Ayaan's da'wah, Part 2
The way to disarm these “Islamists” is not by encouraging so-called “moderate” Muslims to remain moderate, but by discouraging moderate Muslims from remaining Muslim.
A da’i, someone who does da’wah, i.e., lies, propagandises and proselytises for Islam, will tell the kufaar, non-Muslims, that a Muslim is someone who submits to Allah and that Islam means submission to Allah. Both of these claims would be true, except that one kind of Muslim deception is to hide a lie within a truth. It is a special da’wah skill that they train in and it is not the worst. The superficial truth of “submission to Allah” conceals readiness to act in the cause of Allah, which means being permanently at war against non-Muslims, hardly something one would associate with submission. War against non-Muslims means advancing Islam. Anything that advances Islam is jihad. The authors of the Qur’an were well aware that those not good at warfare might be good at something else. Islam elevates those who will kill and die for Allah and belittles those who do not like killing:
“Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.” (Qur’an 2:216)
So, feel free to be a peaceful Muslim and sit at home, but...
“Those of the believers who sit still, other than those who have a (disabling) hurt, are not on an equality with those who strive in the way of Allah with their wealth and lives. Allah hath conferred on those who strive with their wealth and lives a rank above the sedentary. Unto each Allah hath promised good, but He hath bestowed on those who strive a great reward above the sedentary.” (4:95)
And exactly how much higher in rank are the killers above those who just pray? A hadith clarifies:
“By Him in whose hand Muhammad's soul is, a morning or an evening expedition in God's path is better than the world and what it contains, and for one of you to remain in the line of battle is better than his prayers for sixty years.” (Mishkat al-Masabih 3849)
Just because you do not have the stomach for blood and gore does not get you out of doing jihad, i.e., advancing Islam. This most generous of religions then offers the “peaceful” Muslims various ways they might compensate for their deficiency. Ayaan Hirsi Ali neglects to mention that during the period prior to Muslims commencing their killing in America, the jihad of those “assimilated” Muslims was jihad of the tongue, deceiving the kufaar as to the nature of Islam.
The complication that Ayaan takes advantage of is that, initially, some Muslims may genuinely mean it when they say that Islam is nice and cuddly and that Muslims are not people who could at any moment turn into pathological killers. Look at us: we escaped the extremism in our own countries for freedom in the West. Such Muslims are generally agreeable and grateful for the safety, generosity and opportunity afforded them in their new lands. Many of them indeed do integrate into their new societies. But it is simplistic to leave the matter there, and irresponsible to generalise from them across the whole Muslim immigrant landscape, especially since emigration from Muslim lands to invade and take over non-Muslim lands is itself part of jihad. Ayaan Hirsi Ali knows this.
The problem is two-fold. While immigrant Muslims who had fled Shari’a want Islam to be less intrusive and more humane, it is, firstly, not possible to estimate what proportion of them are prepared to be honest about either themselves, or Islam. The very fact that they continue to call themselves Muslim, insist that they are practising Islam, and continue to revere both their prophet and the Qur’an, should alert the discerning observer that they are very likely to have an emotional investment in defending Islam, something obligatory on every Muslim. While such “assimilated,” or even “integrated,” immigrants remain Muslim, none of them will be honest about Islam, some wittingly, others unwittingly. Some of them, especially those who ascribe their new freedom to practise religion as they wish to Islam, rather than to the free societies in which they now live, will declare in all sincerity that the mass-rapists and mass-murderers are “extremists” and that what they practise is not Islam. Ayaan validates such obfuscation by peddling in “Islamists” and “Islamism”.
It is an approach that resonates perfectly with that of the liberal West, which can only conceive of “peaceful” Muslims and “extremist” Muslims as mutually-opposing points of view, or at most, different political affiliations. The first type is supposedly tolerant, and the second type intolerant. The first type is like us, the second is not. That the two are both integral parts of the same jihad complex is inconceivable to the Western mind. Westerners do not understand that so-called moderate Muslims are not their allies against the extremists. The moderates are merely Muslims who have gone AWOL from jihad, but retain their allegiance to the Islam, and hence remain Muslim.
