Jihad? Nah, it's all Lenin's fault!

The only Marxist philosopher I admire—i.e., Groucho—is credited with this joke which casts Murawiec’s pretentious gobbledygook in the appropriate light:

“Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?

A: Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.”

Bostom comes out blasting and rightly so. Bostom's eviscerates Laurent Murawie's latest apology for Islam, The Mind of Jihad (what mind? you are not allowed to have a mind). This neurosis amongst the pseudo intellectual crowd to blame anyone, anything, (and they love to blame the messenger) -emasculates the West and obstructs counter jihad efforts . They shake in their boots before they dare speak of  the real culprit - Islam. Invariably they perform an indispensible service to Islam. Sick.

The Marx Brothers of Jihadism?

This brief review of “The Mind of Jihad” by Laurent Murawiec, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 342 pp., will also be appearing in print in the December issue of OUTPOST. ***

Ibn Hudayl a 14th century Granadan Muslim author of an important treatise on jihad war, elucidated the allowable tactics which facilitated the violent, chaotic Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and other parts of Europe:

It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden – if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them – as well as to cut down his trees, to raze his cities, in a word, to do everything that might ruin and discourage him…[being] suited to hastening the Islamization of that enemy or to weakening him.  Indeed, all this contributes to a military triumph over him or to forcing him to capitulate.

And these repeated attacks, indistinguishable in motivation from modern acts of jihad terrorism, like the horrific 9/11/01 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, and the Madrid bombings on 3/11/04, or those in London on 7/7/05, were in fact designed to sow terror. The 17th century Muslim historian al-Maqqari explained that the panic created by the Arab jihadist horsemen and sailors, at the time of the Muslim expansion in the regions subjected to those raids and landings, facilitated their later conquest,

Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.

Contemporary validation of this principle of jihad as described by Ibn Hudayl, and al-Maqqari—rooted in the Koran—(for example, verses 8:12, 8:60, and 33:26)—i.e., to terrorize the enemies of the Muslims as a prelude to their conquest—has been provided in the mainstream Pakistani text on jihad warfare by Brigadier S.K. Malik, originally published in Lahore, in 1979. Malik’s treatise was endorsed in a laudatory Foreword to the book by his patron, then Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq, as well as a more extended Preface by Allah Buksh K. Brohi, a former Advocate-General of Pakistan. This text—widely studied in Islamic countries, and available in English, Urdu, and Arabic—has been recovered from the bodies of slain jihadists in Kashmir. Brigadier Malik emphasizes how instilling terror is essential to waging successful jihad campaigns:

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him…

“Jihad,” the Koranic concept of total strategy…[d]emands the preparation and application of total national power and military instrument is one of its elements. As a component of the total strategy, the military strategy aims at striking terror into the hearts of the enemy from the preparatory stage of war…Under ideal conditions, Jihad can produce a direct decision and force its will upon the enemy. Where that does not happen, military strategy should take over and aim at producing the decision from the military stage. Should that chance be missed, terror should be struck into the enemy during the actual fighting.

…the Book [Koran] does not visualize war being waged with “kid gloves.” It gives us a distinctive concept of total war. It wants both, the nation and the individual, to be at war “in toto,” that is, with all their spiritual, moral, and physical resources. The Holy Koran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test of utmost preparation lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of the enemies.

Laurent Murawiec, in a chapter entitled, “Jihad as Terror,” concludes his recently published meditation on contemporary jihadism, The Mind of Jihad, with a discussion of this same treatise by Brigadier Malik. Murawiec reiterates the obvious—Malik’s profound, overriding indebtedness to classical jihad theory and practice, including jihad terrorism. But in the end, Murawiec is betrayed by his book’s preceding shoddily constructed, and illogical narrativeDespite the inclusion of some fascinating texts, letters, speeches, and anecdotes, Murawiec’s study—a rather discursive amalgam—ignores classical (and still omnipresent) doctrines and practices of jihad war, such as the licit taking of infidel “harbi” (from dar al harb, the unvanquished non-Muslims “lands of war”) non-combatant life and property, or even more fundamentally, the goal of submitting the world to Islamic Law. In addition, he clumsily grafts “millenarian Gnostic” motifs on to the unrelated, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad war, and confuses transient, tactical alliances between (primarily) Bolsheviks/Communists, and jihadists, for some “shared vision”—as if the stark differences between the goals of creating Shari’a-based governments (and ultimately, a global Caliphate), versus a centralized, international system of atheistic, Communist bureaucracies, were immaterial. Thus Mailk’s modern primer on Islamic jihadism becomes for Murawiec, a treatise written,

