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The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism by Shrnuel Bar - Policy Review,
No. 125 Page 10 of 10 
The basis for discerning whether or not a country belongs to I)ar u! is/am is not agreed upon. Some scholars claim that as long as a Muslim can practice his faith openly, the country is not Dar al-Haib.
it should be noted that in the historic paradigms of “suicide” terror, which are used as authority forjustification of such attacks, the martyr did not kill himself but rather placed himself in a situation in which he would most likely be killed. Technically, therefore, he did not violate the Koranic prohibition on a Muslim taking his own life. The targets of the suicide terrorist of ancient times were also quite different — officials of the ruling class and armed (Muslim) enemies. The modern paradigm of suicide bombing called for renewed consideration of this aspect.
The prominent fundamentalist Sheikh Yusufal-QaradawL for example, gave afaiwa obliging Muslims to fund jihad out of money collected for charity (zakal). (fthu’a from April 11,2002 in Islamonline.)
True, religions are naturally conservative and slow to change. Religious reforms aie born
and legitimized through the authority of a supreme spiritual leader (a pope or imam), an accepted mechanism of scholarly consensus (Talmud, the ijma’ of the schools of
jurisprudence in early Islam), internal revolution (Protestantism), or external force (the destruction of the Second Temple in Judaism). Islam canonized itself in the tenth century and therefore did not go through any of these “reforms
Here the pessimist may inject that, today, all the leading Islamic scholars in the Middle East who enjoy such prestige are in the radical camp. But there have been cases of “repentant” radicals (in Egypt) who have retracted (albeit in jail and after due “convincing”) their declarations of tak,tir against the regime. In Indonesia, the moderate Nahdlatul LJlama led by former President Abdurahman Wahid represents a genuine version of moderate Islam.
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By
I January 13, 2003
Islam has an image problem. and American Muslim organizations know it.
If you ask them, this problem comes from people lying about Islam. Irresponsible, hate-filled Christian preachers and others decry Islam as a violent religion, Muslim spokesmen claim, and this bigotry gives rise to acts of violence against Muslims. The Council on American Islamic Relations and other Muslim groups have dedicated themselves to heading off such attacks by setting the record straight. On its website CAIR says that it was established in order to promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in America,” and declares that “we believe misrepresentations of Islam are most often the result of ignorance on the part of non-Muslims and reluctance on the part of Muslims to articulate their case.”
Laudable but the cure offered by American Muslim groups may be worse than the disease. instead of taking the post-September II interest in Islam as an opportunity for a thorough and searching examination of the root causes of Islamic terrorism and the hatred that fomented the terrorist attacks, all too often these groups have constructed a “positive image of Islam” out of smoke and mirrors. instead of dealing forthrightly and constructively with the concerns and questions that non-Muslims have had since the attacks, CAIR, the International Institute of islamic Thought (lilT) and others seem interested in what one ex-Muslim termed “throwing sand in our eyes.”
Sand in hand, the lIlT recently sponsored general mailing of a flyer entitled “Q & A on Islam and Arab Americans.” Virtually everything about this little flyer is misleading, starting with the title itself: although it purports to be about “Arab Americans,” in fact it is solely about Islam. Several times the author of the flyer does what American Muslim groups in other contexts scold non-Muslims for doing: equating Muslims and Arabs. In one place it states that American Muslims come “from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and national origins,” yet in the very next column it poses the question, “What is an appropriate way to greet an Arab-American?,” and explains in the answer that “some Muslims feel it is inappropriate for unrelated men and women to shake hands.” While it acknowledges that “most Arab-Americans grew up in the USA and do not require special greetings,” it makes no mention of the main reason why for most American Arabs, it’s completely irrelevant what Muslims feel about shaking hands or anything else: the vast majority of Arab Americans are Christians.
This confusion is common; it even appears at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). This organization lists boxer Muhammad Ali as a member of its Advisory Board. Au is a famous American convert to Islam, but does that make him an Arab? The ADC does acknowledge that most Arab Americans aren’t Muslims, but the boxer’s inclusion raises an intriguing question about the group’s overall agenda: it “welcomes people of all backgrounds, faiths and ethnicities as members,” but is it welcoming them into an Arab group or a Muslim group? Perhaps the blurring of the distinction between a racial group (Arabs) and a religious group (Muslims) is in service of efforts to portray Muslims as a racial group subject to discrimination in the United States, and thus entitled to privileged victim status.
In any case, the distortions and inaccuracies of this flyer are indicative of the half-truths and untruths that American Muslim groups are propagating today:
1. Islam means peace. The flyer notes that “the Arabic word for islam’ means ‘submission,’ and it derives from a word meaning ‘peace.” Indeed, in Arabic, Islani and .salaam (“peace”) share the same linguistic root, but this in itself is virtually meaningless. All sorts of words share the same roots, and can still have quite divergent meanings
such as the English word love and the related Sanskrit word /nhh (lust). Noting the derivation of the word Islam in this brief information flyer can only be an attempt to lend credibility to the currently fashionable idea that Islam is a religion of peace.
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But that idea glosses over some troubling facts.
2. “Jihad does not mean ‘holy war, “ says the TilT flyer, which originally ran in (J.S4 Today. ‘Literally jihad in Arabic means to strive, struggle and exert effort. it is a central and broad Islamic concept that includes struggle against evil inclinations within oneself, struggle to improve the quality of life in society, struggle in the battlefield for self defense or fighting against tyranny or oppression.”
This is the prevailing notion in academic circles today. Articulating the currently accepted orthodoxy, Duke University professor of Islamic studies Bruce Lawrence agreed that jihad doesn’t mean ‘holy war”: he defines this all-important Islamic concept as “being a better student, a better colleague. a better business partner. Above all, to control one’s anger.” To its credit, the t’lyer’s explanation goes farther than Lawrence by mentioning the battlefield, and in this it is more accurate than the professor’s preposterously innocuous farrago. Islamic theology distinguishes between the “greater jihad,” which involves “struggle against evil inclinations within oneself, and the “lesser jihad,” which is hinted at here as “struggle in the battlefield for self defense or fighting against tyranny or oppression.”
Still, left unmentioned is the fact that throughout history, Muslims have not stopped at self-defense or fighting against tyranny. “In premodern times,” observes the noted scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes, “jihad meant mainly one thing among Sunni Muslims, then as now the Islamic majority. It meant the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims (known in Arabic as dar al-Islam) at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims (dar al-harb). In this prevailing conception, the purpose ofjihad is political, not religious. It aims not so much to spread the Islamic faith as to extend sovereign Muslim power (though the former has often followed the latter). The goal is boldly offensive, and its ultimate intent is nothing less than to achieve Muslim dominion over the entire world.”
Pipes adds: “Jihad was no abstract obligation through the centuries, but a key aspect of Muslim life. . . . Within a century after the prophet’s death in 632, Muslim armies had reached as far as india in the east and Spain in the west. Though such a dramatic single expansion was never again to be repeated, important victories in subsequent centuries included the seventeen Indian campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazna (r. 998-1030), the battle of Manzikert opening Anatolia (1071), the conquest of Constantinople (1453), and the triumphs of Uthman dan Fodio in West Africa (1804-17). In brief, jihad was part of the warp and woof not only of premodern Muslim doctrine but of premodern Muslim life.”
Has this changed? Certainly it’s quite different from the idea ofjihad purveyed by Muslim groups and the major
media today. But this older idea ofjihad is alive and well in the Islamic world. One manual of Islamic law said
to conform “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni Community” by Al-Azhar University of Cairo, Egypt,
the oldest and most prestigious university in the Islamic world calls jihad “a communal obligation” to “war
against non-Muslims. . . . The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. . . until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poii tax. . . The caliph fights all other peoples until they become Muslim.”
Some Muslims assert that because there is no caliph today (the caliphate was abolished by the secular state of Turkey in 1924), there can be nojihad. That’s one reason why some radical Muslims urge that the caliphate must be restored. Says Britain’s Sheikh Omar Bakri: “The Muslim Ummah [worldwide Muslim community] has never before been in a position where we are divided into over 55 nations each with its own oppressive kufr [infidel] regime ruling above us. There is no doubt therefore that the vital issue for the Muslims today is to establish the Khilafah [caliphate].”
Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden isn’t waiting for this restoration to declare jihad, and he is by no means isolated in this perspective in the Islamic world witness the many terrorist groups around the world that rally under the name of jihad. Pipes asks, “And what about all the Muslims waging violent and aggressive jihads, under that very name and at this very moment, in Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao, Ambon, and other places around the world? Have they not heard that jihad is a matter of controlling one’s anger?”
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3. ic/am condemns terrorism. The “Q & A” asserts that “Islam does not support terrorism under any circumstances, Terrorism goes against every principle in Islam. If a Muslim engages in terrorism, he is not following Islam. He may be wrongly using the name of Islam for political or financial gain.”
