Why Europeans Should Support Israel
by Fjordman
One of the most frustrating things to watch is the powerful anti-Israeli and sometimes outright anti-Semitic current that is prevalent in too much of Europe’s media. Bat Ye’or’s predictions about Arab anti-Semitism spreading in Europe as the continent’s Islamization and descent into Eurabia continues have so far proved depressingly accurate. This trend needs to be fought, vigorously, by all serious European anti-Jihadists. Not only because it is immoral and unfair to Israelis, which it is, but also because those who assist it are depriving Europeans of the opportunity to fully grasp the threat and understand the nature of the Jihad that is now targeting much of Europe as well.
In 2005 the Norwegian police issued a mobile security alarm to Carl I. Hagen, leader of the right-wing Progress Party. Mr. Hagen had criticized Islam and could see no similarity with the concept of morality and justice found in Christianity. During the 1990s, Mr. Hagen was one of the few politicians who protested against giving money to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a part of the Norwegian-brokered Oslo Peace Process.
Hagen said that if Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next. He felt that Christians should support Israel and oppose Islamic inroads into Europe. In an unprecedented step, a group of Muslim ambassadors to Norway blasted Carl I. Hagen in a letter to the newspaper Aftenposten, claiming that he had offended 1.3 billion Muslims around the world. Other Norwegian politicians quickly caved in and condemned Hagen. Maybe Norway, “the country of peace” and home to the Nobel Peace Prize, will get along just fine with Islam, “the religion of peace.”
Although some political leaders such as Mr. Carl I. Hagen have a clear understanding of what’s going on, they are unfortunately few and far between. Most European media commentators are hostile to the Jewish state of Israel, partly because they get angry with anybody defending themselves against Islamic Jihad instead of surrendering, and partly because they want to project their own feelings of guilt from the Holocaust onto Israel by recasting the Jews as villains and the Palestinians as victims.
French filmmaker Pierre Rehov made the film Suicide Killers where he interviewed the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He warns that we are facing “a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization,” a “culture of hatred in which the uneducated are brainwashed to a level where their only solution in life becomes to kill themselves and kill others in the name of a God. I hear a mother saying ‘Thank God, my son is dead.’ Her son had became a shaheed, a martyr, which for her was a greater source of pride than if he had became an engineer, a doctor or a winner of the Nobel Prize. [...] They don’t see the innocent being killed, they only see the impure that they have to destroy.”
Rehov believes that we are dealing with “a new form of Nazism” that it is going to spread to Europe and the United States, too.
Spanish journalist Sebastian Villar Rodriguez claims that Europe died in Auschwitz: “We assassinated 6 million Jews in order to end up bringing in 20 million Muslims!” Yet in 2007, Ciempozuelos, a small Madrid suburb, refused to commemorate Holocaust Day and opted instead to commemorate the ‘Day of Palestinian Genocide.’ In Britain following Muslim pressure, the Bolton Council scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event. The Muslim Council of Britain asked for a Genocide Day to protest the Israeli “genocide” against the Palestinians. The secretary-general of the MCB, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, has earlier compared the situation of Muslims in Britain to Jews under Hitler.
We thus have the absurd situation where the Nazis of today are presented as Jews while the Jews are presented as Nazis.
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut thinks that Auschwitz has become part of the foundation of the European Union, a culture based on guilt. “I can understand the feeling of remorse that is leading Europe to this, but this remorse goes too far.” It is too great a gift to present Hitler to reject every single aspect of European culture. This is said by the Jewish son of an Auschwitz prisoner.
The Holocaust was an unspeakable crime. It also did massive damage to Europe’s own identity and cultural confidence, and is one of the major causes of Europe’s seeming inability to withstand the ongoing Islamic Jihad.
As Hugh Fitzgerald notes, “Fortunately for so many, and for the Arabs, the victory of Israel in the Six-Day War promptly provided a reason to depict Jews as villains, not victims. This found an eager audience of Europeans, who were already eager for psychological reasons to find fault with Jews so as to avoid thinking unduly about the behavior of many European peoples and states during the war. [...] The damage done to the morale of Europe because of the destruction of European Jewry has been great. If Western Europe, or the West generally, were after all that has happened to permit Israel to go under, Europe would not recover.”
He warns that those who believe sacrificing Israel would in any way stop the global Jihad are very wrong. On the contrary, “The loss of Israel would fill the Arabs and Muslims with such triumphalism that their Jihad in Western Europe and elsewhere (including the Americas) would receive a gigantic boost. The duty is to make sure that Islam covers the globe; that Islam dominates, and Muslims rule.”
Europeans need to understand how closely intertwined are the fates of Israel and of Europe itself. The term “Judeo-Christian” is not a cliche. We cannot defend Western civilization without defending its Jewish component, without which modern Western culture would have been unthinkable.
The religious identity of the West has two legs: The Christian and the Jewish ones. It needs both to stand upright. Sacrificing one to save the other is like fighting a battle by chopping off one of your legs, throwing it at the feet of your enemies and shouting: “You won’t get the other one! We will never surrender!” We could always hope that our enemies will laugh themselves to death faster than we bleed to death, the Monty Python way of fighting. Maybe that works, but most likely it will leave us crippled and pathetic, if not dead.
I agree with Mr. Finkielkraut: To reduce absolutely everything about Europe to gas chambers, thereby allowing the Nazis the opportunity to expropriate everything that has been created during thousands of years, is to grant Adolf Hitler victory posthumously. We should not award him that pleasure, especially since what would replace Western civilization would be Islamic culture, the most warlike and anti-Semitic on earth, and greatly admired by Mr. Hitler for it.
We cannot change what has happened in the past. We should, however, consider it our duty to combat anti-Semitism in the here and now and make sure that the remaining Jews both in Europe and in Israel are safe. This is not just because it is our moral and historical obligation, which it is, but also because we only gain the right to defend ourselves against Islamization of we grant the same right to Israel. Likewise, we can only begin to heal our self-inflicted civilizational wounds if we embrace the Jewish component of our cultural identity.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
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1) Why Europeans Should Support Israel
Showing posts with label Fjordman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fjordman. Show all posts
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
MUST READ: THE FUNNY SIDE OF ISLAM: MUHAMMAD & THE HADITH
The Funny Side of Islam: Muhammad and the Hadith
by Fjordman
First of all I’d like to remind readers that all of my essays can be republished online or translated into other languages by anybody who wants to, as long as I am credited as the author. If you like this essay, I encourage you to republish it at your website.
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Iranian Islamic leader the Ayatollah Khomeini once said that “There is no fun in Islam.” I disagree. Islam can be quite funny; it just isn’t intended to be so. I have long said that Islam’s weakest point is mockery. Any enemy will reveal what he fears the most, if you listen to him closely. Muslims fear criticism or mockery of their religion more than they fear death. Well, if mockery is what they fear above all else, maybe that’s exactly what we should give them?
The good thing about Islam is that you don’t actually have to mock it, Islam mocks itself. To demonstrate the funny side of Islam, I will quote a number of authentic hadith, exclusively taken from the major collections of Bukhari and al-Muslim. These are the most important religious texts for a billion Sunni Muslims, second only to the Koran itself.
The Sunna of Muhammad, his personal example, is mainly contained in extra-Koranic sources, especially the hadith (plural: ahadith). Even the practices of prayer and pilgrimage are to a very large extent based on information from the hadith literature. One should always be careful with using Wikipedia as a source, but their entry on the five pillars of Islam is reasonably accurate:
Five Pillars of Islam is the term given to the five duties incumbent on every Muslim. These duties are:
1) Shahadah (profession of faith)
2) Salat (ritual prayer five times each day)
3) Sawm (fasting during Ramadan)
4) Zakat (Islamic tax or tithing)
5) Hajj (Pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during life).
These practices are essential to Sunni Islam. Shi’a Muslims subscribe to eight ritual practices which substantially overlap with the Pillars. The concept of five pillars is taken from the Hadith collections, notably those of Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. The Qur’an does not speak of five pillars, although one can find in it scattered references to their associated practices.
The Shias have their own hadith collections. They differ from the Sunnis in some respects in terms of theology, but not by much when it comes to violence and aggression against non-Muslims. For instance, here is a speech by Khomeini from 1981:
“Why do you only read the Quranic verses of mercy and do not read the verses of killing? Quran says; kill, imprison! Why are you only clinging to the part that talks about mercy? Mercy is against God. Mehrab means the place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the mehrabs, wars should proceed, just as all the wars of Islam used to proceeded out of the mehrabs. The Prophet has [had] sword to kill people. Our [Holy] Imams were quite military men. All of them were warriors. They used to wield swords; they used to kill people. We need a Khalifa who would chop hands, cut throat, stone people in the same way that the messenger of God used to chop hands, cut throats, and stone people. In the same way that he massacred the Jews of Bani Qurayza because they were a bunch of discontent people. If the Prophet used to order to burn a house or exterminate a tribe, [then] that was justice.”
At the mainstream Sunni website IslamOnline, Dr. Khalid Alvi answers a question as to whether there is any need for hadith. According to him, the Koran contains dozens of reminders of the important position of Muhammad, and “No one remains Muslim if he does not accept the Prophet’s decisions and judgments.”
As Alvi writes, “The Qur’an, while pressing the Muslims to obey the Prophet, goes a step further when it announces that the Prophethood of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is above all the limitations of time and space. He is the Last Prophet and is a Messenger of Allah for the whole of humanity for all time to come. Hadith is nothing but a reflection of the personality of the Prophet, who is to be obeyed at every cost. Any student of the Qur’an will see that the Qur’an generally deals with the broad principles or essentials of religion, going into details in very rare cases. The details were generously supplied by the Prophet himself, either by showing in his practice how an injunction is to be carried out, or by giving an explanation in words.”
The great Hungarian orientalist Ignác Goldziher has cast doubt on the authenticity of the hadith literature, but according to other scholars, much of the same can be said about the Koran as well, which was probably completed far later, and with far more changes, than Muslims would like us to believe. Some of the Koran may even be based on pre-Islamic texts.
And as Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch asks, “who is going to red-pencil a number of the most ‘authentic’ Hadith, or perhaps throw them out altogether, and while we are at it, throw out the Sira (the biography, in the basic Muslim version, of Muhammad)? Who will declare it done? And how could it possibly be accepted? It can’t, and holding out such hope to naïve Infidels is meretricious and sinister.”
It is true that Muslim reformists do exist, though they are numerically marginal, who from time to time will argue for downplaying or ignoring the hadith and the Sunna in favor of relying on the Koran alone. I personally doubt whether they will succeed in reforming Islam in this way, as this will be viewed as heresy by people who follow the traditional interpretation of Islamic law, where heresy is punishable by death.
Sheikh Tantawi, leader of Al-Azhar in Cairo, the most important center of learning for Sunni Muslims, attacked the Sunna deniers, calling them “ignoramuses, liars, and hypocrites” and warning the public not to listen to their views. In statements delivered on November 5, 2004 at a conference organized by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Tantawi said, “The attack on the Sunna is a means employed by the enemies of Islam for the [upcoming] attack on the Koran, because the Sunna is only a clarification of the laws appearing in the Koran… Thus, anyone who raises doubts about the prophetic Sunna as a source of legislation is acting according to a plan that is hostile to Islam… We have no life, future, or greatness among the societies except by clinging to the Koran and the Sunna. It is incumbent upon us all to stand in one rank and in one thought against anyone who attacks and denies the Sunna, because the laws [regarding matters] between man and Allah are not correct without the Sunna that explains in detail the rules and clarifies the things that are important.”
We should remember, from a theological point of view, that the Koran on quite a few occasions orders Muslims to follow the example of Muhammad, and most of his Sunna is contained in extra-Koranic sources, especially in the hadith. If you remove these, Islam will essentially collapse as a recognizable religion. Moreover, the Koran contains dozens of Jihad-verses and other verses advocating violence and intolerance against non-Muslims. Even if you ignored the entire hadith literature, a religion based on the Koran alone would still be the most aggressive major religion on earth.
In order to put the hadith into perspective, let me quote one of the most pro-Islamic writers in existence, John L. Esposito. In his book Islam: The Straight Path, Esposito says about Muhammad:
“He was revered from earliest times: Muslims remembered and recounted what he said and did. Both during his lifetime and throughout the following centuries, Muhammad has served as the ideal model for Muslim life, providing the pattern that all believers are to emulate. He is, as some Muslims say, the ‘living Quran’ — the witness whose behavior and words reveal God’s will. Thus the practices of the Prophet became a material source of Islamic law alongside the Quran. Muslims look to Muhammad’s example for guidance in all aspects of life: how to treat friends as well as enemies, what to eat and drink, how to make love and war. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the growth of Prophetic traditions.”
In Esposito’s view, “His impact on Muslim life cannot be overestimated, since he served as both religious and political head of Medina: prophet of God, ruler, military commander, chief judge, lawgiver. As a result, the practice of the Prophet, his Sunna or example, became the norm for community life. Muslims observed and remembered stories about what the Prophet said and did. These reports or traditions (hadith) were preserved and passed on in oral and written form. The corpus of hadith literature reveals the comprehensive scope of Muhammad’s example; he is the ideal religiopolitical leader as well as the exemplary husband and father. Thus when many Muslims pray five times each day or make the pilgrimage to Mecca, they seek to pray as the Prophet prayed, without adding or subtracting from the way Muhammad is reported to have worshipped. Traditions of the Prophet provide guidance for personal hygiene, dress, eating, marriage, treatment of wives, diplomacy, and warfare.”
As Turkey’s leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is reported to have said, “Islam, this absurd theology of an immoral Bedouin, is a rotting corpse which poisons our lives.” The following quotes, with links, are from authentic hadith with sayings by or about Muhammad, according to Muslims the “living Koran,” the most perfect human being who has ever lived. Until the end of time, we should all emulate the way he eats, farts, or kills his enemies for mocking him. Some of these nuggets are hysterically funny, some less so. But whatever you do, don’t laugh when reading this. That makes you a dangerous Islamophobe according to the United Nations, and Muslims across the world want you dead for insulting their prophet.
Enjoy:
Volume 1, Book 11, Number 662:
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Narrated Anas:
The Prophet said, “Listen and obey (your chief) even if an Ethiopian whose head is like a raisin were made your chief.”
Volume 8, Book 76, Number 505:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
I heard Allah’s Apostle saying, “People are just like camels, out of one hundred, one can hardly find a single camel suitable to ride.”
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 356:
Narrated Sad:
Allah’s Apostle said, “He who eats seven ‘Ajwa dates every morning, will not be affected by poison or magic on the day he eats them.”
Book 028, Number 5612:
Buraida reported on the authority of his father that Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: He who played chess is like one who dyed his hand with the flesh and blood of swine.
Volume 7, Book 67, Number 403:
Narrated Ibn Abi Aufa:
We participated with the Prophet in six or seven Ghazawat, and we used to eat locusts with him.
Volume 7, Book 72, Number 747:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “If you want to put on your shoes, put on the right shoe first; and if you want to take them off, take the left one first. Let the right shoe be the first to be put on and the last to be taken off.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 105:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “If somebody keeps a horse in Allah’s Cause motivated by his faith in Allah and his belief in His Promise, then he will be rewarded on the Day of Resurrection for what the horse has eaten or drunk and for its dung and urine.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 238:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “A wound which a Muslim receives in Allah’s cause will appear on the Day of Resurrection as it was at the time of infliction; blood will be flowing from the wound and its color will be that of the blood but will smell like musk.”
The Prophet said, “You will meet Allah barefooted, naked, walking on feet, and uncircumcised.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 537:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said “If a house fly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease.”
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 366:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
The Prophet said, ‘When you eat, do not wipe your hands till you have licked it, or had it licked by somebody else.”
Volume 7, Book 72, Number 754:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet forbade the wearing of a gold ring.
Volume 7, Book 71, Number 636:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “The effect of an evil eye is a fact.” And he prohibited tattooing
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 536:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “Once while a prophet amongst the prophets was taking a rest underneath a tree, an ant bit him. He, therefore, ordered that his luggage be taken away from underneath that tree and then ordered that the dwelling place of the ants should be set on fire. Allah sent him a revelation:— “Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to burn a single ant? (that bit you)
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 362:
Narrated ‘Abdul ‘Aziz:
It was said to Anas “What did you hear the Prophet saying about garlic?” Anas replied, “Whoever has eaten (garlic) should not approach our mosque.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 210:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
Allah’s Apostle drank milk, rinsed his mouth and said, “It has fat.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 245:
Narrated Abu Burda:
My father said, “I came to the Prophet and saw him carrying a Siwak in his hand and cleansing his teeth, saying, ‘U’ U’,” as if he was retching while the Siwak was in his mouth.”
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 368:
Narrated Abu Umama:
Whenever the dining sheet of the Prophet was taken away (i.e., whenever he finished his meal), he used to say: “Al-hamdu lillah kathiran taiyiban mubarakan fihi ghaira makfiy wala muwada’ wala mustaghna’anhu Rabbuna.”
Volume 7, Book 69, Number 535:
Narrated Thumama bin Abdullah:
Anas used to breathe twice or thrice in the vessel (while drinking) and used to say that the Prophet; used to take three breaths while drinking.
