Recently in Robert Spencer Category

The BBC yesterday reported that a Muslim dentist in Bury, near Manchester, has been brought before a disciplinary tribunal accused of demanding that a Muslim woman wear a hijab to his practice if she wanted to be treated (HT: UZ). He allegedly told her she could not register with his practice unless she covered her hair, a rule he apparently only applied to Muslim women. There is more on this at the Manchester Evening News, which I found via Dhimmi Watch, having expected that he would pick up on this.

Dhimmi Watch: Study the threats, and the response to them

"Hugh Fitzgerald", the person Robert Spencer calls on (or pretends to be, as some suspect) when he wants to publish an intellectual-sounding article, calls on countries in Europe to follow the example of Benes and Masaryk in Czechoslovakia and expel the Muslims. This is in response to a claim by "Appa", a Dutch Moroccan rapper, that if he got his hands on the bigoted politician Geert Wilders then Wilders would "be his", i.e. he'd harm him (although he didn't actually say he would kill him, as Fitz alleges):

Appa, who says he represents a large group of Muslims youth in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, says in De Pers: "If I ever meet Wilders, he's mine. I swear to you, I'll take him on. And there are more people who feel the same way. People shouldn't be surprised if a Mohammed C. [i.e. a successor to Mohammad B, or Bouyeri, who killed Theo Van Gogh] springs up soon. If someone were to put a bullet in his head, I wouldn't mind."

Robert Spencer today posted to his blog Jihad Watch a memo by one LTC Joseph C. Myers, Senior Army Advisor at Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, in reply to an article on the American Forces Information Service website by two National Defense University scholars who sought to define Muslim extremists not as jihadists but as spreaders of corruption (mufsidun) and their activities as banditry (hiraba). Myers suggests that anyone who thinks that jihad means personal striving consult Reliance of the Traveller, in which he notes that jihad is re-indexed to "Holy War".

Technorati Tags: ayaan+hirsi+ali, melanie+phillips, netherlands, islam, terrorism

With Ayaan Hirsi Magan's resignation after the exposure of her asylum grounds as largely false and her Dutch citizenship now in serious doubt, the hypocritical crocodile tears are beginning to flow in large numbers. Robert Spencer calls it "persecution", the immigration minister Rita Verdonk "lamentable" and the politicians involved "despicable, black-hearted Dutch dhimmis" who "evidently want to take the greatest stateman they have produced in this age and send her back to Somalia and certain death". Melanie Phillips talks of the Dutch being "in the throes of a pathological moral convulsion" and her downfall "a development that shames the Dutch people and should strike a chill throughout the rest of dhimmi Europe". (More: Pickled Politics, MPACUK, CLOSER, Muslim Contrarian, Umar Lee, Izzy Mo, Crooked Timber.)

Hugh Fitzgerald, Robert Spencer's deputy and second windbag in command at Jihad/Dhimmi Watch, has a bit of a cob-on about converts at the moment, with one article after another puzzling over why anyone would want to convert to Islam; any motive is considered by him other than actually believing in it. This week it's the turn of black American converts to get the treatment. Why would any African-American convert to a religion which has what he considers to be such an abysmal record on slavery, and a community which treats black fellow Muslims as badly as they do? As with middle-class white converts, the answer, of course, may well lie in one simple fact: they believe.

A new blog called Watching Jihad Watch (hat tip: UZ, who has links there to a number of hate-watch sites) has a long article on Spencer & co's "coverage" of the Armanious murders (note: this is a Wayback Machine archive, as the original blog has been deleted) in New Jersey, in which it was assumed that the Coptic victims were murdered by Muslims who pretended to convert to Christianity in order to gain the family's confidence in order to kill them, but it turned out that the murderers were simply robbers. They did not apologise, instead posting lengthy excuses.

Brother Habib Abbasi asked me to comment on a post made recently at Dhimmi Watch about converts, in which a series of ulterior motives are given for why westerners of various categories accept Islam. While browsing the blog (something I no longer do very often), I noticed that Hugh Fitzgerald, the author of the piece on converts, has also noticed a website called DawaNet (www.dawanet.org), from which he has somehow gleaned some excuse to link it to a "jihadist cult".

One of Robert Spencer's minions has come close to delivering the "wimp" taunt that politicians seem to fear these days, whether it is on the death penalty or on the so-called War on Terror. This time Tony Blair is the target, the subject being the decision not to allow police to "shut down extremist mosques".

Since Robert Spencer has recently drawn attention to a discussion we had last April which started when I replied to a post about female circumcision on his Dhimmi Watch sub-blog, I thought I'd do the same. The reader is invited to notice a few things about the conduct of the debate:

Some folk reading this are going to start asking why I mention people like Robert Spencer so much on my blog. Well, if Spencer was some guy howling on the sidelines, like so many internet conspiracy theorists, I might leave him alone, but he likes to boast about how many American media outlets give him airtime, many of them, as I previously stated, being Murdoch outlets. I don't have time for a whole piece on Rupert Murdoch here. Let's state a few facts: Dennis Potter, the late playwright who died of cancer, named one of his tumours Rupert, after him. He publishes the Sun, a major London newspaper which, like many British newspapers (if not all) is widely read in the Irish Republic also. The Sun puts its political stories on page two, next to a topless bimbo on page three, and supported Margaret Thatcher's government throughout the 1980s (and Major's too, until the writing appeared on the wall around 1996 because of various scandals, when they switched their allegiance to Tory Bliar). And he was praised for his Australianness by the Prime Minister of Australia, after he'd given up his citizenship for a US passport in order to run more media outlets in the USA.

