| May 2012 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
I've been talking a lot on this site about the view that Islam is not a religion, but a political ideology. This view was first expressed to me in person by prominent Muslim reformer Tashbih Sayyed. I later heard it expressed by another leading Muslim reformer, Wafa Sultan, as I blogged here:
Dr. Wafa Sultan: I have lost hope for Islam and I think it is the duty of all free speakers to help in the effort to enlighten the Muslims.
...Islam should not be considered a religion, but a political ideology that applies its policy violently.
...Sometimes when I talk to American friends, I get so upset that they don't know anything. A friend [...] said, Islam is a religion of peace. The President of the United States said, Islam is a religion of peace. Do you read anything about Islam? Do you know anything about Islam? When I heard that I just wanted to close my eyes.
...Islam shouldn't be classified as a religion because as a Muslim you have to believe in Islam as a religion and as a state.
...As long as you are allowing the Koran to be read in your schools, you are in grave danger.
...You should force Imams to answer your questions publicly about Islam. Just have them open their book and read it. Many Muslims are embarrassed because the world is starting to ask questions about Islam, and the Muslims know they don't have good answers.
...Muslims at my house say, "wait a few years -- we will replace the U.S. constitution with sharia law, here in the U.S." They are working for that. They don't say it to your face, but they are working for that.
Today I'd like to review some of the things others have written on this.
From the Egyptian blogger, The Big Pharaoh:
I was watching Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi give his friday sermon today. He talked about how Saddam Hussein "repented" during the last years of his reign and started building mosques all over Iraq. He then went on to say that Saddam was the only Arab leader who said "no to America" and that he fired missiles into Israel. It seems that, according to Qaradawi, these things are enough to create a hero out of Saddam Hussein. And Qardawi is considered one of the most senior religious figures in the Middle East. May Allah have mercy on me!
Besides, what does Saddam and his execution has to do with friday sermons. I mean aren't sermons for dos and donts and prayers, and other spiritual stuff. Oh I forgot, Islam has turned from a religion into a political ideology.
From Robert Spengler, in Asia Times Online:
Religion offers the individual a way of transcending death by separating the holy, or eternal, from the profane, or transitory. It presupposes not merely an eternal plane of being exalted above mere creation, but also some means by which mortals may participate in this higher being through revelation and grace, and some procedure by which they may obtain grace, that is, ritual and prayer.
In Islam, this procedure is jihad....Jihad, that is, conquest and forcible conversion of the Dar-al-Harb (the realm of war [i.e. all lands which are not Muslim -- ed.]), is the quintessence of Islamic prayer...
In another article, Spengler notes:
...the vast majority of Muslims have no interest in ideology in the sense that the modern West understands the term. Religion for them is an existential matter, of one substance with the smallest details of their daily lives.
From Wikipedia:
Islamism is a set of political ideologies that hold that Islam is not only a religion, but also a political system that governs the legal, economic and social imperatives of the state according to its interpretation of Islamic Law. Islamists thus demand the return of the society to Islamic values, and the return of the state to sharia law. A society governed by Islamic principles and law is seen as the true and sole answer to problems caused by the realities of modern life, including social and cultural alienation through urbanisation and migration, and political and economic exploitation.
From Zev Chafets:
It may be that Islam in its true form is as gentle as a lamb. But in the real world, it is an aggressive, violent political ideology. It may also be that a majority of U.S. Muslims object to the jihad being waged against infidel Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, agnostics and democrats of all denominations. But if so, they are keeping it to themselves.
After Abdurahman Alamoudi's confession of guilt, his lawyer, Stanley Cohen, warned that "there are those people who will seek to manipulate this plea into an attack on the entire Muslim community."
The Muslim establishment in America uses this form of intellectual jujitsu every time one of its leaders gets caught conducting holy war. Mosques and Muslim schools and institutions are hotbeds of agitation and terrorism? Why, just making the charge is a hate crime.
This trick has worked amazingly well on Americans who pride themselves on pluralism and good manners. For years, it kept the feds away from mosques and the politicians insisting against all evidence that Islam is nothing more than another path to the G-d of Us All.
But almost three years after 9/11, this hocus pocus is losing its potency. "There are terrorists among us," Gov. Pataki said after the Albany jihadis were arrested. He didn't specify because he didn't need to.
If America's Muslims don't want to be identified with America's enemies, they are going to need new leaders and loud voices. Slapping the word "peace" over the door of the mosque just isn't going to do it anymore.
From iranian.ws:
..."Many are schooled, yet only a few are educated." Many worship this dangerous political ideology posing as a religion without even once reading the Quran, Nahjol Balagheh (Ali's Book), any Hadith (Islamic Scholar's quotes), nor the history of Islam!
From Farid Ghadry, president of the Reform Party of Syria:
Some people can't bear to hear the word "Islam" associated with "fascism," no matter whom it describes. As for "fascism," why not use this word to refer to those radicals bent on subjecting the world to their ideology, by whatever means necessary? As for "Islam," what else do you call religious imams who encourage suicidal jihadists to take innocent lives and promise them the eternal gratitude of a heaven filled with virgins?
Unfortunately, instead of admitting that these jihadists are acting in the name of Islam, this fact is ignored; if you try to point it out, as President Bush has, you are accused of intolerance.
Many Muslims come to find sanctuary in this country, having escaped one oppressive regime or another, but precious few can find it in their hearts to be grateful to the safe haven that this country has offered us. Instead, many of them use their newfound freedom to denounce those who dare accurately describe the nature of their enemy. In so doing, they defend these Islamic fascists, whether willingly or not. And they fail to confront the true attackers of Islam: those terrorist fascists who call themselves Muslims.
