World’s 100 greatest bloodbaths…but no Jihad

In his book Atrocitology (aka The Big Bad Book of Horrible Things in other editions) Matthew White lists the 100 bloodiest episodes of human history. Although not a professional historian his list, with accompanying information and classifications, has been welcomed by many academics. Steven Pinker referenced it in his The Better Angels of Our Nature to argue that humankind is getting less violent.

Top of White’s list is World War II with 55,000,000 deaths. The 8th century An Lushan Revolt in China comes 4th with 36,000,000. Pinker took into account the relative world population in earlier times by giving mid 20th century equivalents. The weighted death tolls moved the An Lushan Revolt up to 1st place with 429,000,000 while World War II dropped to 9th place.

As another example, White places the Middle East Slave Trade (7th-19th centuries) in 9th place with 19,000,000 deaths and the Atlantic Slave Trade (15th-19th centuries) in 10th place with 18,000,000. After applying Pinker’s weighting the Middle East Slave Trade moved up to 3rd place with 132,000,000 and the Atlantic Slave Trade moved up to 8th place with 83,000,000.

Atrocitology is a fascinating read but there is one thing missing…the real number 1, which doesn’t appear in the top 100 at all! I know, it’s a shock. Let me try and approach the matter obliquely.

Number 30 on White’s list is the Crusades with 3,000,000 deaths. Several campaigns were launched over a period of 200 years yet he classifies them as an analytically and functionally coherent group; not a sequence of distinct events but a succession of waves of new recruits fighting the same long war. That seems a reasonable view because the Crusades were started as a response to a call to war issued in 1095 by a religious leader, Pope Urban II, and they had in common the religiously motivated aim of taking control of a particular piece of real estate, the Holy Land, from their Muslim rulers.

Here is a map of all the battles fought during the Crusades:

In contrast, here is a map of all the battles fought between Muslims (attacking) and Christians and others (defending) in the preceding 450 years (historians consider the Crusades to be a defensive, or counter-offensive, response to this onslaught):

I was shocked to find so many battles fought between Muslims pushing west and then north into Europe, and Christians defending their lands (and then counter-attacking in the early stages of the Reconquista of Spain). So I asked a professor of history who confirmed that they really happened.

Are the campaigns fought over 450 years a sequence of distinct events or a succession of waves of new recruits fighting the same long war? The military expansion of Islam also started as a response to a call to war by a religious leader, Mohammed (speaking for Allah), in the 620’s. The Muslim invasions also had in common the religious aim of taking control of a particular piece of real estate from their non-Muslim rulers. It just happens to be rather larger than that fought over in the Crusades, namely Dar al-Harb (the house of war), all of the world not yet brought within Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam).

It is an unfamiliar comparison to most people simply because of the difference of scale in both time and space, but the principle is the same for both. Over 200 years the different waves of Crusaders took control of (and lost) Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli, Jerusalem and Acre. Over 450 years waves of Muslim armies took control of Jerusalem, Cairo, the whole of North Africa and Spain. If one campaign can be grouped together as the Crusades then I can see no reason why the other should not be grouped together as Jihad.

Look at it this way. Everyone recognises Meteor Crater in Arizona as just that, a meteor crater. That is because we are looking from the outside and it is small enough (1 km across) and well enough defined to afford us a clear view of the whole thing. The citizens of Nordlingen in Germany, on the other hand, had no idea they were living inside a meteor crater until modern science showed that the 24 km wide depression in which Nordlingen sits is just such. The Nordlinger Reis crater is less obvious but it is every bit as much a crater as its more famous cousin.

Likewise, to us the Crusades are clearly a long but coherent military campaign, but Jihad is less obviously so. Firstly, its spatial extent is so much greater, in fact it has no boundary since the world is round. Secondly, its temporal extent is also unclear since it is still continuing today, 1400 years after its inception. On both counts we are living within the crater of Jihad and, unable to see the rim, do not recognise it for what it is.

Defining our terms

Firstly, The Maliki manual of Islamic Law, the Risala, defines the word “jihad” as “a technical term for the Muslim fighting the unbelievers who have no treaty with the intention of elevating the word of Allah or presenting Islam”. The Risala provides a succinct explanation of Jihad in Chapter 30: On Jihad, including important features such as the different kinds of obligation; presenting the triple choice of conversion, paying the jizya, or war; rules of engagement; and the distribution of booty. One thing missing is an explanation of the Dhimma, the agreement of protection (as in protection racket) which entailed humiliating conditions for conquered non-Muslims, including the jizya tax, in return for which they were permitted to a) practise their ancestral faith and b) remain alive.

Secondly, this is how the Encyclopaedia of Islam characterises Jihad:

“The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general…Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam…Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated.”

Thirdly, the Islamic historian Bernard Lewis adds this:

“The basis of the obligation of jihad is the universality of the Muslim revelation. God’s words and God’s message is for all mankind; it is the duty of those who have accepted them to strive (jihada) unceasingly to convert or at least subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of the Islamic state.”

Note the phrase “without limit of time and space”, making clear the scope of Jihad. It could accurately be referred to as “Eternal and Global Jihad” but let’s just stick with “Jihad” for the sake of brevity.

The scriptural basis for Jihad

This is verse 48:28 of the Koran, showing Allah’s frankly supremacist attitude towards other religions:

“He it is Who sent His Messenger with the guidance and the true religion that He may make it prevail over all the religions; and Allah is enough for a witness.”

And this is verse 9:29, which is the clearest expression of what Allah expects his followers to do about it:

“Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

It is the source of the famous triple choice traditionally presented to unfortunate infidels who happened to be next on the map: Convert, Submit and pay the jizya, or War. There are those who maintain that 9:29 and the other Jihad verses, conveniently highlighted in mauve here, refer only to the infidels Mohammed happened to be fighting at the time he produced the revelations. That would be a plausible claim if Mohammed had called a halt to his Jihad at the borders of Arabia before he died. But he didn’t. Mohammed’s last act was to send Jihad international by ordering an attack on Byzantine Syria. His surviving companions, who presumably understood his intentions, immediately set about subduing rebelling tribes in Arabia and then attacked their neighbours to East and West. What we can definitely say is that the Muslim warriors who took Islam to the infidel after Mohammed’s death clearly subscribed to the “universal” rather than the “contextual” view of Jihad.

And remember, they did not issue ultimatums in the name of this or that empire, but always in the name of Islam. As White points out in his chapter Religious Killing, “…if the parties declare religious motives, we should at least consider the possibility that they are telling the truth”.

Two early Jihadists make their motivations clear

Less than 10 years after Mohammed’s death in 632 Al-Nu’man ibn Muqarrin, a representative of the encroaching Muslim army, made the Persian emperor, Yazdegerd III, an offer he should have accepted:

“We are therefore inviting you to embrace our religion. This is a religion which approves of all that is good and rejects all that is evil. If you refuse our invitation, you must pay the poll tax [ie jizya]. This is a bad thing, but not as bad as the alternative; if you refuse, it will be war.”

In the 680’s, after conquering Christians living in North West Africa, the invading general Uqba ibn Nafi reached the Atlantic coast. He rode his horse out onto the beach and into the waves, declaring:

“Great God! If my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of thy holy name, and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other Gods than thee.”

Both the examples above are taken from Robert Spencer’s indispensable The History of Jihad.

What was the extent of Jihad?

Here is the video from which the pictures above were taken, showing Jihad in the West and the Middle East, not just up until the Crusades but throughout 13 centuries, starting with Mohammed’s wars to bring Arabia under Islam and ending with the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.

And there was just as much Jihad carried out to the East, some say to much more deadly effect in India, and all the way to China.

What would the death toll be for all this historic Jihad? Various estimates for the total number of victims of Jihad exist, such as this one on Bill Warner’s site Political Islam:

120,000,000 Africans
60,000,000 Christians
80,000,000 Hindus
10,000,000 Buddhists

For our purposes I think we should discount the figure of 120,000,000 Africans. It comprises slaves taken plus collateral losses in transportation, and dependents left behind to starve. Slavery is definitely connected to Jihad because taking slaves as booty from Jihad raids is sanctioned in Islamic Law, but it cannot count as Jihad itself because the Middle East slave trade was not conducted in order to convert slaves but merely to profit from them.

So that would give us an estimate of 150,000,000 deaths due to Jihad. It is only an estimate, made up from estimates. The fact is that no one really knows the correct figure so suppose, for the sake of argument, we halve that number to 75,000,000. Since the total for World War II stands at 55,000,000 Jihad immediately shoots to number 1. Applying Steven Pinker’s weighting would surely also push Jihad above the 8th century An Lushan Revolt with 36,000,000 (unweighted) deaths since the first great Jihad conquests took place in the 7th and 8th centuries and the invasion of India started around 1000 AD (with less weighted increments ever since).

Not joining up the dots

Why does Matthew White not include a chapter on Jihad or even have an entry for it in the index? Presumably because it never occurred to him that it forms a coherent whole just as much as the Crusades do. Nor does he detect Jihad in particular atrocious episodes of history. For instance he denies the Muslim invasion of India a place in his list because it is “too long and sporadic to count as a single event”. His dismissal is arbitrary. If he understood what Jihad is he would recognise that it doesn’t matter how long and sporadic the long war is. Allah has plenty of time.

Also, although he gives Aurangzeb a chapter, White does not see his wars against the Hindus and Sikhs as Jihad, even though he touches on the humiliating conditions of the Dhimma Aurangzeb imposed on Hindus, and the temples he had destroyed and replaced with mosques. Puzzlingly, White identifies the dividing line in these conflicts as being between Muslims and Hindus but does not classify Aurangzeb’s wars as religious yet in the preceding chapter about Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland he identifies the dividing line as being between the English and the Irish but does classify it as religious.

