HERETIC----- INSIDE ISLAM--- NO PUNCHES PULLED!!!

I  DO  NOT  THINK  ANY  POLITICAL  LEADER  OF  ANY  POLITICAL  PARTY  IN  THE  WESTERN  WORLD,  WILL  HAVE  ENOUGH  BACK-BONE  TO  EVER  READ  THIS  BOOK.

I  HAVE  RE-ARRANGED  THE  CONTENTS  TO  MAKE  IT  VERY  RIGHT  IN  YOUR  FACE,  UP-FRONT,  AND  EASY  AND  PLAIN  TO  SEE  WHAT  THE  AUTHOR  IS  SAYING - Keith Hunt 

HERETIC

Bslam a Religion

BY  AYAAN  HIRSI  ALI

Emphasis mine - Keith Hunt

FLAP  COVER

IN what is sure to be her most controversial book  to date, Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes a powerful case that a religious Reformation is the only way to end the terrorism, sectarian warfare, and repression of women and minorities that each year claim thousands of lives throughout the Muslim world. 

With bracing candor, the brilliant, charismatic, and uncompromising author of the bestselling Infidel and Nomad argues that it is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do, that the violent acts of Islamic extremists can be divorced from the religious doctrine that inspires them. Instead we must confront the fact that they are driven by a political ideology embedded in Islam itself.

Today, Hirsi Ali argues, the world's 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims, and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. 

But there is only one Islam, and as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war - inspire violence not just in the Muslim world but in the West as well.

For centuries it has seemed that Islam is immune to historical change. But Hirsi Ali is surprisingly optimistic. She has come to believe that a Muslim "Reformation"—a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity—is at hand, and may even already have begun.

Partly in response to the barbaric atrocities of Islamic State and Boko Haram, Muslims around the world have at last begun to speak out for religious reform. 

Meanwhile, events in the West, such as the shocking Charlie Hebdo massacre, have forced Western liberals to recognize that political Islam poses a mortal threat to free speech. Yet neither Muslim reformers nor Western liberals have so far been able to articulate a coherent program for a Muslim Reformation.

This is where Heretic comes in. Boldly challenging centuries of theological orthodoxy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali proposes five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims must make if they are to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty first. 

She also calls upon the Western world to end its appeasement of radical Islamists—and to drop the bogus argument that those who stand up to them are guilty of "Islamophobia." It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, she argues, not the opponents of free speech.

Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies, and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not so much a call to arms as a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global tolerance. 

As jihadists kill thousands, from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world's number one problem.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the New York Times bestselling author of Infidel, Nomad, and The Caged Virgin. Born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, she grew up in Africa and Saudi Arabia before seeking asylum in 1992 in the Netherlands, where she went from cleaning factories to winning a seat in the Dutch Parliament. A prominent speaker, debater, and journalist, she was chosen as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. She is now a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Hirsi Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation.

INTRODUCTION

ONE ISLAM, THREE SETS OF MUSLIMS

On ____ a a group of ___ heavily armed, black-clad men burst into a ___ in ___ opening fire and killing a total of ___ people.  The attackers were filmed shouting "Allahu akbar!"

Speaking at a press conference, President ___ said:

"We condemn this criminal act by extremists. Their attempt to justify their violent acts in the name of a religion of peace will not, however, succeed. We also condemn with equal force those who would use this atrocity as a pretext for Islamophobic hate crimes."

As I revised the introduction to this book, four months before its publication, I could of course have written something more specific, like this:

On January 7, 2015, two heavily armed, black-clad attackers burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, opening fire and killing a total of ten people. The attackers, were filmed shouting "Allahu akbar!"

But, on reflection, there seemed little reason to pick Paris. Just a few weeks earlier I could equally as well have written this:

In December 2014, a group of nine heavily armed, black-clad  burst into a school in Peshawar, opening fire and killing a total of 145 people.

Indeed, I could have written a similar sentence about any number of events, from Ottawa, Canada, to Sydney, Australia, to Baga, Nigeria. So instead I decided to leave the place blank and the number of killers and victims blank, too. You, the reader, can simply fill them in with the latest case that happens to be in the news. Or, if you prefer a more historical example, you can try this:

In September 2001, a group of 19 Islamic terrorists flew hijacked planes into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C., killing 2,996 people.

For more than thirteen years now, I have been making a simple argument in response to such acts of terrorism. 

My argument is that it is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do, that the violent acts of radical Islamists can be divorced from the religious ideals that inspire them. 

Instead we must acknowledge that they are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in Islam itself, in the holy book of the Quran as well as the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad contained in the hadith.

Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace!

For expressing the idea that Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic, or political conditions—or even in theological error—but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself, I have been denounced as a bigot and an "Islamophobe." I have been silenced, shunned, and shamed. In effect, I have been deemed to be a heretic, not just by Muslims—for whom I am already an apostate—but by some Western liberals as well, whose multicultural sensibilities are offended by such "insensitive" pronouncements.

My uncompromising statements on this topic have incited such vehement denunciations that one would think I had committed an act of violence myself. 

For today, it seems, speaking the truth about Islam is a crime. "Hate speech" is the modern term for heresy. And in the present atmosphere, anything that makes Muslims feel uncomfortable is branded as "hate."

In these pages, it is my intention to make many people— not only Muslims but also Western apologists for Islam— uncomfortable. 

I am not going to do this by drawing cartoons. Rather, I intend to challenge centuries of religious orthodoxy with ideas and arguments that I am certain will be denounced asheretical. My argument is for nothing less than a Muslim Reformation. Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam's core concepts, I believe, we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion. I intend to speak freely, in the hope that others will debate equally freely with me on what needs to change in Islamic doctrine, rather than seeking to stifle discussion.

Let me illustrate with an anecdote why I believe this book is necessary.

In September 2013, I was flattered to be called by the then-president of Brandeis University, Frederick Lawrence, and offered an honorary degree in social justice, to be conferred at the university's commencement ceremony in May 2014. All seemed well until six months later, when I received another phone call from President Lawrence, this time to inform me that Brandeis was revoking my invitation. I was stunned. I soon learned that an online petition, organized initially by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and located at the website change.org, had been circulated by some students and faculty who were offended by my selection.

Accusing me of "hate speech," the change.org petition began by saying that it had "come as a shock to our community due to her extreme Islamophobic beliefs, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali would be receiving an Honorary Degree in Social Justice this year. The selection of Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree is a blatant and callous disregard by the administration of not only the Muslim students, but of any student who has experienced pure hate speech. It is a direct violation of Brandeis University's own moral code as well as the rights of Brandeis students."1 In closing, the petitioners asked: "How can an Administration of a University that prides itself on social justice and acceptance of all make a decision that targets and disrespects it's [sic] own students?" My nomination to receive an honorary degree was "hurtful to the Muslim students and the Brandeis community who stand for social justice."2

No fewer than eighty-seven members of the Brandeis faculty had also written to express their "shock and dismay" at a few brief snippets of my public statements, mostly drawn from interviews I had given seven years before. I was, they said, a

"divisive individual." In particular, I was guilty of suggesting that:

violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus [and] . . . the hard work on the ground by committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition and are effective at achieving it.

On scrolling down the list of faculty signatories, I was struck by the strange bedfellows I had inadvertently brought together. Professors of "Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies" lining up with CAIR, an organization subsequently blacklisted as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates? An authority on "Queer/Feminist Narrative Theory" siding with the openly homophobic Islamists?

It is quite true that in February 2007, when I still resided in Holland, I told the London Evening Standard: "Violence is inherent in Islam." This was one of three brief, selectively edited quotations to which the Brandeis faculty took exception. 

What they omitted to mention in their letter was that, less than three years before, my collaborator on a short documentary film, Theo van Gogh, had been murdered in the street in Amsterdam by a young man of Moroccan parentage named Mohammed Bouyeri. First he shot Theo eight times with a handgun. Then he shot him again as Theo, still clinging to life, pleaded for mercy. Then he cut his throat and attempted to decapitate him with a large knife. Finally, using a smaller knife, he stuck a long note to Theo's body.

I wonder how many of my campus critics have read this letter, which was structured in the style of a fatwa, or religious verdict. 

It began, "In the name of Allah—the Beneficent— the Merciful" and included, along with numerous quotations from the Qur'an, an explicit threat on my life:

My Rabb [master] give us death to give us happiness with martyrdom. Allahumma Amen [Oh, Allah, please accept]. Mrs. Hirshi [sic] Ali and the rest of you extremist unbelievers. Islam has withstood many enemies and persecutions throughout History. . . . AYAAN HIRSI ALI YOU WILL SELF-DESTRUCT ON ISLAM!4

On and on it went in the same ranting vein. "Islam will be victorious through the blood of the martyrs. They will spread its light in every dark corner of this earth and it will drive evil with the sword if necessary back into its dark hole. . . . There will be no mercy shown to the purveyors of injustice, only the sword will be lifted against them. No discussions, no demonstrations, no petitions." The note also included this passage, copied directly from the Qur'an: "Be warned that the death that you are trying to prevent will surely find you, afterwards you will be taken back to the All Knowing and He will tell you what you attempted to do" (62:8).

Perhaps those who have risen to the rarefied heights of the Brandeis faculty can devise a way of arguing that no connection exists between Bouyeri's actions and Islam. I can certainly remember Dutch academics claiming that, behind his religious language, Bouyeri's real motivation in wanting to kill me was socioeconomic deprivation or postmodern alienation. To me, however, when a murderer quotes the Qur'an in justification of his crime, we should at least discuss the possibility that he means what he says.

Now, when I assert that Islam is not a religion of peace I do not mean that Islamic belief makes Muslims naturally violent. 

This is manifestly not the case: there are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. 

What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. 

Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.

Yet from the moment I first began to argue that there was an unavoidable connection between the religion I was raised in and the violence of organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the self-styled Islamic State (henceforth IS, though others prefer the acronyms ISIS or ISIL), I have been subjected to a sustained effort to silence my voice.

Death threats are obviously the most troubling form of intimidation. But there have also been other, less violent methods. Muslim organizations such as CAIR have tried to prevent me from speaking freely, particularly on university campuses. Some have argued that because I am not a scholar of Islamic religion, or even a practicing Muslim, I am not a competent authority on the subject. In other venues, select Muslims and Western liberals have accused me of "Islamophobia," a word designed to be equated with anti-Semitism, homophobia, or other prejudices that Western societies have learned to abhor and condemn.

Why are these people impelled to try to silence me, to protest against my public appearances, to stigmatize my views and drive me off the stage with threats of violence and death? 

It is not because I am ignorant or ill-informed. On the contrary, my views on Islam are based on my knowledge and experience of being a Muslim, of living in Muslim societies— including Mecca itself, the very center of Islamic belief—and on my years of study of Islam as a practitioner, student, and teacher. 

The real explanation is clear. 

It is because they cannot actually refute what I am saying. And I am not alone. Shortly after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Asra Nomani, a Muslim reformer, spoke out against what she calls the "honor brigade"—an organized international cabal hell-bent on silencing debate on Islam.5

The shameful thing is that this campaign is effective in the West. Western liberals now seem to collude against critical thought and debate. I never cease to be amazed by the fact that non-Muslims who consider themselves liberals— including feminists and advocates of gay rights—are so readily persuaded by these crass means to take the Islamists' side against Muslim and non-Muslim critics.

ATTACKS  BY  ISLAM  PEOPLE

In the weeks and months that followed, Islam was repeatedly in the news—and not as a religion of peace. On April 14, six days after Brandeis's disinvitation, the violent Islamist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria. On May 15, in Sudan, a pregnant woman, Meriam Ibrahim, was sentenced to death for the crime of apostasy. On June 29, IS proclaimed its new caliphate in Iraq and Syria. On August 19, the American journalist James Foley was beheaded on video. On September 2, Steven Sotloff, also an American journalist, shared this fate. The man presiding over their executions was clearly identifiable as being British educated, one of between 3,000 and 4,500 European Union citizens who have become jihadists in Iraq and Syria. On September 26, a recent convert to Islam, Alton Nolen, beheaded his co-worker Colleen Hufford at a food-processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma. On October 22, another criminal turned Muslim convert, named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, ran amok in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, fatally shooting Corporal Nathan Cirillo, who was on sentry duty. And so it has gone on ever since. On December 15, a cleric named Man Haron Monis took eighteen people hostage in a Sydney cafe; two died in the resulting shootout. Finally, just as I was finishing this book, the staff of the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo were massacred in Paris. Masked and armed with AK-47 rifles, the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the offices of the magazine and killed the editor, Stephane Charbonnier, along with nine other employees and a police officer. They killed another police officer in the street. Within hours, their associate Amedy Coulibaly killed four people, all of them Jewish, after seizing control of a kosher store in the east of the city.

In every case, the perpetrators used Islamic language or symbols as they carried out their crimes. To give a single example, during their attack on Charlie Hebdo, the Kouachis shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great") and "the Prophet is avenged." They told a female member of the staff in the offices they would spare her "because you are a woman. We do not kill women. But think about what you are doing. What you are doing is bad. I spare you, and because I spare you, you will read the Quran."6

If I had needed fresh evidence that violence in the name of Islam was spreading not only across the Middle East and North Africa but also through Western Europe, across the Atlantic and beyond, here it was in lamentable abundance.

After Steven Sotlof's decapitation, Vice President Joe Biden pledged to pursue his killers to the "gates of hell." So outraged was President Barack Obama that he chose to reverse his policy of ending American military intervention in Iraq, ordering air strikes and deploying military personnel as part of an effort to "degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL." But the president's statement of September 10, 2014, is worth reading closely for its critical evasions and distortions:

Now let's make two things clear: ISIL is not "Islamic." No religion condones the killing of innocents. And the vast majority of ISIL's victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state. . . . ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.

In short, Islamic State was neither a state nor Islamic. It was "evil." Its members were "unique in their brutality." The campaign against it was like an effort to eradicate "cancer."

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the White House press secretary went to great lengths to distinguish between "the violent extremist messaging that ISIL and other extremist organizations are using to try to radicalize individuals around the globe" and a "peaceful religion." The administration, he said, had "enjoyed significant success in enlisting leaders in the Muslim community ... to be clear about what the tenets of Islam actually are." The very phrase "radical Islam" was no longer to be uttered.

But what if this entire premise is wrong? 

For it is not just Al-Qaeda and IS that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death. 

It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed, and where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment, so much so that there was almost a beheading a day in August 2014. 

It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their "crime." 

It is Brunei, where the sultan is reinstituting Islamic sharia law, again making homosexuality punishable by death.

We have now had almost a decade and a half of policies and pronouncements based on the assumption that terrorism or extremism can and must be differentiated from Islam. 

Again and again in the wake of terrorist attacks around the globe, Western leaders have hastened to declare that the problem has nothing to do with Islam itself. For Islam is a religion of peace.

These efforts are well meaning, but they arise from a misguided conviction, held by many Western liberals, that retaliation against Muslims is more to be feared than Islamist violence itself. 

Thus, those responsible for the 9/11 attacks were represented not as Muslims but as terrorists; we focused on their tactics rather than on the ideology that justified their horrific acts. In the process, we embraced those "moderate" Muslims who blandly told us Islam was a religion of peace and marginalized dissident Muslims who were attempting to pursue real reform.

Today, we are still trying to argue that the violence is the work of a lunatic fringe of extremists. We employ medical metaphors, trying to define the phenomenon as some kind of foreign body alien to the religious milieu in which it flourishes. And we make believe that there are extremists just as bad as the jihadists in our own midst. The president of the United States even went so far as to declare, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012: "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam"—as opposed, presumably, to those who go around killing the slanderers.

Some people will doubtless complain that this book slanders Muhammad. But its aim is not to give gratuitous offense, but to show that this kind of approach wholly—not just partly, but wholly—misunderstands the problem of Islam in the twenty-first century. Indeed, this approach also misunderstands the nature and meaning of liberalism.

For the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been "hijacked" by extremists. The killers of IS and Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct. And instead of letting them off the hook with bland cliches about Islam as a religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.

At the same time, we need to stand up for our own principles as liberals. Specifically, we need to say to offended Western Muslims (and their liberal supporters) that it is not we who must accommodate their beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech.

