A contemporary Muslim is an anguished being preoccupied with mediaeval concerns. Never before in the history of Islam has it faced a danger such as this. For the first time, Muslims en masse are reclaiming their place in humanity and rejoining history. Islam has always relied on Muslims being unequivocally Muslim in clear contradistinction to the kafir, the unbeliever, treating the values and mores of the infidel with utter disgust and contempt. But history has played a trick on Islam and increasing numbers of Muslims find the values and mores of the infidels growing within their own hearts, gradually forcing out the Qur’an so firmly lodged there during their early childhood. This drama plays out as Islam struggling against Muslims and Muslims struggling against themselves, leaving an ummah in meltdown. This short series explores aspects of that complex struggle. Here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7. The series concludes with Part 8.
Part 8: The Final Delusion
The second decade of the twenty-first century was but a week old when the contradiction that is Islam put itself on tragic display before the eyes of the world. ISIS having been driven into occultation, the Islamic Republic of Iran stood as the purest manifestation on earth of the will of Allah and the emulation of Muhammad. The theocratic leaders of Iran, sitting upon the greatest global oil reserves and commanding the ferocious Revolutionary Guard with its notorious jihad terrorist Quds Force reinforced by thousands of Allah’s finest angels, had been goading, threatening and provoking Israel and the United States in particular, and the West in general, for forty years in their unshakeable faith that in the cataclysmic confrontation they so crave, the righteous, i.e., themselves, are certain to prevail.
In the early morning of Wednesday 8 January 2020, the Iranian military, in its widely-anticipated and feared Wrath-of-Allah-red-flag-and-all response to the United States killing the Quds Force leader Qasim Suleimani in Iraq with a single surgical strike six days earlier, fired off sixteen missiles at two bases in Iraq housing American soldiers. Two of these missiles landed in Iran, i.e., it managed to bomb itself, twice, while none of the rest caused a single injury or death, destroying only some buildings.
Two hours after the end of the attack, Iran’s Russian-made air defense system, still primed for a counter-attack, picked up just such a counter-attack from within Iran itself, to be precise, from no less a source of incessant enemy hostility than Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport and, naturally, they shot it down. What else? It has not been disclosed whether the direct hit elicited the customary triumphant outbursts of “Allahu akbar!” However, what could not be concealed was that the Iranian hi-tech missile defense system had just managed to shoot down a low-speed, low-altitude, lumbering passenger jet at close range. At least the Great Satan and Little Satan now know that Iran has that capability. 176 dead people fell from the sky, of whom eighty-two were Iranian.
“’To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again…’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without the benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.”
Thus spake Salman Rushdie in the opening lines of The Satanic Verses, in a prophesy chillingly consummated over Tehran, where an ancient high priest, whose name is now forever linked to spectacular Islamic incompetence, once commanded Rushdie’s death for writing that very book. “I tell you, you must die. I tell you. I tell you.”
Then came the lies, and more lies, and more lies, and clearing-away of evidence, and a mounting crescendo of international outrage, until the one who had been corrupted by Western education, the country’s President Hassan Rouhani, could take it no more, and the regime admitted its “mistake”, sort of — “American adventurism,” they managed to slip in there somewhere. But the prophesy already covered that:
“Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning. A miniature echo of the birth of time. The jumbo jet Bostan, Flight A I-420, blew apart without any warning, right above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city.”
Just one day before this catastrophe, the Great Martyr was buried, the occasion for the ummahric hero to be joined in the Afterlife by a further 56 mourners who were trampled to death in a crushing stampede, the regime apparently unaware that such crowds need to be managed. But then, management has always been a profane concern beneath the Islamic Republic’s rulers.
At the end of it all, 138 Iranians were dead, all at the hands or feet of Iranians. It was a revenge cock-up of staggering extravagance. The irony is that the Iranian regime had gone out of its way to avoid another American casualty, confirming what ex-Muslims and critics of Islam have been saying to deaf ears for decades: Muslims only respect force that they know can hurt them. This arrogant regime that had given the pointless IAEA inspectors the runaround for years was compelled by its own actions to invite in a swarm of infidel inspectors, including from the Great Satan itself, and stand humbly by as they pore over the wreckage and pass earthly judgment on their divinely-inspired deeds. It was a humiliation such as the Islamic Republic had not experienced since its inception forty-one years ago.
