Who are spreading their universal belief system through whose world?

(Be sure to check out the astonishment and alarm of KE, a secular pro-Western Turk, at the presence of large, golden-domed mosques in the U.S.)

DH writes from Atlanta:

I could not agree more with your recent entry, “A ‘global struggle’ against Islamism—to be waged everywhere except where it matters most.” I was especially struck by your stating that “the thousands of mosques being built throughout the Western world” evidence that the war against Islamism must be fought at home.

The pictures attached to this e-mail are of the current skyline of Atlanta, Georgia, taken from the west side of downtown.

As you can plainly see, a shiny new mosque, with its 70-foot-high minaret next to it (seen to the right of the Bank of America building, the 20th tallest building in the world), has occupied a prominent place in the profile of this Southern city. Unfortunately, I must drive past this monstrosity everyday as I drive to and from my office, and it is even visible from my office window.

When I first noticed the mosque being constructed, I told a colleague about it. As he looked out the window, he commented on the “beauty” of the building and especially the beauty of what it represented: the metamorphosis of Atlanta from a bastion of Old South pride and prejudice to a new, cosmopolitan metropolis in which religious and ethnic minorities are encouraged to fluorish, yadda yadda yadda, ad nauseum. I’m no psychiatrist, but I recommend for this person whatever you prescribe for Stockholm Syndrome.

I suppose if I could prove to my colleague that would-be suicide bombers were busily building bombs in the basement of this mosque, he might be motivated to resistance. But when I told him that the construction of a mosque in the center of Atlanta represents a fundamental departure from our historic cultural and religious roots and is a harbinger of the eventual eradication of Western civilization, he was unfazed.

For him, the proliferation of non-Western, non-Christian minorities in our city is a beautiful thing until it (literally) blows up in his face.

The mosque in DH’s photograph is the Al-Farooq Masjid of Atlanta. As explained at the mosque’s website, Al-Farooq was the nickname of Umar, the second Caliph, who ruled Islam from 634 to 644. Umar, of course, was the leader who conquered Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, Armenia, and parts of Persia, destroying and subjecting to Islamic rule the ancient and flourishing Christian and Jewish societies of the Near East and initiating the Muslim empire. That’s whom the Muslims are honoring with that mosque in the middle of downtown Atlanta.

Among the missions of the mosque are:

4. Presenting Islam to the followers of other faiths and promoting goodwill between Muslims and non-Muslims (Dawah).

Thinking that dawah had a stronger meaning than that, I did a little googling and found that the ”presentation of Islam” and the “promotion of good will” as seen by Muslims may seem a little different from the point of view of non-Muslims. Robert Spencer writes:

Traditional Islam teaches that Muslims must call people to accept the faith or at least submit to the Islamic social order—that is dawah. If they refuse, Muslims must fight them—jihad. This is based on numerous passages of the Qur’an and Islamic tradition, including this one. Says the Prophet Muhammad:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war … When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them…. If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim, book 19, no. 4294).

Spencer goes on to give a contemporary example of dawah, as reported in the Telegraph, on January 21, 2004. “A young Russian soldier, Yevgeny Rodionov, an Orthodox Christian, was asked to convert to Islam by Chechen jihadis. When he refused, they killed him.”

In fact, they beheaded him.

Apparently, then, Muslims define dawah as the invitation to Islam, or alternatively as Allah’s call on Muslims to invite others to Islam. Dawah in Arabic simply means to invite. This invitation consists of presenting Islam to non-Muslims, persuading them of the truth of Islam, etc. And at various Islamic websites this is the way dawah is defined. However, the dawah does not stop at presentation and invitation, but extends up to the ultimatum to convert, pay the tax, or be subjected to jihad and death. Thus a Muslim on a tv show presenting Islam in the most positive light possible is engaged in dawah, and a Chechen terrorist saying to a prisoner, “Convert or die,” is also engaged in dawah.