Latest in Spencer's "Canadian Shari'ah Watch" (and here's a local Muslimah's opinion):

A hard-won victory for human rights. It is only unfortunate that the other religious arbitration arrangements have to be sacrificed, which feeds the assumption that they are all morally equivalent. If Western authorities could dare to speak honestly about the distinctive characteristics of Islamic law, this would not be necessary.

Morally equivalent? By all means say you don't like religious arbitration if that's your position, but to compare Shari'ah family law unfavourably with a system which allows a woman to be "chained" for 16 years by her "husband" who is no longer willing to live with her, as reported in the current London Jewish Chronicle? Islamic family law does allow for judicial separation in certain circumstances, as well as for a woman to specify a right to unilateral separation, either in certain circumstances or in any. Does Jewish law allow the same thing? And hey, what about Catholic divorce law, Spencer?

Get real. And get honest.

When I did the feature two days ago on the way various societies, including Muslim societies, oppress women, I had intended to include a section on what certain writers have been saying about the supposed condonement of rape in Islam. The actual writing comes from our favourite Islamophobe, Robert Spencer. No doubt somebody will write and suggest that I not waste my talents on debunking this sort of filth. But some of the converts to Islam on one of the email lists I subscribe to find these issues unsettling, and Spencer is in any case very close to the mainstream media.

Which is surprising for somebody whose web design is courtesy of such a lousy practitioner of the art as Charles Johnson of the infamous hate blog Little Green Footballs. He has clearly been hired for being a fellow traveller, rather than for his actual skills, because his design looks lousy on Linux. Take a look at his blog for yourself if you are reading this on Windows or the Mac; I have four screenshots of how it looks on Linux: Konqueror on Fedora Core 4, Firefox on FC4, Konqueror on SUSE 9.3, Firefox on SUSE 9.3. The wrong fonts (and the problem of the normal text being bigger than the headings) can be avoided simply by making allowances for common Linux fonts in the CSS stylesheet. (Linux is not that popular in the west, but it is increasingly so in eastern Europe, Asia and the developing world where people can't afford Microsloth's prices.)

Melanie Phillips is also an admirer of Spencer's; Spencer has called her "incomparable" and her diary "always essential reading", and she has called one of his articles on FrontPageMag.com "typically informed and thoughtful". Melanie Phillips has written for the Times and the Guardian, and currently writes a column in the Daily Mail. As we know, the Sunday Telegraph published four hate pieces by the deranged hate-monger calling himself Will Cummins, a complete literary nobody apart from his tirades last July. Spencer already boasts of his appearances in the right-wing American mass media and even (probably occasionally) the mainstream media; it may not be too long before Spencer's ideas appear in sections of the British media as well.

The accusations this piece refers to can be found in the FrontPageMag.com article Muslim Target, reproduced at Jihad Watch here. It is in response to a lawsuit against Oriana Fallaci, a vitriolically anti-Muslim Italian journalist, by one Adel Smith, who if Spencer is to be believed, has a history of "defending Islam" by launching misguided lawsuits. For example, he is reported to have sued both the late and current Pope for statements which merely asserted the superiority of their own religion; given that the popes are based in the Vatican, not in the Republic of Italy, I wonder how they'd make good the result of any such suit. Last month, he was also convicted of defaming the Catholic church himself, by calling it a "criminal association". Bear in mind that Italy has a lower standard of free speech than either the UK or the USA; there are criminal libel laws, and I have read elsewhere of someone being prosecuted for criminal defamation for saying (to the police!) that he suspected a neighbour of a campaign of harrassment.

Adel Smith numbered among Fallaci's offences her accusations about Muslim soldiers in Italy; Spencer defends her with quotes from the Reliance of the Traveller and some hadeeth. The school of thought relevant to Italy is the Maliki, as this is the school which is predominant in North Africa (except lower Egypt), from whence any invasion of Italy would have come. The school, as represented a standard text and commentary translated by A'isha Bewey, has this to say:

Killing monks and priests should be avoided unless they are involved in the fighting. Similarly, women who fight can also be killed. [Commentary: The prohibition against killing monks is not by virtue of their monasticism, because they are further from Allah because of the strength of their disbelief. They are left since the people of their deen leave them and so they are like women. Priests (rabbis) are left unless they actually fight. It is said that this refers to women and children as well. Women can be killed if they are involved in the actual fighting. Ibn 'Umar limits this to the state of fighting. When fighting is over, women are not killed. The predominant opinion is that when women fight with weapons, they can be killed during the fighting or afterwards, even if they did not fight anyone. According to the Mukhtasar, monks and nuns retain their freedom, and it is forbidden either to kill them or to reduce them to slavery.]

The Mukhtasar is likely to be Mukhtasar Khalil, an authoritative text on Maliki fiqh. What Fallaci alleges is either false, or a violation of Islamic law. Later on, Spencer moved into what took place at Thessalonica in 904 CE:

When jihadists captured Thessalonica in 904, just over twenty years after sacking Montecassino, an eyewitness recorded that “nuns, petrified with fear, with their hair disheveled, tried to escape, and ended up by the thousands in the hands of the barbarians, who killed the older ones, and sent the younger and more attractive ones into captivity and dishonor… The Saracens also massacred the unfortunate people who had sought refuge inside churches.”[14] And when the children and spiritual heirs of those jihadists streamed into Constantinople on May 29, 1453, historian Steven Runciman notes that “some of the younger nuns preferred martyrdom to dishonour and flung themselves to death down well-shafts.”[15] It is unclear whether these sisters had been reading dastardly Islamophobic propaganda or the life of the Prophet.

