Hugh Fitzgerald's review of Onward Muslim Soldiers

Hugh Fitzgerald, who has graced Jihad Watch with his incisive and perceptive comments on several occasions, has written a review in Outpost of Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer's book Onward Muslim Soldiers. The review is so detailed as to be a short course in the realities of jihad and terrorism in itself. Also, it is written with an erudition, elegance, and linguistic opulence that is rare these days, and which makes it delightful to read from beginning to end.

". . . In a rightly ordered world, its fate would be clear: the book would be translated into all major languages; it would be on the shelves and, more importantly, in the minds, of all those whose duty it is to instruct us. For Onward Muslim Soldiers explains, clearly, scrupulously, meticulously, the central political tenets of Islam (not the tenets of 'political Islam'), that make so many of its adherents such a threat to the entire non-Muslim world -- the world of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Confucians, agnostics, atheists and others. Though few non-Muslims seem to realize it, they face not a 'war on terror' ('terror' is merely a tactic, and by no means the most effective one), but a world-wide Jihad, or war to extend, through many instruments, the dar al-Islam until all non-Muslims, ultimately, are subjugated to the rule of Islam. It sounds fantastic, but it is deeply rooted in an ideology that is not tangential but central to Islam. And all non-Muslims are the targets of this military, economic, propagandistic, and demographic campaign. . . .

"Spencer links the latest pronouncements of Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Sheikh Rantisi of Hamas, and others not only to such 20th century writers as Hassan al-Banna, Qutb, Mawdudi, and Abdullah Azzam, but to the central texts of Islam: Qur'an and hadith (the sayings and acts of Muhammad). As the 'gates of ijtihad (interpretation)' closed more than a millennium ago, these texts, and the tenets they give rise to, cannot be changed or interpreted away. 'Moderate' Muslims (often thrusting young academics in the West) who suggest otherwise, are often wilfully misleading. The behavior of those 'moderates' who deny central teachings of Islam, and who are not engaged in such wilful deception, may have other explanations -- ignorance, filial piety, or simply embarrassment. In fact, it is the so-called 'extremists' who articulate what is mainstream and orthodox Islam, and who would have been so regarded by any Muslim writer of significance in the past, from al-Ghazzali to Ibn Khaldun. . . .

"Spencer explains the best-known excerpts routinely invoked by Muslim apologists, and brings to bear both the classical commentators, and what Muslim history reveals about the application of these excerpts to dealings with non-Muslims. Calm, unruffled, humorous, he offers quite a contrast to the humorless hysteria of those Muslim spokesmen, with whom, over the past year, on radio, television, and Internet, he has entered the lists. He explains how, by the Islamic doctrine of naskh, or abrogation, the later, more aggressive verses 'cancel' the earlier, milder ones. He is enviably familiar with these passages, and cannot be cowed by bullying Muslim opponents; consequently, they are reduced either to silence, or to torrents of abuse. For them, Spencer is the worst sort of opponent -- he knows.

"Spencer is unfoolable and unflappable. He shows how Qur'an and hadith, embodied in the shari'a, or Law of Islam, have always promoted the Jihad against all non-Muslims. Jihad is not an invention of a 'handful of extremists'; it does not date from the twentieth but from the seventh or eighth centuries. He shows how once conquered, subjugated non-Muslims become dhimmi (from ahl al-dhimma, or 'people of the pact') -- a misleading word translated as 'a member of the "protected people."' They are protected, of course, from the Muslims themselves, who otherwise would kill, or forcibly and immediately convert, these 'protected peoples.' Spencer shows that Jihad and dhimmitude work together, first to conquer, then to consolidate the hold of the Muslim conquerors over initially far larger populations of conquered non-Muslims. Islamic doctrine is used to explain and justify the oppression of the conquerors, even to make it palatable to those conquered by offering them an ideology (a religion) which contains bits and pieces of the pre-existing religions of those conquered -- both of Western religions, Christianity and Judaism, and those of Persia, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism.

