Quran Study: How Islam Is Striving To Dominate The World
Since 9/11, American secularists arguably have never had to be more vigilant in fending off the aims of political religion. With Islam, much of the Western world has conventionalized truly paradoxical norms of self-censure.
Even our popular “liberal” President repeatedly has stated that Islam is a peaceful religion, distorted “by a few extremists.”1
So if you are concerned about matters jeopardizing the separation of church and state, you should be aware that Islamic fundamentalism ultimately prescribes merging the two in any manner or degree possible, in all independent states of the world.
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Political party lines have, in fact, exacerbated the situation. No liberal-minded person wants to be associated with the bigotry and vitriol of the most extreme (often Christian) Republicans who seem to be the only ones discussing the ongoing threat of Islam—but for all the wrong reasons.
Christianity and Islam were both born of the Hebrew Bible or Torah. However, many important differences have evolved over time.
In Christianity, a handful of bitter intra-faith conflicts do remain today. But, for the most part, they exist in parallel with little antagonism. This is not the case with Islam. In both theory and practice, Islam tolerates no diversity, neither within nor outside its ranks.
No true Christian theocracies exist in the world today. That is, no nation-states are constitutionally bound by the passages of Biblical scripture.
Contrary to common misconception, Vatican City is better described as an ecclesiocracy, being a state within which a religious leader assumes the leading role but does not govern according to any literal edicts of scripture.
On the other hand, there are at least seventeen nations in the world today that formally adhere to Islam’s holy Quran as the basis of their constitutions.
When it comes to Christianity, contemporary writers, cartoonists, comedians, journalists, and bloggers run rampant with blasphemous derision all the time. For this, nobody is executed. Nobody is imprisoned. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Islam is a different story altogether.
“We sent not a messenger except to teach in the language of his own people.” (Quran, Surah, 84.57)
While the Bible’s original Hebrew and Greek texts have been translated into well over 2,000 languages, the ramifications of translating Islam’s holy Quran are perilous and politically loaded. Its literal word is paramount—and inviolable.
That’s because the alleged revelations of Allah to the prophet Mohammad were said to be in Arabic, and Muslims have historically considered translations of the Quran to be the flawed interpretations of humans and, as such, fail to represent the precise, sacred character of the Arabic original.
The Quran’s most fundamental teaching is that Islam is the only acceptable religion on Earth, to be imposed over all others.
But long ago, a handful of Islam’s more strategic proponents realized that the Quran was unlikely to become the supreme operational manual of the world if it could not be understood.
Nonetheless, it is a risky endeavor to translate the Quran in many countries, even if it includes the Arabic text alongside the translation, line by line. The very existence of translations incites varying degrees of contempt around the world.
In November 2013, The Huffington Post World Edition reported that a pocket-sized translation of the Quran into “one of Afghanistan’s languages” landed six men in prison and left two of them begging judges to spare their lives.
Afghanistan’s powerful Islamic Council quickly condemned the translation and jailed both the cleric who endorsed it and its publisher.
The printer who distributed it was declared an infidel. As such, they contended, he should be killed. The native languages of numerous Islamic theocracies in the world today are not Arabic. These include Farsi, Kurdish, Indonesian, Pashto, Somali, and numerous other African and Indic languages. The official language of Nigeria is English.
Depending on where you happen to be, you may or may not be permitted to possess a Quran that you can understand.
You are, however, held responsible for straying from its doctrine. All Muslims inherit their religion at birth and must vow to remain wholly uncritical of all things Islam, even if they are illiterate or don’t understand Arabic.
“Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” (Hadith, Sahih Al-Bukhari, 9:57)
Every non-Muslim on Earth is considered a “kafir,” meaning someone impure, lowly, and disrespectful to Allah, his apostles, and Islam’s holy books.
The Qur’an makes it perfectly clear that anyone who remains a kafir incites Allah’s wrath and displeasure, and is deserving of severe retribution, both on earth and in the hereafter.
