The Myth of Moderate Islam.

The funeral of British suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer was held in absentia in his family’s ancestral village, near Lahore, Pakistan. Thousands of people attended, as they did again the following day when a Qul ceremony was held for Tanweer. During Qul, the Koran is recited to speed the deceased’s journey to paradise, though in Tanweer’s case this was hardly necessary. Being a shahid (martyr), he is deemed to have gone straight to paradise. The 22 year old from Leeds, whose bomb at Aldgate station killed seven people, was hailed by the crowd as ‘a hero of Islam’. A crowd numbering 10 000. 10 000 Voices unified praising the deaths of 7 innocent civilians, not soldiers or mercenaries, civilians caught by unawares in the acting out of a bizarre fantasy held in a sick mind.

Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?

Some in Britain cannot conceive that a suicide bomber could be a hero of Islam. Since the 7th of July many have made statements to attempt to explain what seems to them a contradiction in terms. Since the violence cannot be denied, their only course is to argue that the connection with Islam is invalid. The deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, said that ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’ His boss, the Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, asserted that there is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Muslim.

On 8 July the London-based Muslim Weekly published a lengthy opinion article by Abid Ullah Jan entitled ‘Islam, Faith and Power’. A day after 51 people died at the hands of faith. The gist of the article is that Muslims should strive to gain political and military power over non-Muslims, that warfare is obligatory for all Muslims, and that the Islamic state, Islam and Sharia (Islamic law) should be established throughout the world. All is supported with quotations from the Koran. It concludes with a veiled threat to Britain. The bombings the previous day were a perfect illustration of what Jan was advocating, and the editor evidently felt no need to withdraw the article or to apologize for it. His newspaper is widely read and distributed across the UK, it is a mainstream Islamic publication. It took a poll, apparently 37 of all Muslims living in England today “understand” and “sympathize” with the Terrorist’s motives and frustrations, how thoughtful of them. Whilst 10, believe that the terrorists were justified in their actions, and another 5 believe more terrorist attacks should take place. That’s over 50 of a huge poll, of which supports radical Islamic terrorism, either indirectly, directly or with vigorous pleasure. Perhaps the moderate majority the BBC seeks to imprint on us is false, it seems the majority is not so moderate, and the moderates are not the majority.

Muslims are stuck in a theological maze. If you want peace, you can find peaceable verses in the Koran. If you want war, you can find cruel verses. You can find verses which permit only defensive jihad, or you can find verses to justify offensive jihad, it is a rag tag book.

You can even find texts which specifically command terrorism, the classic one being Q8:59-60, which urges Muslims to prepare themselves to fight non-Muslims, ‘Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies’ (A. Yusuf Ali’s translation). Pakistani Brigadier S.K. Malik’s book The Quranic Concept of War is widely used by the military of various Muslim countries. Malik explains Koranic teaching on strategy:

In war our main objective is the opponent’s heart or soul, our main weapon of offence against this objective is the strength of our own souls, and to launch such an attack, we have to keep terror away from our own hearts... Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose on him.

So the boorish liberal mantra ‘Islam is peace’ is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace and nothing but peace. From AD 622 onwards it became increasingly aggressive, albeit with periods of peaceful coexistence, particularly in the colonial period, when the theology of war was not dominant. For today’s radical Muslims just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical Islam it would be truer to say ‘Islam is war’. One of the most radical Islamic groups in Britain, al-Ghurabaa, stated in the wake of the two London bombings, ‘Any Muslim that denies that terror is a part of Islam is kafir.’ A kafir is an unbeliever (i.e., a non-Muslim), a term of gross insult. . Mahmud Muhammad Taha argued for a distinction to be drawn between the Meccan and the Medinan sections of the Koran. He advocated a return to peaceable Meccan Islam, which he argued is applicable to today, whereas the angry Medinan teachings should be consigned to history. For taking this position he was tried for apostasy, found guilty and executed by the Sudanese government in 1985. A religious reformer executed for heresy in 1985! Welcome to the medieval mindset in the 20th century. Madness, scary madness.

Another modernist reformer was the Pakistani Fazlur Rahman, who advocated the ‘double movement’; i.e, understanding Koranic verses in their context, their ratio legis, and then using the philosophy of the Koran to interpret that in a modern, social and moral sense. Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, an Egyptian professor who argued similarly that the Koran and hadith should be interpreted according to the context in which they originated, was charged with apostasy, found guilty in June 1995 and ordered to separate from his wife and then tortured and killed, the location of his body his unknown.

The violence which is endemic in Muslim societies such as Pakistan is increasingly present in Britain’s Muslim community. Already we have violence by Pakistani Muslims against Kurdish Muslims, by Muslims against non-Muslims living among them (Caribbean people in the West Midlands, for example), a rapid growth in honour killings, and now suicide bombings. It is worth noting that many conflicts around the world are not internal to the Muslim community but external, as Muslims seek to gain territorial control, for example, in south Thailand, the southern Philippines, Kashmir, Chechnya and Palestine. Is it possible that a conflict of this nature could occur in Britain?

