Note: This article was posted yesterday, and was on top as a “sticky” feature all day. Scroll down for a review of the chapter on Quilliam in Tommy Robinson’s book, “We Are Patriots, Slavs, Lions!”, a fun video of Michael Moore and jihad antics, and the news feed.
Maajid Nawaz is a prominent “moderate” or secular Muslim and the founder of the Quilliam Foundation in Britain. His organization was featured briefly in this space two years ago, when Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll left the EDL and teamed up with Quilliam just before Tommy’s trial (see these three posts from October 2013 for more on Tommy Robinson and Quilliam).
The following exposé by Vikram Chatterjee examines the extensive use by Maajid Nawaz of untruths, dissimulation, evasions, and misleading statements in his writings about Islam. In these he reveals himself to be a practitioner of taqiyya, tawriya, and kitman, the time-honored Islamic doctrines of lying and sacred misdirection.
Update: Mr. Chatterjee has cross-posted this article to his own blog, where you will find his further thoughts on Maajid Nawaz.
Maajid Nawaz: Stealth Jihadist Exposed
by Vikram K. Chatterjee
Thanks in part to the help of Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Prime Minister David Cameron and others, Maajid Nawaz has acquired an undeserved reputation as a secular liberal. Despite his outward facade of secularism and liberalism, Nawaz is in fact a deeply devout Sunni Muslim supremacist, operating far behind enemy lines in the Dar al-Harb, the House of War. Nawaz, to fulfill his duties as a Muslim, is waging a campaign of stealth Jihad in order to further the cause of Islam by making himself appear friendly and open to the Infidels of the West while simultaneously carrying out a campaign of mass deception about Islam itself. His goal is to weaken any resistance to the conquest of the Infidel lands of the West by publicly spreading disinformation about the faith, about its many ways of conquest, and deceiving his audience about the doctrinal details of Islam itself. While this may seem like a preposterous claim to make, it merely reflects the ordinary reality of stealth Jihad.
In what follows, Nawaz’s campaign of deception will be demonstrated.
Maajid Nawaz’s not-so-subtle threats of decapitation
The first thing to be said is that Nawaz is easily shown to have deployed threatening, jihad-tinged language after he supposedly became a secular liberal. In July of 2012, Nawaz’s book Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism was published by WH Allen. The book purports to be a memoir in which Nawaz describes his youth in Essex, how he joined the Sunni supremacist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and how he became a political prisoner in Egypt where he supposedly had a revelation in which he saw that “Islamism”, or variously “Islamist extremism” was a divisive political ideology, and decided to leave it (but not, crucially, Islam itself), becoming a secular liberal. Fifteen months later, in October 2013, a year and a half after the UK publication of Nawaz’ memoir, Tommy Robinson quit the English Defense League, the organization which he started, out of fear that its ranks were swelling with neo-Nazis. He embraced Maajid Nawaz and Quilliam Foundation instead, accepting at the time their claims of secularism to be genuine. In an email obtained by Huffington Post Assistant News Editor Jessica Elgot, Nawaz described this event as the “UK’s largest right-wing street movement — the EDL — is being decapitated.”[1] (emphasis added)
Interesting choice of words, no? Why would the “former Islamist extremist” Maajid Nawaz use such threatening, jihad-tinged language? Could his secular liberalism be a clever sham? As we shall see, turning to the book he co-authored with Sam Harris, the evidence shows Nawaz is cold and calculating in his bald-faced telling of untruths, repeatedly deploying outrageous falsehoods about Islam.
The lies of Maajid Nawaz in Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue
Published in October 2015, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue purports to be a conversation between two liberals, one an acknowledged atheist and secularist, the other a supposedly nominal Muslim. The goal of the book seems to be to find a way of talking about Islam and its attendant problems in a polite way, and search for a path for a kind of Islamic secularism. Harris, apparently convinced of Nawaz’ liberalism and secularism, entered into the “dialogue” with him in October 2014. In an article entitled “Can Liberalism Be Saved From Itself”, Harris wrote what will prove to have been a fateful sentence:
Whatever the prospects are for moving Islam out of the Middle Ages, hope lies not with obscurantists like Reza Aslan but with reformers like Maajid Nawaz.[2]
Harris called Aslan an obscurantist, yet turning to his book with Nawaz, on page 44 we find Nawaz saying, of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood leader, theologian and author of Milestones, and In The Shade of the Qur’an, whose zealous career was a primary force in creating the modern Islamic movements to restore the Caliphate, that “the Egyptian regime killed him for writing a book”.
This is a straightforward falsehood. Notoriously, Qutb was executed by the Egyptian state for his alleged involvement in an attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.[3] By saying that Qutb was executed for merely writing a book, Nawaz portrays Qutb as a devout Muslim as an innocent victim, a tried and true tactic of Islamic propaganda. It seems highly unlikely that Nawaz is unaware of the real reason for Qutb’s execution, given that Nawaz spent four years at the same prison in which Qutb was held, Mazra Tora.
Moving on, on page 61 of the book, Harris brings up the important point of Qur’anic literalism:
I want to ask you about this, because my understanding is that basically all “moderate” Muslims — that is, those who aren’t remotely like Islamists, or even especially conservative, in their social attitudes — are nevertheless fundamentalists by the Christian standard, because they believe the Qur’an to be the literal and inerrant word of God.
Excellent question, Sam. Do mainstream Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal and inerrant word of God? What is Nawaz’s reply?
Well, Nawaz’s three-page reply on pages 61-64 gives no answer whatsoever to this question. He avoids it entirely, beginning with the evasive phrase “I think we have to be careful to avoid two mistakes…” and so on. Nawaz then goes on a curious series of tangents, offering up entertaining thoughts about the meaning of the term literal, which is apparently a big mystery. He then turns down a series of historical side tracks about the Mu’tazilites, Iranian philosophy, and the Council of Nicaea before telling us, in answer to the question of whether the Qur’an was created by God that he “won’t take theological stances here”.
Having done all that, on page 64 Nawaz drops the arresting phrase “because there is no clergy in Islam”, apparently confident that Harris and the reader have never heard of the ulama. Nawaz finishes by stating that “My role is to probe and ask skeptical questions about interpretive methodology, Muslim history, identity, politics, policy, values, and morality”, a job description that apparently does not include answering straightforward questions like “Do Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal and inerrant word of God?” The reader ends up finding no definitive answer to this salient question, which is curious, since Nawaz is supposedly an honest secularist and liberal who should be eager to answer simple questions. That Harris cannot bring himself to press Nawaz on this important point, or catch Nawaz’s lie about there being “no clergy in Islam” demonstrates his inadequacy to the task at hand.
After a further set of comments from Harris about the nature of religious moderation and the different range of problems posed by literal readings of different religious traditions, Nawaz responds on page 69 with some apparently secular-minded comments about “sad and horrendous atrocities committed against hostages in Syria by British and European Muslim terrorists.” From the context, it appears that Nawaz is referring to Islamic State beheadings and immolations of captives, but without specific definitions of the terms used in the sentence: “hostage” and “British and European Muslim terrorists”, the statement could be read in other ways. He could just as easily be referring to bombing done by the British and French states in Syria, and using tawriya[4] to privately redefine what a “hostage” and a “European Muslim terrorist” is, so that he appears to be denouncing Islamic State atrocities, while in his own heart he actually isn’t. That may sound to some readers like a paranoid suspicion to have, but time and again we have seen Muslims appear make overtures of peace or condemnations of Muslim atrocities, employing vague language like “we condemn the killing of innocents” while not deigning to mention what is meant by the term “innocent”. Nawaz may well be up to similar shenanigans with this phrase.
On the next page, we find Nawaz saying, of Islamic reform, that “I think the challenge lies with interpretation…” In Islam, interpretation of scripture and tradition is dictated from the top down, beginning with the ulama, the clergy, who in turn are today mostly re-iterating interpretations (generally called tafsir — commentary or elucidation) that were arrived at by Muslim theologians about a thousand years ago. This class of Muslim clergy, the ulama, in turn runs the various schools where Islam is taught to Imams, qadis and the like, so that the teaching of the ulama spreads outward from the main centers of Islamic teaching, such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, and the schools run by and for Shia clerics in Qom, Iran.
That Maajid is telling Harris that the path forward for Islamic reform is to have new ‘interpretation’ (tafsir) of scripture should be very troubling to Harris. This kind of interpretation in Islam is only permitted to the learned scholars of Islam. It is not a democratic notion, with everyday Muslims reading scripture for themselves. Rather, Nawaz’s stated position on Islamic reform is basically “let’s leave it to the ulama to give us new tafsirs. That will result in a reformed Islam.” This indicates that he is not willing to really break with orthodoxy in Islam, and make Islam open to lay Muslims to read for themselves, in their own languages, the way that William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for daring to translate the Bible into English, insisted on for his fellow Christians.
This point of language is one that Harris appears not to understand, or doesn’t think worth discussing. Muslims don’t really read the Qur’an. Rather, they just recite it in a language they don’t understand. At no point in the book does Harris even ask Nawaz if he would encourage his fellow Muslims to read the Qur’an in a language they can actually understand, as the number of people who can actually read and understand the classical Arabic of the Qur’an is vanishingly small. Since Nawaz does not suggest this crucially important change himself, we can safely assume he does not want to break with orthodoxy and encourage Muslims to read the Qur’an in their own languages and thus be able to interpret it for themselves. From this we can see his true agenda: he wants to keep scripture, and the authority that goes with it, in the hands of the few. When it comes to interpreting the Qur’an, Nawaz is no democrat. He’s an authoritarian.
