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3. Jihad: Muhammad's blueprint for
conquest
In the 20th century we became accustomed to the
fact that all totalitarian ideologies are
unremittingly aggressive towards their neighbors.
The same can be said for totalitarian Islam, which
came into existence already in the 7th
century.
There can be no doubt that Islam was conceived
as a conquering and empire-building force. Its
followers have been imbued with the sense that they
are destined by Allah to rule the entire world. In
Jihad, Paul Fregosi repeatedly stresses that
Islam is a mix of politics, ideology, and religion,
and that it was basically designed as an enterprise
to conquer and to rule the entire world. For
example,
- As much as a religion, Islam is an
ideological (or call it political) movement
built on a religious foundation. The Jihad is
there to spread the message, whatever it might
be, with the aid of the sword. [8] p.
186.
-
- The purpose of the Jihad became, and
basically still is, to expand and extend Islam
until the whole world is under Muslim rule. The
Jihad is essentially a permanent state of
hostility that Islam maintains against the rest
of the world, with or without fighting, for more
sovereignty over more territory. . . The Muslims
make no distinction between religion and the
state, hence the "holy" tinge that the
imperialist wars have acquired. Let us not be
deceived by the religious coloring Muslims gave
to their territorial conquests. The Jihad wars
were sheer imperialism, just as ours
[European] were. [8] p. 20.
-
- The Jihad made the war permanent and natural
between Islam and Christendom, even when they
were not actually fighting. Whatever the reasons
for its existence at any particular time, as
long as the Jihad continued to be the policy of
Islam, the enmity and distrust inevitably also
continued. [8] p. 337.
-
- There are still many Muslims who believe
that it is Islam's manifest destiny to conquer
the whole world. Obliged to face the realities
of the modern world, many more may not be too
sure about this article of their faith. But,
just the same, many still ardently cling to it .
. . [8] p. 21.
-
- It needs to be said: Islam considers itself
doctrinally a religion whose destiny is to
dominate the world. In the spiritual sphere it
believes that it has taken over from the older
Jewish and Christian religions. It considers
them outdated and itself therefore entitled to
the recognition of its true and superior status,
and to their deference. [8] p.
411.
Samuel P. Huntington makes similar
observations:
- The overwhelming majority of fault line
conflicts ... have taken place along the
boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that
separates Muslims from non-Muslims. While at the
macro or global level of world politics the
primary clash of civilizations is between the
West and the rest, at the micro or local level
it is between Islam and the others. [1]
p. 255.
-
- Wherever one looks along the perimeter of
Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably
with their neighbors. [1] p. 256.
-
- The Koran and other statements of Muslim
beliefs contain few prohibitions on violence,
and a concept of nonviolence is absent from
Muslim doctrine and practice. [1] p.
263.
-
- . . . Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Western
Christians, and Orthodox Christians have less
difficulty adapting to and living with each
other than any one of them has in adapting to
and living with Muslims. [1] p.
264.
Indeed, Muhammad's Jihad idea proved to be as
spectacularly successful as was his idea of making
politics and ideology parts of his religion which
he called Islam. Islam conquered vast territories
in the first hundred years of Jihad warfare and
- . . . the Arabs were lords of an empire
larger than that of Alexander and of the Romans.
It included Spain and Morocco, the entire shore
of North Africa to Egypt, Palestine, Syria,
Iraq, Iran, Transoxiana, and the Indus valley.
[3] p. 36.
Let it also be noted well that Islam has seldom,
if ever, won over a people to itself by friendly
persuasion. In most of the territories that it
overran it displaced by merciless means religions
that had prevailed there for centuries:
- Islam originated in Arabia in the seventh
century. At the time Egypt, Libya and all of
North Africa were Christian and had been so for
hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon,
Syria and Asia Minor. The churches that St. Paul
addressed in his letters collected in the New
Testament are located in Asia Minor (now Turkey)
as well as Greece. North of Greece, in a buffer
zone between Eastern and Western Europe, were
lands that would become the Christian domains of
the Slavs. . . Antioch and Constantinople
(Istanbul), in modern Turkey, and Alexandria, in
modern Egypt, were three of the most important
Christian centers of the first millennium.