Fear of the Basij militia melted away before the disgust and anger that Iranians feel towards their regime, the shame that they feel for the pathetic mess that their once-great country had been reduced to, and their determination to reclaim their own destinies. They are out on the streets again, the effects of the over fifteen hundred deaths that ended the fuel-hike protests just weeks earlier annulled. Masha-Allah.
“They know how to destroy buildings,” mused former Lebanese Civil War commander Ziad Saab about Hezbollah, “but they don’t know how to build a small house for their dog.” Not even the 1400-year long Sunni-Shi’a split could shield the world’s Muslims from the humiliation and embarrassment of such spectacular Islamic incompetence beamed around the globe just a few short months after Islam’s last attempt at a caliphate was ended by a dog.
This short series on the Muslim’s inner struggles was motivated by what I see as Islam’s dénouement and final crisis and the impact of that crisis on its votaries, brought so dramatically into sharp focus over the course of the first days of the new year. The American chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a gang of spoilt-brat wannabe Muslim tyrants, aspires to “revive the Islamic Ummah from the severe decline that it had reached, and to liberate it from the thoughts, systems and laws of Kufr [unbelief], as well as the domination and influence of the Kufr states.” Whether the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, the OIC, the Muslim World League, cry-baby Imran Khan, nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamad, puffed-up little Kalashnikov-totting jihadi outfits with world-conquering delusions, punch-drunk “scholars” or split-personality sheikhs, the lament of the “severe decline of the ummah” resounds everywhere, like an annoying adhan that no one can do anything about.
The decline of the ummah had exercised Abul A’la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna early in the 20th century as it does the likes of Yasir Qadhi and Bilal Philips today. What chance do these distraught revivalists have of “liberating” their ummah from “the thought systems of Kufr”, “the laws of Kufr”, “the influence of the Kufr states”, and “the domination of the Kufr states” when their beloved ummah has become such an embarrassment to so many unfortunate enough to have been born into it.
“It is a calamity!” says Sheikh Said Rageah. “It is an avalanche, a tsunami,” says imam Bilal Phillips. Yasir Qadhi has a whole string of adjectives for these times, all meaning “bad”. Mahathir Muhammad cannot face the prospect of dying leaving the ummah in the state it’s in. What are these fine gentlemen so alarmed about? They are spooked by Muslims leaving Islam, by Muslims abandoning the ummah. Why are so many leaving Islam? Because the thoughts of Kufr are already in them, they are part of the systems of Kufr, they respect the laws of Kufr and they admire the Kufr states. By invading the world of freedom and mixing amongst free people, far from their jihad mass murder terrorising Western people into submission, far from their da’wa seducing Western people to Islam, they discover, instead, their children fleeing Islam for Kufr in rising disquiet at the “scholar’s” inability to answer their straightforward questions in straightforward ways. They learn, to their deep disappointment, that their children had internalised those Kufr values. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The smarter sheikhs, like Yasir Qadhi, engage in rather squalid rhetorical acrobatics in vain attempts to stem the haemorrhage, while idiots like Imran ibn Mansur, aka “Dawah Man”, can do little more than throw the Qur’an at them. The most interesting and sincere response is that of the pitiful fool, Saajid Lipham, whose exasperation leads him to plead with Muslims to homeschool their children so as to minimise their exposure to Kufr.
Most of them say Western education, Western ways, Western values, Western laws, are responsible for so many people leaving Islam. And in a superficial way they are right. They say such people are weak of faith. And again, in a superficial way, they are right. Many sheikhs blame one of their own, Yasir Qadhi, for trying to square the circle of being Muslim in the modern, free world, and of encouraging others to do the same. They don’t say that it cannot be done (that would be philosophically too complex to deal with), but that it shouldn’t be done, it shouldn’t even be attempted, or desired or contemplated. It shouldn’t even cross your mind. And if it does, then Shaitan put it there. There are places where that kind of logic carries weight. The free world isn’t one of them.
Your faith, being Muslim, is the most precious thing you have, they say. Subhan-Allah. The scholarly clique is united on this one point, alhamdulillah. But they fail to understand that when Muslims approach their sheikhs with all these previously-unheard-of questions, all conflicted, all distressed, some in tears, it is not because they want to leave Islam, but because they want to remain. They are struggling to remain Muslim. Sometimes I think that Yasir Qadhi gets this, while at other times I have to wonder. As for the rest, they don’t have a clue.
