Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (17 page)

At his 2012 trial for stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, Ahmed argued that he was in fact only spreading the word of God as taught through Islam: “My intention was to do my duty as a Muslim, to inform people of God’s word and to give the message on what God says about homosexuality.” According to the BBC, Ahmed also told the court he felt it was his duty as a Muslim to inform and advise people if they were committing sins, and that he would be failing if he did not. “My duty is not just to better myself but to try and better the society I live in,” he added. “We believe we can’t just stand by and watch somebody commit a sin, we must try and advise them and urge them to stay away from sin.”
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Ahmed was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. After his release, he left his wife and three small children and joined IS. On November 7, 2014, he drove a truck laden with explosives into an Iraqi police convoy north of Baghdad, killing himself, an Iraqi general, and seven policemen, and injuring fifteen others.
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A few months before he had told a
Newsweek
reporter, “It is for the sake of . . . religion and . . . honor. We are not for this life, but for the afterlife.”
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This is the doctrine of commanding right and forbidding wrong in action.

Ahmed’s case is very far from unique. Consider this 2011 broadcast from a Muslim radio station in Leeds, England, during Ramadan. Speaking in Urdu, Rubina Nasir told listeners to Asian Fever’s
Sister Ruby Ramadan Special
: “What should be done if they [practice homosexuality]? If there are two such persons among you, that do this evil, the shameful act, what do you have to do? Torture them; punish them; beat them and give them mental torture. Allah states, ‘If they do such a deed, punish them, both physically and mentally. Mental punishment means rebuke them, beat them, humiliate them, admonish and curse them, and beat them up. This command was sent in the beginning because capital punishment had not yet been sent down.’ ”
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The following day Nasir was back on the air, talking about what happens when a Muslim man or woman gets married to a Mushrak—one who associates God with another (Jesus), i.e., a Christian.

Listeners! Marriage of a Muslim man or woman with a Mushrak is the straight path to hellfire. Have my sisters and brothers, who live with people of bad religions or alien religions, ever thought about what would become of the children they have had with them—and the coming generation? Where the filth of
shirk
[the sin of following another religion] is present, where the dirt of
shirk
is present, where the heart is impure, how can you remove apparent filth? How many arrangements will you make to remove the apparent filth? We are saying that Mushraks have no concept of cleanliness and uncleanliness.
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For these comments, the radio station was fined £4,000 (around $6,000), but there was no move to suspend its broadcasting license.

Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance—such abuses of the freedom of speech—a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.

Only when Muslims—particularly those in Western countries—are free to say what they want, to pray or to not pray, to remain Muslim or to convert, or to have no faith at all; only when Muslim women are free to wear what they want, to go out as they want, to choose the partners that they want—only then will we be on a path to discover what is truly right and truly wrong in the twenty-first century. Commanding right and forbidding wrong are fundamentally at odds with the core Western principle of individual freedom. They, too, need to be removed from the central Islamic creed.

W
e don’t expect Islamic holy war in Ottawa, Canada’s chilly capital city. But in October 2014, a young Muslim named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot an unarmed Canadian soldier who was guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier at Ottawa’s National War Memorial and then was himself killed in a shoot-out inside the Canadian Parliament’s Hall of Honor. In the immediate aftermath, a Washington Post reader sent the following to the newspaper’s website: “ISIL, via an incredible internet marketing, recruitment and promotion campaign, is delivering a message that is resonating with westerners. Western governments and society will need to figure out how and why this message of death is more appealing than the life these folks have been given in their countries.”

That is the question, in various forms, that gets asked after each new atrocity, whether it happens in Oklahoma City or Sydney, Australia. In the wake of the shooting, stabbing, and attempted beheading of the British soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on a London street by two Muslim converts, the same question was asked. One of the men, Michael Adebolajo, gave his answer in a handwritten note he gave to a stunned bystander. The note read:

To my beloved children know that to fight Allah’s enemies is an obligation. The proofs of which are so numerous that but a handful of any of them cuts out the bewitching tongues of the Munafiqeen [hypocrites].

Do not spend your days in endless dispute with the cowardly and foolish if it means it will delay you meeting Allah’s enemies on the battlefield.

Sometimes the cowardly and foolish could be those dearest to you so be prepared to turn away from them.

When you set out on this path do not look left or right.

