As told to:
George
Sontag*
I
only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a
reasonably good education—which is to say, not much more than I had
been told in the media. I had no trouble believing what our
government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that
all the men in terrorist attacks were Muslims and that their actions
were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to
the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic
scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s
great religions, a religion that encourages peace.
This seems like a complete contradiction yet we are being bombarded with
this narrative constantly. I wanted to find out the truth. Not only
what is really happening but also why it happens. Being in law
enforcement I had access to many of these jihadists. What I have
found is that their claims of religion of peace are false.
I
was able to talk to an Imam who is the leader of the terror cell. Our
government was portraying him as a ruthless killer who was lying
about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy
war. That was not the case. He turned out to be a globally renowned
scholar, a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from a Cairo
University. His area of academic expertise was
sharia—Islamic law. There is no doubt that he was the unquestioned
leader of the terror cell but was this because there was more to his
interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was telling?
As
he was an expert I had no chance in debating what I knew of Islamic
law with him but I did think that if what we
were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting or
radicalizing Islam—then there should be obvious contradictions that
I could use to trip him up. What I found was alarming: whenever he
quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted
them accurately. When he said the scriptures command that Muslims
strike terror into the hearts of lslam’s enemies, the scriptures
backed him up. When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad
until Islamic law was established throughout the world, his
scriptures backed him up. When he said Islam directed Muslims not to
take Jews and Christians as their friends, his scriptures backed him
up.
One could counter that
there are other ways of construing the scriptures, however, is that
what you’d be arguing
is an interpretation, not the text. It is the jihadists who seem to
be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their
side. The fact is that the summons to jihad was rooted in a
coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting
Islam- he was, if anything, shining a light on it.
I came to the conclusion that Islam
is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that
could make it something other than a call to war but even these do
not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who
believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye
find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them
in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter
how one rationalizes.
Moderate, peaceful
American-Muslims may not be terrorists yet when questions about
Islamic doctrine are discussed such as, —“What does jihad mean?”
“What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain
situation?”— these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they
were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d
have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Imam. In the minds of these
moderate, peaceful Muslims, they were claiming to be too ignorant to
be rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets
of their own, so-called, religion.
It
is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with
Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology,
the belief that sharia must govern all societies. What about Islamic
law? Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion.
It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as
between Muslim and non—Muslim. It makes no separation between
spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for
human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat,
along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and
personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and
non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do
so.
A
report to the government in 1955 by Robert Jackson, FDR’s attorney
general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the
war crimes trials at Nuremberg. Here is what he concluded:
"The
law of the Middle East is the antithesis of our Constitution and
Western law. The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the
doctrine".
Sixty
years later the world still calls this cult, a religion, and it is the
mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. When videos of beheading or other atrocities surface, American and European
politicians can't get to microphones fast enough to insist that these
had nothing to do with Islam. Yet when the government of Saudi Arabia
beheaded people for various violations of sharia—the law that
governs Saudi Arabia, there is silence. It is absurd to claim—as
President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in
Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. Even if only
ten percent of all Muslims believe this it means there are 2 million
Islamic terrorists world-wide. Why is it that they can’t say two
plus two equals four when Islam is involved?
*
Many thanks to the insights of Andrew McCarthy
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