It's a Sign of the Times

Short and sweet.

Our friends at the United American Committee are taking the direct approach in getting their message out, hiring a billboard to raise awareness about the dangers of Sharia law. The billboard is on southbound I-75, between Monroe and the Ohio line.

The message is undeniable, and people can't be reminded enough. Thanks, you guys, for getting this done. We hope it keeps people talking.

Or maybe you don't think the message is undeniable. If you think Sharia is a good thing for America, we'd be interested in hearing your reasons.

All That Glitters Is Not a Golden Age

Someone invariably proposes that the jizya tax on conquered non-Muslims shows the generosity and genius of Muslim conquerors who, rather than slaying all non-believers, magnanimously allowed a captive workforce to remain alive as laborers enriching the caliphate. The sufferance of dhimmis to remain on their land or act as government functionaries is also held out as an indicator of Islamic tolerance.

It is closer to the truth to say that the numerous taxes levied on the conquered peoples, including the kharaj (land tax), and the jizya (poll tax), were emblematic of the rapacious governing theory of Islam militarily triumphant: the financing of the caliphate by expropriation of conquered wealth as booty, by taxation, and by forcing peasants to work the land to enrich Arab usurpers. Then, when resources were depleted, and a peasantry exhausted by taxation and abuse fled the land, violence and cruelty were brought to bear to squeeze the remainder until only a wasteland remains.

Moreover, the use of dhimmi administrators and functionaries was purely pragmatic, as counting, tracking, and extorting money from vast conquered populations of different tongues, religions, and social structures, was best accomplished by cooperative leaders close to and familiar with the defeated peoples.

Nor, as both Koran and hadith make clear, is dhimmi status any guarantee of protection against arbitrary violence, murder, robbery, or reduction of one's family to slavery, as non-Muslims have no rights recognized under Islamic jurisprudence.

Bat Ye’or describes the some historical realities of the “Golden Age” of Islamic tolerance as follows:

. . . The famous qaid of Baghdad, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub (731-98), wrote a basic work on this subject [of the kharaj land tax] of the caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809) during what is generally called the classical period of Islam, considered the most prestigious in Arab-Muslim civilization both because of its cultural influence and the opulence of a court endowed with fabulous wealth. Invoking the authority of hadith, the author recommends tax collectors to treat the tributaries with clemency and justice. Notwithstanding a chapter devoted to restrictive provisions concerning Jews and Christians, this work of theoretical law nonetheless confirms the traditional image of a government inspired by tolerance and equity, a genuine “Golden Age” for the Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic justice.

Yet, a remarkable chronicle written by a Monophysite monk, the pseudo-Patriarch Dionysius--a native of Tell-Marhe, a village in Mesopotamia--gives a precise description of the fiscal situation of non-Muslims. The chronicle, completed in 774, provides almost photographic detail of one of the turning-points in history. The description covers Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in the eight century. At that time, the dhimmis formed the majority of the rural population: small landowners, artisans, or share-croppers farming the fiefs allotted to Arabs; a numerous Jewish peasantry lived alongside Christian villagers: Copts, Syrians, and Nestorians. Ths chronicle reveals the mechanisms which destroyed the social structure of a flourishing dhimmi peasantry in the whole Islamized Orient. The continuous process of the confiscation of lands by the infiltration of Bedouin tribes with their flocks or by Arabs who settled at the time of the first wave of Islamization was aggravated by the government’s damaging fiscal oppression . . . .

. . . . The peasantry was not alone in suffering from the tax authority. The chronicle mentions extortions from notables and the execution of “free men.” This drive to track down dhimmi peasants, organized throughout the Abbasid Empire, required a considerable number of participants, who were joined by brigands greedy for plunder and pillage. The accommodation and maintenance of the tithe owners and tax collectors and the gifts they demanded from their hosts completed the ruin of the villages.

The chronicler provides information on the situation in Palestine:

The caliph moved into the western region in order to go to Jerusalem. He wreaked havoc, turned everything topsy turvy, terrorizing and devastating, to a degree worse than in Mesopotamia. He acted as Daniel had prophesied of the Antichrist himself. He turned the temple into a mosque, because the little that remained of Solomon’s [Temple] became a mosque for the Arabs [. . .]. He repaired the ruins of Jerusalem. He attacked men, took their property and livestock, particularly buffalos. He did not willingly leave anything to anyone whomsoever he was. When he had perpetrated every sort of evil there, as he had done in Mesopotamia, he returned in early winter to Mesopotamia to reside there and to continue his destruction.

