Who are the Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj?

by Mohammed Ali Ibn Zubair Ali

http://www.islam.tc/prophecies/yajooj.html

The Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj

During the reign of Hadhrat Isa (A.S.) people will live an extremely peaceful life filled with prosperity and
abundance. Then the wall which imprisons Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj will break and they will surge forth in large
numbers.
"But when Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj are let loose and they rush headlong down every hill" (Quran
21:97)
Who are the Ya'jooj and Majooj?
Zul Qarnain (A.S.) who was a pious and just Ruler travelled to many lands and conquered them,
establishing justice and the Law of Allah therein. Allah Ta'ala provided him with all forms and material
strength through which he was able to carry out his conquests and missions.
He once carried out a mission in three directions, the far west, the far east, and then in a northerly
direction. It was here that he came across a tribe of people who complained to him about the tribes of
Ya'jooj and Majooj which inhabited the land behind two huge mountains and often emerged from behind
these mountains to perpetrate acts of anarchy and plunder among them. They requested Zul Qarnain
(A.S.) to erect a barrier between themselves and the tribes of Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj so that they could be
saved from their atrocities. With the material strength at his disposal, Zul Qarnain (A.S.) enlisted their
physical labor and set about erecting a high wall between the two mountains. The height of the wall or its
exact length is unknown. What is known is that the height of this wall reaches that of the summit of both
mountains. It is made with blocks or sheets of iron, which is further strengthened by molten lead. In this
manner Ya'jooj and Majooj are unable to scale the wall, or cross it, except when it is the will of Allah.
"And when the promise of my Rabb approaces, He will level it to dust" (Quran 18:98)
They are situated in a land of ice which is hidden from our gazes and the exact location of which is
unknown. Though many interpretations do exist in this respect, none of these can be said to absolute.
Ya'jooj and Majooj are human beings and according to a narration they are from the progeny of Yafith ibn
Nooh (A.S.).
Some Ahadith...
In a lengthy hadith by Hadhrat Nawwas ibn Sam'aan (R.A.) Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) is
reported to have said:
"...Allah will send revelation upon Eesa (A.S.) that 'Such a creation of mine is now going to
emerge that no power will be able to stop them. Therefore take my servants and ascend the

Mount of Toor.' Then Ya'jooj and Majooj will emerge and surge forth in all their fury. When those
from among them who constitute the former part of their army pass the lake of Tiberias (which is
in northern Palestine), they will drink up all the water of that lake and by the time those that
constitute the latter part of that same army pass the lake, they will say, "There used to be water
here (long ago). When they reach the Mount of Khamr in Jerusalem, they will arrogantly
proclaim: 'We have conquered the people of the earth, now we will annihilate those in the sky.' So
saying they will fire their arrows towards the sky. When the arrows return to the ground they will
be blood stained.
In the meantime, Eesa (A.S.) will be on the Mount of Toor with his followers. At that time the head
of and ox will be as valuable as is a hundred dinars to you in this day. [This indicates the scarcity
of provisions]. Faced with these hardships, Eesa (A.S.) and his followers will make dua unto Allah
(to remove this calamity). As a result, Allah will cause sores to appear on the necks of each and
every individual of these people which will cause their death suddenly. When Eesa (A.S.) and his
followers descend from the Mount of Toor there will not be a single space on the land where the
dead rotting bodies of these people is not littered, giving off a horrendous odour. Eesa (A.S.) and
his followers will once more supplicate unto Allah as a result of which Allah will send down huge
birds whose necks will be as thick as that of the necks of camels, and they will dump these
bodies in a place where Allah wills. (According to a narration by Tirmidhi, they will be dumped at
a place called Nahbal).
Allah Ta'ala will then send down a heavy rain, the waters of which will flow in every part of the
earth cleansing it thoroughly. It will rain for a period of forty days.
The Muslims will then burn the bows and arrows of the Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj for a period of seven
years.
Allah will order the earth to yield forth its crops in abundance and there will be such blessing and
prosperity that one pomegranate will be sufficient for a whole group while the peel thereof will
suffice to cast a shadow over them. The milk of one camel will be sufficient for many groups while
one milk giving cow will be sufficient for a whole tribe. One milk giving goat will be sufficent for a
whole family..."
(Muslim)
Hadhrat Abu Saeed Khudri (R.A.) narrates that Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) said:
"On the day of Qiyamah Allah will say to Adam (A.S.) to pick out the Jahannamis from his entire
progeny. Adam (A.S.) will ask: 'O Rabb, who are they?'
Allah will say: 'Nine hundred and ninety nine of a thousand are Jahannami while the one is a
Jannati.'
On hearing this the Sahaba were overtaken by fear and they asked "O Rasulullah (Sallallahu
Alayhi Wasallam), who will that one Janniti be?'
Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) said: 'Do not grieve, the nine hundred and ninety nine
will be Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj while you will be the Jannati."' (i.e. your numbers in relation to them will
be one in a thousand).
(Bukhari and Muslim)

Hadhrat Abdullah ibn Umar (R.A.) says that Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) said:
"Allah Ta'ala divided mankind into ten parts. Nine tenths constitute Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj while the
remaining tenths constitutues the rest of mankind."
Hadhrat Zainab bint Jahsh (R.A.) says: "...once Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wassallam) awoke
from such a sleep that his face was red and these words were on his tongue: 'There is none
worthy of worship except Allah. Destruction is upon the Arabs on account of the evil which has
come close to them. Today a hole as big as this has opened up in the wall of Ya'jooj and
Ma'jooj.' ..and Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) indicated the size of the hole forming a
ring with his index finger and thumb."
(Bukhari and Muslim)
Hadhrat Abu Hurairah (R.A.) narrates that every day Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj break (dig) through the wall
erected by Zul Qarnain (A.S.) until they reach the end of it to that extent that they can actually see the
light on the other side. They then return (home) saying that 'We will break through tomorrow.' But Allah
Ta'ala causes the wall to revert to its original thickness and the next day they start digging through the
wall all over again, and this process continues each day until as long as Allah wills them to remain
imprisoned. When Allah wishes them to be released, then at the end of the day they will say, "If Allah
wills, tomorrow we will break through." The following day they will find the wall as they had left it the
previous day (i.e. it will not have returned to its orginal state) and after breaking the remaining part of it
they will emerge."
(Ahmad, Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah)
Commenting on the above hadith, Allamah Ibn Arabi says, Three miracles are evident in this Hadith:
1.) It never occurs to these tribes that they must continue work during the night. After all, they are
in such large numbers that they can easily delegate the work among themselves and work in
shifts. But Allah does not allow this thought to occur to them.
2.) It never occurs to them that they can merely cross the mountains or scale the wall, which
they can do through the aid of equipment and implements wich they possess in large numbers.
According to a narration by Wahab ibn Munabbah it is known that these tribes are agriculturists
and artisians possessing various types of equipment.
3.) The thought of saying "If Allah wills" never enters their minds and it will only occur to them to
say it when Allah wills that they be released.
from: "Signs of Qiyamah"
by Mohammed Ali Ibn Zubair Ali

Yajuj and Majuj: The Disbelievers

http://www.islamonline.net/

First of all, wed like to stress that what we know for certain is that Gog and Magog are
descendants of Adam who will appear before the end of the world. All information about them
should be taken from the Quran and authentic Sunnah. We should not crave for tiny details,
because it is a matter of unseen or unknown things which are known only to Almighty Allah.
In this context, Sheikh M. S. Al-Munajjid, a prominent Saudi Muslim lecturer and author, states:
Yajuj and Majuj are two disbelieving tribes from among the sons of Adam. They used to
spread mischief on earth, so Allah gave Dhul-Qarnayn the power to build a barrier to detain
them. They will keep on digging at it until Allah gives them permission to come out at the end of
time, after `Isa (peace be upon him) has killed the Dajjal. They will emerge in huge numbers and
will drink up the lake of Tiberias (in Palestine). They will spread mischief on earth and no one
will be able to resist them. `Isa (peace be upon him) and the believers with him will take refuge
in Mount Tur until Allah destroys Ya'juj and Ma'juj by sending worms that will eat their necks.
Then Allah will send rain to wash away their bodies into the sea and cleanse the earth of their
stench.
Excerpted, with slight modifications, from: www.islam-qa.com
Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi, former President of the Islamic Society of North America, adds:
"Ya'juj and Ma'juj or Gog and Magog are mentioned in the Qur'an in two places in surat al-Kahf
18:94 and in surat al-Anbiya' 21:96. There are several ahadith of the Prophet (peace and
blessings be upon him) about them. Gog and Magog are also mentioned in the Bible in the book
of Ezekiel chapters 38-39. Some commentators of the Qur'an under the influence of the Bible
tried to identify them with the people of Russia and Caucasia, but there is no basis for this

neither in the Qur'an nor in the Hadith. We do not need to identify Gog and Magog with any
nation or race. It seems that it is a generic name for some wild, unruly, barbaric, uncivilized and
un-religious people. They were causing trouble in the past and then again they or some people
like them will cause some mischief before the end of the world. It is reported in the ahadith that
Imam Mahdi and Jesus (may Allah be pleased with both of them) will destroy them and then
peace will prevail on this earth. May Allah protect us from their trials, Ameen."
Elaborating on this, wed like to cite for you the following:
Gog and Magog (two tribes or two peoples) will appear at the time of the second coming of
Jesus son of Mary (peace be upon him) before the end of the world, soon after the Dajjal (antiChrist). Almighty Allah will destroy them all in one night, in response to the supplication of
Jesus.
Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) reports that the Prophet (peace and blessings be
upon him) said: Every day, Gog and Magog try to dig a way out through the barrier. When they
begin to see sunlight through it, the one who is in charge of them says, Go back; you can carry
on digging tomorrow, and when they come back, the barrier becomes stronger than it was
before. This will continue until their time comes and Allah wishes to send them forth. They will
dig until they begin to see sunlight, then the one who is in charge of them will say, Go back;
you can carry on digging tomorrow, InshaAllah. In this case, he will make an exception by
saying InshaAllah, thus relating the matter to the Will of Allah. They will return on the
following day, and find the hole exactly as they left it. They will carry on digging and come out
against the people. They will drink all the water, and find the hole exactly as they left it, and the
people will entrench themselves in their fortresses. Gog and Magog will fire their arrows into the
sky, and they will fall back to earth with something like blood on them. Gog and Magog will say,
We have defeated the people of earth, and overcome the people of Heaven. Then Allah will
send a kind of worm in the napes of their necks, and they will be killed by it... By Him in
Whose Hand the soul of Muhammad is, the beasts of the earth will become fat. (Reported by
At-Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah, and Ahmad)
Gog and Magog were at the time of Dhul-Qarnayn. Dhul-Qarnayn was a good man and a great
king. Allah gave him great power, and he ruled the East and West. He held sway over all kings
and countries, and traveled far and wide in both East and West. He traveled eastwards until he
reached a passage between two hills, through which people were coming out. Those people did
not understand anything, because they were so isolated; they were Gog and Magog. They were
spreading corruption through the earth, and harming the people, so the people sought help from
Dhul-Qarnayn. They asked him to build a barrier between them and Gog and Magog. He sought
their help in building it, so together they built a barrier by mixing iron and copper.
Thus Dhul-Qarnayn restrained Gog and Magog behind the barrier. They tried to penetrate the
barrier, or to climb over it, but to no avail. They could not succeed because the barrier was so
huge and smooth. So they began to dig, and they have been digging for centuries; they will
continue to do so until such a time when Allah decrees that they come out. At that time a hole
will be made in the barrier, and Gog and Magog will rush out in all directions, spreading

corruption, uprooting plants, and killing people. When Jesus (peace be upon him) invoke Allah
against them, Allah will send a kind of worm in the napes of their necks, and in the morning they
would perish like one single person.
Based on Ibn Kathirs Al-Bidayah wa an-Nihayah (The Beginning and the End)
The Quran narrates this story saying: They ask thee concerning Dhul-Qarnayn. Say, I will
rehearse to you something of his story.? Verily we established his power on earth, and we gave
him the ways and the means to all ends. One (such) way he followed, until, when he reached the
setting of the sun, he found it set in a spring of murky water: near it he found a people: we said:
O Dhul-Qarnayn (thou hast authority,) either to punish them, or to treat them with kindness. He
said: whoever doth wrong, him shall we punish; then shall he be sent back to his Lord; and he
will punish him with a punishment unheard of (before). But whoever believes, and works
righteousness, he shall have a goodly reward, and easy will be his task as we order it by our
command. Then followed he (another) way, until, when he came to the rising of the sun, he
found it rising on a people for whom we had provided no covering protection against the sun.
(He left them) as they were: we completely understood what was before him. Then followed he
(another) way, until, when he reached (a tract) between two mountains, he found, beneath them,
a people who scarcely understood a word. They said: O Dhul-Qarnayn the Gog and Magog
(people) do great mischief on earth: shall we then render thee tribute in order that thou mightest
erect a barrier between us and them? He said: (the power) in which my Lord has established me
is better (than tribute): help me therefore with strength (and labor): I will erect a strong barrier
between you and them: Bring me blocks of iron. At length, when he had filled up the space
between the two steep mountain sides, he said, blow (with your bellows) then, when he had
made it (red) as fire, he said: bring me, that I may pour over it, molten lead. Thus were they
made powerless to scale it or to dig through it.? He said: this is a mercy from my Lord: but when
the promise of my Lord comes to pass, he will make it into dust; and the promise of my Lord is
true. (Al-Kahf: 83-97)
Zaynab bint Jahsh (may Allah be pleased with her) narrates that the Prophet (peace and blessings
be upon him) once came to her in a state of fear, and said, None has the right to be worshipped
but Allah. Woe unto the Arabs from a danger that has drawn near. An opening has been made in
the dam of Gog and Magog like this, (making a circle with his thumb and index finger.) Zaynab
bint Jahsh said, O Messenger of Allah! Shall we be destroyed even though there are pious
persons among us? He said, Yes, when corruption increases.
Allah Almighty knows best.

Yajuj wa Ma'juj (Gog and Magog)

Courtesy: Excerpted from The Next World Order by Ahmad Thomson, Copyright 1994.

http://muslimsonline.com/

... The great Muslim scholar, Ibn Kathir, when discussing the origins of Yajuj wa Majuj
(Gog and Magog) - the people who traditionally inhabited the area between the Black Sea and
the Caspian Sea, which is where the Khazar kingdom was originally situated - in his historical
work, Al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah (The Beginning and the End), specifically states that "Gog and
Magog are two groups of Turks, descended from Yafith (Japheth), the father of the Turks, one of
the sons of Noah."
It is interesting to note in passing that one of the questions which Hasdai ibn Shaprut [the
treasurer, court physician and minister of (Caliph) Abdar-Rahman III (912-961 A.D.) in
Spain] asked in his letter to [Khazar] King Joseph was whether the tribe of the Khazar
Jews had any connection with the lost ten tribes - that is, the ten tribes of the Tribe of Israel
who, as we have already seen, became known as the Israelites (as opposed to the other two, who
became known as the Judahites), and who were disowned by the Judahites, and who
'disappeared' after becoming conquered by the Assyrians [in 721 B.C.].
King Joseph categorically stated in his reply that there was no such connection whatsoever.
In providing a genealogy of his people, King Joseph, writes Arthur Koestler in his
book, The Thirteenth Tribe, "cannot, and does not, claim for them Semitic descent; he
traces their ancestry not to Shem but to Noah's third son, Japheth; or more precisely to
Japheth's grandson, Togarma, the ancestor of all Turkish tribes."
The Jewish Encyclopaedia says that the Judaist scholars had no doubt as to the genuineness of
this correspondence, in which the word Ashkenazi first occurs as denoting this sharply-outlined,
hitherto unknown group of "Eastern Jews" and as indicating Slav associations.
This answer of King Joseph is very significant, not only because it demonstrates conclusively
that the Khazar Jews are not semitic, but also because, as we shall see in greater detail later on in

this book, insh'Allah, the uncle of Togarma, according to Genesis 10.2-3, was Magog.
This means that it is highly likely that the prophecies in The Bible and in the Qur'an, together
with the prophecies made by the Prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace,
concerning Gog and Magog, are directly relevant to the activities and destiny of the Khazar
Jews.
... It is therefore clear that the Khazar Jews are not descended from any of the original twelve
tribes that formed the original Tribe of Israel, but rather are directly related to the people of Gog
and Magog.
Furthermore, it is important to note - since some authors, including Michael Rice, appear to be
under the impression that term 'Ashkenazim' originated amongst those Jews of Spain who
moved on to Eastern Europe when they were expelled in 1493 - that Ashkenaz was the name of
a son of Gomer, who was a son Japheth, a son of Noah. 'Ashkenazi' derives directly from the
Khazar Jews, not from the Sephardhic Jews.
Although it can certainly be argued that the Sephardhim and the Ashkenazim are related insofar
as they ultimately trace their ancestry back to two brothers, Shem and Japheth, two of the of
the sons of Noah, peace be on him, it is clear that certainly by the time of Moses, peace be on
him, the descendants of these two brothers had become entirely different peoples, inhabiting
entirely different areas of the world, and speaking entirely different languages. No rational being
could possibly argue that the original Tribe of Israel and the contemporary Turkic ancestors of
the Khazars were one and the same people.
There are other recorded references to contact being made between these two main groups of
Jews: Professor Graetz, for example, when describing the eventual collapse [in the second half
of Tenth century A.D.] of the Jewish Khazar kingdom, states, "As though Andalusia were a
Jewish state, the sons of the last chagan or king of the Khazars, like those of the exilarch,
also sought refuge in Spain."
Similarly, Abraham ben Daud in his book, Sefer ha-Kabbalah, written in 1161 [about one-half
century before the fall of Toledo to Christians], states that he had "seen in Toledo some of their
descendants, pupils of the wise, and they told us that the remnant of them followed the
Rabbanite faith."
It would appear, however, from the overall lack of recorded references to contact between these
two very different groups of Jews, that any contact between the Khazar Jews in Russia and the
Sephardhic Jews in Spain, during the period of Muslim rule in Spain, was of a limited nature perhaps partly because the Khazars in the East were viewed with a certain degree of suspicion by
the Sephardhim in the West.
It is interesting to note that some commentators on the Qur'an do equate these European
Khazar Jews who are not Jews with 'Jewj wa ma Jewj - a people who are described in the
Qur'an as spreading over the face of the earth and creating mischief. Classical European

scholars identify Jewj wa ma Jewj with Gog and Magog, who, as we have already seen earlier,
originally lived in the area of land that lies between the Black sea and the Caspian sea - and from
whom King Joseph of the Khazars claimed his ancestry.
Indeed it is also interesting to note in passing that the Muslim historian, At-Tabari, relates
accounts of at least two expeditions made by the early Muslims to find and examine the wall that
had been erected - as described in the Qur'an - by Dhu'l-Qarnayn (who, some say, was in fact
Alexander the Great), in order to prevent Gog and Magog spreading south through the Caucasus.
D. M. Dunlop refers to these accounts in his book, The History of the Jewish Khazars, stating
that the wall in question was "the Caucasus fortification (dating from pre-Islamic times) known
as the Wall of Darband", and observing that "successive courses of bright and dark material
(copper and iron) are the most prominent feature of both accounts, which of course may be
influenced by the Qur'an passage in which iron and molten brass are mentioned.
Ibn Kathir, in his book Al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah - The Beginning and the End, provides
this general summary - part of which has already been quoted - of the history and future of Gog
and Magog (who are usually referred to as 'the Huns' by modern historians), and of the building
of the wall by Dhu'l-Qarnayn:
Gog and Magog are two groups of Turks, descended from Yafith (Japheth), the father of the
Turks, one of the sons of Noah. At the time of Abraham, peace be on him, there was a king
called Dhu'l-Qarnayn. He performed Tawaf around the Ka'bah with Abraham, peace be on him,
when he first built it; he believed and followed him. Dhu'l-Qarnayn was a good man and a
great king; Allah gave him great power and he ruled the east and west. He held sway over all
kings and countries, and travelled far and wide in both east and west. He travelled eastwards
until he reached a pass between two mountains, through which people were coming out. They
did not understand anything, because they were so isolated; they were Gog and Magog. They
were spreading corruption through the earth, and harming the people, so the people sought help
from Dhu'l Qarnayn. They asked him to build a barrier between them and Gog and Magog. He
asked them to help him to build it, so together they built a barrier by mixing iron, copper and tar.
Thus Dhu'l-Qarnayn restrained Gog and Magog behind the barrier. They tried to penetrate the
barrier, or to climb over it, but to no avail. They could not succeed because the barrier is so huge
and smooth. They began to dig and they have been digging for centuries; they will continue to
do so until the time when Allah decrees that they come out. At that time the barrier will collapse,
and Gog and Magog will rush out in all directions, spreading corruption, uprooting plants,
killing people. When Jesus, peace be on him, prays against them, Allah will send a kind of worm
in the napes of their necks, and they will be killed by it.
Clearly this barrier has now long been breached, and Gog and Magog have now spread
everywhere, doing what it has been decreed they must do, until it is time for them to meet
their final end after Jesus, peace be on him, has returned to this earth.
It is thus even more interesting to note in passing that one of the prophecies in Ezekiel,
contained in chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine, and addressed to Gog the "prince of Rosh"

(Russia), states that the people of Gog, from "the land of Magog", will come from their place "in
the far north, you and many nations with you" and invade "the mountains of Israel", spreading
out "like a cloud that covers the land". Eventually there will be a mighty battle in which the
hordes of Gog will be destroyed, and their remains either devoured by carrion or buried in "the
Valley of Hamon Gog", near Hamonah.

