From Broken Hill to Martin Place: Individual Jihad Comes to Australia, 1915 to 2015

December 31, 2014, 4:04 pm

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One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities.

For Australians, the anxious question about the Martin Place attack, which has grabbed the attention of everyone, is whether this atrocity is but a harbinger of a further series of deadly attacks on Australian soil, or whether it will pass into memory as an exceptional one-off event, much as the 1915 New Year’s Day massacre in Broken Hill did.

Alma Cowie, killed in Broken Hill 1915, and Katrina Dawson, killed in Sydney 2014

On New Year’s Day, 1915, two Muslim men, Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah, shot and killed four people and wounded several others before finally being killed by police. They had both come to Australia more than a decade previously.

Beginning in 1860, many Muslim cameleers came to Australia to help open up the arid outback. Today a famous train from Adelaide to Darwin is known as ‘The Ghan’ to commemorate the contribution of the ‘Afghans’ – as they were known (although they came from many different places across the Middle East and South Asia) – to the development of Australia.

The jihad attack was staged against a picnic train which was taking 1200 picnickers out on a New Year’s Day in open ore trucks. Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah first made enquiries at the station beforehand to make sure they would be in the right place at the right time to attack this particular train. They then positioned themselves on the side of a hill around 30 meters from the tracks, and opened fire as the trucks passed. Among the victims was Alma Cowie, aged 17, shot dead. By the end of the incident the jihadi cameleers had themselves been killed by police.

The two were found to have left notes to explain that they were responding to a call to jihad issued by the Ottoman Caliphate (on 11 November 1914).

Mullah Abdullah said that his intention was to die for his faith in obedience to the Sultan’s order, and Mahommed Gool wrote “I must kill you and give my life for my faith, Allahu Akbar, apparently in reference to Sura 9:111:

Allah has purchased of their faithful lives and worldly goods, and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for His cause, kill and be killed.

The Ottoman fatwa declared that it was a religious duty “for all the Muslims in all countries, whether young or old, infantry or cavalry, to resort to jihad with all their properties and lives, as required by the Quranic verse of enfiru.” The verse of enfiru (Arabic ‘go forth’) is a reference to Sura 9:38:

You who believe! What is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the path of Allah, you cling heavily to the earth? Do you prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless you go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place…

The enfiru verse calls upon Muslims to ‘go forth’ for jihad, or else face a painful doom under the judgement of Allah; better to fight as a martyr and go to paradise than burn in hell for hanging back.

A more detailed fatwa, ‘A Universal Proclamation to all the people of Islam’ was published by the ‘National Society of Defense of the Seat of the Caliphate’.[1] This ‘Universal Proclamation’ declared that ‘every Muslim without exception must be considered as a soldier’ and the duty of jihad ‘is enjoined upon all the peoples of Islam who are spread abroad upon the face of the whole earth’:

They must know that the killing of infidels who rule over the Islamic lands has become a sacred duty, whether it be secretly or openly, as the great Koran declares in its words: “Take them and kill them whenever you come across them, and we have given you a manifest power over them by revelation. [Sura 4:91].

This fatwa goes on to define three different forms of jihad, including ‘individual jihad’, in which an individual Muslim attacks an infidel in a solo act. It names contemporary examples of attacks on Westerners in colonial contexts which were familiar to Muslims at the time, including the killing of an English governor, Peter Galy,[2] as well as the assassination of an English chief of police in India. The fatwa suggests the use of ‘cutting, killing instruments’. It also cites as a precedent the assassination of certain Jews by Muhammad’s companions.

The fatwa urges faithful Muslims to rise up, ‘go out … and kill one of those who belong to the Triple Entente (Russian, France and Great Britain) of the infidels’:

... let every individual of the Muslims in whatever place they may be, take upon him an oath to kill at least three or four of the ruling infidels, enemies of Allah, and enemies of the religion. He must take upon him this oath before Allah Most High, expecting his reward from Allah alone, and let the Muslim be confident, if there be to him no other good deed than this, nevertheless he will prosper in the day of judgment …

The two ‘Afghan’ jihadis of Broken Hill, according to their own testimony, acted in accordance with such instructions: they went out to kill infidels as an act of individual jihad.

Another mode of jihad recommended by the ‘Universal Proclamation’ is ‘jihad by bands’, which it claims to be particularly effective when Islam is weak. The ‘Universal Proclamation’ states:

… the most profitable of them is that which makes use of secret formations, and it is hoped that the Islamic world of today will profit very greatly from secret bands, and therefore it is in the degree of duty to him who wishes to participate in the Jihad that he should take council with people of experience in the formation of secret bands and gain profitable information of this kind.

‘Jihad by bands’ is the mode of Al-Qa’ida.

The third recommended form of jihad is ‘jihad by campaigns’, which is warfare using armies directed by the Caliph. This is the mode the self-declared caliphate known as the Islamic State is following today.

The phenomenon of individuals launching a personal jihad against non-Muslim infidels is nothing new. The precedents in the life of Muhammad are well-known and some of these were cited in the Ottoman ‘Universal Proclamation’. As the Ottoman fatwa indicated, the phenomenon was already a thorn in the side of colonial authorities a century ago.

In the Dutch occupation of Aceh, the phenomenon of individual Muslims killing Dutch people was frequent enough to be given a name, Atjeh-moorden‘Acehnese murders’. The Dutch authorities conducted investigations into the mental state of perpetrators of such attacks. This was not always easy: because the attacks were mounted with the intention of ‘killing and being killed’ to attain martrydom, only a minority of attackers survived in a fit state to be investigated.

The Dutch wrestled for decades to understand the phenomenon. The psychiatrist R.A. Kern conducted a study of Atjeh-moorden and concluded that while Islamic theology accounted for the common pattern of the murders, this was not enough to determine which particular individuals might be triggered to mount such attacks: for that one needed to look to the personal circumstances of the individuals.

Nevertheless, repeated psychiatric studies of perpetrators showed that they were not mad. David Kloos summarized their findings: “Over the years, a consensus had formed among the Dutch that the Ajteh-moorden were committed deliberately, in ‘cold blood’ and thus ‘rationally’.[3] Going for individual jihad was not normally a symptom of mental instability.

There are striking parallels between the Broken Hill massacre a century ago, and the recent Martin Place siege.

In both cases the media puzzled over the motivation of the attackers. The Barrier Miner wrote in 1915“The question has been asked over and over again, and by many people since yesterday morning’s tragic occurrence, as to the motive of the men in attacking the picnic train with its load of women and children...”
The attackers in both cases had resided for many years in Australia and were well-known in their communities.
Both attacks were individual acts; although the 1915 attack by two individuals working together, they were not part of a larger network of jihadis, but were merely combining their individual efforts.
In both cases the attackers subscribed to the dogmas of jihad in the path of Allah, and martyrdom in Holy War.
In both cases, attackers were mobilized in response to a global call to jihad: in 1915 issued by the Ottoman Caliphate; in 2014 issued by Islamic State.
Both global calls to jihad had specifically invited Muslims around the world to commit individual acts of jihad by killing infidels (see here on the Islamic State’s call to Muslims to run over infidels with their cars).
In both cases the perpetrators had been experiencing difficulties with the law: in the 1915 massacre, Mullah Abdullah had been convicted days before for slaughtering sheep on an unlicensed premises. In the Martin Place siege, Hojat al-Islam Muhammad Hassan Manteqi (AKA ‘Sheikh’ Man Haron Monis) was facing criminal charges as an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife and had a history of convictions for serious offenses.

There were also similarities in the way the wider community and the media responded:

In both cases the media took pains to point out that the majority of people in the Muslim community abhorred the killings, and reported that no-one from the Muslim community wished to claim the bodies (see here and here).
In both cases there were no reprisals against Muslims. However the Broken Hill German Club was burned down in 1915; the killings were considered to be linked to the World War I conflict as a whole, rather than as manifestations of individual jihadism.

Michael Wesley, professor of International Relations and director of the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies at the Australian National University confidently wrote in The Australian that ‘this is a new and more dangerous form of terrorism’, which he called ‘third-generation’ terrorism.

According to Wesley, ‘first-generation’ terrorism only appeared in the world in the 1960’s, ‘second-generation’ terrorism in the 1990’s, and this, in its turn, ‘morphed’ into ‘third generation’ terrorism, which we are experiencing today.

Is individual jihad really a new phenomenon? Nothing could be further from the truth. It is, on the contrary, an old, old form of warfare, as old as the origins of Islam itself. The Ottoman fatwa writers knew their Koran and were qualified to draw conclusions from it, which did not differ from the long-established mainstream of Islamic teachings about jihad.

To discuss such things the term terrorism is inadequate and even misleading. It confuses experts like Professor Wesley, who attempt to lump the Martin Place siege into a conceptual grid which includes the IRA, in apparent ignorance of the well-documented history of jihadism.

Also misleading is the widely used term lone wolf, which implies social disengagement and dysfunction, including disconnection with the broader jihadi movement. This very Western secular construct overlooks the considerable attention in Islamic jurisprudence to the idea of warfare as an ‘individual obligation’ (fardh al-’ayn), which is incumbent upon Muslims as individuals, even if they are not enlisted in a jihad army.

The West puzzles and puzzles over jihad. The Martin Place hostage taker ‘Sheikh’ Monis certainly seems to have been a very unpleasant individual, and many have been tempted to write him off as ‘crazy’. However what fascinates and terrifies most is the utter ordinariness of so many jihadis. Here in Australia article after article has been published in the media pointing out how normal the young men are who have joined Islamic State. We have read how they enjoy social media, made YouTube videos, do well at school, are liked by their friends, go partying, have girlfriends, support local football teams etc. And all this is related to us as if it was the most amazing news.

Given the terrifying ordinariness of the jihadis, it is tempting to apply pejorative labels to them, to write them off as deranged misfits. This is an attempt to marginalize the problem. Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop called it ‘idiotic’ to refer to those who die in jihad as ‘martyrs’.

However such attempts to push the jihad phenomenon to the edges of our rational world are doomed to fail. Instead the same question keeps arising, like a persistent itch, that the Barrier Miner put on January 2, 1915: ‘The question has been asked over and over again, and by many people since yesterday morning’s tragic occurrence, as to the motive of the men in attacking the picnic train with its load of women and children…’

This question will simply not go away. In reality, the will to ‘go forth’ for jihad is not a manifestation of craziness – many of its actors are entirely sane. It is not a manifestation of stupidity – many of its actors are quite intelligent. It is not a manifestation of social dysfunction or poverty – many of its actors come from stable and wealthy homes. It is not a manifestation of weirdness – many of its actors are quite ordinary. Nor is it a manifestation of ‘morphing’ trends in international relations – jihadism is as old as the hills.

Jihadi terror is a manifestation of Islamic theology. Despite the fact that so many Muslims reject jihadism, and millions of Muslims can be counted among its victims, this remains as true today as ever it has been. Yet this is something the West remains disturbingly ill-prepared to accept, engage with, or address appropriately. We stubbornly continue to seek worldview solace in misplaced explanations.

Australians are right to be deeply concerned about the Martin Place incident. History will show that this was not a one-off blip in the peaceful lives of Australians. It will certainly not take another hundred years before more Australians die at the hands of Australian jihadis on Australian soil. Such future tragedies may eventually compel us to revise and reject our inadequate worldviews. Until then it seems we must continue to wear our self-imposed blindfolds, all the while trying to defend ourselves against an enemy we cannot see and stubbornly refuse to understand.

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[1] Excerpts from the ‘Universal Proclamation’ are also reproduced in Andrew Bostom’s Legacy of Jihad, p.221 ff. For a different translation of the whole document see here, which is the version cited here. Trans. American Agency and Consulate, Cairo, Egypt. US State Department document 867.4016/57, March 10, 1915.

[2] This is almost certainly a reference to the assassination of Boutros Ghaly five years previously, in 1910. Ghaly was a Coptic Christian and prime minister of Egypt at a time when the country was a de facto English protectorate, although formally under the Ottomans Sultanate. When the fatwa refers to him as an “English Governor”, this is a slander which summarizes the Islamic charge against him. The assassin was Ibrahim Nassif al-Wardani, a graduate in pharmacology from a privileged Muslim background, who been educated in Lausanne, Paris and London. This was the first of a series of assassinations in Egypt which continued up until the start of WW I. See Reid, Donald M. (1982). "Political Assassination in Egypt, 1910-1954". The International Journal of African Historical Studies15 (4): 625–651. (Prime Minister Boutros Ghaly was the grandfather of Boutros Boutros-Ghaly, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, after whom he is named.)

[3] David Kloos, ‘A crazy state: violence, psychiatry and colonialism in Aceh, Indonesia, ca. 1910-1942’. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 170: 25-65.

