(Refer to Appendix 1 for a glossary of Islamic words and terms)

Besides the two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, there are various other strains, three of the most important being Salafism, Wahhabism, and Deobandism.

Salafism

Salafism – from salaf, meaning “ancestors” or “predecessors” in Arabic – urges the emulation of the first three generations of the Islamic prophet Mohammad’s companions, and Muhammad himself. It is often deemed to be the most fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. Salafism is not a true branch of Islam and is more accurately described as a philosophy and motivating force, one which underpins much of the terrorism we see today.

Few Muslims would think of themselves as Salafist. An English approximation for Salafist would be “fundamentalist.” Salafism seeks a return to the envisioned purity and perfection of early times. It strives for a strict and literal interpretation of the Quran and holds up early leaders of Islam as examples of Salafists.

The Prophet Muhammad, naturally, is their best role model, and Salafists seek to emulate his behavior as closely as possible, including in dress and warlike zeal.

Salafists desire a return to the Islamic caliphate. They do not respect secular states. They believe sharia law should constitute the only legal system in society because it is divine law.

Wahhabism

Wahhabism is a concrete manifestation of Salafism. Wahhabists apply existing Salafist doctrine.

The Wahhabist sect was founded in Saudi Arabia by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792).

Wahhabism, based on Salafism, is the prevailing ideology in Saudi Arabia, where women are repressed, and barbaric legal punishments are carried out. People are beheaded for so-called crimes including adultery, homosexuality and converting from Islam. Lesser crimes, such as theft, are met with the amputation of limbs.

Wahhabism has been active in the Saudi peninsula since the 18th century. However, within the last 50 years or so, it has emerged as a global force, as the sect has acquired access to the “petrodollars” flowing into Saudi coffers.

The Wahhabis have used their new wealth to fund the international propagation of their version of Islam. They continue to finance Salafi mosques in countless locations and have made their literature available, at little cost, to Muslims around the world.

Islamism, as practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood (see Appendix 2), is a modern ideology that seeks to introduce Islam into the political sphere, in much the same way a lobby group would. Islamists are famous for forming political parties, participating in elections and pushing for constitutional reform. Their targets are governments, universities, the media and any other institutions into which they can integrate Islam.

Salafism, on the other hand, has sought to “purify” Islam from Western influence and centuries of “deviant” digressions from “true” Islam. Salafism is strictly Sunni, and is the underlying philosophy and motivation of Islamic State (IS).

Political elites, journalists and academics betray their lack of understanding of Salafism when they describe members of Islamic State as “un-Islamic.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Salafism is pure Islam, as devised and propagated by Muhammad.

Salafists define Islam as anything that was explicitly condoned by Muhammad, and that was upheld by his first three generations of Sunni followers. This view is based on a hadith, a statement by Muhammad, in which he allegedly said that “the best of my community is my generation, then those who follow them, then those who follow them.” By extension, anything that appeared after that – and anything Muhammad did not explicitly condone – is considered un-Islamic – an extremely broad category. Secular political ideologies, nation-states, political parties, and so on, are all, by this definition, un-Islamic. In short, whereas the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamism accommodates the trappings of modern political life, the Salafists’ does not.

This particular sect of Islam originated from a response to British rule in India. Although not as well-known as other Islamic sects, it is nevertheless, linked to about half of the Mosques in Britain and most of the Indian Muslim Welfare Society’s “Area Representative Members,” according to the Society’s 2013-14 annual report.

Tablighi Jamaat

Tablighi Jamaat, or Preaching Party, a spin-off of the Deobandi school is a global army of Muslim missionaries helping to expand their religion and reinforce their faith. They believe that emulating the habits of the Prophet Muhammad is the surest way to restore Islam to its intended path.

The Tablighi is one of the primary forces spreading Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, and many young men pass through the group on their way to an extreme, militant interpretation of the religion.

While not all Deobandis are Tablighis, all Tablighis are Deobandi. With their isolationist and segregationist mindsets, they have gained access to the largest number of mosques in Britain, earning themselves the name “the Army of Darkness” along the way. The Tablighis, unlike their Salafist counterparts, fly under the radar, scarcely making it into the news, because journalists and politicians are unable or unwilling the wrap their heads around the differences between Muslim groups.

