In another instance, members of an Arab tribe by the name of Uraina suffered unspeakable torture at the hands of Mohammed when they left Medina, claiming they could not tolerate the climate (what they really meant was they could not tolerate Islam). Mohammed then sent his men after them, and they cut the people's hands and feet, branded their eyes with heated irons, and left them in the hot desert to slowly die (Bukhari, V2B24N577).
Contrary to what many Muslims claim—that Islam was spread peacefully—Mohammed forced Islam on others. Islamic historians have documented that Mohammed and a follower by the name of Abul Abbas entered Mecca triumphantly, looking for Mohammed's enemy Abu Sufian. When they met Sufian, Abbas asked him whether it wasn't time to acknowledge that there is no God but Allah? When Sufian's answer was yes, Abbas asked whether it wasn't also time to acknowledge that “Mohammed is his messenger” to which Sufian answered, “That I doubt.” Then Abbas raised his sword as a threat to sever Sufian's neck and forced Abu Sufian to give shahada, which means affirming that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger. Stories of this kind are never told to Muslims as proof of forced Islamization but as positive Islamic stories of triumph.
Western scholars who studied Mohammed have found that certain events in his early childhood can explain his fear of abandonment, which is clearly conveyed in Islamic writings. In Mohammed's infancy, Mohammed's mother gave him up to a foster mother, who later returned him to his mother. Yet soon after his mother took him back, she died. Mohammed's grandfather then took him in, but he also died a few years later, and his uncle raised him until adulthood. Mohammed then married a wealthy but much older woman, who died after about a decade and a half of marriage. His first wife was a great influence in interpreting his visions and the voices that he heard as proof of his prophethood. The abandonment, rejection, and deaths in Mohammed's early life are well documented in Islamic history, but Muslims have never interpreted these as the root cause of his violence later in life against apostates, Jews, Christians, and his own tribe when it rejected him.
Mohammed elevated himself to an even higher status than Allah. This is reflected in the laws of Islam, which do not automatically carry a death penalty for insulting Allah, but do carry a death penalty for anyone who criticizes Mohammed, whether the person repents or not. In that sense, Muslim scholars in general agree that apostates must be made an example of before the general public, whose members are vulnerable to corruption by the apostates' views and who might be led away from believing in Mohammed and Allah. A prominent Moroccan scholar, Sheikh Abdul Bari Az-Zamzamy, described the danger:
Apostasy causes a total disruption and confusion in the Muslim community, and thus, a severe punishment [death] was set for it to deter anyone from thinking of it. It was originally put into force following the Jewish conspiracy against Islam. The details of that conspiracy were simply mass conversion to Islam and then mass apostasy. The main ill aim was to cause confusion and to lead people astray. Thus, the punishment was set as a precautionary measure to stop all these offenses.3
Mohammed's anger and merciless violence against those who rejected him forced almost all of Arabia to convert to Islam so that he would spare their lives. As soon as Mohammed died, however, a large majority (about 70 percent) of the people of Arabia quickly abandoned Islam. This was disastrous news for Mohammed's caliphs (those who succeeded Mohammed in commanding the Islamic state), who were preparing to pursue Mohammed's plan to conquer wealthy neighboring civilizations such as Egypt and Persia. Before Mohammed died, he had sent letters to the Byzantine emperor and the Persian king, warning them, “Islam Taslam,” meaning they should embrace Islam to be safe. Incidentally, before 9/11, Osama bin Laden demanded the same from the United States; following in the tradition of Mohammed, he told Americans to accept Islam or suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, the Western news media did not understand the meaning of the threat.
The apostasy of the majority of the tribes in Arabia led Mohammed's successors to wage several brutal wars, called “ridda wars”—meaning “apostasy wars”—which lasted for two years. The followers of Mohammed won the wars and succeeded in bringing all of the Arabian tribes back to Islam by the force of the sword. Mohammed's successors could never have been able to conquer and expand throughout the Middle East without first unifying Arabia itself. Through killing and torturing apostates, Islam was able to grow. Islam's very survival relied heavily not only on violent jihad toward the outside world but, more important, on the death penalty for apostasy; on the commandment to lie, exaggerate, and slander; and on giving conflicting and dual answers to Islamic controversies and embarrassments.
The Islamic sword is literally being held to the neck of every Muslim. Beheading by the sword is the preferred manner of execution in Saudi Arabia today for those who commit the crimes of apostasy, adultery, and many other sins forbidden by Islam. The Saudi flag itself proudly exhibits the Islamic sword as a symbol that threatens the use of force in spreading Islam outwardly and keeping Muslims in line inwardly.
Not only is the legal right to kill apostates given to Islamic governments, but Islamic law allows Muslims to execute apostates unofficially by delegating this authority to individuals or groups that can operate with impunity and with no oversight from the government. This works well for Islamic governments that want to appear respectful of international human rights laws. Such a trick is known to all Muslims in so-called moderate Muslim countries, which still kill and threaten apostates in many creative ways that can be even more torturous than government executions. Muslim parents are often forced to execute their own apostate children, and, if they refuse, their own lives are threatened.
