ISLAM--- THE NITTY-GRITTY TRUTH!!! PART 2

 HERETIC

by  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

CHAPTER 7

JIHAD

Why the Call for Holy War Is a Charter for Terror

We don't expect Islamic holy war in Ottawa, Canada's chilly capital city. But in October 2014, a young Muslim named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot an unarmed Canadian soldier who was guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier at Ottawa's National War Memorial and then was himself killed in a shoot-out inside the Canadian Parliament's Hall of Honor. 

In the immediate aftermath, a Washington Post reader sent the following to the newspaper's website: 

"ISIL, via an incredible internet marketing, recruitment and promotion campaign, is delivering a message that is resonating with westerners. Western governments and society will need to figure out how and why this message of death is more appealing than the life these folks have been given in their countries."

That is the question, in various forms, that gets asked after each new atrocity, whether it happens in Oklahoma City or Sydney, Australia. In the wake of the shooting, stabbing, and attempted beheading of the British soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on a London street by two Muslim converts, the same question was asked. One of the men, Michael Ade-bolajo, gave his answer in a handwritten note he gave to a stunned bystander. The note read:

To my beloved children know that to fight Allah's enemies is an obligation. The proofs of which are so numerous that but a handful of any of them cuts out the bewitching tongues of the Munafiqeen [hypocrites].

Do not spend your days in endless dispute with the cowardly and foolish if it means it will delay you meeting Allah's enemies on the battlefield.

Sometimes the cowardly and foolish could be those dearest to you so be prepared to turn away from them.

When you set out on this path do not look left or right.

Seek Shaheedala oh my sons . . .1

"Shaheedala" means martyrdom for the sake of Allah. It is the ultimate obligation—and reward—of the Islamic imperative of jihad: holy war.

The injunction to wage jihad is as old as the Qur'an, but in Muhammad's time there were no automatic weapons, no rocket-propelled grenades, no improvised explosive devices, no suicide vests. It was not possible to leave homemade bombs in backpacks near the finishing line of a race.

The carnage that erupted on April 15, 2013, some fifty yards from the finish line of the Boston Marathon, was apparently perpetrated by two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Born in the former Soviet Union to a Chechen father who had sought asylum in the United States in 2002, each of the brothers had received the gifts of free education, free housing, and free medical care from various U.S. governmental agencies. The younger brother, Dzhokhar, had already been granted his American citizenship, administered to him on, of all dates, September 11. Tamerlan was merely waiting for his final citizenship paperwork to be processed. 

The brothers spent months preparing for their bombing to take place on Patriots' Day, which commemorates the heroes of the American Revolution. How to explain such staggering ingratitude toward their adopted homeland?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offered at least the beginnings of an explanation in a note written not long before he was apprehended: "I'm jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus [the highest level of Paradise] (in-shallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA) [a martyr inshallah] to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. A[llah Ak]bar!"2 

He also offered this explicit account of his and his brother's motivations:

the ummah is beginning to rise/ [unintelligible] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that[?]3

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is very far from the only young man in the West to have fallen under the spell of jihad. 

Consider the near-perfect all-American life of Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani national who also became a naturalized U.S. citizen. 

He arrived on a student visa, married an American, graduated from college, worked his way up the corporate ladder to become a junior financial analyst for a cosmetics company in Connecticut, and received his citizenship at the age of thirty. A year later, in 2010, Shahzad tried to blow up as many of his fellow citizens as possible in a failed car bombing in New York's Times Square. 

Prior to his courtroom sentencing, the criminal trial judge asked Shahzad about the oath of allegiance to the United States that he had taken, in which, like all newly minted citizens, he did "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen." Shahzad replied: "I sweared [sic], but I didn't mean it"—the legal equivalent of swearing with one hand and crossing his fingers with the other, but with far more damaging consequences. He then expressed his regret about the failure of his plot and added that he would gladly have sacrificed a thousand lives in the service of Allah. He concluded by predicting the downfall of his new homeland, the United States.

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.

None of this is convincing. 

Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) 

We must move beyond such facile explanations. 

The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation.

But it also reflects the influence of the strategic minds behind global jihad, in particular Sayyid Qutb, the author of Milestones, who explicitly argued that Islam was not just a religion but a revolutionary political movement; Abdullah Az-zam, Osama bin Laden's mentor, who propounded an individualist "lone wolf" theory of jihad; and the Pakistani army general S. K. Malik, who argued in The Quranic Conception of War that the only center of gravity in warfare was the soul of the enemy and that therefore terror was the supreme weapon.4

In Great Britain, the radical cleric Anjem Choudary has declared: 

"We believe there will be complete domination of the world by Islam." 

That domination can only come through the waging of jihad. 

Through his words, Choudary has helped to send hundreds of Europeans to the battlefields in Iraq and Syria, as well as to plant the seeds for jihadist attacks inside Britain. Choudary also supports the IS beheadings of Americans and Britons, telling a Washington Post reporter that the victims deserved to die. 

This message may seem foreign or outlandish to most Westerners, but we underestimate its appeal at our peril.

The Call to Jihad

As a sixteen-and seventeen-year-old girl in Kenya, I believed in jihad. With the enthusiasm of idealistic young Americans who want to join the Peace Corps, I was ready for holy war.

For me, jihad was something to aspire to beyond chores for my mother and grandmother and my dreaded math class. 

The ideal of holy war encouraged me to get out of the house and engage in charitable work for others. It gave me a focus for my inner struggle; now I could struggle to be a better Muslim. Every prayer, every veil, every fast, every acknowledgment of Allah signalled that I was a better person or at least on the path to becoming one. I had value, and if the hardships of life in the Old Racecourse Road section of Nairobi felt overwhelming, it was only temporary. I would be rewarded in the afterlife.

That's how jihad is generally first presented to most young Muslims—as a manifestation of the inner struggle to be a good Muslim. It's a spiritual struggle, a path toward the light. But then things change. Gradually, jihad ceases to be simply an inner struggle; it becomes an outward one, a holy war in the name of Islam by an army of glorious "brothers" ranged against the enemies of Allah and the infidel. Yet this martial jihad seems even more appealing.

The origins of jihad can be traced back to the foundational Islamic texts.5 

Key verses in the Qur'an, and many verses in the hadith, call for jihad, a type of religious warfare to spread the land ruled by Allah's laws. For example:

9:5 "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful."

8:60 "Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly."

8:39 "And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere."

8:65 "O Prophet! rouse the Believers to the fight. If there are twenty amongst you, patient and persevering, they will vanquish two hundred."

Today, these words have lost none of their appeal. Beguilingly presented by modern theorists of jihad such as Qutb, Azzam, and Malik, they can readily inspire young men to try to replicate the achievements of Muhammad's warriors in battle.

Celebrity Jihad

When I was a teenager, only a few decades ago, there were only so many jihadists who could be recruited. 

It was a tedious process of finding the right recruits in the right mosques and madrassas. It required a form of charismatic retail politics, of selecting, nurturing, and pulling along. Today, it is far easier. All a jihadist needs is access to a smartphone, and recruits will follow him. 

Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, even the pages of Facebook have become virtual recruiting grounds with a global reach. For young people who have very limited chances to achieve fame and notoriety in their current situation, jihad is like one giant selfie. Suddenly, they have Twitter followers and video viewers. Suddenly, more and more people are paying attention to them. They become social media celebrities.

An Egyptian student, Islam Yaken, is a good example. He studied engineering, received a law degree, and was fluent in French and Arabic. A fitness buff who once posted workout tips and photos of his bare torso on his Facebook page, he left Egypt to join IS. His photo uploads changed from gym scenes to images of him riding a horse and holding a sword. The news raced across Egyptian social media websites, only amplifying his newfound celebrity.

Jihadists do not have to wait for martyrdom to bring them fame. 

Thanks to electronic media, they can be immortalized in an instant. Photos and 140-character postings from Syria and Iraq currently litter the Internet. 

They show smiling jihadists, relaxed, with their rifles or trophies of war. A young man named Yilmaz, a Dutch national from a Turkish family, posted a photo of himself holding a cute Syrian toddler. After a Florida man, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, carried out a suicide bombing in Syria, an image of him smiling and holding a cat popped up online. 

Another who has achieved instant infamy is the man nicknamed Jihadi John, whose face was disguised but whose English accent was clearly audible as he appeared in IS videos with the severed heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. 

As Shiraz Maher of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College, London, explains, the message is: "Come out here and have the time of your life. It makes it look like jihadi summer camp."

Jihad, it seems, has become a kind of hip lifestyle for disaffected youth. Online videos use "jihad rap." There is a distinctive jihadist look, too. In photos and videos, they all look the same: men in the backs of trucks, waving their rifles aloft, bearded, dressed in black. Whether they are IS warriors driving toward Baghdad, Boko Haram members striking a Christian village in northern Nigeria, Taliban fighters attacking a school in Peshawar, the style is very much the same.

Yet we should not confuse style with substance. While modern technology allows jihadist groups to glamorize their activities, the content of their videos remains firmly rooted in Islamic tradition and the theory of global jihad. 

These are rebels with a cause. In their own minds, they are reliving the glorious past of holy war, reenacting Muhammad's early battles against the Quraysh, when he and his men were grossly outnumbered yet still were victorious, egged on by Allah's promise of rewards for those who died as martyrs.

I was about eight years old when I first heard the tales of the Prophet's army, at my Qur'an school in Saudi Arabia. (Our teachers showed us dramatic video re-creations of the battles.) Make no mistake: today's jihadist fighters have been raised with these same stories—and often the ineptitude of the jihadists' opponents seems to make history repeat itself. In Iraq, government soldiers fled their positions when IS attacked, despite being better armed than their attackers. In Nigeria, too, despite substantial Western assistance, the authorities failed miserably to free "our girls" from Boko Haram.

After the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the airport attack in Karachi, Pakistan, the jihadist websites gloated that Allah had weakened the enemy, allowing victory—exactly the same story I heard from Somalis back in 1994 after eighteen American military personnel were killed and mutilated in Mogadishu. Even the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan in exchange for five Taliban leaders can be presented as another victory for Allah's warriors over the infidel.

The jihadists, then, are not simply disaffected youths from deprived backgrounds who have surfed the wrong websites. They are men and women with a sense of sacred mission. The words of a ten-year-old Palestinian boy, speaking after his father's own death, perfectly capture what I mean:

By Allah, oh my father, I love you more than my own soul, but that is trivial because of my religion, my cause and my Al-Aqsa [the mosque in Jerusalem]. Father, my eyes will shed no tears, but my finger will pull the trigger—this trigger that I still remember. I will never forget, beloved father, the times when you taught me the love of jihad. You taught me the love of arms, so that I would be a knight, Allah willing. I will follow in your steps and fight the enemies on the battlefield. Every drop of blood that dripped from your pure body is worth dozens of bullets directed towards the enemies' chests. Tomorrow I will grow up, tomorrow I will avenge, and the battlefields will know who is the son of the Martyr, the commander, Ashraf Mushtaha. Finally, father, we are not saying goodbye, rather, I'll see you as a Shahid [Martyr] in Paradise. [I am] your son, who longs to meet you, the young knight, Nairn, son of Ashraf Mushtaha.7

"You taught me the love of jihad." That is the message being heard today across the globe. And thousands are heeding it.

Global Jihad

The scale of the jihadist problem is growing much faster than most people in the West want to face. 

At the University of Maryland at College Park, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), part of the Global Terrorism Database, tracks terror attacks worldwide. What they are finding is that "worldwide terrorism is reaching new levels of destructiveness," according to Gary LaFree, a START director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Maryland. Leading this dramatic rise is an "incredible growth" in jihadist attacks perpetrated by "al-Qaeda affiliates." 

In 2012, START identified the six most lethal jihad terror groups as the Taliban (more than 2,500 fatalities), Boko Haram (more than 1,200), Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (more than 960), Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (more than 950), Al-Qaeda in Iraq (more than 930), and Al-Shabaab (more than 700).

The numbers for 2013 and 2014 will likely be even higher. Places such as Iraq and Syria are of course a long way away from the United States: it is five and a half thousand miles from New York to Damascus. Even Europeans tend to regard the Middle East as distant: from London to Damascus is, after all, nearly three thousand miles.

To many of us, Syria may just seem like this decade's Bosnia or Rwanda; we tend to assume, in a slightly cynical or fatalistic way, that the next decade will bring along a new list of distant conflict zones. On an intellectual level, we may accept that we should be concerned about jihadists abroad, but on an emotional level, most people in the West are still disengaged.

But the rise of Western jihadists is changing that. Almost no one in the United States, Canada, Australia, or Europe could escape the ghastly spectacle of a British-born jihadist beheading helpless American and British captives.