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Bearing the cross: a letter to the Islamic State

February 20, 2015, 2:22 pm

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This is the first of a two-part post on the 21 Egyptian martyrs killed in Libya. This first part is a reflection, as a Christian, on aspects of this event and reactions to it. The second part, ‘A message signed with blood to the Nation of the Cross’ consists of explanatory notes on the texts – spoken and written – which were part of the Islamic State’s film of their ritual beheadings. This post has also appeared on Lapido media, and Quadrant Online.

The Islamic State sent me a letter this week. This letter was in the form of a short film produced by the Islamic State’s Al-Hayat Media centre. This was not addressed to me personally, but to all Christians everywhere. Its title was A Message Signed with BLOOD to the Nation of the Cross. This was a video of the ritual slaughter of the 21 Egyptian Christians. Their blood flowing in the ocean waves was the ‘signature’ at the end of the video.

As I write this it is Ash Wednesday. This is the start of forty days of Lent, a period of fasting and contemplation for Christians all over the world. For many centuries it has been a custom of Christians to receive a mark of the cross in ash upon the forehead as a sign of repentance.

As I received this mark of the cross today I was thinking of the 21 Egyptian Christian martyrs. Copts permanently bear the sign of the cross, tattooed on their wrists, as a sign that they will refuse to renounce their beliefs.

A Coptic Girl with a Wrist Cross Tatoo

I intend to read out these men’s names at our morning church services this Sunday, here in Melbourne, Australia. And I also choose to honour them today by writing to acknowledge the truth about why they were killed, and in particular the explanation given by their killers.

I also wish to record, as a Christian and a pastor, my intense protest at the White House official statement of February 15 2015 concerning this event. This makes no mention of the reason the twenty one were killed: their Christian faith. This culpable denial dishonours them, as it dishonours me and Christians everywhere.

The White House statement claimed that “ISIL’s barbarity knows no bounds. It is unconstrained by faith, sect or ethnicity.” Not true. The Islamic State’s actions are constrained by its theology, and in this case its targets are also determined on religious grounds; they were Christians. It is not an endorsement of the killers’ Islamic beliefs to acknowledge that these jihadis follow a form of Islam, and that their sect and faith does constrain their behaviour accordingly.

President Obama has defended his administration’s misrepresentations on the grounds that the radicals are “desperate for legitimacy” so “They try to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” But these are not desperate people. They are shockingly confident in their beliefs. They do not “try to portray themselves” as Islamic: they sincerely believe they are. Christopher Hitchens got it right over a decade ago when he suggested of Al Qa’ida recruits that “they believe their own propaganda,” and “absolutely subscribe to the tenets of their version … of their religion, Islam.”

Obama also stated that “we must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie.” This too is nonsense. A lie is a deliberate intention to deceive, and these self-described jihadis are – at least by their own understanding – speaking the absolute truth when they claim to speak for Islam.

Some years ago I had the privilege of reading the Gospel at a Coptic service held in St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, here in Melbourne. The service was held to commemorate the 22 martyrs of the attack on Al-Qiddisin Church in Alexandria on New Year’s Eve. It was led by Bishop Suriel, Melbourne’s Coptic bishop.

The Al-Qiddisin martyr’s service impressed me deeply. I long pondered the fact that the Coptic church of Egypt has been grieving over the freshly dug graves of its martyred sons and daughters since the dawn of Christianity. As I sat through the service and sung the hymns about martyrdom, I thought, “So this is what it means to be a Copt”.

The Islamic State video, a polished production, depicts 21 Christian men, hands bound behind them, being led one-by-one along a beach in Libya to a point where they are forced to bow down with their heads in the sand, and there they are beheaded, crying out Ya Rabbi Yasou‘Lord Jesus!’, some reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Severed heads were then placed on top of each corpse, their Muslim slayer standing over them. The final film shots show the Mediterranean washing red with their blood.

One of the Coptic victims with his killer

The whole event was meticulously choreographed and rehearsed. The video’s obvious purpose is to humiliate and terrorise Christians, whom it derisively calls, “The Nation of the Cross”. I admire the courage of the martyrs, who did not disown the name of Christ and the cross to follow Islam, even as they were being mocked and killed by their tormentors.

It is indisputable (see Part 2) that the whole script of this video is intensely religious. It is packed with references to the Qur’an and the Hadiths of Muhammad. As Graeme Wood comments inan important recent Atlantic Monthly article, the Islamic State adherents are constantly referencing Islam’s sacred texts. In their everyday speech, “Koranic quotations are ubiquitous”. This film is no exception. For anyone who knows anything about Islam it is impossible to view this film without being aware of the heavy constraining influence of the Qur’an and the Hadiths on the script. These references are essential for understanding the true context, meaning and intent of the film. 

The Egyptian government reacted angrily to the executions, bombing Islamic State positions inside Libya. Egypt was incensed about this massacre – and rightly so – but it has a very long and enduring track record of not prosecuting Muslims who have massacred Christians within its own borders. General Al-Sisi is a leader who has been complicit in this peculiar form of Muslim cowardice. This moral inconsistency is causing great division and confusion among Copts at the present time.

My comment after the Al-Qiddisi massacre in January 2011 remains as valid now as it was then:

“I deplore the lack of freedom of religion in Egypt, the authorities’ apparent unwillingness to protect the indigenous Christian minority and its places of worship, and the lamentable track record of the Egyptian justice system in securing criminal convictions against those who have targeted Christians for attack. I call upon Egypt’s leaders to respond to these abuses honestly and with integrity, without making excuses or indulging in denial.”

There is a double standard in the house of Islam. Examples are legion. The Jordanian royal house has been prominent in speaking up against attacks against Christians in Iraq and Syria, yet at the time when the Common Word letter was being released to the Christian world in 2008 under Jordanian royal sponsorship, its own Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought had posted on its website fatwas by its Chief Scholar – the former Mufti of Jordan – which declared death for Christians for the crime of leaving Islam, and even identified one person by name (see here).

King Abdullah has on the one hand been a champion of the rights of displaced Christians in the Middle East, and God knows they surely need one. On the other hand he has held up the notorious Pact of Umar as evidence of Jordan’s history of religious tolerance:

“Jerusalem, which is, regrettably, subject to the worst forms of Judaisation today, stands witness to fourteen centuries of deep, solid and fraternal relations between Muslims and Christians, enhanced by the Pact of Omar [ibn al-Khattab], and promoted by my grandfather, Sharif Hussein bin Ali, may God bless his soul.”

In contrast to this historical revisionism, the renowned Muslim jurist Ibn Kathir, accurately described the intent and effect of the conditions of the Pact of Umar as guaranteeing the continued degradation of Christians under Islamic rule:

“This is why the Leader of the faithful ‘Umar bin Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, demanded his well-known conditions be met by the Christians, these conditions that ensured their continued humiliation, degradation and disgrace.”

Readers who read classical Arabic may consult the Royal Jordan Aal al-Bayt Institute’s own database of commentaries here, to view Ibn Kathir’s original text.

The problem is that as long as Muslims allow derogatory words like mushrik‘associator, polytheist’ and kafir‘infidel’ to be applied to Christians, while also preaching Qur’anic verses which denigrate non-Muslims, the hostility and hatred can only continue.

As long as the highest legal authorities of the Islamic mainstream continue to assert the right of Muslims to kill those who leave Islam, bursts of extreme religious hatred such as we have just seen in Libya can only continue.

As long as Muslims claim that the well-documented brutal slaughters of Islamic conquest and the ensuing oppression of nations under the Islamic system of dhimmitude were a mercy to the world, the ‘opening’ up (al-futuh) of dark nations to light and truth, hatred towards non-Muslims will continue to arise in the house of Islam.

The fundamental problem is not peculiar variants of extreme religious worldviews, it is a deeply engrained religious worldview that is not acknowledged by many who hold it. Those who, like King Abdullah, allow it room to breathe by claiming that it is something other than what it really is are as much a part of the problem as the violent jihadis who are proud to own the worldview.

In the house of Islam, hatred has deep roots stretching back through time. In 1836 Edward Lane reported in The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptiansthat it was standard practice in many Cairo schools to require Muslim school boys to invoke daily curses on the heads of Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. In essence these curses called for the looting, killing and enslavement of non-Muslims. It is only against the backdrop of inter-generational hatred that a television series on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion could have become mainstream viewing in Egyptian society, and continuing kidnapping, rape and killings of Copts are perpetrated without justice for the victims.

There is an ill-wind of hatred blowing in the house of Islam and it has been blowing for a very long time indeed. When this wind is whipped up into a tornado, the world is appalled, but it is the constant steady breeze of hatred that is the root of the problem.

As this letter was addressed to the Christians of the world, here I give my personal reply to the Islamic State, written as a Christian:

I am not intimidated by your hatred. Our Lord Jesus Christ taught us not to fear those who may kill the body. The people of honour on that beach in Tripoli were those 21 courageous Copts, who dared to confess the name of Christ, even with a knife to their necks. They knew well what choice they were making. You thought to humiliate them, but the Word of God tells me they are the vindicated ones, the men of glory. I believe they knew that full well.

For you I have no hate, only pity. You wield the sword to kill ideas and worship you do not understand, but you do this in vain. The truth cannot be killed by your knives.

General Sisi of Egypt was right: because of you, people all over the world are doubting Islam.

Here is how a young Egyptian girl reacted to what you did:

‘I am encouraged because now I know that what we have been taught in history books about Egyptian Christians being martyred for their faith is not just history, but that there are Christians today who are brave enough to face death rather than deny their Lord! When I saw these young men praying as they were being prepared for execution and then many of them shouting ‘O Lord Jesus’ as their throats were being slit, I realized that the Gospel message can still help us to hold on to the promises of God even when facing death!’

This is the true truth, and it is precisely because of this truth that a new wind is blowing in the house of Islam: a fresh breeze of questioning, a wind of gentleness and openness. This is the life-giving breath of hope that there must be a different way to walk with God. You are men of the past: the future belongs to those you killed on the beach.

To read the second part of this post, go to this link.

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‘A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross’

February 20, 2015, 2:25 pm

≫ Next: Challenging Islam’s Warrant to Kill

≪ Previous: Bearing the cross: a letter to the Islamic State

This post is a analytical explanation of a film produced by Al-Hayat Media of the Islamic State, which portrays the ritual slaughter of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya, in the film “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross”. Words in blue are from the film, either in the form of titles or sub-titles, or as narration. Text in red is for the words of Muhammad or the Qur’an. This is Part 2 of a pair of posts about this film. Part 1 is Bearing the cross: a letter to the Islamic State. This post has also appeared on Lapido Media.

The Coast of Wilāyat Tarābulus [in the region of Tripoli] by the Mediterranean Sea

The people of the cross, the followers of the hostile Egyptian Church

The opening scenes show the 21 men being led along the coast towards the camera, each one held by a hooded captor.

All praise is due to Allah, the strong and mighty, and may blessings and peace be upon[1] the one sent by the sword[2] as a mercy for all the world[3].

[1] It is a standard Islamic text opening to bless Muhammad.

[2] In this case Muhammad is identified as the ‘one sent by the sword.’ This phrase is taken from Muhammad’s own words:

“I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and associate no partners with him. I command you to believe and subjugate those who disobey me.” Subhi al-Salih, ed., Ahkam Ahl al-Dhimmah vol 2: 736. Also cited by (Ibn Taymiyyah in Majmu’ Al-Fatawa (Vol. 28, p. 270).

[3] Sura 21:107 “We have sent you [Muhammad] as a mercy for the worlds.”

Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of as-Sham [Syria] and on Dabiq’s plain,[4] chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross delusion for a long time, filled with spiteagainst Islam and Muslims[5].

[4] Dabiq is a town in northern Syria. In Islamic eschatology it is believed to be a place of battle between Christians and Muslims. For this reason Dabiq was chosen as the title for the Islamic State’s propaganda magazine.

[5] The idea that Christians have enmity against Muslims is from the Koran:
Sura 60:4 “...enmity and hatred have appeared between us and you forever until you believe in Allah alone”

Sura 86:15 “Surely, the disbelievers are your ardent enemies.”
Sura 3:119 “O ye who believe! Take not others than your own people as intimate friends; they will spare no pains to ruin you. They love to see you in trouble. Hatred has already shown itself through the utterances of their mouths and what their breasts hide is greater still.”

And today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message. “Oh Crusaders, safety for you will only be wishes,[6] especially when you are fighting us all together.[7] Therefore, we will fight you all together,[7] until the war lays down its burdens[8] and Jesus, peace be upon him, will descend, breaking the cross, killing the swine and abolishing jizya.[9]”

These few lines are packed with references to Islam’s canonical texts.

[6] Muhammad famously told the Jews of Medina aslim taslam‘convert/surrender (to Islam) and you will be safe’. By this logic, those who refuse to convert to Islam can never be safe.

[7] Sura 9:36 “… fight the polytheists all together as they fight you all together”. This verse comes hot on the heels of 9:29 which is the key verse in the Koran to support the subjugation of Christians under Islam’s yoke. The Arabic word for ‘fight’ here actually means‘fight to kill’.

