Under Orders

Establishing Allah's Sovereignty Upon the Earth

Consider the following quotations: 

I was ordered to fight all men until they say, "There is no god but Allah".  [Prophet Muhammad's farewell address, March 632.]

I shall cross the sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.  [Saladin, January 1189.]

We will export our revolution throughout the world . . . until the calls "there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah" are echoed all over the world.  [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 1979.]

I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.  [Osama bin Laden, November 2001.]

[Cited by Efraim Karsh in the opening pages of his, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p.1.]

The religion of "peace" is actually a call to arms, to jihad.  All men are to be brought into submission to Allah by force, by compulsion, by conquest.  Whenever Islam has experienced a reformation, it has returned to bloodshed as a means of extending its dominion.  Reforming back around the fundamentals of the religion has produced imperial ambitions, bloodshed, conquest, and forced submission.

The West has a hard time acknowledging this, let alone comprehending it.
  Yet, such statements as those above have been repeated incessantly, and lived out sporadically when opportunity presented itself.  The Muslim Brotherhood has captured this reality.  The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna became influential in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century.  The Muslim Brotherhood movement spread rapidly throughout Egypt to where it effectively began to run a state-within-a-state in Egypt.  The credo of the Brotherhood was (and remains)

Allah is our goal; the Qur'an is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration. [Karsh, ibid., p.214.]

The West's take on such sentiments is that they reflect prolonged mistreatment by oppressed people at the hands of Western imperialists.  Treat the al-Banna's of this world with politeness, respect, and an inclusive equality, and such folk will give up their angry ways and become urbane, reasonable global citizens, united around the banner of Western liberal ideology.  One could hardly conceive of a posture more condescending and paternalistic.  But there you go.

Al-Banna was succeeded by Sayyid Qutb as the Moslem Brotherhood's most influential thinker (he was eventually executed by Egyptian authorities).  He argued that violence was a necessary part of  subduing the entire world to Allah.

"Those who have usurped Allah's authority on earth and have enslaved His creatures will not surrender their power merely through preaching.  Had this been the case, Allah's messengers would have far more easily achieved the task of establishing His religion across the world.  But this runs counter to the history of the prophets and this religion throughout the ages. . . . [Allah has established] only one cause for killing--where there is no other recourse--and that is striving for the sake of God (jihad)" and imposed this sacred duty on all Muslims, not as a means to convert individuals or communities to Islam, but as the foremost tool "to establish Allah's sovereignty on earth."  [Karsh, p.217.]

These men, whilst extremists to Western eyes, are faithful sons of Muhammad.  They are not the unintended consequences of Western imperialism.  They are the true and faithful followers of an eighth century Arab mystic. The burden of proof lies heavily upon those who would contend to the contrary.  

I was ordered to fight all men until they say, "There is no god but Allah".  [Prophet Muhammad's farewell address, March 632.]