A report from the AIVD, the Dutch intelligence service, describes a pattern that can be seen not only in the Netherlands but right across Western Europe: young Muslims are quickly moving from being merely "fellow traveler sympathizers" with jihadists to being fully fledged "ruthless fighters." It is not just an apostate like me who must now live in fear; even moderate Muslims face threats. "Muslims in the Netherlands who openly oppose joining the Syrian conflict and challenge the highly intolerant and antidemocratic dogma of jihadism have found themselves increasingly subject to physical and virtual intimidation," according to the AIVD.8 High-profile Muslims who oppose the jihadists "cannot even go out in public without protection," while former Muslim radicals, who have turned away from the violent ideology, are severely threatened.9 

And the call to jihad is transmitted through multiple channels. As the AIVD report puts it: "it is now available in multiple forms and many languages, with material ranging from the movement's classic written works to sound recordings of lectures and films from the front line."10

The jihadists have the upper hand in Europe—and they know it. In April 2014, a Dutch jihadist addressed the following tweet directly to the AIVD: 

"Greetings from Syria! Intensively monitored for years, sent back 4 times and now drinking Pepsi in Syria? Que pasa what went wrong?" 

The AIVD report grimly predicts attacks throughout Europe, on governments, on Jews, on moderate Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites. The threat, it concludes, is greater than ever before.11

Why should the United States be any different, even if in relative terms the Muslim share of the population is smaller than in most Western European countries? A Pew survey from 2007 noted that American Muslims under the age of thirty were twice as likely as older Muslims to believe that suicide bombings in defense of Islam could be justified, and 7 percent of American Muslims between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said that they had a "favorable" view of Al-Qaeda.12

While the proportion may be small, the absolute number of Americans committed to political Islam and willing to contemplate violence to advance its goals is not trivial.Another Pew survey, from 2011, found that somewhere around 180,000 American Muslims regarded suicide bombings as being justified in some way.13 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS, is said to have told his U.S. Army Reservist guards when he walked away from four years of detention in Camp Bucca in Iraq, "I'll see you in New York." I fear it is only a matter of time before IS does indeed manifest itself in Manhattan.

Islam has always been transnational. It was founded and established and spread across the world when the nation-state and national identity were at best inchoate and more often nonexistent. People belonged to tribes, city-states, empires, or religious orders. But whereas Christianity was configured from its inception to co-exist with states and empires alike (if they would tolerate Christianity), Islam from the outset aspired to be church, state, and empire. If you are a self-respecting Islamist, you are therefore bound to be a crosser of national borders. You may need to gain local power, but your ultimate goal is to have Islam rule the world. And today you can write and talk openly about that goal on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else you like.

Islamic State's social media mastermind is believed to be Ahmad Abousamra, a dual American-Syrian citizen, who grew up in the comfortable Boston suburb of Stoughton, while his father, worked as an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He attended the private Xaverian Brothers Catholic high school in Westwood, Massachusetts, before transferring to Stoughton High in his senior year, when he made the honor roll. He also made the dean's list at Northeastern University.

If this sounds like a privileged upbringing, that's because it was. Yet, according to the testimony of FBI agents, Abousamra "celebrated" the 9/11 attacks and, while in college in the early 2000s, expressed his support for murdering Americans because "they paid taxes to support the government and were kufar [nonbelievers]." 

Abousamra worshipped at the same Cambridge mosque as the Tsarnaev brothers and five other high-profile terrorists, among them Afia Siddiqui, an MIT scientist turned Al-Qaeda agent known as "Lady Al-Qaeda," who was sentenced to eighty-six years in prison for planning a chemical attack in New York.

An MIT scientist. A dean's list student at Northeastern. These jihadists are hardly uneducated, unskilled, or impoverished. 

Some have been the beneficiaries of the best Western education that money can buy. That they have nevertheless committed themselves to holy war against the West is deeply perplexing to those of us who cannot imagine anything being more attractive than the Western way of life. That is why we cast around desperately for explanations of their behavior— any explanations, other than the obvious one.

The Roots of Jihad

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, there was a rush to deny that the Tsarnaev brothers had been motivated by religious radicalism. 

President Obama went out of his way to avoid referring to Islam in his statements after the Boston bombing. 

When it became impossible to deny that the perpetrators had in fact been avidly reading the online tirades of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian teacher and mentor of Osama bin Laden, the Islamic Society of Boston issued a bland statement saying that "one suspect [had] disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology of the ISB Cambridge mosque."

It was much the same story just over a month later, on May 22, when Lee Rigby was hacked to death in Woolwich. Within hours, a woman named Julie Siddiqi, representing the Islamic Society of Britain (and a convert to the faith), stepped before the microphones to attest that all good Muslims were "sickened" by the attack, "just like everyone else." 

The Guardian ran a headline quoting a Muslim Londoner: "These poor idiots have nothing to do with Islam." Try telling that to Lee Rigby's murderer who killed him while yelling ("Allahu ak-bar") (God Is Great).

Omar Bakri also claimed to speak for the true faith following the Woolwich killing. Of course, he was unavailable for the cameras in England because the Islamist group he founded, Al-Muhajiroun, was banned in 2010, so he spoke from Tripoli in northern Lebanon, where he now lives under an agreement with the Lebanese government that prevents him from leaving the country for thirty years. 

A decade earlier, in London, Bakri had taught Michael Adebolajo, the accused Woolwich killer who was videotaped at the scene. 

"A quiet man, very shy, asking lots of questions about Islam," Bakri recalled of his student, the terrorist. The teacher was impressed to see in the grisly video of Lee Rigby's murder how far his shy disciple had come, "standing firm, courageous, brave. Not running away. . . . The Prophet said an infidel and his killer will not meet in Hell. That's a beautiful saying. May God reward him for his actions. ... I don't see it as a crime as far as Islam is concerned."14

Omar Bakri is not making up Muhammad's words. If the Qur'an or the hadith urges the believer to kill infidels ("slay them wherever ye catch them" [2:191]) or to behead them ("when ye meet the Unbelievers [in fight], smite at their necks; At length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly [on them]" [47:4])—or to whip adulterers and stone them to death (Sahih Muslim 17:4192), 

then we cannot be wholly surprised when fundamentalists do precisely those things. 

Those who say that the butchers of Islamic State are misinterpreting these verses have a problem. The Qur'an itself explicitly urges pitilessness.

Or consider the case of Boko Haram, the organization that briefly attracted the attention of the American public by kidnapping 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last year. 

The translation of Boko Haram from the Hausa language is usually given in English-language media as "Western Education Is Forbidden." But "Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden" might be more accurate. 

Like individual terrorists, organizations such as Boko Haram do not spring from nowhere. The men who establish such groups, whether in Africa, Asia, or even Europe, are members of long-established Muslim communities, most of whose members are happy to lead peaceful lives. To understand why the jihadists are flourishing, you need to understand the dynamics within those communities.

It begins simply enough, usually with the establishment of an association of men dedicated to the practice of the sunnah (the tradition of guidance from the Prophet Muhammad). 

There will be a lead preacher, not unlike Boqol Sawm, the Muslim Brotherhood imam I encountered as a girl in Nairobi. Much of the young man's preaching will address the place of women. He will recommend that girls and women be kept indoors and covered from head to toe if they are to venture outside. He will also condemn the permissiveness of Western society.

What kind of response will he encounter? In the United States and in Europe, some moderate Muslims may quietly draw him to the attention of authorities. Women may voice concerns about the attacks on their freedoms. 

But in other parts of the world, where law and order are lacking, such young men and their extremist messages can thrive. 

In particular, where governments are weak, corrupt, or nonexistent, the message of Boko Haram and its counterparts is especially compelling. Not implausibly, they can blame poverty on official corruption and offer as an antidote the pure principles of the Prophet.

But why do so many young men turn from these words to violence? At first, they can count on some admiration for this fundamentalist message from within their own communities. Some may encounter opposition from established Muslim leaders who feel threatened. But the preacher and his cohorts persevere because perseverance in the sunnah is one of the most important keys to heaven. And over time, the following grows, to the point where it is as large as that of the Muslim community's established leaders. That is when the showdown happens—and the argument for "holy war" suddenly makes sense to leader and follower alike.

The history of Boko Haram has followed precisely this script. 

The group was founded in 2002 by a young Islamist called Mohammed Yusuf, who started out preaching in a Muslim community in Borno state of northern Nigeria. He set up an educational complex, including a mosque and an Islamic school. For seven years, mostly poor families flocked to hear his message. But in 2009, the Nigerian government investigated Boko Haram and ultimately arrested several members, including Yusuf himself. The crackdown sparked violence that left about seven hundred dead.

Yusuf soon died in prison—the government said he was killed while trying to escape—but the seeds had been planted. Under one of Yusuf's lieutenants, Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram turned to jihad. In 2011, Boko Haram launched its first terror attack in Borno. Four people were killed, and from then on violence became an integral part, if not the central part, of its mission.

It is no longer plausible to argue that organizations such as Boko Haram—or, for that matter, Islamic State-—have nothing to do with Islam. It is no longer credible to define "extremism" as some disembodied threat, meting out death without any ideological foundation, a problem to be dealt with by purely military methods, preferably drone strikes. We need to tackle the root problem of the violence that is plaguing our world today, and that must be the doctrine of Islam itself.

The Practice of Jihad: The Worldwide War on Christians

One of the most devastating manifestations of the modern era of jihad is the violent oppression of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority nations all over the world.

In Islamic history, the land controlled by Islam is referred to as dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam). The land controlled by non-Muslims is dar al-Harb (the abode of War).15 

Historically, after being conquered by Muslims, groups deemed People of the Book, including Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, were required to pay a special tax, the jizya, as a mark of their humiliation. If they did so, they were allowed to keep their religion (9:29). Yet there was always a strain of "eliminationism" in Islam, too. The Prophet himself promised to "expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and . . . not leave any but Muslims" (Sahih Muslim 19: 4363-67). The Quran (5:51) warns Muslims: 

"take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors." Muslim men may marry Jewish or Christian women but Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men because under Islamic law the religious identity of children is passed through the father (5:5).

Modern Islamists go further. 

In some countries, governments and their agents openly sponsor anti-Christian violence, burning churches and imprisoning observant Christians. In others, rebel groups and self-proclaimed vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries. Often, local leaders and governments do little to stop them or simply turn a blind eye.

This phenomenon of Christophobia (as opposed to the far more widely discussed "Islamophobia") receives remarkably little coverage in the Western media. Part of this reticence may be due to fear of provoking additional violence. But part is clearly a result of the very effective efforts by lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading journalists and editors in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a deep-rooted Islamophobia. This, of course, extends with an Orwellian illogic to coverage of Muslim violence against Christians. 

Yet any fair-minded assessment of recent events leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the Christophobia evident in Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.

Take Nigeria, where the population is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, who for years have lived on the edge of civil war. But the stakes have risen dramatically with the gains made by Boko Haram, which has openly stated that it will kill all of Nigeria's Christians. And it is making good on its promise. In the first half of 2014, Boko Haram killed at least 2,053 civilians in ninety-five attacks.16 They have used machetes, guns, and gasoline bombs, shouting "H/-lahu akbar" (God is great) while launching their attacks, one of which—on a Christmas Day gathering—killed forty-two Catholics. They have targeted bars, beauty salons, and banks. They have murdered Christian clergymen, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers.

In Sudan, the authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian (as well as animist) minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government's sustained policy of persecution, which culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan's Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been charged at the International Criminal Court in The Hague with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted South Sudan's independence in 2012, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, for example, Christians are still subjected to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnapping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that there are now 1 million internally displaced persons in South Sudan.17

Both kinds of persecution—-undertaken by nongovernmental groups as well as by agents of the state—have come together in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. On October 9, 2012, in the Maspero area of Cairo, Coptic Christians—who make up roughly 5 percent of Egypt's population of 81 million18—marched in protest against a wave of attacks by Islamists, including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders, that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship. During the protest, Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on protesters, crushing and killing at least twenty-four and wounding more than three hundred people.19 Within two months, tens of thousands of Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks.20

Nor is Egypt the only Arab country where Christian minorities have come under attack. Even before the advent of IS, it was dangerous to be a Christian in Iraq. Since 2003, more than nine hundred Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed in Baghdad alone, and seventy churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). 

Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of Christians in the country from just over a million before 2003 to fewer than half a million today. AINA understandably describes this as an "incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq." The recent decimation by IS forces of Mosul's two-thousand-year-old Christian population—who fled under threat of death or forced conversion, and saw their possessions stolen and looted, their homes marked with "N" (for Nazarene) and their churches desecrated—is merely the latest episode in a campaign of persecution.

