Sayid Imam al-Sharif is purportedly doing just what needs to be done, and what I have many times called upon peaceful Muslims to attempt to do: undermining the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad. As an Egyptian official rightly says, "The way to deprive them of their ability to recruit is to attack the message. If you take Islam out of the message all that is left is criminality." This is what I have said all along, so I guess this makes Sayid Imam al-Sharif an "Islamophobe," but never mind: he is doing it so well, according to this article, that Zawahiri himself is all shook up. And "Egyptian and western experts, government officials and former jihadis agree that Sharif's shift is both genuine and highly significant."
Yet apparently the main idea that Sayid Imam al-Sharif and others are attacking is the jihadists' promiscuous application of the principle of takfir: the declaration that a fellow Muslim is an unbeliever (and can thus lawfully be killed). The main goal seems to be discrediting jihad attacks against non-Sharia Muslim states like Egypt and nominal Muslim authoritarian rulers like Mubarak. For "their self-criticism includes observations that the wrong path to jihad benefits only the Jews, the US and Egypt's Christian minority." Jihad against them is still A-OK.
"Violence won't work: how author of 'jihadists' bible' stirred up a storm: Revisionist message from prison cell shakes al-Qaida colleagues," by Ian Black for The Guardian (thanks to Twostellas):
In a prison cell south of Cairo a repentant Egyptian terrorist leader is putting the finishing touches to a remarkable recantation that undermines the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad and is set to generate furious controversy among former comrades still fighting with al-Qaida.Sayid Imam al-Sharif, 57, was the founder and first emir (commander) of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organisation, whose supporters assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and later teamed up with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviet occupation.
Sharif, a surgeon who is still known by his underground name of "Dr Fadl", is famous as the author of the Salafi jihadists' "bible" - Foundations of Preparation for Holy War. He worked with Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian doctor and now Bin Laden's deputy, before being kidnapped in Yemen after 9/11, interrogated by the CIA and extradited to Egypt where has been serving a life sentence since 2004.
Sharif recently gave an electrifying foretaste of his conversion by condemning killings on the basis of nationality and colour of skin and the targeting of women and children, citing the Qur'anic injunction: "Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress the limits; for God loveth not transgressors." Armed operations were wrong, counterproductive and must cease, he declared sternly.
That would be Qur'an 2:190, a passage that culminates with the injunction that Muslims must fight against unbelievers until "religion is for Allah" (2:193).
Zawahiri, evidently rattled, rounded sarcastically on him in a video message broadcast after Sharif's statement - faxed from Torah prison to an Arabic newspaper - announced not only his change of heart but a book-length repudiation endorsed by hundreds of other former militants, and which is due to be published soon."Do they now have fax machines in Egyptian jail cells?" Zawahiri asked. "I wonder if they're connected to the same line as the electric-shock machines [used to torture prisoners]," dismissing the exercise as propaganda warfare by Hosni Mubarak's security services.
But Egyptian and western experts, government officials and former jihadis agree that Sharif's shift is both genuine and highly significant. "People will say things to stop being tortured, but this is the result of a long process of reflection and debate," insists Muntasir al-Zayyat, a lawyer jailed for Islamic Jihad membership in the 1980s. "When the book comes out there will be a furious reaction from Zawahiri and the global jihadi movement. It is clear that Sayid Imam will call a halt to killing operations in Egypt and abroad."
Diaa Rashwan, of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, says: "I have no doubt that this is genuine. It will be a real shock and cause a lot of confusion. Jihadis will see hundreds of their former brothers criticising their most fundamental ideas. That's why Zawahiri is so bothered by it."
Conversion
No one is predicting that the book will stop suicide bombings in Iraq or Afghanistan, but interest is so intense that several Arabic newspapers are competing to buy the 100-page work, entitled: Advice Regarding the Conduct of Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World.
Sharif's recantation has emerged from an Egyptian government counter-radicalisation programme which has successfully "converted" and rehabilitated members of the Gama'a Islamiyya (Islamic Group), once the largest jihadist organisation in the Arab world, and which mounted countless armed attacks starting in the 1980s until calling a ceasefire after massacring 62 foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997.
Its top ideologues, mostly now freed, have written 25 volumes of revisions in a series called Tashih al-Mafahim (Corrections of Concepts). These tackle key doctrinal issues such as the concept of "takfir" - declaring a Muslim an apostate and therefore permissible to kill; attacks on civilians and foreign tourists; and waging jihad against a Muslim ruler who does not apply sharia law.
"If you want to rob these people of their cover you have to take away their legitimacy," says Ashraf Mohsin, an Egyptian diplomat dealing with counter-terrorism. "The way to deprive them of their ability to recruit is to attack the message. If you take Islam out of the message all that is left is criminality."
Like the Gama'a before them, Sharif and other Jihad prisoners have been allowed by the interior ministry and state security to meet and consult each other in prison and have held religious dialogues with clerics from al-Azhar, the fount of mainstream jurisprudence in the Sunni world. "Of course the Egyptian government is benefiting from this," Zayyat agrees. "But it's not done for their benefit, or for the Americans."