[8] Sura 47:4 “And when you meet in battle those who disbelieve, smite their necks [i.e. behead them]; and, when you have overcome them, by causing great slaughter among them, bind fast the fetters - then afterwards either release them as a favour or by taking ransom - until the war lays down its burdens.”

[9] Muhammad said “Isa (Jesus) ... will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizyah. Allah will perish [destroy] all religions except Islam.” (Sunan Abu Dawud, Book of Battles). According to this well-known tradition of Muhammad, Isa the Islamic Christ will destroy Christianity, and kill anyone who does not submit to the sharia of Muhammad. In Islamic law the abolition of jizya means the end of tolerance for non-Muslim religions. After Jesus’ return, all humanity will be given only two choices: Islam or death. These Christians in Tripoli are being killed in anticipation of this end-times principle.

And the sea you have hidden Shaikh Usama Bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah, we will mix it with your blood.

The principle of qisas or retribution is at play here: just as Bin Ladin was buried at sea, so Christians will have their blood spilled into the ocean. Cf. Sura 2: 190-94 “fight in the way of Allah those who fight you … slay these transgressors wherever you meet them and derive them out from where they have driven you out … if they fight you, then fight them … if they violate the prohibition, then you may do the same in retaliation” And also Sura 16: 126 “retaliate with an equivalent punishment”.

The same motivation influenced the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot: because his bombs had caused people to die in burning buildings, so it was considered permissible to burn him. See here.

The principle of qisas also accounts for the standard Guantanamo Bay-style orange jumpsuits supplied to the beheading victims. This is saying: “we are humiliating you as you humiliated us at Guatanamo.”

The worldview of qisas is not limited to the Islamic State. Jordan and Egypt cited the same principle when executing prisoners and launching bombing raids in response to IS atrocities.

Another theological driver at play here is the principle of collective punishment: if one Christian wrongs a Muslim, then all Christians should be punished, even if these particular Egyptian Christians had absolutely nothing to do with Bin Ladin or his death: because of the manner in which the United States buried Bin Ladin at sea, Egyptian Christians’ blood is to be mingled in the ocean. Likewise, because of the humiliating way in which the United States treated uncooperative Muslim captives in Guantanamo, Egyptian Christians are to be beheaded wearing orange jumpsuits.

They supplicate what they worship and die upon their paganism.

As the victims are being forced down, first to kneel, and then to lower their heads into the sand, the subscription declares that they are ‘supplicating’ i.e. down on their knees to worship, and dying for the sake of their religion, which is their pagan ‘worship’. As they go down, a number of the men can be seen calling on the name of Jesus.

This textual inscription is designed to humiliate the victims and make crystal clear to other Christians that these men are being killed for their faith. The manner of their death is also an enactment of the false worship they are charged with: they are compelled to bow down, as if to an idol, but they are going down to their deaths. This ritual is communicating, “Because you have bowed down to a false god, you will now bow down to your death.”

This filthy blood is just some of what awaits you, in revenge for Camella and her sisters.

Camilla Shehata is a Coptic woman, the wife of a Christian priest, who went missing. Her husband reported her missing to the police fearing that she had been kidnapped by Muslim men, who regularly kidnap, rape and forcibly convert Christian women in Egypt, all too often with the collusion of the authorities. Kidnappers are known especially to target the wives of priests. Later Camilla appeared on national television to state that she had just gone to be with relatives after a domestic dispute and she had not converted to Islam. However the Muslim public in Egypt was not to be placated. It was incited by Muslim leaders with the idea that she had converted to Islam, and the Coptic church, having kidnapped her, was torturing her to force her back into Christianity. This libel against Egyptian Christians was also made in connection with other Coptic women.

This is a case of projection. Muslims have captured hundreds of Coptic girls and women in recent years (see here and here) compelling them through threats and violence to accept Islam and give false testimony that the have entered Islam willingly. There is normally no recourse for the families of the captive females. The families are simply told that the women have converted to Islam and are now married, and their new husbands can speak for them, in accordance with Islamic law. (See my book The Third Choice, p.163ff for a theological explanation of why non-Muslim women are especially vulnerable to rape and capture in Islamic conditions.)

The massacre of congregants in the Baghdad Catholic cathedral on October 31, 2010 was also claimed by the Al Qaida perpetrators to be retribution for Camilla.

The idea of revenging Camilla by killing random Coptic men is another example of a theological tendency among Islamic radical to promote collective punishment for the People of the Book. The Moroccan jurist Al-Maghili wrote concerning the dhimma pact of ‘protection’ for non-Muslims, “The fact that one individual (or one group) among them [i.e. the non-Muslims] has broken the statute is enough to invalidate it for all of them”.

We will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission, the promise of our prophet, peace be upon him.

This references a number of well-known hadiths of Muhammad in which he prophesies the conquest of Rome, e.g.: “You will attack Arabia and Allah will enable you to conquer it, then you would attack Persia and He would make you to conquer it. Then you would attack Rome and Allah will enable you to conquer it,…” (Sahih Muslim, the Book of the Torments and Portents of the Last Hour).

This boast signifies the final destruction of the fifth of the four original centres of the church. The others, already overrun by Islam, are Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria.

The film ends with a close-up of the blood-red water of the ocean: the signature in blood.

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Challenging Islam’s Warrant to Kill

March 25, 2015, 5:45 am

≫ Next: Correcting a typo in "Challenging Islam's Warrant to Kill"

≪ Previous: ‘A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross’

This post was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

Last week the Islamic State’s ‘Hacking Division’ released the names and addresses of one hundred US military personnel. It urged the ‘brothers residing in America’ – i.e. American Muslims – to ‘deal with’ them, which is to say, it wants them killed.

There is much talk these days of radicalization and deradicalization. At the heart of both processes are religious ideas: theological dogmas. What are some of the key theological principles which might cause a Muslim to take this call seriously? What is the Islamic reasoning given by the IS Hacking Division in support of its call to kill non-Muslims?

The Hacking Division quotes two verses of the Qur’an:

Sura 9:123 ‘fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you’ and
Sura 9:14 ‘Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them, and satisfy [actually yashfi ‘heal’] the breasts of a believing people’.

The meaning of these two verses hangs upon the word qātilū, translated here as ‘fight’. The verbal root q-t-l from which qātilū is formed means ‘kill’, so the Arabic actually means ‘fight to kill’ (see discussion here). These Qur’anic verses truly are commands to kill non-Muslims.

The second quoted verse, from Sura 9:14, puts forward a view concerning what Muslims should do about emotional pain and anguish they may experience because of unbelievers. ‘Allah’, the verse says, ‘will heal the breasts’ of Muslims, – and then the sentence continues into the next verse – ‘and remove the rage of their hearts’.

The key concept here is that if Muslims have strong feelings, including anger, against non-Muslims, their emotional distress will subside and be ‘healed’ as they kill, humiliate and triumph over non-believers. Strange therapy indeed for the human soul! According to the Qur’an, peace within the Muslim soul can be secured by shedding non-Muslim blood.

These are stock-standard verses used to urge Muslims to go for jihad against disbelievers. However what most caught my eye in the Hacking Division’s call to arms against infidels in America was a reference to Muhammad’s teachings. The Hacking Division refers to hadith 4661 in a published English version of the Sahih Muslim (translated by Abdul Hamid Sidiqqi).

The Sahih Muslim is one of the most revered and authoritative sources for the teaching and example of Muhammad, whose life is considered exemplary and compulsory for Muslims to emulate. This particular hadith can be found on page 1263 of Volume 3 of the English edition:

Chapter 789 (DCCLXXXIX)
About a man who killed a disbeliever and embraced Islam.
(4661) It has been narrated on the authority of Abu Huraira that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: A disbeliever and a believer who killed him will never be gathered together in Hell. [See here.]

This is a most significant statement. It is saying that if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, they cannot both end up in hell. The alternative to hell is paradise, so in other words, killing a non-Muslim – who is destined for hell due to their unbelief – can provide a sure ticket to paradise for a Muslim.

This tradition is the authority for a view widely put about by jihadis, that if a Muslim personally gets to kill a disbeliever, the Muslim will gain paradise. Put together with with the famous belief that for a Muslim to be ‘martyred’ in jihad opens the gates of paradise (see Sura 3:169-170; 9:111; and 22:58), fighting to kill non-Muslims can be a ticket to glory, win or lose. Either one kills and gains a get-out-of-hell free card, or one is killed and gains a get-into-paradise-free card. This is a win-win proposition for the jihadi.

Persuading Muslims to take the words of Muhammad seriously is the core strategy of radicalization. This tactic works as well as it does because it appeals to a plain reading of Islam’s holy texts.

To be deradicalized, a Muslim needs to repudiate the theological authority of the teachings of Muhammad and the Qur’an. This is a hard call for pious Muslims. Ayan Hirsi Ali was surely correct in her recent essay calling for reform of Islam when she wrote that:

‘the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.’

Hirsi Ali also declared:

‘we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.’

Hirsi Ali was right: the West needs to engage with and repudiate the Islamic dogmas that killing or being killed in murderous attacks against non-Mulims is some kind of golden key which unlocks the gates of paradise. Until these beliefs and the canonical teachings they rely on are acknowledged and repudiated, the lives of non-Muslims will continue to be discarded as the ‘ticket to paradise’ of Muslim belligerents.

Hadiths such as 4661 from Sahih Muslim, and the Qur’anic verses cited here are a genuine part of the Islamic canon. Such verses remain unrenounced and unrepudiated by a great many Muslims and Islamic institutions today.

As long as such texts are not repudiated, the theological winds of Islam will all too easily continue to sweep pious Muslim hearts and minds towards radicalization, a process which exalts the idea that the lives of infidels are disposable.

Islam’s warrant to kill infidels is an idea which deserves to be exposed, challenged, thoroughly debated, and rejected.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church,

a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum,

and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

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Correcting a typo in "Challenging Islam's Warrant to Kill"

April 5, 2015, 4:49 am

≫ Next: Sex Slavery and the Islamic State

≪ Previous: Challenging Islam’s Warrant to Kill

In my most recent post "Challenging Islam's warrant to Kill" there was a typo, which has now been corrected:
http://blog.markdurie.com/2015/03/challenging-islams-warrant-to-kill.html

A quotation from the Qur'an was incorrect:
Sura 9:123 ‘fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you’
(The post had 'believers' in error.)

Mark Durie

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Sex Slavery and the Islamic State

July 2, 2015, 4:35 pm

≫ Next: Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy

≪ Previous: Correcting a typo in "Challenging Islam's Warrant to Kill"

This article appears first in On Line Opinion.

Jamie Walker, Middle East correspondent for The Australian, asked two critical questions in a recent article which discussed the involvement of two Australian citizens, Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, in Islamic State sex slavery. In 2014 Elomar purchased sex slaves, of whom four, all Yazidis, later escaped to a refugee camp where the ABC caught up with them and interviewed them. Elomar had also boasted on Twitter that he had “1 of 7 Yehzidi slave girls for sale” at $2500 each.

Walker’s questions were:

“The uncomfortable questions for the Western world, including Australia, are why this debased appeal seems to be gaining traction with Islamic State’s target audience, which increasingly includes women, and why it’s not challenged more stridently in the public arena.”

The Islamic State has given its own answer to the first question. In the fourth edition of its magazine Dabiq it aggressively promoted sex slavery as an Islamic practice, arguing that the practice conforms to the teaching and example of Muhammad and his companions.

Does this argument have any wider appeal than among Islamic State recruits?

The reality is that many Muslim scholars have upheld the practice of enslaving captives of war. For example Islamic revivalist Abul A‘la Maududi wrote in his influential and widely disseminated tract Human Rights in Islam that for Muslims to enslave their captives was “a more humane and proper way of disposing of them” than Western approaches. Enslavement by Muslims, he argued, is preferable to the provisions of the Geneva Convention because of the value of this policy for fuelling the growth of Islam:

“The result of this humane policy was that most of the men who were captured on foreign battlefields and brought to the Muslim countries as slaves embraced Islam and their descendants produced great scholars, imams, jurists, commentators, statesmen and generals of the army.”

Islamic revivalist movements which look forward to the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate have repeatedly endorsed the practice of slavery in the name of their religious convictions. For example the (now banned) Muhajiroun movement in the UK announced in an article, “How does Islam Classify Lands?” that once a true Islamic State is established, no-one living in other nations (which it calls Dar al Harb ‘house of war’) will have a right to their life or their wealth:

“… hence a Muslim in such circumstances can then go into Dar Al Harb and take the wealth from the people unless there is a treaty with that state. If there is no treaty individual Muslims can even go to Dar Al Harb and take women to keep as slaves.”

It is a problem that the Qur’an itself endorses having sex with captive women (Sura 4:24). According to a secure tradition (hadith) attributed to one of Muhammad’s companions, Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri, this verse of the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad at a time when Muslims had been ‘refraining’ from having sex with their married female captives. Verse 4:24 relieved them of this restraint by giving them permission to have sex with captive women even if the women were already married.