One Mosul resident, Bashar Nasih Behnam, escaped with his two children. "There is not a single Christian family left in Mosul," he said. "The last one was a disabled Christian woman. They came to her and said you have to get out and if you don't we will cut off your head with a sword. That was the last family." Those fleeing were also robbed: the IS fighters took their money and gold, ripped earrings from women's ears, and confiscated mobile phones.

Then there are the states where intolerance is part and parcel of the nation's legal code. Pakistan's Christians are a tiny minority—only about 1.6 percent of a population of more than 180 million. But they are subject to intense segregation and discrimination: allowed to shop only at a few sparsely stocked stores, forbidden to draw water from wells earmarked for Muslims, and forced to bury their dead, stacked on top of one another, in tiny graveyards because Muslims cannot be buried near people of other faiths.

They are also subjected to Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws, which make it illegal to declare belief in the Christian Trinity. 

When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. In the spring of 2010, the offices of the international Christian aid group World Vision were attacked by ten men armed with grenades, who left six people dead and four wounded. A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack, on the ground that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the survivors of a major earthquake.)

Not even Indonesia—often touted as the world's most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation—has been immune to the fever of Christophobia.Between 2010 and 2011, according to data compiled by the Christian Post, the number of violent incidents committed against religious minorities (and at 8 percent of the population, Christians are the country's largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276.

Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in Saudi Arabia as foreign workers, even private acts of Christian prayer are banned. To enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim's. Saudi Arabia bans the building of churches, and its textbooks enshrine anti-Christian and anti-Jewish dogma: sixth-grade students are taught that "Jews and Christians are enemies of the believers." An eighth-grade textbook says, "The Apes are the people of the Sabbath, the Jews; and the Swine are the infidels of the communion of Jesus, the Christians."21 

Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.

(AND  WE  SUPPORT  IN  DIFFERENT  WAYS  MANY  OF  THESE  COUNTRIES  -  WE  SHOULD  BE  HAVING  NOTHING  TO  DO  WITH  THEM,  BUT  INSTEAD  WE  GET  SILENCE  FROM  THE  GOVERNMENTS  OF  THE  WEST  -  NO  WONDER  GOD  SAYS  OUR  LEADERS  ARE  MAD  AND  OUR  PROPHETS  PROFANE  -  Keith Hunt)

Anti-Christian violence is not centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. It is, rather, an expression of anti-Christian animus that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities. As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have "lost the protection of their societies."

Of course, intolerance of different faiths is not unique to Islam. The Roman Empire first persecuted Christians, then persecuted non-Christians after Christianity was adopted as the Empire's official religion. 

In medieval Christendom there was no "religious freedom" as we would recognize it today; heretics were cruelly punished, Jews persecuted. When Pope Urban II called for the first crusade in 1095, he told knights willing to journey to Jerusalem that they would be forgiven all their past sins if they killed unbelievers in the Holy Land. And when European Christians set out to conquer and colonize the world, their treatment of "heathens" was often brutal to the point of genocide. 

Yet Patricia Crone argues that there was always something unique about the Muslim concept of jihad—"the belief that God had chosen one people over others and ordered them to go conquer the earth." 

Christians today, with few exceptions, repudiate the intolerance of the past. In the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust forced Christian thinkers to confront the pernicious role of anti-Semitism in European history. 

The contrast with the Muslim world is stark. There, intolerance is on the rise and the remit of jihad has been extended to include all nonbelievers.

Why Are the Jihadists Winning? Because We Are Letting Them

In July 2014, the prospect of a flag bearing the words of the Shahada being raised over Downing Street got the attention of one hundred British imams, who signed a letter urging "British Muslim communities not to fall prey to any form of sectarian divisions or social discord" but rather "to continue the generous and tireless efforts to support all of those affected by the crisis in Syria and unfolding events in Iraq . . . from the UK in a safe and responsible way." Qari Muhammad Asim, the imam at the Makkah Mosque in Leeds and one of the authors of the letter, told BBC radio: "Imams from a cross-section of theological backgrounds have come together to give a very strong message to young British Muslims who might be inclined to go to Syria or Iraq to fight, saying to them, 'Please don't expose yourselves, don't put your lives at risk and the lives of others around you.'" Responding to a question, he went further:

Islam itself has been hijacked and [some] people . . . have been completely brainwashed. It's completely ridiculous to say that people, fellow human beings, are enemies and as a result they should be blown up. Obviously, social media plays a huge part, the Internet plays a huge part, in brainwashing and radicalizing people.22

According to Asim, more than one hundred imams were planning to launch appeals on social media and platforms like Twitter. They have even developed a website, imamsonline.com.

"A lot of work needs to be done," he acknowledged. But "it's not just the responsibility of the Muslim community and the imams. It's law enforcement, intelligence services. We all need to work together in partnership and make sure that young British Muslims are not preyed upon by those who want to use them for their own political gains."

It would, of course, be deeply reassuring if we could believe that the Western jihadists are merely the victims of online brainwashing and that a few moderate websites would soon fix the problem. 

But the reality is very different. Those who have been recruited to the cause of jihad have not just been unlucky in their Internet browsing selections. 

Since the 1990s, foreign-born imams have established themselves in pockets of London and other major European cities, preaching sermons and distributing audio recordings in which they have explicitly and repeatedly called for jihad.

With the best of intentions, no doubt, the British government opened its doors to many of these imams, often recognizing them as legitimate asylum seekers and offering them the usual welfare benefits available to those fleeing persecution. 

To give just one example, the Finsbury Park Mosque, led by the Egyptian imam and now convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri, had among its congregation the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, the 9/11 "twentieth hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be Los Angeles airport bomber Ahmed Ressam, as well as Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who stands accused by the Pakistani government of murdering the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

In response to this kind of threat, the British government developed what it calls the "Prevent strategy." Prevent is supposed to stop Britons and residents from being drawn into terrorist activities and networks, by working with all branches of government, from education to law enforcement. For instance, Prevent is supposed to help the immigration authorities to deny visas to extremist imams. But the remit of Prevent is broad: it is supposed to cover all forms of terrorism, from right-wing extremism to something vaguely called "nonviolent extremism," whatever that means.

The potential weaknesses of this approach can be seen in the comments of one of its regional managers, Farooq Siddiqui, who in 2014 used a Facebook chat to offer his approval to Britons who wanted to travel to Syria to fight against the regime of President Assad, saying that these men had "walked the walk." He compared these fighting jihadists to British Jews who might join the Israel Defense Forces and could then return to the United Kingdom, arguing on that basis that jihadists returning from Syria should not face automatic arrest. "If a man describes himself as wanting to help the oppressed and dies," Siddiqui wrote, "in that case he is a martyr."23 It is not immediately obvious what a man like Siddiqui is going to prevent, aside from a serious discussion of the problem Britain faces.

Ghaffar Hussein, the managing director of Quilliam, a British think tank working on combatting terrorism, notes that jihad is appealing because of its "one size fits all" set of answers to complex problems. 

Introspection is not required, he notes, because all blame is shifted to outside enemies and "anti-Muslim conspiracy theories." The jihad narrative has therefore become "the default anti-establishment politics of today. It is a means of expressing solidarity and asserting a bold new identity while being a vehicle for seeking the restoration of pride and self-dignity." In response, "mainstream Muslim commentators"—not to mention non-Muslims—have failed to articulate a positive narrative that does not simply reinforce the idea that Muslims are somehow victims. In short, Hussein's argument is that the jihadists have the more compelling narrative. To understand the power of that narrative, let's look more closely at what motivates young Western-educated Muslims to sign up for jihad.

In 2013 Umm Haritha, a twenty-year-old Canadian, traveled to Syria via Turkey to join Islamic State. Within a week, she had married an IS fighter, a Palestinian national who had been living in Sweden. He was killed five months later and Umm, a widow, turned to Hogging, offering advice to others who wished to move to Syria, marry jihadists, and create families inside the IS caliphate.

Her words make for interesting reading. In an interview with Canada's CBC via text messages, Umm described herself as "middle class," adding that her decision to join jihad was made by a desire to "live a life of honor" under Islamic law rather than the laws of the "few/ar," or unbelievers. She had begun her journey to jihad in Canada, where she donned the niqab, a veil that exposes nothing more than the wearer's eyes. She told her interviewer that she felt "mocked" and harassed by her fellow Canadians, adding, "Life was degrading and an embarrassment and nothing like the multicultural freedom of expression and religion they make it out to be, and when I heard that the Islamic State had sharia in some cities in Syria, it became an automatic obligation upon me since I was able to come here."24

Umm's online postings describe life in Manbij, an IS-controlled city of 200,000 close to the Turkish border, and show images such as the white loudspeaker van that patrols the city streets to remind residents of their daily prayers. She notes approvingly that a man was recently crucified and beheaded for the crime of robbing and raping a woman. And she adds that many of those who have moved to the caliphate have "ripped up their passports." Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS leader, who has renamed himself "Caliph Ibrahim," has called on Muslims worldwide to move to the caliphate, saying, "Those who can immigrate to the Islamic State should immigrate, as immigration to the house of Islam is a duty." 

(THAT  WOULD  BE  A  NICE  WAY  TO  HAVE  ALL  PEOPLE  OF  ISLAMIC  RELIGION  LEAVE  THE  WESTERN  NATIONS  -  THE  PROBLEM  WITH  SOME  OF  THEIR  CHILDREN  WOULD  BE  ENDED  -  Keith Hunt)

As the stepbrother of a radicalized British man explained, the purveyors of jihad know what their recruits "are craving—identity, respect, empowerment. They push all the right buttons—make them feel special. And once you're in the door, it's like family. They look after each other."

Consider, too, a 2014 BBC 5 Live interview with a man calling himself Abu Osama, who claimed to be from the north of England and said that he was training with the Al-Nusra Front in Syria with the ultimate goal of establishing a caliphate (Khilafah in Arabic) across the Islamic world. 

Osama told the BBC: 

"I have no intention of coming back to Britain, because I have come to revive the Islamic Khilafah. I don't want to come back to what I have left behind. There is nothing in Britain—it is just pure evil." 

And for emphasis he added: "If and when I come back to Britain it will be when this Khilafah—this Islamic state—comes to conquer Britain and I come to raise the black flag of Islam over Downing Street, over Buckingham Palace, over Tower Bridge and over Big Ben."25 

(Anjem Choudary has promised the same, predicting that the black flag of IS will fly over both 10 Downing Street and the White House after the conclusion of the great global battle that is now under way.)

Such seemingly wild narratives are not out of the mainstream; rather, they present jihad just in the way it has always been taught. 

"If you look at the history of Islam," as the young jihadist Osama put it, "you will see that the Prophet fought against those who fought against him. He never fought those that never fought against the Islamic state. Where I am, the people love us, the people love the mujahideen, the warriors." 

As for Osama's family, at first they had found it "hard to accept," but he had won them over to his "good cause." As he put it: "They are a bit scared but I tell them we will meet in the afterlife. This is just a temporary separation. They said, 'We understand now what you are doing,' and my mother said, 'I have sold you to Allah. I don't want to see you again in this world.'"26

Is Jihadism Curable?

The Harvard Kennedy School scholar Jessica Stern has spent years studying counterterrorism and, in particular, efforts to prevent the spread of jihad. 

Indeed, she was consulted on the development of an anti-jihad effort in the Netherlands after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh ten years ago. In a recent article, she describes in detail a Saudi Arabian jihadist rehabilitation program that has "treated" thousands of militants, and claims that the graduates have been "reintegrated into mainstream society much more successfully than ordinary criminals."27

The Saudi approach, Stern notes, is inspired by the efforts of other governments in other regions of the world to "deprogram" everyone from neo-Nazis to drug lords. 

The goal is to get them "to abandon their radical ideology or renounce their violent means or both." 

The method is a full-time residential program that includes "psychological counseling, vocational training, art therapy, sports, and religious reeducation," along with "career placement" services for themselves and their families, if needed. Upon completion, the program's graduates— some of whom have been previously incarcerated in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay—receive housing, a car, and even funds to pay for a wedding. The Saudis will even assist them with finding a wife.

But the program doesn't end there. There is what Stern describes as "an extensive post-release program as well, which involve[s] extensive surveillance." Rather like convicted sex offenders in the West, ex-jihadists will be monitored for most if not all of the rest of their lives. Stern goes on to explain that the "guiding philosophy" behind the program is that "jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance." Accordingly, the Saudis have a very specific term for the program's participants. They are "beneficiaries."

