The 9/11 Commission and Jihad

the west is 'in bed with the devil' in making
alliances with muslim states.

and yes there will be hell to pay for it.

in fact, it is already paying for it:

it is dying a slow death, as it is blinded to the truth.

but take heart:

crack a bible and take refuge and comfort
in the Lord.

the muslim problem is not too big for Him
to handle.

Praise You Jesus!

Perhaps the Commission is simply lower down on the learning curve of Islam. The word "religion" rather than "belief system" does get in the way of sober understanding; so too do all the apologists for Islam who, until recently, had the field to themselves, and to some extent remain powerful and influential. It is horrifying to think that someone like Esposito for example was actually consulted as an expert during the Clinton years. One assumes those days are over.

The idea that it is a handful of writers on Islam of the last few decades, such as Qutb, Maudoodi, and Said Hawwa, who have been unfinged by the Muslim "encounter with modernity" (someone should make a list of these fashionable and misleading phrases), and that these writers, deemed so influential among the "extremists" (at least that "a handful of" before the word "extremists" seems to have been jettisoned -- mocked out of the court of informed opinion), harken back to one Ibn Taymiyya (c. 1320). But Ibn Taymiyya was not a sport. Whatever his other views, those on Jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims are consistent with, in no way different from, the views of thousnads of Muslim Qur'anic commentators, collectors, and weighers of the authenticity, of hadith (muhadithin), and Muslim figures of renown in other fields. When one mentions the names Averroes, and the "Sufi" (ah, "Sufi" -- the poetry of Rumi, and those otherworldly Whirling Dervishes -- yes, "Sufi" -- they surely are "moderates" and don't believe in Jihad, now do they? -- Sorry to disappoint you, but they do.) al-Ghazali, and the theoretician of human history Ibn Khaldun (his Muqaddimah more appreciated in the West than by Muslims until very recently), all insist on the centrality, and necessity, of Jihad.

The failure to understand how remarkably consistent Islamic teachings are -- or rather, how unremarkably consistent, in time and space, given the fact that the same canoncial texts, not subject to change, and not subject (any longer, since the "gates of ijtihad" or interpretation were closed nearly a millennium ago) they are -- is something that slowly, slowly, will have to remedied.

Meanwhile, an important piece that goes to the heart of the Great Will Not To Believe what Islam is all about, when unmediated and unmitigated by the messiness of what is called "Muslim civilisation" that rounds the sharp swordpoints of Islamic doctrine. Which, considering that we Infidels are Unbelievers, is entirely fitting.

Hugh, you are a very educated man and, to be blunt, I am not. I assume you are saying that there really is no hope for any kind of reconciliation with Islam and that 9/11 was entirely consistent with Islamic doctrine?

Islam, or rather Muslims, can be contained, or constrained, but it is difficult to see how its central tenets can be changed. How can those verses in the Qur'an, 120 or 130 or 140, in which the doctrine of Jihad is preached, and the Manichean division of the world between Believer and Infidel is impressed upon Believers at every turn, in so many suras? The hadith (properly, in the plural, ahadith)-- the stories of the words and acts and even the silences of Muhammad -- are even more dangerous for Infidels, and those that are regarded as "strong" hadith (i.e. those that are regarded as having greater claims to being authentic), collected in the most authoritative collections, those of al-Bukhari and Muslim, are even more useful in whipping up, or sustaining, the violence, aggression, and hate directed at all non-Muslims by so many who claim to be adherents of Islam.

No "reformer" within Islam has ever succeeded. Surely this ought to give pause to all those would-be Muslim "reformers" with their grants from American Law Schools, Bunting Institutes, and suchlike -- or rather, give those who give out those grants some pause. It is not always a con game, but it is based on dealing with the tangential, from the Infidel point of view -- such as "trying to improve the lot of women" by, for example, simply pretending that it is not passages in the Qur'an and hadith that are used to justify oppression of women, but that it is just a "cultural thing." What nonsense. A does of Azam Kamguian's clearsighted rage, or that of a number of female Iranian exiles, would shut the proponents of that nonsense up in a way that no mere Infidel could hope to do.