One sickness of the Western ego is that it needs these Muslims to remain Muslim to stand as living proof of Western tolerance, especially if they are identifiably Muslim ("authentic"): hijabs, beards, ridiculous trousers, 7th-century manners and all the rest of it. Thus does the West proudly behold the tolerant image it wishes for itself confirmed in reflection back at it. The masochism of Western tolerance dictates that it tolerates being deceived, having its lands invaded, its coffers drained, its armies enfeebled, its women and girls raped, its laws spat on, its places of worship defiled and destroyed, its memorials fulled down, its Constitutions undone, and its values openly besmirched, reviled and overturned.... while they look the other way to turn the other cheek.
An analogy would be a Nazi defecting to the British Army, ditching the Hitler salutes, but proudly declaring himself a Nazi and continuing to wear his Wehrmacht uniform. He is now a moderate Nazi. The British Army proudly shows off its moderate Nazi officer and only wishes he would bring over his family, which in due course, he does. More families join them and before long, a small community of peaceful Nazis is raising the first generation of homegrown Nazis. All is sweetness and light. One fine day, some Nazis turn up uninvited and are aghast at our integrated Nazis’ neglect of their Hitler salutes. “What kind of Nazi have you become?” Only a fool would be surprised if our hitherto peaceful Nazis suddenly started goose-stepping and Hitler-saluting all over the place. The peaceful Muslim immigrants know full well that sooner or later, the “extremists” will come for them in their mosques to haul them out of their candyfloss fantasy back to Islam, and they will feel compelled to atone for their neglect.
Secondly, when an extremist turns up to command the right and forbid the wrong, it is not possible to tell what proportion of these supposedly peaceful immigrant Muslims will return to the fold of Islam and become the kind of Muslims they had previously emigrated to get away from. The fact that so many of them do says everything about them, and says nothing about the so-called “activists” of Ayaan’s fancy.
When Ayaan calls such Muslims, “normal peace-loving American Muslims going about their business,” she compounds the problem. “Normal” Muslims are not peace-loving Muslims. At the same time, there is nothing “normal” about Muslims “going about their business”. “The business” of Muslims, at all times, is the advancement of Islam, and advancement of Islam comes at the expense of non-Muslims. When Muslims are “moderate,” they advance Islam by demonstrating through their own inoffensive conduct that Muslims are wonderful people and no one has anything to fear from Islam. At other times, especially after activists had done their da’wah of, in Ayaan’s words, “getting these [Muslims] to practice Islam”—an admission that they do not practise Islam—such Muslims deliver exactly the same message — no one has anything to fear from Islam and Muslims — only now in addition, they invite their targets to become Muslim.
It is disingenuous of Ayaan, a former Muslim, to tell her audience that “American Muslims have been persuaded,” when she has just talked of commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, “a very important principle in Islam,” that both the “existing Muslims” and the “Islamists” understand in exactly the same way. There is no persuasion in Islam, only degrees of retribution for refusing to accept. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is well aware of this, but now that she is a Christian, she cannot lie about it, but she cannot be truthful either.
In her public confession of her new Christian faith, it took no more than one-and-a-half paragraphs for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, albeit unwittingly, to draw a parallel between herself and one of her most infamous co-religionists. Talking about herself as having been a non-practising Muslim, Ayaan describes the dilemma that the Muslim mass-murderers of 9/11 placed her in, and wherein lies Ayaan's Mother Theresa moment — Christopher Hitchens offered a powerful insight: “Mother Theresa did not love the poor; she loved poverty.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us:
“I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the nineteen men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the Twin Towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?” (Emphasis mine)
These "men" were not non-Muslims who committed mass-murder "in the name of" Ayaan's religion, Islam; they were Muslims who did as their religion, Islam, commands. “If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me?” agonises Ayaan. This no-brainer was a major issue for her. Nineteen Muslims kill 3,000 people in a stunning act of mass-murder. How could any half-decent person possibly feel any self-doubt over condemning something like this? Let us see where 9/11 left America's darling moderate Muslim sheikh, Dr Yasir Qadhi? By his own unsolicited admission, his immediate response was: “Oh Allah, please let this not be Muslims.” Where did 9/11 leave Ayaan Hirsi Ali? “Was it possible for me simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?” The inhumanity of Muslims is purely a matter of degree. Even Muslims held up as proof of the humanity of Muslims, such as the Rwandan Muslims who hid Tutsis in their mosques during the genocide, fall on that spectrum, and that spectrum never goes so far as to equate a Muslim’s life to that of a non-Muslim.
