Robert Spencer - Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West

Copyright 2003 by Robert Spencer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website or broadcast.

First ebook edition 2014

eISBN 978-1-62157-116-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spencer, Robert, 1962-

Onward Muslim soldiers / Robert Spencer.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Jihad. 2. War-Religious aspects-Islam. 3. Terrorism-Religious aspects-Islam. 4. Religious tolerance-Islam. 5. Islam-Controversial literature. I. Title.

BP182.S64 2003

297.7'2dc22

2003017604

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Acknowledgments

For many reasons, including the unpleasant prospect of reprisals against innocent people, there are more people who helped make this book a reality than I can thank here. However, I am able to single out Dr. Andrew Bostom and Bat Yeor for alerting me to important sources, Theresa Barger for help with French, and many others for their enormously valuable advice, information, and support, including Jeffrey Rubin, Dr. Walid Phares, Fr. Thomas Steinmetz, Paul Weyrich, and Dr. Farajollah Parvizian. I am grateful also to the indefatigable and resourceful Steve Lilienthal of the Free Congress Foundation, and to my editor, the protean and insightful Harry Crocker. As for the others, I trust you know who you are, and to all: Shukran.

Dedicated to the victims of jihad and dhimmitude worldwide Your sufferings are not forgotten

Table of Contents

Get out your weapons, commanded Jaffar Umar Thalib, a forty-year-old Muslim cleric, over Indonesian radio in May 2002. Fight against [Christians in Indonesia] to the last drop of blood.

I T WAS JIHAD.

Christians, Jaffar explained, were belligerent infidels (kafir harbi) and entitled to no mercy. This designation was not merely a stylistic flourish on Jaffars part. On the contrary, kafir harbi is a category of infidel that is clearly delineated in Islamic theology; by using it, Jaffar not only incited his followers to violence, but gave that violence the legitimacy of Islamic doctrine.

His usage and reasoning resonated with his followers in the now-disbanded Laskar Jihad. Thousands heeded his call with ferocious single-mindedness. Some estimate the death toll among

Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that has set itself up as the chief roadblock on the latest road map to peace in the Middle East, also sees itself as fighting a jihad. The Hamas charter of August 1988 declares: Nothing is loftier or deeper in Nationalism than waging Jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, aspiring warriors of jihad were invited to enroll in Ultimate Jihad Challenge: a two-week course in our thousand-acre state-of-the-art shooting range in the United States. This was not a course for effete intellectuals. The course emphasis is on practical live fire training. You will fire between two to three thousand rounds of mixed caliber ammunition. Class theory is kept to a minimum. The British-based website advertising the course explained that, due to the firearms law of the UK all serious firearms training must be done overseas. That is, in the United States.

The websites owner, an English convert to Islam named Sulayman Zain-ul-Abidin, denied operating anything less innocuous than a training center for security guards. However, police charged that he had received and erased e-mails containing evidence to the contrary, including one that read, Let me sacrifice myself for jihadsend details.

Enrollees in the Ultimate Jihad Challenge at Camp Ground Zero would no doubt have agreed with the Saudi sheikh Nasser Muhammad Al-Ahmad, who preached a sermon on jihad in 2000 at the Al-Nour mosque in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Speaking of Jerusalem, sheikh Nasser declared, There is no solution to this problem, and to any problem to which the infidel enemy is party, except by waving the banner of Jihad....The sites holy to Muslims will be regained only by Jihad for the sake of Allah....When true Islamic Jihad is declared, the balance of power will shift.

The sheikh rejoiced that the West perceived jihad as a threat. What frightens the West more than anything else is the word Jihad, because they understand what it means. A sweatshirt spotted among Muslim radicals at pro-Iraq rallies in the Middle East in spring 2003 bore a similar legend: JIHAD is the language they understand!

Sheikh Nasser and the sweatshirt manufacturers could be certain that the West understood what they meant by jihad, because their view of the term has ample support in Islamic theology, tradition, and history. Theirs isnt the only Muslim understanding of jihad, but its well enough established in Islam to enable radicals to recruit and mobilize Muslims in Egypt, Palestine, Pakistan, Turkey, Nigeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, and around the worldincluding Western Europe and the United States. Jihadist movements are able to gain followers around the world not by calls for political or economic justice or by twisting and abusing Islamic theology, but by preaching the old-time religion of jihad as holy war, which has always been attractive to a significant sector of Islamic populations. Samuel Huntington puts it bluntly in The Clash of Civilizations: Some Westerners, including President Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamic extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.Westa threat that, as Huntington points out, key Western analysts and policymakers persistently refuse to face on its own terms.

That is what I report about in this book. In doing so, I give not my own conclusions but draw on Islamic sources themselves, beginning with the Quran and ranging through Islamic tradition and law from the earliest centuries to the present day. Whenever possible I have quoted these sources verbatim, in order to emphasize that these are not my words or mere reconstructions of what they have said, but their actual statements.

Muslim controversialists often try to silence critics who quote uncomfortable passages from Islamic sources by maintaining that they can be truly understood only in Arabic. This claim, however, is palpably absurd. Muslims around the world preach Islam and attempt to make converts in languages other than Arabic. If the Qurans message can be understood only in Arabic, why do they do this? Also, most Muslims in the world today are not native speakers of Arabic; the most populous Muslim country is Indonesia, hardly an Arab land. With ancient and populous Muslim communities existing outside the Arab world, from Bosnia to Iran and Pakistan to Indonesia, Muslims have always translated the Quran, if only for private spiritual edification. I have relied in this book on Quranic translations written by Muslims for Muslimschiefly