jihad universities Wahhabi madrassas universities of terror how to hate you yes you. They see you as an infidel as a swine and monkey that can be killed without a thought. Is this really the kind of cult religion we want in the U.S.
"Madrassas function as jihadi feeder schools for a multitude of terrorist organizations..." Nina Shea is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. Her reporting on Saudi educational texts can be found here.
Posted December 11, 2008, National Review
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ODFiZDg4NmEwOTAzMjNiZGE2ZDRjM2I1NDkyYTc0Zjc=
Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism.
August 2007, the NYPD released "Radicalization in the West. The report noted that Saudi "Wahhabi" scholars feed the jihadist ideology, legitimizing an "extreme intolerance" toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians and Hindus. In particular, the analysts noted that the "journey" of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadis often begins in a Wahhabi mosque.
At least two of Imam Rauf's books, a 2000 treatise on Islamic law and his 2004
"What's Right with Islam," laud the implementation of sharia -- including within
America -- and the "rejuvenating" Islamic religious spirit of Ibn Taymiyyah and
al-Wahhab.
He also lionizes as two ostensible "modernists" Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani (d.
1897), and his student Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905). In fact, both defended the
Wahhabis, praised the salutary influence of Ibn Taymiyyah and promoted the
pretense that sha ria -- despite its permanent advocacy of jihad and
dehumanizing injunctions on non-Muslims and women -- was somehow compatible with
Western concepts of human rights, as in our own Bill of Rights.
In short, Feisal Rauf's public image as a devotee of the "contemplative" Sufi
school of Islam cannot change the fact that his writings directed at Muslims are
full of praise for the most noxious and dangerous Muslim thinkers.
More revealing is the fact that Rauf himself has refused to sign a
straightforward pledge to "repudiate the threat from authoritative sharia to the
religious freedom and safety of former Muslims," a pledge issued nine months ago
by ex-Muslims under threat for their "apostasy." That refusal is a tacit
admission that Rauf believes that sharia trumps such fundamental Western
principles as freedom of conscience.
Rauf’s Dawa from the World Trade Center Rubble
Meet the Ground Zero Mosque imam’s Muslim Brotherhood friends.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is the imam behind the “Cordoba Initiative” that is
spearheading plans to build a $100 million Islamic center at Ground Zero, the
site where nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by jihadists on 9/11. He is also
the author of a book called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with
America. But the book hasn’t always been called that. It was called quite
something else for non-English-speaking audiences. In Malaysia, it was published
as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the
Heart of America Post-9/11.
Both ISNA and IIIT have been up to their necks in the promotion of Hamas, the
Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthless Palestinian branch, which is pledged by charter to
the destruction of Israel. In fact, both ISNA and IIIT were cited by the Justice
Department as unindicted co-conspirators in a crucial terrorism-financing case
involving the channeling of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas through an
outfit called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. For the last
15 years, Hamas has been a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law.
Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World Trade Center or elsewhere, is
the missionary work by which Islam is spread. As explained in my recent book,
The Grand Jihad, dawa is proselytism, but not involving only spiritual elements
— for Islam is not merely a religion, and spiritual elements are just a small
part of its doctrine. In truth, Islam is a comprehensive political, social, and
economic system with its own authoritarian legal framework, sharia, which
aspires to govern all aspects of life.
This framework rejects core tenets of American constitutional republicanism: for
example, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom to govern ourselves
irrespective of any theocratic code, equality of men and women, equality of
Muslims and non-Muslims, and economic liberty, including the uses of private
property (in Islam, owners hold property only as a custodians for the umma, the
universal Muslim nation, and are beholden to the Islamic state regarding its
use). Sharia prohibits the preaching of creeds other than Islam, the
renunciation of Islam, any actions that divide the umma, and homosexuality. Its
penalties are draconian, including savagely executed death sentences for
apostates, homosexuals, and adulterers.
The purpose of dawa, like the purpose of jihad, is to implement, spread, and
defend sharia. Scholar Robert Spencer incisively refers to dawa practices as
“stealth jihad,” the advancement of the sharia agenda through means other than
violence and agents other than terrorists. These include extortion, cultivation
of sympathizers in the media and the universities, exploitation of our legal
system and tradition of religious liberty, infiltration of our political system,
and fundraising. This is why Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood and the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, boldly promises
that Islam will “conquer America” and “conquer Europe” through dawa.
In considering Imam Rauf and his Ground Zero project, Qaradawi and the Muslim
Brotherhood are extremely important. Like most Muslims, Rauf regards Qaradawi as
a guide, and referred to him in 2001 as “the most well-known legal authority in
the whole Muslim world today.” And indeed he is: a prominent, Qatar-based
scholar whose weekly Al Jazeera program on the subject of sharia is viewed by
millions and whose cyber-venture, Islam Online, is accessed by millions more,
including Muslims in the United States. Not surprisingly, his rabble-rousing was
a prime cause of the deadly global rioting by Muslims when an obscure Danish
newspaper published cartoon depictions of Mohammed.
Qaradawi regards the United States as the enemy of Islam. He has urged that
Muslims “fight the American military if we can, and if we cannot, we should
fight the U.S. economically and politically.” In 2004, he issued a fatwa (an
edict based on sharia) calling for Muslims to kill Americans in Iraq. A leading
champion of Hamas, he has issued similar approvals of suicide bombings in
Israel. Moreover, as recounted in Matthew Levitt’s history of Hamas, Qaradawi
has decreed that Muslims must donate money to “support Palestinians fighting
occupation. . . . If we can’t carry out acts of jihad ourselves, we at least
should support and prop up the mujahideen [i.e., Islamic raiders or warriors]
financially and morally.”
Qaradawi’s support for Hamas is only natural. Since that organization’s 1987
founding, it has been the top Muslim Brotherhood priority to underwrite Hamas’s
jihadist onslaught against the Jewish state. Toward that end, the Muslim
Brotherhood mobilized the Islamist infrastructure in the United States.