Moderate Muslims

There is a minor part of Islam that is indeed a religion, which consists of what a Muslim does to avoid hell and go to Paradise, described as Islam’s Five Pillars – prayer, charity to Muslims, pilgrimage to Mecca, fasting, and declaring Mohammad to be the final prophet. Those who confine their observance to the Five Pillars become what the West calls “moderate” Muslims. However, many moderate Muslims believe jihadists “are doing Allah’s work.”

Passive terrorism

It has been said that the Ummah (worldwide Muslim community) is the sea upon which the jihadist boats float.

A large percentage of Muslims today passively approve of Islamic terror. They minimize it, shift the blame or do nothing about it. Sometimes it is deliberate, while for others it is simply an unwillingness to face the problem. Therefore, the term, “passive terrorism” refers to a broad category of enabling behaviors and beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, which serve to exacerbate jihadism. Islamic terror often makes passive terrorists secretly proud, giving them a sense of victory and power.

In a 2007 poll, Al Jazeera asked its Arab viewers whether they supported al-Qaeda kidnapping and killing civilians in Iraq. Nearly 75 percent of polled viewers approved.

The situation is little better in the United Kingdom. According to polls there, nearly 60 percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under sharia law. Nearly 35 percent aged between 16 and 24 believe leaving Islam should be punished by death, and 13 percent of young people aged 16 to 24 reported admiring al-Qaeda.[1]

The origins and reach of sharia law

Muhammad died in 632 AD, following a brief illness. After an initial period of confusion, a council of his followers chose Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, to be his successor. Disagreements over how this transition came about, and whether or not it was legitimate, persist to this day and account for the bitter divisions between Shi’ites and Sunnis. The Sunnis hold that Abu Bakr was chosen by Muhammad, and all future caliphs (Islamic heads of state) should be chosen by consensus or election by the community, while the Shi’ites believe that Mohammed divinely ordained his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, to succeed him, and thereafter the position was to be handed down according to bloodline.

The 100-year period after Muhammad’s death was a time of bloody civil wars, assassinations, revolutions and mass killings. Caliphs competed to link their lineage to the prophet Muhammad, to claim legitimacy, by killing each other and calling each other apostates.

After a hundred years of fighting, the immense empire of the caliphate was falling apart, and they needed to legitimize their rule through holy divine laws. This was especially true of the newly conquered territories outside of Arabia. Muslim leaders needed more than just the Quran and bloody wars to get the territories to surrender to Islam.

Muhammad left his followers with an ambiguous, inconsistent and incomplete book, which by itself could not provide the foundation for an Islamic constitution. They needed a brutal but divine law to guarantee total submission, with penalties of death, amputation of limbs, flogging and stoning. Muslims went on a mission to collect the hadiths[2] of Mohammed, in order to form sharia law.

Thus sharia law was written down, codifying seventh-century Arabian culture as law for all Muslims, for all time and in all places. Over the next 14 centuries, through sharia law, Arabs would spread not only their religion but their language, culture, and way of life.

To the Western mind, it is difficult to understand how a religion can control its followers to the degree that Islam does. Through sharia law, the Muslim caliphate succeeded in bringing conquered populations into total dependence and submission; the way desert tribes had always subdued vanquished tribal foes. Now they had a “divine” tool to accomplish this, a tool that regulated every detail of life.

Some 14 centuries later, the laws that codified the brutal seventh-century desert tribal way of life still rule over 1.2 billion people around the globe.

Everything about a Muslim’s life – family, sexuality, hygiene, business, banking, contracts, economics, politics and social issues – is dictated by the Islamic law code known as sharia law.

Sharia law and child marriage

Aisha was Mohammed’s favorite wife. She was only six years old when he married her, and the marriage was consummated when she was nine years old. This set a precedent, and we now see Muslim girls aged nine to 15 married off in many Muslim countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Yemen.

This is how we ended up with the situation of 9-year-old Muslim girls being married off to old men in the London borough of Islington, going to primary school in the day, while providing sexual services to an old man in the evening.[3]

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organization (IKWRO), in an interview with the Islington Tribune in January 2012, claimed that at least 30 girls in the borough were forced into marriage in 2010.

IKWRO, which made headlines in 2012 after revealing there had been almost 3,000 “honor-based” violence cases in 2010, showed the Islington Tribune records which revealed at least three 11-year-old girls and two nine-year-olds had been forced into marriage with older men within Islington. The oldest girls involved were 16.

They have warned that hundreds of Islington girls could be suffering sexual, emotional and physical scars as a result of child marriages every year, and are calling for teachers, social workers and police to be better trained to spot and manage the abuse.