As D. M. Dunlop points out in his book, The History of the Jewish Khazars:
... When Khazar kingdom began to fragment [in the second half of Tenth century A.D.], and they
began to disperse, suffering the same kind of trials and tribulations as had their Sephardhic
counterparts as they went. The Ashkenazim spread northwards into Russia, and then westwards
into the rest of Europe. Wherever they went, they met with considerable opposition from the
mediaeval European 'Christians' who, because they mistakenly believed that Jesus had been
crucified - an event which, ironically, had never taken place - and that the Jews had been partly
responsible for that alleged crucifiction, persecuted them as 'murderers of Christ'. The Khazar
Jews had not only inherited the obsolete religion of the Sephardhic Jews, but also the stigma
attached to them by the European Christians.
It was partly because of this persecution by the mediaeval European Christians that the
European Jews were constantly kept on the move, right across Europe and even into Spain,
where they were treated with far greater toleration by its Muslim rulers, in accordance
with the Dhimma Contract, until the Spanish Inquisition took over. At the turn of the
present century, large numbers of the Ashkenazim migrated to America, their land of hope
and promise.
This gradual dispersion of the Khazar Jews up into central Russia and across into the rest of
Europe and eventually beyond is described by Michael Rice in his book, False Inheritance.
They came to represent an important stratum in the lineage of the Ashkenazi Jews, having
migrated into Poland, Lithuania and Hungary... Although some of today's Ashkenazi Jews
attempt to deny their origins - for obvious reasons - there is no dispute about the truth of the
Khazar Jews' origins and history, which, as Michael Rice points out, were well-established by
reputable and distinguished scholars long before they became the subject of any controversy...

When the Muslims in Spain began to grow decadent, and abandon the original teachings of
Islam, they became divided amongst themselves and began to fight each other. Under these
circumstances, ... the Christians continued to push southwards in what they described as their
'Reconquest'. By 1236 A.D., the Christians had reconquered all of Spain except Granada and the
territory that immediately surrounded it. During this process of reconquest, the Jews ...
migrated from Muslim territory to Christian territory whenever it seemed expedient to do so.
The Sephardhic Jews had no real allegiance to either the Muslims or the Christians, but simply
chose to recognise the rulers who were most likely to treat them the most favourably under

whatever circumstances prevailed at the time. ... the Christians were content with this state of
affairs, for not only were the Muslims further weakened as a result of the Jews' transfer of
alliance, but also the Jews were an important source of much needed income, both as a result of
the taxes that were imposed on them by the Christians, and by virtue of the more wealthy Jews
being in a position to finance the Reconquest by means of financial loans... Furthermore, since
many of the Jews were by Christian standards extremely well-educated and very able
administrators, it was inevitable that the Christians Soon began to rely on the Jews to teach them
what they did not know and to administer their society on their behalf...
The Moors remained in Spain for nearly eight hundred years. When the Spanish reconquest was
completed in 1492 the [Sephardhim] Jews, as well as the Moors, were expelled, and the "centre"
of Talmudic government was then transferred to Poland..... The Sephardhim, then neither went to
Poland nor mingled with other Jews, when they left the Spanish Peninsula and spread over
Western Europe. They remained aloof and apart, "looked down" on others professing to be Jews,
and lost their authority. (The Judaist reference works also give curious estimates of the decline in
their proportion of Jewry, from a large minority to a small minority; these seem beyond
biological explanation and probably are not trustworthy).
At that point, less than four centuries before our own generation, a significant mystery enters the
story of Zion: why was the government set up in Poland? Up to that stage the annals reveal no
trace of any large migration of Jews to Poland. The Jews who entered Spain with the Moors
came from North Africa and when they left most of them returned thither or went to Egypt,
Palestine, Italy, the Greek islands and Turkey. Other colonies had appeared in France, Germany,
Holland and England and these were enlarged by the arrival among them of Jews from the
Spanish Peninsula. There is no record that any substantial number of Spanish Jews went to
Poland, or that any Jewish mass-migration to Poland had occurred at any earlier time.
... From the moment when "the centre" was transferred to Poland these Asiatics [the Khazars]
began to move towards, and later to enter the West in the guise of "Jews" and they brought
Europe to its greatest crisis. Though their conversion had occurred so long before they were so
remote that the world might never have known of them, had not the Talmudic centre been set up
among them, so that they came to group themselves around it. ...When they became known, as
"Eastem Jews", they profited by the confusing effect of the contraction of the word Judahite, or
Judean, to "Jew"; none would ever have believed that they were Judahites or Judeans. From the
time when they took over the leadership of Jewry the dogma of "the return" to Palestine was
preached in the name of people who had no Semitic blood or ancestral link with Palestine
whatever!
Thus it is clear that the Ashkenazim were not descended from any of the Hebrews, or from any
of the twelve tribes of the Tribe of Israel, and especially not from the tribes of Judah or Levi.
... Once again, a virtually independent state was formed within the Polish state, which like
so many states before and after showed the greatest benevolence to the nation-within-nations
that took shape within its gates... The Talmudists were allowed to draw up "a constitution", and
through the 1500's and 1600's the Jews in Poland lived under "an autonomous government", the

Kahal. In its own territory the Kahal was a fully-empowered government, under Polish
suzerainty. It had independent authority of taxation in the ghettoes and communities, being
responsible for payment of a global sum to the Polish government. It passed laws regulating
every action and transaction between man and man and had power to try, judge, convict or
acquit.

... the claim of the Sephardhim to a right to live in the Holy Land was clearly far more
convincing than that of the Ashkenazim. Some of them were already settled in the Holy Land,
and many others were living relatively near it. Most of them spoke Arabic. They were already an
integral part of Middle Eastern culture. A sudden influx of Sephardhim into the Holy Land
would not be nearly so dramatic or noticeable as a sudden influx of Ashkenazim from Europe,
strangers from a different culture, speaking different languages - especially Yiddish - and from a
completely different social background. This is why the Ashkenazim concentrated on creating a
need amongst the Sephardhim for a Jewish Homeland by arousing Arab feelings against them.
Once the need for the Homeland was established [1917 Balfour Declaration], and then the
Homeland itself was established, it was much easier for the Ashkenazim to enter the Holy Land
hiding under the 'Jewish' umbrella: They call themselves Jews, they behave like Jews, so they
must be Jews - even though in fact they were, and are, not real Tribe of Israel Jews.
End of the Excerpt.

Some Hadiths on "The Signs Before The Last Day"

Note: The sequence of these events is known only to Allah (SWT).

... Zaynab bint Jahsh said, The Prophet (sallallah alayhe wa sallam) got up from his sleep; his
face was flushed and he said, There is no god but Allah. Woe to the Arabs, for a great evil which
is nearly approaching them. Today a gap has been made in the wall of Gog and Magog like
this (Sufyan illustrated this by forming the number of 90 or 100 with his fingers). Someone
asked, Shall we be destroyed even though there are righteous people among us? The Prophet
said, Yes, if evil increases. (Bukhari).
Abu Hurairah (radiallahu anhu) said, The Prophet said, TIME WILL PASS RAPIDLY,
knowledge will decrease, miserliness will become widespread in peoples hearts, afflictions will
appear, and THERE WILL BE MUCH HARJ. The people asked, O Messenger of Allah, what is
Harj? He said, KILLING, KILLING! (Bukhari).
"The Prophet (sallallahu alayhe wa sallam) said, 'I fear for you in other matters besides the
Dajjal... The DAJJAL will be a young man, with short, curly hair, and one eye floating. I would
liken him to 'Abd al-Uzza ibn Qatan. Whoever amongst you lives to see him should recite the
opening Ayat of Surat al-Kahf. HE WILL APPEAR ON THE WAY BETWEEN SYRIA AND

IRAQ, and will create disaster left and right. O servants of Allah, adhere to the Path of Truth..."
"... At that point, Allah will send the MESSIAH, SON OF MARY, and he will descend to the
white minaret in the east of Damascus, wearing two garments dyed with saffron, placing his
hands on the wings of two angels. When he lowers his head, beads of perspiration will fall from
it, and when he raises his head, beads like pearls will scatter from it. Every Kafir who smells his
fragrance will die, and his breath will reach as far as he can see. HE WILL SEARCH FOR THE
DAJJAL until he finds him at the gate of LUDD (the biblical LYDDA, now known as LOD in
Israel), where he will kill him..."
"...Then Allah will send GOG and MAGOG, and they will swarm down from every slope. The
first of them will pass by the Lake of Tiberias (in Palestine), and will drink some of its WATER;
the last of them will pass by it and say, "THERE USED TO BE WATER HERE." Jesus, the
Prophet of Allah, and his Companions will be besieged until a bull's head will be dearer to them
than one hundred dinars are to you nowadays."
Abu Hurairah reported that the Prophet (sallallahu alayhe wa sallam) said, "...GOG and
MAGOG WILL FIRE THEIR ARROWS INTO THE SKY, AND THEY WILL FALL BACK TO
EARTH WITH SOMETHING LIKE BLOOD ON THEM. Gog and Magog will say, 'WE HAVE
DEFEATED THE PEOPLE OF EARTH, AND OVERCOME THE PEOPLE OF HEAVEN.
Then Allah will send a kind of worm in the napes of their necks, and they will be killed by it'..."
Abu Hurairah said, The Prophet said, The HOUR will not come until the following events have
come to pass: two large groups will fight the another, and there will be many casualties; they will
both be following the same religious teaching. Nearly THIRTY DAJJALS will appear, each of
them falsely claiming to be a Messenger from Allah. Knowledge will disappear, earthquakes will
increase, time will pass quickly, afflictions will appear, and HARJ (ie KILLING) will increase.
Wealth will increase, so that a wealthy man will worry lest no-one accept his Zakat, and when he
offers it to anyone, that person will say, I am not in need of it. People will compete in
constructing high buildings. When a man passes by someones grave, he will say, Would that I
were in his place! The sun will rise from the west; when it rises and the people see it, they will
believe, but, [No good will it do to a soul to believe in them then, if it believed not before nor
earned righteousness through its faith ... (Al-Anam 6:158)].
Dhu Mukhammar said, "The Prophet (pbuh) said, 'You will make a peace-treaty with the
Romans, and together you will invade an enemy beyond Rome. You will be victorious and take
much booty. Then you will camp in a hilly pasture; one of the Roman men will come and raise a
cross and say "Victory to the Cross", so one of the Muslims will come and kill him. Then the
ROMANS WILL BREAK THE TREATY, and there will be a battle. They will GATHER AN
ARMY AGAINST YOU AND COME AGAINST YOU WITH EIGHTY BANNERS, EACH
BANNER FOLLOWED BY 10,000 MEN.' " (Ahmad, Abu Dawud, Ibn Majah.)
Thawban (RA) said that the Messenger of Allah (sallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam) said, "TWO
GROUPS of my umma Allah has protected from the hellfire: A GROUP THAT WILL
CONQUER INDIA AND A GROUP THAT WILL BE WITH 'ISA B. MARYAM - 'alaihimas-

salat was-salam." Reported Ahmad, an-Nisa'i, and at-Tabarani.

Na'im b. Hammad in al-Fitan reports that Abu Huraira (RA) said that the Messenger of Allah
(sallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam) mentioned India and said, "A GROUP OF YOU WILL CONQUER
INDIA, ALLAH WILL OPEN FOR THEM [INDIA] UNTIL THEY COME WITH ITS KINGS
CHAINED - Allah having forgiven their sins - WHEN THEY RETURN BACK [FROM
INDIA], THEY WILL FIND IBN MARYAM IN SYRIA."

Islam - A Religion of Terror ?

Invitation to Islam, Issue 5, October 1998
A bomb goes off in a marketplace in Jerusalem. A suicide bomber launches himself into a
bus full of women and children in Tel Aviv. Foreign tourists get massacred at a holiday resort
in Luxor, Egypt. Villages upon villages get annihilated in Algeria. The list of events
worldwide which have come to symbolise the 'Islamic terror' are endless. From the times in
the 70's and 80's when Pan Am and TWA aeroplanes would be highjacked, to the mid 80's
in war torn Lebanon where Americans and Europeans would be held as hostages for years;
all such incidents have come to be identified with the religion of Islam. Such incidents from
past and present have undoubtedly affected Muslims worldwide and more so in the West.
Any Muslim, who wants to practice his/her religion and expresses the pious desire to live
under the banner of Islam, is labelled a fundamentalist or extremist. Any Muslim man who
walks down a busy street in London or Paris (and Paris moreso) with a beard and a scarf on
his head, is looked upon as being a terrorist who's probably got an AK47 stashed

somewhere on his person. Muslim women who are veiled can't go anywhere in the Western
world without being taunted as being oppressed or being mad (for covering up). However,
are such beliefs and opinions about Islam really justified?
Exploding the myth
One of the many short comings which has arisen in the West, is judging Islam by the
conduct of a minority of its people. By doing this, segments of Western society have
deliberately played off the desperate actions of many Muslims, and have given it the name
of Islam. Such behaviour is clearly not objective and seeks to distort the reality of Islam.
For if such a thing was done - judge a religion by the conduct of its people - then we too
could say that all Christianity is about is child molesting and homosexuality [1] whilst
Hinduism was all about looting and breaking up mosques [2]. Generalising in such a
manner is not seen as being objective, yet we find that the Western world is foremost in
propagating this outlook on Islam. So what is the reality of Islam? How does one dispel the
myths which have been created and spread so viciously? The only way to examine Islam is
to simply examine its belief system. Look at its sources, the Qur'an and Sunna, and see
what they have to say. This is the way to find the truth about what Islam says about terror,
terrorism and terrorists. One who is sincerely searching for the truth, will do it no other
way. The very name Islam comes from the Arabic root word 'salama' which means peace.
Islam is a religion which is based upon achieving peace through the submission to the will
of Allah. Thus, by this very simple linguistic definition, one can ascertain as to what the
nature of this religion is. If such a religion is based on the notion of peace, then how is it
that so many acts done by its adherents are contrary to peace? The answer is simple. Such
actions, if not sanctioned by the religion, have no place with it. They are not Islamic and
should not be thought of as Islamic.
Jihad
The word jihad sends shivers down the spines of many Westerners. They readily equate this
term with violence and oppression. However, it must be said that the meaning of jihad, as a
'holy war', is something which is totally foreign and not from Islam. If anything, such a
description belongs more so to Christianity and its adherents. It was terms like this which
were used to justify the slaughter and pillage of towns and cities during the crusades by the
Christians. By simply looking into the sources of Islam, one is able to know that the true
meaning of jihad is to strive/make effort in the way of Allah. Thus striving in the way of
Allah can be both peaceful and physical. The Prophet Muhammed (saws) said:
"The best jihad is (by) the one who strives against his own self for Allah, The Mighty and
Majestic" [3]
In the Qur'an, Allah also says:
"So obey not the disbelievers, but make a great jihad (effort) against them (by preaching)
with it (the Qur'an)"
(Surah Al-Furqan 25:52)

By controlling and fighting against ones desires, the Muslims can then also physically exert
themselves in the path of Allah. It is this physical or combative jihad which receives so
much criticism. Because of the sheer ignorance of this type of jihad Islam is regarded as
terror, and Muslims are regarded as terrorists. However, the very purpose of this physical

jihad is to raise the word of Allah uppermost. By doing this, it liberates and emancipates all
those who are crying out for freedom all over the world. If the likes of the pacifists of this
world had their way, then the world would indeed be full of anarchy and mischief. The
combative jihad seeks to correct this as Allah says in the Qur'an:
"And if Allah did not check one set of people by means of another, the Earth would be full of
mischief. But Allah is full of bounty to the worlds"
(Surah Al-Baqarah 2:251)

Such would be the corruption on this Earth if there had never been a combative jihad that
Allah says:
"For had it not been that Allah checks one set of people by means of another, monasteries,
churches, synagogues and mosques, wherein the name of Allah is mentioned much, would
surely have been pulled down. Indeed Allah will help those who help His (cause). Truly Allah
is All strong, All mighty"
(Surah Al-Hajj 22:40)

This combative jihad being both defensive and offensive, is something which is commanded
by Allah upon the Muslims. Through this command the oppressed and weak are rescued
from the tyranny of the world:

"And what is the matter with you that you do not fight in the cause of Allah and for those
weak, ill treated and oppressed among men, women and children whose only cry is; 'Our
Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors and raise for us from you one
who will protect and raise for us from you one who will help"
(Surah An-Nisa 4:75)

Anyone who knows the early history of Islam, will know that all those nations and empires
which came under the fold of Islam were indeed previously oppressed. When the
companions of the Prophet Muhammed (saws) went out for the offensive jihad against the
Egyptians, the Persians and the Romans, we find that the people did not resist against them
at all. Rather, they accepted Islam on such a scale, that it is inconceivable that the jihad of
Islam could be anything other then a liberation for these people; a liberation from centuries
of tyranny. In fact, with the Byzantine Egyptians and the people of Spain, the Muslims were
even beckoned to come and liberate these lands from the oppression of their kings. This is
the glorious track record of the Muslim jihad. Compare this with the brutal track record of
warfare in the Western world over the centuries. From the crusades against the Muslims to
the days of colonial warfare, the Western world has killed, destroyed and plundered
everything which has come in its way. Even today this merciless killing goes on by the
Western nations. While claiming to be about world peace and security, Western nations are
ready to bomb innocent civilians at the drop of a hat. The classic example of this is the
recent bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan. Whilst claiming that Sudan and Afghanistan
were havens for Islamic terrorists, the bombings of these two nations could not have come
at a better time for the American president Bill Clinton. The destruction of innocent lives
which were a result of these bombings clearly seem to have been an attempt by Clinton to
avert attention away from his sexual misdemeanours; [4] something which he so often gets
caught up in. Without doubt this was the reason for such terror from the American military
upon innocent people. This is the same American military which claims to enter the worlds

trouble spots under the guise of being peace keepers. But

" when it is said to them; 'Make not mischief on the Earth', they say; 'We are only peace
makers'. Indeed they are the ones who make mischief, but they perceive it not"
(Surah Al-Baqarah 2:11-12)

The hypocrisy of the West is indeed astounding.

By looking at the rules and regulations of this combative jihad it will be clear to any sincere
person that this is indeed the religion of truth. When fighting an unjust enemy, no matter
how unjust they are, it is forbidden by Islam that their retreating forces are mutilated,
tortured or slaughtered. The treacherous violation of treaties and carrying out
assassinations after a cease fire, are also prohibited. Allah says in the Qur'an:

"And fight in the way of Allah those who fight you. But do not transgress the limits. Truly
Allah loves not the transgressors"
(Surah Al-Baqarah 2:190)

Not transgressing the limits means not to kill women and children, for the Messenger of
Allah (saws) "forbade the killing of women and children" [5]. Not transgressing the limits
means that the elderly, the sick, monks, worshippers and hired labourers are not attacked.
Not transgressing the limits means not killing animals wantonly, burning crops and
vegetation, polluting waters and destroying homes, monasteries, churches and synagogues:
"Allah does not forbid you to deal justly and kindly with those who fought not against you
on account of religion, nor drove you out of your homes. Indeed, Allah loves those who deal
with equity"
(Surah Al-Mumtahinah 60:8)

After reading such passages from the Qur'an and knowing about what Islam commands and
prohibits in jihad, the rules of warfare are given a new meaning; a meaning of justice. How
sad it is then, that whilst Islam is condemned for striking terror into the hearts of the
people, the likes of the Serbs, the Indian army in Kashmir and the Israeli soldiers in
Palestine are left untarnished for the atrocities they have committed in the name of
warfare.
So what about suicide bombing, is this too a part of jihad in Allah's path? From what has
already been stated above, it can be deduced that this is not from the religion. However,
unfortunately many Muslims have taken suicide bombing as being a virtuous act by which
one receives reward. This could not be further from the truth. The Prophet (saws) said:
"Those who go to extremes are destroyed" [6]. Suicide bombing is undoubtedly an
extremity which has reached the ranks of the Muslims. In the rules of warfare, we find no
sanction for such an act from the behaviour and words of the Prophet Muhammed (saws)
and his companions. Unfortunately, today (some misguided) Muslims believe that such acts
are paving the way for an Islamic revival and a return to the rule of Islam's glorious law.
However, we fail to bear in mind that the Prophet (saws) said:
"Do not be delighted by the action of anyone, until you see how he ends up" [7]
So, for example what is the end of a suicide bomber in Palestine?, a leg here, an arm there.