Past "revisions" have included apologies to the victims of terror attacks, recognition of them as "martyrs", and the annulment of fatwas as misguided. But these are not an Islamist version of The God That Failed - the 1949 anthology written by disillusioned communists - but rather a reasoned rejection of theological misinterpretations. Their authors are neither secular nor liberal: their self-criticism includes observations that the wrong path to jihad benefits only the Jews, the US and Egypt's Christian minority. "The Egyptian state is holding all this out as a huge triumph," says a foreign diplomat. "But the views these people preach are still pretty sinister. The state has to some extent accommodated itself to the Islamists."
Zawahiri sez:
""People will say things to stop being tortured...."
...and he should know...we hear stange things from people that the Muslim terrorists have kidnapped or captured.....
"Repentant jihadist renounces violence -- sort of"
I suppose this is better than nothing, but the only beneficiaries of the new and improved version of jihad seems to be Muslims and Muslim dominated regimes. As for the rest of mankind -- we're still sitting ducks.
The only possible means of reforming Islam is for some brave individual to write an annotated Koran, droping, explaning away, or reinterpreting, the more violent, hateful and murderous suras.
If it caught on, it could go a long way to modifying the behavior of Muslims. More likely, though, the writer would be labeled an apostate.
But it might be worth the try.
Nothing any muslim says can be believed whether he be tortured or not.
Only apostates, who are NO longer Muslims are free to tell westerners the truth.
They don't need the Jihad anyway as all they ahve to do is keep breeding in the west like cockroaches.
What do you call a jihadi at the bottom of the ocean ?
What one might say of this ostensibly good piece of news:
A good start.
(with apologies to the liberal bar association)
The sword and fraud are the parents of Islam. Without them, Islam wouldn't have been born at all.
Therefore violent Jihad is an integral part of Islam. No doubt, the profiteer (er..the Prophet) declared violent Jihad the central and highest duty of any " religious" Muslim.
Thinking of Islam without violence, backwardness and ignorance is like thinking of a zebra without its stripes.
The sword and fraud are the parents of Islam. Without them, Islam wouldn't have been born at all.
Therefore violent Jihad is an integral part of Islam. No doubt, the profiteer (er..the Prophet) declared violent Jihad the central and highest duty of any " religious" Muslim.
Thinking of Islam without violence, backwardness and ignorance is like thinking of a zebra without its stripes.
He's renouncing violence, not jihad.
The goal of Islamists remains the same: subjugation of all peoples all over the world.
The Egyptian diplomat says: 'take Islam out of the message and all you have is criminality'.
Sir: Islam's message IS criminality! You cannot separate the two.
This newest "conversion" can be boiled down to a single adage: you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
We are the flies.
The sword and fraud are the parents of Islam. Without them, Islam wouldn't have been born at all.
Therefore violent Jihad is an integral part of Islam. No doubt, the profiteer (er..the Prophet) declared violent Jihad the central and highest duty of any " religious" Muslim.
Thinking of Islam without violence, backwardness and ignorance is like thinking of a zebra without its stripes.
The Egyptians need to allow Sharif on a lengthy & widely distributed video where he can effectively convey his message and vigorously deny that he is tortured. His scholarly repudiations may not be a perfect for Israel or the West but it might weaken the murderous convictions of a great many jihadists and potential suicide bombers.
At the very heart of Islam as at the heart of Saudi Arabia is 'rub al-Khali (The Empty Quarter), a terrible and inhuman wasteland.
There is no reason -- none -- for Infidels to be relieved, much less overjoyed, at this news. This is purely an internal Muslim matter, and has nothing to do with the tenets of Islam, the texts of Islam, the inculcated hostility or hatred toward Infidels, and the state of permanent war (not necessarily active warfare, but war) that must exist between the Muslim world, and Infidels. For Infidels, the ability of this or that group of Muslims to convince another group of Muslims not to consider them to be “Infidels” (the “takfir” business) not only offers no hope to us, the full-fledged Infidels, but is likely to be misunderstood, and taken by ignorant Infidels eager to grasp at straws (and there are a great many of those “taking a leadership role” who, almost willfully ignorant, are eager to grasp at those straws), as proving what it does not prove and cannot prove: that Muslim terrorists can be "reformed" and that if only we play our cards right, and do nothing to offend Muslims, why then the same new view of things can extend to us, the Infidels.
It can't. It won't. There is no possibility, in Islam, of doing away with the central view on which that fighting faith, itself concocted early on to justify conquests already under way by Arabs, conquests of lands possessed by far more settled, wealthy, advanced populations of Christians and Jews (and later, Zoroastrians, and later still, Hindus, Buddhists, and others), is so obviously based: on the opposition of Believer to Infidel.
What has happened as described above is simply that clever and ruthless and corrupt regimes, accused (quite rightly) of being corrupt and ruthless, and that opposition, naturally framing its opposition in Islamic terms, must describe those regimes -- the Al-Saud princes, princelings, and princelettes, or Mubarak and his family-and-friends plan -- as "un-Islamic" and the rulers as "non-Muslim." Since, in Islam, one is encouraged to obey the Ruler, no matter how ruthless, as long as that Ruler (or government) can be called "Muslim," the only way in states and societies full of Muslims to arouse opposition is to put everything in terms of Islam.