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 143:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
The Prophet said, “If anyone of you on having sexual relations with his wife said (and he must say it before starting) ‘In the name of Allah. O Allah! Protect us from Satan and also protect what you bestow upon us (i.e. the coming offspring) from Satan, and if it is destined that they should have a child then, Satan will never be able to harm that offspring.”
Volume 8, Book 77, Number 594:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet said, “Allah puts an angel in charge of the uterus and the angel says, ‘O Lord, (it is) semen! O Lord, (it is now ) a clot! O Lord, (it is now) a piece of flesh.’ And then, if Allah wishes to complete its creation, the angel asks, ‘O Lord, (will it be) a male or a female? A wretched (an evil doer) or a blessed (doer of good)? How much will his provisions be? What will his age be?’ So all that is written while the creature is still in the mother’s womb.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 433:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “On every Friday the angels take heir stand at every gate of the mosques to write the names of the people chronologically (i.e. according to the time of their arrival for the Friday prayer and when the Imam sits (on the pulpit) they fold up their scrolls and get ready to listen to the sermon.”
Sahih Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 11, Number 660:
Quote: Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “Isn’t he who raises his head before the Imam afraid that Allah may transform his head into that of a donkey or his figure (face) into that of a donkey?”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 174:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “A man saw a dog eating mud from (the severity of) thirst. So, that man took a shoe (and filled it) with water and kept on pouring the water for the dog till it quenched its thirst. So Allah approved of his deed and made him to enter Paradise.” And narrated Hamza bin ‘Abdullah: My father said. “During the lifetime of Allah’s Apostle, the dogs used to urinate, and pass through the mosques (come and go), nevertheless they never used to sprinkle water on it (urine of the dog.)”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 494:
Narrated Ibn Umar:
Allah’s Apostle said, “When the (upper) edge of the sun appears (in the morning), don’t perform a prayer till the sun appears in full, and when the lower edge of the sun sets, don’t perform a prayer till it sets completely. And you should not seek to pray at sunrise or sunset for the sun rises between two sides of the head of the devil (or Satan).”
Volume 7, Book 71, Number 619:
Narrated Nazi’:
Abdullah bin ‘Umar said, “The Prophet said, ‘Fever is from the heat of Hell, so put it out (cool it) with water.’ “ Nafi’ added: ‘Abdullah used to say, “O Allah! Relieve us from the punishment,” (when he suffered from fever).
Volume 9, Book 87, Number 123:
Narrated Anas:
The Prophet said, “Whoever has seen me in a dream, then no doubt, he has seen me, for Satan cannot imitate my shape.
Volume 9, Book 87, Number 124:
Narrated Abu Qatada:
The Prophet said, “A good dream is from Allah, and a bad dream is from Satan. So whoever has seen (in a dream) something he dislike, then he should spit without saliva, thrice on his left and seek refuge with Allah from Satan, for it will not harm him, and Satan cannot appear in my shape.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 513:
Narrated Abu Qatada:
The Prophet said, “A good dream is from Allah, and a bad or evil dream is from Satan; so if anyone of you has a bad dream of which he gets afraid, he should spit on his left side and should seek Refuge with Allah from its evil, for then it will not harm him.”
Volume 2, Book 21, Number 245:
Narrated ‘Abdullah :
A person was mentioned before the Prophet (p.b.u.h.) and he was told that he had kept on sleeping till morning and had not got up for the prayer. The Prophet said, “Satan urinated in his ears.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 509:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “Yawning is from Satan and if anyone of you yawns, he should check his yawning as much as possible, for if anyone of you (during the act of yawning) should say: ‘Ha’, Satan will laugh at him.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 516:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “If anyone of you rouses from sleep and performs the ablution, he should wash his nose by putting water in it and then blowing it out thrice, because Satan has stayed in the upper part of his nose all the night.”
Volume 1, Book 1, Number 2:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
(the mother of the faithful believers) Al-Harith bin Hisham asked Allah’s Apostle “O Allah’s Apostle! How is the Divine Inspiration revealed to you?” Allah’s Apostle replied, “Sometimes it is (revealed) like the ringing of a bell, this form of Inspiration is the hardest of all and then this state passes ‘ off after I have grasped what is inspired. Sometimes the Angel comes in the form of a man and talks to me and I grasp whatever he says.” ‘Aisha added: Verily I saw the Prophet being inspired Divinely on a very cold day and noticed the Sweat dropping from his forehead (as the Inspiration was over).
Volume 6, Book 61, Number 558:
Narrated Aisha:
Allah’s Apostle heard a man reciting the Qur’an at night, and said, “May Allah bestow His Mercy on him, as he has reminded me of such-and-such Verses of such-and-such Suras, which I was caused to forget.”
Volume 6, Book 61, Number 550:
Narrated Abdullah:
The Prophet said, “It is a bad thing that some of you say, ‘I have forgotten such-and-such verse of the Qur’an,’ for indeed, he has been caused (by Allah) to forget it. So you must keep on reciting the Qur’an because it escapes from the hearts of men faster than camel do.”
Volume 6, Book 61, Number 552:
Narrated Abu Musa:
The Prophet said, “Keep on reciting the Qur’an, for, by Him in Whose Hand my life is, Quran runs away (is forgotten) faster than camels that are released from their tying ropes.”
Salman reported that it was said to him: Your Apostle teaches you about everything, even about excrement. He replied: Yes, he has forbidden us to face the Qibla at the time of excretion or urination, or cleansing with right hand or with less than three pebbles, or with dung or bone.
Volume 5, Book 58, Number 200:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
That once he was in the, company of the Prophet carrying a water pot for his ablution and for cleaning his private parts. While he was following him carrying it(i.e. the pot), the Prophet said, “Who is this?” He said, “I am Abu Huraira.” The Prophet said, “Bring me stones in order to clean my private parts, and do not bring any bones or animal dung.” Abu Huraira went on narrating: So I brought some stones, carrying them in the corner of my robe till I put them by his side and went away. When he finished, I walked with him and asked, “What about the bone and the animal dung?” He said, “They are of the food of Jinns. The delegate of Jinns of (the city of) Nasibin came to me—and how nice those Jinns were—and asked me for the remains of the human food. I invoked Allah for them that they would never pass by a bone or animal dung but find food on them.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 144:
Narrated Anas:
Whenever the Prophet went to answer the call of nature, he used to say, “Allah-umma inni a’udhu bika minal khubuthi wal khaba’ith i.e. O Allah, I seek Refuge with You from all offensive and wicked things (evil deeds and evil spirits).”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 145:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
Once the Prophet entered a lavatory and I placed water for his ablution. He asked, “Who placed it?” He was informed accordingly and so he said, “O Allah! Make him (Ibn ‘Abbas) a learned scholar in religion (Islam).”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 146:
Narrated Abu Aiyub Al-Ansari:
Allah’s Apostle said, “If anyone of you goes to an open space for answering the call of nature he should neither face nor turn his back towards the Qibla; he should either face the east or the west.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 147:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
People say, “Whenever you sit for answering the call of nature, you should not face the Qibla or Bait-ul-Maqdis (Jerusalem).” I told them. “Once I went up the roof of our house and I saw Allah’s Apostle answering the call of nature while sitting on two bricks facing Bait-ul-Maqdis (Jerusalem) (but there was a screen covering him. ‘
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 152:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Whenever Allah’s Apostle went to answer the call of nature, I along with another boy used to accompany him with a tumbler full of water. (Hisham commented, “So that he might wash his private parts with it.)”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 137:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “The prayer of a person who does Hadath (passes, urine, stool or wind) is not accepted till he performs (repeats) the ablution.” A person from Hadaramout asked Abu Huraira, “What is ‘Hadath’?” Abu Huraira replied, “ ‘Hadath’ means the passing of wind from the anus.”
Volume 8, Book 82, Number 797:
Narrated Anas bin Malik: A group of people from ‘Ukl (or ‘Uraina) tribe ——but I think he said that they were from ‘Ukl came to Medina and (they became ill, so) the Prophet ordered them to go to the herd of (Milch) she-camels and told them to go out and drink the camels’ urine and milk (as a medicine). So they went and drank it, and when they became healthy, they killed the shepherd and drove away the camels. This news reached the Prophet early in the morning, so he sent (some) men in their pursuit and they were captured and brought to the Prophet before midday. He ordered to cut off their hands and legs and their eyes to be branded with heated iron pieces and they were thrown at Al-Harra, and when they asked for water to drink, they were not given water. (Abu Qilaba said, “Those were the people who committed theft and murder and reverted to disbelief after being believers (Muslims), and fought against Allah and His Apostle”).
[MY COMMENT: The idea of drinking urine remains in force today, as do other practices of Muhammad (MEMRI, June 2007): Media Uproar Following Egyptian Mufti’s Fatwa on Companions of the Prophet Muhammad Being Blessed by Drinking His Urine]
Volume 1, Book 5, Number 277:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, ‘The (people of) Bani Israel used to take bath naked (all together) looking at each other. The Prophet Moses used to take a bath alone. They said, ‘By Allah! Nothing prevents Moses from taking a bath with us except that he has a scrotal hernia.’ So once Moses went out to take a bath and put his clothes over a stone and then that stone ran away with his clothes. Moses followed that stone saying, “My clothes, O stone! My clothes, O stone! till the people of Bani Israel saw him and said, ‘By Allah, Moses has got no defect in his body. Moses took his clothes and began to beat the stone.” Abu Huraira added, “By Allah! There are still six or seven marks present on the stone from that excessive beating.”
Book 030, Number 5654:
Jabir b. Samura reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: I recognise the stone in Mecca which used to pay me salutations before my advent as a Prophet and I recognise that even now.
Volume 8, Book 82, Number 808:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “The boy is for (the owner of) the bed and the stone is for the person who commits illegal sexual intercourse.’
Volume 5, Book 58, Number 188:
Narrated ‘Amr bin Maimun:
During the pre-Islamic period of ignorance I saw a she-monkey surrounded by a number of monkeys. They were all stoning it, because it had committed illegal sexual intercourse. I too, stoned it along with them.
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 17:
Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah:
When I got married, Allah’s Apostle said to me, “What type of lady have you married?” I replied, “I have married a matron’ He said, “Why, don’t you have a liking for the virgins and for fondling them?” Jabir also said: Allah’s Apostle said, “Why didn’t you marry a young girl so that you might play with her and she with you?’
[MY COMMENT: Muhammad married Aisha when she was six years old, and consummated the marriage sexually when she was nine and he was 54. See “Aisha the Child Wife of Muhammad”: by Ali Sina]
Book 008, Number 3311:
‘A’isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) married her when she was seven years old, and he was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 64:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death).
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 229:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
I used to wash the traces of Janaba (semen) from the clothes of the Prophet and he used to go for prayers while traces of water were still on it (water spots were still visible).
Volume 1, Book 5, Number 282:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet used to visit all his wives in one night and he had nine wives at that time.
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 148:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
The wives of the Prophet used to go to Al-Manasi, a vast open place (near Baqia at Medina) to answer the call of nature at night. ‘Umar used to say to the Prophet “Let your wives be veiled,” but Allah’s Apostle did not do so. One night Sauda bint Zam’a the wife of the Prophet went out at ‘Isha’ time and she was a tall lady. ‘Umar addressed her and said, “I have recognized you, O Sauda.” He said so, as he desired eagerly that the verses of Al-Hijab (the observing of veils by the Muslim women) may be revealed. So Allah revealed the verses of “Al-Hijab” (A complete body cover excluding the eyes).
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 33:
Narrated Usama bin Zaid:
The Prophet said, “After me I have not left any affliction more harmful to men than women.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 250:
Narrated Ibn Abbas:
That he heard the Prophet saying, “It is not permissible for a man to be alone with a woman, and no lady should travel except with a Muhram (i.e. her husband or a person whom she cannot marry in any case for ever; e.g. her father, brother, etc.).”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been sent with the shortest expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy).
The Koran 8,12:
I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
Book 041, Number 6983:
Abdullah b. ‘Umar reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: You and the Jews would fight against one another until a stone would say: Muslim, here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
Allah’s Apostle said, “You (i.e. Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.’“
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 260:
Narrated Ikrima:
Ali burnt some people and this news reached Ibn ‘Abbas, who said, “Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, ‘Don’t punish (anybody) with Allah’s Punishment.’ No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.’ “
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 268:
Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle called, “War is deceit”.
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 42:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
Allah’s Apostle said, “There is no Hijra (i.e. migration) (from Mecca to Medina) after the Conquest (of Mecca), but Jihad and good intention remain; and if you are called (by the Muslim ruler) for fighting, go forth immediately.
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 44:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
A man came to Allah’s Apostle and said, “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” He replied, “I do not find such a deed.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 50:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet said, “A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 63:
Narrated Al-Bara:
A man whose face was covered with an iron mask (i.e. clad in armor) came to the Prophet and said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Shall I fight or embrace Islam first? “The Prophet said, “Embrace Islam first and then fight.” So he embraced Islam, and was martyred. Allah’s Apostle said, A Little work, but a great reward. “(He did very little (after embracing Islam), but he will be rewarded in abundance).”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 73:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin Abi Aufa: Allah’s Apostle said, “Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 80i:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “Allah welcomes two men with a smile; one of whom kills the other and both of them enter Paradise. One fights in Allah’s Cause and gets killed. Later on Allah forgives the ‘killer who also get martyred (In Allah’s Cause).”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 195:
Narrated Anas:
The Prophet set out for Khaibar and reached it at night. He used not to attack if he reached the people at night, till the day broke. So, when the day dawned, the Jews came out with their bags and spades. When they saw the Prophet; they said, “Muhammad and his army!” The Prophet said, Allahu—Akbar! (Allah is Greater) and Khaibar is ruined, for whenever we approach a nation (i.e. enemy to fight) then it will be a miserable morning for those who have been warned.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 270:
Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah:
The Prophet said, “Who is ready to kill Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf who has really hurt Allah and His Apostle?” Muhammad bin Maslama said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Do you like me to kill him?” He replied in the affirmative. So, Muhammad bin Maslama went to him (i.e. Ka’b) and said, “This person (i.e. the Prophet) has put us to task and asked us for charity.” Ka’b replied, “By Allah, you will get tired of him.” Muhammad said to him, “We have followed him, so we dislike to leave him till we see the end of his affair.” Muhammad bin Maslama went on talking to him in this way till he got the chance to kill him.
[MY COMMENT: Ka’b bin al-Ashraf was murdered by Muhammad’s followers for the crime of having verbally criticized Muhammad and his teachings. See: Answering Islam. Asma bint Marwan, a female poet, suffered the same fate. See: Answering Islam and Wikipedia. The murder of Theo van Gogh by the devout Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri in Amsterdam in November 2004 was based on the same principle as these murders of Islam critics almost 1400 years ago. The Sunna of Muhammad, his personal example as contained in the quotes above, is valid forever.]
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) The Funny Side of Islam: Muhammad and the Hadith
by Fjordman
First of all I’d like to remind readers that all of my essays can be republished online or translated into other languages by anybody who wants to, as long as I am credited as the author. If you like this essay, I encourage you to republish it at your website.
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Iranian Islamic leader the Ayatollah Khomeini once said that “There is no fun in Islam.” I disagree. Islam can be quite funny; it just isn’t intended to be so. I have long said that Islam’s weakest point is mockery. Any enemy will reveal what he fears the most, if you listen to him closely. Muslims fear criticism or mockery of their religion more than they fear death. Well, if mockery is what they fear above all else, maybe that’s exactly what we should give them?
The good thing about Islam is that you don’t actually have to mock it, Islam mocks itself. To demonstrate the funny side of Islam, I will quote a number of authentic hadith, exclusively taken from the major collections of Bukhari and al-Muslim. These are the most important religious texts for a billion Sunni Muslims, second only to the Koran itself.
The Sunna of Muhammad, his personal example, is mainly contained in extra-Koranic sources, especially the hadith (plural: ahadith). Even the practices of prayer and pilgrimage are to a very large extent based on information from the hadith literature. One should always be careful with using Wikipedia as a source, but their entry on the five pillars of Islam is reasonably accurate:
Five Pillars of Islam is the term given to the five duties incumbent on every Muslim. These duties are:
1) Shahadah (profession of faith)
2) Salat (ritual prayer five times each day)
3) Sawm (fasting during Ramadan)
4) Zakat (Islamic tax or tithing)
5) Hajj (Pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during life).
These practices are essential to Sunni Islam. Shi’a Muslims subscribe to eight ritual practices which substantially overlap with the Pillars. The concept of five pillars is taken from the Hadith collections, notably those of Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. The Qur’an does not speak of five pillars, although one can find in it scattered references to their associated practices.
The Shias have their own hadith collections. They differ from the Sunnis in some respects in terms of theology, but not by much when it comes to violence and aggression against non-Muslims. For instance, here is a speech by Khomeini from 1981:
“Why do you only read the Quranic verses of mercy and do not read the verses of killing? Quran says; kill, imprison! Why are you only clinging to the part that talks about mercy? Mercy is against God. Mehrab means the place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the mehrabs, wars should proceed, just as all the wars of Islam used to proceeded out of the mehrabs. The Prophet has [had] sword to kill people. Our [Holy] Imams were quite military men. All of them were warriors. They used to wield swords; they used to kill people. We need a Khalifa who would chop hands, cut throat, stone people in the same way that the messenger of God used to chop hands, cut throats, and stone people. In the same way that he massacred the Jews of Bani Qurayza because they were a bunch of discontent people. If the Prophet used to order to burn a house or exterminate a tribe, [then] that was justice.”
