Below is the second of two-part series about the Islamic State by Hartmut Krauss, as translated by JLH. Part One is here.

Pure, Unadulterated Islam

On the “Islamic State” — The Basis for its Impetus and Legitimization and for its Anti-Civilization Reign of Terror (Continued)

By Hartmut Krauss

August 29, 2014

Source: Hintergrund-Verlag

II. “Mohammed the Model” and Islamic Imperialistic Conquest as Historical Paragon

The life and works of the Prophet Mohammed as described in traditional tales and biographies are the sacred model for devout Muslims. Whoever doubts, criticizes, questions or actually mocks it is a blasphemer, to be punished with utmost severity.[12]

If we examine Mohammed’s vita more closely, we find a wealth of material for emulation on the violent practice of Islamic orthodoxy. Mohammed functions not only as the proclaimer, but as the enactor of Allah’s absolute laws. Ayatollah Khomeini expressed this clearly and succinctly in his “The Islamic State” (1983, p. 28). “At the time of the most noble Prophet…laws were not just announced and explained. They were carried out. God’s Messenger… carried out the laws. For instance, he carried out the directions of criminal law. He chopped off thieves’ hands, he stoned those convicted under Hadd.[13] The caliph, too has the responsibility of disposing of such matters.” The perpetrators of IS are acting in strict accordance with this principle.

The actions of the Prophet also included contract killing. This was directed at those who — after military confrontations — authored insulting verses about Mohammed’s tribe, the Quraysh. One of these persons was Ka’b b. al-Asraf, a leader of the Jewish Banu n-Nadir. After Mohammed’s death edict had been carried out, “The criminals carried Ka’b’s severed head to Mohammed. As they drew close to his home, they called out, ‘Allahu akbar!’ and the Prophet interrupted his ritual prayer with ‘Allahu akbar!’ ‘Blessed be your countenances!’ He greeted them. ‘And yours, Messenger of Allah!’ they replied, and threw the severed head at his feet. He praised Allah for the death of Ka’b. then he spat into the wound of the [one] murderer who had been injured, and the wound healed. This is what al-Waqidi reports about the ghastly crime.” (Nagel 2008, p. 38)

The IS practice of beheading defenseless male “infidels” as well as raping and enslaving women and girls is also a “Salafist” tradition, as is the early Muslim robbery-and-conquest economy, including the traditional extortion of ransom for captured hostages. The fate of the Jewish tribe, the Qurayzah, may serve as an example. During the “War of the Trench,” they were accused of covertly aiding the hostile besiegers and blockading their own residential quarter for 25 days. After their capitulation, the defeated Qurayzah were prepared, like the other Jewish tribes, to leave the city under the same stipulations. But Mohammed rejected this and made a perfidious arrangement with the arbiter, Sad ibn Moas, “who, he knew full well, did not have a good word to say about the Qurayzah. Sad did not disappoint him. His decision was that all (700, H.K.) men of the Banu Qurayzah should be beheaded, the women and children sold into slavery and their entire property distributed among the Muslims.” (Dashti 1997, p. 163) Rodinson (1975, p. 205) describes the carrying out of the gruesome deed: “The next day, he (Mohammed, H.K.) had great ditches dug in the market of Medina. The Jews were led there, bound and in groups, beheaded one-by-one and thrown in. Some say there were between 600 and 700, others between 800 and 900.”

In retrospect, Mohammed interprets the horrifying occurrence as “God’s judgment”[14] and adds that a Jewish woman was beheaded in contravention of Sad’s judgment, because she had thrown a stone during the blockade of her residential quarter. She had been a friend of his wife Aisha.

Tradition explicitly legitimizes the rape of women in conquered regions: “According to Abu Said — We were on a campaign with God’s Messenger in Mustaliq and took upper-class women from among the Arabs. We had had to practice abstinence for a long time, but we wanted ransom. And we wanted to pleasure ourselves and practice coitus interruptus.

We said: If we wish to do this while we are in company with God’s Messenger, should we not ask him about it.

So we asked him.

He said: You have no obligation not to do it. The creation of a human being, from now until the Day of Resurrection, does not happen, unless God decides it.” (Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Nasai)[15]

Contrary to the myth of Islamic tolerance — which is just as persistent as it is false — it is legitimate, besides economic extortion and mass slavery, to confirm the following agenda, which serves today’s jihadist as an unadulterated model.

As is known from traditional chronicles, the early Muslim and later conquests were invariably connected with massacres, devastation and extirpation, In the subjection of Syria under the first caliph, Abu Bakr, for instance, 4,000 peasants (Christians, Jews and Samaritans) were murdered. It was the same in the conquest of Mesopotamia from 635 to 642 or the military acquisition of Egypt and Armenia. Sometimes the entire population was slaughtered and in many places women, children and old people were killed. That the expansion of the Islamic culture by the sword was an exception, as claimed by “Islamic leaders” in an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, does not correspond with the truth. On the contrary, similar atrocities could be recorded in all areas of conquest.[16] On the Arabian peninsula, a policy of religious cleansing was pursued, and Arabia, with the exception of Yemen and Jordan, was made “Jew- and Christian-free” — a procedure that was employed later in Spain by the Almohads and Amoravids after the end of the caliphate in 1031. There were pogroms against Christians in 889 in Elvira and Seville; against Jews in Moroccan Fez in 1033 with over 6,000 dead, in 1066 in Granada with 1,500 families killed[17], in 1135 in Cordova and 1235 in Marrakesh.