In most cases, the children fear they will be killed if they reveal the truth to anybody, while others believe they will be separated from their families and taken into the care of social services.

Dianna Nammi, director of IKWRO, explained that the girls are married in a mosque’s sharia court. This means they are not legally married according to British law, rendering the Home Office unable to recognize or prove the abuse. She said:

They are still expected to carry out their wifely duties, though, and that includes sleeping with their husband.

They have to cook for them, wash their clothes, everything. They are still attending schools in Islington, struggling to do their primary school homework, and at the same time being practically raped by a middle-aged man regularly and being abused by their families. So they are a wife, but in a primary school uniform.

The reason it doesn’t get out is because they are too terrified to speak out, and also the control their families have over them is impossible to imagine if you’re not going through it. The way it is covered up is so precise, almost unspeakable.

Who are girls going to tell? Often they feel like teachers at school won’t understand what their families are like. They will think they’re like Western families, and won’t understand that if they pass on anything at all that they’ve been told to the family, then the girl will be killed. So they just chose not to tell at all.[4]

This explains why so many of the men in the so-called grooming gangs (which are really sex-slave gangs) were interested in girls as young as 10.

Western journalists and Muslim apologists who don’t see much wrong with sharia should heed the words of Nonie Darwish, a woman born and raised under sharia law in Egypt, and who, at the age of 30, fled to the United States to escape the repressive system. She issued this dire summary of sharia:

Muslims have no choice but to live as captives within the confines of a psychological “iron curtain” of sharia from which they cannot escape. They are living under the most brutal, degrading and humiliating laws in human history; laws that are obsessed with the sexuality of women, that subjugate and humiliate non-Muslims, and that ultimately produce a dysfunctional, angry society.

Without sharia, Islam could not have survived, especially in the conquered lands. Islam has now become sharia, and sharia has become Islam. They are inseparable for survival.[5]

Islam’s history of slavery

From the start of Islam until just after World War II, slavery was not only legal in Islamic countries, it was an all-pervasive part of Islamic history, actively practiced throughout their culture. Slavery was widely practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia, and the practice was enthusiastically continued by Muhammad. For the past 1,400 years, Islamic society has been based on subjugation and slave taking. Under international pressure, particularly from Britain and France, Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962. Oman followed suit in 1970. However, slavery, claiming the sanction of Islam, is documented as presently occurring in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.[6]

The morality and legality of slavery was taken for granted at the time of Muhammad as he himself had slaves, and took women as slaves, a practice he viewed as exemplary. Muhammad married some of the women he took as slaves, but not all of them. After one battle, Muhammad beheaded the men and boys, and sent the women off to be sold as slaves, but kept Rayanah as his sex slave. Further, when Mohammed had Kinana, a Jewish man, tortured to death for his gold, he took the wife of Kinana as his own sex slave.[7]

The Quran contains instructions telling Muslims how they can treat their slaves. The Quran makes a distinction between legal wives and slaves, and allows Muslim men to have sex with either their wives or their slaves.

We have made lawful to you your wives whom you have given their dowries, and those whom your right hand possesses out of those whom Allah has given to you as spoils of war.[8]

“Whom your right hand possesses” is a common Islamic metaphor for a slave.

Not only are Muslim men permitted legally and morally, to rape their slaves, but they are also forgiven if they turn a slave girl into a prostitute.[9]

In 1951 the United Nations expert panel on slavery concluded that slavery is legal under Islamic law. The UN report estimated that there were 750,000 slaves living in Arabia.[10]

In 711, a Muslim raiding force from North Africa, led by Tariq Ibn Ziyad, landed in the south of present-day Spain. They defeated the Visigoth army, led by King Roderic, in a decisive 712 battle, and took control of most of Iberia, ruling the land for the next 700 years.

Emmet Scott writes:

Islamic Spain became the hub of a vast new slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of European slaves, both from Christian territories and from the lands of the pagan Slavs, were imported into the Caliphate, there to be used (if female) as concubines or to be castrated (if male) and made into harem guards or the personal body-guards of the Caliph.[11]

It has been calculated that, between 1500 and 1800, more than one million white Christians were enslaved by Muslim slaving ships in the Mediterranean, and off the coast of North Africa.[12] Slave-taking raids also took place on land, with about 40 percent of those captured being females of reproductive age, many of whom ending up as concubine slaves (sex-slaves).[13]

In 2003, a high-level Saudi jurist, Shaykh Saleh al-Fawzan issued a fatwa claiming, “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.”[14] He attacked Muslim scholars who said otherwise, maintaining they were “infidels” and “ignorant, not scholars.” At the time of the fatwa, al-Fawzan was a member of the Senior Council of Clerics (Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body), a member of the Council of Religious Edicts and Research, the Imam of the Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh, and a professor at Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University, the main Wahhabi center of learning in the country.