Islam requires obedience and allegiance, while all love must be for Allah and his rasool alone. These requirements cannot be met in a world of freely associating autonomous individuals. Islam is only possible in a world of subordinate dependents imbued with primal allegiance. The religion has sustained itself for 1400 years in the world where these conditions obtain, primal allegiances providing the necessary insulation from the encroachment of corroding social forms, in particular freedom, free thought and free individuals.
There are only two possible outcomes to Islam’s current predicament, especially in the West. Either the West becomes like the Islamic world, i.e., a world of monumental cock-ups where Muslims can feel at home, or Islam is progressively repelled from where it has encroached, until it is again safely confined to its original barren desert. Islam is unlikely to prevail, as Iran demonstrates, but it is likely to wreak a great deal of damage, again, as Iran demonstrates. This is partly because the West’s patience with these habitual abusers of its tolerance may finally be running out, but also because the autonomous individual has finally recognised itself as a self-conscious social force in the Islamic world.
Even the insane “Palestinian territories” are not immune from the autonomous individual. After Mahmoud Abbas is called unto Allah, the Palestinian civil war is likely to resume at which point we may well begin to see those wanting done with Islam become more visible and vociferous, as they are now in Egypt, Morocco, Iran and Saudi Arabia. How many people know that atheists make up a larger percentage of the Saudi population than they do in America?
The events of January 2020 might well prove the twilight of the god but for whom there would be no gods, and the undoing of the doddering mediaeval freak, latter-day High Priest Ali Khamenei. He will die a sad, bitter and broken old man, having given his all to create a nation aloof from human concerns in the material world. May Ayatollah Khomeini take pity on him when they meet and treat him kindly. The poor man had been fated to supremely guide the one country in the Islamic world least suited to Islam.
Iran is already a failed state, as the Suleimani fiasco so tragically showed, and the enforcement of Islam alone is responsible for reducing that country to such a pitiful condition. “Those bastards down there won’t know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby.” Being a society of autonomous individuals already under the Pahlavis, it has everything it needs to become a powerful, modern state free of religious influence very quickly, and it will find in Israel the best friend in the region it could possibly hope to have.
“Proclaims Xerxes, the Great King: By the favour of Ahura Mazda, Darius the king, my father, built much that is beautiful and ordered, and similarly, by the will of Ahura Mazda, I added to that work and built more. May Ahura Mazda, along with the divine beings, protect me and my kingdom.”
In Iran, the camel’s back has broken. Elsewhere else, the cracks spread and widen. Many people bringing their genuine concerns to the “scholars” and sheikhs are still without the inner resources necessary to deal with the ummah. They are traumatised all the more for the stupid and insulting replies they receive to their vexing questions. It is perfectly fine to beat your wife, they are told, because the Qur’an says so; it is a good thing to rape a nine-year-old girl because the Prophet-Peace-Be-Upon-Him did it. They only struggle with such things, they are told, because their faith is weak. They are told that they are the problem, not their barbaric scripture or their rapist prophet. The Qur’an is never to be questioned. The Prophet (saw) was the perfect man. What else is left to them, but to leave Islam?
The “scholars”, the sheikhs, the Islamic apologists simply do not get that they are not dealing with people who believe what they are told to believe, and think what they are permitted to think. These are not the stock from which the ummah had been bred for century after century, people who have known only darkness and fear and seek, above all else, to conform. The cannot take pride in barbarism and savagery just because they are told to be proud Sunna and that the Qur’an contains no mistakes. Question: “what do we say to our non-Muslim friends when they ask us whether the Qur’an really says that the sun sets in a muddy spring?” Answer: “Don’t have non-Muslim friends.” The sheikhs have no rhetoric other than what works on Friday khutbah congregations and Zakir Naik audiences. They cannot grasp that the people leaving Islam are not disobeying Islam, are not betraying the ummah. It is simply that they can no longer disobey themselves; they can no longer betray themselves. Muslims, being people who obey and conform inside an exaggerated tribal loyalty, have an impaired sense of self, and hence lack the basic psychological wherewithal to comprehend the free mind, let alone the apostate.