At the mainstream Sunni website IslamOnline, Dr. Khalid Alvi answers a question as to whether there is any need for hadith. According to him, the Koran contains dozens of reminders of the important position of Muhammad, and “No one remains Muslim if he does not accept the Prophet’s decisions and judgments.”
As Alvi writes, “The Qur’an, while pressing the Muslims to obey the Prophet, goes a step further when it announces that the Prophethood of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is above all the limitations of time and space. He is the Last Prophet and is a Messenger of Allah for the whole of humanity for all time to come. Hadith is nothing but a reflection of the personality of the Prophet, who is to be obeyed at every cost. Any student of the Qur’an will see that the Qur’an generally deals with the broad principles or essentials of religion, going into details in very rare cases. The details were generously supplied by the Prophet himself, either by showing in his practice how an injunction is to be carried out, or by giving an explanation in words.”
The great Hungarian orientalist Ignác Goldziher has cast doubt on the authenticity of the hadith literature, but according to other scholars, much of the same can be said about the Koran as well, which was probably completed far later, and with far more changes, than Muslims would like us to believe. Some of the Koran may even be based on pre-Islamic texts.
And as Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch asks, “who is going to red-pencil a number of the most ‘authentic’ Hadith, or perhaps throw them out altogether, and while we are at it, throw out the Sira (the biography, in the basic Muslim version, of Muhammad)? Who will declare it done? And how could it possibly be accepted? It can’t, and holding out such hope to naïve Infidels is meretricious and sinister.”
It is true that Muslim reformists do exist, though they are numerically marginal, who from time to time will argue for downplaying or ignoring the hadith and the Sunna in favor of relying on the Koran alone. I personally doubt whether they will succeed in reforming Islam in this way, as this will be viewed as heresy by people who follow the traditional interpretation of Islamic law, where heresy is punishable by death.
Sheikh Tantawi, leader of Al-Azhar in Cairo, the most important center of learning for Sunni Muslims, attacked the Sunna deniers, calling them “ignoramuses, liars, and hypocrites” and warning the public not to listen to their views. In statements delivered on November 5, 2004 at a conference organized by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Tantawi said, “The attack on the Sunna is a means employed by the enemies of Islam for the [upcoming] attack on the Koran, because the Sunna is only a clarification of the laws appearing in the Koran… Thus, anyone who raises doubts about the prophetic Sunna as a source of legislation is acting according to a plan that is hostile to Islam… We have no life, future, or greatness among the societies except by clinging to the Koran and the Sunna. It is incumbent upon us all to stand in one rank and in one thought against anyone who attacks and denies the Sunna, because the laws [regarding matters] between man and Allah are not correct without the Sunna that explains in detail the rules and clarifies the things that are important.”
We should remember, from a theological point of view, that the Koran on quite a few occasions orders Muslims to follow the example of Muhammad, and most of his Sunna is contained in extra-Koranic sources, especially in the hadith. If you remove these, Islam will essentially collapse as a recognizable religion. Moreover, the Koran contains dozens of Jihad-verses and other verses advocating violence and intolerance against non-Muslims. Even if you ignored the entire hadith literature, a religion based on the Koran alone would still be the most aggressive major religion on earth.
In order to put the hadith into perspective, let me quote one of the most pro-Islamic writers in existence, John L. Esposito. In his book Islam: The Straight Path, Esposito says about Muhammad:
“He was revered from earliest times: Muslims remembered and recounted what he said and did. Both during his lifetime and throughout the following centuries, Muhammad has served as the ideal model for Muslim life, providing the pattern that all believers are to emulate. He is, as some Muslims say, the ‘living Quran’ — the witness whose behavior and words reveal God’s will. Thus the practices of the Prophet became a material source of Islamic law alongside the Quran. Muslims look to Muhammad’s example for guidance in all aspects of life: how to treat friends as well as enemies, what to eat and drink, how to make love and war. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the growth of Prophetic traditions.”
In Esposito’s view, “His impact on Muslim life cannot be overestimated, since he served as both religious and political head of Medina: prophet of God, ruler, military commander, chief judge, lawgiver. As a result, the practice of the Prophet, his Sunna or example, became the norm for community life. Muslims observed and remembered stories about what the Prophet said and did. These reports or traditions (hadith) were preserved and passed on in oral and written form. The corpus of hadith literature reveals the comprehensive scope of Muhammad’s example; he is the ideal religiopolitical leader as well as the exemplary husband and father. Thus when many Muslims pray five times each day or make the pilgrimage to Mecca, they seek to pray as the Prophet prayed, without adding or subtracting from the way Muhammad is reported to have worshipped. Traditions of the Prophet provide guidance for personal hygiene, dress, eating, marriage, treatment of wives, diplomacy, and warfare.”
As Turkey’s leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is reported to have said, “Islam, this absurd theology of an immoral Bedouin, is a rotting corpse which poisons our lives.” The following quotes, with links, are from authentic hadith with sayings by or about Muhammad, according to Muslims the “living Koran,” the most perfect human being who has ever lived. Until the end of time, we should all emulate the way he eats, farts, or kills his enemies for mocking him. Some of these nuggets are hysterically funny, some less so. But whatever you do, don’t laugh when reading this. That makes you a dangerous Islamophobe according to the United Nations, and Muslims across the world want you dead for insulting their prophet.
Enjoy:
Volume 1, Book 11, Number 662:
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Narrated Anas:
The Prophet said, “Listen and obey (your chief) even if an Ethiopian whose head is like a raisin were made your chief.”
Volume 8, Book 76, Number 505:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
I heard Allah’s Apostle saying, “People are just like camels, out of one hundred, one can hardly find a single camel suitable to ride.”
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 356:
Narrated Sad:
Allah’s Apostle said, “He who eats seven ‘Ajwa dates every morning, will not be affected by poison or magic on the day he eats them.”
Book 028, Number 5612:
Buraida reported on the authority of his father that Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: He who played chess is like one who dyed his hand with the flesh and blood of swine.
Volume 7, Book 67, Number 403:
Narrated Ibn Abi Aufa:
We participated with the Prophet in six or seven Ghazawat, and we used to eat locusts with him.
Volume 7, Book 72, Number 747:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “If you want to put on your shoes, put on the right shoe first; and if you want to take them off, take the left one first. Let the right shoe be the first to be put on and the last to be taken off.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 105:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “If somebody keeps a horse in Allah’s Cause motivated by his faith in Allah and his belief in His Promise, then he will be rewarded on the Day of Resurrection for what the horse has eaten or drunk and for its dung and urine.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 238:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “A wound which a Muslim receives in Allah’s cause will appear on the Day of Resurrection as it was at the time of infliction; blood will be flowing from the wound and its color will be that of the blood but will smell like musk.”
The Prophet said, “You will meet Allah barefooted, naked, walking on feet, and uncircumcised.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 537:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said “If a house fly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease.”
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 366:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
The Prophet said, ‘When you eat, do not wipe your hands till you have licked it, or had it licked by somebody else.”
Volume 7, Book 72, Number 754:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet forbade the wearing of a gold ring.
Volume 7, Book 71, Number 636:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “The effect of an evil eye is a fact.” And he prohibited tattooing
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 536:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “Once while a prophet amongst the prophets was taking a rest underneath a tree, an ant bit him. He, therefore, ordered that his luggage be taken away from underneath that tree and then ordered that the dwelling place of the ants should be set on fire. Allah sent him a revelation:— “Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to burn a single ant? (that bit you)
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 362:
Narrated ‘Abdul ‘Aziz:
It was said to Anas “What did you hear the Prophet saying about garlic?” Anas replied, “Whoever has eaten (garlic) should not approach our mosque.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 210:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
Allah’s Apostle drank milk, rinsed his mouth and said, “It has fat.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 245:
Narrated Abu Burda:
My father said, “I came to the Prophet and saw him carrying a Siwak in his hand and cleansing his teeth, saying, ‘U’ U’,” as if he was retching while the Siwak was in his mouth.”
Volume 7, Book 65, Number 368:
Narrated Abu Umama:
Whenever the dining sheet of the Prophet was taken away (i.e., whenever he finished his meal), he used to say: “Al-hamdu lillah kathiran taiyiban mubarakan fihi ghaira makfiy wala muwada’ wala mustaghna’anhu Rabbuna.”
Volume 7, Book 69, Number 535:
Narrated Thumama bin Abdullah:
Anas used to breathe twice or thrice in the vessel (while drinking) and used to say that the Prophet; used to take three breaths while drinking.
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 143:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
The Prophet said, “If anyone of you on having sexual relations with his wife said (and he must say it before starting) ‘In the name of Allah. O Allah! Protect us from Satan and also protect what you bestow upon us (i.e. the coming offspring) from Satan, and if it is destined that they should have a child then, Satan will never be able to harm that offspring.”
Volume 8, Book 77, Number 594:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet said, “Allah puts an angel in charge of the uterus and the angel says, ‘O Lord, (it is) semen! O Lord, (it is now ) a clot! O Lord, (it is now) a piece of flesh.’ And then, if Allah wishes to complete its creation, the angel asks, ‘O Lord, (will it be) a male or a female? A wretched (an evil doer) or a blessed (doer of good)? How much will his provisions be? What will his age be?’ So all that is written while the creature is still in the mother’s womb.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 433:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “On every Friday the angels take heir stand at every gate of the mosques to write the names of the people chronologically (i.e. according to the time of their arrival for the Friday prayer and when the Imam sits (on the pulpit) they fold up their scrolls and get ready to listen to the sermon.”
Sahih Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 11, Number 660:
Quote: Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “Isn’t he who raises his head before the Imam afraid that Allah may transform his head into that of a donkey or his figure (face) into that of a donkey?”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 174:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “A man saw a dog eating mud from (the severity of) thirst. So, that man took a shoe (and filled it) with water and kept on pouring the water for the dog till it quenched its thirst. So Allah approved of his deed and made him to enter Paradise.” And narrated Hamza bin ‘Abdullah: My father said. “During the lifetime of Allah’s Apostle, the dogs used to urinate, and pass through the mosques (come and go), nevertheless they never used to sprinkle water on it (urine of the dog.)”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 494:
Narrated Ibn Umar:
Allah’s Apostle said, “When the (upper) edge of the sun appears (in the morning), don’t perform a prayer till the sun appears in full, and when the lower edge of the sun sets, don’t perform a prayer till it sets completely. And you should not seek to pray at sunrise or sunset for the sun rises between two sides of the head of the devil (or Satan).”
Volume 7, Book 71, Number 619:
Narrated Nazi’:
Abdullah bin ‘Umar said, “The Prophet said, ‘Fever is from the heat of Hell, so put it out (cool it) with water.’ “ Nafi’ added: ‘Abdullah used to say, “O Allah! Relieve us from the punishment,” (when he suffered from fever).
Volume 9, Book 87, Number 123:
Narrated Anas:
The Prophet said, “Whoever has seen me in a dream, then no doubt, he has seen me, for Satan cannot imitate my shape.
Volume 9, Book 87, Number 124:
Narrated Abu Qatada:
The Prophet said, “A good dream is from Allah, and a bad dream is from Satan. So whoever has seen (in a dream) something he dislike, then he should spit without saliva, thrice on his left and seek refuge with Allah from Satan, for it will not harm him, and Satan cannot appear in my shape.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 513:
Narrated Abu Qatada:
The Prophet said, “A good dream is from Allah, and a bad or evil dream is from Satan; so if anyone of you has a bad dream of which he gets afraid, he should spit on his left side and should seek Refuge with Allah from its evil, for then it will not harm him.”
Volume 2, Book 21, Number 245:
Narrated ‘Abdullah :
A person was mentioned before the Prophet (p.b.u.h.) and he was told that he had kept on sleeping till morning and had not got up for the prayer. The Prophet said, “Satan urinated in his ears.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 509:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “Yawning is from Satan and if anyone of you yawns, he should check his yawning as much as possible, for if anyone of you (during the act of yawning) should say: ‘Ha’, Satan will laugh at him.”
Volume 4, Book 54, Number 516:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “If anyone of you rouses from sleep and performs the ablution, he should wash his nose by putting water in it and then blowing it out thrice, because Satan has stayed in the upper part of his nose all the night.”
Volume 1, Book 1, Number 2:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
(the mother of the faithful believers) Al-Harith bin Hisham asked Allah’s Apostle “O Allah’s Apostle! How is the Divine Inspiration revealed to you?” Allah’s Apostle replied, “Sometimes it is (revealed) like the ringing of a bell, this form of Inspiration is the hardest of all and then this state passes ‘ off after I have grasped what is inspired. Sometimes the Angel comes in the form of a man and talks to me and I grasp whatever he says.” ‘Aisha added: Verily I saw the Prophet being inspired Divinely on a very cold day and noticed the Sweat dropping from his forehead (as the Inspiration was over).
Volume 6, Book 61, Number 558:
Narrated Aisha:
Allah’s Apostle heard a man reciting the Qur’an at night, and said, “May Allah bestow His Mercy on him, as he has reminded me of such-and-such Verses of such-and-such Suras, which I was caused to forget.”
Volume 6, Book 61, Number 550:
Narrated Abdullah:
The Prophet said, “It is a bad thing that some of you say, ‘I have forgotten such-and-such verse of the Qur’an,’ for indeed, he has been caused (by Allah) to forget it. So you must keep on reciting the Qur’an because it escapes from the hearts of men faster than camel do.”
Volume 6, Book 61, Number 552:
Narrated Abu Musa:
The Prophet said, “Keep on reciting the Qur’an, for, by Him in Whose Hand my life is, Quran runs away (is forgotten) faster than camels that are released from their tying ropes.”
Salman reported that it was said to him: Your Apostle teaches you about everything, even about excrement. He replied: Yes, he has forbidden us to face the Qibla at the time of excretion or urination, or cleansing with right hand or with less than three pebbles, or with dung or bone.
Volume 5, Book 58, Number 200:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
That once he was in the, company of the Prophet carrying a water pot for his ablution and for cleaning his private parts. While he was following him carrying it(i.e. the pot), the Prophet said, “Who is this?” He said, “I am Abu Huraira.” The Prophet said, “Bring me stones in order to clean my private parts, and do not bring any bones or animal dung.” Abu Huraira went on narrating: So I brought some stones, carrying them in the corner of my robe till I put them by his side and went away. When he finished, I walked with him and asked, “What about the bone and the animal dung?” He said, “They are of the food of Jinns. The delegate of Jinns of (the city of) Nasibin came to me—and how nice those Jinns were—and asked me for the remains of the human food. I invoked Allah for them that they would never pass by a bone or animal dung but find food on them.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 144:
Narrated Anas:
Whenever the Prophet went to answer the call of nature, he used to say, “Allah-umma inni a’udhu bika minal khubuthi wal khaba’ith i.e. O Allah, I seek Refuge with You from all offensive and wicked things (evil deeds and evil spirits).”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 145:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
Once the Prophet entered a lavatory and I placed water for his ablution. He asked, “Who placed it?” He was informed accordingly and so he said, “O Allah! Make him (Ibn ‘Abbas) a learned scholar in religion (Islam).”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 146:
Narrated Abu Aiyub Al-Ansari:
Allah’s Apostle said, “If anyone of you goes to an open space for answering the call of nature he should neither face nor turn his back towards the Qibla; he should either face the east or the west.”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 147:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
People say, “Whenever you sit for answering the call of nature, you should not face the Qibla or Bait-ul-Maqdis (Jerusalem).” I told them. “Once I went up the roof of our house and I saw Allah’s Apostle answering the call of nature while sitting on two bricks facing Bait-ul-Maqdis (Jerusalem) (but there was a screen covering him. ‘
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 152:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Whenever Allah’s Apostle went to answer the call of nature, I along with another boy used to accompany him with a tumbler full of water. (Hisham commented, “So that he might wash his private parts with it.)”
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 137:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “The prayer of a person who does Hadath (passes, urine, stool or wind) is not accepted till he performs (repeats) the ablution.” A person from Hadaramout asked Abu Huraira, “What is ‘Hadath’?” Abu Huraira replied, “ ‘Hadath’ means the passing of wind from the anus.”
Volume 8, Book 82, Number 797:
Narrated Anas bin Malik: A group of people from ‘Ukl (or ‘Uraina) tribe ——but I think he said that they were from ‘Ukl came to Medina and (they became ill, so) the Prophet ordered them to go to the herd of (Milch) she-camels and told them to go out and drink the camels’ urine and milk (as a medicine). So they went and drank it, and when they became healthy, they killed the shepherd and drove away the camels. This news reached the Prophet early in the morning, so he sent (some) men in their pursuit and they were captured and brought to the Prophet before midday. He ordered to cut off their hands and legs and their eyes to be branded with heated iron pieces and they were thrown at Al-Harra, and when they asked for water to drink, they were not given water. (Abu Qilaba said, “Those were the people who committed theft and murder and reverted to disbelief after being believers (Muslims), and fought against Allah and His Apostle”).