It is clear that these kinds of Islamic views easily lend themselves to Muslim men who see women as objects to be controlled and dominated. It would lead them to believe that if some non-Muslim woman within their control could be prostituted, there would be no legal consequences for them, within an Islamic world-view.

The Quran refers to non-Muslims as animals, and the standard term for a non-Muslim is kafir, a highly derogatory and insulting term.

Although “outlawed” in 1981 and criminalized as recently as 2007, slavery is still rife in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. The West African nation of Mauritania is regarded as one of the world’s worst slave states, according to the Global Slavery Index.[15]

The 2016 Global Slavery index found that an estimated 43,000 Mauritanians, around 1 percent of the population, live in slavery. It is difficult to determine a true figure, as some slaves are owned by nomadic tribes that are often on the move. Some indigenous anti-slavery organizations put the number of slaves between 140,000 and 600,000.[16]

The slaves in Mauritania are all black Africans, called the Haritine class. They are chattel slaves, belonging body and soul to their masters, who can buy and sell them at will. Children born to slaves also become the property of their parents’ masters.

The masters are all Arabs and Berbers, called “whites,” who constitute about 20 percent of the population. Both slaves and masters are Muslim.

It is little surprise, then, to find Islamic fundamentalist groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State, capturing females and using them as sex slaves.

Boko Haram’s brutal sex slavery

The bloodstained barbarity of the Boko Haram Islamists came to world attention in 2014 with the abduction of 200 schoolgirls from Chibok in Nigeria. In reality, the girls were not “abducted”: they were enslaved. The standard procedure when Boko Haram’s fighters raid a village is to kill the men and treat the women and children as booty of war. Its fighters are engaged in the ancient Islamic business of slave-trading.

Boko Haram is completely open about this. The movement’s self-styled “emir,” Abubakar Shekau announced he would sell the girls into slavery. “Allah instructed me to sell them – they are his properties,” he declared in a YouTube video shortly after the girls were taken. “I will sell them in the market by Allah.”[17]

The United Nations Populations Fund announced that 234 women and children were rescued on April 28, 2015, and transported to a refugee camp in Yola along Nigeria’s eastern border, where they are receiving much-needed medical treatment. At least 214 of the rescued females are said to be visibly pregnant. This group is part of a total of 677 women and girls rescued from Boko Haram in the preceding weeks – most of whom were abducted by the militant Muslims within the previous nine months.

But officials say that the schoolgirls from the infamous kidnapping in Chibok were not among those who were rescued.

However, on May 7, 2017, following months of negotiations, 82 of the Chibok schoolgirls were released in exchange for five militant leaders. The fate of the remaining schoolgirls is unknown at the time of writing.

“A large number of girls and women rescued from Boko Haram have been found to be pregnant,” stated Stéphane Dujarric, who served as spokesperson for former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “We do not know yet the total number of pregnant girls among those rescued. The screening is still ongoing.”[18]

One of the victims was repeatedly raped by the Islamic terrorists after her abduction six months previously. The 23-year-old Asabe Aliyu, a mother of four, at the time of her rescue was pregnant with another child after being raped daily by numerous men – one of whom forced her to marry him.

“I was abducted six months ago in Delsak, when our village was overrun by Boko Haram”, Aliyu informed Nigeria’s The Daily Times, while trying to hold back tears. “First I had sojourned from my village to a forest close to Cameroun. They turned me into a sex machine. They took turns to sleep with me. Now, I am pregnant and I cannot identify the father.”

Hundreds of women like Aliyu have been held captive as sex slaves under unspeakable living conditions at one of Boko Haram’s camps located in northeast Nigeria. Lami Musa was another rape victim, who, at 27 years of age, recounted her nightmare of being both physically and emotionally tortured by the Islamic militants.

“They abducted the whole of my family and killed my husband at Kilkasa forest when I was four months pregnant,” Musa recalled, “They took us to Sambisa forest. We were sleeping in an open field.”

Besides the abuse, Musa had little to no access to food, water or shelter.

