Armed with this simple and illusory slogan, the Brothers and their followers and everyone who spawned from them – Salafists and jihadists – roam the regions of the earth to convince the people of the house of peace and the people of the house of war that everything being followed and pursued of laws, codes and ideologies is all unbelief and falsehood, and that the solution is Islam.
Islam is – as they see and interpret it, they and only they alone – religion, sharia, jurisprudence, way of life and politics. In the opinion of these people, there is one single truth without a second: the truth that they proclaim. They have appointed themselves God's lawyers on earth, his legitimate and sole representative. True Islam, in their view, is their Islam, so they declared infidel anyone who differed from them and anyone who practiced and strove with Islam before them. The Shia, the Ahmadis, the Alawites, the Druze, the Sufis, as well as the followers of other religions and the leftists and the democrats – they declared them all infidel with the same unbelief as the Brothers. And the day of victory for their true Islam, as they claim, inevitably comes with the help of God and the sword! As Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Saati (Hassan al-Banna's father) wrote, calling on the group's members to prepare the medicine necessary for healing the nation: “Devote yourselves to preparing it in your pharmacy, and let your rescue teams administer it. If the nation refuses, bind her hands in chains, weigh down her back with iron, and force-feed her the medicine. And if you find in her body a malignant limb, amputate it, or a dangerous cancer, remove it. Prepare yourselves, O soldiers, for much of this people has pus in their ears and throats, and in their eyes a splinter.”*
And it is an error on your part to take into account – the media landscape unfortunately being what it is – that there is a difference between moderate and radical in the Islamist movements. The truth is that the difference between them lies in the discourse and is in degree, not in kind. At the heart of their discourse, whether moderate or radical – as the researcher Dr. Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, may God have mercy on him, found – two fundamental pillars are positioned on which they build their discourse and long-term strategy. The first is “God's sovereignty” (Hakimiyyat Allah), which sees no place for democracy and human laws. And the ideological father of the Islamists, Abu al-Ala al-Maududi, said of it: “Democracy is unbelief, because it is the deification of man and the sovereignty of the masses.” And Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote: “Democracy is a man-made artificial religion; the right of legislation in it belongs to humans, in contrast to Islam, where the right of legislation belongs to God, the exalted, who has no partner ...”
And the second pillar of their ideology, “no debate over the text”, means that humans have no right – except the Islamists of their kind, as superhuman, supernatural beings – to understand and interpret the text, even though the text does not by itself disclose its meaning and signification. The text is a linguistic expression, and language can be understood in several ways – especially when the text carries several senses – and even the noble Quran was understood by some one way and by others another way – indeed, some have deliberately manipulated and toyed with the text. And perhaps this is what led Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib to say: “The Quran does not speak, as it is written; it is humans who speak through it, and it carries several senses.” If the Quran spoke as a written thing, would it have permitted Abdullah ibn Saba to ignite the fire of discord between Ali and Uthman, and then between Ali and Muawiya, claiming interpretations of noble verses ... Would it ever have occurred to anyone?
And we see the Islamists today chanting against the godless West – the West that raised them until they grew up, and supported them with money and weapons for decades to fight the national leftists who sacrificed themselves for the homeland and the nation and its liberation from the colonizers. And have these forgotten how the godless West used to brand them Mujahideen while they slaughtered their Muslim brothers in Algeria, in Afghanistan, in Egypt and in other regions of the earth! This Islam of theirs, which permits the slaughter of men and women and the killing of innocents in the name of religion! And they forgot that the Islam brought by the Messenger called for tolerance and love of goodness for all ... an Islam of peace and love and brotherhood ... an Islam of love of life and well-being and loathing of death, killing and revenge ... an Islam of humility and indifference to appearances! The sword in the hand of the Muslim was no different from the scalpel in the surgeon's hand, to cut away the social disease. The call of Islam was in its essence a call to establish reason in the domain of thought, and justice in the domain of social conduct – these being the opposites of ignorance and injustice, the two pillars of the reality of the Arab society that revelation first addressed.
The Islamists of the age want us to accept ignorance and injustice in the name of obedience and faith, and the beard and the headscarves have become a voucher of absolution for their bearers to toy with society and humans. They confront us day after day with strange, bizarre fatwas, as if Muslims were a herd of cattle to be toyed with, along with their fate and life, as their keepers please. Faith is not measured by appearances, nor by religious positions and false claims of sheikhhood.
We are speaking about Muslims, not about Islam itself ... for Islam as creed and religion is a heavenly gift, wholly sound. Whereas we find that Muslims have all sorts of opinions – and each of these opinions is open to interpretation, with right and wrong. And it demands argument, statement and counter-statement. And finally I recall the saying of Ibn al-Muqaffa: “Religion is submission through faith, and opinion is submission through disputatiousness. Whoever made religion into opinion made it into disputation, and whoever made opinion into religion made it into law.”
It is time for the Muslims to reject the sorcery that the Islamists planted in the nation and to expel these charlatans whose concern is something other than the comfort of humans and the peace of the homeland. They make the religion political and make politics religious, only to control and dominate. They are the fox in the sheep's clothing. They have bared their fangs and removed the mask, and every rational person has seen from these sheikhs of the age and flag-raisers.
