Here’s a test. Which of these two statements is from the eleventh century, and which from the twenty-first?
“O God, raise the banner of Islam and its helper and refute polytheism by wounding its back and cutting its ropes. Help those who fight for jihad for your sake and who in obedience to you have sacrificed themselves and sold their souls to you…. Because they persist in going astray, may the eyeball of the proponents of polytheism become blind to the paths of righteousness.”1
“We ask Allah to turn this Ramadan into a month of glory, victory, and might, to hoist high in [this month] the banner of religion, to strengthen Islam and the Muslims, to humiliate polytheism and polytheists, to wave the banner of monotheism, to firmly plant the banner ofJihad, and to smite the perverts and the obstinate.”2
Islamic scholar Ibn al-Mawsilaya wrote the first paragraph late in the eleventh century. The al Qaeda Sheikh Aamer bin Abdallah al-Aamer wrote the second in 2004.
Guess what?
· Islam has not reformed or changed its traditional doctrines of jihad warfare.
· Modern-day jihad groups are working to restore the caliphate as a means to further their war with the West.
· These groups despise democracy as a Western import at odds with the caliphate and sharia.
If you failed the test, don’t worry. After all, the two paragraphs are extremely similar to each other—and that is no accident. Modern-day jihad movements consciously pattern themselves after the jihad warriors of old, and frequently invoke their memories. “During the month of Ramadan,” Dr. Fuad Mukheimar, secretary-general of the Egyptian Sharia Association, wrote in 2001, “a great Muslim victory was won over the Crusaders under the leadership of [Salah Al-Din] [Saladin] Al-Ayubi. His advisors counseled him to rest from the Jihad during the month of fasting, but Saladin insisted on continuing the Jihad during Ramadan because he knew…that fasting helps to [achieve] victory, because during Ramadan the Muslims overcome themselves through fasting, and thus their victory over their enemies is certain. Fasting gives them determination, heroism, and will-power…Saladin replied to his advisors, ‘Life is short.’ Allah learned of [Saladin’s] loyalty and the loyalty of his soldiers, and gave them a decisive victory. They took the fortress of Safed, the greatest of the Crusader fortresses, in the middle of the month of fasting. [Saladin] conquered the lands of Al-Sham [Greater Syria] and purified Jerusalem of the tyranny and defilement of the Crusaders.”3 Mukheimar also referred to the Battle of Badr and other historic battles to try to rouse modern-day Muslims to imitate Muhammad and Saladin and wage jihad for themselves.
This is a principal reason why jihad terrorists routinely refer to American troops as “Crusaders.” In their view, the War on Terror, which began for Americans on September 11, 2001, is only the latest installment of a conflict that has continued for over a thousand years.
What are they fighting for?
This conflict, in their view, is destined to end with the hegemony of Islam. In the words of Osama bin Laden, jihad warriors the world over are fighting, “so that Allah’s Word and religion reign supreme.”4 This involves the re-establishment of full Islamic law in Muslim countries and above all, the restoration of the caliphate.
As we have seen, the caliph was (in Sunni Islam) the successor to Muhammad and the leader of the Muslim community; Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkish government abolished the caliphate in 1924. Islamic theology makes no distinction between the sacred and the secular, and for Sunni Muslims the caliph was something like a combined generalissimo and pope, although he never wielded anything comparable to the pope’s spiritual authority. Michelangelo’s patron, Pope Julius II, earned the dubious honor of going down in history as the “warrior pope;” by contrast, the overwhelming majority of the Prophet’s successors were warrior caliphs.
Many modern jihad groups date all the woes of the Islamic world to the loss of Muslim unity that resulted, in their view, from the loss of the caliphate.
That was when our heartaches began
This exhortation from the international Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir indicates the depth of anguish jihadists feel at the loss of the caliphate, which they attribute to Kemal Ataturk, an “English agent”:
It was a day like this 79 years ago, and more specifically on the 3rd of March 1924 that the kuffar [unbelievers] were able to reap the fruits of their tireless efforts of plotting and planning, which they had expended for more than a hundred years. This happened when the criminal English agent, Mustafa Kemal (so-called Ataturk, the ‘Father of the Turks’!) announced that the Grand National Assembly had agreed to destroy the Khilafah [caliphate]; and announced the establishment of a secular, irreligious, Turkish republic after washing his hands from responsibility of the remaining Islamic lands which the kuffar occupied in the First World War.
Since that day the Islamic ummah has lived a life full of calamities; she was broken up into small mini states controlled by the enemies of Islam in every aspect. The Muslims were oppressed and became the object of the kuffar’s derision in Kashmir, Philippines, Thailand, Chechnya, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Palestine and other lands belonging to the Muslims until what happened to the Muslims became the subject of studies and statistics. Thousands were killed, millions dispossessed and the honour of tens of thousands has been violated amongst other calamities. Anyone who reads the papers or hears the news always finds the Muslims under a state of oppression, humiliation and killings; and this is prevalent in every report.