Now, it does not take any scholar to realise that Montecassino is in Italy and Thessalonica is in Greece, and that the people who carried out the raids on the two places were almost certainly different groups of people. Italy would have been reached via Sicily, and Greece via Anatolia or Cyprus. As for whether "the sisters had been reading dastardly Islamophobic propaganda", the answer is most likely yes. Convents are often places where people are isolated from the outside world and may not have access to information which contradicts what the church wants them to hear. If Mother Superior had told them stories about sex-crazed Saracens who followed a "liar named Mohammed" (or some corruption on that name), it's highly likely that they would have been terrified had such people entered their land.

And besides the reputation of the Arabs, we have to ask what reputation the monks and nuns themselves had, or indeed whether the invading armies consisted entirely of Arabs or included local converts who might have known things about these monasteries and their inhabitants that we don't. While some Christian "religious" (as monastics are called) have a reputation today for good community works and even radicalism within the Church, other sections of the priesthood and the monastic orders have been known for various types of abuse of people in their care. The physical and sexual abuse of children in church-run "industrial schools" in Ireland and the regimes of the infamous "Magdalen laundries" has been widely reported; the Birmingham diocese (in England) has just been hit with a £600,000 damages bill (that's over a million US dollars) for the sexual abuse of a boy in Coventry in the 1980s. Similar scandals have affected the American section of the church.

Bear in mind also that the monastic orders fulfilled a different function in medieval European society to that they fill today - they were common dumping grounds for younger children of wealthy families who did not want the expense of getting them married; there was also the issue of primogeniture, in which the eldest son was left everything and the others got nothing. The monastic life was not always an ascetic one; it was often culturally very rich, with the participants enjoying pretty much every pleasure except (at least officially) sex. What corruption went on in this system does not justify any orgy of rape and murder, but we should treat any account of such things happening with some circumspection. After all, the above cited Shari'ah textbook does not deal with the capture by Muslims of a monastic institution known for corruption or abuse.

Spencer elsewhere cites the Reliance and a hadeeth from Bukhari regarding the status of slaves and the right of a man to have sexual relations with a slave girl. It's worth noting here that the enslavement of people captured on the battlefield or when a place falls to an invading army was a fact of life until perhaps the 18th or 19th century; it fell into disrepute due to the mass enslavement of Africans, in many cases by methods which amounted to simple banditry. They included slaving scams which were known of even in the time of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) such as selling into slavery people to whom you had made a promise to convey them. This is equivalent to National Express or Greyhound coach drivers selling their passengers by the side of the road - you can imagine the outrage this would cause. Added to this was the appalling conditions on the slave ships and plantations and the crude racism. The position in Islam of a slave-girl who had born her master's child are also well-known; neither she nor the child is sold, and is free when the master dies (I'm not sure if the child is free from birth or from the master's death). There could be no Jefferson / Hemmings controversy in an Islamic society.

The hadeeths do record that the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) permitted the Muslim soldiers to take slave-girls from among the populations they captured, and did so himself (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam). Spencer, however, makes this accusation:

According to a generally accepted Islamic tradition, when Muhammad’s men emerged victorious in another battle, they presented him with an ethical question: “We took women captives, and we wanted to do ‘azl [coitus interruptus] with them.” Muhammad told them: “It is better that you should not do it, for Allah has written whom He is going to create till the Day of Resurrection.’”[13] When Muhammad said “it is better that you should not do it,” he was referring to coitus interruptus, not to raping their captives. He took that for granted.

Spencer assumes, without any evidence, that the relations the Sahaba (may Allah be pleased with them) had with their mates was rape and that the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) encouraged rape. He has absolutely no proof of this - he is simply assuming the worst. "Come on, it must have been." Well, that sort of reasoning won't convince a jury, except perhaps the worst type of redneck jury. The motto seems to be "think dirty" - and as demonstrated by recent events in the UK, in which cot deaths were investigated by people working on precisely that motto, a "think dirty" attitude does not produce just or truthful outcomes.

Now, I have come across Muslims who apparently lack the ability to give the Salaf the benefit of the doubt on such a serious accusation as this. It should be noted that Islam does not encourage the rape of wives or slave-girls. The Deobandi Hanafi mufti Muhammad bin Adam al-Kawthari, in response to a question on whether a husband may force himself on a wife if she is unwilling, replied:

Imam al-Nawawi (Allah have mercy on him) states in his commentary on the Hadith of Abu Huraira stated above: “This Hadith indicates that it is unlawful (haram) for the wife to refuse her husband for sexual intimacy without a valid reason. Menstruation will not be considered a valid reason, for the husband has a right to enjoy her from above the garment (on top of cloths).” (Sharh Sahih Muslim, P. 1084) However, this does not in any way mean that the husband may force himself over her for sexual gratification. The Hadith mentions that, “the husband spends the night in anger or being displeased,” which clearly shows that he must restrain himself from forcing himself over her. Had this not been the case, the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him & give him peace) would have advised the husband to gain his right in a forceful manner.

Given the copious amount of material that exists on the duties and rights of married women, I must point out here that I've never seen any reference to the duties of a slave in Islam, other than not to run away. For example, here is a passage from the Reliance of the Traveller, in the section "Holding One's Tongue", which is edited from a book by Imam Nawawi (Durubi is the late Syrian Shafi'i shaikh Abdul-Wakeel Durubi):

It is offensive to contend against the words of anyone with authority over one, or talk back, oppose, rebut, or disobey such a person in anything lawful [Durubi: meaning not unlawful or offensive], the prohibition applying to such people as a follower with his leader, son with his parents, student with his teacher, wife with her husband, or unlearned person with a scholar.