Americans and other Westerners have failed to realize this. They have failed in the past to realize that the nubmers of the truly Westernized and secularized are small, and that they -- such people as Kanan Makiya and Mithal al-Alusi and Ahmad Chalabi -- will forever be a small minority, and when we fashion policy on the assumption that they or others like them will win out, it always will lead to naught, for in the end one Muslim regime will be replaced by another.
Still another, even more dangerous conclusion, is that drawn by some who believe we have "nothing to fear" from Muslims who are, or seem to be, outraged largely by domestic corruption. Obviously the Slow Jihadists of Fatah are much more corrupt than Hamas; their cosmetic accommodation with the West, and their differences on timing and tactics (a longer weight, less obvious support for outright annihilation, by military means, for the state of Israel) should not obscure the fact that their goals remain the same. In Egypt, Mubarak's regime is corrupt and unjust (which causes his opposition) and also meretricious abroad, but yet it manages, by uttering a few phrases, to be a continuous recipient of American aid (more than $60 billion) though its regime is vicious, and its people far more anti-American than, say, the people in Iran. Some now argue, in their latest attempt to ignore or miscomprehend Islam, that we should take the side of the opponents of such regimes, and not be "afraid" to work with, for example, the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, "as long as its methods are peaceful."
This is senseless. Of course the Ikhwan will promise us, we the foolable Infidels, that its methods are "peaceful." Of course the opposition to the Al-Saud, similarly, can rightly point to the viciousness of the regime, and suggest that if only...if only, the Americans and other Westerners would support them, they would be glad they did, because an honest regime of Muslims, Muslims whom, we will be told, are being told, are "not part of Al Qaeda" (formally true, and also utterly irrelevant), and will create -- well, something. Something good.
One lesson from Iraq is that the Infidels should not presume to think that they can undo the effects, or attitudes, or atmospherics, of Islam. Only those regimes, in Muslim countries, that can hold Islam in check, and what's more, work steadily to create a class that is truly secular, and a class that will be able to constantly enlarge its numbers through iron-fisted control of education and the media, can contribute to lessening the overall menace of Islam. Turkey under Kemal Pasha, was such a regime. But he died in 1938, and those, the kind of Turks who are secularized and Westernized, that is those who managed to get beyond deep belief in the obvious replacement-theology of "the Turk" and "Ataturk" (instead of "Believers" and "Muhammad"), relied too heavily on the army as the final guarantor of their own position, when they should all of them been working night and day to enlarge their own ranks, and to constrain Islam still further, using whatever elaborated ideas they could. They might also have encouraged a truthful coming-to-terms with the Armenian genocide, and what's more, have begun openly to discuss just how many "Turks" must, in fact, be of Armenian, Greek, Jewish origin -- and even encouraged a "search for roots." [The same thing, by the way, would be useful in Iran, where a revival of interest in Zoroastrianism, and a depiction of Islam as the "Arab gift" that turned out to be the source of so much present, and past, woe, sounds absurd, but is not, in the one Muslim state that can actually be called a country].
What is described in the article above is, as Robert Spencer notes, only an intra--Islamic accommodation. As such, it has no meaning for, that has offers nothing useful that will help Infidels. In fact, like other kinds of accommodation, like that sought by the Bush Administration in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'a, it may actually work against us. For we do not want an Egypt or a Saudi Arabia where there is no domestic opposition. We want the Al-Saud to go to bed at night worried about what will happen to them. We want them to be deeply concerned about whether or not foreign workers, without whom Saudi Arabia would collapse, will stay. We want them to worry about the loyalty of their people. We want them to worry about, and to discover the need to stop spending the fortunes they are spending, on mosques and madrasas, on public relations campaigns (the recent transparent campaign, through Op/Eds, and media appearances and coordinated "Letters to the Editor" all meant to demonstrate that "Muslims"
in America are "just as American as apple pie," aw-shucks and good country people, the whole shtick, carefully keeping us from looking at the texts and tenets of Islam, but focussing on participation in some local group, all very inspiring and no doubt, such sentimentalists as Bush or the unsentimental careerist Dinesh D'Souza would focus on this kind of thing as "proving" that there is no problem with Islam, no menace from campaigns of Da'wa and demographic conquest all over the European half of the West, because this or that Muslim has run for office (and therefore this means he must have "accepted" the American way, for he has chosen not to throw bombs but to "work within the system"). And, as a just-published article by Stanley Kurtz shows, the Saudi effort is not limited to all those mosques (with the anti-Infidel hate literature that Freedom House investigators discovered), and madrasas, and public relations specialists (Western hirelings, eager to take on any client, indifferent to the results to their own society, even possibly to their own children), but now there is an effort to take control of how Islam is taught in schools, and to carefully limit what is said and written, in those carefully-compiled courses, with the lesson plans all prefabricated, and the syllabi all pre-written (read what Kurtz has to say, and then read as well what Sandra Stotsky, in her study of what is being done in Massachusetts, thanks in part to "Middle East experts" relying on their ability to intimidate and silence opposition because, you see, they are associated with Harvard).
