Under the Shadow of the Swords

 Plain Vanilla Islam

We recently caught up with an old Christian friend, born and raised in Pakistan.  He had been engaged in doctoral studies and was researching Islam--its theology, ideology, and praxis.  Of course, in his country this is a live topic.

Christians in Pakistan are a very small minority--often persecuted.  His objective was to demonstrate that such Islamic persecution was contrary to the fundamental tenets of Islam, a perversion of the Islamic faith.  If this argument could be sustained, he thought, it may well help ease some of the tensions between Islamic and Christian communities on the ground.  Thus his research began, but the more he studied Islam and its teachers, the more he began to doubt his starting point.  He came to the point where he realised that violent oppression and persecution of non-Islamic people by Islam was not an aberration of that religion, but essential to it.

It was so from the beginning of that religion.  Thus it has continued to this day.

Towards the end of his life, Muhammad sought to break down the tribal divisions within Arabia.  He had suffered opposition and persecution from tribes and families not related to his own.  Muhammad came to understand that such vehement parochialism had to be crushed or neutralised if his religion was to be triumphant.

Muhammad created the concept of the umma--the Islamic community.  The umma was a human community linked by common fealty to Allah and his prophet.  The ties that bound the umma overrode any other tribal or national loyalty.  Even to this day, if one puts the following question to a conscientuous Islamic believer: which are you more loyal to, the Islamic umma or the civil government? the answer will affirm primary loyalty always to be to the umma.  If the respondent were to answer differently, the umma itself would regard such a response as "apostate talk".

The West, of course, has a different calculus and weighing machine.  Its primary loyalty is to Man.  Therefore, when it is faced with a similar challenge, the question is nonsensical.  There is only one authority recognised by the Western mind--and that is Man, and his Prophet, the State.  The West assumes, therefore, that the Islamic world can be divided into two camps.  The vast majority of Islamic confessors also have a primary loyalty to Man, they believe, and it is only the weirdos, the extremists or the radicals among them who think otherwise.  In the mindset of the West, true Islam's primary loyalty is to Man.

The arrogance of the West at this point is mind boggling--but that is the way things are.  This fanatical loyalty to Man is the West's version of the doctrine of the umma.  It makes the West's approach to Islam a state of perpetual denial.  The reality, however, is very different.

. . . the formation of the umma [by Muhammad] created a sharp dichotomy between Muslims and "infidels" and presupposed a permanent state of war between them. . . . It was further underscored by Muhammad's farewell address, which bequeathed to all Muslims a mission "to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah,'" and by countless sayings and traditions attributed to the Prophet (hadith).  "The gates of Paradise are under the shadow of the swords," runs one famous saying, while another hadith stipulates that: "A morning or an evening expedition in God's path is better than the world and what it contains, and for one of you to remain in the line of battle is better than his prayers for sixty years."  [Ephraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 20.]

Religious motivation, apart from loyalty to Man, is a strange curiosity to the secular Westerner.  But the Christian sees and understands what the purblind Western mind cannot.    In late medieval times the Western Church came to believe in special works and deeds of such merit that they cancelled all previous sins and admitted one immediately to heaven.  Going on a crusade to the Holy Land was one such meritorious act.  Buying an indulgence from Rome was another.  They called these works of supererogation.  Thankfully, such perversions have largely been washed out.  But we understand the pull, the seduction of the idea--false and evil though it be.

The idea that all past sins can be cancelled by one great act can powerfully motivate a guilty soul.  This seduction is what drives many Islamic terrorists, we believe.  To be in the line of battle is better than sixty years worth of prayers!  To bear and wield the sword (or the AK47, or the bomb) is to be at the very gates of Paradise.  It means one has entered into the centre of the umma, the essence of belonging, the very heart of the Prophet.