Islam is Arab Imperialism

The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land.

—Qur’an 5:33

O Prophet! … Strive hard against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be harsh against them, their abode is Hell, – and worst indeed is that destination. —Qur’an 9:73

And the Jews say: ‘Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: Messiah is the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouths. They imitate the saying of the disbelievers of old. Allah’s Curse be on them, how they are deluded away from the truth!

—Qur’an 9:30

Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which the Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim!There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’”

—Sahih Bukhari 4:52:177

O Prophet! … Exhort the believers to fight.

—Qur’an 8:65

President Barack Obama has been desperately trying to get America out of the “War on Terror” since he took office. One of the curious consequences of this policy is the case of a man named Sabir Ali Khan. According to the United States, Khan was a key conspirator behind the death of 39 Americans in Afghanistan’s Kunar province in 2010. He allegedly smuggled weaponry from Pakistan and helped organize a suicide attack against an American base.1 Since the U.S. Military is no longer engaged in detaining terrorists, as journalist Massimo Calabresi observes, “this means when U.S. authorities find a suspected terrorist, they have three options: kill him, leave him in the field or work with the local government to detain him and perhaps eventually bring him into the U.S. court system.”2

In Khan’s case, none of those options seems to have worked. He’s a Dutch citizen, so after Pakistani officials detained him, they shipped him to the Netherlands. He was arrested when he got off the plane, but at his extradition hearing his lawyer alleged that the U.S. was complicit in his client’s torture while in detention in Pakistan. In July 2014, the Dutch Supreme Court blocked Sabir Ali’s extradition to the U.S. “because the Dutch Government had declined to look into the alleged U.S. role in Khan’s arrest.”3 Meanwhile, the accused terrorist sits at home collecting welfare checks and playing video games.

The Sabir Ali Khan situation is only one in a long line of absurdities the Obama administration is party to on the issue of Islam. In February 2014, the Department of Homeland Security issued new exemptions to a law that prevented terrorist supporters from seeking asylum in the United States. The exemptions now allow people who have provided “limited” material support to be eligible for asylum. In addition to security questions raised by the changes, which a former State Department official called “extremely broad and vague” and “sure to be exploited by those seeking to game our generous refugee admissions program,” there are questions about the legality of the administration deciding to change the law as written by Congress.4

In Syria, radical jihadists have massacred and terrorized people.5 A YouTube video captured the leader of one militant group tearing the heart out of a dead supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and taking a bite. These are the same people the Obama administration is now providing with weapons to continue their fight. Senator John McCain, who supports this—and even more intervention in Syria if he could get it—fatuously claims that America can tell the difference between which Syrian rebels are “good guys” and which are not. Were it not for widespread popular opposition, Obama would have ordered the bombing of Syrian army assets in support of the jihadists.

President Obama has willingly fed some of the worst, most virulent beliefs of the very jihadists he supposedly opposes. On June 4, 2009, he gave a speech in Cairo addressed to the Muslim world in which he accepted many jihadist claims. For example, jihadists claim they are responding to an “attack” on Islam from the West which began in the age of European colonialism. In his speech, Obama claimed that tensions between the West and Islam “ha[ve] been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.”6 In a later 2012 speech to the United Nations, the President insisted that “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” which is a curious charge for him to make given that the traditional defense against slander is if what one says is the truth.7

The President also provided cover for Islam, attributing terrorist attacks to “violent extremists … a small but potent minority of Muslims.” In so doing, he completely ignored the large number of Muslims who agree with the terror attacks on the United States, and the absolute majorities of Muslims who doubt that the 9/11 attacks were even carried out by Muslims. In his speech, Obama called for a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims,” based upon the supposed “truth that America and Islam are not exclusive.”8 As this book has conclusively shown, America and Islam are mutually exclusive. One is founded on “We the People,” and the other is founded on the revelations of Muhammad.

In his speech, the President makes a number of errors. He speaks of how Islam supposedly “paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” which this book has shown to be based on a mistake. He credits Islam for “innovation” which developed algebra, the compass, and printing—all of which have nothing to do with Islam. Stretching the bonds of credulity he credits Islam with demonstrating “the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.” As we have shown in this book, the actual history of Islam presents a much different picture. Most tellingly and offensively of all, Obama went as far as to say “Islam has always been part of America’s story,” insisting that somehow Islam, which has until very recently had only a negligible presence in all of North America, somehow has shaped America into what it is today.9

Above all, President Obama’s speech demonstrated the fundamental problem facing all politicians who have attempted to grapple with the issue of terrorism: he failed to define the enemy. After insisting that “America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam” he referred vaguely to “violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security.”10 This definition is incoherent. It is as if America had said the Cold War was not about opposing Communism but only “violent extremists” like Joseph Stalin. Yet when Stalin died, Communism was still around. In the same way, Osama bin Laden was killed and al-Qaeda disrupted and tens of thousands of “violent extremists” killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—yet Islamic terrorism is still around.