…in pure Gnostic fashion, with a strong dose of Leninist voluntarism, or Nietzschean Wille zur Macht. [Will to Power]

Moreover, central to Murawiec’s overall construct, is the orthodox Pakistani Muslim ideologue Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, influential friend of Ayatollah Khomeini and Sayyid Qutb (the latter, also being Osama bin Laden’s hero). Maududi was a prolific Koranic commentator, and essayist, whose ideas were firmly rooted in classical Islamic formulations of jihad, and the creation of traditional Muslim societies, culminating in his full rendition of how a contemporary Islamic State should appear and function, under the Shari’a.  Pace Murawiec, however, Maududi—a pious, traditional Muslim, whose espoused doctrines are entirely consistent with those of a multitude of prototypical Islamic revivalists who have surfaced throughout the history of the creed—must have been nurtured on Lenin, in the author’s words,  “as if Lenin’s ‘The State and Revolution’ had become [his, i.e. Maududi’s] bedtime reading.”

From his sober perspective, J.B. Kelly, the great modern historian of the Arabian Gulf—contra Murawiec—viewed (writing in 1980) the aroused spirit of jihad in the Gulf during the 1960s and 1970s—fomented by Faisal b. Abdul Azziz’s implacable hatred for Israel, and the complementary doctrines of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood—as merely a return to the region’s deep Islamic roots and values, following a brief dalliance with “revolutionary” ideologies:             

Yet for all the anathematizing of Arab revolutionary movements by Muslim conservatives, it is extremely doubtful whether these movements are au fond anti-Islamic or irreligious. Marxist dogma sits very lightly and uncomfortably upon the few semi-educated peninsular Arabs who have ostensibly adopted it. Their thoughts and their lives are still shaped by Islam, they themselves are fundamentally Muslim. Nor could it be otherwise, since…Islam is the only real source of moral and intellectual guidance available to Arabs of the peninsula. The present evidence of Islamic revivalism, therefore, may be a more significant indication of the drift of events in the Gulf than sporadic troublemaking by self-styled Marxist revolutionaries

Please read it all. Bostom is uniquely brilliant and unfraid of the slings and arrows of cowards.

Comments

[Hev]

I'm going to steal a joke from Woody Allen here:

What do you get when you cross Commentary with Dissent?

'Dissentary!'

Sorry to make a joke at Commentary's expense, I am a subscriber and I love them. I'm just starting to get depressed ovah here.

[C Max]

Terrorism has been the touchstone for Muslim expansion from the get-go according to any reliable history book you might happen to pick up. Invariably, the reaction to the violence moves from appeasement to zealous opposition once people see they have no choice. St. James the Moorslayer comes to mind.

Much of the mood of appeasement comes from outright lies that people have bought into. Far from being the "fastest growing religion," for example, the birth rate in most Muslim countries is plummeting just as it is in the west. Modern Muslim women don't want to have ten children.

We'll see how well the jihad goes now that the price of oil is crashing. It's hard to take over the world with no money, no impressionable young recruits, and no brains.

[Jane]

A different opinion of the book:

From the site Muslims Against Sharia:

November 14, 2008, 0:00 p.m.

Know Thy Enemy
Inside the Mind.

By Michael Ledeen

Laurent Murawiec’s The Mind of Jihad is, at last, a book on radical Islam that does it all. Unlike many engaged in the heated debate over the nature of our enemies, Murawiec does not believe that ancient texts tell us all we need to know. He insists that all ideas change over time, even those believed to have been dictated by God’s angel. He has therefore immersed himself not only in the sacred texts of Islam but also in the richly variegated speeches, writings, and actions of its most extremist practitioners: the jihadis waging war against us.

He candidly admits that it was not easy, that many of his initial ideas turned out to be wrong, and that his current understanding of “the mind of jihad” surprises him. This understanding holds that the current doctrine is far more than the resuscitation of medieval commandments, and in fact has a lot to do with modern European and Soviet totalitarianism.