This assertion is closely allied to the differing explanations of the meaning ofjihad. There is no necessary connection between jihad and terrorism, and indeed, many moderate Muslims declare that their extremist brethren who justify terrorism on lslamic grounds oniy do so by distorting the concept ofjihad. “Jihad is misused,” says an expert in PBS’s documentary, Muhammad: Legacy 0/a Prophet. “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies, uh, the claim of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda or other similar groups to kill innocent civilians. That is unequivocally a crime under Islamic law. Acts of terror violence that have occurred in the name of Islam are not only wrong, they are contrary’ to Islam.”
Once again, this is not as much of an open-and-shut case as these authorities would like us to believe. After all, no less an authority than George Bush’s ‘imam of peace,” Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi of Al-Azhar University, disagrees. Bush quoted him in late 2001 at the United Nations as saying that “terrorism is a disease, and that Islam prohibits killing innocent civilians.” But evidently his definition of terrorism would differ from that of the average American: according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), last spring Tantawi called suicide bombing “the highest form of Jihad operations,” and added that ‘every martyrdom operation against any Israeli, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamici religious law, and an Islamic commandment.
Tantawi is no isolated crank. He holds his position at Al-Azhar by the grace of the Egyptian government, and he uses that position to wield enormous influence in the Islamic world: the New York Times called Al-Azhar the “revered mosque the distinguished university, the leading voice of the Sunni Muslim establishment. . . . It has sought to advise Muslims around the world that those who kill in the name of Islam are nothing more than heretics. It has sought to guide, to reassure Westerners against any clash of civilizations.”
Nor is Tantawi singular in his opinions. Abu Bakar Bashir, suspected mastermind of the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali as well as bombings of churches in 2000. declared that “martyrs’ bombs are a noble thing, ajihad of high value if you are forced to do it. For instance, in Palestine there is no other way to defend yourself and defend Islam. All Ulamas [Muslim leaders] agree with martyrs’ bombs because we are forced to do it. There is no other way to defend ourselves and to defend Islam. . . . We are obliged to defend ourselves and attack people who attack Islam. In Islam there is no word for hands up, there is no word for surrender, there are only two things, win or die. . . if infidels do want to attack Islam, fight Islam, so we are instructed to fight them.”
Instructed by whom? Does Abu Bakar Bashir read the same Qur’an that moderate Muslims say condemns terrorism?
After a shooting at a church in Pakistan, police detained another Muslim cleric, Mohammed Afzal, who is alleged to have told his people that ‘it is the duty of every good Muslim to kill Christians. . . You should attack Christians and not even have food until you have seen their dead bodies.”
Presumably Afzal would not consider Christians “innocent civilians.” Osama and other Muslim extremists have maintained that the people killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not innocent, but complicit in what they imagine to be the American government’s worldwide oppression of Muslims. Consequently, they argue that they were fitting victims ofjihad even envisioned only as a struggle against “tyranny or oppression.”
Disquieting evidence indicates that such ideas are not restricted to obscure covens of ranting radicals, shunned by decent Muslims everywhere. According to MEMRI, “Mahmoud AlZahhar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, told the Israeli Arab weekly Ku/A/Arab, ‘Two days ago, in Alexandria, enrolment began for volunteers for martyrdom [operations]. Two thousand students from the University’ of Alexandria signed up to die a martyr’s death. This is
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the real Egyptian people.”
Two thousand students from one university? Didn’t these two thousand students know that ‘those who kill in the name of Islam are nothing more than heretics”? Didn’t they know that “terrorism goes against every principle in Islam’?
The point is not that the moderates who wrote the flyer are wrong and that these radicals are right. The point is that these radical Muslims use the Qur’an and other core Islamic sources to justify their actions, and their exegesis is compelling enough to win over large numbers of Muslims. Moderate Muslims have thus far not been remotely successful in reading the radicals out of Islam. Certainly terrorism is not universally accepted in the Islamic world, but with terrorist groups rallying under the banner ofjihad in all corners of the globe today, lilT might have performed a valuable service by explaining how this violation of “every principle in Islam” came to be so widely accepted in the Muslim world.
4. “Is/an, is LI re/igi on 0/peace, mercy atid forgiveness. “This assertion is stated but left unsupported in the lilT flyer; elsewhere it is often buttressed with quotations from the Qur’an. One verse in particular is often invoked to make the claim that Islam teaches peace and mercy: “That was why We laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as a punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as though he had saved all mankind” (Sura 5:32).
There are exceptions in this verse, however — “murder or other i’illain in the Icind” — and these are particularly troubling in light of other teachings of the sacred book of Islam:
“Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (Sura 48:29).
“Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home:
an evil fate” (Sura 9:73).
“The true believers fight for the cause of Allah, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan” (Sura 4:76).
“When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Sura 47:4).
“Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love the aggressors. Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage.” (Sura 2:190-191). The part of this passage that forbids striking first explains why Osama and other terrorists couch their self-justifications in the terminology of self-defense.
“When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy [i.e., the ji:va, the special tax on non-Muslims], allow them to go their way. Allah is forgiving and merciful” (Sura 9:5).
“Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given [i.e., Jews and Christians] as believe neither in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Apostle have forbidden, and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued” (Sura 9:29).
“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is able to give them (believers) victory” (Sura 22:39).
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Muslim apologists today condemn virtually any quotation of such verses as quoting “out of context” One Islamic information website cautions against this and notes that “it should be emphasized that so many revelations in the Holy Quran came down to provide guidance to Prophet Muhammad and the Muslims based on what they were confronting at that time. Therefore, it is important to understand and know the historic context of the revelations for a proper understanding of these verses.” Muslims have declared that the violent verses above were revealed to Muhammad at a time when the infant Islamic community was in danger of being exterminated altogether by powerful external enemies, and that these verses have no force unless Muslims find themselves in similar circumstances
However, in November 2002, Dr. Sheikh Bakr Abed Al-Razzaq Al-Samaraai said in a Ramadan sermon at Mother of All Battles Mosque in Iraq that “jihad has become an obligation of every individual Muslim. Anyone who does not comply, will find himself lost in [hell], side by side with Haman, Pharaoh and their soldiers. These are not just words of a sermon delivered from the pulpit of a mosque with enthusiasm, they are religious law. Ask the j un sprudents, if you don’t know that.’
How could the good doctor issue such a challenge if he knew that Islam was a religion of peace, mercy, and forgiveness, and that anyone who investigated his claim would find that out?
Also speaking of fighting during Ramadan was Dr. Fuad Mukheirnar, whom MEMRI identifies as “an Al-Azhar University lecturer and secretary-general of the Egyptian Shari’a Association.” According to Mukheimar, throughout history Muslims have waged “a number of honorable battles during the month of Ramadan —to the point where this month came to be called ‘The Month of Jihad.’ The nation of Islam came to be called ‘the Jihadfighting nation,’ and its moral values came to be called ‘the values of warfare.’”
Was this cleric referring merely to self-control and the like, as explained in Bruce Lawrence’s concept ofjihad? Unfortunately, no. He assumes that jihad involves fighting for Islamic society: “Fasting is a continuous commandment, until Judgment Day . . . and the same is true for Jihad, because Muslim society needs it to defend [its] faith, honor, and homeland.”
Similarly, the November 2002 letter purporting to be from Osama bin Laden and offering a sweeping justification for terrorism invoked several of the verses quoted above as well as many other Qur’anic texts. After issuing a series of demands to America and the West, the letter warns: “If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. . . . The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: ‘Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their (believers’) hearts. Allah accepts the repentance of whom He wills. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise’ [Quran 9:13-15].”
Muslim terrorists either blithely ignore the context that moderate Muslims use to hedge the Qur’an’s violent verses, or claim that the believers today face the same sort of challenge that they did at the time the verses were revealed, and so the verses are applicable to the present situation.
Again: this is not to say that the extremists are right and the moderates are wrong, but only that the extremist view is based on ample Qur’anic support that moderate elements have not yet effectively refuted.
What’s more, the Islamic theory of abrogation (nuskh) also cuts against the idea of Islam as a religion of peace, mercy, and forgiveness. This is the doctrine that Allah cancels certain verses of the Qur’an and replaces them with other ones. Curious as it may seem, the doctrine of abrogation is founded upon the Qur’an itself: “None of Our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: knowest thou not that Allah Hath power over all things?” (Sura 2106).
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Dcvi sed by Muslim divines in order to explain away contradictions in the Qur’an. this theory holds that the cancelled verses remain in the Qur’anic text, but without any binding force for believers. The scholars who have advanced this doctrine, which is generally accepted in the Islamic world, work from simple chronology: verses that were revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career cancel contradictory verses from earlier.
There is no universally accepted chronology of the revelations of the Qur’an. but the broad outlines of the prophet’s life make it clear that the bellicose verses were revealed later than the peaceful ones. His more conciliatory revelations come from his early prophetic career in Mecca, when he still had high hopes of winning over Arabian Jews and Christians. Later, however, when it became abundantly clear that Jews and Christians would not accept him as a prophet, Allah’s messenger became bellicose: revelations from the latter part of his career in Medina are considerably more hard-edged. Hence, according to the idea of naskh. the peaceful verses are abrogated but the violent ones are still in effect. Muslim extremists are fully aware of this. It is another reason why they feel free to quote the Qur’an in support of their violent actions today: they clearly believe that when they do so, they are using the book properly and “in context.”