Abd-al-Hamid Siddiqui, a Fellow of the Islamic Research Academy of Karachi and the translator into English of the Sahih Muslim, commented on this tradition, saying: “When women are taken captive their previous marriages are automatically annulled. It should, however, be remembered that sexual intercourse with these women is lawful with certain conditions.”

There have been many cases reported across the centuries of Islamic armies using captive women for sex slavery, but is this any different from all wars? It is different in one important respect, that the mainstream of Islamic jurisprudence has justified and supported this practice on the basis of Islam’s canonical sources, including Muhammad’s own example and teaching. Islamic sex slavery is religiously sanctioned ‘guilt-free sex’.

This religious teaching is impacting our world today because the global Islamic community has been deeply affected by a grassroots religious revival, which seeks to purify Islam and restore it to its foundational principles, which include rules for war and the treatment of captives.

This leads us to Walker’s second question: why is the Islamic State’s ‘debased appeal’ not ‘challenged more stridently in the public arena’?

An obstacle which stands in the way of such a challenge is that it would require a sober evaluation of the Islamic character of sex slavery. However even suggesting a link between Islam and ‘terrorism’ has become taboo to those who are afraid of being judged intolerant. Not only do some impose this taboo upon themselves, but they are quick to stigmatise those who do not partner with them in this ill-considered ‘tolerance’.

The taboo attached to making any link between Islamic State atrocities and the religion of Islam was apparent in comments by Greg Bearup on his interview with South Australian politician Cory Bernardi. During the course of the interview Senator Bernardi linked the Islamic State with Muhammad’s example, to which the interviewer wrote “Kaboom!”, and called the comment a ‘hand grenade’, ‘inflammatory’ and ‘divisive’.

While it is a hopeful sign that some Muslims, such as Anooshe Mushtaq, have been willing to explore the Islamic character of the Islamic State, non-Muslim opinion-makers should show more backbone by engaging with the issue at hand.

It is not a sign of tolerance when free people deliberately silence themselves about the ideological drivers of sex trafficking. The same can also be said of acts of terrorism, such as the world has witnessed over the past week in France, Tunisia and Kuwait.

Until societies are able and willing to have a frank and free discussion of the ideological drivers which motivate acts of terror and abuse, they should not expect to be able to develop effective strategies to contain or wind back such atrocities.

A state of denial is a state of defeat.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church,
a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum,
and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

↧

Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy

November 16, 2015, 3:31 pm

≫ Next: Love alone is not enough

≪ Previous: Sex Slavery and the Islamic State

LEADING commentator Janet Daley's article in Saturday's Telegraph‘The West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad.

It is a triumph of religious illiteracy.

Janet Daley has called ISIS a 'death cult'

The jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond encompassing in ‘coherent, systematic thought’ that no vocabulary can describe it: ‘This is just insanity’, she writes. Because the enemy is ‘hysterical’, lacking 'rational demands', 'negotiable limits,’ or ‘intelligible objectives’ Daley claims it is pointless to subject its actions to any form of historical, social or theological analysis, for no-one should attempt to ‘impose logic on behaviour that is pathological’.

Despite this, Daley then ventures to offer analysis of and explanations for ISIS’ actions, but in doing so she relies upon her own conceptual categories, not those of ISIS.

Her explanations therefore fall wide of the mark.

‘Civilians’

Daley writes: ‘We face a violent and highly contagious madness that believes the killing of civilians is a moral act.’ Here she appeals to Western concepts of war, reflected, for example, in the Geneva Convention, which provides detailed principles for the ‘protection of civilian persons’.

Yet the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own, is to describe it in its own terms.

ISIS does not subscribe to the Geneva Convention. Its actions and strategies are based upon medieval Islamic laws of jihad, which make no use of the modern Western concept of ‘civilian’.

They do, however, refer to the category of disbelievers (mushrik or kafir).
ISIS believes that killing disbelievers is a moral act, in accordance, for example, with Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an, which states :‘Fight and kill the idolators (mushrik) wherever you find them'.

Not nihilism

Daley writes: ‘The enemy has stated explicitly that it does not revere life at all’ and ‘Civilians are not collateral damage in this campaign: their deaths are the whole point.’ She goes on to lament that the latest French attacks lack any purpose, but are ‘carried out for the sheer nihilistic thrill of it’.

The claim that ISIS does not ‘revere life’ seems to refer to any number of statements by Islamic radicals, including an ISIS militant who vowed to ‘fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies’, and boasted that ISIS ‘loves death like you love life’ (see here). This is a theological reference to a series of verses in the Qur’an in which Jews are criticised for desiring life (Sura 2:94-96, 62:6-8).

According to the Qur’an, loving life is a characteristic of infidels (Sura 3:14; 14:3; 75:20; 76:27) because it causes them to disregard the importance of the next life. The taunt much used by jihadis, ‘We love death like you love life’, implies that jihadis are bound for paradise while their enemies are hell-bound.

The point of these statements is that Muslims are willing to fight to the death, while their infidel enemies will turn back in battle. This is not about reverence for life, but about who has the will to win. This has nothing to do with nihilism, which is a belief that there are no values, nothing to be loyal to, and no purpose in living. In fact ISIS fighters have strong and clear loyalties and values, alien though they may be to those of Europe.

Daley’s claim that the deaths are ‘the whole point’ is also mistaken. While it is true that the jihadis consider killing infidels a meritorious act, potentially earning the killer a place in paradise (see here), and they consider being killed in battle against infidels a ticket to paradise, in fact the killings do serve a strategic purpose. This is to make infidels afraid, and thereby to weaken their will to resist Islamic dominance.

This strategy is commended by the Qur’an, for example in Sura 8:12, 'I shall cast dread into the hearts of those who disbelieve. So strike above (their) necks and strike (off) all their fingers!', as well as by the successful example of Muhammad in fighting the Jews of Medina, referred to in Sura 33:26-27, ‘He brought down from their fortifications those of the People of the Book who supported them, and cast dread into their hearts. You killed a group (of them), and took captive (another) group. And he caused you to inherit their land, their homes, and their wealth, and a land you had not set foot on.’ A similar passage is Sura 59:2, which ISIS has in fact been quoting in its celebrations of the Paris carnage.

It may seem to Daley that ISIS’ often-stated intention of defeating the West is fanciful, but the point is to understand ISIS, and as far as it is concerned, these deadly attacks are instrumental in weakening the will of infidels and hastening eventual victory.

Daley wonders what possible point these attacks could serve. She speculates: '… what is the alternative that is being demanded? Sharia law? The subjection of women? An end to liberal democracy? Are any of these things even within the bounds of consideration? What could be accomplished by national self-doubt or criticism at this point, when there is not even a reasonable basis for discussion with the enemy?' It is hardly a secret that the ultimate goal of ISIS is to bring non-Muslims everywhere to convert to Islam or live under an Islamic caliphate as dhimmis. Sharia law and the subjection of women are part and parcel of this.

It is odd that Daley laments having no reasonable basis for negotiating with the enemy. ISIS is not playing by a Western-style negotiating rule book. It is following Muhammad’s instructions to his followers to offer three choices to infidels: conversion, surrender, or the sword. Bin Ladin has explained that the West’s rejection of this framework is the whole reason for its conflict with what he calls ‘the authority of Islam’:

“Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue; one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice, and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; or [2] payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or [3] the sword, for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.” (The Al Qaeda Reader)

It may seem unimaginable to European elites that ISIS is fighting for the goal of the surrender or conversion of Europe, but ISIS is thinking in time frames which extend to centuries, and their forebears conquered vast territories using such tactics. A final act of conquest can be preceded by decades, or even centuries, of military raids.

While killing is currently the main mode of ISIS’ attacks inside the West, if they could they would use other tactics as well, such as taking booty and slaves or destroying infrastructure, as they have been doing in Syria and Iraq.

Grievances

Daley claims it is pointless to argue with people who have no reasonable grievances, for ‘the French people did not deserve this, just as Americans did not deserve 9/11’. However the important question is how ISIS sees its own motivations. Their ideology teaches them that infidels deserve death, simply by virtue of their unbelief. This has nothing to do with France’s history of colonialism or its treatment of Muslim minorities. ISIS needed no appeal to grievances to justify killing and enslaving Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, so why should they view the people of France any differently? Their objection to Europeans is that they are not Muslims, and their objection to European states is that they do not implement sharia law.

Irresponsible

It is irresponsible and dangerous to claim that a tenacious enemy is insane and incomprehensible. To refuse to acknowledge the ideology of ISIS, and to deny its relevance is tantamount to a death-wish.
Like so many other revivalist Islamic groups, ISIS believes that it will be successful if it stays faithful to its divinely-mandated goals and tactics. It believes the nations of Europe are morally corrupt, weak infidels who love life too much to fight a battle to the death with stern Muslim soldiers who have set their hearts on paradise. It believes Europe stands on the wrong side of history.

To combat this ideology it is necessary for Europe to prove ISIS wrong on all counts. It must show strength, not weakness. It must have confidence in its cultural and spiritual identity. It must be willing to fight for its survival. It must show that it believes in itself enough to fight for its future. It must defend its borders. It must act like someone who intends to win an interminably long war against an implacable foe.

There is a great deal Europe could have done to avert this catastrophe. It could, long ago, have challenged the Islamic view of history which idolised jihad and its intended outcome, the dhimma. It could have demanded that Islam renounce its love affair with conquest and dominance. It could have encouraged Muslims to follow a path of self-criticism leading to peace. This lost opportunity is what Bat Ye’or referred to in a prescient 1993 interview as the ‘relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism’.

Instead the elites of Europe embarked on decades of religiously illiterate appeasement and denialism.

There is still much that European states could do to defeat ISIS. They could, for example, inflict catastrophic military failure upon it as a powerful counter-argument to its theology of success. This will not deliver decisive, final victory against jihadism, but it will make the supremacist claims of ISIS less credible and hurt its recruitment. Islam’s laws of war allow Muslims to suspend their battle with infidels temporarily if there is no immediate prospect of victory and the risks to their cause are too great.

Europe also needs to act to suppress incitement of jihadi ideology by its clients, including the anti-Israeli jihadism of the Palestinian Authority. It must put more pressure on the militarily vulnerable Gulf states to stop funding Islamic radicalism throughout the Middle East and exporting jihad-revering versions of Islamic theology throughout the whole world.

One hope for Europe is that Islamic populations will get tired of the doctrine of jihad and all its bitter fruits. There are some signs that this is already happening, and many of the Muslims who are now seeking asylum in their hundreds of thousands will have come to this conclusion. However it seems likely that Muslim communities now established within Europe will be the last to reconsider their dogmas and their take on history, because they have not had to suffer first-hand the harsh realities of life under Islamic dystopias such as the ISIS ‘caliphate’ or Iran’s Islamic Revolution. A 2014 opinion poll found that among French 18-24 year olds, the Islamic State had an approval rating of 27%, which must include the overwhelming majority of young French Muslim men. For Europe, the challenge from within will be more enduring and intractable than the challenge from without.

Nevertheless, European states could still do much on their own turf. They could ban Saudi and other Middle Eastern funding to Islamic organisations, including mosques. They could stop appeasing Islamists in their midst. They could, even at this late hour, demand that the large and rapidly growing Muslim communities now well-established across Europe engage in constructive self-criticism of their religion, for the sake of peace.

This article first appeared in Lapido Media.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

↧

Love alone is not enough

November 20, 2015, 4:03 am

≫ Next: Paris attacks: Islamic State sees its attacks as sacred strategy

≪ Previous: Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy

Walid Aly is a well-known Australian media commentator. This week on Channel Ten’s The Projecthe produced an impassioned and compelling speech about the Paris killings. This went viral, achieving 27 million views on social media within just a few days. That is more hits than there are people in Australia.

According to Walid Aly, ISIS is weak but it hides this because it wants us all to be afraid, very afraid. Its whole purpose is that our fear will turn to hate, and hate will ripen into ‘World War III’.

All people of good will who would stand against ISIS, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, must therefore come together in unity. According to Walid Aly, love, and less hate is what we need.

Walid Aly is absolutely right that we do need love. But like the air we breathe, love by itself is not enough. It is not all we need.

We also need truth, and a whole lot more of it. John's gospel reports that Jesus came ‘full of grace and truth.’ Truth without grace becomes a police state. But grace without truth is every bit as dangerous.

Walid Aly himself rightly identified the Paris atrocity as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. It is not hatred to ask what this word ‘Islamist’ actually means.

He was also right to point out that ISIS wants to set non-Muslims and Muslims against each other. But this is not all ISIS wants, and saying this does not explain why they want it. It is not enough to say “ISIS wants to cause World War III,” for war is but a means to an end. This tactic is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.

Asking hard questions is not evidence of lack of love. It is not victimizing Muslims to seek to understand the theology of the jihadis. Asking how and why ISIS makes use of the Qur’an or the model of Muhammad is not vilification.

