Differentiation from non-Muslims is necessary, but not sufficient. The Muslim must know, with every fibre of his being, that he is a higher order of creation than the kafir, and that the boundary between himself as human, and the animals, lies more properly between himself and the kafir.
Jerusalem, 1948. Arab Muslim victor condescends to Jewish leader
Muhammad is “the seal of the prophets”. His religion, Islam, is the final religion, and so also the perfect religion. Its adherents, therefor, are as close to perfect as it is possible for humans to be (if they are not prophets). Any creed arising after Islam is thus not a religion, and whatever their adherents might think they are, they cannot be religious. Readers might find the following near-verbatim account of an exchange between myself and some Muslims in Marrakech instructive. The conversation had turned to their claim that Islam is the final religion:
“In that case, how do you explain Sikhism?”
“What?”
“Sikhism, the religion of the Sikhs. How do you explain it?”
“If it is a religion, then it must be older than Islam.”
“It comes almost a thousand years later than Islam.”
“Then it is not a religion.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course! Islam is the final religion. If it came later than Islam, then it is not a religion.”
“Would you like to inform forty* million Sikhs that their religion is not a religion?”
“They are ignorant. They should follow Islam. It is the final religion.”
“I’m interested to know what you consider a religion and what not.”
“A religion comes from God. There can be a right religion and a wrong religion, but all religions come from God. Islam is the right religion.”
“All religions come from God? Even Buddhism?”
“Of course!”
“You do know that Buddhism has no God, right? It’s an atheist religion.”
“I can see what you are doing. You are trying to use clever words on me. I am not stupid. [Expletive]!”
“And if all religion came from God, then what was so wrong about the Quraysh? They had their religion before Islam, so it came from God, and they had all their idols in the Kaaba. What can be more blessed than that?”
“[EXPLETIVE]!”
“Ok. Ok. I’m trying to figure out how you can tell, just by looking at a religion, but knowing nothing at all about it, whether it came before Islam or after Islam.”
“If it is not Islam, then it came before Islam.”
“And if it came after Islam, then it is not a religion, right?”
“That is right.”
“So you will simply deny that Sikhism, a religion practised by millions of people for the last more than 500 years, is even a religion at all.”
“Islam is the final religion—Basta!”
* 25 million, not 40 million.
These are the products of secular education in Morocco, the most liberal Arab Muslim country. Although the jihad army, Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS), is imposing Shari’a on Syria, it is not imposing it onto a secular population. As the dialogue above illustrates, within a Muslim milieu, there cannot be secularism in any sense, since God infuses all aspects of people’s thinking and emotions, even when their thinking and responses are against religion and in a context devoid of Shari’a.
The burdens Shari’a imposes on people make it impossible for them to give expression to their human passions and predilections. To this, Muslims have historically responded in two ways. Where they have social control, they have been able to insert into Shari’a any number of hadiths that show Muhammad either to have approved of, or better still, practised, their particular unorthodox practice. Where they lacked social control – the vast majority of the population – an unspoken code of hypocrisy developed according to which everyone vocally disapproves of something that they all know everyone secretly does. The public character of a regime in a Muslim society, therefore, must be assumed to represent some kind of dynamic equilibrium between hypocrisy, piety, obsequiousness, permissiveness, thought control, nepotism and extreme brutality. The behaviour of the ruled show responses that are constantly in flux.
Add to all the above a civil war that has lasted for longer than most Syrian schoolchildren have been alive, and we have the environment in which they grow up and are socialised. Everyone is close to deprivation and as such, highly susceptible to totalitarian indoctrination. When HTS sets about transforming these children into a new generation of “martyrdom-seeking” adults, they are not necessarily pushing at an open door, but they don’t exactly have to batter the door down either. The Muslim children are already formatted, so to speak, to receive whatever a “scholar” might imprint onto their minds.
Restoring the Qur’an and Shari’a to the centre of education instills in the children a sense of themselves as “the best of peoples ever raised up for mankind” (Qur’an 3:110) juxtaposed against non-Muslims as “the worst of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6). It also perverts the children’s emotions by reducing them to two only: love and hate, the most ennobling and the most base brought into union. They must love everyone and everything that Allah loves, and hate everyone and everything that Allah hates. Allah loves Muslims and Islam; Allah hates the kufaar and kufr, unbelief. A lifetime under this dictum reduces a Muslim to an austere, grim freak, such as Ayatollah Khomeini.
This emotional crippling underlies many a Muslim depravity, not least of which is Al-wala’ w’al-bara’, loyalty and disavowal, as well as extreme responses to slights against Muhammad. Loyalty to Islam and Muslims overrides everything, and when combined with all love for Allah and his messenger, sets the conditions for both infanticide and children denouncing their parents, both of which Islam encourages. A Muslim must love Muhammad more than he loves any other human being, including himself, and be ready to die for Muhammad’s honour. Each Muslim becomes the personal bodyguard of a dead man.