Turning to page 76, we find Nawaz repeating a falsehood told earlier:
A sensible way forward would be to establish this idea that there is no correct reading of scripture. This is especially easy for Sunnis — who represent 80 percent of the Muslims around the world — because they have no clergy.
What’s that, Maajid? Sunnis have no clergy? The American Heritage Dictionary defines clergy as:
The body of people ordained or recognized by a religious community as ritual or spiritual leaders.[5]
Turning to The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, we find the term ‘Ulamā defined as:
Those who are recognized as scholars or authorities of the religious sciences, namely the Imāms of important mosques, Judges, teachers in religious faculties of universities and, in general, the body of learned persons competent to decide upon religious matters.[6]
That sure sounds like a clergy to me, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary. For Sunnis today, the most important ulama institution is Al-Azhar University, unless said Sunnis accept the Islamic State’s claim to be the Caliphate.
Further down the page we find Nawaz saying the following:
What is said in Arabic and Islamic terminology is: This is nothing but your ijtihad. This is nothing but your interpretation of the texts as a whole. There was a historical debate about whether or not the doors of ijtihad were closed. It concluded that they cannot be closed, because Sunni Muslims have no clergy.
This is so outrageously dishonest that at this point, we could easily conclude that Maajid Nawaz is a stealth jihadist and basically stop reading. But we must go on. First off, ijtihad does NOT mean interpretation, as Nawaz indicates. For “interpretation”, the word tafsir is generally used, although it tends to mean something more like “elucidation” or “commentary”. What does ijtihad actually mean? Let’s turn again to the Encyclopaedia of Islam:
IDJTIHAD (A.), literally “exerting oneself”, is the technical term in Islamic law, first, for the use of individual reasoning in general and later, in a restricted meaning, for the use of the method of reasoning by analogy[7] (emphasis added)
So in Islam the term ijtihad (as current Romanization standards spell it) means the use of individual reasoning in religion, NOT interpretation. The use of reason is something a genuinely secular Muslim, looking to help his fellow Muslims lift themselves out of the dark ages, should be keen to promote. But rather, Nawaz is keen for Harris and the readers of this book to think that the term means “interpretation”. Why? Well it gets even worse from there, because not only does ijtihad mean something different than Nawaz is telling us, it is also the case that the doors of ijtihad are CLOSED. Contrary to what Nawaz claims in the passage quoted above, The Encyclopedia of Islam informs us that:
During the first two and a half centuries of Islam (or until about the middle of the ninth century A.D.), there was never any question of denying to any scholar or specialist of the sacred Law the right to find his own solutions to legal problems. It was only after the formative period of Islamic law had come to an end that the question of who was qualified to exercise idjtihad was raised. From about the middle of the 3rd/9th century the idea began to gain ground that only the great scholars of the past, and not the epigones, had the right to idjtihad. By the beginning of the fourth century (about A. D. 900), the point had been reached when the scholars of all schools felt that all essential questions had been thoroughly discussed and finally settled, and a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one might be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at the most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all. This “closing of the door of idjtihad”, as it was called, amounted to the demand for taklid [q.v.], the unquestioning acceptance of the doctrines of established schools and authorities. (emphases added).[8]
To summarize: the above quotation from Nawaz, found on page 76 of Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue, tells a falsehood to the reader in three important ways. First, Nawaz has carefully redefined ijtihad to mean “interpretation”, when in fact it actually means the use of one’s faculties for reason and independent thinking. Secondly, he tells us that the doors of ijtihad remained open, while in fact, it is generally said, including by the learned scholars that produced the landmark Encyclopaedia of Islam, that the doors of ijtihad have been CLOSED for about 1,100 years. Thirdly, Nawaz dissembles when he fabricates a reason to justify his fabrication about the doors of ijtihad remaining open, because Sunnis supposedly have no clergy, when they patently do, as we saw above. In Islam, the clergy is called the ulama.
On page 78, we find Nawaz, the tireless deceiver, lying again. Responding to Harris’ statement that it’s hard to read the Qur’an as justifying eating bacon, Nawaz writes:
Yes, okay. I can’t sit here and say to you that I’ve got a reading that justifies eating bacon. That’s a very good example you gave.
This too, is a piece of rank dishonesty. Nawaz’s statement makes it sound as if Muslims cannot justify eating bacon in the light of Islamic scripture, but they can. Harris does not apparently know enough about Islam to see through it. Some readers may find this a bit odd. Muslims can eat bacon? Yes they can, if their lives depend on it.
Islam comes packaged with a principle called darura, or necessity. It says that Muslims can violate just about any aspect of Sharia, if it is necessary to further the cause of Islam. If necessary, the haram can be made halal. If a Muslim lives deep behind enemy lines in the Dar al-Harb, he may consider himself to be in a war zone, and therefore see his life as permanently under threat, and thus allowed do things like drink wine and eat bacon to pass among the Infidels undetected. Turning again to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, we find:
DARURA, necessity (also idtirar), in works of fikh has a narrow meaning when it is used to denote what may be called the technical state of necessity, and a wider sense when authors use it to describe the necessities or demands of social and economic life, which the jurists had to take into account in their elaboration of the law which was otherwise independent of these factors.
I. The state of necessity, whose effects recall those of violence, does not result from threats expressed by a person, but from certain factual circumstances which may oblige an individual, finding himself in a dangerous situation which they have brought about (shipwrecked, dying of hunger or thirst in the desert, for example), to do some action forbidden by the law, or to conclude a legal transaction on very unfavourable terms in order to escape from the danger which threatens him. The Kur’ān contains numerous verses which, directly or indirectly, legitimize on grounds of necessity certain acts which in principle are forbidden (II, 168; V, 5; VI, 119; XVI, 116). Ibn Nudiaym derived from this a maxim which became famous: al-darūrāt tubīh al-mahzūrāt, which the Ottoman Madjalla (art. 21) reproduced literally and which may be translated: “Necessity makes lawful that which is forbidden”. The effects of the state of necessity of which the writers here fixed the conditions and limits, are more or less drastic according to the domain of fikh in which they occur. a) In what concerns prohibitions of a religious character (the prohibition against eating pork or dead animals, or against drinking blood or other liquids regarded as impure, for example), it is admitted without difference between the Schools, that necessity legitimizes the non-observance of these rules. It follows — and this is the opinion which has prevailed in doctrine — that one is even obliged to disregard them in a case of danger. (emphases added)[9]
So yes, Sam. Maajid Nawaz can indeed find a “reading” that justifies eating bacon. In fact, he has a robust piece of Islamic doctrine which allows him to eat bacon, a doctrine described by the Encyclopaedia as “famous” and “without difference between the Schools” of fikh, or jurisprudence. As Nawaz parades around, deep behind what he conceives of as enemy lines in the Dar al-Harb, he is free, since he views himself to be in a war zone, to drink wine, eat bacon, or what have you. Anything to pass among the Infidels, if it helps to bring about the final victory of Islam over the world.
Turning to page 107, Harris rightly brings up the doctrine of taqiyya:
Hand-waving displays of tolerance often conceal some very ugly truths — which puts one in mind of the doctrine of taqqiya, wherein it is said that Muslims are encouraged to lie to infidels whenever it serves their purpose. I hope you will enlighten me about that.
Alas, Maajid Nawaz is unable to enlighten anyone about taqiyya. Instead on page 109, he gives us the following:
The taqqiya you speak of is a Shia concept.
This lie is well worth spending time on. Firstly, let us notice that this sentence is, in and of itself, a piece of taqiyya about taqiyya. In an article entitled “Taqiyya About Taqiyya”, the greatly knowledgeable Raymond Ibrahim informs us that:
One of the few books exclusively devoted to the subject, At-Taqiyya fi’l-Islam (“Taqiyya in Islam”) make this unequivocally clear. Written (in Arabic) by Dr. Sami Mukaram, a former Islamic studies professor at the American University of Beirut and author of some twenty-five books on Islam, the book demonstrates the ubiquity and broad applicability of taqiyya in its opening pages:
Taqiyya is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it … We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream … Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.[10]
So taqiyya is common to both major branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia alike[11]. So gleeful is Nawaz at how easily he has duped Harris, so unable to help himself, that on the next page he states that “I could be doing taqqiya now in my explanation of what taqqiya is.” That is indeed the case. What’s more, the statement itself, “taqqiya is a Shia concept”, is deeply revealing. Not only is taqiyya NOT just a Shia concept, but one that is common to both Sunni and Shia Islam, but the statement “taqqiya is a Shia concept” is itself a piece of sectarian, anti-Shia propaganda.
Because many Infidels have come to associate the word taqiyya with the notion of Islamic deception, Nawaz has clearly deployed this phrase in order to denigrate the Shia in the mind of his audience, while at the same time drawing attention away from the Sunni practice of taqiyya. The deployment of this phrase indicates beyond doubt that Nawaz retains his sectarian agenda behind his mask of secularism.
Maajid’s ship keeps on sinking ever lower. How low can he go? The reader may have noticed that the term taqiyya has been spelled in two different ways. In the text written by myself, readers will find that the term is always spelled T-A-Q-I-Y-Y-A, single-Q, double-Y. However, readers will also see that the quotations that come from the book co-written by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz are spelled T-A-Q-Q-I-Y-A, double-Q, single-Y. What accounts for this discrepancy in spelling?
