The very courageous and forthright Dr. Tawfik Hamid has
written a must read analysis in the Jerusalem
Post, entitled “The
development of a jihadist’s mind.” Although Dr. Hamid—a former member of
the jihadist organization, al-Gama'a
al-Islamiyya (Jamaah Islamiyah)—faces overwhelming obstacles, not
the least of which will be the flimsy basis for his own, albeit desperately needed,
re-interpretations of core
Islamic theology/jurisprudence vis a vis the jihad, and its corollary
institution, dhimmitude, he is possessed of unusual candor, and insight.
Dr. Hamid even voices concerns about the much
ballyhooed “Qur’anist” movement, including the lionized
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, executed in the Sudan in 1985 on a politicized
“apostasy” charge. And Hamid’s concerns about Taha, specifically, are well
justified.
Taha was extolled in a September 2006 essay by the New Yorker’s shallow and self-important
writer George
Packer, for his “radically peaceful vision of Islam.” Apparently Packer
never read Taha’s defining work, “The Second Message of
Islam” (readily available in an English translation by Taha’s fawning
acolyte, and Islamic Shari’a-promoting apologist, Abdullah an-Naim) before
writing his distressingly stupid puff piece on the Sudanese “Qur’anist.” These extracts from “The Second Message of
Islam” reveal that the man whom Packer celebrated as the ecumenical
“anti-Qutb” (i.e., Sayyid Qutb, the prolific 20th century Egyptian
Qur’anic commentator, and jihad theorist)—Mahmoud Taha—was in fact just more
disingenuous than his presumptive polar opposite, Qutb. Taha proclaims these
bowdlerized pieties (in “The Second Message of
Islam”) on Islam’s violent Medinan emergence as a polity:
Islam
used persuasion for thirteen years in propagating its clearly valid
message…When the addressees failed to discharge properly the[ir] duties…the
Prophet was appointed as their guardian…once they embraced the new religion
[i.e., by coercion]…the sword was suspended…and [they] were penalized according
to new laws. Hence the development of Islamic Shari’a law…
And Taha further had the temerity to compare the
jihad-genocide waging historical “sword of Islam” to a surgeon’s scalpel—an
unconscionable immoral equivalence to this physician:
In justifying the use of the
sword, we may describe it as a surgeon’s lancet, and not a butcher’s knife…We [the Muslims] have enacted fighting with
the sword in order to curtail the freedom
of those who abuse it, so the sword brings them to their senses, thereby
allowing them to earn their freedom and benefit from their life [note:
“freedom as perfect slavery to Allah”, the Sufi notion of Ibn Arabi, perhaps?]
But Taha’s true sentiments towards non-Muslim infidels are
in the end, not concealed from anyone who cares to look. He in fact
justifies—consistent with mainstream Islamic jurisprudence—their historical
subjugation by violent jihad:
Suffering
death by the sword in this life is really an aspect of suffering hell in the
next life, since both are punishments for disbelief…for the disbelievers the
law of war, and hardship of iron.
Dr. Hamid has examined contemporary jihadist ideology by “immersion”
in order to better comprehend the nexus between such teachings, and acts of
violence. The conclusions of this former jihadist, turned introspective
analyst, provide a remarkable validation of Major Coughlin’s own
extensive independent findings (summarized earlier, here,
and here),
about the extent and prevalence to which the Muslim mainstream religious
institutions teach, and successfully inculcate classical jihadist ideology.
It is a bitter irony
that while Major Coughlin has apparently been terminated by the Pentagon for
sharing his “hard
to refute” and well-received
analyses within the military, Hamid—a jihadist turned reformer—validates
Coughlin’s thesis, stating plainly that,
These
doctrines [of jihad] are not taken out of context, as many apologists for
Islamism argue: They are central to the [Islamic] faith and ethics of millions
of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic
educational systems in the Middle East as well as in the West.
Moreover,
there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an
alternative to the [Qur’anic, and other sacred text] passages I have cited
[advocating jihad violence, misogyny, Jew-hated, enslavement and rape of female
war prisoners and the beating of women]. It has thus become clear to me that
[jihadist] ideology is largely what is responsible for the so-called “clash of
civilizations.”
The seminal modern scholar
of Islamic civilization, S.D. Goitein, warned almost sixty years ago, in
1949, speaking of the Arab Muslim world generally, in particular Dr. Hamid’s Egypt:
Islamic
fanaticism…is now openly encouraged…writers whose altogether Western style …have
been vying with each other for some time in compiling books on the heroes and
virtues of Islam…What has now become possible in educated circles may be
gathered from the following quotation from an issue of the ‘New East’, an Arab
monthly periodical describing itself as the ‘organ of the academic youth of the
East’[emphasis added]:
“Let
us fight fanatically for our religion; let us love a man-because he is a
Moslem; let us honor a man- because he is a Moslem; let us prefer him to anyone
else-because he is a Moslem; and never let us make friends with unbelievers,
because they have nothing but evil for us.”
And a decade later, in 1958,
Lebanese Law Professor Antoine Fattal, perhaps the greatest scholar of the
legal condition of non-Muslims living under the Shari'a, lamented—(much
as Dr. Hamid laments now),
No social relationship, no fellowship is
possible between Muslims and dhimmis...Even
today, the study of the jihad is part of the curriculum of all the Islamic
institutes. In the universities of Al-Azhar, Nagaf, and Zaitoune, students are
still taught that the holy war is a binding prescriptive decree, pronounced
against the Infidels, which will only be revoked with the end of the
world..." [Emphasis added]
Lebanese-American political scientist, lawyer, and jihad
terrorism expert, Dr.
Walid Phares recently expressed his puzzlement, at one level over the Coughlin
affair: “I don't understand why is there so much intellectual commotion
about this matter in the West and in the US.”
He added, “Muslim scholars and historians agree that the
theological texts have also a military dimension. In Islamic studies there is
no debate about that. So why is there one in non-Muslim research and political
circles, particularly in America?
Major Coughlin was studying the texts used by the Jihadists to call for
military action.”
Phares argues that although politicians might attempt to
separate Islam from Jihad for their own purposes, “the study of the theological
roots of Jihad is something else, and that is an academic not a political
issue.”
But perhaps Dr. Phares had already expressed matters most
appositely a decade ago in his The Palestine Times, November, 1997, essay
entitled, “Jihad is Jihad”:
In
the Christian world, modern Christians outlawed crusading; they did not rewrite
history to legitimize themselves. Those who believe that the jihad holy war is
a sin today must have the courage to de-legitimize it and outlaw it as well.
Sadly, almost fifty years after Dr. Phares’
scholarly Lebanese predecessor Antoine Fattal made his observations (in 1958),
the sacralized hatred of jihad is
still being inculcated as part of the formal education of Muslim youth in
Egypt, the most populous Arab country, and throughout the Arab Muslim, and
larger non-Arab Muslim world. We in the West must press our political and
religious leaders to demand that such bellicose, hate-mongering “educational”
practices be abolished in Islamic nations, under threat of severe, broad
ranging economic sanctions.
Ignoring Dr. Hamid’s observations, and worse
still firing Major Coughlin, are delusional and dangerous steps in the opposite
direction.