Saudi Arabia's rulers are not our friends. And we do not wish or should not wish them well. We should wish that their domestic opposition causes them anguish and worry. We should not be happy that the Saudi rulers, or the Egyptain rulers, have found a way -- if they have found a way -- to stay solidly in power by making sure that Al Qaeda, and all others who wish to participate personally in active Jihad (there are rules for when collective participation is enough, that is when a Muslim may lend support of various kinds to those actively engaged in qital, or combat, or what we rightly call "terrorism" but Muslims define simply as another form of qital -- without having to take part himself; rules as well for when it is a duty of all Muslims, individually, to participate actively in the fighting).
This article offers no hope, has no real significance, for Infidels. If indeed some of the most corrupt and vicious regimes have managed to successfully deal with the "takfir" problem -- that is, the problem of one group of Muslims defining another group as "not Muslim" or as "Infidels" who can be treated as Infidels of course can be treated) that is to their advantage, but not to ours. We will only suffer the more. We have a stake in encouraging division and demoralization in the Arab and Muslim world. If our cities are not off-limits to the Jihad, we have a stake in Riyadh and Jiddah and Cairo and Damascus being similarly unsettled. We have a stake in Muslim regimes that cnanot be allowed to believe that their domestic opposition will always and everywhere target only the certified Infidels of the West, or only the local non-Muslims (nothing is said in the article above about managing to convince Al-Qaeda supporters in
Egypt to lessen their vicious hostility to non-Muslims, such as the insecure and frightened Copts.)
The more secure the Mubarak regime is, the more that dissatisfied Egyptians can no longer take out their dissatisfaction against the regime but are persuaded that their only enemies are, as before, the "Infidels," the more likely it is that they will, within Egypt, attack the Copts, or, still more likely, go off to attack the Infidels elsewhere -- perhaps after having been admitted to a Western country as merely a hard-working "economic" immigrant. There are no merely "economic" immigrants among Muslims in Infidel lands; they bring Islam, undeclared, in their mental baggage, and the Infidel governments, like the people they are supposed to be protecting, simply have no understanding of this.
No, for Infidels this news means nothing good, and very likely will make our task, rightly conceived, much harder. And just wait. Just how many breathless articles do you think you will now see, from oily Fawaz Gerges, from lean, mean, jogging John Esposito, from that thrusting young academic who seems deplorably to have turned his media party trick (raised as an "Orthodox Jew" but now an "expert on Islam") into a frequent gig at The Times, that thrusting young academic Noah Feldman, from Tom Friedman and from Nicholas Kristoff, in other words -- tutti quanti -- about what "hope" this new development offers, and what a magnificent model this is for us, if only we do not listen to "those who preach that there can be no accommodation with Islam" when the turn-around in the minds of former terrorists, by the Egyptian authorities, is..."nothing short of miraculous."
Oh God. Spare us this kind. But we won't be spared.
There is no reason -- none -- for Infidels to be relieved, much less overjoyed, at this news. This is purely an internal Muslim matter, and has nothing to do with the tenets of Islam, the texts of Islam, the inculcated hostility or hatred toward Infidels, and the state of permanent war (not necessarily active warfare, but war) that must exist between the Muslim world, and Infidels. For Infidels, the ability of this or that group of Muslims to convince another group of Muslims not to consider them to be “Infidels” (the “takfir” business) not only offers no hope to us, the full-fledged Infidels, but is likely to be misunderstood, and taken by ignorant Infidels eager to grasp at straws (and there are a great many of those “taking a leadership role” who, almost willfully ignorant, are eager to grasp at those straws), as proving what it does not prove and cannot prove: that Muslim terrorists can be "reformed" and that if only we play our cards right, and do nothing to offend Muslims, why then the same new view of things can extend to us, the Infidels.
It can't. It won't. There is no possibility, in Islam, of doing away with the central view on which that fighting faith, itself concocted early on to justify conquests already under way by Arabs, conquests of lands possessed by far more settled, wealthy, advanced populations of Christians and Jews (and later, Zoroastrians, and later still, Hindus, Buddhists, and others), is so obviously based: on the opposition of Believer to Infidel.
What has happened as described above is simply that clever and ruthless and corrupt regimes, accused (quite rightly) of being corrupt and ruthless, and that opposition, naturally framing its opposition in Islamic terms, must describe those regimes -- the Al-Saud princes, princelings, and princelettes, or Mubarak and his family-and-friends plan -- as "un-Islamic" and the rulers as "non-Muslim." Since, in Islam, one is encouraged to obey the Ruler, no matter how ruthless, as long as that Ruler (or government) can be called "Muslim," the only way in states and societies full of Muslims to arouse opposition is to put everything in terms of Islam.
Americans and other Westerners have failed to realize this. They have failed in the past to realize that the nubmers of the truly Westernized and secularized are small, and that they -- such people as Kanan Makiya and Mithal al-Alusi and Ahmad Chalabi -- will forever be a small minority, and when we fashion policy on the assumption that they or others like them will win out, it always will lead to naught, for in the end one Muslim regime will be replaced by another.