No refutation of such ideas is included in the lilT’s information flyer or from virtually any American Islamic source. Unfortunately, this is the sort of reading of the Qur’an that they decline even to discuss.
5. Is/am i.s ioleraiii of other be/iefc. Moderate Muslims like to quote Sura 2:256. “There is no compulsion in religion,” in support of the idea that islam is a broadly tolerant faith. It has become a commonplace of discussions about Islam today that the great Islamic empires of old were tolerant of Jews and Christians to an extent that non- Christians were never tolerated in medieval Christendom. “It is a function of Islamic law,” says the lilT flyer, “to protect the privileged status of minorities. Islamic law also permits non-Muslims to set up their own courts, which implement family laws drawn up by minorities themselves.”
Once again, there is some truth to this, but it is neither wholly true nor the whole truth. It is true that Islamic law, the Sharia, allows Jews and Christians to practice their religious beliefs in an Islamic state however, other religions are not accorded the same privilege: while islamic states can according to the Sharia make “a formal agreement of protection” with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, “such an agreement may not be effected with those who are idol worshippers,” that is, Hindus, Buddhists, and others.
Also, the “tolerance” granted to Jews and Christians is severely circumscribed. Jews and Christians are termed “People of the Book” in the Qur’an — that is, communities that have received a genuine revelation from Allah. That’s why they’re offered this “protection” in an Islamic state. However, the Qur’an also teaches that both Jews and Christians have incurred the curse of Allah (cf. Sura 5:60 and many others) for their refusal to receive Muhammad as a legitimate prophet and his Qur’an as a book from Allah. Consequently. the tolerance they enjoy is nothing like that of a modern-day secular state, although Muslim apologists often succeed in equating the two in the face of the general Western ignorance of Islamic history and theology.
In fact, the Sharia dictates that such a “protection” agreement between Muslim rulers and Jewish and Christian subjects “is only valid when the subject peoples: follow the rules of Islam . . . (those involving public behavior and dress, though in acts of worship and their private lives, the subject communities have their own laws, judges, and courts, enforcing the rules of their own religion among themselves) and pay the non-Muslim poll tax jizya).”
The /izyu is a special levy on non-Muslims, whose higher tax rates contributed much to the magnificent Islamic empires of old. It is not the Sharia’s only restriction on non-Muslims: according to classic Islamic law, non- Muslims in an Islamic state “are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar), are not greeted with “as-Salarnu ‘alaykum” [the standard Muslim greeting, “Peace be with vou”j must keep to the side of the street may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed are forbidden to openly display wine or pork, . . . recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays and are forbidden to build new churches.”
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There is indeed no compulsion” in any of this: Jews and Christians are not forced to become Muslims. But there is also precious little dignity and respect.
Such humiliating laws are rarely enforced today even where the Sharia is the law of the land, although they have not disappeared entirely from the Islamic world. Nor have they been renounced or rejected by Islamic clerics of any sect. There is no mufti or imam in the world today apologizing for the abject status of the dhirnn,is, the Jews and Christians under Islamic rule, as the Pope and many Protestant groups have apologized for the Crusades and other perceived enormities of Christendom. These laws could be revived by any Muslim ruler who wants to restore the pure observance of Islam — and such reformers have not been rare in Islamic history.
Even if this never happens, however, such laws should be borne in mind by anyone who wants a true and accurate picture of Islamic ‘tolerance.”
6. Is/ani respects (‘hrisiia,,iii’. The HIT flyer correctly informs readers that ‘Islam teaches that Christians and
Muslims are both people of the book.’ By that it means that the to religions share the same basic beliefs
articulated through the Bible and the Koran. The main difference between Christians and Muslims is that
Muslims do not believe that Jesus was the Son of God.”
It is debatable whether or not much is left of the “basic beliefs articulated through the Bible.” or at least of the New Testament, once the idea of Jesus’ divine Sonship is removed. Although the Qur’an states that “nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, We are Christians,” (Sura 5:82), it also claims that Christians are under Allah’s curse: “The Jews call Uzair [Ezra] a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth, (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!” (Sura 9:30).
Once again, this is no dead letter. Anti-Christian Muslims point to the fact that the Qur’an even undercuts its own assertion that Christians will be “nearest in love” to Muslims: “0 ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust” (Sura 5:51).
In a recent Friday k/ni/ha (sermon) at a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qadhi, in a decidedly un-ecumenical mood, called Christianity “one of the distorted religions,” and “a faith that deviates from the path of righteousness.” He also labeled it a “false faith” and a “distorted and deformed religion.” The Sheikh decried the present-day situation, in which ‘many Muslims ... know about Christianity only what the Christians claim about love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans. . . . After all this, we still find people who promote the idea of bringing our religion and theirs closer, as if the differences were mini scule and could be eliminated by arranging all those [interreligous] conferences, whose goal is political
Another Saudi imam, Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Al-Munajjid, preached in a similar vein: “Muslims must . educate their children to Jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children to Jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels.”
Of course, these Wahhabi sheikhs are no more representative of Islam as a whole than are the moderates who claim that Islam respects Christianity. But they have read the Qur’an as well as the moderates, and their conclusions about Islam and Christianity are quite different. The irenic vision of the lIlT flyer is anything but a full or adequate description of the real Muslim perspective on Christianity.
7. Jslarn respects .Judaism. In its treatment of Judaism, the lilT flyer replicates its language regarding Christianity:
“Islam teaches that Jews and Muslims are both ‘people of the book.’ By that it means that the two religions share the same basic beliefs articulated through the Torah and the Koran. The main difference between Jews and
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Muslims is that Jews do not believe in prophets after the Jewish prophets, including Muhammad and his teachings.”
Jews and Muslims may share basic beliefs, but we have already seen that the Qur’an places Jews under Allah’s curse. This idea recurs in the Qur’an, which also says that Allah turned the Jews into detested beasts: ‘Say: O people of the Book! Do ye disapprove of us for no other reason than that we believe in Allah, and the revelation that bath come to us and that which came before (us), and (perhaps) that most of you are rebellious and disobedient?’ Say: ‘Shall I point Out to you something much worse than this, (as judged) by the treatment it received from Allah? Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil these are (many times) worse in rank, and far more astray from the even path!” (Sura 5:60).
Muslim radicals today routinely echo this language. Sheikh lbrahim Madhi of the Palestinian Authority declared recently that Jews are “the enemies of Allah, the nation accursed in Allah’s book. Allah described [them] as apes and pigs.’
Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi was clearly referring to the Qur’an. s it then remiss to trace at least some of the impetus for the anti-Semitism that is rampant in the House of Islam today to the core beliefs of Muslims? But again, the lilT flyer gives readers no inkling that this problem even exists.
8. Muhammad was a inaii 0/peace. “This is his message,” says the American convert to Islam Hamza Yusuf in PB S’s documentary, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet: “spread peace, feed people food, and do some devotional practice and you will enter paradise without any trouble.”
Spread peace? Perhaps, but radical Muslims might add that this must be done by the force of arms. After all, this is the example of the prophet himself. “According to one calculation,” notes Daniel Pipes, “Muhammad himself engaged in 78 battles, of which just one (the Battle of the Ditch) was defensive.”
The prophet was a man of principle: he not only engaged in these battles, but his teachings were consistent with them. Says a Muslim tradition about Muhammad: “A man came to Allah’s Messenger and said, ‘Guide me to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).’ He replied, 1 do not find such a deed.”
How would Kamza Yusuf explain this? There’s no way to tell evidently he would prefer to ignore it.
As the American people learn more and more about Islam, Islam’s image problem is getting worse, not better. One principal reason for this may be the dissonance between the loud and repeated claims of Islamic spokesmen in the United States and the facts that Americans are learning about Islam. If the International Institute of Islamic Thought and other Muslim groups really want to educate the American people about Islam, they would acknowledge and deal squarely with the questions that are really in people’s minds: does Islam provide a justification for terrorism? Have the dozens of groups that preach and perpetrate “ iolence in the name of Islam all around the world really “hijacked” the religion? If they are using the Qur’an to justify their actions, what are moderate Muslims doing to forestall this kind of interpretation of the sacred book of Islam?
It isn’t enough to say, as Muslim spokesmen never tire of repeating, that there are kooks of every creed and that every creed can be used to justify violence. This still leaves unanswered the question of why there are so many more terrorist groups worldwide invoking Islam than there are terrorist Christian groups.
By ignoring such questions. Muslim advocacy groups in the United States have only made matters worse, giving non-Muslims good reason to suspect their intentions and honesty. The next time American Muslim spokesmen decry Islam’s image problem, in all fairness they should point fingers not at Christian fundamentalist preachers or at scholars who raise uncomfortable questions, but at themselves.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articl es/Printable. asp?l D=5 502 1 2/22/200b