Stern maintains that, while terrorist movements "often arise in reaction to an injustice, real or imagined," that the supporters "feel must be corrected," ideology generally plays a limited role in someone's decision to join the terror cause. She writes: 

"The reasons that people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose their professions: market conditions, social networks, education, individual preferences. Just as the passion for justice and law that drives a lawyer at first may not be what keeps him working at a law firm, a terrorist's motivations for remaining in, or leaving, his 'job' change over time." 

Stern also argues that the terrorists who "claim to be driven by religious ideology are often very ignorant of Islam." The Saudi "beneficiaries" have, she writes, little in the way of formal education and a limited understanding of Islam.

I am deeply skeptical about all this, for two reasons. 

First, as part of the Saudi program Stern describes, clerics are brought in to teach the beneficiaries that only "the legitimate rulers of Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. They preach against takfir [accusing other Muslims of apostasy] and the selective reading of religious texts to justify violence." One participant in the program told her: "Now I understand that I cannot make decisions by reading a single verse. I have to read the whole chapter." No matter how well intentioned this approach may be, it leaves the core concept of jihad intact.

Second, we should not forget that the global jihadist network would not exist on anything like the scale it does today if it had not been for Saudi funding—to say nothing of the millions that have flowed to terrorist organizations from other Gulf states. 

As Nabeel al-Fadhel, a liberal member of Kuwait's Parliament, told The Christian Science Monitor: 

"There isn't a bomb that explodes anywhere [inside Syria] without some of its material financed by Kuwait." Noting the vast number of Kuwaitis who have donated to the jihadist cause, he added that while they may "think they are getting closer to God by giving this money," instead, "it is gong to places [they] never dreamt of."28

The last people we should expect to develop an effective counterforce to jihad are the rulers of those countries that, over the past thirty years, have played the biggest role in funding the Medina Muslims who have been jihad's most ardent advocates.

Decommissioning Jihad

In one of the many IS videos that can be found online, a British man who identifies himself as Brother Abu Muthanna al Yemeni extolls the virtues of jihad. 

He encourages foreign Muslims "to answer the call of Allah and His Messenger when He calls you to what gives you life. . . . What He says gives you life is jihad."29 

This is not empty rhetoric. We need to answer these words. We need more than just a counternarrative. We need a theological reply.

The nuclear arms race of the Cold War was not won by the proponents of unilateral disarmament. No matter how many thousands of people turned out for antinuclear marches in London or Bonn, missiles were still deployed in NATO countries and pointed at the Warsaw Pact countries, which had their own missiles pointed right back at the West. 

The only way the arms race ended was with the ideological and political collapse of Soviet communism, after which there was a large-scale (though not complete) decommissioning of nuclear weapons. 

In much the same way, we need to recognize that this is an ideological conflict that will not be won until the concept of jihad has itself been decommissioned. 

We also have to acknowledge that, far from being un-Islamic, the central tenets of the jihadists are supported by centuries-old Islamic doctrine.

The IS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani recently called on Muslims to use all means to kill a "disbelieving American or European—especially the spiteful and filthy French—or an Australian or a Canadian."30 

"Please don't" is not an adequate reply. As Ghaffar Hussain, himself a former Islamist, has said, "You need to stand up, challenge them, and rubbish their ideas."

It is obviously next to impossible to redefine the word "jihad" as if its call to arms is purely metaphorical (in the style of the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers").31 

There is too much conflicting scripture, and too many examples from the Quran and hadith that the jihadists can cite to bolster their case.

Therefore I believe the best option would be to take it off the table. 

If clerics and imams and scholars and national leaders around the world declared jihad "haram" forbidden, then there would be a clear dividing line. 

Imagine the impact if those hundred imams in Great Britain had explicitly renounced the entire concept of jihad. 

Imagine if the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holy shrines, itself renounced jihad, rather than turning the jihadists into beneficiaries of (yet more of) its largesse.

And if that is too much to expect—if Muslims simply refuse to renounce jihad completely—then the next best thing would be to call their bluff about Islam being a religion of peace. 

If a tradition truly exists within Islam that interprets jihad as a purely spiritual activity, as Sufi Muslims tend to do, let us challenge other Muslims to embrace it. 

Christianity was itself once a crusading faith, as we have seen, but over time it abandoned its militancy. If Islam really is a religion of peace, then what is preventing Muslims from doing the same?

………………..

THERE  IT  IS  FROM  SOMEONE  ONCE  INSIDE  THE  ISLAMIC  RELIGION.  IF  ENOUGH  ISLAMIC  PARENTS,  GRAND-PARENTS,  TEACH  THE  NEXT  GENERATION  WHAT  THE  AUTHOR  HAS  STATED  IN  HER  LAST  PARAGRAPHS,  THEN  ISLAM  CAN  BECOME  A  RELIGION  OF  PEACE!

BUT  THE  SAD  FACT  IS  IT  WILL  NEVER  HAPPEN.  BIBLE  PROPHECY  TELLS  US  A  UNION  OF  ARAB  NATIONS,  WITH  EGYPT  AS  ITS  SPEAR-HEAD,  WILL  UNITE  TO  FORM  WHAT  THE   BIBLE  CALLS  THE  "KING  OF  THE  SOUTH"  -  WHICH  WILL  "PUSH  AT"  THE  "KING  OF  THE  NORTH"  -  A  UNITED  EUROPE  OF  THE  BABYLON  BEAST  OF  THE  BOOK  OF  REVELATION.  THE  BEAST  WILL  HAVE  NO  CHOICE  BUT  TO  COME  AGAINST,  AND  DESTROY  THIS  ARAB/ISLAMIC  UNITY.

BUT  THAT  WAR  IS  FOR  THE  VERY  END  TIME  OF  THIS  AGE,  THE  LAST  42  MONTHS  OF  THIS  AGE,  WHICH  WILL  END  WITH  THE  COMING  AGAIN  OF  THE  MESSIAH,  IN  GLORY  AND  POWER,  TO  STOP  THE  NATIONS  FROM  COMMITTING  UTTER  SUICIDE.

THEN  THERE  WILL  BE  PEACE  -  ONE  THOUSAND  YEARS  OF  PEACE  WHEN  NATIONS  WILL  LEARN  WAR  NO  MORE.

………………..

HERETIC

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

CHAPTER 8

THE TWILIGHT OF TOLERANCE

The first time I stood up to speak in a public setting was shortly after September 11, 2001. It was a public forum, a "discussion house," which is a relatively common institution in the Netherlands. I was working at a small but well respected social democratic think tank, and my boss suggested that I go.

The discussion was being hosted by a Dutch newspaper, a publication that was originally religious (Protestant), but now was very secular, and the topic was "Who Needs a Voltaire, the West or Islam?" The auditorium was packed to capacity. People who couldn't find seats were standing along the walls. And in many ways it was an interesting and unusual gathering because there were so many Muslim participants in the audience. Normally these things were almost all white because the discussion topics would be things like "How Much Control Do We Cede to the European Union?" or "Why Should We Give Up the Guilder for the Euro?" 

On this night, however, the usual members of the Amsterdam elite were rubbing shoulders with Muslims from Turkey, Morocco, and other nations, nearly all of them immigrants or the children of immigrants to the Netherlands.

There were six speakers for the evening, and five of them essentially said that it was the West that needed a Voltaire, meaning that the West was the place most in need of reform. Their argument was that the West had a blind spot, that it had a long and wicked history of exploitation and imperialism, that it was tone deaf to what went on in the rest of the world, and it needed another Voltaire to explain all of this.

I was sitting in the middle of this sea of faces, white, brown, and black, and just listening, increasingly aware that I disagreed with what was being said. Finally, the sixth panelist spoke, a man from Iran, a refugee, a lawyer. 

"Well," he said, "look at these people in this room. The West has not one Voltaire, but thousands if not millions of Voltaires. The West is used to criticism, it's used to self-criticism. All the sins of the West are out there for everyone to see." And then he said: "It's Islam that needs a Voltaire." 

He discussed a list of all the things that are wrong or questionable about Islam— points that resonated with me. And for this he was booed; he was shouted down.(Ironically, ten years later, Irshad Manji, a staunch advocate of Islamic reform, spoke in this same hall. By then, the crowd had completely changed. It was packed not with curious observers, but with hard-line, fundamentalist Islamists, and that night the audience grew so combative that Irshad had to be hustled out by security.)

After the Iranian lawyer spoke, there was a break, and then the audience was given a chance to ask questions. I waved my hand, and someone with the microphone saw my black face and probably thought, "for the sake of diversity"—the white organizers of such events were in fact quite keen to hear what went on in the heads, households, and communities of immigrants. He gave me the microphone. 

I stood up and agreed with the Iranian. I said: 

"Look at you guys. There are six people there, you've invited six speakers, and one of them is the Voltaire of Islam. You guys have five Voltaires, just allow us Muslims one, please." 

That led a newspaper editor to ask me to write an essay, to which he gave the headline "Please Allow Us One Voltaire."

In the months and years that followed, I read more and more widely. I read Western views of Islam and Muslim culture. I read more Western liberal thinkers. And I read about the Muslim reformers of the past. My conclusion remains that Islam still needs a Voltaire. But I have come to believe it is in dire need of a John Locke as well. It was, after all, Locke who gave us the notion of a "natural right" to the fundamentals of "life, liberty, and property." But less well known is Locke's powerful case for religious toleration. And religious toleration, however long it took to be established in practice, is one of the greatest achievements of the Western world.

Locke made the case that religious beliefs are, in the words of the scholar Adam Wolfson, "matters of opinion, opinions to which we are all equally entitled, rather than quanta of truth or knowledge."1 In Locke's formulation, protection against persecution is one of the highest responsibilities of any government or ruler. 

Locke also argued that where there is coercion and persecution to change hearts and minds, it will "work" only at a very high human cost, producing in its wake both cruelty and hypocrisy. 

For Locke, no one person should "desire to impose" his or her view of salvation on others. Instead, in his vision of a tolerant society, each individual should be free to follow his or her own path in religion, and respect the right of others to follow their own paths: "Nobody, not even commonwealths," Locke wrote, "have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretense of religion."2

What is often forgotten is that Locke restricted this freedom of religion to various Protestant denominations. He did not include the Roman Catholic Church because "all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince." Were Locke alive today, I suspect he would make a similar argument about Islam. So long as there are some Muslims who regard Muhammad's teachings in Medina as trumping their loyalty to the states of which they are citizens, there will be a legitimate suspicion that tolerance of Islam endangers the security of those states. The central question for Western civilization remains what it was in Locke's day: What exactly can we not tolerate?

Let us begin with the oppression of half of humanity.

Rights in Retreat

Today, more than two hundred years after Voltaire and three hundred years after John Locke, the rights of women are in retreat throughout the Muslim world. 

Consider, by way of a simple illustration, the way that Muslim women are permitted to dress. It is not the most important human right, I admit. But it is a freedom most women care about.

Look at photographs of any of the Muslim cities of the world in the 1970s: Baghdad. Cairo. Damascus. Kabul. Mogadishu. Tehran. You will see that very few women in those days were covered. Instead, on the streets, in office buildings, in markets, movie theaters, restaurants, and homes, most women dressed very much like their counterparts in Europe and America. They wore skirts above the knee. They wore Western fashions. Their hair was done up and visible.

Today, by contrast, a mere photo of a woman walking on the streets of Kabul with a knee-length skirt becomes a viral happening on the Internet, and sparks widespread condemnation as "shameful" and "half-naked," with the government criticized for "sleeping." When I was a girl in primary school in Nairobi, those who covered their heads were the exceptions—fewer than half of all the girls. A few years ago, I googled my old primary school. In the photos posted, nearly every girl was covered.

This is not just about how we dress. If you are a woman living in Saudi Arabia, you want to drive, you want to go out of the house without a male guardian. You may well have money, but you have nothing to do except sit at home or shop under male supervision. In Egypt, you are battling against a rising tide of sexual harassment—99 percent of women report being sexually harassed and up to eighty sexual assaults occur in a single day.3

Especially troubling is the way the status of women as second-class citizens is being cemented in legislation. 

In Iraq, a law is being proposed that lowers to nine the legal age at which a girl can be forced into marriage. That same law would give a husband the right to deny his wife permission to leave the house. In Tunisia, your worries are about the imposition of sharia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, by contrast, you have to fear being gunned down for the crime of attending school. And for young girls all over North Africa and beyond there remains the threat of female genital mutilation, a practice that certainly predates Islam but which is now almost entirely confined to Muslim communities. 

UNICEF estimates that more than 125 million women and girls have been cut in African and Arab nations, many of them majority Muslim.4 As is gradually becoming clear, the practice is also widespread in immigrant communities in Europe and North America.