If you are born Muslim, or if you are a kafir divinely cleansed by becoming Muslim, there’s no getting out of it, at least not publically. Any defector, deserter, or “traitor” is considered an apostate—and to be an apostate from Islam is dangerous.
Apostasy carries the penalty of death in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Mauritania, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Gaza. Under Islamic “Sharia” law, other crimes that carry the death penalty include adultery and homosexuality.
These executions are often by decapitation. In March 2013, The Daily Mail reported the beheading of at least 28 people in Saudi Arabia alone. Other forms of execution under Sharia law may include hanging, maiming, or stoning—often in a fervently attended public spectacle.
The crime of blasphemy carries penalties of imprisonment in Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Morocco, Somalia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The BBC World Service reported that more than 800 Islamic clerics and “religious scholars” over the past decade have been killed for perceived crimes of blasphemy for expressing negative views on Islamic terrorism.
The Taliban—an Arabic term meaning “religious student”—accepted responsibility for most of these murders. Many victims were prayer leaders in mosques or teachers at government schools. The Taliban accused these clerics of weakening the morale of fundamentalist “resistance fighters.” 2
When we hear estimates of the number of Muslims worldwide, which number around two billion, we are hearing about two billion people who may or may not want anything to do with Islam, but continue to identify as Muslim, for obvious reasons.
Regarding the danger of leaving Islam, Pakistani scholar Abul Ala Mawdudi says, “Converts from Islam in the West, too, are keenly aware of it and fear its consequences, not only against themselves but against their families and friends here and in their native lands.” 3
The 2011 documentary Godless: Spreading the Word profiles well-assimilated former Muslims in the United States who candidly discuss continuing trepidation about their apostasy. Some even insisted on concealing their faces for their interviews.
In 2013, with the support of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and Atheists Alliance International published a joint report, The Political and Legal Status of Apostates in Islam.
It reviews the punishments of apostates in 29 countries, highlights the cases of many persecuted Atheists, secularists, and freethinkers, and calls for the condemnation of such laws and for the full protection for apostates and “blasphemers” worldwide.
In the April 2003 issue of Abuse Your Illusions, Howard Bloom, author of The God Problem and The Mohammad Code, recounted that “Arab pressure groups asked ever so politely . . . that nothing that I write to be published again.
They offered to boycott my publisher’s products—all of them—worldwide. And they backed their warning with a call for my punishment in seventeen Islamic countries.”
This call for punishment is called a fatwā and refers to an official ruling of a Muslim leader as defined by Sharia law. It can be a worldwide edict, unconcerned with international boundaries or secular laws.
As Bloom attests, fatwās are not isolated to distant lands and invisible third-world citizens; nor are they a matter of centuries past.
Throughout the world today, they are used to silence speakers, censure writers, and artists, and terrorize dissenters through manipulation, intimidation, and violence. They are the edicts of the thought police.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwā on writer Salman Rushdie for unsavory references to the life of Mohammad in his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, he was forced into hiding for more than a decade. Other high-profile international fatwās have targeted Somali-DutchAmerican feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose film, Submission, exposed the ruthless treatment of Muslim women.
Theo Van Gogh, the film’s director, was also targeted. While Ali survived, Van Gogh was not so fortunate.
In the name of Allah, he was assassinated in 2004 while riding his bicycle in the streets of Amsterdam. As he lay dying from several gunshot wounds, pleading for his life, his assassin, Mohammad Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim, attempted to decapitate him and plunged a knife into his chest with a note attached threatening the life of Ali as well.
Armed guards provided by the Dutch government-protected Ali after Van Gogh’s execution, and a trust fund set up by Atheist author and neuroscientist Sam Harris also provided aid for her protection. Ali went on to receive several prestigious human rights awards and was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2005.