As it turns out, the correct spelling, according to modern conventions of Romanization of Arabic script, is the former, with one Q and two Ys. The correct spelling of the term is taqiyya or taqiyyah . To check this, at first we will consult the useful tool created by Google, the Ngram database. Google’s Ngram database charts the frequency of terms, as printed in literature in Romanized script, over many centuries. These data have been produced from the Google Books Library Project, through which Google has scanned in and digitized literally tens of millions of books. After scanning these books in, Google used character recognition software to record the words contained therein, and then carried out statistical analysis on the appearance of words in those same books, producing chronological charts of word frequency over time. The resultant Ngram tool can chart the appearance of words in Romanized scripts over time. Looking up the charts for taqiyya, taqiyyah, taqqiya, and taqqiyah, we find that the spelling T-A-Q-Q-I-Y-A is, according to Google’s vast database, an unprecedented in print books from 1800 to 2008[12]
As the Google’s Ngram tool helpfully reports — “Ngrams not found: taqqiya, taqqiyah
In its vast catalog of words in Romanized script, Google tells us that these spellings appear nowhere. Why would these spelling variations never appear in Google’s vast Google Books Library Project database?
Could this be some mistake? Could it be some misunderstanding? For clarity, I decided to contact an expert on Arabic, someone who specializes in the reading and teaching of Arabic itself. Reached via email, Munther Younes, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, a specialist in Arabic linguistics and the language of the Qur’an, and author or co-author of six books of Arabic language instruction, informed me that the Romanized spelling taqqiya double-Q, single-Y is “definitely an error”.[13]
This term taqqiya, with the double-Q, single-Y spelling, appears no fewer than five times in Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue. It appears once on page 107, once on page 109, and thrice on page 110. Why? Given what we have seen of Maajid Nawaz’s output so far, given that he appears to be a blatant liar and sectarian propagandist, we can hazard an educated guess.
Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue will be for many the first book that they read about Islam. Nawaz and company, knowing this, and having won the easy trust of Sam Harris, may have inserted this spelling in the hopes that unwitting readers would type this incorrect spelling — taqqiya double-Q single-Y — into Google, where they would, at time of writing, be greeted with the following misleading article, at the top of the search results. The article, entitled “Taqqiya — An [sic] Tactic of Lying, Concealment”, at the website of the Clarion Project, curiously lists no author. The spot near the top for the author merely lists “By ____”. No name is listed. Still more curiously, both spellings of taqqiya double-Q and taqiyya single-Q are found in the article, which oh-so-helpfully informs us
Islamists also interpret taqiyya to permit lying about the nature of Islam to non-Muslims in order to convert them to Islam. Mainstream Muslims regard this as forbidden.
Aside from the misleading distinction between “Islamists” and “Mainstream Muslims”, both of which go undefined in this authorless article, the idea that taqiyya is employed not by “Mainstream Muslims”, but “Islamists”, in order to “convert them to Islam” is deeply misleading. The use of taqiyya, as with every other tactic of Islamic deceit and supremacism, is everywhere and always the same: to bring about the final political and religious victory of Islam over the world. Conversion into Islam is never the direct goal. Conversion is only seen as one of many tools of Jihad which, in the case of conversion into Islam, can help to further the cause of Islam by enlarging the numerical strength of the umma to assert its superiority and the dominance of Islam itself, which devout Muslims believe is destined to win dominion over the Earth.
While we cannot be sure as to the motive of Nawaz in deploying this curious misspelling of taqiyya as taqqiya double-Q, single-Y, and those of the writers with whom he and Harris collaborated (among the names in the acknowledgements: Faisal Saeed al-Mutar, Usama Hasan, and Ali A. Rizvi), it seems plausible that Nawaz, engaged in a large and well-financed campaign of deception, has enlisted the help of a confederate at the Clarion Project website to ensure this misleading article appears at the top of the Google Search results. In addition, he and his confederates may have used some means to game the Google Search results themselves.
There are many more dishonesties and misleading statements about Islam to be found in the book, too many to catalog here. Nawaz’s “Islamism” vs “jihadism” distinction is wildly misleading. The “fatwas” issued by Sheikh “Dr.” Usama Hasan are obvious fakes, etc. Other questions come to mind. How did Harris manage to sign his name to a book about “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” which contains no mention of the other basic sources for Islam? To read the book, one would guess that Islam is based exclusively on the Qur’an and Hadith alone. No mention of the Sira, no mention of the History of Al-Tabari. The reader comes away with no knowledge of the existence of these books, let alone of their importance in Islam. Why was Ali A. Rizvi, who is supposedly an ex-Shia, willing to participate in and promote a book with an obvious piece of sectarian, pro-Sunni, anti-Shia propaganda?
How Maajid Nawaz Wages Jihad
To understand what Maajid is up to, we have to look at Qur’an 3:28 which reads:
The believers may not take the unbelievers for their allies in preference to the believers. Whoever does this has nothing to do with Allah unless he does so in order to protect himself from their wrongdoing. Allah warns to beware of Him for to Allah is the ultimate return.
Regarding Q 3:28, Mawdudi — the most revered Sunni commentator on the Qur’an of the 20th century — states, in his essential Tafhim al-Qur’an:
5) This means that it is lawful for a believer, helpless in the grip of the enemies of Islam and in imminent danger of severe wrong and persecution, to keep his faith concealed and to behave in such a manner as to create the impression that he is on the same side as his enemies. A person whose Muslim identity is discovered is permitted to adopt a friendly attitude towards the unbelievers in order to save his life. If he considers himself incapable of enduring the excess to which he may be subjected, he may even state that he is not a believer.[14] (emphases added)
Read carefully Mawdudi’s commentary quoted above. Whenever we read Maajid Nawaz or watch him on television, watch his actions and statements carefully, and see how they can be made to fit to what Mawdudi says is permissible for the Muslim to do, when he is deep behind enemy lines in the Dar al-Harb, as Maajid is.
| For: | “Muslim identity is discovered”, read: “left hanging right out in the open and never really denied” | |
| For: | “may even state that he is not a believer”, read: “subtly suggest that he is basically a closet atheist, even though he is really anything but” or “I’m openly not devout” | |
| For: | “create the impression that he is on the same side as his enemies”, read: “No, my secular liberalism is not the “other extreme” to Islamism”[15] |
Read every word of this Facebook post from the hissing, fork-tongued Nawaz, and contemplate just how many people are deceived by him, who will continue to be deceived by him, as long as the lies exposed here go unnoticed. Read the astonishing moral arrogance displayed by Nawaz, who writes in the comments “And the mere fact that I actually have to clarify this. wow.”
Wow, indeed. This is how stealth Jihad works. Maajid is a master of the art of making himself seem friendly to Infidels and many, many people have fallen for him badly.
The Jihad that Maajid Nawaz wages is not a Jihad of the Kalashnikov or the suicide belt. It is instead a stealth Jihad. Maajid Nawaz is a deeply devout Sunni Muslim who, while deep behind enemy lines in the Dar al-Harb, wages a Jihad of mass deception against Infidels, using the Islamic doctrines of taqiyya, tawriya and kitman deception. His goal is to make himself appear to be friendly to Infidels and against all bigotry and hatreds, all the while diligently working to deceive those same Infidels about the nature of the Jihad, that hydra-headed, multi-pronged instrument of warfare, which includes campaigns of religious propaganda, campaigns of deceptive speaking and writing, campaigns of da’wa, campaigns of anti-Infidel propaganda, campaigns of bribery and other financial muscle-flexing, and campaigns of Jihad by demographic conquest, embodied by polygamy and marital laws that have asymmetric inter-faith and gender rules. Nawaz is desperate that these last, non-violent aspects of Jihad remain unnoticed by the Infidels of West.
While he has often spoken with welcome accuracy about Jihad, in his capacity as Nawaz’s dupe, in serving as a launching pad for his campaign of mass deception about Islam in their book Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue, Sam Harris has been nothing short of an ally of Islam itself. To borrow a phrase from Nawaz’s ally Murtaza Husain, Glenn Greenwald’s “colleague” at The Intercept, Harris has been, to a first approximation, Maajid Nawaz’s own, personal, well-coiffed talking monkey. By failing to do due diligence about the specific doctrines of Islam itself, by failing to check Nawaz’s claims about Islam against authoritative sources on the subject, and failing to ask many important questions, he has been no foe of Jihad. He has been, rather, its unwitting accomplice.
Furthermore, Nawaz, in posing as a secularist and reformer, has doubly victimized the genuine liberals and humanists like Asra Nomani, Zuhdi Jasser, Irshad Manji, Tarek Fatah and Bassam Tibi. Now that Nawaz’s deceptions are uncovered, they will come under increased scrutiny. Some of these people, like Tarek Fatah, seem to have seen long ago that Nawaz was an imposter. Fatah is endlessly active on Twitter and Facebook, yet a look at the advanced Twitter search results for interaction between the two show that Fatah has carefully steered clear of Nawaz for four long years.[16] Fatah, greatly knowledgeable about Islam, probably saw all the telltale signs of Nawaz’s deception from afar. He has only joined Nawaz in co-signing the public statement, organized by the Gatestone Institute, and published as a full-page ad in the New York Times “What Can Muslims Do To Reclaim Their Beautiful Religion?”[17] Another liberal Muslim, Irshad Manji, has given Nawaz and Harris’ disastrously misleading book, filled with falsehoods, sectarian anti-Shia propaganda, and hugely misleading statements about Islam itself, a somewhat positive review in the New York Times.[18] We might like to ask Manji why she didn’t point out any of the obvious dishonesties in the book. Should she explain herself? We don’t need to ask. Manji is already under enormous pressure and death threats from some Muslims. She no doubt wrote the review while keenly aware of the long arms of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Islamic State, of which Nawaz is almost certainly a supporter.