In Egypt at the same period, the dhimmis, ruined by taxation, abandoned their lands and villages. Pursued by the tax collectors, they were brought back by force. Taking advantage of the right of conquest over non-Muslims, the state recouped its losses from the insolvent Coptic peasantry by enslaving their children. The contemporary chronicle of pseudo-Dionysius describes in realistic detail a situation totally contrary to the one conveyed in the above mentioned theoretical and abstract treatise written later by Abu Yusuf. This is a picture of peasants and artisans stripped of everything, forced to hide and flee from place to place--a hunted population, on whose exploitation was built the ostentations of the Abbasid court and the wealth of the umma.

Some centuries later, as a consequence of subsequent emigration by nomadic Turks and jihad, there developed a similar situation in Anatolia, in the Turkish emirates, and in the Balkans. The allocation of fiefs and the oppression of the Christian peasantry caused a similar evolution, with exodus to the towns. Like the Arab conquerors of earlier times, the Turkish sultans Osman and Orkhan also adopted measures for their new European possessions which immobilized the Christian peasants on their fiefs and forbade them to flee or to emigrate. Anxious to preserve productivity from the land and the volume of taxation, the Ottomans protected the peasants. Some Christian regions, the island of Chios, for example, even benefited from a semi-autochthonous administration which guaranteed a better economic yield and a higher tax. In remote and inaccessible regions of Serbia, the Turkish administration left a large degree of autonomy to the villages, where mayors, elected by the population, allocated taxes and served as intermediaries to the Turks. In this way, the Serbian national language and traditions were preserved.

This relatively tolerant and enlightened policy toward their Christian raya subjects on the part of the Ottomans explains the survival of an indigenous peasantry in European Turkey after centuries of Muslim domination, while in the Arabized regions, with the exception of Egypt, the Christian and Jewish peasantries had been almost totally eliminated.

SOURCE: Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (1996). Pp 73-77

Jihad, Old School

Andrew G. Bostom at FrontPage Magazine, has written a lengthy, in-depth article exploring the real roots of Islamic anitsemitism ("Jihad and Islamic Antisemitism").

No surprise, Bostom finds that Islamic antisemitism didn't originate after centuries of peaceful coexistence with Jews, as a justifiable response to the founding of modern Israel.

He describes how contemporary calumnies against Israel and the Jews are

part of a central antisemitic motif in the Koran which decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ reiterated at 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. It should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured in the pre-amble to Hamas’ foundational Covenant. This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’ ”. And the related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption,” a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Bostom also takes a close look at the true meaning of "jihad," (“wag[ing] war, against unbelievers”), and that even America's first encounter with jihadism goes all the way back to her first days as a new nation:

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan [modern Libya] Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets—emanating from the Barbary states (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Thus an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years—exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.

Read the rest of this worthwhile article here.

Must Be That British Humour

There is a reason Melanie Phillips gave Britain's capital the nickname, "Londonistan," "a complex cultural jigsaw," she writes, resulting from "the fusion of an aggressive ideology, and a society that has lost its way."

To get some idea of how badly Britons have lost their way, (and we aren't so different from Britons), consider the following article by Michael Hodges, who writes for a London "things-to-see-and-do" periodical called Time Out London.

Either Hodges meant his article as a joke, and is taking irony to a whole other level, or he's a sign of just how decadent Western liberal thinking has become--don't be afraid of rape, girls! just lie back and enjoy it!

I've added the bold and italics where I thought the writer simply had to be kidding.

Is London's future Islamic?

It’s the capital’s fastest growing religion, based on noble traditions and compassionate principles, yet Islam can still be tainted by mistrust and misunderstanding. Here Time Out argues that an Islamic London would be a better place

The noise from the expectant crowd hushed to a murmur as an open-backed lorry that had driven slowly up the Mall – known since the Islamic revolution of 2021 as The Way of the Martyrs – nudged its way through the thousands gathered in Mohammad Sidique Khan Square. On the lorry, two masked guards held a young man, black hood over his head; a quiver running through the material suggested he knew what was coming.

The lorry halted by the plinth that had once held Marc Quinn’s sculpture ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ – long since removed as an insult to decency – and was now the place of public execution. A rope noose attached to a wire cable hung from a mechanised hoist. The main doors of what had been the National Gallery flung open and an Imam walked down the steps of the new Institute of Islamic Jurisprudence, opened only a week before by Sultan Charles, Prince of Islam and protector of the faithful in England.