Since all non-Muslims are by their nature corrupt, it falls to Muslims to command the right and forbid the wrong, i.e., enforce morality, such they have it, upon the world, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. HTS leads by example. It has just promised the string of gullible Westerners who beat a path to Damascus all the fluffy things they want to hear, and no sooner had they left than it imposed the jizya on Christians. Three central principles of Islamic rule are demonstrated at once: one, lie to the infidels; two, subjugate them to extreme oppression; and three, show contempt for their dignitaries by breaking your promises as soon as they’re out the door.
HTS is confident that no Western visitor will complain, because they have an “agreement”, which is what they had gone to Damascus to extract. To admit that their “agreement” is worthless is to admit failure. As Syria’s children mature into political awareness, these are precisely the kinds of victories that will inspire them. Every Western diplomat or “expert” flattered to accept a Muslim Brotherhood invitation to visit Damascus, contributes to the moulding of Syria’s future killers.
Muslim supremacism entails a unique kind of racism. According to Qur’an:
On the Day [of Judgement] when (some) faces will be whitened and (some) faces will be blackened; and as for those whose faces have been blackened, it will be said unto them: Disbelieved ye after your (profession of) belief? Then taste the punishment for that ye disbelieved. And as for those whose faces have been whitened, in the mercy of Allah they dwell for ever. (3:106-107) (My emphasis)
Astonishingly, there are black Muslims, and they do not wonder why Allah has made their faces black even before they died. But perhaps this comment is too crass. Let us stick to Muslims not having to wait until they’re dead for the Muslim race to become physiologically distinct from the kufaar. Muhammad is reported to have said, for example, “A believer eats in one intestine, whereas a non-believer eats in seven intestines.”
Closer to our time, while people around the world rushed to protect themselves from Covid-19 and to develop vaccines, the Muslims’ only concern was to know from their sheikhs, “How must a Muslim respond to the Corona-virus?” Such is the logic of Muslim racial superiority, that “Corona-virus affects the kufaar; it doesn’t affect Muslims”, a sincerely held and almost universal Muslim belief well into the pandemic. More devastating to Muslims than the corona virus affecting them, was that it affected them and the kufaar without distinction. Similarly, during the AIDS epidemic, Muslims took serious offence to any suggestion that a Muslim could get AIDS.
Muslims hold this conception of themselves not only as a distinct race, but as a physiologically distinct species, as strongly today as a thousand years ago. While Muslim medical doctors know this not to be so, it does not mean that they reject all of Islam’s medical insights. Dr Zakir Naik, for example, has no problem going on record extolling the virtues of drinking camel urine, and he is far from the only one. Muslims’ moral distinctiveness is part of the same mindset. When the Black Lives Matter riots flared up after the death of George Floyd, everyone came down on one side of the issue or the other. Muslims, however, first wanted to know from their sheikhs, “How must a Muslim respond?”
More disturbingly, the very kufaar that Muslims would not be seen dead sharing the same genome with, elevate Muslim morality above their own. The same Black Lives Matter riots had wall-to-wall coverage in the British media, while hardly anyone had anything say about the simultaneous epidemic of Muslim gangs raping non-Muslim, especially white, girls, as they are entitled. Fathers, sons, uncles and grandfathers were often in the same gangs raping the same girls. Perhaps the media said nothing because that would just be too crass to mention, who knows. I’m sure we all know one Muslim who would never do this.
None of what is good or bad or right or wrong for everybody else applies to Muslims. “The best of people” have superior rights and wrongs that apply exclusively to them. It is racism so powerful that a black person and a white person need merely both say, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger,” and their Master Faith, Islam, instantly transforms them into the same Master Race, Muslims. They rule supreme over all others, another entitlement. All else is lesser and shall bow before them. A Muslim’s life is worth more than the life of a kafir. How much more depends on the kafir:
The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third of the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth of that of a Muslim. (Reliance of the Traveller, Book O:4.9)
It matters not how others perceive Muslims, since their views are irrelevant and not sought. Yet, it matters so much that Muslims kill over it. They are at the same time both supreme and supremely vulnerable. As here illustrated again, Islam and Muslims are so completely enmeshed that it is folly to imagine that one can be criticised without touching the other.
No matter what his material and moral conditions, the Muslim is a supremacist, and there is no loftiness or baseness that tempers that supremacism. The most genteel of liberal Muslims still revere the Qur’an (the perfectly preserved word of Allah) and Muhammad (the perfect man). British “Da’wah man”, Imran ibn Mansur, offers an excellent bottom example. He quotes a hadith in which the narrator is asked: “Did your prophet teach you even how to use the toilet?” Da’wah man waxes lyrical about the magnificence of his prophet:
Not only did he teach us how to use the toilet, but he taught us which direction to face, he taught us which direction not to face, he told us how many stones we should use. Brothers and sisters, can you imagine a prophet that did not leave out teaching us the details, the intricacies of how to wash ourselves, how to use the toilet to the point he told us which direction we should face in the toilet. Do you think that the prophet (SAW) left out how we should be when we meet these [challenging] days?