By ignoring or misunderstanding the ideology that produces men like bin Laden, America and the West are risking a disastrous failure. Some, like Obama, believe they can make peace with Islam as with any other religion. This attitude of softness or complacency will not work anymore than President Bush’s approach.

THE FAILURE OF THE “WAR ON TERROR”

The War on Terror has failed. What’s more, Americans and their allies know it. In an early 2014 survey, 52 percent of Americans rated both the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars as mostly failing to achieve their goals.11 Some politicians, such as Britain’s Lord Ashdown, have openly admitted the failure, going as far as to say the war in Afghanistan is “not worth the life of one more soldier.”12 The Iraq and Afghanistan wars claimed more than 6,656 service members killed and 106,000 injured. Civilian deaths totaled over 200,000. U.S. government spending on the wars since 2001 is at $3.3 trillion and counting. Future spending obligations, such as medical care for injured soldiers and debt servicing, will likely push the total to well over $4 trillion.13

The end results in Afghanistan and Iraq bear out the grim assessment of the American people. Even before the 2013 troop withdrawals, Afghani security forces across the country were already cutting deals with the Taliban. After 13 years of fighting, the Taliban is still present and still a force in Afghanistan while much of the country is as much a lawless haven for terrorists as it was before 9/11.14 On top of all this, our alleged ally in the war, Pakistan, has been providing detailed assistance and shelter to our enemies from the start.

In Iraq, a secular (albeit tyrannical) leader and government have been replaced with a shaky Shia regime. The new constitution calls sharia law the highest law of the land. Fundamentalist Iran has taken on greater influence due to the power of Iraq’s Shia majority. Instead of replacing a secular tyrant with a secular democracy, we have replaced him with a religious theocracy masquerading as a democracy. Law and order have broken down along religious lines, as sectarian violence has become commonplace. One million of its people are still internally displaced and corruption is rampant.15 Hundreds of billions of dollars were completely lost to corruption in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. All this for a country that had no involvement in 9/11 at all!

What the U.S. and other western governments completely fail to grasp are the reasons for our failure in the War on Terror, first and foremost being a lack of ideological clarity. Our enemy in Afghanistan was not terrorism, or Osama bin Laden, or even the Taliban. It was literal Islam. Terrorism is only a technique—a means to an end. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are only soldiers. Literal Islam is what produces bin Laden and the Taliban and encourages young men to engage in terror attacks. Killing bin Laden or any number of terrorists will not stop this production.

While fighting a bunch of guerilla soldiers in Afghanistan, America has remained friendly with those who are those soldiers’ masters: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These two nations provide the ideology and the funding that drives our opponents, and yet we call them allies. Afghanistan and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. But Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the hijackers and funded and disseminated the deadly ideology which motivated all of them. Pakistan provided funding and training for a generation of jihadists, as well as the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. If America had attacked Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after 9/11, we might have accomplished something meaningful. Even forcing Pakistan to dismantle the Taliban—which they created in the first place—would have been more significant than what we did.The war we should be waging is not a War on Terror but a war on literal Islam. That is, on those who seek to live their lives (and force others to live their lives) in accord with the literal words of the fundamental Islamic texts. These same texts command them to hate and kill the infidel and spread their ideology across the face of the earth. Islam must be reduced to a personal faith of individuals, not established as a national religion.

ISLAM IS ARAB IMPERIALISM

We began this book with the claim, “Islam is not a religion.” Instead, it is now what it always has been—a creed of domination. Remarkably, despite its bloody and brutal history of conquest, murder, and oppression, Islam still receives cover and protection from any number of apologists. Whether they are well-meaning or intentionally deceptive, such people whitewash past crimes and conceal present dangers through their actions. Any honest assessment of Islam, as this book has shown, can only conclude that it is at its core a unique Arab imperialism.