Note that "a slave with his master" is not mentioned in this. (Shaikh Nuh Keller, has not translated pieces relating to slavery given its lack of relevance in our time, but he has not said that he has removed them from the Arabic.) I do not mean by this that a slave has no duty whatever, but Islamic texts I have read do not dwell over it. In fact, sections on slaves are mostly given headings to do with freeing slaves, rather than with slavery.

Other accounts demonstrate that the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) did not force himself on unwilling wives: the book by Ibn Abi Zaid al-Qairawaani translated by Abdas-Samad Clarke as A Madinan View (Ta Ha, London, 1419/1999) states that the he (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) divorced two women who sought refuge from him when they entered in upon him. Bear in mind, these were obviously non-Muslims. But there are numerous reports demonstrating the good character the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) showed to people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and to both animals and even plants. There is also a famous hadeeth in which he (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) admonished one of his Companions (who, as I recall, was departing to Yemen for da'wah purposes) to beware of the du'a of the oppressed, as there is no barrier between it and Allah.

New Muslims especially should beware of making the same assumptions about the Salaf that the enemies of Islam do. Our duty is to give people the benefit of the doubt; we do not form opinions of people based on mere assumption, and we should especially guard ourselves about being swayed by the assumptions and aspersions of those whose hatred of Islam is clearly manifested in their published works. (Spencer cannot persuade any respectable publisher to publish his books.) There are ample books on the character of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) which should be resorted to if we are disturbed by scurrilous filth. Causing distress to an animal is forbidden in Islam; harming a person without need is also forbidden. Rape is harmful and the distress it causes is well-known, even if it is not covered by the adultery laws when the victim is a wife or slave-girl. As the fatwa quoted above demonstrates, Islam does not condone rape. And Allah Most High knows best.

The Independent reported a few days ago that a young woman was murdered in Gaza by members of Hamas, because she was seen walking in the streets with her husband. The story has been repeated in the New Zealand Herald after the Independent's copy of its report went into pay-per-view. Bear in mind that the Independent is regarded as a left-wing and generally pro-Arab newspaper, and its best known columnist is Robert Fisk. So whatever can be said about the mainstream western media, I don't think they'd issue an inauthentic story which shows Palestinians in as bad a light as this.

Except that it's not Palestinians this reflects badly on, but Hamas - the report makes clear that locals are outraged, and that Hamas fear that the action may cost them dearly in upcoming elections. A Hamas spokesman is reported to have claimed that the killing was due to a "suspicion of immoral behaviour", and the group has issued leaflets promising to punish the people responsible. Honour killings are a known problem in that part of the world, but this seems to be the first time it's been carried out by members of an armed group (the report suggests that factionalism may be at work, as the victim was married to a Fatah member).

A guy called Patrick, posting at Clarity & Resolve and Pardon My English, calls this "a deliberate act of base depravity for Allah". Well, as a Muslim all I can say is that there have been Muslims from the earliest days of Islam whose fanaticism leads them to exceed the bounds of decency. Anyone with an ounce of Islamic knowledge will tell you that you cannot kill someone for holding hands with someone of the opposite sex in public, especially if they are married! The death penalty, which is by stoning (not shooting), only applies to proven married adulterers - and proving it is no easy task. There is no sanction whatsoever for killing people for anything less than that, much less for the mere suspicion of it.

I intend, insha Allah, to obtain word from various Islamic authorities on the status of this killing (this takes time). From what I've read, it's just plain murder.

(And what is PME doing on Google News? I thought Google News was for news, not blogs.)

An amusing observation on Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch site:

An additional note about Arizona: last night after I spoke, a woman in the audience told me about a friend of hers who has a large place here in Arizona. Beginning over ten years ago, she began to find prayer rugs and Arabic texts on the grounds. This phenomenon, of course, has been widely reported -- and this is just another indication of how long jihadists have crossed into the US from Mexico. If Babar Ahmed had been successful, they wouldn't have had to travel far to get to a training camp.

So, because she finds Islamic paraphernalia on her property, it necessarily follows that the owners are jihadis. They couldn't, of course, just be illegal immigrants using Mexico as a staging post, much as illegal migrants from all corners of the world, including Muslims, try and sneak across the English channel by stowing away on ferries. And none of them have so far carried out a terrorist act, much as none of his jihadis in Arizona appear to (how many of the 9/11 hijackers sneaked across from Mexico through your friend's property, Bob?).

Spencer at Jihad Watch claims that a group of "Muslim fanatics" are posting to a "Jihadist website" the names, and other details, of Christians who debate with Muslims about religion on PalTalk, as some of the recently murdered Armanious family did. I find some of the quotes he offers odd to say the least. (By the way, the website referred to, barsomyat.com, has recently been deleted; Internic's "whois" service claims that the registrar is Direct Information PVT Ltd., but there's no other really useful information. Perhaps the owner took it down, or it got shut down.)

Bibo 117: Allah bless you brothers! Here is the surprise you’ve all been waiting for and we haven’t published yet due to a certain reason. The damned Muhammad-cursing dog "[NAME REMOVED]" is the big brother of "[NAME REMOVED]" and their little brother is the one called "[NAME REMOVED]." "[NAME REMOVED]" the dog is married to the daughter of one of the Muhammad-cursing Christians from paltalk. We have postponed publishing this information because there is a lot more to be revealed when the time is right. These are the pictures of the "devil triangle."