These points are important because the feeling of being unloved by itself is not enough to turn so many young people into killers. There are many communities in the world which experience hatred, but this is rarely enough on its own to give rise to virulent, violent global ideologies.

No one could dispute that the tactic of intentionally using violence to incite fear and hatred is one of the weapons in the jihadis’ arsenal, but it is just that: a tactic. Hatred incited by violence is not the heart of the matter, nor the fundamental driver in this war. It is but a symptom of deeper things.

Hatred can fuel this war, but love alone will not put it out.

Furthermore, a danger with Walid Aly's rhetoric is that it could work as a wedge to separate love from truth, treating the two as strangers. It could be used as a pretext to censor those who ask the hard questions, on the grounds that this is unloving. In this struggle it is wrong to privilege either love or truth, for we will need both.

Truth without love can cause endless heartache. This is true. But love without truth can cause a naive blindness which meekly tolerates abuse and leads to suicidal submission.

This is likely to be a very long war. Relationships will be strained. And yes, we will all need a lot of compassion. But without truth to strengthen it, love alone will not save us.

This post also appeared in Lapido Media.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

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Paris attacks: Islamic State sees its attacks as sacred strategy

November 26, 2015, 12:44 pm

≫ Next: John Eibner on the Future of Syria

≪ Previous: Love alone is not enough

This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted a few days previously on Lapido Media ‘Paris attacks were not nihilism’.

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms.

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs.

In July a ISIS militant vowed on video to ‘fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies’, boasting that ISIS ‘loves death like you love life’. Yet for ISIS these attacks were not pointless nihilism. Nihilism is a belief that there are no values, nothing to be loyal to, and no purpose in living, but these killings were purposeful. They were designed to make infidels afraid, to weaken their will to resist, and to render them self-destructive through fear. This strategy is made explicit in an ISIS celebratory post put out after the carnage, which quoted the Koran: ‘Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers’ (Sura 59:2).

The taunt that ISIS jihadis ‘love death like you love life’ is not simply a life-denying death wish. This references multiple passages in the Koran in which Jews (Sura 2:94-96, 62:6-8) and non-Muslims in general (Sura 3:14; 14:3; 75:20; 76:27) are condemned for desiring life. On this basis, ISIS considers Europeans to be morally corrupt, weak infidels who love this life too much to fight a battle to the death with stern Muslim soldiers whose hearts are set on paradise.

The ISIS post also referred to the French victims as ‘pagans’, by which it made clear that the victims were killed for being non-Muslims. Many commentators have rightly lamented ‘civilian casualties’, but the point is that ISIS rejects the Geneva Convention and has no use for the modern western concept of a ‘civilian’. ISIS fighters are taught that non-Muslims, referred to as mushrikin ‘pagans’ or kuffar ‘infidels’, deserve death simply by virtue of their disbelief in Islam. For ISIS, killing disbelievers is a moral act, in accordance with Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an, ‘fight and kill the mushrikin wherever you find them’ and Sura 9:29, ‘fight (i.e. to kill) the People of the Book’.

Some, like Australia’s Grand Mufti, have spoken in this past week of Muslim grievances. However ISIS needed no appeal to grievances to justify its genocidal killing and enslaving of the Yazidis, whom it targeted solely because they were ‘pagans’. It has the same fundamental objection to the people of France.

ISIS objects to Europeans because they are not Muslims, and to European states because they do not implement sharia law. Its goal is to dominate Europeans as dhimmis under a caliphate. It claims to follow Muhammad’s instructions to offer three choices to infidels: conversion, surrender, or the sword, or, as Bin Ladin put it, ‘The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit [i.e. convert], or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.’

 It may seem fanciful for ISIS to set its sights on the surrender or conversion of Europe, but, mindful of the history of Islamic imperialism, it thinks in time frames which extend to centuries. It believes Europe stands on the wrong side of history, and a final act of conquest can be preceded by decades, or even centuries, of military raids.

To combat this ideology it is necessary to prove ISIS wrong on all counts. France – or any nation which believes in its own future – must show strength, not weakness. It must have confidence in its cultural and spiritual identity. It must be willing to fight for its survival. It must show that it believes in itself enough to fight for its future. It must defend its borders. It must act like someone who intends to win an interminably long war against an implacable foe.

There is a great deal Europe could have done to avert this catastrophe, which ISIS has declared is ‘just the beginning’. It could, long ago, have demanded that Islam renounce its love affair with conquest and dominance. It could have encouraged Muslims to follow a path of self-criticism leading to peace. Instead the elites of Europe embarked on decades of religiously illiterate appeasement and denialism.

There is still much that can be done. European armies could inflict catastrophic military failure upon ISIS as a counter-argument to its theology of success. This will not eradicate jihadism, nor bring peace in the Middle East, but it would make the supremacist claims of ISIS less credible and hurt its recruitment.

Europe also needs to act to suppress incitement of jihadi ideology by its clients, including the jihadism of the Palestinian Authority. It must put more pressure on the militarily vulnerable Gulf states to stop funding radicalism throughout the Middle East and exporting jihad-revering versions of Islamic theology throughout the whole world.

For Europe, the challenge within will be more enduring and intractable than the challenge without. A 2014 opinion poll found that among all French 18-24 year olds, the Islamic State had an approval rating of 27%. While many of the millions of war-weary Muslims now seeking asylum in the west will have had enough of jihad, it seems likely that Muslim communities already established in the west may be the last to challenge Islam’s supremacist take on history, because they have not had to suffer first-hand the harsh realities of life under Islamist dystopias such as ISIS and the Iranian Revolution.

Nevertheless, European states could still do much in their own backyard. They could ban Saudi and other Middle Eastern funding to Islamic organisations, including mosques. They could stop appeasing Islamists in their midst. They could, even at this late hour, insist that the large and rapidly growing Muslim communities now well-established across Europe engage in constructive self-criticism of their religion, for the sake of peace. If this fails then according to ISIS’s jihadi mindset the alternatives are conversion, surrender, or death.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-GinsburgWriting Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

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John Eibner on the Future of Syria

November 26, 2015, 1:05 pm

≫ Next: Turnbull’s Islamic Howlers

≪ Previous: Paris attacks: Islamic State sees its attacks as sacred strategy

John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International and anti-slavery activist, shares his wisdom on the future of Syria on The Tablet blogs, including reflections on the collective desire of the West, Turkey and Gulf States to establish a Sunni Salafist state in Syria as a bulwark against Iranian power.

This failed policy let the Sunni jihadi genie out of its bottle in Syria to create the ‘opposition’, which led to the creation of the Islamic State and disintegration of Syria and Iraq. The only rational solution, Eibner argues, is a return to a policy of supporting a secular state.

However the more likely outcome is a long and cruel proxy war which only finishes when the fighting-age manpower of Syria is exhausted – i.e. when a generation of young men has been killed or fled the region.

Along the way there are serious risks that tensions will escalate between the external powers whose proxy war this is. e.g. Iran vs the Gulf States, or Russian vs. Turkey (as we have seen this past week with the downing of a Russian Jet by Turkey).

This is what the post-American Middle East looks like.

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Turnbull’s Islamic Howlers

December 9, 2015, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

≪ Previous: John Eibner on the Future of Syria

Agility and innovation? Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s version of history is all that and more. Leaping facts in a single bound, he ducks and weaves though a thicket of politically correct cliches to land effortlessly upon the desired conclusion: the West owes everything to Mohammad.

Back in 2011, on 28 February, Malcolm Turnbull, now Australia’s Prime Minister, had this to say about Islam on Q&A(excerpted here):

Islam is an ancient religion, of great scholarship. I mean — for heavens sake — much of our learning and culture came to us from the Muslims, just like, you know, our whole system of numbers and much of the learning of the ancient Greeks only survived because of the Arab scholars and the Islamic scholars. So, you know, the idea that Islam is antithetical to learning or culture or scholarship is absurd. Now, you know, it’s a great tradition. It is important for us that we promote and encourage Islam and Islamic traditions which are moderate, which support freedom, which support democracy and which support Australian values — not in the sense of “Aussie values” — but in the sense of democracy, rule of law, tolerance, freedom. That's what we’re talking about and they are universal values.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull

Malcolm Turnbull made this statement in order to dismiss a suggestion he considered absurd, namely that Islamic schools in Australia promote extremism. He intended the argument he put forward to be evidence for the inherent moderation of Islam.

The idea that Western people should feel indebted to Islam for keeping Greek and Hindu learning alive is common enough. But does it make any sense at all?

Consider the case of the Hindu number system. Muslim conquests of the Indian subcontinent commenced in the 7th century and by the early 9th century Muslim scholars had learned about the Hindu numbering system and adopted it. Use of the system then spread rapidly across the Arab world, and by the early 10th century it had reached Spain.

The Hindus were quite capable of preserving their intellectual achievements without the dubious benefits of Islamic conquest. Indeed Hindu societies have preserved the use of the number system they invented right down to the present day.

The fact that this excellent system passed into Europe via Arab colonies stretching around the Mediterranean cannot justify a claim that the Hindu system of numbers ‘only survived’ because of Muslims or Islam. Nor does it imply that the Arabs who passed on this numbering system to the West were – to use Turnbull’s words — ‘moderate’ or supportive of freedom and democracy. It is not possible to work out whether a society is moderate from the numbering system it uses. Even the Islamic State uses the same numbering system as Malcolm Turnbull.

Concerning Greek learning I had this to say in my book, The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom:

A repeated theme in ... school texts is that the West should be grateful to Islamic civilization for preserving Greek philosophy. The narrative offered to justify this gratitude is that during the Dark Ages the Islamic world underwent a golden age of cultural and scientific development, preserving Greek learning, which then kick-started the Western Renaissance.

Of course Greek civilization did not need ‘rescue-by-conquest’: in fact it continued in Constantinople all through the European (so-called) dark ages. It is true that when the Europeans translated Arabic texts into Latin, this did stimulate the development of Western philosophy and science. Many terms passed over from Arabic into European languages as a result, including sherbet, zero and zenith. However the fact that elements of Greek philosophy and science were transmitted to Europe via Arabic is not something for which Western children should be schooled to feel grateful. If Arab conquest had never happened, we can assume that Greek culture and philosophy would have continued to develop in Alexandria, Damascus and Constantinople to the present day.

In reality, as Crombie pointed out in The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, the conquest of the heart of the Greek-speaking world by Islam, and resulting Arab control of the Mediterranean, stunted scientific progress in Europe:

… it was the eruption of the Mohammedan invaders into the Eastern Empire in the 7th century that gave the most serious blow to learning in Western Christendom. The conquest of much of the Eastern Empire by the Arabs meant that the main reservoir of Greek learning was cut off from Western scholars for centuries …

Islam’s disruption of Mediterranean civilization ushered in the so-called European ‘Dark Ages’, as historian Henri Pirenne concluded in his classic study, Mohammed and Charlemagne:

The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity. … The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer the thoroughfare of commerce and of thought which it had always been. The West was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources.

It is disappointing that today history books are teaching a dhimmified version of history, according to which children are schooled in feeling grateful to Islam for rescuing Western and Christian culture from Islam itself. This is exactly the dhimmi condition, and the essential meaning of the jizya payment ritual: to render gratitude to Islam for being rescued by conquest.
Malcolm Turnbull’s comment on Q&A illustrates the hole the West is falling into. It risks being buried alive by the weight of bad ideas about its own identity and history.

In the face of escalating Islamic terrorism, it is reasonable to inquire into the contribution schooling may or may not make to the ideological formation of jihadis. However the way to make that inquiry is by examining what people are saying and doing today, not by making grandiose appeals to a mythical history.

To learn from history is wisdom. To abuse it is folly indeed.

This article first appeared with Quadrant Online.
Mark Durie is a Shillman-GinsburgWriting Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

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Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

December 16, 2015, 2:43 pm

≫ Next: Open Letter to President Obama about Christmas Bells Falling Silent in the Middle East

≪ Previous: Turnbull’s Islamic Howlers

This article first appeared with Independent Journal. Originally published under the title “Anyone Using The Phrase ‘Islam Is A Religion Of Peace’ Needs To Read This”

Days after the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the threat of ISIS missed the mark. In fact, President Obama seemed at times to be more concerned with Americans ostracizing Muslim communities through “suspicion and hate,” than he was with protecting innocent American civilians from murder in the name of radical Islam.

It is high time for western political leaders to stop responding to terrorism by naming Islam as ‘the religion of peace’. It is time to have a hard conversation about Islam.

The West is in the throes of acute cognitive dissonance over Islam, whose brands are at war with each other. On the one hand we are told that Islam is the Religion of Peace. On the other hand we are confronted with an unending sequence of acts of terror committed in the name of the faith.

There is a depressing connection between the two brands: the louder one brand becomes, the more the volume is turned up on the other.

