination which he also made to serve his Jihad. He then blasphemed by calling his idol God (Allah in Arabic). As such, Bin Laden had actually left the true path of Islam and become a Jihadi-Takfiri (Warfare-Apostate). He compounded his idolatry, blasphemy, and apostasy by getting others to do acts of outrageous violence, and by seducing others to follow him into his spiritual abyss.

No, I wouldn't give Usama Bin Laden an Islamic burial. I'd feed his body to wild pigs, collect the dung, and flush it into the sewers at the Pentagon, and around site of the former World Trade Center. Then, any converts to his cause who want to worship him could stick their heads in a toilet at either of these locations.

Oh well. There are bigger things going on. Japan has been going through a terrible time following the earthquake/tsunami of March 11 and aftershocks. The Arab peoples are attempting to throw off the chains of their oppressive governments, and are having a pretty grim time of it in some places. Let us pray for them all.

And then, let us thank God that Usama Bin Laden is now to appear in the history books, rather than the news.

Will the Real Islam Please Stand Up

In a previous post (What is Moderate Islam?) I claimed that Islamofascism will eventually be overcome by real Islam. This raises the question of just what is real Islam?

The easy answer, attempted by the Salafists, is  that real Islam was what the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his Companions (the Salafs, may God be pleased with them) practiced. But even those Salafists who live on the Arabian peninsula are separated from the Salafs by 1400 years of time. Even though there are records from that time (the Qur'an and the Sunnah - deeds - and Hadith - sayings of the Prophet) and a continuous living practice of Islam, not everything from that time can be recorded, and traditions change subtly or not so subtly over time. If they did not, the Salafists would not be calling for a return the Islam of the past.

The Salafists consider the past 1400 years of change to be contrary to the Will of God. But God created Time, and God ordained that the Prophet and his Companions should die after living ordinary lifespans. It is apparently God's Will that these people should be no longer with us, and that traditions should evolve.

Given that, the accident of geography seems insignificant. After 1400 years, why should Arabian Islam be considered superior to the Islam of Malaysia, or Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion? Indeed, the saddling of religion with the baggage of culture has always been an impediment to the adoption of religion. Christianity did not become widespread in China, India, or Japan because Christian missionaries for the most part insisted that converts to Christianity practice European Christianity, with European cultural values. Had they been flexible enough to let Christianity take on the cultural accoutrements of Asia, world history might have been different.

Islam on the other hand, has taken on the styles and interpretations of the cultures in which it has become widespread. There are many Islams, and all of them are authentic, including American Islam.

As Paul Johnson notes in his History of Christianity, American religions may differ on matters of faith, but all agree to minimum standards of public moral behavior. This consensus has become strained as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered lifestyles are accepted into the mainstream, and as premarital sex and abortion have become common. But there is still wide consensus that there should be a consensus. American Muslims participate in and help shape this consensus along side American Christians, Jews, atheists, and all other Americans.

In other words, the battle lines are drawn up around a minimal rule set (an idea taken over by Thomas P. M. Barnett in The Pentagon's New Map). Matters of religion itself are not part of the fight - they are in the realm of persuasion, or dawa, as Muslims call it. Living under the more numerous and stricter rules of a particular religion (e.g., Sharia for Muslims, Halacha for Jews) is voluntary for the members of that religion, and simply does not apply to members of other religions.

It is the willingness to coexist, neither dominating other religions nor being dominated by them, that American Muslims can take to the world. This, it seems to me, is what Imam Faisal Rauf is trying to promulgate, despite his unfortunate choice of location for the finger he wishes to stick in the eye of the Islamofascists.

There is a great deal of talk about peace in Islam. Muslims greet one another with "Peace be with you." American Muslims have an idea of how to make that peace a reality.

What is moderate Islam?

THe Wall Street Journal ran a "symposium" on this question last week. Several writers contributed, but the closest thing to a sensible answer came from Ed Husain, who had once been seduced by Islamofacism, but has since reconverted to Islam. There is no such thing as "moderate" Islam. There is just Islam. So-called "radical Islam," or "political Islam" are misnomers for the ideology believed by Osama Bin Laden and his followers, wannabes, and hangers-on. The most accurately descriptive name I have heard for it is Francis Fukuyama's term: Islamofascism.

Islamofascism denotes an unholy union between one strand of Islamic Salafist thought and Western European Fascist thought. Ed Husain describes this in some detail in his memoir, The Islamist, which I have reviewed here.