Muslims must stop this self-deception. They must with honesty recognize the violence that has existed in their history in the same way that Christians have had to do, for Christianity has a very dark past. Some Muslims have, with great courage, begun to do this.

The reasons Islam gets a relatively free pass in the media, or at least it used to in my mind, when it was compared to Christianity are many and complex. The number one reason by far is my fear of being branded a racist. Even though "Muslim" is not a race, the majority of Islam's adherents are brown skinned minorities that have historically and repeatedly been fucked around by white races, by the technologically advanced, by our guns, germs and steel.

I cannot overemphasize how thoroughly the idea that being a racist is the worst possible thing you can be has been drilled into the head of any white liberal under the age of 40. Personally, being both white and liberal, raised in a liberal democrat household, I was taught that being in the slightest way racist is about on the same moral level as being a blood drinking pedophilic serial killer. Not that there is anything wrong with making sure your kids know that racism is bad, on the contrary, it should be a mainstay of any childhood education. But having this lesson be so fundamental a foundation of their core belief makes even gentle criticism of Islam a thorny prospect for most liberals. But know this, Islam is not race, it is an idea and one who holds radical Islamic ideas, can be hated with justification.

Add to that all the other compounding factors; the Israel/Palestine situation, the West's support of Israel, the crusades, the west's interference in Middle East politics, repeatedly propping up of dictators for our own selfish interests, arming Muslims to do our fighting during the cold war, our complete dependence on Middle East oil, the first gulf war, the war in Iraq right now, and you can see why most liberals shy away from direct criticism of Islam even when it is deserved. Usually, under criticism, Muslims have only to play the race card(or Western policies card), claim this is a modern day lynching, and most people will immediately back down and begin to apologize. Lastly there is the constant demonizing of Islam going on from our ideological enemies on the right. Most of them do it because they are xenophobic warmongering Christian fundamentalist borderline fascists, but just because they are criticizing Islam for all the wrong reasons does not mean Islam does not deserve to be criticized. This is the distinction that must be made.

Even on a board as un-PC as fictionpress, a board where the users such as me, enjoy an immense amount of freedom, people have a hard time making that distinction. I know I have trouble with it myself. It's hard to say something that you realize puts you in agreement, even partially, with people on the right that you despise everything about. A few times in the past I have had posts typed out in threads about Islam where I have done something like quote some of the cartoonishly, insanely, violent passages from the Koran, stuff that makes the worst parts of the Bible look like My Pet Goat, and then before hitting post found myself hesitating. When re-reading what I have written I end up saying to myself "I can't say that. I sound like fucking Bill O'Reilly! That's the type of shit he says on his show. Or even worse that retard Anne Coulter! Fuck, I better just delete it" so that's exactly what I end up doing. What I am saying is that this is sometimes the wrong impulse and should be fought.

Valid criticism is still valid, even if it is being echoed by an imbecile, and if there is any religion on this earth that is deserving of criticism it is Islam.

I give Christianity an extremely rough time here and deservedly so. For the reasons listed above however, even a board as honest as fictionpress tends to generally give Islam a pass in comparison. This should not be the case. Everything I hate about Fundamentalist Christianity is concentrated in Islam to an incredible degree. The xenophobia, the un-emancipation of women, the complete disregard for women's and minorities rights, the total lack of empathy in for the "other" in fact flat out hatred of the "other" would be more like it, the forced acceptance of religious "morals", the elevation of superstition and delusion over obvious facts, the complete refusal to hear even the slightest criticism of religious beliefs, the reliance on prayer over reason, the hatred of homosexuality, the execution of theologians, the supremacy of religion over the state and it's laws, the use of violence to defend gospel, the complete rejection of democracy wherever it conflicts with religious doctrine, the expansionist drive, the impetus to indoctrinate and convert, the necessity of the supremacy of their belief system over all others.

In short; all the worst aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they are concentrated and amplified in Islam to a degree rarely, and sometimes never, reached by either. I want to be clear, I am not talking about radical Islam here, I am talking about mainstream Islam.

The bombers of Manhattan represent a new fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend, Islamic terrorists hate everything I love about the West. Its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost or how America and England now sleep in the fire of their own creation, is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Ward Churchill, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. We do not deserve to die for our freedoms.

Islam's fascistic elements represent a far greater threat to every ideal that I hold (and I say this without irony) sacred than any other movement today, and yet we treat Islam like Christianity's rebellious kid brother. Who, just because his older brother had a delinquent youth, is entitled to his own. This is a grave mistake. Islam is Christianity's darker and far more dangerous sibling, in which every cruel fang and claw of the Christian faith had been refined, evolved, and sharpened, it is a faith of war and suffering that was forged in the heart of a desert conflict that claimed thousands of lives. It is a religion that is one with the warrior’s code, one who dies in battle will get to heaven, the Islamic Jihad engrained in the Koran is the Catholic crusade, but an idea taken to a far more dangerous extreme. We would do well to start treating it as such.

