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Sharia States: Totalitarian to the Core

A review of Dr. Andrew G. Bostom's seminal Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, now available.

by
Alyssa A. Lappen

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October 26, 2012 - 10:47 pm
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In less than two weeks, American voters must decide whether to reelect or to boot the current White House occupant. Dr. Andrew Bostom’s monumental new work, Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, could not have come at a more fateful hour. This brilliant scholarship, while designed as an overarching analysis, also conveniently provides a kind of detailed 2012 Electoral Guide for the Perplexed. [i]

Among recent perplexities that demand voters’ consideration:

  • For weeks after the murderous 9/11, 11th anniversary attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, U.S. President Barack Obama, rather than its jihadi perpetrators, blamed a crude and laughable internet parody aimed at the founder of Islam for inciting their actions. Incredibly, to a global audience during his September 24 UN address, Obama six times reinforced that lie.
  • Now Obama plans to authorize Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to announce a temporary nuclear crisis “solution.” Iran will swap a temporary halt in partial uranium enrichment for U.S. sanctions cuts, including some on Iran’s Central Bank, before the March arrival of Nowruz, the pre-Islamic Persian New Year. [ii] The U.S. Treasury Dept. long ago designated Iran’s Central Bank for supporting terrorism. The massive inflation caused by sanctions has increasingly harmed Iranian nuclear ambitions. Obama’s blatant ploy to win reelection loosens the noose.
  • Obama banned terms that help define the current Islamic war on the West — “jihad,” “sharia,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and the like — and effectively outlawed study of Islamic doctrine at U.S. official and security agencies. During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. did not provide Nazi sensitivity training or ban reading books on or by Karl Marx.
  • In June 2009, at the world’s leading Islamic university, Cairo’s Al Azhar, President Barack Obama praised Islam and blamed the West for virtually all the world’s problems.
  • The Obama embrace of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood evidently extends to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Hamas fundraising arm in the U.S. In March 2010, the Obama Department of Justice dropped indictments against CAIR and its co-founder Omar Ahmad, among others, despite massive evidence of the kind that in November 2008 convicted the Holy Land Foundation and its officers on 108 terror financing and fraud charges.

Andrew Bostom’s latest book exposes the logic that possibly motivated these and many similar perplexities in an engrossing and encyclopedic catalog of ideology and history of the naked totalitarianism of Islamic religious and political doctrines. The introduction alone establishes the diametric opposite embodied in Islamic law (sharia) to free Western social structure. It prohibits political freedoms as well as freedoms of conscience, faith, and expression (both oral and written). In Islamdom, one expresses personal views at great risk. As applied throughout its history and expressed in internal jurisprudence, the creed Mohammed founded has suppressed and oppressed all with whom it interacted — especially non-Muslims.

Indeed, jihadism and Islamic canon are intrinsically totalitarian. Neither concerns or governs only “believers.” Islamophilic obfuscation notwithstanding, many sharia attributes make the ostensibly “religious” legal code intractable, even now. By Muslim belief, according to seminal scholar Joseph Schacht (d. 1969), the “clear path to be followed” establishes divine, global Islamic order and is therefore:

not to be penetrated by the intelligence … i.e., man has to accept it without criticism. … It comprises without restriction, as an infallible doctrine of duties the whole of the religious, political, social, domestic and private life of those who profess Islam, and the activities of the tolerated members of other faiths so far as they may not be detrimental to Islam. [emphasis added]

In short, sharia statutes also govern the unique Islamic institution of jihad war, and relationships of Muslims to non-Muslims. The code requires Muslims to mount regular jihad attacks on unvanquished non-Muslims and to permanently, deliberately humiliate these “inferior” jihad survivors. Incorporation into Islamic polity subjects non-Muslims to sharia (pp. 110-112) and with it, statutes covering inheritance, requirements and prohibitions and draconian hadd penalties. These include death (by stoning) for adultery, apostasy, and highway robbery (whose victim was murdered); loss of hands and feet for simple robbery; loss of right hand for simple theft; 100 lashes for “fornication”; and 80 lashes for wine drinking. Tracing to individual Quran passages (including 45:18, 42:13, 42:21, and 5:48) and other Islamic sacred texts, primarily hadith (Mohammed’s reputed sayings and deeds), sharia is ultimately understood by Muslims as “the totality of Allah’s commandments relating to the activities of man,” Schacht notes. It embodies “the most characteristic phenomenon of Islamic thought [and] nucleus of Islam itself.”

These facts are not an expression of hatred for Muslims. “I have nothing against the people,” said Geert Wilders in a March 2009 interview Bostom later cited — in this respect, undoubtedly speaking for all anti-jihad scholars and writers:

I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. [In] no country where Islam is dominant [do] you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values.

Bostom shows in myriad ways how Islam cements “religion” to Mohammed’s  crushing totalitarian 7th century creed. For openers, while the Arabic word “hurriyya” translates to “freedom,” it refers to “freedom as perfect slavery to Allah,” as prescribed by highly dogmatic sharia laws engineered by the same dictatorial chief (Mohammed said, by divine instructions delivered via the angel Gabriel). It means something diametrically opposite to the same word in English — study of which is now off limits for U.S. military and security officials.

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