Massive retaliation by the Israeli's in the West Bank and Gaza. More Muslims killed and
persecuted. How can we be delighted with such an end? What really hammers the final nail
in the coffin of this act, is that it is suicide; something which is clearly forbidden in Islam.
The Messenger of Allah (saws) said:
"He who kills himself with anything, Allah will torment him with that in the fire of Hell" [8]
Some are under the misconception that by killing oneself for an Islamic cause, one commits
an act which deserves Paradise. Once when a man killed himself, the Prophet (saws)
said: "He is a dweller of the Fire". When the people were surprised at this, the Prophet
(saws) said:
"A person performs the deeds which to the people appears to be the deeds befitting the
dweller of Paradise, but he is in fact one of the dwellers of the Fire" [9]
The taking of ones life which Allah has given as a trust to the human, is a great sin.
Likewise the taking of other lives (which is so often the case with suicide bombing) is also
forbidden, as human life is indeed precious:
"...If anyone killed a person not in retaliation for murder or to spread mischief in the land, it
would be as if he killed the whole of mankind. And (likewise) if anyone saved a life, it would
be as if he saved the whole of mankind"
(Surah Al-Maaida 5:32)

Thus, all other types of extremities such as hostage taking, hijacking and planting bombs in
public places, are clearly forbidden in Islam.
The Media
By going through the teachings of Islam, it is clear that such a religion has only come to
benefit mankind - not to destroy it. So why is there so much hatred for this noble religion in
the West? The answer is simple, the media. It is the Jewish influenced media of the West
which has portrayed Islam to be something that it is not. During the 70's and 80's when the
PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) were carrying out daring highjacks on the worlds
airways, the media in the West portrayed it as being Islamic. When the Shi'ite suicide
bombers of the 80's were causing so much havoc in the Lebanon and in the Gulf region, the
media in the West portrayed it as a part of Islam. However, it is known by the heads of the
media that the likes of the PLO were not an Islamic organisation, and that according to
Islam, Shi'ites are outside the fold of Islam [10]. Yet such facts are never portrayed by a
media which seeks to cover the truth of this religion. A number of years ago, when the
Oklahoma City bomb went off, a headline in one of the newspapers, 'Today' [11], summed
up this attitude. With a picture of a fire fighter holding a dead child in his arms, the headline
read: "In The Name of Islam" Time has of course proven that this bigoted assumption was
incorrect, as Timothy McVeigh, a right wing radical now faces the death penalty for the
crime [12]. Likewise the bombs which went off in the Paris metro in 1995, were also blamed
on Muslim fanatics. It has now emerged that the Algerian secret service who having
routinely bribed many European journalists and MPs, were actually behind it. The desire to
throw a veil over Islam is immense by these people:
"They intend to put out the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will complete His light
even though the disbelievers hate (it)"

(Surah As-Saff 61:8)

Whilst trying to destroy Islam through this instrument of the media, the Jews clearly try to
portray an image of themselves as being the oppressed people. Every year, we are
reminded as to how many Jews perished under the Nazis in World War II. We are made to
feel sorry for these same people who have gone on to commit so many crimes upon the
Palestinian people. Some may say that this is a racist and biased viewpoint. But we say; If
this media was not run and orchestrated by the Jews and was truly neutral, then why are
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, two former Israeli prime ministers, not held aloft as
being terrorists? Anyone who knows about the history of the Palestinian occupation will tell
you that these two men were members of the Stern Gang and Irgun, two notorious Jewish
terror groups who killed many innocent people [13]. If this media was truly impartial, then
why does it not tell about the extent of the Israeli bombardment and illegal occupation of
Southern Lebanon and its people? [14] And if this media really had nothing against the
religion of Allah, then why does it not inform the people that every day hundreds are
entering the religion of Islam? Such things will never be highlighted in the Western media,
simply because to do so would be against their very interests.
With such immense pressure against it, it is indeed a blessing from Allah that Islam goes
from strength to strength. It continues to grow faster then any other religion in the Western
world, conquering the hearts and minds of thousands. All this should not even surprise us
though, for Allah has promised us that this religion will prevail:
"It is He who has sent His Messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, so that He
may make it victorious over all other religions, even though the disbelievers detest it"
(Surah As-Saff 61:9)

It is a must that humanity comes towards the religion of Islam. Without it, we will continue
to slip down the road of inequity and darkness. With it we can establish a society of justice
and peace. Religion of terror? ... no. The way forward? ... yes.
"There is no compulsion in religion. The right path has indeed become distinct from the
wrong. So whoever rejects false worship and believes in Allah, then he has grasped the
most trustworthy handhold that will never break. And Allah is All Hearing, All Knowing"
(Surah Al-Baqarah 2:256)

Footnotes
1 By using the many cases of child abuse and homosexuality by priests, Such a
generalisation about Christianity could be made
2 By using the incident of the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodya, India in December
1992 by Hindu zealots, such generalisations could be made about Hinduism
3 Authentic - Reported by At-Tabaranee
4 Years of sexual liaison with a White House aide, Monica Lewinski, has been proved against
Mr Clinton. Since this time, a number of other women have also claimed that they have had
affairs with the president. And this is the same man who propagates family values and to
whom millions look up to!
5 Reported by Bukhari - Eng. Trans, Vol.4, p. 160, No. 258
6 Authentic - Reported by Ahmed
7 Authentic - Reported by Ahmed
8 Reported by Muslim - Eng. Trans, Vol. 1, p.62, No.203

9 Reported by Muslim - Eng. Trans, Vol. 1, p.64, No.206

10 The beliefs which are contained in the books of the Shi'ites places them outside of the
fold of Islam generally. However, upon the individual Shi'ite, the proofs need to be
established before one can say that he or she is a disbeliever
11 This newspaper no longer exists
12 It is strange indeed that whilst the Western media criticises Islamic law for being
barbaric and harsh, not a word is said about the fact that McVeigh too will be executed just
as someone would in an Islamic state
13 These two groups killed Arabs, Jews and the British. They are accredited with the
massacre at the village of Deir Yassin, in which many innocent people were butchered
14 Despite the fact that the UN has even made a resolution against Israel for this illegal
occupation, no 'democratic peace loving nation' (like the USA!!) has bothered to implement
it

Islaam and Terrorism

Islaam Spread By The Sword
The common image of Islaam being spread by an Arab on camel back riding in off the desert
with a Quraan in one hand and a scimitar (a curved sword) in the other offering a choice of
either accepting Islaam or losing ones head.
1. As mentioned earlier under the issue of apostasy, forcible conversion is prohibited in
Islaam. The religion did not spread by the sword. There were military confrontations
between the Muslim state and the existing world powers of Rome and Persia. However,

the areas conquered were put under Muslim administration and the populations were free
to maintain their own beliefs. Muslims ruled Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon from the
8th century and sizeable Christian communities continued to exist over the past 13
centuries. Muslims ruled Spain for 700 years and India for 1000 years without the vast
majority of the population converting to Islaam.
2. The largest Muslim country in the world today is Indonesia, having over 200 million
citizens, never saw a Muslim soldier. Islaam spread there and in Malaysia and
Philippines by trade. That was also the case of Islaams spread in West African countries
like Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Chad and Niger. Also, Islaam is the fastest growing
religion in America today with anywhere between 300 and 500 converts daily. This is
taking place without any soldiers or even missionaries.
Terrorism
Terrorism is defined by the American government as the threat or the use of violence to advance
a political cause by individuals or groups, whether acting for or in opposition to established
governmental authority, when such actions are intended to shock, stun, or intimidate a target
group wider than the immediate victims. Actually such a general definition will include all wars
of liberation from the American War of Independence to the French Revolution. The worst
aspect and perhaps the most common feature of terrorism is the unleashing of violence against
innocent civilians.
1. The State of Israel is the most recent example of the establishment of a state by terrorism.
It was established by Jewish terrorist groups, the most infamous of which was the Stern
Gang.
2. The term Muslim terrorist is used to label Islaam as a terrorist religion. However, it is a
misnomer. When IRA bombers struck, they were not labeled as Catholic terrorists even
though the struggle is between Catholic Ireland and Protestant Northern Ireland
supported by Protestant England. Likewise, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the CIA
headquarters in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people, he was not labeled as a
Christian terrorist, though he was Christian and a terrorist. In fact the Muslim
terrorist label was attached to the activities of the PLO who were a mixture of Muslims,
Christians and communists. The PLO is not, nor was it ever, a Muslim organization. It is
a nationalist organization working for the establishment of a secular Palestinian state.
3. The face of terrorism can be seen in the extremist movements of Egypt. Al-Gamaa AlIslamiya (Islamic Group) and Jihaad Movements provided shock troops for a bitter
struggle with Egypts security forces that caused about 1,200 deaths from 1992 to 1997
but failed to topple Hosni Mubaraks secular rule. The Gamaa claimed responsibility for

the Luxor massacre of tourists in November 1997. However, in March 1997 its exiled
leaders declared a unilateral truce and renounced violence. The philosophy of these
movements and their program of action have been loudly condemned by leading Muslim
scholars internationally as well as local Egyptian scholars.
4. The case of Algeria is somewhat more complex. However, it is sufficient to say that the
Islaamic Salvation Front (F.I.S.) - which was poised to win the elections cancelled by the
Algerian military - renounced violent struggle over a year ago, yet the slaughter of
innocents still continues. From the beginning of the civilian slaughters, the F.I.S.
disclaimed them and identified the G.I.A. as the main culprit. Recent reports indicate that
the G.I.A. was created by government secret service agents to discredit the F.I.S.s
military struggle by alienating them from the masses through atrocities.
5. Islaam opposes any form of indiscriminate violence. The Quraan states: Anyone who
has killed another except in retaliation, it is as if he has killed the whole of
humankind. (32:5) There are strict rules regulating how war may be conducted.
Prophet Muhammad forbade the killing of women, children, and old people and the
destruction of Churches and Synagogues or farms. Of course, if women, children or the
elderly bear arms they may be killed in self-defense.
Jihaad
Usually translated by the Western media as holy war is a greatly misunderstood principle in
Islaam. There is no term in Arabic which means holy war. War is not holy in Islaam it is.
1. The meaning of jihaad is striving or struggle. It is used in Islaam to refer to a variety
of different efforts enjoined upon the believers. Striving to keep God and His Messenger
more important than loved ones, wealth and ones own self is the most basic form
of jihaad prescribed on every Muslim. The Prophet said, No one has truly believed until
Allaah and His Messenger becomes more beloved than everything. Doing the righteous
deeds prescribed by God is itself a jihaad. The Prophet was reported to have said, The
best jihaad is the perfect Hajj. On another occasion, someone asked the Prophet if he
should join the jihaad. The Prophet responded by asking him whether his parents were
still alive and when he replied that they were, he said, Make jihaad by serving them.
2. Defending Islaam and the Muslim community is a primary aspect of the
physical jihaad which involves taking up arms against an enemy. God states in the
QuraanPermission to fight has been given to those who have been attacked because
they are wronged. And indeed, Allaah is Most Powerful. (22:39) Fight in the cause
of Allaah against those who fight against you, but do not transgress the limits.
Indeed Allaah does not love transgressors. (2:190). Muslims are also enjoined to fight
against tyranny. The Quraan states, Why shouldnt you fight in the cause of Allaah

and for those oppressed because they are weak. Men, women and children who cry
out, Our Lord! Rescue us from this town of oppressors (4:75)

Does the Quran Teach Violence/Terrorism?

http://www.islamonline.net/fatwa/english/FatwaDisplay.asp?hFatwaID=51761
Question of Fatwa: I hope you scholars will help me get rid of these confusions I have been
having since the Sept 11 incident, especially as regards some Quranic verses. These verses
totally contradict what Muslims say that their religion calls for peace and denounces violence.
Mind you, though not a Muslim, but I dont hate Muslims. I just need shedding light on some
issues. How would you interpret a verse like this (And slay them wherever ye catch them)?
(Al-Baqarah 2: 191) and (But if they turn away, seize them and slay them wherever ye find
them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks) (An-Nisaa' 4: 89) I will
really appreciate your quick reply.
Content of Reply: In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Thanks for the question you posed, its very interesting, and that is why we also try our best to

furnish you with appropriate answer.

In the first place, we would like to stress that when we Muslims state that Islam is a religion of
peace, we are not trying to prove something unreasonable or solve a crossword puzzle. Rather,
we are just stating a fact backed by clear-cut evidence and unquestionable proofs. Even we dont
need to state this fact, for Islam, in itself, is self-explanatory, in terms of its meaning, its noble
teachings and the core of its message conveyed by the Prophets Allah sent to mankind.
Shedding more light on this issue, Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi, former President of the Islamic
Society of North America, states the following:
Thank you very much for your kind words that you do not hate Muslims. Hate is not good for
any person. I want to assure you that we Muslims also do not hate non-Muslims, be they
Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhist or followers of any religion or no religion. Our religion does
not allow killing any innocent person regardless of his or her religion. The life of all human
beings is sacrosanct according to the teachings of the Quran and the guidance of our blessed
Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him and upon all the Prophets and
Messengers of Allah).
The Quran says about the prohibition of murder, (Take not life, which Allah hath made
sacred, except by way of justice and law: thus does He command you, that ye may learn
wisdom.) (Al-An`am 6: 151) and Allah says in the Quran, (Nor take life, which Allah has
made sacred, except for just cause. And if anyone is slain wrongfully, We have given his
heir authority (to demand Qisas or to forgive): but let him not exceed bounds in the matter
of taking life; for he is helped (by the law)) (Al-Israa 17: 33). According to the Quran, killing
any person without a just cause is as big a sin as killing the whole humanity and saving the life
of one person is as good deed as saving the whole humanity. (See Al-Maidah 5: 32)
However, your question is valid, then how come the Quran says, (kill them wherever you find
them) as it is mentioned in Surah Al-Baqarah 2: 191 and Surah An-Nisaa 4: 89. The answer
is simple and that is, you should read these verses in their textual and historical context. You
should read the whole verse and it is better that you read few verses before and few after. Read
the full text and see what is said:
(Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah
loves not transgressors. And kill them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from
where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but
fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight
you, kill them. Such is the reward of those who reject faith. But if they cease, Allah is OftForgiving, Most Merciful. And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression,
and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, let there be no hostility except
to those who practice oppression. The prohibited month, for the prohibited month, and so
for all things prohibited, there is the law of equality. If then any one transgresses the
prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him. But fear Allah, and know that

Allah is with those who restrain themselves.) (Al-Baqarah 2: 190-194)

For your second quotation also read the full text:
(They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as
they): so take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (from what is
forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them;
and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks. Except those who join a
group between whom and you there is a treaty (Of peace), or those who approach you with
hearts restraining them from fighting you as well as fighting their own people. If Allah had
pleased, He could have given them power over you, and they would have fought you:
therefore if they withdraw from you but fight you not, and (instead) send you (guarantees
of) peace, then Allah hath opened no way for you (to war against them). Others you will
find that wish to gain your confidence as well as that of their people: every time they are
sent back to temptation, they succumb thereto; if they withdraw not from you nor give you
(guarantees) of peace besides restraining their hands, seize them and slay them wherever
ye get them; in their case We have provided you with a clear argument against them.) (AnNisaa 4: 89-91)
Now tell me honestly, do these verses give a free permission to kill any one anywhere? These
verses were revealed by God to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), at the
time when Muslims were attacked by the non-Muslims of Makkah on a regular basis. They were
frightening the Muslim community of Madinah. One may say using the contemporary jargon
that there were constant terrorist attacks on Madinah and in this situation Muslims were given
permission to fight back the terrorist. These verses are not a permission for terrorism but
they are a warning against the terrorists. But even in these warnings you can see how much
restraint and care is emphasized.
It is important that we study the religious texts in their proper context. When these texts are not
read in their proper textual and historical contexts they are manipulated and distorted. It is true
that some Muslims manipulate these verses for their own goals. But this is not only with Islamic
texts, it is also true with the texts of other religions. I can quote dozens of verses from the Bible
which seem very violent, if taken out from their historical context. These Biblical texts have
been used by many violent Jewish and Christian groups. Crusaders used them against Muslims
and Jews. Nazis used them against Jews. Recently Serbian Christians used them against Bosnian
Muslims. Zionists are using them regularly against Palestinians.
Let me mention just a few verses from the Old Testament and New Testament and tell me what
do you say about them:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and
clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the
Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and
stronger than you. And when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat
them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no

favor to them. (Deutronomy 7:1-2)

When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to
make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your
forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war
against you, then you shall besiege it. When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you
shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the
animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall
use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you Only in the cities of
these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive
anything that breathes (Deutronomy 20:10-17)
Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man
intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, sparefor yourselves. (Numbers
31:17-18) Even in the New Testament we read the following statement attributed to Jesus saying
to his disciples:
I tell you that to everyone who has, more shall be given, but from the one who does not have,
even what he does have shall be taken away. But these enemies of mine, who did not want me to
reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence." (Luke 19:26-27)
May Allah guide you to the straight path, and guide you to that which pleases Him, Amen.
Allah Almighty knows best.

Tolerance in Islam (Lessons from history)

Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall

http://www.islamicity.com/articles/articles.asp?ref=IC0201-394&p=1

In 1927 Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall gave eight lectures on several aspects of Islamic
civilization at the invitation of The Committee of "Madras Lectures on Islam" in Madras, India.

This was the second in the series, the first one was held in 1925 on "The Life of Prophet
Muhammad (pbuh)." Parts of Pickthall's lectures were made available in India at various times.
All of his lectures were published under the title "The Cultural Side of Islam" in 1961 by Sh.
Muhammad Ashraf Publishers, Lahore from a manuscript provided by M.I. Jamal Moinuddin.
The book has gone through several reprints since then.
An abridged version of his fifth lecture on "Tolerance in Islam" is presented below.

