April 27, 2007
The Muslim Mainstream and the New Caliphate
By
Andrew
G. Bostom
Writing in 1916, C.
Snouck Hurgronje, the great Dutch Orientalist, underscored how the
jihad doctrine of world conquest, and the re-creation of a
supranational Islamic Caliphate remained a potent force among the
Muslim masses:
...it would be a
gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may
be considered as obliterated...the canonists and the vulgar
still live in the illusion of the days of Islam's greatness. The
legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual
political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought
never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced
to the authority of Islam-the heathen by conversion, the
adherents of acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians]
by submission.
Hurgronje further noted
that although the Muslim rank and file might acknowledge the
improbability of that goal "at present" (circa 1916), they were,
...comforted and
encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of
humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah
bestowed victory upon his arms...
Thus even at the nadir
of Islam's political power, during the World War I era final
disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hurgronje observed how
...the common people
are willingly taught by the canonists and feed their hope of
better days upon the innumerable legends of the olden time and
the equally innumerable apocalyptic prophecies about the future.
The political blows that fall upon Islam make less
impression...than the senseless stories about the power of the
Sultan of Stambul [Istanbul], that would instantly be revealed
if he were not surrounded by treacherous servants, and the
fantastic tidings of the miracles that Allah works in the Holy
Cities of Arabia which are inaccessible to the unfaithful.
The conception of the Khalifate [Caliphate] still exercises a
fascinating influence, regarded in the light of a central point
of union against the unfaithful (i.e., non-Muslims).
[emphasis added]
Nearly a century later,
the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to
Indonesia, apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror
waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily
supporting the gruesome means) of re-establishing an Islamic
Caliphate. Polling data just released (April 24, 2007) in a
rigorously conducted face-to-face
University of Maryland/
WorldPublicOpinion.org
interview
survey
of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15,
2007-1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141
Indonesians-reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed-almost
2/3, hardly a "fringe minority"-desired this outcome (i.e.,
"To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or
Caliphate"), including 49% of "moderate" Indonesian Muslims. The
internal validity of these data about the present longing for a
Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of
this Muslim sample approved the proposition "To require a
strict [emphasis added] application of Shari'a law in every
Islamic country."
Notwithstanding
ahistorical drivel from Western Muslim "advocacy" groups such as the
Muslim Association of Britain, which lionizes both the Caliphate and
the concomitant institution of Shari'a as
promulgators of "a
peaceful and just society"
, the findings from the University of Maryland/
WorldPublicOpinion.org poll are ominous.
The Prototypical
Caliphate
Umar Ibn al-Khattab (d.
644), was the second "rightly guided" caliph of Islam. During his
reign, which lasted for a decade (634-644), Syria, Iraq and Egypt
were conquered. Umar was responsible for organizing the early
Islamic Caliphate. Alfred von Kremer, the seminal 19th
century German scholar of Islam, described the "central idea" of
Umar's regime, as being the furtherance of "...the
religious-military development of Islam at the expense of the
conquered nations." The predictable and historically verifiable
consequence of this guiding principle was a legacy of harsh
inequality, intolerance, and injustice towards non-Muslims observed
by von Kremer in 1868 (and still evident in Islamic societies to
this day):
It was the basis of
its severe directives regarding Christians and those of other
faiths, that they be reduced to the status of pariahs, forbidden
from having anything in common with the ruling nation; it was
even the basis for his decision to purify the Arabian Peninsula
of the unbelievers, when he presented all the inhabitants of the
peninsula who had not yet accepted Islam with the choice: to
emigrate or deny the religion of their ancestors. The
industrious and wealthy Christians of Najran, who maintained
their Christian faith, emigrated as a result of this decision
from the peninsula, to the land of the Euphrates, and ‘Umar also
deported the Jews of Khaybar. In this way ‘Umar based that
fanatical and intolerant approach that was an essential
characteristic of Islam, now extant for over a thousand years,
until this day [i.e., written in 1868]. It was this spirit, a
severe and steely one, that incorporated scorn and contempt for
the non-Muslims, that was characteristic of ‘Umar, and instilled
by ‘Umar into Islam; this spirit continued for many centuries,
to be Islam's driving force and vital principle.
During the jihad
campaigns of Umar's Caliphate, in accord with nascent Islamic Law,
neither cities nor monasteries were spared if they resisted. Thus,
when the Greek garrison of Gaza refused to submit and convert to
Islam, all were put to death. In the year 640, sixty Greek soldiers
who refused to apostatize became martyrs, while in the same year
(i.e., 638) that Caesarea, Tripolis and Tyre fell to the Muslims,
hundreds of thousands of Christians converted to Islam,
predominantly out of fear.
Muslim and non-Muslim
sources record that Umar's soldiers were allowed to break crosses on
the heads of Christians during processions and religious litanies,
and were permitted, if not encouraged, to tear down newly erected
churches and to punish Christians for trivial reasons. Moreover,
Umar forbade the employment of Christians in public offices.
The false claims of
Islamic toleration during this prototype "rightly guided" Caliphate
cannot be substantiated even by relying on the (apocryphal?) "pact"
of Umar (Ibn al-Khattab) because this putative decree compelled the
Christians (and other non-Muslims) to fulfill self-destructive
obligations, including: the prohibition on erecting any new
churches, monasteries, or hermitages; and not being allowed to
repair any ecclesiastical institutions that fell into ruin, nor to
rebuild those that were situated in the Muslim quarters of a town.