Vikram K. Chatterjee is a Bengali-American writer and researcher who lives in Texas.
Notes:
| 1. | See paragraph 6: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/02/03/quilliam-maajid-nawaz-edl_n_4716443.html | |
| 2 | See the last paragraph: www.samharris.org/blog/item/can-liberalism-be-saved-from-itself | |
| 3 | www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East-Encyclopedia/sayyid_qutb.htm | |
| 4 | Tawriya — this astonishingly deceptive Islamic tactic of deception can be thought of as deceit by secret double-entendre. Secret double-entendre works like this:
On Sunday mornings, Jack and Jill play a secret game. Jill dresses up like a French maid, and she and Jack have wild sex on the kitchen counter. They call this game “housekeeping”. Later, they go to lunch with their friends Bob and Betty. When they sit down to eat, Betty asks “What did you to do today? Bob and I planted roses in the garden.” Jill replies “oh, just a little housekeeping”, while shooting Jack a knowing glance. Bob and Betty aren’t in on the secret joke. For more, see The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill, 1954-2005. See the entries in Vol. 10 T-U on TAKIYYA, beginning on p. 134 and TAWRIYA, p. 395. KITMAN is also discussed in this entry. |
|
| 5 | ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=clergyahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=clergy | |
| 6 | The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 407. Edited by Cyril Glassé. Harper and Row, 1989. | |
| 7 | The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill, 1954-2005. See the entry in Vol. 3 H-Iram on IDJTIHAD, p. 1026. | |
| 8 | The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill, 1954-2005. See the entry in Vol. 3 H-Iram on IDJTIHAD, p. 1026. | |
| 9 | The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill, 1954-2005. See the entry in Vol. 2 C-G on DARURA, p. 163. | |
| 10 | www.raymondibrahim.com/2014/04/12/taqiyya-about-taqiyya/ | |
| 11 | The entry TAKIYYA in the Encyclopaedia of Islam also makes it clear that the practice of dissimulation is common to both Sunni and Shia Muslims. Historically, it has been more associated with the Shia, who, being in a minority in the heartlands of Islam, have been forced to conceal their true faith from the Sunnis who, being in an overwhelming majority, have no need of hiding their agendas in those same lands. See the entry in Vol. 10 T-U on TAKIYYA, beginning on p. 134 The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill, 1954-2005. | |
| 12 | books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=taqiyya%2Ctaqiyyah%2Ctaqqiya%2Ctaqqiyah&year_start=1800&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctaqiyya%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctaqiyyah%3B%2Cc0 | |
| 13 | Personal correspondence. Younes’ faculty page at Cornell University here neareasternstudies.cornell.edu/people/detail.cfm?netid=may2 | |
| 14 | Towards Understanding Islam,abridged version of Tafhim al-Qur’an, by Sayyid Maulana Abul A’la Mawdudi. UK Islamic Mission, 2007. www.amazon.com/Towards-Understanding-Quran-Sayyid-Mawdudi/dp/0860374165 | |
| 15 | Archived at: web.archive.org/web/20151219184549/www.facebook.com/MaajidNawazFanPage/posts/894253547308578 | |
| 16 | twitter.com/search?q=from%3ATarekFatah%20to%3AMaajidNawaz&src=typd | |
| 17 | www.gatestoneinstitute.org/pics/880.jpg | |
| 18 | www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/islam-and-the-future-of-tolerance-and-not-in-gods-name.html |
If anybody has any questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer them. You can find me on twitter at @chatterjee_vk
I have also cross-posted the article at my blog here
https://vkchatterjee.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/maajid-nawaz-stealth-jihadist-exposed/
Similar to Outlaw below I viewed this snake-oil salesman with the same distaste I hold for Tariq Ramadan, Reza Aslan, Ahmed Rehab (CAIR Chicago thug who might be in long-term rehabilitation as he seems to have disappeared from the Taqiyya scene) and a bevy of other taqiyya experts whose names I’m disinclined to remember.
Tommy Robinson’s dalliance with Quilliam and Maajid Nawaz concerned me because of this. Will you please provide your perspective on this coupling, where it stands and what we might expect from Tommy moving forward? I understand Tommy was forced to make accommodations with the British powers-that-be for simple survival.
Also, how has Douglas Murray contributed to Nawaz’s accension?
Tommy Robinson’s dalliance with Quilliam and Maajid Nawaz concerned me because of this.
Tommy’s book, “Enemy of the State” is out. Chapter 17 is titled simply “Quilliam”…I will skip forward to that, read it, and report back.
As far as I know, the book is not available in the U.S. yet. I plan to contact several people more knowledgeable than we are on ways to get this on Amazon.us
Here it is in the UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tommy-Robinson-Enemy-State/dp/0957096496
It is available on Amazon US — although only in Kindle format at this time.
THANK YOU!!
Tommy Robinson Enemy of the State
I am reading Tommy’s book right now. Here in the UK, Amazon is showing 51 reviews, which is encouraging.
I’m fairly sure that Tommy is done with Quilliam and Maajid.
He’s rightly moved on.
Yes he has and attends PEGIDA protests , also in Europe
Where he is always a welcome guest speaker. He is back in form
Thank-you MR Chatterjee for your very compelling and desperately needed perspective.From your lips to God’s ear.
When I first started to actively oppose islam, I met a Pakistani atheist in England. This young man was on the run, fleeing from his family and the contract killer he believed they’d employed.
His crime? He’d publicly denounced islam and declared himself an atheist. He was alternately angry and dejected that Britain offered him no freedom of religion.
In my halcyon days, I thought that the likes of Quilliam/Nawaz were the way forward, a way to avoid civil war. The young Pakistani atheist told me: “Do not be fooled by Quilliam. It is a project of deception by Hizb ut Tahrir, who feel they have gone too far, too fast.” With that in mind, I’ve spent years warning people of what this young man said. (This young man has not been seen in several years).
Tommy Robinson has spoken to me several times about Nawaz. Tommy does not believe that Nawaz is some kind of stealth jihadist. But I’m sure glad you made the effort of researching and writing this.
For my money, I’m not interested in the views or support of anyone who does not want to ban islam. Reformers and apostates can peddle their charms elsewhere.
“Thanks in part to the help of Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Prime Minister David Cameron and others, Maajid Nawaz has acquired an undeserved reputation as a secular liberal.”
Well, I can say I NEVER fell for it. I NEVER gave him so much as a morsel of the benefit of doubt. And today I see the vindication of my misgivings.
Good for you. One of the dead giveaways is that he bills himself as Maajid Nawaz “Founder” of Quilliam Foundation, the WORLDS FIRST counter-extremism think tank.
These terms are chosen to subtly suggest his own supremacy as “founder” of something that is to be thought of as the “worlds first”, whatever that is. This is stealth supremacism.
Vikram, I should have added this yesterday. Thank you for providing us with this extremely thorough investigation. Very good work. It must have cost you hours and hours of research and compiling.
Could just be that like many aspiring politicians (he stood unsucessfully for the UK Parliament at the last election) the man is a narcissist. I am not entirely convinced by your analysis. I am not entirely convinced by him either. Certainly his post Hizb persona has earned him the hatred of many conservative Muslims including I have heard members of his own family.
I have to agree Nawaaz always has seemed rather slimy and oily to me.
I was surprised that Tommy Robinson was taken in by him.
Sam Harris however seems a bit of a plonker to me.Harris is just one hugely inflated ego on legs ,convinced of his own moral and intellectual superiority to everyone else on earth.
He strikes me as pompous and deluded .
As for Ayaan Hirsi Ali ,she seems to be far to eager to believe in the myth of that Islamic reformation is possible.
It is quite impossible to reform an ideology that portrays a viscious paedophile warlord and trader in sex slaves as the perfect man.I think she is battle weary and thus merely using the concept of Islamic reformation as some sort of emotional crutch.
Cameron seems to be a thoroughly unprincipled hypocrite bent on doing everything he can ,by spin lies and deceit to steer Britain in the wrong direction.He does this not because he is ignorant of the disservice he is doing his country ,but out of a desire to cling on to power ,line his own pockets and garner a post national career in the E.U once he steps down as British Prime Minister.
Sadly he is merely Tony Blair in a better suit (heir to Blair indeed)
He should have led Labour ,because he is most certainly not a Conservative .A faux Conservative yes -a true Conservative no.And thus he has betrayed the Conservative voter by masquerading as a Conservative politician .And worst of all he has betrayed his country.
Thank you: an authoritative and much needed article.
And thank you!
Deeply saddening and disappointing. One point; I understand taqiyya originated with the Shias (is that the plural?), though adopted later by Sunnis.
I don’t think that’s true. It’s written up in Reliance of the Traveller, which means it goes way back, and has authoritative Sunni sources.
Reliance of the Traveller long postdates the Sunni Shia schism
Yes, that’s true. I was not implying that it doesn’t. I was merely pointing out that authoritative Sunni sources sanction the practice of taqiyya.
I think that’s more deception. But does it matter?
What in it saddened or disappointed you, Mark? Surely none of it was a surprise?
I’m afraid it was, maybe because I wanted to believe. We could certainly use more genuine reformers from within Islam.
It is historically associated more with the Shia, because they were in a minority in Muslim lands ans the Sunni-Shia split developed. Being in a minority, they had to practice taqiyya more to hide their true loyalties, while Sunnis, being in a majority could comfortably practice in the open.