Ayaan first escaped her dilemma by seeking refuge in atheism: “I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed.” She had merely discarded her faith in God, rather than come to any insight that no such entity existed. Later, as it turned out, she would pick up that faith in God again. The other “members of the Muslim community” did not have this luxury. The best they could do was insist that, “those are not real Muslims,” and hope to be left alone to "go about their business."
From Yasir Qadhi to members of the Muslim community to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the hold of Islam on the Muslim mind was stronger than all of them. And now that the religious Ayaan finds that she cannot outrun her dilemma in atheism, she slips away to seek refuge again, this time in Christianity, now with the “God-hole” again filled. In the meantime, those “not real Muslims” have turned up in America and, through commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, are getting Ayaan’s “existing Muslims” to practice Islam, i.e., engage more determinedly in jihad, and move from “just praying for things to doing things,” something Ayaan remembers well from her foreshadowing experience in Nairobi.
In all the time that I have been a critic of Islam, I have warned against taking this most fickle demographic into our confidence. But Western liberals know better, what else. It is not possible for “peaceful” Muslims to remain peaceful without giving up their demonym, “Muslim.” Their humanity has to replace their allegiance to Islam as the starting point of who they are. They will then finally be able, like everyone else, to live their humanity to the full in open pursuit of human happiness, without the constant pressure of having to make excuses for their ummah's behaviour. They can finally truly escape the depraved happiness of Allah’s religion that makes it impossible for Muslims to react to 3,000 people murdered in cold blood as any psychically healthy human being would.
Even if they have abandoned all of the fundamental tenets of Islam, by clinging to the name Muslim, such “moderate” Muslims try to absolve themselves of having betrayed Islam. If they are known as Muslims, then regardless of what they find objectionable about either Islam or Muslims, and no matter how cutesy-cuddly the Islam they practise, their allegiance to Islam remains in tact, ready to be rekindled.
Authentic Muslim behaviour is, indeed, “the mirror of our religion”, as Dr Nervana Mahmoud put it the aftermath of the Muslim reaction to the “Islam is in crisis” controversy. Whether it is a nice young man who suddenly starts slapping his sisters around and upending his family, or a bearded stranger who turns up out of the blue to singlehandedly rebuild a derelict mosque or a battle-hardened jihad militia that overnight appears on the streets of your laid-back, secularised Muslim town to tell people they are not behaving Islamically, these are all authentic Muslim behaviour.
Whether the Islamic revivalist shows lapsing Muslims the true Islam today, or fifty, 100, 500, or 1000 years from now, they will always be able to rely on the demonym Muslim as the flickering ember indicating Square One from which Islam is to rise again, and Allah’s rule restored. No matter how “cultural”, “peaceful”, “moderate”, “progressive”, or “New Age” a Muslim you like to think of yourself as, so long as you identify as Muslim, Allah has a claim on you, and on your sons, and on the sons of your sons. And he knows where you live.
Moderate Muslims provide extremists with a firm place to stand, from which to lever those moderate Muslims back onto the straight path. That firm place to stand is their being Muslims. The thousands of Afghans who are apostatising in the United States have not only escaped a Shari’a Hellhole, and are not only leaving Islam, but they are putting themselves beyond the reach of those who would guilt-trip them into jihad of the sword. Once brought back into the fold, that firm place to stand comes to serve as leverage on the society as a whole, by which time Shari'a is openly called for on the streets and the point of no return has been reached.
