• In Re: Marriage of Malak, California, 1986: A Muslim couple from Lebanon moved to the United Arab Emirates. A few years later, the wife left for America with their two children and eventually filed for divorce and sole custody in California. A sharia court in Lebanon, however, gave custody to the husband, and he asked the California court to enforce this decision. The lower court refused, but on appeal, custody was granted to the husband in Lebanon when the “California appellate court appeared to defer” to the sharia court. This shows that the appeals process cannot always be relied upon.
Perhaps most troubling, in February 2015, the city of Irving, Texas, which is where my studios are located, found itself in the center of a national controversy. The North Texas Islamic Tribunal had established itself as a sharia court in Irving.
I sat down with two of the tribunal’s three judges, and while they claimed their authority was limited, they offered some troubling views. One of the judges even praised harsh sharia punishments like cutting off the hands of thieves, “because if he feels my hands were cut because of that, he will think about this 100 times. He will never do it.”
The Irving City Council responded by passing a resolution officially recognizing the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land. And yet it passed by only a 5–4 vote. Why? Seemingly because four of the City Council members were more afraid of appearing politically incorrect than they were committed to preserving the integrity of America’s laws.
These council members would be wise to study Great Britain, which, by one estimate, had more than eighty sharia courts in 2009. Most of these deal with marriage and family issues, with many of the cases brought by women. A 2013 BBC investigation found that “Islamic rulings given here are not always in the interests of the women concerned, and can run counter to British law.” They cited examples of British sharia courts ordering women to go back to abusive marriages or to give up custody of their children to violent spouses.
Back in the United States, the sharia judges in Texas told local media that they’ve received calls from all over the country from other Muslim leaders looking to set up their own courts. Irving’s mayor, Beth Van Duyne, sees where all of this is likely headed. “Our nation cannot be so overly sensitive in defending other cultures that we stop protecting our own,” she said.
Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what’s happening. Being labeled a conspiracy theorist or an Islamophobe is so scary to most people that they won’t even raise their hand to affirm that yes, our Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
Political correctness is beating common sense. Once the floodgates open—once a viable system of sharia courts is allowed to operate and coexist with U.S. law—there will be no going back. At that point they won’t say we are “conspiracy theorists” anymore; they’ll just say we were right.
LIE #6
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“THE CALIPHATE IS A FANCIFUL DREAM.”
“When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists the connections between Caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.”
—Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard, February 2011
“Our strategy is shaped by a deeper understanding of al-Qaida’s goals, strategy and tactics that we have gained over the last decade. I’m not talking about al-Qaida’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate. That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counter-terrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen.”
—John Brennan, director of Central Intelligence, June 2011
“No, I don’t believe that at all.”
—White House spokesman Josh Earnest, when asked, “Do you believe that ISIS has established something of a caliphate?”
Grandiose.” “Absurd.” “A feckless delusion.” “Never going to happen.”
That’s what John Brennan, a longtime counterterrorism advisor to the Obama and Bush administrations and current director of the CIA, had to say about the idea that a Caliphate might be pitching its tent in some hellhole on the other side of the planet.
Bill Kristol, neocon scribe and architect of Alan Keyes’s feckless campaign for the Senate, attacked me a few years back for daring to suggest that Islamist radicals had ambitions to create a Caliphate.
Now, in 2015, an estimated six million people in Syria and Iraq find themselves living under what U.S. News & World Report, as well as other outlets, has termed the militants’ “caliphate.”
So, what exactly is a caliphate?
As discussed in chapter 3, the term has been used to describe Islamic empires since the seventh century A.D. When the prophet Muhammad died in 632, his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, was appointed the first “caliph,” or “successor,” to rule over the followers and territory that Muhammad had amassed. Throughout many different rulers and succession disputes, the original Caliphate’s borders expanded and contracted over time until 1258, when its last capital, Baghdad, fell to Mongol invaders. Shortly thereafter, the Ottoman Turks established a new caliphate based in Constantinople, before it disintegrated in the wake of the empire’s defeat in World War I.
Hope for restoring the Caliphate was rekindled in 1928, when Hassan al-Banna started the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. According to terrorism researcher Stephen Coughlin, al-Banna viewed the end of the Caliphate as “a calamity that highlighted how far the Islamic world had strayed from the true message and governing system of Islam.” Al-Banna was not shy about announcing his group’s goal. “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated,” the godfather of modern Islamist terrorist groups said, “to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
ISIS realized this vision on June 28, 2014, by formally establishing a Caliphate—almost three years to the day after CIA director Brennan’s assurances that it would never happen. In their official statement that day, ISIS announced that they had “gained the essentials necessary for khilīfah [caliphate], which the Muslims are sinful for if they do not try to establish.”