The same dynamic works in the concept of violent jihad, where Muslim governments play the same game. They try to appear to be against terrorism against the West, but they coddle and protect terrorists and finance and encourage terrorist groups to attack the West. Yet if the West asks them whether they are “with us or against us,” their answer is always “We are with you and against terrorism.” Such duplicity was made clear to the West when bin Laden was living in Pakistan with the knowledge and protection of the authorities. The U.S. government and the media do not fully expose the duplicity of Islamic governments in supporting terrorist groups; they only blame al Qaeda. This leaves the majority of the American public in the dark about the depth of the threat the United States is facing.
Similar to Islamic fighters who kill non-Muslims, killers of apostates are not only forgiven under Islamic law, but, as Mohammed said many centuries ago, they will be rewarded in heaven: “So, wherever you find them, kill them, for whoever kills them shall have [a] reward on the Day of Resurrection” (Bukhari, V9N64). This is the same promise that Mohammed gave his fighters when they hesitated to kill the Jews of Medina.
The Islamic death sentence for apostates applies whether the apostate is in a Muslim country or elsewhere. Mosques and the Muslim community in the United States have rejected and even threatened Muslims who criticized jihad after 9/11, along with accusing them of apostasy. This may explain why most Muslims were silent.
As a former Muslim, I understand the anguish and fear of those who leave Islam—even the ones who live in Western democracies. Many suffer from abandonment by their families, shaming, harassment, abuse, beatings, and even murder. A common theme they all voice is “We are constantly looking over our shoulders,” because they are aware of the existence of Islamic sleeper cells in the United States and rumors of Islamic squads, especially in Europe, whose mission, in part, is to keep Muslims in line.
Living in the West does not guarantee people protection against punishment for leaving Islam, but it is certainly much safer than being an apostate in the Muslim world. Despite the danger that I and many others face in the United States, I thank my lucky stars every day that I am a U.S. citizen. My family in Egypt—my mother, brother, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles—who are not radicals, have all abandoned their relationships with me, except for one cousin a
nd a niece.
There is no doubt that apostates in the West are living under enormous pressure from those who issue fatwas of death (death warrants) against them from inside the Muslim world. Such fatwas are a form of psychological terrorism by the same radicals who want to terrorize the United States. On page 126 is a photocopy of a fatwa of death issued by Al Azhar University in Arabic against an Egyptian man and his son, who left Islam and now live in Germany.4
Al Azhar University fatwa of death against an apostate in Germany.
Muslim leaders today can no longer contain their fear about the growing numbers of people becoming disillusioned with Islam. This topic was recently openly discussed in the Arab media. The site aljazeera.net published an interview with Islamic cleric Ahmad Al Qataani, who expressed deep fears: “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every day, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity.”5
I think his claim that 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity annually is an exaggeration, but we can never know the exact number, because most converts do so secretly. Yet there is undoubtedly a strong movement to silently leave Islam, perhaps a few million people annually. The apostasy movement today is unprecedented in Islamic history, ever since the seventh-century Riddah Wars were won by Muslims.
The recent exodus out of Islam is no longer exclusively made up of intellectuals, but now includes average Muslims. They are leaving Islam to embrace other religions, especially Christianity. The attacks of 9/11 accelerated this exodus, because it forced many Muslims to reevaluate their religion and what it really says. They have seen how it has not led them to a loving God but to desperation, ignorance, chaos, poverty, and war.
Although Muslims assert that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, they fully understand that such numbers are inflated and are not due to Western infatuation with Islam, but instead to the high birthrate of Muslims. Another reason that, statistically, Islam appears to be spreading rapidly is because apostates and nonpracticing Muslims are also counted as Muslims.
The courage of former Muslims was bolstered in 2008 by the public conversion of a prominent Muslim journalist in Italy, Egyptian-born Magdi Allam, who was publicly baptized by Pope Benedict. Allam said,
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. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.6
The plight of former Muslims in the West drew the world's attention when in the summer of 2009 a seventeen-year-old Muslim girl in Ohio, Rifqa Bary, ran away from home. Her father had threatened to kill her on discovering that she had secretly converted to Christianity. Her family mosque, Noor Mosque, had uncovered the story of her conversion and warned her parents to do something. When Rifqa's father threatened to kill her, she was forced to seek refuge at a church in Florida. Her family, with the help of the Council on American Islamic Relations, fought her in court for several months, after which she lived in a foster home until she turned eighteen. During Rifqa's legal and emotional ordeal, she also received death threats from her home country of Sri Lanka.