“For days, we went without water or food,” Musa continued. “As I am talking to you, I cannot ascertain the status of her [the baby’s] health. I have not had a bath since I was delivered of the baby. The baby is yet to be bathed, too.”[19]

Islamic State: Yazidi women tell of sex-slavery trauma

As they swept through large parts of northern Iraq in 2014, fighters with IS systematically targeted members of non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities. But even within the context of its persecution of minority groups, IS singled out the Yazidi minority, notably the women and children, for particularly brutal treatment.

In August 2014, IS fighters abducted thousands of Yazidi men, women and children who were fleeing the IS takeover of the Sinjar region, in the north-west of the country. Hundreds of men were killed, and others were forced to convert to Islam under threat of death. Women and girls, some as young as 12, were separated from their parents and older relatives and sold, given as gifts or forced to marry IS fighters. Many were subjected to torture and ill-treatment, including rape, and other forms of sexual violence.

Up to 300 of those abducted, mostly women and children managed to escape IS captivity, where some of them have given harrowing accounts to Amnesty International of the torture and abuses they have suffered. An Amnesty International report found that Islamic State is kidnapping thousands of women and girls as young as 12. They are then traded in open markets as sex slaves for as little as $30 each.[20]

After being abducted from their homes, they are sold as playthings to the highest bidder, usually IS commanders, or gifted to the “bravest” fighters as rewards for their services to jihad.

In December 2014, BBC reporter Paul Wood interviewed an escapee named Hanna about her traumatic experience as a captive of IS. Hanna told the reporter that the jihadists blocked Sinjar’s roads with their pick-up trucks. She was turned back to town, where women and girls were separated from everyone else.

“There were 20 of them, with long beards and weapons. They said: ‘You’re coming to Mosul.’ We refused. They hit us and dragged us to their cars.”

She was taken with other women to a sports hall. Then, after a couple of weeks, she was taken to a wedding hall. In one place, there were 200 women and girls. These were slave markets. IS fighters could come to take their pick.

“We didn’t dare look at their faces. We were so afraid. One girl came back after she had been used as a sex slave and told us everything. After that, IS did not allow anyone else to return.”

“They were shooting to scare us. They took whomever they wanted, by force. We were crying the whole time. We wanted to kill ourselves but we couldn’t find a way.”

One girl did manage to kill herself, Hanna revealed.

“She slashed her wrists. They didn’t let us help her. They put us in a room and shut the door. She died. They said: ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll just dump the body somewhere.’”[21]

The religious Yazidi minority community in Iraq has said that, as of December 2014, 3,500 of its women and girls are still being held by the so-called Islamic State, many being used as sex slaves.[22]

UK preacher tells British jihadists that it is “permissible under Islam to have sex slaves”

A hard-line Muslim preacher suspected of radicalizing three British jihadists told teenage disciples that it is “permissible” under Islam to have sex slaves.

Ali Hammuda, an Imam at a Cardiff mosque where three young jihadists worshipped before traveling to Syria to join Islamic State, also told the group of boys as young as 13 that the “day of judgment is close” – a key part of the warped propaganda of IS.

The revelations come amid heightened fears over the Islamist terror threat in the UK, and in the wake of the bloody attacks in France.

Hammuda is still preaching at the same mosque, two years after the three “Cardiff jihadis,” Nasser Muthana and Reyaad Khan, then 20, and Muthana’s younger brother Aseel, then 17, left for Syria in 2014.

The cleric’s extraordinary preachings were recorded secretly at a halaqa, or religious study circle, at the Al-Manar mosque by an undercover reporter.

In the most damning section of the recording, Hammuda, the English Islamic Programs officer at the mosque, explains a series of Hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, with his group. He tells them:

One of the interpretations as to what this means is that towards the end of time there will be many wars like what we are seeing today, and because of these wars women will be taken as captives, as slaves, yeah, women will be taken as slaves.

And then, er, her master has relations with her because this is permissible in Islam; it’s permissible to have relations with a woman who is your slave or your wife.[23]

“Religion of peace”

Islam is often portrayed by Muslim leaders, and their apologists in the media and academia, as the “religion of peace.” Such portrayal is a clever use of the Islamic principle of taqiyya – lying and deception to deceive the infidel.[24]

In fact, many scholars and people who have lived under Islam and sharia law, claim Islam is not a religion at all. Noni Darwish states:

The conclusion that I – and others who have studied it – have reached is that Islam as a whole is not a religion. It is Arab Imperialism and a protectionist tool to preserve what they believe to be a supremacist Arab culture.[25]

As emeritus professor of philosophy at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Howard Kainz, points out in an illuminating essay, “Islam and the Decalogue,” that Islam reverses the Golden Rule, which is central to Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, by citing verses from the Quran, such as:

“Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. Be merciful to one another, but ruthless to the unbelievers” (Qur’an 48:29); “Never take unbelievers for friends” (3:28). Furthermore, the commands in the Qur’an to slay the unbelievers wherever they find them (2:191), not befriend them (3:28), fight them and show them harshness (9:123), and smite their heads (47:4).