Seek Shaheedala oh my sons . . .
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“Shaheedala” means martyrdom for the sake of Allah. It is the ultimate obligation—and reward—of the Islamic imperative of jihad: holy war.

The injunction to wage jihad is as old as the Qur’an, but in Muhammad’s time there were no automatic weapons, no rocket-propelled grenades, no improvised explosive devices, no suicide vests. It was not possible to leave homemade bombs in backpacks near the finishing line of a race.

The carnage that erupted on April 15, 2013, some fifty yards from the finish line of the Boston Marathon, was apparently perpetrated by two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Born in the former Soviet Union to a Chechen father who had sought asylum in the United States in 2002, each of the brothers had received the gifts of free education, free housing, and free medical care from various U.S. governmental agencies. The younger brother, Dzhokhar, had already been granted his American citizenship, administered to him on, of all dates, September 11. Tamerlan was merely waiting for his final citizenship paperwork to be processed. The brothers spent months preparing for their bombing to take place on Patriots’ Day, which commemorates the heroes of the American Revolution. How to explain such staggering ingratitude toward their adopted homeland?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offered at least the beginnings of an explanation in a note written not long before he was apprehended: “I’m jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus [the highest level of Paradise] (inshallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA) [a martyr inshallah] to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. A[llah Ak]bar!”
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He also offered this explicit account of his and his brother’s motivations:

the ummah is beginning to rise/ [unintelligible] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that[?]
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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is very far from the only young man in the West to have fallen under the spell of jihad. Consider the near-perfect all-American life of Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani national who also became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He arrived on a student visa, married an American, graduated from college, worked his way up the corporate ladder to become a junior financial analyst for a cosmetics company in Connecticut, and received his citizenship at the age of thirty. A year later, in 2010, Shahzad tried to blow up as many of his fellow citizens as possible in a failed car bombing in New York’s Times Square. Prior to his courtroom sentencing, the criminal trial judge asked Shahzad about the oath of allegiance to the United States that he had taken, in which, like all newly minted citizens, he did “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” Shahzad replied: “I sweared [
sic
], but I didn’t mean it”—the legal equivalent of swearing with one hand and crossing his fingers with the other, but with far more damaging consequences. He then expressed his regret about the failure of his plot and added that he would gladly have sacrificed a thousand lives in the service of Allah. He concluded by predicting the downfall of his new homeland, the United States.

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.

None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation.

But it also reflects the influence of the strategic minds behind global jihad, in particular Sayyid Qutb, the author of
Milestones
, who explicitly argued that Islam was not just a religion but a revolutionary political movement; Abdullah ‘Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s mentor, who propounded an individualist “lone wolf” theory of jihad; and the Pakistani army general S. K. Malik, who argued in
The Quranic Conception of War
that the only center of gravity in warfare was the soul of the enemy and that therefore terror was the supreme weapon.
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In Great Britain, the radical cleric Anjem Choudary has declared: “We believe there will be complete domination of the world by Islam.” That domination can only come through the waging of jihad. Through his words, Choudary has helped to send hundreds of Europeans to the battlefields in Iraq and Syria, as well as to plant the seeds for jihadist attacks inside Britain. Choudary also supports the IS beheadings of Americans and Britons, telling a
Washington Post
reporter that the victims deserved to die. This message may seem foreign or outlandish to most Westerners, but we underestimate its appeal at our peril.

The Call to Jihad

As a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girl in Kenya, I believed in jihad. With the enthusiasm of idealistic young Americans who want to join the Peace Corps, I was ready for holy war. For me, jihad was something to aspire to beyond chores for my mother and grandmother and my dreaded math class. The ideal of holy war encouraged me to get out of the house and engage in charitable work for others. It gave me a focus for my inner struggle; now I could struggle to be a better Muslim. Every prayer, every veil, every fast, every acknowledgment of Allah signaled that I was a better person or at least on the path to becoming one. I had value, and if the hardships of life in the Old Racecourse Road section of Nairobi felt overwhelming, it was only temporary. I would be rewarded in the afterlife.

That’s how jihad is generally first presented to most young Muslims—as a manifestation of the inner struggle to be a good Muslim. It’s a spiritual struggle, a path toward the light. But then things change. Gradually, jihad ceases to be simply an inner struggle; it becomes an outward one, a holy war in the name of Islam by an army of glorious “brothers” ranged against the enemies of Allah and the infidel. Yet this martial jihad seems even more appealing.