“The (anti-Jewish, H.K.) pogroms in Christian-ruled areas,” according to Flaig (2006, p. 37) “are no badge of honor for European culture, but their magnitude was far less than those of the Islamic world. There is a pressing need for a comparative history of religious subjugation.”

The Islamization accomplished as a result of the conquest of numerous tribes also includes an inter-cultural synthesis with, in part, fatal consequences. An example is the combination of Mongolian cultural heritage with the Islamic hegemony culture, as represented by the infamous and blood-thirsty despot, Timur the Lame — also called Tamerlane. He killed thousands of Hindus and erected a triumphal column from their severed heads. He also carried out a systematic annihilation of Christians in Mesopotamia, to which tens of thousands fell victim. His ghastly methods of dominating “represent a historically unprecedented synthesis of Mongolian barbarism and Muslim fanaticism. He symbolizes that particular advanced type of primitive slaughter: Murder committed in service of an abstract ideology, as duty and sacred mission.” (Grousset, quoted in Warraq 2004, p.324)

III. Conclusions

The elemental nexus of the claim to religious superiority, the drive for universal-absolute sovereignty and the jihad principle has two serious consequences:

First, the idealization of violence as well as the normative establishment of murder, theft, enslavement and extortion of tribute as religious duties create an aggressive disposition among the believers socialized under the aegis of orthodox Islam. True, there are, happily, people born into the Islamic milieu but bolstered by their own rational and moral tendency, who free themselves from the dogmatic standards of the religious philosophy forced upon them, and turn to the normative principles of European modernism. (A smart integration strategy would focus this process of resolution, and not broadly encourage or solidify Islamic identity politics.) On the other hand, the persistently peddled myth of the “peace-loving Muslims” must be critically questioned. What this myth overlooks is that the Islamic sovereign culture is a system defined by allotted tasks, in which specific functionaries have the task of introducing swathes of political-philosophical, legal and cultural acceptance and “recognition” into the non-Muslim intake society, while other functionaries elsewhere are simultaneously lopping off heads and massacring infidels. These belong together and no amount of wishful thinking à la Cinderella can bring about two essentially distinctive “Islams.” And it must also be recognized that “peaceful” Muslims can quickly change their attitude when a change in the situation and a concomitant alteration in the balance of power occur. Thus, the Yazidis who fled from ISIS report that, after the jihadists appeared, their Muslim neighbors of many years were not only suddenly aggressive toward them, but were even chiefly responsible for the atrocities committed against them.

“You know, the Yazidis feel so betrayed by the Arab neighbors they had lived among for so many years; they all turned on the Yazidis when ISIS came. Many of the atrocities were carried out not by the militants but by their own neighbors.”[18]

There is absolutely no plausible reason that strictly devout Muslims, confronted with the Islamic terrorism of subjugation and eradication of “infidels” should act differently than the “ordinary Germans” confronting the Nazi terror (cf. Gellately 2002). And lo and behold, current information is that 92% of the population of Saudi Arabia believes that the IS is compatible with Islamic values and Islamic laws.[19]

So it is not really surprising that some time ago, when no one was yet talking about “Google Jihadism” and the PC censorship of thought and investigation still had some holes in it, even among Turkish youth living in Germany, there was recorded a very strong “correlation between an Islamocentric sense of superiority with a largely conservative-traditional point of view and a religiously based tendency to violence.” (Heitmeyer/Müller/Schröder 1997, p. 130) 35.7% of the Turkish youth questioned agreed with the statement “If it serves the Islamic community, I am prepared to use physical violence against infidels.” 24.3% agreed “If it serves the Islamic community, I am prepared to humiliate others.” 28.5% reacted positively to “Violence is justified if it is for establishment of the Islamic faith.” And 23.2% agreed “If someone fights against Islam, he must be killed,” (ibid. p. 129)[20]

Second, the Islamic sense of superiority and the resultant will to dominate require orientation to a kleptocratic-parasitic economy of theft, plunder and extortionate tribute instead of a rationally guided, productive and creative culture of commerce and science. That is, the normative canon of Islam is fixated on an aristocrat-clientele culture of dominance, with its pre-modern, medieval dependency relationships, allotment principles, methods of enrichment, values perceptions and ideas of honor. These are the basic elements of a vicious cycle which is now becoming apparent in the fatal combination of an easily ignited tendency to violence, a pronounced welfare mentality and economic stagnation in the framework of a normatively patriarchal population surplus.[21] IS at present is also following this line: conquest of foreign sovereign territory; grisly killing and enslavement of “infidels”; proclamation of a caliphate; establishment of a reign of terror; possession of oil resources; collection of taxes; ransom demands for freeing of hostages, etc. None of this is new, none of it is surprising or unusual and all of it is within the context of the traditional Islamic matrix

