Critical Recognitions Dept.

     When you’ve been saying something vital to the survival of your civilization, year after year – now and then in an ear-piercing shriek – it’s gratifying to see that someone else actually gets it:

     What is Islam? To answer that question, it’s more important to know what Islam isn’t. Islam is not a religion. It is an authoritarian, political ideology that forcibly imposes itself on all aspects of any society unfortunate enough to be under its yoke…. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, cultural, and military components. The religious component is the veil that hides the dangers of its all-encompassing ideology.

     Thank You, God.

     Most of the article describes the horrors prevalent in Islamic nations. Yes, they’re horrible, inexcusable offenses against human rights and free will. But the key point is that they proceed from the central tenet of Islam, which is that Islam must be supreme over all persons, places, and things.

     Kinda hard to get anything past that one, isn’t it?

     What follows is a reprint of a piece I wrote about twenty years ago. It first appeared at the old Palace of Reason. It’s as relevant today as it was then.

March 26, 2004

     Your Curmudgeon had intended to write about ideonics today, a topic that, so far as Google can determine, has received zero attention from the World Wide Web. However, an interesting exchange between two very dissimilarly minded parties has commanded his attention, so ideonics will have to wait.

     Anyone with an interest in the current clash between Islam and the West will probably have heard of Robert Spencer. He’s written two fine books on the matter, Islam Unveiled and Onward Muslim Soldiers, which have garnered him great respect among serious students of religious conflict and scathing condemnations from the spokesmen of Islam. Both responses are understandable, as Spencer holds, based on his close study of Islam’s core documents, its history, and the emissions of its most prominent expositors, that Islam as it stands is the intellectual property of the militants and radicals in its ranks, which makes it a real danger to the liberal Western tradition.

     To your Curmudgeon, Spencer’s conclusions appear inescapable. He’s coupled them to an impassioned appeal to the world’s Muslims: find a basis for civilizing and moderating your medieval creed, marginalize the radicals among you, and come to an amicable coexistence with persons and nations of other faiths. One could hardly ask for a more objective, more principled indictment of a creed than Spencer has produced, nor for a more gentlemanly approach to those who hold to it.

     So naturally, the spokesmen of the innumerable Islamic advocacy agencies have done their best to brand Spencer as a liar and hate monger. They’ve attacked him principally for his entirely accurate citations of the creed’s sacred documents and major thinkers, which are inarguably better aligned with the goals and behavior of militant Islamic radicals than with any hypothetical “religion of peace.” In particular, Ibrahim Hooper, chief mouthpiece for the odious Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has accused Spencer of virtually every scurrility known to Man, often on radio or television broadcasts available to millions.

     All this is compatible with our intuition. Regardless of his real motives, who would want to be revealed as an adherent of a militant totalitarian ideology as bloodthirsty as Nazism that sails under the protective cover of a religion? Who wouldn’t try to redecorate such a creed as something mild and unthreatening, at least until he felt he’d amassed sufficient force to strike?

     Believe it or not, there’s at least one Muslim who wouldn’t. Meet Amir, proprietor of Jihaad, who despises Spencer for a reason one won’t often hear spoken aloud: Spencer’s pleas to Muslims to find a tolerant and civilized basis for their beliefs, that doesn’t commit them to a struggle for the domination of the world and the subjugation of all “infidels.” Amir, you see, holds that that struggle for a world-girdling totalitarian Islamic state is at the very heart of Islam, that to excise it somehow is to become an apostate, and that therefore, Spencer’s call for non-militancy and modernization in Islam amounts to a call for Muslims to abandon their faith:

AoA. I hope there isn’t a Muslim in the whole world who stumbles across “Jihad Watch” and falls for the crap Robert Spenceris pumping out. Him and his loyal band of anti-Islamics (who flood his article comments with Islamaphobic preaching) have dedicated time and effort to make an influential impression on people, mainly Muslims, to re-write the meaning of Jihaad and make people believe it. Mainly Muslims.

     Spencer hasn’t necessarily studied Islam for the purpose of calling people away from it, he isn’t a fanatical enough of a Christian to be doing that, he’s instead studied Islam for the purpose of convincing Muslims to adopt incorrect Islamic concepts — namely on the issue of jihaad. From the Muslim perspective it’s not as bad as apostasy, but still pretty damn bad.

     Here is an example of the depths of deviousness his tactics and styles droop to. Muslims recognise that Islam is not a secular religion, that it is not just a bunch of worship rituals and is in fact a lot more than that — Islam is a complete ideology. An ideology that must be implemented in a state. An Islamic state. Thanks to Islamic groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroon, to name a few, the majority Muslims are aware of the need and Islamic obligation of the Khilafah State. But, to cast doubt and fear in the hearts of some unaware Muslims, here we have Spencer slyly attacking the Muslims in Canada who are advocating the notion of re-establishing the Khilafah as something sinister because “That’s the Islamic state that Osama bin Laden and other radical Muslims around the world have declared their intention to restore.”

