by Sperry, Paul
Muslim women also lack equal rights in their houses of worship—even in America. At fully two-thirds of U.S. mosques, they’re required to worship behind a curtain or partition—separated from the men—a recent national survey shows.36 And many of them require women to enter the mosque from the back of the building, often near the dumpster, such as the 9/11 mosque in Falls Church, Virginia.
What’s more, the Muslim declaration of faith, or Shahada, must be performed in front of two male witnesses. And women cannot make the pilgrimage to Mecca, or hajj—the fifth pillar of Islam—by themselves. They must be accompanied by a mahram—a first-degree male relative such as a father, husband, son, or brother—and marriage or birth certificates must be submitted as proof of their relationship. And if a married woman elects to go with her brother, she must still obtain a notarized “no-objection” letter from her husband. Even if a widow wishes to go to hajj, she cannot go without first obtaining a notarized letter from her son or brother addressed to the Saudi embassy stating that he has no objection with her traveling to hajj.
Surely CAIR—the supposed guardian of civil rights for all Muslims—does not condone such blatant sexism. Think again. No less than the female former civil rights director of CAIR’s Maryland-Virginia chapter frowns on reforms proposed by feminist Muslim activists, such as Asra Nomani, who have pushed for equal treatment of women in U.S. mosques.
“The Asra Nomani position that men and women should be able to pray shoulder to shoulder is not the majority one,” Farooq argues, “nor are her tactics really respected among the Muslim community.”37
Also under Islamic law, men have permission to beat their wives, a “privilege” that is rooted in the Quran.
Astoundingly, CAIR gives its blessing to such domestic violence through the Quran it endorses and distributes, although in CAIR’s watered-down English version, men are advised to merely “spank” their wives, and then only “lightly”—an adverb not even found in the original Arabic text.38
The CAIR-approved Quran—“The Meaning of the Holy Quran,” as translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali—also authorizes men to have sex with their wives “in any manner, time, or place.” It compares them to a field to be plowed. “Your wives are as a tilth unto you, so approach your tilth when or how you will.”39
Muslim Brotherhood leaders associated with CAIR have even issued fatwahs authorizing wife beating.
Sheik al-Qaradawi, for one, says its okay for men to slap around their disobedient wives, though only as a last resort. If other approaches to correcting their behavior fail, such as denying them sex, “it is permissible for him to beat her lightly with his hands, avoiding her face and other sensitive parts.”40
Al-Qaradawi is part of the IIIT leadership, and is perhaps the most important leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement. IIIT, the Herndon, Virginia-based Islamic think tank raided by federal agents after 9/11, gave at least $20,500 in donations to CAIR between 2000 and 2007. Recall, too, that CAIR’s former operations director often visited IIIT’s office to pray during afternoon prayers. The radical IIIT, which remains under federal investigation for terror-financing, also recently pumped more than a million dollars into Islamic studies programs at Washington-based George Mason University and other colleges.
Then there’s Jamal Badawi, a leader of ISNA’s Fiqh Council of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood dispenser of Islamic jurisprudence. He has issued a fatwah authorizing American Muslim husbands to physically punish their wives.
“There are cases in which a wife persists in bad habits and showing contempt of her husband and disregard for her marital obligations,” Badawi advises. “Instead of divorce, the husband may resort to another measure more accurately described as a gentle tap on the body.”41
So much for CAIR’s claim of Muslim women being “free from spousal abuse.”
But perhaps Badawi, a key Brotherhood figure, has misinterpreted the Quran. Maybe he’s been overruled by the chairman of the Fiqh Council, who happens to be former ISNA president and CAIR advisor Siddiqi. No such luck. Siddiqi actually confirmed Badawi’s ruling in a 2004 fatwah of his own, which decrees:
It is important that a wife recognizes the authority of her husband in the house. He is the head of the household, and she is supposed to listen to him…. In some cases, a husband may use some light disciplinary action in order to correct the moral infraction of his wife.42
Siddiqi goes on to define this disciplinary action as a “light strike.” He also explains that a Muslim woman commits a moral infraction when she does not “obey” her husband.