What makes Islam particularly successful as an imperialist ideology is that it dupes non-Arabs into doing its dirty and difficult work. At the same time, it erases or appropriates the history of the nations under its sway, replacing them with its own ideology and values far more thoroughly than European imperialism ever did. It is currently fashionable in the Muslim world and among Leftists to blame the world’s current ills on the West and its relatively brief period of colonial and imperial rule. But history shows quite clearly that the only imperialist dogma to survive through the ages down to today is Islam.

Islamic history itself begins with its ascent to power. The Islamic calendar begins in 622, the year when Muhammad the founder was appointed to wield communal power in Medina. Muhammad quickly consolidated this power base by killing or expelling the Jewish communities from the city and raiding the rich caravans of the pagan Meccans. By the time of his death in 632, the authority of Islam had been extended across the Arabian Peninsula.

The pattern Muhammad set in Medina was imperialist. It involved slaughter of opponents, appropriation of wealth, and replacement of existing cultures with Islamic culture. The non-Islamic Arab culture was violently and irrevocably replaced in favor of Muhammad’s teachings. Once Arabia was secure, the Arabs expanded this imperialist ideology beyond its borders. After them, non-Arab Muslims, most notably the Turks, would take up the mantle and do the same.

Among the first victims outside the Arabian Peninsula were the Persian Sassanid Empire and its Zoroastrian civilization and the ancient Christian cultures of the Middle East. In both cases, the Arab conquerors immediately went to work appropriating not only the wealth but the cultural accomplishments of the conquered. Persian clerks and administrators were utilized organizing the burgeoning empire. In Jerusalem, Caliph Abd al-Malik arranged for the construction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

The structure used Byzantine Christian designs and architects, but was then plastered over with anti-Christian propaganda. The imperialist appropriation of the city has been so thorough that today apologists will actually claim that Jerusalem is a sacred city for Islam. It was originally nothing of the kind: Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Qur’an and is only referenced in a later hadith, which may or may not be genuine.

The cultural appropriation of Islam extends to the religion of others. Rather than admit its textual and theological debts to Jewish and Christian scriptures, Muslims claim that these religions were originally forms of Islam but the texts were corrupted. Muhammad was sent to revise and correct these corruptions. Central religious figures of Judaism and Christianity such as Abraham and Jesus are retroactively defined by Islamic texts as good Muslim people.

This appropriation extends down to the modern era. Even today, Muslims claim that there were never Jews in Palestine. A university lecturer on Palestinian Authority television declared the Jewish Temple “fictitious,” adding “There is no remnant of it. It’s a myth.”16 It is even claimed that Arabs have been living in Jerusalem since 3000 BC. One lecturer at an Egyptian university explained to a television audience that the Biblical King Saul was a Muslim leader who achieved “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle.”17

Such claims would be laughable if they were not the pretext to what often follows them in the logic of Arab imperialism—genocide. Another Palestinian university professor, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiyah, makes the connection:

[Jews] do not have any moderates or any advocate of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed … It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them anywhere that you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them.18

Islamic imperatives are constantly used in the context of Palestine to seal Arab claims to the land. This is clear in the constant references to the Al-Aqsa mosque and in describing all of modern Israel as ribat, meaning sacred Islamic territory.19

The same mixture of rapacity supported by a religious blank check also lies behind the Arab imperialist invasion of the Indian subcontinent. Although this era is described extensively earlier in this book, a couple of points must be emphasized about the fundamental nature of Islamic Arab imperialism. First, in their invasions of India Muslims found justification for their violence and destruction from the Hadith, in which they read that “participants in the holy war against al-Hind [India] are promised to be saved from hell-fire.”20 In the eighth century, a jihad was proclaimed against India and Arab armies poured into the heartlands of Buddhist and Hindu civilization. In the immediate consequences we find three things which completely characterize the Islamic assault on Indian civilization which has been going on for 1,300 years: the destruction of non-Muslim places of worship, the looting of riches, and the mass enslavement of the local population.The story of the Arab empire is a story of stolen goods, armies, harems, and workforces filled with slaves. Its so-called religious dogma was enforced at the point of a sword and established through coercion and demographic spread. It is not the story of a religion. All religions have had their share of bad people and bad deeds to apologize for. But the attainment and exploitation of power has been the prime modus operandi for Islam from its beginnings, and it makes no apologies for it. From the Islamic perspective, it is their God-given right to steal, kill, and enslave the infidel.

