Donald Trump’s latest politically incorrect comment concerning Islam is much truer than most know.
After being asked last week on CNN if he believed the West was at war with Islam, the Republican presidential candidate simply said:
I think Islam hates us. There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.
While millions of Americans undoubtedly agree with Trump’s assertions—at least those who have eyes and ears to see and hear with—few realize that this “tremendous hatred” is not a product of grievances, political factors, or even an “extremist” interpretation of Islam; rather, it is a direct byproduct of mainstream Islamic teaching.
According to the ancient Islamic doctrine of al-wal’a wa al-bara’, or “loyalty and enmity”—which is well grounded in Islamic scriptures, well sponsored by Islamic authorities, and well manifested all throughout Islamic history and contemporary affairs—Muslims must hate and oppose everyone who is not Muslim, including family members.
Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse of this doctrine and speaks for itself: “You [Muslims] have a good example in Abraham and those who followed him, for they said to their people, ‘We disown you and the idols which you worship besides Allah. We renounce you: enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in Allah alone’” (Koran 60:4, emphasis added).
Koran 58:22 praises Muslims who fight and kill their own non-Muslim family members: “You shall find none who believe in Allah and the Last Day on friendly terms with those who oppose Allah and His Messenger—even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred.”
According to Ibn Kathir’s mainstream commentary on the Koran, this verse refers to a number of Muslims who slaughtered their own non-Muslim kin (one slew his non-Muslim father, another his non-Muslim brother; a third—Abu Bakr, the first revered caliph of Islamic history—tried to slay his non-Muslim son and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered his relatives.) As Ibn Kathir explains,[1] the continuation of verse 58:22 shows that Allah was immensely pleased by their unwavering zeal for his cause.
In fact, verses that support the divisive doctrine of “loyalty and enmity” permeate the Koran (see also 4:89, 4:144, 5:51, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 60:1). There is one caveat, captured by Koran 3:28: when Muslims are in a position of weakness, they may pretend to befriend non-Muslims, as long as the hate carries on in their hearts. (Read here for several recent examples of Muslims living for years at peace and in friendship with non-Muslims, but then violently turning on them once they became stronger.[2])
Because enmity for non-Muslims is so ironclad in the Koran, mainstream Islamic teaching holds that Muslim men must even hate—and show that they hate—their non-Muslim wives, for no other reason than that they are “infidels.”… Keep reading