[7] p. 132.
Moreover, the Jihad was waged on quite practical
terms. The Jihad offered material rewards for both
the ruling class and the ordinary (and often poor)
Muslim soldiers in the ranks. It was designed to
reward its soldiers with property, wealth and
sexual pleasures which they took by force from the
defeated peoples. If one were to cynically view the
Jihad as a business enterprise, one could say that
it yielded lucrative returns for its shareholders
for some 900 years.
- [The invasion of Spain in 710]. . .
was just a magnificent illustration of . . .
planned mass abduction and mass robbery . . .
The Jihad, through these ages, inspired from its
pre-Islamic tradition of Arabian tribal raids,
was already a mighty instrument of what in the
twentieth century we could bluntly call white
slave traffic. [8] p. 91.
-
- . . . the Muslim conquerors were not anxious
to win too many converts. Converting infidels
meant losing taxpayers or potential slaves, both
valuable commodities. The non-Muslim citizens of
these new Muslim lands were setting the pattern
for the future lucrative Islamic rule in
conquered territories . . . Although many
Muslims would have denied it, and probably still
do, more money, more slaves, and more tax-payers
were more important to the Islamic rulers than
more Muslims. [8] p. 108.
-
- The Muslim rulers needed money more than
they needed converts. . . The Jihad was largely
a fraud. It fought for the Treasury as much as
for Allah. Throughout the centuries it was one
of the great triumphs of hypocrisy. [8]
p. 109
-
- Islam provided suitable motives to its
soldiers for the pursuit of the Jihad, plunder
and travel among them. The Muslims were great
travelers, as their far-flung conquests
indicate. The Jihad also had much to offer those
who loved power and adventure. [8] p.
133.
-
- . . . [the sultan's] loyal Islamic
subjects never asked any questions. Some perhaps
wondered whether the Jihad was not simply a vast
freebooting enterprise, but the human race being
what it is, most were happy to keep quiet,
praise Allah, and count the loot as it came
pouring in. [8] p. 259.
Recall, also, that for the ordinary man in the
ranks of Islam's armies Jihad offered a win-win
situation: plunder if he won the fight, paradise
with all imaginable earthly pleasures if he was
killed. Fregosi writes:
- Even more than Allah, the prime motive for
fighting that inspired the Arabs were plunder,
slaves, women, and eagerness for death fighting
for Islam, which meant immediate entry into
Paradise with all joys and pleasures for those
who died in battle. Dying for Islam made them
"martyrs" (it still does) and an eternity of
sexual pleasure awaited them. Hence, death in
action was a highly sought privilege and the
best way to die in battle was to charge and
fight fearlessly. It made the Arabs the most
terrifying enemies, eager for death . . .
[8] p. 66.
4. Islam's nasty side
Up to this point, one can view Islam as a very
cleverly conceived enterprise for conquest. That
would make Islam's designers ingenious but not
necessarily sinister, nor any more avaricious that
the run-of-the-mill conquerors throughout mankind's
history. After all, famous conquerors have come
along and empires have risen and fallen with the
passing of time. But there are several things that
I find distasteful about Muslim imperialism, things
that go beyond mere physical subjugation of the
vanquished.
I have done my fair share of reading about
Islam, as the list of references will bear out.
During my reading I have frequently been struck by
what I can only describe as echoes in my mind of
times and events I experienced in my own lifetime.
It was weird to sense the strains of a very
stirring and simultaneously menacing melody, "Die
Fahne Hoch," which had a very symbolic meaning for
Europeans in the 20th century, frequently course
through my mind while I was reading about Islam.
These echoes were particularly strong while reading
Fregosi's excellent history of the Jihad.
Nazism is an ideology that comes very close to
being a religion. As Baigent et al. write: "Nazism
did not just adopt the accoutrements of a religion.
It quite literally became a religion in its
substance as well" ([10]p.197). Nazism is
grounded in ancient Teutonic myths and a belief in
the racial superiority of the Aryans, wherefrom it
derives the justification and right to kill,
conquer, and subjugate less worthy people. Nazism
glorifies and holds akin to divine the strong Aryan
conqueror -- the "Overman." Nazis believed (perhaps
some still do, as do many Muslims) that they were
destined to rule the world.