Still another, even more dangerous conclusion, is that drawn by some who believe we have "nothing to fear" from Muslims who are, or seem to be, outraged largely by domestic corruption. Obviously the Slow Jihadists of Fatah are much more corrupt than Hamas; their cosmetic accommodation with the West, and their differences on timing and tactics (a longer weight, less obvious support for outright annihilation, by military means, for the state of Israel) should not obscure the fact that their goals remain the same. In Egypt, Mubarak's regime is corrupt and unjust (which causes his opposition) and also meretricious abroad, but yet it manages, by uttering a few phrases, to be a continuous recipient of American aid (more than $60 billion) though its regime is vicious, and its people far more anti-American than, say, the people in Iran. Some now argue, in their latest attempt to ignore or miscomprehend Islam, that we should take the side of the opponents of such regimes, and not be "afraid" to work with, for example, the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, "as long as its methods are peaceful."
This is senseless. Of course the Ikhwan will promise us, we the foolable Infidels, that its methods are "peaceful." Of course the opposition to the Al-Saud, similarly, can rightly point to the viciousness of the regime, and suggest that if only...if only, the Americans and other Westerners would support them, they would be glad they did, because an honest regime of Muslims, Muslims whom, we will be told, are being told, are "not part of Al Qaeda" (formally true, and also utterly irrelevant), and will create -- well, something. Something good.
One lesson from Iraq is that the Infidels should not presume to think that they can undo the effects, or attitudes, or atmospherics, of Islam. Only those regimes, in Muslim countries, that can hold Islam in check, and what's more, work steadily to create a class that is truly secular, and a class that will be able to constantly enlarge its numbers through iron-fisted control of education and the media, can contribute to lessening the overall menace of Islam. Turkey under Kemal Pasha, was such a regime. But he died in 1938, and those, the kind of Turks who are secularized and Westernized, that is those who managed to get beyond deep belief in the obvious replacement-theology of "the Turk" and "Ataturk" (instead of "Believers" and "Muhammad"), relied too heavily on the army as the final guarantor of their own position, when they should all of them been working night and day to enlarge their own ranks, and to constrain Islam still further, using whatever elaborated ideas they could. They might also have encouraged a truthful coming-to-terms with the Armenian genocide, and what's more, have begun openly to discuss just how many "Turks" must, in fact, be of Armenian, Greek, Jewish origin -- and even encouraged a "search for roots." [The same thing, by the way, would be useful in Iran, where a revival of interest in Zoroastrianism, and a depiction of Islam as the "Arab gift" that turned out to be the source of so much present, and past, woe, sounds absurd, but is not, in the one Muslim state that can actually be called a country].
What is described in the article above is, as Robert Spencer notes, only an intra--Islamic accommodation. As such, it has no meaning for, that has offers nothing useful that will help Infidels. In fact, like other kinds of accommodation, like that sought by the Bush Administration in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'a, it may actually work against us. For we do not want an Egypt or a Saudi Arabia where there is no domestic opposition. We want the Al-Saud to go to bed at night worried about what will happen to them. We want them to be deeply concerned about whether or not foreign workers, without whom Saudi Arabia would collapse, will stay. We want them to worry about the loyalty of their people. We want them to worry about, and to discover the need to stop spending the fortunes they are spending, on mosques and madrasas, on public relations campaigns (the recent transparent campaign, through Op/Eds, and media appearances and coordinated "Letters to the Editor" all meant to demonstrate that "Muslims"
in America are "just as American as apple pie," aw-shucks and good country people, the whole shtick, carefully keeping us from looking at the texts and tenets of Islam, but focussing on participation in some local group, all very inspiring and no doubt, such sentimentalists as Bush or the unsentimental careerist Dinesh D'Souza would focus on this kind of thing as "proving" that there is no problem with Islam, no menace from campaigns of Da'wa and demographic conquest all over the European half of the West, because this or that Muslim has run for office (and therefore this means he must have "accepted" the American way, for he has chosen not to throw bombs but to "work within the system"). And, as a just-published article by Stanley Kurtz shows, the Saudi effort is not limited to all those mosques (with the anti-Infidel hate literature that Freedom House investigators discovered), and madrasas, and public relations specialists (Western hirelings, eager to take on any client, indifferent to the results to their own society, even possibly to their own children), but now there is an effort to take control of how Islam is taught in schools, and to carefully limit what is said and written, in those carefully-compiled courses, with the lesson plans all prefabricated, and the syllabi all pre-written (read what Kurtz has to say, and then read as well what Sandra Stotsky, in her study of what is being done in Massachusetts, thanks in part to "Middle East experts" relying on their ability to intimidate and silence opposition because, you see, they are associated with Harvard).
Saudi Arabia's rulers are not our friends. And we do not wish or should not wish them well. We should wish that their domestic opposition causes them anguish and worry. We should not be happy that the Saudi rulers, or the Egyptain rulers, have found a way -- if they have found a way -- to stay solidly in power by making sure that Al Qaeda, and all others who wish to participate personally in active Jihad (there are rules for when collective participation is enough, that is when a Muslim may lend support of various kinds to those actively engaged in qital, or combat, or what we rightly call "terrorism" but Muslims define simply as another form of qital -- without having to take part himself; rules as well for when it is a duty of all Muslims, individually, to participate actively in the fighting).