Now, if you're wondering what will eventually defeat Islamofascism, the answer is Islam. Or if you must have an adjective, authentic Islam.

The use of the words "moderate" and "radical" connote that Islamofascism is simply a more intensely believed version of Islam. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Top Ten Anti-Israel Lies

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is hosting these here. They're pretty good, so I thought I'd pass them along.

As Josh Billings used to say, "It ain't ignorance that hurts folks. It's all the things they know that ain't so."

The War on Whatchamacallit

Right-wing radio and its blogosphere has been all a-twitter about members of the Obama Administration not using the phrase, "War on Terror." Well good for Obama!

Terrorism isn't an enemy. Terrorism is a technique. You can't win a war if you can't even name your enemy. But what do you call it when everything you can think of is Politically Incorrect.

It is certainly not a war against Islam. There are too many Muslims on our side to call it that. Like the ones I saw inside the Pentagon.

Academics get more specific. They call the enemy the "Global Salafist Jihad" or the "Jihadists" for short. But Muslims have positive associations with the Salafs (may Allah be pleased with them) and with jihad. It would be like someone calling the US Military the Freedom Fighters in the names of the Founding Fathers of the Republic.

If we need a short name for the enemy (and we do need one) I nominate the term introduced by Francis Fukuyama: Islamofascism. It connotes the toxic combination of a malignant narcissistic fantasy retrojected onto the founders of Islam, combined with modern Western fascist techniques of agitation, propaganda, and thuggishness. And of course, Western weapons. The worst of the Middle East in unholy matrimony with the worst of the West. It is a bad name for a bad thing.

Nobody should like it as a name for the enemy. That's the point.

Hope and Concern

Let us hope that Barack Obama has become and will remain a powerful symbol in the minds of urban youth that if you go to school and work hard, you just might make it. You might even become President. If that is the major change wrought by the Obama Administration, it will be change enough.

On the other hand, Obama has already moved to change things. He's closing GTMO, which has become a public relations disaster for the US. But what will we do with the 250 remaining detainees? Even if we manage to repatriate the 60 we want to send back to their countries of origin, there are 80 that the CIA says are really bad guys but that there is not "enough evidence" to try them in US courts. That could be code for "if we put them on trial a bunch of classified information might get put into the public record." The kind of information the CIA is skittish about because it might reveal what they call "sources and methods."

And that still leaves 110 bad guys who could be tried and presumably convicted, and then what? Do we have the will to keep these SOBs in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives so that they can't recruit other convicts to their cause while they're in prison? It's not as is we haven't had home-grown Islamofascist terrorism before.

Then there is the next big round of bailout money. Which, given the relentless politicization of the Washington crowd, will be misspent either all or in part. But that's not so bad. What bothers me is that it will be spent in the absence of a viable economic model that predicts the effects of the expenditure. It's like the scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard boards a ballon whose mooring rope is loosed prematurely. When Dorothy shouts for him to come back, he shouts back, "I can't! I don't know how it works!"

Once all that taxpayer money has flown away, we won't be able to get it back, because nobody really knows how the economy works. My concern is that we will have set in motion the chain of events that leads China to world hegemony and makes the US an also ran. You can bet that China will not be as benign a hegemon as the US.

Finally there was the "all hands meeting" that our new Secretary of Energy, Steve Chu, held today, which was broadcast throughout the DOE complex. He didn't have much to say about the National Nuclear Security Agency, much less the future of nuclear deterrence and nuclear forensics, or even next-generation nuclear power that doesn't require enrichment. He might be a Nobel prize winning physicist and a brilliant administrator, but it looks like there is a gap in his awareness thus far.

On the Making of Muslim Terrorists

Zakisamsudin has posted his thoughts on The Making of Muslim Terrorists. To begin, he points out that they should be called Muslim terrorists, but not Islamic terrorists, because terrorism is not Islamic. I thank him for the distinction.

He then theorizes that Muslim anger originates in fellow-feeling within the Muslim umma, in the desire to alleviate the oppression of Muslims in various places around the world. But I think he overlooks the effect of culture on shaping the outward expression of that desire.

For example, Coptic Orthodox Christians are oppressed in Egypt. The latest outrage has been anti-Christian rioting in Cairo that resulted in a Church being stormed by a crowd of Muslims. Yet, I do not feel motivated to burn a mosque, or to get a gun and shoot into a halal restaurant.

In my culture it is forbidden to make someone pay for a crime he or she did not commit. This came about because we have developed a system of justice in which it is reasonably likely that the individual perpetrators can be found and prosecuted.

