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

Time Mag says Boko Haram un-Islamic, ignores Qur’an verses on sex slavery

May 16, 2014 12:43 pm By Robert Spencer

A member of Boko Haram in Kano, Nigeria.Here is yet another article (remarkably poorly edited for a major magazine) purporting to show that Boko Haram is violating the teachings of Islam, while ignoring the passages of the Qur’an and Hadith that Boko Haram uses to justify its actions. The problem with such pieces is that they do nothing to refute the jihadist claims and thus do nothing to blunt the jihadist justification for their actions, so all they really accomplish is to lull the Infidels into complacency. Is that the objective? “5 Reasons Boko Haram is Un-Islamic,” by Carla Power, Time, May 15, 2014:

The official name of Boko Haram, the Nigerian group apparently responsible for the kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls, is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad. That translates into English as “People Committed to the Propogation [sic] of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” The name is wholly inappropriate. With their sustained campaign of murders and kidnappings, the members of Boko Haram conduct themselves in a manner that could barely be more alien to the Prophet Muhammad teachings [sic]. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz Al [sic] al-Sheikh, declared Boko Haram was “set up to smear the image of Islam.” The secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the world’s largest bloc of Muslim countries, told the Associated Press that violent extremists like Boko Haram “not only disavow their Islam, but their humanity.”

It’s always dangerous to generalize about a faith observed by 1.6 billion people – there’s a lot of room for interpretation between that many people – but it’s clear that Boko Haram’s atrocities go against the mainstream teachings of Islam. Here are five reasons why Boko Haram’s actions are fundamentally un-Islamic:

1. Boko Haram targets educational establishments.

In the local Hausa language, “Boko Haram” translates roughly as “Western education is forbidden.” In 2012, the group began targeting government schools with home-made firebombs. Over the last two years, reports Amnesty International, attacks by armed groups have forced over 60 schools in northern Nigeria to close, with Boko Haram claiming responsibility for some of the attacks.

Boko Haram’s hostility to education stems from its suspicion of what it views as the government’s secular education system. But that hostility strongly contravenes the teachings of Islam, a faith whose first revelation to the Prophet Muhammad was the word “Read,” whose scripture repeatedly enjoins Muslims to reflect, and whose traditions enjoin all Muslims – regardless of gender – to pursue education.

Boko Haram’s objection is not to education as such, but to education that is not Islamic and Qur’an-based. The Taliban also attacks schools, for the same reasons.

2. It claims to be waging jihad.

Boko Haram’s formal name makes it clear that the group is pursuing jihad. There’s debate among Islamic scholars as to what constitutes a “just” jihad, but mainstream scholars agree that jihad can only be led by a legitimate leader of a Muslim community, not self-appointed leaders like Osama bin Laden or Boko Haram’s Abubakar Shekau, who has led the group since 2009. Even if the conditions for jihad are met, the Prophet Muhammad banned targeting non-combatants. Boko Haram has repeatedly flaunted that ban. In February, the group killed over 50 schoolboys, opening fire on a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria before burning it down. Last fall, Boko Haram gunmen shot 40 students at an agricultural training college as they lay asleep in their dorms. According to the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, women and children, rabbis and priests and other noncombatants are to be spared. Warriors cannot burn down property, destroy trees or fields, or commit atrocities.

Power here ignores the fact that in Islamic theology, jihad warfare is fard kifaya, an obligation of the community as a whole but not of every individual believer. Jihad becomes fard ayn, obligatory on every individual Muslim to aid in some way, when a Muslim land is attacked. In Sunni Islam, only the caliph is authorized to declare offensive jihad, and there has been no caliph since 1924, so if Boko Haram were waging offensive jihad, her point would hold that ” jihad can only be led by a legitimate leader of a Muslim community.” But defensive jihad remains a universal obligation that, according to Islamic theology can and should be waged by everyone, since it is an individual obligation of every believer. Hence every jihad today has to be cast as defensive, and Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau did that in 2012 when he claimed that the group’s attacks on Christians were “revenge” for supposed enormities they committed against Muslims in Nigeria: “We are also at war with Christians because the whole world knows what they did to us,” he said. “They killed our fellows and even ate their flesh in Jos.” He thereby situated his jihad as defensive.

3. It has declared war against Christians.

In a rambling video released May 5, Shekau declared war “against Christians generally.” He included in that group President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “and any unbeliever.” But the Quran tells Muslims to respect their fellow monotheists, specifically the Christians and the Jews, who are “People of the Book.” The Quran says: “Those who believe [Muslims], the Jews, the Christians….whosoever believe in God and the Last day and do good deeds, they shall have their reward from their Lord, shall have nothing to fear, nor shall they come to grief.”