What have I learned about Islam that would lead
me to regard it as historically a precursor of
Nazism?
Both Nazism and Islam set out to conquer the
world in lightning manner. Although it took the
Muslims longer than it took the Nazis to attain
their respective territorial conquests, the Muslims
held theirs for much, much longer. After invading
Spain in 711, it took the Arabs only three years to
cross the Pyrenees into France. I found it more
than just interesting to see Paul Fregosi remark
that,
- The Arab conquest of Spain had been one of
history's blitzkriegs.[8] p.
109.
However, it was not merely daring military
tactics by the Muslims and the speed of their
conquests that reminded me of the Nazi war machine.
What truly impressed me was that the Ottoman
sultans were centuries ahead of the Nazis when they
created a fanatical and ruthless elite fighting
force -- the Janissaries - which would follow the
orders of their commanders even if that meant going
to the ends of hell itself:
- The Janissaries were for centuries the
fer-de-lance of the Jihad. . . Originally
recruited by force, usually as teen-aged boys
from the Christian villages of occupied Europe,
they were forcibly (but often willingly)
converted to Islam . . . and turned into the
finest fighting force of the age. . . They were
heavily indoctrinated into the Muslim faith and
ideology, and taught, above all, to be loyal to
the sultan and to him alone. The Janissaries
were the most formidable fighting force in
Europe and Asia. They were considered by those
who fought them, and those in whose service they
fought, rather like the French Foreign Legion or
the U.S. Marines; or, perhaps more fittingly,
like the Waffen SS. [8] p.
217.
As Baigent et al. describe Hitler's elite
fighters, "If Hitler was the Messiah of a new
religion, his priesthood was the elite black-clad
Schutzstaffel, or SS ([10]p.201).
The methods of indoctrination and conditioning of
the elite fighters of Islam and of the Third Reich
had much in common.
5. Islam's cultural barbarism
What really made me see Islam as an ideology
comparable to Nazism was the wicked abasement by
the Muslim conquerors of the dignity of the
vanquished peoples, and their systematic effort to
eradicate the cultural heritage of the
vanquished.
It is a fact that all Muslims, not just Arabs,
must learn to read the Koran and other religious
texts, such as the hadiths, in Arabic. The Arabic
language and culture have been imposed on the
subjugated nations, along with the religion of
Islam, by the conquerors. This was noted by V.S.
Naipaul during his travels through the non-Arab
Muslim countries, from Iran to Indonesia, where
Islam had arrived along with Arab or Mogul rulers
and colonizers.
- What was there in the subject
[Islam] that called for so much study?
Well, there was Arabic itself; there was grammar
in all its branches; there was logic and
rhetoric; there was jurisprudence, Islamic
jurisprudence being one course of study and the
principles of jurisprudence being another; there
was Islamic philosophy; there were the Islamic
sciences -- biographies, genealogies,
"correlations," traditions about the Prophet and
his close companions. [5] p. 46.
-
- It turns out now that the Arabs were the
most successful imperialists of all time, since
to be conquered by them (and then to be like
them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to
be saved. [5] p. 142.
In Iran, as noted by Amir Taheri, this has led
to a cultural schizophrenia; I would suggest a
stronger term -- cultural genocide.
- The advent of Islam nearly fourteen
centuries ago led to what some Iranian thinkers
describe as "our national multiple
schizophrenia." Nowhere is the schizophrenia
more evident than in the Persian language. An
Indo-European language, Persian is,
nevertheless, written in the borrowed Arabic
alphabet. [6] p. 59.
-
- Most Iranians had all but forgotten their
pre-Islamic past and had little or no
chronological notion of history. Persepolis,
whose majestic ruins dominated the plain of
Morghab near Shiraz, was not recognizable to the
average Iranian as the once glorious capital of
the Achaemenean empire. It was called
Takht-e-Jamshid (Jamshid's Throne) and believed
to be a relic of a mythological past. The tomb
of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae was believed to
be the resting place of King Solomon's mother.