One of the commonest charges brought against Islam historically, and as a religion, by Western
writers is that it is intolerant. This is turning the tables with a vengeance when one remembers
various facts: One remembers that not a Muslim is left alive in Spain or Sicily or Apulia. One
remembers that not a Muslim was left alive and not a mosque left standing in Greece after the
great rebellion in l821. One remembers how the Muslims of the Balkan peninsula, once the
majority, have been systematically reduced with the approval of the whole of Europe, how the
Christian under Muslim rule have in recent times been urged on to rebel and massacre the
Muslims, and how reprisals by the latter have been condemned as quite uncalled for.
In Spain under the Umayyads and in Baghdad under the Abbasid Khalifas, Christians and Jews,
equally with Muslims, were admitted to the Schools and universities - not only that, but were
boarded and lodged in hostels at the cost of the state. When the Moors were driven out of Spain,
the Christian conquerors held a terrific persecution of the Jews. Those who were fortunate
enough to escape fled, some of them to Morocco and many hundreds to the Turkish empire,
where their descendants still live in separate communities, and still speak among themselves an
antiquated form of Spanish. The Muslim empire was a refuge for all those who fled from
persecution by the Inquisition.
The Western Christians, till the arrival of the Encyclopaedists in the eighteenth century, did not
know and did not care to know, what the Muslim believed, nor did the Western Christian seek to
know the views of Eastern Christians with regard to them. The Christian Church was already
split in two, and in the end, it came to such a pass that the Eastern Christians, as Gibbon shows,
preferred Muslim rule, which allowed them to practice their own form of religion and adhere to
their peculiar dogmas, to the rule of fellow Christians who would have made them Roman
Catholics or wiped them out.
The Western Christians called the Muslims pagans, paynims, even idolaters - there are
plenty of books in which they are described as worshiping an idol called Mahomet or Mahound,
and in the accounts of the conquest of Granada there are even descriptions of the monstrous idols
which they were alleged to worship - whereas the Muslims knew what Christianity was, and in
what respects it differed from Islam. If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims knew
of Christendom, in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally chivalrous and heroic, but

utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades could not have taken place, for they were based
on a complete misapprehension.
I quote a learned French author:
"Every poet in Christendom considered a Mohammedan to be an infidel, and an idolater, and his
gods to be three; mentioned in order, they were: Mahomet or Mahound or Mohammad, Opolane
and the third Termogond. It was said that when in Spain the Christians overpowered the
Mohammadans and drove them as far as the gates of the city of Saragossa, the Mohammadans
went back and broke their idols.
"A Christian poet of the period says that Opolane the "god" of the Mohammadans, which was
kept there in a den was awfully belabored and abused by the Mohammadans, who, binding it
hand and foot, crucified it on a pillar, trampled it under their feet and broke it to pieces by
beating it with sticks; that their second god Mahound they threw in a pit and caused to be torn
to pieces by pigs and dogs, and that never were gods so ignominiously treated; but that
afterwards the Mohammadans repented of their sins, and once more reinstated their gods for the
accustomed worship, and that when the Emperor Charles entered the city of Saragossa he had
every mosque in the city searched and had "Muhammad" and all their Gods broken with iron
hammers."
That was the kind of "history" on which the populace in Western Europe used to be
fed. Those were the ideas which inspired the rank and file of the crusader in their attacks on the
most civilized peoples of those days. Christendom regarded the outside world as damned
eternally, and Islam did not. There were good and tender-hearted men in Christendom who
thought it sad that any people should be damned eternally, and wished to save them by the only
way they knew - conversion to the Christian faith.
It was not until the Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more
tolerant; and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that they declined
in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture. Therefore the difference evident in that
anecdote is not of manners only but of religion. Of old, tolerance had existed here and there in
the world, among enlightened individuals; but those individuals had always been against the
prevalent religion. Tolerance was regarded of un-religious, if not irreligious. Before the coming
of Islam it had never been preached as an essential part of religion.
For the Muslims, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are but three forms of one religion, which, in
its original purity, was the religion of Abraham: Al-Islam, that perfect Self-Surrender to the Will
of God, which is the basis of Theocracy. The Jews, in their religion, after Moses, limited God's
mercy to their chosen nation and thought of His kingdom as the dominion of their race.

Even Christ himself, as several of his sayings show, declared that he was sent only to the lost
sheep of the House of Israel and seemed to regard his mission as to the Hebrews only; and it was
only after a special vision vouchsafed to St. Peter that his followers in after days considered
themselves authorized to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. The Christians limited God's mercy
to those who believed certain dogmas. Every one who failed to hold the dogmas was an outcast
or a miscreant, to be persecuted for his or her soul's good. In Islam only is manifest the real
nature of the Kingdom of God.
The two verses (2:255-256) of the Qur'an are supplementary. Where there is that realization of
the majesty and dominion of Allah , there is no compulsion in religion. Men choose their path allegiance or opposition - and it is sufficient punishment for those who oppose that they draw
further and further away from the light of truth.
What Muslims do not generally consider is that this law applies to our own community just as
much as to the folk outside, the laws of Allah being universal; and that intolerance of Muslims
for other men's opinions and beliefs is evidence that they themselves have, at the moment,
forgotten the vision of the majesty and mercy of Allah which the Qur'an presents to them.
In the Qur'an I find two meanings (of a Kafir), which become one the moment that we try to
realize the divine standpoint. The Kafir in the first place, is not the follower of any religion. He
is the opponent of Allah's benevolent will and purpose for mankind - therefore the disbeliever in
the truth of all religions, the disbeliever in all Scriptures as of divine revelation, the disbeliever
to the point of active opposition in all the Prophets (pbut) whom the Muslims are bidden to
regard, without distinction, as messengers of Allah.
The Qur'an repeatedly claims to be the confirmation of the truth of all religions. The former
Scriptures had become obscure, the former Prophets appeared mythical, so extravagant were the
legends which were told concerning them, so that people doubted whether there was any truth in
the old Scriptures, whether such people as the Prophets had ever really existed. Here - says the
Qur'an - is a Scripture whereof there is no doubt: here is a Prophet actually living among you
and preaching to you. If it were not for this book and this Prophet, men might be excused for
saying that Allah's guidance to mankind was all a fable. This book and this Prophet, therefore,
confirm the truth of all that was revealed before them, and those who disbelieve in them to the
point of opposing the existence of a Prophet and a revelation are really opposed to the idea of
Allah's guidance - which is the truth of all revealed religions. Our Holy Prophet (pbuh) himself
said that the term Kafir was not to be applied to anyone who said "Salam" (peace) to the
Muslims. The Kafirs, in the terms of the Qur'an, are the conscious evil-doers of any race of creed
or community.
I have made a long digression but it seemed to me necessary, for I find much confusion of ideas
even among Muslims on this subject, owing to defective study of the Qur'an and the Prophet's

life. Many Muslims seem to forget that our Prophet had allies among the idolaters even after
Islam had triumphed in Arabia, and that he "fulfilled his treaty with them perfectly until the term
thereof." The righteous conduct of the Muslims, not the sword, must be held responsible for the
conversion of those idolaters, since they embraced Islam before the expiration of their treaty.
So much for the idolaters of Arabia, who had no real beliefs to oppose the teaching of Islam, but
only superstition. They invoked their local deities for help in war and put their faith only in brute
force. In this they were, to begin with, enormously superior to the Muslims. When the Muslims
nevertheless won, they were dismayed; and all their arguments based on the superior power of
their deities were for ever silenced. Their conversion followed naturally. It was only a question
of time with the most obstinate of them.
It was otherwise with the people who had a respectable religion of their own - the People of the
Scripture - as the Qur'an calls them - i.e. the people who had received the revelation of some
former Prophet: the Jews, the Christians and the Zoroastrians were those with whom the
Muslims came at once in contact. To these our Prophet's attitude was all of kindness. The
Charter which he granted to the Christian monks of Sinai is extant. If you read it you will see
that it breathes not only goodwill but actual love. He gave to the Jews of Medina, so long as they
were faithful to him, precisely the same treatment as to the Muslims. He never was aggressive
against any man or class of men; he never penalized any man, or made war on any people, on the
ground of belief but only on the ground of conduct.
The story of his reception of Christian and Zoroastrian visitors is on record. There is not a trace
of religious intolerance in all this. And it should be remembered - Muslims are rather apt to
forget it, and it is of great importance to our outlook - that our Prophet did not ask the people of
the Scripture to become his followers. He asked them only to accept the Kingdom of Allah, to
abolish priesthood and restore their own religions to their original purity. The question which, in
effect, he put to everyone was this: "Are you for the Kingdom of God which includes all of us,
or are you for your own community against the rest of mankind?" The one is obviously the way
of peace and human progress, the other the way of strife, oppression and calamity. But the rulers
of the world, to whom he sent his message, most of them treated it as the message of either an
insolent upstart or a mad fanatic. His envoys were insulted cruelly, and even slain. One cannot
help wondering what reception that same embassy would meet with from the rulers of mankind
today, when all the thinking portion of mankind accept the Prophet's premises, have thrown off
the trammels of priestcraft, and harbor some idea of human brotherhood.
But though the Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians refused his message, and their rulers
heaped most cruel insults on his envoys, our Prophet never lost his benevolent attitudes towards
them as religious communities; as witness the Charter to the monks of Sinai already mentioned.
And though the Muslims of later days have fallen far short of the Holy Prophet's tolerance, and
have sometimes shown arrogance towards men of other faiths, they have always given special

treatment to the Jews and Christians. Indeed the Laws for their special treatment form part of the
Shari'ah.
In Egypt the Copts were on terms of closest friendship with the Muslims in the first centuries of
the Muslim conquest, and they are on terms at closest friendship with the Muslims at the present
day. In Syria the various Christian communities lived on terms of closest friendship with the
Muslims in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and they are on terms of closest
friendship with the Muslims at the present day, openly preferring Muslim domination to a
foreign yoke.
There were always flourishing Jewish communities in the Muslim realm, notably in Spain, North
Africa, Syria, Iraq and later on in Turkey. Jews fled from Christian persecution to Muslim
countries for refuge. Whole communities of them voluntarily embraced Islam following a
revered rabbi whom they regarded as the promised Messiah but many more remained as Jews,
and they were never persecuted as in Christendom. The Turkish Jews are one with the Turkish
Muslims today. And it is noteworthy that the Arabic-speaking Jews of Palestine - the old
immigrants from Spain and Poland - are one with the Muslims and Christians in opposition to
the transformation of Palestine into a national home for the Jews.
To turn to the Christians, the story of the triumphal entry of the Khalifah Umar ibn al-Khattab
(ra) into Jerusalem has been often told, but I shall tell it once again, for it illustrates the proper
Muslim attitude towards the People of the Scripture....The Christian officials urged him to spread
his carpet in the Church (of the Holy Sepulchre) itself, but he refused saying that some of the
ignorant Muslims after him might claim the Church and convert it into a mosque because he had
once prayed there. He had his carpet carried to the top of the steps outside the church, to the spot
where the Mosque of Umar now stands - the real Mosque of Umar, for the splendid Qubbet-usSakhrah, which tourists call the Mosque of Umar, is not a Mosque at all, but the temple of
Jerusalem; a shrine within the precincts of the Masjid-al-Aqsa, which is the second of the Holy
Places of Islam.
From that day to this; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has always been a Christian place of
worship, the only things the Muslims did in the way of interference with the Christian's liberty of
conscience in respect of it was to see that every sect of Christians had access to it, and that it was
not monopolized by one sect to the exclusion of others. The same is true of the Church of the
Nativity of Bethlehem, and of other buildings of special sanctity.
Under the Khulafa-ur-Rashidin and the Umayyads, the true Islamic attitude was maintained, and
it continued to a much later period under the Umayyad rule in Spain. In those days it was no
uncommon thing for Muslims and Christian to use the same places of worship. I could point to a
dozen buildings in Syria which tradition says were thus conjointly used; and I have seen at Lud
(Lydda), in the plain of Sharon, a Church of St. George and a mosque under the same roof with

only a partition wall between. The partition wall did not exist in early days. The words of the
Khalifah Umar proved true in other cases; not only half the church at Lydda, but the whole
church in other places was claimed by ignorant Muslims of a later day on the mere ground that
the early Muslims had prayed there. But there was absolute liberty of conscience for the
Christians; they kept their most important Churches and built new ones; though by a later edict
their church bells were taken from them because their din annoyed the Muslims, it was said;
only the big bell of the Holy Sepulchre remaining. They used to call to prayer by beating a
naqus, a wooden gong, the same instrument which the Prophet Noah (pbuh) is said to have used
to summon the chosen few into his ark.
It was not the Christians of Syria who desired the Crusades, nor did the Crusades care a jot for
them, or their sentiments, regarding them as heretics and interlopers. The latter word sounds
strange in this connection, but there is a reason for its use.
The great Abbasid Khalifah Harun ar-Rashid had, God knows why, once sent the keys of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre among other presents to the Frankish Emperor, Charlemagne.
Historically, it was a wrong to the Christians of Syria, who did not belong to the Western
Church, and asked for no protection other than the Muslim government. Politically, it was a
mistake and proved the source of endless after trouble to the Muslim Empire. The keys sent, it is
true, were only duplicate keys. The Church was in daily use. It was not locked up till such time
as Charlemagne, Emperor of the West, chose to lock it. The present of the keys was intended
only as a compliment, as one would say: "You and your people can have free access to the
Church which is the center of your faith, your goal of pilgrimage, whenever you may come to
visit it." But the Frankish Christians took the present seriously in after times regarding it as the
title to a freehold, and looking on the Christians of the country as mere interlopers, as I said
before, as well as heretics.
That compliment from king to king was the foundation of all the extravagant claims of France in
later centuries. Indirectly it was the foundation of Russia's even more extortionate claims, for
Russia claimed to protect the Eastern Church against the encroachment of Roman Catholics; and
it was the cause of nearly all the ill feeling which ever existed between the Muslims and their
Christians Dhimmis.
When the Crusaders took Jerusalem they massacred the Eastern Christians with the Muslims
indiscriminately, and while they ruled in Palestine the Eastern Christians, such of them as did not
accompany the retreating Muslim army, were deprived of all the privileges which Islam secured
to them and were treated as a sort of outcasters. Many of them became Roman Catholics in order
to secure a higher status; but after the re-conquest, when the emigrants returned, the followers of
the Eastern church were found again to be in large majority over those who owed obedience to
the Pope of Rome. The old order was reestablished and all the Dhimmis once again enjoyed their

privileges in accordance with the Sacred Law (of Islam).

But the effect of those fanatical inroads had been somewhat to embitter Muslim sentiments, and
to ting them with an intellectual contempt for the Christian generally; which was bad for
Muslims and for Christians both; since it made the former arrogant and oppressive to the latter
socially, and the intellectual contempt, surviving the intellectual superiority, blinded the Muslims
to the scientific advance of the West till too late.
The arrogance hardened into custom, and when Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt occupied Syria in the
third decade of the nineteenth century, a deputation of the Muslims of Damascus waited on him
with a complaint that under his rule the Christians were beginning to ride on horseback. Ibrahim
Pasha pretended to be greatly shocked at the news, and asked leave to think for a whole night on
so disturbing an announcement. Next morning, he informed the deputation that since it was, of
course, a shame for Christians to ride as high as Muslims, he gave permission to all Muslims
thenceforth to ride on camels. That was probably the first time that the Muslims of Damascus
had ever been brought face to face with the absurdity of their pretentions.
By the beginning of the Eighteenth century AD, the Christians had, by custom, been made
subject to certain social disabilities, but these were never, at the worst, so cruel or so galling as
those to which the Roman Catholic nobility of France at the same period subjected their own
Roman Catholic peasantry, or as those which Protestants imposed on Roman Catholics in
Ireland; and they weighed only on the wealthy portion of the community. The poor Muslims and
poor Christians were on an equality, and were still good friends and neighbors.
The Muslims never interfered with the religion of the subject Christians. (e.g., The Treaty of
Orihuela, Spain, 713.) There was never anything like the Inquisition or the fires of Smithfield.
Nor did they interfere in the internal affairs of their communities. Thus a number of small
Christian sects, called by the larger sects heretical, which would inevitably have been
exterminated if left to the tender mercies of the larger sects whose power prevailed in
Christendom, were protected and preserved until today by the power of Islam.
Innumerable monasteries, with a wealth of treasure of which the worth has been calculated at
not less than a hundred millions sterling, enjoyed the benefit of the Holy Prophet's Charter to the
monks of Sinai and were religiously respected by the Muslims. The various sects of Christians
were represented in the Council of the Empire by their patriarchs, on the provincial and district
council by their bishops, in the village council by their priests, whose word was always taken
without question on things which were the sole concern of their community.
With regard to the respect for monasteries, I have a curious instance of my own
remembrance. In the year 1905 the Arabic congregation of the Greek Orthodox Church in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or Church of the Resurrection as it is locally called, rebelled

against the tyranny of the Monks of the adjoining convent of St. George. The convent was
extremely rich, and a large part of its revenues was derived from lands which had been made
over to it by the ancestors of the Arab congregation for security at a time when property was
insecure; relying on the well known Muslim reverence for religious foundations. The income
was to be paid to the depositors and their descendants, after deducting something for the
convent.
No income had been paid to anybody by the Monks for more than a century, and the
congregation now demanded that at least a part of that ill-gotten wealth should be spent on
education of the community. The Patriarch sided with the congregation, but was captured by the
Monks, who kept him prisoner. The congregation tried to storm the convent, and the amiable
monk poured vitriol down upon the faces of the congregation. The congregation appealed to the
Turkish government, which secured the release of the Patriarch and some concessions for the
congregation, but could not make the monks disgorge any part of their wealth because of the
immunities secured to Monasteries by the Sacred Law (of Islam). What made the congregation
the more bitter was the fact that certain Christians who, in old days, had made their property
over to the Masjid al-Aqsa - the great mosque of Jerusalem - for security, were receiving income
yearly from it even then.
Here is another incident from my own memory. A sub-prior of the Monastery of St. George
purloined a handful from the enormous treasure of the Holy Sepulchre - a handful worth some
forty thousand pounds - and tried to get away with it to Europe. He was caught at Jaffa by the
Turkish customs officers and brought back to Jerusalem. The poor man fell on his face before
the Mutasarrif imploring him with tears to have him tried by Turkish Law. The answer was: "We
have no jurisdiction over monasteries," and the poor groveling wretch was handed over to the
tender mercies of his fellow monks.
But the very evidence of their toleration, the concessions given to the subject people of another
faith, were used against them in the end by their political opponents just as the concessions
granted in their day of strength to foreigners came to be used against them in their day of
weakness, as capitulations.
I can give you one curious instance of a capitulation, typical of several others. Three hundred
years ago, the Franciscan friars were the only Western European missionaries to be found in the
Muslim Empire. There was a terrible epidemic of plague, and those Franciscans worked
devotedly, tending the sick and helping to bury the dead of all communities. In gratitude for this
great service, the Turkish government decreed that all property of the Franciscans should be free
of customs duty for ever. In the Firman (Edict) the actual words used were "Frankish
missionaries" and at later time, when there were hundreds of missionaries from the West, most
of them of other sects than the Roman Catholic, they all claimed that privilege and were allowed
it by the Turkish government because the terms of the original Firman included them. Not only

that, but they claimed that concession as a right, as if it had been won for them by force of arms
or international treaty instead of being, as it was, a free gift of the Sultan; and called upon their
consuls and ambassadors to support them Bly if it was at all infringed.
The Christians were allowed to keep their own languages and customs, to start their own schools
and to be visited by missionaries to their own faith from Christendom. Thus they formed patches
of nationalism in a great mass of internationalism or universal brotherhood; for as I have already
said the tolerance within the body of Islam was, and is, something without parallel in history;
class and race and color ceasing altogether to be barriers.
In countries where nationality and language were the same in Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia
there was no clash of ideals, but in Turkey, where the Christians spoke quite different languages
from the Muslims, the ideals were also different. So long as the nationalism was un-aggressive,
all went well; and it remained un-aggressive - that is to say, the subject Christians were content
with their position - so long as the Muslim Empire remained better governed, more enlightened
and more prosperous than Christian countries. And that may be said to have been the case, in all
human essentials, up to the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Then for a period of about eighty years the Turkish Empire was badly governed; and the
Christians suffered not from Islamic Institutions but from the decay or neglect of Islamic
Institutions. Still it took Russia more than a century of ceaseless secret propaganda work to stir
ups spirit of aggressive nationalism in the subject Christians, and then only by appealing to their
religious fanaticism.
After the eighty years of bad government came the era of conscious reform, when the Muslim
government turned its attention to the improvement of the status of all the peoples under it. But
then it was too late to win back the Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgars and the Romans. The poison
of the Russian religious-political propaganda had done its work, and the prestige of Russian
victories over the Turks had excited in the worst elements among the Christians of the Greek
Church, the hope of an early opportunity to slaughter and despoil the Muslims, strengthening the
desire to do so which had been instilled in them by Russian secret envoys, priests and monks.
I do not wish to dwell upon this period of history, though it is to me the best known of all, for it
is too recent and might rouse too strong a feeling in my audience. I will only remind you that in
the Greek War of Independence in 1811, three hundred thousand Muslims - men and women and
children - the whole Muslim population of the Morea without exception, as well as many
thousands in the northern parts of Greece - were wiped out in circumstances of the most
atrocious cruelty; that in European histories we seldom find the slightest mention of that
massacre, though we hear much of the reprisals which the Turks took afterwards; that before
every massacre of Christians by Muslims of which you read, there was a more wholesale
massacre or attempted massacre of Muslims by Christians; that those Christians were old friends

and neighbors of the Muslims - the Armenians were the favorites of the Turks till fifty years ago
- and that most of them were really happy under Turkish rule, as has been shown again and again
by their tendency to return to it after so called liberation.
It was the Christians outside the Muslim Empire who systematically and continually fed their
religious fanaticism: it was their priests who told them that to slaughter Muslims was a
meritorious act. I doubt if anything so wicked can be found in history as that plot for the
destruction of Turkey. When I say "wicked," I mean inimical to human progress and therefore
against Allah's guidance and His purpose for mankind. For it has made religious tolerance appear
a weakness in the eyes of all the worldlings, because the multitudes of Christians who lived
peacefully in Turkey are made to seem the cause of Turkey's martyrdom and downfall; while on
the other hand the method of persecution and extermination which has always prevailed in
Christendom is made to seem comparatively strong and wise.
Thus religious tolerance is made to seem a fault, politically. But it is not really so. The victims of
injustice are always less to be pitied in reality than the perpetrators of injustice.
From the expulsion of the Moriscos dates the degradation and decline of Spain. San Fernando
was really wiser and more patriotic in his tolerance to conquered Seville, Murcia and Toledo
than was the later king who, under the guise of Holy warfare, captured Grenada and let the
Inquisition work its will upon the Muslims and the Jews. And the modern Balkan States and
Greece are born under a curse. It may even prove that the degradation and decline of European
civilization will be dated from the day when so-called civilized statesmen agreed to the inhuman
policy of Czarist Russia and gave their sanction to the crude fanaticism of the Russian Church.
There is no doubt but that, in the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of
culture in a people. Let no Muslim, when looking on the ruin of the Muslim realm which was
compassed through the agency of those very peoples whom the Muslims had tolerated and
protected through the centuries when Western Europe thought it a religious duty to exterminate
or forcibly convert all peoples of another faith than theirs - let no Muslim, seeing this, imagine
that toleration is a weakness in Islam. It is the greatest strength of Islam because it is the attitude
of truth.
Allah is not the God of the Jews or the Christians or the Muslims only, any more than the sun
shines or the rain falls for Jews or Christians or Muslims only.

