Ahmadi Muslim leader Qasim Rashid is, as Pamela Geller calls him, “a one-man cottage industry of deception and hypocrisy.” He has whitewashed Muhammad’s support for torture and the reality of jihad violence and Sharia oppression; dissembled about the Qur’an’s sanction of deception of unbelievers; lied about the presence of violent passages in the Qur’an; lied about the Qur’an’s sanction of beating disobedient women; lied about the nature of Sharia; called for limitations on the freedom of speech and expression to outlaw behavior and speech some Muslims may find offensive; and lied about Muhammad’s stance toward the persecution of Christians. When challenged about the “facts” he has presented, he (like virtually all other Islamic supremacists) responds with furious ad hominem contempt, but never answers the refutations of his articles on substantive grounds.
Now he is going after Ben Carson — with his usual farrago of lies, half-truths and telling omissions. More below.
“Ben Carson slanders Islam: Here’s exactly why his claims about Muslims are dead wrong,” by Qasim Rashid, Salon, October 4, 2015:
In his recent anti-Muslim crusade, Ben Carson promoted a disturbing form of religious segregation, claiming that a Muslim should only be president if he or she “renounces the tenets of Islam.”…
Does Qasim Rashid not know what the word “segregation” means, or does he just hope that his readers don’t? Carson is not advocating that Muslims be set apart from others in the U.S. He is simply pointing out that there are elements of Sharia that are incompatible with American law, which is manifestly true. Rashid is using the incendiary term “segregation” in order to try to link Carson’s truthful words about Sharia with racism, which for a Leftist is the easiest way to win an argument.
In the process, Dr. Carson has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment. A recent PPP survey in North Carolina reported that 72 percent believe a Muslim should not be allowed to be president of the United States. Likewise, 40 percent seek to ban Islam altogether.
Ben Carson “has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment”? He has risen sharply in the polls, but still, Rashid is giving him far too much credit. Neither Ben Carson nor any of those whom Rashid defames as “Islamophobes” are famous enough or popular enough to help “promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment.” If there are “frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment,” it is because of the seemingly endless procession of Muslims raping and brutalizing and killing people and pointing to Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions. But Rashid is in the business of trying to fool you into overlooking that and blaming people like Carson instead. Rashid would have you believe that Carson and others like him are responsible for people linking Islam with terrorism, because he wants you not to notice the many Muslims who link Islam with terrorism.
Under Dr. Carson’s crusade of religious segregation, some Americans appear to have forgotten the First Amendment’s fundamental religious freedom guarantee, and likewise Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids religious tests for any government office. Like his racial segregationist predecessors, Dr. Carson demonstrates that the Constitution is suddenly meaningless when influential politicians use fear and hate to advance their agenda.
Undeterred from his myopic comments on CNN and the resulting blowback last week, Carson advanced his religious segregationist views in a recent email to his constituents, claiming that “Under Shariah law, women must be subservient and people following other religions must be killed.”
Saudi Arabia and Iran are Sharia states. In them, women must indeed be subservient. In fact, everywhere that Sharia is obeyed, women must be subservient. Rashid would have you believe that none of this is real Sharia — that it has been universally misunderstood and misapplied. He reminds me of a doctrinaire Marxist I knew in college, who when confronted with the millions of murders of Communist regimes, denied they were really Communist and claimed that real Communism had not yet been seen. A easy way to avoid inconvenient facts.
Meanwhile, I don’t know if Carson really said that in Sharia states, “people following other religions must be killed,” and don’t trust an inveterate serial liar like Qasim Rashid to report his words accurately. In any case, it isn’t true. If, on the other hand, Carson was referring to those who leave Islam, Sharia does mandate death for apostates. And nowhere in any Muslim country today do non-Muslims enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims. At very least, proselytizing for other religions is forbidden, while Muslim proselytizing proceeds unfettered.
Dr. Carson defends these claims by arguing that he “hate[s] political correctness. It’s dangerous.” More dangerous, however, are his patently false claims about women in Islam, and Islam’s view of non-Muslims. If Dr. Carson is correct—and unfortunately his rising poll figures indicate that enough Americans believe he is correct—then America’s 3 million Muslims are obliged to make America’s 170 million women subservient and likewise kill the nation’s 330 million non-Muslims. Both concepts are beyond absurd and wholly unfounded in Islam.