He writes:

… As I have discovered in further researches, however, the ethical/religious problems within Islam are even more serious. Just as Islam teaches the reverse of the Golden Rule, it teaches the reverse of the last seven of the Ten Commandments, which have to do with morality:

4th Commandment, Honoring Father and Mother: Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam states that retaliation is generally required for murder, but not subject to retaliation is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring or offspring’s offspring.” Honor killings can go in the other direction, too. Boys captured by ISIS report that they were ordered to kill their parents, according to injunctions in the Qur’an – Suras 9:23, 58:22, 60:4, which mandate complete hatred of, and disassociation from unbelievers, even if they are kindred or parents.

5th Commandment, no killing: Muhammad is considered by Muslims to be the “perfect man,” and offered numerous examples of murder for devout Muslims to follow – beginning with the murder of poets who ridiculed him in Medina and Mecca, and ending with beheading of hundreds of “unbelievers” in his various raids and battles. Osama bin Laden, in his 1996 “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” justified his Fatwa to kill Americans by quoting Quranic verses 3:145, 47:4-6, 2:154, 9:14, 8:72, and 9:5 (the “verse of the sword”). Terrorism is specifically supported in verses 8:12, and 3:151, and a hadith of Bukhari 52:256. And conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by execution, according to Bukhari 9.84.57, “[Muhammad ordered] ‘Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him’.”

6th Commandment, no adultery: “Adultery” in common parlance signifies infidelity to one’s spouse. But for married Muslim males, allowed up to four wives, easy divorce, and slave girls (4:3), it would require extreme carelessness to commit adultery. The Prophet himself offers the example of “avoiding adultery” with thirteen wives, concubines, and slave girls, permitted by Allah (Sura 33:50). For women and unmarried males, however, adultery is possible and severely punishable.

7th Commandment, no stealing: Ali Dashti, in his biography of Muhammad, Twenty-Three Years, shows how, by combining in a single massive force, Muslims were able to capitalize on the already existing customs of Arab tribes “to indulge their greed by rustling two or three hundred camels in a raid on a weaker tribe,” and “became able to siege far more booty,” and “to conquer rich and fertile lands.”[26] Sura 8 of the Qur’an provides comprehensive instructions on obtaining booty in war, including a special revelation (8:41) that “God and his apostle” should receive 1/5 of the spoils.

8th Commandment, no lying: Unlike Christian martyrs, who were willing to die rather than deny their religion, Muslims are allowed by taqiyya to lie about their religious beliefs when this will support the advancement of Islam. Nonie Darwish, in The Devil We Don’t Know, describes how Islamic sharia law incorporates taqiyya: “Sharia itself allows lies not only with infidels, but also to solve disputes among Muslims and in the wife/husband relationship, thereby covering practically all relationships…. The individual Muslim is taught that protection of Islam is a sacred communal obligation that is more important than family, life, or happiness.”[27]

9th Commandment, not coveting a neighbor’s wife: Muhammad himself, the model of Islamic virtue, offers the best example of nullifying this command. Smitten with infatuation for Zeinab, the wife of his adopted son, Zeid, he received approval from Allah (33:37) to take her for a wife. Similar incidents include his infatuation for Aisha, when she was six, who later became his favorite wife; and for a newly created Jewish widow, Reihana, taking her to bed the same night he executed her husband.

10th Commandment, not coveting a neighbor’s goods: Wafa Sultan in A God Who Hates discusses the cultural and historical conditions which accentuated and still fuel the importance of envy in Islam: “Bedouins feared raiding on the one hand, and relied on it as a means of livelihood on the other. Then Islam came along and canonized it. Muslims in the twenty-first century still fear they may be raided by others and live every second of their lives preparing to raid someone else.

For these reasons, Kainz concludes, “Islam may best be understood, not as a religion, but as a world-wide cult.”[28]

Certainly no other religion prescribes the death penalty for apostasy. Hadith 9:57 states: “Mohammed said, ‘Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him’.”

