
Amil Imani
An Appeal to Cultural Muslims
March 12, 2009
There are some 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the overwhelming
majority of which are Cultural Muslims who are generally called moderate
Muslims. Muslims are born into Islam, where a great many never go
through the process of deciding for themselves if they want to be
Muslims. It is not a religion that they choose, it is a belief they
inherit. For whatever reason, this great majority of Cultural Muslims
are Muslims of sort without fully toeing the line of Islam. The real
Muslims are the jihadists, a small minority who lives and dies by the
dictates of the Quran and the Sunna, the life examples of Muhammad.
The free world, rightfully alarmed by ever-varied and escalating
assaults of the jihadists, myopically has directed its tentative and
haphazard effort at countering them, believing that by so doing it can
eliminate their threat and at the same time remain on good terms of
live-and-let-live multiculturalism with the Cultural Muslims. This is a
dangerous assumption that, if not abandoned, will likely culminate in an
Armageddon-kind of conflagration.
There is virtually no chance of reasoning with the brain-dead jihadists
whose eyes are fixed on the promised lush paradise of Allah. It isn’t
that they love death, just for the sake of death itself as Muslim
leaders such as Hasan Nasrullah, the head of Lebanon’s Hizbollah
proclaimed. They love death and happily embrace it because of what
they have been brainwashed to believe is awaiting them as a reward.
Death in carrying out the work of Islam earns them entry into Allah’s
eternal sensuous male paradise, so they believe. It is in keeping with
propagating this fraud of afterlife paradise that portraits and names of
Muslim killers, glorified as martyrs, festoon the length and breadth of
Muslim cradles of Islamism such as Iran and Palestine. To the wild-eyed
robot jihadist even a day on this "heap of dirt” earth is simply another
day of unbearable delay from winging to the lasting abode of lust. Why
else would tens of thousands of Iranian Shi’a fools, for instance, sign
up to be martyred?
For as long as there are millions of fanatical fools, the Islamic
handlers will have an endless supply of foot-soldiers to spread and
impose the savage doctrine of Islam and its Sharia on the people of the
world. Just this week, for instance, under the Sharia law, a
Saudi Arabian court sentenced a 75-year old widow to prison and
lashes for having "mingled” with two men who were not related to her.
The two men reportedly brought the woman some bread. This is the kind of
Sharia law that awaits us all down the road if we fail to reach out to
the Cultural Muslims and help them leave the real Islam altogether,
since they are already partly there.
But is the real Islam indeed a peaceful religion? Are people such as
Geert Wilders,
Robert Spencer, and
Dr. Ali Sina Islam bashers? Is the real Islam completely innocent of
all the charges liberty-honoring civilized people level against it? Read
what
Hamid Hafez, a former jihadist himself, has to say about Islam.
Tragically, over the years, media pundits, leftist academics, and
politicians have constructed a formidable alliance that successfully
keeps both the Cultural Muslims as well as the non-Muslim general public
in a slumber of complacency.
All along, the campaign of the jihadists has been moving forward. On the
one hand are the well-financed Islamists with their hordes of simpletons
who are ready to die for the cause. The horrific acts of these villains
are daily occurrences in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and
Pakistan. On the other hand are the people of the free world who are
lulled into the complacency they seek and lack the will to confront the
deadly danger of Islamism.
The Cultural Muslims hold the balance of power in their hands. They are
not active jihadists. Yet, they knowingly or unknowingly, constitute the
most vital support for the Islamists. It is this majority that projects
an image of normalcy and even tolerance of others while supplying funds
as well as foot-soldiers to the work of the Islamists.
Islamic apologists often point to Muslim communities in non-Muslim lands
as peaceful religious communities like any other and deny that these
Muslims pose any threat to the way of life of the free people. Yet, the
facts convincingly argue against this fraudulent contention because,
when the jihadists gather enough local strength, the Cultural Muslims
like docile sheep will submit to the rule of their co-religionist
killers. This is not a hypothetical prognostication. The capitulation of
the Cultural Muslims has already played out in many parts of
European towns and cities.
It is worth repeating that as Islamists wage their war under the banner
of Islam, they receive immense direct and indirect support from the
rank-and-file of Cultural Muslims. Their support is the life-blood that
keeps the Islamists alive.
