Thursday, May 8, 2008

Pride of Lions, Part 2

In Part 1 we had a brief excerpt from Are Muslim enclaves no-go areas, forcing other people out, asks historian John Cornwell, dated March 16, 2008. Skipping down some in that article, we have the following passage:

A mild-eyed young man called Osman comes to squat next to me where I sit with my back to the wall. "What does total submission entail?" I ask. "We don't leave our religion in the mosque," he says reverentially. "We take it out into the streets, the workplace, into our homes." Osman is joined by three other curious worshippers. One of them embraces me and starts to talk about the Prophet: "Peace be upon him." I ask him why, if their religion is truly peace-loving, it perpetrates crimes like honour killings and supports terrorism. "Islam is a religion of peace," he says. "There is no such thing as Muslim terrorism, just as there is no such thing as Muslim alcoholism, no such thing as Muslim pig-eating."


"There is no such thing as Muslim terrorism" -- the very statement makes takfir out of all the Muslims who commit terrorist acts. This goes beyond denial. By internalizing the concept of takfir, he is adopting terrorist ideology, and setting the stage for further terrorism.

The majority of Muslims do not kill women for running away from brutal husbands and forced marriages, nor are they terrorists, yet moderate Muslims nevertheless appear to be creating divisive enclaves within this country as a result of routine Muslim religiosity and lifestyle. Consider the following. In Dewsbury, imams petition Mid Yorkshire Hospital NHS Trust to request nurses to turn beds of sick Muslims to face Mecca five times a day. A Muslim shop assistant at Reading's Marks & Spencer refuses to touch a book of children's Bible stories because it is "unclean". In hospitals around Britain, female Muslim surgeons refuse to follow hygiene guidelines stipulating scrubbing up bare arms (a measure to combat MRSA and Clostridium difficile). In Oxford the imam of the new central mosque is requesting amplified calls to prayer, prompting Christian clergy to predict "white flight" from a city of burgeoning minarets.


It's called "Islamification".

While billed as a racial issue, Islam is in fact not a "race" but an ideology -- a religion, a way of life -- and anyone can become a Muslim.

However, since many of the non-Muslim inhabitants of the British Isles are "white" and, many of the relatively newly-arrived Muslims are of darker complexion, the matter is billed as "racism" -- hence, the use of the term "white flight" when non-Muslims leave an area that is becoming Islamified.

We consider now excerpts from 'White flight' increasing, race chief says by Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, dated January 16, 2008:

Trevor Phillips said so-called "white flight" -- an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here -- was deepening racial segregation.

Mr Phillips has warned in the past of the growing polarisation of the country along ethnic lines.

But his use of the emotive term "white flight" will fuel the controversy triggered by the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester.

[snip]

The term "white flight" was coined in 1960s America to describe the emergence of inner city ghettos.

However, Government ministers have preferred to refer to it as "churn" and to attribute the movement of people to house price fluctuations.


House price fluctuations...

A survey conducted by the old Commission for Racial Equality in 2006 found that a quarter of Britons wanted to live in an all-white area.

The movement has been especially notable in London, which has always seen a big turnover of population, and is now witnessing unprecedented movement.

Last year, nearly 245,000 people left inner boroughs for the suburbs, rural areas, or new lives abroad.

The movement has a bigger impact in northern cities where communities already live "parallel lives".

As a consequence they become "shut off" and vulnerable to political and religious extremism.

[snip]

"This is another courageous contribution from Trevor Phillips, who is clearly prepared to face the facts about the current strains in our society," he said.

"We would add -- although he does not -- that massive levels of immigration are a significant factor in this."


The extremism is being cultivated by ongoing government policies. The government is allowing in too many immigrants, and making it too easy for them to not assimilate. That last sentence in the article nails it, although it is not just a matter of immigration. It is a question of the ideology held by the people they are letting in.

Toward the end of Part 1, we began reviewing The Gina Khan Interview - Part One January 9, 2008. That excerpt ended with Gina saying the following:

I am not liked by the Islamists. I've had bricks thrown through the window and I've had family members beaten up. I've been told to move on. But I'm not budging. This is my home and I belong here. The Islamists where I live -- in Birmingham's Ward End -- are an awful scourge.


We now continue with that interview:

Q: Why are you not like them yourself?

I was 10 when I first started to reason and listen to what my inner voice was telling me, compared to the voices that were drowning out my own authentic voice. I remained silent back then though, and I have since paid a very high personal price for that silence, as I could not get on with the confined ways as laid out for me. Looking back -- I suppose I was only young -- I participated in my own oppression and thought I was being a good Muslim woman. As hard as people tried though, they couldn't take the Britishness out of me! I fought suppression and oppression until I have become who I've become.

I think in English, I talk in English. I wasn't even fluent speaking Urdu and Punjabi until I was 18yrs of age. The women in my family were not backwards, my Mum was the head of the family, and she was a strong independent woman who made sure Dad could never engage in polygamy in this country (as he had done before in Pakistan before they migrated to Birmingham). But don't get me wrong -- I'm a Muslim alright.


This is a key point.

According to the extremists, Gina Khan is not a Muslim -- she is takfir.

Wikipedia explains takfir thus:

In Islamic law, takfir or takfeer is the practice of declaring unbeliever or kafir (pl. kuffār), an individual or a group previously considered Muslim. The act which precipitates takfir is termed the mukaffir.

Conditions

This declaration may be made if the alleged Muslim in question declares himself a kafir, but more typically applies to a judgement that an action or statement by the alleged Muslim indicates his knowing abandonment of Islam.