Muslim leaders may quote from some of the few sections of the Quran that refer to peace, conveniently overlooking the fact that there are 35,213 verses, Hadiths, laws, and Muslim scriptures, commanding and encouraging killing, violence, war, annihilation, corporal punishment, hatred, boycott, humiliation and subjugation, aimed mainly against non-Muslims.[29]

Some examples:

Quran 9:5 “Kill those who join together other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and siege them, besiege them, and lay in wait for them with every kind of ambush.”

Quran 8:12 “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Quran 8:67 “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he has made a great slaughter in the land.”

Quran 61:4 “Surely Allah loves those who fight in His cause.”

Quran 47:4 “Therefore, when you meet the unbelievers strike off their head.”

Bukhari 52:220 Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been made victorious with terror.”[30]

Those who take time to read the Quran and Hadiths, and want to follow the example of Muhammad, cannot help but be terrorists. They must hate, distrust, deceive and kill non-Muslims when the situation is appropriate. This is a central doctrine of Islamic scripture.

As an example, Appendix 3 lists a small sample of Islamic terrorist attacks carried out in just the first week of July 2017.

Statistics on the “religion of peace”

The website www.TheReligionOfPeace.com maintains a detailed list of attacks by Islamic terrorists since 9/11. As of April 2018, the site reports that since 9/11, Islamists have carried out more than 32,873 deadly terrorist attacks. Just for the month of March 2018, the website recorded 171 terrorist attacks across 27 countries resulting in 736 deaths with 1,067 persons injured.

Wikipedia also maintains a list of Islamic terrorist attacks at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

However, Wikipedia lists only major attacks.

The Islamic State group and al-Qa’ida have both called on followers to use trucks in particular to attack crowds. On July 14, 2016, a truck plowed into Bastille Day revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 86 people. Islamic State claimed responsibility for that attack, which was carried out by a Tunisian living in France.

Another example of the “religion of peace” is Boko Haram, referred to by themselves as Wilyat Gharb Ifrqyyah‎‎, (Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP), and Jam’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihd‎‎, (Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad). Boko Haram is an Islamic extremist group based in north-eastern Nigeria, but is also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon. The group’s leader is Abubakar Shekau. The group was allegedly linked to al-Qaeda, but in March 2015 it announced its allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Since the current insurgency started in 2009, it has killed over 20,000 people and displaced 2.3 million from their homes, and was ranked as the world’s deadliest terror group by the Global Terrorism Index in 2015.[31]

A report by the Catholic diocese of Maiduguri estimated that, as of May 2015, over 5,000 Nigerian Catholics had been killed by Boko Haram. The diocese also reported 7,000 widows and 10,000 orphans among its laity. Furthermore, Boko Haram militants had taken over several parish centers within the diocese.[32]

The worldwide goal of jihad

Based on her 30 years of living under sharia law, Noni Darwish warns:

The ultimate goal of Islam is not simply to convert people to follow the religion of Islam; it is to establish sharia law over the entire world. It is nothing less than the achievement of totalitarian power and the subjugation of humanity to the most brutal laws of enslavement, and to Arabize the world culture, laws and politics.[33]

The following statement from Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, one of the most influential theologians and Islamic thinkers of the 20th century, makes very clear the plan of Islam:

Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam regardless of the country or nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology and programme, regardless of which nation assumes the role of the standard bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic state.

It must be evident to you from this discussion that the objective of Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule.

Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution.[34]

Islamic “charities” support terrorists

Zakat is defined in Islamic Sacred Law (sharia) as “the name for a particular amount of property that must be paid to certain kinds of recipients under the conditions specified in sharia.”

Zakat is also one of the five pillars of Islam.

According to Islamic sharia law, “Zakat is obligatory for every free Muslim (male, female, adult or child) who has possessed a zakat-payable amount for one lunar year.”

Sura (Chapter), 9 in the Quran, is the “sura of the sword.”

Verse 9:60 states: “Zakat expenditures are only for the poor and for the needy and for those employed to collect zakat and for bringing hearts together for Islam and for freeing captives or slaves and for those in debt and for the cause of Allah and for the stranded traveller – an obligation imposed by Allah. And Allah is Knowing and Wise.”

This Quranic verse declares: “It is obligatory to distribute one’s zakat among eight categories of recipients – meaning that zakat goes to none besides them, one-eighth of the zakat to each category.”