[MY COMMENT: The idea of drinking urine remains in force today, as do other practices of Muhammad (MEMRI, June 2007): Media Uproar Following Egyptian Mufti’s Fatwa on Companions of the Prophet Muhammad Being Blessed by Drinking His Urine]
Volume 1, Book 5, Number 277:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, ‘The (people of) Bani Israel used to take bath naked (all together) looking at each other. The Prophet Moses used to take a bath alone. They said, ‘By Allah! Nothing prevents Moses from taking a bath with us except that he has a scrotal hernia.’ So once Moses went out to take a bath and put his clothes over a stone and then that stone ran away with his clothes. Moses followed that stone saying, “My clothes, O stone! My clothes, O stone! till the people of Bani Israel saw him and said, ‘By Allah, Moses has got no defect in his body. Moses took his clothes and began to beat the stone.” Abu Huraira added, “By Allah! There are still six or seven marks present on the stone from that excessive beating.”
Book 030, Number 5654:
Jabir b. Samura reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: I recognise the stone in Mecca which used to pay me salutations before my advent as a Prophet and I recognise that even now.
Volume 8, Book 82, Number 808:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “The boy is for (the owner of) the bed and the stone is for the person who commits illegal sexual intercourse.’
Volume 5, Book 58, Number 188:
Narrated ‘Amr bin Maimun:
During the pre-Islamic period of ignorance I saw a she-monkey surrounded by a number of monkeys. They were all stoning it, because it had committed illegal sexual intercourse. I too, stoned it along with them.
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 17:
Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah:
When I got married, Allah’s Apostle said to me, “What type of lady have you married?” I replied, “I have married a matron’ He said, “Why, don’t you have a liking for the virgins and for fondling them?” Jabir also said: Allah’s Apostle said, “Why didn’t you marry a young girl so that you might play with her and she with you?’
[MY COMMENT: Muhammad married Aisha when she was six years old, and consummated the marriage sexually when she was nine and he was 54. See “Aisha the Child Wife of Muhammad”: by Ali Sina]
Book 008, Number 3311:
‘A’isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) married her when she was seven years old, and he was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 64:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death).
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 229:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
I used to wash the traces of Janaba (semen) from the clothes of the Prophet and he used to go for prayers while traces of water were still on it (water spots were still visible).
Volume 1, Book 5, Number 282:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet used to visit all his wives in one night and he had nine wives at that time.
Volume 1, Book 4, Number 148:
Narrated ‘Aisha:
The wives of the Prophet used to go to Al-Manasi, a vast open place (near Baqia at Medina) to answer the call of nature at night. ‘Umar used to say to the Prophet “Let your wives be veiled,” but Allah’s Apostle did not do so. One night Sauda bint Zam’a the wife of the Prophet went out at ‘Isha’ time and she was a tall lady. ‘Umar addressed her and said, “I have recognized you, O Sauda.” He said so, as he desired eagerly that the verses of Al-Hijab (the observing of veils by the Muslim women) may be revealed. So Allah revealed the verses of “Al-Hijab” (A complete body cover excluding the eyes).
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 33:
Narrated Usama bin Zaid:
The Prophet said, “After me I have not left any affliction more harmful to men than women.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 250:
Narrated Ibn Abbas:
That he heard the Prophet saying, “It is not permissible for a man to be alone with a woman, and no lady should travel except with a Muhram (i.e. her husband or a person whom she cannot marry in any case for ever; e.g. her father, brother, etc.).”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been sent with the shortest expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy).
The Koran 8,12:
I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
Book 041, Number 6983:
Abdullah b. ‘Umar reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: You and the Jews would fight against one another until a stone would say: Muslim, here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
Allah’s Apostle said, “You (i.e. Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.’“
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 260:
Narrated Ikrima:
Ali burnt some people and this news reached Ibn ‘Abbas, who said, “Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, ‘Don’t punish (anybody) with Allah’s Punishment.’ No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.’ “
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 268:
Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle called, “War is deceit”.
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 42:
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas:
Allah’s Apostle said, “There is no Hijra (i.e. migration) (from Mecca to Medina) after the Conquest (of Mecca), but Jihad and good intention remain; and if you are called (by the Muslim ruler) for fighting, go forth immediately.
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 44:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
A man came to Allah’s Apostle and said, “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” He replied, “I do not find such a deed.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 50:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet said, “A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 63:
Narrated Al-Bara:
A man whose face was covered with an iron mask (i.e. clad in armor) came to the Prophet and said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Shall I fight or embrace Islam first? “The Prophet said, “Embrace Islam first and then fight.” So he embraced Islam, and was martyred. Allah’s Apostle said, A Little work, but a great reward. “(He did very little (after embracing Islam), but he will be rewarded in abundance).”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 73:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin Abi Aufa: Allah’s Apostle said, “Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 80i:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “Allah welcomes two men with a smile; one of whom kills the other and both of them enter Paradise. One fights in Allah’s Cause and gets killed. Later on Allah forgives the ‘killer who also get martyred (In Allah’s Cause).”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 195:
Narrated Anas:
The Prophet set out for Khaibar and reached it at night. He used not to attack if he reached the people at night, till the day broke. So, when the day dawned, the Jews came out with their bags and spades. When they saw the Prophet; they said, “Muhammad and his army!” The Prophet said, Allahu—Akbar! (Allah is Greater) and Khaibar is ruined, for whenever we approach a nation (i.e. enemy to fight) then it will be a miserable morning for those who have been warned.”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 270:
Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah:
The Prophet said, “Who is ready to kill Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf who has really hurt Allah and His Apostle?” Muhammad bin Maslama said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Do you like me to kill him?” He replied in the affirmative. So, Muhammad bin Maslama went to him (i.e. Ka’b) and said, “This person (i.e. the Prophet) has put us to task and asked us for charity.” Ka’b replied, “By Allah, you will get tired of him.” Muhammad said to him, “We have followed him, so we dislike to leave him till we see the end of his affair.” Muhammad bin Maslama went on talking to him in this way till he got the chance to kill him.
[MY COMMENT: Ka’b bin al-Ashraf was murdered by Muhammad’s followers for the crime of having verbally criticized Muhammad and his teachings. See: Answering Islam. Asma bint Marwan, a female poet, suffered the same fate. See: Answering Islam and Wikipedia. The murder of Theo van Gogh by the devout Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri in Amsterdam in November 2004 was based on the same principle as these murders of Islam critics almost 1400 years ago. The Sunna of Muhammad, his personal example as contained in the quotes above, is valid forever.]
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) The Funny Side of Islam: Muhammad and the Hadith
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
MUST READ: CREATING A EUROPEAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT
Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement
by Fjordman
An American friend of mine has proposed that native Europeans should create a European Indigenous People's Movement. I have hesitated with supporting this because it sounded a bit too extreme. However, in more and more European cities, the native population is being pushed out of their own neighborhoods by immigrant gangs. The natives receive little or no aid from their authorities, sometimes blatant hostility, when faced with immigrant violence. In an age where the global population increases with billions of people in a few decades, it is entirely plausible, indeed likely, that the West could soon become demographically overwhelmed. Not few of our intellectuals seem to derive pleasure from this thought.
Bat Ye'or in her book about Eurabia has documented how the European Union is actively allowing Muslims to colonize European countries. The next time EU leaders complain about China's treatment of minorities, I suggest the Chinese answer the following: "Yes, we represent an anti-democratic organization dedicated to subduing the indigenous people of Tibet, but you represent an anti-democratic organization dedicated to displacing the indigenous peoples of an entire continent." There is no love lost between me and the Chinese Communist Party, an organization responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its citizens, but even Chinese authorities do not actively seek to displace their own people with violent Muslims. European authorities do.
In decadent societies of the past, the authorities didn't open the gates to hostile nations and ban opposition to this as intolerance and barbarophobia. What we are dealing with in the modern West is not merely decadence; it's one of the greatest betrayals in history. Our so-called leaders pass laws banning the opposition to our dispossession as "racism and hate speech." To native Europeans, when listening to our media and our leaders, it's as if we don't even exist, as if it were normal for them to put the interests of other nations over their own. Despite having "democratic" governments, many Western countries have authorities that are more hostile to their own people than dictators in some developing countries. Why?
At the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer suggests that the mass immigration encouraged in particular by the Labour governments of Blair and Brown in Britain is not happening out of incompetence, but is part of "a doctrinally driven determination by the new Government in 1997 to destroy our national identity and to advance multiculturalism." I agree, but this policy of state-sponsored population replacement is far from limited to Britain.
Numbers discussed in 2008 showed clearly that mass immigration has had no positive effects on the economy in Britain, and I have seen similar calculations from France, Denmark and Norway, among others. On the contrary, it is a drain on the finances of the native population, and that's even if we don't count the wave of terrorism, insecurity and street violence which is sweeping Western Europe, from Sweden via Germany to the Netherlands. On top of this, the costs of destruction of national cohesion and weakened cultural legacies are incalculable, yet mass immigration continues as if nothing has happened. In April 2008, a report indicated that Spain needed over two million new foreign workers just until 2020, many of whom are likely to come from Muslim North Africa. The authors of the report would call upon the Spanish government to adopt a new law on immigration "to facilitate the legal entry, take advantage of the new arrivals and encourage integration."
I have earlier toyed with the idea of giving native Norwegians the legal status as indigenous people in Norway. A large proportion of my ancestors have lived here since the end of the last Ice Age, for as long as this country has been habitable for humans. The original settlers, who came from Central Europe (Germany and the Czech Republic), have been supplemented by other Europeans. Genetic traces from peoples of Near Eastern origins who spread agriculture to Europe are detectable, but until recently most Europeans were overwhelmingly the descendants of men and women who had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years.
Genetically speaking, native Europeans have thus lived longer on the same continent than have Native Americans. Many Southeast Asians are descendants of southern Chinese settlers who displaced or eradicated the original, dark-skinned inhabitants of the region in early historical times, just as many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa are Bantu invaders who displaced or eradicated the indigenous Khoi-San peoples throughout much of Africa. Modern-day Japanese have lived in Japan for a shorter period of time than Europeans have lived in Europe. Yet a Scottish councillor, Sandy Aitchison, was chastised for using the term "indigenous" about native Brits. Why is it considered ridiculous or evil if Europeans assert our rights? Is it because we are white? Everybody's supposed to keep their culture, except people of European origins? Is that it? Why is colonialism bad, except when my country, which has no colonial history, gets colonized by Third World peoples?
Western Europeans have in recent years accepted more immigration in a shorter period of time than any society has ever done peacefully in human history. If we want a break we have the right to do so. What we are dealing with is not "immigration" but colonization, and in the case of Muslims, internationally organized attempts to conquer of our countries. If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization then so do Europeans. Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway hardly have any colonial history at all. The Germans had a colony in Namibia. Why should they accept millions of Turkish Muslims, who have a thousand years of brutal colonial history of their own, because of this? There are hardly any Britons in Pakistan today, so why should the Brits allow huge numbers of Pakistanis to settle in Britain? And if the Algerians can demand independence from France, why can't the French demand independence from Algerians?
I like cultural diversity and would hope this could be extended to include my culture, too. Or is Multiculturalism simply a hate ideology designed to unilaterally dismantle European culture and the peoples who created it? If people in Cameroon or Cambodia can keep their culture, why can't the peoples who produced Beethoven, Newton, Copernicus, Michelangelo and Louis Pasteur do the same? As Rabbi Aryeh Spero points out, European elites insist "on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands."
Yes, a little immigration from compatible cultures can be absorbed, and can be beneficial on certain terms. But what we are dealing with now is not from compatible cultures, and it certainly isn't little. My nation runs a very real risk of being demographically wiped out during this century, as do the other Nordic countries. We will go from being among the most successful societies in human history to being eradicated in the space of a few generations if current levels of mass immigration continue. Do I have the right to worry about this, or is that "racist"?
The author Gore Vidal once stated: "Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species." Thomas Jefferson said that "The law of self-preservation is higher than written law," and he was right.
As I wrote two years ago: "By any standards possible, we're one of the most successful cultures in the world, our largest flaw, which could eventually bury us, probably being our naivety. So why on earth should we quietly watch while our country is subdued by the most unsuccessful cultures in the world? The most basic instinct of all living things, even down to bacteria level, is self-preservation. In 2006, you have a natural right to self-preservation if you are an amoeba, but not if you're a Scandinavian. Maybe the solution then is to argue that Scandinavians are indeed a species of amoebas, and that we need special protection by the WWF. We could showcase some of our finest specimen of Leftist intellectuals and journalists to prove our point. Shouldn't be too hard."
For simply suggesting that I would not enjoy being turned into a persecuted minority in my own country, I have been accused of being a "white nationalist," which says a great deal about how demonized people of European ancestry have become. What about Koreans or Japanese? If they were gradually being displaced by, say, Nigerians and Pakistanis and were harassed in their cities by people who moved there out of their own free will, would they be denounced as yellow nationalists if they objected to this? In fact, why do the terms yellow nationalist, brown nationalist and black nationalist hardly exist, whereas the term white nationalist does? Isn't that by itself an indication of a double standard?
I started out initially writing almost exclusively about Islam, and I still write predominantly about Islam. However, I have gradually realized that we are dealing with an entire regime of censorship that needs to be removed before we can deal with Islam. I will in any situation highlight and support the struggle of Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha'is, Jews, African Christians, Chinese Taoists etc. against Islamic Jihad, which is a global fight. I always have and I always will. The one thing I will not do is surrender my land, which is not mine to give. I do not see anybody else quietly accept being turned into a minority in the country where their ancestors have lived since the end of the last Ice Age, and I cannot see why I should have to do so, either. I don't care if white Westerners are "scared of being called a racist." I will not leave a ruined land behind to my descendants because I was afraid of being called bad names. If you think it is "racist" for Europeans to preserve their heritage and protect their children from abuse, then I'm not the bigot here. You are.
I hereby propose that native Europeans should create a European Indigenous People's Movement, on behalf of the traditional majority populations of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark etc., inspired by the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The European Indigenous People's Movement should support the right of Europe's indigenous peoples to preserve their self-determination, traditions, sovereignty and culture as majority peoples in their own lands.
The list of goals and objectives should include:
1.) The right to maintain our traditional majorities in our own lands, control our own sovereignty and our own self-determination. We do not wish harm or ill-feeling toward any other peoples on earth, but we assert the right to maintain our own majorities in our own lands without being accused of "racism." We reject current trends which preach that we have no right to oppose, control or lessen unlimited immigration from non-indigenous cultures.
2.) The right to teach our children our cultures, languages, historical interpretations, religious celebrations and traditions unimpeded. We reject educational trends which encourage our children to forget or despise their culture, traditions, religious practices and history in order to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens.
3.) The right to maintain, cherish and practice our own indigenous religious holidays and celebrations. We reject out of hand current trends which preach that traditional indigenous European religious or cultural celebrations such as Christmas are somehow "racist" or "non-inclusive" and therefore must be "downgraded," "renamed" or otherwise de-emphasized or eliminated in order to avoid offending non-indigenous European residents or citizens. We reject current policies which establish that our indigenous cultures are somehow deficient and therefore are not complete until they are "enriched" by other, non-indigenous cultures.
4.) The right to maintain, cherish and display our own indigenous religious, national, ethnic and cultural symbols. We reject out of hand current trends or policies which preach that our national flags or ethnic symbols of centuries standing are somehow "racist" or "non-inclusive" in order to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens.
5.) The right to maintain, cherish, protect and display our own indigenous cultural expressions such as music, artwork and sculptures. We reject out of hand current trends or policies which preach that indigenous European cultural expressions such as statues of boars, folkloric tales about pigs or dogs, paintings with Christian or Classical pagan themes, war memorials with a Christian theme, etc., should be removed from public view, banned, destroyed, modified or otherwise threatened in order to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens.
6.) The right to maintain, cherish and protect indigenous burial sites, structures, buildings, churches, museums and other public works and structures from destruction, modification or other changes. We reject out of hand current trends or policies which establish that indigenous public works and structures must be changed or modified to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens, or to "make way" for structures or public works that benefit non-European residents or citizens (i.e. digging up indigenous graves that are centuries old in order to "make room" for non-indigenous cemeteries, removing external Christian symbols and statues from churches, etc.)
Mr. Franco Frattini of the EU Commission, the unelected and unaccountable government for nearly half a billion people, has stated that Europeans should accept further tens of millions of immigrants within a generation. The British Foreign Minister Milliband stated late in 2007 that the EU should expand to include Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East. The French President Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed this early in 2008. This is part of an organized attempt to surrender Europe to Islamization that has been going on for decades. Since the European Union involves the free movement of people across borders, European leaders are opening the floodgates to tens of millions of Muslims and other non-indigenous peoples at a time when native Europeans fear for the survival of their civilization and feel like aliens in their own cities. Meanwhile, Ernst Uhrlau, the president of Germany's foreign intelligence agency, warned about the rising assertiveness of violent Jihadist organizations in North Africa.
Based on this evidence, the European Union can hardly be seen as anything other than a criminal organization dedicated to the demographic dispossession and cultural marginalization of the indigenous peoples of an entire continent. Consequently, the EU should be immediately and totally dissolved. Native Europeans should demand that we have an interim period with public de-Eurabification, where the lies propagated by pro-Islamic Multiculturalists should be removed from our history books, and a proper respect for European cultural traditions should be restored. Those officials on senior levels who have participated in the creation of Eurabia should stand trial for crimes against their civilization.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement
by Fjordman
An American friend of mine has proposed that native Europeans should create a European Indigenous People's Movement. I have hesitated with supporting this because it sounded a bit too extreme. However, in more and more European cities, the native population is being pushed out of their own neighborhoods by immigrant gangs. The natives receive little or no aid from their authorities, sometimes blatant hostility, when faced with immigrant violence. In an age where the global population increases with billions of people in a few decades, it is entirely plausible, indeed likely, that the West could soon become demographically overwhelmed. Not few of our intellectuals seem to derive pleasure from this thought.