"The status of dhimmi is linked to Jihad, for it follows immediately upon the initial successful conquest. It imposes a status of permanent humiliation, degradation, and insecurity (witness the massacres and forcible mass conversions of 'protected peoples' throughout Muslim history, despite their supposed 'protected' status). The host of financial, legal, economic, political, religious, and social disabilities inevitably led to the slow asphyxiation of non-Muslim communities, which became 'islamized' as non-Muslims, and then, under intolerable pressure, gradually succumbed to Islam and, in most cases (Persia being the great exception), became 'arabized' as well, in language, customs, and even in entirely fictitious Arab lineages created and adopted by non-Arabs (all those 'Sayeeds' in Pakistan).

"Spencer understands the importance of ideas. The tenets of Islam, few and simple in nature, are based on an updated version of Manichaeism: a division of the world not between Good and Evil, but between Muslim and non-Muslim. There must ultimately be the conquest, and then subjugation, of the latter by the former. This is natural, right, and in accordance with the will of Allah. No other outcome is possible, however long it takes. Such a result may be furthered by what we call terrorism. It may be furthered through traditional military combat, or qital. It may be furthered by the use of 'wealth' -- that is, economic warfare, involving boycotts and bribery (chiefly of diplomats, journalists, and assorted fixers). It may involve propaganda (the virtual takeover of the UN and its subsidiary organizations by Islamic forces, expressed most obviously in the permanent kangaroo courtroom, with Israel perennially in the dock, of the General Assembly). . . .

"Many lives and many dollars might be saved if a sufficient number of people throughout the Infidel world were to read, understand and thoroughly assimilate Onward Muslim Soldiers. Spencer cuts through the sentimentalism, fear, confusion, and ignorance in the West carefully exploited by Muslim apologists. Like Ibn Warraq and Bat Ye'or, Robert Spencer is beholden to no one; he writes and works on his own. He does not need to worry about what Muslim colleagues or old friends may think; he can allow himself the greatest luxury of all: the freedom to tell the truth. Spencer lucidly introduces us to the daily fare of many hundreds of millions of Muslims repeated throughout the khutbas (sermons) delivered at Friday Prayers from New Jersey to the Philippines, from Capetown to Stockholm, and forming the attitudes, and creating the atmospherics, in which most Muslims, even if they live in the West, lead their lives. Onward Muslim Soldiers is the clearest and most intelligent guide to what the 'war on terrorism' really is: a war of self-defense, by non-Muslims, a war imperfectly understood and imperfectly articulated by those whose duty it is to instruct and to defend us against the Jihad.

"Jihad has remained central to Islam; local Jihads, from China (1930), to India (the Moplah Insurrection), to Israel (one long Jihad against the Infidel state), to the Moro Islands, Sulawesi, East Timor, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all punctuate the 20th century. Dhimmitude can be seen expressed in a variety of modes: in the recent imposition of shari'a laws even on Christians in Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan. But until an accident of geology endowed Muslims with the wherewithal, a worldwide Jihad, using the full range of instruments, was not possible. Now the 5-6 trillion dollars that OPEC states have received in the last 30 years has helped to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in arms, to corrupt diplomats and journalists, to build mosques throughout the dar al-Harb and madrassas throughout the dar al-Islam. Only in one case, Kemalist Turkey, has Islam effectively been defanged in relation to the Infidels -- and that requires constant vigilance by the Turkish army, with never an assurance that the Kemalist experiment will prevail. . . .

"The 'war' of self-defense against the Jihad will not be over in 10 years, nor in 100 years. And in this war, where the enemy follows Muhammad's definition of war as 'deception,' non-Muslims must begin by understanding the enemy. The media are full of grim tidings that can be described as Jihad news. Some persist in believing that this Jihad news, from all over the world, is caused only by a 'handful of extremists' who have 'hijacked a great religion' (Variant 1) or 'by fundamentalist Wahhabis' (Variant 2); both are wrong. Adherents of Islam, both Sunni and Shi'a, and within Sunni Islam, all four main schools of Muslim jurisprudence, share the same beliefs concerning the Infidels. Those who persist in avoiding these tenets, or in presenting a tortuous or guarded account, end up avoiding much in the 1350-year history of Islam. Those non-Muslims, including scholars, who practice such apologetics help, objectively, to further the Jihad. Thus, they constitute a danger to the rest of us. Spencer's book, especially in the current atmosphere of confusion, is an indispensable guide and vademecum.

"One hopes that many thousands of copies of Onward Muslim Soldiers may be bought by some far-sighted Maecenas, and distributed to every important maker of policy, and molder of opinion, in Washington and New York. It would be money well spent."