Dr Moz what a truly excellent article I am 4/5 through it. It shows real understanding of islam and its dangers. A MUST READ
I am posting some extracts but one really should read this article. I am going to send it out to friends as folk need to understand these thing.
We can gather that their state
rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its
religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change,
even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a
harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
There is a temptation to
rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern
political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the
Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in
light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization
to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the
apocalypse.
The most-articulate spokesmen
for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves.
They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will
not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the
Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and
allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific
traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In
September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman,
called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an
infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car,
or “destroy his crops.
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with
theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly
echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the
armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the
lands of kuffar, or
infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The
reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted
psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected
populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its
most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of
Islam.
Virtually every major decision
and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press
and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and
coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and
example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail.
Muslims can reject the Islamic
State; nearly all do (DOUBT THAT). But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious,
millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has
already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to
counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual
genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead
help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
In Islam, the
practice of takfir, or
excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You
are an infidel,’?” the Prophet said, “then
one of them is right.” If the accuser is
wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The
punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range
of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.
Denying the holiness of the
Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi
and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a
Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs,
wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for
a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates.
Following takfiri doctrine,
the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers
of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true
extent of the slaughter unknowable,
Exempted from automatic
execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government.
Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic
authority for this practice is not in dispute. (THESE GUYS LIKE CHRISTIANS A LOT MORE THAN WARPED dud WHO WOULD HAVE US LL PUT DOWN LIKE RABID DOGS)
Their skepticism is comprehensible.
In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient
scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward
Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another
way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in
which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the
humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.
Without
acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic
State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology
reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t
matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in
Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate,
sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.
But Muslims who call the
Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard
Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and
politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects
“what their religion has historically and legally required.
According to Haykel, the ranks
of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic
quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff
constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic
doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all
the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has
distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful
ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a
religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what
Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all
Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much
legitimacy as anyone else.”
The Koran specifies crucifixion
as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on
Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth
chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay
the jizya with
willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims
consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slave
What’s striking about them is
not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these
texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims
don’t normally have.”
We will conquer your Rome,
break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in
one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then
our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as
slaves at the slave market.”
Enslaving the families of the kuffar[infidels] and taking their women as concubines is
a firmly established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he
would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the
Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.
Peter R. Neumann, a professor
at King’s College London, told me that online voices have been essential to
spreading propaganda and ensuring that newcomers know what to believe. Online
recruitment has also widened the demographics of the jihadist community, by
allowing conservative Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach
out to recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria.
Bernard Haykel, the
foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology, believes the group
is trying to re-create the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing
its norms of war. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness” about the
group’s dedication to the text of the Koran, he says. (Peter Murphy)
Their principal goal in meeting
me was to explain what the Islamic State stands for, and how its policies
reflect God’s law.
Before the caliphate, “maybe 85
percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws
are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—a caliphate—“and
now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are
not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create
a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence,
suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the
territory where the caliph is applying these laws
The caliph is required to
implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance
to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to
excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been plagued with this great
matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility,”
Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience—and
those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned
and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.
The ideological purity of the
Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the
group’s actions.
In London, Choudary and his
students provided detailed descriptions of how the Islamic State must conduct
its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It has already taken up what
Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries
that are ruled by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,”
Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable concept.
But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the
caliph.
Choudary took pains to present the
laws of war under which the Islamic State operates as policies of mercy rather
than of brutality. He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its
enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions
and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and
avoids prolonged conflict. (as warped as warped DUD!!!!!!)
Choudary’s
colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits only temporary peace
treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting any border is
anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda
videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he
will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied
to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may
not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.
” This form of
diplomacy is shirk, or
polytheism, he argued, and would be immediate cause to hereticize and replace
Baghdadi. Even to hasten the arrival of a caliphate by democratic means—for
example by voting for political candidates who favor a caliphate—is shirk.
The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State
belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic
blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as
far back as 2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and
Iraq and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told
followers then that the group’s ambition was to “restore the Islamic
caliphate,”
Our goal is to
establish an Islamic state that doesn’t recognize borders, on the Prophetic
methodology.”
If we had
identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and realized that the vacuum
in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to carry them out, we might, at a
minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its border with Syria and preemptively make
deals with its Sunnis. That would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda
effect created by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of
Iraq’s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The
New Yorker that he considered ISIS to
be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that
doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” the president said.(OBAMA IS CONSISTENTLY AND IT LOOKS LIKE DELIBERATELY WRONG ON MUSLIM ISSUES)
One way to un-cast
the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it
militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al?Qaeda
is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground.
The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and
Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground
movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its
command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding.
Muslims can say
that slavery is not legitimate now, and
that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn
slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example
of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents
could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam
are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of
apostasy.
READ THE ARTICLE!!!!!!!! MUSLIMS ARE EASILY RADICALISED BY APPEALS TO THE KORAN TEXTS ON JIHAD.
