The Vision of Islam
The infidel and the heretic in disarray, fleeing, decapitated and burned alive, their property confiscated or destroyed, their women cowering in fear of kidnap and rape, the true believer triumphant – this is the “better” future that Islam envisions and toward which it has been struggling since the day its Prophet Muhammad first heard the call of the Angel Gabriel.
Judaism’s beginnings are rooted in the cultures of the ancient Near East, brutal autocracies whose idolatrous religions featured child sacrifice and temple prostitutes and whose military tactics included massacring entire towns and enslaving captured populations to build massive royal tombs. The Hebrew slaves who escaped this dismal fate emerged from their desert wanderings with a Torah that rejected those cultural mores and enjoined the Israelites to build a better world, where the weak would be treated with compassion and everyone from king to pauper subject to the same law, and assured them that one day the lion would lay down with the lamb, swords would be beaten into ploughshares and men would cease to learn the arts of war. This better world, to be built not by God for man but by man for man, never materialized, but even the worst of the kings and the powerful who filled Jerusalem’s streets with innocent blood were repeatedly admonished by courageous prophets who held up a shining beacon for the oppressed, a vision of a better world – in this life, not just in the next – in which their cries would be heard and justice would be done for all.
Christianity arose in a Roman Empire that, like the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian and all the empires that rose and fell before it, was bloody, corrupt and cruel on a scale the world had not yet seen. Constantly at war around its edges, brutally suppressing numerous revolts by its millions of oppressed slaves, feeding the poor gory spectacles in its coliseums to distract them from their misery; the empire embodied every imaginable depravity and atrocity.
Christianity repudiated the values of the surrounding society, assuring its faithful that the day would come when relations among all men would be governed by love, when poverty would vanish and peace would reign on earth. Like the promise of the Jewish prophets, this promise too was never fulfilled, but even in the darkest and bloodiest of Christian ages, as armies of faithful Christians stormed back and forth across Europe and Asia murdering, raping and pillaging everyone in their path, it was not forgotten. There were always those who continued to firmly believe the Gospel’s message that the horrors would one day pass, that men would be free of their oppressors and build a better world for themselves and their children.
The Arabian Peninsula was home to numerous incessantly warring tribes who made their living raiding each other’s towns and caravans. Here too a religion arose that came to straddle the globe. Islam, however, promised its faithful neither peace nor harmony, but rather that they would triumph in war and subjugate all the world’s peoples to themselves. Islam did not repudiate the values of the violent society in which it arose; it sanctified them above all others. It had no vision of a just society suffused with peace and goodwill among men; it dreamed instead of forcing all mankind to submit to Muslims and Islamic law.
Christians in post-Reformation Europe eventually grew weary of their incessant sectarian wars and the massive bloodshed and destruction they left in their wake and began to lay the foundations of a secular society in which all men and women, of whatever race or religion, would be held equal before the law and live peacefully alongside each other in dignity and honor. This vision has been to some extent realized in our day, not completely of course but certainly more than ever in the past. The change did not come without violence: the Christian sects that had for centuries shed rivers of each other’s blood in the name of their respective religions did indeed cease to do so, but surrendered their grip on the European mind to the new secular ideology-religions which proceeded to kill even more people in the name of sans-coulottes, workers and master races.
For many in the West it seems that the horrors of the past are behind us forever, that utopia is attainable, that peace on earth is finally within reach. If only this were so. World peace can be realized only if everyone is dedicated to its pursuit, if it is a goal shared by all, if it is everyone’s idea of utopia, but sadly, Islam does not share the dream. Its vision of world peace is a world no longer at war only because Islam has achieved its goal of conquering every last square millimeter of the world’s surface, so that there is no one left to make battle against. Islam does not dream of a world in which men and women of all faiths and races live together as equals in peace and goodwill, only of a world ruled by Muslims in which non-Muslims are subjected to the status of dhimmi, degraded, impoverished, humiliated and whether they live or die, whether their women are molested or unmolested, kidnapped or allowed to go on living with their families, is entirely at the unpredictable sufferance of their all-powerful Muslim overlords.
Islam has no vision of a world without war, poverty and disease, but only of a world in which all wars are won by Muslims, all wealth is owned by Muslims and only infidels are afflicted by disease. It never developed an interest in expanding human knowledge in the arts and sciences, only in acquiring the latest weapons.
Jews had prophets who bequeathed them a vision of better and more just world. Jesus and the Apostles rejected corrupt Roman values and proclaimed a world based on love and peace among men, and Christians and Jews today have come to embrace the Western values of democracy, freedom and equality of all before the law.
Islam’s prophet did not reject the violent mores of his seventh-century world but embraced and perpetuated them. Islam’s hope for the future is the restoration of its imagined glorious and triumphant past when its unstoppable advances struck terror into the hearts of unbelievers. Indeed, it has never had any other vision of mankind’s future. In its schools and mosques it continues to this day to preach the values of seventh-century Arabia, to install in its young people the same supremacist war-glorifying ideology that inspired the early Arabs to overrun and subjugate peoples from the Atlantic to the Indus valley and beyond. While Jews and Christians rejected the values of the brutal ancient societies from which they emerged, Islam honored them above all others. Islam can leave no land or people alone, unmolested and unconquered.
In this fifteenth century of jihad, the West continues to proclaim the fundamental goodness of all men no matter how many fundamentally evil men wreak murder and mayhem in their own countries and, increasingly, in the still-unconquered West, whose leaders deny that there is any problem at all, who dare not speak its name for fear of angering the very people who are the root of the problem, and who assure their voters that all that is needed to solve the problem that does not exist is to provide employment for the young men of the religion whose name must not be uttered.
Though we all live on one planet, we live in many different worlds, and in one of those worlds, children are taught from early childhood to believe that they are destined by God to subdue, pillage, enslave and rape everybody else, and that the sooner they obey God’s command the sooner they will enjoy their eternal rewards in Paradise.
The infidel and the heretic in disarray, fleeing, decapitated and burned alive, their property confiscated or destroyed, their women cowering in fear of kidnap and rape, the true believer triumphant – this is the “better” future that Islam envisions and toward which it has been struggling since the day its Prophet Muhammad first heard the call of the Angel Gabriel.
We in the West face a terrible choice: do we quietly resign ourselves to live in Islam’s past or do we muster the courage to confront the threat to our way of life and fight for the future our ancestors promised us?
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