This is what makes it so difficult for the West to understand and combat Islamic terror: the cleverness with which religion has been intertwined with politics to justify and legitimise brutality. In the name of Allah, killing becomes holy killing and evil is His holy tool.
Why is everyone so surprised that young Muslims are rushing off from every civilised country to sacrifice themselves as jihadists on the barren plains of Iraq? The day after the World Trade Centre was reduced to piles of rubble, Americans were told they had had it coming to them. The cheers rang around the Islamic world. New York was soon confronted with a demand to set up a mosque a couple of blocks away — the classic victory salute from Arab history to mark the site of a battle won.
But nobody listened, or heard. Least of all the leader of the shattered country, George W. Bush. Incredibly, he chose Washington’s Islamic Centre as the site from which to explain the event to his nation. Standing beside leaders of the Muslim community, he exonerated Islam: “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”
In one of the most stupid acts of an American presidency, in which political expediency triumphed over historical knowledge and common sense, Bush quoted a passage from the Qur’an:
“In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”
Where, that day, were the scholars who should have been able to explain to the president what those words meant to Islam? Precisely the opposite of what he thought. It had been evil America which had held the signs of Allah up to ridicule. In his misbegotten quote, President Bush sent out a coded message to the Arab world, signalling that the leader of the Free World didn’t understand what he was talking about, what he was up against.
It doesn’t require the code-breakers of Bletchley Park to decipher the messages of the Qur’an; it simply needs a reading of history and a study of how Muhammad designed his political religion and applied it in his own time. The atrocities we are seeing at the hands of ISIS, the self-promulgated Islamic State, are straight out of the script of Muhammad’s terrorism. What is happening today is an imitation of what Mohammed did 1400 years ago.
Massacre, rape, beheadings, crucifixions were the tools used to extend Islam in the seventh century; armed raids, seizures, and slavery financed the campaign. As leader, and the messenger of Allah, Muhammad was not merely charismatic, he could not be questioned. He was accepted as “the perfect human” (al ensan-e-kamel) and the ‘Mercy of God among all the worlds’ (rahmatan lil alamin). The laws he claimed to be passing on as the word of God conveniently legitimised his every action and were so crafted as to bind his followers, for all time.