White is not alone in this unseeing of the thread of Jihad which connects apparently unconnected conflicts in the Old World over 1400 years, and now around the whole world. It is a cultural pathology currently affecting the great majority of people in the West. Until a hundred years ago the West (aka Cristendom in those days) knew Islam as its implacable enemy. Mystifyingly, over the last 50 years or so, a great amnesia has fallen upon the population.

Why did that happen? It is not as though Jihad has disappeared. In fact it has come roaring back after 150 years of relative quiescence under European colonialism (here is a list of 35 recent or current conflicts “fought as Jihad”). We can only speculate on the reasons, but invariably our attention is diverted away from the one thing that the endless litany of atrocities on our streets share in common. Academics tell us that Muslims are attacking us because of poverty or Western foreign policy or othering or ontological insecurity or a host of other things. A current favourite is mental illness which is routinely diagnosed in the mainstream media immediately after a devout Muslim stabs a policeman, shouting “Allahu akbar”.

What would happen if Matthew White accepted the reality of Jihad “without limit of time or space”? That would put him in opposition to the message, promoted by governments and spread by the mainstream media, that there is no such thing as global Jihad, only lone wolves, criminals and “extremists” adhering to an aberrant interpretation of Islam. I suspect that in the eyes of establishment academics he would immediately be demoted from “amateur historian” to “dissident historian” and the calls would dry up. They have careers to protect and, given the spirit of the age, who would wish to be seen associating with “the vilest of creatures”, Islamophobes? He would also likely attract the attention of CAIR, the lawfare specialists who try to kid the world that “jihad” means making new friends and going to the gym. And of course there are those who take this kind of thing personally…

Even putting those disincentives aside, I do not expect that he will accept my argument regarding Jihad and rearrange his list. Nevertheless I will ask him and report back if he replies [he didn’t].

At the moment it is only dissident scholars – Robert Spencer, Bill Warner, Ibn Warraq, Andrew Bostom, Mark Durie etc – who point out the obvious. Wouldn’t it be a great step forward if mainstream scholars started to investigate 1400 years of correlation to see if there might be some causation there too? Estimates of the death toll of Jihad might be firmed up and find a respectable place in academia alongside those for the victims of the Holocaust, Mao, Stalin etc.

Danusha Goska has actually proposed a museum of the victims of Jihad, along the lines of the Holocaust Museum and similar. It would not only commemorate the dead but act as a centre for academic research for the purpose of educating the general public, academics, journalists and our purblind leaders. Why hasn’t this been done already? I expect for the same reason that Matthew White hasn’t included Jihad in his list, because so very few people have joined up the dots and realised what they spell.

The Cairo Declaration

There are many ways to differentiate between the two sides currently playing out the Clash of Civilisations which has been going on for 1400 years but which has taken on new and more insidious forms in recent times.

One very telling one is to compare the Western and Islamic attitudes to human rights, as represented by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its Islamic equivalent the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam which was produced by the OIC (Organisation of the Islamic Conference since renamed the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation).

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I am sure that few Westerners would argue with the selection of rights presented in the UDHR. Nor would I. Most of them should apply in any society which calls itself civilised.

Nevertheless I have to admit to feeling more than a little queasy about them because I do not recognise specifically human rights as rights at all, but merely wishes disguised by impressive sounding words like “fundamental” and “inalienable”. It has always seemed to me that most religions consist of the suggestion that people could be a bit nicer to each other, wrapped up in mumbo jumbo to to hide its obviousness. So it is with the modern secular religion of human rights.

As far as I can see, all rights are conferred on humans by other humans whether formally as in legal rights or informally as in customary rights. The kind which philosophers claim are inherent in humans simply by dint of being human are, I’m sorry to say, only imaginary rights. That’s the trouble with letting philosophers get involved with things like this, they tend to confuse their concepts with actual things – it’s called reification.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is Jeremy Bentham letting rip about Human Rights’ not too distant ancestor Natural Rights:

“Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible [in our modern terms “inalienable”] rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts.”

As an example, Article 26 states that everyone has the right to education. Well, no they don’t unless someone else – their parents, their tribe or the state – is prepared to provide it. Likewise with Article 24 which states that everyone has the right to paid holidays.

The idea that humans pop into the world with a list of entitlements which were only discovered 200 years ago after 200,000 years of going unnoticed is….well, see above.

There are problems with believing in things which do not exist. For one thing they can get out of hand. The number of stripes on a zebra are limited by reality. The number of stripes on a unicorn are limited only by the imagination of the believer in unicorns. Thus rapists can now avoid deportation because of their human right to a family life or because of their human right not to be subjected to human rights deficiencies in their homeland.

All that explains why I would feel more comfortable if it was called the Universal Declaration of Human Aspirations. That said, it was clearly written by people with their hearts in the right place. Three things we can say about it are that it is:

1) Universal in that it is intended to apply to every human being regardless of race, sex, religion etc.

2) Benign in its intentions.

3) Honest since (putting aside the well meaning self-deception about the nature of rights) there is no intent to deceive the reader with hidden or deceptive content.

Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam

Firstly, we notice that the title does not include the word “Universal”. That is quite accurate since in Islam different categories of humans qualify for markedly different rights. However it does use the phrase “in Islam” which implies that the conception of human rights presented here applies only within Islam, ie only to Muslims, with no implications for non-Muslims. We will see that this is not the case.

Secondly, Article 24, as shown in the picture above, is of crucial significance because it underlies the whole Declaration:

“All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah.”

We should bear this in mind when examining selected excerpts from the Declaration. The excerpts are in italics with my highlights in bold like this, followed by comments in standard text.

PREAMBLE

“Reaffirming the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah which Allah made as the best community….”

This comes from Koran 3:110:
“Ye are the best community sent forth unto mankind….”

The authors of the Declaration were too polite to include the matching verse regarding unbelievers (8:55):
“The vilest of moving creatures with Allah are those who disbelieve….”

“Believing that fundamental rights and freedoms according to Islam are an integral part of the Islamic religion and that no one shall have the right as a matter of principle to abolish them either in whole or in part or to violate or ignore them in as much as they are binding divine commands….”

This prepares us for the reality that the Cairo Declaration is more about proscriptions than rights. Note that this also applies to non-Muslims since the crucial section starts “no one shall have the right….” rather than “no Muslim shall have the right….”.

ARTICLE 1

“All human beings form one family whose members are united by their subordination to Allah….”

One thing the Cairo Declaration is not is universal. Rights for Muslims, non-Muslims, men and women are markedly different. The only universality in the Declaration is that which we find here in Article 1, that of universal subordination to Allah. That does not mean just Muslims but Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians, Atheists…and you too, Kafir. And it’s not optional.

“All men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities,
without any discrimination on the basis of race, colour, language, belief, sex, religion, political affiliation, social status or other considerations.”

Did the authors of the Declaration think no one would notice these bare faced lies?

Islam was founded on discrimination based on religion….Muslim good, infidel bad. Being a non-Muslim in Medina around 630 AD was a very bad idea, as it still is in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc today.

The same goes for discrimination based on sex….unless “basic human dignity” is characterised by near total domination by father then husband, and lesser legal rights over property, marriage, divorce, children, her own body and testimony in court.

ARTICLE 5

“Men and women have the right to marriage, and no restrictions stemming from race, colour or nationality shall prevent them from exercising this right.”

That’s nice but where is “religion” in that list? Nowhere, because in Islamic law (effectively equivalent to Sharia) Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women whereas Muslim women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim men. Since the children in Muslim families have always automatically taken the religion of the father the Muslim population in any mixed society will always grow at the expense of the non-Muslim population.

ARTICLE 6

“Woman is equal to man in human dignity….”

See above.

ARTICLE 9

“The State shall ensure the availability of ways and means to acquire education and shall guarantee its diversity in the interest of the society so as to enable man to be acquainted with the religion of Islam.”

Sounds fine to start with doesn’t it, until it becomes clear what the point of the education is. And, of course, it is not just Muslims who are to become acquainted with Islam but “man”. Islam has always been a proselytising religion….by fair means (dawah) or foul (jihad).

ARTICLE 10

“Islam is the religion of true unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of pressure on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to force him to change his religion to another religion or to atheism.”

This of course means to change his Muslim religion to another religion or atheism.

ARTICLE 11

“Human beings are born free, and no one has the right to enslave, humiliate, oppress or exploit them, and there can be no subjugation but to Allah the Almighty.”

Human beings are of course not born free into Islam. They are immediately slaves of Allah. That’s how he refers to his followers throughout the Koran. The popular name “Abdul” means “slave of Allah”. All that is recognised in the phrase “no subjugation but to Allah the Almighty”. The problem comes when humans take on subjugating duties on his behalf. Just as an example, what is likely to happen when a Muslim decides to reject Allah?

Come to think of it, aren’t the authors of the Declaration accusing Mohammed of being a human rights abuser? He certainly enslaved the women and children of the Banu Qurayza tribe (after executing the men) and the protection racket he instituted, known as jizyah, was specifically intended to humiliate, oppress and exploit subjugated non-Muslims:

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” (Koran 9:29)

ARTICLE 19

“All individuals are equal before the law, without distinction between the ruler and the ruled.”

But plenty of distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims and between men and women.

“There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shari’ah.”

This is interesting, and shows the predominance in the OIC of Saudi Arabia which really does adhere to Article 19. Only they and a few other countries do so. The majority of Muslim countries retained large parts of the European Colonists’ legal systems and yet they endorsed the Declaration. Can it be that all the 45 OIC signatory countries have a hankering for the old ways?