That tribal loyalty is deeply ingrained, and by the point Muslims leave Islam, many have been tormented by their struggle to remain Muslim in the face of not only an increasing awareness of the barbarism, savagery and irrationality of their perfect religion, and of the never-ending fitna within their ummah, tearing themselves apart even as they bluster their bombastic threats at the world of kufr. Who hasn’t noticed the OIC, “the sole legitimate representative of the ummah,” snarl at the Muslim leaders who dared unite in Kuala Lumpur without the OIC having ordered them to do so? Allahu-akbar. And this against a background of headlines such as “Blast inside Quetta mosque claims 15 lives, injures 19,” of Muslims killing Muslims (readers unaware of this event should not blame themselves for not having heard of it. The worshippers in the mosque were not massacred by a kafir).
To expect anyone with more ethics than a seventh-century barbarian to feel at home in such an ummah is to fail to understand civilised human beings. To those struggling to remain Muslim, it becomes clearer by the day that they are trapped inside a scam of epic proportions. Why should it even be a struggle? Are they not the best of people? Has Allah not perfected their religion for them? Were they not schooled and sent on their lying, plundering, beheading, raping, enslaving, mass-murdering way by the perfect man to be emulated by all? What is the problem? Increasingly, though nor yet overwhelmingly, Muslims know exactly what the problem is. It is Islam and the ummah, and while they cannot solve Islam, they can solve being part of it.
Those who end up leaving Islam start out from the same point as those who remain, and while they are driven to fulfil a need for honesty towards themselves, they are not necessarily psychologically equipped for the brutal completeness of the severance that awaits them, especially if the significant parts of their lives up to their apostasy had been Muslim, Muslim and nothing but Muslim. Many leave Islam still with delusions of things remaining the same between them and “the community”, or at least their families, and are hence in for a long period of further trauma. Others have made their peace with themselves and leave Islam, the ummah, family and friends, and put that entire part of their lives behind them. It is a heavy price to pay (I am one of the millions who paid it). There is nothing that Islam can give you that is uniquely good, but there is a huge amount of good that Islam withholds from you, even forbids to you. This much becomes obvious to the apostate soon after leaving Islam. It helps to ease the mourning.
Islam’s calamity, its avalanche, its tsunami of apostasy is a problem of its own making: it took it upon itself to take its jihad and da’wa to free people in a free society, something that is alien and incomprehensible to those schooled on a book of seventh-century knowledge about which there is no doubt. The ummah and its “scholars” were simply blindsided. But Islam’s existential crisis is not entirely of its own making either, as human social evolution can also lay claim to that credit. The social being responsible for rationalism, freedom and human rights, the autonomous individual, has finally generalised across the centuries-old, insular, paranoid, superstitious, claustrophobic and cruel Dar al-Islam where in its most sophisticated corner, one missile finding its target in the early hours of Friday 8 January in a blinding wake-up call, brought home to those below that they had had enough. It was time to get out.
So it is for millions still under the yoke of Islam. More significant than that their parents rejecting them, the “scholars” patronising them, their former friends despising them, mobs terrorising them and the authorities persecuting them, is that those who remain behind in Islam find them incomprehensible. Just as the Qur’an is not equipped for modern thought, the ummah is not equipped for the modern world and the Muslim parent is not equipped for the modern child, who is not only of another generation, but of another epoch, of another reality — an utterly different kind of being.
Islam’s attribute of being future-proof, that has sustained it for fourteen centuries, has finally encountered a force it is helpless against, and that is eroding it from within, which, ironically, is precisely what da’wa is meant to achieve in the West. Poor Yasir Qadhi is even driven to publicly lament, “Why don’t people embrace Islam immediately?” That’s how it’s supposed to work. Perhaps, instead of people embracing Islam, Muslims are again embracing humanity, and in so doing, re-joining the flow of history. The struggle to remain Muslim, to remain frozen in time, is a futile one. The final delusion is that of the remaining Muslim.
Walter Sieruk says
Sited from this above article , .As the late twentieth century , came, starting in 1979 “the Islamic Republic of Iran stood as the purest manifestation on earth of the will of Allah and the emulation of Muhammad. ”
For it’s now been been forty years of horror and misery in this “purest manifestation on earth of the will of Allah and the emulation of Muhammad” since the establishment of tyranny it’s been only lies, deceptions and deadly violence from those in power in that harshly oppressive “mullah tyranny ‘ of Iran .
