Islam

The Archbishop of Canterbury has used the word genocide to describe the treatment of suppressed Christians around the world in his Christmas message to churches. Most Revd Justin Welby writes of the "troubled, uncertain world" we live in and the need to stand alongside fellow believers as they endure suffering. Speaking of the treatment by extremist groups, he said: "In some places, this is motivated by a desire to eradicate the indigenous Christian presence completely. These are acts not only of terror but of genocide; criminal acts for which the international community must bring those guilty to account.

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There have been many calls for the suffering experienced by Christians at the hands of Islamic State to be labelled genocide. Earlier this year the UK parliament voted to use the word and called on the government to refer the issue to the UN Security Council. Once referred, member states then have a legal duty to take action to stop the genocide. The UK government is yet to refer the issue.

John Wesley on Islam:

Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it … have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.

— John Wesley, “The Doctrine of Original Sin, Works” (1841), ix 205

We all know about those nasty Europeans – Portuguese/Spanish / ‘Americans’ and their purchase of  slaves between the  (15th-19th century)  but how many know of  Islam’s far longer and still going slave trade from Africa (eg East, West Africa), central and Eastern Europe, Turkey/central Asia, and China, India, and south east Asia.  The Islamic slave trade was/is vast and is a significant feature of Islamic ‘civilization.’


After slavery became unacceptable in the West slaves continued to flow in the Islamic world.  In 2003, Al Fawzan, a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body and a member of the Council of Religious Edicts and Research, the Imam of Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh and a professor at Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University, stated that   

 

“slavery is part of  jihad  and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.” 

He claims that those who say Islam is against slavery are ignorant,... infidels.  (source)

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   However, at least 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East.  Since at least 80% of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been over 112 million.  When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the Trans Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 million people. 

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According to one report, 7,000 English people were abducted between 1622 to 1644, many of them ship crews and passengers.  But the Corsairs also landed on unguarded beaches, often at night, to snatch the unwary.  Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were captured in 1631, and there were other raids in Devon and Cornwall.

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While Christian Reformers spearheaded the anti-slavery abolitionist movements in Europe and North America, and Great Britain mobilised her Navy, throughout most of the 19th Century, to intercept slave ships and set the captives free, there was no opposition whatsoever to slavery within the Muslim world.

• In its report, the Charity Commission makes note of the iERA's promotion of hate preachers, but treats the charity as a victim of such extremism, rather than an instigator.
• According to the Commission, bureaucracy is the solution -- the iERA's extremism will be solved by more "adequate procedures... to prevent abuse of the charity, its status, facilities or assets."
• Those more familiar with the iERA will know that asking this Salafist charity to produce and follow its own counter-extremism plan is akin to demanding that the Ku Klux Klan introduce affirmative action hiring processes.
• Extremist charities are not private institutions: charitable status affords extraordinary legal and financial benefits, including the opportunity for radical Islamist organisations to claim government subsidies. But no government should allow extremist networks to exploit charitable status. Shut these charities down, and ban those Islamist activists from ever again becoming trustees of a charitable organisation.

• "Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution." — The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
• "The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar's programs... Al Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim world. Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing the apostate. Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and teaches things like not building churches... Al Azhar teaches stoning people. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic?" — Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr, a scholar of Islamic law and graduate of Egypt's Al Azhar University.
• The jihadists who carry out terrorist attacks in the service of ISIS, for example, are merely following the commands in the Quran, both 9:5, "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them..." and Quran 8:39, "So fight them until there is no more fitna [strife] and all submit to the religion of Allah."
• Archbishop Welby -- and Egypt's extraordinary President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi -- has finally had the courage to say in public that if one insists on remaining "religiously illiterate," it is impossible to solve the problem of religiously motivated violence.

Exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who lives under constant protection, has told AFP that Islamic fundamentalism has destroyed Bangladeshi society. Nasreen said that in the 1980s she "wrote about Islamic fundamentalists. I said that they should not go unopposed or they will destroy our society, that's exactly what's happened now. "Islamisation started in Bangladesh in the 1980s and in the 80s I was very worried." Several fatwas were issued calling for her death for secular writing, and Nasreen has not returned to Bangladesh in over twenty years.

Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman sentenced to hang and forced to give birth in jail, says her story represents the ordeals of “many” Christians in Islamic countries forced to live under sharia law. In a rare public appearance since she was helped to travel to the US two years ago, she told a congregation in Washington, DC, last Saturday: “My story did not start when I was sentenced or when I was in prison.

Since the decline of Socialism, the major ideological fault line in British politics, insofar as there has been one, has been between, on the one hand, conservativism and, on the other, various forms of liberalism – espoused bynot just the Liberal Democrats, but also in large measure by the Labour Party.