Article 22

“Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari’ah.”

In other words everyone is free to express any opinion as long as it does not criticise Allah, Mohammed or Islam. And remember the Sharia applies to you too.

“Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari’ah.”

But you see, jihad is good according to Sharia and freedom of conscience is wrong.

In any case, this is a toned down version of the Sharia based duty to “command the right and forbid the wrong” which goes a good deal further than mere advocating and warning. According to The Reliance of the Traveller, a handy guide to Islamic Law, sanctions against wrong-doing (which can be applied vigilante style) range from “explaining” to “force of arms”.

“Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical Values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith.”

As with so many of the above articles this is not a right but a proscription. That’s Islam for you but, you know what, the same authoritarian mindset can be found in our own Western controllers of information today who shadow ban and close the accounts of offenders against prevailing left/liberal orthodoxies. Just change a few words….

“Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may violate politically correct sanctities and the dignity of favoured identity groups, undermine globalist Values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm the Left’s cultural dominance or weaken the faith of the indoctrinated.”

ARTICLE 24

“All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah.”

Here we come to the nub of the matter. Throughout the Declaration we routinely find curtailments of what Westerners would regard as rights, as though the UDHR has been laid on the Procrustean bed of Sharia and found to be too long, which means too generous, too fair, too free. What the Cairo Declaration presents is not Human Rights at all but Sharia Rights – miserable, hobbling facsimiles of the originals.

Bad enough for those primarily affected, Muslims, but non-Muslims should be aware that Sharia has a place for them too, and it’s not a good place. In Sharia there is only one true religion and it is entitled to dominate all the others, which in effect means Muslims dominating infidels. Saps in the West cannot imagine that this is the reality of Islam but if they dared to examine how non-Muslims are treated in Muslim majority countries around the world they would understand. As it is, with demographic changes in the West showing no sign of doing anything but accelerating, they will soon enough have the chance to experience it for themselves.

ARTICLE 25

“The Islamic Shari’ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.”

Islamic Sharia is invoked throughout the Declaration so you would need to know what it consists of before you can understand what the Declaration means. No source for the Islamic Sharia is referenced in the Declaration so anyone accepting it is buying a pig in a poke.

It is extraordinarily difficult to get a straight answer to the question “Where can I find the Sharia?” from any imam. It appears to consist in a massive, scattered collection of fatwas and legal rulings. Fortunately there are a few manuals of Islamic Law which have been translated into English and give the enquiring infidel a key to the Declaration. They all have things to say about relations between Muslims and non-Muslims which give the lie to many claims made in the Declaration, for instance the statement in Article 1 that:

“All men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities, without any discrimination on the basis of race, colour, language, belief, sex, religion…”

This is what the Hanafi manual of Islamic Law, the Hedaya (Book 9 p.140) has to say about discrimination against non-Muslims on the basis of religion:

“War must be carried on against the infidels, at all times, by some party of the Mussulmans. The sacred injunction concerning war is sufficiently observed when it is carried on by any one party or tribe of the Mussulmans; and it is then no longer of any force with respect to the rest. It is established as a divine ordinance, by the word of God, who has said, in the Koran ‘SLAY THE INFIDELS’; and also by a saying of the prophet, ‘war is permanently established until the day of judgment’.”

So how does the Cairo Declaration shape up on the 3 criteria above? It is:

1) Universal regarding the subordination of all humans to Allah but not so much for humans themselves.

2) Benign for Muslim males at least. Again not so much for anyone else.

3) Honest about the fact that that Islamic human rights equals Sharia but dishonest in kidding us about equal respect for non-Muslims and women, and dishonest in hiding from the reader what Sharia actually entails.

While Muslims routinely play Western human rights for all they are worth in that branch of jihad known as “lawfare”, the OIC have made it clear here what human rights we can expect when they are in a position to dictate them. We should be grateful to them at least for the warning.

The word “Jihad” in the Koran

After Linda Sarsour called for a jihad against Donald Trump there naturally followed the usual bunfight about what the word actually means. Some people thought she meant “smiting his neck and every fingertip” as, of course, she hoped they would so that she could then bring out the hadith about the best jihad being “speaking truth to a tyrant” and claim to be misrepresented by Islamophobes.

We know that ”jihad” literally means “strive” or “struggle” but how is it actually used in the Koran? In context does it mean “holy war” or “spiritual struggle” or both?

The Qur’anic Studies site identifies all the occurrences of the word in the Koran from the triconsonantal root “j-h-d” in the Arabic transliteration. It tells us that derivatives of the word “jihad” occur in 30 verses of the Koran; 6 of them in Meccan suras and 24 in Medinan suras.

In a separate exercise conducted some years ago, 160 or so verses were identified as referring directly to Mohammed’s wars against non-Muslims. I checked the 30 “j-h-d” verses against the 160 war verses (highlighted in mauve in this presentation of the Koran which is in turn based on this list).

Here are the 30 “j-h-d” verses, presented in chronological order, with matching verses marked with “**WAR**” (Shakir translation).

Meccan Verses

[25.52] So do not follow the unbelievers, and strive against them a mighty striving with it.

[31:15] If they strive to make you set up any partners besides Me, then do not obey them. But continue to treat them amicably in this world. You shall follow only the path of those who have sought Me. Ultimately, you all return to Me, then I will inform you of everything you have done.

**WAR** [16.110] Yet surely your Lord, with respect to those who fly after they are persecuted, then they struggle hard and are patient, most surely your Lord after that is Forgiving, Merciful.

[29.6] And whoever strives hard, he strives only for his own soul; most surely Allah is Self-sufficient, above (need of) the worlds.
[29:8] And We instructed man to be good to his parents. But if they strive to make you set up partners with Me, then do not obey them. To Me are all your destinies, and I will inform you of what you used to do.
[29.69] And (as for) those who strive hard for Us, We will most certainly guide them in Our ways; and Allah is most surely with the doers of good.

Medinan Verses

**WAR** [2.218] Surely those who believed and those who fled (their home) and strove hard in the way of Allah these hope for the mercy of Allah and Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

**WAR** [8.72] Surely those who believed and fled (their homes) and struggled hard in Allah’s way with their property and their souls, and those who gave shelter and helped– these are guardians of each other; and (as for) those who believed and did not fly, not yours is their guardianship until they fly; and if they seek aid from you in the matter of religion, aid is incumbent on you except against a people between whom and you there is a treaty, and Allah sees what you do.
**WAR** [8.74] And (as for) those who believed and fled and struggled hard in Allah’s way, and those who gave shelter and helped, these are the believers truly; they shall have forgiveness and honorable provision.
**WAR** [8.75] And (as for) those who believed afterwards and fled and struggled hard along with you, they are of you; and the possessors of relationships are nearer to each other in the ordinance of Allah; surely Allah knows all things.

**WAR** [3.142] Do you think that you will enter the garden while Allah has not yet known those who strive hard from among you, and (He has not) known the patient.

[60.1] O you who believe! do not take My enemy and your enemy for friends: would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the truth, driving out the Apostle and yourselves because you believe in Allah, your Lord? If you go forth struggling hard in My path and seeking My pleasure, would you manifest love to them? And I know what you conceal and what you manifest; and whoever of you does this, he indeed has gone astray from the straight path.

**WAR** [4.95] The holders back from among the believers, not having any injury, and those who strive hard in Allah’s way with their property and their persons are not equal; Allah has made the strivers with their property and their persons to excel the holders back a (high) degree, and to each (class) Allah has promised good; and Allah shall grant to the strivers above the holders back a mighty reward:

**WAR** [47:31] And We will test you until We know those who strive among you and those who are patient. And We will bring out your qualities.

**WAR** [22.78] And strive hard in (the way of) Allah, (such) a striving a is due to Him; He has chosen you and has not laid upon you an hardship in religion; the faith of your father Ibrahim; He named you Muslims before and in this, that the Apostle may be a bearer of witness to you, and you may be bearers of witness to the people; therefore keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate and hold fast by Allah; He is your Guardian; how excellent the Guardian and how excellent the Helper!

**WAR** [49.15] The believers are only those who believe in Allah and His Apostle then they doubt not and struggle hard with their wealth and their lives in the way of Allah; they are the truthful ones.

**WAR** [66.9] O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be hard against them; and their abode is hell; and evil is the resort.

**WAR** [61.11] You shall believe in Allah and His Apostle, and struggle hard in Allah’s way with your property and your lives; that is better for you, did you but know!

**WAR** [5.35] O you who believe! be careful of (your duty to) Allah and seek means of nearness to Him and strive hard in His way that you may be successful.
[5.54] O you who believe! whoever from among you turns back from his religion, then Allah will bring a people, He shall love them and they shall love Him, lowly before the believers, mighty against the unbelievers, they shall strive hard in Allah’s way and shall not fear the censure of any censurer; this is Allah’s Face, He gives it to whom He pleases, and Allah is Ample-giving, Knowing.