These sound like extremely ill-informed Muslims! Muslims, especially those from traditionally Muslim backgrounds, like Arabs, don't refer to the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) as just Muhammad. We say "the Prophet" or "the Messenger of Allah" or, in Arabic, "Rasoolullah" (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam). We use the name quite rarely, such as when we are also talking about earlier prophets. This echoes the bizarre suicide notes supposedly left by the 9/11 hijackers with lines like "the time of fun and waste is gone" and what was it again, "in the name of God, my family and myself" or something like that, which no Muslim would ever write.

The other day I suddenly decided to rip down my other blog, The Vane. I can only write so much in one day, and I don't have the whole day to write (unlike some people). The theme, elegant as it was, slowed down every single web browser I tried it on. Very few people stopped by, and I was hoping that the writers would include people other than me (I can do this with Wordpress, as being a GPL package, you can use it, without limitation, for free; Movable Type is a commercial package with a restricted free licence - you can't have group blogs unless you pay Six Apart).

Robert Spencer has lately taken on a "Vice President" named Hugh Fitzgerald, and put the notorious Ibn Warraq onto the board. I first came across Spencer after seeing his two blogs linked off Little Green Footballs, which has become proverbial for irrational anti-Arab and anti-Muslim ravings in the comments. LGF is a web-design company, and in the aftermath of 9/11, the blog turned from being mostly about web-design issues to being a hawkish pro-war blog, and acquired a fanatical Zionist commenter base. LGF did the web design for Spencer's two blogs. Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch, being run by someone with an academic record who regularly crops up as an "expert" in the US media and (sometimes) abroad, have a spurious intellectual air. His lieutenants and associates, like Fitzgerald and DC Watson, are somewhat more unbridled. The recent surge in articles by Hugh Fitzgerald has coincided with the terrible murders in Jersey City of a Coptic family, at least two of which were known for their vehement pro-Coptic and anti-Islamic stance on certain online forums. His most recent article on Jihad Watch, "On the commanded and prohibited in Islam", examines what Fitzgerald sees as the "polarities" by which Muslims see the world.

Islam is based on divisions, or perhaps one should say polarities. And these polarities explain the widespread bipolar disorder of Muslim peoples, swinging from gloom (as in June, 1967) to elation (as on the afternoon of September 11, 2001).

These two incidents concern the Palestinian occupation, and the celebration of the 9/11 attacks which were (allegedly) seen in Palestine. If Palestinians celebrated, it was because they saw the friend of their enemy suffer. Some Muslim scholars in fact condemned these celebrations, but the fact remains that the US has harmed Palestinians, by giving massive amounts of aid to Israel, to a far greater extent than Palestinians have ever harmed the USA. Actually, most Muslims were not elated about the 9/11 attacks. They were appalled, or scared. Some had a "chickens coming home to roost" type of response. That's not the same as being elated.

For Infidels, the main polarity to be aware of in Islam is the absolute divide between the Believer and the Unbeliever.

Correct. A person is either a Muslim or he isn't. You can't be half a Muslim.

Fellow Believers must be supported, must never have war made upon them in the service of Unbelievers (or Infidels). Unbelievers, on the other hand, must not be taken as friends “Christians and Jews are friends with each other”), not be treated as equals but subject to all sorts of disabilities, and while they may be exploited in every possible way, that exploitation should not lead to any felt gratitude toward the Infidels.

The verse in the Qur'an which tells us not to take the People of the Book as our allies, and that they are friends of each other, is clearly borne out by the Christians' recent support for the Israelis, against even their fellow Christians among the Palestinians. I have never heard any Islamic injunction giving us the right to "exploit [non-Muslims] in every possible way", nor to harbour or exhibit ingratitude towards them. Rather, we (as a group) are warned that they (as a group) have their own agenda, and that if they wish to assist us in something, it may well be for their own ends, and that we should therefore not take them (as a group) as allies.

The Iraqi who told an NPR interviewer (Deborah Amos) on Jan. 22 that the Americans “must leave” but only after they “stop terrorism” and “fix everything,” was perfectly willing to have American soldiers fight and die to end terrorism by some Muslims, for the sake of other Muslims who apparently disagree with the President’s notion that “freedom isn’t free” (they are quite content, at least, to pay for that “freedom” not out of their own pockets, but to pick the pockets of the obliging, trusting, ever-generous and hopeful Americans).

The Iraqis don't want to pick the pockets of the ever-generous Americans; they want them to put right what they have sown by invading, replacing order (if a tyrannical order) with chaos, and by their trade embargo which lasted more than a decade, prohibiting them from trading with the outside world (and ruining their once world-class health and education systems).

If the Shi’a are now “supporting the elections, it is only because they know they will win those elections, and not because they have, all of a sudden, become staunch democrats and great readers of The Federalist and John Stuart Mill. They will bide their time, take power, and continue to regard all Infidels as “najis” or unclean.

There is probably some truth in this except that Sistani and his teacher, Imam Khu'i, rejected the Iranian Wilayat-e-Faqih (scholar's rule) model. A government led by Sistani or his followers is unlikely to turn into a copy of Iran.

Despite the opinions expressed by some, including the convert to Sufi Islam Stephen Schwartz, or Reuel Gerecht, who assured a CNN audience that the Islamic Republic of Iran had “run its course” more than a decade ago, and therefore presumably, we can stop worrying about it – unfortunately someone forgot to tell the Teheran regime that it had “run its course” and its time was up, and that it really should stop constructing those nuclear weapons.