In 2012, an American filmmaker came to the world’s attention when violent protests erupted in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories after a trailer of his movie Innocence of Muslims was posted on YouTube and broadcast in Egyptian media.
During a sermon at a mosque in London, Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the world leader of the supposedly “moderate” Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat sect of Islam, reacted strongly to the film. He renounced it as an abhorrent distortion of the peaceful nature of Islam, yet in the same speech stated, “Let it not be that in the name of freedom of speech that the peace of the entire world be destroyed.”
The incongruence is striking. In a press release and at a press conference attended by BBC National News, BBC Newsnight, Sky News, Sky Arabic, Reuters, and others, Ahmad conveyed a thinly veiled warning to world leaders that when they support the rights of people to make films or caricatures that offend Muslims, they are causing the hostilities.
Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward. (Quran 4:74)
While a fatwā typically involves a threat to specific people or groups, the larger-scale warfare incumbent on all Muslims against infidels and secular nation-states are acts of global “jihad,” from the Arabic “jahada,” which means “struggle.”
In this context, the struggle is the one undertaken by devout Muslims to eliminate or convert all non-Muslims to Islam and defend against religious “persecution.” The twelve Imams descendent from Mohammad in the Quran are the original wagers of jihad.
As such, their prescribed agenda is paramount. Jihad is an ongoing holy war, striving or fighting in the way of Allah, and those who are most fervent are promised great reward in the afterlife.
Seventy-two virgins seem to be the standard issue, although there is considerable confusion about how that particular accolade came to be so specific.
All incidents of Islamic terrorism, whether military, insurgent, or by fatwā, are acts committed out of religious duty. Credible historians have estimated that more people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined.4
ReligionOf Peace.com, run by a pluralist, non-partisan watchdog group, lists more than 2,800 acts of Islamic terrorism in 2013 alone.
This number includes neither “honor” killings nor incidents related to military combat, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, unless it involved suicide bombings or attacks on sites providing medical care to civilians.
The targets of jihad are kafirs, infidels, apostates, and secular states, and the exclamation “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is greatest!) is its mantra.
Allah is the best of the schemers. (Quran 3:54)
The Islamic principle of “taqiyya” means “religious deception” but is often euphemized as simply a means of “caution” in situations where religious persecution is a perceived threat.
One example of taqiyya in political action involves former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords, a framework enacted in 1993 to advance a resolution of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After signing the agreement with U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat was revealed in praise as the shining star of peace and conciliation in the Middle East.
Afterward, Arafat was quick to clarify his real intentions. Speaking in a Johannesburg mosque, he explained that he signed the accord with little sincerity.
Believing this address to be outside the scrutiny of Western media, Arafat clarified his unchanged intention to fight the Israelis as soon as it was advantageous to do so.
Unaware that his speech was being videotaped, he equated his deception with Mohammad’s ten-year truce with the Arabic tribe of Quaresh in the city of Mecca in 628 CE. This pact was quickly abandoned in the form of a surprise attack when Mohammad conquered Mecca and defeated the ill-prepared Quaresh.
In the same spirit of taqiyya, Arafat intimated, the jihad against Israel was to continue. There are many Muslim leaders and clerics in democratic, secular countries worldwide who spell out this loosely conditional duty to deceive and dissociate from non-Muslims.
They do so in the sanctity of protected mosques, and by exploiting official policies regarding religious freedom, multiculturalism, and free speech—all of which would be eliminated under Sharia law.
Of further irony is that these conditions provide a climate in which Islamic authorities don’t seem to have much reason to deceive at all.
Perhaps the most astounding oversight in the West is the failure to listen to what Muslim leaders of the highest international standing are actually saying.
For example, Omar Ahmed, Chairman of the Board of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has publicly said that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant.
The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” In a speech delivered in 2013 at a Muslim rally in Austin, Texas, Mustafa Carroll, the Executive Director of CAIR’s Dallas Fort-Worth branch, declared that “members of the faith should not be bound by American law . . . If we are practicing Muslims, we are above the law of the land.”
