Jihad has remained central to Islam; local Jihads, from China (1930), to India (the Moplah Insurrection), to Israel (one long Jihad against the Infidel state), to the Moro Islands, Sulawesi, East Timor, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all punctuate the 20th century. Dhimmitude can be seen expressed in a variety of modes: in the recent imposition of shari'a laws even on Christians in Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan. But until an accident of geology endowed Muslims with the wherewithal, a worldwide Jihad, using the full range of instruments, was not possible. Now the 5-6 trillion dollars that OPEC states have received in the last 30 years has helped to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in arms, to corrupt diplomats and journalists, to build mosques throughout the dar al-Harb and madrassas throughout the dar al-Islam. Only in one case, Kemalist Turkey, has Islam effectively been defanged in relation to the Infidels -- and that requires constant vigilance by the Turkish army, with never an assurance that the Kemalist experiment will prevail.

No one has shown how the fixed and immutable doctrines of Islam that have been a permanent threat to non-Muslim peoples and polities for nearly 1400 years can possibly be changed. A long-term standoff, as in the Cold War, is the best one can hope for. And just as in that war it was the realization, by Communists in Russia that their system had failed, it may be that eventually a sufficient number of its own putative adherents will recognize that Islam, created in the seventh century as a fighting faith to promote and justify conquest of vast areas beyond the Arabian peninsula, is inadequate -- politically, economically, intellectually, and morally -- for the modern world. This recognition must come from within. It will come only when the full failure -- the lack of human rights or a modern polity that transcends both tribalism and a solidarity limited to fellow Muslims, the inability to create a work-ethic or a modern economy, the absence of a tradition of free, critical, and skeptical inquiry, the refusal to accord equal rights to women or non-Muslims, the cultivated hostility toward all non-Muslims, reaching murderous dimensions at times -- can no longer be hidden or disguised.

These failures have been obscured as Islamic states and peoples have been maintained on the artifical life-support system of OPEC money, and Western aid. The former should be diminished to the greatest extent possible; the latter eliminated altogether, and migration to the dar al-Harb stopped. When Islamic rulers and peoples finally are convinced, as Ataturk was, that disaster can be avoided only by completely isolating and suppressing political Islam (and that would require a real, not feigned, recognition of the damage it does, not least to its own adherents), there may be the possibility of a modus vivendi with the more advanced and powerful non-Muslim world, which otherwise is going to lose patience. The experiment of an Islamic Republic in Iran has failed utterly, and Iranians have felt that failure. For a generation or two political Islam will be despised in Iran. But as with Kemalism in Turkey, the possibility of a permanent disavowal remains unlikely: how, after all, does a Muslim permanently disavow central tenets of Islam? That is why, no matter what reforms are instituted, non-Muslims will have to remain permanently vigilant.

Only in Kemalist Turkey has Islam effectively been defanged in relation to the Infidels -- and that requires constant vigilance by the Turkish army.

The "war" of self-defense against the Jihad will not be over in 10 years, nor in 100 years. And in this war, where the enemy follows Muhammad's definition of war as "deception," non-Muslims must begin by understanding the enemy. The media are full of grim tidings that can be described as Jihad news. Some persist in believing that this Jihad news, from all over the world, is caused only by a "handful of extremists" who have "hijacked a great religion" (Variant 1) or "by fundamentalist Wahhabis" (Variant 2); both are wrong. Adherents of Islam, both Sunni and Shi'a, and within Sunni Islam, all four main schools of Muslim jurisprudence, share the same beliefs concerning the Infidels. Those who persist in avoiding these tenets, or in presenting a tortuous or guarded account, end up avoiding much in the 1350-year history of Islam. Those non-Muslims, including scholars, who practice such apologetics help, objectively, to further the Jihad. Thus, they constitute a danger to the rest of us. Spencer's book, especially in the current atmosphere of confusion, is an indispensable guide and vademecum.

One hopes that many thousands of copies of Onward Muslim Soldiers may be bought by some far-sighted Maecenas, and distributed to every important maker of policy, and molder of opinion, in Washington and New York. It would be money well spent.  

Hugh FItzgerald is a lecturer on the manipulation of language for political ends.

January 2004               - 5 -               Outpost