John R. Houk
© March 1, 2011
I always get in trouble for this thought: Islam is evil. This three word thought elicits vulgar comments from Muslims and outrage from Left Wing multiculturalists with the accusation of Islamophobe meant as an epithet and not a compliment. In honesty I have often given Muslims devoted to a theological principle of worship with the desire to better oneself via their monotheistic deity the benefit of the doubt. The benefit is a faith of inner peace. The doubt is Islam is just as much political as it is theological. This means there is a direct link between the governing authority and a focus on faith in the religion of Islam.
In my Christian faith, residing in America as well as being a Conservative, I am a huge believer of religion being an influence on governing the State, BUT NOT the State having any influence on any religion. The American Left has warped 20th century Constitutional thought into Judicial Activism believing in the propagandized myth of Separation of Church and State. This means that religion must not have any influence in the affairs of governing as well as the government not having any influence in religious practice. The problem for America with the Leftist vision of religion and State is that the moral foundations of our past are being eroded by the Leftist replacement with Secular Humanism which emphasizes Moral Relativity. Moral Relativity means the values of society are purely measurable by what humanity defines as moral. When humanity defines morality there is no constant standard. Biblical Morality is a constant standard based on the Word of God. The lack of a constant standard by its nature means there is little restraint on the proclivity of human nature to act selfishly. Selfishness in human nature left unchecked leads to an ever evolving descent toward wickedness.
Today in the name of First Amendment Free Speech there is a pervasiveness of pornography; family disunity via divorce; children are disrespectful of authority to the point of social dysfunction that leads to violence in schools, pervasive teen drug use, despicably abhorrent bullying that incites violent retribution or suicide; theft is so prevalent that one is thought a fool if they don’t loc their doors and more.
The absence of a distinctive difference between temporal governing and religious practice in Islam means that the governing authority must comply with Islamic Law and that the governing authority has the duty to enforce society to follow Islamic Law. This leads to a concept of Islamic Supremacism in which Muslim and non-Muslims have severely curtailed civil rights. For the devoted Muslim this may not be bad news; however for the more secular minded Muslim and the non-Muslim civil rights and civil liberty is extremely hampered which is REAL bad news for a person who violates the governing principles of Sharia Law.
It is the theopolitical nature of Islam that makes Islam evil. This is especially so in America in which our nation’s whole foundation is based on the Declaration of Independence which emphasizes the concepts of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. America’s Constitution insures explicitly various rights of Liberty and Freedom which are unalienable. From the Founding Father perspective these unalienable rights are created in humanity by God Almighty Himself. In America life is about choice that does not break the law. In Islam life is about submission to Allah and the deity’s prophet Mohammed.
American representative democracy and Islamic culture are as divergent as night and day. Islam can take no other view other than the American way of life is evil. The Liberty implicit in American culture has no choice but to view Islamic culture as evil. The unfortunate circumstance in America is that American Liberty allows Leftist doctrine and Islamic theopolitical thought to be freely expressed even if it eradicates American Liberty.
To switch gears a bit allow me to express some concerns that is going on in the Muslim Maghreb and Middle East.
The little Muslim nation of Tunisia exploded into a grassroots move to end the government of their dictator. This move in Tunisia spread through the Muslim world as a wild fire. The irony is the apparent Muslim populist movement is very reminiscent of the Bush Doctrine Neoconservative idea that democracy is an infectious way to live if given the opportunity to attach to any nation in the world. After Iraq and Afghanistan began to regard American invasions as an occupation rather than as a deliverance from despotism, the Bush Doctrine took a major dent. Even Neoconservatives began to be disillusioned with democratic nation building. We Neocons believed that the democratization of Germany and Japan after WWII could be a repeated experiment on any form of despotism. The thing is Germany is from the Western tradition. Although Japan has no roots in Western influence, if one examines Japanese history there are surprising similarities between Japan’s feudal past and Europe’s feudal past. It could be that the feudalism of Japan was a precursor making Japan pliable to adapt Western style democratic institutions.