Taken in the aggregate, the Islamic drive for universal domination is a sophisticated strategy capable of taking into account particular power relationships. Its basic maxims are: dedication to the battle when its own strength and the enemy’s weaknesses are clear; avoidance of battle when it is weak and the enemy is strong. When the constellation of powers is such that the forces of the infidels are greater, as for example with Muslim immigrants in a non-Muslim land, the principle of taqiyya is recommended, i.e., permission in unfavorable situations and conditions adverse to action, to conceal one’s own religion and thus the intentions it engenders. Thus, Sharia says:

“If it is possible to achieve a goal by lying and not by telling the truth, then lying is allowed and required, if the goal is obligatory (world conquest is obligatory). But in all these cases, it is religiously more circumspect to use words which give a misleading impression, that is, to say something that is literally true and is therefore not a lie, while the apparent sense of the words deceives the listener. But even if you do not tell the truth and simply lie, this does not violate the law in the given situation.”[22]

In the West, the standard repertoire of this hybrid form of half-truths, lies and deceptions includes the following corresponding claims which are eagerly sucked up and multiplied by the mass media:

1. The Koran and the Hadith are completely, voluntarily interpretable. 2. There is no single Islam, but Islams. 3. It is not the orthodox and radical Muslims who are in the majority, but the “moderates.” 4. Therefore, every form of criticism of Islam must be suppressed, so as not too disturb the illusory achievements of moderate Muslims.



Last but not least, taqiyya appears as a specific type of behavior in the form of a hypocritical accommodation to non-Islamic surroundings, and simultaneously as a concealment of actual intentions. This is especially true of the ambiguous activities of the functionaries of Islamic organizations in Germany who have been specifically trained in this method. What has been said about them over a long period of time is still emphatically true: “To Germans and in German, they emphasize ceaselessly that they honor the constitution and want dialogue. Among Turks and in Turkish, the majority of remarks are inflammatory slogans against German democracy, pluralism and the allegedly ‘morally rotten’ German society.” (Hildegard Becker, cited in Spuler-Stegeman 2002, p.55)

Anyone who wishes — in the face of these facts — to truly free Europe from this reactionary, destructive ballast, must first forge a force that is capable of permanently disassembling this multiple, brachiate, pro-Islamic edifice of lies with its multiple facets of institutional and personal guarantees.

Notes:

12. On Muslim belief in Mohammed, cf. Nagel 2008a. 13. “Hadd” are Islamic punishments intended as deterrents and given for misdeeds against the alleged legal dicta of God. Among them were crimes against property, offenses against Islamic social order and against imposed Islamic customs. 14. In the Koran, Sura 33:25-27, the occurrences are described as follows: “And Allah repelled the infidels in their fury. They gained no advantage. And Allah was enough for the believers in the battle, for Allah is strong and mighty. And he made the People of the Book who had helped them come down from their forts and he cast dismay into their hearts. Some of them you killed and some of them you took captive. And he gave you the inheritance of their land and their dwellings and their property, and a land that you had never entered. And Allah has power over all things.” (Koran 1984, p. 364 f.) 15. The Hadith, Vol. III, p. 37, number 2985. See also Rodinson (1975, p. 190 f.) 16. Cf. the verse in Warraq 2004, pp. 304 ff., Flaig 2006; Singer 1987, pp. 276/77 and 301. 17. “This disaster was just as serious as the one that was to befall the Jews of the Rhineland 30 years later during the First Crusade, but it is not much noted by scholarship,” (Wistrich in Warraq 2004, p.316) 18. www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/world/middleeast/iraq-alissa-j-rubin-a-times-correspondent-recounts-fatal-helicopter-crash-in-kurdistan.html?=3 19. muslimstatistics.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/92-of-saudis-believes-that-isis-conforms-to-the-values-of-islam-and-islamic-law-survey/ 20. Current investigations with subject groups confirm this attitude potential. Cf,, e.g., Krauss 2013 b (Freidenkerln 2/2013); Pew research Center 2013 or the summary in www.gam-online.de/Bilder/Säkulare Lebensordnung-Programm.pdf 21. IS and the other scattered jihadist organizations, with their war and plunder economy, are primary catch-basins for the following groups: 1. Parts of the surplus male population of Islamic lands. This is by far the largest segment, 2. Dis-integrated Islamically socialized immigrants from Western countries who blame their failure to integrate on the non-Muslim host society and have undergone an Islamist/Salafist form of dissent conditioning. 3. A small group of European converts consisting of adolescent misfits, previously associated with left- or right-radical groups, and have now succumbed to the flair of Google Islamism or have been identified by Muslim friendship circles as friendly resources. 22. ncwdi.igc.org/html/shariavfc.html



Sources: