Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (10 page)

The Koran consists of 6,360 verses, collected in 114
suras,
or chapters. The suras are arranged by length, with the longest at the beginning and the shortest at the end. Islam holds that the Koran is eternal. It has existed forever with Allah. The copies on earth are a perfect copy of the
Umm al-Kitab,
the “Mother of the Book” which, written in Arabic by Allah himself, lies on a table in Heaven. Gabriel ordered Muhammad to recite and memorize what the angel dictated from the eternal book. As the Koran was written directly by Allah and not by a human being, it is infallible, inviolate, absolute, and necessarily right. It contains everything man needs to know, and it must be obeyed in all details. Because Allah is the author of the Mother of the Book, any criticism or disrespect expressed toward the Koran is considered blasphemy punishable by death.

Since Allah authored the entire Koran, there is no room to re-interpret its commandments—they simply must be followed, unquestioningly, in their most literal sense. It is fundamentally different from the Bible, whose content is subject to passionate discussion and interpretation. Thus, for example, there is no movement in contemporary Judaism or Christianity seeking to reinstitute the harsh punishments, such as the death penalty for adulterers, laid down in the Jewish Talmud in the fifth century BC.
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In fact, these punishments were abandoned long ago. The Gospel relates how an adulterous woman was brought to Jesus with the question of what punishment she deserved. The accusers referred to the old Talmudic law, but Christ told them, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”
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None of them did. Likewise, the Jewish tribes that Muhammad encountered in seventh-century Arabia had renounced the practice of stoning adulterers to death, having reduced the punishment to lashing.

However, when the Jews from Yathrib (Medina) brought an adulterous couple to Muhammad, he scolded them, “Woe to you Jews! What has induced you to abandon the judgment of God which you hold in your hands? I am the first to revive the order of God and His Book and to practice it.”
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Note that Muhammad said he is
the first
to revive the old punishments, indicating they had been abandoned long before the seventh century. Then the prophet ordered the unfortunate couple to be stoned. They must have loved each other; in a moving passage from the Hadith, one of the Muslim witnesses recalled, “I saw the man leaning over the woman to shelter her from the stones.”
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Adulterers are still being sentenced to death by stoning in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.
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Some provinces in Malaysia and Indonesia have recently introduced stoning.
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In perhaps an even greater outrage, some Islamic states consider female rape victims to be adulterers liable to be stoned to death.
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This stems from the Koran’s injunction that a female rape victim has to present four male witnesses to support her claim that she has been raped.
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If she fails to do so, she incriminates herself, and the victim’s charge of rape becomes an admission of adultery. At least half the women in prison in Pakistan are behind bars for the crime of being a rape victim.
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Indian-born ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq, founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society, calls the Koran “an obscure, incoherent, bizarre mediaeval text, a curious amalgam of Talmudic Judaism, apocryphal Christianity and pagan superstitions... full of barbarisms.”
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Though it covers topics as exotic as how believers should clean themselves after urinating or defecating when there is no water available—“take some clean sand and rub your hands and face with it”
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—the Koran is brief compared to the Old and even the New Testament.

The Koran claims to be God’s final revelation to man. It states that “Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets.”
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Allah had previously spread his word through other prophets including Iesa (Jesus), but Islam claims the Jews and Christians deliberately falsified the scriptures given to them.

The Koran also states that “there is a good example in Allah’s apostle for those who look to Allah and the Last Day.”
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Hence devout Muslims who want to curry favor with Allah must study Muhammad’s life and follow his example. That is why the Hadith, the collection of Muhammad’s acts and sayings, is an authoritative guide to Islamic behavior.

The Hadith teaches the
Sunna,
which explain the model of Muhammad, the ideal man. There is a huge collection of hadith written in the first two centuries after Muhammad’s death, based on the oral tradition of Muhammad’s companions. The most respected is the
Sahih Bukhari,
compiled by Imam al-Bukhari (810-70). There are five other collections, all lengthy, that Islam generally regards as trustworthy. Another part of the
Sunna
is the
Sira,
or biography of Muhammad, written by Ibn Ishaq (704-73). Its full name is
Sirat Rasul Allah,
the “Biography of the Prophet of Allah.”

Christians and Jews hold that God created man in His image. The Koran, on the contrary, states that “nothing can be compared with Allah.”
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Since Allah has absolutely nothing in common with us, he obviously did not create man in his image. The Biblical concept of God as our father is absent from Islam. The purpose of Islam is the total surrender of oneself and others to the unknowable Allah, whom we must serve through total obedience to the teachings of Muhammad.
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One thing we
do
know about Allah is that “Allah is One, the Eternal God. He begot none, nor was He begotten. None is equal to Him.”
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This concept of “Oneness” is called
tawhid.
Similarly, Muslims have to become one body, the
Umma,
which is the nation of Islam or the Islamic ecumenical world community. Islam is a universal religion that stands for the unity of God and the oneness of mankind. Islam commands the
Umma
to act like an army.