In the Islamic world, too many basic rights are circumscribed, and not only women's rights. Homosexuality is not tolerated. Other religions are not tolerated. Above all, free speech on the subject of Islam is not tolerated. As I know only too well, freethinkers who wish to question works such as the Qur'an or the hadith risk death.

Islam has had schism; it has never had Reformation. 

Early disputes in Islam produced fierce sectarianism that often involved bloodshed, but largely over technical questions. The biggest was about who should succeed the Prophet as leader of the ummah: the Sunnis wanted to select a caliph (literally a deputy) on the basis of merit, while the Shia insisted on an imam who was a relative of the Prophet. A smaller division was sparked by the question of whether Allah spoke in dictating the Qur'an. (One school of Islamic thought, the Mu'tazi-lite, argued that Allah does not have a human larynx and that the Qur'an is therefore not Allah's "speech.")5

The idea of "reform" in Islam has largely centered on the resolution of such narrow questions. Indeed, the term "ijti-had" the nearest thing to reform in Arabic, means trying to determine God's will on some new issue, such as: Should a Muslim pray on an airplane (a new technological invention) and, if so, how can he be sure he is facing Mecca? But the larger idea of "reform," in the sense of fundamentally calling into question central tenets of Islamic doctrine, has been conspicuous by its absence. Islam even has its own pejorative term for theological trouble-makers: "those who indulge in innovations and follow their passions" (the Arabic words ahl al-bida, wa-l-ahwa').6

Tolerating Intolerance

Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that "religion," however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. I can sympathize with that. In many respects, despite its high aims and ideals, America has found it difficult to make religious and racial tolerance a reality.

But that does not mean we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. 

For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets this. In the fall of 2014, Bill Maher, host of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, held a discussion about Islam that featured the best-selling author Sam Harris, the actor Ben Affleck, and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof Harris, and Maher raised the question of whether or not Western liberals were abandoning their principles by not confronting Islam about its treatment of women, promotion of jihad, and sharia-based punishments of stoning and death to apostates. To Affleck, this smacked of Islamophobia and he responded with an outburst of moralistic indignation. To applause from the audience, he heatedly accused Harris and Maher of being "gross" and "racist" and saying things no different from "saying you're a shifty Jew.'" Siding with Affleck, Kristof interjected that brave Muslims were risking their lives to promote human rights in the Muslim world.

After the show, during a discussion in the greenroom, Sam Harris asked both Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof, "What do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Qur'an on tonight's show?" 

Sam then answered his own question, "There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when IS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands—all in the name of Islam— the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag [#NotInOurName]."

Shortly after the show was broadcast, a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim woman (and gay rights activist) named Einah wrote an open letter to Ben Affleck that summed up my feelings precisely:

Why are Muslims being "preserved" in some time capsule of centuries gone by? Why is it okay that we continue to live in a world where our women are compared to candy waiting to be consumed? Why is it okay for women of the rest of the world to fight for freedom and equality while we are told to cover our shameful bodies? Can't you see that we are being held back from joining this elite club known as the 21st century?

Noble liberals like yourself always stand up for the misrepresented Muslims and stand against the Islamophobes, which is great but who stands in my corner and for the others who feel oppressed by the religion? Every time we raise our voices, one of us is killed or threatened.

. . . What you did by screaming "racist!" was shut down a conversation that many of us have been waiting to have. You helped those who wish to deny there are issues, deny them.

What is so wrong with wanting to step into the current century? There should be no shame. There is no denying that violence, misogyny and homophobia exist in all religious texts, but Islam is the only religion that is adhered to so literally, to this day.

In your culture you have the luxury of calling such literalists "crazies." ... In my culture, such values are upheld by more people than we realize. Many will try to deny it, but please hear me when I say that these are not fringe values. It is apparent in the lacking numbers of Muslims willing to speak out against the archaic Shariah law. The punishment for blasphemy and apostasy, etc, are tools of oppression. Why are they not addressed even by the peaceful folk who aren't fanatical, who just want to have some sandwiches and pray five times a day? Where are the Muslim protestors against blasphemy laws/apostasy? Where are the Muslims who take a stand against harsh interpretation of Shariah?7

Anyone for Apartheid?

One of the early suffragettes, Alva Belmont, said that American women must serve as a beacon of light, telling not only the story of what they have accomplished, but also representing a lasting determination that women around the world shall be "free citizens, recognized as the equals of men." Too often, when it comes to women's rights (and human rights more generally) in the Muslim world, leading thinkers and opinion makers have, at best, gone dark.

I cannot help contrasting this silence with the campaign to end apartheid, which united whites and blacks alike all over the world beginning in the 1960s. 

When the West finally stood up to the horrors of South African apartheid, it did so across a broad front. The campaign against apartheid reached down into classrooms and even sports stadiums; churches and synagogues stood united against it across the religious spectrum. South African sports teams were shunned, economic sanctions were imposed, and intense international pressure was brought to bear on the country to change its social and political system. American university students erected shantytowns on their campuses to symbolize their solidarity with those black South Africans confined to a life of degradation and impoverishment inside townships.

Today, with radical Islam, we have a new and even more violent system of apartheid, where people are targeted not for their skin color but for their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, or, among Muslims, the form of their personal faith.

I have spent more than a decade fighting for women's and girls' basic rights. I have never been afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight. 

As I have repeatedly said, the connection between violence and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to Muslims when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. We need to ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Should it be blasphemy— punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Why, when I have made these arguments, have I received so little support and so much opprobrium from the very people in the West who call themselves feminists, who call themselves liberals?

I do not expect our political leadership to take the lead in directly challenging the inequities of political Islam. The ideological self-confidence that characterized Western leaders during the Cold War has given way to a feeble relativism. Instead, this campaign for female, gay, and minority rights needs to come from elsewhere: from the men who built Silicon Valley's social networks, whose instincts are deeply libertarian; from our entertainment capital, Hollywood, where at least the old hands still remember the era of blacklists and witch hunts; from our civil society, from human rights activists, from feminists, and from lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender communities; as well as from organizations like the ACLU who, if they still stand for anything, can hardly ignore the way civil liberties are being trampled all over the Muslim world. They must remember Alva Belmont's words. They must light their beacons.

A Unique Role for the West

Whenever I make the case for reform in the Muslim world, someone invariably says: "That is not our project—it is for Muslims only. We should stay out of it." 

But I am not talking about the kind of military intervention that has got the West into so much trouble over the years.

For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against "terror" and "extremism" that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. 

For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network—the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis—as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. 

We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.

Yet here is another conflict that we can take inspiration from as we embark on this process: the Cold War.

Islam is not communism, of course, but in certain respects it is just as contemptuous of human rights, and Islamic republics have proved almost as brutal toward their own citizens as Soviet republics once were. 

Yet we have welcomed fundamentalist preachers into our cities and have stood idly by as thousands of disaffected young people have been radicalized by their rantings. 

Worse, we have made almost no attempt to counter the proselytizing of the Medina Muslims. If we continue this policy of nonintervention in the culture war, we will never extricate ourselves from the actual battlefield. For we cannot fight an ideology solely with air strikes and drones or even boots on the ground. We need to fight it with ideas— with better ideas, with positive ideas. We need to fight it with an alternative vision, as we did in the Cold War.

The West did not win the Cold War simply through economic pressure or building new weapons systems. 

From the beginning, the United States recognized that this was also going to be an intellectual contest. Aside from a few "useful idiots" on leftist campuses, we did not say the Soviet system was morally equivalent to ours; nor did we proclaim that Soviet communism was an ideology of peace.

Instead, through a host of cultural initiatives funded directly or indirectly by the CIA, the United States encouraged anti-Communist intellectuals to counter the influence of Marxists and other fellow-travelers of the Left. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, dedicated to defending the non-Communist Left in the battle of ideas in the world, opened in Berlin on June 26,1950. Leading intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to serve as honorary chairmen. Many of the members were former Communists such as Arthur Koestler who warned against the dangers of totalitarianism on the basis of personal experience.8 Magazines such as Encounter (UK), Preuves (France), DerMonat (Germany), and Quadrant (Australia) were made beneficiaries of American support.9 The Free Europe Press mailed numerous books to dissidents in Eastern Europe, sneaking their materials past the censors wherever they could. By the end of the Cold War, "it was estimated that over ten million Western books and magazines had infiltrated the Communist half of Europe through the book-mailing program."10

How much did these efforts cost? In the case of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, surprisingly little. In 1951, the budget of the Congress for Cultural Freedom seems to have been about $200,000, or approximately $1.8 million in 2014 dollars.11 Contrast the small budget of the Congress for Cultural Freedom with the enormous sums the United States has spent since 2001 against what policymakers call "terror" or "extremism." A 2013 analysis of the so-called black budget suggested that the United States has spent more than $500 billion on various intelligence agencies and efforts from 2001 to 2013.12 The economist Joseph Stiglitz has calculated the cost of the military intervention in Iraq to be between $3 and $5 trillion.13

This strategy is unsustainable. For one, the United States cannot afford to continue fighting a war of ideas solely by military means. Second, by ignoring the ideas that give rise to Islamist violence we continue to ignore the root of the problem.

Instead, modeled on the cultural campaigns of the Cold War, there must be a concerted effort to turn people away from fundamentalist Islam. 

Imagine a platform for Muslim dissidents that communicated their message through You-Tube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Imagine ten reformist magazines for every one issue of IS's Dibuq or Al-Qaeda's Inspire. Such a strategy would also give us an opportunity to shift our alliances to those Muslim individuals and groups who actually share our values and practices—those who fight for a true Reformation and who find themselves maligned and marginalized by those nations and leaders and imams whom we now embrace as allies.

In the Cold War, the West celebrated dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel, who had the courage to challenge the Soviet system from within. 

Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam—former Muslims, and reformers—but the West either ignores them or dismisses them as "not representative." 

This is a grave mistake. Reformers such as Tawfiq Hamid, Irshad Manji, Asra Nomani, Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Saleem Ahmed, Yunis Qandil, Seyran Ates, Bassam Tibi, and many others must be supported and protected. 

They should be as well known as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were in the 1980s—and as well known as Locke and Voltaire were in their day, when the West needed freethinkers of its own.

……………….

WELL  SHE  HAS  SAID  IT  LIKE  IT  IS  OR  LIKE  IT  SHOULD  BE;  TIME  FOR  THE  WEST  TO  CALL  A  SPADE  A  SPADE,  TO  LAY  THE  CARDS  ON  THE  TABLE,  TO  STOP  BEING  "POLITICALLY  CORRECT"  AND  SOUND  OUT  THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MATTER.  TIME  TO  GET  ALONG-SIDE  THE  ONES  WHO  ARE  CALLING  FOR  REFORMATION  IN  THE  ISLAMIC  RELIGION.

UNTIL  THIS  IS  ALL  DONE,  FOR  AND  FROM  THE  NEXT  GENERATION  OF  ISLAMIC  PEOPLE,  WE  SHALL  NOT  WIN  AGAINST  A  RELIGION  THAT  IS  ANYTHING  BUT  PEACEFUL  IN  ITS  WRITTEN  SCRIPTURES.

ALL  LEADERS  OF  ANYTHING  IN  THE  WESTERN  NATIONS,  SHOULD  BE  READING  THIS  BOOK  BY  AYAAN  HIRSI  ALI,  AND  GETTING  ON  THE  BOAT  THAT  SAILS  TO  THE  LAND  OF  ISLAMIC  REFORMATION.

Keith Hunt

HERETIC

by  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

CONCLUSION

THE MUSLIM REFORMATION

Today there is a war within Islam—a war between those who wish to reform (the Modifying Muslims or the dissidents) and those who wish to turn back to the time of the Prophet (the Medina Muslims). The prize over which they fight is the hearts and minds of the largely passive Mecca Muslims.

For the moment, measured by four yardsticks, the Medina side seems to be winning. 

One is the scale of individuals leaving the Mecca side and joining the Medina side (what in the West we call "radicalization"). 

The second metric is attention: the Medina Muslims attract media attention through statements and acts of violence that shock the world. 

The third metric is resources: through zakat (charity), crime, the violent seizing of territory and property, support from rogue states, and petrodollars, Medina Muslims have vast resources. The Modifying Muslims have virtually none. Pushed to make a choice between earning a living and campaigning for religious reform, most Modifiers soon opt for the former. 

The fourth metric is one of coherence: in many ways this is the most important advantage the Medina Muslims have over the Modifier Muslims. The latter are faced with the daunting— and dangerous—task of questioning the fundamentals of their faith. All the Medina Muslims have to do is pose as its defenders.

Yet I believe a Muslim Reformation is coming. In fact, it may already be here. 

I think it is plausible that the Internet will be for the Islamic world in the twenty-first century what the printing press was for Christendom in the sixteenth. 