In other words, since 1979 this Islamic regime was founded on false promises, Islamic violence and lying words of Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in his deception of the Iranian people.
To put this in another way, that Islamic regime was based in the foundation of false and empty promises. As well as lying words. After the fiendish Muslim clerics obtained total power in Iran they showed their true colors by having their Islamic state police who are called the “Revolutionary Guards truest the people on Iran in many heinously brutal and ruthless ways. As, for example, their brutal, callous misogyny against both girls and women. This statement is explained, in some detail, by the following. This tyrannical Islamic regime in Iran that so falsely and inappropriately has the word “republic” in its title. It should be made known that this called the “Iranian Revolution” turned out to be a hoax. Ayatollah Khomeini before achieving power in Iran in his lying and deceptions presented himself to the Iranian people as if he was someone who would be in power would give freedom to the people of Iran with any tyranny.
The reality turned out to be just the opposite. As explained by a former Muslim as well as a man who took part in this Islamic “revolution “ ,who is now a Christian informs the reader of his book that “Prior to the Revolution no one ever imagined that other political parties would be suppressed under the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. He had promised that all groups would have freedom to run their own campaigns after the Revolution. He even stated that governing system would be based on the decision of the people via a referendum. He never spoke of a system that would be governed by Islam. He even made clear that mullahs would not take part in any political activities, and that they would only be allowed to teach spirituality… Immediately after the Revolution, mullahs rushed into government offices to occupy the most important political l positions, making it difficult for the interim secular government to function … The mullah’s occupation of position was exactly the opposite to what the Ayatollah Khomeini had promised before the Revolution.”. [1] In other words, the insincere, disingenuous and outright lying Ayatollah Khomeini made many bogus promise he really had no intention of keeping. His lying deception worked, for he achieved great power in Iran.
Furthermore, of the many heinously evils outcome s of that Islamic “revolution” is the extremely cruel, brutal and demonic misogyny of this hideous Islamic regime. Not only against women but even young girls. As explained by a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard member who defected to the West and how now lives in America his book also informs the reader about the malicious and murderous affront girls in Iran’s Evin prison which reads that those in power ,the “paraded teenage girls in front in front of me as they led them to their deaths. These girls were barely out of their childhood, barely old enough to think of themselves, much less form thoughts against the state. They knew nothing about the machinations of politics. They were innocent in every sense of the word and certainty innocent of trumped –up charges that led to their imprisonment. Yet they suffered fates too brutal for even the most vicious criminal. ..Their few remaining moments of life had been filled with the level of abuse that few can imagine…The author further states “They tortured and killed young girls, in God’s name and before their execution they raped them because they believed that if a girl dies virgin, she will go to heaven, and they wanted to deny them this reward.” [2]
This is as malice -filled and viciously wicked as can possibly be. This, very much, reflects the wisdom found in POOR RICHARDS’ ALMANAC in which Benjamin Franklin printed “Those who are feared are also hated.”
[1] ISLAM THE HOUSE I LEFT BEHIND by Daniel Shayesteh . Pages 90, 91
[2] A TIME TO BETRAY by Reza Kahlili. Pages 2,3. 117.
FYI says
Those islamic “scholars”….
Many muslims,thanks to 1]the internet and 2]objective critical analysis by muslims themselves and 3]the dismissal of all this “oh you couldn’t possibly understand the Arabic of the koran ” nonsense are seeing that the ‘perfect’ koran is actually imperfect and is full of errors.
So much so in fact,that by allah’s OWN Criterion of koran 4:82,the koran,in its imperfections, must come from “Other than allah{God}”
Indeed it does:it was written by ARABS using information stolen from the Bible/Jewish sources;there is even evidence of plagiarization
muhammed,from the evidence, is the most obvious false prophet in history essentially proving this after he was felled by poisoned Leg of Roast Meat,apart from admitting to being a fraud{al tabri 6:111}and failing the koran’s own criterion of being entitled to be a prophet{muhammed was not from the Children of Israel on whom the right of prophethood was bestowed{koran 45:16}
Many muslims probably don’t know any of this,as the imams didn’t bother to tell them.