In many honor/shame cultures, the system of justice is much more "lightweight." Without an elaborate network of police, judges, courts, and prisons (all very expensive) these cultures leave justice up to clans and families. Since apprehending the perpetrators is more of a problem, the problem is made easier by allowing any of the perpetrator's clan or family to bear the punishment if they can be caught. The idea that revenge can be sought against any and all of the members of another ethnic group, nation, or culture is a modern extension of this old concept.

I'm glad to see that Zakisamsudin has read Ed Husain's The Islamist. But again, the story is not just psychological but the coming together of culture and psychology. Specifically Ed fell into extremism because he was trying to forge an authentically Islamic adult identity that was different from his parents' and dramatically distinct from the cultural identity that was offered by Britishness. He was thus caught between his partial understandings and fantasies of Islamic and Western culture. In his effort to become a man under such circumstances, he went part way down the path of becoming evil. Fortunately for him and for all of us, his God-implanted sense of right and wrong asserted itself, and he turned back. In the end, Ed forms an identity that is simultaneously (1) authentically Muslim after the pattern of his parents and the Islamic scholars they revere, and (2) authentically British with its embrace of free speech, thought, and inquiry, and its sense of honor and fair play.

The point of all this is that Muslim terrorism is not entirely a psychological phenomenon. It must be understood in the context of culture as well. Religion plays a part, too, but more as an identity-badge, not as religion per se. After all, the terrorists' psychology and culture lead them to commit atrocities that are specifically forbidden by their religion, and at the same time to lie to themselves about it. They do that which is forbidden and feel themselves to be holy witnesses, to be martyrs.

Mumbai: Change of Tactics

So, the siege of Mumbai is winding down. Coordinated teams have shot up a town instead of hijacking planes or planting improvised explosive devices. Instead of a quick bang, they managed to disrupt Mumbai for 60 hours (not quite 3 days). They came by sea, bypassing border guards. A new tactic to watch for.

The shooters were the same types we have seen before. Young males questing for their own identity, trying to prove to themselves and their God that they are worth something. Another atrocity carried out by boys who felt themselves to be second-class.

Happy Thanksgiving and Screw the Islamofacists

O give thanks to the Lord for the Lord is good!

In this epoch of globalization it is hard to keep focussed on all the good around you when you are able to know about every nasty thing done in every far away place. The self-appointed soldiers for Islam have been at it again, shooting up hotels in Mumbai, India, and staging anti-Christian (Coptic Orthodox) riots in Cairo.

Well, screw all you who believe that you must dominate all others in the name of your religion.

I give thanks that I live in America, where I can be any kind of Christian I want, worship God as I see fit, and join in prayer and thanksgiving with American and visiting Jews, Muslims, Baha'is, Buddhists, Hindus, etc., who feel so inclined.

You whose vision of God is too small to accomodate that don't know what you're missing.

A Religion of Second-Class Boys

Review: The Islamist
Why I joined radical Islam in Britain,
what I saw inside and why I left
Ed Husain

Beware of extremism in religion; for it was extremism in religion that destroyed those who went before you. — The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)

In contrast to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Ed Husain was born into Islam, and raised by his parents (first generation immigrants from India and Bangladesh to the UK) with a good foundation in traditional Islamic spirituality. They followed a well-established spiritual teacher, who had followed a teacher before him, and so on, ostensibly back to the Prophet and his Companions. His earliest secular educational experiences also seem to have been pleasant, thanks to liberal "colour-blind" British schoolmarms. But to many "native" Brits, including some of his schoolmates, he was still a bespectacled "Paki." He did not "fit in." Neither did he fit in with the Bollywood enamored Bangladeshi boys at his next school. Fitting in with one's peers is the externalization of the inward quest for identity. When one is young "Who am I?" and "Who will have me?" are two faces of the same coin. The coin which with you can be seduced to sell your soul.

Ed decided to strike out in his own direction. He asked his school if he could study Religious Education after hours to learn more about Islam. Eventually a sympathetic Church of England British teacher took on the project using as a text Islam: Beliefs and Teachings by Gulam Sawar. It contained a remarkable passage, which Ed quotes

Religion and politics are one and the same in Islam. They are intertwined. We already know that Islam is a complete system of life ... Just as Islam teaches us how to pray, fast, py charity and perform the Haj, it also teaches us how to form a state, run a government, elect councillors and members of parliament, make treaties, and conduct business and commerce.