This is outstandingly disingenuous. Does Power actually not know that the Qur’an also says this? “Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (9:29) “People of the Book” is the Qur’an’s designation for Jews, Christians and some others.

4. It forcibly converts people.

The May 12 video of the kidnapped schoolgirls purports to show some Christian girls speaking their new Muslim names. The girls had been “liberated,” claimed Shekau, by having converted from Christianity to Islam. But he’s flouting a key teaching of Islam. “Let there be no compulsion in religion,” states the Quran. The verse, notes Usama Hasan, senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, a U.K.-based counter-extremism think-tank, was revealed to Muhammad after some of the earliest Muslims’ children converted to Judaism and Christianity. Nobody can force anyone to convert to Islam, say scholars. Embracing the faith is a matter between individuals and their God.

Certainly the Qur’an says that (2:256), but what constitutes “compulsion” is in the eye of the beholder. After all, the institutionalized subjugation of the dhimma, with its regular humiliation and harassment, from which one can be freed for the simple price of converting to Islam, is not considered compulsion. Remember Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the journalists who were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam — even though their conversions were obviously coerced, their captors made them say that they were converting freely, and the captors probably believed that themselves. After all, the journos could have chosen to be killed instead.

5. It espouses forcing girls and women into marriage.

In the May 5 video, Shekau says the kidnapped schoolgirls should be married off. But Islam does not allow anyone – male or female – to be married without his or her own consent. According to one hadith – hadiths are the words or deeds of the Prophet Muhammad that, along with the Quran, constitute the basis of Islamic law – one day a girl married off against her will came crying to Muhammad, saying she hadn’t agreed to the marriage. Muhammad promptly declared the marriage invalid.

Here again we see an Islamic apologist ignore the verses that Muslims like Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau point to in order to justify kidnapping young girls and selling them into sexual slavery — even to offer a mitigating explanation of them:

“If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one, or what your right hands own; so it is likelier you will not be partial.” (Qur’an 4:3)

And:

“And also prohibited to you are all married women except those your right hands possess.” (Qur’an 4:24)

See also 33:50-52 and 70:29-30.

The members of Boko Haram certainly consider themselves Muslims but their actions make them traitors to their faith. We should start referring to them as a criminal group rather than an Islamist group. Their sickening deeds and rhetoric repeatedly demonstrate that not only do they lack kinship with the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, but they lack respect for the religion they claim to fight for.

The problem with stopping referring to them as an “Islamist” or Muslim group is that ignoring the Islamic justifications for their actions, instead of confronting them and working for genuine reform, only ensures that other Islamic jihadists will use them to justify similar actions later.

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Filed Under: journalistic bias, Moderate Muslims, Qur'an, slavery, Useful idiots Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. tpellow says

    May 16, 2014 at 12:53 pm

    “Every Mohammedan is Boko Haram”

    (5 min video clip)

    By Bill Warner.

    http://www.politicalislam.com/blog/every-mohammedan-is-boko-haram/

    • RaymondofCanada says

      May 16, 2014 at 2:14 pm

      Thank you. I can’t believe I unsubscribed to this magazine over 20 years ago. I wonder would I have swallowed these lies if I had stayed with them?

  2. Walter Sieruk says

    May 16, 2014 at 1:16 pm

    One thing we may all be sure of . Kidapping a person or a group of people as slave for sex of any other kind of slave is a great sin according tothe Bible.
    Such a terrible sin that it warrents death. For it is written “Whoever steals someone to keep them as a slave or to keep them for their own slave must be killed.” Exodus 21;16. [ERV]

  3. sifter says

    May 16, 2014 at 2:06 pm

    UnIslamic? Lol. Tell it to the parents of the Ma’alot school massacre, 22 kids murdered ,67 wounded. It is so pathetic for these apologists go try and redefine what constitutes Islamic to weasel their way out of accountability. Muslims have been hacking, raping, beheading and murderingbtheir way across the globe since time immemorial.

    • Huck Folder says

      May 17, 2014 at 3:51 am

      “According to the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, women and children, rabbis and priests and other noncombatants are to be spared.”

      Interesting. I wonder where she got that from; who told her? When mo’s men decapitated 6-900 Jewish males, some maybe as young as 11 or 12, and some as old as perhaps 70, were there any rabbis among them? I’ve never seen any such mention before. There could have been only one, if the clan always stayed together. Then, there could have been say 50-70, if there were one rabbi for every ten males 13 and older.