The régime has "run its course" certainly in terms of being able to command the loyalty of Muslims, particularly Sunnis, outside Iran's borders. Khomeini received enormous support for the Rushdie fatwa from uneducated Muslims in countries like the UK. Others, particularly scholars, continued to regard them as extreme heretics and, in some cases, disbelievers. Iran and Saudi Arabia were hostile for many years - a Wahhabi anti-Iranian tract called The Mirage in Iran was translated by Bilal Philips, and a Saudi imam called al-Hudhaifi became a celebrity after delivering an anti-Iranian khutba. This does not mean that Iran has run its course, or that Iran's government will not build up the country's defences, against explicit external threat, as they see fit.

Shi’a as compared to Sunni may in Iraq, as in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, be slightly more sinned against than sinning, but this does not make them the friends of Infidels. Americans should expect no gratitude for having rescued them from the monstrous regime of Saddam Hussein, which had lasted for 35 years, and was prepared to last for another 35.

And why should they be grateful, as they rebelled against Saddam Hussain after the Gulf War. You had the opportunity to help them (and the Kurds) then, and you failed. In fact, they were subject to the same sanctions as the Sunnis of Baghdad.

The division between Believer and Infidel in the world is mirrored in how the world itself is divided, between Dar al-Islam, the lands were Islam rules and Muslims dominate (though they need not be a majority of the population), and dar al-harb, the House of War, where Infidels, for now, have not yet been conquered, by whatever means, and subjugated to Islam.

This is a myth; Dar al-Harb means the lands which are under enemy non-Muslim control. Muslims who find themselves in such lands are absolved of certain duties towards non-Muslims which other Muslims living in Muslim and non-Muslim lands must follow. Notably, some scholars allow Muslims to take usury from hostile non-Muslims in hostile land. Shaikh Nuh Keller, in a note to a commentary on this issue in the Reliance of the Traveller (Beltsville, MD, 1997 edition), wrote that Dar al-Harb means those countries with which the Muslim countries are at war, in the light of which "there is virtually no country on the face of the earth where a Muslim has an excuse to behave differently than he would in an Islamic country, whether in his commercial or other dealings" (w43.6; the discussion arose from a fatwa from the Mufti of Deoband about dealing in usury with non-Muslims in India, a country with a long history of both internal and external hostility against different groups of Muslims).

The divisions of the great world are mirrored in the divisions that rule all of life. Everything one does is either halal (permited, licit) or haram (prohibited, illicit). It is all laid down, or if not laid down in some book, then a fatwa or opinion may serve as the final guide of how a Muslim should act.

Islam is not the only religion which places prohibitions and rules on various aspects of life. Not every religion is as vague and wishy-washy as Christianity is. What do you find wrong in this? If we do not know, we ask those who do - what do you find wrong with this?

Muslims living in the Lands of the Infidels face new questions. May they, for example, obey Infidel laws? (Answer: Only to the extent that those laws do not contravene Islam.)

Which they almost invariably don't (for example, laws like speed limits), and those that do, make things forbidden which Islam allows (such as a man taking two wives), or allow what Islam forbids (like illicit sex or eating pork). None of these pose a problem for Muslims, who sometimes take second wives without registering the marriage (as a non-Muslim takes a mistress or begins whatever relationship he likes without informing the state) and we somehow manage to abstain from pork. Muslims also pay their taxes, despite these taxes being spent on military operations which harm Muslims elsewhere.

Where these laws do force us to break Islamic law, then if all else fails, we emigrate.

Now a good guide to what is halal and what is haram is Al-Halal wal Haram fil Islam by the well-known Qaradawi, who now lives in Qatar (also the home of Al-Jazeera). Hairdos in the shape of a camel’s hump? Haram. Statues that have not been vandalized or defaced? Haram. A nice glass of fruit juice? Halal. A leg of lamb, from a lamb that has been killed in the Halal manner (oops, this is a trick question). Halal.

The "camel's hump hairdos" were specifically mentioned by the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam); again, we are not the only people with a religion which bans certain fashions. The making and keeping of statues is forbidden when they have a face, as this implies an attempt at mimicking Almighty God in His creation. As for the foods mentioned, people sometimes ask the shaikhs questions about things others have told them are wrong because "the kuffar do them" - and here, the shaikh reassured them that these pleasures are quite OK. It's also necessary to distinguish between ethnic customs and religious ones - cuisines, in particular, are eaten by whoever has access to the ingredients.

A few years ago Michael Cook wrote his Commanding Right and Prohibiting Wrong in Islam. In Christianity, one is expected to promote what is “right”, and to discourage people from doing “wrong.” The Christian version of Cook’s book would be Commending Right and Discouraging Wrong. What a difference a vowel makes. Islam is all about power; Islam commands, Islam forbids, Islam demands of Believers absolute slavish submissiveness to the Rules of Islam. And Unbelievers, too, must obey the rules of the game, for if they are allowed to live, they owe their very lives to Muslims who have generously permitted that – in return for behaving as dhimmis, and for not putting up resistance to the spread of Islam.

In Islam, the average person only has the ability to recommend or discourage; as in every other culture, commanding and forbidding (with force) is the province of the authorities. If a common person steps into that province, he may be punished, even if it is something which is not a sin in itself. For example, the penalty for murder, or other crimes involving injury, is retaliation in kind. But if the family of a murdered person decide, without recourse to the authorities, to simply kill the person responsible, they may be "disciplined", even though the killing is not a sin. Similarly, if someone kills a member of your family, Hugh, and you respond by locking them in your attic or cellar for a decade or more and feed him on bread and water, even though that may be the penalty in your state or country, you will be up on a charge of kidnapping and false imprisonment. As for "slavish adherence", Islam makes it clear that the only real slavery is to Allah Almighty. This is a far cry from the slavish following exhibited by the followers of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler, or various religious cult leaders like David Berg.