The slogan ‘Religion of Peace’ has been steadily promoted by western leaders in response to terrorism: George Bush Jr and Jacques Chirac after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7, David Cameron after drummer Lee Riby was beheaded and after British tourists were slaughtered in Tunisia, and François Hollande after the Charlie Hebdo killings. After the beheading of 21 Copts on a Libyan beach Barak Obama called upon the world to “continue to lift up the voices of Muslim clerics and scholars who teach the true peaceful nature of Islam.”

One may well ask how ‘the religion of peace’ became a brand of Islam, for the phrase cannot be found in the Qur’an, nor in the teachings of Muhammad.

Islam was first called ‘the religion of peace’ as late as 1930, in the title of a book published in India by Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi. The phrase was slow to take off, but by the 1970s it was appearing more and more frequently in the writings of Muslims for western audiences.

What does “religion of peace” actually mean?

Words for ‘peace’ in European languages imply the absence of war, and freedom from disturbance. It is no coincidence that the German words Friede‘peace’ and frei‘free’ sound similar, because they come from the same root.

While there is a link in Arabic between salam, a word often translated ‘peace’, and Islam, the real connection is found in the idea of safety.

The word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama‘surrender’ its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama) through surrender. In its original meaning, a muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare.

Thus Islam did not stand for the absence of war, but for one of its intended outcomes: surrender leading to the ‘safety’ of captivity. It was Muhammad himself who said to his non-Muslim neighbors aslim taslam‘surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be safe’.

The Religion of Peace slogan has not gone uncontested. It has been rejected by many, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Melanie Phillips writing for The Times, who called it ‘pure myth’.

Even among Muslims the phrase has not only been challenged by radical clerics such as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, but also by mainstream Muslim leaders.

Sheikh Ramadan Al-Buti of Syria was one of the most widely respected traditionalist Sunni scholars before he was killed in 2013 by a suicide bomber. The year before he had been listed as number 27 in the ‘The Muslim 500’, an annual inventory of the most influential Muslims in the world. According to Al-Buti, the claim that Islam is a peaceful religion was a ‘falsehood’ imposed upon Muslims by westerners to render Islam weak. He argued in The Jurisprudence of the Prophetic Biography that when non-Muslims fear Islamic jihad, their initial inclination is to accuse the religion of being violent. However they then change tack, and craftily feed to Muslims the idea that Islam is peaceful, in order to make it so. He laments the gullibility of ‘simple-minded Muslims’, who:

“… readily accept this ‘defense’ as valid and begin bringing forth one piece of evidence after another to demonstrate that Islam is, indeed, a peaceable, conciliatory religion which has no reason to interfere in others’ affairs. … The aim … is to erase the notion of jihad from the minds of all Muslims.”

There does seem to be something to Al-Buti’s theory, for it has invariably been after acts of violence done in the name of Islam that western leaders have seen fit to make theological pronouncements about Islam’s peacefulness. Who are they trying to convince?

In the long run this cannot be a fruitful strategy. It invites mockery, such as Palestinian cleric Abu Qatada’s riposte to George Bush’s declaration that ‘Islam is peace’. Abu Qatada asked: ‘Is he some kind of Islamic scholar?’

We do need to have a difficult conversation about Islam. This is only just beginning, and it will take a long time. The process will not be helped by the knee-jerk tendency of western leaders to pop up after every tragedy trying to have the last word on Islam. This strategy has failed, and it is time to go deeper.

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

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Open Letter to President Obama about Christmas Bells Falling Silent in the Middle East

December 26, 2015, 6:58 pm

≫ Next: Minister for Islamic Apologetics

≪ Previous: Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

Dear President Obama,

in your recent statement on persecuted Christians at Christmas you stated:

In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent; this silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.

When you say that ‘church bells have rung for centuries’ you are not speaking the truth. Bells have rung in Syria and Iraq for not much more than a hundred years, at most.

As determined by Islamic law, church bells did not sound throughout the middle East for more than a thousand years from the 7th century conquests until modern times (except under the Crusaders). This was due to the conditions set by the Pact of the Caliph Umar, by which Christians of Syria surrendered to Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD. In this pact the Christians agreed that “We will not sound the bells in our churches.” Churches in regions controlled by Muslims used semantrons (also called nakos) instead of the forbidden church bells. Examples of these are still visible in Jerusalem to this day, e.g. see here.

The pact of Umar is an example of what is known as a dhimma pact. Christians living in regions conquered by Islam were known as dhimmis. As dhimmis they were not permitted to display their religion in public. The silence of the bells was just one of many restrictions imposed upon Christians by Islamic law.

Nakos (gong) outside St James Church in Jerusalem

Hamas, when it took control of Gaza, also re-implemented dhimma conditions over Christians, and ISIL has now done the same in regions it controls.

The silence of church bells for more than a thousand years across the Middle East bears witness to the conquest and long-standing suppression of Christian societies under Islamic rule. Recent genocidal attacks on Christians by ISIL are sadly but the end-stage of a long series of abuses. They are the culmination of an historical process, not a departure from it.

President Obama, it is good that you have desired to speak up for persecuted Christians, but when you do so, please speak the truth. Please do not whitewash history, because to do so partners with abuse.

Sincerely,

Dr Mark Durie, BA, BTh, DipTh, PhD, FAHA
27 December 2015

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

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Minister for Islamic Apologetics

December 28, 2015, 3:26 am

≫ Next: Do we worship the same God? Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins and Miroslav Volf

≪ Previous: Open Letter to President Obama about Christmas Bells Falling Silent in the Middle East

Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells

This article was first published on Quadrant Online.

Other than the need to discredit her party’s former leader and push what might be termed the Turnbull Doctrine of warm-and-cuddly relativism, what could have possessed the Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs to present Islamic dogma as incontrovertible fact?
Writing in The Australian, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has attempted to throw light on the challenge of Islamic radicalism. She offers a ‘reality check’ by injecting what she asserts are ‘basic facts’ into the public debate. However she only succeeds in promoting misinformation and multiplying confusion.

Why must the Australian assistant minister for multicultural affairs present Islamic dogma as incontrovertible fact? Fierravanti-Wells astonishingly declares the Koran to be ‘a collection of revelations from God to the Prophet Mohammed.’ Does she really accept it as a ‘basic fact’ – for the purpose of public debate – that Mohammed was God’s prophet, or that the Koran is a genuine revelation from God? Surely only a believing Muslim could make such a declaration and mean it?

Why can Fierravanti-Wells not show more sensitivity to disbelievers in Islam – the majority of her audience – by adopting an objective stance, for example by saying ‘Muslims believe the Koran to be a collection of revelations from God,’ or ‘Muslims believe Mohammed to be a prophet’?

Fierravanti-Wells also misrepresents other faiths. It is not true that all ‘world faiths’ apart from Islam have intermediaries between God and the individual. The majority of Protestants around the world do not recognise a hierarchy of clergy, and a great many Christians do not accept that there are intermediaries between themselves and God. To project supposed attributes of Catholic Christianity onto all Christians as part of an apology for Islam is not ‘basic fact’, but propaganda pure and simple.

Why does Fierravanti-Wells not understand that many Christians will see her list of ‘basic facts’ as a crude distortion of what they believe? Does she really mean to imply that the Christians of the world have a single overarching authority to ‘establish or forbid’ religious practices or interpretation of the Bible? They do not. In this respect Muslims are no different from Christians. Of course some Christians do recognise an authority for their own denomination, but so do some Muslims sects.

Many Christian groups do not recognise ‘priests’ and they believe that any Christian can fulfill a role of preaching or leading worship. Many would believe that any Christian can gather a flock, plant a church, or function as pastor to it. The fact that not all denominations allow such license is beside the point. All over this country Christian congregations are being started all the time by lay people. There is, moreover, no single overarching system for training Christian clergy in Australia, but a multiplicity of systems and training options.

Equally misleading is the claim that there is no overarching authority in Islam. Many Islamic countries, such as Egypt, have a public official known as the mufti. The mufti’s function is to pass authoritative rulings at a national level on religious matters. Moreover the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation – the UN of Islamic states – has established a peak religious body, the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, which is tasked with issuing authoritative rulings on religious matters. This academy draws upon the leading authorities on Islam from the nations of the world and is backed by the considerable political clout of the OIC. It has been influential in several important areas, such as the international system of Islamic finance. Of course its rulings are not accepted by, or binding on, all Muslims, but there is no global Christian body which has that kind of authority either, and certainly no Christian organization has a claim to global legitimacy comparable to that of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy.

All these errors aside, the bottom line is that it is up to the Muslims of Australia who they choose to listen to and appoint as their religious leaders. If what Fierravanti-Wells implies is true, namely that the vast majority of Australian Muslims want a ‘moderate’ form of Islam preached in their mosques, then let them take steps to ensure this happens. If they are unhappy with their imams, let them replace them, or else vacate those mosques to frequent other mosques they like better, with imams whose teachings they find more congenial. This is how religious freedom works. It is precisely because Australian Muslims do have religious freedom that it is entirely reasonable for Australians to hold the Muslim community to account for the utterances of their leaders.

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness

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Do we worship the same God? Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins and Miroslav Volf

January 22, 2016, 3:50 am

≫ Next: Obama doesn’t understand Jihadist doctrine

≪ Previous: Minister for Islamic Apologetics

The recent suspension of Larycia Hawkins by Wheaton College is a symptom of a fault line among evangelicals about Islam. The question of whether the God of the Qur'an is the same as the God of the Bible is an important and complex one, but it is unhelpful to politicize inquiry into it by insisting that anyone who disagrees with one position or another is a bigot.

This article below is appearing in the February 2016 edition of Eternity, which is distributed to local churches across Australia. It is more an engagement with Volf than an exploration of the evolving, escalated situation at Wheaton, which seems to be not just about the 'same God' issue, but also about the use and impact of social media in the context of an academic dispute. I would like to write more on this interesting topic of 'Do we worship the same God' and the situation at Wheaton but am very tied up with finishing a book project just at the moment.

This article by Nabeel Qureshi is excellent: http://rzim.org/global-blog/do-muslims-and-christians-worship-the-same-god

Also readers may like to listen to a podcast debate between Miroslav Volf and Nabeel Qureshi: http://rzim.org/global-blog/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god-debate-with-nabeel-qureshi-and-dr-miroslav-volf

Wheaton announced that one of their tenured professors, Larycia Hawkins, was put on paid leave while they ‘explore theological implications of her recent public statements concerning Christianity and Islam’. In particular Wheaton wanted to know whether Hawkins’ statement that Muslims and Christians worship the same God is compatible with the college’s Statement of Faith. Larycia Hawkins was asked to clarify her views. (Wheaton College Council has subsequently confirmed that the college has commenced a termination process for her position.)

The decision led to protests on the Wheaton campus. Miroslav Volf, Professor of Theology at Yale, published an article in the Washington Post criticizing Wheaton. Volf suggests that Wheaton is motivated by hatred towards Muslims, dressed up in dogma. He argued that:

Those who claim that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God base this upon Muslims’ denial of the Trinity and the incarnation.

However Jews deny the Trinity and the incarnation, and Christians down the ages have not claimed that Jews worship a different God.

Therefore those who do not accept the ‘same God’ thesis must be motivated by enmity, not reason.

There are problems with this reasoning. One is the premise. Wheaton had not itself stated that it objects to the ‘same God’ thesis on the basis of Muslims’ beliefs about the Trinity and the incarnation. However Volf appears to impute this thinking to all Christians who do not accept his ‘same God’ thesis.

Another is the leap from pointing out a supposed inconsistency in the reasoning of other Christians to making a severe value judgment about their motives.

In reality the best and strongest reason for rejecting the ‘same God’ thesis is not Muslims’ disbelief in the Trinity or the incarnation. It is that the Qur’an projects a different understanding of God from the Bible. As Denny Burk of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville put it ‘our books are very different’.

The theological differences involved are subtler and more fundamental than ticking or not ticking the Trinity box.

Eminent Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod observed that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation was grounded upon the fundamentally Biblical – and thoroughly Jewish – concept of the indwelling of God’s Shekinah presence with his people. Christian beliefs about the Trinity and the incarnation developed out of Jewish incarnational theologies.

Unlike the Old Testament, the Qur’an completely lacks a theology of the presence of God. Although the Arabic term sakīnah– borrowed from Hebrew shekinah– appears six times in the Qur’an, it has been repurposed to mean ‘tranquility’, and the concept of the personal presence of God is not comprehended by Quranic theology. It is not just that Islam rejects the incarnation of Jesus: in complete contrast to Judaism its scripture offers no basis for an incarnational theology.

Judaism differs from Islam in its organic relationship to Christianity in two key respects.

First, Christians and Jews share scripture. Judaism bases its understanding of God on what was the Bible of Jesus, the Tanakh or Old Testament. This is not the case with Islam. Muslims do not base their theology on any part of the Bible. Indeed mainstream Islam rejects the authority of the Bible, for reasons clearly stated in the Qur’an.