Did the Prophet endorse suicide bombing?

By: Dr. Mohammad Omar Farooq Iviews* -

http://www.islamicity.com/articles/Articles.asp?ref=IV0507-2750
Anti-Islamic Propaganda by "former Muslims"
There is a new level of anti-Islamic propaganda. It is based on half-truths and no truths. Let
alone unsuspecting non-Muslims, many Muslims are falling victims of such propaganda, as they
are sometimes feeling confused. The issue has assumed greater significance as some people are
perpetrating vile acts of violence, and doing so in the name of Islam.
There are Qur'anic verses that, taken in isolation, can easily cause people to misunderstand the
message of those verses. But that is only if people intentionally or unintentionally take those
verses in isolation or out of context. It is also an unfortunate fact that, parallel to their glorious
contributions, many Muslim exegetes and scholars of the past have added to the confusion, by
generalizing issues and views that ought not to be generalized. Once Muslims were in power,
especially after a century or so after the Prophet, the issues of non-Muslims and minorities have
not been dealt with a desired level of Islamic and human sensitivity. Rather, attitude toward nonMuslims have been shaped by the bitter localized conflicts between the Muslims and the
Mushrikeen (as well as others).
But, even beyond those, there is clearly a prejudiced propaganda against Islam and Muslims that
can not be explained merely in terms of ignorance. I produce an example below. In the internet
circle, some so-called "former Muslims" have been concertedly spewing their hatred against
Islam and Muslims. Among them are Ali Sina (a pseudonym), and Abul Kasem (possibly
another pseudonym). Uninformed or less informed readers can easily be duped or confused by
their propagandist approach.
Anyway, during the post 9/11 era, Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, condemned the targeted

atrocity against the civilians. He also condemned "suicide bombing". A group of people who
claim to be "former Muslims" challenged him by alleging that the Prophet himself has endorsed
suicide bombing and thus the condemnation of Yusuf Islam and others is of no value, in the face
of clear hadith. How did they reach that conclusion? Well, read the following part taken from a
writing by Abul Kasem.
Islamic Peace Train a la Brother Yusuf Islam
If you know Mr. Yusuf Islam's email please ask him to read this message and respond. (Ali Sina)
http://www.humanists.net/alisina/to_yusuf_islam.htm
Now, to add fuel to the fire, here is a Hadith, which clearly sanctions suicide to kill the 'infidels'
Mohammed eulogized a person for committing suicide for Allah's cause...9.83.29
Volume 9, Book 83, Number 29: Narrated Salama:
We went out with the Prophet to Khaibar. A man (from the companions) said, "O 'Amir! Let us
hear some of your Huda (camel-driving songs.)" So he sang some of them (i.e. a lyric in
harmony with the camels walk). The Prophet said, "Who is the driver (of these camels)?" They
said, "Amir." The Prophet said, "May Allah bestow His Mercy on him !" The people said, "O
Allah's Apostle! Would that you let us enjoy his company longer!" Then 'Amir was killed the
following morning. The people said, "The good deeds of 'Amir are lost as he has killed himself."
I returned at the time while they were talking about that. I went to the Prophet and said, "O
Allah's Prophet! Let my father be sacrificed for you! The people claim that 'Amir's good deeds
are lost." The Prophet said, "Whoever says so is a liar, for 'Amir will have a double reward as he
exerted himself to obey Allah and fought in Allah's Cause. No other way of killing would have
granted him greater reward.
Can Mr.Yusuf Islam deny this Hadith, which is from Shahih Bukhari, the most trusted Hadith in
Islam.
From a plain reading of the above hadith, one may easily conclude that as Amir "killed himself",
so he committed suicide. Since the Prophet actually eulogized Amir's killing himself, can't one
reasonably and conscientiously conclude and argue that the Prophet endorsed suicide bombing?
Well, not so fast.
One of the problems with many hadiths, even in the most respected collections of Sahih alBukhari and Sahih Muslim, one can find narrations that are fragmented, incomplete, and
sometimes even contradictory. Thus, one can't take a particular hadith in isolation. The above
hadith, allegedly supporting suicide bombing, is unambiguously clarified in another hadith: Amir
actually had an unintentional/accidental self-inflicted wound. Let us read that hadith from the
same collection, Sahih al-Bukhari.

Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 5, Book 59, Number 509: Narrated Salama bin Al-Akwa:
We went out to Khaibar in the company of the Prophet. While we were proceeding at night, a
man from the group said to 'Amir, "O 'Amir! Won't you let us hear your poetry?" 'Amir was a
poet, so he got down and started reciting for the people poetry that kept pace with the camels'
footsteps, saying:-- "O Allah! Without You we Would not have been guided On the right path
Neither would be have given In charity, nor would We have prayed. So please forgive us, what
we have committed (i.e. our defects); let all of us Be sacrificed for Your Cause And send Sakina
(i.e. calmness) Upon us to make our feet firm When we meet our enemy, and If they will call us
towards An unjust thing, We will refuse. The unbelievers have made a hue and Cry to ask others'
help Against us." The Prophet on that, asked, "Who is that (camel) driver (reciting poetry)?" The
people said, "He is 'Amir bin Al-Akwa'."
Then the Prophet said, "May Allah bestow His Mercy on him." A man amongst the people said,
"O Allah's Prophet! has (martyrdom) been granted to him. Would that you let us enjoy his
company longer." Then we reached and besieged Khaibar till we were afflicted with severe
hunger. Then Allah helped the Muslims conquer it (i.e. Khaibar). ... So when the army files were
arranged in rows (for the clash), 'Amir's sword was short and he aimed at the leg of a Jew to
strike it, but the sharp blade of the sword returned to him and injured his own knee, and that
caused him to die. When they returned from the battle, Allah's Apostle saw me (in a sad mood).
He took my hand and said, "What is bothering you?" I replied, "Let my father and mother be
sacrificed for you! The people say that the deeds of 'Amir are lost." The Prophet said, "Whoever
says so, is mistaken, for 'Amir has got a double reward." The Prophet raised two fingers and
added, "He (i.e. Amir) was a persevering struggler in the Cause of Allah and there are few 'Arabs
who achieved the like of (good deeds) 'Amir had done."
So, did Amir commit suicide and the Prophet praised his "suicidal" action? No. Amir DID NOT
commit suicide and the Prophet DID NOT praise suicide. Such are the glaring
misrepresentations and lies being spread about Islam!
Such exposure of lies or ignorant claims of these former Muslims may not stop them from their
anti-Islamic propaganda, but Muslims themselves need to be educated about Islam and its
various sources (the Qur'an, hadith, history books, commentaries, etc.). More importantly,
Muslims need to be educated in these regards in a self-critical manner. I also should point out
that there is need to produce cross-referenced hadith collection, so that people can easily identify
and read "related" hadith that are scattered throughout a collection or across collections. For
example, the hadith quoted by Abul Kasem is in Vol. 9, Kitab ad-Diyat (blood money) ... and the
clarifying one occurs in Vol. 5, Kitab al-Maghazi (military expeditions). Such cross-referencing
can be helpful for the education of Muslims, and may lessen such callous and shameless
attempts to misrepresent Islam by others.
Life is the most precious and sanctified thing in this world. That applies to our lives and others'
lives. Islam teaches us to be preservers of life. As the al-Qur'an categorically teaches:
We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person - unless it be for murder or

for spreading mischief in the land, it would be as if he slew the whole people; and if any one
saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to
them Our Apostles with clear signs, yet, even after that, many of them continued to commit
excesses in the land." [Qur'an 5:35]
Let others figure out their own stance, but for us as Muslims, we must have respect for life in
general, life of ourselves and of others, irrespective of faith, race and nationality.
Dr. Mohammad Omar Farooq is an associate professor of economics and finance at Upper Iowa
University.
Homepage: http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm
The author welcomes volunteers who would like to translate this piece into their native
language.
Email: farooqm@globalwebpost.com

Bombing Without Moonlight

The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism
Oct 2004 Abdal-Hakim Murad

1. Amnesia
Attention deficit disorder seems to flourish under conditions of late modernity. The past becomes
itself more quickly. Memories, individual as well as collective, tend to be recycled and consulted

only by the old. For everyone else, there are only current affairs, reaching back a few months at
most. Orwell, of course, predicted this, in his dystopic prophecy that may have been only
premature; but today it seems to be cemented by postmodernism (Deleuze), and also by
physicists, who are now proclaiming an almost Asharite scepticism about claims for the real
duration of particles.
This is a condition that has an ancestry in the stirrings of the modernity which it represents.
Hume anticipated it in his stunning insistence on the non-continuity of the human self: we are
nothing but a collection of perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity
and are in perpetual flux and movement; or so he thought.[1]Modern fiction may still explore or
reaffirm identities (Peter Carey) and thus define human dignity as the honourable disposition of
at least some aspects of an accumulated heritage. But this is giving way to the atomistic, playful,
postmodern storytelling of, say, Elliot Perlman, which defines dignity - where it does so at all in terms of freedomfrom all stories, even while lamenting the superficial tenor of the result. It is
against the backdrop of this culture that the scientists, now far beyond Ataturk's Science is the
Truest Guide in Life, raise the stakes with their occasionalism, and, for the neurologists, the
increasing denial of the autonomy of the human will - a new predestinarianism that makes us
always the consequence of genes and the present, not the remembered past.[2]
Our public conversations, then, seem to be the children of a marriage of convenience between
two principles, neither of them religious or even particularly humanistic. The elitist mystical
trope of the moment being all that is, significantly misappropriated by some New Age
discourses, has become the condition of us all, albeit with the absence of God. Journalism thus
becomes the privileged discourse to whose canons the public intellectual must conform, if he or
she is to become a credible guide. More striking still is the observed fact that amidst our current
crisis of wisdom it also seems to provide the language in which the public discussion of faith is
carried on. Thus Catholicism becomes the humiliated cardinal of Boston, not St Augustine. Its
morality is taken to be that which visibly clashes with the caprice of characters in Home and
Away, not a severe but ultimately liberating cultivation of the virtues rooted in centuries of
experience and example. Judaism, in its turn, becomes the latest land-grab of a settler rabbi, not
a millennial enterprise of faith and promise. Of course, our new occasionalism does invoke the
past. But it does so with reference either to scriptures, stripped of their normative exegetical
armature, or to those events which remain in the consciousness of a citizenry raised on
enlightenment battles with obscurantism. So again, we recall Galileo, not Eckhart; we recall the
interesting hatreds of the Inquisition, not the charity of St Vincent de Paul. Otherwise, our
culture is religiously amnesiac. Winston Churchill, near the end of his life, began to read the
Bible. This book is very well-written, he said. Why was it not brought to my attention before?
It is in this frankly primitive condition that we seek to discuss religious acts which, against all
the predictions of our grandparents, claim to interrupt the progress of history towards a world in
which there will be no continuity at all. To our perplexity, history, despite Fukuyama, does not

seem to have ended. Humans do not always act for the economic or erotic now; Tamino still
seeks his Sarastro. A residue of real human diversity persists. For the human soul is not yet, as
Coleridge wrote,
Seraphically free,
From taint of personality.[3]
This failed ultimacy, this sense that we, the Papageni, have to dust down the armour of an earlier
generation of moral absolutes, when history was still running, when the victory of the
corporations and of Hollywood was not yet assured, accounts for the maladroit condition of the
worlds current argument about terrorism. The most active in seizing the moment, as they elbow
impatiently past the fin de sicle multiculturalists and postmodernists, are the oddly-named
American neoconservatives, who invoke Leo Strauss and roll up their sleeves to defend
Washington against Oriental warriors who would defy the dialectics of history and seek to
postpone the apotheosis of Anglo-Saxon consumer society, which they see as the climax of a
billion years of evolution.[4] But despite such ideologised adversions to the longue
dure, secularism seems to have little to offer that is not short-termist and reactive, and
determined to reduce the globe to a set of variations on itself.
Traditionalists, who should be more helpful, seem paralysed. Much of the fury and hurt that
currently abounds in the Christian and the Muslim worlds reveals a sense that the timetable
which God has approved for history has been perverted. Christendom is not a virgin in this
respect; in fact, it was first, with scholastic and Byzantine broadsides against Christian sin as
invitation to Saracenic chastisement (Bernard, Gregory Palamas). Then it was the turn of Islam,
when, from the seventeenth century on the illusion of the Muslims as materially and militarily
Gods chosen people was dealt a series of shocking blows. Now it is, once again, the turn of
Christendom (if the term be still allowed), which is currently wondering why history has not yet
experienced closure, why a former rival should still be showing signs of life, either as the result
of a misdiagnosis, or as a zombie-like revenant bearing only a superficial resemblance to his
medieval seriousness. Certainly, the American president and his frequently evangelical team see
themselves in these terms. Architects of a society which, Disney-like, appropriates the past only
to emphasise the glory of the present, these zealots appeal to a prophecy-religion in which the
Book of Revelation is the key to history. For them, too, the promised closure is imminent, and its
frustration by the Other an outrage.
President Reagan, while less captivated by end-time visions than his successors, could offer
these thoughts to Jewish lobbyists:
You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling
Armageddon and I find myself wondering if were the generation that is going to see that come
about. I dont know if youve noted any of these prophecies lately, but, believe me, they

certainly describe the times were going through.[5]

The protagonists of the current conflict, then, are unusual in their confidence that history has not
ended, although millennialism seems to hover in the background on both sides, helped along by
the frequently Palestinian scenery. The triumph of the West, or the resurgence of an Islam
interpreted by bestselling Pentecostal authors as a chastisement and a demonic challenge, signals
the end of a growing worry about the religious meaninglessness of late modernity. Tragically,
however, neither protagonist seems validly linked to the remnants of established religion, or
shows any sign of awareness of how to connect with history. Fundamentalist disjuncture is
placing us in a kind of metahistorical parenthesis, an end-time excitement in which, as for St
Paul, old rules are irrelevant, and Christ and Antichrist are the only significant gladiators on the
stage. Fundamentalists, as well as mystics, can insist that the moment is all that is real.
2. Sunna Contra Gentiles
In such a world of pseudo-religious reaction against the postmodern erosion of identity, it
follows that if you are not with us, you are with the devil. Or, when this has to be reformulated
for the benefit of the blue-collar godless, you are a cheese-eating surrender monkey. Where
religion exists to supply an identity, the world is Augustinian, if not quite Manichean. The West's
ancient trope of itself as a free space, perhaps a white space, holding out against Persian or
Semitic intruders, is being coupled powerfully, but hardly for the first time, with Pauline and
patristic understandings of the New Israel as unique vessel of truth and salvation, threatened in
the discharge of its redemptive project by the Oriental, Semitic, Ishmaelitic other. In the West, at
least, the religious resources for this dualism are abundant and easily abused. Take Daniel
Goldhagen, for instance, who in his most recent book suggests that the xenophobia of the
Christian Bible is qualitatively greater than that of any other scripture. New Bibles, he urges,
must be printed with many corrections to what he describes as this founding text of a lethal
Western self-centredness.[6] Semites of several kinds would be well-advised to beware a culture
raised on such a foundation.
It is remarkable that both sides, in constructing themselves against a wicked, fundamentalist
rival, mobilise the ancient trope of antisemitism. The Self needs its dark Other, preferably nearby
or within. That Other has standard features: in the case of Christian antisemitism it is that it
stands for Letter rather than Spirit, for blind obedience rather than freedom, for an discreet but
intense transnational solidarity in place of Fatherland and Church. It is sexually aberrant (hence
the Nazi polemic against Freud). It hides its women (who should, instead, join the SS, or
practice nacktkultur). It imposes archaic and unscientific taboos: diet, purity, circumcision. Such
are the categories in which an almost dualistic West historically defines its relationship to its
nearest and most irritating Other.[7]
Antisemitism is, in Richard Harries' words, a 'light sleeper'. But part of its strength is that it is

not asleep at all; and never has been. As Christendom seeks its identity, the Dark Other today is
now more usually Ishmael. Torched mosques, terrified asylum-seekers, bullied schoolchildren,
and, we may not unreasonably add, a journalistic discourse of the type that is now being labelled
Islamophobic, are less new than they seem. They represent a vicarious antisemitism. Islamic
law is immutable is a chorus in the new Horst Wessel song. Circumcision is barbaric. Their
divorce laws are medieval and anti-woman. They keep to themselves and dont integrate. Such
is the battle-cry of the resurgent Western right: Pim Fortuin, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider,
Filip de Winter. It has become startlingly popular, though always volatile at the polls. Thus is the
old antisemitic metabolism of Europe and its American progeny being reinvigorated by the
encounter with Ishmael. Again, history has started up again, and again our amnesiac culture
ignores the vast cogwheels, deep beneath the surface, which move it.
On the other side, now, crossing the Mediterranean, or the Timor Sea, we generally find not a
bloc of sincere fundamentalist regimes, but an archipelago of dictatorships, Oriental despots
after the letter, which are in almost every case answerable not to their own electorates - for they
recognise none - but to a distant desk in the State Department.[8] These are the neo-mamluks,
ex-soldiers and condottieri of a system that penalises ethics. Ranged against them we observe the
puritans, iconoclasts with El Greco eyes, whose claim it is to detest the modernity of the
regimes. Such puritans, led by the memory of Sayyid Qutb, have no illusions about the nature of
secular rule. They see clearly that the regimes are more modern than those of the West, because
more frank in their conviction that science plus commerce does not equal ethics. Where the
Western journalistic eye sees retardation, the Islamist sees modernity. Hitler and Stalin were
more modern than Churchill and Roosevelt, more scientific, more programmatic, more distant
from the past. The future is theirs, and it is neither Christs millennial reign nor the triumph of
small-town America. It is Alphaville.
The Islamist, then, is not the caricature of the envious, uncomprehending Third Worlder.
Typically he has spent much of his life in the West, and is capable of offering an empirical
analysis, or at least a diagnosis. Sayyid Qutb, in his writing on what he calls the deformed birth
of the American man, sees Americans as advanced infants; advanced because of their
technology, but puerile in their ignorance of earlier stages of human development.[9] There is
something of Teilhard de Chardin in his account, which inverts Tocqueville to identify an
American idiot-savant mania for possession. Technology made America possible, and ultimately,
America need claim nothing else. Linked to Christian fundamentalism, it is an enemy of every
other story; and unlike the East, it will not remain in its place. It must send out General Custer to
subdue all remnants of earlier phases of human consciousness rooted in nature, spirituality or art.
Its client regimes are therefore its natural, not opportunistic, adjuncts in its programme to subdue
the world. They are not a transitional phase, they are the end-game.
Antisemitism forms part of this vision too, certainly. But since, as Goldhagen confirms, this is an
essentially Christian phenomenon, to be healed by correcting the views of the Evangelists, in an