Muslims around the world faced damnation if they did not fulfill their religious duty to support the new state, according to ISIS. They elevated their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to the position of “imam and khalīfah [caliph] for the Muslims everywhere.” He was now to be called “Caliph Ibrahim.”
The captain of the “JV” squad apparently woke up one morning and dubbed himself leader of the Islamic world.
Anyone surprised by this (and there are plenty) has simply not been paying attention. In 2005, members of the Bush administration and military leaders told us about terrorists’ dreams for a Caliphate. “They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the seventh-century caliphate,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned, “governed by Sharia law, the most rigid interpretation of the Koran.”
Similarly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned that “Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East, and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia.”
And then there was this from General John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East: “They will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world. Just as we had the opportunity to learn what the Nazis were going to do, from Hitler’s world in ‘Mein Kampf,’ we need to learn what these people intend to do from their own words.”
But the mainstream media would have none of it. The New York Times, among others on the left, took great umbrage at the idea of a Caliphate. In 2005, the Times wrote that “a number of scholars and former government officials take strong issue with the administration’s warning about a new caliphate, and compare it to the fear of communism spread during the Cold War. They say that although Al Qaeda’s statements do indeed describe a caliphate as a goal, the administration is exaggerating the magnitude of the threat.”
br /> The Times also quoted Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, who assured readers, “There’s no chance in the world that they’ll succeed. It’s a silly threat.”
Yet here we are.
Each week, the Islamic State’s Caliphate controls an area larger than Great Britain. With nearly every passing day, it absorbs more cities and villages in Iraq and Syria. To date, this desert heartland of the Caliphate puts the Islamic State in control of more than six million people.
The Caliphate continues to expand into oil-rich areas, which provide millions of dollars in funding for increased terrorist activity and expansion. And unlike most pure terrorist organizations, ISIS governs the territory it captures, providing water, roads, and a justice system operated under sharia law. From Libya to Egypt to Yemen and Nigeria it has far-flung cells operating in more than a dozen countries with outposts where it governs pockets of territory.
The term caliphate has deep meaning and cultural resonance for Muslims around the world. While it’s true that the vast majority of them do not recognize the legitimacy of the Caliphate established by the Islamic State, it has attracted a steady stream of recruits and other means of support as the fulfillment of a political vision that was erased from the face of the earth for ninety years. The new Caliphate is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as Islamist radicals flock to join a weak but Allah-ordained political entity destined to spread to the corners of the earth. Osama bin Laden once said, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” As the Caliphate expands and the West does nothing to stand in its way, it’s pretty clear that hundreds of thousands of Muslim youths see the strong horse and want to be part of the winning team.
It’s also important to remember why the Caliphate is so important in the first place: it’s a necessary step to bring about the return of the Mahdi, the final successor to Muhammad before the Day of Judgment. Islamists do not just want money, power, or land. All of these things are necessary, but they are a means to an end.
That end is nothing less than the End Times themselves.
We know that extremists have had a very specific plan to achieve this goal in place for years. As chapter 4 describes, Zawahiri, al-Qaeda, and its ISIS allies have a detailed seven-stage vision, which was published in 2005. Their strategy anticipated a U.S. response to 9/11 that would draw America into war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and successfully predicted the so-called Arab Spring, when secular governments would topple, and the creation of an Islamic Caliphate sometime between 2013 and 2016—years before they actually occurred.
Phase 7, to be completed by 2020, is when “one-and-a-half billion Muslims” join the Caliphate, ensuring its “definitive victory.” Given their track record so far (the predicted Caliphate arrived right on time), we have every reason to take them seriously.
The Islamic State has been ground zero for some of the worst crimes against humanity in modern times. Sexual slavery, mass executions, and beheadings are broadcast around the world. They use the Quran and sharia to justify their actions, and to govern the territory they control under their self-declared “Caliphate.” They do not kill and conquer in their own name, but in the name of Allah. The question of whether any of this is “legitimate” in the eyes of other Muslims is irrelevant. The Islamic State does not need or care about recognition as a true Caliphate from anyone else. It will continue to act like one and grow as one until, according to their plan, they have more than a billion Muslims under their control and the rest of the world is powerless to stop them.
LIE #7
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“ISLAM IS TOLERANT TOWARD NON-MUSLIMS.”
“Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated, through words and deeds, the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. . . . Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance.”
—President Barack Obama in Cairo, 2009
“If Islam’s sole interest is the welfare of mankind, then Islam is the strongest advocate of human rights anywhere on Earth.”
—Hip-hop artist and actor Mos Def
“Never in its history did Islam compel a single human being to change his faith.”