The Armanious family had overstepped those rules. The father, who defended the Copts and attacked the treatment they had historically received from Muslims, expressed these views on Muslim websites. Sylvia the 15-year-old daughter, was proud to defend, even to promote among others, her own faith. Either the father, or Sylvia, or perhaps both of them, had violated what is demanded of dhimmis.

The Armanious family lived in New Jersey, and the laws of Islam do not apply in New Jersey. That's all there is to it! Non-Muslims who choose to live, or remain, in Muslim-ruled countries know that they are not entitled to insult Islam, except in what simply states their differences from us. Enforcement of that is the province of the state, not ordinary people, but where the laws simply don't apply, because the Christians in question lived in a Christian country with a religiously-neutral state, none of this matters, because Muslims live here knowing that the laws of Islam don't apply. Whoever did do this may well get the death penalty, and Muslims cannot complain, because they knew that was the law.

This murder was not "strictly halal"; as everyone who knows about this subject knows, the fanatics interpret the Book and the Sunna to give them licence to do the things they see fit to do. This includes declaring some (in some cases, most!) Muslims to be non-Muslims, and to absolve themselves of the rights other people, including non-Muslims, have over them. To paraphrase the judge in the shoe-bomber case, these people were not soldiers in any war; they are a species of criminal.

Anyone who has not been deflected from reading Robert Spencer’s blogs by the nausea they generate will have noticed his “stuck-record” tendency of going back to the same themes time and time again: “taqiyya” and “kitman” are two of this most frequent accusations. When someone suggests, for example, that terrorism or oppression of women are due to some local custom and are not, in fact, from Islam itself, Spencer accuses him of “taqiyya", i.e. lying.

In an entry posted today, Egyptian Progressive Criticizes Ibish, CAIR, Qaradawi, Spencer recycles a familiar accusation: that Muslims refer to Jews as “apes and pigs", and that this is what they are called in the Qur’an. He quotes a series of verses as proof, presumably hoping that nobody will check. Here’s what the verses actually say:

2:65: “And certainly you have known those among you who exceeded the limits of the Sabbath, so We said to them: Be apes, despised and hated.” 5:59-60: “Say: O followers of the Book! do you find fault with us (for aught) except that we believe in Allah and in what has been revealed to us and what was revealed before, and that most of you are transgressors? Say: Shall I inform you of (him who is) worse than this in retribution from Allah? (Worse is he) whom Allah has cursed and brought His wrath upon, and of whom He made apes and swine, and he who served the Shaitan; these are worse in place and more erring from the straight path.” 7:166: says something similar to 2:65.

So, the reference is clearly to a particular group of Jews who broke the sabbath, as all Muslims understand it. So Hussain Ibish’s claim to Spencer that “that’s not in the Qur’an", far from being false or demonstrating “profound chutzpah", is in fact true; since “Jews are apes and pigs” is a different statement to “a group of Jews were turned into apes and pigs".

Comment from Shamil Askov: "In the bible God inflicts similar punishments on the jews and yet no one seems to have a problem with this."

Spencer has obviously forgotten the distinction between personal law and “sociopolitical law", and indeed, the existence of “socio-personal law", that is, law governing how people interact with each other and behave around each other. He’s moaning about the decision of a school in Tennessee to allow a Muslima called Emily Smith (aged 18) to wear her hijab; they don’t allow most headwear, but make an exception because their attorneys advise them that religious headscarves are protected from the Constitution.

The “national civil rights group for Muslims,” CAIR, demands that non-Muslims accept as axiomatic that Muslims in America have no intention of following through on the Sharia’s political imperatives, while maintaining its personal ones – and if we don’t accept this, CAIR tars us as “hatemongers” and “bigots.” But what is the evidence of this? Where are the Sharia manuals redlined by CAIR or any other Muslim group to cross out the elements that mandate that states be governed according to Islamic law? And if Muslims in America have not really renounced these elements of Sharia, then is not Emily Smith’s action a declaration with enormous political implications?

Well, CAIR don’t need to “redline” any manual of Shari’ah in order to indicate which parts of the Shari’ah aren’t applicable to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries with laws they knew all along to be non-Islamic. The imposition of Shar’iah follows conquest, or a country choosing it. This doesn’t absolve Muslims of obeying the commands of Islam that apply to individuals, which in the case of women, does include covering the head.

So no, Emily Smith’s decision doesn’t have “enormous political implications"; it has none, in fact.

Spencer's two blogs also have something to say about Muslim responses to the recent Aceh tsunami disaster. The biggest-hit area was the Aceh province in Sumatra, with casualties in six figures, followed by Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and (indirectly) Sweden, and finally Mauritius, the Seychelles, Somalia and Tanzania. He quotes an article at Jihad Unspun speculating that the disaster was Divine retribution against Thailand and the "apostate" Indonesian leader, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whom its author accuses of "actively fighting against Islam at home and abroad, by openly supporting the US foreign policy".