Rifqa's story was a wakeup call for me and other former Muslims in the United States. We felt that something had to be done, because we could not stay silent while our children became victims of honor killings or were forced to run away from home after facing death threats for not behaving as good Muslims should. I got together with other high-profile former Muslims in the United States, including Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem, and others. We decided to form a support group that we called Former Muslims United (FMU), to stand up and expose the Islamic threat to our lives and its violation of our basic civil rights as U.S. citizens. Wafa Sultan, in particular, had been moving from one apartment to another and spent a lot of her own funds paying for her security. The time was ripe to say, “Enough is enough.” The time had come to publicly post the e-mails we received, telling us, “You must be destroyed,” or “You will be killed just like the Jews you support.”
Thanks to Rifqa Bary, FMU was established in 2009. The first thing we did was ask for the support of Muslim leaders in the United States, who have the power and the connections to enact reforms and force change. We then mailed more than 165 letters (the “Muslim Pledge for Religious Freedom and Safety from Harm for Former Muslims”) to various Muslim leaders and establishments in the United States. We needed their support and for them to prove how dedicated they are about reforming the radicals whom they believe are not true Muslims and who are threatening us. The pledge states that they repudiate the laws and the commandments that condemn apostates to death and discrimination under Islam. Yet unfortunately, no Muslim group operating in the United States has signed our plea letter or even responded. Only two Muslim reformists signed the pledge and are themselves accused of not being good Muslims.
Instead of support, we were attacked for being Islamophobes. Muslim leaders in America deny that there are any threats on our lives and safety. On September 24, 2009, two days after we mailed our pledges, Sheila Musaji, the editor of the American Muslim, wrote an article stating, “We live in a country where such freedom [of religion] is a foundational principle and must be defended. We must continue to insist on the Islamic principle that there is ‘no compulsion in religion.'” She forgot to mention that this verse was an early statement in the Koran that has been abrogated by later commandments to kill apostates. Musaji, who has declined to sign our pledge, is an educated Muslim and should have been fully aware that all Islamic scholars have rejected “no compulsion in religion” as a basis for Islamic law. These scholars have relied on commandments in the Koran, on hadiths, and on the example of Mohammed to justify killing apostates.
Musaji and other Muslim leaders who refused to sign our pledge are practicing Islamic deceit with brazen confidence when they say they personally do not approve of killing apostates, which is in stark opposition to a basic tenet of Islam, the religion their organizations are promoting in the United States. Americans are especially vulnerable to such spin, which no other religion engages in to this degree. If one were to ask a Catholic, for instance, what the Vatican position on abortion is, the answer is clear. Even if people disagree with the Vatican, they will say that Catholicism does not allow abortion. Yet Muslims in the United States seem to teach, at least when it suits them, religious principles that stand in stark contradiction to the core ideology of Islam. Such double talk and lies about what Islam is has worked in favor of Islamic expansion, spreading confusion about the goals of Islam and effectively silencing people who disagree.
How can Ms. Musaji defend her refusal to sign our plea for respect for our civil rights while claiming that Muslims in the United States are speaking up against injustice and extremism? Where are the Islamic marches against 9/11? Where are their protests demanding abolition of the apostasy and blasphemy laws that condemn us to death? Where is their condemnation of the imprisonment and the death sentences used as punishment for blasphemy and apostasy today in Islamic jails across the Middle East? Where are their letters demanding the release of a Pakistani Christian mother of five who is awaiting execution in Pakistan for insulting Islam? Where is Islamic outrage over honor killing and the stoning of women for sexual sins, practices that are prevalent today in the Muslim world? How can they deny all of that? Instead, they are busy trying to spread a destructive and totalitarian religion in the United States.
Muslim groups in the United States are guilty of a disconnect from reality when they deny what is clearly a daily assault on basic human rights by mainstream Islam in the Middle East. While these groups call us I
slamophobes, we in the United States are watching Arab TV condemn us to death. Just recently, Sheikh Youssef Al-Badri, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Egypt, went on national TV and said, while reading from the Koran, “God has commanded us to kill those who leave Islam.” The interior minister of Egypt at that time agreed with the sheikh and was quoted in a newspaper as saying, “Converts are to be killed.” The majority of Islamic scholars, as well as the Egyptian public, agree with them. This video was posted on the FMU website. What more can we do?
The truth is that Muslim groups in the West are strangely silent about, and defensive of, Islamic persecution, torture, killing, and imprisonment of apostates, women, and non-Muslims all over the Islamic world. All they care about is pacifying the American public and convincing people that sharia is compatible with democracy and that Islam is a religion of peace. Whenever Western Muslim groups are asked about what is happening in the Muslim world and its tragic impact on the West, they accuse those who question them of being racists who need sensitivity training to understand the true peaceful nature of Islam. They force and shame Americans into believing there is nothing to fear from Islam. They expect Americans to reject their gut feelings that something is intrinsically wrong with Islam for causing so many Muslims to repeatedly engage in terrorism all over the world. They want us to disregard those who issue fatwas of death against Western politicians, cartoonists, filmmakers, apostates, and practically any one who dares to ask difficult questions about Islam.
The Devil We Don't Know Page 11