The “perfect” koran is utterly imperfect.
For example,to give one example,the koran is Theologically wrong on the matter of the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity.
According to koran 5:116,allah thinks the Trinity consists of allah,Jesus and…MARY.
But nowhere in Christian Theology is that the case:note too that allah missed that essential aspect of God’s Wisdom,the Holy Spirit.
Other mistakes…
Koran 9:30 Jews do not believe in anybody called “Ezra is the son of allah”
koran 5:46 “WE bestowed on Jesus the Gospel”{Jesus never had the Gospel…}
MISSING in the koran:any concept of the 2nd Chief commandment of God{lev19:18},the Golden Rule,a formal listing of the Exodus 20 laws etc
1,400 years of islamic study,1,400 years of reading the koran and now we see these errors are in the koran and they…… MISSED them !{or perhaps didn’t bother to tell muslims about them:after all,the holy men of islam would lose their power}
muslims should read the koran with a critical eye and look at the evidence about muhammed.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
Dear Ann Julie Pandavar: Thank you for this well written essay. You write, “How many people know that atheists make up a larger percentage of the Saudi population than they do in America?” Note than by putting this assertion in the form of a question, you do not affirm it. But is it true? Can you cite a source? How can you even poll for “Are you an atheist?” in Saudi Arabia and collect reliable data?
PETER BUCKLEY says
https://fpif.org/number-of-atheists-in-the-arab-world-rivals-the-west/
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
Thank you, Peter Buckley, for finding this. I was hoping for a little more psephological information about how poll-takers collected this information in Saudi Arabia and ensured an unbiased sample. For example, was it an online survey in which respondents selected themselves? Were the questions asked in person in the presence of family members?
Anjuli Pandavar says
MS, what would be “an unbiased sample” in a context where the participant could face death for being an atheist? If anything you can take it as a given that the sample IS biased, *against* claiming an atheist worldview, as in when the participant at the last minute loses confidence in the trustworthiness of the pollster and rather denies atheism than admits it. In that scenario, you can be sure that no one is going to claim to be an atheist if they are not.
As for psephology, there are no elections and there is no voting. Pollster and participant eventually end up in conversation after many layers of vetting and security and anonymous contacts and venues that change at the last minute, blindfolds, switching cars, etc., etc. The information we get is the best we can hope to get. Until something more reliable comes along, that’s all we can go with. Whichever way, errors never inflate the number of atheists in such a world, quite the contrary.
Michael Copeland says
Thank you for this encouraging forecast. Islam is not equipped to encounter the modern Western enquiring mind. Here are similar observations from “Panini” at PoliticalIslam.com:
“Muslims are the FIRST victims of Islam. They are enslaved to Islam. They have never known anything resembling actual freedom of the mind, of the soul, of the spirit. They have never known freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or freedom of choice in the political systems that subjugate them.”
https://www.politicalislam.com/islam-the-universal-empire-of-savagery/
Islam is, in fact, a great personal handicap for a muslim in the West.
Please continue with your “view from inside” exposure work. Thank you again
mhw says
nice essay
as noted by another commentator, it is difficult to get any reliable empirical data to substantiate the statements made
also, as a minor point there were American soldiers injured by the Iranian missile retaliation although none of the injuries were life threatening
just yesterday, Iranian Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhod gave a fiery sermon stating that a hundred thousand American soldiers were killed by these missiles – I wonder what was going through the mind of his audience when he proclaimed this
marc says
Could you share a source for that please?
gravenimage says
Marc, I think this is the story:
“US military now says US troops injured in Iran attack”
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/01/17/us-troops-injured-iran-missile-strike-airbase-iraq-damon-acfc-full-episode-vpx.cnn
This story was also covered by the Washington Post, MSNBC, the Times of Israel, and Politico.
mhw says
a source for Ayatollah Alamolhoda claiming a hundred thousand Americans died from the missiles is
https://www.memri.org/tv/ayatollah-alamolhoda-english-ambassador-chopped-pieces-killed-thousands-american-soldiers-retaliation
gravenimage says
Thanks for the link, mhw. Do any Iranians actually believe this? Hard to tell.
marc says
thanks @mhw, that was what I was after.