The examples of constraint of Islam, or just ignoring some of Islam, are to be found among various quasi-enlightened despots in the Muslm world. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had he lived, might even have set Pakistan on a different course; he liked his wine and perhaps even pork, and who knows -- perhaps things might have been put on a different basis in Pakistan, a country that has only Islam for its past, only Islam for its future. Had the Russians won in Afghanistan, perhaps they could have limited Islam in the way they managed to do in Central Asia -- but the powers of recuperaton for this belief-system are great. Those despots include King Mohammd V of Morocco, the secularist Bourguiba with his Destour Party in Tunisia, and the late Shah Reca Pahlevi, a vain and not terribly intelligent man (though his Shahbanou loved him), who at least protected the non-Muslims as had his father before him. Indeed, while some disaffected Iranians allow themselves to believe that Khomeini and his epigones represent some monstrous exception (of course Arafat and the PLO, and other Arabs, helped to put Khomeini in power -- something which the Iranians should not forget) to Iranian history, unfortunately it is the relatively tolerant Pahlevis who, since the dynasty was founded in 1925, are the exception to most of modern Iranian history. Under the Pahlevis, Baha'is Christians and Jews and the handful of Zoroastrians left were not subject to persecution as "najis" (unclean) Infidels; some were even treated semi-decently, for short periods, and in the largest cities. The real Persian tradition can be seen in the behavior of Shah Abbas II, as recorded by Arakel of Tabriz (an Armenian chronicler; there are passages from Arakel that Bat Ye'or used in her superb study, "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam."

But it was Ataturk who offers the most successful example of a conscious attempt to constrain Islam. His Hat Act, his giving the vote to women, his attacks on mosques and on insubmissive Muslim leaders, his ending the use of Arabic script, his deliberate policy of not promoting in the army those who were "too religious" and of keeping those who had religious educations out of institutions of higher learning, his giving women the right to vote long before they obtained it in some countries of Western Europe, his campaign against the hijab, all helped to limit the power of Islam. He emphasized Turkish nationalism; after his death, the cult of Ataturk took over. The army was the custodian, and remains the custodian, of Kemalism.

But Kemalism is now being undermined by the cunning Erdogan. He is undoing it, bit by bit, and moving ever closer to the Arab Muslim states, even though some of them are natural enemies (Syria certainly is, over the division of the waters of the Euphrates). And yet Erdogan still has supporters in Washington; they are not found among the usual Middle-East-Institute pro-Arab legions, but rather among such people as Feith and Perle (it was Perle who introduced Erdogan to an A.E.I. audience recently)--both of them, in a period when they were not in government, serving as lobbyists for Turkey. But they may not have kept up with the changes in Turkey, and in how the Turkey of Ankara, and the Turkish generals, is no longer the Turkey that is in power. They have been, and perhaps still are, being snookered -- because why else continue to press for Turkish admission to the E.U. (unless, of course, it is now being done all "nudge-nudge-wink-wink" and "we don't really mean it but have to say it")-- by Erdogan and his party.

Erdogan is very clever and very dangerous. Note has been taken, of course, of his more or less ripping up the carefully cultivated military and diplomatic relationship with Israel. It is a sign of his confidence that this will not antagonize his American supporters that he has done this so soon; perhaps he simply believes the Americans can be jettisoned, because the E.U. will not dare to keep Turkey out. Or perhaps he does not really care if Turkey is kept out, because either way, Erdogn figures he, and his plans to undo Kemalism, will win.

Erdogan's strategy is clever. He intends to use the formal demands made by the E.U. on the Turkish government, to weaken the Turkish army, to limit the power of the state to deal with terrorists (i.e. Muslim terrorists), and to constrain the only real force now in Turkish society that can constrain Islam, and to do it all in the innocent guise of "the E.U. made us do it, I have to do what the E.U. wants, we have to limit the army's power, it's not in my hands." And so, little by little, the Turkish army is being hobbled, its senior officers having important powers taken away from them -- slowly, but surely. And yet if the army were to act now, the E.U. would idiotically use that as the excuse not to admit Turkey, because that is preferable to admitting to the real reason, which is that Turkey is a Muslim country, and now that Islam is understood to be a threat to the Infdiels of Europe, the members of the E.U., even as they suicidally pursue a policy of appeasement of the Arab states and of the Arabs within their own countries, will draw the line at admitting another 80 million Turkish Muslims into the E.U. (and providing an entry point for other Muslims who can slip in as Turks). And if the army either fights to retain its powers, or stages a coup, and then Turkey is kept out of the E.U., it will never be forgiven by the Turkish population for supposedly ruining its chances --- they were already ruined, and not for anything the Turkish army did -- for admission to the E.U.

