By Tarek Fatah

The Montreal Gazette

 

It is almost two weeks since jihadi Islamists carried out a terrorist attack in Indonesia, causing many casualties, including injuries to two Canadians. The dust had barely settled when on Sunday, other jihadis, half a world away, struck with a vengeance and barbarity that shocked the world. This time, their playground was the Muslim-dominated parts of northern Nigeria. More than 100 people have been killed, and the fighting is said to be continuing.

One would expect Canadian and U. S. Islamist groups to come out with the usual denunciations but, surprisingly, even cliched condemnations failed to materialize. In the past, Islamist groups like CAIR, the CIC and ISNA have issued statements about "Islam being a religion of peace" and that "terrorists do not speak for Islam," but not this time. Groups that seldom waste an opportunity to denounce violence where non-Muslims cause Muslim suffering, have lost their voice. Apparently, if Muslims kill fellow Muslims, that is OK.

Compare this silence with the brouhaha over the July 1 stabbing in Germany of a single hijabi Egyptian. It triggered demonstrations. The executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress denounced the media for their supposed silence. He said if the woman's killer had been a Muslim, "The media would've reported it widely. Then for days afterwards, they would deliberate the case and conclude that Muslims are 'brutal and uncivilized.' But when a racist European murders an innocent woman, the silence is deafening."

Two weeks after Muslim terrorists attacked a Muslim country and killed and maimed dozens of Muslims in Jakarta, the CIC did not utter a word of condemnation against the jihad that has been launched against all of us. Why would the death of one Egyptian in Germany cause a Canadian Islamist outfit to vent rage, but the response to dozens of casualties in Jakarta and hundreds of deaths in Nigeria amount to nothing?

The Islamists have declared jihad on the rest of us who believe in liberal democracy, gender equality, separation of religion and state and citizenship based on laws and values, not inherited race or religion. Some Islamists like Nigeria's Taliban leader, Aminu Tashen-Ilimi, say their group intends "to lead an armed insurrection" and rid society of "immorality" and "infidelity."

Others adopt a softer approach of dissimulation and deception.

The moment one utters the word jihad, one can predict the Islamists' response. "Jihad is misunderstood . . . it is not holy war . . . it is one's struggle with one's own ego . . . it is the name of men in the Arab world." So intense is the effort to cover up the ideology that drives jihadis to kill that most non-Muslim editors and journalists have bought into the propaganda. Some Canadian media ensure jihad is never mentioned in the same sentence as a terrorist attack.

Yet the doctrine of armed jihad provides the fertile soil for Islamic terrorism. It is true that Prophet Muhammad, after returning from a battle, told his colleagues: "You are returning from a lesser jihad to a greater jihad," and the latter "is the jihad against your passionate souls."

What about the lesser jihad and the ideology and theology that require Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims and wayward Muslims as an act of faith?

The jihad the Jakarta terrorists invoked to kill people is the lesser kind. This is the jihad that such Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as Syed Qutb, Hassan al-Banna and Pakistan's Syed Maudoodi have written about. These three are the gurus of the world jihadi movements and they have their apologists in Canada.

Let me take you to Toronto's annual Word on the Street book festival where in 2007, Islamists distributed a free booklet titled Towards Understanding Islam, written by Maudoodi. In it, he exhorts ordinary Muslims to launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims.

"Jihad is part of this overall defence of Islam," he writes, adding that "in the language of the Divine Law, (jihad) is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims."

Maudoodi labels Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:

"Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful."

If Muslim countries do not go to war against Islam's enemies, Maudoodi says a worldwide uprising by ordinary Muslims is the answer. Does it surprise anyone that ordinary Muslims in Indonesia, Britain and Canada have rallied to his call and declared jihad?

We also have the late Hassan al-Banna's words distributed in schools and universities. Banna makes it clear that jihad means armed warfare. Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement, writes in his book Milestones: "Any place where Islamic sharia is not enforced and where Islam is not dominant becomes the Home of Hostility (Dar-ul-Harb). . . . A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it, whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located."

Unless Muslim leaders and Islamic organizations distance themselves from the doctrine of jihad as pronounced by the Muslim Brotherhood, their position that "jihad means peace" will be seen as propaganda.

Muslim Canadians must lead the attack on jihadi Islamists. They need to stop vying for a gold medal in the Olympics of victimhood. They should say clearly in their mosques that the days of jihad are over. In the world of nation states, the UN, multilateral pacts and international law, there is no room for the doctrine of armed jihad.

Otherwise, the day is not far when jihadis will strike inside Canada.

Why are we reluctant to criticize the racist and supremacist ideology of Islamism? Islamism is not Islam, it is the use of Islam as a political and fascist ideology to wage war on the civilization we have inherited after 200 years of Enlightenment.

Enough with the Chamberlains, we need a Churchill.

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Tarek Fatah Is Founder Of The Muslim Canadian Congress and author of Chasing A Mirage: The Tragic Illusion Of An Islamic State (Wiley 2008)

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