Muslim traditionists and early historians (such as al-Baladhuri)
further maintain that Umar expelled the Jews of the Khaybar oasis,
and similarly deported Christians (from Najran) who refused to
apostasize and embrace Islam, fulfilling the death bed admonition of
Muhammad who purportedly stated: "there shall not remain two
religions in the land of Arabia."
Umar imposed limitations
upon the non-Muslims aimed at their ultimate destruction by
attrition, and he introduced fanatical elements into Islamic culture
that became characteristic of the Caliphates which succeeded his.
For example, according to the chronicle of the Muslim historian Ibn
al-Atham (d. 926-27), under the brief Caliphate of Ali b. Abi Talib
(656-61), when one group of apostates in Yemen (Sanaa) adopted
Judaism after becoming Muslims, "He [Ali] killed them and burned
them with fire after the killing." Indeed, the complete absence of
freedom of conscience in these early Islamic Caliphates-while
entirely consistent with mid-7th century mores-has
remained a constant, ignominious legacy throughout Islamic history,
to this day.
Unto the Ages
During the long twilight
of the last formal Caliphate under the Ottoman Turks, Sir Henry
Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat (including
postings in Turkey), described this abhorrent spectacle which he
witnessed in the heart of Istanbul, in the autumn of 1843, four
years after the first failed iteration of the so-called Tanzimat
reforms designed to abrogate the sacralized discrimination of the
Shari'a:
An Armenian who had
embraced Islamism [i.e., common 19th century usage for Islam]
had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was
condemned to death according to the Mohammedan law. His
execution took place, accompanied by details of studied insult
and indignity directed against Christianity and Europeans in
general. The corpse was exposed in one of the most public and
frequented places in Stamboul [Istanbul], and the head, which
had been severed from the body, was placed upon it, covered by a
European hat.
Salient examples from
within the past 25 years confirm the persistent absence of freedom
of conscience in contemporary Islamic societies, in tragic
conformity with a prevailing, unchanged mindset of the earliest
Caliphates: the 1985 state-sponsored execution of Sudanese religious
reformer Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for his alleged "apostasy"; the
infamous 1989 "Salman Rushdie Affair", which resulted in the
issuance of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Rushdie to
death; the July 1994 vigilante murder of secular Egyptian writer
Farag Foda-supported by the prominent Egyptian cleric, Sheikh
Muhammad al-Ghazali, an official of Al Azhar University, who
testified on behalf of the murderer, "A secularist represents a
danger to society and the nation that must be eliminated. It is the
duty of the government to kill him."; and the recent (March, 2006)
tragic experience of
Abdul Rahman,
an unassuming Afghan Muslim convert to Christianity, forced to flee
his native country to escape the murderous wrath of Muslim clerics
and the masses they incited in "liberated", post-Taliban
Afghanistan.
An even more alarming
and utterly intolerable phenomenon was on display just this week in
the United States when a Johnstown (western Pennsylvania) area imam
Fouad El Bayly
openly sanctioned the punishment by death of former Dutch
Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali-born and raised a Muslim in
Somalia-for her open avowal of secularism.
Individualism
and Freedom of Conscience
Ibn Warraq
has observed aptly that the most fundamental conception of a
Caliphate, "...the constant injunction to obey the Caliph-who is
God's Shadow on Earth", is completely incompatible with the creation
of a "rights-based individualist philosophy." Warraq illustrates the
supreme hostility to individual rights in the Islamic Caliphate, and
Islam itself, through the writings of the iconic Muslim philosopher,
jurist, and historian, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and a contemporary
Muslim thinker, A.K. Brohi, former Pakistani Minister of Law and
Religious Affairs:
[Ibn Khaldun] All
religious laws and practices and everything that the masses are
expected to do requires group feeling. Only with the help of
group feeling can a claim be successfully pressed,...Group
feeling is necessary to the Muslim community. Its existence
enables (the community) to fulfill what God expects of it.
[A.K. Brohi] Human
duties and rights have been vigorously defined and their orderly
enforcement is the duty of the whole of organized communities
and the task is specifically entrusted to the law enforcement
organs of the state. The individual if necessary has to be
sacrificed in order that that the life of the organism be saved.
Collectivity has a special sanctity attached to it in Islam.
In contrast, Warraq
notes, "Liberal democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom
and attaches all possible value to each man or woman." And he
concludes,
Individualism is not
a recognizable feature of Islam; instead the collective will of
the Muslim people is constantly emphasized. There is certainly
no notion of individual rights, which developed in the West,
especially during the eighteenth century.
Almost six decades ago
(in 1950), G.H. Bousquet, a pre-eminent modern scholar of Islamic
Law, put forth this unapologetic, pellucid formulation of the
twofold totalitarian impulse in Islam:
Islam first came
before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to
impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the
divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of the
fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole
life of the Islamic community and of every individual
believer....the study of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding
though it may appear to those who confine themselves to the
indispensable study of the fiqh) is of great importance
to the world today.
The openly expressed
desire for the restoration of a Caliphate from two-thirds of an
important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab Islamic nations,
representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as a chilling
wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential threat
posed by the living, uniquely Islamic
institution of jihad.
Andrew G.
Bostom is the author of
The Legacy of Jihad
(2005), and the forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism
(2007), which can be previewed
here.