Second, Jesus was a practicing Jew, and so were his disciples, so it would be absurd to state that the God of the faith Jesus practiced is different from the Christian God. This same observation does not apply to Islam. Muhammad was never a practicing Jew nor a practicing Christian, and, according to Muslim tradition, the large majority of his companions came to Islam out of paganism. This has deeply influenced the Qur’an and its understanding of God.

It is disappointing that Volf attributes fear-based enmity and loveless bigotry to Wheaton’s leaders. He implies that Christians who disagree with his 'same God' thesis must want to fight Muslims. Such rhetoric incites hatred and contempt over a theological difference of opinion.

The question of whether the God of the Qur’an is the same as the God of the Bible is an important and complex one. Christians do need to consider carefully to what extent the God of the Bible and the God of the Qur’an are the same or different. This has far-reaching implications. However it is not helpful to paint those who disagree with one position or another as haters.

It is a false step, in the name of love, to demand assent to the ‘same God’ thesis. Christians are commanded to love others whether they worship the same God or not. Our common human condition should be enough to motivate solidarity with others. After all, Jesus never said to only ‘love those who believe in the same God’.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom. His book Which God? discusses differences between the understanding of God in the Bible and the Qur'an.

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Obama doesn’t understand Jihadist doctrine

June 29, 2016, 11:55 pm

≫ Next: Guess who's coming to Iftar?

≪ Previous: Do we worship the same God? Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins and Miroslav Volf

In his June 14 address to the nation, President Obama attributed Omar Mateen's attack on patrons of Orlando, Fla.'s, Pulse nightclub to "homegrown extremism," saying "we currently do not have any information to indicate that a foreign terrorist group directed the attack."

It is a terrible thing to misunderstand one's enemy so deeply.

While Obama acknowledged that the Islamic State has called for attacks around the world against "innocent civilians," he suggested these calls were incidental, emphasizing that Mateen was a "lone actor" and "an angry, disturbed, unstable young man" susceptible to being radicalized "over the Internet."

It is a terrible thing to misunderstand one's enemy so deeply. The doctrine of jihad invoked by terrorist groups is an institution with a long history, grounded in legal precedent going back to the time of Muhammad.

Militants who invoke the doctrine of jihad follow principles influenced by Islamic law. The point to be grasped is that the doctrinal basis of jihad generates conditions that can incite "bottom up" terrorism, which does not need to be directed by jihadi organizations.

When the Ottoman Caliphate entered World War I in 1914, it issued an official fatwa calling upon Muslims everywhere to rise up and fight the "infidels." In 1915, a more detailed ruling was issued, entitled "A Universal Proclamation to All the People of Islam."

This second fatwa gave advice on the methods of jihad, distinguishing three modes of warfare: "jihad by bands," which we would today call guerrilla warfare; "jihad by campaigns," which refers to warfare using armies; and "individual jihad."

The fatwa cited approvingly as an example of individual jihad the 1910 assassination of Boutros Ghaly, a Christian prime minister of Egypt (and grandfather of former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghaly), at the hands of Ibrahim Nassif al-Wardani, a Muslim graduate in pharmacology who had been educated in Lausanne, Paris, and London.

This Ottoman fatwa cited precedents from the life of Muhammad for each of the three modes of warfare. To support individual jihad, it referenced three instances when companions of Muhammad conducted assassinations of non-Muslims. Two of these involved attacks on Jews that were personally instigated by Muhammad.

When the Islamic State issued a call for Muslims around the world to rise up and kill their neighbors, it was invoking the individual mode of jihad. This mode relies upon the teaching that when Muslim lands are attacked or occupied by infidel armies, jihad becomes farḍ al-'ayn, an "individual obligation," which a Muslim can act upon without needing to come under anyone else's command.

This principle of individual obligation has been much emphasized by jihadi clerics. Abdullah Azzam wrote in his influential tract Join the Caravan, "There is agreement ... that when the enemy enters an Islamic land or a land that was once part of the Islamic lands, it is obligatory ... to go forth to face the enemy."

It was undoubtedly in response to this dogma that Omar Mateen went forth to kill Americans. In line with this, Mateen reported to his victims that his attack was in retaliation for Americans bombing Afghanistan. By this understanding, it was America's military action against a Muslim country — the country of origin of Mateen's family — that justified an act of individual jihad.

Preventing future "lone wolf" attacks requires the disruption of the Islamic doctrine that underpins these acts and legitimizes them in the eyes of many Muslims. Teachers and preachers in Islamic institutions across America must openly reject the dogma of farḍ al-‘ayn in relation to U.S. military action.

They need to teach their congregants that this doctrine does not apply, that anyone who uses it to attempt to legitimize his or her personal jihad is acting against God's laws and that no martyr's paradise awaits them.

At the same time, U.S. homeland security agencies need to closely watch and monitor any Muslim teacher who promotes this doctrine, which, once it is taken on board and applied against a nation, will lead to acts of jihadi terrorism as surely as night follows day.

During his June 14 speech, Obama defended his refusal to use the phrase "radical Islam" in connection with terrorism, asking, "What exactly would using this label accomplish?"

The answer is simple. It will be difficult to elicit the cooperation of Muslim religious leaders in discrediting the Islamic doctrine at the heart of America's homegrown terrorism epidemic when President Obama himself is reluctant to acknowledge that doctrine matters — they can simply point to him and decline.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner.

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Guess who's coming to Iftar?

June 30, 2016, 10:45 pm

≫ Next: What to tell would-be jihadis

≪ Previous: Obama doesn’t understand Jihadist doctrine

A widely-publicised Iftar dinner, intended to show that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gets what it means to be inclusive, ended badly after he was advised that one of his guests, Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, had taught that Islam prescribes death for adulterers, and homosexuals spread diseases. No rogue maverick, Australian-born Sheikh Shady is the elected national president of the Australian National Imams Council.

Although insisting that ‘mutual respect is absolutely critical’, Turnbull subjected this prominent Muslim leader to public humiliation. He regretted inviting him to dinner and counselled the sheikh‘to reflect on what he has said and recant’. In the middle of an election, wanting to limit fallout from the dinner-gone-wrong, held only days after the Orlando massacre, Turnbull stated that his no-longer-welcome guest’s views are ‘wrong, unacceptable and I condemn them’.

Well may Mr Turnbull deplore Sheikh Shady’s teachings, but the real challenge is that these were not merely his personal views. The sheikh’s teachings on homosexuality and adultery reflect the mainstream position of Islam, preached by many a Muslim scholar around the world today, and telling a sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.

Many Australian Muslims will be disappointed at the treatment meted out to Sheikh Shady. An event designed to honour the Muslim community ended up providing a platform to denigrate one of their most respected leaders for promoting Islamic doctrines. Several Australian Muslim leaders have since dug in their heels to affirm support for the sharia position on homosexuals. So much for recanting.

While Turnbull refused to pass judgement on Islam itself, saying ‘there are different views of different issues, as there are in all religions’, he also sent a message that he is prepared to disparage Australian Muslims’ religious beliefs. It was a bitter pill for Muslims to swallow that this came in the form of a humiliating invite-to-disavow game of bait-and-switch, conducted during a pre-election media storm.

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

On the one hand Mr Turnbull has stated‘I reject and condemn any comments which disparage any group of Australians, whether on the basis of their race, their religion, their sexuality, their gender’. On the other. he is willing to disparage one of Australia’s most prominent Muslim religious leaders on the basis of his religious teachings.

Turnbull has also said ‘It is vital in our multicultural society that every part feels included and that each of us gives to the other the mutual respect that each of them gives us’. A video response posted on Sheikh Shady’s Facebook page, and viewed more than 40,000 times, asks,‘But that statement also includes respect for people’s religious beliefs, doesn’t it?’

Turnbull appears to subscribe to the really bad idea that the same basic values are channeled by all religions. In 2011 on Q&A he praised Islam’s moderation in embodying ‘universal values’. This vacuous universalism has blinded him to the possibility that a religion might actually teach things which he would be duty-bound to disparage. No doubt the PM is also influenced by advice from ASIO not to alienate Muslims by criticising their religion. This policy is ultimately driven by fear of offending adherents of the one religion from which most terrorists are drawn; and why millions of dollars are directed to Muslim organisations, and not to Sikhs or Copts. Turnbull attempted to use a ‘shoot the messenger’ strategy to minimise the cognitive dissonance of his conflicted statements, directing attention away from the religion onto an individual.

The fact remains that, whatever the sheikh’s personal attitudes to gays, his teachings on adultery and homosexuality are not personal. Given his extensive training in sharia law, Sheikh Shady’s views could only be called personal if they had diverged from the mainstream Islamic positions. But they did not.

Turnbull’s staff might have googled the sheikh before they invited him to dinner. And as Sheiky Shady’s Facebook post put it, ‘the prime minister might have the same issue in future when inviting just about any other Muslim imam to any other function’. Rather than calling out the sheikh as a hater, what is needed is to challenge the religious doctrines which have determined his preaching.
As long as our political leaders pretend that objectionable Islamic teachings are merely personal faults, while insisting that the religion of Islam is above reproach, we will stay stuck in this unhelpful place; where we tell a highly trained Muslim imam that we respect his religion, but denigrate his religious beliefs as bigotry. The conversation needs to be about Islamic sharia, not those who preach it.

The post Guess who’s coming to Iftar? appeared first on The Spectator.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

Follow @markdurie

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What to tell would-be jihadis

August 12, 2016, 2:52 am

≫ Next: Violent Protests in Indonesia Blow an Ill Will for Religious Tolerance

≪ Previous: Guess who's coming to Iftar?

Malcolm Turnbull has warned Australians fighting with the Islamic State that they face 'almost certain death'. He needn't encourage them. The Australian Prime Minister has apparently not yet learned that jihadis seek death and despise those who don't (Sura 2:94-96).

Instead of inciting jihadis in their mission to attain paradise through martyrdom, Malcolm Turnbull might try discouraging them.

They might be told that their leaders have deceived them, and the Islamic State has done great damage to the Muslim cause.

They might be told that many Muslims who know more than they do consider their jihad to be null and void, so they risk being condemned as hypocrites and relegated to the lowest place in hell (Sura 4:145).

They might be told that with so many jihadi groups fighting each other to attain paradise, they have no sure way of knowing which group is on Allah's side, and they are playing Russian roulette with their eternal destiny. Not Smart.

They might be told that they can expect to be captured and banished to some desolate place for the rest of their long lives, without friend or family to comfort them.

They might be told that they are dragging themselves down the path to failure and disgrace in the eyes of their own community. (To be fair Malcolm Turnbull did almost say something like this, if accidentally.)

Whatever we say, let's not tell them they face certain death.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

Follow @markdurie

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Violent Protests in Indonesia Blow an Ill Will for Religious Tolerance

November 9, 2016, 4:10 pm

≫ Next: After Ariana Grande & The Manchester Attacks: Three 'Unrealities' Are Killing Britain's Children

≪ Previous: What to tell would-be jihadis

Jakarta Riots against Christian Governor November 4, 2016
Source: Reuters

In Jakarta violence between protestors and police broke out Friday night, November 4, 2016 when an estimated 200,000 Muslims emerged from Friday prayers in mosques to rally outside the Indonesian President’s palace. Clashes with police led to tear gas being used on demonstrators, and Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, had to postpone his planned visit to Australia to deal with the crisis.

Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, 'Ahok', the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta
Source: VICE news

The crowd was calling for the arrest of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta, which is Indonesia’s capital and the largest city in the world’s fourth most populous nation.

A video had gone viral showing Ahok referring in a speech to chapter 5, verse 51 of the Qur’an. He warned his listeners not to give credence to those who might try to deceive them with this verse or others like it.

Ahok has faced criticism before from hardline Muslims, who objected when he stood as Deputy Governor of Jakarta in 2012. Yet Ahok is very popular, and seems set to win the next gubernatorial election in February 2017. He previously took office as Governor in 2014 after Joko Widodo resigned his position as Jarkarta mayor to take up the Presidency of the nation.

Muslims opposed to Ahok had been citing verse 5:51 from the Qur’an to try to delegitimize his candidacy. The verse reads:

You who believe! Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies. They are allies of each other. Whoever of you takes them as allies is already one of them. Surely Allah does not guide the people who are evildoers. (5:51)

The word translated here as allies (Arabic) awliya, is ambiguous. It can mean ‘allies’, but also ‘patrons’ or ‘guardians’. The rejection of dependence upon disbelievers is emphasized repeatedly in the Qur’an (e.g. in verses 3:28 and 4:141, 144). In Indonesian translations of the verse 5:51 is rendered ‘do not take Jews and Christians as your leaders (pemimpin-pemimpinmu)’.

Ibn Kathir, an authoritative medieval commentator on the Qur’an, explained this verse as follows:

Allah forbids his believing servants from having Jews and Christians as allies or patrons, because they are the enemies of Islam and its people, may Allah curse them.