This ideological divide is of critical importance in the fight against Islamism. I say this because there is a myth that has been propagated by liberals that the only answer to Islamism is liberalism. However, liberalism not only lacks the capacity to counter Islamism and has significantly failed to do so, but is seen by many Islamists as part of the back door by which they can take over and impose Islamic law and government on western society.The reasons for this are not hard to find:

• Liberalism promotes diversity rather than cohesion. The essence of Liberalism is that diversity is ‘good’, and so should not just be tolerated but actively promoted. The active promotion of diversity by the last government led to various forms of support for Islamist groups that were seeking to pull people away from traditional British values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In other words, it was doing exactly the opposite to community cohesion, which any right-thinking person would understand as encouraging people to adhere to the values that we have historically developed and learned as a nation to cherish – such as democracy, the equality of everyone before the law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and so forth. All of these are significantly diminished by sharia, which in various aspects treats men and women, Muslims and non Muslims differently. Liberalism’s politically correct promotion of groups perceived to have been historically disadvantaged has led to the strange combination of liberals advocating ,for example, partial implementation of sharia in Britain, while at the same time supporting legislation that diminishes historic rights such as freedom of religion for other groups that political correctness regards less favourably. This was vividly illustrated during the time of the last Labour Government, when the Home Secretary went on the Today programme to argue for freedom of speech for Islamists, while only a few hours later sought to pass legislation restricting the same freedom of speech for Christians.

Claims that the atrocities of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have “nothing to do with Islam” are harming efforts to confront and combat extremism, the Archbishop of Canterbury has insisted.

Religious leaders of all varieties must “stand up and take responsibility” for the actions of extremists who profess to follow their faith, the Most Rev Justin Welby said.

He argued that unless people recognise and attempt to understand the motivation of terrorists they will never be able to combat their ideology effectively. 

I’d like to go back to exactly a year ago today, when the contrast between intellectual honesty and intellectual bankruptcy could not have been more starkly captured than with Foreign Policy magazine’s question, “Can the wave of violence sweeping the Islamic world be traced back to the religion’s core teachings?” posed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and to Manal Omar, and their answers then published. I want to look at how these two critics, the realist Hirsi Ali and the apologist Omar, approached this question, and suggest that the “Terrorism has nothing to do with Islam,” claim is discredited not only because it is manifestly untrue, but because the people making that claim lack integrity. We are not talking about merely the other side of an argument here. An obviously dishonest claim is knowingly advanced by obviously dishonest means. One tragic outcome of this is that Muslim sensibilities came to trump human life.

One of the ways I have seen Muslim leaders promote Islam is by talking about the glory of the Islamic civilization. The Islamic empire is said to be a system of justice and responsible for everything good in the world. Very often when these claims are made the Western Christian civilization is criticised as corrupt and brutal. This approach to promoting Islam is successful for a few reasons:

Most Westerners feel some shame over the history of their empires, and so when a speaker attacks Western culture they acknowledge these faults.
Most Westerners have little knowledge of Islamic history, and so assume that what the Islamic leader says about the Islamic empire must be true.
Hence in the study of Islam in the West, the dominant convention is that a critical approach is reserved for the Christian past but forbidden for the Muslim past. ... The net result is a romantic picture of the history of Islam avoiding and sometimes denying such issues as the jihadists’ slaughter and massive enslavement of traditional African believers. (John Alembillah Azumah, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa, pp. xiv-xv.)
In this article I invite you to begin to learn about Islam's involvement in slavery. Islam has had a major role in the history of slavery beginning with Muhammad, and taking slaves from Europe across to Indonesia and down into Africa. But unlike the Western empires, Islam has never apologised and feels no shame. In fact Muslim leaders boast of their empire as the "Golden Period" and hide its corruption and brutality.

If Allaah enables the Muslim mujahideen to defeat kaafir enemies in war, then the men may be killed, ransomed, set free without ransom or enslaved. The choice between these four options is to be made by the ruler, according to what he thinks is the best course.

With regard to the women, they become slaves and “those whom one's right hand possesses” (described as a “right hand servant” in the question). Male children also become slaves. The ruler shares out these slaves among the mujaahideen.

Shaykh al-Shanqeeti (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: The reason why a person may be taken as a slave is his being a kaafir and waging war against Allaah and His Messenger. If Allaah enables the Muslims who are striving and sacrificing their lives and their wealth and all that Allaah has given them to make the word of Allaah supreme over the kaafirs, then He allows them to enslave the kuffaar when they capture them, unless the ruler chooses to free them or to ransom them, if that serves the interests of the Muslims.

If an imam violently protests something, the liberal elite always supports the false charge of "Islamophobia." If a peaceful protest is led by a Catholic bishop, the same elite always rejects it under the name of "freedom of expression."

The "Caliph" of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ridiculed by Charlie Hebdo, triggered self-censorship because of "hate speech," while the work of Chris Ofili "The Holy Virgin Mary," in which the mother of Jesus is covered with feces and images of genitalia, was defended by the New York Times as "free speech." Does this now mean that some religions are more equal than others?

On Halloween night, only the "Sexy Nun" is available, while "Caliph" Baghdadi can rape his Yazidi and Christian sex slaves with impunity.