I wrote this inspired by this article found below, it's time to be proud of our mighty western way of life, because it is mighty, it is great. We have achieved democracy, individualism, comfort and liberty in a harsh and hostile world. We have ascended through scientific progress, hard work and war, trade and freedom. Throughout our history we have laid down millions of lives in battles in the face of fascism, in all its forms, in its anti individualism, in its suppressive and oppressive guises we have forced it back from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, we have liberated industrialized Europe. Islamic fundamentalism, is Islamo Fascism, we can over come it, it's time to embrace the west, the beauty of human achievement, capitalism, consumerism, moderate Christianity, we're its children and now, it's time to fight for everything we have earned.

“The Muslim mind is on fire

Youssef M. Ibrahim

July 26, 2005

DUBAI -- The world of Islam is on fire. Indeed, the Muslim mind is on fire. Above all, the West is now ready to take both of them on.

The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down.

Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings.

A couple of weeks ago London was on fire as Pakistani and other Muslims with British citizenship blew up tube stations in the name of Islam. Al Qaeda in Europe or one of its franchises proclaimed proudly the killing of 54 and wounding 700 innocent citizens was done to "avenge Islam" and Muslims.

Madrid was on fire, too, last year, when Muslim jihadis blew up train stations killing 160 people and wounding a few thousands.

The excuse in all the above cases was the war in Iraq, but let us not forget that in September 2001, long before Iraq, Osama Bin Laden proudly announced that he ordered the killing of some 3,000 in the United States, in the name of avenging Islam. Let us not forget that the killing began a long time before the invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, jihadis have been killing for a decade in the name of Islam. They killed innocent tourists and natives in Morocco and Egypt, in Africa, in Indonesia and in Yemen, all done in the name of Islam by Muslims who say that they are better than all other Muslims. They killed in India, in Thailand and are now talking of killing in Germany and Denmark and so on. There were attacks with bombs that killed scores inside Shia and Sunni mosques, inside churches and inside synagogues in Turkey and Tunisia, with Muslim preachers saying that it is okay to kill Jews and Christians - the so called infidels.

Above all, it is the Muslim mind that is on fire.

The Muslim fundamentalist who attacked the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, stabbed him more than 23 times then cut his throat. He recently proudly proclaimed at his trial: "I did it because my religion - Islam - dictated it and I would do it again if were free." Which preacher told this guy this is Islam? That preacher should be in jail with him.

Do the cowardly jihadis who recruit suicide bombers really think that they will force the US Army and British troops out of Iraq by killing hundreds of innocent Iraqis? US troops now have bases and operate in Iraq but also from Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman.

The only accomplishment of jihadis is that now they have aroused the great "Western Tiger". There was a time when the United States and Europe welcomed Arab and Muslim immigrants, visitors and students, with open arms. London even allowed all dissidents escaping their countries to preach against those countries under the guise of political refugees.

Well, that is all over now. Time has become for the big Western vengeance.

Visas for Arab and Muslim young men will be impossible to get for the United States and Western Europe. Those working there will be expelled if they are illegal, and harassed even if their papers are in order.

Airlines will have to right to refuse boarding to passengers if their names even resemble names on a prohibited list on all flights heading to Europe and the United States.

What is more important to remember is this: When the West did unite after World War II to beat communism, the long Cold War began without pity. They took no prisoners. They all stood together, from the United States to Norway, from Britain to Spain, from Belgium to Switzerland. And they did bring down the biggest empire. Communism collapsed.

I fear those naïve Muslims who think that they are beating the West have now achieved their worst crime of all. The West is now going to war against not only Muslims, but also, sadly, Islam as a religion.

In this new cold and hot war, car bombs and suicide bombers here and there will be no match for the arsenal that those Westerners are putting together - an arsenal of laws, intelligence pooling, surveillance by satellites, armies of special forces and indeed, allies inside the Arab world who are tired of having their lives disrupted by demented so-called jihadis or those bearded preachers who, under the guise of preaching, do little to teach and much to ignite the fire, those who know little about Islam and nothing about humanity.”

This equivalence is the West's problem. There has to come a point where we stand up and ditch the self loathing. There is a fucking huge problem inside Islam and we cannot sit on our hands any more and say 'oh well we're just as bad as they are'. We fucking well aren't and saying we are lets the moderates off the hook and makes the Islamists think we are weak. It cannot go on. Non-muslims and muslims both have to face up to it and it won't be done by pretending Islamists can be dealt with by continuing to trash our own nations.

As I see it, the man who’s head is infected with Radical Islam is sick, and he should not be allowed to join our great secular societies to corrupt them, we do not allow criminals to immigrate, these are just the same, all potential walking bombs. If the fanatic despises our decadence and hates our way of life perhaps he should remove his mouth from the teat of western excellence and return to Arabia to fight his ruling Princes who fuck hundreds of whores and fly around the world snorting coke fuelled by their oil wells. Laughing their arses off as the idiot fundamentalist instead of hanging around his home country to attempt reform, revolution and equal distribution of wealth, goes off to die in by the dozen in front of the “crusading” American’s guns.

So the question before us is simple. How can we make Islam go through an enlightenment when the fundamentalist, the moderate and the fanatic sees everything about religious enlightenment as decadent, Western and an enemy of Islam?