Islamic expert Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., told news agencies that “when you hear one of their speakers say, ‘We are above the law of the land’—take it to the bank. That is what they really believe; that is what Sharia teaches.
To the extent that Muslims adhere to Sharia, they are obliged to try and impose it on the rest of us.”5 Many respected Muslim leaders encourage the calculated strategy of “gradualism” as the way to infiltrate secular democracies.
Gradualism is a form of jihad based on pragmatism, patience, and long-term planning. In November 2011, Sheik Yousef al-Qaradawi, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential Sunni clerics, called on Muslims everywhere to embrace the strategy of gradualism.6
The Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Muhammad Badie, outlined six stages. The first stage is Sharia over the individual, the second is Sharia over the family, the third is Sharia over society, and the fourth is Sharia over the government. The resurrection of the “caliphate” (an Islamic state led by a supreme religious leader known as a “caliph”) is the fifth stage and the sixth is the mastership of the world.
In Western democracies, clandestine Sharia courts exemplify the first and second stages of gradualism by forbidding women to seek divorce or legal retribution in secular courts for crimes committed against them.
The authoritative Imam of a Sharia “court” (typically in a mosque) will instead provide “counsel,” which is essentially a process of recommitting the wife to the sanctity of the marriage.
Muslim women are also dissuaded from obtaining education, learning the languages, or adopting the dress of Western countries, and are thus rendered incapable of working, socializing, or seeking any form of legal justice or empowerment.
If a woman is compelled to comply with laws in secular countries banning the burka in public, her husband may refuse to allow her to appear in public at all.
In 2008, journalists in the UK produced Dispatches—Undercover Mosque, a five-part documentary film which includes footage of a number of Imams implementing stage one by strongly reiterating distrust and disregard for kafirs and infidels—persistently reinforcing the obligation of Muslims to avoid contact with secular legal systems and adhere strictly to Sharia law.
An example of stage two is the October 3, 2013, online story from The Daily Mail that reported on eighteen mosques wherein Imams were caught agreeing to marry girls fourteen years old and under. A good example of stage-three gradualism in the U.S. comes from Dearborn, Michigan, where the Muslim population has reached 50,000, approximately half of the city’s population.
In May 2013, a federal judge ruled that the violent reaction of some Muslims toward Christian demonstrators outside a Muslim festival was acceptable. Another example of stage-three gradualism are the food corporations that put the “halal” label on their products.
Halal is the stamp of approval for something that meets Muslim dietary restrictions. Halal animal products must come from livestock that is slaughtered according to Sharia law. The animal is hung upside down, and its throat is slit without anesthesia or stunning. As it bleeds to death, the slaughterer exclaims, “Allahu Akbar,” or “Bismillah” (in the name of Allah.)
A number of international investigators have also linked Halal certification operations with charities that divert proceeds to the Muslim Brotherhood, which then finance Islamic terrorism.
In May of 2014, Malaysian Muslims were outraged to find traces of porcine DNA (Muslims are forbidden to consume pork) in Cadbury’s halal chocolate and declared jihad on the company, which operates in 50 countries worldwide, including the U.S.
The 1979 revolution in Iran provides one example of how a naive and/or largely indoctrinated public can pave the way to the successful implementation of the fourth and fifth stages of Islamic gradualism in a democratic country.
Iranian Muslims brought about the rebellion against the pro-Western monarchy under the Shah of Iran, who was eventually exiled with the assistance of the U.S. government under Jimmy Carter.
The Shah was ultimately replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini who immediately implemented full Sharia law and declared Iran an Islamic theocracy.
While millions of Muslims initially supported the Ayatollah, the revolution spurred an exodus of secular and liberal-minded Iranians to Western destinations.
Iran is now one of the most oppressive Islamic regimes in the middle east. Nothing in this discussion is more disparaging than the emergence of the word “Islamophobia.”