Under the mendacious headline "No Charity for Dhimmis", Spencer also draws attention to the Live Fatwa at IslamOnline.net, in which the usual point about Zakaat being reserved for Muslims is made. Of course, the amount Muslims give in general charity (not reserved for Muslims) vastly exceeds zakaat, which is a fortieth of one's disposable income and livestock. Spencer doesn't like the fact that some of our charity is reserved for our own people. Oh, well. I'm more concerned about the article he links to by "Abu Ziyaad" in Jordan (there's a spelling mistake which Spencer see's fit to draw attention to). The effectively anonymous article contains the usual Wahhabi positions about tawheed and shirk and a few misplaced assumptions and speculations. For example, we have this passage:

Indeed, only last week, at the opening of a two-day meeting of Asia-Pacific religious leaders in central Java, the President called terrorism (Islam) the enemy of all religions ...

Well, of course, terrorism isn't the same thing as Islam, and no doubt Yudhoyono didn't think it was either. Of course, we as Muslims must condemn such actions as deploying troops to assist the occupation of Muslim lands, but neither should we issue loud condemnations when things aren't exactly perfect. Do we actually want to be ruled by people like OBL - because this would be the consequence if their efforts actually succeeded. The truth is, no we don't. Of course we want to see Islamic law established in the lands of Islam; we don't want thugs harrassing our womenfolk and kicking our doors down to enforce their extremist positions. What OBL himself thinks of most Muslims I don't know, but we do know that jihadi literature is in circulation which effectively declares most Muslims to be idolators. (You can read more about their mentality here.)

The truth is that Indonesia has developed as a democracy since 1998 when Suharto was forced out of office. It may well have surpassed Malaysia in terms of actual freedom to practice Islam publically as well as privately. We've not heard of any scurrilous accusations of sodomy against people who campaign for political reform and against corruption, unlike in Malaysia. And Yudhoyono is in nothing like the same league as "Islam Karimov" in Uzbekistan or that Kim Il-Sung wannabe in Turkmenistan.

As for what's going on in Aceh, the truth is that the campaign to separate Aceh from Indonesia would result in a weak Aceh and a weaker Indonesia. Why should anyone desire a state of affairs like that of the immediate pre-colonial era - one of weak petty states which could be easily played off against each other? If the people are so devout, why can't they take the opportunity to influence the rest of Indonesia towards Islamic governance, now that a functioning democracy exists? It might not last forever, after all.

I do hope nobody gleans from Spencer's highlighting of this article that Muslims everywhere consider this disaster some sort of Divine retribution for Thai oppression in the Islamic, Malay-dominated south of the country or for Indonesian government support for the so-called war on terror. It didn't hit Java, where the Indonesian government is based, nor Bangkok - it hit the west coast around Phuket, an area notorious for every type of immorality. Apparently much of what tourist income Aceh has (given the conflict) is from the west coast beaches, where people no doubt do the same as they do on any other beach.

But in any case, we should hesitate to draw any inference of a message from Allah from this event. It hit all kinds of people, mostly Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists with a relative few of Christian background, and all this in an area with a long history of cataclysmic seismic activity. We've yet to hear any of the rumours similar to those which emerged after the Izmit earthquake, such as of soldiers entertained by dancing girls from Israel playing football with the noble Qur'an and people found in collapsed buildings with men on top of women they were not married to. We should learn the usual lessons, and do what we can to help the relief effort.

And Allah knows best.

Yet again, a mentally-ill Muslim with a criminal background has murdered someone. It's not, of course, all that uncommon that somebody with a disturbed mind may imagine that they are doing the "Lord's work" by committing a murder which any sane person would consider to be just plain murder. It's only when that person is a Muslim that a journalist (if that's what you can call him) publicly suggests that his action was, in fact, correct according to his religion. The Beaumont (TX) Enterprise writes that Frederick Wayne Arnold, a deacon at the local New Covenant Church, was murdered by 36-year-old Kerron Laverne Otis as he fished in a canal near the church in October 2003. Otis allegedly also stole his car, making this capital murder. Otis has a history of mental illness and arrests, and told the police he is a Muslim, leading them to believe he sought out a Christian.

Spencer takes issue with two local Islamic organisations who denied any affiliation with Otis and said he acted in a "totally un-Islamic" way. Perhaps it's immoral, he suggests, only because he killed Arnold without first inviting him to Islam, in violation of Sahih Muslim 4294, "a well-attested hadith in which [the Prophet, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam] tells his followers to offer non-Muslims conversion, subjugation, or death?" You can read the hadith in question here and I'm sure you'll agree that it applies to the Muslim ruler and his capacity to invite non-Muslim rulers to embrace Islam, to pay jizya or to face war. It has nothing to do with private citizens attacking others, of whatever religion, for the purposes of stealing their cars.

The hadith "does seem to assume an Islamic army", he concedes. But the argument of "one prominent Islamic apologist" who has excoriated "today's jihadist" because of this "founders, however, on the fact that Islamic jurisprudence stipulates that defensive jihad must be waged by all Muslims, whether or not there is a caliph, whenever an Islamic land is attacked -- and that that justification is invoked today by jihadist Muslims around the world". But Spencer's argument founders because attacking a lone Texan deacon for his car has absolutely nothing to do with jihad at all, even if he was part of a jihad effort in Texas.

The difference between such an attack, by a mentally-ill serial criminal, and anything to do with jihad, is obvious to anyone. It's obvious to Spencer too; as I've said before, he is not stating honestly-held opinions, but simply lying. He thinks he's raising "difficult questions" about Islam, jihad and its policies on dealing with non-Muslims (and these issues never were any secret), but there is no difficulty in Islam's stance on murder and armed robbery. You can read what Islam says about this here, and note that no difference is made if the victim is an unbeliever.