Muslim Disinformation Campaign Page 9 of 9
This essay is available in print form from the Free Congress Foundation.
Robert Spencer is an adjunct fdlow of the Free Congress Foundation and a Board member of the ChristianIslamic Forum. He is the author of Islam t/nveiled. Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books), as well as the monographs “An Infroduction to the Qur ‘an,” “Waive,, tifl(l Iskiin,” “Islam,, tint! the West,” and “An Islamic Primer,” which tire available from the Free Congress Foundation.
http://www.frontpagemagcom/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=5502 12/22/2006

Steven Steinlight in an article titled High Noon to Midnight, Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry (April 2004) wrote: 

The upsurge of violent anti-Semitism in Western Europe tracks perfectly with mass immigration, especially of Muslims....

Muslim immigration has fundamentally altered demography, culture, and the political landscape of Western Europe. Its impact on Jewish life is disastrous, and it has turned European foreign policy on the Middle East from even-handedness to one that is overtly anti-Israel, if not outright anti-Semitic. Symbolizing the transition was the EU’s failure to condemn the Nazi oration by the former Malaysian Prime Minister. Also shocking was the EU’s rejection of the report it commissioned from the German Technical University on the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe. It was labeled as "racist" because it identified by far the greatest numbers of perpetrators of anti-Semitic outrages as Muslim. In today’s Islamized Europe, Jews live under physical threat, something unknown since the rise of fascism. Nor is hostility to Israel confined to political leadership, media elites, or Muslims: a survey conducted by the European Commission, "Iraq and Peace in the World," revealed that more ordinary Europeans consider Israel a threat to world peace than any other country. Asked which countries posed a risk to world peace, Israel topped all others with 59 percent, ahead of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and even North Korea. (The United States was tied with North Korea at 53 percent.)..

In the banlieues — the lawless slums that ring Paris and other French cities — Jews and Jewish institutions are repeatedly attacked by marauding gangs of Muslim hoodlums. CNN recently reported that violent attacks on Jews in Paris average 12 a day. Reminiscent of Germany, circa 1930, when Hitler’s Brown Shirts ruled the streets while a timid government and press kept silent, government and media in Western Europe turn a blind eye to Islamic anti-Semitic violence out of fear of their growing political power and reflexive political-correctness. Living amidst a Muslim population that outnumbers it 10 to one and a political establishment indifferent to anti-Semitism, beleaguered French Jews endure conditions not seen for more than half a century...

Current U.S. immigration law ensures an exponential growth in the Islamic population. Having established a foothold over the past 30 years and attained citizenship, these new Americans may petition to bring in large numbers of extended family members. Current policy entitles U.S. citizens to bring not only their nuclear families but parents, adult children and their spouses and children, and adult siblings and their spouses and children. Over time, these extended family members can bring a similar range of relatives in an unbreakable chain. What begins with a single immigrant can result in the immigration of an entire village, and in some West Bank towns as much as half the population now lives in the United States or has American citizenship.

Political and economic realities within the Islamic world guarantee a tidal wave of immigration — unless a cut-off mechanism is enacted. Most of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims live in poverty-stricken, politically oppressive countries; two-thirds of the poorest people on Earth live in socially, politically, and economically fossilized Muslim societies. Given the chance to immigrate to the United States, countless millions would — at the same time harboring hatred and contempt for American culture and political institutions.

    An example of this hatred was observed by Sharona Shapiro at rallies against the Israeli war against Hezbollah, in Detroit where Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah was glorified and signs compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler and equated stars of David with Nazi swastikas. (Detroit Hezbollah’s Amen Corner, Frontpagemag.com 7/31/2006)

popular topic for discussion on Arabic TV channels is the best strategy for conquering the West. It seems to be agreed that since the West has overwhelming economic, military and scientific power, it could take some time, and a full frontal assault could prove counterproductive. Muslim immigration and conversion are seen as the best path.

Saudi Professor Nasser bin Suleiman al-Omar declared on al-Majd TV last month, ‘Islam is advancing according to a steady plan, to the point that tens of thousands of Muslims have joined the American army and Islam is the second largest religion in America. America will be destroyed. But we must be patient.’

Islam is now the second religion not just in the US but in Europe and Australia. Europe has 15 million Muslims, accounting for one in ten of the population in France, where the government now estimates 50,000 Christians are converting to Islam every year. In Brussels, Mohammed has been the most popular name for boy babies for the last four years. In Britain, attendance at mosques is now higher than it is in the Church of England.

Al-Qa’eda is criticised for being impatient, and waking the West up. Saudi preacher Sheikh Said al-Qahtani said on the Iqraa TV satellite channel, ‘We did not occupy the US, with eight million Muslims, using bombings. Had we been patient and let time take its course, instead of the eight million there could have been 80 million [Muslims], and 50 years later perhaps the US would have become Muslim.’

Muhammad & Islam
Stories not told before

By Mohammad Asghar

 

Dear Mr. Editor,
Most of the Islamists respond to the Free Thinkers' criticism of Islam by claiming that Muhammad was a God's prophet and as such, whatever he did and said in his lifetime could not be doubted or questioned by any human being. Instead of responding to each and every Islamists, I worked on Muhammad's life and tried to prove the fact that he was simply a manipulative, conniving and dictatorial ruler, by using all of which, he not only established the religion of Islam, he also ruled the Arabian Peninsula with an iron fist for so long as he lived.
 
 

Part 1

                                                 
Long time ago, a tiny spot in the midst of the Arabian Peninsula, became a focal point for all the Pagan Bedouins of the desert for the reason that it had on its bosom the House of God, also known as the Ka'aba, along with a well, the pagans called Zumzum, which helped them quench their killing thirst. 

The pagans were a deeply religious people. They held the view that there was a god to cover each aspect of their lives. Consequently, they believed that there was a god who gave them life. They also believed that the same god gave them sustenance and protected them from all hazards of their lives. They further believed that there were other gods who rained water from the sky and made them successful in their battles.
There was a tribe, called Quraish, among the pagans, which was intelligent and enterprising. Its members preferred sedentary life to a nomadic life.

Capitalizing on other Bedouin tribes' religious devotions as well as their lack of preference to a sedentary life, the members of the Quraish tribe installed themselves in Mecca, around the House of God and the well of Zumzum, with the aim to cater to the religious needs of their nomadic and sedentary brethren. They had the inside and outside of the House of God staked with three hundred and sixty idols, which all of the pagans venerated and worshipped.

Over a period of time, the spot first came to be known as Bakka (3:96) and then Mecca. The Quraish tribe was its virtual occupants due to the fact that some of its powerful members perpetually controlled the supervision, and the religious rituals, of the House of God.

