Strictly Bum Journalism

This BBC article epitomises the clueless political correctness of the Leftist mainstream media when it comes to reporting on Islam. It concerns the death of a jihadist leader in Nigeria. Mohammed Yusuf was the leader of the Boko Haram group, which has been wreaking havoc in the country over the last few days, starting riots that have killed hundreds. According to the BBC, the group "wants to overthrow the Nigerian government and impose a strict version of Islamic law."

Excuse me? A "strict version" of Islamic law? Does this mean that the BBC can point to a school of Islamic law that does NOT teach, for example, that apostates from Islam should be put to death? Can they point to any school that does NOT teach jihad against, and the subjugation of, unbelievers? What about a school that does NOT consider the selling of alcohol to be unlawful and a punishable offence?

Can the BBC name such schools or can't they? If they can't, then why are they referring to a "strict version of Islamic law"?

The reality is that all of the above must either be sanctioned by Islamic law - STANDARD Islamic law, not some aberrant "strict version" of it - or not. Anyone who knows of any school of jurisprudence that does not teach this "strict version" is welcome to let me know in the comments field or by email.

Why Islam Is Responsible For Honour Killings

In the past month alone, there have been dozens of cases from around the world of so-called "honour killings", where men, often explicitly in the name of Islam, have murdered or attempted to murder female relatives over matters of religious and cultural honour.

Today, the Jerusalem Post reports that a Gaza man is being held on suspicion that he bludgeoned his daughter to death with an iron chain because he discovered she owned a mobile phone.

Also reported today, a Maghrebi Muslim in Spain stabbed his daughter 20 times because he allegedly believed that she had a non-Muslim boyfriend.

On the 21st of the month, it was reported that a German man of Afghan origin stabbed his daughter "in the name of the Koran".

Also this month, an Afghan family is believed to have plotted an honour killing in Canada.

In Jordan recently, there has been a spree of honour killings.

In Saudi Arabia, two sisters were shot dead by their own brother.

And so on, and so on.

What does this have to do with Islam, you may ask? Isn't honour killing a cultural practice rather than an Islamic one?

There is no doubt that honour killing is not limited exclusively to Muslims. However, it is practised widely in Muslim societies today - even in the West. And as we can see from some of the articles above, many of the perpetrators imbue their acts with religious significance.

Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveler) is a classic manual of Islamic law from the Middle Ages. In 1991, it was authorised by Al-Azhar University, the highest spiriual authority in Sunni Islam, as conforming "to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community”. And this manual says specifically that Muslim fathers who kill their children incur no penalty under Islamic law: "Retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right...The following are not subject to retaliation:...a father or mother (or their fathers of mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring..." Why would that be?

In 2003, the Jordanian Parliament rejected a new law which was designed to introduce harsher penalties for honour killings. And according to Al Jazeera, they did so on Islamic grounds: "Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values."

There is no denying the fact that the actual theological justification for honour killing in Islam is very slim. The general culture of shame and honour prevalent in the Arab world and perpetuated by Islam is a bigger driving force. However, the Islamic component is certainly there, and is almost certainly generating more cases of honour killing in Muslim communities than there would otherwise be. Until moderate Muslim communities begin to address these Islamic elements (which they are currently not doing), honour killing in the name of Islam will continue.

"Arafat would condemn [terror] operations by day while at night he would do honorable things"

Student and mentor

A close friend of Yasser Arafat has admitted that the jihadist leader publicly condemned acts of Islamic terrorism while privately approving of such acts. PA (Fatah) Member of Parliament Muhammad Dahlan made the confession on Palestinian TV recently. Speaking of the right to "violent resistance" against Israel, Dahlan said: "I lived with Chairman Yasser Arafat for years. Arafat would condemn [terror] operations by day while at night he would do honorable things. I don't want to say any more about this."

This "revelation" should not come as a surprise to anyone who has bothered to learn the facts of the case. Arafat was notorious for his duplicity. He sanctioned brutal jihads against Israel starting in the 1960s, and a led a brutal campaign against the Christians of Lebanon in the mid-70s and early 80s. Shortly after Khomeini's ascension to power, Arafat wrote the following to the Iranian leader:

I pray to Allah to guide your step along the path of faith and Holy War (Jihad) in Iran, continuing the combat until we arrive at the walls of Jerusalem, where we shall raise the flags of our two revolutions.

Notoriously, Arafat also compared the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel to the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, a truce the Prophet Muhammad concluded with his enemies the Quraysh in 628. Muhammad had conceived of the truce as a method of obtaining a strategic advantage over his enemies, and broke it as soon as he was able. Arafat's comparison of Oslo with this Treaty was his way of articulating the same goal: a temporary truce in order to give the PA more time to prepare further jihad attacks against the Jewish state.

We can see his same pattern reccuring in the current Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas. As the article linked at the beginning of this post notes: "Neither Arafat nor PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas ever condemned terror because it is wrong, but only because it is ineffective or because it damages Palestinian interests."

Is There Equality of the Sexes in Islam?