Turkey will be denied admission into the E.U. because, in part, the countries of Bulgaria, Rumania, Serbia, Croatia, and Greece all have historic memories of centuries of Ottoman Muslim rule, of the devshirme (the forced levy of Christian children, seized to suppy the armies of the Sultan), and of the condition of dhimmitude which, in the Ottoman lands of Europe, so many had to endure. Perhaps everyone has forgotten Gladstone's famous speech on the Bulgarian Massacres in the 1870s; it can no doubt be found on-line.

Now the real culprit of coursee are the Arab Muslims. Intelligent statecraft would involve planning now for the Turkish rejection, and palnning to ensure that the Turks blame the hated Arabs, whose display of "their" Islam has sullied Islam forever in Infidel eyes, and raised the specter of unending war thrust on Infidels by Believers who are intent on violent Jihad, or on demographic conquest from within. Who now can blame the Infidels of the E.U. for keeping Turkey out? But who will ensure that the Turks themselves will blame -- not the Turkish army for being too rigid in its refusal to abandon all of its powers as the E.U. may demand, not the European Infidels who did the rejecting of Turkey's candidacy, but the Arab Muslims, so that the rejection will not be used by Erdogan to strengthen his hand, but to help to weaken and further split the camp of Believers. All intelligent Turks must understand that the intellectual freedoms they have taken for granted, those bookstores on Istiqlal Caddesi for example, that free press, that lively debate, a real literature instead of the political trash of the Arabs, is owed entirely to Kemalism. They need to preserve it and exhibit that eternal vigilance which, as one famous American put it, is "the price of liberty."

If Turkey were to be admitted to the E.U., because it jad scrupulously fulfilled every requirement and so cut the legs out from under the army, Turkish Islamists will, basking in their achievement, continue to chip away at Kemalism, with even greater zeal (because there will now be no need to pretend to be semi-secularists any longer); it will be too late to keep a revived Muslim state in Turkey (did the example of Iran teach the Turks nothing? Apparently not -- or at least the lesson was not taught with sufficient pedagogic force and vivacity)out of the E.U.; once it, it can't be expelled.

The free movement of all those Muslims -- Turks and Kurds -- throughout the E.U., will no doubt be accompanied by other millions of Muslims, using the porous border of Turkey, and its accomodating Muslim border guards, to gain first the Turkish lands, and then the great wide wonderful and open world of the E.U. And in the E.U. more mosques and more madrasas will be built to accomodate the millions of Turkish citizens (and others, flowing through Turkey, with false papers) who will spread out across the E.U. Since Islam and Western civilization are, for anyone who cares to look at the principles of the former, and compare them with the principles of the latter, completely opposed, and the first represents a mortal danger to the second (just ask yourself this: could Shakespeare, could Dante, could Mozart, could Piero della Francesca or Michelangelo, ever be produced by a Muslim environment? could any of their works be allowed to survive in a Muslim environment? What plays of Shakespeare? What frescoes of Piero, depicting human forms, or what statues of Michelangelo? What about Dante? What kind of music is permitted in Islam? What about Newton, or Einstein, or Darwin? Could any of these people come out of the Islamic world, could any of them thrive in it, could any of their efforts be permitted to survive the rage and fury of devout Believers?). The future of Turkey, the future of the Turkish army's power to constrain Islam, is one of the most important matters today, and one has the uneasy feeling that analysis of what is to come, and how Erdogan is so cleverly manipulating the situation (that is, Erdogan and all those who are slowly reintroducing Islam at the expense of Kemalism) and the application for admission to the E.U. That, then, is the situation with attempts to constrain Islam. They are bleak, for Islam keeps coming back, and always will.

As to your specific question as to whether there is any "hope of reconciliation" with Islam, the very word "reconciliation" implies some kind of quarrel, or insult, or misunderstanding. But that is not the problem. It is not a problem of American policies, any more than the Christians in the Sudan and Pakistan and Indonesia and northern Nigeria and the Philippines are being attacked because they have done something to offend Islam; nor do the Hindus in Bangladesh being murdered go on the attack against their Muslim neighbors, nor the Buddhists in southern Thailand. The wars, and daily persecutions (of Copts in Egypt, for example) of non-Muslims by Muslims, and as a subset of this, the persecution and murder of non-Arab Muslims, or "mawalis," by Arab Muslims (Kurds in Iraq, Berbers in Algeria, Tuareg throughout the Sahara, the black Muslims in Darfur), which comes from the Arab Muslim belief that because the Qur'an was given "in your language" to Muhammad, and to the Arabs, "the best of people," that they are clearly superior to all other Muslims. Indeed, Islam has been a vehicle of Arab imperialism -- the most successful imperialism in human history), have nothing to do with something that somebody -- America, Israel, Australia -- did or did not do.