With the turn of a phrase, the problem of Islamic extremism is semantically hijacked as an irrational fear. In turn, those who represent the ideological antithesis of all things egalitarian, humane, and free are transposed as the victims of oppression and bigotry.
Jackson Doughart, a policy writer for the Canadian Secular Alliance, suggests that “The only sentiment in this debate that could actually be described as phobic is the unconditional contempt among many Muslims for people who disagree with them.”
He is, however, doubtful that a formulation like “infidelophobia” will gain traction anytime soon. The assertion of Islamic apologists is that fringe groups do not represent the true “peaceful” nature of Islam, and, as such, cast unfair aspersion on well-assimilated Muslims in the West.
However, acts of violence, intimidation and holy jihad cannot be considered extreme if the Quran is understood to be the definitive guide for Muslims to live by.
In recent years, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has brought several motions before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to classify mere criticism of Islam to be a form of hate speech. A failure to censure it, they claim, can only “fuel discrimination and extremism, with dangerous unintended and unforeseen consequences.”
The OIC has repeatedly insisted that the culprit most responsible for “the institutionalization of Islamophobia” in Western countries is freedom of speech.
The message seems to be getting through. A significant portion of Western media goes to spectacular lengths to avoid accusations of Islamophobia in their reporting vernacular, which is, essentially, evidence of successful terrorization.
Sexual crime waves against Swedish and Danish women committed by Muslim immigrants in recent years have frequently been attributed to “Asian” perpetrators in the European press.
Even the barbaric beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby in the streets of London in 2013 was framed by some as an isolated attack of a deranged fanatic.
In 2013, September’s attack on a shopping mall in Nigeria, the Islamic faction Al-Shabaab deliberately spared Muslims and massacred, dismembered, and disfigured scores of innocent non-Muslims. This was euphemized in some Western media as the work of ambiguous “militants.”
In recent months, the tide seems to have shifted in the court of public opinion when the Islamic militants of Boko Haram (a moniker meaning “Western education is sinful”) kidnapped over two hundred schoolgirls in Nigeria.
At the time of this writing, their fate is still unknown. Although Boko Haram has committed atrocities at schools on a regular basis in recent history, the scope of this particular incident has sparked an international furor and has brought attention to Islamic fundamentalism which can not be euphemized away.
Every video that this barbaric group has released is heavy with Islamic references and direct quotes from the Quran. Apologists of the “religion of peace” take us down a slippery slope, where oppressive ideologies have rights and people do not. Religion is equated with culture, culture is equated with ethnicity, humanitarianism with bigotry and human rights and freedoms are dismissed as secondary to religious protectionism.
Just like Christians who are woefully unfamiliar with most of their holy Bible, many Muslims haven’t examined much of the Quran at all.
Where they exist, English translations are methodically sanitized, and, internationally, Muslims frequently chant their prayers in a language only fifteen percent of them speak.
As such, it is reasonable to suggest that an inestimable number of them literally don’t know what they are talking about. In sum, much of Western society has euphemized the danger of Islam, avoided identifying its perpetrators, and villainized humanitarian objectors.
Where Islam flourishes, there is no peace. And as a neuroscientist and Atheist author Sam Harris has suggested, “It is time for secular liberals and (truly) moderate Muslims to stop denying it.”
In her book Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali warns that “Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, and women still stoned and enslaved—just as the prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.”
The Islamic faith is one of conquest, with a contemporary agenda of setting legal precedents in secular courts, proliferating a politically significant minority population, electing Muslim officials into political office, and gradually expropriating secular norms and laws.
Fundamentalist Muslims have methodically exploited the freedom of speech and multicultural protections in a myriad of Western democracies, yet protesting any form of opposition as Islamophobic. They have managed to garner sympathy for their “persecution” among a daunting number of uninformed idealists. We ignore this at our peril.
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