**WAR** [9.16] What! do you think that you will be left alone while Allah has not yet known those of you who have struggled hard and have not taken any one as an adherent besides Allah and His Apostle and the believers; and Allah is aware of what you do.
**WAR** [9.19] What! do you make (one who undertakes) the giving of drink to the pilgrims and the guarding of the Sacred Mosque like him who believes in Allah and the latter day and strives hard in Allah’s way? They are not equal with Allah; and Allah does not guide the unjust people.
**WAR** [9.20] Those who believed and fled (their homes), and strove hard in Allah’s way with their property and their souls, are much higher in rank with Allah; and those are they who are the achievers (of their objects).
**WAR** [9.24] Say: If your fathers and your sons and your brethren and your mates and your kinsfolk and property which you have acquired, and the slackness of trade which you fear and dwellings which you like, are dearer to you than Allah and His Apostle and striving in His way, then wait till Allah brings about His command: and Allah does not guide the transgressing people.
**WAR** [9.41] Go forth light and heavy, and strive hard in Allah’s way with your property and your persons; this is better for you, if you know.
**WAR** [9.44] They do not ask leave of you who believe in Allah and the latter day (to stay away) from striving hard with their property and their persons, and Allah knows those who guard (against evil).
**WAR** [9.73] O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.
**WAR** [9.81] Those who were left behind were glad on account of their sitting behind Allah’s Apostle and they were averse from striving in Allah’s way with their property and their persons, and said: Do not go forth in the heat. Say: The fire of hell is much severe in heat. Would that they understood (it).
**WAR** [9.86] And whenever a chapter is revealed, saying: Believe in Allah and strive hard along with His Apostle, those having ampleness of means ask permission of you and say: Leave us (behind), that we may be with those who sit.
**WAR** [9.88] But the Apostle and those who believe with him strive hard with their property and their persons; and these it is who shall have the good things and these it is who shall be successful.

So, in the Meccan suras 1 out of the 6 “j-h-d” verses appears among the war verses while in the Medinan suras 22 out of the 24 “j-h-d” verses do so. Therefore we can say there is an overwhelming correlation between the word “jihad” and warfare against the unbelievers in the Medinan suras. This will hardly surprise anyone who knows that Mohammed’s career consisted of two parts, his time in Mecca during which any violence was the prerogative of Allah and his time in Medina where he became a warlord and exercised violence on Allah’s behalf.

Also, none of the remaining 7 “j-h-d” verses is about spiritual struggle against one’s baser nature, ie the so-called Greater Jihad. Anyone wishing to promote that idea has to go a long way from the Koran to find any support for it. It is not even to be found in the six sahih (ie authentic) collections of hadiths but rests solely on one hadith from a later collection, dismissed by mediaeval Islamic scholars as weak or fabricated.

Another point worth making is that no less than 10 of the verses we are talking about occur in the last substantive sura, the ferocious sura 9. It seems that Mohammed became more warlike with age, rather than less. To my mind this gives jihadis a stronger claim to be following the example of Mohammed than the elusive moderates we hear so much of but who disappear like the mist whenever a demonstration against ISIS is organised or the government requests help in tackling “extremism”.

Conclusion: Anyone wishing to use Islamic scripture, in particular the Koran, to claim a peaceful interpretation of jihad is indeed rowing against a very strong tide. Unless they’re just kidding us, of course.

The Reliance of the Traveller

Umdat al-Salik or the Reliance of the Traveller is the classical manual of Islamic Law (also referred to as Sacred Law or Sharia Law) of the Shafi’i school of Islamic Jurisprudence (fiqh). It was compiled in the mid 14th century by Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri. The 1991 translation by the American convert Nuh Ha Mim Keller has been certified by al-Azhar University in Cairo as “conforming to the faith and practice of the orthodox Sunni Community”.

(See HERE for details of online availability)

It is worth noting, to avoid confusion, that although Keller’s translation is called the “Reliance of the Traveller” the mediaeval text by al-Misri only constitutes books E to O and even then section o25, The Caliphate, was added by Keller. The other books consist of various other material including texts of fiqh by other authors and commentary by Keller.

Sections of the text are précised below but direct quotes are marked as such. The translater’s and other commentators’ additions are mostly left unidentified in order to avoid confusing clutter. [My comments look like this].

Here is a selection of items likely to be of particular interest to non-Muslims (and women, children, apostates, thieves, drinkers, prisoners of war, dog lovers, artists, musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, scientists, transvestites, homosexuals and fornicators).

Book E – Purification  

e.4.3 “Circumcision is obligatory for both men and women. For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (bazr) of the clitoris (not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert). (Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna [ie exemplary], while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband).”
[however, the linguist and Anglican pastor Mark Durie claims that “bazr” does indeed mean the clitoris]

Going to the lavatory
e9.1 “It is recommended when one intends to use the lavatory:”
(6) “to enter with the left foot first and depart with the right foot first”

e14.0 FILTH (NAJASA)
e14.7 Something that becomes impure by contact with something from dogs or swine does not become pure except by being washed seven times, one of which (recommended not to be the last) must be with purifying earth mixed with purifying water,

Book F – The Prayer (Salat)  

f1.3 Someone raised among Muslims who denies the obligatoriness of the prayer, zakat, fasting Ramadan, the pilgrimage, or the unlawfulness of wine and adultery, or denies something else upon which there is scholarly consensus thereby becomes an unbeliever (kafir) and is executed for his unbelief.

f1.4 A Muslim who holds the prayer to be obligatory but through lack of concern neglects to perform it until its proper time is over has not committed unbelief. Rather, he is executed, washed, prayed over, and buried in the Muslims’ Cemetery.

Book G – The Funeral Prayer  

g4.20 “It is unlawful to wash the body of a martyr or perform the funeral prayer over him. A martyr (shahid) means someone who died in battle with non-Muslims. It is recommended that war gear be removed from the body and it is best to bury the martyr in the rest of his bloodstained clothes since it is the effect of worship.”
[thus allowing the Imams who refused to pray over the London Bridge jihadis’ bodies to fool the kuffar, details HERE].

Book H – Zakat  

h8.7 “It is obligatory to distribute one’s zakat [mandatory charitable giving] among eight categories of recipients”:
h8.8-18 The poor, people short of money, those who collect and distribute zakat, “those whose hearts are to be reconciled” [ie of wavering faith], slaves purchasing their freedom, those in debt, “those fighting for Allah” and “the traveller in need of money”.

h8.24 “It is not permissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim”.

Book K – Trade  

k32.0 Manumission [ie the freeing of slaves]
[The translater leaves this section about slavery untranslated because “the issue is no longer current”. That strongly implies then that he considers the rest of the contents of the book to be still current.]

Book M – Marriage  

Guardians Who May Marry A Virgin To A Man Without Her Consent
m3.13 (2) Whenever the bride is a virgin, the father or father’s father may marry her to someone without her permission, though it is recommended to ask her permission if she has reached puberty. A virgin’s silence is considered as permission.

Book N – Divorce  

n9.2 A waiting period [to determine pregnancy or otherwise] is obligatory for a woman divorced after intercourse, whether the husband and wife are prepubescent, have reached puberty, or one has and the other has not.
[therefore intercourse with prepubescent girls is quite lawful]

Book O – Justice  

Who Is Subject To Retaliation For Injurious Crimes
o1.2 The following are not subject to retaliation:
(2) “a Muslim for killing a non-Muslim”
(3) a dhimmi for killing an apostate
(4) a parent for killing their child or grandchild
[thereby excusing honour killings of girls who have become too westernised]

Indemnity (Diya)
o4.9 The indemnity for an accidental death of a woman is half that for a man. For a Jew or Christian it is one third, and for a Zoroastrian one fifteenth, of that for a Muslim.

Apostasy From Islam (Ridda)
o8.1 “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”.

Acts That Entail Leaving Islam:
o8.7 (1) “to prostrate to an idol”
(2) “to intend to commit unbelief, even if in the future”
(4) “to revile Allah or his Messenger”.
(6) “to be sarcastic about Allah’s name”
(7) to deny any verse of the Koran or to add any to it
(11) to accuse a Muslim of unbelief [ie takfir] incorrectly
[a serious matter because one of the parties will necessarily be considered an apostate]
(14) “to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslims is part of Islam”
(17) “to believe that things in themselves or their own nature have any causal influence independent of the will of Allah”
[perhaps explaining the dearth of great Muslim scientists, despite the myth of the Golden Age]
(18) “to deny the existence of angels or jinn, or the heavens”
(19) “to be sarcastic about any ruling of the Sacred Law”
[ie anything in the Reliance]
(20) “to deny that Allah intended the Prophet’s message to be the religion followed by the entire world”
[thereby mandating Islamic supremacism].

Jihad
o9.0 “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs).”
[NB section o9.0 was not in the original Reliance but comes from a 19th century commentary by Umar Barakat added by the translater. The idea of “the greater jihad” comes solely from a particular hadith which is considered weak or fabricated.]

The Obligatory Character Of Jihad
o9.1 “Jihad is a communal obligation. When enough people perform it to successfully accomplish it, it is no longer obligatory upon others.”
“He who provides the equipment for a soldier in jihad has himself performed jihad.”

The Objectives Of Jihad
o9.8 “The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians until they become Muslim or else pay the non Muslim poll tax [ie jizya].”

o9.9 “The caliph fights all other peoples until they become Muslim.”
[ie they have no escape by paying the jizya since they are not “people of the book”]

The Rules Of Warfare
o9.13 “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.”

o9.14 When an adult male is taken captive the caliph decides between the prisoner’s death, slavery, release or ransoming.

Truces
o9.16 Umar Barakat explains that truces are only ever temporary, for the benefit of the Muslim war effort, since it is “a matter of the gravest consequence because it entails the non-performance of jihad”.

Non-Muslim Subjects Of The Islamic State (Ahl Al Dhimma)
o11.1 An agreement of protection is made with People of the Book.

o11.2 The 20th century commentator, Abd al-Wakil Durubi, tells us that idol worshippers and followers of “cults which have appeared since Islam” such as Sikhs, Baha’is, Mormons, Qadiani [ie Ahmadis] do not qualify as People of the Book.

o11.3 Dhimmis [ie protected people (in a state of dhimmitude)] must follow the rules of Islam and pay a poll tax (jizya).

o11.5 The rules include:
(2) wearing distinctive dress
(4) keeping to the side of the street
(5) not building as high as Muslim buildings
(6) not openly displaying signs of their religions
(7) not building new churches.

o11.10 The agreement is also violated (if the state has stipulated any of the following conditions) when a non-Muslim:
(1) commits adultery with or marries a Muslim woman
(3) leads a Muslim away from Islam
(5) mentions something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet or Islam
[ie what is apostasy for a Muslim is blasphemy for a Non-Muslim]

o11.11 When a dhimmi violates the agreement the caliph chooses between the same four options for prisoners of war detailed in o9.14, death, slavery, release or ransoming.