The official executioner placed a stepladder against the plinth. The lorry pulled up and the young man was pushed out, then forced up the ladder. The noose was forced over the condemned man’s head. The crowd chanted ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is greater than everything).

The hoist driver put his finger on a green button … Okay, not really – that’s a hysterical, right-wing nightmare of a future Muslim London: where an cruel alien creed is forced on a liberal city. A society where women are second-class citizens, same sex relationships a crime and Sharia law enforces terrible public disfigurement and death. But the reality is a long, long way from this dark vision.

For a start, Islam is not an alien religion to London. At the end of World War I the city sat at the heart of an Empire that had 160 million Muslim subjects, 80 million in India alone. London was the largest Islamic capital in the world. Forty years later and the end of the Empire, unrest and war and poverty in south Asia had lead to mass immigration to the mother country and London became a Muslim capital in another sense.

According to the 2001 census there are 607,083 Muslims living in London (310,477 men and 296,606 women). The majority of Muslims live in the east of the city and, by 2012, the Muslim Council of Britain estimates that the Muslim population of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney will be 250,000. There are plans afoot (though no formal application has yet been submitted) to build the UKs biggest mosque – capable of welcoming 40,000 worshippers – near the 2012 Olympic site, a move which has prompted predictable outrage from some quarters. Consequently, Muslim disillionment with a reactionary and often ill-informed press is at an all time high.

But rather than fear the inevitable changes this will bring to London, or buy in to a racist representation of all Muslims as terrorists, we should recognise both what Islam has given this city already, and the advantages it would bring across a wide range of areas in the future.

Public health
On the surface, Islamic health doesn’t look good: the 2001 census showed that 24 per cent of Muslim women and 21 per cent of Muslim men suffered long-term illness and disability. But these are factors of social conditions rather than religion. In fact, Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes public hygiene and would reduce the transmission of superbugs in London’s hospitals.

Alcohol is haram, or forbidden, to Muslims. As London is above the national average for alcohol-related deaths in males, with 17.6 per 100,000 people (Camden has 31.6 per 100,000 males), turning all the city’s pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health. Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.

Ecology
The world is green and beautiful,’ said the prophet Muhammad, ‘and Allah has appointed you his guardian over it.’ The Islamic concept of halifa or trusteeship obliges Muslims to look after the natural world and Muhammad was one of the first ever environmentalists, advocating hima – areas where wildlife and forestry are protected. So we could expect more public parks under Islam, but halifa also applies to recycling: in 2006, 12,000 Muslims attended a series of sermons at the East London Mosque explaining the theological evidence for a link between behaving in an environmentally sustainable way and the Islamic faith.

Education
Presently, Muslim students perform less well than non-Muslim students. In inner London, 37 per cent of 16 to 24-year-old Muslims have no qualifications (the figure for the general population of the same age and location is 25 per cent). When it comes to university education the picture is equally gloomy: 16 to 24-year-old Muslims are half as likely to have degree level or above qualification than other inner London young people.

Again, social factors rather than religion have led to this state of affairs. Young Muslims in London are often of south Asian origin and therefore more likely to live in households where English is not the first language, more likely to encounter racism (both intentional and unintentional) during their education, and more likely to suffer from poverty and bad housing conditions.

But Tahir Alam, education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, claims Muslim children do better in their own faith schools than in the mainstream state sector: ‘Muslim schools have their own distinct ethos. They use the children’s faith and heritage as primary motivators to provide the backdrop for their education and behaviour. This ethos is consistent with the messages that children are getting at home, so it is a very coherent operation between the home and the school.’

If Islam became the dominant religion in London the same ethos could be applied to schooling across swathes of underprivileged and deprived areas of the city. This could have a revolutionary effect on educational achievement and, perhaps just as importantly, general levels of discipline and self-respect among London’s young people. While controversy rages over faith schools, there are 37 Muslim schools in London. As of 2004, only five were state schools, but there is growing pressure to bring more into the state sector which, according to Alam, will ‘help raise achievement for many sectors of the Muslim community. Many private Muslim schools are under-resourced and if they can be brought into the state sector this valuable experience can be extended to more children.’

Food
Application of halal (Arabic for ‘permissable’) dietary laws across London would free us at a stroke from our addiction to junk food, and the general adoption of a south Asian diet rich in fruit juice, rice and vegetables with occasional mutton or chicken would have a drastic effect on obesity, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders and associated public health problems. As curry is already Londoners’ and the nation’s favourite food (see our Brick Lane food feature), it would be a relatively easy process to encourage the adoption of such a diet. Not eating would be important as well. The annual fasting month of Ramadan instils self-discipline, courtesy and social cohesion. And Londoners would benefit philosophically and physically from even a short period when we weren’t constantly ramming food into our mouths.