Sorry @GI I should have been clear.
gravenimage says
Sorry, Marc. I hadn’t realized which part of the post you wanted a link to.
gravenimage says
The Muslim’s Inner Struggles (Part 8)
……………..
As always, I hope that Anjuli Pandavar is right about freedom of thought and freedom of conscience finding its way into Dar-al-Islam.
faraway says
Notice how ex-muslims blossom once they cast off the shackles of islam: Aayan Hirsi Ali,Bosch Fawstin,Wafa Sultan,Ibn Wariq etc.,the list is long.
gravenimage says
*So true*, faraway.
And it works the other way around when you look at “reverts” to Islam–they get that dead “shark eyes” look.
Joe S. says
A most impressive analysis by Anjuli Pandavar of Islam’s implosion taking place before our eyes. With millions of Muslims opening their eyes here in the West, as well as the prevalent use of social media, young Muslims are unsurprisingly getting fed up with Islam’s barbarism and embracing the freedom of the West. My real hope is that millions of ex-Muslims will eventually have the courage to open themselves up to the love of Jesus Christ and embrace the freedom of Christianity.
elee says
All well and good, and also mostly irrelevant. Will they lose the ability and the inclination to pick up knives and stolen vehicles to kill kafirs? When? How do we bring this about? Until they are neutralised, why should a civilised man care about covert Muslim introspections? Covert introspections—-and Im pretty sure that all or nearly alll introspections are covert in Islam, K 81:30—make neither human beings nor civilised liberties any safer. stu
gravenimage says
If they leave Islam then this is indeed significant.
Anjuli Pandavar says
Thanks, elee. It’s just as well I’m not writing to convince non-Muslims about apostasy from Islam, but to give Muslims the courage to apostatise, to let them know that they’re not the bad ones, to show them that others have done it and are doing it. I use my real name to convince doubting Muslims of my bona fides, not to boast about knives I might pick and cars I might steal to kill kafirs. Make no mistake about it, I hate Islam. It is a serious curse on the world. It kills millions and stunts millions more. I also think that Muslims get away with far too much and that we should be a great deal tougher on them. That, however, does not mean that I should descend into anti-Muslim bigotry.
I am an ex-Muslim precisely because I am repelled by the people who were once my co-religionists, whether they pick up knives and steal cars to kill kafirs, or merely condone such barbarism. Myself and the millions of others you would so glibly dismiss will not be deflected from our cause by bigotry, whatever its source. The civilised man had better care about our covert introspections, because when it comes down to it, we are the only ones on the civilised man’s side who truly know what it’s all about.
gravenimage says
+1
Rob Porter says
A fascinating article, but the big problem is that the “eroding from within” that afflicts Islam in Iran of which this writer speaks, also affects democracies in the West that has been seduced, and subverted by Islam and Marxism.
Peter Clemerson says
To Anjuli Pandavar
Are you going to publish these articles or an expansion of them in a book? You might well reach a wider audience than readers of JW who are already on your side. Perhaps your articles are extracts from something you have already published in which case, my apologies for not knowing about this. Could you provide details?
I learned recently that many of Richard Dawkins’ books are being translated into a number of Muslim relevant languages, for, I believe, free internet downloads into these countries. An example worth copying?
Let me add my expressions of admiration for both your literary skills and courage. As someone who has never had to face the trials you have, I am humbled.
Regards
Peter Clemerson
Anjuli Pandavar says
Thank you for your kind words, Peter. Your suggestion is a very good one and I take it to heart. I am considering whether to publish these essays as a standalone anthology, or to include other essay as well. For free online downloads, I have Arabic, Somali, Urdu, Farsi and Bahasa Indonesja in mind. I’d be grateful for your further thoughts, feedback and advice.
Peter Clemerson says
Hello Anjuli
Thank you for your reply. I vaguely recall that Richard Dawkins includes Turkish in his list of target languages. Low on your priorities you could include French, spoken widely in the Sahel states of Africa. We can expect Internet access in these countries to be improving in the near future. (https://www.businessinsider.com.au/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet-how-it-works-2019-5?r=US&IR=T)
You might like to contact Robyn Blumner, Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and President of the Center for Inquiry (1012 14th Street NW, Suite 205 Washington, DC 20005 and PO Box 741, Amherst, NY 14226) or Thomas Flynn, editor of the CFI magazine Free Inquiry. Recent editions of the magazine have included articles by writers with Islamic backgrounds. The RDFRS/CFI have a media contact email address: mediacontact@richarddawkins.net.
