July 9, 2005
Jihad Is Knocking
Another Episode in the War between Christendom and Islam
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers
The slaughter in London is another grisly wake-up call that likely
will go as unheeded as earlier ones. Already the standard narrative
is being trotted out: evildoers created by what the New York Times
predictably called the "root causes of terrorism": autocracy, or
economic stagnation, or Palestinian suffering, or globalization's
dislocations, or Western historical sins, or the war in Iraq (the
cause will depend on the political prejudices of the pundit)
have "hijacked" Islam and distorted its peaceful message. And now
they are using Islam to justify murder in order to further their own
ambitions or dysfunctional psychic needs. Given this explanation, so
the story goes, we must be careful not to demonize all Muslims and
assure them that we respect their religion and culture. The tale is
then wrapped up with fierce threats against the terrorists and
protestations of admiration for Islam.
Believing this delusion requires that one ignores fourteen centuries
of Islamic jihad against the West, a war of conquest and colonization
ratified by centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Indeed,
what we call Islamic radicals are in fact Islamic traditionalists; it
is the so-called "moderates" - those wanting to compromise Islam so
it can coexist with Western ideas such as secular government,
separation of church and state, and human rights - who are the
radicals and innovators. The terrorists are simply fulfilling the
traditional and orthodox command of their religion to battle the
infidels who resist the revelation of Mohammed and the global socio-
political order mandated by Islam.
Listen to one of the most respected and influential of Muslim
clerics, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, on the legitimacy of jihad: "It
has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of
people of Dar Al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for
the domination of Islam should be waged] is not protected. Because
they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled
the protection of his blood and his property." (See Andrew
Bostom:).This interpretation is entirely consistent with fourteen
centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which in turn is
based on the Koran's injunction to "slay them [infidels] wherever you
catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out;
for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter . . . . Such is
the reward of those who suppress faith." And this jihad is to
continue "until persecution is no more, and religion is all for
Allah."
Islam's divinely sanctioned entitlement to global domination explains
the symbolic value of the London attacks: one day after London was
chosen to host the 2012 Olympics, and right in the middle of the G8
summit in Scotland. For both the Olympics and the G8 represent a
global order that rivals Islam, one based on Western ideals and
institutions, a social and political order in which Islam has no
exalted position but is simply one religion among many. And, we
should add, a global order whose notions of individual rights and
secular government are incompatible with Islamic law.
So much is obvious - facts of the historical record. Yet listen to a
respected historian in a conservative magazine: "Muslim holy wars
("jihads"), as taught in the Koran, were first and foremost a
personal inner struggle for moral purity" and only secondarily a war
against infidels. So all those Muslim armies that conquered the
Christian Near East, North Africa, Egypt, Spain, Sicily, the Balkans,
all that plunder, slaughter, rape, enslavement, kidnapping, and
destruction were only the "secondary" jihad. How could such blindness
to the obvious, masquerading as sophisticated "tolerance," not arouse
contempt in the minds of our adversaries? They tell us over and over
that they are waging jihad in order to establish the global hegemony
of Islam, and we tell ourselves that these Muslims don't understand
their own religion. Millions and millions of Muslims all over the
world cheer for the jihadists and support them materially and
psychologically, millions idolize bin Laden and celebrate the murder
of Westerners, but we tell ourselves that they are a minority of
confused souls whose minds have been addled by poverty or autocracy
or anger over the Palestinians.
In any conflict it's a good idea to take seriously the motives the
enemy professes and not rationalize or explain them away in terms of
your own cultural assumptions. The murderers we call terrorists are
traditional jihadists, as much as were the first Islamic armies that
swept away the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman civilizations of the
Mediterranean. They are not going to be bought off with votes, a free
press, more cable channels, Wal-Mart, or any other material good that
to us constitutes the good life. They are fighting for a spiritual
cause, the establishment of Islam as a global order in fulfillment of
the will of Allah, and the reduction of all those who will not become
Muslims to dhimmi, inferiors who acknowledge the superiority of Islam
and the rightness of their subjection to it.
The next few weeks will show whether the British have advanced as far
down the road of dhimmitude as have the Spaniards, who responded to
the murder of their citizens not with the force and resistance their
ancestors showed for seven centuries, but with fear and appeasement.
As for us, we'd better discard our illusions that the jihadists, as
Thomas Freidman put it, are "a cancer within the [Islamic] body
politic" and accept instead that jihad just may be a vital organ.
Then maybe we can see this war for what it is: one more episode in
the long struggle between what used to be called Christendom and a
religion of aggressive conquest and colonization.
C2005 Victor Davis Hanson
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