Three Sets of Muslims

Before we begin to speak about Islam, we must understand what it is and recognize certain distinctions within the Muslim world. The distinctions I have in mind are not the conventional ones among Sunni, Shia, and other branches of the faith. Rather, they are broad sociological groupings defined by the nature of their observance. I will subdivide Muslims. I will not subdivide Islam.

Islam is a single core creed based on the Qur'an, the words revealed by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and the hadith, the accompanying works that detail Muhammad's life and words. Despite some sectarian differences, this creed unites all Muslims. All, without exception, know by heart these words: "I bear witness that there is no God but Allah; and Muhammad is His messenger." This is the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.

The Shahada may seem a declaration of belief no different from any other to Westerners used to individual freedom of conscience and religion. But the reality is that the Shahada is both a religious and a political symbol.

ISLAM  CORE  STRUCTURE

In the early days of Islam, when Muhammad was going from door to door trying to persuade the polytheists to abandon their idols of worship, he was inviting them to accept that there was no god but Allah and that he was Allah's messenger, much as Christ had asked the Jews to accept that he was the son of God. However, after ten years of trying this kind of persuasion, Muhammad and his small band of believers went to Medina and from that moment Muhammad's mission took on a political dimension. Unbelievers were still invited to submit to Allah, but, after Medina, they were attacked if they refused. If defeated, they were given the option either to convert or to die. (Jews and Christians could retain their faith if they submitted to paying a special tax.)

No symbol represents the soul of Islam more than the Shahada. But today there is a contest within Islam for the ownership of that symbol. Who owns the Shahada? Is it those Muslims who want to emphasize Muhammad's years in Mecca, or those who are inspired by his conquests after Medina? There are millions upon millions of Muslims who identify themselves with the former. Increasingly, however, they are challenged by fellow believers who want to revive and reenact the political version of Islam born in Medina—the version that took Muhammad from being a wanderer in the desert to a symbol of absolute morality.

On this basis, I believe we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims.

The first group is the most problematic. 

These are the fundamentalists who, when they say the Shahada, mean: "We must live by the strict letter of our creed." They envision a regime based on sharia, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version. What is more, they take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.

I was tempted to call this group "Millenarian Muslims," because their fanaticism is reminiscent of the various fundamentalist sects that flourished in medieval Christendom prior to the Reformation, most of which combined fanaticism and violence with anticipation of the end of the world.7 But the analogy is imperfect. Whereas Shiite doctrine looks forward to the return of the Twelfth Imam and the global triumph of Islam, Sunni zealots are more likely to aspire to the forcible creation of a new caliphate here on earth. Instead, then, I shall call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of sharia as their religious duty. They aim not just to obey Muhammad's teaching, but also to emulate his warlike conduct after his move to Medina. Even if they do not themselves engage in violence, they do not hesitate to condone it.

It is Medina Muslims who call Jews and Christians "pigs and monkeys" and preach that both faiths are, in the words of the Council on Foreign Relations Fellow (and former Islamist) Ed Husain, "false religions." It is Medina Muslims who prescribe beheading for the crime of "nonbelief" in Islam, death by stoning for adultery, and hanging for homosexuality. It is Medina Muslims who put women in burqas and beat them if they leave their homes alone or if they are improperly veiled. It was Medina Muslims who in July 2014 went on a rampage in Gujranwala, Pakistan, setting eight homes on fire and killing a grandmother and her two granddaughters, all because of the posting of an allegedly blasphemous photo on an eighteen-year-old's Facebook page.

Medina Muslims believe that the murder of an infidel is an imperative if he refuses to convert voluntarily to Islam. They preach jihad and glorify death through martyrdom. The men and women who join groups such as Al-Qaeda, IS, Boko Ha-ram, and Al-Shabaab in my native Somalia—to name just four of hundreds of jihadist organizations—are all Medina Muslims.

Are the Medina Muslims a minority? Ed Husain estimates that only 3 percent of the world's Muslims understand Islam in these militant terms. But out of well over 1.6 billion believers, or 23 percent of the globe's population, that 48 million seems to be more than enough. 

Based on survey data on attitudes toward sharia in Muslim countries, I would put the proportion significantly higher;8 I also believe it is rising as Muslims and converts to Islam gravitate toward Medina. Either way, Muslims who belong to this group are not open to persuasion or engagement by either Western liberals or Muslim reformers. They are not the intended audience for this book. They are the reason for writing it.

The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence. I call them Mecca Muslims. Like devout Christians or Jews who attend religious services every day and abide by religious rules in what they eat and wear, Mecca Muslims focus on religious observance. I was raised a Mecca Muslim. So were the majority of Muslims from Casablanca to Jakarta.

Yet the Mecca Muslims have a problem: their religious beliefs exist in an uneasy tension with modernity—the complex of economic, cultural, and political innovations that not only reshaped the Western world but also dramatically transformed the developing world as the West exported it. The rational, secular, and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age, and inherited status.

In Muslim-majority countries, the power of modernity to transform economic, social, and (ultimately) power relations can be limited. Muslims in these societies can use cell phones and computers without necessarily seeing a conflict between their religious faith and the rationalist, secular mindset that made modern technology possible. 

In the West, however, where Islam is a minority religion, devout Muslims live in what is best described as a state of cognitive dissonance. Trapped between two worlds of belief and experience, these

Muslims are engaged in a daily struggle to adhere to Islam in the context of a secular and pluralistic society that challenges their values and beliefs at every turn. Many are able to resolve this tension only by withdrawing into self-enclosed (and increasingly self-governing) enclaves. This is called cocooning, a practice whereby Muslim immigrants attempt to wall off outside influences, permitting only an Islamic education for their children and disengaging from the wider non-Muslim community.9

To many such Muslims, after years of dissonance, there appear to be only two alternatives: either leave Islam altogether, as I did, or abandon the dull routine of daily observance for the uncompromising Islamist creed offered by those—the Medina Muslims—who explicitly reject the West's modernity.

It is my hope to engage this second group of Muslims— those closer to Mecca than Medina—in a dialogue about the meaning and practice of their faith. I hope that they will be one of the primary audiences for this book.

Of course, I recognize that these Muslims are not likely to heed a call for doctrinal reformation from someone they regard as an apostate and infidel. But they may reconsider if I can persuade them to think of me not as an apostate, but as a heretic: one of a growing number of people born into Islam who have sought to think critically about the faith we were raised in. It is with this third group—only a few of whom have left Islam altogether—that I would now identify myself.

These are the Muslim dissidents; call them the Modifying Muslims. A few of us have been forced by experience to conclude that we could not continue to be believers; yet we remain deeply engaged in the debate about Islam's future. The majority of dissidents are reforming believers—among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.

I shall have more to say in what follows about this neglected—indeed largely unknown—group. 

For now, it is enough to say that I choose to identify myself with the dissidents. In the eyes of the Medina Muslims, we are all heretics, because we have had the temerity to challenge the applicability of seventh-century teachings to the twenty-first-century world.

SHOULD  I  HATE?

The dissidents include people such as Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, the former dean of Islamic law at Qatar University, who disavows the hatred of religions other than Islam. He has quoted at length a Saudi woman who asked why her daughter should be taught to hate non-Muslims: "Do they expect me to hate the Jewish scientist who discovered insulin, which I use to treat my mother? Am I supposed to teach my daughter that she should hate Edison, who invented the lightbulb, which lights up the Islamic world? Should I hate the scientist who discovered the cure for malaria? Should I teach my daughter to hate people merely because their religion is different? Why do we turn our religion into a religion of hatred toward those who differ from us?" Al-Ansari then quotes a response by a leading Saudi cleric, who replied, "This is none of your business" and "cooperation with the infidels is permitted, but only as a reward for services, and not out of love." Al-Ansari's plea is to "make religious discourse more human."

And that is precisely the thing Western-based reformers such as Irshad Manji, Maajid Nawaz, and Zuhdi Jasser are seeking: what they have in common is an attempt to modify, adapt, and reinterpret Islamic practice in order to make religious discourse more human, (For further details on the Modifying Muslims, see the Appendix.)

How many Muslims belong to each group? 

Even if it were possible to answer that question definitively, I am not sure that it matters. On the airwaves, over social media, in far too many mosques, and of course on the battlefield, the Medina Muslims have captured the world's attention. Most disturbing, the number of Western-born Muslim jihadists is sharply increasing. 

The UN estimated in November 2014 that some 15,000 foreign fighters from at least eighty nations have traveled to Syria to join the radical jihadists.10 Roughly a quarter of them come from Western Europe. And it is not just young men. Between 10 and 15 percent of those traveling to Syria from some Western countries are female, according to estimates from the ICSR research group.11

TROUBLING  STATS

But there are more troubling statistics. According to estimates by the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population of the United States is set to increase from around 2.6 million today to 6.2 million in 2030, mainly as a result of immigration, as well as above-average fertility. Although in relative terms this will still represent less than 2 percent of the total U.S. population (1.7 percent, to be precise, compared with around 0.8 percent today), in absolute terms that will be a larger population than in any West European country except France.12

As an immigrant of Somali origin, I have no objection whatever to millions of other people from the Muslim world coming to America to seek a better life for themselves and their families. My concern is with the attitudes many of these new Muslim Americans will bring with them (see table 1).

Approximately two fifths of Muslim immigrants between now and 2030 will be from just three countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iraq. Another Pew study—of opinion in the Muslim world—shows just how many people in these countries hold views that most Westerners would regard as extreme.13 

Three quarters of Pakistanis and more than two fifths of Bangladeshis and Iraqis think that those who leave Islam should suffer the death penalty. 

More than 80 percent of Pakistanis and two thirds of Bangladeshis and Iraqis regard sharia law as the revealed word of God. Similar proportions say that Western entertainment hurts morality. Only tiny fractions would be comfortable if their daughters married Christians. Only minorities regard honor killings of women as never justified. A quarter of Bangladeshis and one in eight Pakistanis think that suicide bombings in defense of Islam are often or sometimes justified.

THE  IMPLICATIONS

Medina Muslims can exploit views such as these to pose a threat to us all. In the Middle East and elsewhere, their vision of a violent return to the days of the Prophet potentially spells death for hundreds of thousands and subjugation for millions. In the West, it implies not only an increasing risk of terrorism but also a subtle erosion of the hard-won achievements of feminists and campaigners for minority rights.

Medina Muslims are also undermining the position of those Mecca Muslims attempting to lead a quiet life in their cultural cocoons throughout the Western world. 

Yet those under the greatest threat are the dissidents and reformers: the Modifying Muslims. They are the ones who face ostracism and rejection, who must brave all manner of insults, who must deal with the death threats—or face death itself. So far, their efforts have been diffuse and individual, compared with the highly organized collective action of the Medina Muslims. We owe it to the dissidents—to their courage and their convictions—to change that.

Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that the only viable strategy that can hope to contain the threat posed by the Medina Muslims is to side with the dissidents and reformists and to help them a) identify and repudiate those parts of Muhammad's moral legacy that stem from Medina and b) persuade the Mecca Muslims to accept this change and reject the Medina Muslims' summons to intolerance and war.

AYAAN  ALI  GIVES  A  CHART  ON  PAGE  21;  THOSE  COUNTRIES  THAT  GIVE  THE  LARGEST  CURRENT  AND  PROJECTED  MIGRATION  TO  THE  UNITED  STATES -  THE  COUNTRIES ARE:  PAKISTAN - BANGLADESH - IRAQ.  THE  CHART  ASKS  QUESTIONS  LIKE:  FAVOR  THE  DEATH  PENALTY  FOR  LEAVING  ISLAM.  PAKISTAN 75% - BANGLADESH 43% - IRA 41%.  SAY  HONOR  KILLINGS  ARE  NEVER JUSTIFIED  WHEN  FEMALE  COMMITTED  THE  OFFENSE.  PAKISTAN 45% - BANGLADESH 34% - IRAQ 22%........AND  SO  FORTH.....LOOK  AT  THE  PERCENT  THAT  DO  BELIEVE  "HONOR"  KILLINGS  ARE  JUSTIFIED  -  Keith Hunt

This book is not a work of history. I do not offer a new explanation for the fact that more and more Muslims have embraced the most violent elements of Islam in my lifetime— why, in short, the Medina Muslims are in the ascendant today. I do seek to challenge the view, almost universal among Western liberals, that the explanation lies in the economic and political problems of the Muslim world and that these, in turn, can be explained in terms of Western foreign policy. This is to attach too much importance to exogenous forces. There are other parts of the world that have struggled to make democracy work or to cope with oil wealth. There are other peoples besides Muslims who have complaints about U.S. "imperialism." Yet there is precious little evidence of an upsurge in terrorism, suicide bombings, sectarian warfare, medieval punishments, and honor killings in the non-Muslim world. 

There is a reason why an increasing proportion of organized violence in the world is happening in countries where Islam is the religion of a substantial share of the population.

The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform. 

Non-doctrinal factors—such as the Saudis' use of oil revenues to fund Wahhabism and Western support for the Saudi regime—are important, but religious doctrine is more important. 

Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances.

Islam is at a crossroads. Muslims, not by the tens or hundreds but by the tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions, need to make a conscious decision to confront, debate, and ultimately reject the violent elements within their religion. To some extent—not least because of widespread revulsion at the unspeakable atrocities of IS, Al-Qaeda, and the rest—this process has already begun. But ultimately it needs leadership from the dissidents. And they in turn stand no chance without support from the West.

Imagine if, in the Cold War, the West had lent its support not to the dissidents in Eastern Europe—to the likes of Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa—but to the Soviet Union, as the representative of "moderate Communists," in the hope that the Kremlin would give us a hand against terrorists such as the Red Army Faction. Imagine if a "Manchurian candidate" president had told the world: "Communism is an ideology of peace."

That would have been disastrous. Yet that is essentially the West's posture toward the Muslim world today. 

We ignore the dissidents. Indeed, we do not even know their names. We delude ourselves that our deadliest foes are somehow not actuated by the ideology they openly affirm. 

And we pin our hopes on a majority that is conspicuously without any credible leadership, and indeed shows more sign of being susceptible to the arguments of the fanatics than to those of the dissidents.

Five Amendments

Not everyone will accept this argument, I know. All I ask of those who do not is that they defend my right to make it. 

But for those who do accept the proposition that Islamic extremism is rooted in Islam, the central question is: What needs to happen for us to defeat the extremists for good? Economic, political, judicial, and military tools have been proposed and some of them deployed. But I believe these will have little effect unless Islam itself is reformed.

Such a Reformation has been called for repeatedly—by Muslim activists such as Muhammad Taha and Western scholars such as Bernard Lewis—at least since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent abolition of the Caliphate. In that sense, this is not an original work. 

What is original is that I specify precisely what needs to be reformed. I have identified five precepts central to the faith that have made it resistant to historical change and adaptation. Only when these five things are recognized as inherently harmful and when they are repudiated and nullified will a true Muslim Reformation have been achieved. The five things to be reformed are:

1. Muhammad's semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur'an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina;

2. The investment in life after death instead of life before death;

3. Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur'an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence;

4. The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong;

5. The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.

All these tenets must be either reformed or discarded. In the chapters that follow I shall discuss each of them and make the case for their reformation.

I recognize that such an argument is going to make many Muslims uncomfortable. Some are bound to say that they are offended by my proposed amendments. Others will no doubt contend that I am not qualified to discuss these complex issues of theological and legal tradition. I am also afraid—genuinely afraid—that it will make a few Muslims even more eager to silence me.

But this is not a work of theology. It is more in the nature of a public intervention in the debate about the future of Islam. 

The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world is precisely its suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting here. If nothing else comes of it, I will consider this book a success if it helps to spark a serious discussion of these issues among Muslims themselves. That, in my opinion, would represent a first step, however hesitant, toward the Reformation that Islam so desperately needs.

For their part, many Westerners may be inclined to dismiss these propositions as quixotic. Other religions have undergone a process of reform, modifying core beliefs and adopting more tolerant and flexible attitudes compatible with modern, pluralistic societies. But what hope can there be to reform a religion that has resisted change for 1,400 years? If anything, Islam today seems, from the Western point of view, to be moving backward, not forward. Ironically, this book is written at a time when many in the West have begun to despair of winning the struggle against Islamic extremism, and when the hopes associated with the so-called Arab Spring have largely proved to be illusory.

