MAINSTREAM CALIPHATE CONFESSIONS
By Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPage magazine.com, CA
April 27 2007
Writing in 1916, C. Snouck Hurgronje, the great Dutch Orientalist,
underscored how the jihad doctrine of world conquest, and the
re-creation of a supranational Islamic Caliphate remained a potent
force among the Muslim masses:
…it would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal
conquest may be considered as obliterated…the canonists and the
vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam’s greatness.
The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual
political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought
never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to
the authority of Islam-the heathen by conversion, the adherents of
acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] by submission.
Hurgronje further noted that although the Muslim rank and file might
acknowledge the improbability of that goal "at present" (circa 1916),
they were,
…comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period
of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah
bestowed victory upon his arms…
Thus even at the nadir of Islam’s political power, during the World
War I era final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hurgronje
observed how
…the common people are willingly taught by the canonists and
feed their hope of better days upon the innumerable legends of
the olden time and the equally innumerable apocalyptic prophecies
about the future. The political blows that fall upon Islam make less
impression…than the senseless stories about the power of the Sultan
of Stambul [Istanbul], that would instantly be revealed if he were
not surrounded by treacherous servants, and the fantastic tidings
of the miracles that Allah works in the Holy Cities of Arabia which
are inaccessible to the unfaithful. The conception of the Khalifate
[Caliphate] still exercises a fascinating influence, regarded in
the light of a central point of union against the unfaithful (i.e.,
non-Muslims). [emphasis added]
Nearly a century later, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream
Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, apparently share with their
murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal
(if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of re-establishing
an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data just released (April 24, 2007)
in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/
WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted
between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007-1000 Moroccans, 1000
Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians-reveal that 65.2% of
those interviewed-almost 2/3, hardly a "fringe minority"-desired this
outcome (i.e., "To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic
state or Caliphate"), including 49% of "moderate" Indonesian Muslims.
The internal validity of these data about the present longing for
a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5%
of this Muslim sample approved the proposition "To require a strict
[emphasis added] application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country."
Notwithstanding ahistorical drivel from Western Muslim "advocacy"
groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, which lionizes
both the Caliphate and the concomitant institution of Shari’a as
promulgators of "a peaceful and just society", the findings from the
University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org poll are ominous.
Umar Ibn al-Khattab (d. 644), was the second "rightly guided" caliph
of Islam. During his reign, which lasted for a decade (634-644), Syria,
Iraq and Egypt were conquered. Umar was responsible for organizing the
early Islamic Caliphate. Alfred von Kremer, the seminal 19th century
German scholar of Islam, described the "central idea" of Umar’s regime,
as being the furtherance of "…the religious-military development
of Islam at the expense of the conquered nations." The predictable
and historically verifiable consequence of this guiding principle
was a legacy of harsh inequality, intolerance, and injustice towards
non-Muslims observed by von Kremer in 1868 (and still evident in
Islamic societies to this day):
It was the basis of its severe directives regarding Christians
and those of other faiths, that they be reduced to the status of
pariahs, forbidden from having anything in common with the ruling
nation; it was even the basis for his decision to purify the Arabian
Peninsula of the unbelievers, when he presented all the inhabitants
of the peninsula who had not yet accepted Islam with the choice: to
emigrate or deny the religion of their ancestors. The industrious and
wealthy Christians of Najran, who maintained their Christian faith,
emigrated as a result of this decision from the peninsula, to the
land of the Euphrates, and ‘Umar also deported the Jews of Khaybar. In
this way ‘Umar based that fanatical and intolerant approach that was
an essential characteristic of Islam, now extant for over a thousand
years, until this day [i.e., written in 1868]. It was this spirit,
a severe and steely one, that incorporated scorn and contempt for
the non-Muslims, that was characteristic of ‘Umar, and instilled by
‘Umar into Islam; this spirit continued for many centuries, to be
Islam’s driving force and vital principle.
During the jihad campaigns of Umar’s Caliphate, in accord with
nascent Islamic Law, neither cities nor monasteries were spared
if they resisted. Thus, when the Greek garrison of Gaza refused to
submit and convert to Islam, all were put to death. In the year 640,
sixty Greek soldiers who refused to apostatize became martyrs, while
in the same year (i.e., 638) that Caesarea, Tripolis and Tyre fell to
the Muslims, hundreds of thousands of Christians converted to Islam,
predominantly out of fear.
Muslim and non-Muslim sources record that Umar’s soldiers were allowed
to break crosses on the heads of Christians during processions and
religious litanies, and were permitted, if not encouraged, to tear
down newly erected churches and to punish Christians for trivial
reasons. Moreover, Umar forbade the employment of Christians in public
offices. The false claim of Islamic toleration during this prototype
"rightly guided" Caliphate cannot be substantiated even by relying
on the (apocryphal?) "pact" of Umar (Ibn al-Khattab) because this
putative decree compelled the Christians (and other non-Muslims) to
fulfill self-destructive obligations, including: the prohibition on
erecting any new churches, monasteries, or hermitages; and not being
allowed to repair any ecclesiastical institutions that fell into ruin,
nor to rebuild those that were situated in the Muslim quarters of a
town. Muslim traditionists and early historians (such as al-Baladhuri)
further maintain that Umar expelled the Jews of the Khaybar oasis, and
similarly deported Christians (from Najran) who refused to apostasize
and embrace Islam, fulfilling the death bed admonition of Muhammad
who purportedly stated: "there shall not remain two religions in the
land of Arabia."