Now that Sunnis are in a minority in Infidel lands, they are practicing taqiyya quite often. For more, look at the article by Raymond Ibrahim linked in the footnotes.
Taqiyya MUST pre-date the shia/sunni schism. Perhaps its very first instance in islam came when one of mohamy’s followers sought his permission to commit the most vile sort of deception to gain the trust of one of mohamy’s most relentless detractors in order to assassinate him. mohamy gave his blessing, and the dirty deed was done.
Conversion into Islam is never the direct goal. Conversion is only seen as one of many tools of Jihad …
Precisely. If everyone converted, from whence would come the jizya, or the concomitant sadistic pleasure derived from its collection? Subjugation of other human beings is central to the core evil of Islam.
Excellent fisk of this despicable man. His success depends on the willing ignorance of his interlocutors for whom being seen as a cool kid is crucial to one’s existence. Douglas Murray has obviously never left the miserable jockeying-for-position which defines adolescence.
I know Ayaan Hirsi Ali is considered by many to be a valiant survivor of her Islamic past. While her suffering – e.g., the genital mutilation she endured as a child – is real, it is the characterological formation of her childhood whihc has left her deeply mutilated (i.e., Islamic). The woman’s moral development is on a par with Turkish carpet merchants.
We are fortunate to have this post on Gates of Vienna.
Thanks to GoV for letting me write here, Dymphna!
Douglas Murray is well-intentioned, in my view, but the road to Britainistan is paved with good intentions. What is needed is for people to actually study Islam itself, to know what is and is not true about it, so that they can detect these kinds of deceptions. Nawaz has hoodwinked a lot of people, including David Cameron. He has been aided by whole gaggle of confederates. He’s well funded, too.
I would be a bit more charitable toward Ayaan Hirsi Ali, myself. I believe that her intentions are good as well, but she doesn’t really know enough about Islam to see what an eternal menace it is, or to see through the lies of Nawaz.
In this sense, she’s a bit like a survivor of the Gulag, being asked to comment on how to deal with Communism. A Gulag survivor may be well equipped to tell you what a disaster Communis is from in the first person perspective. But that doesn’t mean that their knowledge is enough to know exactly how to combat Communism ideologically or militarily. Our Gulag survivor could tell you about the starvation and slavery, but they would probably not be a good guide to the byzantine detailes of Marxism-Leninism, or which Leftist was genuinely anti-Stalinist.
So too with Ayaan. She survived the Islamic Gulag of Somalia and Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t mean she knows how to recognize stealth Jihad, or that show knows the details of Islamic doctrine.
I disagree, based on her actions since leaving the train of Islam and landing in the Netherlands.
She lied her way through the documentation process, using the mentors attracted to her obvious intelligence, charm and beauty.
She used that poor fool, Theo van Gogh, without ever informing him of the danger he would face after the film was made. His family rightly blamed her at least in part for his death.
While a parliamentarian in the Netherlands, she proposed closing ALL private religious schools as the solution to the problem of Islamic indoctrination in madrasas. She chose to totally ignore the hard work done by the religious groups there to create an accommodation with one another.
Her “work” since fleeing to the U.S. has been to break up a heretofore solid marriage and leave three children without a father.
She could be doing much more for the victims of FGM than she has so far…makes a fine figurehead, though. And commands a hefty speaking fee.
Let’s discuss this further after you read her first autobiography and then contemplate how her behavior differs from any other careless narcissist.
I read “Heretic” this summer, and felt I was being unkind with my personal evaluation of it being self-promotional tripe. I’m glad to see my feelings were not unfounded.
I read her first book. I think you are being unfair. How do we know she did not warn Van Gogh? Why is she responsible for the family breakup and not the man involved? He is the one who left his kids. I think I might have had more sympathy for your position if you had left that one off.
Her use of van Gogh, a careless man who had little to no political comprehension, seemed calculated at the time. It still does.
Yes, the fellow – whose name I’ve forgotten – is equally responsible for their mutual irresponsibility in the ruin of his children’s lives. The loss those children suffer(ed) still seems so heedless. When kids are involved, adults must put the needs of children first if we are to have a functioning next generation.
Her ignorance of Dutch history damaged those she was elected to serve.
We call men who use others, who calculate and who use unsavory tactics to gain power that way “empty suits”. I don’t know a parallel epithet for a woman who does the same thing, leaving a trail of destruction behind her.
Yes, I have my own agenda here. I was one of those ‘left’ wives – though by the time he left, I was so “erased” that it was a relief to simply let the loss wash over me. Those years of putting my whole self into keeping my family together had taken its toll. Our children never fully recovered from his (perhaps) bipolar disorder and substance abuse which wreaked its own havoc on their bodies and minds. However, all these years later I know it was the loss of our family unit, his abandonment of them that has resonated into the next generation. As they go about the arduous/joyful tasks of raising of their own children, that work has been crippled by their own early losses.
———————————————
Murray Bowen built his theories of family systems on the work of Walter Toman, an Austrian who created a “calculus of loss” so that individuals could remain in calm contact with their families of origin in order to differentiate from the suffering they endured as children. The destruction is so culturally widespread and so deeply physically damaging that finally the CDC is realizing that the “epidemics” of obesity and heart disease and other manifestations of self-rejection (which is what auto-immune disorders are) have their beginnings in the traumas of childhood. Thankfully, they are also investigating not just the damage, but also the possibilities for creating resilience in children so they have an opportunity to transcend the damage.
http://acestoohigh.com/
http://acestoohigh.com/2014/07/29/to-prevent-childhood-trauma-pediatricians-screen-children-and-their-parentsand-sometimes-just-parents/
http://acestoohigh.com/2015/12/08/esta-soler-elevates-child-trauma-to-national-policy-stage/
I’ve been studying the phenomenon of family failure at its root – in the parents<-->child dynamic – for several decades now. What we permit (e.g., the financial abandonment of children) in the name of a narcissistic “liberty” is literally killing us – as individuals, as families, and as a culture. I am so hopeful now; the powers that be have begun to accept that “science” and scientific answers to illnesses are not sufficient. Necessary, yes, but not sufficient. And remediation begins in childhood long before the body has been worn away. And it has to be done in a way that does not undermine the moral authority of the parents.
The opportunistic viral disease that is Islam could not have gained a toehold in the West had it not already been so hollowed out by its own moral emptiness.
One of the great cruelties of Islam is the ways they structure their family systems and the horrors they are permitted to perpetuate against infants and young children. Ms. Hirsi Ali is a victim and she perpetuated the experience of loss onto another woman’s children, thus spreading out the harm done.
Shame on you for blaming Ayaan for the murder on Theo van Gogh, which was a terrorist act aimed at her too ! What you say is simply untrue: she did warn Van Gogh not to put his name up as director of “Submission”, but he declined. You know why? Because he did not want his life to be determined by fear. (all other contributors to that short film stayed anonymus). She herself was in fact the main target of the muslim assassin, and was forced to live in hiding for years. Ayaan: one of the first in the Netherlands (with prof. Afshin Ellian) that had the clarity of mind and the courage to speak up against the threat of political islam, the oppression of women in islamic societies, and some more “inconvenient truths”. For you I can only say: he who throws mud, stains himself.
Well said. I suspect Van Gogh was at core ignorant of how far jihadis will go and at that time considered that such a thing would not happen to him living in a liberal democracy. It seems to me that Dymphna’s attack has more to do with her own personal experiences than any real analysis of Ayaan’s path. As for obesity and auto immune disease- well you only have to look at the quality of modern manufactured food and the ridiculous quantities people eat to see why people become really obese. I don’t mean overweight – that is often a meaningless measure constantly adjusted in order to sell slimming products just as desirable blood pressure and cholesterol measurements are readjusted to market the drugs meant to “treat” them. I would be far more inclined to closely look at overuse of various medicines especially fluoroquinolone antibiotics in the explosion of autoimmune disease coupled with thyroid destruction from fluorisation of water supplies and disastrously low vitamin d levels due to propaganda against sun exposure- again so as to sell people sunscreens.
Families that stay together can be just as unhappy as those that split up particularly if the father is violent or abusive. The only negative thing I can really find to say against AHA is that she has very poor taste. Her husband comes across as a prat in the historical documentary programs he presents.
“He’s well funded, too”
Worrying.
What details do we have of the source of his funds?
No details concerning who funds Quilliam.
I’ve heard from one (reliable) source that Quilliam is funded by wealthy muslim businessmen. Hizb ut Tahrir (UK) have since removed their list of grandees from their website, but I recollect seeing that list a few years ago, and it was a list of successful muslim businessmen.
So, I still can’t say if Quilliam/Nawaz are as duplicitous as Vikram’s article makes out. However, reformers and apostates are irrelevant: by the time muslims are the majority of the population in our countries, those muslims may not be reformers or apostates any longer. We need to ban islam.
I think your comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali are [redacted]. What exactly is it about her”moral development” you are decrying?
I have already explained my point of view at length.
I read her books, followed her career in the Dutch Parliament, her use of a foolish young man which led to his death, and her subsequent work in the U.S.
I base my point of view on an assessment of her behavior, dating back to the day she got off the train and lied about her reasons for refugee status…it went downhill from there.
My dislike of her behavior is my opinion and last time I looked, we were still allowed to have those.
I’m done with this subject.
The bit you redacted was not swear words but an opinion expressed in everyday polite language. That you cannot accept a criticism of your views without redacting as if I had sworn at you shows exteme narrow mindedness. Needless to say I am not surprised.