I agree that the Arab Spring was an illusion, at least in terms of Western expectations. From the outset, I regarded parallels with the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Velvet Revolution of 1989 as facile and doomed to disappointment. 

Nevertheless, I think many Western observers have missed the underlying import of the Arab Spring. 

Something was—and still is—definitely afoot within the Muslim world. There is a genuine constituency for change that was never there before. It is a constituency, I shall argue, that we overlook at our peril.

In short, this is an optimistic book, a book that seeks to inspire not another war on terror or extremism but rather a real debate within and about the Muslim world. It is a book that attempts to explain what elements such a Reformation might change, written from the perspective of someone who has been at various times all three kinds of Muslim: a cocooned believer, a fundamentalist, and a dissident. My journey has gone from Mecca to Medina to Manhattan, and to the idea of a Modified Islam.

The absence of a Muslim Reformation is what ultimately drove me to become an infidel, a nomad, and now a heretic. 

Future generations of Muslims deserve better, safer options. Muslims should be able to welcome modernity, not be forced to wall themselves off, or live in a state of cognitive dissonance, or lash out in violent rejection.

The Muslim world is currently engaged in a massive struggle to come to terms with the challenge of modernity. The Arab Spring and Islamic State are just two versions of the reaction to that challenge. We in the West must not limit ourselves solely to military means in order to defeat the jihadists. Nor can we hope to cut ourselves off from contact with them. For these reasons, we have an enormous stake in how the struggle over Islam plays out. We cannot remain on the sidelines as though the outcome has nothing to do with us. 

If the Medina Muslims win and the hope for a Muslim Reformation dies, the rest of the world will pay an enormous price. And, with all the freedoms we take for granted, Westerners may have the most to lose.

That is why I am also addressing this book to Western liberals—not just to those who saw fit to disinvite me from Brandeis but also to all the many others who would have done the same if their university had offered me an honorary degree.

You who call yourselves liberals must understand that it is your way of life that is under threat. Withdraw my right to speak freely, and you jeopardize your own in the future. Ally yourselves with the Islamists at your peril. Tolerate their intolerance at your peril.

In all kinds of ways, feminists and gay rights activists offer their support to Muslim women and gays in the West and, increasingly, in Muslim-majority countries. However, most shy away from linking the abuses they are against—from child marriage to the persecution of homosexuals—to the religious tenets on which the abuses are based. To give just a single example, in August 2014 the theocratic regime in Tehran executed two men, Abdullah Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, apparently for violating the Islamic Republic's law against sodomy. That law is based on the Quran and the hadith.

People like me—some of us apostates, most of us dissident Muslims—need your support, not your antagonism. We who have known what it is to live without freedom watch with incredulity as you who call yourselves liberals—who claim to believe so fervently in individual liberty and minority rights—make common cause with the forces in the world that manifestly pose the greatest threats to that very freedom and those very minorities.

I am now one of you: a Westerner. I share with you the pleasures of the seminar rooms and the campus cafes. I know we Western intellectuals cannot lead a Muslim Reformation. But we do have an important role to play. We must no longer accept limitations on criticism of Islam. We must reject the notions that only Muslims can speak about Islam, and that any critical examination of Islam is inherently "racist." Instead of contorting Western intellectual traditions so as not to offend our Muslim fellow citizens, we need to defend the Muslim dissidents who are risking their lives to promote the human rights we take for granted: equality for women, tolerance of all religions and orientations, our hard-won freedoms of speech and thought. 

We support the women in Saudi Arabia who wish to drive, the women in Egypt who are protesting against sexual assault, the homosexuals in Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, the young Muslim men who want not martyrdom but the freedom to leave their faith. But our support would be more effective if we acknowledged the theological bases of their oppression.

In short, we who have the luxury of living in the West have an obligation to stand up for liberal principles. Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity. And we need to say unambiguously to Muslims living in the West: If you want to live in our societies, to share in their material benefits, then you need to accept that our freedoms are not optional. They are the foundation of our way of life; of our civilization—a civilization that learned, slowly and painfully, not to burn heretics, but to honor them.

Indeed, one highly desirable outcome of a Muslim Reformation would be to redefine the meaning of the word "heretic" itself. Religious reformations always shift the meaning of this term: today's heretic becomes tomorrow's reformer, while today's defender of religious orthodoxy becomes tomorrow's Torquemada. 

A Muslim Reformation would have the happy effect of turning the tables on those I am threatened by—rendering them the heretics, not me.

....................

SO  WE  SEE  FROM  SOMEONE  WHO  HAS  BEEN  THERE,  DONE  THAT,  AS  WE  SAY;  WHO  HAS  LIVED  IT;  WHO  KNOWS  THE  TEACHINGS  OF  THE  KORAN,  THAT  THERE  IS  A  WAR  GOING  ON  THAT  IS  THE  WHOLE  ISLAMIC  RELIGION.

THIS  WAR  MAY  NEVER  BE  WON  AS  IT  STAND  TODAY.

BIBLE  PROPHECY  DOES  TELL  YOU  A  MIGHTY  BATTLE  IS  COMING  BETWEEN  THE  KING  OF  THE  NORTH  AND  THE  KING  OF  THE  SOUTH,  AT  THE  TIME  OF  THE  END,  BRINGING  IN  THE  LAST  42  MONTHS  OF  THIS  AGE.

ALL  THIS  AND  MUCH  MORE  ABOUT  END  TIME  PROPHECY  IS  EXPOUNDED  FOR  YOU  ON  THIS WEBSITE  UNDER  "PROPHECY."

Keith Hunt

HERETIC

by  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Why Has There Been No Muslim Reformation?

Speaking  about  a  class-room  setting

…….I had not designed the course to be a seminar on my personal vision of Islam. I had been careful not to assign my own writings. Instead, I had drawn up a balanced list of scholarly articles and academic books, points and counterpoints around the nature of political theory in Islam. This material was what I had intended to discuss in class. Yet it was as if the objectionable students had not even looked at the syllabus. For them, simply to ask a question about Islam was a grave offense.

So, to start with, we need simply to ask: Why is it so hard to question anything about Islam? 

The obvious answer is that there is now an internationally organized "honor brigade" that exists to prevent such questioning. The deeper historical answer may lie in the fear of many Muslim clerics that allowing critical thought might lead many to leave Islam. 

Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a staunch Medina Muslim and a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said: "If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam would not exist today. Islam would have ended with the death of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Opposing apostasy is what kept Islam to this day."1 

The clerics fear that even the smallest of questions will lead to doubt, doubt will lead to more questions, and ultimately the questioning mind will demand not only answers but also innovations. 

An innovation in turn will create a precedent. Other minds that question will build on these precedents and more concessions will be demanded. Soon people will be innovating themselves out of their faith altogether.

Innovation of faith is one of the gravest sins in Islam, on a par with murder and apostasy. 

Thus it is perfectly intelligible why the leading Muslim clerics (the ulema) have come to the consensus that Islam is more than a mere religion, but rather the one and only comprehensive system that embraces, explains, integrates, and dictates all aspects of human life: personal, cultural, political, as well as religious. In short, Islam handles everything. 

Any cleric who advocates the separation of mosque and state is instantly anathematized. He is declared a heretic and his work is removed from the bookshelves. 

This is what makes Islam fundamentally different from other twenty-first-century monotheistic religions.

It is important to grasp the extent to which religion is intertwined with politics and political systems in Islamic societies. It is not simply that the boundaries between religion and politics are porous. There scarcely are any boundaries. 

Seventeen Muslim-majority nations declare Islam the state religion and require the head of state to be a practicing Muslim, while in the Christian world only two nations require a Christian head of state (although the British monarch is required to be the "Defender of the Faith," the heir to the throne intends to be "Defender of Faith").2 

In countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, or within mounting insurgent movements such as IS and Boko Haram, the boundaries between religion and politics do not exist at all.

This fusion of the spiritual and the temporal offers an initial clue as to why a Muslim Reformation has yet to happen. For it was in large measure the separateness of church and state in early modern Europe that made the Christian Reformation viable……

Ali Abdel Raziq, an Oxford-educated Egyptian scholar and a professor at Al-Azhar University, was a devout Muslim and religious judge who argued that Islam should be completely separated from politics so as to protect it from political corruption. 

In his 1925 book, Islam and the Foundations of Governance, Abdel Raziq argued that Muslims could use their innate powers of reason to devise the political and civil laws best suited for their times and circumstances. What is more, he specifically rejected the idea of restoring a Muslim caliphate, so dear to modern radicals. "In truth," he wrote:

This institution which Muslims generally know as the caliphate has nothing to do with religion. It has. . . more to do with . . . the lust for power and the exercise of intimidation that has been associated with this institution. The caliphate is not among the tenets of the faith. . . . There is not a single principle of the faith that forbids Muslims to co-operate with other nations in the total enterprise of the social and political sciences. There is no principle that prevents them from dismantling this obsolete system, a system which has demeaned and subjugated them, crushing them in its iron grip. Nothing stops them from building their state and their system of government on the basis of past constructions of human reason, of systems whose sturdiness has stood the test of time, which the experience of nations has shown to be effective.

For positing these ideas, Abdel Raziq was dismissed from Al-Azhar. The university's Supreme Council condemned and denounced his book, and expelled him from the circle of the ulema. He lost his title of dim, or learned man, and was forced into domestic exile, escaping a worse fate thanks only to his family's prominence……

Who Speaks for Islam?

Luther's Reformation was launched against a hierarchical ecclesiastical establishment. When the pope sought to anathematize him, Luther could retort: "I am called a heretic by those whose purses will suffer from my truths." Islam is different. Unlike Catholicism, Islam is almost entirely decentralized. There is no pope, no College of Cardinals, nothing like the Southern Baptist Convention—no hierarchical structure, no centrally controlled system of ordination. Any man can become an imam; all it takes is a self-professed knowledge of the Quran and followers.

I am always intrigued when on college campuses there are heated demands that an imam or scholar of Islam be present when I speak to offer the "correct" interpretation of Islam. 

That was the demand of Yale's Muslim Student Association in September 2014, when I was invited to the university's campus to give the Buckley Lecture. But whom did they have in mind for this role? A Saudi cleric? An American convert? An Indonesian? An Egyptian? A Sunni? A Shiite? A representative of Islamic State, perhaps? Or how about Zeba Khan, an American Muslim of Indian descent, who was educated at a Jewish day school while also attending a mosque in Toledo, Ohio, where men and women prayed side by side, and who in 2008 started the group Muslims for Obama? Or perhaps they would prefer the British-born lawyer turned imam, Anjem Choudary, who favors the imposition of sharia in Britain and has looked forward to seeing the black flag of IS flying over Parliament? All can legitimately claim to speak for Islam. There is no Muslim pope to say which of them is right.

In my own Harvard seminar room, a Muslim woman from Egypt became very argumentative. 

She came to some sessions of my study group and not to others, but was always ready to contradict whatever I was saying. Finally, I asked her about a point that had been made in the assigned reading. She replied: "I haven't done the assigned reading. I don't need to. I already know everything." This goes to the heart of the matter. Paradoxically, Islam is the most decentralized and yet, at the same time, the most rigid religion in the world. Everyone feels entitled to rule out free discussion.

One of the fiercest critics of my course was a female Sudanese student. Despite never actually attending a single session of the study group, she was completely convinced that everything being said in the classroom was a serious affront to Islam. She was one of a number of Muslim students who lobbied the Kennedy School authorities to have my study group terminated. 

When one of my colleagues made the point that academic freedom—the freedom to teach and learn about viewpoints and ideas that are fundamentally at odds with others' beliefs—is the cornerstone of the Western university, she reacted with perplexed hostility. Academic freedom was a concept that seemed to her deplorable if it permitted any questioning of her faith.

To understand this hostility, it is important to recognize that the long traditions in Judaism and Christianity of passionate debate and agonizing doubt are largely absent in Islam. There are no great schisms within the Sunni or Shia branches (a division that was not originally theological in nature, but was essentially a dispute over succession). Instead, there is conformity. There is no Reform or Reconstructionist Islam, as there is in Judaism. Rather, like the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, Islam is still persecuting heretics.

Consider this admonition from a Roman Catholic professor of theology, David Bonagura, who notes that Catholic worship is often considered more "stoic" compared with the "energy" of Protestant services, but who goes on to say that these "different styles are pathways to faith," adding that "we need not think our preferred religious experience should be shared by everyone else."9 How many Muslim clerics today would dare say such a thing?

In no other modern religion is dissent still a crime, punishable by death. When a conservative Jewish rabbi said in a Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Washington, D.C., that Orthodox Judaism needs female rabbis, he was not denounced. A few people in the audience even applauded. When Pope Francis broached the idea of toleration for homosexuals within the Catholic Church, there was heated disagreement, but no violence, and no one called for his overthrow or death.

By contrast, consider the case of Hamza Kashgari, a twenty-three-year-old Saudi man, who in 2013 was accused of blasphemy and threatened with death for having openly challenged the authority of the Prophet Muhammad. What did Kashgari do that was so reprehensible? On the eve of the Prophet's birthday, he addressed a series of tweets directly to Muhammad. In an almost immediate response, Saudi sheiks took to YouTube to demand his execution; a Face-book group demanding his death had ten thousand "friends" within one week—not surprising perhaps when one considers that Saudi Arabia's homegrown Twitter heroes are clerics such as Muhammad al-Arifi, who cannot enter any European nation because of his unabashed support for wife-beating and his hatred of Jews. (Al-Arifi has 10.7 million Twitter followers.)

Kashgari, a newspaper columnist from the port city of Jeddah on the Red Sea, promptly deleted his tweets and fled to Malaysia, where he was detained in the departure hall of Kuala Lumpur International Airport by police as he tried to board a flight to New Zealand. He was soon thereafter repatriated to Saudi Arabia.

What had he written in 140 characters that was so blasphemous? The answer is this:

On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you've always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity surrounding you. I shall not pray for you.10

He also posted: "On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more." 

And finally: "I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more." 11

For these innocent words, clerics rose up to demand Kashgari's death for the crime of apostasy, and King Abdullah ordered a warrant for his arrest. It did not matter that Kashgari had apologized and erased his tweets. He was jailed. And although he was freed some eight months later, he has effectively been silenced.

This is a young man who grew up in a conservative religious home, who was doing no more than testing and feeling about the contours of his faith. He did not reject Islam, Allah, or the Prophet. His words merely sought to humanize a religious icon. And for this he was jailed……

Moreover, Islam is now a global religion with what might even be called a global diaspora. As a result of postwar migrations, there are more than 20 million Muslims living in Western Europe and North America. These Muslims are, as we have seen, confronting the daily challenge of existing in the modern secular West while still remaining Muslim. In short, there is a rapidly growing potential audience for ideas about a new direction for Islam……

In the chapters that follow, I will explore the source of the ideas and doctrines in question and evaluate the prospects for reforming them. For now, we may simply note that they are closely interrelated. The main problem for us is obviously the promotion of jihad. But the appeal of holy war cannot be understood without factoring in the prestige of the Prophet himself as a model for Muslim behavior, the insistence on a literal reading of the Qur'an and the attendant rejection of critical thinking, the primacy of the afterlife in Muslim theology, the power of religious law, and the license bestowed on individual Muslims to enforce its codes and disciplines. These issues overlap to the extent that they are sometimes hard to separate. But all must be addressed.

As readers of my previous books will realize, this represents a new approach. When I wrote my last book, Nomad, I believed that Islam was beyond reform, that perhaps the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god. I was certain of it, not unlike the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, who wrote in 1987 of his absolute certainty that the Berlin Wall would endure. Two years later, the Wall fell. Seven months after I published Nomad came the start of the Arab Spring. I watched four national governments fall—Egypt's twice—and protests or uprisings occur in fourteen other nations, and I thought simply: I was wrong. Ordinary Muslims are ready for change.

The path forward will be hard, even bloody. But unlike previous waves of reform that foundered on the monolith of religious and political power, today it is possible to find a fellowship of people who desire a separation of religion from politics in the Muslim world.