Outside the small Zoroastrian community all
ancient Persian names had been replaced by Arab
Islamic ones. Even Shahnameh (Book of Kings),
Iran's national epic, subsequently adopted as
the holy book of Persian nationalism, was
recited in public in praise of Ali, the first
Imam. Darius the Great's famous edict, engraved
on the face of a rock near the western city of
Kermanshah, had been discovered and deciphered
by the British archaeologist Sir Henry Rawlinson
[in1839] and later translated into both
English and Persian. But most Iranians did not
know of its existence and were therefore unaware
of the King of King's great exploits. Over some
four hundred years the mullahs had succeeded in
effacing the nation's collective memory of its
pre-Islamic past. Iran's ancient history was
considered a tragic tale of ignorance and
damnation that was best bequeathed to oblivion.
[6] p. 75.
-
- History, in the Pakistan school books I
looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the
simpler texts, surveys of the Prophet and the
first four caliphs and perhaps the Prophet's
daughter are followed, with hardly a break, by
lives of the poet Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, the
political founder of Pakistan, and two or three
"martyrs," soldiers or airmen who died in the
holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971. . .
History as selective as this leads quickly to
unreality. Before Mohammed there is blackness:
slavery, exploitation. After Mohammed there is
light: slavery and exploitation vanish.
[5] p. 142.
Irshad Manji suggests that the continued
imposition of Arabic culture and language on all
Muslims is due to Islam's roots in "desert
tribalism,"
- Suppose we [Muslims] are not really
joined by faith in God but by submission to a
particular culture. Could it be that Islam, even
of the passive sort, is more a faith in the ways
of the desert than it is the wisdom of the
divine, and that Muslims are taught to imitate
the power dynamics of an Arabian tribe . . .
[12] p. 145.
I do not agree with Manji's reasoning. I think
that Muhammad (and if not he, then his immediate
successors, the "Companions of the Prophet"),
recognized the necessity that the conqueror,
besides maintaining a superiority of arms over the
subjugated enemy, also distances and removes
himself from the mass of the subjugated people by
maintaining an air of linguistic and cultural
superiority. This kind of cultural domination has
been practiced often throughout history by the
conquering peoples over the defeated peoples.
Muhammad's Arabs certainly respected the dominant
cultural influences that accompanied the Greek and
Roman conquests in their own part of the world.
However, the Greco-Roman cultures actually brought
enlightenment and advances in knowledge to the
conquered people and did not impose on them a
stifling religion.
Unfortunately, the Arabs had nothing like an
enlightening culture to bring with them that the
defeated could absorb and learn from. They really
did not have a written language or culture that
would impress the peoples they eventually
conquered. Raphael Patai writes:
- In 622 the Arabs were nothing more than a
number of disunited tribes making a living
either as nomadic herders, or, mainly in the
south and on the northern fringes of the
peninsula, as agriculturalists settled in
villages, or again as traders or merchants in a
few oasis towns, such as Mecca and Yathrib
(later Medina) near the west coast. They were
torn by centuries-old strife and feuding. They
were almost totally illiterate, and the very few
who could read and write had only a very
defective script at their disposal which was
little more than a reminder. [3] p.
35.
The budding conquerors (it doesn't matter
whether it was Mohammed himself or his successors)
came up with a brilliant idea of how to get around
their cultural deficiency vis-à-vis the
people who they were about to conquer. They simply
stipulated that the Koran was not written by man;
it was quite literally Allah's words spoken through
the mouth of His Prophet Muhammad. Because Allah
dictated his words to Mohammed in Arabic and that
is the language in which Allah's words were written
down by Muhammad's scribes, it was sacrilege of the
highest order to translate the Koran into any other
language. Furthermore, since the hadiths were
explanations and elaborations on the Koran, they,
too, had to be read and studied in the original
Arabic language in which they were written. Thus,
wherever Islam and the Koran went, so did the
Arabic language and Arabic customs.
There is a further argument to dispute Manji's
claim that Islam is the way it is because it is a
"faith in the ways of the desert." If that was all
there was to the code of Islam, it is
incomprehensible why other races and cultures, such
as the Turks or Moguls, would subscribe to it for
centuries after the Arabs had lost their hold of
the Muslim empire. I think the reason is as I have
suggested, that every Muslim conqueror, of whatever
race or nationality, understood the utility of the
Arabic language and attendant Arabic cultural mores
which distinguished and distanced the victorious
Muslim conquerors from the alien conquered people.
