Projection Alert: here the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad says that Israel has imperialist designs upon the whole Islamic world, when actually it is Islam, not Israel, that has a program for conquest and transformation of society in its own image.
Don’t believe me. Take it from Majid Khadduri, an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:
The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)
Don’t believe Khadduri? Very well. How about Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
Don’t believe Nyazee, either? How about Iran’s Thug-In-Chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Of course, he is no Islamic scholar, but he is a devout Muslim, and he learned Islam not from greasy Islamophobes but from…Islamic scholars. And he has said: “Have no doubt… Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.”
Don’t believe Ahmadinejad? How about a Shafi’i manual of Islamic law endorsed by the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo? It says that the leader of the Muslims “makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax,” and cites Koran 9:29 in support of this idea: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden-who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o9.8)
Remember also that Ramadan Shallah was a professor at the University of South Florida in the 1990s — due to the influence of another professor there, Sami Al-Arian, who was the darling of the mainstream media for years before he pleaded guilty to being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
“Jihad leader preaches new Jerusalem vision,” from the Ma’an News Agency, April 5:
Gaza – Ma’an – Islamic Jihad’s secretary-general in Palestine on Sunday described Israeli measures in Jerusalem as representing the last opportunity for the Muslim and Arab world to support the holy city against occupation.
“Israel is not acting in secret. Every Israeli plot and action is being carried out publicly,” Ramadan Shallah said in a telephone address to participants at a festival held in Istanbul, Turkey to show solidarity with Jerusalem.
“If Israel succeeds in realizing its goals of annexing and Judaizing Jerusalem, that will pave the way to controlling every capital in the Arab and Islamic world including Ankara, Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Riyadh, and others. Israel could even work its way toward Mecca and Medina,” he said.
The Islamic Jihad leader preached a new vision and new education that would create a different approach toward liberating Jerusalem. He maintained that each home, street, foundation, and mosque in the Islamic world should focus on Jerusalem.