This article offers no hope, has no real significance, for Infidels. If indeed some of the most corrupt and vicious regimes have managed to successfully deal with the "takfir" problem -- that is, the problem of one group of Muslims defining another group as "not Muslim" or as "Infidels" who can be treated as Infidels of course can be treated) that is to their advantage, but not to ours. We will only suffer the more. We have a stake in encouraging division and demoralization in the Arab and Muslim world. If our cities are not off-limits to the Jihad, we have a stake in Riyadh and Jiddah and Cairo and Damascus being similarly unsettled. We have a stake in Muslim regimes that cnanot be allowed to believe that their domestic opposition will always and everywhere target only the certified Infidels of the West, or only the local non-Muslims (nothing is said in the article above about managing to convince Al-Qaeda supporters in
Egypt to lessen their vicious hostility to non-Muslims, such as the insecure and frightened Copts.)
The more secure the Mubarak regime is, the more that dissatisfied Egyptians can no longer take out their dissatisfaction against the regime but are persuaded that their only enemies are, as before, the "Infidels," the more likely it is that they will, within Egypt, attack the Copts, or, still more likely, go off to attack the Infidels elsewhere -- perhaps after having been admitted to a Western country as merely a hard-working "economic" immigrant. There are no merely "economic" immigrants among Muslims in Infidel lands; they bring Islam, undeclared, in their mental baggage, and the Infidel governments, like the people they are supposed to be protecting, simply have no understanding of this.
No, for Infidels this news means nothing good, and very likely will make our task, rightly conceived, much harder. And just wait. Just how many breathless articles do you think you will now see, from oily Fawaz Gerges, from lean, mean, jogging John Esposito, from that thrusting young academic who seems deplorably to have turned his media party trick (raised as an "Orthodox Jew" but now an "expert on Islam") into a frequent gig at The Times, that thrusting young academic Noah Feldman, from Tom Friedman and from Nicholas Kristoff, in other words -- tutti quanti -- about what "hope" this new development offers, and what a magnificent model this is for us, if only we do not listen to "those who preach that there can be no accommodation with Islam" when the turn-around in the minds of former terrorists, by the Egyptian authorities, is..."nothing short of miraculous."
Oh God. Spare us this kind of false hope, the news ripe for miscomprehension. But we won't be spared.
There is no reason -- none -- for Infidels to be relieved, much less overjoyed, at this news. This is purely an internal Muslim matter, and has nothing to do with the tenets of Islam, the texts of Islam, the inculcated hostility or hatred toward Infidels, and the state of permanent war (not necessarily active warfare, but war) that must exist between the Muslim world, and Infidels. For Infidels, the ability of this or that group of Muslims to convince another group of Muslims not to consider them to be “Infidels” (the “takfir” business) not only offers no hope to us, the full-fledged Infidels, but is likely to be misunderstood, and taken by ignorant Infidels eager to grasp at straws (and there are a great many of those “taking a leadership role” who, almost willfully ignorant, are eager to grasp at those straws), as proving what it does not prove and cannot prove: that Muslim terrorists can be "reformed" and that if only we play our cards right, and do nothing to offend Muslims, why then the same new view of things can extend to us, the Infidels.
It can't. It won't. There is no possibility, in Islam, of doing away with the central view on which that fighting faith, itself concocted early on to justify conquests already under way by Arabs, conquests of lands possessed by far more settled, wealthy, advanced populations of Christians and Jews (and later, Zoroastrians, and later still, Hindus, Buddhists, and others), is so obviously based: on the opposition of Believer to Infidel.
What has happened as described above is simply that clever and ruthless and corrupt regimes, accused (quite rightly) of being corrupt and ruthless, and that opposition, naturally framing its opposition in Islamic terms, must describe those regimes -- the Al-Saud princes, princelings, and princelettes, or Mubarak and his family-and-friends plan -- as "un-Islamic" and the rulers as "non-Muslim." Since, in Islam, one is encouraged to obey the Ruler, no matter how ruthless, as long as that Ruler (or government) can be called "Muslim," the only way in states and societies full of Muslims to arouse opposition is to put everything in terms of Islam.
Americans and other Westerners have failed to realize this. They have failed in the past to realize that the nubmers of the truly Westernized and secularized are small, and that they -- such people as Kanan Makiya and Mithal al-Alusi and Ahmad Chalabi -- will forever be a small minority, and when we fashion policy on the assumption that they or others like them will win out, it always will lead to naught, for in the end one Muslim regime will be replaced by another.
Still another, even more dangerous conclusion, is that drawn by some who believe we have "nothing to fear" from Muslims who are, or seem to be, outraged largely by domestic corruption. Obviously the Slow Jihadists of Fatah are much more corrupt than Hamas; their cosmetic accommodation with the West, and their differences on timing and tactics (a longer weight, less obvious support for outright annihilation, by military means, for the state of Israel) should not obscure the fact that their goals remain the same. In Egypt, Mubarak's regime is corrupt and unjust (which causes his opposition) and also meretricious abroad, but yet it manages, by uttering a few phrases, to be a continuous recipient of American aid (more than $60 billion) though its regime is vicious, and its people far more anti-American than, say, the people in Iran. Some now argue, in their latest attempt to ignore or miscomprehend Islam, that we should take the side of the opponents of such regimes, and not be "afraid" to work with, for example, the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, "as long as its methods are peaceful."