      So I would like to know the source of her quote, possibly unctuous ahmadis.
      Can anyone give her source?

  4. Champ says

    May 16, 2014 at 3:15 pm

    Time Magazine un-Intelligent …

  5. Jack Diamond says

    May 16, 2014 at 4:09 pm

    No compulsion in religion! As she says the verse has to do with Muslims being converted away from Islam. What were the three choices and only three choices Muhammad gave to his kafir neighbors? Convert, live in subjugation or die. No compulsion there. Let’s add that pagan Arabs were only given two choices, convert or die. No compulsion in the conquering, bloody sword of Islam. No compulsion in the jizya and other taxes and the oppressive laws of dhimmitude, no compulsion in there to convert to Islam for any chance of any decent tolerable life. And to offend the Muslims? To break the rules of being “protected”? Then it’s back to a death sentence over you unless you convert. No compulsion in that. Clearly.

    If there is no compulsion in religion why is there a death penalty hanging over the head of any Muslim who would leave Islam? Does that add up Carla? As in so much of Islam words mean very different things to Muslims than they might to Carla Power. Muhammad had renegades killed. Too bad for Muslims, okay Carla, but at least non-Muslims aren’t to be forcibly converted, right? But what constitutes conversion in Islam? It turns out to be another slippery term, like “innocents” or “peace.” “When Abu Sufyan of Mecca is brought to Muhammad he is told to confess, ‘there is no God but the only God’ and ‘I am his Apostle.’ Abu Sufyan answered ‘by God O Muhammad, of this there is doubt in my soul.’ ‘Woe to you! Accept Islam and testify that Muhammad is the apostle of God before your neck is cut off by the sword.’ Thus he (Abu Sufyan) professed the faith of Islam and became a Muslim.’ (The late) Dr. Muhammad al-Buti (Al-Azhar scholar) repeats the story in “The Jurisprudence of Muhammad’s Biography”. He feels some will protest who believe faith ought not be imposed by the threat of the death! “What is required of an infidel or one who confuses other gods with God, is to have his tongue surrender to the religion of God and to subdue himself to the prophethood of Muhammad. But his heartfelt faith is not required at the beginning. It will come later.”

    So compulsion is not making someone profess Islam, it is forcing them to believe it in their heart. If you say the words, not believing them, you haven’t been forced to convert! Ibn Hisham p134 “Biography of the Apostle”:
    ‘Muhammad sent Khalid Ibn al-Walid to the tribe of the children of Harim and told him ‘Call them to accept Islam before you fight with them…if they refuse, fight them.’ They entered Islam by force. He brought them to Muhammad, ‘had you not accepted Islam I would have cast your heads under your feet.’ (Al Road Al Anf p.4. pp21218). But Carla Power doesn’t know this, Carla Power clearly knows next to nothing yet she feels she has the knowledge to determine what is un-Islamic. Her other four points are equally deluded, their only function is to uphold the innocence of Islam. If the Boko Haram are “traitors” to their faith they would have takfir pronounced on them from Al-Azhar on down to the Saudi Mufti she quotes (not mentioning Mr. Mufti’s other memorable remarks: all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula should be destroyed (how Boko Haram of him!); issuing a fatwa that 10-year old girls can marry). Reading her paragraph on marriage it is clear her knowledge of Islam is on the Weekly Reader-Wikipedia level. Time Magazine, post mortem.

    • EYESOPEN says

      May 17, 2014 at 1:59 am

      Excellent post-mortem on the Time magazine article, Jack Diamond. Thank you.

  6. DhimmiNot says

    May 16, 2014 at 6:04 pm

    Carla Power is an educated stooge.
    She is a journalist specializing in Muslim societies, global social issues, and culture. A frequent contributor to Time Magazine, she is a former Newsweek correspondent, who in her decade at the magazine produced award-winning stories, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her essays have appeared in a wide range of publications, from Vogue and Glamour to The New York Times Magazine and Foreign Policy.

    She has been writing on Islam since the early 1990s, first as a Junior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, then as a journalist. She graduated from Yale University cum laude in 1988, and went on to receive a degree from the Journalism School at Columbia University, and an M.Phil. from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. Married, with two children, she lives in Brighton, England. She is currently writing IF THE OCEANS WERE INK (Times Books; Tentative Release Date: Winter, 2015), an account of her year spent studying the Quran with a traditional Islamic scholar.