The original building block of that infrastructure was the Muslim Students
Association (MSA), established in the early Sixties to groom young Muslims in
the Brotherhood’s ideology — promoting sharia, Islamic supremacism, and a
worldwide caliphate. As Andrew Bostom elaborated in a New York Post op-ed on
Friday, Imam Rauf, too, is steeped in this ideology.
In 1981, after two decades of churning out activists from its North American
chapters (which now number over 600), the Brotherhood merged the MSA into ISNA.
In its own words, ISNA was conceived as an umbrella organization “to advance the
cause of Islam and service Muslims in North America so as to enable them to
adopt Islam as a complete way of life.” That same year, the Brotherhood created
IIIT as a Washington-area Islamic think tank dedicated to what it describes as
“the Islamicization of knowledge.”
After Hamas was created, the top Brotherhood operative in the United States,
Mousa Abu Marzook — who actually ran Hamas from his Virginia home for several
years in the early Nineties — founded the Islamic Association for Palestine to
boost Hamas’s support. One of his co-founders was Sami al-Arian, then a student
and Muslim Brotherhood member, later a top U.S. operative of the terrorist
organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which he helped guide from his perch as
a professor at the University of South Florida. In 2006, al-Arian was convicted
on terrorism charges.
Marzook and other Brotherhood figures established the Occupied Land Fund,
eventually renamed the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), to
be Hamas’s American fundraising arm. The HLF was headquartered in ISNA’s Indiana
office. As the Justice Department explained in a memorandum submitted in the HLF
case:
During the early years of HLF’s operation, HLF raised money and supported
Hamas through a bank account it held with ISNA. . . . Indeed, HLF (under its
former name, OLF) operated from within ISNA, in Plainfield, Illinois. . . . ISNA
checks deposited into the ISNA/[North American Islamic Trust] account for the
HLF were often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen,” the original name
for the Hamas military wing. . . . From the ISNA/NAIT account, the HLF sent
hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook . . . and a
number of other individuals associated with Hamas.
Ultimately, the HLF raised over $36 million for Hamas. At the height of the
intifada, this was not about the social-welfare activities Hamas touts to
camouflage its barbarism. As the journalist Stephen Schwartz of the Center for
Islamic Pluralism has observed, “Ordinary Americans should be shocked and
outraged to learn that Hamas was running its terror campaign from a sanctuary in
the U.S.” In addition, prosecutors showed that ISNA was central to a 1993
meeting of top Brotherhood operatives, who were wiretapped “discussing using
ISNA as an official cover for their activities.”
Meantime, in 1992, the IIIT contributed $50,000 to underwrite an al-Arian
venture, the World & Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a front for Palestinian
Islamic Jihad that ostensibly employed several members of the PIJ governing
board. IIIT has been under federal investigation since 2002 — and after his
terrorism conviction, al-Arian went into contempt of court rather than honor a
grand-jury subpoena in the probe.
In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood’s American leadership prepared an internal
memorandum for the organization’s global leadership in Egypt. It was written
principally by Mohamed Akram, a close associate of Sheikh Qaradawi. As Akram put
it, the Brotherhood
must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in
eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging”
its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is
eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
The memorandum included a list described by Akram as “our organizations and the
organizations of our friends,” working together to implement this sabotage
strategy. Prominently included in that list were ISNA and IIIT.
The Ground Zero project to erect a monument to sharia overlooking the crater
where the World Trade Center once stood, and where thousands were slaughtered,
is not a test of America’s commitment to religious liberty. America already has
thousands of mosques and Islamic centers, including scores in the New York area
— though Islam does not allow non-Muslims even to enter its crown-jewel cities
of Mecca and Medina, much less to build churches or synagogues.
The Ground Zero project is a test of America’s resolve to face down a
civilizational jihad that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from
within.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the
author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage
America.
In most of the Madrasahs of Pakistan, the only subject taught is the Koran, and
that also in Arabic, which is a foreign language and unknown to the students. By
end of 2005, there were about thirty-nine thousand registered Madrasahs in
Pakistan, whereas during 1978, this number was three thousand only (O'Rourke,
2005). The number of students are estimated somewhere between eight hundred
thousand to one million (Dalrymple, 2005). They are often run by religious
organizations and lure young children mainly from poor families by providing
free food and lodging. Some of the schools even provide intensive political and
armed training. Recent estimates suggest that between 10 and 15 percent of
Pakistan’s 46,700 Madrasahs (including both registered and unregistered) promote
violence openly (Davis, 2002). In Taliban schools of Afghanistan, often the
first word children learn to spell is “jihad”, which means “God’s path to
paradise”. There are at least six specialized Madrasahs in Pakistan which
regularly supply suicide bombers to the Taliban. (Al Qaeda Training Manual,
2001). During their heyday, the Taliban had banned watching television, going to
school, and learning modern sciences. Even the learning of history, geography,
and mathematics was totally banned and the only activities permissible were the
recitation and the memorization of the Koran. Learning English was a huge crime
(Sohail, 2007). Many Taliban controlled Madrasahs are sponsored from the outset
by Pakistani ISI (Atwan, 2006). In Pakistan and Afghanistan, still there are
some orthodox Madrassh teachers, who teaches that earth is flat and stationary
and sun rotates around the earth.
In addition to the promotion of violence against non-Muslims, often there are
Madrasahs which promote sectarian violence (e.g, between Shia – Sunni etc).
Several anti-Shia militias such as the Sipah-i Sahaba (army of Prophet’s
companion) and Lashkar–i Jhangvi (Jhangvi’s army) hailed from the extremist
Deobandi Madrasahs, and maintained close ties with other terrorist organizations
in Afghanistan, Kashmir and elsewhere (Nasr, 2006). The results, we are seeing
everyday in Iraq, where not a single day passes without sectarian violence and
killing.