Some might argue that this description of Islam as a system of Arab imperialism only applies to its first two centuries. While it is true that non-Arab peoples took up the mantle of Islam, in doing so they have abandoned their earlier cultures and identities. This is quite evident in Pakistan, whose people despise their Indian ancestry and past and long for nothing so much as the discovery of Arab ancestry in their family trees. Islam insists that its original language and culture are definitive for all its followers. A translation of the Qur’an from Arabic is no longer really the Qur’an. All over the Islamic world one finds people following Arab rules and customs, speaking Arabic, worshipping in Arabic, kneeling daily in the direction of the Arabian Peninsula, and saving their money to make the required pilgrimage to Mecca. At the same time, these people are taught that the heritage and traditions of their people before the arrival of Islam are evil and despicable. What else can one call this but imperialism?

Others argue that Islam is not necessarily an imperialist system and that the only danger it poses comes from extremists. This is the favored explanation of politicians who are guided by considerations of political correctness and short-term advantages. Tellingly, those who dare to criticize Islam are often silenced—sometimes by murder, sometimes by political or social ostracism. In the Netherlands, a man named Pim Fortuyn dared to publish a book in 1997, Against the Islamization of Our Culture. He attacked the influence of Islam upon the secular and tolerant foundations of Dutch society. His views had gained supporters, putting him on the verge of electoral success in 2002 when he was murdered by an assassin who claimed to be “protecting” Muslims. Two years later, a friend of Fortuyn’s named Theo van Gogh was butchered on the streets of Amsterdam by a Muslim. His crime was producing a film named Submission which exposed the misogyny rampant in Islam.

Muslims living in the West bring their imperialist views with them. Unlike most other immigrant groups, Muslims reject the societies which welcome and house them and instead claim sovereignty over the areas where they predominate. For example:

In Britain, imams have pressed the government to designate part of Bradford as being under Muslim law. In Belgium, Muslims in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek consider it to be under Islamic jurisdiction. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought similar control over parts of Copenhagen. In France, an official met with an imam at the edge of Roubaix’s Muslim district out of respect for his declaration that it was Islamic territory.21

Such claims come with the threats and the realities of violence. In 2004, bombs killed 191 passengers on Spanish trains. In 2005, 52 Londoners were killed by mass transit suicide bombers. Three of the four men involved in the London bombing were British-born and lived lives which were neither ignorant nor economically deprived. They were not driven to kill by oppression but by the claims of Islam. In 2005, the suburbs of Paris exploded in riots by Muslim immigrants, prompting months of handwringing from European liberals about how Europe had failed its Muslim immigrants. Yet the riots were set off by two young men who tried to hide from police in an electrical transformer station. When police were sent to get them out, local Muslims saw this as an invasion of “their” domain. As one journalist concluded, “these riots, in short, are early battles in a continent-wide turf war.”22

Ignorance of the threat posed by Islam could be forgiven if it were a new or unfamiliar phenomenon. But as author Gregory Davis has pointed out, it is all-too-familiar:

What is occurring in western Europe has occurred at other times in other places with calamitous results … all of the Muslim world today comprises territories in which other civilizations once flourished but which succumbed—sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually—to the genocidal effects of jihad and dhimmitude.23

The histories of Iran, North Africa, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia all provide ample evidence for Davis’s assertion. The suffix “-stan” which is applied to most of the Central Asian nations (like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan) is a Sanskrit word. These places were all formerly Buddhist and Hindu states, but their former culture was wiped out by Islam. In 2001, the Taliban blasted apart the Bamiyan Buddha statues—1,500 year old legacies of Afghanistan’s Buddhist past which were nearly 200 feet high. The statues were destroyed because the Taliban regarded them as idols forbidden by Islam.

Saudi Arabia is the face and the banker of Arab imperialism. Thanks to the Saudis and the other oil-rich Gulf states, funding continues to flow toward the spread of this ideology through the mosques and madrassas and Islamic charities and media outlets which promote it. Thanks to their funding, the terrorist groups around the world have the money they need to wage jihad.

The Afghan insurgency against the Soviets was backed to the tune of at least $4 billion from the Saudi government in addition to the considerable support by “charities” and individual members of the royal family.24 Along with Pakistan, the Saudi government was responsible for the funding and support which promoted the Taliban. Most of the Taliban’s leaders were educated in Saudi-funded madrassas. In India, a jihadist group known as Jamaat-i-Islami used Saudi money to wage jihad in Kashmir, killing hundreds. In Central Asia and Russia itself Saudi money built Wahhabi schools and mosques with the specific aim of radicalizing the local populations. The Saudi-led World Muslim League has declared the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan “Islamic Territories.” Another Saudi proxy, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, is known to have provided arms, supplies, funding, and fighters in the Balkan wars over Bosnia.25