I am not a cleric. I have no weekly congregation. I simply lecture, read, write, think, and teach a small seminar at Harvard. Those who might object that I am not a trained theologian or historian of Islam are correct. But it is not my purpose singlehandedly to engage the Muslim world in a theological debate. Rather, it is my purpose to encourage Muslim reformers and dissidents to confront obstacles to reform—and to encourage the rest of us to support them in whatever way we can.

For me there can be no going back. It is too late to return to the faith of my parents and grandparents. But it is not too late for millions of others to reconcile their Islamic faith with the twenty-first century.

Nor is my dream of a Muslim Reformation a matter for Muslims alone. People of all faiths, or of no faith, have a great interest in a changed Islam: a faith that is more respectful of the basic doctrines of human rights, that universally preaches less violence and more tolerance, that promotes less corrupt and less chaotic governments, that allows for more doubt and more dissent, that encourages more education, more freedom, and more equality before a modern system of law.

I see no other way forward for us—at least no other way that is not strewn with corpses.

Islam and modernity must be reconciled. And that can happen only if Islam itself is modernized. Call it a Muslim Renovation if you prefer. But whatever label you choose …. It is a debate that must begin with a reconsideration of the Prophet and his book as infallible sources of guidance for life in this world.

………………..

HERETIC

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

CHAPTER 3

MUHAMMAD  AND THE QUR'AN

How Unquestioning Reverence for the Prophet and His Book Obstructs Reform

A key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: 

Christians worship a man made divine. 

Jews worship God through study of a book. 

And Muslims worship both God and a book.

Christians believe in the divinity of Jesus while also stating that the Christian Bible was written by men. Jews believe in the sanctity of the Torah, which they kiss and treat with reverence during their services; but they traditionally ascribe its authorship to Moses, a prophet who, like other Hebrew prophets, is presented as human and fallible. 

However, Muslims believe in both the superhuman perfection of Muhammad and the literal truth and sanctity of the Qur'an as the direct revelation of God. Indeed, while even Orthodox Jewish rabbis argue that it is impossible to defile the Torah, Muslims believe the opposite—so much so that the charge of disrespecting Muhammad or the Qur'an is enough to incite violent protests, riots, and, frequently, death.

For example, erroneous charges in 2005 that U.S. guards had flushed a Quran down the toilet in the Guantanamo Bay detention center resulted in violent riots in many Muslim nations. Seventeen people died in Afghanistan in the ensuing rage and frenzy. 

More recently, in November 2014, a Christian man and his wife living in Lahore, Pakistan, were beaten and burned alive in a brick kiln after they were accused of burning pages of the Quran. (The couple protested their innocence.) 

Likewise, a series of twelve satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet, which were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, triggered a paroxysm of outrage across the Muslim world that resulted in more than two hundred reported deaths as well as attacks on Western embassies.

These episodes reflect a key distinction between the West and the Muslim world. While an irreverent approach to religious figures and beliefs is tolerated and even encouraged in Western societies, Muslims regard any "insult" to the Prophet or the Qur'an as deserving the ultimate penalty. And this is not an extreme position. As I mentioned earlier, as a teenager I myself unthinkingly agreed that Salman Rushdie deserved to die for writing a novel that very few people in the Muslim world, myself included, had read.

To understand the roots of the problem, and why I believe that it is not in fact insoluble, we need to reexamine Islam's two most sacred elements: its Prophet, and its holy book. 

Muslims need to understand Muhammad as a real man, in the context of his times, and the Qur'an as a historically constructed text, not as a divine instruction manual for life today.

Who Was Muhammad?

He is the greatest lawgiver of all time. The revelations he received, along with the facts of his life, form the foundation of a legal code that governs hundreds of millions of people. 

Yet scholars cannot agree on which year or on which date he was born. The most commonly accepted time is 570 years after the birth of Jesus Christ. His father died before he arrived in the world; by the age of six he had become an orphan. An uncle raised him. He met his first wife when she hired him to act as her commercial agent on a trading mission to Syria. A servant informed her that two angels had watched over the young agent as he slept, and that he had rested under a tree that was known to offer shade only "to prophets."

The young agent was twenty-five, his employer was forty. It was his first marriage and her third, and she initiated the wedding proposal. It would be another fifteen years before the words that would eventually become the Quran were first revealed to him. His wife, Khadija, was his first convert.

Over the next twenty-two years, the man known as Muhammad would establish the world's last great religion, create an intertwined religious, political, and legal order, and plant the seeds of an empire that would stretch from the Asian steppes to northern Africa and up through the Iberian peninsula. 

Today, more than a billion people profess their faith by saying the Shahada—"There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger." In nearly fourteen hundred years, that message has remained unchanged.

What made this message revolutionary was not simply the belief in one God, as opposed to the worship of many. This was hardly original, and indeed Muhammad presented his religion as the extension and fulfillment of the monotheistic revelations of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. 

What made Islam revolutionary was its vast scope, extending well beyond theology. Islam, as Muhammad devised it, is not simply a religion or a system of worship. It is, as the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner has put it, "the blueprint of a social order."1 In its very name, "Islam" means submission. You subsume yourself to an entire system of beliefs. The rules as set down are precise and exacting.

WHAT  MUHAMMAD  DID

Islam became so multifaceted and all-encompassing in part because Muhammad and Islam were a prophet and a faith for their place and time. Muhammad is usually understood in his familiar roles as warrior and prophet. But it is in some ways more revealing and interesting to view him in another role— that of a tribal leader. Muhammad's achievement in this capacity was to create a new religiously based community out of the loosely organized elements of tribal Arab society. In short, he was as much the founder of a "supertribe" as a religious and military figure.

There is general agreement that Muhammad existed, though little is known for certain of his life. But while we cannot verify the facts of his biography, what can be surmised is that he was a product of the kin-based social order that then prevailed throughout the Middle East.

Before Islam, there was kinship. Families, clans, and tribes are the basis of organization in all pre-state societies. The basic social unit is the lineage, a group of families united by their descent from a common ancestor. Each family is part of a lineage; many lineages make up a clan; many clans make up a tribe. All in turn are thought to be descended from a single (mythological or sem-idivine) founder.

But while they are united by the fiction of common de-scent, these kin groups are decentralized and fractious, frequently driven by feuds that can go on for generations. Strong leadership is needed to unite them if they are not to degenerate (as they did in the West) into mere shared names with next to no bonds of mutual allegiance. This was the case in Muhammad's time. It was still the case fourteen hundred years later when T. E. Lawrence united the Bedouin tribes against the Turks in World War I. It was also true of my own native Somali environment.

In this world of shifting interests and allegiances, tribal leaders arise through personal qualities of strength, cunning, and innate magnetism. The tribal leader plays many roles: he is lawgiver and judge, businessman, war chief, and head of the tribe's religious cult. He is also a source of patronage and distributes the bounty of commerce and war. Honor and personal loyalty (often reinforced by strategic marriages) are the primary bonds that support the tribal leader and hold the system together. Based on what we know of him from Islamic sources, Muhammad fulfilled all these roles. He transcended tribal disorder by claiming the leadership position for himself alone and demanding complete submission.

We are told that Muhammad was born a member of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh, a powerful mercantile tribe that controlled the Arabian trade routes through Mecca. The Quraysh were a typical corporate kin group: subdivided into many clans, the tribe was itself a subdivision of the larger Banu Kinanah tribe. All these clans and tribes were loosely united by their supposed descent from the mythical wanderer Ishmael. This gave them a remote connection to the Jewish descendants of Abraham. It is therefore not an accident that the new Islamic "supertribe" incorporated Abraham and Jesus into its lineage.

The Quraysh rose to prominence when a tribal leader named Qusai ibn Kilab obtained control of the Kaaba, an ancient pagan shrine that attracted numerous pilgrims. This was a lucrative franchise and Qusai ibn Kilab placed family members in control of it, distributing responsibilities (and profits) among the clans of his tribe. Their rivalries continued, however, apparently growing more intense during Muhammad's lifetime.

Muhammad was a religious revolutionary who introduced Abrahamic monotheism into a polytheistic culture. Arabs at that time believed in a supreme deity but also in various lesser gods or tribal deities. Mecca was the center of this polytheistic system. Muhammad's revelation attracted many followers but also drew opposition from powerful clan leaders, whose authority (and income) relied on control of the pilgrimage trade.

In Mecca, Muhammad preached what in today's terms was a religion: prayer to one God, charitable contributions, and the like. The rejection of his message by the polytheists is etched into Islam as a period of persecution of Muslims. 

To this day, followers of Muhammad's example who encounter the slightest resistance to their preaching speak of persecution.

In 622, these rivals drove Muhammad and his small Muslim community out of Mecca. Muhammad fled to Medina, where he built up his power base through alliances with larger tribes such as the Bakr and Khuza'a. Strategic marriages strengthened his ties with these clans; he himself married the daughters of Abu Bakr and Umar, while Uthman and Ali (Muhammad's cousin) married his daughters. 

Thus he had family ties with the first four caliphs who succeeded him after his death. 

During this time Muhammad also promulgated a comprehensive system of moral and political rules, known as the Constitution of Medina, which served to unite the tribes in a community of faith and practice. It was at this point that many tribal practices became an integral part of what evolved to become sharia.

Eight years later, having assembled a large army (known as the Prophet's Companions), Muhammad marched on the Quraysh, who are said to have surrendered without a fight. He then returned to Mecca, married the daughter of the head of the Quraysh, and proceeded to incorporate the other tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into the new Islamic community.

After Muhammad died in 632, a series of lightning conquests by his successors extended Muslim control over an enormous territory—one of the largest empires the world had ever seen. 

These conquests were extremely brutal and the conquered populations were given a stark choice: convert, die, or (if they were Jews or Christians) accept second-class status as taxpaying dhimmi. Most chose conversion and were incorporated wholesale into the growing Muslim supertribe or ummah. Yet in many ways the social psychology of Islam remained that of a persecuted tribe, with a powerful "insider/ outsider" mentality.

During Muhammad's lifetime, tribal and nationalistic differences within the Islamic community were strongly discouraged. After his death, however, clan rivalries reemerged to shape dynastic struggles in the Caliphate. The Quraysh claimed control and supplied the first three ruling dynasties: the Uma-yyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid. The Sunni/Shia split was originally a war of succession between two rival lineages—unlike the schisms of Christianity, as we have already noted, it was initially not theological in nature. The passions aroused by this ancient tribal blood feud still divide the Muslim world today.

RELIGION  AND  POLITICAL  ORDER

Medina welcomed Muhammad in part because the local tribal leaders believed their feuding residents might be able to unite around his teachings. Islam would defuse the discord within the city and become a rallying cry against enemies outside. Thus, from the start, Muhammad entered Medina charged not just with spreading his religious message, but also with creating a political order.

The other monotheistic religions were different. The Torah was recorded long after the kingdom of Israel had fallen into ruins. 

(NOT TRUE - Keith Hunt)

Christian doctrine evolved over centuries, always in the context of a preexisting Roman Empire, one of the strongest polities of the entire premodern period. 

(NOT TRUE EITHER, ONLY SO IF YOU READ AND BELIEVE ROMAN CATHOLIC  HISTORY _ Keith Hunt)

In Islam, by contrast, the Qu'an was revealed in tandem with its rise and early conquests. In fact, Muhammad's empire began to take shape before all of the verses were compiled in one book. Thus, for Islam, faith and power were from the outset intertwined—indeed inseparable.

DIFFERENT  THAN  ABRAHAM  AND  JESUS

Muhammad himself differed in a crucial way from Abraham and Jesus. He was not only a prophet but also a conqueror. He is said to have personally led numerous military campaigns and raiding expeditions. Sahih Muslim, one of the six major authoritative hadith collections, claims he undertook no fewer than nineteen military expeditions, personally fighting in eight of them.2 

Nor did he hesitate to mete out violent reprisals or to enjoy the spoils of war. In the aftermath of the 627 Battle of the Trench, for example, "Muhammad felt free to deal harshly with the Banu Qurayza, executing their men and selling their women and children into slavery."3 

In this way the Prophet became a conquering chieftain. Thus the Qur'an declares, "O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses [slaves] out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee" (33:50).4 

(It is, of course, passages such as these that groups like Islamic State or Boko Haram use to justify their actions.)

GLUED  TOGETHER

From a Muslim Reformer's perspective, one of the main problems with Islam is that the tribal military and patriarchal values of its origins were enshrined as spiritual values, to be emulated in perpetuity. The Quran emphasizes that all Muslims form one community of believers, the ummah (2:143). Although this community superseded prior tribal allegiances, the new religion retained many traditional tribal customs and enshrined them as religious values. 

These values pertain especially to honor, male guardianship of women, harshness in war, and the death penalty for leaving Islam. As Philip Salzman explains, "Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its adherents' attitudes toward non-Muslims. Today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within Islam impacts everything from family relations, to governance, to conflict."5

Prior to the rise of Islam, Arab tribes had fought one another, through raiding expeditions and perpetual feuds. Salzman notes that Islam imposed a measure of unity while retaining the traditional tribal habit of the feud "by opposing the Muslim to the infidel, and the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam and peace, to the dar al-harb, the land of the infidels and conflict."6 

What had been tribal raiding now "became sanctified as an act of religious duty": holy war, or jihad.7 

What mattered to Muslims was conquering as much territory as possible and bringing it under Islamic sovereignty, ruled through Islamic holy law.8

SPOILS  OF  WAR

Muhammad also left behind—true to tribal form— detailed instructions on the division of the bounty gained by Muslim troops through conquest. In Qur'an 8:1 such spoils of war are legitimized. The hadith are full of detailed instructions on what are really norms of tribal conquest. In the authoritative collection Sahih Bukhari alone, there are more than four hundred stories describing military expeditions led by the Prophet Muhammad, and more than eighty stories containing instructions on the appropriate division of booty.9 These various residues of tribalism matter because even if Islam is reformed, they are likely to persist. A separation of religion from politics—a distinction between Mecca and Medina—would not do away with the problems created by these inherited tribal norms.

The Honor/Shame Dynamic

Among the most crucial features of the tribal system institutionalized by Islam is the concept of honor. 

This requires careful explanation for Western readers, whose understanding of terms like "family" and "honor" is fundamentally different. The family structure to keep in mind is an extended kinship group (or clan) whose numbers are increased through practices such as polygamy and child marriage. By having boys marry when they are as young as fifteen or sixteen, the space between generations shrinks, and the number of descendants grows. This kind of family is much like an old talal tree, with a deep main root, a solid stem, and myriad branches. Leaves bud, grow, and fall off; branches may be cut and new ones take their place; but the tree stands. Each of its components is dispensable, but the tree itself is not. That is the most important "family value" instilled into children. The individual barely registers in this scheme.

Each person within the kinship group has value to the tribe as a whole, but certain members are more valuable than others: young men who can go into battle to defend their kin are more useful than young girls or old women. Marriageable girls are more highly valued than older women because they are necessary to produce sons, and can also be traded. Each family's worst nightmare is to be uprooted and destroyed. Given all the possibilities for destruction, the longer a kinship group survives, the stronger it is. Families draw a sense of pride from their history of resilience, passed on through oft-repeated stories and poems about the bloodline.

That pride was what made my grandmother teach me my line of descent back so many generations and hundreds of years. She made it clear to me that it was the duty of young people not only to bask in the inherited glory of their bloodline, but also to maintain it above all else, even if that might cost them their property or their lives. I was also taught to regard anyone outside the bloodline with extreme wariness.

Before Islam was founded, the various extended families of Arabia collaborated and also competed through a network of complex commercial and marital alliances, sometimes allying in battle, sometimes fighting against one another. In this world, conflicts within the clan had to be defused as quickly as possible to preserve the image of strength; infighting would lead to the perception of weakness and make the clan vulnerable to attack. 

Honor was all-important. Anyone who insulted or humiliated the bloodline must be punished. If one man killed another, for example, the victim's father, brother, uncle, cousin, or son must take revenge, to uphold the clan's honor. And this revenge might be inflicted not just on the killer, but also on his entire family.