During 1994, the Human Rights commission of Pakistan investigated child abuse
incidents and the result of the investigation showed that in many Madrasahs, the
children are often locked in iron chains, to a heavy wooden block, in groups of
four or five. During March 1996, police raided a Madrasah near Multan and rescued 64 such victims (Anon, 2004). They were held in strong ropes and chains. The religious
head teacher of the Madrasah said that the students had fallen into bad habits
of watching satellite television
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REFERENCE LIST
Books, Thesis, Journals and Newspapers
1. Lindsey A. O'Rourke, (2005) - A Sociobiological View of Palestinian
Suicide Bombers, (Undergraduate Philosophy Thesis) The Ohio State University;
submitted on 7th March, 2005.
2. Atwan A. B (2006), The Secret History of Al-Qa’ida, pp 74, 152. Second
edition. Clays Ltd, GB.
3. Nasr V. (2006), The Shia Revival – How conflicts within Islam will shape
the future, Chapter – 5, pp 165. First Edition, Norton, London.
4. Davis C (2002) - “A” Is for Allah, “J” Is for Jihad; World Policy Journal,
Spring 2002 issue.
5. Shourie, Arun (2004), India under threat, Part-III, The ticking bomb
inside mosque and Madrasa , The Indian Express (daily newspaper) of dated 17th
December, 2004.
Internet
1. Al Qaeda Training Manual (2001), U.S. Department of Justice, online
release 7th December 2001; URL:
2. Anderson Paul (2004), Madrasas hit by sex abuse claims, BBC News,
Islamabad, 2004. URL:
http://www.asiansinmedia.org/news/article.php/current_affairs/1271
3. Anonymous (2006) - Breaking the Chains of Islam, Children in Chains...
URL:
4. Anonymous (2006), Muslim group calls for madrasa regulation. URL:
5. Ansari Massoud (2004), Acid attack on boy who refused sex with Muslim
cleric, Karachi. URL :
6. Children in the Community and family (2005), Amnesty International (AI)
Publications, London. URL :
7. Dalrymple William (2005); Inside Islam's "terror Schools"?, Times of
Pakistan.URL:
8. Fair C.C & Haqqani H (2005); Think Again: Islamist Terrorism “Madrasas Are
Terrorist Factories” pp-2 , URL :
9. Khawaja Irfan (2004) - Sex and the Madrasa, URL:
10. Paz (2006), Khomeini's Teachings on sex with infants and animals. URL:
11. Petit Juan Migual (2004) – Rights of the child. URL:
12. Rasheeda (2004) - Why I Became an Apostate. Published at FFI in Leaving
Islam section on 07/01/2004, URL :
13. Siddiqui Ghayasuddin (2006), Child Breaking the Taboo of Child Abuse,
Protection in Faith-Based Environments, A Guideline Report, sponsored by The
Muslim Institute Trust, Bait al-Mal al-Islami, March 2006. URL:
14. Sohail (2007), Reminiscing the Nights and Days of Talibans—the True Islam
in An Afaghan's eye-witness account of Taliban, Part - 1(an e-mail exchange with
Abul Kasem, published at FFI on 25th June / 2007). URL:
Al-Aqsa Mosque; the cause of Muslim Afghanistan and the causes of persecuted
Muslim minorities around the world.” [Document No. 28] Wahhabi writings
emphasize the obligatory nature of the purification that jihad produces, whether
it be in overcoming external enemies, or perfecting the inner self. To Be a
Muslim [Document No. 31], published by Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic
Publishing House and gathered from the
Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, Texas,
exhorts Muslims to work for the establishment of “functionally Islamic
governments” in all nations: “[Muslims should work] to form a society that is
committed to the Islamic way of thinking and Islamic way of life, which means to
form a government that implements principles of justice embodied in the
shari’a….Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments,
every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.”
[Document No. 31] The Houston mosque-goers are then instructed that change –
including political change – is connected directly with jihad: “These
responsibilities to change both oneself and the world are binding in principle,
in law, in self-defense, in community, and as a sacred obligation of jihad….”
[Document No. 31] Quoting from the writings of some of the leading militant
ideologues of modern Islamic extremism, the tract instructs Houston mosque-goers
to form Islamic opposition groups to face “attacks from every materialistic
ideology and system that threatens the existence of Islam as a global paradigm
of thought and system of life.” Because, it asserts, many Muslim countries are
suffering either under “the oppression of non-believing occupiers,” or under the
“brutality of an evil minority, which governs through the iron fist” and serves
as the infidels’ local puppets, self-defense has become an imperative duty for
all Muslims. To underscore the hardships involved in defending and spreading
Islam, the Saudi text cites Muslim Brotherhood radical leader Sayyid Qutb,
advocating the building of an organized movement “of sufficient size and quality
to carry on every level of Islamic work and also to handle unexpected situations
and needs.” The Saudi document quotes Qutb urging Muslims to join such
movements, 58
“[Believers] should realize that their self-value derives only from Islam,
without which they are like animals or worse. They must know, however, that true
honor can never be achieved unless they continue actively to involve themselves
in the Islamic Movement. Those who remain in isolation will be in the Hellfire.
Those who join in the Islamic Movement are joining themselves with honorable
people.” [Document No. 31] According to the text, the path of Islamic
activism—sometimes a euphemism for jihad—“purifies and liberates a person and
teaches one to be strong. It is a path of blessings and honor.” [Document No.
31] Successful Islamic movements should liberate oppressed peoples, including of
course Muslims, and the Saudi tract uses the term “taghut,” familiar among
Islamists, to describe any power or system responsible for such oppression.
Usually taghut is comprised of “those who worship the false gods of modernist
and postmodernist cultures,” or those who adopt capitalist, socialist,
communist, and other manmade systems, in whole or in part. Again, the tract
appeals to an authoritative voice, the fiery Hasan al-Banna, the extremist
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Our task in general is to stand against the
flood of modernist civilization overflowing from the swamp of materialistic and
sinful desires. This flood has swept the Muslim nation away from the Prophet’s
leadership and Koranic guidance and deprived the world of its guiding light.