Bat Ye'or in her book about Eurabia has documented how the European Union is actively allowing Muslims to colonize European countries. The next time EU leaders complain about China's treatment of minorities, I suggest the Chinese answer the following: "Yes, we represent an anti-democratic organization dedicated to subduing the indigenous people of Tibet, but you represent an anti-democratic organization dedicated to displacing the indigenous peoples of an entire continent." There is no love lost between me and the Chinese Communist Party, an organization responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its citizens, but even Chinese authorities do not actively seek to displace their own people with violent Muslims. European authorities do.
In decadent societies of the past, the authorities didn't open the gates to hostile nations and ban opposition to this as intolerance and barbarophobia. What we are dealing with in the modern West is not merely decadence; it's one of the greatest betrayals in history. Our so-called leaders pass laws banning the opposition to our dispossession as "racism and hate speech." To native Europeans, when listening to our media and our leaders, it's as if we don't even exist, as if it were normal for them to put the interests of other nations over their own. Despite having "democratic" governments, many Western countries have authorities that are more hostile to their own people than dictators in some developing countries. Why?
At the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer suggests that the mass immigration encouraged in particular by the Labour governments of Blair and Brown in Britain is not happening out of incompetence, but is part of "a doctrinally driven determination by the new Government in 1997 to destroy our national identity and to advance multiculturalism." I agree, but this policy of state-sponsored population replacement is far from limited to Britain.
Numbers discussed in 2008 showed clearly that mass immigration has had no positive effects on the economy in Britain, and I have seen similar calculations from France, Denmark and Norway, among others. On the contrary, it is a drain on the finances of the native population, and that's even if we don't count the wave of terrorism, insecurity and street violence which is sweeping Western Europe, from Sweden via Germany to the Netherlands. On top of this, the costs of destruction of national cohesion and weakened cultural legacies are incalculable, yet mass immigration continues as if nothing has happened. In April 2008, a report indicated that Spain needed over two million new foreign workers just until 2020, many of whom are likely to come from Muslim North Africa. The authors of the report would call upon the Spanish government to adopt a new law on immigration "to facilitate the legal entry, take advantage of the new arrivals and encourage integration."
I have earlier toyed with the idea of giving native Norwegians the legal status as indigenous people in Norway. A large proportion of my ancestors have lived here since the end of the last Ice Age, for as long as this country has been habitable for humans. The original settlers, who came from Central Europe (Germany and the Czech Republic), have been supplemented by other Europeans. Genetic traces from peoples of Near Eastern origins who spread agriculture to Europe are detectable, but until recently most Europeans were overwhelmingly the descendants of men and women who had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years.
Genetically speaking, native Europeans have thus lived longer on the same continent than have Native Americans. Many Southeast Asians are descendants of southern Chinese settlers who displaced or eradicated the original, dark-skinned inhabitants of the region in early historical times, just as many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa are Bantu invaders who displaced or eradicated the indigenous Khoi-San peoples throughout much of Africa. Modern-day Japanese have lived in Japan for a shorter period of time than Europeans have lived in Europe. Yet a Scottish councillor, Sandy Aitchison, was chastised for using the term "indigenous" about native Brits. Why is it considered ridiculous or evil if Europeans assert our rights? Is it because we are white? Everybody's supposed to keep their culture, except people of European origins? Is that it? Why is colonialism bad, except when my country, which has no colonial history, gets colonized by Third World peoples?
Western Europeans have in recent years accepted more immigration in a shorter period of time than any society has ever done peacefully in human history. If we want a break we have the right to do so. What we are dealing with is not "immigration" but colonization, and in the case of Muslims, internationally organized attempts to conquer of our countries. If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization then so do Europeans. Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway hardly have any colonial history at all. The Germans had a colony in Namibia. Why should they accept millions of Turkish Muslims, who have a thousand years of brutal colonial history of their own, because of this? There are hardly any Britons in Pakistan today, so why should the Brits allow huge numbers of Pakistanis to settle in Britain? And if the Algerians can demand independence from France, why can't the French demand independence from Algerians?
I like cultural diversity and would hope this could be extended to include my culture, too. Or is Multiculturalism simply a hate ideology designed to unilaterally dismantle European culture and the peoples who created it? If people in Cameroon or Cambodia can keep their culture, why can't the peoples who produced Beethoven, Newton, Copernicus, Michelangelo and Louis Pasteur do the same? As Rabbi Aryeh Spero points out, European elites insist "on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands."
Yes, a little immigration from compatible cultures can be absorbed, and can be beneficial on certain terms. But what we are dealing with now is not from compatible cultures, and it certainly isn't little. My nation runs a very real risk of being demographically wiped out during this century, as do the other Nordic countries. We will go from being among the most successful societies in human history to being eradicated in the space of a few generations if current levels of mass immigration continue. Do I have the right to worry about this, or is that "racist"?
The author Gore Vidal once stated: "Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species." Thomas Jefferson said that "The law of self-preservation is higher than written law," and he was right.
As I wrote two years ago: "By any standards possible, we're one of the most successful cultures in the world, our largest flaw, which could eventually bury us, probably being our naivety. So why on earth should we quietly watch while our country is subdued by the most unsuccessful cultures in the world? The most basic instinct of all living things, even down to bacteria level, is self-preservation. In 2006, you have a natural right to self-preservation if you are an amoeba, but not if you're a Scandinavian. Maybe the solution then is to argue that Scandinavians are indeed a species of amoebas, and that we need special protection by the WWF. We could showcase some of our finest specimen of Leftist intellectuals and journalists to prove our point. Shouldn't be too hard."
For simply suggesting that I would not enjoy being turned into a persecuted minority in my own country, I have been accused of being a "white nationalist," which says a great deal about how demonized people of European ancestry have become. What about Koreans or Japanese? If they were gradually being displaced by, say, Nigerians and Pakistanis and were harassed in their cities by people who moved there out of their own free will, would they be denounced as yellow nationalists if they objected to this? In fact, why do the terms yellow nationalist, brown nationalist and black nationalist hardly exist, whereas the term white nationalist does? Isn't that by itself an indication of a double standard?
I started out initially writing almost exclusively about Islam, and I still write predominantly about Islam. However, I have gradually realized that we are dealing with an entire regime of censorship that needs to be removed before we can deal with Islam. I will in any situation highlight and support the struggle of Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha'is, Jews, African Christians, Chinese Taoists etc. against Islamic Jihad, which is a global fight. I always have and I always will. The one thing I will not do is surrender my land, which is not mine to give. I do not see anybody else quietly accept being turned into a minority in the country where their ancestors have lived since the end of the last Ice Age, and I cannot see why I should have to do so, either. I don't care if white Westerners are "scared of being called a racist." I will not leave a ruined land behind to my descendants because I was afraid of being called bad names. If you think it is "racist" for Europeans to preserve their heritage and protect their children from abuse, then I'm not the bigot here. You are.
I hereby propose that native Europeans should create a European Indigenous People's Movement, on behalf of the traditional majority populations of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark etc., inspired by the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The European Indigenous People's Movement should support the right of Europe's indigenous peoples to preserve their self-determination, traditions, sovereignty and culture as majority peoples in their own lands.
The list of goals and objectives should include:
1.) The right to maintain our traditional majorities in our own lands, control our own sovereignty and our own self-determination. We do not wish harm or ill-feeling toward any other peoples on earth, but we assert the right to maintain our own majorities in our own lands without being accused of "racism." We reject current trends which preach that we have no right to oppose, control or lessen unlimited immigration from non-indigenous cultures.
2.) The right to teach our children our cultures, languages, historical interpretations, religious celebrations and traditions unimpeded. We reject educational trends which encourage our children to forget or despise their culture, traditions, religious practices and history in order to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens.
3.) The right to maintain, cherish and practice our own indigenous religious holidays and celebrations. We reject out of hand current trends which preach that traditional indigenous European religious or cultural celebrations such as Christmas are somehow "racist" or "non-inclusive" and therefore must be "downgraded," "renamed" or otherwise de-emphasized or eliminated in order to avoid offending non-indigenous European residents or citizens. We reject current policies which establish that our indigenous cultures are somehow deficient and therefore are not complete until they are "enriched" by other, non-indigenous cultures.
4.) The right to maintain, cherish and display our own indigenous religious, national, ethnic and cultural symbols. We reject out of hand current trends or policies which preach that our national flags or ethnic symbols of centuries standing are somehow "racist" or "non-inclusive" in order to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens.
5.) The right to maintain, cherish, protect and display our own indigenous cultural expressions such as music, artwork and sculptures. We reject out of hand current trends or policies which preach that indigenous European cultural expressions such as statues of boars, folkloric tales about pigs or dogs, paintings with Christian or Classical pagan themes, war memorials with a Christian theme, etc., should be removed from public view, banned, destroyed, modified or otherwise threatened in order to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens.
6.) The right to maintain, cherish and protect indigenous burial sites, structures, buildings, churches, museums and other public works and structures from destruction, modification or other changes. We reject out of hand current trends or policies which establish that indigenous public works and structures must be changed or modified to avoid offense to non-indigenous European residents or citizens, or to "make way" for structures or public works that benefit non-European residents or citizens (i.e. digging up indigenous graves that are centuries old in order to "make room" for non-indigenous cemeteries, removing external Christian symbols and statues from churches, etc.)
Mr. Franco Frattini of the EU Commission, the unelected and unaccountable government for nearly half a billion people, has stated that Europeans should accept further tens of millions of immigrants within a generation. The British Foreign Minister Milliband stated late in 2007 that the EU should expand to include Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East. The French President Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed this early in 2008. This is part of an organized attempt to surrender Europe to Islamization that has been going on for decades. Since the European Union involves the free movement of people across borders, European leaders are opening the floodgates to tens of millions of Muslims and other non-indigenous peoples at a time when native Europeans fear for the survival of their civilization and feel like aliens in their own cities. Meanwhile, Ernst Uhrlau, the president of Germany's foreign intelligence agency, warned about the rising assertiveness of violent Jihadist organizations in North Africa.
Based on this evidence, the European Union can hardly be seen as anything other than a criminal organization dedicated to the demographic dispossession and cultural marginalization of the indigenous peoples of an entire continent. Consequently, the EU should be immediately and totally dissolved. Native Europeans should demand that we have an interim period with public de-Eurabification, where the lies propagated by pro-Islamic Multiculturalists should be removed from our history books, and a proper respect for European cultural traditions should be restored. Those officials on senior levels who have participated in the creation of Eurabia should stand trial for crimes against their civilization.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
MUST READ: FJORDMAN REVIEWS "FITNA"
Fjordman Reviews “Fitna”
by Fjordman
by Fjordman
I liked it. It is impressive how much they managed to squeeze into just 15 minutes. I notice several of the comments at Jihad Watch say Geert Wilders could have made it worse. Yes, he could. He left out quite a few things, but what he kept was authentic and bad enough.
We should remember that the people reading websites such as Jihad Watch or Atlas Shrugs or Gates of Vienna are perfectly aware of how bad Islam is. This movie was not made for them. It was made for all those tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people out there who don’t trust the official propaganda about Islam, but still don’t fully understand how bad it is. Being too harsh (even if what is described is true) could put some of them off.
I believe this movie struck a good balance between showing Islam for what it is and still making it possible for the average person to digest the message. It is highly effective.
- - - - - - - - -
But I agree with Hugh Fitzgerald: We want a sequel! What about “Pirates of Muhammad: At Islam’s End,” starring Johnny Depp? Yes, I know, it would be too cute, but at least people would see it. As long as Keira Knightley plays Aisha, I’m happy.
For the comments about Jews, you should read Andrew Bostom’s upcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. There is much, much more.
I especially liked the agitated gentleman waving a sword, screaming for Jihad. I thought Jihad was about inner, peaceful struggle against yourself, a bit like yoga? He didn’t seem to enjoy any inner peace, though.
And if Jihad is about better education, as I have heard from my local newspaper, why didn’t he wave a pencil?
Maybe it was a pencil sharpener?
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Fjordman Reviews “Fitna”
MUST READ: BOYCOTT THE UNITED NATIONS
Boycott the United Nations!
by Fjordman
The United Nation’sSecretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Wilder’s movie Fitna as “offensively anti-Islamic,” and said that “There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence.” Does that mean that the UN is now going to ban the Koran, which does both? As Robert Spencer commented, “What exactly is ‘hate speech’ about quoting Qur’an verses and then showing Muslim preachers using those verses to exhort people to commit acts of violence, as well as violent acts committed by Muslims inspired by those verses and others?”
Earlier in March, the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is dominated by Muslim countries, passed a resolution saying it is deeply concerned about the defamation of religions and urging governments to prohibit it. The only religion specified is Islam. The document was put forward by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the largest voting bloc at the UN, sponsored by Saudi money.
I have been saying for a long time that trying to export “democracy” to Islamic countries is pointless. Islam can be compatible with “democracy” in the limited sense of voting rights and majority rule, but this has never automatically implied individual liberty. (See my online booklet Is Islam Compatible With Democracy?)
It’s a sick joke that American soldiers are bleeding literally and American taxpayers financially to export “democracy” to Iraq while Muslims are exporting sharia to us. Freedom is free speech, that’s the simplest, and maybe the truest, definition of it. Muslims are trying to use the UN to limit free speech across the world, which basically means putting the entire world under Islamic rule.
My view of the United Nations is quite clear: It is at best irrelevant. At best.
Increasingly, it is turning into an outright enemy, an enemy funded by us but used to attack us. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m goddam tired of sponsoring enemies, at home and abroad. I’m all for boycotting the UN and making it truly irrelevant by bleeding it dry for funds and ultimately withdrawing from it.
Even if we are in a weak phase, which we are, we are still a civilization of vastly superior resources. Muslims have lots of oil and lots of babies and lots of aggression, but that’s all they have. Otherwise, they’re a spectacular failure. We need them for very little. They need us for virtually everything. Their greatest flaw is their arrogance. Muslims are arrogant losers.
We should exploit that. We should separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. They will suffer far more from this than we will. We can start by boycotting the UN, which is now little more than a tool for global sharia, and the Arab Muslims of the West Bank and Gaza, who reinvented themselves as “Palestinians” and started whining at the UN after the Israelis kicked their collective behinds in 1967.
I notice former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad calls upon Muslims worldwide to boycott Dutch products. I’m all for boycotts of and by Muslims. The more, the merrier. In case somebody forgot, Mr. Mahathir held the notorious speech at the OIC conference in 2003, where he said that the Jews rule the world by proxy and that Muslims must unite to achieve a final victory over them. Not everybody remembers that he also boasted about the age when”Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.”
Somebody should remind him that the so-called “golden age” of Islam was a result of a still-majority or near-majority non-Muslim population. As soon as that majority declined, due to harassment and discrimination, the Islamic world never recovered. Malaysia is sometimes portrayed as an economically successful Muslim nation, but that is because it only recently became majority Muslim and still has a large Chinese, Indian and other non-Muslim minority. Since Islam is becoming more aggressive and Muslims increase discrimination of non-Muslims, infidels will leave, and Malaysia will gradually be reduced to just another failed sharia state.
We should all be happy if Muslims boycott us. When they feel so unwelcome that they stop coming to our countries, we will be making progress.
Some older posts on the subject:
- - - - - - - - -
Recommendations for the West
The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should ban Muslim immigration. This could be done in creative and indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations with citizens known to be engaged in terrorist activities. We should remove all Muslim non-citizens currently in the West. We should also change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” and of women should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.
We need to create an environment where the practice of Islam is made difficult. Muslim citizens should be forced to either accept our secular ways or leave if they desire sharia. Much of this can be done in a non-discriminatory way, by simply refusing to allow special pleading to Muslims. Do not allow the Islamic public call to prayer as it is offensive to other faiths. All children, boys and girls should take part in all sporting and social activities of the school and the community. The veil should be banned in all public institutions, thus also contributing to breaking the traditional subjugation of women. Companies and public buildings should not be forced to build prayer rooms for Muslims. Enact laws to eliminate the abuse of family reunification laws. Do not permit major investments by Muslims in Western media or universities.
Right now, Muslims can enjoy the best of both worlds: Following medieval religious laws while enjoying the fruits of 21st century civilization. We need to drive home the utter failure of the Islamic model by making sure that Muslims should no longer able to count on permanent Western or infidel aid in their overpopulated, self-primitivized states, whose very unviability they are prevented from recognizing by this constant infusion of aid.
I’m advocating isolating the Islamic world, not the West. Even if we cannot allow all non-Muslims to freely settle in our lands, this does not mean that they have to be our enemies. Jihad is being waged against the entire non-Muslim world, not just the West. We should stop trying to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims and start reaching out to non-Muslims.
