Dymphna’s Afterword: Instead of kibitzing over the Baron’s shoulder as I usually do, it might be better to add my verbosity in the form of an update a post to share with our readers what we’ve learned from studying Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law
In this case I’m kibitzing because Reliance escaped into the MSM for a brief moment; this is too important to let it pass by without notice.
We use this book as a reference. It’s quite a handsome, durable text, so nicely bound and printed that one can only conclude its publication was underwritten by someone or other. If you cannot afford to buy it (it’s about $30.00) then treat yourself to the comment section. The numbers there have grown since we first got our copy.
I forget now how it came into our possession; it may have been acquired when the Baron was working with the written materials of a pre-eminent Counterjihadist a few years ago. He realized that the opacity of the Koran could be overcome by using this book as a reference instead. Reliance has the imprimatur of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the intellectual heartbeat of Islam. Think of Al-Azhar as a kind of papal library and repository (one the New Boyz could burn down before moving on to conflagrate Rome. True blue and blood-red Muslims are required to destroy history).
Reliance is an essential part of any Counterjihad library. Why? Because it goes straight to the heart of the matter. Better than any history of Islam, this practicum lets you see the rigors required of any observant (Sunni) Muslim. You don’t have to read it in the order prescribed by the sections; simply pick up the book and open it to whatever rule or law strikes your fancy. After several months you’ll understand the utter minutiae of Sharia, the absolute perfection required of Muslims. You’ll grasp how very unreachable an aim is subsumed in “submission” yet every good submitter is required to reach for it anyway. This is a door into understanding the despair for which violent jihad is the fix.
Reliance of the Traveller isn’t Pilgrim’s Progress. Nor are there parallels with the Christian Bible or the Jewish Torah. No stories of the patriarchs, no Prophets or Kings. No women of valor. No miracles or sacrifices or compassion. Nothing about caritas (one form of love), or faith (an entirely different experience than submission), and no hope. None. At. All. (You get a never-ending dose of predestination instead.) There can be no hope when everything has been already been decided by Allah but you have to strive anyway, living under the fear that maybe you’re condemned already. The only perfect cure is… yep, jihad. Instant massacre equals instant salvation into a very material world. This explains the fatalistic poverty of Muslim countries.
That is why Islam has no Middle Ages, no Renaissance, no Reformation. No “City of God” vis-à-vis Saint Augustine. No Saint Augustine. No Liturgical Year celebrating cyclically the life-events of Mohammed. No Gethsemane for a Bedouin. There are thousands of books devoted to some version of “The Life of Christ”, but if you’re a Muslim, you will find no invitations to “come, follow Me”. Instead, it’s “Obey Perfectly or Go to Hell”.
Reliance is not the Holy Book; it is the workbook demonstrating that Islam is not a religion any more than Communism was. Reliance is the guide for a supremacist ideology with rules and regulations to keep an observant Muslim safe. It is The Law without an iota of Love. As sad as that is, for the moment it is this very jurisprudence we need to understand.
You and I know the momentary ascendancy of Islam is only that: a moment in the world’s long human history. But it is a frightening moment for those caught in its predatory jaws. Our misfortune is to find ourselves at the juncture of history which requires us to witness the bloody predation. However, it is crucial that we not avert our eyes. We turn and face it instead, because that is what Islam does not want. They win when we’re too afraid to look. No, I’m not advocating watching those jihad porn videos. This is about understanding the enemy. Jesus may have said to turn the other cheek, but he never said to keep turning it. He also said that we must be as innocent as a dove and as wise as a serpent. That’s the kind of thinking which can lead to understanding the heart of evil without having to like it.
Reliance is a via. A way to not look away, but to gaze unflinchingly at the banal evil of Islamic jurisprudence and to comprehend the quotidian nature of Islam: it’s just a set of blood-soaked rules. Despotism hiding behind diktat.
Many of us are frustrated that there is nothing we can do against the depravity and desperation that comes from living next to the horror. But there are things we can do, even without money or influence:
- Learn to know your enemy as intimately as possible.
- Accept the times in which you live.
- Wherever possible, celebrate your culture and history. Warts and all, it’s your larger family.
- Band together with the like-minded.