Western secularism moved into a Muslim world already estranged from its Koranic
roots, and delayed its advancement for centuries, and will continue to do so
until we drive it from our lands. Moreover, we will not stop at this point, but
will pursue this evil force to its own lands, invade its Western heartland, and
struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts by the name of the Prophet
and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims
achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more ‘persecution’ and all
religion will be exclusively for Allah….” [Document No. 31] This passage is a
distillation of Islamist extremism: an adversarial posture fueled by a
conspiratorial outlook, the candid call to jihad against the West, and a recipe
for open-ended struggle practiced beyond the borders of Dar Al-Islam in the
heart of enemy territory.
The same Saudi-Wahhabi book [Document No. 31] also
contains a detailed point- by-point plan for Texas Muslims to propagate Islam by
following al-Banna’s tactics. These include: the incremental approach in thought
and action, the maintenance of a low profile with maximum work and minimum
publicity, a clear long-range strategy for
59
ultimate victory, openness in activity but secrecy in organization, and guarding
separation and spiritual autonomy in the midst of a hostile world. On the
gradualist approach, al-Banna is quoted explaining the steps in preparing to
launch jihad.
First there is dissemination of concepts and ideas “among the
people through oratory and writing, civic action, and other practical methods.”
Then comes the delicate task of identifying “good and reliable cadre to bear the
burden of initiating and sustaining jihad.”
And finally there is the execution where, “the stage is set for relentless combat and consistent effort to achieve the goals. This stage will weed out all but the most honest and sincere, both in their own commitment and in their obedience to the chain of command.”
Sayyid Qutb is quoted explaining how a vanguard of select Muslims must brave the
environment of infidelity while remaining uncontaminated by it.
This, says Qutb, will invariably have the psychological effect of a “feeling of isolation” as the Islamist pioneers insert themselves in an alien environment, but never become of it [Document No. 31].
The text continues that, once the da’wa (Islamic mission) becomes known, those bearing its message will be hated by everyone around them.
This is the stage of preparation for declaring the da’wa and commencing the
jihad.
Al-Banna is quoted as saying even the so-called noted scholars of Islam
will “look down upon your understanding of Islam and will not support your
jihad.” He predicts that many tribulations await the committed Muslims as they
prepare to engage in jihad for the sake of Allah. Those who are sincere in their
faith and strong will endure to the end and succeed with Allah’s help. This
program for jihad, and the discipline required for its meticulous organization
and execution, is totalitarian in character. It is also universal in its reach:
“…it is active everywhere, in every country and throughout every society.”
[Document No. 31]
Many of these texts stress that jihad’s purpose is converting unbelievers to Islam. The jihad must continue until they have done so. One tract on jihad available in English [Document No. 39] published by the Maktaba Dar-us-Salam, in Riyadh, and collected at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, New York, states unequivocally that such a jihad is intended to save infidels from certain punishment in hellfire.
SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN For Wahhabis and other salafist interpretations of
Islam, women are considered a perpetual source of potential fitna or discord in
a social and moral sense. This situation requires constant vigilance on the part
of men, especially Islamic authorities, to ensure women are properly segregated
by being concealed behind closed doors or beneath veils and chadors.52 Much of
the work of the mutawa’a (religious police) inside Saudi Arabia involves
enforcing these strict prohibitions on women.
For Wahhabis, women must be kept in check and under careful scrutiny at all times lest they become occasions—deliberate or unintended—for the enticement of men and thus the sowing of confusion and anarchy in society. It is as though in their very nature women are under continuous suspicion of creating the conditions for unraveling familial and social bonds, and must therefore be hemmed in and watched at all times.
In a collection of fatwas [Document No. 52] gathered from several American
sources, which was intended specifically for distribution in the United States,
the Saudi Embassy in Washington through its Cultural Department actively
advocates the veiling of American Muslim women.
In another of the embassy-propagated fatwas, a woman asks whether some leniency could be shown certain women who come to Islamic centers to study the tenets of the faith without wearing the veil. Otherwise, she fears, they might not come at all and thereby be lost to Islam and eventually Christianized or secularized. Sheik al-‘Athimein replies that such women should be urged repeatedly and at every occasion to wear the veil. If they do so, this will be good for everyone. If they refuse repeated exhortations to cover up, then they must be barred from attending [Document No. 52].
In a collection of fatwas entitled Rulings on Women [Document No. 23], copies of which were collected from Dar Al Hijra in Falls Church, Virginia, Bin Baz, the Saudi government’s official religious authority, categorically rejects the idea of female teachers instructing adolescent boys: “A ten-year old boy is considered adolescent
because he tends to like women and because, at his age, he is able to get
married and can do what men do.” [Document No.23]
Stringent Saudi attitudes towards women are further justified as thwarting an
infidel conspiracy to corrupt Muslim women. One work expressing these concerns
[Document No. 33] was published by the Al-Haramain Foundation, run from Saudi
Arabia and operating branch offices in the United States until the FBI blocked
its assets in February 2004 and found that it was directly funding al Qaeda. (In
October 2004, the Saudi government’s Ministry for Islamic Affairs dissolved the
foundation and, according to a senior Saudi official, its assets will be folded
into a new Saudi National Commission for Charitable Work Abroad.) The
Al-Haramain publication, written by Sheik Al-Fawzan, was obtained from the
Islamic Center of America in East Orange, New Jersey, and asserts that
unbelievers aim to destroy Muslim men by corrupting their women: “The enemies of
Islam, or the enemies of humanity today, the unbelievers, hypocrites, and those
with sick hearts, are angry because of what the Muslim woman has received by way
of honor, prestige, and safety in Islam. These enemies want the woman to become
a destructive tool, bait they can use, to hunt down those who have weak faith
and uncontrollable desires….” [Document No. 33]
"Madrassas function as jihadi feeder schools for a multitude of terrorist organizations..." Nina Shea is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. Her reporting on Saudi educational texts can be found here.Posted December 11, 2008, National Review
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ODFiZDg4NmEwOTAzMjNiZGE2ZDRjM2I1NDkyYTc0Zjc=
Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism.