The origins of jihad can be traced back to the foundational Islamic texts.
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Key verses in the Qur’an, and many verses in the hadith, call for jihad, a type of religious warfare to spread the land ruled by Allah’s laws. For example:

•
9:5 “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.”

•
8:60 “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly.”

•
8:39 “And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere.”

•
8:65 “O Prophet! rouse the Believers to the fight. If there are twenty amongst you, patient and persevering, they will vanquish two hundred.”

Today, these words have lost none of their appeal. Beguilingly presented by modern theorists of jihad such as Qutb, ‘Azzam, and Malik, they can readily inspire young men to try to replicate the achievements of Muhammad’s warriors in battle.

Celebrity Jihad

When I was a teenager, only a few decades ago, there were only so many jihadists who could be recruited. It was a tedious process of finding the right recruits in the right mosques and madrassas. It required a form of charismatic retail politics, of selecting, nurturing, and pulling along. Today, it is far easier. All a jihadist needs is access to a smartphone, and recruits will follow him. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, even the pages of Facebook have become virtual recruiting grounds with a global reach. For young people who have very limited chances to achieve fame and notoriety in their current situation, jihad is like one giant selfie. Suddenly, they have Twitter followers and video viewers. Suddenly, more and more people are paying attention to them. They become social media celebrities.

An Egyptian student, Islam Yaken, is a good example. He studied engineering, received a law degree, and was fluent in French and Arabic. A fitness buff who once posted workout tips and photos of his bare torso on his Facebook page, he left Egypt to join IS. His photo uploads changed from gym scenes to images of him riding a horse and holding a sword. The news raced across Egyptian social media websites, only amplifying his newfound celebrity.
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Jihadists do not have to wait for martyrdom to bring them fame. Thanks to electronic media, they can be immortalized in an instant. Photos and 140-character postings from Syria and Iraq currently litter the Internet. They show smiling jihadists, relaxed, with their rifles or trophies of war. A young man named Yilmaz, a Dutch national from a Turkish family, posted a photo of himself holding a cute Syrian toddler. After a Florida man, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, carried out a suicide bombing in Syria, an image of him smiling and holding a cat popped up online. Another who has achieved instant infamy is the man nicknamed Jihadi John, whose face was disguised but whose English accent was clearly audible as he appeared in IS videos with the severed heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. As Shiraz Maher of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College, London, explains, the message is: “Come out here and have the time of your life. It makes it look like jihadi summer camp.”

Jihad, it seems, has become a kind of hip lifestyle for disaffected youth. Online videos use “jihad rap.” There is a distinctive jihadist look, too. In photos and videos, they all look the same: men in the backs of trucks, waving their rifles aloft, bearded, dressed in black. Whether they are IS warriors driving toward Baghdad, Boko Haram members striking a Christian village in northern Nigeria, Taliban fighters attacking a school in Peshawar, the style is very much the same.

Yet we should not confuse style with substance. While modern technology allows jihadist groups to glamorize their activities, the content of their videos remains firmly rooted in Islamic tradition and the theory of global jihad. These are rebels with a cause. In their own minds, they are reliving the glorious past of holy war, reenacting Muhammad’s early battles against the Quraysh, when he and his men were grossly outnumbered yet still were victorious, egged on by Allah’s promise of rewards for those who died as martyrs.

I was about eight years old when I first heard the tales of the Prophet’s army, at my Qur’an school in Saudi Arabia. (Our teachers showed us dramatic video re-creations of the battles.) Make no mistake: today’s jihadist fighters have been raised with these same stories—and often the ineptitude of the jihadists’ opponents seems to make history repeat itself. In Iraq, government soldiers fled their positions when IS attacked, despite being better armed than their attackers. In Nigeria, too, despite substantial Western assistance, the authorities failed miserably to free “our girls” from Boko Haram.

After the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the airport attack in Karachi, Pakistan, the jihadist websites gloated that Allah had weakened the enemy, allowing victory—exactly the same story I heard from Somalis back in 1994 after eighteen American military personnel were killed and mutilated in Mogadishu. Even the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan in exchange for five Taliban leaders can be presented as another victory for Allah’s warriors over the infidel.