Anthropologists since Ruth Benedict's study of Japan in World War II have made a distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In the former, social order is maintained by the inculcation of a sense of honor and shame before the group. If our behavior brings discredit on our tribe, it may punish or even expel us. 

In a guilt culture, by contrast, a person is taught to discipline himself by means of his own conscience—sometimes backed up by the threat of punishment in the life to come. Most Western societies went through a thousand-year transformation from shame to guilt, a process that coincided with the gradual breakup of tribal family structures. Europeans underwent a long process of detribalization, beginning with subjection to Roman law, conversion to Christianity, the imposition of monarchical rule over baronial power, and the gradual rise of nation-states with their concept of individual citizenship and equality before the law. 

The Arab world in which Islam first triumphed did not undergo a similar transition. As Antony Black writes in The History of Islamic Political Thought, "Muhammad created a new monotheism fitted to the contemporary needs of tribal society."10 

The effect was to perpetuate tribal norms by freezing them in place as holy writ. Arabs could see themselves as "the chosen people" with "a mission to convert or conquer the world." According to Muhammad, each of the great monotheistic religions was an ummah—a community or nation defined by its adherence to the teachings of its prophet. 

Jews were defined as an ummah through their adherence to the book of Moses. Christians were an ummah united by adherence to the teachings of the prophet Jesus. 

The Islamic ummah, however, was meant to supersede these other groups. Within the ummah, all Muslims were brothers and sisters. Yet this notion did not displace the older ties of the bloodline. As it is set down in the Quran: "Blood relations among each other have closer personal ties in the Decree of Allah than (the Brotherhood of) Believers" (33:6).Despite the rise of a pan-Islamic religious identity in which all individuals notionally submitted to Allah, Islam therefore retained elements of the shame culture.

From its origins as a new faith community, Islam had the overwhelming need to remain unified or risk reverting back to tribal fragmentation. The first schism over the question of succession nearly led to the collapse of the religion. Within Islam, fitna—strife or disagreement—was therefore seen as fundamentally destructive. Dissent was a form of betrayal; heresy as well. 

These individualistic impulses had to be suppressed to preserve the unity of the larger community. Those who wonder at the ferocity of Islamic punishments for dissent fail to grasp the threat that skepticism and critical thinking were believed to pose.

In a clan setting, shameful behavior constitutes a betrayal of the bloodline. In the wider Islamic setting, heresy constitutes a comparable threat, as does outright unbelief—apostasy—both of which are punishable by death. Those who betray the faith must be weeded out to maintain the integrity of the ummah.

This belief in the danger of dissent has had powerful consequences, but perhaps the greatest has been to suppress innovation, individualism, and critical thinking within the Muslim world. 

Muhammad himself, as both the messenger of God and the founder of the Islamic "supertribe," is revered as an irreproachable source of wisdom and a model of behavior for all time. To question his authority in any way is considered an unacceptable affront to the honor of Islam itself.

It is not fashionable today in academic circles to discuss the legacy of Arab clan structures in the development of Islam. It is considered ethnocentric, if not downright orientalist, even to bring it up. But today the Middle East and the wider world are increasingly at the mercy of a combination of the worst traits of a patriarchal tribal society and unreformed Islam. And because of the taboos over what can and cannot be said—taboos backed up by the threat of violent reprisals—we are unable to have an open discussion of these issues.

The Sacrosanctity of the Qur'an

If Muhammad is unique among the prophets, the Qur'an is unprecedented among religious texts. Muslims today are taught that the Qur'an is a complete and final revelation that cannot be changed: it is literally God's last word.

The Qur'an and its related texts are the fundamental source of the Islamic veneration of the afterlife, as well as the call to jihad. They make explicit the concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong and the specific dictates of sharia. In turn, these concepts would not have such enduring power were they not so entwined with the belief in the timeless, all-powerful, and immutable words of Allah and the deeds of Muhammad. 

Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done—-question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture—it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.

(DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY "MODERNIZE"  -  THE  EXTREME  IS  TO  OVERLOOK OR THROW OUT  VERSES,  WHICH  MAKE  HOMOSEXUALITY "GAY"  LIFESTYLE, INCLUDING SAME SEX MARRIAGE, A SIN. PEOPLE HAVE MODERNIZED THE BIBLE TO SAY GOD IS JUST FINE WITH THE "GAY" LIFESTYLE. OTHER "MODERN" IDEAS LIKE GENESIS ONE IS TALKING ABOUT MILLIONS OF YEARS AS GOD USED "EVOLUTION" TO GIVE US WHAT THE EARTH IS TODAY, AND SO ON  -  Keith Hunt)

My first memories of the Qur'an are of my mother and grandmother kissing its cover, of the admonition never to touch it without having first washed my hands, and of sitting on the hot Somali ground as a small child of four or five while the book seemed to tower above us on a high shelf. As I memorized its verses, I was taught simply to obey it. The Qur'an, I learned, was the book sent down "explaining all things" (16:89). It had been revealed to Muhammad by Allah through the Angel Gabriel, beginning when Muhammad lived in Mecca and continuing when he moved to Medina. Gabriel spoke the words one by one to Muhammad, who in turn recited them before scribes. Islamic orthodoxy—not radical Islam, but mainstream Islamic doctrine—thus insists that the Qur'an is God's own word. Questioning any part of the Qur'an therefore becomes an act of heresy.

HELL-FIRE  TEACHING

The Allah of my childhood was a fiery deity. "On the Day that the enemies of Allah will be gathered together to the Fire," it is written in chapter 41 of the Qur'an, "their hearing, their sight, and their skins will bear witness against them, as to (all) their deeds." Of Abu Lahab, Muhammad's uncle who persistently opposed Islam, it is said in chapter 111: "Burnt soon will he be in a Fire of Blazing Flame! His wife shall carry the (crackling) wood—As fuel!—A twisted rope of palm-leaf fiber round her (own) neck!" Fire is a recurring theme of the Qur'an, and the heat of the desert and the scalding sun, like the crackle of fires at night outside their tents, made these punishments exceedingly vivid to most Arabs, as well as to me. When my mother spoke of "hellfire," she would point to the flaming brazier in our kitchen and tell me: "You think this fire is hot? Now think about hell, where the fire is far, far hotter and it will devour you." The thought gave my sister nightmares. Small wonder I strove to submit to Allah's will.

Later, I learned what it was that made Allah different from the Christian God and Hebrew Yahweh. 

ALLAH  CANNOT  BE  PICTURED

Allah is not a benevolent father figure, to be depicted in flowing robes with a white beard. In fact, Islam requires that neither God nor Muhammad be depicted in any physical form. Unlike the mosaics of medieval chapels or the frescoes of churches in the Renaissance, every Muslim house of worship from the Grand Mosque down has no human images, only geometric adornments featuring nothing more figurative than enormous flowering plants.

This abstract Allah also reigns supreme as the sole divinity; in Islam there is no Jesus-like son or Holy Ghost. Association of any other god or entity with Allah is considered shirk and is one of the gravest sins in Islam—punishable by death according to some scholars. 

The Qur'an pointedly says, "no son has [Allah] begotten, nor has He a partner in His dominion" (25:2). 

In Islam, Jesus is recognized as being in the tradition of major Old Testament prophets like Noah and Abraham, but Muhammad is revealed as the last and greatest prophet and the Qur'an is the last word spoken by God. According to Islamic teachings, each prophet up to and including Muhammad opened a window onto the unseen, but after Muhammad's death that window was declared shut until Judgment Day and the end of time. Muhammad was thus the bearer of the last word of God's revelation.11

ISLAM  IN  FIVE  WAYS

In a similar way, Allah's imperatives for the faithful are not exhortations, such as love thy neighbor, or a covenant, as between God and the Jews, or even a wider moral code, like the Ten Commandments, which address everything from adultery to murder. Rather, first and foremost, Islam commands its followers to perform five religious duties, all of which remind the believers through word and deed that they must above all else submit to the faith and its rules:

1. Have faith in the one God, Allah, and Muhammad, His Prophet;

2. Pray five times a day;

3. Fast during the day for the entire ninth month of Ramadan;

4. Provide charity;

5. Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.

ISLAAM  SCRIPTURES  DIFFERENT - PREDESTINATION

In its scripture, Islam is also fundamentally different. It places more emphasis on divine omnipotence and less on human free will. "God leads astray whom He will and guides whom He will," it is written. There is even a suggestion in the Qur'an that just as Allah has created what is good, He has also created evil. Chapter 25 says He "created all things, and ordered them in due proportions." This suggests that each person's fate and future have already been established.12

Of course, such concepts can also be found in some versions of Christianity. John Calvin was especially insistent on the idea of "double predestination," that God had already chosen who was damned and who saved. The difference is that throughout the history of Christianity there has been intense debate about the relationship between divine omnipotence and human agency. Early debates in Islamic history were eventually won by champions of a heavy determinism, both pertaining to the destiny of one's soul as well as to one's actions in this life.13 Thereafter, debate on these issues was effectively shut down by zealots who argued that asking such questions was akin to shirk, if not to heresy.

(I  HAVE  A  STUDY  ARTICLE  ON  "PREDESTINATION"  WHICH  EXPLAINS  ALL.  IT  IS  NOT  AS  TAUGHT  BY  ISLAM  OR  JOHN  CALVIN  - Keith Hunt

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Qur'an's unique status is the fact that the most violent Medina Muslims can find in holy writ justifications for everything they do. 

WAR  AND  VIOLENCE

Consider the words of Tawfik Hamid, who was once a member of the same radical organization as the Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, but is now one of a new generation of Islamic reformers: "The literal understanding of Qur'an 9:29," he has said, "can easily be used to justify what it [Islamic State] is doing. 'Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture [Jews and Christians]—[fight] until they give the jizyah [payment of a tribute tax to Islamic authorities] willingly while they are humiliated.'"14

Hamid notes that the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that this verse means 

"that Muslims must fight non-Muslims and offer them the following choices: Convert to Islam, pay a humiliating tax called jizyah or be killed." Indeed, he adds, "A basic search of almost ALL approved interpretations for the Qur'an supports the same violent conclusion. The 25 leading approved Qur'an Interpretations (commentaries)—that are usually used by Muslims to understand the Qur'an—unambiguously support the violent understanding of the verse."15

Hamid's conclusion: while there are certainly many in Islam who are "moderate Muslims," the central truth is that until "leading Islamic scholars provide a peaceful theology that clearly contradicts the violent views of the IS," there will be only a limited space for such moderation.16

As the violence committed in the name of Islam is so often justified by the Qur'an, Muslims must be challenged to engage in critical reflection about their most sacred text. This process necessarily begins by acknowledging both its human composition and its numerous internal inconsistencies.

The Qur'an as Text

Muslims have generally shown little interest in subjecting the Qur'an to the same scientific, archaeological, and textual scrutiny the Bible has received.17 Yet respect for religious beliefs does not require us to suspend our own critical judgment where the Qur'an is concerned, any more than it does in the case of the Old or New Testaments.

Very little is definitely known about the Qur'an's early composition and little work on it was done until quite recently. 

Western scholars who have studied the Qur'an dispassionately have argued against the traditional Islamic narrative.18 One of the scholars who took a more critical approach toward early Islamic history was John Wansbrough, who challenged the traditional narrative in two books published in the 1970s, arguing that Islam was originally a Judeo-Christian sect.19

Fred Donner, a professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Chicago, has argued that the Qur'an was originally an orally recited text, and its history in the years following Muhammad's death is "not clear." The survival of various ancient manuscripts indicates that the recitation of the early Qur'anic text "was far from uniform." An early collection of the verses may have been prepared under Caliph Abu Bakr and kept by Caliph Umar, but "it is not clear . . . whether this written collection was complete or not, nor whether it had any official status."20 An official text is said to have been prepared under Caliph Uthman (644-656), who ordered that competing versions of the Qur'an be destroyed.21 But in the city of Kufa one of Muhammad's companions, Abdallah Ma-sud, refused Uthman's order. Islamic tradition itself also contains evidence that the Qur'an we know today differs from the original text. The pious Caliph Umar warned Muslims against saying they know the whole Qur'an, because "much of it has disappeared."22

Western researchers have advanced several theories about the  Qur'an's composition.  

Gunter Luling believes that it reflects a combination of Christian texts that have been given a new Islamic meaning, and "original Islamic passages which had been added to the Christian ones." For Luling, the Quran is a composite work shaped by human hands and human editors. Gerd Puin's study of ancient manuscripts found in Yemen led him to conclude that the Qur'an is a "cocktail of texts," some of which may have predated Muhammad by a century.23 Christoph Luxenberg (a pseudonymous scholar) theorizes on the basis of linguistic analysis that there exists a gap of one and a half centuries between the Qur'an's first publication and the final editing process through which it received its traditional form.24 Fred Donner suggests another possibility: it may be a composite of different religious texts from various communities in Arabia. Certainly, there are significant variations in spelling in different versions of the Quran.25

What might have motivated people to compile a document like the Quran? Malise Ruthven offers the "revisionist theory":

that the religious institutions [of Islam] emerged at least two centuries after Muhammad's time, to consolidate ideologically, as it were, the Arab conquest. [This theory] would mean that the Arabs, anxious to avoid becoming absorbed by the more advanced religions and cultures of the peoples they conquered, cast about for a religion that would help them to maintain their identity. In so doing they looked back to the figure of the Arabian Prophet, and attributed to him the reaffirmation of an ancient Mosaic code of law for the Arabs.26

Ruthven notes that the revisionist theory, if true, would help explain why the qiblas of certain early mosques in Iraq face Jerusalem rather than Mecca.27 Other evidence indirectly supports this theory of later authorship. Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, has argued that a story about Muhammad—in which a Jewish tribe surrendered to the Islamic army in the city of Medina and the Prophet personally beheaded between six hundred and eight hundred prisoners of war—may in fact be a creation of later Muslim rulers, two hundred years after the incident was said to have occurred (627 CE). (This story is not in the Qur'an, but it shows how easily the life of the Prophet could be embroidered long after the fact.)

It is, to say the least, difficult in the face of all this evidence to deny that there was a human influence involved in composing what is now known as the Qur'an. 

Yet Islamic thinkers such as the late Pakistani Abul A'la Mawdudi have declared without hesitation that the Qur'an "exists exactly as it had been revealed to the Prophet; not a word—nay, not a dot of it—has been changed."28 And that remains mainstream Muslim doctrine.

All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur'an is no exception. 

(WE  DO  HAVE  WHAT  SEEMS  TO  BE  CONTRADICTIONS  IN  THE  BIBLE,  BUT  THEY  HAVE  ALL  BEEN  ANSWERED  IN  VARIOUS  BOOKS  ON  THE  SUBJECT  -  Keith Hunt)

But Islam is the only religion that has promulgated a doctrine to reconcile the Qur'an's contradictions in order to maintain the belief that it is the direct revelation of God. As Raymond Ibrahim observes:

No careful reader will remain unaware of the many contradictory verses in the Qur'an, most specifically the way in which peaceful and tolerant verses lie almost side by side with violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were initially baffled as to which verses to codify into the Shari'a worldview—the one that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till they either convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29).29

To explain these contradictions, Islamic scholars developed a doctrine known as "abrogation" (an-Nasikh wa'l Man-sukh), whereby Allah issues new revelations that supersede old ones.

Take, for example, the specific injunctions regarding war and peace. These successive revelations follow a distinctive arc in the course of the book: they begin in the early "Mecca" sections with admonitions of passivity in the face of aggression; then they give permission to fight back against aggressors; then they exhort Muslims to fight aggressors; finally, Muslims are commanded to fight all non-Muslims, whether they are the aggressors or not. What explains this pattern of gradually increasing aggressiveness? Most likely, it is the growing power and strength of the early Islamic community. Yet orthodox Muslim scholars insist that these changes have nothing to do with contingent circumstances.

Thus Ibn Salama (d. 1020) argued that chapter 9, verse 5, known as ayat as-sayf, or the sword verses, abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses.30 

The same applies to the verses concerning forcible conversion. As Ibrahim explains, "whereas Allah supposedly told the prophet that 'there is no compulsion in religion' (2:256), once the messenger grew strong enough, Allah issued new revelations calling for all-out war/jihad till Islam became supreme (8:39, 9:5, 9:29, etc.)."31

Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence continues to hold that the sword verses (9:5 and also 9:29) have "abrogated, canceled, and replaced" those verses that call for "tolerance, compassion, and peace."32 

This same doctrine is also applied to apparent flaws or contradictions in Muhammad's personal behavior. 