August 2007, the NYPD released "Radicalization in the West. The report noted that Saudi "Wahhabi" scholars feed the jihadist ideology, legitimizing an "extreme intolerance" toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians and Hindus. In particular, the analysts noted that the "journey" of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadis often begins in a Wahhabi mosque.
At least two of Imam Rauf's books, a 2000 treatise on Islamic law and his 2004
"What's Right with Islam," laud the implementation of sharia -- including within
America -- and the "rejuvenating" Islamic religious spirit of Ibn Taymiyyah and
al-Wahhab.
He also lionizes as two ostensible "modernists" Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani (d.
1897), and his student Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905). In fact, both defended the
Wahhabis, praised the salutary influence of Ibn Taymiyyah and promoted the
pretense that sha ria -- despite its permanent advocacy of jihad and
dehumanizing injunctions on non-Muslims and women -- was somehow compatible with
Western concepts of human rights, as in our own Bill of Rights.
In short, Feisal Rauf's public image as a devotee of the "contemplative" Sufi
school of Islam cannot change the fact that his writings directed at Muslims are
full of praise for the most noxious and dangerous Muslim thinkers.
More revealing is the fact that Rauf himself has refused to sign a
straightforward pledge to "repudiate the threat from authoritative sharia to the
religious freedom and safety of former Muslims," a pledge issued nine months ago
by ex-Muslims under threat for their "apostasy." That refusal is a tacit
admission that Rauf believes that sharia trumps such fundamental Western
principles as freedom of conscience.
Rauf’s Dawa from the World Trade Center Rubble
Meet the Ground Zero Mosque imam’s Muslim Brotherhood friends.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is the imam behind the “Cordoba Initiative” that is
spearheading plans to build a $100 million Islamic center at Ground Zero, the
site where nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by jihadists on 9/11. He is also
the author of a book called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with
America. But the book hasn’t always been called that. It was called quite
something else for non-English-speaking audiences. In Malaysia, it was published
as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the
Heart of America Post-9/11.
Both ISNA and IIIT have been up to their necks in the promotion of Hamas, the
Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthless Palestinian branch, which is pledged by charter to
the destruction of Israel. In fact, both ISNA and IIIT were cited by the Justice
Department as unindicted co-conspirators in a crucial terrorism-financing case
involving the channeling of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas through an
outfit called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. For the last
15 years, Hamas has been a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law.
Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World Trade Center or elsewhere, is
the missionary work by which Islam is spread. As explained in my recent book,
The Grand Jihad, dawa is proselytism, but not involving only spiritual elements
— for Islam is not merely a religion, and spiritual elements are just a small
part of its doctrine. In truth, Islam is a comprehensive political, social, and
economic system with its own authoritarian legal framework, sharia, which
aspires to govern all aspects of life.
This framework rejects core tenets of American constitutional republicanism: for
example, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom to govern ourselves
irrespective of any theocratic code, equality of men and women, equality of
Muslims and non-Muslims, and economic liberty, including the uses of private
property (in Islam, owners hold property only as a custodians for the umma, the
universal Muslim nation, and are beholden to the Islamic state regarding its
use). Sharia prohibits the preaching of creeds other than Islam, the
renunciation of Islam, any actions that divide the umma, and homosexuality. Its
penalties are draconian, including savagely executed death sentences for
apostates, homosexuals, and adulterers.
The purpose of dawa, like the purpose of jihad, is to implement, spread, and
defend sharia. Scholar Robert Spencer incisively refers to dawa practices as
“stealth jihad,” the advancement of the sharia agenda through means other than
violence and agents other than terrorists. These include extortion, cultivation
of sympathizers in the media and the universities, exploitation of our legal
system and tradition of religious liberty, infiltration of our political system,
and fundraising. This is why Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood and the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, boldly promises
that Islam will “conquer America” and “conquer Europe” through dawa.
In considering Imam Rauf and his Ground Zero project, Qaradawi and the Muslim
Brotherhood are extremely important. Like most Muslims, Rauf regards Qaradawi as
a guide, and referred to him in 2001 as “the most well-known legal authority in
the whole Muslim world today.” And indeed he is: a prominent, Qatar-based
scholar whose weekly Al Jazeera program on the subject of sharia is viewed by
millions and whose cyber-venture, Islam Online, is accessed by millions more,
including Muslims in the United States. Not surprisingly, his rabble-rousing was
a prime cause of the deadly global rioting by Muslims when an obscure Danish
newspaper published cartoon depictions of Mohammed.
Qaradawi regards the United States as the enemy of Islam. He has urged that
Muslims “fight the American military if we can, and if we cannot, we should
fight the U.S. economically and politically.” In 2004, he issued a fatwa (an
edict based on sharia) calling for Muslims to kill Americans in Iraq. A leading
champion of Hamas, he has issued similar approvals of suicide bombings in
Israel. Moreover, as recounted in Matthew Levitt’s history of Hamas, Qaradawi
has decreed that Muslims must donate money to “support Palestinians fighting
occupation. . . . If we can’t carry out acts of jihad ourselves, we at least
should support and prop up the mujahideen [i.e., Islamic raiders or warriors]
financially and morally.”
Qaradawi’s support for Hamas is only natural. Since that organization’s 1987
founding, it has been the top Muslim Brotherhood priority to underwrite Hamas’s
jihadist onslaught against the Jewish state. Toward that end, the Muslim
Brotherhood mobilized the Islamist infrastructure in the United States.