Islam holds that everybody is born a Muslim. Adam, the first man, was created a Muslim. “Mankind were once one nation,” says the Koran.
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According to Islamic theology, human beings are born with
fitra,
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an innate knowledge of
tawhid.
Muhammad said, “Every child is born with a true faith of Islam but his parents convert him to Judaism, Christianity or Magainism [Zoroastrianism].”
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Hence, if some of us today are not Muslims, this is either through our own fault or through the apostasy of our parents. Islam teaches that the unbeliever is doomed; he is always
kafir
(“guilty”), whether by his own or his forefathers’ fault.

A Muslim has five religious duties—the so-called “Pillars of Islam.” The first is to pronounce the
Shahada,
the Declaration of Faith, and accept its words: “There is no God but Allah: Muhammad is His Messenger.” The flag of Saudi Arabia displays the
Shahada
with a sword underneath it, sending an unambiguous message of Islamic conquest. The flags of the Afghan Taliban and the Palestinian terror organization Hamas also display the
Shahada,
while the flag of the Lebanese terror organization Hizbollah (the “Party of God”) displays a Kalashnikov assault rifle with the Koranic verse, “The Party of God are sure to triumph.”
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The second pillar of Islam is
salat,
the obligation to pray five times a day, at fixed times, in the direction of the
Kaaba
in Mecca.
Salat
is becoming a familiar sight in Europe. In September 2011, France even felt compelled to enact a law banning the increasingly common practice of street prayer, whereby huge crowds of Muslims take over the sidewalks and sometimes even the roads, halting all traffic as they worship Allah.
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The third pillar is
zakat,
the giving of alms, which is given either on behalf of poor Muslims or “in the cause of Allah” for purposes such as building mosques. Some of these religiously mandated donations are used to finance jihad, or “holy war.” As Yusuf al-Qaradawi, head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research and founder of the Islam Online website, writes, “The meaning of Jihad in our present time particularly refers to striving to liberate Muslim lands from the grip of the disbelievers.... Declaring Jihad to save our land is an Islamic obligation.... It thus needs to be financed from the money of Zakah.”
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The fourth pillar is the duty to fast during the holy month of Ramadan. This is not a total fast, but an obligation to abstain from food, drink, and sex from dawn to dusk. Some groups are exempted from the requirement, such as old men, whom Muhammad allowed to have sex during Ramadan. The Hadith relates that a man asked Muhammad whether he was allowed to “embrace his wife” during the fast. “[Muhammad] gave him permission; but when another man came to him, and asked him, he forbade him. The one to whom he gave permission was an old man and the one whom he forbade was a youth.”
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The prophet himself did not restrain from all forms of intimacy either; his wife Aisha said that he “used to kiss her and suck her tongue when he was fasting.”
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The Ramadan fast is broken every evening with a meal after sunset, the so-called
Iftar.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Islamic leaders to the White House for an
Iftar
meal, thus starting an annual tradition continued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During the last decade, American embassies across Europe have adopted a similar, annual tradition of inviting local Muslim representatives to an
Iftar
meal at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence.

The fifth and final pillar of Islam is the
hajj,
the pilgrimage to the
Kaaba
in Mecca, which a Muslim must make once in his lifetime. The annual pilgrimage was an ancient Arab practice predating the advent of Islam. It occurs during four days in the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar. The pilgrimage ends with the Islamic festival of
Eid al-Adha,
the “Festival of Sacrifice,” during which Islamic men all over the world must ritually slaughter a sheep or goat.

While Christian sacraments, such as baptism, the Eucharist, confirmation, confession, matrimony, priestly ordination, and the anointing of the sick, center predominantly on the individual, the pillars of Islam are largely centered on the collective, symbolizing the worldwide solidarity of the
Umma,
the army of Allah.

Since Islam lacks a commitment to individual freedom, it is unsurprising that the ideology downplays the notion that man is responsible for his own fate. To the contrary, Islam teaches Muslims to be fatalistic, because Allah has predestined everyone’s future. As such, the Koran is filled with injunctions such as, “Such is the grace of Allah: He bestows it on whom He will”
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; “Nothing will befall us except what Allah has ordained”
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; “We have made all things according to a fixed decree,” says Allah
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; “The term of every life is fixed”
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; and “Allah leaves in error whom He will and guides whom He pleases.”
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“It was the predestination doctrine that prevailed in Islam,” writes Ibn Warraq.
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Every sura in the Koran begins with the invocation of “Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” However, as Mervyn Hiskett observes, “Allah’s mercifulness does not require Him to relieve His creatures, whether men or beasts, from the tribulations of life or the pangs of death. It consists solely of demanding less of men by way of worship and service than He otherwise might; and of making Paradise available to those who, inherently, do not deserve it.”
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