—Muslim Brotherhood theorist Said Qutb
You’re probably familiar with that purple “COEXIST” bumper sticker—the one where the C is an Islamic crescent, symbolizing the unshakable Muslim commitment to peace and interfaith dialogue. It’s a familiar refrain, one heard over and over again from Islamists and their apologists alike: Islam’s history is one of cooperation and peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims.
Like so much of the material in the Quran and Islamic law, teachings on how to treat Christians, Jews, and other unbelievers often appear murky and contradictory. But, as discussed earlier, these teachings become painfully clear if you know where to look, and know which later Medinan passages replace the earlier, more peaceful Meccan ones. The abrogative structure—meaning that verses in the Quran from an earlier time period are superseded as doctrine by verses revealed by Muhammad at a later time—makes Allah’s true message easy to spot: all non-Muslims must be “subdued.”
Like many of the more brutal elements of Islam, the persecution of non-Muslims at the hands of Islamist fanatics has seen a resurgence as the global jihad movement has gained strength. Barbarism toward and murder of nonbelievers became the law of the land in the Islamic State Caliphate after it announced that Christians were legitimate targets for death. Dabiq, the Islamic State’s official propaganda magazine, has listed “the Jews, the Christians, the Rafida [Shia] and the proponents of democracy” as its main enemies deserving of jihad.
Many Muslims are, of course, tolerant and pluralistic people, proud citizens of the twenty-first century who realize that medieval-style religious persecution has no place in the world today. But the fact remains that the Quran and Islamic law contain ample justification for subjugating non-Muslims to Muslim power. Our enemies acknowledge this justification openly—we ignore it at our own peril.
It should be apparent to anyone reading this book that the Quran itself often works against those who present a benevolent, tolerant image of Islam. In this case, however, the Quran seems to have given them evidence to back up their views. It is found in Sura 2:
There is no compulsion in religion. Verily, the Right Path has become distinct from the wrong path. (Quran 2:256)
This seems nice and pluralistic. The very first phrase, “There is no compulsion in religion,” is seized upon by some as proof that Islam, by nature, is peaceful and content to leave other religions alone. Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, even includes the verse in his list of the “Top Ten Ways Islamic Law forbids Terrorism.” According to Cole’s analysis, “Islam’s holy book forbids coercing people into adopting any religion. They have to willingly choose it.”
That would seem to tie up the issue nicely, and reduce concerns about Islamic treatment of nonbelievers to mere “alarmism.” But digging further into the Quran brings to light some contradictory messages.
Let’s go back to Cole, who also claims that verse 2:256 “was never abrogated by any other verse of the Quran,” meaning it would be established as the ironclad word of Allah on the topic. But Cole’s case is not exactly ironclad itself. In fact, Stephen Coughlin, one of the top Defense Department experts on Islamic law until his politically motivated dismissal, uses verse 2:256 as a classic case study for the concept of abrogation.
Coughlin points out that the pluralistic message of verse 2:256 is actually abrogated in the very next chapter, Sura 3, by the following verse:
And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers. (Quran 3:85)
There may be no “compulsion,” but there is no “acceptance,” either. Coughlin goes on to argue that the final abrogation of the seemingly benign verse 2:256 is found in Sura 5:
O you who believe! Take not the Jews
and the Christians as Auliya’ (friends, protectors, helpers, etc.), they are but Auliya’ to one another. And if any amongst you takes them as Auliya’, then surely he is one of them. Verily, Allah guides not those people who are the Zalimun (polytheists and wrong-doers and unjust). (Quran 5:51)
According to Coughlin’s analysis, “Surah 2 is abrogated by Surah 3, and Surah 3 facilitates Surah 5.” Because Sura 5 “reflects a divine command from Allah,” it becomes “the end-state understanding of how an informed Muslim is to regard Christians and Jews.”
Other Quranic verses seem to contribute to the idea that Sura 2 is not the final word on the matter. In one particularly biting verse, those who suffer Allah’s wrath—as unbelievers do—are referred to as “apes and swine”:
Shall I inform you of something worse than that, regarding the recompense from Allah: those (Jews) who incurred the Curse of Allah and His Wrath, those of whom (some) He transformed into monkeys and swines, those who worshipped Taghut (false deities); such are worse in rank (on the Day of Resurrection in the Hell-fire), and far more astray from the Right Path (in the life of this world). (Quran 5:60)
The verse that precedes this one makes it clear that this warning is being addressed to the “People of the Scripture” or “People of the Book,” a common Quranic expression for Jews and Christians (“O people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians)! Do you criticize us for no other reason than that we believe in Allah, and in (the revelation) which has been sent down to us and in that which has been sent down before (us), and that most of you are Fasiqun [rebellious and disobedient (to Allah)]?”)