Umar imposed limitations upon the non-Muslims aimed at their ultimate
destruction by attrition, and he introduced fanatical elements
into Islamic culture that became characteristic of the Caliphates
which succeeded his. For example, according to the chronicle of
the Muslim historian Ibn al-Atham (d. 926-27), under the brief
Caliphate of Ali b. Abi Talib (656-61), when one group of apostates
in Yemen (Sanaa) adopted Judaism after becoming Muslims, "He [Ali]
killed them and burned them with fire after the killing." Indeed,
the complete absence of freedom of conscience in these early Islamic
Caliphates-while entirely consistent with mid-7th century mores-has
remained a constant, ignominious legacy throughout Islamic history,
to this day. During the long twilight of the last formal Caliphate
under the Ottoman Turks, Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist,
writer, and diplomat (including postings in Turkey), described this
abhorrent spectacle which he witnessed in the heart of Istanbul, in
the autumn of 1843, four years after the first failed iteration of
the so-called Tanzimat reforms designed to abrogate the sacralized
discrimination of the Shari’a:
An Armenian who had embraced Islamism [i.e., common 19th century usage
for Islam] had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was
condemned to death according to the Mohammedan law. His execution
took place, accompanied by details of studied insult and indignity
directed against Christianity and Europeans in general. The corpse was
exposed in one of the most public and frequented places in Stamboul
[Istanbul], and the head, which had been severed from the body,
was placed upon it, covered by a European hat.
Salient examples from within the past 25 years confirm the persistent
absence of freedom of conscience in contemporary Islamic societies, in
tragic conformity with a prevailing, unchanged mindset of the earliest
Caliphates: the 1985 state-sponsored execution of Sudanese religious
reformer Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for his alleged "apostasy"; the infamous
1989 "Salman Rushdie Affair", which resulted in the issuance of a
fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Rushdie to death; the July 1994
vigilante murder of secular Egyptian writer Farag Foda-supported by
the prominent Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, an official
of Al Azhar University, who testified on behalf of the murderer,
"A secularist represents a danger to society and the nation that
must be eliminated. It is the duty of the government to kill him.";
and the recent (March, 2006) tragic experience of Abdul Rahman, an
unassuming Afghan Muslim convert to Christianity, forced to flee his
native country to escape the murderous wrath of Muslim clerics and the
masses they incited in "liberated", post-Taliban Afghanistan. An even
more alarming and utterly intolerable phenomenon was on display just
this week in the United States when a Johnstown (western Pennsylvania)
area imam Fouad El Bayly openly sanctioned the punishment by death
of former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali-born and raised a
Muslim in Somalia-for her open avowal of secularism.
Ibn Warraq has observed aptly that the most fundamental conception
of a Caliphate, "…the constant injunction to obey the Caliph-who is
God’s Shadow on Earth", is completely incompatible with the creation
of a "rights-based individualist philosophy." Warraq illustrates the
supreme hostility to individual rights in the Islamic Caliphate, and
Islam itself, through the writings of the iconic Muslim philosopher,
jurist, and historian, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and a contemporary
Muslim thinker, A.K. Brohi, former Pakistani Minister of Law and
Religious Affairs:
[Ibn Khaldun] All religious laws and practices and everything that
the masses are expected to do requires group feeling. Only with the
help of group feeling can a claim be successfully pressed,…Group
feeling is necessary to the Muslim community. Its existence enables
(the community) to fulfill what God expects of it.
[A.K. Brohi] Human duties and rights have been vigorously defined
and their orderly enforcement is the duty of the whole of organized
communities and the task is specifically entrusted to the law
enforcement organs of the state. The individual if necessary has to
be sacrificed in order that that the life of the organism be saved.
Collectivity has a special sanctity attached to it in Islam.
In contrast, Warraq notes, "Liberal democracy extends the sphere of
individual freedom and attaches all possible value to each man or
woman." And he concludes,
Individualism is not a recognizable feature of Islam; instead the
collective will of the Muslim people is constantly emphasized. There
is certainly no notion of individual rights, which developed in the
West, especially during the eighteenth century.
Almost six decades ago (in 1950), G.H. Bousquet, a pre-eminent
modern scholar of Islamic Law, put forth this unapologetic, pellucid
formulation of the twofold totalitarian impulse in Islam:
Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It
claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also,
by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of the
fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of
the Islamic community and of every individual believer….the study
of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding though it may appear to those
who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh) is of
great importance to the world today.
The openly expressed desire for the restoration of a Caliphate
from two-thirds of an important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab
Islamic nations, representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as
a chilling wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential
threat posed by the living, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad.
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