A question that comes up a lot is whether men and women are considered equal according to the teachings of Islam. Apologists who would answer that they are tend to quote passages such as this one:

“O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord Who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate and from them twain hath spread abroad a multitude of men and women. Be careful of your duty toward Allah in Whom ye claim (your rights) of one another, and toward the wombs (that bare you). Lo! Allah hath been a watcher over you.” (4:1)

The assertion that men and women have been created “from a single soul” is sometimes pointed to as evidence that Islam recognises the full equality and dignity of women. Ayatollah Murtada Mutahhari says that “other religions also have referred to this question, but it is the Qur’an alone which in a number of verses expressly says that woman has been created of the species of man, and both man and woman have the same innate character.” He then quotes 4:1.

And yet traditional Islamic views of women have been overwhelmingly in favour of the idea that they are in almost all ways inferior to men. The noted scholar Baydawi sums up this attitude: “Men are the maintainers over women just as rulers are over their populous...due to the completeness of men’s brains over women’s deficiency, their management skills, and their extra requirement of worship; this is why men were chosen to be prophets, religious leaders, rulers, and enforcers of commandments, legal witnesses in a court of law, fighters in the cause of Allah, receivers of more share of the inheritance and in control of divorce.” Islamic tradition and law deny the equality of women in numerous ways: a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282); a son's inheritance is twice the size of a daughter's (4:11); Allah has made men the “protectors” of women because they are superior to them (4:34); and the majority of the people in Hell will be women (Bukhari v.1, b.2, no.28). Thus it is not surprising that another famous scholar, Qurtubi, even goes so far as to dehumanise women completely: “A woman may be likened to a sheep – even a cow or a camel – for all are ridden.”

The Sufi mystic Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111), often lionised as the greatest ever Muslim after Muhammad himself, clearly did not believe that men and women were equal partners. Here is an excerpt from one of his works, in which he outlines a woman's role:

“She should stay at home and get on with her spinning, she should not go out often, she must not be well-informed...she must not leave her house without his [her husband's] permission and if given his permission she must leave surreptitiously...She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband's sexual needs at any moment.”

Al-Ghazali also warns men that the guile of women “is immense and their mischief is noxious; they are immoral and mean-spirited.”

So much for equality.

I should also briefly address the other common claim that Islam made life better for women in Arabia. The Islamic texts explicitly say otherwise. Aisha herself, Muhammad's favourite wife, said it best, after witnessing her husband fail to do or say anything to criticise a Muslim man who had brutally beaten his wife: "I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women. Look! Her skin is greener than her clothes!" (Sahih Bukhari v.7, b.72, no.715)

Apologists For Evil

Here is the latest video by noted British atheist Pat Condell - and in my opinion, it's his best rant ever. In it, he takes the Western Left - to whom he, by his own confession, used to belong - to task for their naive and disgraceful appeasement of Islam, their intellectual cowardice in smearing all those who disagree with them as racists, and their worryingly successful attempts at cultural suicide. It should be required viewing for every liberal.

Obama's "Puzzling" Approach to the Muslim World

Raymond Ibrahim has a thoughtful article on Barack Obama's appeasement of Islam and the dangers it presents, especially when one considers the President's Muslim background - in other words, he should know better.

I ought to head off any doubts by saying that I do not believe Ibrahim is here endorsing the view that Obama is a Muslim. If he is, I repudiate such a view. Obama is not a Muslim - that's a smear that won't quite go away - but on the other hand, the fact that he once was a Muslim is almost beyond dispute.

As I have stated here before, Obama's suicidal approach to the global jihad can be best explained by the fact that he is a classic Leftist - such liberals having a long track record of supporting and appeasing not only radical Islam, but other totalitarian ideologies, as well. The years he has spent imbibing radical Marxist doctrine from his self-loathing "progressive" friends was bound to make him a dangerous appeaser once he entered office. Next to this, his Muslim background really doesn't mean anything.

Speaking Gibberish

Over at The Religion of Peace, they have a good refutation of the common Islamic apologetic claim that the Qur'an can only be properly understood in Arabic. So the argument goes, the Qur'an doesn't really say anything about fighting unbelievers, hating their guts or oppressing women. In the original Arabic it says something perfectly benign; it's just that it comes across badly in translation. TROP expose this "argument" for what it really is: "Obviously, the real reason for this illogical myth is that, for the first time, the information age is making the full history and texts of the Islamic religion available to a broader audience, and it is highly embarrassing to both Muslim scholars and their faithful flock. Pretending that different meanings exist in Arabic is a way of finding solace and saving face." Do be sure to read it all.

The TROP refutation deals with this apologetic claim from a logical point of view. A few years back, Ibn Warraq refuted the same myth from a more practical perspective, in his series on How To Debate A Muslim:

However, the majority of Muslims are not Arabs or Arabic speaking peoples. The non-Arabic speaking nations of Indonesia with a population of 197 million, Pakistan with 133 million, Iran with 62 million, Turkey with 62 million, India with a Muslim population of about 95 million, out- number by far the total number of native Arabic speakers in about thirty countries in the world estimated as 150 million. Many educated Muslims whose native tongue is not Arabic do learn it in order to read the Koran, but then again the vast majority do not understand Arabic, even though many do learn parts of the Koran by heart without understanding a word.

In other words, the majority of Muslims have to read the Koran in translation in order to understand it.