This text was still being widely used in the UK as a "moderate" textbook, and the opinion voiced in the above paragraph is taken as obvious truth by the UK and Western press generally. But Ed, a born Muslim, was surprised by this paragraph when he first read it, and would later be able to de-bunk it. It turns out that Sawar was not a religious scholar, but a business management lecturer, and a sympathizer with if not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamat-e-Islami, two radical Islamist organizations dedicated to the establishment of a world-wide "Islamic State." Such a concept is touted as being straight from the Prophet and his Companions, but it is really a graft from Marxism onto Islamic Fundamentalism, which is itself bida, a modern innovation in reaction against modernity.

Under the influence of Brother Falik, the first real friend he ever had, Ed joins a mosque that has been taken over, "colonized" as it were, by Jamat-e-Islami, to the horror of his traditionalist Muslim parents. The method of colonization relied on the innocent sounding Young Muslim Organization. No pious bearded old men to interfere here - just cadres of activist youth organizing events to proselytize for the radical Islamism of the Jamat-e-Islami. JI's intellectual founder is Abdul Ala Mawdudi, a Pakistani journalist, who "translated the Koran according to his own whims, without reference to or within the paradigm of classical Muslim scholarship." Mawdudi "rebranded" Islam as an ideology instead of a religion, and founded the JI to market his concept. It has since sold well to Muslim youth, who in their adolescent rebellion against their parents and their societies, are received into radical Islam.

In college, Ed left Falik and Jamat-e-Islami to join the even more militant Hisb-ut-Tahrir, which is organized into small cells, like the European Red Brigades of the 1970s and 1980s. Ed describes how the Hizb use Marxist agitation-propaganda techniques to colonize other Muslim organizations, all the while using innocent sounding names and never their own. Banned in Pakistan and the Middle East for its violence-inciting rhetoric, Hisb ut Tahrir and organizations like it flourish in the free societies they condemn. (They see the Western concept of indifidual freedom as sin, an exaltation of self-will over God's will.) The Hisb, it turns out draws its inspiration from works by Hasan al-Banna, Syed Qutb and others who elaborated on Mawdudi. None of these men is a recognized Islamic scholar, and all of them knowingly or unknowingly grafted onto Islam categories of nihlist and anti-rationalist thought they absorbed from the West that they hated so much.

Ed's journey out of radical Islam bgan with a murder committed by one of his radical friends. His internal moral sense (which radical Islamists denigrate - how dare you judge God!) caused him to be repelled by the actuality of the violence his own rhetoric extolled. Gradually, he comes under the influence of real Islamic scholars and historians, and returns to the traditional Islam of his parents. Sojourns in Syria and Saudi Arabia confirm to him the misery of existence in societies that approximate the "Islamic State." He also discovers his Britishness: all his life he had taken basic human rights and basic fairness for granted, out of habit. British habit, it turns out.

Ed ends up discovering his own identity as simultaneously authentically Muslim and authentically British. He thus embodies Islam augmented not by the worst ideas of the West, but by the best. Like liberal democracy and freedom of religion, including the freedom of Muslims to be Muslim as inspired by God rather than as dictated by some self-aggrandizing "authority."
Ultimately, identity is the central theme of Ed's journey into and out of radical Islam. He had formed a youthful identity as a second-class Brit, and was drawn to radical Islam's promise to make him instantly a first-class citizen of the nascent Islamic State. Thus he exposes radical Islamism as a religion of second-class boys.

Good Friday: The Sin of Indifference

When one contemplates the Crucifixion, one would be remiss not to contemplate the opportunities to have prevented it.

At his trial before Caiaphas and some part of the Sanhedrin, nobody spoke in defense of Jesus. Nobody said, "If he is a heretic, then so am I. You will have to take me with him." When given the cruel choice of which of the condemned should be freed, the supporters of Barabbas shouted, but the New Testament records no shouts for Jesus. And it probably took at most three Roman soldiers to nail Jesus to the cross and raise it up. Supposedly a crowd watched this, yet nobody is recorded to have raised a hand against this small force.

It didn't take much force at all to crucify Jesus, or any of the thousands that the Romans crucified during their history. That's because it was enabled by the cowardice of the few and the indifference of the many who might have acted, or at least spoken up.

We've seen it again. The Nazis slaughtered six million Jews and millions of others, including Roma (Gypsies), Poles, Jehovah' Witnesses, and homosexuals. It took relatively few Nazis to do the actual killing, or to run the extermination camps. That's because it was enabled by what was effectively the cowardice or indifference of everyone who might have done something about it, but did not.