It was an insulting ad-hominem description aimed at a fellow commenter. That’s why it was redacted. An alternative way of saying it, having the same meaning but without the pejorative component, would be: “I think that what you said made no sense whatsoever.”
The Mohammedan Koran puts great emphasis on lying?
War is deception. Jihad is war. Jihad is obligatory. Therefore: war is obligatory, deception is obligatory.
Some Muslims try to get into semantic arguments about the word “taqiyya” and whether only Shia use that term for “war is deception” etc. but we all know it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s still the Islamic obligation of jihad->war->deception.
Taqiyya, Kitman, & muruna are all forms of doctrinally permissible deception to promote &/or protect Islam.
actually, Douglas Murray (together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali) recently particiapted in the debate against Maajid Nawaz on the topic of “Islam is the religion of peace” – and ours have won.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUGmv5TGaTc
I noticed the “decapitation” wording immediately, and treated everything he says with suspicion since.
however, I don’t think everything is that simple – Maajid might be genuine double agent, an intellectual parasite practicing “fake taqiyya” 🙂 to avoid problems with IS.
basically, Obama’s ideology (and unfortunately practice) of fusing Islam with civilization isn’t far from Maajid’s techniques.
but these smart-[alecks] can easily dupe themselves in the end.
many Muslims looking at all that, may simply skip all subtleties of taqiyya, and choose apostasy eventually – which will be a disaster for the deceivers, as their goal is to keep them – whatever sort, whatever grade – but Muslims.
…
What is written on the back of this card is true. What is written on the face of this card is false.
When you see someone parsing something forever and ever, it is reasonable to conclude that they are disciples of that something.
Very succinct and on point.
I’m currently reading [I]Londonistan[/I] by Melanie Phillips, never realized before that the royal family, particularly Prince Charles, are so enamored with Islam.
Where does this come from?
Oil money?
Or does he just like the idea of having 4 wives?
Which brings up the next question: What does the Muslim man do if all 4 wives start nagging at the same time? Get them stoned (the rock kind, not the Hippie kind) and get new ones?
Wow that is scary. I think the royal family likes Islam because they associate it with the sort of absolute monarchy(Saudi
Arabian) comfortingly familiar to them through the lives of their illustrious forbears/ancestors.
Charles has always been an intellectual lightweight and a bit odd – a fruit loop in fact.Must have been dropped on his head one time too many by the royal nanny.
Far as I’m concerned, all the current royals are basically a joke.
Britain doesn’t need limp half-Germans who sell their estates to Arabs, they need a Celtic chieftain in the mold of Owen Glendwr.
Holland doesn’t need poofy playgirls, they need as Frisian pirate captain.
Sweden doesn’t need a French head waiter, they need a Viking warrior.
And so on.
With all due respect, I believe this blog has bigger fish to fry than Maajid Nawaz.
Nawaz appears, at least to the average listener, as a genuine moderate Muslim, a very rare creature indeed. Whether his intentions are truly pure or not is irrelevant, because he is currently serving as a secular, reformed Islamic role model. If he is able to convince the anti-Jihad movement, then he is probably able to do the same for all the young Muslims out there.
There are far worse Taqiyyah artists out there, such as Reza Aslan and Tariq Ramadan, which we should direct our efforts against. My experience tells me that there is a simple enough test to identify them: If they support the destruction of Israel, they are Islamic supremacists at heart.
I wish I could spend the time answering this comment in depth. However, I will say this:
Your words define the exact strategy that Nawaz and similar “moderates” want to promote.
I think the same process is going on in a lot of places. There must be hundreds of deep-cover Ikhwan operatives in these non-profit organizations, feeding sincere well-meaning people exactly what they want to hear about Islam. It makes those good-hearted folks feel so relieved — it gives them hope that a modern, civilized society that includes Islam can somehow be salvaged.
But it can’t. Despite all the hard work and millions of non-profit dollars that have gone into promoting “moderate” Islam over the past fifteen years, there is nothing to show for it. There is no sign that any of it will bear any fruit.
All this diversionary tactic has done is to keep the Western public in a hypnotic state wherein they continuously mutter “moderate Islam… radical Islam… tiny minority of extremists… the need for an Islamic Reformation…” etc. This gives the Islamic State — the longed-for Caliphate — the time it needs to grow into a coherent, implacable manifestation of the will of the Ummah.
By the time Westerners throw off the post-hypnotic commands and wake up to what is happening to them, it will be too late. The enemy will have metastasized to the point where there is no choice but full civilizational war, with all the horrors that entails — mass-casualty terrorism, heaps of rotting corpses in the streets, the destruction of parts of major Western cities, and so on. Millions of deaths, economies destroyed, whole nations turned into wastelands. Just like North Africa circa 660 A.D.
So all I can say to you, Mr. Oren, is: Get thee hence, Satan!
Ten years ago I might have embraced your words. But I have learned a lot since then and been hardened by bitter events.
You may well be a taqiyya artist just like Maajid Nawaz. Or you may have just been fooled by his ilk. It doesn’t really matter; the end result is the same.
The Islamic Sleeping Pill
http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/news-libertygb/6095-the-islamic-sleeping-pill
Sorry, intended for Matt Bracken, below, picking up his point of slipping soporifics into the bloodstream.
Got it, thanks.
You are falling for the Good Muslims/Bad Muslims Mutt and Jeff routine. It’s the same as the old good cop/bad cop schtick.
“Look, I’m a Good Muslim. But you gotta give me something here, or the Bad Muslim is going to come back in and beat you some more. And above all, don’t mention the blood on his hands, or the girl you heard screaming in the next room! It makes the Bad Muslim angry! Just let me do the talking. I understand him. I can handle him. We can work this out. But you gotta give me something here.”
Down that road you get a progression from “hate speech” laws (that only apply to one category of speech), to blasphemy laws, to halal food laws, to Sharia courts “under some circumstances,” etc etc etc…..until your grandchildren wake up and they are the last persecuted dhimmi Christians living in a Muslim land under total Sharia Law.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say the “moderate” taqiyya Muslims are more dangerous than the overt jihad killers in the Islamic State. One group obvious and can be fought. The other slips soporifics into your bloodstream a bit at a time, rendering you in the long term unable to fight at all.
It’s similar to the success of the “Long March through the institutions” stealth socialists (Gramsci, Fabians, Frankfurt School etc) compared to the overt “war Communists” such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
I agree, but with this slight refinement: it is in fact the Gutmenschen among non-Muslims whom the “moderates” have snookered that are the most dangerous of all. These good people have been flim-flammed, and as a result are putting the brakes on the process that would save our culture. They cannot stop the catastrophe from coming, but they can delay it until its effects are incalculably more horrific.
They are Mohammed’s Useful Idiots.
Their enslaved granddaughters will spit on their graves.
Speaking of enslaved granddaughters — ten years later, Dan Simmons’ “The Time Traveler” is still relevant.
I’ve spent 5 years zoning in on the muslim/apologist groups in the UK who want to snooker kuffars about the good muslim/bad muslim schema.
There’s very few of these groups now. Hopefully the last few (like Quilliam) will be exposed and will disappear. Then the [Leftist] elite won’t be able to traipse examples of black swans before the public to make confuse the public into thinking that the white swans are fundamentally different in oh-so-many ways.
Once people realise there is only one islam, and that the place of the non-muslim within islam is that of subjugation, people will be far more receptive to the idea that we need to ban islam.
No this is completely wrong. Nawaz is far more dangerous that Aslan (a Shia) or Tariq Ramadan (now thoroughly exposed and old news).
Nawaz’s deception matters because he’s waging a much more sophisticated campaign, one in which he makes himself appear to be a for-identification-purposes-only Muslim, a Muslim in name only, but in reality he is deeply devout.
Further more, he’s playing the Good Cop in the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine that is now standard on the BBC. Nawaz’s allies like Murtaza Husain and Anjem Choudary play the Bad Cop.
> If he is able to convince the anti-Jihad movement, then he is probably able to do the same for all the young Muslims out there.
This is such [ridiculous material]. Muslims everywhere can see quite plainly that he remains loyal to Islam.
Well the ones on The Big Questions are fantastic actors. They deserve Oscars just for the looks of loathing they cast in his direction.
Whatever the truth, Nawaz is potentially dangerous because he is trying to convince non-Muslims that there is nothing to worry about. Nawaz’s message in essence: all we need to do is call out the Islamists (those who want to impose Islam by violent jihad or by stealth) and give the religion of Islam a free pass.
Of course, some of us doubt that it’s even possible to make such a neat divide, to separate the religion of Islam from its political aspect.
Most us know there’s little goodness within any aspect of Islam, hence the reason why genuine reformers are striving to enlighten the ideology by eradicating its inherent misogyny and transforming Islam into a religion of peace.
Islamic enlightenment, of course, may never manifest – at least not in our own lifetimes. So, even if Nawaz is not a stealth jihadist, he’s a harmful influence nonetheless. He’s encouraging his devotees (including Sam Harris) to lower their guard, to be more trusting of Islam – and in so doing, enabling Islamisation of the West through the back door.
And buying time. Don’t forget that.
Every year the Caliphate survives makes the eventual victory of the Ummah that much more likely. When that finally happens, there won’t be any further need for people like Maajid Nawaz. They will have served their purpose.
Try this..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Within_You_Without_You
[edited by Admin. The URL slopped over the boundaries.]
Do not open the above link
The name Quilliam commemorates a convert to Islam who established the first mosque in Britain. A rather satisfactory irony is that he was a solicitor who was struck off.