The members of the Quraish tribe consisted of three groups. One was the priestly group, which controlled the House of God, and sustained itself on the income that the House generated for it from the pilgrims. The second group consisted of a small number of the Quraish people who engaged themselves in trade. The third group was large, and it consisted of the people who sustained themselves by providing water and other services to the pilgrims. This occupation of theirs did not guarantee them a regular income; when they had a large number of pilgrims, they earned a good living, but when the number of the pilgrims declined, so did their income. Those people can be compared with our modern-day day laborers; they get paid only when they are employed for active service.

Over 1,400 years ago, there lived in Mecca a man by the name of Abdullah. He belonged to the third group of the Quraish people. His wife's name was Amina. Because he did not have a consistent income, his household often suffered from deprivations. Many a times, the couple had to go to bed without food. Persistent poverty took its toll; the couple frequently fought and argued on their financial condition as well as on what was likely to happen to them in future.

Recognizing the fact that she and her husband did not have the means to feed another mouth, Amina always forced her man to ejaculate his semen outside her vagina. This practice helped her to avoid pregnancy for sometime, but one night Abdullah failed to control himself, and she ended up being a pregnant woman.
Amina was angry. She tried her best to destroy the pregnancy, but failed.

Unable to do anything else with her conception, she resigned to her fate and decided to carry her pregnancy to its full term. Abdullah, her husband, felt for her discomforts and sought to help by providing her with the services of a slave-girl, named Barakat.

But as misfortune would have it, Amina's husband died when she was about six months into her pregnancy. This tragedy increased her hatred towards the child she was carrying in her belly. She considered it to be the harbinger of a bad luck. She feared that many more mishaps would befall her after she delivered the jinxed baby.

At the time of his death, Abdullah is believed to have owned five camels, a few sheep and a female slave of Ethiopian origin, named Barakat.

Not being able to do anything else to alleviate her fear, she carried the fetus until it was ready to take birth as a baby-boy. When the time finally arrived, she delivered the baby without a hitch.

Amina called the baby-boy Kothan, but his grandfather changed it to Muhammad at a later date (see R. V. C. Bodley's The Messenger, p. 6).

Contrary to the general belief, Muhammad is not a Muslim name; rather, it is an Arabian pagan name that was in use even before the birth of Islam's founder.

Genealogically, it is claimed that Muhammad was a descendent of Ismail who, as the Bible implies, was an illegitimate son of Abraham, born of Hagar, an Egyptian handmaid of his wedded wife, Sarah (Genesis, 16:1-15). It was this son, the majority of Muslims believe, whom Abraham attempted to sacrifice upon God's command in a dream, and who, as a consequence, earned the heavenly title of "Zabi-Ullah," i.e. "the one to be sacrificed in the name of God" - - - not his legitimate son Isaac, as claimed by the Book of Genesis.

The actual date of Muhammad's birth is not known, nor can it be ascertained now. The scholarly hypothesis on this issue is at some variance. Philip K. Hitti says that he was born in or around 571 AD (History of the Arabs, p. 111). Abdullah Yusuf Ali maintains, "The year usually given for the Prophet's birth is 570 A.D, though the date must be taken as only approximate, being the middle figure between 569 and 571, the extreme possible limits."(The Holy Quran, V. 2, p. 1071).

The discrepancy in the year of Muhammad's birth notwithstanding, some Muslims categorically maintain that he was born in the early hours of Monday, the 29th day of August, 570 A.D (See Ghulam Mustafa, Vishva Nabi, p. 40).  - - an occasion that they observe each year with great fanfare. Contrary to this, and as is the case with Jesus Christ, the year of Muhammad's birth cannot, in fact, be established with reliable historical evidence. The celebrations that are held now to celebrate Muhammad's birth, therefore, have no Islamic basis and these are mere traditions only.

At the time of Muhammad's birth, the Arabs lived in a state of moral decadence. Though the institution of marriage existed among the Arabs for its namesake, they pursued extramarital sex at whim. On the subject of the Arabs' fornication, Maxime Rodinson quotes Rabbi Wathan:

Nowhere in the world was there such a propensity towards fornication as among the Arabs, just as nowhere was there any power like that of Persia, or wealth like that of Rome, or magic like that of Egypt. If all the sexual license in the world were divided into ten parts, nine of these would be distributed among the Arabs and the tenth would be enough for all the other races (Muhammad, p. 54, as translated by Anne Carter) 

R. V. C Bodley tacitly concurred with Wathan, saying:

There was Amr Ibn al As, the son of a beautiful Meccan prostitute. All the better Meccans were her friends, so that anyone, from Abu Sofian down, might have been Amr's father. As far as anyone could be sure, he might have called himself Amr Ibn Abu Lahab, or Ibn al Abbas or Ibn anyone else among the Koreishite upper ten. According to Meccan standards of that time, it did not matter who had sired him (In his book, The Messenger, p. 73).

According to historians, Muhammad was born during this period of time, and in one of the ten upper class Quraish families of Mecca. To these people, it did not matter who had fathered whom. All children born under this condition must have always faced the question over the legitimacy of their mothers' conceptions!

In spite of becoming the mother of a son, whom her society greatly valued, Amina continued to maintain her hatred towards the newborn boy. In order to take her vengeance out, she refused to suckle him, even when he was hungry.

Seeing the child's suffering and to help him survive, Thuwaibah, a slave-girl of the child's uncle Abu Lahab, took upon herself the responsibility to breastfeed him for a few days (see Adil Salahi's Muhammad: Man and Prophet, p. 23) until someone else was found to take him into her permanent custody.

In the period Muhammad was born, poor Bedouins from the desert used to flock, from time to time, to Mecca to collect alms from those few who could afford to give it to them. Following the tradition, Haleema, a poor Saadite shepherd woman, came and knocked at Amina's door. Being herself a poor widowed woman, Amina had nothing to offer Haleema; instead, she wished to unload her own burden by putting her newborn son into her lap.

Haleema was dumbfounded, for, in her judgment, no mother would ever dispose of her baby in the manner Amina wanted hers disposed. Knowing well her own situation, Haleema, at first, refused to accept the custody of the child, but when she considered the fact that she would have, in due course of time, two more hands to help her family out in its dire circumstances, she took the baby and left for her home.

Haleema's tribe lived in one of the pastoral valleys of Northern Arabia. Though they were poor, yet they always maintained their industrious and bold characters. Unlike the people of the Quraish tribe, the people of the Saadite tribe excelled in the use of sword and lances. Their dexterous use of swords and lances always earned them triumphs in the struggles that they had to face almost regularly, and perpetually, in order to survive in the harsh conditions and environments of their surroundings.

The people of the Saadite tribe were also renowned for speaking the most refined Arabic in all of Arabia. The similarity of the Quran's language with that of the Saaditic Arabic is the indication that the writer of the Quran must have been one of the Saadites, or that he must have lived among them during his formative years.

The entire population of the Arabian Peninsula believed in the existence of angels. They also believed that angels pay visits to people who were destined to receive special favors from Allah. This deity lived in and around the Ka'aba along with other 359 gods. Because the Arabs believed in the angels' closeness to Allah, many of them took up their worship with the hope that once pleased, the angels would have no difficulty in convincing Allah to grant them relief from their endless sufferings.

Haleema's son, Masroud, was almost of Muhammad's age. She began rearing up both the infants in her right earnest. She suckled both of them and cared for them equally. She looked forward to the day when those two infants would grow up and provide her with the help she always needed to make her life somewhat pleasant.

In the interlude she rarely enjoyed, Haleema, being a loving and caring mother, often used to mull over the future of Masroud, her own son. She was the product of the Bedouin life; she herself had been living such a life. Her long experience convinced her that no matter how industrious and brave her son was, the bareness of the desert and the conditions that obtained in it, would never afford him an opportunity to live a life that could even distantly be compared with the one that some people of Mecca lived. She, therefore, wanted her son to go to Mecca to live there a comfortable life.

But how was she going to send her son to Mecca? she consistently asked herself.

Haleema thought and thought. Lost in it, she spent many, many nights without sleep. Even during the day, her mind remained occupied with her only thought: how to induct Masroud, with a secured base, into the Meccan life.

Her constant and persistent exploration of possibilities eventually paid the dividend. It dawned on her that she could achieve her ambition easily, if she arranged to return Muhammad to his mother in Mecca with an undetectable switch. The switching plan required Haleema simply to have Muhammad substituted by Masroud and plant him in Amina's house where, she knew for sure, there was none who could ever suspect or question his identity. 

Pleased with her plan, Haleema began working on its implementation. First of all, she needed to call Muhammad Masroud, and Masroud Muhammad. At the beginning, the infants appeared a little confused, but after a short period of time, they got used to the change. And this change proved hugely instrumental in turning around the destinies of two innocents infants; one of them was going to change, undeservedly, the face of the earth; the other was going to live, undeservedly for him, too, the life of an anonymous Bedouin.