Inter-faith relations
In an Islamic London, Christians and Jews – with their allegiance to the Bible and the Talmud – would be protected as ‘peoples of the book’. Hindus and Sikhs manage to live alongside a large Muslim population in India, so why not here? Although England has a long tradition of religious bigotry against, for instance, Roman Catholics, it is reasonable to assume that under the guiding hand of Islam a civilised accommodation could be made among faith groups in London. This welcoming stance already exists in the capital in the form of the City Circle (see Yahya Birt interview), which encourages inter-faith dialogue and open discussion.

Art
Some of the finest art in London is already Islamic. The Jameel Gallery at the V&A houses ‘ceramics, textiles, carpets, metalwork, glass and woodwork, which date from the great days of the Islamic caliphate of the eighth and ninth century’ up until the turn of the last century. Or take a free daily tour of the Addis Gallery of Islamic art (at the British Museum). London-based Nasser David Khalili, an Iranian-born Jew, has amassed what is considered to be the world’s largest private collection of Islamic art. Islamic influences have also flourished in other areas of the arts, with novelists, comedians (Birmingham-born Shazia Mirza was an instant hit on the London circuit), and music (from rappers Mecca2Medina on, to the less in-your-face Yusuf Islam).

Social justice
Each Muslim is obliged to pay zakat, a welfare tax of 2.5 per cent of annual income, that is distributed to the poor and the needy. If the working population of London, 5.2 million, was predominantly Muslim this would produce approximately £3.2bn each year. More importantly, everyone would be obliged to consider those Londoners who haven’t shared their good fortune. London would become a little less cruel.

Race relations
Under Islam all ethnicities are equal. Once you have submitted to Allah you are a Muslim – it doesn’t matter what colour you are. End of story.

Michael Hodges, Tue Jun 5 2007
Back to Time Out London home

End of story is right.

Mr. Hodges, I think you need a Time Out.

Free Press Discovers a Patriarchy It Approves Of

Niraj Warikoo’s Detroit Free Press feature article on Tuesday about the increase in Muslim women wearing headscarves in metro Detroit (“A return to tradition: More Muslim women in metro Detroit defy stares and prejudice by wearing head scarves”) is more of interest to me for what I expect it will not do, than what I expect it ever will do.

What it will not do, is call down a storm of protest from feminists, defenders of women’s rights nor the usual critics of the injustices endemic in patriarchal society. I will be shocked if there is anything less than a category five hurricane of silence.

According to Mr. Warikoo’s article, the decision by Muslim women to go about in public wearing the hijab “comes with a price”: reactions of “stares and prejudice” from non-Muslims, and the usual tongue-wagging ignoramuses (ignorami) who reportedly cruise Dearborn’s streets endlessly searching for Middle Easterners to jeer at.

Mr. Warikoo quotes one young lady on the price she pays:

“Some "look at us, smirk, stick out their tongues or shout out the window, 'Why do you have that on?' " said Arrwa Mogalli, 29, of Dearborn, who has worn hijab since she was 11. "You have nuns totally covered ... and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we're from outer space."

As a ten-year Dearborn resident and a longtime Catholic, I have a point of difference with Ms. Mogalli on whether she often sees “nuns totally covered” in or around Dearborn, since any such spectacle was swept from every American diocese years before Ms. Mogalli began wearing hijab, or was even born. American nuns now march around waving their “NO WAR” signs in modest J.C. Penney pantsuits, and generally despise veils as reactionary, pre-Vatican II mummery.

But speaking on my own account, the religious sisters who tried to educate me all those years ago still wore habits and uncomfortable veils, and it’s true we did not question it, and I have never questioned the logic of Islamic women wearing veils up until now. The sisters wore their veils for the same reason that Islamic women wear them now (that is, when they're wearing them without compulsion and with a free will, and not under orders from the religious police)--for reasons of female modesty.

But Mr. Warikoo is kidding us if he thinks that the big challenge of Muslim young girls and women wearing hijab is that they have to do it in defiance of curious outsiders.