Islamic context which lacks a letter-spirit dichotomy it seems a hazier resource for identity
construction. Qutb was influenced by the Vichy theorist Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), through his
odd, vitalist tract LHomme, cet inconnu, which remains an ultimate, though unacknowledged,
source text for much modern Islamism.[10] No medieval Muslim thinker of any note wrote a
book against Judaism, although homilies against Christianity were quite common. If medieval
Islam had a dark Other, it was more likely to be Zoroastrianism than Judaism, which, in Samuel
Goiteins phrase by which he summed up his magisterial work A Mediterranean Society, enjoyed
a close and symbiotic relationship with Islam.[11] But todays Qutbian Islamist purges
midrashic material from Koranic commentary, and studies the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion, and, even, Mein Kampf. Nothing can be discovered, it seems, in the
Islamic libraries, so that this importation into an ostensively nativist and xenophobic milieu
becomes inescapable - the fundamentalists familiar appeal to necessity.
As he surveys the wreckage of Istanbul synagogues and Masonic lodges, the journalist, as ibn
al-waqt, is oblivious to the happier past of Semitic conviviality in the Ottoman Sephardic lands.
And perhaps he is right, perhaps, under our conditions, the past is another religion. But the
paradox has become so burning, and so murderous, that we cannot let it pass unremarked. The
Islamic world, instructed to host Israel, was historically the least inhospitable site for the
diaspora. The currently almost ubiquitous myth of a desperate sibling rivalry between Isaac and
Ishmael is nonsensical to historians.
Here, at the dark heart of Islams extremist fringe, we find what may be the beginnings of a
solution. No nativist reaction can long survive proof of its own exogenous nature. And no less
than its Christian analogues, Islamic ghuluww, at least in its currently terroristic forms, betrays a
European etiology. It borrows its spiritual, as well as its material, armament from Western
modernity. This, we may guess, marks it out for anachronism in a context where intransigence is
xenophobic.[12]
This is an unpopular diagnosis; but one which is gaining ground. It cannot be without
significance that outside observers, when not blinded by a xenophobic need to view terrorism as
Islamically authentic, have sometimes intuited this well. Here, for instance, is the verdict of John
Gray, in his book Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern:
No cliche is more stupefying than that which describes Al-Qaida as a throwback to medieval
times. It is a by-product of globalisation. Its most distinctive feature - projecting a privatised
form of organised violence worldwide - was impossible in the past. Equally, the belief that a new
world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction is nowhere found in medieval times. AlQaidas closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe.[13]
And Slavoj Zizek, a still more significant observer, is convinced that what we are witnessing is
not Jihad versus MacWorld the standard leftist formulation - but rather MacWorld versus

MacJihad.[14]
This implies that if ghuluww has a future, it will be because modernity has a future, not because
it has roots in Islamic tradition. That tradition, indeed, it rules out of order, as it dismisses the
juridical, theological and mystical intricacies of medieval Islam as so much dead wood. The
solution, then, which the world is seeking, and which it is the primary responsibility of the
Islamic world, not the West to provide, must be a counter-reformation, driven by our best and
most cosmopolitan heritage of spirit and law.
A point of departure, here, and a useful retort to essentialist reductions of Islam to Islamism, is
the fact that orthodoxy still flies the flag in almost all seminaries. The reformers are, at least
institutionally, in the Rhonnda chapels, not the cathedrals. Perhaps the most striking fact about
regulation Sunni Islam over the past fifty years has been its insistence that religions general
response to modernity must not take the form of an armed struggle. There have been local
exceptions to this rule, as in the reactive wars against Serbian irredentism in Bosnia, and Soviet
intrusion into Afghanistan. But a doctrine of generic jihad against the West has been conspicuous
by its absence.[15]
It is not immediately clear how we gloss this. In the nineteenth century Sunni Islam frequently
elected to resist European colonial rule by force, giving rise to the figure of the Mad Mullah who
formed part of the imperial imagination, in the fiction of John Buchan, or Tolstoys Hajji Murad.
In the twentieth century, however, the traditional pragmatism of Sunnism seemed to generate an
ulema ethos that was certainly not quietist, but had nothing in common with Qutbian Islamism
either. Hence the Deobandi movement in India, and its Tablighi offshoot, supported the Congress
party, and generally opposed Partition. Arab religious leaders sometimes resorted to force, as
with the Naqshbandi shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in mandate Palestine; but the independence
movements were overwhelmingly directed by secular modernists. The ancient universities, alQarawiyyin, al-Zaytuna, al-Azhar and the rest, regarded the modern period as a mandate for
doctrinal retrenchment and the piecemeal ijtihad-based reassessment of aspects of Islamic law.
In other words, mainstream Islams response to the startling novelty of a modernity that was
forced on its societies at the point of an imperial or postcolonial bayonet was self-scrutinising
and cautious, not militant.
Traditional wisdom and the texts, of course, were the reason for this. Sunnism, as inscribed by
the great Seljuk theorists, had put its trust in prudence, pragmatism, and a strategy of negotiation
with the sultan. So in British India, the Hanafi consensus decided that the Raj formed part of dar
al-islam. In Russia, Shihab al-Din Marjani took the same view with regard the empire of the
Tsars. But for Qutb, all this was paradigmatic of the error of classical Sunni thought. Islam was
to be prophetic, and hence a liberation theology, challenging structures as well as souls, not by
preaching and praying alone, but by agitation and revolution. Given his education and sitz im
leben in the golden age of anti-colonialism, probably nothing could have extricated Qutb from

his critique of what he saw as Sunni indifferentism, rooted, he suspected, in Ashari deontology
and a presumed Sufi fatalism. The prophetic is not meant to be accommodating; it fails, or it
succeeds triumphantly. The normative political thinkers, Mawardi, Nizam al-Mulk, Ghazali,
Katib elebi, and their modern advocates, had to be jettisoned. Technological empires had made
the world anew, and, if it was to cope with an increasingly bizarre and offensive Other, Islamic
thought had to be reformed in the direction of an increasingly unconditional insurrectionism.
Qutbs resurrection of Ibn Taymiya, via Rashid Rida, became paradigmatic. In the fourteenth
century this angry Damascene had attacked ulema who acquiesced in the rule of the nominally
Muslim Mongols. Loyalty could be to a righteous imam alone. Rida and others had taken pains
to dissociate this from the Kharijite slogan No rule other than Gods, for an unpleasant odour
hung about the name of Kharijism. But de facto, the hard wing of Hanbalite Islam seemed
vulnerable to a Kharijite reading. Prototypical al-Qaida supporters wrote to condemn the Syrian
neo-Hanbali scholar Nasir al-Din al-Albani, when he released a series of taped sermons
entitled Min Manhaj al-Khawarij, From the Method of the Kharijites, in the early 1990s.
[16] Often the word used by less radical puritans in Saudi Arabia for those engaged in terrorism
is, precisely, Kharijite.
What everyone agrees, however, is that al-Qaida is far, far removed from medieval Sunnism. For
some, it is Kharijite; for others, an illicit Westernisation of Islam. As Carl Brown puts it, it
cannot be stressed too often just how much Qutbs hardline interpretation departs from the main
current of Islamic political thought throughout the centuries.[17] For Brown, Qutbism is
kharijism redux; but we would add, with Gray, that it is a Westernised kharijism. Like all identity
movements, it ends with only a very arguable kind of authenticity.
The convergence between a malfunctioning Hanbalism and modern revolutionary vanguardism
may owe its strength not to a shared potential for an instantiated xenophobia, although this will
attract many party cadres; instead, I suspect, it relates to deeper structures of relationality with
the world and its worldliness. The new Islamic zealotry is angry with the Islamic past, as Ibn
Taymiya was. For Ibn Taymiya, the ulema had not adequately polarised light and dark. In the
case of the mystics, they had disastrously confused them. There is something of the Augustine in
Ibn Taymiya: a concrete understanding of a God who is radically apart from creation, or, in
patristic terms, alienated from it, and a consequently high view of scripture that challenges
Asharite and Maturidi confidences in the direct intelligibility of God in the world, and revives
essentially dualistic readings of the Fall narrative. It may be that Ibn Taymiyas roots in Harran,
scene of neo-Gnostic and astral speculations, parallel Augustines Manichean background. But
there is certainly a furious, single-minded zeal in both men that expresses itself in a deep
pessimism about the human mind and conscience, and hence the worth of intellectuals, poets,
logicians, and mystics.[18] In such a cosmology, which deploys the absolute polarity abhorred
by Deleuzes Pli (his love of nomadic arts, with their blocs of sensations is Islamically

suggestive) gentilizing becomes first, not second nature.

Seljuk accommodationism, by contrast, had been driven by an ultimately Ghazalian moralism
that feared the spiritual entailments of this crypto-dualism. Nizam al-Mulk, paradigm of high
Sunni realpolitik, does not enforce a norm, but enforces the toleration of many norms. He finds
that like all scripture, the Koran is super-replete, overflowing with meaning, and no exegete may
taste all its flavours; this destabilising miracle may express itself in schism, historically the less
favoured Islamic option, or in adab al-ikhtilaf, the forced courtesy of the scholar-jurist well
aware of the ultimately unfixable quality of much of holy writ. The Sunni achievement, which
was a moral as well as a pragmatic achievement, was to incorporate a wide spectrum of
theological and juristic dispute into the universe of allowable internal difference. For zealotry, as
Ghazali puts it, is a hijab, a veil.[19] It is a form of, in the Rabbis language, loving the Torah
more than God. A besetting odium theologicum which can only be healed through self-scrutiny
and a due humility before the often baffling intricacy of Gods word and world.
It was on the basis of this hospitable caution that non-Qutbian Sunnism engaged with modernity.
Reading the fatwas of great twentieth-century jurists such as Yusuf al-Dajawi, Abd al-Halim
Mahmud, and Subhi Mahmassani, one is reminded of the Arabic proverb cited on motorway
signs in Saudi Arabia: fil-taanni as-salama - there is safety in reducing speed. Far from
committing a pacifist betrayal, the normative Sunni institutions were behaving in an entirely
classical way. Sunni piety appears as conciliatory, cautious, and disciplined, seeking to identify
the positive as well as the negative features of the new global culture. Thus it is not the orthodox,
but the merchants of identity religion, the Sunna Contra Gentiles, who insist on totalitarian and
exclusionary readings of the Law and the state.[20]
If this is our curious situation, if al-Qaida is indeed a product and mirror not of the Sunni story,
but of the worst of the Enlightenments possibilities, if it is, as it were, the Frankenstein of
Frankistan (as Zionism is a golem), how effective can be Americas currently chosen antidote?
This takes the form of killing, imprisoning and torturing the leadership, and many of the rank
and file, using the methods which have been reported by British and other detainees released
from Guantanamo Bay, and by Red Cross officials disturbed by news from Bagram air base in
Kabul. Again, our occasionalism has allowed us to forget the history of revolutionary
movements, which suggests that such measures are self-defeating, sowing the dragons teeth of
martyrdom, and announcing to the world the depth of the torturers fear. A civilisation confident
of victory would not resort to such desperate means. For after violence and internment, there is
no last resort. Both moral advantage and deterrent threat have already been used up.
Traditional Sunnis intuit that al-Qaida is a Western invention, but one which cannot be defeated
in a battleground where the logic is Western. This was one of the messages that emerged from
the 2003 summit meeting of eight hundred Muslim scholars at Putrajaya.[21] Al-Qaida is
inauthentic: it rejects the classical canons of Islamic law and theology, and issues fatwas that are

neither formally nor in their habit of mind deducible from medieval exegesis. But it is not
enough for the entire leadership of the religion to denounce al-Qaida, as it did at Putrajaya, and
then to hope and pray that the same strange logic of modernity that bred this insurgency can
spirit it away again. The West inseminates, but does not so easily abort. Faced with this, the
Sunni leadership needs to be more alert to its responsibilities. Even the radical Westernisation of
Islamic piety remains the responsibility of Muslim ulema, not, ultimately, of the Western matrix
that inspired it. And it has to be said that the Sunni leadership has not done enough.
Denunciations alone will not dent the puritans armour, and may strengthen it; this the CounterReformation learned by experience.
3. Jus in bello
The war against neo-Kharijite ideology can only be won by Sunni normalcy. Washingtons
rhetoric of religion-building disguises either a Texan missionary instinct or the triumphant
relativism of the secular academy. Franklin Graham and the Ashcroft Inquisition will fail, as
Christianity always does against Semitic monotheism, while liberalism, at once its rival and its
hypocritical bedfellow, cannot be relied on to supply ethics under conditions of stress. For the
Occidental energy all too often responds to such conditions either by apathy (remember the
wartime Parisian intelligentsia), or by suspending the ethical teleologically, the classic
revolutionary gambit since the days of the Paris commune, if not the English civil war.
The zealots of both sides insist that the validating of soft targets is a representative Islamic act.
How might they respond to evidence that it is, in fact, a representative secular-Western one? The
evidence, as it turns out, is compelling, being a matter of historical record. Despite its claims in
times of obese complacency to abhor the killing of the innocent, the secular West reverts with
indecent haste to Ciceros maxim, Silent enim leges inter arma - laws are silent during war. And
it is in this Occidental culture, and not in mainline Islam, that we should seek the matrix of
radical Islamism. Let us survey the record.
W.G. Sebald has been a recent and helpful contributor here. He writes lyrically of the vengeance
visited by the RAF on Germanys cities in the early 1940s, focussing on the thirty thousand who
died in Operation Gomorrah (!) against the city of Hamburg. The object of such campaigns was
military only in a very indirect way, for Churchills purpose in what he called terror bombing
(where it was not straightforward vengefulness) was to sap the morale of Germanys civilian
population. As Sebald shows, Parliament restructured the whole British economy to support the
area bombing campaign, for one reason alone: it was the only way in which Britain could
successfully strike back.[22]
In 1930, the British population had generally shared the view of one politician that to bomb
civilians was revolting and un-English.[23] But with its back against the wall, the population
changed its mind with impressive speed. In 1942, Bomber Commands Directive No. 22

identified the 'morale of the enemy civil population as the chief target. By the end of the war, a
million tons of high explosive had rained down on German cities, and half a million civilians
were dead. By that time a majority of Britons explicitly supported the bombing of civilian
targets.[24] As the MP for Norwich put it: I am all for the bombing of working-class areas of
German cities. I am Cromwellian - I believe in slaying in the name of the Lord,[25] while
after Operation Gomorrah, a popular headline crowed that Hamburg has been
Hamburgered.[26] A third of the war economy was directed to serve this onslaught, with the
development of new weapons of mass destruction, such as incendiary bombs, designed
specifically to maximise devastation to private homes.[27] Yet after Dresden, which the postwar
official history hailed as the crowning achievement of the bombing campaign, Churchill was
forced to reconsider:
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply
for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise,
we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.[28]
This was no sort of repentance. To his last breath Churchill defended the terror campaign which
he had instigated and which underpinned so much of his popularity. Mass destruction from the
air of a target whose details were often obscured by clouds or the absence of moonlight, was not,
for this icon of English defiance, a moral problem.
A largely secular person of the stamp of our wartime Prime Minister was clearly following a
fairly standard Enlightenment philosophy which had replaced the wars of kings with the wars of
peoples. Clausewitz, the chief architect of post-medieval military thought, was certain that war
is an act of force which theoretically can have no limits,[29] a view that the most influential
military theorists of the twentieth century extended to the use of airpower to terrorize civilians
(Liddell Hart, Douhet, Harris). One might have hoped that this illustration of the moral calibre of
secularity was found appalling by the Christian conscience of the day. But the stance taken by
the leaders of British Christianity was already deeply influenced by modernism. The Archbishop
of Canterbury William Temple, followed by his brother bishop of York, consistently refused to
join the anti-terror minority within the Anglican church. As a historian records, only a handful
of the clergy objected outright to area bombing;[30] George Bell, the outspoken Bishop of
Chichester, was a lonely exception in upholding earlier ideals of a just war which had regarded
women and children as sacrosanct.
After the war, the victors reset the moral template to its rhetorical default position, and their
earlier fatwas in favour of terror bombing were relegated to an outer, uncomfortable edge of the
national memory. Once again, England and America (which had carried on its own targeting of
civilians in Japan)[31] reverted to the traditional notion of civilian immunity, with its preEnlightenment roots. So five years later, the British press felt able to excoriate Menachem Begin
as a terrorist, simply because, as he puts it in his memoirs: our enemies called us terrorists []

but we used physical force only because we were faced by physical force.[32] And today, who
can claim that Al-Qaidas logic is different? The 777 has become the poor mans nuclear
weapon, his own Manhattan Project. Again, he has turned traitor to the East by embracing the
utilitarian military ethic of his supposed adversary. He, even more than the regimes, shows the
cost of Westernisation.
In this light, how may we take the pulse of the Wests denunciation of Muslim terror? Let us
recall Adornos First Law of sexual ethics: always mistrust the accuser.
4. Samson Terroristes
The targeting of civilians is more Western than otherwise; contemplating the Ground Zero of a
hundred German cities, this can hardly be denied. Yet it will be claimed that suicidal terrorism is
something new, and definitively un-Western. Here, we are told by xenophobes on both sides, the
Islamic suicide squads, the Black Widows, the death-dealing pilots, are an indigenously Islamic
product.[33] And yet here again, when we detach ourselves from the emotive chauvinism of the
Islamists and their Judeo-Christian misinterpreters, we soon find that the roots of such practices
in the Islamic imagination are as recent as they are shallow. The genealogy of suicide bombing
clearly stretches back from Palestine, through Shia guerillas in southern Lebanon, to the Hindunativist zealots of the Tamil Tigers, and to the holy warriors of Shinto Japan, who initiated the
tradition of donning a bandanna and making a final testament on camera before climbing into the
instrument of destruction. The kamikaze was literally the 'Wind of Heaven', a term evocative of
the divine intervention which destroyed the Mongol fleet as it crossed the Yellow Sea.
Hindu and Buddhist tributaries of Middle-Eastern suicide bombing are conspicuous, and it is
significant that the Islamists, driven as ever by nativist passion, recoil from them in fits of denial.
(How happily, in the sermons, hunud rhymes with yahud!) Yet some scenic images may be
instructive for those who take the philosophy of isnadseriously. After describing the Christian
martyr Peregrinus, who set fire to himself in public, Sir James Frazier records:
Buddhist monks in China sometimes seek to attain Nirvana by the same method, the flame of
their religious zeal being fanned by a belief that the merit of their death redounds to the good of
the whole community, while the praises which are showered upon them in their lives, and the
prospect of the honours and worship which await them after death, serve as additional incentives
to suicide.[34]
But it was in South India that holy suicide seems to have been most endemic:
In Malabar and the neighbouring regions, many sacrifice themselves to the idols. When they are
sick or involved in misfortune, they vow themselves to the idol in case they are delivered. Then,
when they have recovered, they fatten themselves for one or two years; and when another

festival comes around, they cover themselves with flowers, crown themselves with white
garlands, and go singing and playing before the idol, when it is carried through the land. There,
after they have shown off a good deal, they take a sword with two handles, like those used in
currying leather, put it to the back of their necks, and cutting strongly with both hands sever their
heads from their bodies before the idol.[35]
The atmaghataka, the suicidal Hindu, was a familiar sight of the premodern Indian landscape,
where religious suicides were highly recommended and in most cases glorified.[36] Suicide
often functioned as the culmination of a pilgrimage: the enormous Tirtha literature (literature on
pilgrimage) curiously enough describes in detail suicide by intending persons at different places
of pilgrimage and the varying importance and virtues attached to them.[37] Ibn Battuta and alBiruni, among other Muslim visitors, had been particularly shocked by Hindu customs of sacred
suicide, particularly bride-burning and self-drowning.[38] Altogether, in such a culture the
development of suicidal methods as part of war is hardly surprising; they are deeply rooted in
local non-monotheistic values.
Todays Tamil extremists extend this tradition in significant ways. Each Tamil Tiger wears a
cyanide capsule around his neck, to be swallowed in case of capture. The explosive belt, used to
assassinate hated politicians as well as Sinhalese marines and ordinary civilians, predates its
Arab borrowing: the first Tamil suicide-martyrs in modern times appear in the 1970s.[39] The
Tigers Hindu roots[40] thus nourish the current Palestinian practice; as one observer notes: the
Black Tigers, as the suicide cadres are known, have been emulated by the likes of Hamas.[41]
But there is also a strong Western precedent, in pagan antiquity, in early Judaism, and in
Christianity.
Suicide had been a respectable option for many ancients. Achilles chooses battle against the
Trojans, knowing that the gods have promised that this will lead to his death. Ajax takes his own
life, in the confidence that this will not affect his honour. Chrysippus, Zeno, and Socrates all opt
for suicide rather than execution or dishonour. Marcus Aurelius praises it to the skies. It was
only the neo-Platonists and late Platonists (who not coincidentally became the most congenial
Hellenes for Islam) who systematically opposed it.[42]
The Biblical text nowhere condemns suicide. (Judas is condemned for betrayal, not for taking
his own life; although Augustine will claim otherwise.) On the contrary, it offers several
examples of individuals who chose death.[43] Saul (the koranic Talut) falls on his own sword
rather than be humiliated in Philistine captivity (I Samuel 31). Jonah (Yunus) asks the frightened
mariners to cast him into the sea (Jonah 1.12), and begs Take my life from me, (4.3) for it is
better for me to die than to live (4.8-9). Job (Ayyub) prays: O that I might have my request, and
that God would grant my desire; that it would please God to crush me (Job 6:8-13), and even I
loath my life (7:15). Later, during the Maccabean revolts, the hero Razis falls on his sword to