From Maryam Namazie, on ButterfliesAndWheels.com:
Islam in political power, or as a movement targeting political power (political Islam), is as much a political ideology as it is a religion; it aims to establish Islamic states and rules and needs political power to do so. This political power has enabled it to maim, gag and kill women on a mass scale.
From InstantKnowledgeNews.com:
Muslims worldwide condemn these images [the Danish cartoons] of their prophet based primarily on a single factor -- the Koran states that the prophet should not be ridiculed in any fashion and that the punishment for that crime in the ideology and political realm of Islam is death. In fact, examples are given of early insults to the prophet which are questioned for being slight or humorous, but the punishment remains the same: death for any type of perceived insult to the prophet. These 12 images of the prophet fall within two categories, the one listed above and another against idolatry which prohibits any type of depiction of the prophet. Muslims believe in the ideology of Islam which mixes church and state unlike the religions of most democratic countries. Islam is a political ideology wrapped in the trappings of a religion. It operates as a political ideology. Viewing this ideology as one would view a western religion is not valid.
And how does this translate into real-world action? It translates into real-world Muslims, in the U.S., supporting Sharia law. From Robert Spencer on Front Page:
The Somali Supreme Islamic Courts Council regime ruled Mogadishu for only a few months, instituting a particularly draconian version of Sharia. Now its leaders have fled, and the remnants of their forces are now trapped between the sea and Somalia's border with Kenya.
...The Islamic Courts also had supporters in the United States. Last Saturday, 1,500 Somalis gathered in Minneapolis' Peavey Park for a demonstration in favor of the Sharia regime and against American support for the Ethiopian and Somali forces that toppled it. Hassan Mohamud, imam of St. Paul's Al-Taqwa Mosque, who teaches Islamic law at William Mitchell College of Law and is also president of the Somali Institute for Peace and Justice, the group that organized the demonstration, won cheers from the crowd as he thundered: "We ask the president of the United States, Mr. Bush, and his administration to stop supporting the terrorists. Ethiopian troops are terrorists." Mohamud has praised the Islamic Courts regime for bringing "peace and security to a large part of the country within 16 days where the international community could not help the Somalis for 16 years." When asked if Somalis based in Minnesota were supporting the jihadists financially, Mohamud responded: "What I know is that they have overwhelming support inside of Somalia because of the peace and law and order. If you have the support of your people inside of Somalia you don't need any support from outside."The peace and law and order that the Islamic Courts brought to Somalia was decidedly a matter of brute force and intimidation. In November 2005 Sharia supremacists in Mogadishu killed twelve people in the process of closing down movie theaters and video stores, both of which had been deemed un-Islamic. Last July they killed two people at a forbidden screening of a World Cup match. The regime staged public floggings and executions, banned television, music, and women swimming, and in one town a cleric aptly named Sheikh Rage announced that anyone who did not attend Muslim prayers five times a day would be beheaded. The regime repeatedly declared jihad on Ethiopia, making no secret of the expansionist aspirations that eventually led the Ethiopians to take action: Yusuf Mohamed Siad, an Islamic Courts defense official, declaredSomalia open to mujahedin from around the world: "We're saying our country is open to Muslims worldwide. Let them fight in Somalia and wage jihad, and God willing, attack Addis Ababa."
...Emblematic also of the nature of the Islamic Courts regime were statements by a Mogadishu cleric affiliated with the movement, Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin, after Pope Benedict XVI's address in Regensburg, Germany that aroused Muslim ire worldwide: "We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion. Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim. We call on all Islamic Communities across the world to take revenge on the baseless critic called the pope," said Malin.
The Islamic Courts' first vice chairperson, Sheikh Al-Rahman Mohomood Jinikow, stated in September that "we will only approve a constitution based on theology, because an Islamic constitution is the only one that serves all of us justly. Secular constitution, whether it is democratic or any other, is never fair and right, and Muslims have only one constitution which is entirely based on Allah's Qur'an."
That seemed to be fine with the demonstrators in Minneapolis. Some carried signs that read, "Islam is the solution." Abdul Mohamed, a member of the Somali Institute for Peace and Justice, denounced American policy toward Somalia as motivated by "Islamophobia." Given the nature of the Islamic Courts regime, this raises questions that have less to do with Somalia than with Minneapolis and the United States. What are 1,500 supporters of Islamic jihad and Sharia law doing in Minneapolis? What are the implications of this for our own national security? Would these immigrants prefer to live under Sharia than under the United States Constitution?
...The Somali Institute for Peace and Justice's demonstration in Minneapolis was simultaneously a demonstration in favor of Sharia government in Somalia and, unwittingly, of the crying need for serious and searching immigration reform. One may only hope that at least some American officials understood it as such.
Islam may not be a religion at all in the Western sense of the word. As I noted recently in the post, "A 'Religion'? Muslim Cleric on TV Describes the Correct Method for Wife Beatings in Islam:"
What kind of "religion" is this? Almost everybody in America thinks that all widely-followed religions are about peace and love and understanding. Islam does not appear to be like that. Islam is a religion in which they have official rules about how to beat your wife.
...What I want to know is, once they take all the oppressive political ideology out of Islam, and take the Sharia law out, and take out evil practices such as clerically-sanctioned wife-beating, what's going to be left for the reformed Islamists to practice?
I've never yet heard any imam preaching anything publicly except for violence, death and murder. If anyone has seen any video of any imam publicly preaching something about love and kindness, please post a link in the comments section.
We need to carefully consider the differences between Islam, and the widely-followed religions of the world.