OUR QUILLIAM FRIEND
What do we know of our Quilliam friend?
Struck off! Struck off!
His solicitor job? It was brought to an end:
Struck off! Struck off!
He founded a mosque in Liverpool port,
Assisting sailors of lascar sort,
Awarded himself the title of sheikh,
But then became bossy and made a mistake.
Struck off! Struck off!
What are we to make of American Mu[slim]s like Zuhdi Jasser??
In my view, Jasser is genuinely peaceful. Robert Spencer of JihadWatch send to accept him as genuine, so I do as well.
“(…) answering straightforward questions like “Do Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal and inerrant word of God?”
And even if he did, who authorized this guy to speak for all muslims? Can anybody really say they speak for a whole gazzillion-plus group of people and be honest about it?
Does anybody else out there ask: “what do all the (insert diverse religious group here) think?”
My point is, why do we even care about this one guy? Is he acting any differently than CAIR or any other spokesgroup/person that purports to speak for muslims?
This is an ugly war and the only chance of survival is to take a stand, choose a “Yes” or “No” answer. To be on one side or another. We can’t sit on the fence on this one and try to be everything to everybody.
When the fighting really begins in the streets, we’ll see which one of these “secularists” really oppose the “islamists” by which side they take to when all pretense is over and done with.
Let’s act as if no help is coming from them. If some of them really join us, then they’re welcome. But it’s not a comforting prospect.
Precisely my point.
I’m not interested in what any apostate/reformer has to say – unless what he has to say is “ban islam, and ban it now”.
I’ve interacted with scores of these “high value” apostates over the years. I started to notice a trend: get them on to the subject of banning islam, or watch them in some conflict between a muslim and a kuffar. They always take the side of muslims/islam. Always. And this is just in debate: imagine if it descended into violence.
Moreover, they all want more immigrants, and these “apostates” will denounce as “fascist” those kuffars who want to halt immigration (especially if it is immigration by muslims).
It’s quite simple: any of them with a public profile have got scores of family and friends who are muslims. So they want islam to be protected for their family & friends; they want immigration so more of their family & friends can come to Dar Al Harb.
And who, pray tell, has suggested that Maajid Nawaz speaks for “all Muslims”?
I have made no such suggestion in the article. To whom are you responding, except for some imaginary straw man?
As for why we should care: we should care because Nawaz is carrying out a campaign of mass deception, printed in bookstores across the United States. He’s on CNN, FOX, BBC, NPR and so on, and none of these know they are hosting someone who is a deceiver.
He goes on Anderson Cooper to discuss ISIS, but Cooper has no idea of his real politics. It’s insane.
We the people. . . Do we really have a say in what Hussein Obama is deciding? Is importing unlimited of invaders constitutional? Is leaving 12 million illegals in the country without deporting them constitutional? Is leaving borders porous constitutional? Is allowing Saudis to buy any asset, hotel, firm, TV stations constitutional? Is allowing muslim viceroys in the WH and dictating to the government which laws are good, bad, to be omitted, to be enacted constitutional? Is demolishing churches and Christianity and supporting islam to prevail and erecting mosques constitutional ? Is forcing students to study islam and convert them, while forbidding anything Christian constitutional ? Is forcing vulnerable pupils to take a trip to a mosque and try the niqab constitutional ? Is turning irrational into rationa, wrong to right constitutional ? Is hating Israel and insulting Mr Natenyahu and worshipping Palestinians, Turkey, Saudi Arabia constitutional?
How do we go forward? 1. Start killing all Muslims? 2. Try to convince some of them that their religion sucks and hope that they handle the problem? 3. GoV’s third way, whatever that may be?
Or, don’t go foreward, build up our military and close down immigration and sit?
Any involvement with the Middle East, in any form whatsoever, is bad news. Been that way for a few thousand years, not likely to change. The way forward should be based on that very simple law of nature.
I like Sam Harris. I think he’s right on the cusp of actually catching on. But, like so many self proclaimed “liberal atheists”, “atheist liberals” or whatever, he has an almost child like wishy/hopey attitude about Islam and Muslims. And, I think Nawaz saw him coming a mile off. Once he does catch on, he will be a formidable foe of Islam, if he can stand up to the heat he’ll be facing. He faces extraordinary heat now, but he ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I realize that he’s a good person, looking for a way through the blood mist of Islamic slaughter and he truly believes that there’s a rational way to deal with Islam and Muslims. However, Islam has had at least 1,400 years to perfect its psychological warfare and my bet is that such is actually much, much older. I wish him luck, but I’m pretty sure that, sooner or later, he is going to be gravely disappointed in Nawaz and abysmally embarrassed when he finally sees Nawaz’s true face.
Isn’t the claim by the lying Mohammedans that there is no clergy in Mohammedanism a replication of the false claim by communists that communism is not based on hierarchy? In other words, both try to deceive outsiders that their systems, Mohammedanism and Communism, are egalitarian, and are better than all others, where inequality and injustice run wild?
Good point. There are so many parallels, that all boil down to “the ends justify the means.” Mass murder, deception, anything it takes.
The author Vikram K. Chatterjee claims that a search on the misspelling “taqqiya” leads to a certain article as its first hit. Here is a report on my attempt to verify this claim.
A Google search (from the U.S.) on “taqqiya” leads to
https://www.google.com/#q=taqqiya
This recognizes “taqqiya” as a misspelling of “taqiyya” and lists results for the latter term. But at the top of the page are the two lines
Showing results for “taqiyya”
Search instead for “taqiyya”
If you click on “taqiyya” you are taken to
https://www.google.com/#q=taqqiya&nfpr=1
in which the first-listed hit (among “About 66,500 results”) is indeed the article mentioned by VKC. How was it arranged that this particular article would be at the very top of 66,500 results? Does the shortness of this article cause it to migrate to the top?
Bottom line: VKC’s result has been replicated.
Further thoughts…
Not everyone gets the same results from a Google search. Possibly the search results depend on the location of the searcher (e.g., U.K. vs U.S.) and the searcher’s search history (e.g., whether “nuts” refers to threaded metal fasteners, snack foods, or craziness). My preferred search engine is duckduckgo.com, which claims not to track the searcher and accumulate information for Big Data.
Captain Kirk: “Why would God need a starship?”
Me: Why would God need liars to spread his word?”
When you have something that is so inherently and fundamentally vile such as islam, you need to denounce it in toto. It’s continued existence will always create more fanatics, despite anyone or group attempting to moderate it. The idea that someone like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi exists, and can have a PhD in Islamic studies from one of the most prestigious Islamic universities, and that he is in total belief that he is following the “correct” islam, says all I need to know about islam, despite anything any so called moderate says. Someone please prove to me that al-Baghdadi is not following islam. You cannot do this with any credibility. Islam is what it is, there is no denying it’s belief system, or even moderating it. All the real islamic moderates out there really need to take a good long look at what they are actually supporting, and then make the bold decision to stop being a muslim. When I see a burka, it is like looking at someone wearing a Nazi uniform. What they are broadcasting to me is that they are supporters of a vile philosophy, and not something moderate. I happened to be in Barron WI the day after the California shooting. The large group of Somali muslims at the gas station I stopped at all had the same smirk on their faces (“We have struck a blow against the great Satan”). They and their religion disgust me. What they fail to realize is that if they disrupt our society enough, it is their death sentence.
Excellent exposé on Nawaz (and by extension, an apposite critique of Sam Harris for his namby-pamby approach). Precisely because it’s so good, it’s dismaying that the author, Chatterjee, at the end turns around to abandon all the scrupulous standards he applied so well to Nawaz, in order to give “the genuine liberals and humanists like Asra Nomani, Zuhdi Jasser, Irshad Manji, Tarek Fatah and Bassam Tibi” a breezy pass.
[quote author=”Hesperado” date=”1451186316″]I finally read Chatterjee’s article. As I wrote in the comments section at the Gates of Vienna site where it was published:
all the scrupulous standards he applied so well to Nawaz, in order to give “the genuine liberals and humanists like Asra Nomani, Zuhdi Jasser, Irshad Manji, Tarek Fatah and Bassam Tibi” a breezy pass.[/quote]
I have abandoned no standards whatsoever.
1. Space – the editor did not provide me space to discuss all of these people. Just enough to expose Nawaz’s lies
2. Having studied these people’s output, I am quite confident that none of those listed above are deceivers.
Most especially not : Tarek Fatah or Bassam Tibi.
Now: what I am NOT saying is that I agree with their positions on Islam, or the way they talk about “Islamism”: I do not. But I am near-certain that neither Fatah nor Tibi are Muslim. Both of them are closet apostates/atheists.
They are that most useful of things: the for-identification-purposes-only Muslim. Both men readily tell Infidels all types of secrets about Islam, secrets that people like Nawaz very tight-lipped about.
You may care to notice that none other than Andrew Bostom included Bassam Tibi’s essay “War and Peace in Islam” in his magnificent anthology “Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims”. Tibi is no stealth jihadist.
Rather, he is an honest liberal and secularist, as well as a leading political scientist of the Middle East, who, perhaps out of some kind of filial solidarity, cannot really come out as fully atheist and anti-Islam. He’s a good man.
I think much the same of Fatah.
Irshad Manji, Asra Nomani, and Zuhdi Jasser are also genuinely peaceful. It’s just that they are intellectual lightweights.