avoid falling into the hands of the wicked (2 Maccabees 14:42, 45-6). A notion of vicarious
atonement has developed, so that the militants suicide which enrages the enemy brings a
blessing to the people (4 Maccabees 17:21-2). [44]
The early rabbis typically accept self-immolation in situations of military desperation, to avoid
humiliation and to impress the enemy. The deaths of Saul and Samson were regarded as
exemplary.[45] And in 'the Jewish Middle Ages, enthusiasm for martyrdom (at least in Ashkenaz
- northern Europe) became so great that it proved a positive danger to Jewish
existence.[46] Religious voices raised in support of 20th century Zionism could link this
tradition to their own militancy.[47] Hence Avram Kook, the first Ashkenazy Chief Rabbi of
mandate Palestine (in Walter Wurzburgers words)
permitted individuals to volunteer for suicide missions when carried out in the interest of the
collective Jewish community. In other words, an act that would be illicit if performed to help
individuals, would be legitimate if intended for the benefit of the community.[48]
In the nascent Christian movement, Jesus came to be presented as a suicide, albeit one who knew
that he would be resurrected. Some historians are convinced that Jesus, having armed his band
with swords (Luke 22:36), formed part of the larger Zealot movement against Roman
oppression,[49] while others adhere to the orthodox view that his deliberate death was to be a
cosmic sacrifice for human sin; but in either case, the dominant voice in the New Testament
presents him as going to Jerusalem in the awareness that this would bring about his certain death
(see Mark 10:32-4). Hence the insistent courting of martyrdom by many early Christians praised
by Tertullian (here in the words of a modern scholar):
In 185 the proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, was approached by a group of Christians
demanding to be executed. The proconsul obliged some of them and then sent the rest away,
saying that if they wanted to kill themselves there was plenty of rope available or cliffs they
could jump off.[50]
And for Chrysostom, blasting the infidels, the Christians were better than the ancients, since
Socrates had had little choice, while Christians volunteered for martyrdom. In fact, most
orthodox Christian martyrs appear to have been volunteers, many of them appearing from
nowhere to clamour for the death penalty, or emerging from the crowds to join the flames
consuming one of their brethren. It was only with Augustine that this self-immolating behaviour
came to an end, as involuntary martyrdom was established as the only acceptable Christian norm
in the West.[51]
Orthodoxy, however, remained closer to the primitive tradition. As Frazier records (of sixteenth
to nineteenth-century Russia): whole communities hailed with enthusiasm the gospel of death,
and hastened to put its precepts into practice. Although at first the volunteers were dropped into

doorless rooms in which they starved to death for Christ, fire became the most popular method.
Priests, monks, and laymen scoured the villages and hamlets preaching salvation by the flames,
some of them decked in the spoils of their victims; for the motives of the preachers were often of
the basest sort. They did not spare even the children, but seduced them by promises of the gay
clothes, the apples, the nuts, the honey they would enjoy in heaven. [] Men, women and
children rushed into the flames. Sometimes hundreds, and even thousands, thus perished
together.[52]
Combining the practice of suicidal martyrdom-seeking with the pursuit of warfare, resulted, for
Europeans as well as for Tamils, in what would today be called suicidal warfare. This had the
advantage of generating tremendous publicity for the cause in worlds such as the Indic and the
Greco-Roman which, like todays, had a penchant for the bizarre.[53] And for this, the most
spectacular precedent was in the Bible. Brian Wicker, a modern Catholic interpreter, remarks
that to us, Samson just appears like a cross between Beowulf and Batman,[54] while Bernhard
Anderson in his book The Living World of the Old Testament, neutralises the Samson story by
viewing him as the object of divine punishment.[55] Yet he is presented by the narrator of
Judges 13 to 16 as an unambiguous hero, and traditionally the churches regarded his selfdestruction and his massacre of three thousand Philistine men, women, and children, as a valid
act of martyrdom. Augustine and Aquinas both pose the question: why is self-murder not here a
sin, and answer: because God had commanded him, and the normal ethical rule was thus
suspended.[56]
This suicide-warrior rises to the top of Western literature in Samson Agonistes. Milton is here
smarting from the horror and shame of the Restoration. Once again, England is under the
idolatrous law of king and bishops, a kind of jahiliyya, and Cromwells city of glass has been
shattered. His poem, then, is autobiographical: Samson is a true hero, humiliated, blinded by an
unjust king, kept captive in the world of the dark Other. Like the refugee-camp inmate he is
Exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own.[57]
His duty, confronted by a hypocritical War on Terror, is to take effective revenge by any means
necessary. His father, recognising this grim necessity, makes the usual statement of fathers of
suicide bombers everywhere:
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail,
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair.

And what may quiet us in a death so noble.[58]

The theme continues, through Handel, to reach Saint-Saens. In the latters opera Samson and
Delilah the Samson legend, far from falling by the wayside of progress andfraternit, seems the
perfect icon for Frances contemporary humiliation before Prussian technology. The guns of
Krupp have frustrated Frances destiny in her mission civilatrice, and the chosen people must be
avenged. The story seems perfectly modern: there is the theme of the tragic power of sex Delilah becomes a second Carmen - and we witness the inevitability of total destruction in a
grand, cast-iron Gtterdammerung. Ernst Jnger, Stalingrad, and the suicidal B-52 captain
in Doctor Strangelove are not far behind.
But perhaps the most recent, and also the most fascinating, mobilisation of the Samson ideal in
Western literature is the novel Samson by the Zionist ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Homeland, whatever the price! is the captured Israelites slogan. Like the Islamist, the Zionist
hero stresses the impossibility of conviviality:
The second thing I have learned in the last few days is the wisdom of having boundarystones
[] Neighbours can agree so long as each remains home, but trouble comes as soon as they
begin to pay each other visits. The gods have made men different and commanded them to
respect the ditch in the fields. It is a sin for men to mix what the Gods have separated.[59]
Like a good Islamist, the Zionist Samson combines this xenophobia with a passion to acquire the
Others technology. When asked if he had a message for his own people, he cries:
They must get iron. They must give everything they have for iron their silver and wheat, oil
and wine and flocks, even their wives and daughters. All for iron! There is nothing in the world
more valuable than iron. Will you tell them that?[60]
Like the Islamist, too, Jabotinskys suicide-hero is envious of the unbelievers skills at
organisation:
One day, he was present at a festival at the temple of Gaza. Outside in the square a multitude of
young men and girls were gathered for the festive dances [...] A beardless priest led the dances.
He stood on the topmost step of the temple, holding an ivory baton in his hand. When the music
began the vast concourse stood immobile [...] The beardless priest turned pale and seemed to
submerge his eyes in those of the dancers, which were fixed responsively on his. He grew paler
and paler; all the repressed fervor of the crowd seemed to concentrate within his breast till it
threatened to choke him. Samson felt the blood stream to his heart; he himself would have
choked if the suspense had lasted a few moments longer. Suddenly, with a rapid, almost
inconspicuous movement, the priest raised his baton, and all the white figures in the square sank
down on the left knee and threw the right arm towards heaven a single movement, a single,

abrupt, murmurous harmony. The tens of thousands of onlookers gave utterance to a moaning
sigh. Samson staggered; there was blood on his lips, so tightly had he pressed them together [...]
Samson left the place profoundly thoughtful. He could not have given words to his thought, but
he had a feeling that here, in this spectacle of thousands obeying a single will, he had caught a
glimpse of the great secret of politically minded peoples.[61]
Lest this be thought an aberrant, marginal use of the suicide-hero, let us recall the words of
another Zionist thinker, Stephen Rosenfeld: All our generation was brought up on that
book.[62]
Samson provides an important Biblical archetype for the national hero who is a semi-outcast
among his own people, but who saves them nonetheless. In the dying months of Nazi
Germany, selbstopfereinsatz missions were flown by Luftwaffe pilots against Soviet bridgeheads
on the Oder.[63] In 1950, Cecil B. DeMille used Jabotinskys novel as the basis for his
film Samson and Delilah. And a still more recent example is the film Armageddon, in which a
group of socially marginalised Americans sacrifice their lives by detonating their spacecraft
inside a comet that is on a collision course with Earth. In doing so they are defying tradition and
even lawful orders, but they earn thereby the eternal gratitude of their people. As Robert Jewett
and John Lawrence have shown, this image of the American hero as the ordinary man impatient
of traditional authority who risks or destroys himself to save the world (John Brown, Charles
Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, Captain America, Superman, Spiderman, and Captain Picard in the
final episode of Star Trek), is the great monomyth of todays West.[64] In some Eastern parts,
the popularity of magically vanishing Bin Laden figures, who emerge from undistinguished lives
to break conventional laws in order to save the world, offers another suggestion of how deeply
Westernised Arab culture has become.
Let no-one claim, then, that suicide bombing is alien to the West. It is a recurrent possibility of
Europes heritage. What needs emphasizing, against the snapshot thinking of the journalists, is
the absence of a parallel strand in Islamic thinking. For Islam, suicide is always forbidden; some
regard it as worse than murder.[65] Many Biblical stories are retold by Islam, but the idea of
suicidal militancy is entirely absent from the scriptures. Sauls suicide is not present in the
Koran, nor do we find it in Tabaris greatAnnals (which wish simply to record that he died in
battle).[66] The Koranic Jonah does not ask to be pitched overboard, and Job does not pray for
death. Similarly, the suicidal istishhad of Samson is absent from the Koran and Hadith, no doubt
in line with their insistence on the absolute wickedness of suicide. The same Islamic idealism
that cannot accept Davids seduction of Bathsheba, or Lots incest, has here airbrushed out
Samsons killing of the innocent and his self-destruction.
Again, the point is clear: the scriptural and antique sensibilities which provided some cultural
space for suicidal warfare in Western civilisation appear to have very thin foundations in Islam.
Flying into a skyscraper to save the world is closer to the line which links Samson to Captain

America, with a detour through the Book of Revelation, than to any Muslim conception
of futuwwa.
Here are Buruma and Margalit, in their important study of Westernised anti-Westernism:
Bin Ladens use of the word insane is more akin to the Nazis constant use of fanatisch. Human
sacrifice is not an established Muslim tradition. Holy war always was justified in defence of the
Islamic state, and believers who died in battle were promised heavenly delights, but glorification
of death for its own sake was not part of this, especially in the Sunni tradition. [] And the idea
that freelance terrorists would enter paradise as martyrs by murdering unarmed civilians is a
modern invention, one that would have horrified Muslims in the past. Islam is not a death cult.
[67]
Let us now move on to consider other hints of the Western roots of radical Islamism. One
symptom may be detected in a shared fondness for conspiracy theories. The messianic
importance of the hidden deliverer is emphasised by the machinations of the forces of darkness
which are ranged against him. The muamara, or Plot, is everywhere, as Robert Fisk, that
dauntless lamentor of Mid-East fantasies, regularly observes.[68] A sadly typical example is
given by Abdelwahab Meddeb:
When I was at Abu Dhabi in May 2001, a number of my interlocutors, of various Arab
communities (Lebanese, Syrian, Sudanese, etc.), confirmed the warning, spread by the local
newspapers, to the public of the countries of the Near East not to buy the very inexpensive belts
with the label Made in Thailand. These belts, the people told me, were actually Israeli products
in disguise and carried a kind of flea that propagated an incurable disease: one more Zionist trick
to weaken Arab bodies, if not eliminate them. These interlocutors, otherwise reasonable and
likable, gave credit to information as fantastic as that. Those are the fantasies in which the
symptoms of the sickness of Islam can be seen, the receptive compost in which the crime of
September 11 could be welcomed joyfully.[69]
Again, this is historically unusual for Muslims. Healthy communities far from Western influence
find it incredible. The current prevalence of a kind of Islamic McCarthyism, often hysterical in
its attempts to reduce a complex and enraging modernity to a monomaniac opposition, is simply
another indication of how far the Islamists have travelled from the tradition. Religion makes us
more attentive to reality, while secularity, bereft of real disciplines of self-knowledge and selfdisdain, permits a dream-self. They think that every shout is against themselves, says the Koran
of the hypocrites (63:4), while praising the believers for their clearsighted faith that only God is
simple, and it is only He that should be feared. The correct mindset is specified in scripture:
Those to whom the people said: The people have gathered against you, therefore fear them!
But it increased them in faith, and they said: Allah is enough for us, an excellent Guardian is

he!
So they returned with grace and favour from Allah, and no harm touched them. They followed
the good-pleasure of Allah, and Allah is of great bounty.
It is only the devil who would make [men] fear his allies. Fear them not; fear Me, if you are
believers. (3:173-5)
The context is the aftermath of Uhud, when waverers warned of the strength of the combined
enemies around Medina. Paranoia thus becomes the marker of imperfect faith and undue respect
for the asbab. But despair is kufr: Islams Samson could never say:
Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless;
This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard,
No long petition, speedy death,
The close of all my miseries, and the balm.[70]
Moreover, it requires an apparently unbearable humility for the Islamist conspiracy theorist to
recognise that until very recently Muslims have seldom been perceived by the United States as a
noteworthy enemy. For most of its history, America has opposed and feared and stereotyped
Englishmen, Rebels, Red Indians, Spaniards, Huns, Reds or Gooks. The current preoccupation
with Muslims is shallow in the US memory, if we discount the brief and long-forgotten
enthusiasms of the Decatur episode.
Again, as with the conspiracy theories which urgently needed to see 9/11 as the work of Mossad,
and the utilitarian justification of the vanguards suspension of the ethical, the radical Islamists
are an expression of the very Westernising alienation they profess to defy. In a sense, the West
hates them because they are more modern than itself, and thus remind it of the unbearable risks it
has taken by following the road of Enlightenment. It is as Meddeb reminds us: Who are those
who died while spreading death in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? [...] They are the
sons of our times, the pure products of the Americanisation of the world.[71]
Self-immolation in Gaza to bring down the unbelieving temple. This is tragedy in Wagnerian
mode. It is suicide, selbstmord, not really prefatory to redemption, but to publicity and therapy. It
was Nietzsche, not any Islamic sage, who wrote: The thought of suicide is a great source of
comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.[72] After being eyeless
in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, Samson experiences calm of mind, all passion spent[73] - the
English idiom begins with Miltons ending, linking, as do some readings of the Samson
legend, eros and thanatos, desire and death.
But it is Nietzsche who introduces the modern superhero. If the splendrous blond beast, avidly

rampant for plunder and victory cannot take the revenge which heals his heart, he will end his
unworthy existence in a magnificent, Hitlerian funeral pyre. Samson thus becomes
an anticipation of modernity.
Religion, if it has the right to exist at all, must consider this a spurious healing. Neither vainglory
nor despair can have a place in the metabolism of a religion based on the idea of Gods unique
mastery of history, the polar opposite of dualistic paganism, or of the romantic Enlightenment
dream which found its tragic moods congenial. The scriptures denounce hamiyya, the feverish
identity-politics of the pagan Arabs; the post-orthodox Islamist admits it to his heart. Roots of
Muslim Rage is the title of Bernard Lewis most notorious piece on Islamism.[74] His
pathology of the roots is far astray; but the rage is undeniable. How are we to understand such
rage in the heart of a religion built on submission to the Divine will, hulwihi wa-murrihi, the
bitter and the sweet of it? Which insisted that it is not the wrestler who is strong; it is the man
who masters himself when angry?[75] Why did the Blessed Prophet pray for a certainty by
which You render slight in our eyes the calamities of this world?[76]
The roots are, as it turns out, instrumental reason, natural causality, and the enthroning of
Aristotle over Plato, or Newton over St Denys. Without the certainty of an omnipotent God (and
is not Islam here better at restraining passion than all other faiths?) the experience of adversity
leaves us prey to wild emotion. It was this same jahilicraving for revenge that led Churchill
astray, as one historian suggests: In this superheated and bloody time emotion may have
masqueraded as political thinking in a rationalizing Prime Ministers mind.[77]
Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless
grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy. Let the qadi not judge when he is angry,
as it is said. But here is the reality of Gaza:
Hamas operations are not directed and have never been directed against children, says Hamas
political leader Ismail Abu Shanaab. It is directed at military targets. When pushed, however,
he goes further. To be frank with you, there are a lot of the moralities which got broken in this
war, he says. They are letting the Israelis kill Palestinians and they want the Palestinians to be
moderate, to be moral. We cannot control the game because it has no rules, it has no limits.[78]
Revenge, rage, the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is Churchillian, but also aromatic
with a not-yet-dispersed Marxism. Here, for instance, is Mawdudi, a tributary of the Hamas
vision:
Muslim is the name of the international revolutionary party which Islam organizes to
implement its revolutionary program and Jihad is that revolutionary struggle which the Islamic
party carries out to achieve its objectives.[79]

As Abdullah Schleifer goes on to remark:

Mawdoodi took as his enduring model a progression of dynamic relationships - the movement,
the party, revolutionary struggle, the revolution - defined by one of the major desacralizing
forces in contemporary times, in pursuit of a concept of state that draws its substance from nonIslamic sources, and all with that same innocence of the modern Muslim importing his valuefree technology.[80]
The antinomian quality of this furious insurrectionist method confirms Grays suggestion that
Islamism is simply another modern weapon against religion. For theists, the ethical can never be
suspended; on the contrary, it is needed most when most under strain. Yet the militant
transgressions of radicals form only part of a much wider picture of covert but deep surrender to
Enlightenment thought.
Islamism, that soi-disant hammer of the Franks, is ironically modern in very many ways. It is
modern in its eagerness for science and its hatred of superstition. It is modern in its rejection of
all higher spirituality (Qutb recommends, instead, al-fana fil-aqida).[81] It is modern in its
rejection of the principle of tradition, and, despite itself, cannot but impose the insecurities of
Western-trained minds (and are they not all engineers and doctors?) on scripture. Intertextuality
and the community of sages are barred. The theopolitics of classical Islam, where both
scholarship and the state are invigorated by mutual tension (the Men of the Pen and the Men of
the Sword), is replaced by the finally Western model of the ideological totalitarian state, with a
self-appointed clerisy (albeit composed of technocrats) requiring absolute control over policy
and the Sharia. The modular diversities of pre-modern Muslim societies, where villages, tribes,
and millat minorities regulated themselves, give way to the Islamist appropriation of the
machinery of centralised post-colonial etatism. Social subsets which flourished for centuries
under, say, Ottomanism, already eroded by centralising colonial regimes, are finally liquidated
by a vision that is purely Western, albeit camouflaged by loud religious language. As Maryam
Jameelah puts it, in a courageous article in which she publicly announces her disillusionment
with the Islamist model:
The tragic paradox of the life and thought of Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdoodi was his
subconscious acceptance of the very same Western ideas he dedicated his entire life to struggling
against.[82]
In such a system, those who should be serving God end up obeying the men of the state who are
His all too fallible interpreters. They worship in fear of the police, not in fear of God. Dissidence
becomes a simultaneous treason and blasphemy. The failure of this totalitarian model of the
Islamic State, this carceral Islamism which makes a Muslim land a prison rather than a
landscape of options and regional variety, is today everywhere apparent, and is a sign, perhaps,
that God will not allow victory to such a perversion. For the Muslims will not long be allowed to

bow before any other than God.

