The rollicking series continues. Here you can find Parts I, II, III, IV, and V.
In today’s installment, our hero begins chasing his own tail. Back in his Part II, he said this:
Taqiyya is a Shia concept that essentially allows Shias to keep their true beliefs secret while they live among Sunnis. Davis claims that the term also applies to Sunni Muslims who are living in “Dar al-Harb” or as Davis implies, the West, and thus he claims that Muslim organizations who are claiming that Islam is a religion of peace are actually lying.
[…]
Hugh Fitzgerald, the other ideologue at Jihad Watch, attempts to summarize what taqiyya means. He argues that Sunnis also practice taqiyya (his source is a work by Mervyn Hiskett, a British scholar of Islam – he does not cite a single Islamic source stating that Sunni Muslims must deceive non-Muslims [but why would Muslim scholars actually say this? It’s a secret, right Hugh?] although he could find texts from Shia scholars allowing for such a thing in Sunni dominated states).
So we’re to believe — and it is widely believed — that taqiyya, religious deception, is a Shi’ite concept that has no foundation in Sunni theology. But when I quoted Sunni authorities who do allow for it, Subhani begins to backtrack. In fact, he backtracks the whole way. In Part VI of his anti-Spencer farrago, “Taqiyya Alert!,” he says:
Yea, Sunnis sure do practice taqiyya.
Oops! There goes the entire substance of Part II of his series, which was all about what evil dopes we were for suggesting that Sunnis practice taqiyya! Maybe this is why the parts of his series are misnumbered.
Subhani quotes the Tafsir al-Jalalayn for Qur’an 3:28, which says that if the Muslims “fear something,” they may “show patronage” to the unbelievers “through words, but not in your hearts.” It goes on to say that this provision was given “before the hegemony of Islam and [the dispensation] applies to any individual residing in a land with no say in it.”
One might reasonably get the impression from that that the believers may deceive the unbelievers in order to protect themselves in a land in which Islam does not have hegemony, but Subhani says it ain’t so: “This doesn’t provide dispensation to deceive non-Muslims by portraying themselves as ‘moderates’ so that they can secretly take over a non-Muslim country. Maybe Spencer sees that somewhere in this tafsir, but I don’t think most people will. This tafsir specifically says that if a Muslim fears that he or she will be persecuted if they do not speak well of their non-Muslim ruler then they should lie. Why? To preserve their life, duh.”
All right. So if a Muslim believes he will be persecuted if he does not speak well of a non-Muslim ruler, he should lie. Does this allow him to lie if he fears he will be persecuted if he does not speak well of non-Muslim rule in general? In other words, may he lie if he fears that he will face difficulties if he declares his preference for Sharia rather than for democratic pluralism? And may he lie if he is working for the institution of Sharia in a non-Muslim, democratic and pluralist state, but doesn’t want the non-Muslim rulers to find out that that is what he is doing, because he may then face persecution?
I submit that Omer Subhani’s distinction here is a distinction without an effective difference, and that his self-contradiction is indicative of an increasing desperation.
Also, I’d feel much more inclined to accept his indignant contention that it would be forbidden for Sharia supremacists to pose as “moderates” in order to gull unwitting infidels, if it weren’t for the fact that there is so much evidence that exactly that is happening. As I’ve pointed out before, In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document that came to light last year, Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram explains that the Brotherhood’s work in America is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
The memorandum concludes with “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” Among these organizations are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); and the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), from which came in 1994 the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Muslim American Society (MAS), meanwhile, is the name under which the Brotherhood operates in the U.S.
Yet these are all widely reputed to be “moderate” groups.