Suggesting, for example, that Muhammad chose to break a treaty with the Quraysh, rather than being provoked by their dishonorable behavior, has led to threats and violence against Western scholars and journalists. The goal in each instance is to place the Qur'an beyond criticism and reproach. After all, how can one argue with God's word?

THE  HADITH  ALSO…..BUT  THE  QUR'AN  MAINLY

Of course, the Qur'an is not the only Islamic text. Accompanying it is the Hadith, the record of Muhammad's sayings, the customs he followed, his teachings, and the personal examples that he left for all Muslims to follow, as well as assorted commentaries on his life. These texts were supposedly written or dictated by those who knew him, including his original companions and his wives. We have every reason to want to know more about the provenance and human composition of these texts, too. But the main questions that have been raised relate to the Qur'an. These include:

What did the Qur'an retain (or copy) from previous Jewish and Christian holy texts?

What was Muhammad's contribution to the text now known as the Qur'an?

Which other individuals (or groups) composed the Qur'an?

What was added to the Qura'nic draft after the death of Muhammad?

What was edited out or rephrased from the original Qur'an?

The answers to some of these questions may never be fully known, but we have a duty to ask them—and to protect the lives and liberty of those grappling with them, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Leading the effort to bring modern methods to the study of the Qur'an is Professor Angelika Neuwirth of the Free University in Berlin. The research program she leads, Corpus Coranicum, is housed at the Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities and will likely take decades to complete.33 But analyzing the Qur'an is not like studying the holy texts of Judaism or Christianity. When two German researchers traveled to Yemen to take pictures of old Qur'anic manuscripts, the authorities confiscated the pictures. Although diplomats eventually secured the release of most of the pictures, the episode sparked predictable reactions. One letter to the Yemen Times read: "Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents. Allah, help us against our enemies."34

RECITING  NOT  READING

The language of the Qur'an is Arabic, and to many Muslims that remains the divine language. To this day there are tremendous disputes about whether it is acceptable to translate it into other languages. That is partly because, unlike the Bible, the Qur'an is supposed to be learned by heart. As the Islamic scholar Michael Cook puts it, "The Muslim worshiper does not read the Qur'an, but rather recites it." All 77,000 words, roughly 6,200 verses, of the Qur'an must be internalized, giving it what Cook calls "a degree of scriptural saturation of daily life which is hard for most inhabitants of the Western world to imagine."35 In early-nineteenth-century Cairo, for example, parties and gatherings held by the city's middle and upper classes often featured a recital of the Qur'an, usually by three or four trained reciters, spanning as many as nine hours. Guests might come and go, but the recitation of the verses was continuous.

This highlights another important difference with other monotheistic scriptures. 

Although the Qur'an makes reference to some stories found in both the Torah and the Bible, it is distinctly not a storytelling text; no sustained meta-narrative binds it together. The Qur'an is not designed to be read as literature. Nor can scenes from it be depicted as scenes from the Bible were in works of art like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel or Leonardo's Last Supper. It does not have multiple narrators, like the Bible, but rather relies on one voice throughout, which the reciter is essentially channeling.

It is hard to convey to a non-Muslim how the recitation of the Qur'an embeds the text socially. In the middle of the twentieth century, for example, ordinary Egyptians riding public trams would move their lips, silently mouthing scripture as they traveled from stop to stop.36 I can well remember how when someone in my family lay sick or dying— like my aunt when she contracted breast cancer—the Qur'an was chanted by the bedside, in the belief that its words alone would cure the patient. Analogies with Christian prayer are misleading because the reciter of the Qur'an is voicing God's words, not appealing to God for intercession.

Does the Qur'an Inspire Violence?

If the Qur'an were used only to heal the sick, there would be less need for a Muslim Reformation. Unfortunately, as we have seen, it is also very commonly cited today to justify acts of violence, including all-out war against the infidel.

David Cook, a professor of religious studies at Rice University who has carefully studied jihad, notes that in the Qur'an, "the root (the verbal derivatives) of the word jihad appears quite frequently with regard to fighting (e.g., 2:218, 3:143, 8:72, 74-75, 9:16, 20, 41, 86, 61:11) or fighters (mu-jahidin, 4:95, 47:31)."37 Most verses in the Qur'an, Cook emphasizes, "are unambiguous as to the nature of the jihad prescribed—the vast majority of them referring to 'those who believe, emigrate, and fight in the path of Allah.' "38 In the historical evolution of Islam, "the armed struggle—aggressive conquest—came first, and then additional meanings became attached to the term [jihad]."39

To be sure, there are stories of violence and brutality in the Torah and Bible. When King David's daughter, Tamar, is raped by her half-brother, David imposes no punishment and Tamar is discarded and shamed. But Talmudic and biblical scholars today do not sanction sibling rape. Instead, they are most likely to express grief for Tamar and revulsion at the crime, and to show how this one act led to the unraveling of David's family. Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad's decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.

The literal reading of the Qur'an is a central part of what animates the bloody battles of jihad playing out across Syria and Iraq. Many of today's Sunni and Shiite fighters believe they are participating in battles foretold in seventh-century prophecies—the accounts in the hadith that refer to the confrontation of two massive armies in Syria. "If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you're mistaken," a Sunni Muslim jihadist who uses the name Abu Omar explained to a Reuters reporter in 2014. "They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised—it is the Grand Battle."40 "We have here mujahideen from Russia, America, the Philippines, China, Germany, Belgium, Sudan, India, and Yemen and other places," a journalist was told by Sami, a Sunni rebel fighter in northern Syria. "They are here because this is what the Prophet said and promised, the Grand Battle is happening."41 In much the same way, the leader of Boko Haram cites the Qur'an as his excuse to sell 276 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls into slavery.

Reason and the Qur'an

If Muhammad and the Qur'an are providing justifications for so much wrongdoing in the world, then it must be of more than scholarly interest to apply the tools of reason to both Prophet and text. The problem is that Islamic scholars arguing in favor of human reason have long been on the losing end of doctrinal conflicts. When rationalists squared off against lit— literalists during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, they lost. The rationalists wanted to include in Islamic doctrine only principles based on reason. The traditionalists countered that the human intellect is "defective, fickle, and malleable."42

Changing central aspects of Islamic doctrine became even more difficult in the tenth century. At that time, jurists of the various schools of law decided that all the essential questions had been settled and that permitting any new interpretations would not be productive. This famous episode is referred to as the closing of "the gates of ijtihad" The gates of reinterpretation were not suddenly slammed shut: it was a gradual process. But once shut, they proved impossible to reopen. The late Christina Phelps Harris of Stanford University summarized the impact as creating "a framework of inexorable legal rigidity."43

In this process a key role was played by the imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, who died in AD 1111. Al-Ghazali detested the ancient Greek philosophers. He regarded human reason as a cancer upon Islam. His most famous work is Incoherence of the Philosophers, which attacks and refutes the claims of the ancients. Against their pretensions, al-Ghazali posits an all-knowing God. Allah knows the smallest particle in heaven and on earth. And because Allah knows everything and is responsible for everything, he already knows and has fully formed every part of the world and every action, from whether an arrow reaches its target to whether a hand is waved. Thus, al-Ghazali writes, "Blind obedience to God is the best evidence of our Islam." Those, such as the Andalusian scholar Ibn Rushd, who disagreed with al-Ghazali found themselves exiled, or worse.

Nine hundred years have passed, and yet al-Ghazali is still considered by many in Islam to be second only to Muhammad. 

He provided the standard answer to almost any question posed in Arabic: "Inshallah," meaning "If Allah wills it" or "God willing." The latest flowering of al-Ghazali's concepts can be found today in the teachings of groups such as Boko Haram (whose very name means "Non-Muslim teaching is forbidden"), Islamic State, and Southeast Asia's Jemaah Is-lamiyah. They adhere to the principle of "al-fikr kufr," that the very act of thinking (and along with thinking, education, reason, and knowledge) makes one an infidel (kufr). Or as Taliban religious police have written on their propaganda placards: "Throw reason to the dogs—it stinks of corruption."44

There is in fact no good reason al-Ghazali and his ilk should have the last word in defining Islam. Muslims around the world cannot go on claiming that "true" Islam has somehow been "hijacked" by a group of extremists. Instead they must acknowledge that inducements to violence lie at the root of their own most sacred texts, and take responsibility for actively redefining their faith.

The crucial first step in this process of modification will be to acknowledge the humanity of the Prophet himself and the role of human beings in creating Islam's sacred texts. 

When Muslims tell us that the Qur'an is the immutable and unchanging word of God, that it is entirely consistent and infallible, and that none of its injunctions and commandments can be treated as in any way optional for true believers, we need to retort that, by the lights of scholarship and science, this is simply not the case. 

In truth, Islamic doctrine is adaptable; certain parts of the Qur'an were abrogated over time. 

So there is no reason to insist that the militant verses of the Medina period should always be given priority. If Muslims wish their religion to be a religion of peace, all they have to do is "abrogate" those Medinan verses. Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who was executed in 1985 for "apostasy" in Sudan, proposed to do just that.45

The next step in dismantling the ideological foundation of Islamist violence will be to persuade Muslims raised on an alluring vision of the afterlife to embrace life in this world, rather than actively seeking death as a path to the next.

………………..

IN  ITS  PRESENT  FORM  THE  QUR'AN  DOES  BY  COMMAND  OR  EXAMPLE,  TEACH  VIOLENCE  TO  ANY  AND  ALL  NON-ISLAMIC  PEOPLE.

THOSE  WHO  SAY  AND  LIVE  "ISLAM  IS  A  RELIGION  OF  PEACE"  HAVE  ALREADY  EDITED  THE  QUR'AN  -  THEY  HAVE  EDITED  THE  QUR'AN  IN  THEIR  MIND  SO  THEY  CAN  LIVE  AT  PEACE  WITH  ALL  OTHERS  NOT  OF  THEIR  RELIGIOUS  FAITH.

SO  INDEED  A  REFORMATION  HAS  AND  IS  TAKING  PLACE;  IT  JUST  NEEDS  TO  BE  MADE  OFFICIAL.  BUT  THE  PROBLEM  IS  MUCH  DEEPER,  FOR  THOSE  WHO  USE  VIOLENCE  IN  VARIOUS  FORMS,  WILL  SHOUT  THAT  THE  EDITING  OF  THE  QUR'AN  IS  TO BE  A  HERETIC!

ONLY  THE  RETURN  OF  JESUS  CHRIST  TO  EARTH,  WILL  PUT  AN  END  TO  RELIGIOUS  DIFFERENCES,  BIGOTRY,  HATE  AND  VIOLENCE.

THE  AUTHOR  OF  "HERETIC"  CONTINUES  TO  EXPOUND  THE  OTHER  AREAS  WHERE  THE  ISLAMIC  RELIGION  NEEDS  TO  HAVE  A  REFORMATION.

Keith Hunt

HERETIC

BY  AYAAN HIRSI ALI

CHAPTER 4

THOSE WHO LOVE DEATH

Islam's Fatal Focus on the Afterlife

On October 4, 2014, inside Chicago's O'Hare Airport, three American-born teenagers were apprehended by the FBI. The two brothers, aged nineteen and sixteen, and their seventeen-year-old sister were on their way to Turkey, where they planned to cross the border into Syria and join Islamic State. 

The three left behind letters for their parents, devout Muslims who had immigrated to the United States from India. 

The eldest, Mohammed Hamzah Khan, explained that "Muslims have been crushed under foot for too long," adding that the United States is "openly against Islam and Muslims," and that he did "not want my progeny to be raised in a filthy environment like this."1

But the sister took a different tack. She wrote to her parents: "Death is inevitable, and all of the times we enjoyed will not matter as we lay on our death beds. Death is an appointment, and we cannot delay or postpone, and what we did to prepare for our death is what will matter." In a striking irony, the girl who wrote those lines celebrating the primacy of death was planning to become a physician.

Like her brothers, she had attended a private Islamic school for nearly all her educational life. There she had demonstrated the highest facility with the Quran, becoming "Hafiz," meaning that she had memorized the entire text in Arabic.

In short, the decision of these siblings to join IS was not the result of knowing too little about Islam, much less of ignorance of the sacred texts. Nor can we ascribe their choice to poverty, social deprivation, or limited opportunity. The family lived in a comfortable Chicago suburb, the children attended private school, they had computers and cell phones— although, in a classic example of cocooning, the parents got rid of their television when their eldest child was eight because they wanted to "preserve their innocence."

Rather, this was a choice directly underpinned by contemporary Islamic philosophy and, in particular, its contempt for many of the central values of the West. In the words of a local Islamic community leader, Omer Mozaffar, who teaches theology at the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago, Muslim parents "think 'American' equals 'immoral.'"2

And it is not simply our American shopping malls, chain restaurants, movies, and music downloads. It is our values, our social fabric, our very way of life. Americans are raised to believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Muslims such as the Chicago Three, by contrast, are educated to venerate death over life—to value the promise of eternal life more highly than actual life here on earth. 

They see their primary purpose in this life as preparing for death: in the words of that Chicago teenager, "what we did to prepare for our death is what will matter."3 Death is the goal, the event that matters because it leads to the prize of eternal life.

Many Muslims today believe this with a fervor that is very hard for modernized Westerners to comprehend. By contrast, the leaders of IS and similar organizations know exactly how to exploit the Islamic exaltation of death—to the extent that three American teenagers would spend $2,600 on plane tickets with the ultimate goal of hastening their own deaths.

Life and Afterlife

The afterlife is as central to the Islamic mind as the clock has become to the Western mind. In the West, we structure our lives according to the passage of time, what we will accomplish in the next hour, the next day, the next year. We plan according to time and we generally assume that our lives will be long. Indeed, I have heard Westerners in their eighties talking confidently as if they have decades still to live. The old Christian preoccupations with mortality—so vividly expressed in Shakespeare's Hamlet or in the poetry of John Donne—have receded in the face of rising life expectancy, actuarial calculation, and increasingly secular thinking. In the Islamic mind, by contrast, it is not the ticking of the clock that is heard, but the approach of the Day of Judgment. Have we prepared sufficiently for the life that will come after death?

The problem before us, then, is not simply one of better education: the people who hold this belief are not ignorant laborers but highly educated and skilled engineers and doctors. Focusing on death is what they are taught from the beginning of their lives. It was what I was taught from the beginning of mine.

From the time I could learn the most basic lessons, I was taught that our life on this earth is short and that it is temporary. During my childhood, countless people died: relatives died, neighbors died, strangers died—from disease, from malnutrition, from violence, from oppression. Death was on our lips all the time. We got so used to it and it became such a part of us that we wouldn't speak without mentioning it. I could not make the simplest plans with a friend without saying, "See you tomorrow, if I'm alive!" or "If Allah wills it." And the words made perfect sense because I knew that I could die at any time.

I was also told that all of your life is a test. To pass that test, you must follow a series of obligations and abstain from all that is forbidden, so that when it comes to the final trial of judgment before Allah, you will be admitted to paradise, an actual place with water and date trees heavy with fruit. 

Thus, from the beginning, as a Muslim child, I was taught to invest my actions, my thoughts, my creativity not in the here and now, but in the hereafter. The ultimate lesson I learned was that your real, eternal life starts only after you die.

I believed all of this without question—until I reached Holland. There no one talked about death, let alone life after death. Without equivocation they said, "See you tomorrow!" And if I replied, "If I'm alive!" they would look at me quizzically and say, "Of course you'll be alive. Why ever not?"……..

………………..

A  VERY  FINE  BOOK  INDEED  FOR  UNDERSTANDING  THE  ISLAM  RELIGION  AND  WHERE  IT  NEEDS  TO  BE  REFORMED!!