Islamic tenets remain. The words of Qur'an and hadith and commentators and theologians, before the gates of ijtihad swung shut, are there; they cannot be red-inked out, or deleted with a click. I do not believe that Islam will change. What one hopes for is that enough Infidels will come to understand this unpleasant reality, instead of engaging in denial, wishful thinking, a lazy and criminally negligent refusal to investigate the matter. It is astounding that one "Anonymous" (Michael Scheuer) publishes a book that demonstrates he, who was for several years in charge of the "Bin Laden desk" at the C.I.A., really has no conception of what Islam is all about, and continues to believe that it is all a reaction, a modern and local reaction, to specific grievances. This would be unacceptable in a journalist for, say, Cosmopolitan or Newsweek. If it comes from a self-described "C.I.A. man," one has reason to be fearful. How does this "C.I.A. man" know that the real reason for Bin Laden and company are the specific policies of the United States (you know, beginninng with the usual: that "unlimited support for Israel" we all hear so much about from the Arabs, though not a single rifle went from the U.S. to Israel until the 1960s, and the 1967 war was won without Americna military assitance, and American pressuree again and again has forced Israel to yield when it never should have -- in giving the Sinai to Nasser in 1956 (which he then remilitarized contrary to solemn promises), in not finishing off the Egyptian Third Army, which had been encircled in the 1973 war, in giving up bits and pieces of the Sinai and then collapsing, under the pressure of two dimwits, Carter and Brzezinsky, in the Camp David Accords, where Israel gave up the entire Sinai, with the oilfields it had discovered, the airbases it had built, and the entire infrastrcture and strategic depth that were, overnight, part of Egypt -- and Egypt, in turn, failed to fulfill a single one of its solemn commitments under the Accords. Schauer needs to spend a little time reading Qur'an, hadith, and articles by such scholars as Margoliouth, Khadduri, Shacht, J. B. Kelly, and others. I suspect he won't. He's a man of action, you see, at his "C.I.A. desk." And such an agent knows that the Arabs are hostile to the U.S. not because we are the most powerful and determined Infidel power, but because of specific policies (but then what explains the Muslim behavior in Africa? In Asia?). And how does this C.I.A. agent know this? Well, probaly because some Arabs told him so. Yes, that is always the way, isn't it, to figure out why Arab Muslims do what they do -- just listen to their own explanations.

Yo wonder aloud if there is any "hope for reconciliation" with Islam -- I am not sure that "reconciliation" is the right word. Because that would imply some kind of discrete quarrel, which can somehow be overcome. But there is not now, and never was a quarrel -- unless the refusal to submit to Islam, and the subjugation that Islam demands of all non-Muslims, can be called a "quarrel." And how, short of submission, could there be reconciliation? Islam owes its origins, in the seventh and eighth centuries, to its usefulness as a belief-system which, by incorporating elements of Christianity and Judaism (at times hard to recognize after their appropriation and distortion, but clearly present nonetheless), appealed to those more settled, more advanced, wealthier populations of Christians and Jews whom the Arabs first conquered in Mesopotamia and Syria and Judea and Egypt and North Africa (when the Zoroastrians of Persia were conquered elements of Zoroastrianism were possibly incorporporated as well -- but this did not extend, still later, to Hinduism or Buddhism).

Can one hope that Islam will somehow be changed so that hundreds of millions of Believers will not see the main division in the world as that between Muslim and Infidel, and will cease to believe that they have a religious duty to remove all obstacles to the spread of Islam until it covers the globe, and all non-Muslims are subjugated to Muslim rule? Can one see this somehow happening?

No.

Great post Hugh.

My question to you is: how do you get rid of Islam?

Very grim and sobering analysis, Hugh, but excellent. I guess the only thing left is to keep doing what we're doing now, Voltaire.

i think that ultimately the Lord is the only one that can take care of the muslim
problem, but He may not do it before it destroys the west.

you see its a matter of biblical prophecy:

daniel's 5th gentile empire: western/arabian coming against israel. daniel 2.41-45

this sets the stage for the Second Coming.

if i'm wrong, then someone has to kill allah.

there's no other way...

Information on the Pentagon jet of 9/11

">">http://home.att.net/~professorboris/SPECTRE/pentagon_flight.htm"> Information on 9/11