The Quran's deadly role in inspiring Belgian slaughter: Column
Nabeel Qureshi  March 22, 2016  USA TODAY

This six-year-old poodle named Nala goes to work every day. Her job is to make people happy. She scurries around a senior living center in Minnesota and has captured everyone's hearts.

Western recruits for jihad are inspired by the literal interpretation of Muslim sacred texts. This is what we must fight.


Americans awoke this morning to another terrorist attack — this time in the Brussels airport and subway. These attacks hit close to home. Many of us have flown through the Brussels airport, just as we have vacationed in Paris and visited San Bernardino. Once again images of the injured flood social media channels, reminding Americans of the ever-present reality that it could have been us. How is this happening? Why are people becoming radicalized, and so close to home? I am concerned how little we in the West understand why peaceful Muslims who live among us are drawn into radical Islam.

As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. My family modeled love for others and love for country, and not just by their words. My father served in the U.S. Navy throughout my childhood, starting as a seaman and retiring as a lieutenant commander. I believed wholeheartedly a slogan often repeated at my mosque after 9/11: “The terrorists who hijacked the planes also hijacked Islam.”

Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence. How could I reconcile this with what I had always been taught about Islam?

In February 2015, the U.S. State Department Acting Spokesperson Marie Harf suggested that a “lack of opportunity for jobs” might be a significant factor in radicalization and terrorism. Alternatively, Suraj Lakhani, a scholar of radicalization in Wales, suggested that the process is driven by religious concerns and a drive to bolster one’s personal identity. He implies that young Muslims ought not be allowed to hear ISIL messages or interact with their recruiters.

Naturally, I agree that interacting with ISIL recruiters is a bad idea, but I believe what the recruiters themselves say sheds the most insight on the radicalization process. ISIL’s primary recruiting technique is not social or financial but theological. With frequent references to the highest sources of authority in Islam, the Quran and hadith (the collection of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), ISIL enjoins upon Muslims their duty to fight against the enemies of Islam and to emigrate to the Islamic State once it has been established.




A recent two-page spread in the third issue of ISIL’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq, for instance, appealed to prospective recruits to leave their homeland and emigrate to the Islamic State by quoting a hadith from the canonical collections; it urged them to realize that they are living in times that reflect those of the earliest Muslims by referring to Muhammad’s life; it encouraged them to take a step of faith by quoting the Quran; and it praised them for their obedience by quoting yet another hadith. All four references to the Quran, hadith and the related Sunnah, were on the same two-page spread. Such is the frequency and intensity with which ISIL uses Islam's foundational texts to appeal to potential recruits.

As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam. That is no longer the case today. Just as radical Islamists may spread their message far and wide online, so, too, the Internet has made the traditions of Muhammad readily available for whoever wishes to look them up, even in English. When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams’ interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.

The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad's message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.

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Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may “prevail over all religions” (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).

Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence. Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, “We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. ... Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.” In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.

This is not at all to say that most Muslims are violent. The vast majority of Muslims do not live their lives based on chapter 9 of the Quran or on the books of jihad in the hadith. My point is not to question the faith of such Muslims nor to imply that radical Muslims are the true Muslims. Rather, I simply want to make clear that while ISIL may lure youth through a variety of methods, it radicalizes them primarily by urging them to follow the literal teachings of the Quran and the hadith, interpreted consistently and in light of the violent trajectory of early Islam. As long as the Islamic world focuses on its foundational texts, we will continue to see violent jihadi movements.

In order to effectively confront radicalization, then, our tools must be similarly ideological, even theological. This is why I suggest that sharing alternative worldviews with Muslims is one of the best methods to address radicalization. Indeed, this is what happened to me. As I faced the reality of the violent traditions of Islam, I had a Christian friend who suggested that Islam did not have to be my only choice and that there were excellent reasons to accept the gospel.

As more and more Western Muslims encounter ISIL’s claims and the surprising violence in their own tradition, many will be looking for ways out of the moral quandary this poses for them. We need to be equipped to provide alternatives to violent jihad, alternatives that address the root of why so many Muslims are radicalizing in the first place. Any solution, political or otherwise, that overlooks the spiritual and religious roots of jihad can have only limited effectiveness.

DesertRat wrote on 03/23/16 at 16:47:19:


Rat, how can I tell you to go procreate yourself without getting a moderator all over me ....because that's what I'm telling you to do.

Quote:


Yeah , that'll work. Convert 'em all to Christianity. As long as they don't chop yer da*m head off before ya get through The Gospel according to Matthew.

Sorry, I believe in the Gospel according to General Curtis LeMay:

"If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."

WebsterMark wrote on 03/23/16 at 17:03:15:


Truth brought to light. There's always a foundational motive to all terrorists activities, and that includes those perpetuated by our own govt.

WebsterMark wrote on 03/23/16 at 20:55:12:


Not really, how about the mujaheddin we created, or we need to arm those moderate Syrian rebels who are cutting out organs and eating them, or even closer to home let's arm Mexican cartels so we can trace the weapons.



Best regards,

pg wrote on 03/24/16 at 03:26:51:


Big F'ing deal....  that doesn't explain setting a backpack bomb full of ball bearings behind a little boy watching his mommy run a marathon.

There's a lot more behind what goes into the mentality that would allow a young man mostly raised in the US to do that. Payback for events that occurred before either of those Boston Bombers brothers were born is not why they did that. Islam is violent. The Koran's history of violence is  is an open ended It fosters a mentality of 'us against them' and the 'them' at the moment is the civilized west.  

Countries in which Islam dominates, turn violent. Part of it is poverty, because the leaders are like socialist or communist, all they really care about is power. It starts with keeping women in their place, but that's a whole other topic.

The point is, and get this through your head, neither the United States, Britain, France or Europe as a whole is not to blame. That's the mentality that says blame the rape victim for wearing a short skirt.

No, Islam is to blame.

DesertRat wrote on 03/23/16 at 20:41:36:

................................................

And my govt., over years, and largely about controlling oil......even WW1 was largely about oil.....oh, and arms sales.

Mark, remember when you said that the US hadn't invaded any other country since WW2, and I linked a list of 50-ish?

'Reaping' and 'sowing'....................

When the British army shot 26 unarmed civilians, killing 13, on a protest march, recruitment numbers for the IRA 'shot up' (oops).

Muslim women...
"It starts with keeping women in their place, but that's a whole other topic."
The two largest Muslim countries both have/had women Prime-minister/Head-of-State.
A bit different to wanting control over pregnant womens' bodies, eh Mark?
But as you say, that's another topic.
Feel free to start it.

Mark, I'm just sharing HISTORY with you. It's written in books, and available on the internet if you prefer. Not looking to argue with you, just providing facts and additional research I've performed over the years trying to make sense of the senseless violence around me.