Book Review: Baran's 'The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular'. A fantasy novel.

In her book The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular Zeyno Baran,a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute tries her best to divide Islam into the 'Islamists' or radical Muslims and the 'Moderates' those who don't want violence or world domination in their supposed 'faith'. The problem with this approach is that there is only ONE Islam. Islam might not be entirely monolithic in its application in the real world. But the liturgical texts including the Koran; the sayings of Mohammed; and Islamic Law are certainly and mainly fundamentalist. You can't parse a political ideology which merges the state into a cult's church; submerges the individual into the communal; and which divides the world into 'us' versus 'them'. It is a totality, the basis of totalitarianism. Islam is a political project, and political theologies are usually very immoderate, especially when they are racist, supremacist, and desire to manage the entire globe.

The mythical moderate Muslim is like the ever elusive alien; the tricky Sasquatch; or the monstrous squid which hides deep in the ocean. Hard to locate, even harder to put your arms around. Baran's book is another lame attempt by an academic to tell us peasantry that Islam is actually divided into 2 sections: the pious, 'secular' Muslim and the Islamists or fanatics. Sorry I don't buy it. There is no such thing as a secular Islam, simply because Islam is a theology of totality, and submission. What in the word 'submission' is nuanced or complicated? What in the 1400 year history of jihad, blood, war, extermination, racism and lust to rule the globe is hard to comprehend? What in the illiterate, hateful, violent and racist tract called the Koran is hard to fathom? Communism was a totality. Nazism was a totality. There might well have been 'moderate' Germans in the 1930s and lovable Russian grandmother's in the 1950s, but so what. The ideology of their cults was the anti-thesis of moderation. And that is the important point.

Baran falls into the usual cultural Marxist trap, trying to surgically remove Muslims who might not fully embrace Jihad and world domination from the rest of the moon cult. Good luck with that procedure. In cultural Marxist terms, the codeword 'moderate', like all corruptions of language means the opposite of course. CAIR, the North American front for Islamic Jihad and Hamas is declared by pious observers of the multi-cult to be 'moderate', even though its mission is to establish a North American Muslim Caliphate. There is nothing moderate about CAIR or its officers. Likewise, Turkey, Iran, Morocco, Indonesia and other supposedly 'moderate' Muslim states, are engaged in immoderate policies which are supremacist, racist, violent, and deny natural law human rights. Every week one can read about the destruction of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, impious Muslims, or animists in these states. These are Islamic states who desire Islamic law which enforces ideals that are the opposite of Western Civilizational virtues. Nothing moderate about them. 'Moderate' Muslims, the ones who don't strap on bombs and blow up public places, or who are not found wearing turbans fighting NATO forces in Afcrapistan, apparently did dance in the streets throughout Europe and the US on 9-11, overjoyed at the bloody defeat of the Great Satan. There is little moderate about these or most other Muslims. The problem with Islam, is of course Islam.

Baran's ignores history, culture and Islamic theology. A pagan moon cult from Mecca, the Al-Allah cult, is not going to be a cult of rationality, science, good-will or the Golden Rule. The Meccan moon cult was and still is a death cult in existence now for some 5.000 years. Death not life is the focus of Islam. There is no Book of Matthew in the Koran, nor any hint of an ethical program. The world is divided into the inferior Kufar and the Muslims. The moon deity has declared that the Muslim Brotherhood or Umma will prevail. It is therefore okay to kill, enslave, torture, terrorize, lie to, or deceive all Kufars. The Koran says so. So do all of the Islamic texts of jurisprudence.

The goal of Islam is world domination. If you are a Muslim, you believe in the totalitarian constructs of the Koran and Islamic liturgical texts. The basis of these documents is Jihad and the spreading of Islam to encompass the planet, achieved through war. The ultimate goal of Muslims in Europe and North America is immoderate 12^th century pagan Arabian 'law' called Sharia. Sharia legal code is affirmed by all four principal schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence (madhahib): the Maliki, Hanafi, Hanbali and Shafi’i, to which the great majority of Muslims worldwide belong to, as well as of all the other schools (Ja’afari, Ismaili, Imami, Zaidi, Naqshbandi, Chishti, Qadiriyyah, etc). Sharia in other words, is the societal implementation of Islamic governance, achieved through Jihad.

These schools formulated laws regarding the importance of jihad and the ways in which it must be practiced, centuries ago. Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 996), a Maliki jurist, declared: “Jihad is a precept of Divine institution?.[Unbelievers] have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them.” Nothing moderate about Sharia or Jihad.

Likewise, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a Hanbali jurist who is a favorite of Osama bin Laden and other modern-day Jihadists, delcared: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” There is little moderation in such a declaration.

The Hanafi school sounds the same call to arms: “If the infidels, upon receiving the call [to Islam], neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax, it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them.” (Hidayah) The Shafi’i scholar Abu’l Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1058) agrees, saying that if unbelievers “refuse to accept [Islam] after this, war is waged against them?” All this is not merely of historical interest. A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law was certified in 1991 by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University [where the Black Jesus gave his execrable, groveling and insiped speech in June of 2009]; as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.” This manual, Umdat al-Salik (available in English as Reliance of the Traveler), after defining the “greater jihad” as “spiritual warfare against the lower self,” devotes eleven pages to the “lesser jihad.” It defines this jihad as “war against non-Muslims,” and spells out the nature of this warfare in quite specific terms: “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians… until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”

What is moderate in the above? There is no ethical code in the Koran. Read it. It is very clear. Muslims will rule, the rest will either be killed, enslaved, converted or managed as second class knaves by a Muslim elite. Baran's analysis is pathetically out of sync with reality. A 2007 survey by the University of Maryland and others, of the Muslim world revealed that 65% or more want Sharia law wherever they live. Sharia is immoderate. It is barbaric. It regresses human progress back to the neolithic period. What sane person would look at an ideology like Islam and try to parse the 'moderates' from the immoderates?  Were academics in 1938 dividing lovable secular Nazis from the immoderates, within the cult of Hitlerism ?  If they did they were moronic. 

The problem with Islam is Islam. The entire political theology needs a reformation. There is no chance that Muslims will do this themselves. It will be exogenous factors including war which will force Islam to change from an Orientalist barbarity into something more intelligent and faith-based.