The Penalty For Fornication Or Sodomy
o12.2 The penalty for a person considered able to remain chaste (ie validly married) is stoning to death. The penalty for a person not considered able to remain chaste (including someone who is prepubescent at the time of marital intercourse) is scourging with 100 stripes and banishment for a year.
[again we see that intercourse with a pre-pubescent girl is lawful]

o12.6 “A pregnant woman is not stoned until she gives birth and the child can suffice with the milk of another”.

The Penalty For Theft
o14.1 A person’s right hand is amputated. If a person steals again his left foot is amputated, a third time the left hand is amputated, a fourth time the right foot is amputated.

The Penalty For Highway Robbery
o15.0 The caliph is obliged to summon whoever uses a weapon and makes people afraid to use the road…If he steals the equivalent of 1.058 grams of gold [ie a quarter of a dinar] both his right hand and left foot are amputated.
[this is pretty rich considering Mohammed began his career in Medina as a caravan raider]

The Penalty For Drinking
o16.3 “The penalty for drinking is to be scourged forty stripes with hands, sandals, and ends of clothes. It may be administered with a whip, but if the offender dies, an indemnity is due for his death”.

Witnessing And Testifying
o24.9 “If testimony concerns fornication or sodomy then it requires four male witnesses (who testify, in the case of fornication, that they have seen the offender insert the head of his penis into her vagina)”.

o24.10 “If testimony concerns things which men do not typically see (but women do), such as childbirth, then it is sufficient to have two male witnesses, a man and two women, or four women”.

The Caliphate
o25.4 The Caliphate may be legally effected by three means:
(1) “by an oath of fealty”
(2) “by the caliph appointing a successor”
(3) “through seizure of power by an individual possessing the qualities of a caliph”.

o25.5 It is obligatory to obey the commands of the caliph even if he is unjust because of the hadith “Hear and obey, even if the ruler placed over you is an Ethiopian slave with amputated extremities”.

[NB The following sections are not from the original Reliance but taken from elsewhere in the Islamic tradition and added by the translater].

Book P – Enormities  

Masculine Women And Effeminate Men
p28.1 “The Prophet said”:
(1) “Men are already destroyed when they obey women”
[didn’t Mohammed get his first break working for a woman, Khadija his future wife?]
(2) “The Prophet cursed effeminate men and masculine women”
(3) “The Prophet cursed men who wear women’s clothing and women who wear men’s”.

Making Pictures
p44.1 “The Prophet said”:
(1) “Every maker of pictures will go to the fire, where a being will be set upon him for every picture he made, to torment him in hell”.

Book Q – Commanding The Right And Forbidding The Wrong  

q0.2 “Commanding the right and forbidding the wrong is the most important fundamental of the religion…If it were folded up and put away, religion itself would vanish, dissolution appear, and whole lands come to ruin”.

q2.3 “Some scholars stipulate that the person delivering the censure must have permission to do so from the caliph…This is untrue, for the Koranic verses and hadiths all indicate that whoever sees something wrong and does nothing has sinned”.
[thereby sanctioning vigilantism]

q5.0 The Act Of Censuring
q5.1 The censure has various degrees of severity:
q5.3 Explaining That Something Is Wrong
q5.4 Forbidding The Act Verbally
q5.5 Censuring With Harsh Words
q5.6 Righting The Wrong By Hand “such as by breaking musical instruments”
q5.7 Intimidation by making realistic threats
q5.8 Assault “to directly hit or kick the person”
q5.9 Force of arms “when one is unable to censure the act by oneself and requires the armed assistance of others”.

Book R – Holding One’s Tongue  

Slander
r2.2 “Slander means to mention anything concerning a person that he would dislike”.
[ie truth is no defence]

Permissable Lying
r8.2 “Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory”.
[What would be an example of an obligatory goal? See “The Obligatory Character Of Jihad”, section o9.1 above.]

Joking
r19.2 “Excessive joking is blameworthy and forbidden, since it eliminates one’s dignity and reserve…It also causes immoderate laughter, which kills the heart”.

Music, Song and Dance
r40.1 “The Prophet said”:
(2) “On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress”

r40.2 “It is unlawful to use musical instruments – such as those which drinkers are known for, like the mandolin, lute, cymbals, and flute – or to listen to them”

r40.4 “It is not prohibited to dance…unless it is languid, like the movements of the effeminate”.

Book W – Notes And Appendices  

Women’s Obligatory Clothing
w23.1 “The nakedness of a woman that she is forbidden to reveal differs in the Shafi’i school according to different circumstances. In the privacy of the home, her nakedness is that which is between the navel and knees. In the prayer it means everything besides the face and hands. And when outside the home on the street, it refers to the entire body”.

Things That Are Not Inconsistent With The Acceptance Of Fate
w59.2 “And this clarifies the Koranic verses and hadiths about hatred for the sake of Allah and love for the sake of Allah, being unyielding towards the unbelievers, hard against them, and detesting them, while accepting the destiny of Allah Most High insofar as it is the decree of Allah Mighty and Majestic”.
[hence the doctrine of Al Wala’ Wal Bara’ (Love and Hate for Allah’s Sake)]

                                                       *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Moral Sickness

Suppose you found this book in the street, never having heard of Islam. I suggest you would likely be repulsed by the cruelty and viciousness displayed toward so many categories of people, including yourself as a non-Muslim.

What kind of book mandates controlling female sexuality by mutilating girls’ genitals or death for anyone criticising the religion the book represents, of which it is in fact a distillation? Obviously a morally sick one, you might think, with the same going for those who wrote it, the man who inspired it and the people who revere it.

But you would be wrong, or at least taking it out of context which is just as bad.

That context is that the religion it represents is actually a “religion of peace” and “a great historic faith which has brought spiritual nourishment to millions”. We know because our political leaders, versed in theology as they are, tell us so.

Not only that but if you went around telling people what you thought, or put it on Facebook, you would likely get a visit from the boys in blue, if not the boys with bushy beards who don’t take kindly to the kafir mentioning “something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet or Islam” (see section o11.10 (5) above).

Best just put the thought away. No one wants trouble, do they?

Cult Status

Apart form the obvious cruelty, bigotry and hatred on display, what do the contents of the Reliance tell us about Islam itself? Surely the main response a cursory reading must evoke is incredulity at the minute interest taken in Mohammed’s every word and deed, however slight. Why would clever men spend so much time and effort working out the often arbitrary ramifications of what one man said and did as opposed to what is self-evidently reasonable, decent and fair? I know Mohammed was meant to be an example to all men but then so was Jesus and the gospels don’t go into excruciating detail about his toilet habits (see section e9 if you have a strong stomach).

Rational minds like yours and mine struggle to comprehend the downright obsessive loopiness at the heart of the Religion of Peace. Perhaps it should rather be called the “OCD Religion” or the “Religion of Control”. Yes, that’s more like it, control runs through Islam like “Brighton” through a stick of rock. After all, Allah refers to his followers not as his children or his followers but as his slaves and demands from them not reasoned acceptance but unquestioning submission.

We have a word for religions which seek to control every last detail of the believers’ lives with threats of violence for non-compliance, that word being “cult”. Islam is indeed surely a cult, just the biggest in history. HERE Ali Sina details the characteristics which show beyond doubt what Islam really is. Once seen, it is impossible to view Islam in the same light again. Pity the poor cult members unable to escape Mohammed’s malignant mind control, and their victims over 1400 years.

Some general and historical background

We are often told that Sharia Law varies greatly from place to place and that ISIS or Saudi Arabia practice extreme versions. This is not true. Muslim legal codes vary not in the kind but only in the amount of Sharia Law they include, with most countries managing to avoid the worst of the barbaric punishments which authentically come from the practices of Mohammed.

In his introduction the translater writes “The four Sunni schools of Islamic law, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali, are identical in approximately 75 percent of their legal conclusions”. Differences are mostly procedural or a matter of degree. As a comparison here is the 18th century translation of the Hanafi equivalent of the Reliance, the Hedaya, showing a similarly unambiguous attitude to the infidel (p 154):

“War must be carried on against the infidels, at all times, by some party of the Mussulmans. The sacred injunction concerning war is sufficiently observed when it is carried on by any one party or tribe of the Mussulmans; and it is then no longer of any force with respect to the rest. It is established as a divine ordinance, by the word of God, who has said, in the Koran ‘SLAY THE INFIDELS’; and also by a saying of the prophet, ‘war is permanently established until the day of judgment”.

What happened between the time when the manuals of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and the Shia equivalent, provided the bedrock of the law for all Muslims, and the situation today in which Islamic Law is applied patchily throughout the Muslim world? The answer, of course, is not an Islamic Reformation or Enlightenment but only European colonisation. For instance, the translation of the Hedaya was commissioned by the East India Company, not out of scholarly curiosity but as part of their campaign to wrest legal control from the local qadis (religious judges).

The Hedaya fed into the creation of the hybrid system of Anglo-Muhammadan Law in which Sharia family law was left largely untouched as a sop to native sensibilities, not being an area of critical interest to the colonising power.

