The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (40 page)

Alas, I suspect that very few Moslems today have heard of Azad. Instead, today’s Moslems have been force-fed the philosophies of men like Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Tamimi
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—founder of Wahhabism, the jihadist religion taught in Saudi-sponsored schools in nearly every major Western and Eastern city in the world.
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Today’s Moslems have also been swayed by the thoughts of men like Sayyed Qutub, the fundamentalist thinker whose writings inspired Osama bin Laden to declare war—worldwide jihad—on America in his August 23, 1996, “Declaration Of War Against The Americans”.
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And today’s Moslems have been weaned on the attitudes of Hasan al-Banna
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, founder of The Moslem Brotherhood—one of Islam’s most successful movements in the early 21
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century. The Moslem Brotherhood’s motto reads, "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." All these men-- Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Tamimi, Sayyed Qutub, and Hasan al-Banna--were militants dead serious about converting or eliminating unbelievers like you and me.

Those who espouse Islamic liberalism often risk their lives. Salman Rushdie, an Islamic novelist born in Bombay who worked as a journalist in Pakistan then became discontented and moved to England,
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was put under a death sentence for his novel
The Satanic Verses
. Pakistani street mobs rioted over the novel’s alleged insults to Islam in 1989. Five of the rioters were shot by police. When the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, saw the coverage of the killings on television, he issued a fatwa—a religious edict--calling for Rushdie's death and for the deaths of others involved with Rushdie’s book.
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Said the Ayatollah, “I call
on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them.” T
he Ayatollah gave extra oomph to his edict by putting a price of three million dollars on Rushdie’s head. Then an Iranian Islamic organization upped the ante by another $2.8 million.
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Rushdie took these threats seriously. He remained in hiding from 1989 to 1998.
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The fatwa on Rushdie terrified publishers and editors in the West, making them extremely leery of publishing books like the one you’re reading now. Fifteen hundred American bookstores took the
Satanic Verses
off their shelves.
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Why? Khomeini’s fatwa extended not only to Rushdie, but to “all involved in its [the Satanic Verses] publication who were aware of its content.” These words were backed by action. Bookstores in Berkeley, California; York, England; and London’s West End were bombed.
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Other bombs were found outside of bookstores in England’s Guilford, Nottingham, and Peterborough.
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This was a battle of memes, a bloody one.
The Satanic Verses
’ Japanese translator was stabbed to death. The book’s Italian translator was knifed, but lived. Its Norwegian publisher was shot but managed to cling to life. And in Sivas, Turkey, demonstrators denounced the Moslem who had translated
The Satanic Verses
into Turkish. These street mobs did more than chant for the translator’s death. They set a local hotel on fire, killing thirty-seven hotel guests.
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But Rushdie was not the only author to be targeted for “un-Islamic” views. There was Taslima Nasrin
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, an Islamic novelist from Bangladesh. Her newspaper articles and her book
Shame
made the mistake of protesting against the Islamic treatment of women and minorities. That was more than the street rioters and amateur assassins of extremist Islam could take. There were riots in the central roadways of Bangladesh over Nasrin’s un-Islamic freedom of speech. The government of Bangladesh decreed that her writings were riddled with “anti-Islam sentiments and statements that could destroy the religious harmony of Bangladesh". So Nasrin was forced to go into hiding in Sweden.
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At least she wasn’t killed like the poetess Asma, the mother of five about whom Mohammed said,
“Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?”
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Then there was the case of Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. You’d think that the Arab-speaking world would be proud of this honor, even though it came from the barbaric and pagan West. But you’d be wrong. Mahfouz’ novels were banned in many Islamic countries because the author had once made the un-Islamic move of supporting the 1978 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. But that’s not all. An influential extremist interpreter of Islam, Omar Abdul-Rahman (the man who inspired a 1993 bombing of four basement floors of New York’s World Trade Center
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), told a journalist that Mahfouz’s work had helped lay the base for Salman Rushdie’s heresy. That did it. In 1994 Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife
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in front of his house in Cairo. He lived, but the 82-year-old author was forced to surround himself with bodyguards for the rest of his life
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.

These are just the tip of the iceberg—the merest hints of the way in which today’s militant Islamic community follows Mohammed’s example of rigid meme-policing and terrifies would-be liberals into silence. African journalist Isioma Daniel
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was forced to flee her homeland, Nigeria, when she wrote a column about violent Islamic protests against the 2002 Miss World Pageant, a pageant scheduled to take place in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja.
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Referring to Mohammed’s sexual appetites, appetites Allah himself sanctioned in the Qur’an
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, Daniel said: “The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity. What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.” These words triggered three days of riots that claimed the lives of more than 220 people. A government official in the Nigerian state of Zamfara issued a fatwa declaring: "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is binding on all Muslims, wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty." Daniel was forced to go into hiding in the US. And her homeland, Nigeria, is not even a Moslem nation. Only 40% of its citizens follow the religion of Mohammed.
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There are many other examples of this sort. Turkey’s Islamist/feminist writer Konca Kuris was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the militant Islamic movement Hezbollah in the Turkish town of Konya in 1998. Turkish secularist and newspaper columnist Ahmet Taner Kislali died when a bomb went off beneath the hood of his car the following year. Then there’s the punishment of Iranian history professor Hashem Aghajari, who told a Tehran audience in 2002 not to consider the words of extremist religious leaders as sacred and not to follow militant Islam “like monkeys”. Aghajari was sentenced to death for “apostasy”—for abandoning Islam. In a second trial, Aghajari was once again given the death sentence. A third trial finally concluded that Aghajari, had merely “insulted sacred Islamic tenets” and gave him a lighter sentence-- three years in prison.
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Despite these threats, there are figures like Munawar Anees, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, former Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia
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, and founder of two of the leading journals of Islamic studies in the Islamic world.
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Dr. Anees—who has been tortured in a Malaysian prison--ends his letters with these words: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Anees makes it clear in his signature file that this statement comes from a founder-effect generator named Thomas Jefferson.

And there’s Kamal Nawash, founder of The Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism in Washington, DC. Nawash runs one of a handful of Islamic anti-extremist groups, groups whose leaders erect websites but hide in anonymity and seldom reveal their names. Nawash is one of the few who dares to disclose his identity and to make his statements in public.

Anees and Nawash are exceptions. For nearly 1,400 years, the militant form of Islam practiced by Mohammed himself has highjacked Moslem culture and has sunken its liberals into silence.

What is the difference, then, between Americans and militant Moslems? Why do I claim that they, not we, are the barbarians? It's a question of degree. When Syria's president from 1971 to 2000, Hafez al-Assad, seized power, he ran into violent resistance from Islamic fundamentalists—members of the Moslem Brotherhood. To overcome this opposition, Assad embarked on a mass extermination of over 20,000 fundamentalists in the town of Hama.
^1052
1053
No American president since the end of the Civil War in 1865 has exterminated his political opponents to secure his position in office.

When Jordan’s moderate King Hussein was hosting a mass of Palestinian refugees in his country, he ran into trouble. In 1968 and 1969 the Palestinians kicked off over 500 violent “incidents”, attacking Jordanians, holding them up at gunpoint, kidnapping them, and killing Jordanian soldiers by hammering nine-inch nails into their heads. Then the Palestinians went a step farther and tried to assassinate their host, King Hussein, and seize control of Jordan’s government. Hussein solved this problem in 1970 with a military attack on the Palestinians that drove them out of the country…and that killed over 10,000 in the process.
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This murderous chain of events, known as “Black September”, was started by a highly-regarded Moslem politician, Yasir Arafat.
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, the Palestinian leader who would go on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
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