6. Dies Irae
Is this attack on tradition a modernity with a future? Zealotry itself is not normally refuted, it has
to subside. Often that subsidence is enabled by schism: Cromwell could not be replicated
because of the powerfully fissiparous quality of Dissent. Calvins Geneva hardly outlived him.
Hutterites, Levellers, Anabaptists, and the other fragments of the Protestant detonation could
perpetuate themselves, but their energy source seemed to have a half-life. Islamic extremism,
what has historically been called ghuluww, excess, and has occasionally, though not often,
troubled the religions equilibrium, usually knows a similar deflation through internal
factionalism and the disappointment which seeps into all annunciatory movements when the
world does not either improve or come to an end. In the case of Muslim puritanism, we see,
currently, infighting, as in Algeria, and on the streets of Riyadh. Apathy may not be long
postponed.
This seems likely, to the extent that Islamism is the product of indigenous decay, a second
Reformation. But will its porosity to Enlightenment thought prolong or accelerate this decay?
(How ironic that Islams Reformation should come after its Enlightenment!) Here predictions
about Islamism may not be so different from predictions about a certain kind of exhibitionist
postmodernism. Take Foucault, for instance. On his death, he had been praised by Le Monde as
the most important event of thought in our century. He was an iconic Western iconoclast, but
more honest about the consequences of modernity than most liberal seekers after virtue. He had
been strongly pro-Khomeini, and had also praised the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. Like many
Islamists, he was a lapsed Marxist, concerned with making a statement, with angering the
middle-class West, with disruption. A second Bakunin, he was concerned not with advancing a
detailed and realistic agenda, but with a passionate desire to shock. And like his hero Nietzsche,
he died of a venereal disease, his immensely careless sexual habits indicating the powerful allure
of suicide for the sake of making a statement. We need to ask: is this too close for comfort to
radical Islamism, with its penchant for pater les blancs by whatever means? For how long can
the West portray the Islamists as its own polar opposite? Will it be harder to forget the zealots
than to forget Foucault?
This is less hopeful: Foucault has not been forgotten. The ambient vacuum which permitted a
philosophy of the absurd in France and in the Middle East shows no signs of abatement.
Capitalist shortsightedness wedded to postmodern philosophy may offer the only real lifesupport system that the Muslim reformation can hope for. Thus the defeat of the Muslim
aberration may depend on nothing less than the defeat of the current global system, and its
replacement with an order grounded in the ethical brilliance of the monotheisms. This diagnosis
places us far beyond both Qutbs chauvinism and the narcissism of the neocons. The same
classical Islamic strength through cosmopolitanism that helped our ancient order to endure as a

non-totalitarian expression of certainty must be remobilised to affirm the Others heart, in order
to reconnect the global system with religious reality. That is, a successful war on terror cannot
be detached from a humanly consensual war on environmental loss, on unfair trade, on identity
feminism, and on genetic manipulation. If it is so detached, it will be lost.
Blake portrays the spirit of the industrial age as Urizen, blind ignorance, fettered in laws of
causality unveiled by Newton, and sunk in feral emotionalism. Religion is indispensable to the
nurturing of a true humanism because it fights this, and insists that humanity has a telos, and that
the soul is therefore sacrosanct.
To succeed, then we must be able to realise that self-judgement, that greatest and most
irreplaceable gift of the Abrahamic religions, is more than an evolutionary confidence trick.
Consider Jrgen Habermas latest book, which reflects on human nature as challenged by genetic
science.[83] Postmodernism seems to problematise self-judgement; and its associated ethical
practice seems to reduce Aristotles greatness of soul, which he, against later monotheist
reaction, considered a virtue, to superbia, greatest of the seven deadly sins. But Habermas
reminds us that confronted by genetic science, we are required, after a long hiatus, to judge
ourselves. For science seeks our permission to rebuild our bodies to reduce the suffering of
future generations; yet in the process it must ask us to define what we presently are. Liberal
ethics, which resist both such definitions, and any exercise in using human beings for our own
purposes, however idealistic, are thereby interrogated. Habermas is quite clear that the Wests
conception of virtue is a Christian ghost, rooted in a Kantianism that has been the basis of liberal
notions of individual autonomy. Yet he seems convinced that this ghost still lives, and can be
maintained perpetually, and may even serve as the stable basis of ever more ambitious projects
for universal codes of human rights, in the arena of bioethics, as elsewhere. This will include,
presumably, the war on Carrelian Islamism.
John Gray, iconoclastically again, is unsure that this is as coherent as it is helpful. Gray, whose
understanding of Al-Qaida as an Enlightenment project we noted earlier, would rather we
revisited Schopenhauers deconstruction of Kant. Frightened ethicists have deceived themselves
that there is no Christianity in this Christian ghost. Yet true Kantianism would reject the
categoric imperative as a false projection upon the Noumenon. Our desperate desire to find a
new moral anchorage after the sinking of Christian scholasticism blinds us to what is for Gray
the unanswerable insight that without God, we are beyond good and evil. Schopenhauer saw, as
Gray put it, that the enlightenment was only a secular version of Christianitys central
mistake.[84] There is no soul, only the individual will, and we have no reason to suppose that
we are any more free in our decision-making than the animals from which religion taught us that
we were so categorically distinct. Our consciousness is just one more part of the world.
Heidegger turns out to be worse: he insists that he excludes Christian paradigms, but internalises
them implicitly in his consideration of the human plight, suffering, guilt, and the paradox of
being. And while Schopenhauer maintained a pure and private pessimism, Heidegger sought to

intuit Being in his tribe. The Fhrer himself and alone, he exclaimed, is the present and future
German reality and its law. Hitlers xenophobia allowed the philosopher to repair his wounds,
and reconnect with Being. Qutbian fundamentalism is not far away.
It is impossible to exaggerate the debt Giddens runaway world owes to Christianity, for
showing so much vitality even after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of its God. But for the
Gospels, the Western empire would not have benefited from Kants conjuring trick, or Rawls
benign adversion to good people. Yet the fact of its precariousness remains; and the risk of a
tribal resolution is enormous.[85] Science harnessed to Geist dragged up Hitler; and something
similar has beset Islam. Solidarity, mythologically voiced, technologically imposed, is to be the
cure for our desperate alienation. Remember the words of the Furies in Aeschylus:
For many ills one attitude is the cure
When it agrees on what to hate.[86]
The danger, then, is that liberalism will prove too weak to prevent one form of Enlightenment
chauvinism carceral Islamism from triggering a sudden revival of another such form
Hitlerian essentialism. The prosperity of the far-right across the liberal West shows how far this
march has already come. Postmodernity is methodologically incapable of resisting this; and
monotheism must step into the breach. A monotheism, however, which bears all the arms it has
acquired and sharpened during its travels: its intellectual appropriation of Athens, its hospitality
to the autochthonously non-Semitic, its insistence on diversity, all enabled and preserved by the
centrality of spiritual purgation. The civil war within Enlightenment modernity that Gray
identifies as the essence of the war on terror is suicidal. Only a ressourcement in the anchored
past can deliver us.

NOTES
[1] Cited in Joh n Gray, Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (London, 2002), 75.
[2] Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London, 1992); Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of
Conscious Will (Bradford, 2002).
[3] Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
[4] For the neocons see now Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The NeoConservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, 2004).
[5] Cited in Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade

against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2003), 131.
[6] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the
Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (London: 2002), 369-70; e.g. The Catholic Church
and other Christian churches [] could include in every Christian Bible a detailed, corrective
account alongside the text about its many antisemitic passages, and a clear disclaimer explaining
that even though these passages were once presented as fact, they are actually false or dubious
and have been the source of much unjust injury. They could include essays on the various
failings of the Christian Bible, and a detailed running commentary on each page that would
correct the texts erroneous and libellous assertions.
[7] Cf. Julia Lipton, Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of
Nations, Representations 57 (1997), 78: Christian typologists also used Esau, Pharoah and
Herod to couple the Jew and the Muslim as carnal children of Abraham facing each other across
the world-historical break effected by the Incarnation.
[8] See Fukuyama: A country that makes human rights a significant element of its foreign
policy tends toward ineffectual moralizing at best, and unconstrained violence in pursuit of
moral aims at worst. Harpers Magazine, August 2001, p. 36.
[9] Salah Abd al-Fattah al-Khalidi, Amrika min al-dakhil bi-minzar Sayyid Qutb (Beirut, 2002).
[10] Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of
Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), 52; citing Qutbs Khasais al-Tasawwur al-Islami;
Youssef Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism (London 1990), 142-9. As Choueiri concludes:
What Qutb fails to inform his vanguard, however, is that the code of conduct he subsequently
elaborated in his commentary on the Koran matches that of Carrel much more than
Muhammads own Traditions. The result is not an indigenous form of governance, but a Third
World version of Fascism.
[11] Samuel Goitein, Jews and Arabs (New York, 1955), 130: Never has Judaism encountered
such a close and fructuous symbiosis as that with the medieval civilization of Arab Islam.
[12] Many Muslims who have rejected the new radicalism in favour of authenticity will
sympathise with the experience of Franky Schaeffer, who in the 1970s was an extreme Calvinist
advocate of totalitarian government. In the 1980s, shocked by the reality of fundamentalist
leaders, he joined the Greek Orthodox Church, denouncing the Protestant radicals as a hybrid
composed of fragments of ancient Christian faith and thoroughly modern, anti-traditional,
materialist and often utopian ideas. Cited in Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism (Cambridge, 2000),
122.

[13] John Gray, Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London, 2003), 1-2.
[14] Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 146.
[15] See for instance Richard Martin, The Religious Foundations of War, Peace and Statecraft
in Islam, in John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (eds), Just War and Jihad: Historical and
Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions. (New York,
Westport and London, 1991.)
[16] Naqd Kalam al-Shaykh al-Albani fi Sharitihi Min Manhaj al-Khawarij. N.d., n.p.
[17] L. Carl Brown, Religion and State: the Muslim approach to politics (New York, 2000), 1567. It needs to be added that Qutbs aberration is typical of those who carry out
radical ijtihad without the needful qualifications in sharia sciences. For instance, he develops
his absolutist rejection of any conversation with the West in his Maalim fil-tariq (Cairo, 1980),
145, on the basis of out-of-context Koranic verses (2:109, 2:120, and 3:100), which warn only of
the dangers of cooperating with some of the ahl al-kitab. To try and force the issue, he then
produces a hadith from Abu Yala, Do not ask the People of the Book about anything (Abu
Yala, Musnad [Damascus and Beirut, 1985/1405], IV, 102), apparently unaware that this hadith
is weak; see Abduh Ali Kushak, al-Maqsad al-Ala fi taqrib ahadith al-Hafiz Abi Yala (Beirut,
1422/2001), I, 83. In any case, who is more absurd than the radical who rejects all Western
influence, and then writes books with titles like Khasais al-Tasawwur al-Islami(Special
Qualities of the Islamic Conception)? Qutbs whole manner of expression would be
unimaginable without modernity.
[18] Abdelwahab Meddeb, Islam and its discontents (London, 2003), 48-52. Qutbs waning
interest in literature is one symptom of this.
[19] Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Disciplining the Soul, tr. T. Winter (Cambridge, 1995), 86.
[20] Asian Muslims in particular have come to reify the sharia as much as any Orientalist,
converting the law into a symbol of ethnic identification. Lawrence Rosen, The Justice of
Islam: Comparative perspectives on Islamic law and society (Oxford, 2000), 186.
[21] www.dfw.com/mld/bayarea/news/6281132.htm?1c.
[22] W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (London, 2004), 17.
[23] Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and airpower in World War II: the British bombing of German
cities (New York and Basingstoke, 1993), 28.
[24] Garrett, 90; Harvey Tress, British strategic bombing through 1940: politics, attitudes, and

the formation of a lasting pattern (Lewiston, 1988), 304.

[25] Garrett, 90.
[26] Garrett, 103.
[27] Tress, 335.
[28] Cited in Garrett, 20.
[29] Cited in Garrett, 132.
[30] Garrett, 96.
[31] General Curtis LeMay, who planned the Tokyo attacks which killed perhaps a hundred
thousand civilians, remarked that they were scorched and boiled and baked to death. (John W.
Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War [New York, 1986], 50.)
[32] Menahem Begin, The Revolt (revised edition, London 1979), 59-60.
[33] A substantial literature now exists seeking to identify suicide bombing as a paradigmatically
Muslim act. See, for instance, Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (Transaction,
2003); also Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide
Bombing (Princeton, 2004). This forms part of a larger determination to show the radicals as
authentic expressions of Islamic tradition (see, for instance, the works of Emmanuel Sivan). The
level of Islamic knowledge present in this literature is usually poor; see for instance Reuters
belief (p.22) that the Mutazilites were founded by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd! Reuter is
a Stern journalist, whose patronage by Princeton University Press shows the fragility of the
standards of American academic institutions in times of international crisis.
[34] Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough. Part III: The Dying God (London, 1913), 42. For a
more recent study see Jacques Gernet, Les suicides par le feu chez les bouddhiques chinoises de
Ve au Xe siecle, Mlanges publis par lInstitut des Hautes tudes Chinoises I (1960), 527-558.
For Buddhist suicide in India see W. Rahula, Self-Cremation in Mahayana Buddhism in
his Zen and the Taming of the Bull (London, 1978), 111-6. Rahula amplifies (p.113): Usually a
self-cremation was done in public, but there were some monks who burnt themselves secretly.
One monk burnt himself in a cauldron of oil. Some made a modest offering to a stupa by cutting
off a finger or a hand, wrapping it with cloth drenched in oil, and setting fire to it. The practice
is traced back to the time of the Buddha himself; as F. Woodward records: The Buddha
approved of the suicide of bhikkus; but in these cases they were Arahants, and we are to suppose
that such beings who have mastered self, can do what they please as regards the life and death of
their carcases (The Ethics of Suicide in Greek, Latin and Buddhist Literature, Buddhist

Annual of Ceylon [1922], p.8).

[35] Ibid, 54. See also the ritual described on page 47, in which the king of Calicut had to cut
his throat in public at the end of a twelve years reign.
[36] Upendra Thakur, The History of Suicide in India: An Introduction (Delhi, 1963), xv-xvi.
[37] Ibid., 9. See also the section on Religious Suicide, on pp.77-111.
[38] Rihlat Ibn Battuta (Beirut, 1379/1960), 411-3, focussing on the practice of bride-burning,
but referring also to Hindu self-drowning rituals. See also Muhammad ibn Ahmad alBiruni, Tahqiq ma lil-Hind (Hyderabad, 1377/1958), p.480: Those among them who kill
themselves do so during eclipses; or they may hire a man to drown them in the Ganges. Such
people hold them underwater until they die. For more on this practice see Thakur, 112.
[39] Edgar OBallance, The Cyanide War: Tamil Insurrection in Sri Lanka 1973-88 (London,
1989), p.13, for the first Tamil suicide martyrs in the 1970s. Other Tamil Tiger terrorist habits
include beheading (p.10), taking Western hostages (p.40), and drug-dealing to fund operations
(p.120).
[40] For the religious puritanism of the Tamil Tigers (no extramarital relations, no alcohol, etc.),
see Dagmar Hellmann-Rajayanagar, The Tamil Tigers: armed struggle for identity (Stuttgart,
1994), 37. Sometimes considered to be Marxist, the Tamil Tigers are primarily inspired by
national and religious tradition (ibid., p. 56).
[41] Amantha Perera, Suicide bombers feared and revered, Asia Times, July 17, 2003. For
more on Islamist borrowings from Tamil suicide warfare see Amy Waldman, Masters of Suicide
Bombing: Tamil Guerillas of Sri Lanka (New York Times, 14 January 2003).
[42] Cf. Plotinus, against the Stoics: if each mans rank in the other world depends on his state
when he goes out, one must not take out the soul as long as there is any possibility of progress
(Ennead I.9; cf. also the Elias fragment of Plotinus found after this section in Armstrongs Loeb
translation). This is similar to the Islamic virtue of praying for a long life in the service of God.
(Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, VI, 23.)
[43] Within Israelite society, as early as the period of the united monarchy, voluntary death,
given the proper circumstances, was understood as honorable and even routine. (Arthur J. Droge
and James D. Tabor, Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in
antiquity [San Francisco, 1992], 56.)
[44] See J.W. van Henten, The Maccabean martyrs as saviours of the Jewish people: a study of

2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden and New York, 1997).

[45] Droge and Tabor, 87, 100. See also Sidney Hoenig, The Sicarii in Masada Glory or
Infamy? Tradition 11 (1970), 5-30; Sidney Goldstein, Suicide in Rabbinic Literature (Hoboken,
1989), 41-2.
[46] Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and
Judaism (Stanford, 1999), 171. It is not insignificant that during the Moslem period, mass
suicides among Jews do not seem to have occurred (Goldstein, 49).
[47] The former Ashkenazy Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren, allowed suicide as an
alternative to prisoner-of-war status, following the examples of Saul and Masada (Goldstein,
49).
[48] Walter S. Wurzburger, Ethics of Responsibility: Pluralistic Approaches to Covenantal
Ethics (Philadelphia, 1994), 92. For more, see Goldsteins chapter entitled Suicide as an Act of
Martyrdom, pp.41-50.
[49] In strictly historical terms it is unlikely that Jesus of Nazareth ever expected to give his life
as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). Rather, his intention was to bring about the restoration of
Israel and to usher in the kingdom of God. (Droge and Tabor, 115.) Islam would probably be
more impressed by the Lucan Jesus, who apparently never intended to die.
[50] Droge and Tabor, 136.
[51] Droge and Tabor, 134-9, 152-5; 167-83. Voluntary martyrdom continued in some places,
such as early Muslim Cordova, where 48 Christians were beheaded between 850 and 859: the
majority of the victims deliberately invoked capital punishment by publicly blaspheming
Muhammad and disparaging Islam. They were eulogised by the Church. (K. B. Wolf, Christian
Martyrs in Muslim Spain [Cambridge, 1988], 1.)
[52] Frazier, 45.
[53] Glen Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), 66-7.
[54] Brian Wicker, Samson Terroristes: A Theological Reflection on Suicidal Terrorism, New
Blackfriars, vol. 84 no.983 (January 2003), 45. I am indebted to Wicker for much of the
information in the next two paragraphs.
[55] Bernhard Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament (London, 1958), 111.

[56] Droge and Tabor, 186.

[57] John Milton, Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1853), II, 76.
[58] Milton, 125.
[59] Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prelude to Delilah (New York, 1945), 131. This is a translation of the
original, published as Samson in 1926.
[60] Jabotinsky, 330.
[61] Jabotinsky, 200.
[62] Stephen Rosenfeld, Straight to the Heart of Menachem Begin, Present Tense (Summer
1980), 7.
[63] Antony Beevor, Berlin 1945, the downfall. (London, 2002), 238. Focke-Wulf fighterbombers packed with explosives would deliberately ram Soviet bridges and command centres.
[64] Jewett and Lawrence, 35-9.
[65] Abdallah ibn Qutayba, Uyun al-akhbar (Cairo, 1348/1930), iii, 217.
[66] Tabari, History, Volume III: The Children of Israel, translated by William M. Brinner
(Albany, 1991), 139.
[67] I. Buruma and A. Margalit, Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (London,
2004), 68-9.
[68] Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (London, 1990), 78, 79, 85, 139, 166, 175,
178, 302, 320, 374, 408, 523, 530, 567, 603.
[69] Meddeb, 115.
[70] Milton, 93.
[71] Meddeb, 9.
[72] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Helen Zimmern (London, 1907, repr.1967),
98.
[73] Milton, 126.

[74] Bernard Lewis, Roots of Muslim Rage, The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990
[75] Bukhari and Muslim from Abu Hurayra.
[76] Tirmidhi and al-Hakim (1, 528), from Ibn Umar.
[77] Tress, 289.
[78] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2179606.stm
[79] Cited by S. Abdullah Schleifer, Jihad: Sacred Struggle in Islam IV, The Islamic
Quarterly 28/ii (1984), 98.
[80] Schleifer, 100.
[81] William E. Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical
Annotation of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden, 1996), p.xxxiii. Here we have, again, the
phenomenon of loving the Torah more than God.
[82] Maryam Jameelah, An Appraisal of Some Aspects of the Life and Thought of Maulana
Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, Islamic Quarterly xxxi (1407-1987), 116-130, p.130.
[83] Jrgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (London: 2003).
[84] Gray, Straw Dogs, 41.
[85] See Gray, Straw Dogs, 102-3: The egalitarian beliefs on which Rawlss theory is founded
are like the sexual mores that were once believed to be the core of morality. The most local and
changeable of things, they are revered as the very essence of morality. As conventional opinion
moves on, the current egalitarian consensus will be followed by a new orthodoxy, equally certain
that it embodies unchanging moral truth.
[86] The Eumenides 996-7.