The immediately preceding verse, 5:50, urges Muslims not to seek the ‘judgment of the time of ignorance’. In explaining this, Ibn Kathir denounces anyone who follows man-made laws instead of laws revealed by Allah. Such a person:

is a disbeliever who deserves to be fought against (i.e. to be killed), until he reverts to Allah’s and His Messenger’s decisions, so that no law, minor or major, is referred to except by His Law.

Ibn Kathir is insisting that the only valid form of legislation is the Islamic sharia, that only Muslims can rule, and any Muslim who looks to non-Muslims for political or legal direction is an infidel. According to verse 5:51, such a person is already ‘one of them’: in other words, they have to be considered an infidel too, and have apostasized from Islam, for which the penalty is death.

The admonition to Muslims not to take non-Muslims, and especially Christians or Jews, as allies or leaders is orthodox, mainstream Islamic teaching. In the light of this, it is disappointing that the Australian Age newspaper’s Indonesian correspondent, Jewel Topsfield, offers the following gloss:

“some interpret [verse 5:51] as prohibiting Muslims from living under the leadership of a non-Muslim. Others say the scripture should be understood in its context — a time of war — and not interpreted literally.”

It may be true that a few contemporary moderate voices may say this verse should not be taken literally, but this is certainly not the mainstream view of centuries of Islamic jurisprudence.

The Muslim aversion to non-Muslim political leadership has many outworkings around the world. In Egypt Christians make up around 10% of the population, but less than 1.5% of the parliament is Christian. For decades there had been no Christian governors for any of Egypt’s 27 governorates, until Mubarak appointed Major General Emad Mikhail as governor over Qena. However massive protests broke out after imams preached sermons in Qena mosques teaching that God does not permit Christians to have authority over Muslims. Demonstrators marched the streets crying, 'A Muslim governor in a Muslim country' and 'There is no god but Allah and Christians are the enemies of Allah' The protests led to the governor’s appointment being temporarily suspended in order to reestablish the order.

Ahok’s position is difficult. Since his opponents were unable to discredit him politically for being a Christian, they are now upping the ante by accusing him of blasphemy instead, demanding that the state launch legal proceedings against him. In Ahok’s speech, he had brushed aside those who were citing 5:51 against him, saying they were telling lies. In fact he made no comment on the Qur’an itself, apart from implying that a particular interpretation was false. His offense was to criticize the misuse of the text by others for political purposes. Yet this gave enough leeway for a vast crowd to be inflamed against him.

There is a famous hadith or tradition of Muhammad, which states:

Whoever sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.

This is interpreted by many to mean that a Muslim must use the highest level of force available to remove something evil. The protestors in Jakarta were exercising their religious duty by speaking out against a Christian being in political authority over a 95% Muslim city, using his alleged blasphemy as a trigger point. Some went further than just words, threatening action ‘with the hand’: former terrorist Nasir Abas, turned police consultant, carried a sign saying ‘Punish Ahok or our bullets will'.

The phenomenon of Muslims taking political or legal processes into their own hands is widespread. An example was the offer made by Pakistani Imam Maulana Yusuf of a bounty of $6,000 to anyone who would murder Asia Bibi, a young Christian woman on death row for a trumped-up blasphemy offense. Recently Muslim activists have been conducting mass public protests across Pakistan calling for Bibi to be lynched. 'It will be a war if accursed Asia escapes', said Mukhtar, one of the protestors in Lahore.

Another example comes from the UK in 2009, when Geert Wilders was invited to a private meeting at the House of Lords in London. In response Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim peer, threatened to personally mobilize 10,000 Muslim protestors to physically prevent Wilders from entering the House.

Muslims taking the law into their own hands to act against non-Muslims who rise to high political office is not a new phenomenon. Egypt’s only Christian Prime Minister was Boutros Ghali, who served from 1908. He was the grandfather of the former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He was assassinated in 1910 by a European-educated Egyptian Muslim, Ibrahim Nassif Boutros Ghali -Wardani.

An example from further back in history was the crucifixion of Joseph Ibn Naghrela, vizier of Granada, by a Muslim mob in 1066, as well as a pogrom against the Jewishpopulation.Although Joseph had been appointed to his high office by a Muslim king, Badis al-Muzaffar, local Muslims resented having a Jew in authority over them. The Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq wrote a diatribe to incite the violence, arguing that non-Muslims’ blood was no longer protected under the terms of their covenant (of surrender), since they had risen to a position of authority over Muslims:

Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them — the breach would be to let them carry on. They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators? How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent.

Indonesia is often held up as a model of a moderate Muslim-majority nation. Its constitution is not Islamic and many Indonesian Muslims espouse moderate views. However the global Islamist movement has nevertheless made strong inroads in this the most populous Muslim nation. Undoubtedly it will be a landmark test for Indonesia’s tolerance whether Ahok is permitted to continue in office. Those Muslims who are raising both their voices and their hands to protest against him will not be easily silenced.

This outbreak of intolerance bodes ill for Indonesia’s future. Governor Ahok is being supported by significant Muslim leaders. GP Ansor, the former chairman of the largest Indonesian Youth organization called the complaints a ‘hoax’, and politician Nusron Wahid stated that Ahok had said nothing to insult Islam. For his part, Governor Ahok has apologized to Muslims, saying, 'To Muslims who felt insulted, I apologize. I had no intention to insult Islam'. He stated that 'Religion is a very personal matter and should not be mixed up with public discourse'. However his Muslim opponents clearly hold a different view about the place of Islam in public life!

Ahok is being questioned this week by the police, pending a possible charge of blasphemy. The thought that an Indonesian court might find Ahok guilty of such a charge is troubling. To do so would require proof that Ahok intended to incite hatred against Muslims, defame Islam or incite apostasy. The prosecution might argue that in pooh-poohing the legitimate and well-established Islamic prohibition against non-Muslims taking authority over Muslims, he was denigrating the religion. Even if no charges are laid, Ahok will certainly come under very great political pressure to withdraw his candidacy.

In Indonesia today it is apparently unacceptable to some Muslims that a prominent Christian might express an opinion about what the Qur’an says. Yet the same Muslims claim the right to stridently disallow this Christian candidacy for political office, based on the very same Quranic passage. This is supremacist reasoning, which incites hatred while denying the object of hatred any voice in the matter. If this intolerance is given credence by the Indonesian police and courts, it bodes very ill indeed for the nation’s future.

Yet the greater concern is a question for us all: Does the Islamic sharia permit non-Muslims to live alongside Muslims as equals in one world? This is a crucial question, not just for Indonesia, but for Europe, for America, indeed for every nation with more than a tiny minority of Muslim citizens. According to the hundreds of thousands protesting in the streets of Jakarta this week, the answer to this question is a resolute and loud 'No!'

Dr. Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology.

Follow @markdurie

↧

After Ariana Grande & The Manchester Attacks: Three 'Unrealities' Are Killing Britain's Children

June 7, 2017, 4:19 am

≫ Next: Excuse me, but your cognitive dissonance is showing

≪ Previous: Violent Protests in Indonesia Blow an Ill Will for Religious Tolerance

An important article by Jenny Taylor

Three unrealities have collided in Britain, and they are allowing our children to die.

The first unreality is hinted at in the very words of Ariana Grande, at whose concert in Manchester so many lives were destroyed on the night of May 22. Grande, a 23-year-old American singer, called this her Dangerous Woman Tour. In the hit song "Side to Side" she sings: "Tonight I’m making deals with the devil / And I know it’s gonna get me in trouble ... / Let them hoes know."

The Americanization of entertainment has no contact at all with English traditions of modesty and the protection of children against forces they cannot possibly withstand alone. Yet the Grande event has been sentimentalized in the days since the attack as a magical rite of passage - even being called "the most memorable event of their lives" by the prime minister.

That the dark excess stalking such entertainment events contributed to a moral and social atmosphere in which wholesale sex grooming was able to take place without public comment for two whole decades seems to have escaped the sentimentalists' notice. Sexuality was something that used to be held to need the constraints of parents and guardians and society as a whole. Now parents ferry their children to these spectacles.

The new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy. -Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs.

A quick glance at the top video posted on Grande’s website reveals a couple simulating sex on the hood of a taxi cab, with a shocked driver behind the wheel. There are simulated sex scenes on an office photocopier, sex between a gray-haired couple in a bus, brief cutaways to anal sex and lesbian sex in a busy launderette that tilts toward orgy as others are almost dragged in. And all with Grande smiling sweetly and coquettishly in cutaways that link the whole affair together.

It’s called "raunch culture," which Ariel Levy described in her angry book Female Chauvinist Pigs. It is intended to encourage a sense of girls being able to have consequence-free sex like men wherever they want it.

"This is a world," says Levy, "in which young women attend lap-dancing clubs – as patrons – [and] simulate sex on shows like Girls Gone Wild ... as a symbol of liberation. They see these post-feminist antics as a short-cut to cool."

Raunch culture has spread to Britain from the U.S. as something perfectly normal. While the rest of us do not even notice, ordinary Muslims are angry and worried. "Our values" seem to them – I know this because they have told me - to include an encouragement to prostitution that heaven knows has caused enough anguish in Rotherham and elsewhere. Levy is right when she says: "The new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy."

Sure, if you lock girls away, you destroy society itself. But who is talking about locking girls away? Just restoring some sense of what’s at stake will do. - Dr. Jenny Taylor

Yet journalists, who are no doubt good parents, have been completely suckered by it. Here’s just one example from pop music critic Alexis Petridis, who wrote for the Guardian a reflection on the Dangerous Woman Tour: "I take [my daughters aged 10 and 7] because I think those big pop gigs do something incredibly important ... it gave her a first glimpse of a world that was previously outside her experience ... it can provide the kind of indelible, empowering experience ... giving people their first taste of freedom and independence: that strikes me as something at the top of the chart of Incredible Things Music Can do. It is also something that the kind of people who manipulate others into blowing themselves up in public places hate."

There is something so reminiscent here of the statements of little girls groomed for sex by the Pakistani "uncles" in Rotherham and Oxford and elsewhere who gave them sweets and then drugs.

"Children were initially flattered by the attention paid to them, and impressed by the apparent wealth and sophistication of those grooming them," says the Home Office report on the Rotherham grooming. "Boys gave me drink and drugs for free… I was driven around in fast cars," one child told the inquiry. Yet Petridis expresses no sense of irony at the manipulation for gain of his own little girls at concerts like this one, or the "normalization" of sexual responses to adults by children depicted in Grande’s films, which is part of the actual definition of "grooming."

Emily Munro of the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre says that "Children and teenagers with behavioral issues such as 'high attention seeking' have a much higher risk [of grooming] than others" – behavior that is of course being affirmed and supported at pop concerts such as Ariana Grande’s.

Sure, if you lock girls away, you destroy society itself. But who is talking about locking girls away? Just restoring some sense of what’s at stake will do. Thus, people can make better decisions, and avoid waving a red rag in the faces of the unhinged, and the otherwise incomprehensible "others" onto whom we all too easily load what we cannot face about ourselves.

I have heard perfectly decent Muslim academics marvel from public platforms that God has given them such access to the “land of war” – the dar-al-harb. This supremacism is part and parcel of Islam and it is fueled by their sense of Western degeneracy. - Dr. Jenny Taylor

For it is when this first unreality confronts the second that the tinder box is ignited. The second unreality is the belief by Salafi jihadis that they are here to win Britain for Allah and that their callous killings are deeds of righteousness against a godless people they have been drilled to hate.

Aspects of this variant of the faith make it obligatory to spread the religion and to triumph. It will not stop. Being in Britain at all, for the first time in history, is regarded as Allah’s gift to the faithful. I have heard perfectly decent Muslim academics marvel from public platforms that God has given them such access to the "land of war" – the dar-al-harb. This supremacism is part and parcel of Islam, and it is fueled by their sense of Western degeneracy. It is taught by the vast and influential Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) group of Muslims – a group hailing from India who are not Salafi jihadists like Salman Abedi, nor are they even "Wahhabi" – the strict Saudi variant of Islam.

Their type of training, which views the world as "a toilet" and secularization as the second most serious threat to their way of life, has been adopted by the majority of Deobandi mosques in Britain. They see their job as to "combat Western and Christian cultural influences." According to the Muslim-run website Muslims in Britain, the TJ have ten mosques in Manchester, including a huge center in a former industrial unit. The TJ provide the tonic to the Salafi gin.

The third unreality, and perhaps the deadliest because it plays host to the other two, is the kind of political grand-standing by religiously illiterate senior politicians like Andy Burnham, former Labour leadership candidate and now mayor of Manchester. Burnham publicly opposed the government’s "Prevent" scheme, which targets Muslim radicalization, and he said on TV earlier this week: "To describe Salman Abedi as an extreme Muslim is like describing Jo Cox’s killer as an extreme Christian."

He could not be more wrong.

-----

Photo credit: Ariana Grande photo from Wikipedia Commons.

This article was first published by the Media Project. Follow @markdurie

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‘Civilians’

Not nihilism

Grievances

Irresponsible

An important article by Jenny Taylor

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