But many times, the alternative to cowardice and indifference amounts to suicide. We become hostage to our natural desire to live just one more day, to see if we can live until the horror passes. Can any of us who are thus normal honestly claim that we are good?

Ah, but sin is an insidious thing, and if we free ourselves from one sin, we often substitute another in its place. Those who free themselves from their natural desire to live — they become suicide bombers, prey to the Islamofacist Industrial Complex that makes the explosives, the vests, the triggers, that gives the instructions, that points to the targets, most of whom are non-combatants.

Yes, there are occasional saints, moved by the Spirit, who desire to live, who desire not to kill, and yet have the courage to speak and act. But odds are, dear reader, that you and I are not among them.

You and I are more likely to be among the indifferent crowd, who just want to pursue their lives as best they can. Can anyone say, "Darfur," or "Lhasa" (to name the two the media mentions of God knows how many current conflicts there are)? You and I are more likely to be among those watching while the nails are driven in, while the sky darkens, while the last breath is gasped.

And that is why, when Jesus gasped, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do," he was pleading for us as well.

It is now sundown. The Vigil of Easter has begun. Peace and mercy be upon you.

A Chancre on the Face of Islam

In "Worshippers of Death," WSJ 3 March 2008, Alan M. Dershowitz discusses the case of Zahra Maladan, an educated and accomplished Lebanese Muslim woman who edits a magazine, and who was quoted in the New York Times as telling her son, "If you're not going to follow in the steps of the if the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you." By "Islamic resistance martyrs, she is taken to mean suicide bombers. Dershowitz characterizes her attitude as worshipping death.

I think it's worse than that. Let's go back more than 2000 years to the ancient Middle East. A cult existed throughout the region involving the sacrifice of children to a god called Moloch (also known as Molech). The Hebrew prophets (all of whom are also accepted by Muslims as Muslim prophets) struggled to abolish this idolatrous practice from the time of Moses - "You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God." - Leviticus 18:21 - to the time of Jeremiah and beyond.

Indeed, it seems that not even the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) could finally put a stop to this practice. Instead of abandoning child sacrifice, some Muslims have simply grafted the idolatrous worship of Moloch onto the worship of Allah. That is to say, they associate an attribute of Moloch with Allah, even though the association of anything with Allah is expressly forbidden in Islam. By raising their children for sacrifice they have contaminated their Islam with a custom from the Time of Ignorance before the coming of the Prophet.

Now such people are a minority of Muslims, so this contamination is only superficial. Since idolatry was often compared to harlotry in the Hebrew Bible, it is thus fair to call this modern version of child sacrifice a chancre on the face that Islam presents to the world.

Abu Laith al-Libi

We announce the marriage of Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan, to the dark-eyed hounds of hell. The Times Online has an informative article.

Sorry to be so bloodthirsty and disrespectful, but al-Libi was bloodthirsty and disrespectful. He sacrificed unwilling victims to his personal idolatrous vision of who God is, and what God's will is for him to do. He makes better history than news, and until today, the news he made was bad.

Let me take this opportunity to remind you that the world is at war so long as al-Qaeda and its benighted Islamofacist soul-mates can draw enough of a following to play on the world stage. I figure that the social movement they represent will take about 70 years to die out. It will be killed by the adolescent rebellion of the teenagers against their Islamofacist parents. "You can go on fighting your jihad," they will say, "but we will build something for our children. We will build up, rather than break down. We will create, rather than destroy."

Until then each engagement, like Iraq, is not a war in itself. It is only a battle in the larger war. And while one can argue that going into Iraq was a mistake, it will be a worse mistake to pull out before the Iraqis are ready for us to do so. It would be another betrayal of a whole people, and another sign to the Islamofacists that we cannot prevail against their insurgency. That would make them bolder. And since there would be no Americans for them to kill in Iraq, they would have to try harder to kill Americans and Europeans in our homelands.

Hillary Clinton knows that she has to talk like she understands this to get elected. Barak Obama thinks he has to talk like he doesn't understand this to get elected. Mitt Romney talks like he hasn't thought about this yet. And John McCain actually does understand this. So if terrorism were the only issue, I know who I'd pick. But it's not the only issue.

Nevertheless, another Islamofacist has been cured of his lead deficiency. Amen to that.

Can you be radicalized?