The second step of the plan required Haleema to create a situation that would facilitate her son's plantation in Amina's house. This step required her to conceive a scenario that would not only fit in the pagans' age-old belief, it would also soften Amina's attitude towards her son whom she despised from the core of her heart. And what could be a better scenario than the following, which she made use of in order to convince Amina that her son was really a prodigious child.

No sooner had Muhammad stepped into the fifth year of his life, Haleema began telling everyone she came across about the prodigious nature of her adopted son. She took special pleasure in narrating the child's encounter with two angels whom, she claimed, her own son Masroud, had seen with his own eyes, surrounding Muhammad in a broad daylight.

Pressed for details, she used to tell her listeners that one day, Masroud and Muhammad were playing in field. While they were engrossed in their play, from nowhere, two angels appeared before Muhammad.

They laid him gently on the ground, and Gabriel, one of the two angels, opened up the boy's heart. He cleansed it from impurity; wrung from it those black and bitter drops of the sin that we inherited from our forefather Adam, and which lurk in the hearts of the best of his descendents, inciting them to the commission of sin. When infant Muhammad had been thoroughly purified, Gabriel filled his heart with faith and knowledge and prophetic light, and then he replaced it in his bosom.

During this angelic visitation, Haleema told her listeners, the angels also impressed between Muhammad's shoulders the seal of prophecy. To prove her claim, she used to make Muhammad bare his body so that those people who doubted her sanity could see with their own eyes the mark that existed between his shoulders.

Haleema had to resort to this cunning tactic in order to hide a serious problem: The child that was born to Amina bore no mark at the back of his body; whereas Masroud had a distinctive birth mark between his shoulders. Now, if Haleema had not invented the story of the angels who, she had to claim, impressed Muhammad's body with "the seal of prophecy," her entire scheme would have been jeopardized, and her desire to plant her son in Amina's house frustrated.

The ground thus prepared for his return to his mother, Haleema carried Muhammad to Mecca and sought to deposit him on Amina's lap. Seeing her reluctance, Haleema narrated to her all that that had happened to Muhammad, and also the affixation of the seal of prophecy by the angels on his back. Considerably mellowed down by Haleema's account of the child's supernatural expositions, Amina took back her son.

Haleema returned to her home in the desert, with the satisfaction that she succeeded in placing her son in a Meccan home where he would grow into a man and then find for himself a place to lead a life, filled with relative abundance and peace.

Muhammad remained with Amina until his sixth year, although he often missed Haleema, his biological mother. He played with the local children; joined them in their merrymaking games; watched pilgrims praying at the temple of Ka'aba and welcomed and said goodbyes to the caravans that halted at the city before departing for their trading destinations. All the activities of the city fascinated him, for he found them to be quite different from the ones he saw and grew up with in the land of his birth.

Despite the antagonism that Amina had harbored against him following his birth, she treated him fairly well after his return from the desert. She fed him to the best of her ability; clothed him to the extent it was necessary and took care of his well being as well. She also took him around in the city and introduced him to his near as well as distant relatives.

After a few months of his return to Mecca, Amina took Muhammad to Medina and introduced him to her maternal relatives there. On her journey homeward, she died and was buried at Abwa, a village that lied between Medina and Mecca. Barakat, the slave-girl, now acted as a mother of the orphan child and delivered him to his grandfather Abd al Mutallib in whose household he was destined to spend three years of his life.

 Part 2

Abd al Muttalib was the guardian of the temple of Ka'aba and from it he had a good income. But because his family consisted of a large number of people, he often found it difficult to meet all of their needs. As a result, tension prevailed, most of the time, among his family members, even though they always put up a smiling face while being outside their home.

Muhammad's inclusion in the family did not help the situation; rather, it brought about an additional load. All members of the family wanted him gone but as he was under his grandfather's protection, none dared ask him to leave. It did not mean that they had to develop a love for the child; what actually happened was exactly its opposite: They began to hate him and missed no opportunity that came to them to harass him. They might not have inflicted bodily injuries on him, but they almost certainly harmed him, beyond repairs, emotionally and psychologically.

When he suffered at the hands of his grandfather's family members, none of its female members ever came forward either to rescue him from their harassment or to console him afterwards. This attitude of theirs brought to his mind his mother's memory. He longed to be with her; wanted to be loved and hugged by her, but he could have none of them for the reason that she had abandoned him in the midst of those strange people. He started developing a hatred of his own towards his mother!

About three years after Muhammad had joined his family, Abd al Motallib found his end approaching. He, therefore, handed him over to his eldest son, Abu Taleb, in whose household he lived for several years.

 

THE CITY OF MECCA
 

The little town of Mecca, situated near the Red Sea coast of Arabia, had acquired great importance by the sixth century for two different reasons: It became an important center of idol worshipping, to which many of the nomadic tribes of Arabia made pilgrimages on a regular basis. In addition to its religious prestige, however, Mecca also became an active center for commerce, from where caravans departed to various destinations on their trading missions.

Mecca was then a tiny township and most of its inhabitants belonged to the Quraish tribe whose number could not have exceeded a couple of thousands. It was, and it still remains, an arid and inhospitable land incapable of producing anything to support its inhabitants' lives. Its pathways were dusty, with no civic facility worth its name existing therein. Its inhabitants knew nothing about personal health or hygiene.

Dwelling in tiny roofless homes built of clay, they survived in extreme poverty, which forced many of them to use goat and sheep skin to cover their bodies. No school of any kind existed in Mecca. In contrast to the Meccans, the Jews of Madina are believed to have run their own schools in which they instructed their children, primarily in the matters of their religious disciplines.

Because the Arabs could hardly ignite fire, both for cooking and illumination, they ate dates, locusts and lizards, and depended on camel's milk as a substitute for water. However, the Quran says that Allah had provided them with some kind of "green trees" (36:80) from which they obtained fire to meet their needs. During nights, the Arabs stayed inside their tents and homes, fearing mischief from capricious Jinns, which they believed, attacked mankind in darkness at solitary places.

Having nothing worthwhile to do either during the day or night, most of the people spent their time gossiping, drinking, gambling or narrating the fables that came down to them through generation after generation. Their other main pastime was an inordinate obsession with sex, both hetero-and homosexual, for they were reputed to have been endowed with great sexual virility. Muhammad possessed so much of virility, it is said, that he was able to satisfy all of his wives, numbering nine, during a single night.

The Arabs also practiced pederasty, an act they considered to be a normal part of their sexual conduct. Their womenfolk also led a highly licentious life, engaging themselves in sexual acts with any men they felt attracted to. Men recognized this conduct as being normal on the part of their women.

On the death of Abd al Mottalib, his son, Abu Talib succeeded to the guardianship of Ka'aba, assuming the religious functions performed by all of his predecessors. The priestly office held by him required his sacerdotal household to observe rigidly all the rites and ceremonies of the sacred House of Allah. This afforded young Muhammad the opportunity to observe them closely and to record them in his mind, enabling him later to incorporate most of them, sans the idol worshipping, in his own religion.

 

PAGAN RITES
 

The rites and ceremonies practiced by the pagan Arabs before the advent of Islam consisted of, among others, the following:

-The pagans observed three principal fasts within the year; one of seven, one of nine, and one of thirty days. During their fasts, they ate and drank, but refrained from conversations.
-They prayed three times each day; about sunrise, at noon, and about sunset, turning their faces in the direction of Ka'aba (Washington Irving, Mahomet and his successors, p. 31).
     -They performed a yearly pilgrimage or hajj, which required them to circumambulate the Ka'aba seven times, to run between the two hills called Safa and Marwa on each of which was installed a male and a female idol, to sacrifice animals in the name of the deities, and then to shave the heads of all male pilgrims. Female pilgrims satisfied the later commandment simply by having a few locks of their haircut off.

 

ALLAH
 

One of the three hundred and sixty idols the pagans worshipped was called Allah, having all the essential characteristics of a man. He was one of their principal deities. They believed that this Allah gave them life and sustained them with his mercy and kindness. This deity was known as Al-Rahman-an (the merciful) and Al-Rahim (the compassionate) to the people of Northern and Southern Arabia.