As he quotes from one Roleen Nawwas, in the theme sentence he sandbags till the end of his story, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’”

Which of course is a completely revolutionary idea. Or, to go back to my comment about the nuns, it is not revolutionary, but reactionary. The Islamic hijab, and the entire concept of female modesty, no less than the concept that a woman is a priceless thing that must be protected and hidden away, are so nakedly alien and contradictory to western values and ideas about equality and the relationship between the sexes as to be practically a return to the 12th century. Or, what is probably even more upsetting, practically a return to the 1950s.

I wouldn’t know how to begin documenting how enthusiastically the Detroit Free Press, for the forty years or so I’ve been reading it, has championed (under the generic heading of “women’s rights”) things like unrestricted abortion, no-fault divorce, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX entitlement for female athletes, compulsory sex education, liberal access to contraceptives for minors, government-subsidized child care, and that whole thing generally known as the “sexual revolution,” and the whole thing that has been called “equality for women.”

At the same time, the Free Press has staunchly opposed any social or legislative scheme that sought, or could even be accused of seeking, to impose “traditional”, regressive ideas about the sexes, the family, marriage, sex, or society on the rest of the masses yearning to breathe free. I've seen the Free Press shown such a consistent antipathy to traditional Catholicism that I have come to believe they have a shadow job title of Anti-Catholic Issues Editor.

Of course the Detroit Free Press was just one of thousands of liberal publications, read by, and responding to millions of like-minded readers through the years. They don't invent this stuff. They just repeat it in their pages. Endlessly. By now we can all recite the prevailing philosophy backwards and forwards.

For instance, we know now that a woman’s social equality with a man is best manifested when she competes with men in the workplace, and is least apparent when she submits herself to “traditional,” “patriarchal,” ideas of home and family that condemn her to remaining only a housewife and mother, in other words, being a loser.

We also have learned that a woman’s sexual equality with a man is best manifested when she is just as free as a man to choose engaging in guilt-free, uncommitted sexual relationships with men (or, for extra credit, other women); a healthy female begins this career no later than her mid-teens, and abstinence and chastity are nothing more than holdovers of stupid repressive religions invented by men to keep women down.

Only on June 8 the Free Press ran an editorial taking the, for them, unremarkable position of opposing abstinence-only sex education. (“Teach sex education for the real world”). And why not? Liberal, sophisticated, unshackled by arbitrary rules and guilt trips, the Free Press understands that young people cannot be expected to abstain from sex, and, when they don’t abstain, there isn't anything wrong with that, except perhaps for the health angle. Only tight-assed fun-killing repressive religious nuts think otherwise. The creeps.

Yet now here we are with a front-page story that takes this whole philosophy and upends it into the nearest trashcan. To wit: “The purpose of hijab: preserving modesty”, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’” Not only does the point of view uncritically praise the virtues of sexual modesty, but, even worse, it unapologetically endorses female subservience in a traditional stay-at-home role.

It is describing, as the headline boldly claims, and again without a word of apology, a "return to tradition." And we know the term "tradition" itself is dirtier to most liberals than any four-letter word, and that the notion of returning to the past is absolutely verboten to any self-respecting, right-thinking, progressive. One doesn't progress by going backwards, does one?

And just imagine how much more hated he would have been, (if it is possible to imagine he could have been hated more), if Jerry Falwell, in life, had made a public statement that “A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.”

Or imagine if Lawrence Summers, in addition to pointing out to his Harvard professors that innate differences may have explain the fact of fewer female professors in math and science, claimed "it was all good, anyway" because “a woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.” (“Summers' remarks on women draw fire”).

Rather than being fired and allowed to drive out of town at the wheel of his own Volvo, Summers would surely have been carried out of town on a rail, after being tarred and feathered, and the Free Press editorial board would have looked on, approving.

The issue of Islam and its treatment of women is a huge one, and I'm not even trying to tackle it here. Suffice it so say that neither traditional sexual roles, nor modesty and chastity, are exclusive to the religion of Islam.

But we do know that, regardless of what I may think about traditional sex roles and modesty symbolized in the hijab or the nakoor, those virtues in much milder form are utterly obnoxious to an entire society full of ordinarily outspoken and indignant feminists, liberals, freethinkers, and progressives of all kinds.

But they won’t speak out. They never do. Not if the women are Muslim, and not if the reactionary force is Islam.

I don't know exactly why this is, whether it is hypocrisy, fear, or a hatred for Islam's enemies that is greater than hatred for the West's heritage. But it is as certain as sunrise that the Left will not decry in Dearborn's headscarves what it despises in a much more light-handed form in America's Christian colleges, churches, and schools.