[snip]

What constitutes sufficient justification for takfir is disputed between different schools of religious thought. The orthodox Sunni position is that sins do not in general prove that someone is not a Muslim, but that denials of fundamental religious principles do; thus a murderer, for instance, may still be a Muslim, but someone who denies that murder is a sin must be a kafir, as long as he is aware that murder is a sin in Islam. An extreme case is exemplified by the early Kharijites, some of whom concluded that any Muslim who sinned ceased to be a Muslim, while others concluded that any major sin could cause that.


Funny how the Kharijites -- the Khawarij -- should come up in this topic!

The following excerpt is from Jihad Without Rules: The Evolution of al-Takfir wa al-Hijra by Hayder Mili, June 29, 2006. Notice how the term takfir here is used to refer to those who believe in the concept of takfir and incorporate it into extremist ideology.

The September 11 attacks precipitated the uncovering of extensive al-Takfir wa al-Hijra (Excommunication and Exile) networks across Europe specialized in logistical support to terrorist groups. While the obscure group had been previously encountered by law enforcement, many were surprised at the extent and reach of its networks. Once thought of as nothing more than a fringe group in Egypt, in the last 15 years the ideology has undergone a surprising internationalization and evolution with Takfir groups involved in terrorist attacks, criminal activities and cooperating with the al-Qaeda network in its jihad against the West.

The Doctrine

Most contemporary Takfir doctrine was forged inside Egyptian jails following the great wave of arrests targeting the Muslim Brotherhood in the mid-1960s where many of its members were tortured and/or executed. One of those arrested, the sheikh of Egypt's al-Azhar mosque, Ali Ismael, postulated that not only were Egyptian President Nasser and his entourage apostates, but so was Egyptian society as a whole because it was not fighting the Egyptian government and had thus accepted rule by non-Muslims. This was another radical turn in the concept of takfir (to excommunicate), first enunciated by Sheikh Ibn Taymiyyah and further developed by Sayyid Qutb, both intellectual pillars of the contemporary jihadist ideology. While the sheikh later rejected this doctrine, his remaining followers quickly gravitated around a young charismatic agronomist by the name of Shukri Mustafa, who became the spiritual leader of Jama'at al-Muslimin (as they called themselves) but whom Egyptian police came to call al-Takfir wa al-Hijra (ATWAH).

Takfir members exiled themselves (al-Hijra) in the desert practicing complete isolation (al-Uzla) from excommunicated (al-Takfir) Muslim societies. While jihad certainly remained an imperative, Shukri Mustafa initially believed that an imminent world war between the superpowers would leave free reign to the jihadists—then too weak—to take power. Arguing that Egyptian man-made laws were illegitimate, ATWAH was able to justify theft, kidnapping, forced marriages and even the assassination of anyone who was not part of the group (such as apostates). Most of these core precepts are still loosely followed by contemporary Takfir groups.


These extremist groups were "able to justify theft, kidnapping, forced marriages and even the assassination of anyone who was not part of the group" -- in other words, they became murders, criminals, terrorists -- Khawarij!

Here is an excerpt from Maulana Maudoodi’s article: Mischief of Takfir:

In the period of the decline of the Muslims, among the many troubles that have arisen, one serious and dangerous mischief is that of declaring one another as kafir and wrong-doer, and cursing one another. People introduced cracks within the plain and simple creed of Islam, and by means of inference and interpretation they created from them such branches and details as were mutually contradictory, and which were not explained in the Quran and Sunna, and even if these were, then God and His Prophet had not given them any importance. Then these servants of God (may God forgive them) gave so much importance to their own invented side-issues that they made them the criteria for faith, and on the basis of these they tore Islam to pieces, and made numerous sects, each sect calling every other as kafir, wrong-doer, misguided, doomed to hell, and God knows what. Whereas God in His clear Book had drawn a plain line of distinction between kufr and Islam, and had not given anyone the right to have discretion to declare anything he wants as kufr and anything he wants as Islam. Whether the cause of this mischief is narrow-mindedness with good intentions, or selfishness, envy and self-seeking with malevolent intentions, the fact remains that probably nothing else has done the Muslims as much harm as this has done.


"Whether the cause of this mischief is narrow-mindedness with good intentions, or selfishness, envy and self-seeking with malevolent intentions, the fact remains that probably nothing else has done the Muslims as much harm as this has done."

And that came out in May, 1935!

The more things change....

Stay tuned to Stop Islamic Conquest as Pride of Lions continues.

2 comments:

anticant said...

"There is no such thing as Muslim terrorism." This is equivalent to "Waterboarding isn't torture." We live in an age when far too many - maybe most - people deal with inconvenient facts by simply denying them and retreating into a mental cloud cuckoo land.

"Many of the non-Muslim inhabitants of the British Isles are 'white'." Not 'many' - the overwhelming majority are. Yes, Islam is a way of life, even more than it is a religion. One of the difficulties Westerners have in coming to terms with the reality of Islam in their midst is that they have long since ceased to take their own religions literally, as Muslims do, or even seriously. They do not grasp the ingrained unquestioning piety of the religiously attuned mind.

The Muslims who have settled in Britain [mostly from rural areas of Pakistan] in some respects resemble the Pilgrim Fathers. Most of them have not come here to embrace our ways of life and abandon their own. They wish to practise their own faith and customs as they have always done, regardless of their changed environment. And the Western dislike and fear of Islam which they sense since 9/11 has only entrenched them - including the younger generation, many of whom were born here - in their adherence to their faith.

At present, most of them are more interested in asserting their difference from us than in integration, let alone assimilation. That is why they differ from most other past and present immigrants, and why the well-intentioned but utterly mistaken policy of 'multiculturalism' is now increasingly recognised as a dead duck. But what is the alternative? As yet, no-one seems to know.

anticant said...

See:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/losing-our-spines-to-save_b_100132.html