Is Hamas-linked CAIR really unaware of these traditions, and of these unanimous rulings of Islamic law, and consensus among Islamic scholars?
“With regard to the Sunnah,” the site continues, “Abu Dawood (4362) narrated from 'Ali that a Jewish woman used to insult the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and say bad things about him, so a man strangled her until she died, and the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) ruled that no blood money was due in this case….This hadeeth clearly indicates that it was permissible to kill that woman because she used to insult the Prophet.”
And again: “Abu Dawood (4361) narrated from Ibn 'Abbaas that a blind man had a freed concubine (umm walad) who used to insult the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and say bad things about him. He told her not to do that but she did not stop, and he rebuked her but she did not heed him. One night, when she started to say bad things about the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and insult him, he took a short sword or dagger, put it on her belly and pressed it and killed her. The following morning that was mentioned to the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). He called the people together and said, ‘I adjure by Allah the man who has done this action and I adjure him by my right over him that he should stand up.’ The blind man stood up and said, ‘O Messenger of Allaah, I am the one who did it; she used to insult you and say bad things about you. I forbade her, but she did not stop, and I rebuked her, but she did not give up her habit. I have two sons like pearls from her, and she was kind to me. Last night she began to insult you and say bad things about you. So I took a dagger, put it on her belly and pressed it till I killed her.’ Thereupon the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ‘Bear witness, there is no blood money due for her.’”
The conclusion? “It may be noted from this that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) had the right to kill whoever insulted him and spoke harshly to him, and that included both Muslims and kaafirs.”
Is Hamas-linked CAIR unaware of all this? Or do they reject the authenticity of these traditions, and the authority of these legal rulings? They have never given any indication of rejecting the received teachings of mainstream Islam. It is much more likely that their goal is more complacency than enlightenment—a game that will fool most Americans until the day that riots and violence over perceived insults to Muhammad come to our own shores. And that day is coming.
A Prayer for Freedom
Italy’s leading Muslim writer has become a Catholic. As Pope Benedict XVI baptized Magdi Allam during an Easter service at the Vatican, the glare of international publicity annoyed at least one Muslim, Yahya Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, vice president of Coreis, the Italian Islamic Religious Community. He told reporters: “What amazes me is the high profile the Vatican has given this conversion. Why could he have not done this in his local parish? … If Allam truly was compelled by a strong spiritual inspiration, perhaps it would have been better to do it delicately, maybe with a priest from Viterbo where he lives.”
Why should the exercise of a basic human right, the freedom of conscience, be a matter for delicacy? In voicing this complaint Pallavicini raised yet again the Islamic-supremacist specter that increasingly haunts Europe—for in traditional Islamic law, Christians in the Islamic state must be unobtrusive and submissive, eschewing bells, processions, and other public displays, and remaining private and ostentatious in their religious observances, so as to avoid offend the delicate sensibilities of Muslims. In suggesting that Allam would have done better to convert somewhere away from the flashbulbs and microphones, Pallavicini suggests that all this is part of his own mental baggage: In a perfect world, Christians may practice their faith, but they must do so out of sight.
The new convert himself, an editorial writer and deputy editor at the Italian daily Corriere della Sera and for years a vociferous critic of the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, might agree that this is indeed part of the attitude that Islamic sharia law can inculcate in its adherents. “Over the years,” he wrote trenchantly about Islam in a letter to Corriere della Sera, “my spirit has been freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimizes lies and deception, violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission to tyranny.”
Must Allam now live in fear of this violent ideology? Yes. Allam has been under guard ever since he expressed support for Israel, which he does in no uncertain terms—in fact, he entitled a book Viva Israel after Hamas jihadists sent him death threats. And now he expects more, saying that he will likely receive “another death sentence for apostasy.”
The Islamic death sentence for apostasy is very real. All the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that apostates must be executed, and this law is rooted in the dictum of the Muslim prophet Mohammed: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” The internationally influential Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the eminence behind al-Jazeera and IslamOnline, who has been praised by Georgetown Islamic scholar John Esposito as a “reformist,” insisted recently on the traditional and mainstream status of this death sentence: “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-ashriyyah, Al-Jafariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed.”
Given the weight of this traditional ruling, it is extremely difficult for Islamic reformers to make headway—as Allam well knows. In his letter to Corriere della Sera, he explained that this was also one of the signposts on his journey toward conversion: “I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a ‘moderate Islam,’ assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran.” It would not have been an outcome envisioned by those who have insisted that the elements of Islam that jihadists use to justify their violent actions are peripheral at best to the faith itself.