Sharia Law in Britain today

Curiously enough, a similar situation pertains in Britain today with Sharia councils offering adjudication only in domestic matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. In theory this is voluntary but of course this is hardly the reality considering the cultural pressures on Muslim women often newly arrived from Pakistan with no clue about their rights under British Law.

As Home Secretary, Theresa May set up an inquiry into the running of these councils but, scandalously, it explicitly starts from the assumption that it is only the misapplication of Sharia Law which might be a problem. Since it is headed by a Muslim theologian rather than a representative of British Law, with two Islamic scholars on the board, we can presumably rest assured that the profoundly discriminatory roots of Sharia Law will remain undisturbed.

It goes further than that though. Non-Muslims in Britain also live under elements of Sharia Law which various governments have obligingly imposed on everyone. For a start there is the halal meat which is served in schools, prisons, hospitals etc and sold unmarked in supermarkets. Imagine the reaction if the reverse happened.

There is also the de facto blasphemy law enshrined in the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act, set up to protect Muslim sensibilities only a few years after the Christian blasphemy law was scrapped. In theory the act is even-handed but everyone knows you can burn a Bible with not a flicker of interest whereas burning a Koran will get your collar felt. In extreme cases such as draping bacon over a mosque door handle (imagine the horror!) you can expect a year inside like poor Kevin Crehan who failed to come out again. Five months later the cause of death has still not been identified. Perhaps Islamophobia has turned lethal.

Just History?

How can the Islamic Law of the Reliance and similar manuals be reconciled with the modern world? A reader of this blog asked just that question of a Muslim scholar and received this reply:

“It should be remembered that a madhhab [ie school of Islamic Jurisprudence] is a tradition of interpretation, not a body of fixed rulings; hence the normative content of each school often varies from century to century. In the contemporary context, jurists continue to evolve their madhhab-based positions using the characteristic methodologies of their schools. Hence nobody would claim that, say, a law manual from the Mamluk period should be put into practice today.”

Well actually, if the law manual in question is the result of intensive investigation to ascertain the will of Allah to the best of humans’ ability then I would in fact expect the bulk of its rulings to remain valid indefinitely. Why would it go out of date? If Islam’s greatest scholars came to the conclusion that Allah and Mohammed thought that adulterers should be stoned to death, how could changing circumstances negate that? In fact it appears that the rulings in the Reliance have not been negated at all, only avoided. What we find is that when states move away from their colonial legal systems and toward Sharia Law, as for instance Brunei has done, their legal codes look increasingly like what we see in the Reliance.

Today there are only a handful of states which approach a full implementation of Sharia Law. In Pakistan we see lynchings of Christians, as a result of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. In Iran we see the execution of homosexuals and in Saudi Arabia we see beheadings for apostasy and hear reports of crucifixions and stonings kept out of sight. But no jizya or sex slavery anywhere you say. Well, for those we have to go to the state which really applies Sharia Law to the full, the Islamic State. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, but at least they are in no danger of being called hypocrites when they meet up with Mohammed in paradise since there is very little that they do which he didn’t do, and very little that he did which they don’t do.

It does not reassure me one bit to learn that this vile book is widely read and revered by Muslims but to be told “Don’t worry, no one would expect it to be put into practice today”. Remember al-Azhar University, the highest authority in Sunni religious thought, has certified it as “conforming to the faith and practice of the orthodox Sunni Community”. That is “conforming”, ie present tense.

If Islamic Law has moved on from the Middle Ages where is the modern equivalent of the Reliance, let’s call it the Anti-Reliance, which makes clear that the appalling rulings which make non-Muslims shudder have been repudiated, abrogated, consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps it exists somewhere in the untranslated Shafi’i literature but if so it is being kept very quiet, and reform-minded Muslims are missing a trick by not broadcasting its existence. Tell you what, let’s just assume that it doesn’t exist until notified otherwise.

And where is the book written by an authoritative Sharia scholar addressed to non-Muslims titled “Sharia – Why You Have No Need To Fear”? It would put our minds at rest no end. But I suggest it will never be written because repudiating Islamic supremacism, jihad, discrimination against women and unbelievers, and all the vicious punishments as opposed to just avoiding them, would mean repudiating Mohammed and therefore Allah.

Through the academic looking glass

Always keen to learn new things, I enrolled on a short online course given by the University of Groningen entitled Religion and Conflict. The lecturers were Dr Kim Knibbe, Dr Erin Wilson and Prof Marjo Buitelaar, above.

My special interest was one particular religion and conflict and I put in my student profile that I was “hoping to be dissuaded of my expectation of a coming catastrophe in Europe due to religious fanaticism”.

This was true although I couldn’t say I was very hopeful. More realistically I hoped to gain an insight into why academics invariably give Islam such an easy ride. Even in that I was disappointed. The “why” must remain a subject of conjecture but I did come to understand something of the “how”. They minimise the content of the various religions and maximise the many extraneous influences affecting their believers then claim to have come up with a more nuanced understanding. Simple, really!

The course consisted of 6 weeks worth of short lectures, videos, interviews and assignments, each with the opportunity for discussion with fellow students. I had expected a bit of friction in the discussion forums and so it turned out, though no worse than a rough night in the Guardian comments sections. One fellow student was decent enough to say that I probably wasn’t a bad person, just having problems with my shadow (he was a Jungian).

A handful of people gave me a hearing when I challenged the arguments of our tutors and I took the opportunity to inject some real information about Islam into the debate, including a comprehensible presentation of the Koran, a manual of Sharia law, an abridged version of Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Mohammed, an explanation of al wala wal bara, the Hamas charter (see article 7), a dynamic battle map of historic Jihad and the Crusades and a British government report on the Muslim Brotherhood.

We spent Week 1 defining our terms.

Firstly religion and the difference between substantive definitions (what it is) and functional definitions (what it does). The reassuringly basic “Religion is the belief in supernatural beings” was an example of the former and the charmingly silly “Religion is society worshipping itself” represented the latter.

Both approaches were discussed and backed up with academic pedigrees but then, out of the blue and with no explanation, we were told that we would be taking a third approach:

“In this course, we will mainly look at religion in a third sense, as something that can mean different things to different people in different contexts.”

Uh oh, I thought, that sounds suspiciously like non-essentialism, the fashionable and specious academic view that anything can be anything, or to put it more formally “for any given kind of entity, there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must possess”. By taking the view that things, even religions, have basic inherent characteristics, for instance that Allah will never be part of a trinity and God does not live on Mt Olympus, I consigned myself to the essentialist camp. If you think this merely a big end/little end distinction confined to the ivory towers of academia I invite you to consider the skirmish going on elsewhere on the cultural battlefield over whether people with penises should or should not be allowed to use female toilets.

Secondly violence, and here we continued to drift away from commonly understood meanings. Violence apparently can include non-physical violence. Examples of structural or symbolic violence, which is committed by no individual and which leaves no bruises, include the shorter life spans of lower class people, the lower incomes of women and the oppression of Muslim countries by the West. All of these have other possible explanations and the one-sided selection of some of the left’s favourite victims seemed to suggest a leftist bias. At any rate I felt a little cheated out my share of victimhood since the fact that men do not live as long as women failed to make the grade.

Week 2 was about the link between religion and conflict. We prepared the ground with items about framing a conflict as religious, the significance of definition and scholarly understandings of the link between religion and conflict.

Then we started to get down to business in an interview with external Professor Jose Casanova. Since I had been boring everyone with my dreary essentialist concern with what various religious texts actually say, it was encouraging to hear him say “we have to get the facts in a hermeneutic, relatively sensible interpretation of each particular conflict as a first step”.

Since hermeneutics is the interpretation of scriptures, I expected at least a superficial examination of Islamic sources. But no, it turned out that there was no need. He simply dismissed the idea that Islam has an authentic role in Boko Haram’s activities because in other places Muslims and non-Muslims live peacefully together.

In a later interview, citing state-formation as the underlying cause of some instances of violence usually attributed to religious differences, he said that “…Jews, Muslims and Christians could live together in Spain convivencia under Muslim and Christian kingdoms”. Professor Casanova, himself a Spaniard, is talking here about the Convivencia.

It is my understanding that the word refers only to the supposedly harmonious co-existence of the three groups in mediaeval Spain under Muslim rule. With regard to that the professor is wrong. The Convivencia has been officially declared a myth by historians who have found no evidence for it. But even if he was right he would still be wrong because the issue at the heart of the civilised world’s concern about Islam is not whether Muslims can be benign when in power but whether they can, with religious sanction, live as equals with the infidel when they are demographically powerful enough to do otherwise. After all, Allah tells them that they are “the best of peoples” and we are “the vilest of creatures”.

In Week 3 we learned of the many factors that can contribute to religious violence. They include:

State-formation, state-failure, the end of the cold war, the decline of secularism, globalisation, the need to reduce ambiguity, uncertainty and insecurity, Western-backed dictatorships, injustice, unemployment, teenage rebellion, alienation, identity problems, existential anxiety, ontological insecurity, othering and collective memories.

But nothing about what the various religions’ holy texts actually say. How strange. You might think that they could give us a clue as to why there are so many Islamic terrorist groups and so few Jainist ones.

Week 4 included a study of ISIS. Our tutors made it clear what they considered primary in the conflict currently being played out in Syria and Iraq:

“The historical background of present day clashes in Iraq and Syria indicates that rather than civilisational or religious clashes, what we are in fact witnessing are conflicts over economic and political hegemony….Earthly struggles are placed in a framework of cosmic warfare between truth and evil.”

and what they considered secondary:

“…there is no causal relation between the contents of authoritative religious texts on the one hand and specific religious views and practices of adherents to a specific religious tradition on the other. Actors choose from a rich body of transmitted texts those that most adequately answer their existential questions and provide them with concrete scripts for action.”

