America’s dangerous naivety about Islam
America is following Britain’s lead in gradually submitting to Islam. While it is demonstrably true that most Muslims are peaceful, that fact has lulled these two nations into a dangerous naivety about this religion’s aggressively missionary tendencies.
The reality remains that many Muslims—even the peaceful ones—want to convert the world to their faith. What many British see as broad-minded efforts to reach out to Muslims and show respect for their religion have played right into the hands of those Muslims who want Islamic law to trump British law, Muslim culture to supplant British culture. Tolerance has turned into full-scale submission.
The Middle East Forum’s Raymond Ibrahim wrote an eye-opening piece this week detailing two telling examples of American naivety regarding the true nature of this religion it is so vociferously trying to support. The first is a koranic quotation that President Obama used in his Cairo speech to Muslims in June: “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth” (Sura 9:119). Sounds nice. But in fact, that translation completely obscures the actual meaning of the verse.
Let us for the moment put aside the fact that Sura 9, from whence Obama quotes, contains the most violent and intolerant exhortations in all the Koran (which is saying something). The problem here is that the original Arabic text of Sura 9:119 says absolutely nothing about “speaking the truth.” The word “speaking” is nowhere in the text, and “truth,” as an abstract, is a wrong translation for sadiqin, which refers to people. The verse most literally translates as “fear Allah and be with the truthful.” In other words, Muslims should stand firm with fellow Muslims (“truthful” serving as a Koranic epithet for “Muslims” the same way “believers” often does). It is, as ever, a call for divisiveness—of Muslims (the “truthful”) versus infidels (the “false”).
Had Obama or his Mideast advisers and speechwriters simply bothered to read this verse in context—verse 9:111, a jihadi all-time favorite, looms just above, promising believers paradise in exchange for their killing and being killed—or if they had bothered consulting mainstream Muslim exegeses, they might have known that this verse is part of a Koranic segment that deals exclusively with fighting infidels ….
The second example is even more remarkable. The New York Police Department hosted a splashy event intended to show solidarity with members of the Muslim community. Ibrahim reports on npr’s coverage of the event.
In the audio version of this report (around 0:25-0:50), the npr narrator says that “there was not an empty seat to be had at the nypd’s auditorium at One Police Plaza. nypd brass, Muslim clerics, and community members all stood and listened to the cadences of the call to prayer from the nypd’s imam,” Khalid Latif. While this is being said, you can hear part of the imam’s Arabic recitation from the Koran in the background.
The narrator’s enthusiastic talk of nypd brass standing in awe of the “cadences of the call” makes it difficult to discern exactly which verse is being recited. Only the last few words—qawm al-kaffirin, “nation of infidels”—are crystal clear, raising red flags. Thanks to my trusty Arabic-Koranic concordance, I have placed this phrase as part of Koran 2:286, which supplicates Allah “to make us [Muslims] victorious over the nation of infidels.” Bear in mind that, from an Islamist point of view, the United States is the “nation of infidels” par excellence.
Political correctness may seem right. It can be a sincere effort to show good will toward all people. But because it does so without respect to God’s law, and is based entirely on human reasoning, it has extraordinarily dangerous unintended consequences. As Proverbs 16:25 says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