The original building block of that infrastructure was the Muslim Students
Association (MSA), established in the early Sixties to groom young Muslims in
the Brotherhood’s ideology — promoting sharia, Islamic supremacism, and a
worldwide caliphate. As Andrew Bostom elaborated in a New York Post op-ed on
Friday, Imam Rauf, too, is steeped in this ideology.
In 1981, after two decades of churning out activists from its North American
chapters (which now number over 600), the Brotherhood merged the MSA into ISNA.
In its own words, ISNA was conceived as an umbrella organization “to advance the
cause of Islam and service Muslims in North America so as to enable them to
adopt Islam as a complete way of life.” That same year, the Brotherhood created
IIIT as a Washington-area Islamic think tank dedicated to what it describes as
“the Islamicization of knowledge.”
After Hamas was created, the top Brotherhood operative in the United States,
Mousa Abu Marzook — who actually ran Hamas from his Virginia home for several
years in the early Nineties — founded the Islamic Association for Palestine to
boost Hamas’s support. One of his co-founders was Sami al-Arian, then a student
and Muslim Brotherhood member, later a top U.S. operative of the terrorist
organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which he helped guide from his perch as
a professor at the University of South Florida. In 2006, al-Arian was convicted
on terrorism charges.
Marzook and other Brotherhood figures established the Occupied Land Fund,
eventually renamed the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), to
be Hamas’s American fundraising arm. The HLF was headquartered in ISNA’s Indiana
office. As the Justice Department explained in a memorandum submitted in the HLF
case:
During the early years of HLF’s operation, HLF raised money and supported
Hamas through a bank account it held with ISNA. . . . Indeed, HLF (under its
former name, OLF) operated from within ISNA, in Plainfield, Illinois. . . . ISNA
checks deposited into the ISNA/[North American Islamic Trust] account for the
HLF were often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen,” the original name
for the Hamas military wing. . . . From the ISNA/NAIT account, the HLF sent
hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook . . . and a
number of other individuals associated with Hamas.
Ultimately, the HLF raised over $36 million for Hamas. At the height of the
intifada, this was not about the social-welfare activities Hamas touts to
camouflage its barbarism. As the journalist Stephen Schwartz of the Center for
Islamic Pluralism has observed, “Ordinary Americans should be shocked and
outraged to learn that Hamas was running its terror campaign from a sanctuary in
the U.S.” In addition, prosecutors showed that ISNA was central to a 1993
meeting of top Brotherhood operatives, who were wiretapped “discussing using
ISNA as an official cover for their activities.”
Meantime, in 1992, the IIIT contributed $50,000 to underwrite an al-Arian
venture, the World & Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a front for Palestinian
Islamic Jihad that ostensibly employed several members of the PIJ governing
board. IIIT has been under federal investigation since 2002 — and after his
terrorism conviction, al-Arian went into contempt of court rather than honor a
grand-jury subpoena in the probe.
In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood’s American leadership prepared an internal
memorandum for the organization’s global leadership in Egypt. It was written
principally by Mohamed Akram, a close associate of Sheikh Qaradawi. As Akram put
it, the Brotherhood
must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in
eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging”
its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is
eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
The memorandum included a list described by Akram as “our organizations and the
organizations of our friends,” working together to implement this sabotage
strategy. Prominently included in that list were ISNA and IIIT.
The Ground Zero project to erect a monument to sharia overlooking the crater
where the World Trade Center once stood, and where thousands were slaughtered,
is not a test of America’s commitment to religious liberty. America already has
thousands of mosques and Islamic centers, including scores in the New York area
— though Islam does not allow non-Muslims even to enter its crown-jewel cities
of Mecca and Medina, much less to build churches or synagogues.
The Ground Zero project is a test of America’s resolve to face down a
civilizational jihad that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from
within.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the
author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage
America.
In most of the Madrasahs of Pakistan, the only subject taught is the Koran, and
that also in Arabic, which is a foreign language and unknown to the students. By
end of 2005, there were about thirty-nine thousand registered Madrasahs in
Pakistan, whereas during 1978, this number was three thousand only (O'Rourke,
2005). The number of students are estimated somewhere between eight hundred
thousand to one million (Dalrymple, 2005). They are often run by religious
organizations and lure young children mainly from poor families by providing
free food and lodging. Some of the schools even provide intensive political and
armed training. Recent estimates suggest that between 10 and 15 percent of
Pakistan’s 46,700 Madrasahs (including both registered and unregistered) promote
violence openly (Davis, 2002). In Taliban schools of Afghanistan, often the
first word children learn to spell is “jihad”, which means “God’s path to
paradise”. There are at least six specialized Madrasahs in Pakistan which
regularly supply suicide bombers to the Taliban. (Al Qaeda Training Manual,
2001). During their heyday, the Taliban had banned watching television, going to
school, and learning modern sciences. Even the learning of history, geography,
and mathematics was totally banned and the only activities permissible were the
recitation and the memorization of the Koran. Learning English was a huge crime
(Sohail, 2007). Many Taliban controlled Madrasahs are sponsored from the outset
by Pakistani ISI (Atwan, 2006). In Pakistan and Afghanistan, still there are
some orthodox Madrassh teachers, who teaches that earth is flat and stationary
and sun rotates around the earth.
In addition to the promotion of violence against non-Muslims, often there are
Madrasahs which promote sectarian violence (e.g, between Shia – Sunni etc).
Several anti-Shia militias such as the Sipah-i Sahaba (army of Prophet’s
companion) and Lashkar–i Jhangvi (Jhangvi’s army) hailed from the extremist
Deobandi Madrasahs, and maintained close ties with other terrorist organizations
in Afghanistan, Kashmir and elsewhere (Nasr, 2006). The results, we are seeing
everyday in Iraq, where not a single day passes without sectarian violence and
killing.