I would also point out to you something that I didn’t mention in the article: Irshad Manji left a cryptic hint in her New York Times review of Harris and Nawaz’s book. She ends the review thusly:
[quote] On that front, Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz are role models. The Lord works in mysterious, perhaps acrobatic, ways.[/quote]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/islam-and-the-future-of-tolerance-and-not-in-gods-name.html?_r=0
>What does she mean by this cryptic statement about the “acrobatic” ways of the Lord?
I cannot be sure, but my suspicion is that she saw right through the lies of Nawaz, but, fearing for her life (as I mentioned in the article), she didn’t point out his deceptions.
I would add that Maajid Nawaz is not a standard-issue garden-variety pseudo-reformer — those do their taqiyya in order to fool the mainstream. Maajid’s target is not so much the mainstream, but the Counter-Jihad, where he the audience is more difficult to fool, since they’ve educated themselves more on the matter and are wary of ordinary snakes saying stuff like “Islam is a religion of peace” and “Islam does not kill innocents” etc. Those types are the “Good Cops” who fool the mainstream into thinking they are Moderates distinct from the brazen “Extremists” (aka “Terrorists”). The cleverer type of Good Cop, who ups his game in order to fool the warier Counter-Jihad, is the “Better Cop”.
And by this logic & criteria, and seeing how many who may be willing to suspect Maajid but not Zuhdi Jasser, one would have to extend special kudos to Jasser and honor him with the epithet Best Cop.
I don’t know enough to have an opinion on Zuhdi Jasser’s sincerity or “moderation”. But he has very little funding and no significant organization, unlike other titans of taqiyya such as Tariq Ramadan, Imam Rauf, and the Quilliam people.
Just for starters, I would ask Baron Bodissey and Vikram Chatterjee to listen to how Zuhdi Jasser resonds to the oh-so gingerly and respectfully polite Frank Gaffney’s gentle questions about the Koran and Muhammad — beginning at the 29 minute mark of his interview of Dec. 17:
http://securefreedomradio.podbean.com/
Tell me that Zuhdi isn’t responding with the same kind of tissue of sophistry Maajid routinely indulges in.
As I said, I don’t know enough about Zuhdi Jasser to have an opinion on whether or not he is a “stealth jihadist”. My point was not that he is “moderate”, but that his operation is modest (to put it mildly) and impact is miniscule, compared to that of Maajid Nawaz and others at his level of influence. There’s lots of money behind those masters of taqiyya.
The mere fact that Jasser is Muslim makes him suspect. Add to that the sophistry he responds with when articulating his supposed “moderation” and ideas for “reform” and that should clinch it. As for his influence, he is regularly featured on mainstream news media soliciting his opinion; and he has fooled major figures of the Counter-Jihad. His influence thus is significant enough quantitatively; and qualitatively, it serves to tend to lull the Counter-Jihad (the members of it fooled by him) into an attitude reinforcing their feeling that the ongoing presence of multitudes of Muslims in the West is a fait accompli modus vivendi about which we cannot do anything, and perhaps don’t need to do anything, since most of those Muslims “just wanna have a sandwich” and are not presenting a demographic out of which an exponential, metastasizing threat of terror attacks throughout the West, numerous and far worse than 911 in the coming decades of this 21st century will not devolve (and do not require precisely the presence of that demographic).
No this is wholly mistaken. Maajid Nawaz’s target audience is NOT the Counter-Jihad, which has not been taken in by him at all, as far as I know.
Nawaz’s target audience is specifically fans of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris – those liberal Infidels who don’t know enough about Islam to detect basic lies – “taqiyya is a Shia concept” etc – but who know enough to be concerned about Islam.
Harris’s audience in particular, has been very specifically targeted by going after Harris himself. I could not prove it, but having followed Harris for a while now, I believe that he was roped into collaborating with Nawaz with the help of two of Nawaz’ confederates, both of whom are Muslims posing as atheists : Ali A. Rizvi and Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar.
Both of these guys describe themselves as “atheists” and “ex-Muslims”. Rizvi claims to be ex-Shia. He and Al-Mutar collaborated with Harris and Nawaz on the book. But as I show above, the book contains a piece of ant-Shia propaganda “taqiyya is a Shia concept”.
Why would Rizvi, who is supposedly an ex-Shia, participate in the publication of such book? It makes no sense.
Harris was roped into the trap beginning with the article, co-written by Rizvi and Al-Mutar entitled
“A Conversation Between Two Atheists From Muslim Backgrounds (Part 1)”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/a-conversation-between-two-atheists_b_4623831.html
part 2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/a-conversation-between-tw_b_4930715.html
part 3
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/a-conversation-between-tw_1_b_5733362.html
This three-part article was perfectly designed to appeal to Sam Harris’ views. They perfectly replicate his politics: his atheism, his opposition to Jihadist violence, his disdain of Noam Chomsky, his opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry, his liberal support of Western state power (similar to the late Christopher Hitchens, Harris’ longtime ally).
It also is written in the “conversation or dialogue format, which Harris is known to like and has employed himself on his blog.
Having produced an article that perfectly replicated Harris’ politics and literary taste, they then targeted Harris with a social media campaign. Once he read the article and liked it, Harris then followed them on twitter etc., and it was by this means that Maajid Nawaz was insinuated into Harris’ circle of contacts.
I could produce the various links that demonstrate with, but I don’t want to waste the time. Suffice to say, being a fan of Harris, I watched all of this unfold on twitter over the past two years. That’s how he got rope-a-doped by Quilliam Foundation, which is a front group for Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Vikram K Chatterjee on December 27, 2015 at 8:56 pm said:
“No this is wholly mistaken. Maajid Nawaz’s target audience is NOT the Counter-Jihad, which has not been taken in by him at all, as far as I know.”
Since the Counter-Jihad doesn’t exist as a coherent, organized entity, it’s a matter of subjective, relative opinion who is “in” it and “not in”. Anyone who spends as much time and effort as Sam Harris has done for years tackling the problem of Islam (no matter if his efforts may be deemed by some to be flawed) is arguably in the Counter-Jihad. Ditto for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray. Chatterjee’s literal-mindedness also apparently prevents him from subtler detection of nuances — such as, for example, the kid-gloves treatment of Nawaz by such Counter-Jihad luminaries as Robert Spencer, where “kid gloves” includes hardly ever mentioning him at all, thus failing to subject him to the aggressively critical treatment he deserves to be scrutinized under. By hardly ever mentioning Nawaz, such CJ leadership as Spencer, Geller, Frank Gaffney, and others are indirectly sparing him from the harsh spotlight of critical analysis which it is their CJ job to be doing.
I would like to comment on a few issues mentioned above. The source for my comments is Reliance of the Traveller, a translation of sharia certified by Al-Azhar University which states that the translation corresponds to the Arabic original and conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni Community.
First, something about ulama and ijtihad. Book B in Reliance of the Traveller (RoT) is concerned about the importance of “following qualified scholarship”. Only specially qualified members of ulama, mujtahids, are entitled to take part in ijtihad. Their qualifications are specified in Book O (o22.1(d)).
The rules for ijtihad are very strict and stress the importance of ijma (consensus) among the mujtahids. From the following it is obvious that the doors of ijtihad are more or less closed:
b7.2 “When the four necessary integrals of consensus exist, the ruling agreed upon is an authoritative part of Sacred Law that is obligatory to obey and not lawful to disobey. Nor can mujtahids of a succeeding era make the thing an object of new ijtihad because the ruling on it, verified by scholarly consensus, is an absolute legal ruling which does not admit of being contravened or annulled.”
Second, something about what sharia says about taqiyya. In RoT the issue is dealt with in Book R even the word taqiyya is not used in this translation. In r8.2 we can read:
“This is an explicit statement that lying is sometimes permissible for a given interest, scholars having established criteria defining what types of it are lawful. The best analysis of it I have seen is by Imam Ghazali. If something is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish it through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying, but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible (N:i.e. when the purpose of lying is to circumvent someone who is preventing one from doing something permissible), and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory. When for example one is concealing a Muslim from an oppressor who asks where he is, it is obligatory to lie about his being hidden. Or when a person deposits an article with one for safekeeping and an oppressor wanting to appropriate it inquires about it, it is obligatory to lie about having
concealed it, for if one informs him about the article and he then seizes it, one is financially liable(A:to the owner)to cover the article’s cost. Whether the purpose is war, settling a disagreement, or gaining the sympathy of a victim legally entitled to retaliate against one so that he will forbear to do so; it is not unlawful to ;lie when any of these aims can only be attained through lying. But is religiously more precautionary (def:c6.5) in all such cases to employ words that give misleading impression, meaning to intend by one’s words something that is literally true, in respect to which one is not lying (def:r10.2) while the outward purport of the words deceives the hearer, though even if one does not have such an intention and merely lies without intending anything else, it is not unlawful in the above circumstances.”
From this text it is obvious that taqiyya (lying) is common within Sunni.
This is [material that I deprecate]. Playing fast and loose with interpretations in order to produce a less draconian form of Islam is what Maajid and all liberal muslims have to do. This does not make them “Taqiyah merchants”, just guilty of cognitive dissonance which in fact all educated religious people are guilty of.
I disagree that *all* “educated religious people” are “guilty”(??) of cognitive dissonance. Since you made this assertion, Ajit Bains, I suggest you back it up. That global “all” will be difficult to prove but I’m most interested to see your attempt.
Specifics, please.
How would you, or what information would you need to be convinced that Nawas is not a Stealth-jiadist?
How can one know that Gates of Vienna is not a stealth-jihadist mean to alienate the right from the public discourse by branding right wing conspiracy ideas?