The inscription (542-3) of Abrahah dealing with the break of the Ma'rib Dam bears testimony to this historical fact. The inscription begins with the following words: "In the power and grace and mercy of the Merciful ((Rahman-an) and His messiah and of the Holy Spirit." The name Al-Rahman-an is especially significant because al-Rahman became later a prominent attribute of Allah, and one of His ninety-nine names in the Quran. Sura or chapter nineteen of the Quran is dominated by the word al-Rahman. Though used in the inscription for the Christian God, yet the word is evidently borrowed from the name of one of the older South Arabian deities.

In truth, Muhammad, at the beginning of his career as a prophet, had required his followers to worship this same statuary Allah. He changed this commandment later to suite his concept of a God who, he believed, had no form or shape, thus separating his concept from that of the pagans and other polytheists of his time.

Apart from the stated rites, the pagans had many other religious traditions, some of which they acquired in early times from the Jews. They are also said to have nurtured their devotional feelings with the books of Psalms, as well as with a book filled with moral discourses, supposedly written by Seth who, according to the biblical stories, was one of Adam's many sons. Adam was the first human being whom God created, by using his own hands, out of mud, which he made by mixing dust with water.

Muhammad's transfer to his uncle's household did not bring him any relief from what he suffered in his grandfather's house. Abu Taleb was not rich, either, but he, too, had a large family. Even though he, in addition to his sacerdotal duties of the Ka'aba, had taken to trading to supplement his income, yet he did not earn enough to provide for all the needs of his family members. Scarcity was a rule, rather than an exception for his family. As the family often passed their days in hardship, Muhammad's addition to the family became a burden not only for its head, but also for its members. Consequently, they made him feel unwelcome in their midst, and used, in his presence, languages and gestures, which were good enough to act as salt for the wounds he had already acquired from his grandfather's house.

Abu Taleb, on his part, was aware of the situation that his nephew had to endure in his house. He wanted to help, but he, too, was handicapped; had he been able to meet the needs of his immediate family members, he could have justified Muhammad's presence in his house, but that was not the case and, consequently, he could do nothing for him, but to play the role of a spectator. When he could live no more with his nephew's agonizing conditions, he found him a job of a shepherd.
His job required him to take his employers' camels into the plains for grazing. He   thus had to spend, all by himself, the major portion of his days in the grim desert outside of Mecca. Letting the camels roam about in search of a thorn or a blade of grass among the pile of stones, we can visualize how a young, sensitive and intelligent boy of the age of Muhammad, must have spent his time.

It is a rule of nature that misfortune and sufferings create bitterness in a person and these make him conscious of his situation, especially when he finds himself with nothing to distract him from his thoughts. Such a person grieves over his misfortune and tries to find out its causes. While doing so, he develops a strange internal feeling, which can be described only by a person who had undergone such an experience in his or her own life.

Since the above observation amply applied to young Muhammad, we may safely conjecture that in the midst of his frustrating loneliness, he must have asked himself why he had come into the world as a fatherless orphan, and why he had to work as a shepherd at such a lonely place at such a young age, while other children of his age were spending their time in the company of their loving parents. He must also have asked himself why his mother had to leave him at the mercy of the people he hardly knew, and why their treatment of him was different from that of their own children.
Despite the fact that he brought in some income to his uncle's family, yet they continued to treat him in the manner of the past. The continuity of their past behavior hurt him deeply; its resultant pains being the major cause for deepening his hatred towards his mother. He believed that if he had been living with her, nobody would have subjected him to the degrading insults that he suffered from at his grandfather's house, and which continued to be heaped upon on him at his uncle's house. He held his mother responsible for all of his sufferings.

His ego, sensitivity and feelings greatly hurt, Muhammad stopped playing with other children in his spare time. Instead, he felt more at home when conversing with other people who came to Mecca on pilgrimage or on trade. He enjoyed their conversations on religious matters. He also derived immense pleasure from their story-telling sessions. Very often, he prompted them into narrating the tantalizing and fascinating Arabian tales of the past. Most of the tales and fables he heard from them acted like balm for his wounds. When he got his opportunity, he narrated them eloquently to his listeners, who, in their own turn, made them an important and integral part of the Quran!

When he had no story-telling session to attend, he took immense pleasure in watching the arrival and departure of the caravans, which traded in Syria and Yemen, and thronged at Mecca before their dispersal. The thought of being in foreign lands filled young Muhammad's mind with excitement and carried his imagination to things he himself hoped one day to see in those distant countries.

Once, Muhammad saw Abu Taleb mount his camel to depart with a caravan bound for Syria. Unable to suppress his ardent desire, he begged his uncle to take him along on his journey. Abu Taleb could not deny his forceful request and gave him permission to accompany the caravan.

The route to Syria, in those days, lay through regions fertile in fables and traditions, which it was the delight of the traveling Arabs to recount during the evening respites of their caravans. The vastness and solitude of the desert in which the wandering Arabs passed so much of their lives was the fertile ground that also gave birth to numerous superstitious fancies. Accordingly, they had the deserts peopled with good and evil Jinns, and clothed them with tales of enchantment, mingled with wonderful but dubious events, which, they believed, had taken place in the distant past.

While traveling, the youthful Muhammad doubtless imbibed many of those superstitions of the desert. Remaining ingrained in his retentive memory, they later played a powerful role over his thoughts and imagination.

We may note here two ancient traditions, out of the many of the Arabian legends, which Muhammad must have heard at this time, and which we find recounted by him afterwards in the Quran. One of these related to the mountainous district called Hadjar.

As caravans crossed the silent and deserted valleys, caravanners gazed at the caves at the sides of the mountains. These caves were said to have been once inhabited by the Bani Thamud or the Children of Thamud. These people, Arabs believed, belonged to one of the lost tribes of Arabia.

Bani Thamud were a proud and gigantic race, existing at the time of patriarch Abraham. When they lapsed into idolatry, God sent them a prophet from among themselves whose name was Saleh. His task was to restore them to His righteous path. People refused to listen to him unless he proved the divinity of his mission through a miracle. Saleh prayed, and God caused a rock to open up from which came out a gigantic she-camel, producing a foal and abundant milk soon after.
Some of the Thamudites were convinced by the sight of the miracle and gave up idolatry. The greater majority of them remained unimpressed and continued in their disbelief.

Disappointed, Saleh left the camel among the people as a sign from God, but warned them that a catastrophe would befall should they do her any harm. For a time, the camel was left to feed quietly in their pastures, but when she drank from a brook or a well, she never raised her head until she had drained the last drop of water.

In return, it was believed, she produced milk to supply the whole tribe. As she, however, frightened other camels out of pastures by her huge size, she became an object of offense to the Thamudites who, to get rid of the beast, hamstrung and then slew her.

God retaliated for the killing of the she-camel. He caused a fearful cry, accompanied by great claps of thunder, to descend upon the Thamudites people at night from heaven; in the morning all the offenders were found dead, lying prostrated on their faces. Thus for avenging the death of a she-camel, God obliterated a whole race from the face of the earth. The land of the Thamudites still remains barren, caused by a constant curse from heaven.

This story had a powerful impact on Muhammad's mind, who, in later years, refused to let his people encamp in the neighborhood, hurrying them away from this accursed region.

Another tradition gathered by Muhammad during one of his journeys related to the city of Eyla, situated near the Red Sea. This place, he was told, had been inhabited in ancient times by a tribe of the Jews. Like the Thamudites, they had lapsed into idolatry. Also, because the tribe had profaned the Sabbath by fishing on that sacred day, God transformed their old men into swine, and the young ones into monkeys.

What had happened to their womenfolk was not told, so Muhammad necessarily remained vague while narrating this story in the Quran.

The aforesaid traditions, among others, are found eloquently described in the Quran, thus indicating the extent of the bias to which Muhammad's youthful mind had been subjected during his journeys.

Muslim writers have eulogized many wonderful circumstances, which are stated to have attended Muhammad throughout all the journeys of his life. He was, they assert, hovered over by unseen angels with their wings to protect him from the burning sands of the desert and the scorching rays of the sun.

On another occasion, he was protected by a cloud, which hung over his head during the noontime heat. On yet another occasion, a withered tree suddenly put forth its leaves and blossomed in order to provide shade to the distressed Muhammad.

All those miracles did not rest on the evidence of an eyewitness; rather these were Muhammad's own statements, or were invented, after his death, by his zealot followers, which Muslims are required to believe without ever asking any questions.

