Woke Western governments and Islamic regimes may seem like oil and water, but if there’s one thing they agree on it’s that the Sharia law standard forbidding criticism of Islam should be enforced. Ergo, hate-speech laws in the West — and the plight that befell an octogenarian scholar in the Mideast.
As Jihad Watch reported:
An 80-year-old Egyptian Islamic reformist scholar was jailed for telling the truth that Islam was spread by conquest, as obvious as truth is. Ahmed Abdo Maher was being “Islamophobic” in the view of those who judged his case. They found him guilty of “contempt of Islam,” which in the view of Islamic supremacists everywhere is really what “Islamophobia” is. Closer to our neck of the woods, the Toronto District School Board defined “Islamophobia” to be “fear, prejudice, hatred or dislike directed against Islam or Muslims, or towards Islamic politics or culture.” This restrictive definition was supported by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (formerly CAIR-CAN).
“One of Maher’s chief ‘crimes’ is his view on the seventh- and eighth-century Arab conquests — a view based on a close and correct reading of both Muslim and non-Muslim sources: that Arabs conquerors invaded non-Muslim regions — specifically the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain — and engaged in atrocity after atrocity; that, while ‘spreading Islam’ was the motive Islamic later historiography attributed to the Arabs, their true actions belied a lust for rape and rapine; and that they overthrew and supplanted much more advanced societies, to the region’s lasting regret,” wrote author and Islamic history expert Raymond Ibrahim, providing more detail on Thursday.
As The New Arab had put it in a November report, “Maher claimed in many of his speeches, writings, and TV appearances, that the early Islamic conquests were ‘military invasions’, and called on Egypt’s top Islamic institution — Al-Azhar — to apologise on behalf of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions who led the raids.”
This claim is, however, the most controversial of things: the Truth.
And for expressing it, Maher has been sentence to five years in prison, with hard labor, according to this website. (Note: Other sources don’t mention hard labor as part of the punishment.)
The scholar’s sentence is final and cannot be appealed before a higher court, Ibrahim tells us. His only hope is what he has asked for: a pardon from Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. But given that there’s no political upside to contradicting Egypt’s Islamic powers-that-be, this probably isn’t likely.
The Truth is controversial in many cases. For while it can set you free, it also “hurts,” as is said, because it shatters emotionally appealing lies. Yet in Islamic history’s case, it’s also quite clear. As Thomas F. Madden, professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, wrote in his essay “The Real History of the Crusades”:
While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War…. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece.
It was this expansionism that sparked the Crusades, those military campaigns designed to stave off Muslim aggression that have been so misrepresented by revisionist, Islamic-apologist Western historians. I examined this in-depth in my 2010 essay “The Crusades: When Christendom Pushed Back.”
But according to the Islamic apologists, there never was any aggression to defend against. As Ibrahim also informs:
Maher’s position naturally goes counter to the mainstream Islamic presentation of the early Arab conquests, which are referred to as futuhat — literally, “openings” for the light of Islam to enter (or fatah in the singular, as the Palestinian group tellingly calls itself). In this context, every land ever invaded or seized by Muslims was done “altruistically” to bring Islam to wayward infidels, who are seen as the aggressors for unjustly resisting Islam. Or, in the words of an article titled “The Wisdom of Jihad,” published by Islam Question and Answer, jihad does not “only and simply mean to kill non-Muslims”; rather, “[t]he kuffaar [non-Muslims] whom we fight will themselves benefit from jihad. We strive against them and fight them so that they will enter the religion of Allah which is acceptable to Him, which will lead to their salvation in this world and in the Hereafter.”
So don’t expect a change of heart, as the jihadists in question proceed with the approval of their own consciences. They’re doing you a favor, you see.
So many observers, such as Ibrahim, will say this historical violence is entirely explainable. It’s inherent in the Islamic canon, they aver, the Koran, the Hadiths, and the Síra. And this would explain a very interesting German study involving 45,000 young people. Released in 2010, it found that while increasing religiosity made Christian youth less violent, it made Muslim youth more violent.
As for the West, our spiritual/philosophical affliction is different. We’re awash in moral relativism and, consequently, too often fall victim to its corollary: religious relativism. So despite different faiths espousing often very different “values,” many Westerners nonetheless assume that all religions are morally equal.
Yet this is as if we fell prey to a dietary relativist fancy holding that all foods were equally healthful: We not only wouldn’t distinguish between life-enhancing fare and the junk variety, but also wouldn’t be on guard against poison — especially when it takes an appealing form, such as that of beautiful red berries on a bush.
The lesson here is not only that Truth exists, but that there is only Truth — and what we must be on guard against: everything else.