It was only in the 20th century, when the Ottoman
Turks finally ran out of will and energy to conquer
in the name of Allah and Muhammad, that Turkey's
renowned modernizer, Kemal Attaturk could
admit:
- "Cruel and criminal laws in Turkey have been
fixed for more than five hundred years on the
rules and theories of an old Arab sheik, and
through the abusive interpretation of ignorant
and filthy priests. . . Islam, this absurd
theology of an immoral Bedouin, is a rotting
corpse which poisons our lives." [8] p.
407.
Again, I see a similarity in the philosophies
about history and culture between Islam and
modern-day totalitarian Communism and Nazism:
nothing that preceded them historically or
culturally has any meaning or value. As Raphael
Patai writes:
- Before long the period which preceded
Muhammad's appearance came to be called the
jahiliyya, literally "(time or state of)
ignorance." This designation implied a negative
view of everything that had gone before Muhammad
. . . For the believing Muslims Arab history
began with Muhammad, and what preceded him was
either negligible or, better, to be forgotten.
[3] p. 6.
In a similar vein, Robert Spencer quotes two
other writers:
- Philip Hitti explains that Muslims "call the
era before the appearance of Muhammad the
Jahiliya period, a term usually rendered as
'time of ignorance' or 'barbarism.' . . . For
many Muslims, [V.S. Naipaul] observes,
"The time before Islam is a time of blackness:
that is part of Muslim theology. History has to
serve theology." [7] p. 172.
These demented views on culture, tradition and
language of other civilizations and peoples are
those of crude uncivilized barbarians. Measured by
their behavior during the foregoing thirteen
centuries, it is regrettable to conclude that
Muslims are precisely that: uncivilized
barbarians.
6. Islam's Untermenschen
Of all the bad things noted in Islam the worst,
without a doubt, is how Muslims have treated (and
still do) the un-believers under their rule. In
this respect they come closest to resembling the
Nazis' treatment of people who they considered to
be racially or culturally inferior.
Quoting Fregosi:
- [In countries conquered by the
Muslims] . . . the original inhabitants,
Christians and Jews, became legally the inferior
citizens inside the country, subject to the
imposition of special taxes and to a lifetime of
humiliations.
-
- The Christians and Jews were called
"dhimmis" (in the east European and Balkan lands
later conquered by the Turks, they were known as
"rayahs") and they had to acknowledge the
superiority of the Muslims in their daily life,
which was to become one of constant
humiliations. They could not carry a weapon or
ride a horse, only a donkey. They were not
allowed to wear shoes but had to walk barefoot.
A Christian who claimed Jesus was divine was
automatically executed. A Muslim who became a
Christian or a Jew was also executed. The
ringing of church bells was forbidden. Christian
religious processions were banned. Non-Muslims
had to stand aside if a Muslim passed them in
the street. They could not wear anything which
had green in it, as that was the color of Islam.
If a Muslim assaulted them, they were not
allowed to fight back but were only permitted to
ask their aggressor to stop hitting them. Their
status in many ways resembled that of the
Untouchables in Hindu society. The dhimmis were
the dregs, the people at the bottom of the pile.
If they failed to pay the tribute due their
conquerors, they were enslaved or executed.
[8] p. 107-108.
Raphael Patai presents a full account of Muslim
behavior towards non-Muslims:
- Muhammad's turning against the Jews
decisively influenced the attitude of Islam
toward them once and for all. [3] p.
41.
-
- [the Koran says] the Jews were
cursed by God, metamorphosed into apes,
punished, and doomed to humiliation in this
world, and destined to burn in Hell after they
died. . . . this portrait of the Jews is
strongly colored by Muhammad's resentment of his
Jewish contemporaries who rejected his teachings
and refused to recognize him as the last of the
great prophets, or, . . . the khatim, or
seal, of the prophets. [3] p. 42.
-
- [The Arabs] conquered many peoples.