This is senseless. Of course the Ikhwan will promise us, we the foolable Infidels, that its methods are "peaceful." Of course the opposition to the Al-Saud, similarly, can rightly point to the viciousness of the regime, and suggest that if only...if only, the Americans and other Westerners would support them, they would be glad they did, because an honest regime of Muslims, Muslims whom, we will be told, are being told, are "not part of Al Qaeda" (formally true, and also utterly irrelevant), and will create -- well, something. Something good.
One lesson from Iraq is that the Infidels should not presume to think that they can undo the effects, or attitudes, or atmospherics, of Islam. Only those regimes, in Muslim countries, that can hold Islam in check, and what's more, work steadily to create a class that is truly secular, and a class that will be able to constantly enlarge its numbers through iron-fisted control of education and the media, can contribute to lessening the overall menace of Islam. Turkey under Kemal Pasha, was such a regime. But he died in 1938, and those, the kind of Turks who are secularized and Westernized, that is those who managed to get beyond deep belief in the obvious replacement-theology of "the Turk" and "Ataturk" (instead of "Believers" and "Muhammad"), relied too heavily on the army as the final guarantor of their own position, when they should all of them been working night and day to enlarge their own ranks, and to constrain Islam still further, using whatever elaborated ideas they could. They might also have encouraged a truthful coming-to-terms with the Armenian genocide, and what's more, have begun openly to discuss just how many "Turks" must, in fact, be of Armenian, Greek, Jewish origin -- and even encouraged a "search for roots." [The same thing, by the way, would be useful in Iran, where a revival of interest in Zoroastrianism, and a depiction of Islam as the "Arab gift" that turned out to be the source of so much present, and past, woe, sounds absurd, but is not, in the one Muslim state that can actually be called a country].
What is described in the article above is, as Robert Spencer notes, only an intra--Islamic accommodation. As such, it has no meaning for, that has offers nothing useful that will help Infidels. In fact, like other kinds of accommodation, like that sought by the Bush Administration in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'a, it may actually work against us. For we do not want an Egypt or a Saudi Arabia where there is no domestic opposition. We want the Al-Saud to go to bed at night worried about what will happen to them. We want them to be deeply concerned about whether or not foreign workers, without whom Saudi Arabia would collapse, will stay. We want them to worry about the loyalty of their people. We want them to worry about, and to discover the need to stop spending the fortunes they are spending, on mosques and madrasas, on public relations campaigns (the recent transparent campaign, through Op/Eds, and media appearances and coordinated "Letters to the Editor" all meant to demonstrate that "Muslims"
in America are "just as American as apple pie," aw-shucks and good country people, the whole shtick, carefully keeping us from looking at the texts and tenets of Islam, but focussing on participation in some local group, all very inspiring and no doubt, such sentimentalists as Bush or the unsentimental careerist Dinesh D'Souza would focus on this kind of thing as "proving" that there is no problem with Islam, no menace from campaigns of Da'wa and demographic conquest all over the European half of the West, because this or that Muslim has run for office (and therefore this means he must have "accepted" the American way, for he has chosen not to throw bombs but to "work within the system"). And, as a just-published article by Stanley Kurtz shows, the Saudi effort is not limited to all those mosques (with the anti-Infidel hate literature that Freedom House investigators discovered), and madrasas, and public relations specialists (Western hirelings, eager to take on any client, indifferent to the results to their own society, even possibly to their own children), but now there is an effort to take control of how Islam is taught in schools, and to carefully limit what is said and written, in those carefully-compiled courses, with the lesson plans all prefabricated, and the syllabi all pre-written (read what Kurtz has to say, and then read as well what Sandra Stotsky, in her study of what is being done in Massachusetts, thanks in part to "Middle East experts" relying on their ability to intimidate and silence opposition because, you see, they are associated with Harvard).
Saudi Arabia's rulers are not our friends. And we do not wish or should not wish them well. We should wish that their domestic opposition causes them anguish and worry. We should not be happy that the Saudi rulers, or the Egyptain rulers, have found a way -- if they have found a way -- to stay solidly in power by making sure that Al Qaeda, and all others who wish to participate personally in active Jihad (there are rules for when collective participation is enough, that is when a Muslim may lend support of various kinds to those actively engaged in qital, or combat, or what we rightly call "terrorism" but Muslims define simply as another form of qital -- without having to take part himself; rules as well for when it is a duty of all Muslims, individually, to participate actively in the fighting).
This article offers no hope, has no real significance, for Infidels. If indeed some of the most corrupt and vicious regimes have managed to successfully deal with the "takfir" problem -- that is, the problem of one group of Muslims defining another group as "not Muslim" or as "Infidels" who can be treated as Infidels of course can be treated) that is to their advantage, but not to ours. We will only suffer the more. We have a stake in encouraging division and demoralization in the Arab and Muslim world. If our cities are not off-limits to the Jihad, we have a stake in Riyadh and Jiddah and Cairo and Damascus being similarly unsettled. We have a stake in Muslim regimes that cnanot be allowed to believe that their domestic opposition will always and everywhere target only the certified Infidels of the West, or only the local non-Muslims (nothing is said in the article above about managing to convince Al-Qaeda supporters in
Egypt to lessen their vicious hostility to non-Muslims, such as the insecure and frightened Copts.)