I think it is plausible that the violent Islamists I have called the Medina Muslims are the modern counterparts to the millenarian sects of pre-Reformation Europe and that a quite different reform movement is already taking shape in the cities of the Middle East and North Africa. Above all, I believe that the upsurge of popular protest that we call the Arab Spring contained within it some of the seeds of a true Muslim Reformation, despite the obvious and predictable failure of the political revolution to live up to Western hopes of a Middle Eastern 1989 [fall of the Berlin Wall].

Much at this early stage is uncertain. The only real certainty about the Muslim Reformation is that it will not look much like the Christian one. 

There are such fundamental differences between the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad, to say nothing of the radically different organizational structures of the two religions—the one hierarchical and distinct from the state, the other decentralized yet aspiring to political power—that any analogy is bound to break down.

When I first conceived of writing a book about a Reformation of Islam, I imagined it as a novel. Entitled The  REFORMER it was going to tell the story of a charismatic young imam in London who would emerge as a modern-day Muslim Luther. I abandoned the idea because such a book was bound to be dismissed as fanciful.

The Muslim Reformation is not fiction. It is fact. 

Over the past few years, dozens if not hundreds of developments have convinced me that, while Islam's problems are indeed deep and structural, Muslim people are like everyone else in one important respect: most want a better life for themselves and their children. And increasingly they have good reasons to doubt that the Medina Muslims can deliver it.

(MAYBE THAT IS THE ANSWER AS TO WHY SO MANY MUSLIMS LIVE IN WESTERN NATIONS  -  Keith Hunt)

It is no accident that some of the most vocal critics of Islam today are, like me, women. 

For there is no more obvious incompatibility between Islam and modernity than the subordinate role assigned to women in sharia law. 

That subordinate role has long been the justification for a litany of abuses of women in the Muslim world, such as male guardianship, child marriage, and marital rape. 

Just as the surge of sexual assaults was one of the most disturbing features of the Egyptian Revolution, so the response of groups like Tahrir Bodyguard and Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment was one of the most heartening. We are seeing similar movements in Lebanon and Jordan, notably the protest against Article 308, the Jordanian law that allows rapists to marry their victims to avoid going to jail. Iran is an especially interesting case, for there thirty years of Islamist rule appear to have failed to prevent a significant shift in attitudes toward female -sexuality.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of this movement in narrowly feminist terms. Although it is women who are spearheading change, there are other issues in play besides the status of women as second-class citizens. In some parts of Africa, we are seeing waves of conversion from Islam to Christianity. Another pioneer of change is Walid Husayin, the Palestinian skeptic jailed for antireligious agitation. Then there are the Muslims who speak out for toleration, such as the Turkish columnist and TV commentator Aylin Kocaman, who has defended Israel and rejected Islamist calls for violence against Jews, or Nabil al-Hudair, an Iraqi Muslim who has spoken up for the rights of his Jewish fellow countrymen.

There really are tides in the affairs of men—and women, too. I believe this is one of those historic tides.

Why the Tide Is Turning

Three factors are combining today to enable real religious reform:

1. The impact of new information technology in creating an unprecedented communication network across the Muslim world.

2. The fundamental inability of Islamists to deliver when they come to power and the impact of Western norms on Muslim immigrants are creating a new and growing constituency for a Muslim Reformation.

3. The emergence of a political constituency for religious reform emerging in key Middle Eastern states.

Together, I believe these three things will ultimately turn the tide against the Islamists, whose goal is, after all, a return to the time of the Prophet—a venture as foredoomed to failure as all attempts to reverse the direction of time's arrow.

As we have seen, technology is empowering not only the jihadists. It is also empowering those who would oppose them in the name of human rights for all, regardless of religion. (Without the assistance of Google, for example, it would have been far harder for me to write this book.) In November 2014, an Egyptian doctor coined an Arabic hashtag that translates as "why we reject implementing sharia"; it was used five thousand times in the space of twenty-four hours, mostly by Saudis and Egyptians. In language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, a young Moroccan named Brother Rachid last year called out President Obama on YouTube for claiming that Islamic State was "not Islamic":

Mr President, I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. ... I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. . . . ISIL's 10,000 members are all Muslims. . . . They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam's Prophet Muhammad in every detail. . . . They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam.

I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct—to call things by their names. ISIL, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Taliban, and their sister brand names, are all made in Islam. Unless the Muslim world deals with Islam and separates religion from state, we will never end this cycle. ... If Islam is not the problem, then why is it there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and yet none of them has ever blown up himself to become a martyr, even though they live under the same economic and political circumstances and even worse? . . . Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Qur'an and the hadith? . . . How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?1

(Having been saying such things for more than thirteen years, I feel a surge of hope when I read words like those in The New York Times.)

Brother Rachid is a Moroccan convert to Christianity who broadcasts on a television station, Al-Hayat, based in Egypt. His story perfectly illustrates how fast things are changing in North Africa and the Middle East. Religious minorities, as well as women and gay people, remain highly vulnerable in the Middle East and North Africa. But precisely because of their sufferings, I think it is ever more likely that they will ultimately unite against Islam's religious apartheid. When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago.

In short, I agree with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize—winning Pakistani schoolgirl whom the Taliban tried to kill:

The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day—because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society. They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school.2

Here, surely, is the authentic voice of a Muslim Reformation.

Change is also under way in the Muslim communities of the Western world. 

True, further Muslim immigration to Europe and North America will very likely increase the tensions between Westerners and Muslims. Yet even as the probability of such conflict increases, so too does the exposure of second-and third-generation Muslims to Western values and freedoms. 

Yes, some will withdraw into a cocoon of denial, and others will become Medina Muslims in reaction against the dissonances they experience. In the long run, however, these options are far less appealing than the third option of religious reform.

Finally, there is the horrified reaction of many Muslims to the atrocities committed by Al-Qaeda, IS, and Boko Haram, which has led some Muslim political leaders to get serious about taking Islam back from the extremists. 

The government of the United Arab Emirates has called the threat posed by "Islamic extremism" a "transnational cancer" requiring an "urgent, coordinated and sustained international effort to confront" it.3 The fight against radical Islam, the UAE ambassador to the United States insisted, "must be waged not only on the battlefield but also against the entire militant ideological and financial complex that is the lifeblood of extremism."4 

Before an audience of Muslim clergy, as we have seen, the president of Egypt himself has called for a "religious revolution." That is the kind of support a Reformation cannot do without if it is to succeed.

The fact that President Sisi elected to make his call for religious revolution at Al-Azhar—the preeminent institution of Sunni religious learning in the world—was highly significant. For Al-Azhar has long been the citadel of clerical conservatism, ruthlessly resisting even the discussion of meaningful reforms to Islam.5 In June 1992, for example, an Egyptian academic and human rights activist named Farag Foda was shot dead as he left his office. For years, Foda had defended secular policies and criticized sharia law, arguing for a separation of religion and politics. Two weeks before Foda's death, the widely respected cleric Muhammad al-Ghazali, a senior figure at Al-Azhar, had declared Foda to be an apostate, knowing full well that under Islamic religious law, the punishment for apostasy is death.6 Activists of the Islamic group Gama'a al Islamiyya subsequently killed Foda, heavily injuring bystanders (including Foda's son) in the process. "Al-Azhar issued the sentence and we carried out the execution," the group stated.7 Al-Ghazali, the cleric who had declared Foda an apostate, subsequently testified on behalf of Foda's killers, arguing that the presence of an apostate inside the community constituted a threat to the nation.8 Though now deceased, al-Ghazali remains a venerated figure among Islamic scholars,9 while Al-Azhar as an institution has never expressed any contrition for its role in Foda's death.

It is precisely institutions like Al-Azhar that stand in the way of a Muslim Reformation. If the Egyptian government is prepared to take on Al-Azhar, the times are indeed changing.

Je Suis Charlie

There is one final reason I am optimistic. I begin to hope that the West may finally be coming to its senses.

Over the past twenty years, terrified of appearing culturally insensitive or even racist, Western nations have bent over backward to accommodate the demands of their Muslim citizens for special treatment. We appeased the Muslim heads of government who lobbied us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. We appeased leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies, who asked universities to disinvite speakers deemed "offensive" to Muslims. Instead of embracing Muslim dissidents, Western governments treated them as troublemakers and instead partnered with all the wrong people—groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.10 And we even subsidized the jihadists. (For example, the man who killed Theo van Gogh was living off Dutch welfare benefits.)

Yet I dare to hope that what happened in Paris in January 2015 may prove to be a turning point. It was not that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was especially bloody. Many more people had died in the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in December 2014. Many more people died in the Boko Haram attack on Baga in Nigeria in the same week as the attack in Paris. Rather, it was the fact that more than a dozen people were murdered because they had drawn and published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

There were, of course, the usual craven editorials and press statements by moral idiots arguing that the editors of the magazine had lacked "common sense" in offending Muslims, and that nevertheless the violence had nothing to do with Islam. But for the millions of people who took to the streets bearing "Je Suis Charlie" signs, these arguments clearly were not reassuring.

As of this writing, ten thousand military and security personnel have been deployed across France as authorities brace for more attacks. Even to me, just a week ago, such a militarization of policing in one of the West's largest and oldest democracies would have been unthinkable. France's prime minister, Manuel Vails, said three days after the attack that France was at war with "radical Islam." The French, once so critical of the United States after 9/11 (not least for the sweeping scope of the Patriot Act), are now following in the footsteps of George W. Bush. Stephen Harper, the prime minister of the other great French-speaking democracy, Canada, explicitly connected the Charlie Hebdo attack to the "international jihadist movement." "They have declared war on anybody who does not think and act exactly as they wish they would think and act," Harper said. "They have declared war and are already executing it on a massive scale on a whole range of countries with which they are in contact, and they have declared war on any country, like ourselves, that values freedom, openness and tolerance. We may not like this and wish it would go away, but it is not going to go away."

At a time like this, the claims that the "extremists" have nothing to do with the "religion of peace" simply cease to be credible. The enemy in this war is saying just the opposite. Consider, for example, the book written by the Al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Suri, entitled The Call to Global Islamic Resistance. As the enemies of Islam, al-Suri lists: 

the Jews, America, Israel, the Freemasons, the Christians, the Hindus, apostates (including established Muslim leaders, officials, and their security apparatus), hypocritical scholars, educational systems, satellite TV channels, sports, and all arts and entertainment venues.11 

This would be comical if it were not so deadly serious.

Western leaders who insist on ignoring such explicit threats run two risks. 

Not only do their words ("Islam belongs to Germany") embolden the zealots. They also create a political vacancy. Even before Charlie Hebdo, Germans were protesting under the banner of Pegida (short for "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West") in Dresden, Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig. All over Europe, populist parties are mobilizing voters in increasing numbers against immigration and Islam, from the National Front in France to the Sweden Democrats. It can be in nobody's interests for Europe to slide in this way down a perilous path of polarization.

Instead, as briefly happened in Paris in the days after the massacre, we in the West need to unite. But we need to be clear about what we are uniting for, and what we are uniting against.

In all holy books, in the Bible as well as the Quran, you will find passages that sanction intolerance and inequity. But in the case of Christianity, there was change. In that process of change, the people who wanted to uphold the status quo made the same arguments that present-day Muslims are giving: that they were offended, that the new thinking was blasphemy. In effect, it was through a process of repeated blasphemy that Christians and Jews evolved and grew into modernity. That is what art did. That is what science did. And yes, that is what irreverent satire did.

(FALSE  CHRISTIANITY  BROUGHT  INTOLERANCE  AND  "HOLY  WARS"  -  BUT  FINALLY  FOR  NOW,  BETTER  MINDED  PEOPLE,  AND  BETTER  THEOLOGY  OF  FROM  THE  OLD  TO  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT,  BROUGHT  TOLERANCE  TO  "CHRISTIAN  RELIGION"  -  Keith Hunt)

The Muslim Reformation is not going to come from Al-Azhar. 

It is more likely to come from a relentless campaign of blasphemy. So when a Muslim sees you reading his book and says, "I am offended, my feelings are hurt," your reply should be: "What matters more? Your sacred text? Or the life of this book's author? Your sacred text? Or the rule of law? Human life, human freedom, human dignity—they all matter more than any sacred text." 

Christians have been through this, Jews have been through it. It's now time for Muslims to go through it. In that sense—in the sense that I passionately believe in the world-changing power of blasphemy—je suis Charlie.

Yet we need to do more than merely blaspheme. We need to reform.