. . their attitude to the vanquished [was
guided] by the same Koranic principle which
Muhammad applied to the Jews of Arabia: "Fight
those to whom the Scriptures were given, who
believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and
[who] forbid not that which Allah hath
forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the
religion of truth, until they pay the tribute
(jizja) readily, being brought low."
(Koran 9: 29) . . . the heathens had to be
fought, without condition, until they accepted
the din of Muhammad; hence the famous
Arab saying, Din Muhammad bi al-sayf,
"The religion of Muhammad with the sword." . . .
Where the Muslims had the power, as in North
Africa, they proceeded ruthlessly against the
idol worshippers in the conquered populations.
If they adopted Islam, they were spared; if not,
they were put to death. . . . It was the result
of this Muslim policy that with the Arab
conquests in Asia and Africa, large numbers of
native populations converted to Islam.
[3] p. 43.
-
- The first caliph to issue discriminatory
laws against the dhimmis was Umar II, a
religious fanatic, who ruled from 717 to 720. He
ordered the governor of Khurasan (eastern Iran)
to prohibit the building of new synagogues and
churches, to compel the Jews and the Christians
to wear special hats and mantles so as to make
them easily distinguishable from the Muslims,
and to prohibit them from using a saddle and
employing Muslims in their service. These items,
added to the Koranic obligation of exacting a
poll tax from the dhimmis, and of
bringing them low, had as their objective the
separation or segregation (ghiyar) of the
members of the other religions from the Muslims.
This endeavor remained a basic feature of the
Muslim attitude to the dhimmis for all
times.
-
- At a much later date the anti-dhimmi
regulations . . . were collected into a document
which was given the name Covenant of Umar, and
attributed to the Caliph Umar I (reigned
634-644). . . The main points in the Covenant of
Umar can be summarized . . . as follows:
-
- 1. The dhimmis are prohibited from
building synagogues and churches in addition to
those which had existed in pre-Islamic
times.
-
- 2. They must not be taught the Koran.
-
- 3. They must not shelter spies.
-
- 4. They must not buy male or female Muslim
slaves, nor slaves formerly owned by
Muslims.
-
- 5. They must not sell intoxicating beverages
to Muslims, nor; pork, nor the carcasses of
animals not ritually slaughtered.
-
- 6. They must not employ Muslims in their
service.
-
- 7. They must honor Muslims and stand in
their presence.
-
- 8. They must not hit or deceive a
Muslim.
-
- 9. They must put up Muslim travelers in
their houses for three days.
-
- 10. They must not prevent anyone from
converting to Islam.
-
- 11. They must not dress or wear their hair
in a manner resembling that of the Muslims. They
must not wear silk girdles, nor shoes of the
colors worn by Muslims.
-
- 12. They must not be called by Muslim names
or appellations.
-
- 13. Dhimmi men while in bath houses
must wear a special sign around their necks.
Dhimmi women must not use the same bath
house used by Muslim women, but special baths
must be built for them.
-
- 14. The dhimmis are forbidden to
carry arms.
-
- 15. The must not ride on horses or mules,
but only on asses, and must not use riding
saddles but only unornamented pack saddles, on
which they must ride side-saddle.
-
- 16. Their houses and tombs must not be
higher than those of the Muslims.
-
- 17. They must not raise their voices in
their places of worship, and the Christians must
not be seen in public with crosses.
-
- 18. They cannot be employed as government
officials, nor in any capacity which would give
them authority over Muslims.
-
- 19. If a dhimmi dies, his estate
becomes the property of the authorities until
his heirs can prove their right to it under
Islamic law. If there is no legal heir, the
estate remains the property of the authorities.
[3] p. 44-46.
I will conclude this section on Islam's
"untermenschen" with a trenchant statement from
Irshad Manji:
- In North Africa, Jews and Christians wore
shoulder patches with pictures of pigs and
monkeys respectively. They had to slap these
symbols on their homes, too. In Baghdad, seat of
Islamic enlightenment, the dimmi people dressed
in clothes bearing yellow symbols -- a marker
resuscitated by the Nazis. . . I began to grasp
how Islam has come to be an insular, often
hateful religion. [12] p. 72.
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