No wonder Muslim Brotherhood leaders have been arrested for domestic violence. And no wonder many of them require their women to be fully covered in head-to-toe abayas and head scarves. The clothes can literally cover the evidence of male brutality inflicted on a wife’s or daughter’s body.
WHOPPER NUMBER 4: “‘Jihad’ does not mean ‘holy war,’” CAIR maintains in its media guide. It means “striving in the cause of God, the struggle to better oneself or society.”43
Really? That’s not what Yusuf Ali says in his English translation of the Quran that CAIR has approved and is stocking in neighborhood libraries across the country.
“Here is a good description of jihad,” Yusuf Ali says on page 442, referring to one of hundreds of violent passages in the Muslim holy book. “It may require fighting in Allah’s cause, as a form of self-sacrifice,” or martyrdom.
On page 1,315, Ali confirms that jihad means battling the enemy in the physical, not symbolic, sense. “When once the fight [Jihad] is entered upon, carry it out with the utmost vigor, and strike home your blows at the most vital points [smite at their necks],” he advises Muslims, quoting from the Quran. “You cannot wage war with kid gloves.”
On page 438 of CAIR’s recommended translation, Ali interprets the Quran’s so-called “verse of the sword” as a battle cry against the “People of the Book,” or the Jews and Christians. “The fighting,” he says, “may take the form of slaughter, or capture, or siege, or ambush and other stratagems.”
If this is Ali’s interpretation, it must also be CAIR’s interpretation, because CAIR has wholeheartedly endorsed Ali’s translation of the Quran. In fact, it is being published by a Muslim Brotherhood printer in Maryland. (The uniquely militant nature of Islam bleeds through even in this English version of the Quran, which has been demilitarized and rendered more pacifistic for non-Muslim or Western consumption, compared with the more nakedly hateful Saudi versions.)
But then CAIR does not count on Americans actually reading Ali’s commentary, which is published in tiny agate type throughout 6,311 footnotes in a tome that spans 1,760 pages.
CAIR-endorsed imam Zaid Shakir also contradicts what CAIR is saying publicly. Shakir, a frequent guest speaker at CAIR events, tells his Muslim audiences: “Jihad is physically fighting the enemies of Islam to protect and advance the religion of Islam. This is jihad.”
Acceptable targets of jihad, he says, include U.S. military aircraft.
“Islam doesn’t permit us to hijack airplanes filled with civilian people,” Shakir says. However, “If you hijack an airplane filled with the 82nd Airborne, that’s something else.”44 The 82nd Airborne Division’s elite paratroopers fly out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is part of North Carolina state senator Larry Shaw’s district. Shaw happens to be CAIR’s new chairman.
Shakir also gives his blessing to the use of bombs as a weapon of jihad, as long as the explosives hit “select” targets and are not indiscriminate in their destruction. Civilians can be legitimate targets, he says, if “there’s a benefit in that.”
Even “old elderly men” and “women who are conscripted”—including Israeli and American women in uniform—are eligible enemy combatants in jihad. “This is Shariah,” Shakir asserts in a CD recording of one of his lectures, which the authors obtained from a mosque bookstore in Brooklyn.45
Shakir, a black convert, has been portrayed as a moderate in the mainstream media
, including the New York Times, which recently ran a positive profile of him. His pro-jihad statements revealed here have not been previously reported.
Then there’s CAIR advisor and fundraiser Wahhaj, who also completely contradicts what CAIR is telling the media about the meaning of jihad.
“If we go to war, brothers and sisters—and one day we will, believe me—that’s why you’re commanded [to fight in] jihad,” the imam has told his flock in New York. “When Allah demands us to fight, we’re not stopping and nobody’s stopping us.”46
Sheik Qaradawi has ruled that jihad can be an offensive means of expanding the Muslim state as well as a defensive response to attack:
In the jihad which you are seeking, you look for the enemy and invade him. This type of jihad takes place only when the Islamic state is invading other [countries] in order to spread the word of Islam and to remove obstacles standing in its way. The repulsing jihad takes place when your land is being invaded and conquered…. [In that case you must] repulse [the invader] to the best of your ability. If you kill him he will end up in Hell, and if he kills you, you become a martyr.47
So not only does CAIR’s guru believe that jihad is warfare, but he refutes those who believe that only defensive jihad is permissible in Islam.