During his journeys, Muhammad is said to have met a number of Christian hermits. Monk Bahira was prominent among them. On conversing with Muhammad, Bahira was struck by the precocity of his intellect and became entranced by his eager desire for varied information. His inquisitiveness centered, principally, on maters of religion. The two were believed to have held frequent conversations on the subject, in course of which, the discourse of the monk was mainly directed against idolatry, the practice in which the youthful Muhammad had hitherto been raised. The Nestorian Christians, for whom Bahira was a faithful patron, were strenuous in forbidding the worship of images. They prohibited even their casual exhibition. Indeed, they had taken their scruples on this matter so far that even the cross, a common emblem of Christianity, was included in this prohibition.

Muslim writers stress the point that Bahira had become interested in the youthful Muhammad because he had seen the seal of prophecy on his shoulders. This vision, they swear, gave the monk the conviction that this was the same Prophet whose arrival had been foretold in the Christian Scriptures. The monk is further reported to have told Abu Talib to ensure that his nephew did not fall into the hands of the Jews, thereby forecasting with the eye of prophecy the trouble and opposition that Muhammad was destined to encounter in future from that religious group of people.
We doubt if the mentioned encounter had ever taken place. Supposing that it had actually taken place, in that event, the purpose of Bahira's encounter must have revolved around one of his own agendas. Since the monk was engaged in a mission and predisposed toward proselytizing, he, being a sectarian preacher, needed no miraculous sign to develop an interest in an intelligent and intense Muhammad, and to attempt to convert him to the beliefs he was then propagating. He knew that his subject was a receptive listener; and he was also the nephew of the guardian of Ka'aba. He also knew that if he succeeded in implanting the seeds of his teachings into Muhammad's tender mind, he would be spreading, through him, the doctrines of his sect among the people of Mecca, thus advancing his mission by a great stride. This was a good motivation for Bahira to develop an interest in Muhammad. He did not have to see the putative seal of prophecy in order to be convinced with his subject's potentiality and usefulness.

What the monk is reported to have told Abu Talib about Muhammad must have been a precautionary suggestion. In the unsettled state of religious opinions then obtaining in the Arabian Peninsula, the monk wanted to prevent his would-be convert from being engulfed by the Jewish faith, which was then influencing the pagans in its favor. Had it happened; the monk would have lost a good candidate for his faith, and this would have been a great setback for the cause he was then duty-bound to promote. 

With Abu Talib, Muhammad returned to Mecca, his mind teeming with wild tales and traditions he picked up during his journey through the desert. He remained deeply impressed by the doctrines imparted to him by Monk Bahira in the Nestorian monastery, which, as we will note shortly, had helped him tremendously later in his life in shaping his own thoughts and religious doctrines.

Muhammad had also developed a mysterious reverence for Syria, believing it to have given refuge to the patriarch Abraham when he had fled from Chaldea, taking with him the doctrine of worshipping one true God. His veneration of this country was so deep that he is said to have initially faced Syria (Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, as translated by A. Guillaume, p. 135), while saying his three daily prayers.

While not traveling with a caravan, Muhammad worked as a shepherd. But when he reached his manhood, different persons employed him as their commercial agent, to be with their trade caravans, which traveled to Syria, the Yemen and other destinations on commercial pursuits. The fact that he was given charge of trade by his employers negates the Muslim claim that Muhammad was an illiterate person and, therefore, he could not have said or written what the Quran contains. A person unable to read or write could not have been given the important post of a commercial agent, especially, when other Meccans are claimed to have been able to do so. His ability to read and write must also have helped him to get his jobs, for it was in the best interest of his employers to hire someone who was able to keep a written record of the trade activities he engaged himself in, particularly in a situation where he had to travel to, and live in, distant places for a long period of time.

During his journey through Jerusalem, Muhammad had the opportunity of seeing the Temple of Solomon, located on the hill of Moriah. King Solomon had built it for Yahweh, who was one among many gods of the ancient people. In the Quran, this Temple is referred to as the Farthest Mosque (Masjid-ul-Aqsa). His familiarity with this temple helped him later to describe it vividly when questioned about his alleged ascension to Seventh Heaven during a night.

Muslims firmly believe that Muhammad landed here on his wonder horse, known as Burraq, and walked across the plaza - built by Herod to expand the area of the Second Temple - and then ascended to heaven during a night to hold talks with God. When asked to describe the temple in order to prove his claim of the mysterious ascension, God, it said, presented its replica in his vision to enable him to satisfy the incredulity of his Meccan tormentors. During their rule over Jerusalem, Muslims built, near the Temple of Solomon, a mosque known as the Dome of Rock, to commemorate the ascension. It is also called the Mosque of Hadhrat Umar. This has become the third holiest Muslim place of worship after the Ka'aba in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet in Madina.

King Solomon was the person who had first used the oft-repeated Muslim invocation of God's glory in a letter that he is said to have written to Queen Bilquis of Sheba, some seventeen hundred centuries before the advent of Islam. The invocation, reading as follows, are now used by all Muslims every day before they do anything in their lives:

Bismillah hir Rahman nur Rahim, meaning: In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

We suspect that the pagans used the same invocation before their idol Allah. Muhammad lifted it from the pagan practice and made it an essential component of his religion. 

Before we proceed further with our narrative, we may pause here and discuss briefly a psychological theory or observation. It is known that belief can blunt human reasoning and common sense. It has been established that ideas, which have been inculcated into a person's mind in childhood, remain in the background of his thinking forever. Consequently, such a person will want to make facts conform to his indoctrinated ideas, which may have no rational validity. Many learned scholars are known to have remained handicapped by this burden, and inhibited from using their common sense. It is not that they never used their common sense in religious enterprises; they used it only when it corroborated with their inculcated ideas.

Mankind's faculties of perception and rationalization have enabled them to find solution of scientific problems, but in matters of religious and political beliefs, the same species is willing to trample on the evidence of reason and senses.

 

PART-3

Evaluating Muhammad from the above perspectives, one would find that he was one of the few exceptional persons who lived on our earth. Though he grew up in a particular religious environment, yet when situations demanded, he was not only able to throw off his childhood indoctrination that evolved around idolatry; he was also able to introduce and adapt himself to a new religion that suited his as well as his people's interests. The stated metamorphosis on Muhammad's part was possible because, apart from being an exceptionally able person, he was also, in his heart, a true nationalist, who, being motivated to help his people, did everything that was necessary to make their lives better.

Contrary to the Muslim conviction that Muhammad was originally created by God as a believer in His Oneness, he is reported to have worshipped and offered sacrifices to Al-Uzza, an idol the pagans believed to be one of the three daughters of God (cf. 42:52). The Quraish venerated Al-Uzza highly, believing that her intercession on their behalf would be acceptable to God, her father. One of his uncles was named after this idol, and he was called Abd al Uzza, the slave of Uzza, before he was nicknamed Abu Lahab, the Father of Flame, by his Muslim foes.

On Muhammad's pagan backgrounds, F. E. Peters wrote:

According to a famous, though much edited, tradition, it was young Muhammad who was the pagan and Zayd ibn Amr who was the monotheist. Peters also quoted Zayd ibn Haritha, who is said to have narrated the following story to his son:
The Prophet slaughtered a ewe for one of the idols (nusub min al-ansab); then he roasted it and carried it with him. … (Muhammad and the Origins of Islam, p. 126).
While preaching the oneness of God, Muhammad continued, in one form or another, to venerate the idols-up to the time he conquered Mecca-when all the idols housed inside and outside the Ka'aba he had finally destroyed.

In his early life, Muhammad was no different than other youths of his time. He used to "spend his nights in Mecca as young men did" - - - (Ibn Ishaq. Op. cit, p. 81) - - - in quarters where whores offered their bodies to youths whom they expected to defend them in times of perils. His marriage with Khudeija might have had altered his lifestyle to a certain degree, but it was not a good enough reason for him to abandon his earlier habits in their entirety.

Muhammad was also a frequent attainder of fairs, which, in Arabia, were not always the mere venues of business activities, but also occasionally scenes of poetic contests between different individuals, where prizes were adjudged to the victors. Such especially was the case with the fair of Oqadh; winning poems were hung up as trophies on the walls of Ka'aba. At these fairs, also, contestants recited the popular traditions of the Arabs. They also propagated various religious practices that were then common in the peninsula. From oral sources of this kind, Muhammad gradually accumulated varied information about creeds and doctrines, which he afterwards prescribed for his own followers.

As was the wont of his tribe, Muhammad also used to retire to a cave in Mount Hira to practice penance on the 10th of Muharram, a day sacred to the Jews as well. Following the Jewish custom, he also fasted on this day (Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 133. Also see Karen Armstrong's A History of God, p. 132).