For Europe, the most important thing to do right now is to dismantle the European Union in its present form, and regain national control over our borders and our legislation. The EU is so deeply flawed as an organization, and so heavily infiltrated by Eurabian and pro-Islamic thinking that it simply cannot be reformed. And let’s end the stupid support for the Palestinians that the Eurabians have encouraged, and start supporting our cultural cousin, Israel.
Why the Future May Not Belong to Islam
Seaborne believes that many people are underestimating the strength of Islam. Perhaps, but some observers, including Mark Steyn and Mr. Seaborne himself, may be overestimating it. They overlook the fact that Islam has many weaknesses, too. Don’t underestimate your enemy. Muslims should be credited for making clever use of our weaknesses, but this “we’re all doomed and have already lost” theme is overblown.
We should implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world. I’m not saying that containment is all that we will ever need to do, but it is the very minimum that is acceptable. Perhaps the spread of nuclear weapons technology, the darkest side of globalization, will trigger a large-scale war with the Islamic world at some point. The only way to avoid this is to take steps, including military ones, to deprive Muslims of such technology.
We should restrain their ability to hurt us physically. We can’t prevent it completely, but we should limit it as much as possible. Muslims try to wear us down through terrorism. They should be worn down through mockery and criticism. We should also make clear that for every Islamic terror attack we will increase these efforts, which Muslims fear more than our weapons. It’s the new balance of terror.
Dr Koenraad Elst, one of Belgium’s best orientalists, thinks “Islam is in decline, despite its impressive demographic and military surge” — which according to Dr Elst is merely a “last upheaval.” He acknowledges, however, that this decline can take some time (at least in terms of the individual human life span) and that it is possible that Islam will succeed in becoming the majority religion in Europe before collapsing.
Dalrymple is probably correct when he says that Islam is an “all or nothing” religion which cannot be secularized. The future may not belong to Islam, as Mark Steyn suggests. It is conceivable that Islam in some generations will cease to be a global force of any significance, but in the meantime it will be a constant source of danger to its neighbors, from Europe through India to Southeast Asia. The good news is that Islam may not be able to achieve the world dominance it desires. The bad news is that it may be able to achieve a world war. We can only cage it as much as possible and try to prevent this from happening.
Farewell to the United Nations?
Historian David Littman is a representative to the United Nations (Geneva) of the Association for World Education. He has spent years tracking the rise of Islamic influence at the UN. According to him, “In recent years, representatives of some Muslim states have demanded, and often received, special treatment at the United Nations.” “As a result, non-diplomatic terms such as ‘blasphemy’ and ‘defamation of Islam’ have seeped into the United Nations system, leading to a situation in which non-Muslim governments accept certain rules of conduct in conformity with Islamic law (the Shari’a) and acquiesce to a self-imposed silence regarding topics touching on Islam.”
I do not have all the answers to how such a post-UN world will be like. The most important principle at this point is to isolate and contain the Islamic world. We simply cannot allow our enemies to have direct influence over our policies, which they partly do have through the UN. Is it unrealistic to talk about the collapse of the EU and the UN? I don’t know. The UN was created in the aftermath of WW2. It survived the Cold War, but now we are rapidly entering into a new world war. My bet is that we will see huge changes in world affairs in the near future, at least as large as those which laid the foundations for the UN to begin with. Whatever usefulness the UN may have had was lost decades ago. It is today of little use to us, but of significant use to our enemies. The time has come to say farewell to the United Nations.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Boycott the United Nations!
by Fjordman
The United Nation’sSecretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Wilder’s movie Fitna as “offensively anti-Islamic,” and said that “There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence.” Does that mean that the UN is now going to ban the Koran, which does both? As Robert Spencer commented, “What exactly is ‘hate speech’ about quoting Qur’an verses and then showing Muslim preachers using those verses to exhort people to commit acts of violence, as well as violent acts committed by Muslims inspired by those verses and others?”
Earlier in March, the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is dominated by Muslim countries, passed a resolution saying it is deeply concerned about the defamation of religions and urging governments to prohibit it. The only religion specified is Islam. The document was put forward by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the largest voting bloc at the UN, sponsored by Saudi money.
I have been saying for a long time that trying to export “democracy” to Islamic countries is pointless. Islam can be compatible with “democracy” in the limited sense of voting rights and majority rule, but this has never automatically implied individual liberty. (See my online booklet Is Islam Compatible With Democracy?)
It’s a sick joke that American soldiers are bleeding literally and American taxpayers financially to export “democracy” to Iraq while Muslims are exporting sharia to us. Freedom is free speech, that’s the simplest, and maybe the truest, definition of it. Muslims are trying to use the UN to limit free speech across the world, which basically means putting the entire world under Islamic rule.
My view of the United Nations is quite clear: It is at best irrelevant. At best.
Increasingly, it is turning into an outright enemy, an enemy funded by us but used to attack us. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m goddam tired of sponsoring enemies, at home and abroad. I’m all for boycotting the UN and making it truly irrelevant by bleeding it dry for funds and ultimately withdrawing from it.
Even if we are in a weak phase, which we are, we are still a civilization of vastly superior resources. Muslims have lots of oil and lots of babies and lots of aggression, but that’s all they have. Otherwise, they’re a spectacular failure. We need them for very little. They need us for virtually everything. Their greatest flaw is their arrogance. Muslims are arrogant losers.
We should exploit that. We should separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. They will suffer far more from this than we will. We can start by boycotting the UN, which is now little more than a tool for global sharia, and the Arab Muslims of the West Bank and Gaza, who reinvented themselves as “Palestinians” and started whining at the UN after the Israelis kicked their collective behinds in 1967.
I notice former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad calls upon Muslims worldwide to boycott Dutch products. I’m all for boycotts of and by Muslims. The more, the merrier. In case somebody forgot, Mr. Mahathir held the notorious speech at the OIC conference in 2003, where he said that the Jews rule the world by proxy and that Muslims must unite to achieve a final victory over them. Not everybody remembers that he also boasted about the age when”Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.”
Somebody should remind him that the so-called “golden age” of Islam was a result of a still-majority or near-majority non-Muslim population. As soon as that majority declined, due to harassment and discrimination, the Islamic world never recovered. Malaysia is sometimes portrayed as an economically successful Muslim nation, but that is because it only recently became majority Muslim and still has a large Chinese, Indian and other non-Muslim minority. Since Islam is becoming more aggressive and Muslims increase discrimination of non-Muslims, infidels will leave, and Malaysia will gradually be reduced to just another failed sharia state.
We should all be happy if Muslims boycott us. When they feel so unwelcome that they stop coming to our countries, we will be making progress.
Some older posts on the subject:
- - - - - - - - -
Recommendations for the West
The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should ban Muslim immigration. This could be done in creative and indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations with citizens known to be engaged in terrorist activities. We should remove all Muslim non-citizens currently in the West. We should also change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” and of women should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.
We need to create an environment where the practice of Islam is made difficult. Muslim citizens should be forced to either accept our secular ways or leave if they desire sharia. Much of this can be done in a non-discriminatory way, by simply refusing to allow special pleading to Muslims. Do not allow the Islamic public call to prayer as it is offensive to other faiths. All children, boys and girls should take part in all sporting and social activities of the school and the community. The veil should be banned in all public institutions, thus also contributing to breaking the traditional subjugation of women. Companies and public buildings should not be forced to build prayer rooms for Muslims. Enact laws to eliminate the abuse of family reunification laws. Do not permit major investments by Muslims in Western media or universities.
Right now, Muslims can enjoy the best of both worlds: Following medieval religious laws while enjoying the fruits of 21st century civilization. We need to drive home the utter failure of the Islamic model by making sure that Muslims should no longer able to count on permanent Western or infidel aid in their overpopulated, self-primitivized states, whose very unviability they are prevented from recognizing by this constant infusion of aid.
I’m advocating isolating the Islamic world, not the West. Even if we cannot allow all non-Muslims to freely settle in our lands, this does not mean that they have to be our enemies. Jihad is being waged against the entire non-Muslim world, not just the West. We should stop trying to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims and start reaching out to non-Muslims.
For Europe, the most important thing to do right now is to dismantle the European Union in its present form, and regain national control over our borders and our legislation. The EU is so deeply flawed as an organization, and so heavily infiltrated by Eurabian and pro-Islamic thinking that it simply cannot be reformed. And let’s end the stupid support for the Palestinians that the Eurabians have encouraged, and start supporting our cultural cousin, Israel.
Why the Future May Not Belong to Islam
Seaborne believes that many people are underestimating the strength of Islam. Perhaps, but some observers, including Mark Steyn and Mr. Seaborne himself, may be overestimating it. They overlook the fact that Islam has many weaknesses, too. Don’t underestimate your enemy. Muslims should be credited for making clever use of our weaknesses, but this “we’re all doomed and have already lost” theme is overblown.
We should implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world. I’m not saying that containment is all that we will ever need to do, but it is the very minimum that is acceptable. Perhaps the spread of nuclear weapons technology, the darkest side of globalization, will trigger a large-scale war with the Islamic world at some point. The only way to avoid this is to take steps, including military ones, to deprive Muslims of such technology.
We should restrain their ability to hurt us physically. We can’t prevent it completely, but we should limit it as much as possible. Muslims try to wear us down through terrorism. They should be worn down through mockery and criticism. We should also make clear that for every Islamic terror attack we will increase these efforts, which Muslims fear more than our weapons. It’s the new balance of terror.
Dr Koenraad Elst, one of Belgium’s best orientalists, thinks “Islam is in decline, despite its impressive demographic and military surge” — which according to Dr Elst is merely a “last upheaval.” He acknowledges, however, that this decline can take some time (at least in terms of the individual human life span) and that it is possible that Islam will succeed in becoming the majority religion in Europe before collapsing.
Dalrymple is probably correct when he says that Islam is an “all or nothing” religion which cannot be secularized. The future may not belong to Islam, as Mark Steyn suggests. It is conceivable that Islam in some generations will cease to be a global force of any significance, but in the meantime it will be a constant source of danger to its neighbors, from Europe through India to Southeast Asia. The good news is that Islam may not be able to achieve the world dominance it desires. The bad news is that it may be able to achieve a world war. We can only cage it as much as possible and try to prevent this from happening.
Farewell to the United Nations?
Historian David Littman is a representative to the United Nations (Geneva) of the Association for World Education. He has spent years tracking the rise of Islamic influence at the UN. According to him, “In recent years, representatives of some Muslim states have demanded, and often received, special treatment at the United Nations.” “As a result, non-diplomatic terms such as ‘blasphemy’ and ‘defamation of Islam’ have seeped into the United Nations system, leading to a situation in which non-Muslim governments accept certain rules of conduct in conformity with Islamic law (the Shari’a) and acquiesce to a self-imposed silence regarding topics touching on Islam.”
I do not have all the answers to how such a post-UN world will be like. The most important principle at this point is to isolate and contain the Islamic world. We simply cannot allow our enemies to have direct influence over our policies, which they partly do have through the UN. Is it unrealistic to talk about the collapse of the EU and the UN? I don’t know. The UN was created in the aftermath of WW2. It survived the Cold War, but now we are rapidly entering into a new world war. My bet is that we will see huge changes in world affairs in the near future, at least as large as those which laid the foundations for the UN to begin with. Whatever usefulness the UN may have had was lost decades ago. It is today of little use to us, but of significant use to our enemies. The time has come to say farewell to the United Nations.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Boycott the United Nations!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
MUST READ: TOTALITARIAN SWEDEN
Totalitarian Sweden
by Fjordman
According to the news website The Local, members of the only significant (but still small) party in Sweden critical of mass immigration live under constant threat of violence. Sweden is witnessing the greatest explosion of street violence in its history, and a woman is raped every two hours. The national newspaper Aftonbladet links the massive increase in rapes to the warm weather. The state-sponsored organization Expo, which lists a dozen employees at its website and receives backing from the media and the major parties, has been campaigning against the Sweden Democrats for years. Expo’s Daniel Poohl states that it’s “not undemocratic” to deny the SD access to political influence. The writer Bruce Bawer says that “Sweden Democrats have been the targets of events that recall China’s Cultural Revolution. Staged ‘people’s protests’ by members of the ‘youth divisions’ of other parties have led to the firing of Sweden Democrats from their jobs. A few weeks ago, a junior diplomat was dismissed when it became known that he was a member of the party and had criticized his country’s immigration policy. On several occasions, thugs loyal to the ruling parties have broken up Sweden Democratic meetings and beaten up party leaders.”
The Local: Sweden Democrats under constant threat
Leaders of the far-right Sweden Democrats live under constant threat of violence, according to new report from the Swedish security service Säpo.
Säpo reports that it receives an average of 4.5 reports per month of cases of threats made to Sweden’s district and county councillors.The threats are systematic, often involve violence, and come from autonomous groups across Sweden. Media exposure and engagement in controversial issues often increase the incidence of threats, Säpo reports.“This is a democratic problem as it happens that politicians leave their posts as a result of having received threats,” said Säpo analyst Johan Olsson to news agency TT.Threats are most commonly made via email, letters and on the telephone and typically come from disgruntled citizens.
How the West Lost the Cold War
The girlfriend of a politician from the Sweden Democrats, a small party critical of mass immigration, was recently attacked at her home outside Stockholm. The young woman was found bound with duct tape in the apartment block where she lives with Martin Kinnunen, chairman of the youth wing of the SD. Three men had forced their way into the couple’s apartment and held the 19-year-old at knife point. Kinnunen tells of several threats and anonymous phone calls to the family. He blames the media for systematically portraying the SD as monsters and thus for legitimizing aggression against them, and claims that the Swedish democracy is a sham.
Antifascistisk Aktion, a group that supposedly fights against “racists,” openly brag about numerous physical attacks against persons with their full name and address published on their website. Only a week after this group harassed a Swedish judge and vandalized his house, members demonstrated alongside the Swedish police, the Swedish government and the Swedish media establishment during Pride Week, Stockholm’s annual gay celebration, in August 2007. At the very end of the Pride Parade marched a group of black-clothed and masked representatives of AFA. Adjacent to them marched a number of policemen, including members of the Swedish Gay Police organization.
[…]
According to Politikerbloggen, AFA have produced a manual about how to use violence in order to paralyze and hurt their opponents, and they encourage their members to study it closely.
The Death of Sweden
A judge who hears migration appeals had his house vandalized by left-wing extremists. Threats were sprayed on the walls, red paint was poured over the steps and an axe was left outside his home.
[…]
The group Antifascistisk Action (AFA) writes on its homepage that the attack was motivated by the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers.
[…]
AFA openly brag about numerous attacks against persons who get their full name and address published on their website. According to them, this is done in order to fight against capitalist exploitation and for a global, classless society. Their logic goes something like this: If you protest against Muslim immigration, you suffer from Islamophobia, which is almost the same as xenophobia, which is almost the same as racism. And racists are almost Fascists and Nazis, as we all know, and they shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinions in public. Hence, if you protest against being assaulted or raped by Muslims, you are evil and need to be silenced. If a native Swede is really lucky, he or she will thus first get mugged or battered by Muslims, and then beaten up a second time by his own extreme Leftists for objecting to being beaten the first time. The state does next to nothing to prevent either.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Totalitarian Sweden
by Fjordman
According to the news website The Local, members of the only significant (but still small) party in Sweden critical of mass immigration live under constant threat of violence. Sweden is witnessing the greatest explosion of street violence in its history, and a woman is raped every two hours. The national newspaper Aftonbladet links the massive increase in rapes to the warm weather. The state-sponsored organization Expo, which lists a dozen employees at its website and receives backing from the media and the major parties, has been campaigning against the Sweden Democrats for years. Expo’s Daniel Poohl states that it’s “not undemocratic” to deny the SD access to political influence. The writer Bruce Bawer says that “Sweden Democrats have been the targets of events that recall China’s Cultural Revolution. Staged ‘people’s protests’ by members of the ‘youth divisions’ of other parties have led to the firing of Sweden Democrats from their jobs. A few weeks ago, a junior diplomat was dismissed when it became known that he was a member of the party and had criticized his country’s immigration policy. On several occasions, thugs loyal to the ruling parties have broken up Sweden Democratic meetings and beaten up party leaders.”
The Local: Sweden Democrats under constant threat
Leaders of the far-right Sweden Democrats live under constant threat of violence, according to new report from the Swedish security service Säpo.
Säpo reports that it receives an average of 4.5 reports per month of cases of threats made to Sweden’s district and county councillors.The threats are systematic, often involve violence, and come from autonomous groups across Sweden. Media exposure and engagement in controversial issues often increase the incidence of threats, Säpo reports.“This is a democratic problem as it happens that politicians leave their posts as a result of having received threats,” said Säpo analyst Johan Olsson to news agency TT.Threats are most commonly made via email, letters and on the telephone and typically come from disgruntled citizens.
How the West Lost the Cold War
The girlfriend of a politician from the Sweden Democrats, a small party critical of mass immigration, was recently attacked at her home outside Stockholm. The young woman was found bound with duct tape in the apartment block where she lives with Martin Kinnunen, chairman of the youth wing of the SD. Three men had forced their way into the couple’s apartment and held the 19-year-old at knife point. Kinnunen tells of several threats and anonymous phone calls to the family. He blames the media for systematically portraying the SD as monsters and thus for legitimizing aggression against them, and claims that the Swedish democracy is a sham.