So how does a nice, Jewish boy become a radical Islamist? You think I'm making this up, right? Wrong. It actually happened. It's okay - he outgrew it and went to law school – but his book about it is a good read, and an important testimony to how radicalization works, and is working. To this very day, maybe even in your home town.

Here's a review.

Forewarned is forearmed. Enjoy.

Madness in their Method

Review: My Year Inside Radical Islam
A Memoir
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

We said to Moses: "Throw down your staff;" and it swallowed up their conjurations in no time. Thus the truth was upheld, and the falsehood that they practised was exposed. — al-Qur'an, 7: 117,118, trans. Ahmed Ali

At 21, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross was a left-leaning undergrad at Wake Forest University, the child of non-observant Jews who had converted to Joel Goldsmith's Infinite Way. At 23, he was, in his words, "a devout believer in radical Islam" working for Al-Haramain, a Wahhabi-funded charity that smuggled funds to al-Qaeda. His is a story of seduction, not by a woman, but by a religious sect that recruited his reasoning ability to overcome his moral sense. It is a cautionary tale for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, a psychological self-investigation, and a love story.

It seems that Daveed had been seeking a more structured theology than offered by the religion of his parents. His grandfather's death and his own experiences of life-threatening illness added urgency to his quest. We hear no answers from his parents' original Judaism or the Infinite Way. We witness clumsy attempts at evangelism by Daveed's Christian friends (too much structure for him at the time perhaps). At last, Daveed finds comfort with the "progressive" Islam of a Naqshbandi Sufi classmate named al-Husein. We also see that Daveed is seeking community: classmate al-Husein becomes his spiritual brother, and the community of believers (the ummah) his extended spiritual family.

Becoming a Muslim is easy: Daveed recites the shahadah (the profession of faith) in front of two Muslim witnesses. Becoming a good Muslim, however, requires learning. One must learn wudu (the proper way to wash before prayer), salat (the choreography of postures for ritual prayer), and of course, Arabic (the language of salat), with an emphasis on taweed (the proper pronunciation for reciting the Qur'an). All this is not even the barest minumum. One can go much further: the life, words, and actions of the Prophet Muhammad are far more extensively documented than any previous religious leader on earth. To an extent that varies among the branches of Islam, these are taken to be exemplary for a proper Muslim life. An observant Muslim can spend a lifetime perfecting his or her practice of Islam. Islam strikes a balance between orthopraxy (doing things right), and orthodoxy (believing the right things) that is tilted more toward the former than in, say, Western Christianity.

Daveed decides to work for a year between college and law school, and takes a job at the Islamic center in his hometown, where he can live with his parents while saving some money. Daveed needs instruction from more experienced and learned Muslims. The mosque he works for is funded by the aforementioned Wahhabi charity, and run by American salafists who are eager to teach. His radicalization has begun.

Daveed is not allowed to have his own opinions on matters of Islamic practice. How can he? He is new to Islam, and prone to confuse correct practice with his own foreign ideas. His employer and co-workers correct him one behavior at a time. One day, they tell him his pants are too long, another that he must not wear silk, yet another that he must not touch a dog or a woman to whom he is not married. They get him to accept that his own judgement is faulty — his ignorance of things Islamic allows his judgment to be contaminated by his will, which is as yet incompletely submitted to Allah. He begins to accept that the only remedy is to strive for complete submission, which he can achieve by learning all the rules to which he must submit. Each correction consists of a verbal admonishment, a reference to the Qur'an and/or a hadith, and an article or book to read on the subject, by a suitable (salafist) Islamic authority. Is is backed up only by forces of social pressure to conform, and the apparently self-evident logic of the salafist method of determining correctness.

To determine what is correct, the salafists proceed logically — scientifically, they maintain. Who should know what is correct better than the Prophet and his Companions? Thus one consults the Qur'an, which interprets itself. To understand one verse, one need only compare it with others that contain the same word, phrase, or concept. If clarity is still lacking, one may consult the ahadith — the collected sayings of the Prophet. No other sources of information or ways of knowing are allowed, because they are potentially corrupted and unreliable. This is the salafist method of interpreting their texts — the salafist hermeneutic. If the correct course is still unclear, they consults somone more practiced at this hermeneutic — recognized (meaning salafist) Islamic scholar of Qur'an, ahadith and sharia (Islamic Law).