I disagree on both counts but particularly on the second (did you spot the non-essentialism?). There may be no 1 to 1 relation between religious texts and views and practices but it is absurd to suggest that there is no causal relationship at all. Religious texts are not Rorschach tests. There are limits to what you can pull out of them. You will find plenty about spreading the faith by fighting and killing in Islamic texts but precious little in Buddhist texts. Accordingly we find not just ISIS in Syria but jihadist groups fighting expansionary wars in most of the countries on the borders of Islamdom from Mali to the Philippines to the Caucasus, and now of course in Europe. By contrast if there are Buddhist groups doing something similar then they are keeping it very quiet.

I suggested in the discussions that we should make some attempt to ascertain whether the jihadis’ understanding of Islamic supremacism (the end) and jihad (the means) is actually consistent with the mainstream Islamic tradition or not. It seems to me to boil down to the question of whether the undisputed jihad verses in the Koran are to be understood only in the context of the battles Mohammed happened to be fighting at the time they were “revealed” or are valid for all time until the whole world is under the rule of Islam.

Those fellow students who had an opinion on the matter all took the contextual view for granted. I put forward in support of the timeless view:

a) The example of Mohammed and his immediate successors.

b) Mohammed’s threatening letters to surrounding kings and emperors.

c) The views of the great mediaeval commentators (eg “Allah the Exalted and Most Honored said, while delivering the glad tidings to the believers that the Messenger will triumph over his enemies and the rest of the people of the earth“ Tafsir of ibn Kathir).

d) The various schools of Islamic Law (eg “It is apostasy to deny that Allah intended the Prophet’s message to be the religion followed by the entire world” Reliance of the Traveller).

I also pointed out that I had been unable to find any support for the contextual view in the Islamic tradition before the late 19th century (and that was from the Ahmadiyya, generally regarded as heretical) and asked for examples. None were forthcoming. If you could provide some I would be most grateful.

Nor was any attempt made by our tutors to consider whether ISIS’s beliefs and actions had any connection to those of Mohammed and his immediate successors as they claim. I pointed out that ISIS didn’t pluck robbery, ransoming, beheadings, crucifixion, sex slavery, forced conversion, stoning, immolation, throwing homosexuals off rooves, jizya and takfir out of the air and offered to give details but got no takers.

The only time the tutors ventured anywhere near the theology they got it wrong. In attempting to absolve Islam from some of ISIS’ more extreme brutalities they claimed that there is no justification in the Islamic tradition for beheadings and immolation. In fact, since Mohammed did both they are sacralised as part of the Sunnah, the example of Mohammed. If you doubt it check out chapters 18, 20 and 25 here.

Week 5 was about peace building, but focussed on attempting to bring about reconciliation after wars had already burned themselves out.

What could have some effect on the currently warring parties in Syria? Seminars about existential anxiety perhaps?

I suggest the only thing likely to make a difference would be the discovery of a new “world’s oldest Koran” with a previously unsuspected verse at the end of Sura 9 abrogating everything prior, something like:

“And remember boys, when all Arabia is under your control cut out the jihad stuff and make it up with the Jews and Christians…they’re not such a bad lot after all”.

Week 6 involved a couple of assignments and finished with this message to students:

“It is now your job to share with your friends, your family and your colleagues through
social media and conversations in daily life, that religion, or a particular religious
tradition, is NOT either “good” or “bad”, violent or peaceful, but like other strong ideologies, the symbols, rituals and stories found in religion provide the tools for people to make sense of and respond to the world and the issues they have to deal with.”

There are a few things to note here:

1. Six weeks and not so much as a verse from any religious text. Would our tutors take such a hands off approach to the “other strong ideologies” which they equate with religious traditions? Would they say, for instance, that Nazism was “not either violent or peaceful” and would they look everywhere but in Mein Kampf to understand it? If so then they would be taking a very different approach to that of political scientists who analyse to death the texts of political ideologies.

2. How does our tutors’ message that particular religious traditions are not either good or bad, violent or peaceful translate when it filters out to the less rarified atmosphere of public discourse? Why, that no particular religion is more violent than any others of course. And, despite the daily evidence to the contrary with regard to one particular religion, that is what we continue to hear from our journalists, politicians and church leaders.

It is academia which has created the intellectual climate which allows such nonsense to be taken seriously, and which in turn stifles attempts to name our enemy and take realistic precautions. That is why I say that our tutors, along with so many other well meaning academics, were culpable in the slaughter in Brussels which took place during the course and will be culpable in the many more atrocities which we must look forward to in the coming months and years. Perhaps it will take a beheading in the canteen at Groningen University to burst their bubble. Probably even that would not be enough.

3. Nothing adduced in the course justified the claim that particular religious traditions are not either good or bad, violent or peaceful. A very superficial knowledge of different religious texts is enough to show that it is simply wrong. Most religions have both good and bad, violent and peaceful teachings, varying in their proportion.

One fellow student, in discussion, offered his own largely peaceful religion as one also containing some very violent content. He thought he was disagreeing with me but in fact he was agreeing with me and disagreeing with our tutors since “both…and…” is entirely different to “not either…or…”.

What a feat to convince people who disagree with you not only that they agree with you but to spread your message for you. It can only be done by ignoring the obvious and confusing the dupe with irrelevancies which they won’t understand (ontological insecurity…ye gods!). Not that I am accusing our tutors of deliberately deceiving their students. They in turn have allowed themselves to be bamboozled by others or managed to bamboozle themselves. This is how the marketing of “the cloth so fine that only the most intelligent can see it” proceeds. The question is are we to side with the emperor or the child who points out the obvious?

Dear Muslim…

Glad I caught you. If you can spare the time there are a few issues, misunderstandings perhaps, that I would like to raise with you. Can it hurt to bring them out into the open?

Firstly, there is your god Allah. He appears to hate me with a passion. Apparently he intends to torture me forever with fire and each time my skin burns away he will replace it “so I may feel the scourge”. Is this any way for a modern god to behave? In the days when desert tribes worshipped rocks it might have been acceptable but today I really think he has to consider his anger issues. It is not as though I have done him any harm that I know of, just declined to believe in him. You would think an omnipotent being would be too busy regulating the intricate arrangements of the quantum world or designing galaxies to worry about little old me. Frankly, and I’m sorry to say this, his excessive concern over what everyone thinks of him smacks of immaturity.

Then there’s the man who created him, Mohammed. Quite honestly he appears to have been a cruel and vindictive warlord. If he came back today he would surely be shipped off to The Hague to face charges of robbery, murder, rape, enslavement and genocide. Just to mention a couple of his victims, there’s Umm Qirfa the old woman he had tied by the legs to camels and pulled apart, and Kinana ibn al-Rabi the treasurer of a vanquished Jewish tribe. Mohammed ordered him to be tortured until he revealed where the treasure was hidden. A fire was lit on his chest until he was nearly dead then he was beheaded and Mohammed married his wife Safiyya. I hear people justifying some of Mohammed’s thirteen marriages as being motivated by charity towards widows and cannot help thinking “That’s chutzpah!”

Well, that’s all water under the bridge. What bothers me is that I’m told you regard Mohammed as “the perfect man and the example for all Muslims”. That seems like a problem to me.

So much for the pleasantries. Let’s get down to the key question. Is Islam inherently and implacably supremacist, by fair means or foul, or not? That’s what really concerns me. I have been asking around and I think it is. Who told me? Well firstly there is Allah himself:

Koran 8:39
“And fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief and polytheism: i.e. worshipping others besides Allah) and the religion (worship) will all be for Allah Alone [in the whole of the world]. But if they cease (worshipping others besides Allah), then certainly, Allah is All-Seer of what they do.”

I know it is the Hilali-Khan translation, the most incendiary of all, but it does only make explicit what is left implicit in the others and after all it is the version favoured by all those Saudi funded mosques. Wasn’t it in some of those that investigative reporters found Imams saying things like this:

“You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir…we have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others”
and
“You are in a situation in which you have to live like a state within a state, until you take over”?

Then there is Mohammed, in a letter to Haudha bin Ali, governor of Yamama inviting him to convert or take the consequences:

“Peace be upon him who follows true guidance. Be informed that my religion shall prevail everywhere. You should accept Islam, and whatever under your command shall remain yours”. (The Sealed Nectar:Biography of the Noble Prophet)

And lastly, representative of a number of influential Islamic scholars, Ibn Khaldun, mediaeval historian:

“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”.

If these quotes accurately reflect Islamic beliefs then clearly Islam can never live as equals with another culture. It must either dominate or bide its time until it can, just as Mohammed did in Mecca and Medina. That is why, with continuing immigration from warring countries on the other side of the Mediterranean and greater Muslim fertility, I foresee increasing strife between Muslims and everyone else in Britain.

Do not think I hate Muslims but I do pity them and I have to accept that some of them are my enemy. I just do not know which ones. Many, probably yourself included, manage to live in peace with their neighbour but I believe this to be despite their religion which calls for the opposite. It seems clear to me that the bombers and the beheaders are simply following the instructions on the tin and that they would fit right in with Mohammed’s companions. It is Muslims who wish to live peacefully who are obliged to do back flips to avoid the militant aspect of their religion.

Our leaders try to reassure us that there are moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims (otherwise known as radical, Islamist, fundamentalist or militant Muslims). You will know as well as I do that this distinction is never used in Muslim countries, nor it seems even much among British Muslims as we found out when a TV company looked for moderate Imams and could find none who accepted the term.