Sharia states the eight categories are: (1) the poor; (2) those short of money; (3) zakat workers; (4) those whose hearts are to be reconciled; (5) those purchasing their freedom; (6) those in debt; (7) those fighting for Allah; and (8) travellers needing money.

Specifically, “fighting for Allah” is defined in the authoritative Islamic manual, The Reliance of the Traveller, as:

Those Fighting for Allah. The seventh category is those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army roster, but who are volunteers for jihad without remuneration. They are given enough to suffice them for the operation, even if affluent; of weapons, mounts, clothing, and expenses for the duration of the journey, round trip, and the time they spend there, even if prolonged.[35]

The Reliance of the Traveller, or Umdat al-Salik, was composed in the 14th century by Shihabuddin Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri (1302–1367). It is a classical manual of Shafi’i fiqh, meaning it is an authoritative summation of the Islamic jurisprudence – also known as sharia law – associated with the Sunni Shafi’i school. Al Misri is based on the Umdat al-Salik, and on the previous Shafi’i works of Nawawi and Abu Ishaq as-Shirazi.

Another authoritative Islamic manual on sharia law is a two-volume set known as A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence, written by Dr. Salih Al-Fawzan in 2005, and published by the Al-Maiman Publishing House in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Sheikh Fawzan is considered one of the most esteemed sharia scholars in the entire Islamic world, having received three degrees in Sharia from the University of Imam Muhammad in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is a member of the Council of Senior Scholars, the Fiqh Committee in Mecca, and the Committee for Supervision of the Callers in Hajj. He also heads the Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Fatwas. He is the Imam at the Prince Mut’ib Ibn Abdul-Aziz Mosque, hosts a national radio program in Saudi Arabia, and has published 60 books.

Several chapters of Volume 1 are devoted to zakat. Chapter 8 is devoted in its entirety to “Entitled Recipients of Zakat.”

This chapter provides a complete explanation of the eight categories of recipients of zakat who are entitled to receive it. Of particular interest to those of us in the West is the seventh category:

The seventh category is that spent in the Cause of Allah such as that given to warriors who volunteer in fighting for the Cause of Allah and they do not take salaries from the Public Treasury of Muslims. Generally, the phrase “the Cause of Allah” refers to the war against the enemies of Muslims, as Allah, Exalted be He.[36]

An inordinate amount of Islamic “charities” have sprung up in Western countries. Appendix 4 reveals the huge number of Islamic charities in Australia alone, a country with a relatively small population. The level of taxpayer funding for these charities is unknown.

If sharia law binds all, or most, of the thousands of Islamic charities in Western countries, then 1/8 of the billions of dollars collected are doled out to “those fighting for Allah.”

Some of the Islamic charities have been exposed as conduits providing funds for terrorist organizations.

In a federal court in Dallas, Texas, on May 27, 2009, U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis sentenced the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the largest U.S. Muslim charity, and five of its leaders, following their convictions by a federal jury in November 2008, on charges of providing material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.

One of the HLF leaders, Shukri Abu Baker, of Garland, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted of 10 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; 11 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, funds, goods and services to a Specially Designated Terrorist; 10 counts of conspiracy to commit, and the commission of, money laundering, one count of conspiracy to impede and impair the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); and one count of filing a false tax return.

The FBI archives of the trial and subsequent convictions make interesting reading.[37]

Wikipedia lists some 21 Islamic charities accused of ties to terrorist groups.[38]

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), on November 16, 2014, issued a list of terrorist organizations and groups following the implementation of a federal law on combatting terrorist crimes.[39]

The list included the British-based International Relief Worldwide (IRW), the largest international Islamic charity in the world, with a $250 million operating budget. It has over 280 employees and is active in more than 45 countries.

Other groups on the UAE terrorist list, not all of which are necessarily charities, include:

• The Finnish Islamic Association (Suomen Islam-seurakunta)
• The Muslim Association of Sweden (Sveriges muslimska forbund [SMF])
• The Islamic Council Norway (Islamsk Rad Norge [IRN])
• The Cordoba Foundation (TCF) in Britain
• Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
• The Muslim American Society (MAS)
• Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe
• Union of Islamic Organizations of France (L’Union des Organisations Islamiques de France [UOIF])
• Muslim Association of Britain (MAB)
• Islamic Society of Germany (Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland)
• The Islamic Society in Denmark (Det Islamiske Trossamfund [DIT])
• The League of Muslims in Belgium (La Ligue des Mussulmans de Belgique [LMB])