Indeed, the ummah [global Muslim community] is not in a situation as she used to be under the banner of Islam, when she used to be ruled by the Khilafah state that united the Muslims. She was not divided as we see today by borders drawn up by the kafir colonialists or dispersed by oppressive laws of residence. The Muslim used to travel from one corner of the Muslim lands to another without anyone asking him who he was or describing him as a foreigner. When the Khilafah existed the Muslims witnessed the power of Islam through the power of the Khilafah. They led the word under the banner of the Khilafah that applied Islam and conveyed it as a message, guidance and light to the world. However, where is the Khilafah? It existed in the past, but it was destroyed and suspended as a system….
Those were critical nights in which the political entity of the Muslims was destroyed. At that time the Islamic ummah was supposed to raise its sword in the face of this treacherous agent who changed Dar al-Islam into Dar al-Kufr and realized for the kuffar a dream they had wished for a long time. However, the Islamic ummah was overwhelmed, in the worst state of decline. So the crime took place and the kuffar tightened their grasp over the Islamic lands and tore it up into pieces. They divided the one ummah into nationalities, ethnicities and tribes; they tore up the single country into homelands and regions in which they established borders and barriers. In place of a single Khilafah state they established cartoon states and installed rulers as agents to carry out the orders of their kuffar masters. They abolished the Islamic Sharee’ah from the sphere of ruling, economy, international relations, domestic transactions and the judiciary. They separated the deen from the state and confined the Islamic deen to certain rituals, like those in Christianity. They worked to destroy the Islamic culture and uproot the Islamic thoughts to plant in their place western thoughts and culture.
Only one thing will fix this problem
A new caliph and restored Islamic unity are the only things that can repair these wrongs. Allah willed, says the Hizb ut-Tahrir document, “that the Islamic ummah should reawaken again and revive from her decline and realise that her rescue is only by the re-establishment of the Khilafah.”5
When jihad fighters streamed into Iraq in 2003, eager for a showdown with American troops, Mullah Mustapha Kreikar, leader of the Muslim terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, placed their struggle in a larger religious context (from his safe haven in Norway): “The resistance is not only a reaction to the American invasion, it is part of the continuous Islamic struggle since the collapse of the caliphate. All Islamic struggles since then are part of one organized effort to bring back the caliphate.”6
The intellectual father of all modern-day Muslim radicals, the Egyptian Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), decried the end of the caliphate because it separated “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.” Al-Banna characterized the end of the caliphate as part of a larger “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all [the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation, power and means of propaganda.”7 Al-Banna founded the first modern jihad terror organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.
John Wesley on Islam:
“Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.”
(from The Doctrine of Original Sin, Works (1841), ix. 205)
Another influential Muslim theorist, Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi (1903–1979), founder of the Pakistani hard-line party Jamaat-e-Islami (Muslim Party), envisioned a unified Islamic state that would steadily expand throughout the subcontinent and beyond: “The Muslim Party will inevitably extend invitation to the citizens of other countries to embrace the faith which holds promise of true salvation and genuine welfare for them. Even otherwise also if the Muslim Party commands adequate resources it will eliminate un-Islamic Governments and establish the power of Islamic Government in their stead.” This was, according to Maududi, exactly what Muhammad and the first caliphs did. “It is the same policy which was executed by the Holy Prophet (peace of Allah be upon him) and his successor illustrious Caliphs (may Allah be pleased with them). Arabia, where the Muslim Party was founded, was the first country which was subjugated and brought under the rule of Islam.”8
Restoration of the caliphate and the global expansion of Islamic rule and law were also goals of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. In 1996, Mullah Omar wrapped himself in the cloak of Muhammad, which lies in a shrine in Afghanistan, as the Taliban proclaimed him the “new caliph” andEmir ul-Momineen, or Commander of the Faithful. In May 2002, a U.S. official noted that their plan was to “take over the whole country” of Afghanistan, and then “expand the caliphate.”9
Caliphate dreams in Britain—and the United States
Such views have long since come to the West. In 1999, Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was then imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque, spoke at a London conference dedicated to lamenting the seventy-fifth anniversary of the destruction of the caliphate. “Islam needs the sword,” he said to shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great) from the crowd of four hundred Muslims. “Whoever has the sword, he will have the earth.”10
Abu Hamza was a close associate of Omar Bakri and the now-disbanded British Muslim group Al-Muhajiroun. Bakri has declared his desire to see “the black flag of Islam”—that is, the battle flag of jihad—“flying over Downing Street.” Like Bakri and Al-Muhajiroun in Britain, Shaker Assem and the Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir) in Germany work to reestablish the caliphate and institute sharia. Declares Assem, “People who say there is a conflict between sharia and Western democracy are right.”11
What about America? Let’s get it straight from America’s leading Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR board chairman Omar Ahmad said this to a Muslim audience in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”12 Ahmad has since then claimed that he was misquoted, but the reporter who heard him stands by her story.13 CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper was almost as forthright as Ahmad, telling the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future. But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.”14
Through education, not violence, you say, Mr. Hooper? Thank you, everyone feels better now.