Nonetheless, Allam took this step with open eyes: “I realize what I am going up against but I will confront my fate with my head high, with my back straight and the interior strength of one who is certain about his faith.” And his concern is for other converts: also in his letter to Corriere, Allam remembered that “by one of those ‘fortuitous events’ that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriereon Sept. 3, 2003 was entitled ‘The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts.’ It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself.” The situation hasn’t changed since then: “Thousands of people in Italy have converted to Islam and practice their faith serenely. But there are also thousands of Muslims who have converted to Christianity who are forced to hide their new faith out of fear of being killed by Islamist terrorists.”
Allam praised Pope Benedict for baptizing him in the public manner that nettled Pallavicini, for in doing so, he said, the Pontiff “sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a church that until now has been too cautious in the conversion of Muslims … because of the fear of being unable to protect the converted who are condemned to death for apostasy.”
Perhaps the conversion of Magdi Allam will herald the end of this shameful silence and fear, and trigger the recovery of a bit of self-confidence on the part of the West—such that European states and the Church will more zealously guard these new converts, recognizing in their conversion the expression of one of the fundamental human rights challenged today by the global jihad.
Even that would not be as great a Paschal gift as the one Magdi Allam received last weekend. But for all
those who cherish the freedom of conscience as a fundamental human right, it would be a ray of hope.
* * *
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About The Author
Robert Spencer
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (both Regnery). His latest book is Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins (ISI).
Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community.
Spencer is the Associate Director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI). He is a weekly columnist for FrontPage Magazine and has written eleven monographs and well over three hundred articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism. In addition to the above books, he is the author of Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter); Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery); Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't (Regnery), a refutation of moral equivalence and call for all the beneficiaries and heirs of Judeo-Christian Western civilization, whatever their own religious or philosophical perspective may be, to defend it from the global jihad; Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Regnery), an expose of how jihadist groups are advancing their agenda in the U.S. today by means other than terrorist attacks; and The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran (Regnery). He is coauthor, with Daniel Ali, of Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics (Ascension), and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims (Prometheus). He is coauthor, with Pamela Geller, of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America (Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster). Spencer's books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Korean, and Bahasa Indonesia.
Along with his current weekly columns, for nearly ten years Spencer wrote the weekly Jihad Watch column at Human Events. He has completed a weekly Qur'an commentary at Jihad Watch, Blogging the Qur'an, which has been translated into Czech, Danish, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. He has served as a contributing writer to Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism. His articles on Islam and other topics have appeared in the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News, the New Criterion, the Journal of International Security Affairs, the UK's Guardian, Canada's National Post, Townhall, Middle East Quarterly, WorldNet Daily, First Things, Insight in the News, National Review Online, and many other journals.
Spencer has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry. He has also appeared on the BBC, ABC News, CNN, FoxNews's O'Reilly Factor, the Sean Hannity Show, the Glenn Beck Show, Fox and Friends, and many other Fox programs, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, C-Span, France24 and Croatia National Televison (HTV), as well as on numerous radio programs including Bill O'Reilly's Radio Factor, The Mark Levin Show, The Laura Ingraham Show, Bill Bennett's Morning in America, Michael Savage's Savage Nation, The Sean Hannity Show, The Alan Colmes Show, The G. Gordon Liddy Show, The Neal Boortz Show, The Michael Medved Show, The Michael Reagan Show, The Rusty Humphries Show, The Larry Elder Show, The Barbara Simpson Show, Vatican Radio, and many others. He has been a featured speaker at Dartmouth College, Stanford University, New York University, Brown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Washington University of St. Louis, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and many other colleges and universities.
Spencer (MA, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has been studying Islamic theology, law, and history in depth since 1980. As an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation in 2002 and 2003, he wrote a series of monographs on Islam: An Introduction to the Qur'an; Women and Islam; An Islamic Primer; Islam and the West; The Islamic Disinformation Lobby; Islam vs. Christianity; and Jihad in Context. More recently he has also written monographs for the David Horowitz Freedom Center: Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future (with David Horowitz); Obama and Islam (with David Horowitz); What Americans Need to Know About Jihad; The Violent Oppression of Women In Islam (with Phyllis Chesler); Islamic Leaders' Plan for Genocide; and Muslim Persecution of Christians.
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The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism Page 10