Here is yet another example of how telling unwelcome truths is stigmatized today. The UK’sIndependent on Thursday published an article detailing the latest enormity committed by the conservative congresswoman the establishment media loves to hate: “Marjorie Taylor Greene faces angry backlash after Islamophobic tweet: ‘Islam is not a religion of peace.’” There’s just one problem with the Independent’s scenario: Greene is right. Islam really isn’t a religion of peace. But the Independent leans far to the Left, and the Left has never been troubled by facts before; why should it start now?
The Independent article is full of semaphores for the indoctrinated, signaling to them that they must not be sympathetic to Rep. Greene (R-Ga.). It tells us that “far-right Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is embroiled in yet another social media furore over a tweet in which she insisted Islam is ‘not a religion of peace.’”
Not only is Greene “far-right,” which essentially means nothing more than that the media hates her, but the Independent also informs us that she “has previously been sanctioned by the House of Representatives over her long history of racist, incendiary and sometimes violent statements.”
Now that the Independent’s hapless readers are primed to despise and deplore Marjorie Taylor Greene, the paper gives us her outrageous, appalling statement: “Pray for American missionaries in Afghanistan. There are reports that some families may have been killed. Islam is not a religion of peace.”
Then we hear about how terrible this is from anonymous Twitter users quoted by the Independent: “Every time you think she can’t say something worse, she does.” And: “Yea, the Taliban totally represents all of Islam. That’s why there are Muslims hanging off of planes trying to escape their rule.”
The Independent informs disappointed Left-fascists that “it is unlikely Ms Greene will face any formal consequences for her tweet, whether from Twitter or in Congress.”
The inconvenient fact remains, however: Islam is not actually a religion of peace, and it is not a matter of bigotry or hatred to point this out. Are the authoritative schools of Sunni jurisprudence, the Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi and Hanbali schools, “Islamophobic”? A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax” (‘Umdat al-Salik).
Of course, there is no caliph today, and hence the oft-repeated claim that jihadis such as the Taliban are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8).
A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”
However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do” (Al-Hidayah, II.140).
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”
This is also taught by modern-day scholars of Islam. Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad: “The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state” (P. 51).
Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee is an assistant professor on the faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth-century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
Perhaps the Independent will tell us that all these Islamic authorities are as “Islamophobic” as Marjorie Taylor Greene. The establishment media has tried to get us to swallow bigger falsehoods than that.
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