The scope of Britain’s grooming gang scandal is breathtaking. As many as 250,000 British girls, and possibly even more were raped, tortured, trafficked, and more. The perpetrators were overwhelmingly Muslim males, mostly migrants from Pakistan, who looked to Islamic texts and teachings to justify these heinous crimes. Because they believed that Allah himself had sanctioned the seizure and use of infidel women as sex slaves, they didn’t think there was anything shameful about their behavior, and sometimes fathers, uncles, brothers and sons would all participate in a rape gang together.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for Western non-Muslims to comprehend this kind of thinking, but it must be done if Britain or any other Western country is ever going to take serious steps to prevent this sort of thing from continuing to happening. And so it is useful to explore the teachings of an Egyptian Muslim cleric, Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni, who in May 2011 offered an elaborate Islamic theological justification of the sexual enslavement of non-Muslim women. It was, he explained, all part of the jihad against the infidels.
Al-Huwayni asserted that Muslims and non-Muslims were actually in a state of war, and that this was good. “We are,” he said, “in the era of jihad. The era of jihad has come over us, and jihad in the path of Allah is a pleasure. It is a real pleasure. The companions (of the Prophet) used to compete to (perform jihad).” It was a pleasure, sure, but it also had a practical effect: the Muslims would seize the property of non-Muslims and thereby alleviate their own poverty: “The poverty that we’re in—is it not due to our abandonment of jihad? But if we could conduct one, two, or three jihadist operations every year, many people throughout the earth would become Muslims.”
Part of what made waging jihad a pleasure was that Muslims would be able to take captives, including attractive young women: “If Muslims returned to waging jihad, they would be able to take captives, and profit from doing so.”
First the Muslims would invite the non-Muslims to accept Islam. This proselytizing, or da’wa, would precede jihad. Then would come the fighting: “And whoever rejected this da’wa, or stood in our way, we would fight against him and take him prisoner, and confiscate his wealth, his children, and his women—all of this means money.”
The women would simply be more spoils of war: “Every mujahid who returned from jihad, his pockets would be full. He would return with three or four slaves, three or four women, and three or four children. Multiply each head by 300 dirhams, or 300 dinar, and you have a good amount of profit. If he were to go to the West and work on a commercial deal, he would not make that much money. Whenever things became difficult (financially), he could take the head (i.e. the prisoner) and sell it, and ease his (financial) crisis. He would sell it like groceries.”
Al-Huwayni emphasized that Muslim warriors could legitimately seize non-Muslim women as sex slaves: “Do you understand what I’m saying? Spoils, slaves, and prisoners are only to be taken in war between Muslims and infidels. Muslims in the past conquered, invaded, and took over countries. This is agreed to by all scholars — there is no disagreement on this from any of them, from the smallest to the largest, on the issue of taking spoils and prisoners. The prisoners and spoils are distributed among the fighters, which includes men, women, children, wealth, and so on.”
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Then al-Huwayni invoked Qur’an passages on “those whom your right hands possess” to justify this teaching: “When a slave market is erected, which is a market in which are sold slaves and sex-slaves, which are called in the Qur’an by the name milk al-yamin, ‘that which your right hands possess’ [Qur’an 4:24]. This is a verse from the Qur’an which is still in force, and has not been abrogated. The milk al-yamin are the sex-slaves.” He added: “When I want a sex slave, I just go to the market and choose the woman I like and purchase her.”
This may seem to be a long way off from rape gangs victimizing girls on the streets of Britain, but it isn’t. The Qur’an tells women to veil themselves so that they will not be molested (33:59); the corollary to that is that unveiled women are fair game. There is no hot war in Britain between Muslims and non-Muslims, but the Qur’an’s exhortation to fight unbelievers “until religion is all for Allah” (8:39) is open-ended. What better way to humiliate the enemy than to demonstrate that he cannot or will not protect the most vulnerable members of society? And that mission has been abundantly accomplished.