Being Americans, Bush Agenda supporters did not take into consideration that theopolitical Islam would trump civil rights and liberty. Muslim lands have had the curse of a stagnant culture stuck in their successes of the Middle Ages. Also Muslim lands have had the blessing of intense indoctrination of theopolitical Islamic Sharia Law that has made Islam entrenched in the minds of its adherents. The cultural path of Islamic indoctrination enabled each generation of a conquered people to be more and more devoted to Islam. This mind entrenchment thwarts all non-Islamic political ideologies and thwarts the success of an alternative religion from effectively competing with Islam. Alternative political ideologies and alternative religions are not only dealt with harshly by Muslim clerics, but entrenched minds of the populace will take it upon themselves also to deal harshly with alternative concepts.
The indoctrinated entrenchment of the Muslim mind makes it a group of people that have a love affair with the concept of a global Caliphate. One might tell you that a Caliph would have the same significance as the Roman Catholic Pope. The Pope today is considered by Catholic adherents as the head of the Church on earth. Today that is translated as the spiritual head of the Church. An Islamic Caliph has more than spiritual attributes. In Islam the Caliph represents a successor to Mohammed. A Caliph must carry out the directives of the Quran, Hadith and Sira. These directives go beyond a concept of a spiritual leader keeping the Ummah (Global Community of Muslims) on the spiritual path of Allah as espoused by the prophet Mohammed.
Mohammed made it clear that it is the duty of Muslims to bring Islam to the whole earth. If Islam is rejected then it is the duty of the Muslim conquerors to create conditions that makes the choice of converting to Islam easier. Those conditions include brutal temporal conquest, rejecters of Islam monotheists may choose to retain their faith BUT ONLY if there is an agreement to follow Sharia Law, polytheistic rejecters of Islam do not receive a choice of a dehumanized Sharia life or if the combined rejection of Islam and Sharia is the choice then choice as far as the Quran, Hadith and Sira is concerned is to advocate death. Polytheistic rejecters of Islam were cut no slack by historical Caliphs of spiritual/temporal power. The polytheists’ choice was simpler: Convert to Islam or die.
Islam ran into a snag of convert or die in the conquest of India. The polytheistic Hindu population was so huge even in the 7th and 8th century AD that somebody realized that if all the Hindu rejecters of Islam were slaughtered then there would be nobody left to pay tribute called jizya. Still the slaughter and enslavement of the Indian Subcontinent was an immense genocide of the most heinous brutality of conquest to that date in history. After a jizya system was eventually set up for Hindus, Muslim rulers still felt obligated to please Allah every so often to terminate groups of Hindus’ lives by the will of Allah.
This picture of the past is important in this present day.
I foresee a great danger to Western Civilization with the grassroots Muslim uprisings across the Maghreb and the Middle East. Regardless of what you hear about a comparison of grassroots and democracy having a chance in these Muslim lands elucidating the hope that Western democracy will now finally have its opportunity, do not believe it. Islamic theopolitical doctrine and Western concepts of Freedom and Liberty simple are not compatible.
If these Muslim grassroots uprisings are successful I assure you their Islamic indoctrinated mind will eventually look to the Quran, Hadith and Sira for direction in a united Ummah. What do you think a united Ummah entails? A united Ummah would demand a Caliphate. What has been the objective the Muslim Brotherhood (and offshoots), Wahhabis, Salafists, Deobandis (SA Here) and the like including al Qaeda sympathizers? That objective is a reformist return to the purity of Mohammed and the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs which is the establishment of a Caliphate to once again move to force the issue of converting to Islam.
Check out these thoughts from Andrew C. McCarthy on the grassroots uprisings and the potential of a Caliphate:
The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.