The Five Amendments, Restated

The tenth-and eleventh-century Islamic legal scholar al-Mawardi, writing in The Ordinances of Government, says: "If an innovator appears or a holder of suspect views goes astray, the imam should explain and clarify the correct view to him, and make him undergo the penalties appropriate to him, so that the religion may be preserved from flaws and the community preserved from error."12 

I know that anyone who advocates reforming Islam runs a risk. 

So let me be unambiguously clear. 

I am not advocating a war—quite the contrary. I am explicitly arguing for peaceful reform: for a cultural campaign aimed at doctrinal change.

As I have argued, there are five core concepts in Islam that are fundamentally incompatible with modernity:

1. the status of the Quran as the last and immutable word of God and the infallibility of Muhammad as the last divinely inspired messenger;

2. Islam's emphasis on the afterlife over the here-and-now;

3. the claims of sharia to be a comprehensive system of law governing both the spiritual and temporal realms;

4. the obligation on ordinary Muslims to command right and forbid wrong;

5. the concept of jihad, or holy war.

My "five theses" are simply that these concepts must be amended in ways that make being a Muslim more readily compatible with the twenty-first-century world. 

Muslim clerics need to acknowledge that the Quran is not the ultimate repository of revealed truth. They need to make explicit that what we do in this life is more important than anything that could conceivably happen to us after we die. It is just a book. They need to make clear that sharia law occupies a circumscribed role and is clearly subordinate to the laws of the nation-states where Muslims live. They need to put an end to the practice of delegated coercion that inflicts conformity at the expense of creativity. And they need to disavow completely the concept of jihad as a literal call to arms against non-Muslims and those Muslims they deem apostates or heretics.

This Reformation would not only benefit women, gays, and religious minorities. I believe it is also in the interests of Islam itself. In order to avoid eventual collapse, even the most revered structure requires renovation. Mere restoration is no longer a plausible option for Islam, no matter how much blood the Islamists shed. Indeed, the more blood they shed, the more they risk bringing the entire structure crashing down upon their heads.

How long will the rest of us have to wait for this Reformation to succeed in transforming Islam as deeply as the original Reformation transformed Christianity? 

(TRANSFORMED  CHRISTIANITY  TO  BE  TOLERABLE,  PEACEFUL,  FOR  NOW  -  BUT  CERTAINLY  APART  FROM  THAT  TRUTH  IT'S  STILL  A  BABYLON  MYSTERY  RELIGION,  OF  MANY  FALSE  TEACHINGS  -  Keith Hunt)

In the last decade, many thousands of innocent people have lost their lives in an escalating sectarian conflict that rages across borders. Tens of millions of decent men and women and their children remain trapped within failing states, stagnating economies, and repressive societies. Will the Muslim Reformation be widespread or localized (after all, the Protestant Reformation did not succeed in all of Christendom)? Will the Muslim Reformation produce wars of religion, like its Christian predecessor, before its more beneficial effects make themselves felt?

The answers to these questions depend above all on Muslims and the choices they make. 

But they also depend to some extent on the choices we in the West make. Do we help the Reformation? Or do we unwittingly undermine it?

It will not be easy to bring about this change. But perhaps the words of two thinkers, one an Islamic heretic and one a master of the Western Enlightenment, can give us encouragement.

In 1057, the Syrian poet and philosopher Abul Ala al-Ma'arri died. In his lifetime, for the act of forgoing meat and being a vegetarian, he was branded a heretic. He was also branded a heretic for his poetry and other fictional writings, including The Epistle of Forgiveness, in which he imagined a journey to heaven and to hell.13 Although he is largely unknown in the West, his work is regarded as a forerunner of Dante's Divine Comedy, and over the years, statues of him have been erected around his home region, south of Aleppo. In 2013, jihadists, primarily with the Al-Nusra Front, began attacking and beheading his statues. There are multiple theories about the attacks, including one that perhaps al-Ma'arri is related to President Assad. But the more plausible explanation is that nothing—not even the passage of a thousand years—can expunge the guilt of the heretic. The stigma of heresy is eternal.14

And what did al-Ma'arri write that was so heretical? Here are a few of his lines: 

"Shall I go forth from underneath this sky? How shall I escape? Whither shall I flee?" And: "God curse people who call me an infidel when I tell them the truth!" And: "I lift my voice whene'er I talk in vain, / But do I speak the truth, hushed are my lips again."15

I find those lines almost unbearably moving. And yet, nearly a thousand years after they were written, I am certain that the time for heretics to speak the truth with impunity has at last arrived. 

And for those still unsure how they should react to the words of a heretic, I turn again to Voltaire, the freest of freethinkers: 

"I disapprove of what you say," he is said to have written to Claude Helvetius, "but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

The dawn of a Muslim Reformation is the right moment to remind ourselves that the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion.

………………..

AS  WE  MOVE  TO  THE  END  EVENTS  OF  THIS  AGE,  TO  THE  LAST  42  MONTHS  OF  THIS  AGE,  THERE  WILL  BE  A  WAR  BETWEEN  SOME  UNITED  ARAB  NATIONS  LED  BY  EGYPT,  AND  A  RESURRECTED  HOLY  ROMAN  EMPIRE  IN  EUROPE.  DANIEL  SPEAKS  OF  IT  IN  HIS  ELEVENTH  CHAPTER  VERSES  40-45.  THE  BEAST  BABYLON  OF  EUROPE  WILL  WIN;  CHAPTER  12  -  THEN  WE  MOVE  INTO  THE  LAST  42  MONTHS  PLUS  SOME  EXTRA  DAYS [GIVEN  BY  DANIEL  AT  THE  END  OF  THE  CHAPTER]  FOR  A  TIME  OF  TROUBLE  AS  NEVER  BEEN  ON  EARTH  SINCE  THE  CREATION  OF  MANKIND.  JESUS  SAID  IN  MATTHEW  24,  THAT  UNLESS  THAT  TIME  WAS  SHORTENED [STOPPED]  NO  FLESH  WOULD  BE  SAVED  ALIVE.  JESUS  WILL  COME  AND  REIGN  FROM  JERUSALEM;  HE  WILL  SET  UP  ONE  WORLDWIDE  RELIGION;  BY  THAT  TIME  MANKIND  WILL  BE  READY  TO  HAVE  THE  ONLY  HOLY  GOVERNMENT  THAT  CAN  GIVE  THE  NATIONS  PEACE  AND  PROSPERITY,  AND  CORRECT  FREEDOM  UNDER  A  HOLY  AND  RIGHTEOUS  LAW.  ALL  PEOPLES  WILL  COME  TO  AGREE  THIS  GOVERNMENT  FROM  THE  TRUE  GOD,  IS  THE  ONLY  WAY.  MANKIND  WILL  THEN  HAVE  A  THOUSAND  YEARS  OF  LIVING  THAT  CAN  HARDLY  BE  UNDERSTOOD  IN  THE  CONTEXT  OF  HOW  THEY  ARE  LIVING  TODAY.

SO  IT  IS  WRITTEN  -  SO  IT  WILL  COME  TO  PASS!!

Keith Hunt

HERETIC

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

•     APPENDIX      •

Muslim Dissidents and Reformers

The best evidence that a Muslim Reformation is actually under way is the growing number of active dissidents and reformers around the world. It would be quite wrong of me to publish this book without acknowledging them and their often courageous contributions. Broadly speaking, they can be grouped into three broad categories: 

dissidents in the West, 

dissidents in the Islamic world, 

clerical reformers.

Dissidents in the West

There is a growing number of ordinary Muslim citizens in the West who are currently braving death threats and even official punishment in dissenting from Islamic orthodoxy and calling for the reform of Islam. These individuals are not clergymen but "ordinary" Muslims, generally educated, well read, and preoccupied with the crisis of Islam.

Among them are Maajid Nawaz (UK), Samia Labidi (France), Afshin Ellian (Netherlands), Ehsan Jami (Netherlands), Naser Khader (Denmark), Seyran Ate§ (Germany), Yunis Qandil (Germany), Bassam Tibi (Germany), Raheel Raza (Canada), Zuhdi Jasser (U.S.), Saleem Ahmed (U.S.), Nonie Darwish (U.S.), Wafa Sultan (U.S.), Saleem Ahmed (U.S.), Ibn Warraq (U.S.), Asra No-mani (U.S.), and Irshad Manji (U.S.).

These individuals are not clerics, but informed citizens speaking out on the basis of reason and conscience. 

They are urging either a fundamental reinterpretation of Islam or a change in the core doctrines of Islam. 

Some of them have left the faith, seeking reform from the outside, whereas others seek to reform Islam from within.1 

Their arguments focus on the importance of viewing the Quran and the hadith in a historical context and on respecting man-made civil laws as legitimate, overriding sharia religious law.

Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim physician, is the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Jasser has embarked on the "Jefferson project" for Islam. He favors the separation of mosque and state, which will "include the abrogation of all blasphemy and apostasy laws" currently used to stifle Muslim reformers. His aim is to reform Islam and place civil law above sharia law:

If government enacts the literal laws of God rather than natural law or human law, then government becomes God, and abrogates religion and the personal nature of the relationship with God. Governmental law should be based on and debated in reason, not from scriptural exegesis.2

Saleem Ahmed, a Muslim now living in Hawaii, was born in India and raised in Pakistan. Ahmed founded the Honolulu-based All Believers Network in 2003, promoting genuine interfaith dialogue. Its board has individuals from numerous religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, and Islam. 

Ahmed argues that the more political and violent verses of the Quran are superseded by spiritual passages having universal applicability.3 He has written a book arguing for a fundamental reform of Islamic doctrine. A number of fellow Muslims have called Ahmed a kajir (nonbeliever) and his local imam has criticized him for "diluting our religion."4 Ahmed says that his role model is Gandhi.

Yunis Qandil, now living in Germany, was born in Amman, Jordan. He is the son of Palestinian refugees. In his later youth he became closely involved in a Salafi mosque for five years before turning to the Muslim Brotherhood for another four years. He moved to Germany in 1995 and increasingly "sought to combine his spirituality with a secular stance regarding politics."5 

Qandil is critical of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood that seek to create a "parallel society" of European Muslims, preventing individual Muslims from fully integrating into their host societies.6 Even if Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood oppose the use of violence in the short term, they are not true partners for genuine integration and peaceful coexistence in a pluralist democracy. Qandil continues his work for the separation of mosque and state.

Samia Labidi, now living in France, was born in Tunisia in 1964. She attended an Islamic school and grew up in a traditional but tolerant family.7 When she was eleven, her sister married one of the founders of the Islamist group MTI, known as El Nahda (the Renaissance). Her family then became Medina Muslims and Labidi began wearing the veil.8 Labidi's mother found the situation too confining and left Tunisia to live with her brother in France. Labidi, too, felt that she could barely breathe:

My mind was sterilized gradually, unable to have access to freedom of thought, to myself. . . . Women continued to be treated like incapable beings who need to be systematically under the guardianship of a close male relative in order to move, to exist, or even to breathe.9

When she was eighteen, Labidi left Tunisia and went to Paris, earning a master's degree in philosophy from Universite de Paris X Nanterre. Labidi's brother, meanwhile, became radicalized before abjuring terrorism. Labidi has written about her brother's radicalization10 and now argues for reforming Islam: "Ultimately," she writes, "the solution lies in separating religion from politics, particularly in that part of the globe that is still suffering from this amalgam between . . . temporal . . . and spiritual power."11 Labidi remains highly active in groups that are seeking to give secular French Muslims a voice.12

Seyran Ates is a German lawyer of Turkish descent. Ates moved with her family from Turkey to Germany as a six-year-old in 1969. Just before she turned eighteen, she left her parents' home, moved in with a German man, and studied law.13 As an attorney specializing in family law, Ates represented numerous Muslim women for two decades in cases involving abusive marriages, forced marriages, and divorce proceedings.

Through her work, Ates has seen the dark side of excessively tolerant multiculturalism. According to Ates, forced marriages are locking up German-born Muslims in separate Islamic enclaves to the point that tens of thousands of women are so isolated from German society that they are unable even to call an ambulance. There has been excessive tolerance for the repressive side of Islam, something Ates calls the "multicultural mistake," the title of one of several books she has written.

Before she was pressured to stop her public appearances by security threats, Ates argued that Islam needs "a sexual revolution" to emancipate women as equals: 

"Part of the process is that sexuality [in Islam] has to be recognized as something that every individual determines for himself or herself."14 

She has proposed creating a mosque that would welcome Sunnis and Shiites and treat men and women equally, allowing men and women to pray together and women to serve as imams in mixed congregations.