Correct me if I am wrong, and I would dearly love to be wrong, but I think that there are just more or less observant Muslims, particularly when it comes to Mohammed’s call to Jihad. Some manage to convince themselves that Islam can be just a matter of private devotion like other religions, some spread Islamic practices like Halal into the public space and demand special dispensations for prayer facilities or the right not to be offended, and then there are those who actually heed the call to holy war in Syria or in Britain.

It seems to me that Islam is like a black hole around which believers orbit, more or less affected by its gravitational pull. There are those who maintain a stable orbit at a safe distance, observing prayer and Ramadan and so on, and there are those who venture too close and get sucked in, never to be seen again unless it is on the TV news screaming “Allahu akbar” over some atrocity. The ones I am really interested in though are those further out trying to live the sort of life which other religions and viewpoints would recognise as decent and moral, a life in which non-Muslims, ex-Muslims, women, children and homosexuals are seen as being of equal worth. I hope increasing numbers of those people will manage to escape the malign influence of Mohammed entirely and join the community of apostates, most of whom have to hide the fact for obvious reasons.

Sadly, I believe that Muslims and the rest of us are on a collision course unless something gives. Perhaps it will be the rest of us and that appears to be a possible outcome given the refusal of our leaders and the mainstream media to acknowledge the supremacism at the heart of Islam. They beguile us with idiotic terms like “Islamophobia” but the trouble is we all have eyes to see what is happening around the world and on our streets.

Naturally I hope for another more benign outcome, a large scale collapse of belief in Islam as young Muslims weigh “Islamic science” against real science, the 7th century against the 21st. So far the signs are not good. Weren’t we surprised when polls appeared to show that young Muslims are actually more devout than their parents? Faith schools are also hardly a promising development, allowing the teachings of Mohammed to go unchallenged in the classroom or the playground. Nevertheless, I put great hope in the internet which allows Muslims to bypass their local Imam and get independent information from the many Islam critical sites. For the first time in 1400 years the Mosque’s monopoly on information is being challenged. Who knows what the ramifications could be?

Go on, give it a go. After all, you are only a Muslim because you were indoctrinated at an age before you were able to critically assess what you were being told. You didn’t stand a chance. It’s all made up, honest. No virgins for you, no eternal torment for me. You can just step away from Mohammed and his demand for world domination. Isn’t it the best hope for us to get along?

20 years from now

(Written in 2014 – some minor deviations already!)

Version 1.

2034. There are whole cities officially under sharia where the police and non-Muslims do not venture. In the rest of the country a blasphemy law prevents criticism of the one true faith yet in the semi-autonomous region of Deenistan, formerly known as Lancashire, it is illegal to repair churches and Christians have to pay a special tax. The first stoning takes place in the Old Trafford football stadium. Naturally there are no Jews left in the country. Armed militias battle it out with other kinds of Muslims and the Kuffar, just like on the other side of the Channel. Whole neighbourhoods are regularly ablaze. After the Italian Navy set up an EU funded ferry service from Libya, and Italy and France co-operated on the high speed Brindisi to Dover rail link, the Muslim population has swollen to 23%, officially. White flight continues apace but in the Celtic fringes they say “What did you ever do for me, Englishman?”.

Multiculturalism has become Balkanization. The puzzle of the “moderate Muslim” has been solved. The King Faisal Stock Exchange is the centre of world Islamic finance. The young King George, a recent revert, and his beautiful Queen Ayesha (though it’s hard to tell behind that niqab) have turned Buckingham Palace into a centre for the propagation of the faith. Tony Blair and Anjem Choudary sit in the House of Elders, both bearing the title “Hero of Islam”. After numerous blue on blue incidents it has been decided to set up two independent armed forces. The Muslim Brotherhood, the third largest political party, whose offices occupy the top six floors of Canary Wharf, have joined a coalition with the United Kingdom Survival Party in return for a guarantee of free passage in and out of the country for forces of the Caliphate.

A goup called the UAF, having served their purpose, have succumbed to a short campaign of throat cutting. Those who once read the now defunct newspaper “The Guardian” wring their hands and say “It wasn’t meant to be like this”. Old men who tell tales of the Tower Hamlets demo of 2013 look their grandchildren in the eye and say “I tried”.

Version 2.

2015. After a string of low level attacks from the Syrian returnees, MI5 admits there are more extremists than they can possibly monitor. David Cameron insists that the situation has nothing to do with Islam. Boris Johnson, spotting his opportunity, suggests it might have something to do with Islam. Nick Clegg witters about a great salvation religion.

2016. The mood of the country turns ugly after the Bluewater shopping centre massacre but the tide really begins to turn when jihadis plant a bomb outside the offices of the Guardian (the ungrateful swine!). The truth of the old saying “a reactionary is a liberal who’s been blown up” is borne out. An article appears in the Guardian with the title “Diversity bad, Unity good” and another one suggesting that the British Empire did some useful things.

The Pact of Umar is sometimes mentioned at Hampstead dinner parties. It is no longer considered smart to say that Britain has been multicultural since the Jutes. Solicitors who coach asylum seekers through the regulations no longer find “I’m a human rights lawyer” serves as a good chat up line.

EDL demonstrations attract tens of thousands. The occasional journalist and MP start to refer to them as “patriots”.

Mo Ansar, who has not appeared on TV since it was discovered that he was not actually a lawyer and Imam, and Fiyaz Mughal, a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya artist, also down on his luck, complain to anyone who will listen that it’s all so unfair.

The BBC stop pretending that IS and Boko Haram are unIslamic.

It becomes widely known that there is more Jew-hatred in the Koran than in Mein Kampf.

The “Ibaana” programme intended to deradicalise extremist prisoners is suspended when one of the Imams involved is found to be teaching his charges bomb making.

2017. The Cameron government falls and the new prime minister Michael Gove announces a state of emergency, declaring “Both sides know there is a war on now”. He recants on his earlier view that the problem is not Islam but “the specifically 20th century phenomenon of Islamism”.

As an experiment Ed Miliband takes a stroll through Tower Hamlets one evening wearing his skull cap. After he recovers the Labour Party gives limited support to the government. Alas, there are no more Liberal Democrat MPs to give anything to anyone.

Individual liberties are sharply curtailed, as in any time of war:

Plans are put in place for a national identity card programme.

Sharia courts are banned along with sharia compliant legal and financial instruments.

The hate speech legislation, widely seen as a de facto blasphemy law, is revoked.

New, tighter restrictions are placed on the building of mosques, incuding the banning of foreign funding. All sermons have to be given in English. Mosques found encouraging jihad are to be demolished.

A Royal Commission is set up under the chairmanship of ex-Muslim scholar IQ al Rassooli to consider such questions as whether the Medina suras of the Koran should be banned completely and whether religious scriptures should lose their exempt status regarding the crime of incitement to murder. Critics claim that there are also calls to genocidal violence in the Bible but after research is carried out it is found that there are no more Amalekites to be concerned about it either way.

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are asked to give evidence and are invited to tea at Buckingham Palace where Theresa May offers a fulsome apology for banning them in 2013.

Halal meat has to be clearly labelled. It is made illegal to serve it to diners in restaurants and public institutions without their knowledge and consent.

The Charity Commission draft in a team of forensic accountants to ascertain where all that zakat is really going.

Schoolchildren are taught the truth about Mohammed the bloodthirsty warlord. A core syllabus is set up emphasising British values and history.

2018. The government sends the Muslim Brotherhood packing, along with all the other factions they got so chummy with in the old Londonistan days.

Changes are made to the welfare system designed to halt dangerous demographic trends. Sikhs and Hindus say that if indigenous Brits can’t be bothered to reproduce then they will do their best to step into the breach.

There is a five year moratorium on all immigration from OIC countries apart from persecuted non-Muslim minorities.

2019. Ken Livingston and George Galloway decamp to Sweden where they are still welcome.

Translation facilities in public services are slashed and the money saved is put into English language teaching.

2020. Identity cards are issued to everyone entitled to be in Britain. Those who do not qualify are deported. Work starts on the backlog of illegal immigrants.

The government declares Islam a special case because of its dual nature; the private devotional religion (which is welcome) and the political aspect of supremacism, sharia and jihad (which is not). Muslims are required to swear an oath of loyalty to Britain superseding their loyalty to Islam. If they do not accept they have their citzenship revoked and are deported, along with their dependants, to any country which will have them or, as a last resort, Sudan with which Britain has come to an arrangement.

2021. After an economic version of cold fusion is perfected the price of oil falls by 70%. Bloody riots ensue around the Gulf and rulers leave for Switzerland to be near to their money.

2022. Young Muslims start to look at the Koran and ask “What is this bollocks?”

Mehdi Hasan becomes a Seventh Day Adventist, saying “Thank God I stepped into the light. The cognitive dissonance was killing me”.

2024. Matthew Goodwin, the social scientist who once called for the censoring of polls which could provide support for Islamophobes, publishes a book proving that the only way to coexist with Muslims is to limit their proportion in any given population to no more than 2.5%.

2026. Muslims publicly apostasize in such numbers that the fear of reprisals loses its force. They march with placards saying “Mohammed was a monster”. Death threats from the Muslim community dry up.

2028. Sufism becomes the dominant branch of Islam in Britain.

2029. Muslims begin to display a rudimentary sense of humour.

2030. Members of the UAF drift away, embarrassed at their former foolishness. Some of them get proper jobs.

2032. Geert Wilders is awarded the Nobel Peace prize for helping to avert in Europe the horrors we see in the great Sunni/Shia convulsions of the Muslim heartlands.

2033. The proportion of self identifying Muslims stabilises at 2%. They are once again seen as an exotic and welcome addition to the life of the country.

2034. Everyone lives happily ever after.