By Andrew G. Bostom
...
Salient examples from within the past 25 years confirm the persistent absence of freedom of conscience in contemporary Islamic societies, in tragic conformity with a prevailing, unchanged mindset of the earliest Caliphates: the 1985 state-sponsored execution of Sudanese religious reformer Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for his alleged “apostasy”; the infamous 1989 “Salman Rushdie Affair”, which resulted in the issuance of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Rushdie to death; the July 1994 vigilante murder of secular Egyptian writer Farag Foda—supported by the prominent Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, an official of Al Azhar University, who testified on behalf of the murderer, “A secularist represents a danger to society and the nation that must be eliminated. It is the duty of the government to kill him.”; and the recent (March, 2006) tragic experience of Abdul Rahman, an unassuming Afghan Muslim convert to Christianity, forced to flee his native country to escape the murderous wrath of Muslim clerics and the masses they incited in “liberated”, post-Taliban Afghanistan. An even more alarming and utterly intolerable phenomenon was on display just this week in the United States when a Johnstown (western Pennsylvania) area imam Fouad El Bayly openly sanctioned the punishment by death of former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali—born and raised a Muslim in Somalia—for her open avowal of secularism.
Ibn Warraq has observed aptly that the most fundamental conception of a Caliphate, “…the constant injunction to obey the Caliph—who is God’s Shadow on Earth”, is completely incompatible with the creation of a “rights-based individualist philosophy.” Warraq illustrates the supreme hostility to individual rights in the Islamic Caliphate, and Islam itself, through the writings of the iconic Muslim philosopher, jurist, and historian, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and a contemporary Muslim thinker, A.K. Brohi, former Pakistani Minister of Law and Religious Affairs:
[Ibn Khaldun] All religious laws and practices and everything that the masses
are expected to do requires group feeling. Only with the help of group feeling
can a claim be successfully pressed,…Group feeling is necessary to the Muslim
community. Its existence enables (the community) to fulfill what God expects of
it.
[A.K. Brohi] Human duties and rights have been vigorously
defined and their orderly enforcement is the duty of the whole of organized
communities and the task is specifically entrusted to the law enforcement organs
of the state. The individual if necessary has to be sacrificed in order that
that the life of the organism be saved. Collectivity has a special sanctity
attached to it in Islam.
In contrast, Warraq notes, “Liberal democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom and attaches all possible value to each man or woman.” And he concludes,
Individualism is not a recognizable feature of Islam; instead the collective
will of the Muslim people is constantly emphasized. There is certainly no notion
of individual rights, which developed in the West, especially during the
eighteenth century.
Almost six decades ago (in 1950), G.H. Bousquet, a pre-eminent modern scholar of Islamic Law, put forth this unapologetic, pellucid formulation of the twofold totalitarian impulse in Islam:
Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to
impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed
Muhammadan law, by the principles of the fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest
details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual
believer....the study of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding though it may appear
to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh) is of
great importance to the world today.
The openly expressed desire for the restoration of a Caliphate from two-thirds of an important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab Islamic nations, representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as a chilling wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential threat posed by the living, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad.
Pertinent Links:
1) Mainstream Caliphate Confessions
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