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As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Churchill’s views were not eccentric. A modern scholar of Islam, Andrew Bostom, recalls the insights of C. Snouck Hurgronje, among the world’s leading scholars of Islam during World War I. In 1916, even in the dark hours of Ottoman defeat, he marveled at the grip the concept of Islamic hegemony continued to hold on the Muslim masses:
It would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated. . . . The canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam’s greatness. The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam — the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] by submission.
Muslims, of course, understood the implausibility of achieving such dominance in the near term. Still, Hurgronje elaborated, the faithful were “comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms.” So even as the caliphate lay in ruins, the conviction that it would rise again remained a “fascinating influence” and “a central point of union against the unfaithful.”
Today, the OIC is Islam’s central point of union against the unfaithful. Those who insist that the 1,400-year-old dividing line between Muslims and non-Muslims is ephemeral, that all we need is a little more understanding of how alike we all really are, would do well to consider the OIC’s Cairo Declaration of 1990. It is the ummah’s “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,” proclaimed precisely because Islamic states reject the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations under the guidance of progressives in the United States and the West. That is, the leaders of the Muslim world are adamant that Western principles are not universal.
They are quite right about that. The Cairo Declaration boasts that Allah has made the Islamic ummah “the best community . . . which gave humanity a universal and well-balanced civilization.” It is the “historical role” of the ummah to “civilize” the rest of the world — not the other way around. (The OIC and the Caliphate; Andrew C. McCarthy; National Review; February 26, 2011 4:00 A.M.)
“OIC” is the abbreviation for Organization of the Islamic Conference. It is crystal clear that the OIC is the foundation for the dreams of a global Caliphate. There will be a galvanizing of Islamic instruments beginning to call for the return of Islamic purity. Those instruments can be seen in Hasan al-Banna’s founding of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the 1920’s and a Muslim Sheik’s embracement of a little known group in the Arabian Peninsula named by the West after Muhammad bin Abd al Wahhab (1701 – 1791). Hence there is term Wahhabism. I understand Wahhabis do not necessarily appreciate the appellation and prefer the term Salafism. The MB and Wahhabism were both puritanical yet they were distinct. Nasser’s crackdown on the MB in the 1960s led much of their group to flee. The Saudi King offered refuge. At this point the MB and Wahhabism seemed to have a mutual infusion. This is important because the MB vision has been a Pan-Arab move toward a Caliphate. Wahhabism was pretty much confined to the Arabian Peninsula focusing on a return to the purist Islam of Mohammed’s days.
The MB-Wahhabi infusion brought a Pan-Arab Caliphate vision to nation that then began to finance the spread of Salafist theopolitical ideology in the Muslim World (dar al-Islam) and to the non-Muslim world (dar al-harb – significantly Western nations).
So let’s recap my thoughts a bit.
There is an inspired grassroots movement among Muslims in the Maghreb and the Middle East to change despotic governments. The West has viewed this grassroots movement as an opportunity for democratic institutions in the Muslim world. The reality is Islamic Culture and Western Cultural democratic institutions are totally incompatible and cannot coexist successfully. Salafi movements of which the Muslim Brotherhood is the best known in the West (there are others) have the objective of a return to purist Islam and a return of the theopolitical Caliphate. The OIC is plugged into the Muslim Brotherhood in a Pan-Muslim objective as well as extending Muslim influence toward non-Muslim lands. The OIC is as much theological as it is political.
All this points to the OIC as being the platform of establishing the Salafist dream of a Caliphate. Multicultural idiots of the West are big on telling their constituents that the West (especially America) is not at war with Islam. Yet Islam across the Sunni-Shia divide has called America the great Satan. This is an indication that Islam is at war with Western principles because America is the embodiment of Western Freedom and Liberty.
Please tell me, someone in the West or America is wise enough to prepare for the inevitable coming conflict between the Secular West (with a Judeo-Christian heritage) and the theopolitical agenda of Islam’s move to a Caliphate?
JRH 3/1/11
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Links to compare about the course and affect of the OIC:
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