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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Fitzgerald: Islam and capitalism

Jun 13, 2006 5:49 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses Grover Norquist and the compatibility of Islam and capitalism:

A poster at Jihad Watch recently noted that “[Grover] Norquist, a former Executive Director of the College Republicans and current head of Americans for Tax Reform is, along with his devoutly Muslim new wife, Samah Al-Rayyes, the founder of the Islamic Institute, which advocates the compatibility of Islam with free enterprise and capitalism.”

Islam is indeed compatible with “free enterprise” if by “free enterprise” one means the appropriation of economic power, and state money, by those who first inherit, or manage to acquire, political power. It has been noted before that in the Western world, those who first make money but then want something else — fame, glory — ultimately enter politics. In the Muslim Middle East (and elsewhere as well) the only way to make money, real money, is to seize power, or be in the circle of those who have that power.

Mubarak’s Friends-and-Family Plan distributes American Jizyah, taking a large cut for itself — for the Godfather and company. In Jordan, long-suffering American taxpayers used to pay all sorts of bills for King Hussein, the “plucky little king’ who drove around in his sports cars, flew around in his planes, and in the West, in the best hotels, had the most expensive call girls visit him, seriatim. American taxpayers pai, unknowingly, for all of it. In Qatar, there is the family that has taken to describing itself as the “royal” family — as J. B. Kelly nas noted, these sheiklets of statelets were once called, by the British, simply sheikhs, or in some cases “The Ruler,” as in “The Ruler of Bahrain,” but now they keep giving themselves promotions so that they are almost all of them now “royalty.” Very funny, but not so funny is the way that the Al-Thani family in Qatar, the Al-Sabah in Kuwait, the Maktoum (buying all that New York real estate, on enotes) of the United Arab Emirates, and all the others, including the late Sheikh Zayid and his descendants in Abu Dhabi, appropriate much of whatever statelet they pretend to be the head of through some presumed venerable dynasty.

Of course the most egregious and comical example is that of a country named after a single family by that family: Saudi Arabia, named after the Al-Saud. How much is raked off the top, bottom, and sides (and please, trim the eyebrows as well), by the princes and princelings and princelettes, and all their numerous courtiers and consorts (Khashoggis, Bin Ladens, the lot of “contractors” and “defense consultants” who serve the all-important role of being conduits for bribes to assorted Al-Saud family members, who don’t want everything to be official).

“Compatible” with “free enterprise”? Not so far.

And inshallah-fatalism does not exactly, as an attitude, encourage all that industry and enterprise that modern economies require.

But let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that Grover Norquist, almost certainly Muslim himself (for he cannot marry an observant Muslim woman and remain a non-Muslim) and friend of the Good and Great in Washington (that he is not looked upon with great suspicion, not shunned, is itself telling about official Washington, and its willful misunderstanding of Islam), is right. Let’s pretend that “capitalism” and “Islam” go together.

So what?

The real question is: can Islam and non-Islam, can Believers and Infidels, “go together” or co-exist, in a spirit in which Muslims are not constantly striving to deny those Infidels their laws, their customs, their understandings, their ways of doing things, their pluralism? I don’t mean the “pluralism” that Muslims exploit as long as they need to — I mean “pluralism” everywhere, including the Muslim countries. Can Believers accept the Infidels in their relations between the sexes, their attention to the individual and abhorrence of the Muslim emphasis on the collective, their free speech, their freedom of conscience, their art, their music, their everything that makes them them?

Traditional Islam uncompromisingly divides the world between Believer and Infidel. The former are instructed “not to take” the latter as “friends” (Qur’an 5:51) but rather to show implacable hostility to them, and even to show murderous hostility to them. This is because, in the Muslim view, the world’s land is also divided between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the Lands of the Believers and the Lands of the Infidels (the “House, Domain, Abode of War”). Muslims have a duty to strive in whatever way they can, using whatever instruments of Jihad prove most effective and are available, to make as much of Dar al-Harb part of Dar al-Islam, until Islam covers the globe and dominates everywhere, and Muslims rule.

This is not a fantasy. This can be found in the texts. This is taught. The fact that not all Muslims act upon it should be no consolation. Some are too busy making a living. Some wish to pretend those texts and teachings do not exist, for as residents of the West, they have no way to explain them, and just hope that they can keep on distracting Infidels, avoiding the real questions, and keep on reproducing at a rate that will eventually make the answering of such questions, or the pretense of answering them, unnecessary.

That this is not understood is a failure at least as colossal as that of the Western world in its unwillingness to confront Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, or to aid the Whites against the Bolsheviks in the period of the Russian Civil War, when those Bolsheviks might have been stopped.

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