This makes a mockery of CAIR’s additional claim that “the Quran teaches peace” and not violence.
In fact, the only real peace the Quran teaches is peace for Muslims—which it says will come when all non-Muslims are converted or “subdued.” When no fewer than twenty-six chapters of the Quran deal with military fighting and violence, and when it repeatedly states that fighting is “prescribed” upon believers, it’s risibly false to claim it promotes no violence.
But don’t take our word for it. Listen to Wahhaj, who preaches that Islam sanctions violent insurrection in infidel lands—including America.
“I will never tell people, ‘Don’t be violent,’” he says. “That’s not the Islamic way.”
But he cautions Muslims that their violence has to be “selective.” Wait, train, be patient; then strike when the time is right.
“Believe me, brothers and sisters, Muslims in America are the most strategic Muslims on Earth,” Wahhaj says, because the government cannot drop bombs on warring Muslims in America without causing collateral damage to U.S. cities and Americans who aren’t Muslim.
Muslims in America also have an army of potential recruits in the inner city, he says, especially among minority gangs. Once they are converted to Islam, he says, they will be fearless in the jihad.
The U.S. government’s “worst nightmare is that one day the Muslims wake these people up” in South Central Los Angeles and other inner-city areas, Wahhaj fumes in a videotape of a sermon obtained by the authors.
He exhorts the faithful to go into the ‘hood and the prisons and convert disenfranchised minorities, and then arm and train them to carry out an Uzi jihad in the inner cities.
“We don’t need to arm the people with 9mms and Uzis,” he says. “You need to arm them with righteousness first. And once you arm them with righteousness first, then you can arm them [with Uzis and other weapons].”48
He says inner-city gang members will make formidable fighters because they are not afraid of death. All they lack is discipline, Wahhaj says, and Islam can provide that.
“They need to get out of the street and get into the masjid [mosque], learn Islam and then get [back] in the street,” he preaches, “because these people have guts and courage that a lot of Muslims don’t have. Some of these people are ready to stand in front of anyone and fight.”
In contrast, “some Muslims have lost the desire to fight,” Wahhaj adds. “Muslims have become soft. And they love the soft life. And they hate death. And this is why all over the world Muslims are getting their butts kicked—except those Muslims who fight back like in Afghanistan.”49
CAIR of course hopes the trusting public never hears such violent rants from Muslim leaders. Worried about polls showing a majority of Americans associating Islam with violence, CAIR is desperate to sugarcoat such ugly truths.
“There is a common misconception among Westerners that the Quran teaches violence,” CAIR maintains in its media guide.
Apparently CAIR’s own guest speaker Shakir didn’t get the memo. Speaking before private Muslim audiences, the imam readily confesses that Islam is a uniquely militant religion that believes in taking an eye for an eye.
“We don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek philosophy” like the Christians, he says. “Allah has given us permission to fight them” so that the “word of Allah can be uppermost.”50 Brotherhood leader Totonji agrees: “In Islam, we do not believe in the formula, ‘If someone smacks you on the right cheek, turn to him the left.’ We believe that if someone smacks you on the right cheek, smack him on the right cheek.”51
WHOPPER NUMBER 3: CAIR also claims “Allah is the same God worshipped by Christians and Jews.” In fact, the group says, “Muslims love and revere Jesus.”52
Many Americans have fallen for this Allah-God fallacy, including former President Bush, who not long after 9/11 said of Muslims, “I believe we worship the same God.”
Some national polls show that as many as four out of five Americans agree that Muslims worship the same Almighty as Christians and Jews. It’s a popular myth cultivated by years of propaganda by CAIR and liberal interfaith groups promoting shared religious values and themes. And it’s nonsense on stilts.