The way to disarm these “Islamists” is not by encouraging so-called “moderate” Muslims to remain moderate, but by discouraging moderate Muslims from remaining Muslim. You cannot pussyfoot around this with "Islamism" and the like, because the jihad immigrants are going straight for the jugular: Muslim is Muslim; Islam is Islam. Ex-Muslims give extremists nothing, unless they themselves do da’wah, for instance by refusing to criticise Muslims, thereby helping to preserve moderate Muslims for the extremists to reel back in.
Given the novel impracticality of killing apostates, the bottom line has become that it is now far safer to be an ex-Muslim, than it is to be a “moderate” Muslim, for the simple reason that no one is going to come along to remind ex-Muslims of their duty to kill and die for Allah. Concomitantly, it is far safer for Western societies to invest they time and effort into former Muslims, than to play Russian Roulette with “moderate” Muslims, any one of whom, for all Ayaan’s concern, can at any moment turn out to be a killer, “persuaded” by the "Islamists." No matter how much money Western governments lavish on “deradicalisation”, “community outreach” or “interfaith dialogue”, they will never be able to match the resources available through zakat, a vast jihad fund with well over a billion ten percent contributors, as Ayaan acknowledges.
A Western Muslim, of whatever stripe and whatever generation, is a fifth column, whether they like it or not. This effectively makes all Muslim immigration into the Dar al-Harb, be it sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Australia or the West, whether legal or illegal, acts of war. Whether such immigration is undertaken by individual Muslims making their own way to the West so they may freely practise what they imagine is a peaceful Islam, or whether such immigration is orchestrated by the OIC, or by Muslim organisations acting independently, or by Western useful idiots, the objective is always the same: “religion (worship) will all be for Allah alone,” (Qur’an 8:39) i.e., everyone under Shari'a, a world caliphate, of which obvious jihad beachheads already in existence are Minnesota-Ontario-Michigan in North America, and Sweden-Germany-France-UK in Western Europe.
Peaceful Muslims taking up Allah’s commandments and foreswearing Allah’s prohibitions after practising “moderate Islam” for generations, has its echo at the nation-state level. A Muslim country might be widely known as peaceful, tolerant or even secular, until the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, or some other jihad outfit turns up in the country. The government either acts decisively against such seditionists and insurrectionists, or sees its society start devouring itself from within, Islam having been woken from "moderation". In Bosnia, the supposed land par excellence of “non-practising Muslims,” Hajj Amin al-Husseini managed to raise an entire Muslim SS battalion for Hitler. Multi-confessional Lebanon's peaceful Muslims were flashing beacons for Shi'a jihad preachers and militants, resulting in the mess we see today. Mehdi Hasan stopped blustering about Indonesia being a peaceful democratic Muslim country when the rest of us became aware of more than sixty jihad mass-murder groups operating in the archipelago. Azerbaijan enjoyed the status of a “secular” Muslim country until Syrian mercenaries turned up and started commanding the right and forbidding the wrong as part of jihad geopolitical manoeuvrings.
Despite the decade-long and intensifying Muslim massacre of Christians in Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Benin, Togo and elsewhere, and the entrenchment of Al-Qaida and the Islamic State in the region, a friend recently told me that West African Islam is peaceful because it was spread by preachers, rather than by the sword. The occasion did not allow for the kind of response that was called for, and I left it at that, also not mentioning the other great, violent institution that Muslims brought to West Africa as part of their Islam. Many of the West African peoples seized in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade were Muslim, their ancestors having managed to escape Islamic slavery. The same holds true for East Africa, also Islamised by preachers, and also now ravaged by the Islamic State.
Commanding the right and forbidding the wrong does not happen in a vacuum. Whether they arrive as turban-wearing, AK-totting, jihad murderers on pick-up trucks, or as a solitary intrepid sheikh with a walking stick and a backpack, however Islam was first established in a country, and however long those Muslims have been peaceful there, these have little bearing on what happens once their brothers finally turn up to "get Muslims to practice Islam."
Part 3/...
Picture credits:
https://aboutislam.net/muslim-issues/n-america/interfaith-ramadan-iftar-brings-santa-clara-together/
shepard fairey/we the people/amplifier foundation
https://faithessentials.online/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/image2-1.webp
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4218980/asian-grooming-gangs-racially-aggravated-tougher-sentences/