The more secure the Mubarak regime is, the more that dissatisfied Egyptians can no longer take out their dissatisfaction against the regime but are persuaded that their only enemies are, as before, the "Infidels," the more likely it is that they will, within Egypt, attack the Copts, or, still more likely, go off to attack the Infidels elsewhere -- perhaps after having been admitted to a Western country as merely a hard-working "economic" immigrant. There are no merely "economic" immigrants among Muslims in Infidel lands; they bring Islam, undeclared, in their mental baggage, and the Infidel governments, like the people they are supposed to be protecting, simply have no understanding of this.
No, for Infidels this news means nothing good, and very likely will make our task, rightly conceived, much harder. And just wait. Just how many breathless articles do you think you will now see, from oily Fawaz Gerges, from lean, mean, jogging John Esposito, from that thrusting young academic who seems deplorably to have turned his media party trick (raised as an "Orthodox Jew" but now an "expert on Islam") into a frequent gig at The Times, that thrusting young academic Noah Feldman, from Tom Friedman and from Nicholas Kristoff, in other words -- tutti quanti -- about what "hope" this new development offers, and what a magnificent model this is for us, if only we do not listen to "those who preach that there can be no accommodation with Islam" when the turn-around in the minds of former terrorists, by the Egyptian authorities, is..."nothing short of miraculous."
Oh God. Spare us this kind of false hope, the news ripe for miscomprehension. But we won't be spared.
Once the door is open to revisionists, the living room is never quite the same. I can see how muslims can re-think some part of Sharia, and remain Islamic, but how can they do that to the Quran, the immutable word of Allah, and its core directives?
Show me a muslim brave enough to challange Allah, and I will show you an apostate. The slave never challanges the master, without severe punishment.
I bet these reformers and revisionist submitters, like Al- Sharif, are hyper aware of that. Thats why they will stop just short of offending Allah, which means the jihad will continue...
Just one example of the "mental baggage" of Islam brought to America by immigrants. In this case it was a mullah who, when it was suggested to him (by an ex-Muslim) that he, as a welcomed guest, should make an effort to assimilate into American culture rather than criticize American values and attempt to impose his own on all Americans shot back:
"This earth was created by Allah and this America also belonged to Allah. Muslims are the true followers (soldiers) of Allah; hence, they are the true and legitimate owner of this duniah or earth. Therefore, this America also belonged to Muslims."
But of course this mullah doesn't speak for all Muslims, does he President Bush?
Why should Arab countries fear that American oil workers will leave when Halliburton has moved its headquarters to Qatar to be closer to the action? Aren't there plenty of Chinese who will be all too happy to fill the void left by the departure of American workers? I don't see foreign workers leaving Saudi unless they are forcibly pushed out by one side or the other. The lure of the dollar or euro is just too strong.
A religion wants to subjugate people?
Stop the presses!!
Hugh fair go!!...3 long posts...I will never get anything else finished tonight :)
Seriously, if we are going to invade somewhere for oil, why not pick on the saudis and then charge admission to mecca or wall it off totally. I can just imagine the worldwide riots BUT if no haji yr average muslim wont get to heaven unless he declares jihad and then we can all see their true colours.
"Repentant jihadi?"
Can a jihadi change?
Can a jihadi change...a lightbulb?
How many jihadis does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. There is no compulsion in lightbulbs.
There is indeed such a work in existence. Christoph Luxemburgh's "The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran" is one such attempt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syro-Aramaic_Reading_Of_The_Koran
Lets see he has had nothing but time to ponder these things:
Islam can and would be militarily crushed and then occupied.
Islam can and would be economicly destroyed.The worst would be the loss of Jizya for the common muslim.No going to infedel schools and such.
He sees thier best chance that was working until Bin laden opened everyones eyes was that of a different boom,that of the baby kind.
This weopon is what has worked the best for Islam gaining control.While in the times of yore thier jihadist campaigns may have garnered them thier hearts desire now it is nothing but a reason to destroy islam by the modern and more powerful world.
Terrorism for the most part has made it more difficult for them to achieve thier goals.
Yes the baby boom and the continuous suction at the breast of free public money and aid has been working quite well in Islams favor.
Also he hasn't really said anything other than quit killing muslims,thats what he is more interested in ending.
Infedels are just infedels afterall.
It's my guess this is what we can come to expect a "moderate to be".
he just polishes in a differnt motion than some of the other polishers.
Perhaps there is just that need to regroup and this type of yaking is to pave the way for such.
I said it and it's forever."I will never for the rest of my life believe or trust ANY muslim.
Too much time and opprotunity has passed and we have been left wanting.
more taqqiyah banter...
Robert pegged it..."sort of", which for all intents and purposes, may as well be "no...he didn't".
Mere lips service with an escape clause: taqqiyah
Unless they
1) reject taqqiyah in it's entirety (repeat 3 times)
2) put it in writing, with his own signature
3) reject terrorism in all forms (repeat 3 times)
...he's LYING.