So, it’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it? To Muslims, Umar is one of the most devout of all Muslims. To Christians and Jews, he is the destroyer of the Christian, Jewish, and Hellenic civilization of the ancient Near East. From Muslims’ point of view, dawah is benevolent social outreach to non-Muslims and pro-Islamic PR. To non-Muslims, dawah is a demand made to non-Muslims to submit to Islam, or else. Dawah is thus an elastic and flexible concept, subject to circumstances, like jihad itself. Just as Muslims refrain from active jihad when it is not practicable for them to wage jihad, but launch jihad campaigns as soon as it serves their purposes, in the same way, dawah in some circumstances means talking positively about Islam, and in other circumstances it means making an offer that can’t be refused.

At present, we non-Muslims happily accept the Muslims’ benign interpretations of their faith—which of course is benign, to them. But as the number and power of Muslims in the West increases, the real meanings of Umar and of dawah, for us, will become more and more manifest.

* * *

Here is more information on Umar’s approach to non-Muslims, provided by Andrew Bostom. The first quote is by Alfred von Kremer, an important German Orientalist, circa 1868:

…The central idea of ‘Umar’s [b. al-Khattab, d. 644] regime was to further the religious-military development of Islam at the expense of the conquered nations. It was the basis of its severe directives regarding Christians and those of other faiths, that they be reduced to the status of pariahs, forbidden from having anything in common with the ruling nation; it was even the basis for his decision to purify the Arabian Peninsula of the unbelievers, when he presented all the inhabitants of the peninsula who had not yet accepted Islam with the choice: to emigrate or deny the religion of their ancestors. The industrious and wealthy Christians of Najran, who maintained their Christian faith, emigrated as a result of this decision from the peninsula, to the land of the Euphrates, and ‘U mar also deported the Jews of Khaybar. In this way ‘Umar based that fanatical and intolerant approach that was an essential characteristic of Islam, now extant for over a thousand years, until this day [i.e., written in 1868]. It was this spirit, a severe and steely one, that incorporated scorn and contempt for the non-Muslims, that was characteristic of ‘Umar, and instilled by ‘Umar into Islam; this spirit continued for many centuries, to be Islam’s driving force and vital principle.

The next quote is by Demetrios Constantelos, from Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad:

Despite the “tolerant” nature of the treaty between Umar (634-644) and Patriarch (of Jerusalem) Sophronios, the caliph forbade the employment of Christians in public offices, his soldiers were allowed to break crosses on the heads of Christians during processions and religious litanies, and were permitted, if not encouraged, to tear down newly erected churches and to punish Christians for insignificant reasons.

The theory of early Islamic toleration cannot be sustained even by relying on the constitution or ordinance of Umar I, because this measure forced the Christians to fulfill several self-destructive obligations, such as not to erect any new churches, monasteries, or hermitages, not to repair any ecclesiastical institutions that fell into ruin, nor to rebuild those that were situated in the Muslim quarters of a town. Not only did Umar impose limitations upon the Christians aimed at their ultimate destruction by attrition, but he apparently introduced fanatical elements into Islamic culture which became characteristic of other caliphates after his. The Arab historian al-Baladhuri indicates that Umar deported Christians who refused to apostatize and embrace Islam, and that he obeyed the order of the prophet who advised: “there shall not remain two religions in the land of Arabia.”

During the caliphate of Umar neither cities nor monasteries were spared if they resisted Arabic goals. For example, when the Greek garrison of Gaza refused to submit and convert to Islam, all were put to death. In the year 640, sixty Greek soldiers who refused to apostatize became martyrs, while in the same year that Caesarea, Tripolis and Tyre fell to the Arabs hundreds of thousands of Christians converted to Islam, many, if not most, out of fear. Of course, the early intolerance of the Arabs is understandable in the light of their values as a people who considered the pursuit of knowledge and other refinements of life contemptible, placing above all other values of civilization the art of war. This is confirmed by the writings of Arab historians, who concerned themselves primarily with political and military history, displaying utter disregard for social or other a spects of life.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas J. writes:

I lived in Atlanta while I went to Georgia Tech, very close to that mosque. Atlanta was a soulless city, a vacuum waiting to be filled.

BE writes:

I noticed the word “Islamism” making appearances at VFR in the past couple of days. Have you changed your mind about the inappropriateness of this term?

LA replies:

I’m reporting on the debate the way the people I’m discussing are discussing it. I can’t stick my terms into their mouths.