The atrocities of 9/11 brought much of this activity to light, and the Saudis have since exerted tremendous effort and spent a great deal of money to achieve plausible deniability for their support of global jihad.26 Lawyers representing the victims of 9/11 managed to uncover “evidence of extensive financial support for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family,” and back in 2003, 28 pages of the Congressional report on 9/11 were classified—the secret section “is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers.”27

Despite this exposure, the situation has not significantly altered. In a leaked 2009 memo from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton it was revealed that Saudi Arabia is still the “most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Recipients of Saudi largesse include al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group responsible for the deadly series of massacres in Mumbai in 2008).28 Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood group committed to the annihilation of Israel, has also been a top recipient. In 2004, the Council on Foreign Relations suggested that “individuals in Saudi Arabia contributed approximately $5 million to Hamas each year, or approximately half its annual operating budget.”29 While Saudi support has waned a little in recent years, oil sheikhdom Qatar has gladly picked up the slack. The Qatari emir was the first foreign head-of-state to visit Hamas-controlled Gaza and even pledged $400 million in support of the jihadist enclave.30

While the connections between supposed American allies and terrorist groups around the globe may be clearer, we must recognize that the enemy we are facing does not consist of individual terrorists, groups, or even nations. These are only manifestations of the underlying problem. While defeating al-Qaeda or Hamas would be welcome, the enemy would remain. The enemy is 1400-year-old Arab imperialism, which is far more resilient than groups or parties or even nations. Its name is literal Islam.

THE TRUE CLASH: ISLAM VERSUS WORLD CIVILIZATIONS

The enormously influential work of scholar Samuel Huntington theorizes that the major world conflicts of the post-Cold War era will be driven by culture, which is in turn largely defined by religion. The fault lines of the future, Huntington believes, will not be national boundaries but wider civilizational differences. In one critical respect Huntington’s analysis is absolutely correct. There is a coming clash, not between civilizations, but between Islam and non-Islamic civilizations. The clash is already here.

Huntington’s basic idea is that “civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale.”31 He believes that intra-civilizational conflict is likely for several reasons, including fundamental differences in culture and religion, the pressures of modernism, and global resistance to modernizing changes. There is a basic split in his theory between “the West and the rest,” meaning the civilization of Europe and the United States and the various other civilizations of the world.32

Our primary objection to Huntington’s thesis is that we believe the fundamental issue is one of reconcilable and irreconcilable differences. Huntington does recognize this distinction, but his recognition is insufficient. We argue that the conflicts among non- Islamic civilizations can be reconciled or solved without violence. Just as Catholic and Protestant nations overcame their differences and no longer war with one another, the bloc of Orthodox Christian nations and Western Christianity can also be reconciled. Hindu civilization (India and Nepal) is willing to embrace Western values such as individualism, free speech, human rights, parliamentary democracy and so forth. Conflicts between China and its neighbors or between China and the West are also reconcilable because the key differences are essentially economic. Chinese culture does not require that China take over the world or that it convert everyone to Confucianism. The Chinese are not interested in destroying Hindu civilization, nor are the Hindus interested in destroying Chinese civilization. Any conflicts between them, and between almost any of the world’s civilizations, can be negotiated.

In the case of Islam, however, there are differences which are completely irreconcilable. Between Islam and the West, Islam and the Hindus, Islam and Africa, Islam and the Orthodox word, Islam and the Confucian world there are differences which cannot be negotiated or solved. Islam, as Huntington admits, demands universal conquest. All non- Islamic cultures must be made Islamic, without exception or reservation. As the Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri explains:

In Muslim legal theory, Islam and shirk (associating other gods with Allah) cannot exist together in this world; it is the duty of the imam as well as every believer not only to see that God’s word shall be supreme, but also that no infidel shall deny God or be ungrateful for His favors (ni’am). This world would ultimately be reserved for believers; as to unbelievers, “their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.”33

Only Islam mandates that its followers pursue a course of world political domination. Only Islam insists that church and state must be one, and that religious texts become the basis of political constitutions and all political law. Only Islam provides a dual ethics, with one standard for the treatment of fellow believers and another for non-believers. Only Islam allows crippling taxes on non-believers who live in its dominions and encourages its followers to destroy other religions’ houses of worship, use force against non-believers, or even use terror tactics for religious expansion. Only Islam regards its adherents as part of a de facto religious nation that transcends geographical or political boundaries. No other world religion shares these features. While some Westerners pretend that Muslims don’t “really believe” these things, as Huntington says: “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”34

