We turn now to a consideration of Islam as a religion of peace. This face of Islam has been eagerly seized upon in the West and readily believed because the West wants to see in Islam a kindred spirit. It wants to find in Islam the same values which are important to the West. The West is driven to find “peace in our time” because it believes in the fundamental goodness of man. Thus, war and enmity are always seen as a profound aberration in the secular humanist West, whereas in Islam they are seen as a fundamental necessity.
The “peace” of Islam is has a very different meaning to what the West means when it calls for "peace in our time." The peace of Islam is the state that results when all is submitted to Islam. Imagine an unruly household. The Western version of peace is to persuade all the household members to put aside anger and live in willing co-operative harmony with everyone else in the house. The Islamic version of peace is to impose force, or the threat of force, so that everyone in the household does what they are told.
It is the peace that comes from control and suppressing dissent, whereas in the West “peace” means tolerating and accepting everyone as far as humanly possible. Thus, the West has willed itself to believe that Islam is fundamentally like itself. It has resulted in one of the most amazing recrudescences of Chamberlain-esque “peace in our time” imaginable. Virtually all Western political leaders have bought into the fallacy of equivocation over peace. Like Chamberlain before Hitler who preferred not to see what the Nazi's were all about, the West before Islam is denying what is obvious in the desperate hope that it might not be true.
As Ayatollah Khomeini put it so acerbically, “Islam is politics or it is nothing”. Islam is all about gaining political control. When Islam gains political power, it always suppresses opposition. This is the peace of Islam. Muhammad created a political entity: he took political control firstly of Medina, then of Mecca: politics and political control was always inseparable from religious belief. Islam exists and extends by force. It always has. This was Muhammad's teaching and example.
Many scholars have pointed out the differences of Muhammad's teaching and practice when he was “one among many” in Mecca initially (?570—622), and when he gained political control in Medina (622—632). While in the first phase, Muhammad was more of a quietist, teaching toleration, acceptance, and respect of others and their religions. But once he gained political power—and it was political power he sought—the powers of the state were used to force Islamic beliefs and laws and practices upon others: those who resisted were terminated.
The goal of Islamic communities is to walk in the footsteps of the prophet. The founder of their religion took control of Medina and bequeathed to his followers a (city) state. The extension of Islam is to be effected by gaining and extending political control. As Lewis puts it:
In the universal Islamic polity as conceived by Muslims, there is no Caesar but only god, who is the sole sovereign and the sole source of law. Muhammad was his prophet, who during his lifetime both taught and ruled on god's behalf. When Muhammad died in 632 C.E., his spiritual and prophetic mission, to bring god's book to mankind, was completed. What remained was the religious task of spreading god's revelation until finally all the world accepted it. This was to be achieved by extending the authority and thus also the membership of the community which embraced the truth faith and upheld god's law. . . .
From the days of the Prophet, the Islamic society had a dual character. On the one hand it was a polity—a chieftaincy that successively became a state and an empire. At the same time, on the other hand, it was a religious community founded by a prophet and ruled by his deputies, who were also his successors.
Lewis, op cit., p.6 &9. [We have deliberately removed the upper case letter “G” from the word God, although Lewis does not.]
Thus in Islam there is no separation of church and state. There is no church. There are no (or few) checks and balances. There are simply the power structures of Islam which exert control ultimately through the Islamic State whose rulers are bound to follow Muhammad's example—which is to say, by force and by the sword--to extend the community of Islam. This is the “peace” of Islam.
In this regard, we need to be clear about the task and duties of jihad. The “struggle” of jihad can be a moral striving and struggle, or it can be an armed offensive. The word is used in both senses in Islam. Which is true? The West wants to believe that jihad as moral struggle represents civilised and educated and modern Islam. It sees the armed warfare version of jihad as belonging to more primitive times. Thus, the West views Islam thorugh the prism of its own history. The armed struggle of armed struggle is compared to the sub-Christian Crusades; the jihad of moral, rational, and intellectual striving is seen as equivalent to the Western Enlightenment.
This interpretation is aided and abeted by the self-portrayal of Islamic groups in the West. The face of modern Islam portrayed to the world is jihad as moral striving, not jihad as armed conflict. There is a reason for this: Islam is not yet strong enough to take up arms against the West. Lewis again:
In the Qur'an the word (jihad) occurs many times in these two distinct but connected senses. In the earlier chapters, dating from the Meccan period, when the Prophet was still the leader of a minority group struggling against the dominant pagan oligarchy, the word often has the meaning, favoured by modernist exegetists (sic), of moral striving. In the later chapters, promulgated in Medina where the Prophet headed the state and commanded its army, it usually has a more explicitly practical connotation. In many, the military meaning is unequivocal. . . .
Some modern Muslims, particularly when addressing the outside world, explain the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The overwhelming majority of early authorities, citing the relevant passages in the Qur'an, the commentaries, and the traditions of the Prophet, discuss jihad in military terms. According to Islamic law, it is lawful to wage war against four types of enemies: infidels, apostates, rebels, and bandits. Although all four types of wars are legitimate, only the first two count as jihad. Jihad is thus a religious obligation. . . .
For most of the fourteen centuries of recorded Muslim history, jihad was most commonly interpreted to mean armed struggle for the defense or advancement of Muslim power. . . . The presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule.
Lewis, ibid., pp. 26—27
In other words, Islamic history is the exact reverse of the propaganda. The earlier more primitive form of Islamic jihad was the moderate, moral striving perspective. The later, more advanced expression was extension by the sword. Using force to extend Islam is the more advanced and superior state. Thus, one of the great provocations to frustration and anger amongst Islamic nations, and one of the great recruiting tools employed by Islamic fundamentalists, is the military weakness of Islam throughout the world. The only reason this is such an irritant and a shame amongst Islamic people is that they believe Islam is the rightful holder of political and military power in the world.
Islam's modus operandi is to organise to establish Islamic law within its own communities as long as Islam remains in a minority. It progressively insists upon its rights to Islamic law, traditions, marriage, and family life. As it takes over an area, a borough, a city block it then forces compliance of all within the locality it controls (for example, requiring that women, even those visiting, wear the burka). This is all part of jihad; it is the duty of every Muslim to engage in it. Once political control is seized, the sanction of the sword is added to the Islamic regime. Convert, comply, or death are then the only options to all citizens.
These things are not perversions of Islam. They are at the heart of all that Islam represents and teaches. It is what it means to follow the teaching of Muhammad. This is what Muhammad did, after all. The Islamic terrorists are thus much closer to the essence and heart of Islamic teaching than those Islamic rulers who are seeking to “westernise”, introduce democratic reforms, and so forth. Such regimes are seen as apostate—and worthy only of destruction. Their rulers must be killed. The “innovations” of terrorism (suicide bombings, killing women and children, declaring Islamic “collateral damage” to be involuntary martyrs, and so forth) are thus not fundamentally contradictory to the essence of Islam.
The West desperately hopes that Islam will “grow up”. It hopes that it will give up what it sees as primitive superstitions and behaviours. It hopes that it will morph into something less authoritarian, more accommodating of differences and diversity. This is a naïve and forlorn hope. It is not likely that this will ever happen. Or if it does, Islam will no longer be Islam as we have known it for fifteen hundred years.
Chamberlain's desperate and pathetic cry, "Peace in our time!" is increasingly becoming in the West a new chant: "Allah is great!" The peace of Islam is like the peace of National Socialism: it is the peace of the boot and the heel.
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