Ates argues that Islam must be completely separated from politics: "If we are going to stop that movement and separate politics from religion," Ates says, "then we will have chance for Islam to be compatible with democracy."15

Citizen Reformers in the Islamic World

In the Islamic world, too, a growing number of ordinary citizens are calling for reform. These voices include the Egyptian Kareem Amer, the Palestinian Walid Husayin, the Turk Aylin Kocaman, the Iraqi Nabil al-Haidari, the Pakistani Luavut Zahid, the Saudi Arabians Hamza Kashgari and Raif Badawi, and the Bangladeshi Taslima Nasrin.

Kareem Amer (real name Abdel Suleiman) is an Egyptian and a former student at Al-Azhar. In 2005, after Muslims attacked a Coptic church, Amer called Muhammad and his seventh-century followers the sahaba—"spillers of blood"—for their teachings on warfare.16 Amer criticized Al-Azhar as being a force for Islamic orthodoxy and intolerance of reformist views. Early in 2006, he was expelled for criticizing the extreme dogma of his Islamic instructors, writing on his blog that "professors and sheikhs at al-Azhar who . . . stand against anyone who thinks freely" would "end up in the dustbin of history."17 Amer also criticized the autocratic rule of then-President Hosni Mubarak. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2007 before being released in 2010 after being beaten in confinement. He exemplifies those young Egyptians who question not only political but also religious authoritarianism.

Walid Husayin, about thirty years old, is a Palestinian skeptic who has described the Islamic God as "a primitive, Bedouin and anthropomorphic God."18 On Facebook, Husayin also satirized various Qur'anic verses. Husayin is in every sense an irreverent freethinker who in the West might have found work as a comedian or satirist. Many Palestinians, however, responded with anger to Husayin's criticism of Islam, accusing him of working for the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. Some residents of his hometown called on him to be killed "as a warning to others."19 Husayin responded that his critics "actually don't get that people are free to think and believe in whatever suits them."20 After being jailed for a month, and under heavy pressure, Husayin apologized.21

Luavut Zahid, a Pakistani writer and women's rights advocate, wrote in April 2014 that Muslims had to make some significant changes to their religion, and that the crisis of Islam could not be blamed on outsiders:

The tactics of terror used by Islamic countries and Muslims at large in general ensure that people will either put up with them, or shut up and leave. There is no concept of freedom of speech, and there is furthermore no concept of criticism. ... A more pertinent question instead would be why people never spring into action when someone passes a fatwa allowing and requiring female genital mutilation. If it is not real Islam to circumcise young girls, then why did people realize it only after [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali spoke about it? . . . Does she at times sound too extreme? Definitely.

But stop for a second and ask yourself this: how many Muslims has she killed? How many Muslims have had to go into hiding because of her? The onus for change lies with Muslims alone. If they are so hell bent on proving that this extreme interpretation of their faith is wrong, then they need to come forward and start transforming things from the inside. Hirsi Ali cannot and should not be called an Islamophobe only because she loudly repeats the things that she has experienced, and continues to see happening around her, and all in the name of God.22

Taslima Nasrin, an apostate born in Bangladesh currently living in India, has said that "what is needed is a uniform civil code of laws that is not based on religious dogmas, and that is equally applicable to men and women."23 The rule of civil law rather than sharia law will ensure all citizens are treated as equals, regardless of their private religious affiliation. This would entail a full separation of mosque and state.

Dissident Clerics

My own sense is that a Muslim Reformation will not come from within the ranks of the Islamic clergy. 

In the current crisis of Islam, however, there is a growing chorus of Muslim clerics calling for reform of existing Islamic doctrine. Such reformers can be found among both Sunni and Shia clerics, in the Islamic world as well as in the West. These clerics ought to be distinguished from what I would call "fake" reformers, who may condemn the violence used by Al-Qaeda and Islamic State while fervently working toward the imposition of sharia through nonviolent means. That is not what a real "reformer" is, though Western governments— including the U.S. government—have often made the mistake of partnering with such individuals.24 

A real reformer is a cleric who not only rejects violence in the short term but also favors changing certain core religious doctrines of Islam.

These clerical reformers differ on the specific substance of reforms. Some (such as al-Ansari) favor reinterpretation of Islamic doctrine while respecting, for example, the integrity of the text of the Quran. Others (such as al-Qabbanji) view the Quran as a human-influenced text subject to far-reaching reinterpretation.

A description of some clerical reformers will reveal that there are meaningful efforts at present to reform Islam from within, though my own sense is that citizen-reformers will ultimately be more powerful than clerics in reforming Islam.

Imam Yassin Elforkani, a Sunni preaching in the Netherlands, has argued that "a new theology must arise in a Dutch context."25 Though Elforkani views the Qur'an as a divine text (in that regard adhering to orthodoxy), he insists that "all interpretations of the Quran are the work of human beings" and subject to change. 

About young Dutch Muslims who leave the Netherlands to join IS, he says, "We [Muslims] can't permit ourselves to look away, we've got to think critically about ourselves. . . . These young people left with ideals that did not fall from the sky. Those ideals coincide with elaborate theories, with concepts from Islamic theology that have been taught for decades."26

Elforkani has expressed himself critically about the theory of the Caliphate and the activities of IS: "The concept of the Caliphate, of the global rule of Islam—sorry, but that is not of this era, is it? But if we do not develop alternatives to this, IS will only gain more and more ground." Elforkani has received numerous death threats in the Netherlands for explicitly calling for theological reforms within Islam.

In the Islamic world, a number of clerics are publicly calling for theological reforms within Islam. The Sunni Abd Al-Hamid al-Ansari is a former dean of Islamic law at Qatar University. Born in Doha in 1945, al-Ansari has defended liberal Muslims for years. Rejecting calls by Islamic preachers for young Muslims to love death, Ansari has said: "I would like the religious scholars, through their religious discourse, to make our youth love life, and not death."27 Al-Ansari has called for a fundamental overhaul of educational systems in the Islamic world to encourage critical thinking. He has called for Arab freethinkers to be able to sue inflammatory Islamic preachers for harm that befalls them as a result of their sermons.28

Ahmad al-Qabbanji is a Shiite cleric who has proposed to change core aspects of Islam's doctrines. Al-Qabbanji was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1958, and studied Islamic jurisprudence at the Shiite Hawza of his hometown in the 1970s. He has said openly:

I have deviated from [t]his religion, every bit of which I reject. Let them say that I am an apostate and a heretic. It is true. I am an apostate from their religion, which stirs nothing but hatred of the other—a religion devoid of beauty, devoid of love, devoid of humanity.29

Al-Qabbanji proposes "a modifiable religious ruling based on fiqh al-maqasid, or the Jurisprudence of the Meaning."30 According to this innovation, "jurisprudence should address the meaning conveyed by the revelation, rather than adhere blindly to its literal wording, with no regard for reality or reason."31 Al-Qabbanji has proposed viewing the Qur'an as divinely inspired but not divinely dictated, a break with current orthodoxy. Al-Qabbanji believes that "the Qur'an was created by the Prophet Muhammad, but was driven by Allah."32 Al-Qabbanji argues that structural reforms are needed within Islam to prevent its stagnation: "If we want Islam to be eternal even though reality is mobile, then Islam must also be mobile. It cannot stagnate. The scholars in the religious institutions view Islam as stagnant teachings."33

Another reformer worth noting is Iyad Jamal al-Din, an Iraqi cleric. Though he is a Shiite, al-Din has argued against political rule by clerics as occurs in Iran, and for separation of mosque and state, and has faced numerous threats for taking these positions. Al-Din rejects the imposition of sharia and favors civil laws in a civil state in order to guarantee full freedom of conscience to each individual citizen:

I say that either we follow thefiqh [Islamic religious law], in which case ISIS is more or less right, or else we follow man-made, civil enlightened law, according to which the Yazidis are citizens just like Shiite and Sunni Muslims. We must make a decision whether to follow man-made civil law, legislated by the Iraqi parliament, or whether to follow the fatwas issued by Islamic jurisprudence. We must not embellish things and say that Islam is a religion of compassion, peace and rose water, and that everything is fine.34

Al-Din has defended the religious diversity of Iraq and has rebuked IS on theological grounds for imposing its religious views on nonbelievers. He has described the first article in most Islamic constitutions, which declares the state to be an Islamic state, as "a catastrophe." He argues that "religion is for human beings, not the state."35

Ibrahim al-Buleihi, a former member of the Saudi Shura council who has held a number of government posts, has publicly stated that the Arab world needs a fundamental cultural change to empower the individual and make possible independent thinking.36 Al-Buleihi rejects the groupthink and tendency toward public conformity that has constrained independent thinking in the Islamic world. Independent thinking, outside of the shackles of orthodoxy, is necessary for a civilization to flourish.

Similarly, Dhiyaa al-Musawi, a Bahraini Shia cleric, thinker, and writer, has called "for a cultural Intifada in the Arab world, in order to sweep away the superstitions that dwell in the Arab and Islamic mind."37

Reformers and the West

Just as critics of communism during the Cold War came from a variety of backgrounds and disagreed on much, today's critics of Islam unreformed are not in agreement on all issues. Al-Qabbanji, for example, has expressed strong criticism of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Other reformers, such as al-Ansari, are generally pro-American in inclination.

Those Muslim reformers who propose breaking with Islamic orthodoxy to empower the individual, who want to create a civil state under civil laws, who view the Qur'an as a document created by men, and who support critically analyzing the Qur'an and the hadith—these individuals are ultimately allies of human freedom though they may differ with Westerners on matters of public policy. 

These men risk imprisonment and even death in order to reform Islam from within and change its core doctrines. They merit our support—though they are unlikely to agree with Westerners on every matter of foreign policy.

I do not believe, as some people do, in the innate "backwardness" of Arabs or of Muslims, or for that matter of Africans or Somalis. I do not believe Islamic orthodoxy is "ingrained" in the nature of Muslims. I do not believe the Islamic world is doomed to a perpetual cycle of violence, whoever succeeds in reaching the levers of power. And I do not believe that Islamic clerics— guardians of orthodoxy—are powerful enough to stop a ground-swell of dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs.

I am a universalist. I believe that each human being possesses the power of reason as well as a conscience. That includes all Muslims as individuals. At present, some Muslims ignore their consciences, and join groups such as Boko Haram or IS, obeying textual prescriptions and religious dogma.

But their crimes against human reason and against human conscience committed in the name of Islam and sharia are already forcing a reexamination of Islamic scripture, doctrine, and law. 

This process cannot be stopped, no matter how much violence is used against would-be reformers. Ultimately, I believe it is human reason and human conscience that will prevail.

It is the duty of the Western world to provide assistance and, where necessary, security to those dissidents and reformers who are carrying out this formidable task. 

Dissidents have many disagreements among them: what unites them is a concern that Islam unreformed provides neither a viable ethical framework nor a strong connection to the Divine, to the realm beyond. 

To repeat the words of al-Din, "We must not embellish things and say that Islam is a religion of compassion, peace and rose water, and that everything is fine." 

It is not. But the fact that such words can be uttered at all is one of the reasons I believe the Muslim Reformation has begun.

………………..

MUSLIM  RELIGION  SURELY  NEED  TO  BE  REFORMED;  BUT  IT  MAY  NOT  HAVE  THE  TIME  OR  THE  HEART  TO  REFORM  TO  ANY  LARGE  EXTENT  BEFORE  THE  END  OF  THIS  AGE  COMES.  IT  CERTAINLY  WILL  REFORM  WHEN  CHRIST  JESUS  RETURNS.  BY  THEN  THE  NATIONS  WILL  HAVE  SEEN  WHAT  MAN'S  GOVERNMENTS  HAVE  BROUGHT  ON  THE  EARTH;  THEY  WILL  BE  READY  BY  AND  LARGE  TO  LISTEN  TO  THE  TRUE  GOD  OF  THE  UNIVERSE;  THOSE  NATIONS  WHO  WILL  NOT  SHALL  SUFFER  PUNISHMENT [ZECHARIAH 14].  IN  THE  END  ALL  NATIONS  WILL  COME  UNDER  THE  HOLY  RIGHTEOUS  REIGN  OF  CHRIST.

THERE  WILL  BE,  A  NEW  AGE,  A  PROSPEROUS  AGE  FOR  EVERYONE.  AN  AGE  OF  ONE  THOUSAND  YEARS  OF  PEACE,  JOY,  HAPPINESS,  RIGHTEOUSNESS.  THE  LAW  SHALL  GO  FORTH  FROM  ZION,  AND  THE  WORD  OF  THE  LORD  FROM  JERUSALEM.

IT  IS  WRITTEN,  THE  EARTH  SHALL  BE  FULL  OF  THE  KNOWLEDGE  OF  GOD  AS  THE  WATERS  COVER  THE  SEA  BEDS!

GOD  SPEED  THAT  DAY!!

Keith Hunt