- Think in the long-term: read the ancients even if you need a study guide.
- Act in the short term: plant trees you will never see in their full maturity.
Colonel Boyd called it getting inside the enemy’s OODA loop. Just because you ignore the enemy to the point of declaring his totalitarianism a Religion of Peace doesn’t mean he’s going to be a pacifist for your sake. Always keep in mind that though Islam may have set the rules for this domination, it’s up to us to figure out the work-around.
Do keep on figuring. Those are some good suggestions.
In this case I’m kibitzing because Reliance …..
This case might be too heavy to use ‘kibitzing’.
Kibitzing means ‘to chat’.
Chatting over the shoulder is perfect, and no one would lecture that way!
It might be yachna-ing, lektsye (lecture) or possibly another word I don’t know.
Yiddush is pretty specific……
Thanks for posting this very important topic.
I’ve been talking about this book for years and no one is familiar with it.
As history violently unfolds before our very eyes, consider
that we may very well be in the Age of Peak islam.
Are all chapters translated? I had read a review of an edition of this text that did not include a translation of the Chapter concerning Slavery (imagine that!).
Almost everything is translated into English. I’m told that some of the most severe passages, for instance those concerning FGM, have been watered down a little to make them look less egregious to the kuffar.
The person who translated the Reliance of the Traveler into English — Nuh Ha Mim Keller — is a Muslim, and therefore suspect by our rational prejudice. We then are confirmed in our rational prejudice (surprise, surprise!) by scholar Mark Durie, who shows one crucial example from the text:
“Circumcision is obligatory (O: for both men and women. For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (Ar. bazr) of the clitoris (n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert). (A: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)” — ‘Umdat al-Salik e4.3″
Mark Durie objects to this translation — particularly the “…not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert…”
Durie supplies the corrected translation:
“Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris” (section e4.3). ”
And then he adds the explanation:
” The English translation by Nuh Ha Mim Keller (certified by Al-Azhar University) disguises the true meaning of the Arabic text by offering [a] bogus English ‘translation’…”
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/22/clarification-of-islamic-law-support-for-female-genital-mutilation-by-dr-mark-durie/
It’s not that hard to find someone who reads Arabic who is not a Muslim — all those Arab Christians now fleeing MENA, for example. So the kitman artist had to be subtle in his misdirection — he could only shade the translation here and there to try to make Islam seem not quite so bad.
But even in Keller’s version, the badness comes through loud and clear.
Yeah; Keller probably thought that he could get away with it — and, in fact he did get away with it: nobody noticed, even Robert Spencer and his assistant Marisol for years in various Jihad Watch articles kept repeating the Keller translation of that quote, until I kept pestering them in comments about how Mark Durie, who knows Arabic, has pointed out the wicked and obviously mendacious mistranslation (and finally Marisol published an article on Jihad Watch that had my one (and only) “thanks to Hesperado” (though at the time it was another nickname) in the byline).
Mark Durie, incidentally is that non-Muslim who knows Arabic; it would be nice if he took the time and trouble to translate Reliance — but on the other hand, many if not most in the mainstream might be suspicious of its veracity, coming from the pen of an “Islamophobe”.
Nu Ha Mim Keller, by the way, is one of those carrot-top converts (the “Keller” is a dead giveaway):
https://islamicfinancenews.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/mufti-taqi.jpg
When sharia drops it’s velvet glove { the one it wears when seeking Western approval } it invariably exposes a bloody-Iron-Fist !
See: Al Misri on Circumcision
Know your enemy. Know how they smell, they look, they operate. Research and learn. Remember each fact, each lesson and pass them on to your tribe.
There is no middle ground and middle earth is but fantasy even though I love middle earth
The “Fertile Crescent” is now barren desert, the “Land flowing with Milk and Honey” struggles against desertification to produce either, and the ‘Breadbasket of the Empire’ is mainly empty.
What happened – Anthropogenic Global Warming?
No, just several hundred years of Islam.
Islam crushes the life out of a land; it removes the Love. joy. peace, gentleness, long suffering, goodness, meekness, temperance and faith – it has rules against them!
We must stand-fast in the LIBERTY that is our birthright and be not entangled in the yoke of Islam.