    • Jack Diamond says

      May 16, 2014 at 6:53 pm

      Pathetic. Studying the Qur’an with a traditional Islamic scholar explains a lot though. Says something about Oxford too. Stick with Glamour Magazine.

      • Jack Diamond says

        May 16, 2014 at 7:58 pm

        She says “the Prophet Muhammad” which is either meant as showing respect for Islam or she’s an actual convert…but no non-Muslim should be acknowledging his prophethood… Muhammad banned targeting non-combatants. True, except when he didn’t. When he besieged the inhabitants of Ta’if he fired at them with catapults, knowing women and children would be struck. He was asked if it was permitted to attack the idolaters in the dark even if it led to women and children being struck. “They are among them.” was his reply. The Shafi and Hanbali school uphold it is permitted to bombard idolaters even if Muslims and those cautioned against killing are with them, as long as there is a need or obligation. At any rate there is an Islamic basis for even this for this argument, unlike what Carla Power is saying. As for who leads a jihad, dismissing Al Qaeda because Osama bin Laden wasn’t a qualified scholar is also disingenuous. Abdullah Azzam, Omar Abdel-Rahman and Zawahiri do qualify in spades (though it is moot since defensive jihad is an individual obligation in absence of a caliphate anyway). If she and her “scholars” want to argue with the jihadists that their fighting the cause of Allah isn’t legitimate jihad let them. When is that going to happen? They only debate with us, non-Muslims, not their coreligionists. Nor do they dare to pronounce takfir on them. As to Islam’s war and permanent enmity against Christians (announced in 9:29, supported by the entire doctrine of allegiance and rejection and centuries of lived experience) it is self-evident and ubiquitous. Carla Power is either consciously protecting Islam or needs a refund on all that school money.

      • Jack Diamond says

        May 16, 2014 at 8:24 pm

        In her studies of Islam did Carla Power come across abrogation, nasikh? Ever hear the most venerated Islamic scholars declare that the Verse of the Sword abrogated all the peaceful (towards infidels) verses of the Qur’an or understand Surah Nine is the last revelation on warfare and the controlling one? Is she quoting “no compulsion” because she knows that or doesn’t know that? Or she’s decided to stick with her own private Islam?

  7. RaymondofCanada says

    May 17, 2014 at 9:17 am

    “Their sickening deeds and rhetoric repeatedly demonstrate that not only do they lack kinship with the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, but they lack respect for the religion they claim to fight for.”

    What willful ignorance! Am I to believe that all the violence perpetrated by Islam throughout the world, including now the United States, is done by Islamists who betray their faith? Analogy: If you want to see fervent Christians, you will find them in fundamental denominations who try their best to obey every command of the Bible; if you want to find fervent Islamists, you will find them in jihad, carrying out the commands of the Koran. They are the “evangelists” of their “religion.”

  8. Sumit Basu says

    May 17, 2014 at 9:33 pm

    If Boko Haram, by their actions, are traitors to Islam, they would have been accused of Blasphemy by Islamic religious authorities. The fact that that has not happened, points to the fact that Islamic authorities do not regard their acts as Un-islamic.

  9. Brian Hoff says

    May 18, 2014 at 3:53 am

    Very muslim in the mosque I goto donot consider Boro Haran muslim as they donot follow the treaching of Islam and the sunnah. What is the sunnah can change over time as it doing now.

  10. Mirren10 says

    May 18, 2014 at 8:40 am

    ”Very muslim in the mosque I goto donot consider Boro Haran muslim as they donot follow the treaching of Islam and the sunnah. ”

    Then the ‘very muslim’ in your mosque is a very, very, **bad** muslim ! Why, he clearly doesn’t believe the koran to be the absolute, final word of ‘allah’ !

    The wretched chap should be stoned, then crucified, and then have his hands and feet cut off, and then be beheaded !

    Sahih International
    ”O Prophet, indeed We have made lawful to you your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and those your right hand possesses from what Allah has returned to you [of captives] and the daughters of your paternal uncles and the daughters of your paternal aunts and the daughters of your maternal uncles and the daughters of your maternal aunts who emigrated with you and a believing woman if she gives herself to the Prophet [and] if the Prophet wishes to marry her, [this is] only for you, excluding the [other] believers. We certainly know what We have made obligatory upon them concerning their wives and those their right hands possess, [but this is for you] in order that there will be upon you no discomfort. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.”

    “If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one, or what your right hands own; so it is likelier you will not be partial.” (Qur’an 4:3

    “And also prohibited to you are all married women except those your right hands possess.” (Qur’an 4:24

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