Daveed is becoming more ill-at-ease as his Islam "improves." But he feels he can't talk about his unease with his parents or his liberal Christian girlfriend. The one person with whom he could have unburdened himself, al-Husein, is undergoing his own radicalization. Daveed is alone and unhappy, but unable to overcome the logic of the salafists that is superficially so airtight. He finds himself praying for the success of the salafist mujahideen (fighters) against his own civilization. When the year ends, Daveed goes away to law school in the fall of 1999, and grows away from radical Islam. He eventually leaves Islam altogether (despite the death penalty that salafists believe must be visited on apostates), converts to Christianity, and marries his girlfriend. After the shock of 9/11, he discovers that al-Haramain had smuggled money to al-Qaeda, and begins a career as a counter-terrorism consultant.

The book, in much greater detail than the thumbnail sketch above, takes you on Daveed's journey into and out of Islamic radicalism. He details the techniques of what is essentially a form of brainwashing. In this, Daveed has made a valuable contribution to the literature on radical Islam. But he does not provide details on how one might resist such techniques. He does not deconstruct salafism and the line of argument it makes for itself. In the language of Harry Potter, he provides no lessons in Defense Against the Dark Arts of salafism.

For example, let's examine salafism's basic premise: We can restore the pure practice of Islam by imitating the salafs, the Prophet and his Companions. Can we really know in detail what Islamic practice was like during the Prophet's prophethood? The salafist answer is yes, we have the Qur'an and the ahadith. All else is unreliable and corrupt.

There are good theological reasons to believe that a wooden, literal imitation of the salafs was neither their nor God's intention, but let's be generous. Let's accept that idea for the moment in order to question their method. Can we rely only on the Qur'an and the ahadith and nothing else? I must first point out the obvious truth that any reading of any text always involves at least two acts of interpretation — the author must interpret from the author's mental processes or imagery into written language, and the reader must interpret from symbols on a page into the reader's mental imagery. When it comes to the Qur'an and the ahadith, these two acts of interpretation, writing and reading, are separated by 1400 years, and sometimes thousands of miles. Meanings can change, and the cultural context which could preserve the meaning can be lost.

In English, for example, the word "prevent" in the King James Bible meant "precede," i.e., to go before, in the Elizabethan English in which the King James translation was written. It would be surprising if there were not comparable instances of meaning alteration between classical and modern Arabic. As for context, consider that 1400 years from now the average English (or successor language) speaker will probably not know the difference between our current words "outhouse," and "outbuilding." A future context of ubiquitous indoor plumbing may erase an ancient cultural context of outdoor privies.

Now the Qur'an and the ahadith assume, but do not explicitly state the details and cultural context of their times — which everybody knew in the Arabia of 1400 years ago. Everybody knew the context of each Qur'anic verse as it was revealed and spoken to them by the Prophet himself. Moreover, the ahadith are collections not of narratives, but of disjointed fragments of individual memory, as in "Ibn Abbas said, 'The prophet (pbuh) made circuits of the House riding on a camel, and every time he came to the Corner, he made a sign with something that he had with him and said, Allahu Akbar" (Bukhari 25:61, trans. Muhammad Ali, A Manual of Hadith, 1941, p196).

So, since we must interpret texts whose meanings may have changed and whose cultural context is no longer entire, we must employ some principles of interpretation ( hermeneutics) to minimize our errors. We could use rigorous historical, cultural, linguistic and anthropological research, to recover as much context and to infer as much meaning from that context as possible. But this is rejected by the salafists, who insist that the Qur'an interprets itself, that when it doesn't they use the ahadith, and that when these fail, they can turn to one of their own who is "rightly guided." Sorry, but this amounts to retrojecting (projecting backwards) the salafists' current customs, practices, and prejudices into their interpretation of the texts. To accept the salafists' hermeneutic is to abandon critical thinking — to open oneself to believing anything, whether it is true or not.

The salafists' insistence on abandoning critical thought has two consequences: first, it materially disadvantages Islamic cultures in this world. Consider that when Islamic temporal power was rising, its politics were dominated by the "Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason," according to Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy (Physics Today, August 2007, p49). But, he continues, a "resurgent religious orthodoxy" eventually overcame them, and led to decline. Today, the scientific output of the entire Islamic world (which led science during the European Middle Ages) is less than that of Brazil. Here I use scientific output as a surrogate for the popular acceptance of critical thinking. In short, the salafists' basic premise is wrong, and they have made Muslims suffer for it.

