Michael Copeland’s latest essay concerns slavery, especially sex slavery, under Islam, and the violence mandated to enforce it.

“And Take Their Wives as War Booty”

by Michael Copeland

“Bomb Denmark, so we can invade their country, and take their wives as war booty,” shouted a demonstrator hoarsely in London. He was recorded on a mobile, and the clip can be seen on the internet. Perhaps, just a little, he was performing for the camera: it has been known. How does that shout come across to us? Bombast? A revealing fantasy? A theatrical insult? Some sort of Old Testament curse? Most English hearers would react in such a way, not prepared to give it any more serious value, and just regard the shouter as out of touch with modern life.

Here is the surprise: he meant it. Though angry and excited, and staging a performance, he was deadly serious. The occasion was one of those organized rent-a-mob Islamic protests where the demonstrators obey instructions from the mosque to go out and cause a loud and aggressive disturbance, a “Day of Rage”. Once instructed, it becomes the “right” thing to do. As a result they would be beaten up if they did not do it. “Commanding the Right and Forbidding the Wrong,” in the Manual of Islamic Law, specifies that to enforce the “right” the Muslim is entitled to employ “threatening and intimidation” (q5.7). The next step is “directly hit or kick the person” (q5.8), after which comes “the armed assistance of others” (q5.9). All that violence is absolutely fine under Sharia, Islamic law, though it violates criminal law, as does so much else in Sharia. That “swift Islamic manner”, as Anjem Choudary describes it, is how Islamic law is enforced. Force is Islam’s prevailing theme:

“Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword, to submit? Yes!”

wrote Osama bin Laden. The ancient scholar Ibn Khaldun decreed centuries ago:

“… holy war is a religious duty, … [to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

That is, of course, hardly a choice: it is compulsion. The Woolwich killer explained:

“We are forced by the Koran….”

Islam is submission to force, hence the sword emblem on the flag of Saudi Arabia and the badge of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saracen of history is well known for his scimitar, which was no mere emblem: it was put to much use. Currently news item after news item from Syria’s civil war, many with images too gory to show on main channel bulletins, reveal Islam’s obsession with force. There is a need in the West to tune in, or try to tune in, to Islam’s unchanged seventh-century tribal mindset of force.

The idea of “wives as war booty” is foreign to Europeans, not something that is part of Western culture, but more like something from the Old Testament, from the harsh cultures of the Near East. It was not the Old Testament, however, that the shouter was quoting: he is a Muslim, after all, and Islam does not permit Bibles anywhere in their teaching. In certain Muslim states, such as Kyrgyzstan and Saudi Arabia, merely to possess one is a criminal offence: no “diversity” there. It is the Koran that is the source: it has a whole chapter entitled “Spoils of War”. Wives as war booty, part of desert tribal life, have remained a continuing feature of Islam from its seventh-century origins to this day:

“Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam”,

says Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, eminent Saudi scholar of Islam. The Manual of Islamic Law (o9.13) makes it clear:

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