     If some Muslims can be made to believe that some Islamic concepts or ideas are “outdated” or “no longer practical in the modern world” then the Muslims’ reaction will be naturally to find an alternative — which is where the Western-thought inspired method and solution will be presented. Islam came for the whole of mankind to deal with all of mankind’s issues and problems in life — Islam is complete and flawless. It requires no additions or alterations and no creation of the creator can bring forth any ideas that are better than what Allah (swt) has given to mankind through the deen of Islam.

     We don’t need non-Muslims trying to teach us Islam — we should avoid these fraudsters no matter what, and tell our fellow Muslims to do the same.

     Spencer, no shrinking violet in any sort of exchange, called him on it:

So Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun, two groups that forthrightly call for restoration of the caliphate and full implementation of the Sharia (including the oppression of non-Muslims as dhimmis) have the right idea, eh? So Al-Muhajiroun, a group that has praised the 9/11 highjackers and Osama, has the correct Islam?

     Note that he is not angry with me for talking about the Islamic roots of modern-day jihad violence, as are the pseudo-moderate American Muslim advocacy groups. Instead, he is angry with me for trying to stop this jihad.

     This is the great challenge that anyone who calls himself a moderate Muslim faces: to convince people like Amir that their “correct” version of Islam is actually incorrect. This was what I emphasized at UNC Tuesday night. It will be interesting to see if anyone even attempts it in any significant way.

     Amir must have found the kitchen hotter than he’d expected, for this is how he responded:

I would agree that secularism is better than the rule of the Church, better does not necessarily mean correct. Christianity, as I mentioned earlier, is no more than a mere religion. It can exist under whatever society, secular or Islamic. But unlike Islam, Christianity has no rules, examples, guidelines or systems for the running of a State. This is exactly what separates Islam from normal religions. The European monarchies claiming to have the right by god to rule the people ruled however they pleased. In Islam, the Khalifa (leader) has to strictly abide by the Islamic rulings and ensure he fulfils every criteria and obligation required of him — the ruler is even elected in to the seat by the people. This shows that ever since the Islamic State was originally established 1400 years ago the Muslims were eons ahead of the West! Islam has a comprehensive, extensive and complete set of systems for the running of the State.

     So when the modern-day West views Islam as a religion and not an ideology, it remembers the dark ages of when the Church was in power, pre-secularism — drawing incorrect parallels to the Khilafah State, considering it to be something similar to that what the West experienced centuries ago. That is why the West has such a dark pre-conception of what a Sharia ruled Caliphate would be like! Not forgetting to mention that it was European nations controlled by their Christian monarchs that struggled for centuries to dismantle the Khilafah, finally succeeding in 1924.

     Thus, Amir now bids us not to go by the words of the Qur’an concerning the forcible subjugation of dhimmis, nor by the brutalities and barbarities prescribed by the words of the shari’a and inflicted on the helpless every day by Islamic states, but to accept that the Caliphate would be a democratic construct — an advance on Western secular systems, for having been laid down so long ago by the followers of a self-nominated Prophet!

     Nor is this theocracy to be judged by its own bloody history of savagery, conquest, and enslavement, apparently. It is to be taken presumptively as superior to the Christian theocracies of the Middle Ages. But why? On what grounds? Amir doesn’t say, except to state that “Islam has a comprehensive, extensive and complete set of systems for the running of the State.”

     So did the Nazis and the Soviets.

     It’s difficult to give such arrogance its proper coloration in a phrase or two, which is why your Curmudgeon has quoted so extensively from Amir’s lunacies. But of this we may be sure: at a time when the entire Muslim world, with its terrorism, its brutality toward women, children, and persons of other faiths, its many subterfuges, and its relentless demand for power over all others, has placed itself under suspicion of being incompatible with civilization, any Muslims who are not committed to a war to the death with the West have no reason to thank Amir. He has painted a bull’s-eye on his own chest — a mark he’d apparently like to see on the flesh of every Muslim on Earth.

     Let all good and decent men pray that Amir is quietly admonished by his co-religionists and unceremoniously shoved to the margins of his creed.

     The prescription in the final paragraph above hasn’t happened, of course. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.

     Islam remains a terrible danger for Western societies. Far too many Muslims have already migrated to Western, First World nations. Britain, France, and Germany are feeling more than a little uneasy about what’s followed their open-door policy. America isn’t there yet…but the Muslim riots in New York and other American cities are a preview of what awaits us.

     They really do mean to subjugate us.
     They multiply as we diminish.
     All it takes is time.