Khomeini in Dearborn and Dallas
In November 2004, Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, held an anti-America, anti-Israel demonstration. Protesters carried a large model of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and waved signs bearing slogans such as “U.S. Hands Off Muslim Land.” But the most arresting image was that of two Muslim women carrying large signs featuring the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The following month, the Metroplex Organization of Muslims in North Texas held a “Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary,” Ayatollah Khomeini, in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas.15
Khomeini, a hero? In the United States? For Muslims in America to revere him was revealing, for Khomeini’s 1979 triumph in Iran embodied the idea that Islamic law was superior to all others and must be pressed by force. As Khomeini himself put it, “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world…. But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world.” The goal of this conquest would be to establish the hegemony of Islamic law. As Khomeini proclaimed: “What is the good of us [i.e., the mullahs] asking for the hand of a thief to be severed or an adulteress to be stoned to death when all we can do is recommend such punishments, having no power to implement them?”
He then delivered a notorious rebuke to the Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace crowd: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]…. Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”16
The sharia state Khomeini envisioned was not one that guaranteed equal rights for all. In 1985, Sa’id Raja’i-Khorassani, the permanent delegate to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared that “the very concept of human rights was ‘a Judeo-Christian invention’ and inadmissible in Islam…. According to Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the shah’s ‘most despicable sins’ was the fact that Iran was one of the original group of nations that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”17
The Dearborn and Dallas pro-Khomeini displays indicated that Khomeini’s vision for society is alive in America today—and that it is dangerously naive to assume that all Muslims immediately and unquestioningly accept American pluralism and the idea of a state not governed by religious law. Just where American Muslims stand on Khomeini’s doctrines—and how many stand with him—are still forbidden questions for the major media. But if the old man could have spoken from his sign in Dearborn, he might have said, “Ignore me at your own risk.”
A tiny minority of extremists?
So there are some Muslims who want to establish Islamic governments in the West. Aren’t they just a tiny minority? Most Muslims in the West are quite happy to live in Western society…right?
Terrorism expert Daniel Pipes estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the world’s Muslims support the jihadist agenda.18 But there are indications from various parts of the Islamic world that the actual number of supporters of today’s jihad might be higher. American moderate Muslim leader Kamal Nawash said on the O’Reilly Factor in August 2004 that 50 percent of Muslims worldwide supported the jihad.19 During a terrorism finance trial in New York in February 2005, Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Islamic studies at New York University, said, “There are a billion plus Muslims in the Arab world, 90 percent of whom support Hamas”—the Islamic terrorist organization that blows up civilians in buses and restaurants to further its goal of a Palestinian sharia state.20Dr. Imran Waheed, the London spokesman for the international “peaceful” jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, declared in May 2005, “I believe that 99 percent of Muslim people anywhere in the world want the same thing, a caliphate to rule them.”22
Muhammad vs. Jesus
“My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight.”
Jesus (John 18:36)
“I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”21
According to a survey conducted in Pakistan in 2004 by the Pew Research Center, “65 per cent favoured Osama and that pluralities of 47 per cent believed Palestinian suicide attacks on Israelis were justified. Forty-six per cent thought attacks on Westerners in Iraq were justified.”23
Restoration of Muslim unity
One of the chief ills Hizb ut-Tahrir bemoans is the lack of unity among Muslims; in the good old days of the caliphate, the Muslim umma (community) “was not divided as we see today by borders drown up by the kafir colonialists.” Jihadists see this unity as paramount partly because Saladin’s victories over the Crusaders came after he was able to unite most of the Muslim world. Before Saladin, the Crusaders had been able to play the Sunni Abbasids of Baghdad off the Shi’ite Fatimids of Cairo and even entered into perfidious alliances with one against the other. But in 1171, Saladin allowed the call to prayer to resound through Cairo in the name of the Abbasid Caliph; the Fatimids were overthrown and the Islamic world reunited.25 Some of the most resounding victories over the Crusaders only became possible on the basis of this unity, and today’s jihadists have not forgotten this lesson.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Milestones by Sayyid Qutb; Mother Mosque Foundation, n.d. In this slim and hard-hitting book, Qutb (1906–1966) makes it plain: “If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped inJahiliyyah [ignorance of the divine guidance]. This Jahiliyyah is based on rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty, and makes some men lords over others.”24
Islam, says Qutb, in response to this wrongful deification of human beings, must “proclaim the authority and sovereignty of God” and thereby “eliminate all human kingship and to announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth. In the words of the Qur’an: ‘He alone is God in the heavens and in the earth.’ (43:84) ‘The command belongs to God alone. He commands you not to worship anyone except Him. This is the right way of life.’ (12:40)”26 In other words, Muslims must wage war until Islamic law reigns supreme all over the world.