I have recently been wrestling with another topic: how to reconcile human sympathies for the innocent, albeit Muslim, victims of ME wars, now in refugee camps by the million, and their ambition to immigrate into European, North American and Oceanic pluralist democracies, with the inevitable assault on the values underlying pluralism that a minority of these among their huge numbers will launch, and indeed have already launched, after arrival. What to do? Actively assist immigration as a means of alleviating human misery or oppose it in order to preserve the freedoms that have been so expensively acquired in earlier centuries by our forebears. As a student of cognitive dissonance, I know that it’s an issue which perfectly illustrates the psychological conflict that the human mind can be subject to.
JW is a web site for reporting and commenting upon the daily events of the world rather than a vehicle for lengthy discussions on difficult issues. Therefore, via this comment, could I ask the managers of the JW web site, Free Speech Defense, to forward my email address to you so that we might continue this discussion. I strongly suspect that the RDFRS/CFI people would be very interested in your take on this issue. It would also be an interesting topic for an anthology of your essays.
A final thought. Tacked on to one of the many articles about immigrants that appear on JW, Robert’s comments would make an interesting read. I suspect that he has come down solidly against all Muslim immigration, but I might be wrong. At least, he would be very sensitive to the dilemma, as indeed, I suspect, would most of the other writers whose work appears on JW.
Best regards
Peter
gravenimage says
Anjuli, I would definitely buy such a book.
And making this available to as many Muslims as possible–ones who might be reconsidering their ugly creed–is a fine idea from you and Peter.
Anjuli Pandavar says
Hi Peter,
I’d be happy to correspond by email as you propose, and look forward to it.
Thank you very much for the suggestions re RDFRS and CFI. I shall take that up. I know that Richard Dawkins has agreed to write the forward to Ibn Warraq’s forthcoming book, The Allah Delusion, apparently a hefty tome.
About the dilemma of how to respond to genuine Muslim refugees, I’d actually written a short piece a while ago, Dicing with a Deadly Dilemma, that I never published. In it I suggest that there are several ways of approaching this, all of which require the dispassionate clarity of someone at war. In short, I argue that if in doubt, keep them out; and about every Muslim there is doubt, for the simple reason that they have no problem saying, ‘I am a Muslim’, despite what Islam is and does. In other words, the very best that can be expected of them is that they condone the brutality at the heart of Islam and the destruction of the society they’re seeking to enter. I might offer it to JW as a separate article. In the meantime, I’ll share it with you over email.
All the best.
Anjuli
Peter Clemerson says
Hi Anjuli
“Dicing with a Deadly Dilemma.” A good title. I look forward to receiving it.
Peter
Carol the 1st says
I’m a late reader of this article but enjoyed it very much (at times your amusing turn of phrase reminded me of J.K. Rowling in The Casual Vacancy). It’s refreshing to have an “insider” lift the blinds a bit and give us a flash of more sunlight and I’m sure good Iranians are ecstatic at such help. When you wrote of the initial pains of leaving Islam I was reminded of the Apostate Prophet – in a recent video he spoke of how sad and bereft he felt for months, but then, his spirits began to lift and he was amazed by how much more he was enjoying life. I agree with you that voices such as yours are needed – they can lend strength and more charity to both sides.
Anjuli Pandavar says
Thank you for your kind words, Carol I. I certainly hope that Iranian get something from it, but I’m also hoping that people in Malaysia and Turkey take note: all vibrant and efficient societies go to the dogs when you try to run a modern economy and society on the basis of Islam. Go from Jerusalem to Ramallah and the first thing that meets you are the mounds of rubbish. Just ask Chinese Malays about the trains, and you’ll hear just what wonders their mandatory discrimination in favour of Muslims has done for their national economy. Turkey is in the middle of upgrading its physical infrastructure. Wait till Islam starts reprioritising things… IN the EU, everything is going to shit where priorities are skewed towards keeping Muslims happy. Whatever civilisation creates, Islam destroys. Iran is just the latest dramatic illustration of this.