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Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists: The Muslim Mainstream and the Caliphateby Andrew G. Bostom Also see Islam justifies killing prisoners Writing in 1916, C. Snouck Hurgronje, the great Dutch Orientalist, underscored how the jihad doctrine of world conquest, and the re-creation of a supranational Islamic Caliphate remained a potent force among the Muslim masses: ...it would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated...the canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam's greatness. Hurgronje further noted that although the Muslim rank and file might acknowledge the improbability of that goal "at present" (circa 1916), they were, ...comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms... Thus even at the nadir of Islam's political power, during the World War I era final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hurgronje observed how ...the common people are willingly taught by the canonists and feed their hope of better days upon the innumerable legends of the olden time and the equally innumerable apocalyptic prophecies about the future. The political blows that fall upon Islam make less impression... Nearly a century later, the preponderance of contemporary
mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, apparently share with
their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the
goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of
re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate.
Notwithstanding a historical drivel from Western Muslim "advocacy" groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, which lionizes both the Caliphate and the concomitant institution of Shari'a as promulgators of "a peaceful and just society"[3], the findings from the University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org poll are ominous. The Prototypical CaliphateUmar Ibn al-Khattab (d. 644), was the second "rightly guided"
caliph of Islam. During his reign, which lasted for a decade
(634-644), Syria, Iraq and Egypt were conquered. Umar was responsible
for organizing the early Islamic Caliphate. Alfred von Kremer, the
seminal 19th century German scholar of Islam, described the "central
idea" of Umar's regime, as being the furtherance of "...the
religious-military development of Islam at the expense of the
conquered nations."
It was the basis of its severe directives regarding Christians and those of other faiths, that they be reduced to the status of pariahs, forbidden from having anything in common with the ruling nation; it was even the basis for his decision to purify the Arabian Peninsula of the unbelievers, when he presented all the inhabitants of the peninsula who had not yet accepted Islam with the choice: to emigrate or deny the religion of their ancestors. During the jihad campaigns of Umar's Caliphate, in accord with
nascent Islamic Law, neither cities nor monasteries were spared if
they resisted. Thus, when the Greek garrison of Gaza refused to submit
and convert to Islam, all were put to death.
Muslim and non-Muslim sources record that Umar's soldiers were allowed to break crosses on the heads of Christians during processions and religious litanies, and were permitted, if not encouraged, to tear down newly erected churches and to punish Christians for trivial reasons. Moreover, Umar forbade the employment of Christians in public offices. The false claims of Islamic toleration during this prototype
"rightly guided" Caliphate cannot be substantiated even by relying on
the (apocryphal?) "pact" of Umar (Ibn al-Khattab) because this
putative decree compelled the Christians (and other non-Muslims) to
fulfill self-destructive obligations, including: the prohibition on
erecting any new churches, monasteries, or hermitages; and not being
allowed to repair any ecclesiastical institutions that fell into ruin,
nor to rebuild those that were situated in the Muslim quarters of a
town.
Umar imposed limitations upon the non-Muslims aimed at their
ultimate destruction by attrition, and he introduced fanatical
elements into Islamic culture that became characteristic of the
Caliphates which succeeded his. For example, according to the
chronicle of the Muslim historian Ibn al-Atham (d. 926-27), under the
brief Caliphate of Ali b. Abi Talib (656-61), when one group of
apostates in Yemen (Sanaa) adopted Judaism after becoming Muslims, "He
[Ali] killed them and burned them with fire after the killing."
Unto the AgesDuring the long twilight of the last formal Caliphate under the Ottoman Turks, Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat (including postings in Turkey), described this abhorrent spectacle which he witnessed in the heart of Istanbul, in the autumn of 1843, four years after the first failed iteration of the so-called Tanzimat reforms designed to abrogate the sacralized discrimination of the Shari'a: An Armenian who had embraced Islamism [i.e., common 19th century usage for Islam] had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was condemned to death according to the Mohammedan law. His execution took place, accompanied by details of studied insult and indignity directed against Christianity and Europeans in general. The corpse was exposed in one of the most public and frequented places in Stamboul [Istanbul], and the head, which had been severed from the body, was placed upon it, covered by a European hat. Salient examples from within the past 25 years confirm the
persistent absence of freedom of conscience in contemporary Islamic
societies, in tragic conformity with a prevailing, unchanged mindset
of the earliest Caliphates: the 1985 state-sponsored execution of
Sudanese religious reformer Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for his alleged
"apostasy".
An even more alarming and utterly intolerable phenomenon was on display just this week in the United States when a Johnstown (western Pennsylvania) area imam Fouad El Bayly[5] openly sanctioned the punishment by death of former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali-born and raised a Muslim in Somalia -- for her open avowal of secularism. Individualism and Freedom of ConscienceIbn Warraq[6] has observed aptly that the most fundamental conception
of a Caliphate, "...the constant injunction to obey the Caliph -- who is
God's Shadow on Earth", is completely incompatible with the creation
of a "rights-based individualist philosophy."
[Ibn Khaldun] All religious laws and practices and everything that the masses are expected to do requires group feeling. Only with the help of group feeling can a claim be successfully pressed,...Group feeling is necessary to the Muslim community. Its existence enables (the community) to fulfill what God expects of it. In contrast, Warraq notes, "Liberal democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom and attaches all possible value to each man or woman." And he concludes, Individualism is not a recognizable feature of Islam; instead the collective will of the Muslim people is constantly emphasized. There is certainly no notion of individual rights, which developed in the West, especially during the eighteenth century. Almost six decades ago (in 1950), G.H. Bousquet, a pre-eminent modern scholar of Islamic Law, put forth this unapologetic, pellucid formulation of the twofold totalitarian impulse in Islam: Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of the fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer....the study of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding though it may appear to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh) is of great importance to the world today. The openly expressed desire for the restoration of a Caliphate from two-thirds of an important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab Islamic nations, representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as a chilling wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential threat posed by the living, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad.[7] Footnotes 1. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/?nid=&id=&lb=hmpg
Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (2005), and the
forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (2007)
-- see http://www.andrewbostom.org/
See also: Andrew G. Bostom, "Radical Islam's Goal is Global
Conquest," Front Page Magazine, July 2, 2007,
Excerpts from Will Durant's The Age of Faith Pages 162-186 Pub. 1950
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