During 1994, the Human Rights commission of Pakistan investigated child abuse
incidents and the result of the investigation showed that in many Madrasahs, the
children are often locked in iron chains, to a heavy wooden block, in groups of
four or five. During March 1996, police raided a Madrasah near Multan and rescued 64 such victims (Anon, 2004). They were held in strong ropes and chains. The religious
head teacher of the Madrasah said that the students had fallen into bad habits
of watching satellite television
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REFERENCE LIST
Books, Thesis, Journals and Newspapers
1. Lindsey A. O'Rourke, (2005) - A Sociobiological View of Palestinian
Suicide Bombers, (Undergraduate Philosophy Thesis) The Ohio State University;
submitted on 7th March, 2005.
2. Atwan A. B (2006), The Secret History of Al-Qa’ida, pp 74, 152. Second
edition. Clays Ltd, GB.
3. Nasr V. (2006), The Shia Revival – How conflicts within Islam will shape
the future, Chapter – 5, pp 165. First Edition, Norton, London.
4. Davis C (2002) - “A” Is for Allah, “J” Is for Jihad; World Policy Journal,
Spring 2002 issue.
5. Shourie, Arun (2004), India under threat, Part-III, The ticking bomb
inside mosque and Madrasa , The Indian Express (daily newspaper) of dated 17th
December, 2004.
Internet
1. Al Qaeda Training Manual (2001), U.S. Department of Justice, online
release 7th December 2001; URL:
2. Anderson Paul (2004), Madrasas hit by sex abuse claims, BBC News,
Islamabad, 2004. URL:
http://www.asiansinmedia.org/news/article.php/current_affairs/1271
3. Anonymous (2006) - Breaking the Chains of Islam, Children in Chains...
URL:
4. Anonymous (2006), Muslim group calls for madrasa regulation. URL:
5. Ansari Massoud (2004), Acid attack on boy who refused sex with Muslim
cleric, Karachi. URL :
6. Children in the Community and family (2005), Amnesty International (AI)
Publications, London. URL :
7. Dalrymple William (2005); Inside Islam's "terror Schools"?, Times of
Pakistan.URL:
8. Fair C.C & Haqqani H (2005); Think Again: Islamist Terrorism “Madrasas Are
Terrorist Factories” pp-2 , URL :
9. Khawaja Irfan (2004) - Sex and the Madrasa, URL:
10. Paz (2006), Khomeini's Teachings on sex with infants and animals. URL:
11. Petit Juan Migual (2004) – Rights of the child. URL:
12. Rasheeda (2004) - Why I Became an Apostate. Published at FFI in Leaving
Islam section on 07/01/2004, URL :
13. Siddiqui Ghayasuddin (2006), Child Breaking the Taboo of Child Abuse,
Protection in Faith-Based Environments, A Guideline Report, sponsored by The
Muslim Institute Trust, Bait al-Mal al-Islami, March 2006. URL:
14. Sohail (2007), Reminiscing the Nights and Days of Talibans—the True Islam
in An Afaghan's eye-witness account of Taliban, Part - 1(an e-mail exchange with
Abul Kasem, published at FFI on 25th June / 2007). URL:
Al-Aqsa Mosque; the cause of Muslim Afghanistan and the causes of persecuted
Muslim minorities around the world.” [Document No. 28] Wahhabi writings
emphasize the obligatory nature of the purification that jihad produces, whether
it be in overcoming external enemies, or perfecting the inner self. To Be a
Muslim [Document No. 31], published by Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic
Publishing House and gathered from the
Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, Texas,
exhorts Muslims to work for the establishment of “functionally Islamic
governments” in all nations: “[Muslims should work] to form a society that is
committed to the Islamic way of thinking and Islamic way of life, which means to
form a government that implements principles of justice embodied in the
shari’a….Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments,
every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.”
[Document No. 31] The Houston mosque-goers are then instructed that change –
including political change – is connected directly with jihad: “These
responsibilities to change both oneself and the world are binding in principle,
in law, in self-defense, in community, and as a sacred obligation of jihad….”
[Document No. 31] Quoting from the writings of some of the leading militant
ideologues of modern Islamic extremism, the tract instructs Houston mosque-goers
to form Islamic opposition groups to face “attacks from every materialistic
ideology and system that threatens the existence of Islam as a global paradigm
of thought and system of life.” Because, it asserts, many Muslim countries are
suffering either under “the oppression of non-believing occupiers,” or under the
“brutality of an evil minority, which governs through the iron fist” and serves
as the infidels’ local puppets, self-defense has become an imperative duty for
all Muslims. To underscore the hardships involved in defending and spreading
Islam, the Saudi text cites Muslim Brotherhood radical leader Sayyid Qutb,
advocating the building of an organized movement “of sufficient size and quality
to carry on every level of Islamic work and also to handle unexpected situations
and needs.” The Saudi document quotes Qutb urging Muslims to join such
movements, 58
“[Believers] should realize that their self-value derives only from Islam,
without which they are like animals or worse. They must know, however, that true
honor can never be achieved unless they continue actively to involve themselves
in the Islamic Movement. Those who remain in isolation will be in the Hellfire.
Those who join in the Islamic Movement are joining themselves with honorable
people.” [Document No. 31] According to the text, the path of Islamic
activism—sometimes a euphemism for jihad—“purifies and liberates a person and
teaches one to be strong. It is a path of blessings and honor.” [Document No.
31] Successful Islamic movements should liberate oppressed peoples, including of
course Muslims, and the Saudi tract uses the term “taghut,” familiar among
Islamists, to describe any power or system responsible for such oppression.
Usually taghut is comprised of “those who worship the false gods of modernist
and postmodernist cultures,” or those who adopt capitalist, socialist,
communist, and other manmade systems, in whole or in part. Again, the tract
appeals to an authoritative voice, the fiery Hasan al-Banna, the extremist
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Our task in general is to stand against the
flood of modernist civilization overflowing from the swamp of materialistic and
sinful desires. This flood has swept the Muslim nation away from the Prophet’s
leadership and Koranic guidance and deprived the world of its guiding light.
