A Jihad Watch reader recently wrote: “My favorite example of Muslim “˜attitude” was that of a young woman who had converted and started wearing appropriate hide-all clothing. She complained that people on the street related differently to her, in a less friendly manner.”
But her new clothes were a sign. Those clothes said: I am not merely a Muslim, but a true-blue Believer. As a true-blue Believer, you may hold me to knowledge of, and submission to, the dictates of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. When, for example, the Qur’an tells me, as it tells all Believers, “do not take Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other,” I must obey, and not take them as friends. When I am told, as a Believer, that I must not to greet non-Muslims before they greet me (as a sign of their inferiority), I obey.
And my dress semaphores to the world that I obey. It further semaphores, that somber head-to-toe dress in which I now go about, that I willingly submit to Allah and his dictates, as expressed in the Qur’an and glossed by the Hadith and the Sira (for Muhammad is the central figure in Islam, far more present as an exemplary model than distant and whimsical Allah). That means that I agree to regard the key division in the world, the only one that really matters, as between Believers and Infidels, and am ready to participate, as my duty as a Muslim, in the struggle or Jihad to remove all barriers to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. I am ready to do that even if it means I must work to change beyond recognition the political and legal institutions of the Infidel nation-state in which I now happen to be living, and of which I now happen to be a citizen — it hardly matters to a true Believer, for whom all Infidel nation-states are virtually fungible.
That is why you might, if you dress in a way that says I Am A Believer in a Total System that does not wish Infidels well, garner a few stares from Infidels. Would that the expressions of hostility went beyond that, to make it very difficult for those who wish to change for all time our legal and political institutions, so that they could be refused citizenship, or not allowed into the country in the first place — or if natives, could be stripped of their citizenship if they swear allegiance not to a “foreign power” but to an ideology that, if it were to be believed and followed, would mean an end to the Constitution, an end to this young, bumptious, sometimes hopelessly naive and sentimental Republic.
The West is no place to raise a decent Muslim family. May it remain so forever: no place to raise a decent Muslim family, given what that, in the largest sense, implies or means. Those who in the West, free from constraints, societal and family (the Muslim family, backed up by the Muslim society and the Muslim state), shed Islam, and become apostates, or at least Muslims-for-identification-purposes Muslims, will find the West something to be embraced, its freedoms supported. However, those who remain real Muslims will not embrace the Infidels among whom, and the Infidel nation-state within which, they have managed to settle. They will work to chip away at those Infidel freedoms, even while exploiting some of them, in order to remove every barrier to the spread, and then hoped-for dominance, of Islam.
Muslims should be told not, as Karen Hughes naively did, that Muslim life in America is thriving, and isn’t it all so wonderful, but rather that it is difficult to live islamically, and still fit in, in America and the rest of the West. And as Infidels learn more and more about Islam, become more and more wary and disturbed, it will only become — as from our point of view it should — more difficult.
Instead of doing everything to accommodate Islam by changing our legal and political institutions, and social arrangements, Western societies should be reinforcing the barriers to such change, with volunteers supplementing the work of the government, in piling high those sandbags. Some may be discouraged from coming to those places where their numbers are not large and the Infidels are now, too early, wary. Others may decide to leave, whether to participate in the oil bonanza if they came from oil-states (or can obtain work in the Gulf), others to participate in Jihad (Iraq, Somalia), others simply to remain among fellow Muslims, in a Muslim state, where Islam rules.
Otherwise there will be more such incidents such as we saw in Mississauga, where a young woman has been murdered by her father for refusing to wear the hijab. This incident is telling but entirely comprehensible to those who know what Islam is all about. It is a source of wonderment to those who do not (and may think it is just a particular father, behaving inexplicably). And it could just as easily have been a Muslim family in Mississippi, or anywhere else in the Western world.