Most importantly, it is not possible to adopt a “live and let live” posture with regard to Islam. The mere existence of non-Islamic people is an affront in Islam, and it is considered a duty to fight against such people. Fighting them is always justified—it is the supreme example of the good war to fight infidels.35 For most peoples of the world, the only choice offered is between Islam or jihad. The so-called People of the Book have a third option, where they may pay the jizya tax in exchange for being allowed to survive as second- class citizens. Conversion, oppression, or warfare: these are the only possible means of “reconciliation” Islam recognizes for non-Islamic peoples.36

Within the Islamic world, religion is a unifying feature such that we can speak of Islamic civilization as a bloc as Huntington does. Huntington himself makes a good case for it:

Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally arises as to whether this pattern of late twentieth century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one fifth of the world’s population, but … they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of other civilizations. The evidence is overwhelming.37

The evidence he marshals in support of this contention is impressive. He finds “three times as many intra-civilization conflicts involving Muslims as there were conflicts among all non-Muslim civilizations.” Within Islam itself there were more conflicts than within any other civilization, including tribal conflicts in Africa. There is a clearly established pattern of Islamic conflict with other civilizations as well as within itself. In short, he concludes, “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”38

Muslim societies are also comparatively highly militarized. In a 1980s study, James Payne found that the military force ratios (that is, the number of military personnel per 1000 population) of Muslim countries were on average double the size of those of Christian countries.39 Muslim societies also have a stronger propensity to resort to violence in international crises. Out of a total of 142 crisis situations between 1928 and 1979, Islamic nations chose war or violence in 76, far higher than for any other civilization.40

The evidence cited by Huntington establishes that there is no widespread inter- civilizational conflict, but a well-established pattern of conflict both within Islamic states and between Islamic states and other civilizations. The question is why. Huntington offers several reasons which agree substantially with the arguments put forward in this book:

First, the argument is made that Islam has from the start been a religion of the sword and that it glorifies military virtues. Islam originated among warring Bedouin nomadic tribes and this violent origin is stamped in the foundation of Islam. Muhammad himself is remembered as a hard fighter and a skilful [sic] military commander.41

The doctrines of Islam, as we have repeatedly shown, dictate war against unbelievers. History shows that when the expansion of Islam tapered off, the overwhelming tendency was for Muslim groups, contrary to their own doctrines, to war amongst themselves.

Another source of conflict mentioned by Huntington concerns the “indigestibility” of Muslims. While this is certainly a cause, we argue that indigestibility works both ways. Western nations are unable to assimilate their Islamic populations, and Islamic peoples are unwilling to be assimilated. There are far fewer problems getting Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians to live among one another than there are getting any of these groups to live among Muslims—and vice versa. Anti-Chinese riots are almost unheard of in Buddhist Thailand or Catholic Philippines. They have occurred several times in Muslim Indonesia and Muslim Malaysia.

What emerges most clearly from a look at the world is that there is indeed a fault line of conflict which has existed historically, exists at present, and threatens to erupt volcanically in the future. That is the fault line between Islam and the other world civilizations. Alone among the world civilizations, Islam is immune to reform and seeks to impose upon the whole of humanity the rule of a global Islamic caliphate administered according to the medieval code of sharia law.

The first battles in this conflict between Islam and non-Islamic civilizations are already being fought. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both part of this conflict, and they have failed. They failed because they were waged against individuals like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden or groups like the Taliban. The real enemy, literal Islam, was never identified or opposed.

The so-called Arab Spring opened up new fronts in this conflict. Formerly secular governments in Egypt and Tunisia have been replaced by Islamists. Although in Egypt the military regained control, the situation remains fluid and the Islamists are still strong. Other secular nations such as Libya and Syria have become battlegrounds.

The 21st century will be a century of conflict between Islam and the non-Islamic world. The 9/11 attacks and subsequent attacks in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and Chechnya, the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing demographic conquest of Europe, India, and America all point toward this conclusion. This will be a century of Universal Jihad, which the liberal democracies of the world cannot avoid. This fight pits freedom against fanaticism, reason against dogmatic faith. The self-governing spirit of the United States Constitution is the antithesis of the Qur’an, which can never be altered. The very existence of the Statue of Liberty is as offensive to Muslims as the Bamiyan Buddhas were in Afghanistan. We are in an existential struggle against Islamic Arab imperialism.