Second, the salafist abandonment of critical thought corrupts Muslim minds to the point that many Muslims will believe any lie about their chosen enemies as long as it flatters their egos by conforming to their prejudices. For example, when asked what the Talmud is, Daveed is cut short by one of his co-workers who claims it is "the Jews' plan to ruin everything." Apparently, the co-worker had confused the Talmud with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is famous for being a heinous and long-exposed forgery. Would the co-worker be embarassed to know that the Talmud is actually the record of several hundred years of scholarly debate about the halacha (Jewish religious law), which plays the same role in Judaism as sharia does in Islam? Would he be receptive to the idea that the correspondence between the Hebrew halacha and Arabic halal (that which is permitted under sharia) is not accidental? This willingness to believe that which is well-known to be demonstrably false makes such Muslims look backward and foolish in the eyes of the non-Muslim world, which brings shame upon the religion of Islam. Such is the rationalist argument against the salafist method of interpretation.

There is also a literary argument against the salafist method of interpretation. Any good poem, play, or narrative transcends the time and place of its authorship by being pregnant with more meaning than its mere words can carry to any given audience. It evokes fresh insights to successive audiences as the historical development of their culture proceeds. If this is true of mere human creations, how much more must it be true of Divinely Inspired literature? Indeed, the Qur'an was viewed as literature as it was being revealed — one argument for its authenticity was that the power and beauty of its prose and poetry was beyond the capabilities of Muhammad, who was illiterate. The salafist hermeneutic, on on the other hand, does not allow the full imaginative encounter with the Qur'an necessary for it to reveal ever deeper insights as persons and cultures mature. In a manner of speaking, the salafist hermenutic is a case of arrested religious, psychological and cultural development.

In particular, the salafists confabulalate what they uncritically imagine to be seventh-century Arab culture with the universal Religion of Islam. In this, they contaminate Islam with their own bida (innovation), rather than search Islam honestly with their whole minds and souls. And they do this to achieve certainty that they are doing the right things, and thus that they are right with God. But their certainty is not won — it is stolen from their texts. So great is their hunger for certainty that they steal it from their stunted interpretation of the Qur'an and the ahadith, because ultimately, they can't bring themselves to risk trusting the living God.

One cannot fault Daveed Gartenstein-Ross for failing to cut the salafist knot with this particular sword of reason, however. He was young and inexperienced, which made him open-minded. They know a lot about Islam, so let's try to see how they understand things, he must have thought, at least pre-consciously. His willingness to try new things, to attempt understanding by going a little way along another's path — the "tolerance" that we so value in the West and which is so opposite to salafist thought — is what made him vulnerable to being co-opted by the salafists. Tolerance and open-mindedness are good and necessary both for civil society and honest faith, but they can be abused.

Moreover, even if Daveed could have voiced such thoughts as those above, it would have had no effect on the salafists surrounding him. They need to maintain their stolen certainty that they earn God's Love by conforming to their rules. Arguments like those above would have been dismissed, and corrected by the same methods — more of the same stunted hermeneutic as before. These arguments are not for the salafists, but for those either resisting or leaving salafism or any other religious fundamentalism. That is to say, Muslims might consider that Christian and Jewish fundamentalists use the same hermeneutic as Islamic fundamentalists. They just apply it to different texts.

And the results are more or less the same. Fundamentalists of all religions confine God's infinite well-spring of meaning to a box no bigger than their imaginations. Their own superficial reasoning from this small box then negates the moral sense that God planted in them. After that, they can rationalize any action they need to maintain their world view, which is the source of their sense of their own goodness — anything from assassination to the mass slaughter of innocents. This is the ethical argument against the salafist hermeneutic. To invert a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, though this be method, yet there is madness in it.

There are other arguments against the the fundamentalist hermeneutic and their idolatry of the rule book, but ultimately the decision to resist or leave salafism or any other religious fundamentalism goes beyond merely rational arguments. The other major thing one notices about Daveed's narrative is the absence of spirituality during his al-Haramain period. I think Daveed left fundamentalism because he was homesick for God.

I suspect that homesickness for God may even be driving the more militant salafists (such as al-Qaeda and the like) to violence. If they can just get rid of the rest of us, if they can just eliminate our noisy interference, they will be able to tune into God clearly, and feel finally at home. To further this they not only fight, but (to use Irshad Manji's term) they colonize in order to dominate — the Muslim world, and the Muslim disapora in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America — by targeted application of charitable funds and personnel to set up and maintain madrassas (Islamic religious schools), charities, news media, and so on.

What Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has given us is a vivid and personal account of how Islamists colonize. How to stop them is up to the rest of the honest, thinking world — Muslims and non-Muslims, together.