In our contemporary West, the children and heirs of Socrates, Dante Alighieri, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and the rest have legalized weed, sparked up a fatty, and settled back into a comfortable haze, turning off their minds, relaxing, and floating downstream.
The sons of Allah, meanwhile, sneer at all this dissipation, and offer the bleary-eyed hordes of zoned-out Western youths a sterner, tougher way to live that, they insist, leaves a man more at peace with himself, knowing that he has done his part for a great cause rather than waste his life away in the blue smoke of debauchery and the pursuit of pleasure above all else. They don’t need that weed, or that booze, or those women with no sense of modesty or morals. They are walking on the straight path of Allah.
That is essentially the way many young Muslims, particularly those who are devout, and including some who live in the U.S. and Europe, see their new neighbors: as weak, flabby, degenerate human beings who, if only imbued with the light of Islam, would begin to live fruitful, disciplined lives. The Nation of Islam is one manifestation, albeit an eccentric one in many ways, of this Islamic critique of the West, which goes back to the time of the Crusades. In those days, Islamic jihadis professed to find the mores and practices of the “Franks” to be both immoral and repulsive, and vastly inferior to the straight path.
And so it was with particular interest that I noted a news item from Remix News on September 16, reporting that “Ali A. had just turned 18 when he decided to drive his brand new BMW X1 over double the speed limit, high on anti-dust spray, striking 33-year-old Dutchwoman Elisabeth in Rotterdam.”
It seems that just two days after he turned 18, Ali A. “drove at 115 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, or 71 mph in a 30 mph zone, with the car which his father had just given him as a gift.” Dutch authorities are as draconian in their approach to this crime as you might expect: “Prosecutors say they want him to be sentenced to eight months in prison and given a five-year driving ban.” Yes, eight months.
There is strong evidence that young Ali was stoned out of his mind: “Dutch news outlet NOS wrote that Ali A. was weaving his car, driving on the wrong side of the road, and is suspected of having been under the influence of propellant anti-dust spray, a kind of narcotic used by young people. Video footage shows him overtaking a car at very high speed and barely avoiding an oncoming vehicle. Then, he hit Elisabeth’s car, who was on her way to her hockey club, which led her vehicle to slam directly into a tree. Doctors tried to save her life but she died that same day. She was fourteen weeks pregnant with her first child, who also died.”
Ali himself claims that he wasn’t high at all, but just inexperienced: “I didn’t know the car well yet and wanted to test it out. I may have been overambitious and thought I was a better driver, but I couldn’t control it.” However, “police have recorded him fleeing the scene of the accident and throwing away two aerosol cans. He claims that if police had discovered the aerosol cans, it would have given them the ‘wrong impression.’” He explained: “I am aware that the spray is used to get high. I was afraid they would suspect me of that if they had found the cans in the car.” Yeah.
Meanwhile, Remix News reported the following day that in Germany, “Mohammad S. was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for striking killing twin brothers with his car while the brothers were traveling on an electric scooter. The 24-year-old convict also left their friend without a leg after dragging him.” Three years.
Oh, and Mohammad S. “was high on nitrous oxide when he crashed into the three victims.” And so here again we see: the Islamic moral critique of the West is fine in theory, but some young Muslims like to get high as much as any hardcore stoner in Berlin or Los Angeles. After all, Allah himself offers the greatest high of all. Islamic paradise is a physical place, where the blessed recline in “enclosed gardens and vineyards” (Qur’an 78:32), where there will be “fruit in plenty, neither out of reach nor forbidden, and raised couches” (Qur’an 56:32-4). On those couches, there will be “large-breasted women of equal age” (Qur’an 78:32-3). These are the famous virgins of paradise: “Indeed, we have created them a special creation and made them virgins, lovers, friends” (Qur’an 56:35-7).
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These women are, according to Islamic tradition, waiting with tremendous enthusiasm for the Islamic martyrs, who are rewarded for their martyrdom with an immediate trip to paradise. That is why 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta packed a fancy suit in his luggage (which was flagged, while he himself wasn’t) on that fateful day.
Atta was actually anticipating changing into this suit before he flew the plane he hijacked into one of the World Trade Center towers. He wanted to make this change so that he would turn up in paradise looking his very best for the heavenly virgins. According to a letter that was also in his luggage, Atta was looking forward to “marriage” with the “women of paradise,” whom he would encounter “dressed in their most beautiful clothing.”
In Marco Polo’s late thirteenth-century Travels, he describes the redoubt of a Muslim leader known as the Old Man of the Mountain, who recruited unsuspecting young Muslim men to become jihadis by getting them high on hashish (an experience which the young men had no way to understand) and taking them into a lush garden filled with beautiful prostitutes. After spending a day there, the young men, back down to earth now, would be taken out, and told that if they wanted to get back to that wonderful place, they would have to “kill and be killed” for Allah (Qur’an 9:111). It’s the highest high of them all.