KE writes from Turkey:

Larry, err … is this … real? When did these things of this size start to appear in the U.S.? Who let them be built?

This time, I’m the one that’s staggered. (Believe me, more than you could possibly be about certain cultural things down here in Istanbul.) And I was hoping maybe … one day … I could get away from it all … by moving to the U.S. Silly me. There’s nowhere to hide.

(I wish I could communicate the shock I’m having at this moment.) Tell me this isn’t true.

LA replies:

I told KE I was surprised at his shock. Surely he knew that were many hundreds, and by now possibly thousands of mosques in the U.S., some of them extremely large and noticeable.

What should we do about this? The most immediate and obvious solution is, we stop allowing mosques to be built here. It would be too hard for us to do this, at least for the present, on traditionalist basis that Muslim mosques simply don’t belong here. But we could do it on the liberal, fairness basis that as long as Muslim countries don’t allow churches to be built, we’re not going to allow mosques to be built. Seems like a no-brainer, and various conservatives have talked up the idea. Again, one does not need to be a traditionalist to embrace it. It is simple fairness and common sense. I wish someone would say to President Bush, “Why are we allowing hundreds of mosques to be built, when Muslim countries outlaw or put extreme impediments in the way of Christianity, and half the Muslim world is a stew of the vilest kind of Jew-hatred?”

LA writes:

A French blog is discussing the Atlanta mosque.

Chris L. writes:

KE shouldn’t be shocked. This has been happening for a long time. Just south of Toledo right by I-75/I-475 is a nice big mosque built in 1980.

The old white dome was replaced with the gold dome just this year. Amusingly, the cone on the right minaret was blown off recently. From what I can tell, this mosque was funded with Saudi money.

One thing Islam does well is get in your face. Building huge, highly visible mosques is one of the ways it does that.

My daughter’s Christian school had considered purchasing land nearby for a new building. I would have proposed building a tower with a cross on top, slightly higher than the minarets and casting a nice shadow across the mosque.

KE writes:

Well, heck, maybe I’m naive, but believe me I’m not faking any shock.

You see, with Europe, I’m aware of many “mescit” (our spelling of “masjid”), but in our usage, mescit indicates a place of prayer such as the basement of an apartment building. For example, here’s a local bit of news relating a library being converted to a mescit. In other words, there’s (supposed to be) nothing architecturally particular about these places, so you can convert them back to any other use the moment you tell the renter to leave.

I am having a shock looking at the pictures you’re showing me. MY GOD.

YOU’VE GOT TO STOP THIS. This is the way these people stealthily take over—by gradualism. They’re creating their routine basis for installing themselves in the West. The next time you try to make a move, say with some city decree—e.g. using “eminent domain”—to tear down any one of these, they’ll raise hell interpreting it as an “insult” to Islam.

You see, the reason why these people justify violence in the name of protecting their (allegedly) “holy” things is the same reason people secularly become statist in politics: because they have no rational and moral basis for their assertions.

Government is a monopoly on the use of force, so if you want to impose your choices on everybody else without bothering with the pesky formality of acquiring their consent, you use political games to turn your design into government action. Same with the people seeking jihad.

Theirs is, after all, a belief, and nobody has any obligation to share those beliefs or respect what they consider holy since it is, by definition, only their belief. But then, they’ll say “but our book says that it is the final word of God.” You’ll ask, “Says who?” They’ll say “Says the book.” “But,” you’ll stutter and try to reason, “how does a document/a messenger prove its/his authenticity by using itself/himself as proof/witness?” Then they’ll claim since it is something they consider holy, and since their “holy” book tells them to fight (i.e. “smite the necks of”) those who disagree, they say you cannot question its authenticity, and that they have a license to kill those who “insult” them by not respecting their beliefs—i.e. by becoming de facto believers of their creed. Now try not to respect our beliefs if you can get your act together.

Nice work if you can get it, right?

Think of the perfect breeding ground this sets for irrationality and feeble-mindedness. And people still think they can reason with them?

Mafia has more honorable ways of exerting itself.

Again, I’m speechless about the mosques in those pictures. You have to take my word for it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 15, 2006 12:30 PM | Send