Antifascistisk Aktion, a group that supposedly fights against “racists,” openly brag about numerous physical attacks against persons with their full name and address published on their website. Only a week after this group harassed a Swedish judge and vandalized his house, members demonstrated alongside the Swedish police, the Swedish government and the Swedish media establishment during Pride Week, Stockholm’s annual gay celebration, in August 2007. At the very end of the Pride Parade marched a group of black-clothed and masked representatives of AFA. Adjacent to them marched a number of policemen, including members of the Swedish Gay Police organization.
[…]
According to Politikerbloggen, AFA have produced a manual about how to use violence in order to paralyze and hurt their opponents, and they encourage their members to study it closely.
The Death of Sweden
A judge who hears migration appeals had his house vandalized by left-wing extremists. Threats were sprayed on the walls, red paint was poured over the steps and an axe was left outside his home.
[…]
The group Antifascistisk Action (AFA) writes on its homepage that the attack was motivated by the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers.
[…]
AFA openly brag about numerous attacks against persons who get their full name and address published on their website. According to them, this is done in order to fight against capitalist exploitation and for a global, classless society. Their logic goes something like this: If you protest against Muslim immigration, you suffer from Islamophobia, which is almost the same as xenophobia, which is almost the same as racism. And racists are almost Fascists and Nazis, as we all know, and they shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinions in public. Hence, if you protest against being assaulted or raped by Muslims, you are evil and need to be silenced. If a native Swede is really lucky, he or she will thus first get mugged or battered by Muslims, and then beaten up a second time by his own extreme Leftists for objecting to being beaten the first time. The state does next to nothing to prevent either.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) Totalitarian Sweden
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
MUST READ: EUROPEAN LEADERS AGREE TO CREATE EURABIA
European Leaders Agree to Create Eurabia
From the desk of Fjordman
Bat Ye’or in her book about Eurabia documented how European leaders have for years been quietly planning to merge Europe with the Islamic world. This has been denounced as a “conspiracy theory.” Only a few months ago the British Foreign Minister David Miliband said openly that the European Union should expand to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Now French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are saying virtually the same thing. The greatest betrayal in European history is fact, not fiction. And to think that many people supported Sarkozy because he should “halt” Islamization. Now he is speeding it up:
The Eurabia Code
How was a project as big as the creation of Eurabia pulled off? I have thought a lot about this question, and come to the conclusion that it succeeded precisely because of its size. St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.” It’s a matter of scale. If a small group of people sideline the democratic process in one country and start imposing their own laws on the public, it’s called a coup d’état. If they do so on an entire continent, it’s called the European Union.
The European Union and the Islamization of Europe
The British Foreign Minister David Miliband in November 2007 stated that the European Union should work towards including Middle Eastern and North African countries. The EU involves the free movement of people across borders. If it expands to the Middle East, hundreds of millions of Muslims will have free access to Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Sweden and the Czech Republic. If Turkey becomes a member, it means that Greeks, Bulgarians and others who have fought against oppression by Ottoman Turks for centuries will now be flooded with Muslims from a rapidly re-Islamizing Turkey. The same goes for Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and others who fought against Muslims for centuries. Appeasement of Islam is so deeply immersed in the structural DNA of the EU that the only way to stop the Islamization of Europe is to dismantle the European Union. All of it.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) European Leaders Agree to Create Eurabia
From the desk of Fjordman
Bat Ye’or in her book about Eurabia documented how European leaders have for years been quietly planning to merge Europe with the Islamic world. This has been denounced as a “conspiracy theory.” Only a few months ago the British Foreign Minister David Miliband said openly that the European Union should expand to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Now French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are saying virtually the same thing. The greatest betrayal in European history is fact, not fiction. And to think that many people supported Sarkozy because he should “halt” Islamization. Now he is speeding it up:
Merkel and Sarkozy Find ‘Club Med’ Compromise (Der Spiegel, 4 March 2008)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced jointly that they had reached a compromise regarding Sarkozy’s proposed Mediterranean Union. At a press conference held jointly with Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel added that the ensuing outcome should be called the “Mediterranean Union” and that it “should be a project of all 27 (European Union) member countries.” Merkel was referring to her position that any deal to create a union with the Mediterranean states that border the European Union should be negotiated and drafted in conjunction with all EU member states – not just those that border the sea, as Sarkozy had initially proposed.
The Eurabia Code
How was a project as big as the creation of Eurabia pulled off? I have thought a lot about this question, and come to the conclusion that it succeeded precisely because of its size. St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.” It’s a matter of scale. If a small group of people sideline the democratic process in one country and start imposing their own laws on the public, it’s called a coup d’état. If they do so on an entire continent, it’s called the European Union.
The European Union and the Islamization of Europe
The British Foreign Minister David Miliband in November 2007 stated that the European Union should work towards including Middle Eastern and North African countries. The EU involves the free movement of people across borders. If it expands to the Middle East, hundreds of millions of Muslims will have free access to Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Sweden and the Czech Republic. If Turkey becomes a member, it means that Greeks, Bulgarians and others who have fought against oppression by Ottoman Turks for centuries will now be flooded with Muslims from a rapidly re-Islamizing Turkey. The same goes for Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and others who fought against Muslims for centuries. Appeasement of Islam is so deeply immersed in the structural DNA of the EU that the only way to stop the Islamization of Europe is to dismantle the European Union. All of it.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) European Leaders Agree to Create Eurabia
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
MUST READ: THE TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM IN EUROPE
The Truth About Islam in Europe
by Fjordman
This essay was inspired by Joan Acocella's review of David Levering Lewis' book God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. Lewis is an American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Acocella's review is not bad, but she reveals little evidence that she has read authors such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye'or or Andrew G. Bostom. She refers to Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, but not Ibn Warraq's excellent criticism of him in the recent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism.
According to Acocella, "The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as 'the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior' to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe." This was "one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire."
Abd al-Rahman I, a Syrian-born prince who took over in 756, is the hero of "God's Crucible." According to Acocella, "It was he who built the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the most spectacular extant example of Muslim Spain's architectural achievements. He also botanized, and imported to Spain its first date palms, its first lemons, limes, and grapefruit, as well as almonds, apricots, saffron, and henna."
In a digression, I would like to qualify that statement. Apricots were known in the Mediterranean world already in Antiquity. The apricot is called armeniaca vulgaris in Latin because many Europeans thought it originated in Armenia, where it was grown in the Ararat Valley. However, apricots come from China or nearby regions in Central Asia and were cultivated there in prehistoric times. They were later brought to Armenia and the Mediterranean world via Persia through the Silk Road trade.
Citrus fruits originate in south-eastern Asia, and certain types were known in the Mediterranean in ancient times as the Romans did participate to some extent in the Indian Ocean trade. However, the use of citrus fruits was limited at the time and was disrupted after the fall of Rome. It is true that various citrus fruits were reintroduced via Arabs, who brought sour oranges from India. The drink lemonade may have been invented in Egypt.
Sweet oranges had been cultivated by the Chinese for many centuries and were introduced in Europe by the Portuguese, who probably got them from Indians, in the fifteenth century. Sweet oranges quickly replaced sour oranges. Christopher Columbus in 1493 brought with him seeds of orange, lemon and citron from Spain's Canary Islands to Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Oranges were abundant in Haiti by the sixteenth century and were introduced to Florida while the Portuguese brought them to Brazil. Oranges were for many Native Americans one of the more welcome things Europeans brought with them, certainly more so than smallpox. The juice of citrus fruits was used as a cure for scurvy. James Lind of the British Royal Navy conducted the first clinical trial in 1747 to prove this effect.
George Vancouver of the Royal Navy accompanied Captain James Cook, the British explorer and cartographer, on two of his voyages in the Pacific Ocean in the 1770s while exploring the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. Cook's voyages are often seen to mark the beginning of colonialism in the region, and Cook himself died fighting native Hawaiians in 1779. Captain Vancouver later explored the north-western coast of North America, from California to Alaska.
The city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, is named after him. During a visit to California, then a part of Mexico and thus still a Spanish colony, he mentioned seeing oranges. With the growth of the transcontinental railway in the United States during the nineteenth century production grew, and boomed after the American Civil War. Oranges are still grown in the Mediterranean region, in Spain, Portugal, Israel and other countries as well as in Asia, but the largest production is in Brazil, Florida and California.
David Levering Lewis spends a lot of time demonstrating how the Franks were less civilized than Muslims and that their economy was "little better than the Late Neolithic." Their neighbors were supposedly even worse. The Vikings who invaded Frankland were "the filthiest race that God ever created," according to a Muslim ambassador. Being Scandinavian myself, I have no problems admitting that the Vikings did possess a number of barbarian traits, but history is more complex than that. Scandinavians of this age gradually became integrated into the civilized mainstream of European culture. Christian European culture, that is.
Vikings from Denmark went to England and France, Norwegians went to the British Isles and the North Atlantic and Swedes went east, though there was always considerable overlapping between these nations. Some went via the Volga and other rivers in Russia and the Ukraine to the Black Sea engaged in trade and piracy, and a few even settled in Kiev and Volgograd. They occasionally fought Byzantine forces, but the Byzantines had the advantage of Greek fire. Vikings were still respected for their fighting skills and were employed as mercenaries, even as personal bodyguards for the emperors. The Scandinavians called Constantinople Miklagard, "the Great City."
As Timothy Gregory says in A History of Byzantium, during the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire suffered from a decline in its conscript army. Because of this, "the state had to rely more and more on foreign mercenaries, at first Varangians from Russia but increasingly Normans from Sicily and France, Anglo-Saxons from England, and others. The most famous of these was the Varangian Duzina, attested from 1034 onward, which enrolled Vikings from Russia and eventually Anglo-Saxons. This elite guard, whose members had distinct arms and uniforms, had its quarters in Constantinople but also took part in field campaigns. In addition, Byzantium had to rely more than before on its alliances with foreign peoples who might be used to fight the empire's wars."
The Varangian Guard defended Constantinople against other Westerners during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. One of their most prominent members was the future king Harald Hardråde, "Hard-ruler," from 1035, whose story was told by Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson ca. 1230 in the Heimskringla. Harald participated in a number of battles against Muslims and returned to Norway with great wealth. He wasn't the only one to do so. Large quantities of Byzantine gold coins have been found in Scandinavia. He is most remembered, however, for his invasion of England in 1066 with several hundred longships. Harald Hardråde was killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England on 25 September 1066, a date which is often seen to mark the end of the Viking Age. The victor Harold Godwinson was himself soon defeated by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings the same year. This remarkable story has been immortalized in the beautiful Bayeux Tapestry.
It is interesting to notice, though, that much of the contact that did take place between the Byzantine Empire and north-western Europe at this point happened through backdoor channels like the rivers of Eastern Europe, linking the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The Mediterranean was still plagued by Muslim pirates.
Women enjoyed greater freedom in the Norse society than they did in Islamic societies even then, and this continued into Christian times. In What went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis writes: "The difference in the position of women was indeed one of the most striking contrasts between Christian and Muslim practice, and is mentioned by almost all travelers in both directions. Christianity, of all churches and denominations, prohibits polygamy and concubinage. Islam, like most other non-Christian communities, permits both.... Muslim visitors to Europe speak with astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and frowardness of Western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk indulge."
Bernard Lewis has also, in my view correctly, suggested that the concept of "Holy War" was originally alien to Christianity and was imported to Europe after Europeans had been confronted with Islamic Jihad. The Reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rule, is traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese had been liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III.
As Joan Acocella says, "Toledo fell to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a Catholic king, in 1085. Four more centuries passed before the expulsion of the last emir from Granada, in 1492, but [David Levering] Lewis gets through them fast. He doesn't want to talk about it."
Lewis also fails to explain why Spaniards and Portuguese repeatedly rebelled against this glorious Islamic culture in favor of an "almost Neolithic" culture. He writes that Muslims did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but exactly why is that better?
As Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't: "The Qur'an says that the followers of Muhammad are 'ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another' (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the 'worst of created beings' (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of Islam, the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most slaves were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare."
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was finally abolished this was due to Western pressure, especially through the efforts of the British Empire: "Nor was there a Muslim abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries - notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which didn't abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias."
Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever Jihadists conquered a territory, "there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain, and populace of the place." When Muslim armies invaded India, "its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country."
The most comprehensive book on the subject to date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom. Bostom writes about how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as ambassadors, met in 1786 with the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy – murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. However, the spirit of the young Republic came to be embodied in the slogan "Millions for defense, not a penny for tribute." Bostom notes that "By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates."
Robert Davis' methodical enumeration in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims from 1530 through 1780. In his book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in Europe extended as far north as Iceland. Even during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems, young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:
"By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery." Such events took place across much of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: "In 1631…200 Islamic soldiers…sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They) carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers…The French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time…He witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. 'It was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market…Women were separated from their husbands and the children from their fathers…on one side a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that they'd ever see each other again'."
Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to "burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner."
Scholar Bat Ye'or is an expert on dhimmitude, the oppressive system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule, described in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad slave system: "When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana [Iranian central Asia], Sijistan [eastern Iran], Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants."
According to Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, "The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam."
As Robert Spencer says: "Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur'an mandates that both Jews and Christians must 'feel themselves subdued.' One notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip Hitti: 'The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves...and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.'"
In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: "The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial."
Maimonides, the renowned Jewish philosopher and physician, stated that "the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they." Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims he said, will interpret what they are taught "according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason.....they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them." But the Christians "admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact."
Richard Fletcher states in his book Moorish Spain that: "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch."
In the essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality, Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom examine the myth of the supposed "tolerance" enjoyed by Christians and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula: "Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing."
This humiliating status provoked many revolts, punished by massacres. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa in 781 and 881, Cordova (805, 818), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and in 868), and again in Toledo (811-819). Many of the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33: "The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."
In Granada, up to five thousand Jews perished in a pogrom by Muslims in 1066. The Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on the Jewish and Christian populations. Suspicious of the sincerity of converts to Islam, Muslim "inquisitors" (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslims. A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels' ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims.
According to Joan Acocella, "In view of Lewis's high opinion of learning in Al Andalus, it is amazing how little space he gives it." In the twelfth century, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) wrote his commentaries on Aristotle, and Moses Maimonides produced his Aristotle-inflected Guide to the Perplexed. However, both these men had to flee Andalusia. Averroes, despite being an Islamic judge, was banished, his books burnt, and he was forced to emigrate to Morocco (in 1195) where he died in 1198. Maimonides had to flee in order to escape the Almohad Jihad.
It is true that the highly influential Christian scholar St. Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century quoted both these men, but he was critical of the way Averroes used Aristotle and had at his disposal a more complete body of Aristotelian writings than any of the Muslim philosophers ever did. Another Catholic, the Flemish Dominican Friar William of Moerbeke, was heavily involved in translating Byzantine manuscripts into Latin. According to scholar John Dunn in his book Setting the People Free, the word demokratia entered modern Western discourse in the 1260s in William of Moerbeke's Latin translation of Aristotle's Politics, "the most systematic analysis of politics as a practical activity which survived from the ancient world."
Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri states that: "There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.…It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963."
Muslims inherited a great deal of accumulated knowledge when they conquered the Middle East, and most of the translations of earlier works were done by non-Muslims.
According to Robert Spencer, "The Christian Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873) translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac [in Baghdad], from which they were translated into Arabic by his son. The Jacobite Christian Yahya ibn 'Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote his own; his treatise The Reformation of Morals has occasionally been erroneously attributed to various of his Muslim contemporaries. His student, another Christian named Abu 'Ali 'Isa ibn Zur'a (943-1008), also made Arabic translations of Aristotle and other Greek writers from Syriac. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital, another source of pride among Muslims and often a prominent feature of Islamic accomplishment lists, was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate by a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians."
Greek or other pre-Islamic learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at Islamic schools, as it was in European universities. The German-Syrian writer Bassam Tibi points out that "science" in the madrasa meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc.: "Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism, the cast of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university as a seat for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of mankind."
In The Rise of Early Modern Science, second edition, scholar Toby E. Huff warns that if Islam had taken over Europe, later Western scientific achievements would have been impossible: "If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries - say, until the time of Napoleon - it would have retained all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of Islamic civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been unable to found new universities based on the European model of legally autonomous corporate governance, as corporations do not exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model of education rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the standard of preserving the great traditions of the past. This was symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the personal authorization to transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a tradition quite different from the West's group-administered certification (through examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event, the founding of Spanish universities in the thirteenth century, first in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca (1227-8), and so on, occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna."
Apparently, David Levering Lewis doesn't care much about art, as he devotes little space to the subject in God's Crucible. Pictorial arts are banned in Islam. Images have been made at certain times, but paintings, and certainly not sculptures, never had anything remotely resembling the importance they enjoyed in Western art. The Islamic world could produce some good poets, for instance the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) whose works are still popular, but they tended to be unorthodox Muslims.