Keith Hunt

HERETIC

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

CHAPTER 6

SOCIAL CONTROL BEGINS AT HOME

How the Injunction to Command Right and Forbid Wrong Keeps Muslims in Line

When I was a teenage girl growing up in Nairobi, I wondered aloud in our house why the ritual prayers had to be said five times a day. Why not cut the number down to once a day? My half sister overheard me talking and almost immediately launched into hours of lectures, not just on that day but on many subsequent days, about my failures to perform my sacred duty as a Muslim. Nor did she confine herself to lecturing me. She also went about lobbying my extended family to have me "sent away" to be treated for "madness" because I had dared to ask a question about our faith and its practice. 

This illustrates how the practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong functions in Islamic society. Debate and doubt are intolerable, deserving of censure, with the questioner reduced to silence even inside her own home. My half sister believed it to be her duty and obligation to correct me: to command me to do right and forbid me to do—or even think—wrong.

This is only part of a larger truth about Islam. It is almost always the immediate family that starts the persecution of freethinkers, of those who would ask questions or propose something new. 

(Exactly  how  "cults"  work  -  those closest  to  you  report  on  you  -  Keith Hunt)

Commanding right and forbidding wrong begins at home. From there, it moves out into the community at large. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had to work quite hard to persuade family members to denounce one another to the authorities. The power of the Muslim system is that the authorities do not need to be involved. Social control begins at home.

(All cults  work  this  way;  and  Jesus  said  they  of  your  own  house  will  betray  you,  report  on  you….. and  so  tribulation  comes  from  the  cult  -  Keith Hunt)

The constant personal and intellectual unease that many of the Muslim students in my Harvard seminar felt with any discussion of the political organization of the Islamic world is directly connected to this overarching concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong. When the Qatari man challenged me on the first day of class, he was following these principles. He was not the last to do so. I had a male student from Nigeria who claimed to be an expert in sharia, among other things. He, too, repeatedly rose to "correct" me, each time calling me "sister," to emphasize the kinship element— although I was no doubt an apostate to him—and thereby also attempt subtly to nullify my role as the seminar leader. Women and men have very specified roles in Islamic society. It is spelled out exactly how each sex should act. And a man has an unequivocal right to command a woman, even if that woman is purportedly his teacher.

In short, taken together, commanding right and forbidding wrong are very effective means of silencing dissent. They act as a grassroots system of religious vigilantism. And their most zealous enforcers find in these words an excuse not just to command and to forbid but also to threaten, to beat, and to kill. I think of it as the totalitarianism of the hearth.

Origins of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong

As far back as the philosophy of Aristotle and the Stoics in ancient Greece, Western civilization has understood the concept that the law must "command what should be done and forbid what should not be done." Thus the underlying concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong is not completely unique to Islam. The historian Michael Cook even speculates that "this ancient wording, like the owl on Athenian coins, found its way to pre-Islamic Arabia" from ancient Greece.1

Whatever the origin of the phrase, however, Muhammad's interpretation of it is explicit and novel. The Quran itself spells out the concept in three different places: 

"Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is wrong: They are the ones to attain felicity" (3:104). 

"Ye are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah" (3:110). 

And later: "The Believers, men and women, are protectors one of another: they enjoin what is just, and forbid what is evil" (9:71).

(It's  the  old  old  way  of  all  cults  that  want  to  dominate  your  life;  people  tattling  on  others;  and  it  starts  indeed  in  the  home  -  Keith Hunt)

Some scholars have argued that these Quranic definitions might mean little more than separating believers in Islam from nonbelievers, "right" entailing choosing the faith of Allah and "wrong" the decision to worship anything else. But that is not how the injunction has usually been interpreted.

Of course, all religions have rules. Some Protestant sects were especially intrusive in policing their members, as the early history of New England confirms. 

But the comprehensive nature of commanding right and forbidding wrong is uniquely Islamic. 

And because Islam does not confine itself to a separate religious sphere, it is deeply embedded in political, economic, and personal as well as religious life. 

As Patricia Crone explains, "Islamic law obliged its adherents to intervene when they saw other believers engage in sinful behavior and to persuade them to stop, or even to force them to do so if they could." 

The importance of this function was even comparable with that of jihad, because for the Muslims of that era, "fighting sinners and fighting infidels were much the same." 

In its practical application during the medieval era, commanding right and forbidding wrong entailed the Islamic ruler hiring a censor and market inspector who "would patrol the streets with armed assistants to ensure that people obeyed the law in public," whether it was attending Friday prayers, fasting during Ramadan, maintaining modesty in dress, forgoing wine, or segregating men and women.2

Remarkably, more than a thousand years later, little has changed. The religious police in Iran and Saudi Arabia, who beat women for displaying an ankle in public, the followers of the British-born lawyer and imam Anjem Choudary who carry out vigilante Muslim patrols in London,3 chastising women for refusing to cover up and knocking alcohol out of adults' hands, and the sharia brigades cracking down on alcohol consumption in Wuppertal, Germany,4 are the twenty-first-century commanders of right and forbidders of wrong. Today, as much as in medieval times, the concepts of commanding right and forbidding wrong entail telling individual Muslims how to live, down to the most intimate aspects of their lives.

Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Practice

At its most extreme, the concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong provides the justification for fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins who carry out honor killings of female relatives they believe have committed irredeemable transgressions. 

In many parts of the Islamic world, any behavior deemed immodest is reason enough to kill a daughter or female relative. And immodesty is extremely broadly defined: it could include singing, looking out a window, or speaking to a man who is not a relative. Marrying for love, in defiance of one's parents, is also a frequent justification.

No one knows the exact number of honor killings that happen around the world every year. Five thousand is the most commonly cited estimate, but that number illustrates only that the practice is underreported. The practice has certainly become more prevalent since the late twentieth century as more and more nations have formally adopted sharia. Almost a thousand honor killings occur annually in Pakistan alone.5 The problem is that honor killings are often not reported, or are ignored, or are disguised. There is often little or no incentive to bring them to the authorities in countries where the authorities sanction them.

HONOR  VIOLENCE  IN  ACTUALITY

What does honor violence look like in practice? 

In Lahore, Pakistan, a twenty-five-year-old woman who married against her father's wishes was stoned to death outside a courthouse.

Also in Pakistan, a girl was shot dead while doing her homework because her brother had thought she was with a man. 

A Pakistani father and mother doused their fifteen-year-old daughter with acid because she had looked twice at a boy who passed by on a motorcycle, and from that they "feared dishonor." Her mother said that her daughter cried out before she died, "I didn't do it on purpose. I won't look again."6 But the mother added, "I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way." 

When seventeen-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader's father killed her in Basra, Iraq, because she had allegedly fallen in love with a British soldier stationed there, local officials commented: "Not much can be done when we have an honor killing case. You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws."7

Farzana Parveen was three months pregnant when she was stoned to death in Pakistan in 2014 by her father, brother, and a family-selected fiance whom she had declined to marry. Farzana had married against her family's wishes, the family felt shamed, so they killed her in broad daylight outside a courthouse in the city of Lahore. Even more appalling, she was the second woman to die in this case. Her husband had strangled his first wife so that he could marry Farzana. He paid blood money, it was deemed an honor killing, and so he was free to wed again. When Farzana was killed, her stoning was also deemed an honor killing.

A young mother of two in Punjab province was stoned to death by her uncle and cousins, using stones and bricks, on the order of a Pakistani tribal court simply because she had a cell phone. 

Even though stoning is supposedly illegal in Afghanistan, 115 men stood and cheered the stoning of a twenty-one-year-old woman accused of "moral crimes." 

Commanding right and forbidding wrong can also justify the murder of homosexuals and Muslim apostates—even Muslims who are insufficiently devout. When the governor of Punjab acted to protect a Christian woman who was charged with blasphemy, it was his own bodyguard who killed him. Afterward, thousands of Pakistanis, including numerous clerics, lauded the killer, showering him with petals and celebrating his steadfastness and courage. 

Dawood Azami of the BBC's World Service explains the dangers of apostasy in Afghanistan:

For those who were born Muslim, it might be possible to live in Afghan society if one does not practice Islam or even becomes an "apostate" or a "convert." They are most probably safe as long as they keep quiet about it. The danger comes when it is made public that a Muslim has stopped believing in the principles of Islam. There is no compassion for Muslims who "betray their faith" by converting to other religions or who simply stop believing in one God and the Prophet Muhammad. Conversion, or apostasy, is also a crime under Afghanistan's Islamic law and is punishable by death. In some instances, people may even take matters into their own hands and beat an apostate to death without the case going to court.8

Yet while these are striking examples, the practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong is subtler and more pervasive than they imply. 

In a 2013 profile of King Abdullah of Jordan, the writer Jeffrey Goldberg recounted a visit he made with the king to the Jordanian city of Karak (Abdullah flew his own Black Hawk helicopter), "one of the poorer cities in a distressingly poor country." The king was going to have lunch with the leaders of Jordan's largest tribes, which in Goldberg's words "form the spine of Jordan's military and political elite." It is a long-standing symbiotic alliance between the Hashem-ite kings and their kingdom's clan chiefs. The tribal leaders expect the king to help safeguard their power and privileges, in part by keeping Jordan's Palestinian population in check. In return, the tribes help to safeguard the king.

This particular trip was designed in part for Abdullah to make his pitch for developing viable political parties among the tribes before upcoming parliamentary elections. Having watched the chaos engulfing his neighboring nations and having seen the bloody overthrow of established (albeit nonroyal) rulers in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, Abdullah was hoping to mobilize the tribal leaders to stem the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and prevent it from "hijack[ing] the cause of democratic reform in the name of Islam." Still, his expectations were not high. Goldberg quotes the king as saying: "I'm sitting with the old dinosaurs today."

The meal was a traditional Bedouin one, eaten with forks (a small concession to modernity) at a long, high communal table, a hallmark of tradition. Then, with the ceremonial lunch complete, it was time for the tea and talk. Goldberg writes:

The king made a short plea for economic reform and for expanding political participation, and then the floor was opened. Leader after leader—many of whom were extremely old, many of whom merely had the appearance of being old—made small-bore requests and complaints. One of the men proposed an idea for the king's consideration: "In the old days, we had night watchmen in the towns. They would be given sticks. The government should bring this back. It would be for security, and it would create more jobs for the young men."9

"I was seated directly across the room from the king," Goldberg adds, "and I caught his attention for a moment; he gave me a brief, wide-eyed look. He was interested in high-tech innovation, and in girls' education, and in trimming the overstuffed government payroll. A jobs plan focused on men with sticks was not his idea of effective economic reform. As we were leaving Karak a little while later, I asked him about the men-with-sticks idea. 'There's a lot of work to do,' he said, with fatigue in his voice."10

But here's the rub: employing men with sticks is not some quaint old idea; it is a central component of Islam. Commanding right and forbidding wrong is in many ways all about men wielding sticks, enforcing correct behavior.

The Zone of Privacy Is Now a Dead Zone

Part of what makes commanding right and forbidding wrong such a menace is that, unlike the term "jihad," it sounds so virtuous. What could be wrong with living a moral life? Isn't that the primary aspiration of all major religious teachings? And what could be more reasonable than a devolved discipline, with norms of behavior enforced by family rather than some external power?

The problem is that these questions expose some fundamental differences between Islam and Western liberal thought. 

A core part of the Western tradition is that individuals should, within certain limits, decide for themselves what to believe and how to live. 

Islam envisages the exact opposite: 

it has very clear and restrictive rules about how one should live and it expects all Muslims to enforce these rules. In its modern conception, commanding right has become (in the words of Michael Cook) "the organized propagation of Islamic values."11 

As Dawood Azami puts it, if you depart from the basic (and time-consuming) requirements of the faith, you had best "keep quiet about it" if you hope to survive unscathed even by your own family.

It was not always this way. 

In the medieval period, there were disagreements about how far commanding and forbidding should extend. Behind closed doors, in private lives, without witnesses, there was more latitude. As Patricia Crone notes, "Freethinkers could discuss their views with like-minded individuals in private salons, in learned gatherings at the court, and to some extent in books and even more so in poetry, where things could be put ambivalently." There was even an entire Islamic literary style, the mujun, which allowed its practitioners to push the boundaries of what was acceptable in society, allowing them to teeter on the edge of the blasphemous, the pornographic, the scurrilous. "In short," Crone concludes, "freedom lay essentially in privacy. The public sphere was where public norms had to be maintained, where there might be censors or private persons fulfilling the duty of 'commanding right and forbidding wrong' who would break musical instruments, pour out wine, and separate couples who were neither married nor closely related. But their right to intrude into private homes was strictly limited."12 There was even a way to say, to those who sought to enforce the Quran's dictates, "Mind your own business."

The idea of a zone of privacy and the concept of "mind your own business" have eroded in our time. As modern Islamic communities have become radicalized, there is a kind of arms race of commanding right and forbidding wrong. This means that a closet atheist is quickly outed because he is soon caught not praying five times a day, not fasting in the month of Ramadan, not praising Allah constantly, not saying "Inshallah" every time he refers to the future. 

While we in the West have surrendered our privacy to our credit card companies, website cookies, social media networks, and search engines, in the Muslim world the zone of privacy has been eroded by other means.

How Does This Doctrine Take Root?

Universal human rights also play no part in the conception of commanding right and forbidding wrong; there are only the rules of Islam. 

This phenomenon is at its most extreme with the so-called Islamic State, which demands that anyone living within its "caliphate" convert to its extreme practice of Islam and follow its rules. When IS fighters rolled into the city of Mosul, hanging out of car windows or off the backs of trucks, video footage captured one fighter aggressively wagging his finger at a woman on the street. He was signaling to her to cover up. Next would come the order for women not simply to cover, but to stay in their homes. Clothing stores in captured cities and towns could no longer sell anything but Islamic dress and all mannequins were to be veiled and covered. How can formerly progressive cities and regions, or at least fairly modern ones, allow the clock to be turned back to such an extreme degree? The answer is that the central elements of this type of fundamentalism are already present in Islamic politics, albeit in diluted form. The IS agenda is in some respects not so different from that of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Saudi Wahhabist teachings; it is just that their methods are more exposed.

IRAQ  WITHOUT  HUSSEIN

A particularly unfortunate legacy of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein was the rise of sectarian political parties and militias in the wake of the collapse of the single-party Ba'athist authoritarian state. What is clear in hindsight is that the Ba'ath party had not eradicated these beliefs; it had merely driven them underground. Once freed and unleashed, these groups and their clerics proclaimed honor killings to be a legitimate religious means of "policing" women's behavior. Islamists in Basra scrawled graffiti that read, "Your makeup and your decision to forgo the headscarf will bring you death." Years before 2014, in other words, the fundamentalist seeds were already there.

(I  BLOGGED  THAT  THIS  WOULD  HAPPEN  AFTER  THE  USA  AND  ALLIES  PULLED  OUT  OF  IRAQ;  SO  IT  HAS  INDEED  -  Keith Hunt)

SYRIA  ALSO…..BUT  MORE

Syria, too, was widely regarded in the West as relatively secular. But the secularization has melted in the heat of civil war. In Raqqa, the Syrian city that became IS's capital, the insurgents have tested a sort of "Taliban 2.0" style of female repression. As in other fundamentalist states, women who go out without a male chaperone, or who are not fully veiled, are arrested and beaten; but in Raqqa, these arrests and beatings are frequently committed by other women. 

IS has invented something new in the history of commanding right and forbidding wrong: an all-female moral police, the Al-Khansaa Brigade. The philosophy behind the brigade is simple, according to Abu Ahmad, an IS official in Raqqa, who said in an interview, "We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law. Jihad," he added, "is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well."13

For the modern-day jihadists,  embracing the doctrine of commanding right and forbidding wrong also provides an opportunity to expand their ranks and incorporate more individuals outside of a purely combatant role. The practice creates many more soldiers for Allah and, in the case of Al-Khansaa, creates new ways to manage women who cannot go off to traditional war. (At least not yet—the Norwegian Islamic terror expert Thomas Hegghammer foresees a gradual shift to give women "more operative" roles in the jihad fight, explaining: "There is a process of female emancipation taking place in the jihadist movement, albeit a very limited (and morbid) one.")

A teenage girl in Raqqa described to the publication Syria Deeply how the female IS brigades function in practice. She was simply grabbed from the street by a group of armed women. "Nobody talked to me or told me the reason for my detention," she told the reporter. "One of the women in the brigade came over, pointing her firearm at me. She then tested my knowledge of prayer, fasting, and hijab." This girl's "crime" was walking without an escort and with an improperly worn headscarf.