Western secularism moved into a Muslim world already estranged from its Koranic
roots, and delayed its advancement for centuries, and will continue to do so
until we drive it from our lands. Moreover, we will not stop at this point, but
will pursue this evil force to its own lands, invade its Western heartland, and
struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts by the name of the Prophet
and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims
achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more ‘persecution’ and all
religion will be exclusively for Allah….” [Document No. 31] This passage is a
distillation of Islamist extremism: an adversarial posture fueled by a
conspiratorial outlook, the candid call to jihad against the West, and a recipe
for open-ended struggle practiced beyond the borders of Dar Al-Islam in the
heart of enemy territory.
The same Saudi-Wahhabi book [Document No. 31] also
contains a detailed point- by-point plan for Texas Muslims to propagate Islam by
following al-Banna’s tactics. These include: the incremental approach in thought
and action, the maintenance of a low profile with maximum work and minimum
publicity, a clear long-range strategy for
59
ultimate victory, openness in activity but secrecy in organization, and guarding
separation and spiritual autonomy in the midst of a hostile world. On the
gradualist approach, al-Banna is quoted explaining the steps in preparing to
launch jihad.
First there is dissemination of concepts and ideas “among the
people through oratory and writing, civic action, and other practical methods.”
Then comes the delicate task of identifying “good and reliable cadre to bear the
burden of initiating and sustaining jihad.”
And finally there is the execution where, “the stage is set for relentless combat and consistent effort to achieve the goals. This stage will weed out all but the most honest and sincere, both in their own commitment and in their obedience to the chain of command.”
Sayyid Qutb is quoted explaining how a vanguard of select Muslims must brave the
environment of infidelity while remaining uncontaminated by it.
This, says Qutb, will invariably have the psychological effect of a “feeling of isolation” as the Islamist pioneers insert themselves in an alien environment, but never become of it [Document No. 31].
The text continues that, once the da’wa (Islamic mission) becomes known, those bearing its message will be hated by everyone around them.
This is the stage of preparation for declaring the da’wa and commencing the
jihad.
Al-Banna is quoted as saying even the so-called noted scholars of Islam
will “look down upon your understanding of Islam and will not support your
jihad.” He predicts that many tribulations await the committed Muslims as they
prepare to engage in jihad for the sake of Allah. Those who are sincere in their
faith and strong will endure to the end and succeed with Allah’s help. This
program for jihad, and the discipline required for its meticulous organization
and execution, is totalitarian in character. It is also universal in its reach:
“…it is active everywhere, in every country and throughout every society.”
[Document No. 31]
Many of these texts stress that jihad’s purpose is converting unbelievers to Islam. The jihad must continue until they have done so. One tract on jihad available in English [Document No. 39] published by the Maktaba Dar-us-Salam, in Riyadh, and collected at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, New York, states unequivocally that such a jihad is intended to save infidels from certain punishment in hellfire.
SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN For Wahhabis and other salafist interpretations of
Islam, women are considered a perpetual source of potential fitna or discord in
a social and moral sense. This situation requires constant vigilance on the part
of men, especially Islamic authorities, to ensure women are properly segregated
by being concealed behind closed doors or beneath veils and chadors.52 Much of
the work of the mutawa’a (religious police) inside Saudi Arabia involves
enforcing these strict prohibitions on women.
For Wahhabis, women must be kept in check and under careful scrutiny at all times lest they become occasions—deliberate or unintended—for the enticement of men and thus the sowing of confusion and anarchy in society. It is as though in their very nature women are under continuous suspicion of creating the conditions for unraveling familial and social bonds, and must therefore be hemmed in and watched at all times.
In a collection of fatwas [Document No. 52] gathered from several American
sources, which was intended specifically for distribution in the United States,
the Saudi Embassy in Washington through its Cultural Department actively
advocates the veiling of American Muslim women.
In another of the embassy-propagated fatwas, a woman asks whether some leniency could be shown certain women who come to Islamic centers to study the tenets of the faith without wearing the veil. Otherwise, she fears, they might not come at all and thereby be lost to Islam and eventually Christianized or secularized. Sheik al-‘Athimein replies that such women should be urged repeatedly and at every occasion to wear the veil. If they do so, this will be good for everyone. If they refuse repeated exhortations to cover up, then they must be barred from attending [Document No. 52].
In a collection of fatwas entitled Rulings on Women [Document No. 23], copies of which were collected from Dar Al Hijra in Falls Church, Virginia, Bin Baz, the Saudi government’s official religious authority, categorically rejects the idea of female teachers instructing adolescent boys: “A ten-year old boy is considered adolescent
because he tends to like women and because, at his age, he is able to get
married and can do what men do.” [Document No.23]
Stringent Saudi attitudes towards women are further justified as thwarting an
infidel conspiracy to corrupt Muslim women. One work expressing these concerns
[Document No. 33] was published by the Al-Haramain Foundation, run from Saudi
Arabia and operating branch offices in the United States until the FBI blocked
its assets in February 2004 and found that it was directly funding al Qaeda. (In
October 2004, the Saudi government’s Ministry for Islamic Affairs dissolved the
foundation and, according to a senior Saudi official, its assets will be folded
into a new Saudi National Commission for Charitable Work Abroad.) The
Al-Haramain publication, written by Sheik Al-Fawzan, was obtained from the
Islamic Center of America in East Orange, New Jersey, and asserts that
unbelievers aim to destroy Muslim men by corrupting their women: “The enemies of
Islam, or the enemies of humanity today, the unbelievers, hypocrites, and those
with sick hearts, are angry because of what the Muslim woman has received by way
of honor, prestige, and safety in Islam. These enemies want the woman to become
a destructive tool, bait they can use, to hunt down those who have weak faith
and uncontrollable desires….” [Document No. 33]
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