Jihad piracy and slavery remained a serious threat to Europeans for more than a thousand years. As historian Ibn Khaldun proudly proclaimed about the early Middle Ages: "The Christian could no longer float a plank upon the sea." The reason why the West for centuries didn't have easy access to the Classical learning of the Byzantine Empire was because endemic Muslim raids made the Mediterranean unsafe for regular travel. It has to be the height of absurdity to block access to something and then take credit for transmitting it, yet that is precisely what Muslims do. As stronger states slowly grew up in the West, regular contact with their Christian cousins in Byzantium was gradually re-established, especially with the city-states of northern Italy where during the Renaissance the printing press – an invention aggressively rejected by Muslims – made Greco-Roman texts, with translations aided by Greek-speaking Byzantine refugees from Islamic Jihad, available to future generations. Westerners eventually gained access to the Greco-Roman manuscripts preserved in Constantinople, the Second Rome. Consequently, they no longer needed to rely on limited translations in Arabic, which had often been made from Byzantine manuscripts in the first place, and frequently by Christian or Jewish translators.
The Middle East had for thousands of years been more advanced than most of Europe. This situation didn't begin with the introduction of Islam. On the contrary: it ended with Islamization. The region we today call the Greater Middle East, which includes Egypt, Palestine, Syria, south-eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Iran and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the seat of the oldest known civilizations on the planet and the source of many of the most important inventions in human history, including writing and the alphabet.
It is surely no coincidence that the first major civilization on the Indian subcontinent, the Harappan Civilization, arose in the Indus Valley in the northwest, i.e. closest to Sumerian Mesopotamia. A little understood culture at the Mediterranean island of Malta has left us with megalithic temples that may be the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world. Dating back to 3600 BC, they predate the pyramids of Egypt with a thousand years. Still, it is not a coincidence that literate European civilizations took root in lands that were geographically close to Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia: The Minoan civilization at the island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part was more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved more durable.
Contrast this with modern times, when southeast Europe (the Balkans) is Europe's number one trouble spot. So is the original seat of the first Indian civilization, in Pakistan and Kashmir. The Greater Middle East thus went from being a global center of civilization to being a global center of anti-civilization. This change largely coincided with the Islamization of the region.
Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has asked in her book The Trouble with Islam what caused the earlier "golden age" of Islam, and concludes, with a few reservations, that "tolerance served as the best way to build and maintain the Islamic empire." In light of the evidence quoted above I disagree with her, and even more so with David Levering Lewis. Islam's much-vaunted "golden age" was in reality the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed. The brief cultural blossoming during the first centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the pre-Islamic heritage in a region that was still, for a while, majority non-Muslim.
I've recently been re-reading some of the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, including Guns, Germs, and Steel. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. His most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a center of civilization to being a center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Yet is striking to notice how Diamond totally ignores the influence of Islam. This demonstrates clearly that any historical explanation that places too much emphasis on material issues and too little on the impact of human ideas is bound to end up with false or misleading conclusions.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) The Truth About Islam in Europe
by Fjordman
This essay was inspired by Joan Acocella's review of David Levering Lewis' book God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. Lewis is an American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Acocella's review is not bad, but she reveals little evidence that she has read authors such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye'or or Andrew G. Bostom. She refers to Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, but not Ibn Warraq's excellent criticism of him in the recent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism.
According to Acocella, "The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as 'the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior' to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe." This was "one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire."
Abd al-Rahman I, a Syrian-born prince who took over in 756, is the hero of "God's Crucible." According to Acocella, "It was he who built the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the most spectacular extant example of Muslim Spain's architectural achievements. He also botanized, and imported to Spain its first date palms, its first lemons, limes, and grapefruit, as well as almonds, apricots, saffron, and henna."
In a digression, I would like to qualify that statement. Apricots were known in the Mediterranean world already in Antiquity. The apricot is called armeniaca vulgaris in Latin because many Europeans thought it originated in Armenia, where it was grown in the Ararat Valley. However, apricots come from China or nearby regions in Central Asia and were cultivated there in prehistoric times. They were later brought to Armenia and the Mediterranean world via Persia through the Silk Road trade.
Citrus fruits originate in south-eastern Asia, and certain types were known in the Mediterranean in ancient times as the Romans did participate to some extent in the Indian Ocean trade. However, the use of citrus fruits was limited at the time and was disrupted after the fall of Rome. It is true that various citrus fruits were reintroduced via Arabs, who brought sour oranges from India. The drink lemonade may have been invented in Egypt.
Sweet oranges had been cultivated by the Chinese for many centuries and were introduced in Europe by the Portuguese, who probably got them from Indians, in the fifteenth century. Sweet oranges quickly replaced sour oranges. Christopher Columbus in 1493 brought with him seeds of orange, lemon and citron from Spain's Canary Islands to Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Oranges were abundant in Haiti by the sixteenth century and were introduced to Florida while the Portuguese brought them to Brazil. Oranges were for many Native Americans one of the more welcome things Europeans brought with them, certainly more so than smallpox. The juice of citrus fruits was used as a cure for scurvy. James Lind of the British Royal Navy conducted the first clinical trial in 1747 to prove this effect.
George Vancouver of the Royal Navy accompanied Captain James Cook, the British explorer and cartographer, on two of his voyages in the Pacific Ocean in the 1770s while exploring the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. Cook's voyages are often seen to mark the beginning of colonialism in the region, and Cook himself died fighting native Hawaiians in 1779. Captain Vancouver later explored the north-western coast of North America, from California to Alaska.
The city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, is named after him. During a visit to California, then a part of Mexico and thus still a Spanish colony, he mentioned seeing oranges. With the growth of the transcontinental railway in the United States during the nineteenth century production grew, and boomed after the American Civil War. Oranges are still grown in the Mediterranean region, in Spain, Portugal, Israel and other countries as well as in Asia, but the largest production is in Brazil, Florida and California.
David Levering Lewis spends a lot of time demonstrating how the Franks were less civilized than Muslims and that their economy was "little better than the Late Neolithic." Their neighbors were supposedly even worse. The Vikings who invaded Frankland were "the filthiest race that God ever created," according to a Muslim ambassador. Being Scandinavian myself, I have no problems admitting that the Vikings did possess a number of barbarian traits, but history is more complex than that. Scandinavians of this age gradually became integrated into the civilized mainstream of European culture. Christian European culture, that is.
Vikings from Denmark went to England and France, Norwegians went to the British Isles and the North Atlantic and Swedes went east, though there was always considerable overlapping between these nations. Some went via the Volga and other rivers in Russia and the Ukraine to the Black Sea engaged in trade and piracy, and a few even settled in Kiev and Volgograd. They occasionally fought Byzantine forces, but the Byzantines had the advantage of Greek fire. Vikings were still respected for their fighting skills and were employed as mercenaries, even as personal bodyguards for the emperors. The Scandinavians called Constantinople Miklagard, "the Great City."
As Timothy Gregory says in A History of Byzantium, during the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire suffered from a decline in its conscript army. Because of this, "the state had to rely more and more on foreign mercenaries, at first Varangians from Russia but increasingly Normans from Sicily and France, Anglo-Saxons from England, and others. The most famous of these was the Varangian Duzina, attested from 1034 onward, which enrolled Vikings from Russia and eventually Anglo-Saxons. This elite guard, whose members had distinct arms and uniforms, had its quarters in Constantinople but also took part in field campaigns. In addition, Byzantium had to rely more than before on its alliances with foreign peoples who might be used to fight the empire's wars."
The Varangian Guard defended Constantinople against other Westerners during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. One of their most prominent members was the future king Harald Hardråde, "Hard-ruler," from 1035, whose story was told by Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson ca. 1230 in the Heimskringla. Harald participated in a number of battles against Muslims and returned to Norway with great wealth. He wasn't the only one to do so. Large quantities of Byzantine gold coins have been found in Scandinavia. He is most remembered, however, for his invasion of England in 1066 with several hundred longships. Harald Hardråde was killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England on 25 September 1066, a date which is often seen to mark the end of the Viking Age. The victor Harold Godwinson was himself soon defeated by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings the same year. This remarkable story has been immortalized in the beautiful Bayeux Tapestry.
It is interesting to notice, though, that much of the contact that did take place between the Byzantine Empire and north-western Europe at this point happened through backdoor channels like the rivers of Eastern Europe, linking the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The Mediterranean was still plagued by Muslim pirates.
Women enjoyed greater freedom in the Norse society than they did in Islamic societies even then, and this continued into Christian times. In What went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis writes: "The difference in the position of women was indeed one of the most striking contrasts between Christian and Muslim practice, and is mentioned by almost all travelers in both directions. Christianity, of all churches and denominations, prohibits polygamy and concubinage. Islam, like most other non-Christian communities, permits both.... Muslim visitors to Europe speak with astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and frowardness of Western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk indulge."
Bernard Lewis has also, in my view correctly, suggested that the concept of "Holy War" was originally alien to Christianity and was imported to Europe after Europeans had been confronted with Islamic Jihad. The Reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rule, is traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese had been liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III.
As Joan Acocella says, "Toledo fell to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a Catholic king, in 1085. Four more centuries passed before the expulsion of the last emir from Granada, in 1492, but [David Levering] Lewis gets through them fast. He doesn't want to talk about it."
Lewis also fails to explain why Spaniards and Portuguese repeatedly rebelled against this glorious Islamic culture in favor of an "almost Neolithic" culture. He writes that Muslims did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but exactly why is that better?
As Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't: "The Qur'an says that the followers of Muhammad are 'ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another' (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the 'worst of created beings' (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of Islam, the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most slaves were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare."
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was finally abolished this was due to Western pressure, especially through the efforts of the British Empire: "Nor was there a Muslim abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries - notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which didn't abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias."
Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever Jihadists conquered a territory, "there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain, and populace of the place." When Muslim armies invaded India, "its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country."
The most comprehensive book on the subject to date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom. Bostom writes about how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as ambassadors, met in 1786 with the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy – murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. However, the spirit of the young Republic came to be embodied in the slogan "Millions for defense, not a penny for tribute." Bostom notes that "By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates."
Robert Davis' methodical enumeration in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims from 1530 through 1780. In his book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in Europe extended as far north as Iceland. Even during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems, young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:
"By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery." Such events took place across much of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: "In 1631…200 Islamic soldiers…sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They) carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers…The French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time…He witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. 'It was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market…Women were separated from their husbands and the children from their fathers…on one side a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that they'd ever see each other again'."
Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to "burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner."
Scholar Bat Ye'or is an expert on dhimmitude, the oppressive system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule, described in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad slave system: "When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana [Iranian central Asia], Sijistan [eastern Iran], Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants."
According to Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, "The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam."
As Robert Spencer says: "Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur'an mandates that both Jews and Christians must 'feel themselves subdued.' One notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip Hitti: 'The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves...and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.'"
In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: "The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial."
Maimonides, the renowned Jewish philosopher and physician, stated that "the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they." Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims he said, will interpret what they are taught "according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason.....they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them." But the Christians "admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact."
Richard Fletcher states in his book Moorish Spain that: "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch."
In the essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality, Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom examine the myth of the supposed "tolerance" enjoyed by Christians and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula: "Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing."
This humiliating status provoked many revolts, punished by massacres. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa in 781 and 881, Cordova (805, 818), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and in 868), and again in Toledo (811-819). Many of the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33: "The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."
In Granada, up to five thousand Jews perished in a pogrom by Muslims in 1066. The Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on the Jewish and Christian populations. Suspicious of the sincerity of converts to Islam, Muslim "inquisitors" (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslims. A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels' ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims.
According to Joan Acocella, "In view of Lewis's high opinion of learning in Al Andalus, it is amazing how little space he gives it." In the twelfth century, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) wrote his commentaries on Aristotle, and Moses Maimonides produced his Aristotle-inflected Guide to the Perplexed. However, both these men had to flee Andalusia. Averroes, despite being an Islamic judge, was banished, his books burnt, and he was forced to emigrate to Morocco (in 1195) where he died in 1198. Maimonides had to flee in order to escape the Almohad Jihad.
It is true that the highly influential Christian scholar St. Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century quoted both these men, but he was critical of the way Averroes used Aristotle and had at his disposal a more complete body of Aristotelian writings than any of the Muslim philosophers ever did. Another Catholic, the Flemish Dominican Friar William of Moerbeke, was heavily involved in translating Byzantine manuscripts into Latin. According to scholar John Dunn in his book Setting the People Free, the word demokratia entered modern Western discourse in the 1260s in William of Moerbeke's Latin translation of Aristotle's Politics, "the most systematic analysis of politics as a practical activity which survived from the ancient world."
Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri states that: "There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.…It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963."
Muslims inherited a great deal of accumulated knowledge when they conquered the Middle East, and most of the translations of earlier works were done by non-Muslims.
According to Robert Spencer, "The Christian Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873) translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac [in Baghdad], from which they were translated into Arabic by his son. The Jacobite Christian Yahya ibn 'Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote his own; his treatise The Reformation of Morals has occasionally been erroneously attributed to various of his Muslim contemporaries. His student, another Christian named Abu 'Ali 'Isa ibn Zur'a (943-1008), also made Arabic translations of Aristotle and other Greek writers from Syriac. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital, another source of pride among Muslims and often a prominent feature of Islamic accomplishment lists, was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate by a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians."
Greek or other pre-Islamic learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at Islamic schools, as it was in European universities. The German-Syrian writer Bassam Tibi points out that "science" in the madrasa meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc.: "Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism, the cast of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university as a seat for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of mankind."
In The Rise of Early Modern Science, second edition, scholar Toby E. Huff warns that if Islam had taken over Europe, later Western scientific achievements would have been impossible: "If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries - say, until the time of Napoleon - it would have retained all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of Islamic civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been unable to found new universities based on the European model of legally autonomous corporate governance, as corporations do not exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model of education rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the standard of preserving the great traditions of the past. This was symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the personal authorization to transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a tradition quite different from the West's group-administered certification (through examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event, the founding of Spanish universities in the thirteenth century, first in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca (1227-8), and so on, occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna."
Apparently, David Levering Lewis doesn't care much about art, as he devotes little space to the subject in God's Crucible. Pictorial arts are banned in Islam. Images have been made at certain times, but paintings, and certainly not sculptures, never had anything remotely resembling the importance they enjoyed in Western art. The Islamic world could produce some good poets, for instance the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) whose works are still popular, but they tended to be unorthodox Muslims.
Jihad piracy and slavery remained a serious threat to Europeans for more than a thousand years. As historian Ibn Khaldun proudly proclaimed about the early Middle Ages: "The Christian could no longer float a plank upon the sea." The reason why the West for centuries didn't have easy access to the Classical learning of the Byzantine Empire was because endemic Muslim raids made the Mediterranean unsafe for regular travel. It has to be the height of absurdity to block access to something and then take credit for transmitting it, yet that is precisely what Muslims do. As stronger states slowly grew up in the West, regular contact with their Christian cousins in Byzantium was gradually re-established, especially with the city-states of northern Italy where during the Renaissance the printing press – an invention aggressively rejected by Muslims – made Greco-Roman texts, with translations aided by Greek-speaking Byzantine refugees from Islamic Jihad, available to future generations. Westerners eventually gained access to the Greco-Roman manuscripts preserved in Constantinople, the Second Rome. Consequently, they no longer needed to rely on limited translations in Arabic, which had often been made from Byzantine manuscripts in the first place, and frequently by Christian or Jewish translators.
The Middle East had for thousands of years been more advanced than most of Europe. This situation didn't begin with the introduction of Islam. On the contrary: it ended with Islamization. The region we today call the Greater Middle East, which includes Egypt, Palestine, Syria, south-eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Iran and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the seat of the oldest known civilizations on the planet and the source of many of the most important inventions in human history, including writing and the alphabet.
It is surely no coincidence that the first major civilization on the Indian subcontinent, the Harappan Civilization, arose in the Indus Valley in the northwest, i.e. closest to Sumerian Mesopotamia. A little understood culture at the Mediterranean island of Malta has left us with megalithic temples that may be the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world. Dating back to 3600 BC, they predate the pyramids of Egypt with a thousand years. Still, it is not a coincidence that literate European civilizations took root in lands that were geographically close to Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia: The Minoan civilization at the island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part was more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved more durable.
Contrast this with modern times, when southeast Europe (the Balkans) is Europe's number one trouble spot. So is the original seat of the first Indian civilization, in Pakistan and Kashmir. The Greater Middle East thus went from being a global center of civilization to being a global center of anti-civilization. This change largely coincided with the Islamization of the region.
Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has asked in her book The Trouble with Islam what caused the earlier "golden age" of Islam, and concludes, with a few reservations, that "tolerance served as the best way to build and maintain the Islamic empire." In light of the evidence quoted above I disagree with her, and even more so with David Levering Lewis. Islam's much-vaunted "golden age" was in reality the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed. The brief cultural blossoming during the first centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the pre-Islamic heritage in a region that was still, for a while, majority non-Muslim.
I've recently been re-reading some of the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, including Guns, Germs, and Steel. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. His most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a center of civilization to being a center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Yet is striking to notice how Diamond totally ignores the influence of Islam. This demonstrates clearly that any historical explanation that places too much emphasis on material issues and too little on the impact of human ideas is bound to end up with false or misleading conclusions.
Written by well known blogger Fjordman, you can find many of his works at: Gates of Vienna, Islam-Watch, Global Politician, JihadWatch, The Brussels Journal and his own blog @ Blogspot bearing his name Fjordman.
Pertinent Links:
1) The Truth About Islam in Europe
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