When life is dominated by the fear of small infractions, how little thought can be given to the bigger questions? For want of a properly tied headscarf, a woman is beaten. It is the theological counterpart of the American policing theory of fixing broken windows and getting panhandlers off the streets as a way to prevent petty crimes from leading to larger, more serious violent transgressions. In the theory of commanding right and forbidding wrong, every small act, every minor infraction has the potential to become a major religious crime. Who can think about rights or education or economics when a trivial sartorial lapse can have such monumental consequences?

In Iraq,  too,  the current political tumult has  created:

opportunities for vigilantism dressed up as religious policing. The dangers for gay Iraqi men are far greater today than they were under Saddam Hussein's regime. As The Economist notes, "Men even suspected of being gay face kidnappings, rape, torture and extrajudicial killing" by self-appointed sharia judges and squads that deem themselves to be the enforcers of commanding right and forbidding wrong. One gay man who was kidnapped hoped that his kidnappers would not reveal his sexual orientation to his family, the shame of which would force him never to see them again. But hundreds of others have suffered a far worse fate at the hands of religious death squads that patrol the streets of Iraq's major cities looking for "effeminate men."

As reported by Der Spiegel, "In Baghdad a new series of murders began early this year, perpetrated against men suspected of being gay. Often they are raped, their genitals cut off, and their anuses sealed with glue. Their bodies are left at landfills or dumped in the streets." In the words of the head of Iraq's leading lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organization, Iraq "is the most dangerous place in the world for sexual minorities." Even Turkey, where homosexuality is legal and where many Iraqis and Iranians ultimately flee, has seen a gay honor killing, which was carried out by one unfortunate young man's father. (There is of course a rampant hypocrisy at work here because there are significant gay and lesbian populations in all Islamic nations. Because affairs with women are so logistically difficult, for example, Arab men have long turned to other men to satisfy their sexual needs. In Afghanistan, too, wealthy tribesmen are known to purchase young boys for their personal pleasure.)

Many religions have difficulties with accepting homosexuality, needless to say. Some mainly Christian countries in Africa have become appallingly homophobic in recent years. But even they do not prescribe the death sentence for gay people.

Honor Crimes in America

The practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong is not simply a problem for Muslim majority countries. It is increasingly a problem inside Muslim immigrant communities in the West.

I never cease to be amazed at how reluctant ordinary Americans are to believe that honor killings happen in the United States, too. 

In October 2009, for example, twenty-year-old Noor al-Maleki was killed by her father in suburban Phoenix, Arizona. He ran over her with his Jeep in a parking lot, crushing her body beneath its wheels. She did not die instantly, but lay gasping for breath as blood flowed from her mouth. What had she done in her father's eyes to merit such a death? The answer is that she liked makeup, boys, and Western music, and hoped to be able to support herself. She also refused to submit to the marriage her father had arranged for her to an Iraqi man who was in need of a green card. Noor wanted to choose her own fate. Instead, her father chose it for her. Others in the local Iraqi community defended Noor's father's actions. A thirty-something mother praying at a local mosque told Time magazine, as her daughter translated, "I think what he did was right. It's his daughter, and our religion doesn't allow us to do what she did."14 (An Arizona jury found him guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced him to thirty-four years in prison.)

Or consider the case of the Egyptian-born taxi driver in Dallas, Texas, who shot his seventeen-and-eighteen-year-old daughters, Sarah and Amina, a total of eleven times for dating non-Muslim boys. At a vigil commemorating the two girls, their brother took the microphone and said: "They pulled the trigger, not my dad."15 

Or Fauzia Mohammed, who was stabbed eleven times by her brother in upstate New York because she wore "immodest clothing" and was "a bad Muslim girl." 

Or Aiya Altameemi, whose Iraqi-born father held a knife to her throat and whose mother and younger sister tied her to a bed and beat her because she was seen talking to a boy near their home in Arizona. Several months before, Aiya's mother had burned her face with a hot spoon because she refused to be married off to a man twice her age. Fauzia and Aiya survived, but they are scarred for life.

Similar crimes are being committed in Canada, too. The multimillionaire Afghan immigrant Muhammad Shafia killed his first wife and three daughters by locking them in a car and pushing it into a canal (the women may already have been drowned elsewhere) because the girls were becoming "too Westernized." 

Aqsa Parvez was a sixteen-year-old Toronto girl who wanted to be a fashion designer. Her father and brother strangled her to death for not wearing the hijab.

There can be no excuse for such foul acts. There can be no acceptable cultural defense. It should never be any woman's or girl's destiny to die at the hands of her own family—very often, in the documented American cases, her own father's— for the sake of some antiquated notion of family honor. Nor can any community be permitted to hush up the crime in the name of faith or cultural tradition.

In the West, honor violence is all too often conflated with domestic violence. Indeed, that is often how law enforcers and local media report cases of honor violence, sometimes out of a kind of self-censoring impulse. 

Underreporting of such cases encourages people to believe that honor violence "doesn't happen here" or, if it does, is no different from a drunkard punching his wife in the eye or menacing his son with a firearm.

But unlike domestic violence or abuse, where women and children (and sometimes also men) are nearly always brutalized in private, honor violence does not have to happen behind closed doors. Instead, the perpetrators often have the open support of family and community. There is no stigma because of the belief that the perpetrator is in the right. There is no need to leave bruises only where they will not show. Indeed, there can be social vindication and even redemption in a mutilated body, in a trail of blood. To escape a grisly death, a potential victim of honor violence must leave not only her abuser, but often her entire family and cultural community.

Whenever the apologists for honor violence say, "It is our religion," there must be an uncompromising reply: "Murder— and above all infanticide—cannot be sanctioned by any religion, by any faith, by any God."

Consider the case of the Pakistani man in Brooklyn who beat his wife to death with a stick because she made him a meal out of lentils rather than the goat meat he had requested. Though he was seventy-five and she was sixty-six, he left her body "a bloody mess." His defense attorney opened with the proposition that it was a culturally appropriate act because "he believed he had the right to hit and discipline his wife." At sentencing, the same attorney argued that prison would be a "hardship" because the man would not have access to Pakistani food. The New York judge sentenced the murderer to eighteen years to life.16 But in a sharia zone, would the incident have even been reported, let alone come to trial?

Commanding Wrong

In 2010, in the British city of Derby, Kabir Ahmed and four other Muslim men passed out a leaflet entitled "Death Penalty?" and stuffed it through local mail slots. 

Illustrating the leaflet was a picture of a mannequin, hanging by a noose, with the message that homosexuality is punishable by death in Islam: "The death sentence is the only way this immoral crime can be erased from corrupting society and act as a deterrent for any other ill person who is remotely inclined in this bent way." It continued: "The only dispute amongst the classical authorities was the method employed in carrying out the penal code," and then went on to propose burning, being flung from a high point such as a mountain or building, or being stoned to death as suitable methods of death. Two other leaflets, entitled "Turn or Burn" and "God Abhors You," were also given out.

At his 2012 trial for stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, Ahmed argued that he was in fact only spreading the word of God as taught through Islam: "My intention was to do my duty as a Muslim, to inform people of God's word and to give the message on what God says about homosexuality." According to the BBC, Ahmed also told the court he felt it was his duty as a Muslim to inform and advise people if they were committing sins, and that he would be failing if he did not. "My duty is not just to better myself but to try and better the society I live in," he added. "We believe we can't just stand by and watch somebody commit a sin, we must try and advise them and urge them to stay away from sin."17

Ahmed was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. After his release, he left his wife and three small children and joined IS. On November 7, 2014, he drove a truck laden with explosives into an Iraqi police convoy north of Baghdad, killing himself, an Iraqi general, and seven policemen, and injuring fifteen others.18 A few months before he had told a Newsweek reporter, "It is for the sake of. . . religion and . . . honor. We are not for this life, but for the afterlife."19 This is the doctrine of commanding right and forbidding wrong in action.

Ahmed's case is very far from unique. Consider this 2011 broadcast from a Muslim radio station in Leeds, England, during Ramadan. Speaking in Urdu, Rubina Nasir told listeners to Asian Fever's Sister Ruby Ramadan Special: "What should be done if they [practice homosexuality]? If there are two such persons among you, that do this evil, the shameful act, what do you have to do? Torture them; punish them; beat them and give them mental torture. Allah states, 'If they do such a deed, punish them, both physically and mentally. Mental punishment means rebuke them, beat them, humiliate them, admonish and curse them, and beat them up. This command was sent in the beginning because capital punishment had not yet been sent down.'" 20

The following day Nasir was back on the air, talking about what happens when a Muslim man or woman gets married to a Mushrak—one who associates God with another (Jesus), i.e., a Christian.

Listeners! Marriage of a Muslim man or woman with a Mushrak is the straight path to hellfire. Have my sisters and brothers, who live with people of bad religions or alien religions, ever thought about what would become of the children they have had with them—and the coming generation? Where the filth of shirk [the sin of following another religion] is present, where the dirt of shirk is present, where the heart is impure, how can you remove apparent filth? How many arrangements will you make to remove the apparent filth? We are saying that Mushraks have no concept of cleanliness and un-cleanliness.21

For these comments, the radio station was fined £4,000 (around $6,000), but there was no move to suspend its broadcasting license.

Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance—such abuses of the freedom of speech—a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.

Only when Muslims—particularly those in Western countries—are free to say what they want, to pray or to not pray, to remain Muslim or to convert, or to have no faith at all; only when Muslim women are free to wear what they want, to go out as they want, to choose the partners that they want—only then will we be on a path to discover what is truly right and truly wrong in the twenty-first century. Commanding right and forbidding wrong are fundamentally at odds with the core Western principle of individual freedom. They, too, need to be removed from the central Islamic creed.

………………..

FROM  THE  ABOVE,  IT  MUST  MAKE  ONE  WONDER  IF  THE  WESTERN  WORLD  HAS  MADE  A  MISTAKE  IN  ALLOWING  ISLAMIC  RELIGIOUS  PEOPLE  INTO  ITS  COMMUNITY.  MOST  OF  THE  PEOPLE  IN  WESTERN  NATIONS  ARE  REVOLTED  TO  READ  WHAT  YOU  HAVE  JUST  HEARD.  WE  HAVE  A  WAY  OF  LIFE  THAT  ALLOWS  FREEDOM  OF  RELIGION  OR  NO  RELIGION,  BUT  NOT  TO  THE  POINT  OF  "HONOR  KILLINGS."  SUCH  A  WAY  OF  LIFE  IS  FOREIGN  TO  THE  WESTERN  MIND.  WHILE  IT  COULD  BE  ARGUED  THAT  THE  MAJORITY  OF  RELIGIOUS  ISLAMIC  PEOPLE  DO  NOT  ACCEPT  HONOR  KILLINGS,  OR  GOING  OFF  TO  FIGHT  FOR  ISIS,  THE  FACT  IS  A  PERCENTAGE  OF  STRICT  ISLAMIC  FAMILIES,  WILL  PRODUCE  CHILDREN  THAT  WILL  GROW  UP  TO  BECOME  ISIS  MINDED,  AND  SO  PRODUCE  VIOLENCE  NEAR  OR  FAR.  THEN  YOU  DO  HAVE  TO  WONDER  WHY  STRICT  ISLAMIC  RELIGIOUS  PEOPLE [PARENTS, INDIVIDUALS]  WANT  TO  COME  AND  LIVE  IN  WESTERN  NATIONS [PREDISPOSING  NOT  COMING  TO  PLAN  ON  KILLING  PEOPLE]  IN  THE  FIRST  PLACE.  SURELY  YOU  WOULD  THINK  SUCH  PEOPLE  WOULD  BE  MUCH  HAPPIER  LIVING  IN  AN  ISLAMIC  NATION.

FOR  CHRISTIANS,  LET  ME  MAKE  IT  VERY  CLEAR,  CHRISTIANS  ARE  NOT  ALLOWED  BY  THE  GOD  OF  THE  BIBLE,  ESPECIALLY  UNDER  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT,  TO  TAKE  THE  LAW  INTO  THEIR  OWN  HANDS!!! 

WE  AS  CHRISTIANS  MUST  STAND  FOR  THE  TRUTHS  OF  GOD,  WE  MUST  PREACH  AND  TEACH  THE  BIBLE,  PAYING  SPECIAL  ATTENTION  TO  WHERE  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  OVER-RIDES  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT  IN  CERTAIN  WAYS.  PAYING  ATTENTION  TO  THE  EXAMPLES  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT, WHERE  TAKING  PERSONAL  VIOLENCE  ON  PEOPLE  IS  NO  WHERE  TO  BE  FOUND.  CHRISTIANS  TEACH  THE  TRUTHS  OF  GOD,  BUT  LEAVE  PUNISHMENT  OF  SIN  TO  GOD,  IN  HIS  TIME.  CHRISTIANS  ARE  TO  HATE  SIN,  BUT  LOVE  THE  SINNER.  CHRISTIANS  ARE  TO  HAVE  NO  HATRED  FOR  ANYONE  PER  SE.  OF  COURSE  UNDER  A  SITUATION  OF  A  "HITLER  GOVERNMENT"  CHRISTIANS  WILL  NOT  IN  ANY  WAY  CONDONE  SUCH  EVIL;  THEY  WILL  SPEAK  OUT  CONCERNING  EVIL;  THEY  WILL  EITHER  STAND  UP  AGAINST  SUCH  EVIL  AND  TAKE  THE  CONSEQUENCES,  EVEN  UNTO  DEATH;  OR  THEY  WILL  FLEE  THE  SOCIETY  AND/OR  THE  NATION,  AND  SPEAK  OUT  ABOUT  ITS  EVIL  FROM  AFAR.  THEY  WILL  NOT  TAKE  THE  LAW  INTO  THEIR  OWN  HANDS,  AS  UNDER  SOME  "HONOR  KILLING."  THE  CHRISTIAN  CAN  USE  SELF-DEFENCE  IF  IN  THE  SITUATION  HIS  FAMILY [WIFE, CHILDREN]  ARE  UNDER  PERSONAL  ATTACK [ A  CHRISTIAN  MAN,  NAY  ANY  MAN,  CAN  NOT  STAND-BY  IF  FREE  OF  RESTRAINTS,  AND  DO  NOTHING  IF  HIS  WIFE  IS  GOING  TO  BE  RAPED  ETC.].  BUT  OUT  AND  OUT  VIOLENCE  HAS  NO  PART  IN  THE  CHRISTIAN  HEART,  AND  THAT  IS  VERY  EVIDENT  FROM  JESUS,  THE  APOSTLES,  AND  ALL  THE  EXAMPLE  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT.

TRULY  THE  ISLAMIC  RELIGION  HAS  TO  HAVE  A  REFORMATION  ON  ITS  TEACHING  OF  VIOLENCE,  WHATEVER  FLOWERY  NICETY-NICE  LANGUAGE  IT  MAY  BE  WRAPPED  UP  IN.  UNLESS  THAT  HAPPENS  THE  WEST  WILL  BE  FOREVER  PLAGUED  WITH  SOME  ISLAMIC  FUNDAMENTALISTS,  WHO  WILL  TAKE  THE  "VIOLENT  VERSES"  OF  THE  QUR'AN  AND  LIVE  AND  ACT  BY  THEM.  THE  ONLY  OTHER  WAY  WOULD  BE  TO  EXPELL  ALL  RELIGIOUS  MULIMS  FROM  THE  COUNTRIES  OF  THE  WEST,  AND  NOT  ALLOW  ISLAMIC  PEOPLE  TO  LIVE  IN  WESTERN  NATIONS,  AND  THAT  NOW  SEEMS  TO  BE  A  POSITION  THE  WEST  WILL  NEVER  TAKE.

HENCE  WE  NEED  TO  PRAY  ISLAM  WILL  HAVE  A  REFORMATION  ON  HOW  IT  LOOKS  AT  THE  ANCIENT  MAN  CALLED  MUHAMMAD  AND  THE  BOOK  CALLED  "THE  QUR'AN."

Keith Hunt