As Murawiec tells us in fascinating detail, the jihadis have been willing to collaborate will all European totalitarian movement and regimes. And although we have heard quite a lot about their collaboration with the Fuhrer (in the person of Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem), there was a constant, intimate and extremely important alliance with the Soviet Union, which gave some of the key jihadis training in organization (and, most likely, intelligence as well).

He does go a bit far at times, though. “Most of the ugly repertoire of Modern Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism,” he writes, “came from the Soviet Union (with only the racial-biological component added by the Nazis.” That gives insufficient credit to the long tradition of Muslim anti-Semitism; they didn’t need Lenin and Stalin to teach them to hate Jews. But they did need Hitler and, more importantly, Himmler, to explain the most modern ways to hate, and then annihilate, the Jews. No surprise that the mufti quietly visited Auschwitz with his buddy Adolf Eichmann.

But perhaps the most valuable part of this invaluable book is the fascinating exposition of how Islamists, theoretically tied to a social and political doctrine that made it very difficult, if not impossible, to rebel against Islamic rulers, came to embrace a very leftist call for revolution. The key figure, according to Murawiec, is the Pakistani Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, a friend of Khomeini and of Sayyid Qutb (Osama bin Laden’s hero). Maududi, as Murawiec notes, is a throwback to the medieval European chiliasts, like Thomas Muntzer and the radical Anabaptists. And like the European millenarians, Maududi’s claims are universal: “Islam addresses its call for effecting (its) program of destruction and reconstruction, revolution and reform not to just one nation, but to all humanity.” This effectively transforms Islam from a religion into a political cause, a call to arms, “as if Lenin’s ‘The State and Revolution’ had become their bedtime reading.”

As a result of these European and Soviet influences, the jihadis are inspired by a real lust for blood, and are members of a cult of death. Murawiec has a wonderful eye and a fine nose for telling anecdotes, such as that of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tell’s assassination at the Sheraton hotel in Cairo in November 1971. One of the major figures in the repression of the PLO in Jordan, al-Tell had been the object of death threats following “Black September,” and Arafat’s vengeance was swift and brutal:

Five . . . shots, fired at point-blank range. . . . He staggered back against the shattered swing doors . . . and he fell dying among the shards of glass on the marble floor. As he lay there, one of his killers bent over and lapped the blood that poured from his wounds.

Murawiec calmly draws the proper conclusion: “Something out of the ordinary was occurring, not war in the accepted sense, not political conflict or even guerrilla warfare.”

The Mind of Jihad is a work of considerable elegance and culture; it probably could only have been written by a European who has become an American, as it combines the best of French appreciation for the details of jihadist ideology — and jihadism’s connection to European precursors — with a keen pragmatic eye for the terrible consequences of these ideas and passions. It’s a hell of a book, and it deserves a lot of attention.

— Michael Ledeen is Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2QzZGVhYTUzMzkwZjlmY2M2MTI2NGNhZDYyMTFkYzg=

[Zero]

Death is the touchstone of the expansion of Islam.

FountainheadZero
Come to the dark side.

[Witch-king of Angmar]

You know the book is bad when in your review you have to end up defending the bolsheviks from unfair charges. Thankfully, Andrew Bostom has no qualms about it. Communism has enough sins of it's own, we don't need to pin those that it's not responsible of and thus help the real culprit slip away.

[kobi]

hel-lo i must be going, i came to say i must be going..

that's the most ridiculous thing i evah hoid.

....this sums it up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aKKF1-f-A

[kobi]

and if you liked that groucho, try deez:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aKKF1-f-A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLVYK3SwWM

[kobi]

ah, you accuse me of not being serious.

i'm very serious.

i'm seriously disturbed about the lack of humor in dis voild.

or some would say just seriously disturbed.

that's why i read atlas.

that and a bowl of beans will get you from here to the corner in 5 minutes.

or you could take the bus.

speaking of buses,

has anyone seen my catapult?

it's around here somewhere.

[kobi]

ah, you accuse me of not being serious.

i'm very serious.

i'm seriously disturbed about the lack of humor in dis voild.

or some would say just seriously disturbed.

that's why i read atlas.

that and a bowl of beans will get you from here to the corner in 5 minutes.

or you could take the bus.

speaking of buses,

has anyone seen my catapult?

it's around here somewhere.