(with apologies to St. Paul and his Epistle to the Galatians)
It’s not Islamic conquest; it’s just “Culture Change” (from Imam Gore…)
This post is brilliant. Many thanks. Know your enemy. If only it were so easy…
I agree with you, Elisabeth; this post is brilliant. I have been reading down the line of comments wondering when I would find someone who noted that. I’m glad I am not the first.
Minor point: The English title of the book, seen on its cover, is “Reliance of the Traveller [British spelling]”, not “*The* Reliance of the Traveler [American spelling]”.
I have read this book and when some of my friends have said things like have you read this by so and so, all those silver tongued mis-representations of Islam I say no, I have read the Qu’ran, many Ahadiths and most important of all the Reliance of the Traveller, and that is all that really matters to a devout Muslim…, then I suggest they get a copy of Reliance of the Traveller and take their own journey into insanity…, and none of them do because they are too craven.
Great post, spot on with how I felt after reading it, this is so true:
“This is a door into understanding the despair for which violent jihad is the fix.”
I concur with the laudatory opinions about the merits of this post. But I continue in my dissent. Describing the Koran or any other Islamic thing as “the enemy” is akin to describing swollen lymph glands and painful spots and blotches on the skin as “the disease.” But the first is not the enemy and the second not the disease. Both are symptoms of distinctive diseases — in the second case, of AIDS.
Islam, Koran all that meant nothing to us until the 1960s. Dar al-Islam had been beaten into final submission 250 years earlier. Whatever their toxic issues were, they were with the Arabs and other Islamic peoples — often checked there too by indigenous autocratic leaders quite opposed to Koranic rule themselves.
The only reasons Islam and Muslims have become a problem for us is because of the treason and greed of our own ruling elites, and the naïve stupidity of our college-educated middle sub-elite and its inability to see the multiculti, neo-Marxist malarkey it has been taught under the guise of “education.”
It’s there where you have to find the AIDS. Fighting symptoms is easy. Fighting the disease is extremely difficult — it leads right to your own living room.
There are numerous portions of Reliance of the Traveler which are not translated into English. Someone should make a supplement which includes all of those un-translated portions. For example, I had someone translate o3.7 regarding retaliation for me. It says, “He who cut off somebody’s hand and then killed him, the hand of that person must be cut off and then he must be killed. . . .” In other words, taking a life for a life isn’t enough. The person must be tortured first and then killed. How barbaric!
What is the Arabic word “Traveler” used here?
‘Umdat as-Salik wa ‘Uddat an-Nasik is the full Arabic title, at the very least indicating that “Reliance of the Traveler” is an incomplete rendering. I’m guessing “Salik” is the word translated as “Traveler”.
I think the term may be more centrally, even officially, relevant to Islamic Jihad — particularly that one type of Jihad we have come to know all too well, the “Jihad of the Feet” (or Immigration). As I wrote recently in a Jihad Watch comment:
The “Traveler” of that title may well refer to the Muslim migrations, which have been going on for 1,400 years, and which are joined at the hip with its supremacist expansionism (whether by hook (violence) or by crook (stealth), or both as in our time). I.e., in Islam, a Muslim be definition is a pilgrim immigrant in the never-ending desideratum to conquer the world. This would not be the pilgrimage of the Christian “Pilgrim’s Progress” but one intimately interlocked with the militant, supremacist expansionism of Islam.
Meanwhile, any Muslims who seem stationary and settled (no longer on the move) are such by virtue of having been (or their parents or grandparents having been) part of the broader, grander process of expansion.
Aren’t all peoples throughout history like this, the reader may ask? Sure, all peoples throughout history have been migratory to one degree or another, and all “lands” and “nations” and “states” (and “kingdoms” and “empires” etc.) reflect the relatively stationary settlement in that process, but to one degree or another still in flux. However, only Muslims have had a blueprint articulating and mandating an entelechy of world conquest in the name and context of a fanatical eschatolgy which also includes supremacism, hatred of the Other, and a psychopathic cult of violence (criminal, paramilitary, and military) as well as deceit as crucial parts of the whole complex.
anybody have a clue why Traveler is spelled Traveller?
It’s the British/Canadian spelling.