Below is the second of two-part series about the Islamic State by Hartmut Krauss, as translated by JLH. Part One is here.
Pure, Unadulterated Islam
On the “Islamic State” — The Basis for its Impetus and Legitimization and for its Anti-Civilization Reign of Terror (Continued)
By Hartmut Krauss
August 29, 2014
Source: Hintergrund-Verlag
II. “Mohammed the Model” and Islamic Imperialistic Conquest as Historical Paragon
The life and works of the Prophet Mohammed as described in traditional tales and biographies are the sacred model for devout Muslims. Whoever doubts, criticizes, questions or actually mocks it is a blasphemer, to be punished with utmost severity.[12]
If we examine Mohammed’s vita more closely, we find a wealth of material for emulation on the violent practice of Islamic orthodoxy. Mohammed functions not only as the proclaimer, but as the enactor of Allah’s absolute laws. Ayatollah Khomeini expressed this clearly and succinctly in his “The Islamic State” (1983, p. 28). “At the time of the most noble Prophet…laws were not just announced and explained. They were carried out. God’s Messenger… carried out the laws. For instance, he carried out the directions of criminal law. He chopped off thieves’ hands, he stoned those convicted under Hadd.[13] The caliph, too has the responsibility of disposing of such matters.” The perpetrators of IS are acting in strict accordance with this principle.
The actions of the Prophet also included contract killing. This was directed at those who — after military confrontations — authored insulting verses about Mohammed’s tribe, the Quraysh. One of these persons was Ka’b b. al-Asraf, a leader of the Jewish Banu n-Nadir. After Mohammed’s death edict had been carried out, “The criminals carried Ka’b’s severed head to Mohammed. As they drew close to his home, they called out, ‘Allahu akbar!’ and the Prophet interrupted his ritual prayer with ‘Allahu akbar!’ ‘Blessed be your countenances!’ He greeted them. ‘And yours, Messenger of Allah!’ they replied, and threw the severed head at his feet. He praised Allah for the death of Ka’b. then he spat into the wound of the [one] murderer who had been injured, and the wound healed. This is what al-Waqidi reports about the ghastly crime.” (Nagel 2008, p. 38)
The IS practice of beheading defenseless male “infidels” as well as raping and enslaving women and girls is also a “Salafist” tradition, as is the early Muslim robbery-and-conquest economy, including the traditional extortion of ransom for captured hostages. The fate of the Jewish tribe, the Qurayzah, may serve as an example. During the “War of the Trench,” they were accused of covertly aiding the hostile besiegers and blockading their own residential quarter for 25 days. After their capitulation, the defeated Qurayzah were prepared, like the other Jewish tribes, to leave the city under the same stipulations. But Mohammed rejected this and made a perfidious arrangement with the arbiter, Sad ibn Moas, “who, he knew full well, did not have a good word to say about the Qurayzah. Sad did not disappoint him. His decision was that all (700, H.K.) men of the Banu Qurayzah should be beheaded, the women and children sold into slavery and their entire property distributed among the Muslims.” (Dashti 1997, p. 163) Rodinson (1975, p. 205) describes the carrying out of the gruesome deed: “The next day, he (Mohammed, H.K.) had great ditches dug in the market of Medina. The Jews were led there, bound and in groups, beheaded one-by-one and thrown in. Some say there were between 600 and 700, others between 800 and 900.”
In retrospect, Mohammed interprets the horrifying occurrence as “God’s judgment”[14] and adds that a Jewish woman was beheaded in contravention of Sad’s judgment, because she had thrown a stone during the blockade of her residential quarter. She had been a friend of his wife Aisha.
Tradition explicitly legitimizes the rape of women in conquered regions: “According to Abu Said — We were on a campaign with God’s Messenger in Mustaliq and took upper-class women from among the Arabs. We had had to practice abstinence for a long time, but we wanted ransom. And we wanted to pleasure ourselves and practice coitus interruptus.
We said: If we wish to do this while we are in company with God’s Messenger, should we not ask him about it.
So we asked him.
He said: You have no obligation not to do it. The creation of a human being, from now until the Day of Resurrection, does not happen, unless God decides it.” (Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Nasai)[15]
Contrary to the myth of Islamic tolerance — which is just as persistent as it is false — it is legitimate, besides economic extortion and mass slavery, to confirm the following agenda, which serves today’s jihadist as an unadulterated model.
As is known from traditional chronicles, the early Muslim and later conquests were invariably connected with massacres, devastation and extirpation, In the subjection of Syria under the first caliph, Abu Bakr, for instance, 4,000 peasants (Christians, Jews and Samaritans) were murdered. It was the same in the conquest of Mesopotamia from 635 to 642 or the military acquisition of Egypt and Armenia. Sometimes the entire population was slaughtered and in many places women, children and old people were killed. That the expansion of the Islamic culture by the sword was an exception, as claimed by “Islamic leaders” in an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, does not correspond with the truth. On the contrary, similar atrocities could be recorded in all areas of conquest.[16] On the Arabian peninsula, a policy of religious cleansing was pursued, and Arabia, with the exception of Yemen and Jordan, was made “Jew- and Christian-free” — a procedure that was employed later in Spain by the Almohads and Amoravids after the end of the caliphate in 1031. There were pogroms against Christians in 889 in Elvira and Seville; against Jews in Moroccan Fez in 1033 with over 6,000 dead, in 1066 in Granada with 1,500 families killed[17], in 1135 in Cordova and 1235 in Marrakesh.
“The (anti-Jewish, H.K.) pogroms in Christian-ruled areas,” according to Flaig (2006, p. 37) “are no badge of honor for European culture, but their magnitude was far less than those of the Islamic world. There is a pressing need for a comparative history of religious subjugation.”
The Islamization accomplished as a result of the conquest of numerous tribes also includes an inter-cultural synthesis with, in part, fatal consequences. An example is the combination of Mongolian cultural heritage with the Islamic hegemony culture, as represented by the infamous and blood-thirsty despot, Timur the Lame — also called Tamerlane. He killed thousands of Hindus and erected a triumphal column from their severed heads. He also carried out a systematic annihilation of Christians in Mesopotamia, to which tens of thousands fell victim. His ghastly methods of dominating “represent a historically unprecedented synthesis of Mongolian barbarism and Muslim fanaticism. He symbolizes that particular advanced type of primitive slaughter: Murder committed in service of an abstract ideology, as duty and sacred mission.” (Grousset, quoted in Warraq 2004, p.324)
III. Conclusions
The elemental nexus of the claim to religious superiority, the drive for universal-absolute sovereignty and the jihad principle has two serious consequences:
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