Neither Christians nor Jews worship the same deity as Muslims, nor do Muslims worship the same God as the “People of the Book,” and this is apparent from even a cursory reading of their sacred texts. If Muslims honestly believed CAIR’s palaver about a common divinity, the first Muslim member of Congress would not have had reservations about taking his oath of office on the Bible. But Democratic Representative Keith Ellison, a close ally of CAIR, insisted on using the Quran instead.
A critical part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy to conquer America is establishing common ground between Islam and Christianity. As Sheik Qaradawi has said: “We will conquer America not by the sword but by dawah”—the mission to convert others to Islam.53
One of the tools the Brotherhood and CAIR use to blind Christian skeptics and convert easy marks—such as Hispanic immigrants—is to talk up Jesus and his mother Mary.
In fact, the book, Jesus: Prophet of Islam by Mohammed Ata-ur-Rehman and Muslim convert Ahmad Thomson, can be found among CAIR’s dawah training materials. CAIR also recently launched a $60,000 advertising campaign that claims on Florida buses that Jesus was a Muslim. The signs read: “ISLAM: The Way of Life of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.”
“Hispanics are increasingly interested in Islam,” CAIR boasts in its media guide, and they are “converting to Islam.” That’s because CAIR and groups like the Latino American Dawah Organization are targeting them for conversion. Knowing how much Latino Catholics revere Mary, they point out that Mary is mentioned more often in the Quran than the New Testament.
While true, the only reason the Muslim holy book cites Mary so many times is to brand Jesus a mere mortal in the Muslim mind. Christ is referred to exclusively in the text of the Quran as “Jesus, son of Mary,” and never “Jesus, son of God,” which would be blasphemous to Allah. If anything, the literary distinction points up how different the two faiths are, since Muslims don’t believe that Jesus is God. In fact, they believe professing such a thing is shirk—the worst of all sins.
Still, Latino Catholics in particular are impressed with the attention Mary seems to get in the Quran. The “phenomenon” of their rapid conversion to Islam, as CAIR calls it, is predicated on this artifice.
And it’s the same dawah trick used by bin Laden, who in a recently recorded message to America tried to draw Christians’ attention to the allegedly similar beliefs that they and Muslims share regarding Jesus and Mary.
But don’t be misled. Here are the facts:
Islam rejects the central tenet of C
hristianity—that Jesus is divine and part of the Trinity.
The Quran calls those who assign “partners” to Allah “blasphemers” who will roast in Hell.
According to the Quran, Jesus was just a “messenger” and mortal like Muhammad.
Muslims don’t believe Jesus died on the cross, and the Quran clearly denies he was crucified.
Muslims do believe Jesus will return at the end of time. But here’s the part CAIR and other missionaries leave out of their proselytizing pitch:
On the Judgment Day, the Muslim Jesus will descend from Heaven and slaughter the Christian Jesus with a spear, along with all the Jewish “pigs.” He’ll also “break all crosses,” confirming Islam as the only true religion.
But then CAIR knows this. It’s spelled out in a pamphlet titled, “Khilafa” (Caliphate) found tucked in files stored in CAIR’s executive offices. Under the heading, “World Wide Islamic Domination,” it says that “Islam will prevail over every religion” when “Jesus, son of Mary,” returns to slay the “false messiah” worshipped by the non-Muslims.54
Islamist doctrine also holds that all people were born Muslim, but due to the fault of their parents, most are not taught Islam. When they finally see the “truth,” they “revert” back to Islam.
In public, CAIR and Islamic leaders refer to new Muslims as converts—as opposed to “reverts,” which is the term they use in their private communications—because it would be a PR nightmare if they told Christians and Jews they were actually born Muslim. But make no mistake, this is what these Islamic supremacists believe.
Besides the Jesus-Mary stratagem, CAIR also uses the “Abrahamic faiths” pitch to entice non-Muslims to cross over to Islam. But it beards the truth as well.
CAIR argues that we are all children of Abraham; and since we share a common ancestry, we share a common God.