Dear Cultural Muslim, this is the 21st century. The vast planet earth of
the time of Muhammad has shrunk into a global village. The greatly
diverse and disparate peoples of the world are now neighbors in the same
village. This new tribe of the global village is facing immense
challenges and opportunities. The resources and the talents of the
various clans can no longer be squandered on internecine fighting. You,
the Cultural Muslim are indeed the critical force that can prevent the
blaze of Islamism from engulfing the world by completely severing your
connection with a religion that has decayed into nothing more than a
cult of death.
In the 21st century, every member of every clan of the global
village, irrespective of gender, race, or any other consideration, is
entitled to full citizenship that bestows privileges and demands
responsibilities. Radical Islam claims to be the true Islam and strives
to force humanity into submission to a system of beliefs and practices
of Sharia which are anathema to freedom. Even Muslims who do not agree
with the extremist Islam are intimidated, pressured into silence, and
even condemned to death by the fanatics.
It is wishful thinking on the part of the non-Muslims to believe that
one can be a Muslim moderate, given that Islam is radical at its very
core. To be a moderate Muslim demands that the person explicitly
renounce much of the violent, exclusionary, and radical teachings of the
Quran. By so doing, the individual issues his own death warrant in
Islamic countries, is condemned as apostate if he lives in a non-Islamic
land, and may even earn a Fatwa on his head. Yet, if the masses of the
Cultural Muslims, in ones, twos, and droves leave Islam, the Islamists
will be eviscerated since the Cultural Muslims are indeed their
life-blood.
It is deadly, in any confrontation, to assess the adversary through
one’s own mental template, because the two templates can be vastly
different from each other. People in the West are accustomed in
relativistic rather than absolutistic thinking. To Westerners, just
about all matters range from black to white with an array of gray shades
between the two poles. To the real Muslims, the Islamists, by contrast,
nearly everything is in black and white and with virtually no shades of
gray. The former type of thinking is typical of more mature minds, while
the latter is that of young children and the less enlightened.
This absolutist thinking is enshrined in the Quran itself. When the
starting point for a Muslim is the explicit fanatical words of Allah in
the Quran, then the faithful are left with no choice other than
literally obeying its dictates or even taking it to the next level of
fanaticism. Good Muslims, for instance, do not shake hands with women,
even though the Quran does not explicitly forbid it. Although the Quran
stipulates that men are rulers over women, good Muslim men take it upon
themselves to rule women not much better than they treat their
domesticated animals.
It is not uncommon to observe Muslims, anywhere in the world, who are
indeed exemplary in many ways. They are kind, generous and much more.
These are the Cultural Muslims who are, in effect, only part Muslim.
They do not live by the full text of the Quran and elect to live as
decent civilized human beings. But in Islam, one cannot be a
pick-and-choose Muslim when the real Muslims take over. Clear instances
of the rule of real Islam are seen in places such as Saudi Arabia, Iran,
parts of Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia.
Dear Cultural Muslim, while you remain silent out of fear, lack of
organization, or apathy, the Islamists work around the clock and around
the world to further their agenda. Hardly a week passes without a Grand
Mufti or an Ayatollah issuing pronouncements in support of radical
Islam. The rank-and-file Islamist clergy, for their part, transmit these
Fatwas and edicts to their flocks in mosques and hammer them into the
minds of impressionable children in madresehs. Through this grass-roots
process, radical Islam is recruiting greater and greater numbers of
adherents. On the one hand, the Islamists engage in acts of violence to
disrupt the functioning of societies, while on the other they cleverly
exploit the freedom they enjoy in non-Islamic lands to subvert them from
within.
Dear Cultural Muslim, you belong to free people. You cannot have it both
ways. You can’t enjoy the fruits of liberty and at the same time hedge
your bet that by being somewhat of a Muslim you are staying in the good
graces of Allah. Allah is very non-forgiving of even the least
disobedience, Muhammad preaches. You need to make a clean break with
Islam and be an upright decent human being because it is the best reward
that one can have. No one really knows about the confabulated Allah’s
paradise. Don’t help the Islamists in their effort to make hell out of
this world hoping to find admittance into Allah’s purported paradise.
Dear Cultural Muslim, Moderate Muslim, or any other kind of Muslim who
is not a jihadist, please courageously do what is right: Abandon Islam
altogether and enlist in the ranks of the free where all members of the
human tribe can live in peace and harmony.
Dear Cultural Muslim, I am appealing to you. You hold the key. You hold
the balance of power. Please withdraw from Islam completely, as
countless numbers already have, and lend your invaluable support to the
free people of the world who are eager to embrace you with open arms.