Who can deny brother Imran’s logic: a prophet who even has your excrement covered, obviously has everything covered. A hadith confirms that brother Imran did not make this up:
It was narrated that Salman said: “The idolators said: ‘We see that your companion teaches you how to go to the toilet.’ He said: ‘Yes, he forbade us from cleaning ourselves with our right hand, and from facing toward the Qiblah [direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, AP],’ and he said: ‘None of you should clean with less than three stones’” (Sahih Sunan an-Nasa’i, Book of Purification, 49).
There is a serious point here. To a supremacist, everything pertaining to himself is superior, good, desirable, enviable, elevating, aggrandising, and is to be proclaimed as a positive differentiator from others, as something that others can but aspire to, but never attain. His supremacy is confirmed even in his prophet telling him, in minute detail, how he should use a rock to remove faeces sticking to his anus after defecating. It takes a robust detachment from reality, confinement within a strict self-referential fantasy, and unassailable arrogance to perceive as an affirmation of greatness what would under any other circumstances be a mortal embarrassment.
There was a time when child marriage was universally proclaimed with pride as one of the many things that set Islam above other religions, which is presumably why the hadiths describing Muhammad’s sex with a nine-year-old girl were made up in the first place. In Arab barbarian society, such behaviour was positively regarded, and in order to boost their prophet’s credentials, Muhammad was made such a man of the people. In isolated Muslim communities, paedophilia remains a virtue to be emulated.
But history has sneaked civilised mores into the ummah, where ethical values are increasingly making inroads, putting pressure on the Muslim’s ease within his faith, signalling an erosion in his supremacism. Embarrassed Muslims are trying to raise the marriageable age for girls. Such attempts usually fail at the hands of outraged Islamic “scholars”, who perceive the thin edge of a wedge that will eventually take down Islam and them along with it. Let us see how many girls will complete their school education under Hayat Tahrir al-Shams.
Measures to instil supremacism
- Modify the activity of the greeting format because the greeting of Islam is “Peace be upon you”
- Activity: “Peace be upon you” only upon departure.
Nawawi (Allah Most High have mercy on him) says in his commentary on Sahih Muslim, “Scholars disagree about greeting non-Muslims with as-Salamu `alaykum’ or returning their Salams. We hold that it is unlawful to say it to the first, though is obligatory to return their greetings by saying `alaykum’ (and upon you), or simply, “Alaykum.’ Other scholars hold it is permissible to greet them first with `as-Salamu `alaykum’ ” (Reliance of the Traveller, Book R33.2)
A Muslim must not greet a non-Muslim unless the non-Muslim greets first. If the non-Muslim greets the Muslim with “Peace be upon you”, then the Muslim must not return this greeting, for a non-Muslim, by definition, cannot have peace. One of the definitions of a Muslim is that he is permanently at war with non-Muslims. The appropriate response is “and upon you”. The Muslim here practises the Islamic deceit of tawriya: “saying something that means one thing to the listener, though the speaker means something else, his words technically supporting this alternate meaning.” In the Muslim’s mind, he says, “and [anything other than peace] upon you”. Tawriya is not to be confused with taqiyya, a different kind of Islamic lying.
- Replace “from acts of worship that are invalid without cleanliness” with “pure”
From a particular disapproval to a general denigration, suggesting that the worshipper is unclean, rather than that just his act of worship is “without cleanliness”. The problem is non-Muslims, not the way they pray.
- Replace the title “Symbol of Peace” with “The Night of Decree”
A night within the last ten nights of Ramadan. There is a distinct difference in tone between the former (contented settlement) and the latter (fate, destiny, power). “Night of Decree” urges Muslims to see themselves as decreed by Allah to wield power over others, rather than to give them peace.
- Replace “and going along with his people” with “adjusting the discourse to his people”
The Muslim imperative to dominate others, who have no say over anything, including their own lives, as opposed to consulting non-Muslims and addressing their concerns.
To Muslims, every person on earth belongs to one of two camps: Muslim; or kafir. The first question on a Muslim’s mind upon encountering a stranger is always: is this a Muslim, or not? Their entire interaction beyond that point, whether it is to last sixty seconds or sixty years, depends on the answer to that all-determining first question. From this point on, they will either gravitate towards each other, or repel each other. Differentiation from non-Muslims is necessary, but not sufficient. The Muslim must know, with every fibre of his being, that he is a higher order of creation than the kafir, and that the boundary between himself as human, and the animals, lies more properly between himself and the kafir. This is the point that Hayat Tahrir al-Shams needs to get Syria’s schoolchildren to: the point where they feel slight revulsion at being amongst non-Muslims.
Picture credits:
Screenshot from Israel – May 1948: The Battle for Jerusalem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wj_j9aLxF4
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.