This is a ridiculous straw-man hash of Carson’s statement. He was speaking about Muslim women being subservient in Sharia-observant Muslim households and societies, not about some imperative for Muslim men to work to bring non-Muslim women into subservient status. But it is easier for Rashid to twist and dismiss Carson’s words than to refute what he actually said.
For example, far from Dr. Carson’s claim that in Islam women are subservient, Islam gave women equal rights in 610 that our own United States haven’t given even in 2015. To this day America has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile the Quran 33:36 emphatically declares the equality of men and women:
“Surely, men who submit themselves to God and women who submit themselves to Him…God has prepared for all of them forgiveness and a great reward.”
One wonders if Rashid himself believes this. If Islam gave women equal rights in 610, why is there not a single Muslim country, much less Sharia states, in which women enjoy this full legal equality? And as for Qur’an 33:36, Rashid says nothing about Qur’an 4:34: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other…” His claim that in Islam men and women are equal is also belied by the fact that the Qur’an allows men to have as many as four wives, as well as sex slaves (4:3; 4:24) and to beat women from whom they fear disobedience (4:34). It also mandates an inequality in inheritance rights: “Allah instructs you concerning your children: for the male, what is equal to the share of two females….” (4:11) And it devalues women’s testimony: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as you choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her.” (2:282)
Carson’s parents divorced when he was 8—a right American women didn’t have until the 19th century. Meanwhile, Islam was the first religion to give women the right to choose to marry or to divorce, the right to own property, to become secular or religious scholars, the right to inherit, or to run a business—all in the 7th century.
Once again, one wonders why, if Rashid is being truthful, so many Muslim countries that profess to follow Sharia scrupulously misunderstand it so spectacularly. If Muslim women have had the right to choose to marry or divorce since the seventh century, why is asking for a divorce a difficult process that often results in ostracism and penury for Muslim women to this day, while Muslim men can divorce their wives with a single word (“talaq“)? Why are arranged and forced marriages still so commonplace, even among Muslim immigrants in the West, to the extent that even the dhimmi British have made some feeble attempts to forbid forced marriage?
Ayesha, wife of Muhammad, is recognized as one of the foremost legal scholars in Islamic history. Meanwhile, American women finally earn legal recognition as lawyers in the late 1800s. While women of color in 2015 America continue to lag behind white women in terms of college graduation rates and access to financial resources, Fatimah al-Fihri, an African Muslim woman scholar, used her inheritance from her father to establish the world’s first University, al-Qarawiyyin University in 859 C.E.
Prophet Muhammad repeatedly declared, “It is incumbent upon every Muslim male and every Muslim female to attain education.”
So once again it must be asked: if all this was established as long ago as the time of Aisha and the ninth century, why did so many Muslims forget it — especially among the scrupulously Sharia-observant? The Taliban torch girls’ schools and shoot girls who get an education, because they believe it un-Islamic to educate females. Are they all followers of Ben Carson? Or might there be more to Islamic teaching about women than Rashid is telling us?
Dr. Carson’s second claim, that Shariah requires killing people of other faiths, is highly objectionable to both the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. In truth, the Qur’an only permits fighting in self-defense, or to protect “churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques” from attack. Prophet Muhammad issued numerous charters with Christians, Jews, and pagans to affirm his commitment to universal religious freedom and equal human rights for all people regardless of faith. Throughout history non-Muslim historians have praised Muhammad for his pluralism and tolerance….
“Narrated Aisha and Abdullah bin Abbas: When the last moment of the life of Allah’s Apostle came he started putting his ‘Khamisa’ on his face and when he felt hot and short of breath he took it off his face and said, ‘May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the places of worship at the graves of their Prophets.’ The Prophet was warning (Muslims) of what those had done.” (Bukhari 1.8.427)
“It has been narrated by ‘Umar b. al-Khattib that he heard the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) say: ‘I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslim.'” (Muslim 4366)
One day, maybe Qasim Rashid will confront hadiths such as those and explain them, rather than relying on his readers’ ignorance of their existence. But as he smears this good man Ben Carson, he demonstrates yet again the difference between genuine reform of Islam, which has nothing to do with Qasim Rashid, and cynical deception of unbelievers in order to promote their complacency, which is Qasim Rashid’s business.
His new book is apparently called “Talk to Me.” But he only wants sycophants and fools to talk to him. Anyone who dares to disagree with them he will hector and ridicule, hoping that his followers won’t notice that their emperor has no clothes.