The muezzin climbed the minaret for the call to prayer. He was getting too old for the job, he knew. His knees hurt, his back was sore, and by the time he reached the top, he was out of breath. But Allah needed him, and so did the thousands of faithful who heeded his call.
In fact most of the population of the city did not heed the call. At best they managed a prayerful nod in obedience of the law, but went about their business. The souk at the hour of the fourth call to prayer was a very busy place, and he nor his customers had no time for prayer rugs, prostration, and faith. Not that they were not good Muslims - they were in spirit, politics, and good intent, and that was what mattered.
Abdul al-Hassan considered himself devout, but committed the heresy of doubt. God had not provided well for his faithful. They were still poor, living on rutted, unpaved, undrained streets which flooded with trash and excrement in the first rains. They were producing children faster than barnyard animals, and scratched a living from dry, rocky fields or carrying donkey cart loads of coal or cracked tiles. When compared to Christian or Buddhist countries, life in his town was pitiful. Half the population was illiterate and the other half could barely scrawl their names.
It was no wonder that they clambered aboard country craft barely seaworthy enough to sail a mile or two offshore let alone make the crossing to Italy. The risk was worth the benefits - a welcome generous package of free food, clothing, and housing, and eventual permanent settlement in wealthy cities absent from want.
Abdul smiled thinking of the prophet Muhammed who with his Arab army made his way up the peninsula and across Africa, across the Mediterranean and into Spain. This new exodus was a replay of the Prophet's Hijra, albeit less militant, far less well organized, and with only a soft bed and hot couscous in mind rather than the heady notions of a world caliphate imagined by The Great One.
The city felt different after so many braved the waters of the Mediterranean for Europe. The souks were no longer crowded, the wares threadbare and few, the old merchants sitting in their stalls seemed content with a desultory sale or two while smoking their hookahs. Adventure and risk was for younger men, and God's heavenly kingdom was but a few years away.
This exodus not only left the markets empty and the back lanes peopled by households now led by old women, but a cadre of militants, hard core Islamists who were well armed, well trained, and infused with a missionary zeal. The vision of a universal Muslim caliphate was not idle fantasy but reality; and the Quran's verses urging Allah's faithful to kill the infidel were taken as gospel, a call to arms, duty, and one which promised eternal salvation.
The reason why God had neglected this town, this country and this region was because of a lack of faith, a moral desuetude, a reversion to secularism. The militantly faithful, the martyrs, the soldiers of Allah would not be poor, forgotten, and dismissed. They would be the avant-garde of a new Islamic age, crusaders not only to convert the heathen but to reform those fallen from the faith. The theocracy of Iran, so detested by the West was the only way to encourage and preserve an unflinching, complete obedience to God and to his law.
So this, thought Abdul, was what Islam boiled down to - starving immigrants fleeing in boatloads to the land of the infidel; a handful of old crones hanging out wash on Ghazzah Street, an incidental few in the souk selling what nobody wanted; and a fiercely committed, violent cadre of young men out to kill Jews, white men, and the world's apostates.
Compared to Israel let alone Europe, Asia, and North America, the Muslim world was a backward, ignorant, increasingly crazed and murderous place. Muslim populations everywhere were poorer, more illiterate, less educated, and more hopelessly insular than their European and Asian counterparts. These were untrue Muslims, ragged in faith and penurious in spirit. They were the reasons why jihad must occur. Apostasy and lack of faith were not only resident outside of Islam but within.
Some point to the Trucial States and Saudi Arabia as nations which have successfully combined faith and prosperity; but they are just as backward and medieval as he rest of the Muslim world. Sitting atop trillions of dollars of oil simply made these ignorant sheiks wealthy, not wise. They must give up their material wealth and international politics and accept the harsh, disciplined, correct, and only way to Paradise.
When Abdul went out to the desert to pitch his tent and admire God's great universe, he would always hear firing - the crackle of small arms fire, the staccato bursts of automatic rifles, the boom of artillery, and the roar of rockets. The training camps of Islamic jihadists were nearby, training after the US satellites passed overhead, and heading to underground warrens when they returned.
The town was increasingly filled with keffiyeh- and balaclava-wrapped militants in from the desert, riding fully armed in the back of pickup trucks, shooting rounds into the air, shouting Allahu Akbar scattering dogs and children from the mud and smoldering trash heaps along the way.
Abdul remembered the days when the town was simply a quietly reverential place. Yes, poor, uneducated, and ignorant; but peaceful, submissive to the will of Allah but without the angry militancy of today. Islam was truly a religion of peace. Now? The diametric opposite - a violent anger, a thirst for blood, anxious to cause mayhem, turmoil, and revolution in the countries of the infidel. Islam was as far from being a religion of peace as the earth from the sun.
'Kill, kill, kill', shouted a Freedom Fighter as he drove by. 'Kill the infidel, the apostate, and the Jew', he yelled firing his weapon at the flocks of pigeons startled by the caravan jolting through the streets
Perhaps there was some sense to all of this, thought Abdul. We have nothing left. Our faithful ways have left us nothing but these rutted streets, cracked walls, infested rice, and oil lamps. Allah has not forsaken us but inspired us to action. Holy War, jihad, is his way of encouraging a quiescent people to action. The path to paradise must be filled with corpses and rivers of blood (Sura 32:12-17), and the time for the march is now!
He felt his gorge rising, his blood heating, his brain feverish - it all made sense after all. Consignment to a faithful, dutiful poverty was not the way forward, not in Allah's plan, not the reason that the Angel Gabriel gave The Prophet the Holy Book and told him to go forward and conquer.
Islam is not a peaceful religion and never was. 'Kill the Infidels wherever you find them' has been at the core of the religion, the heart of the Quran, the ethos of faith, and the be-all and end-all of crusade to establish a holy Islamic caliphate.
The Quran is filled with exhortations to commit violence, to eradicate apostasy, to make the world unified in the heroic, divine passage to an Islamic world.
"As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help."
"Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority".
"Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward."
"Those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord... So, when you meet (fighting Jihad in Allah's Cause), those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives)... "
Whether the violence is undertaken in the spirit of divine inspiration and purpose, or whether it is a means to the end of a more fair, just, and satisfying secular life on earth, it is still violence. The cry of the muezzin is a call to arms, five times a day urging the obedient to do the will of Allah, to go forth and raze the earth until nothing of the apostatic infidelity of nonbelievers remains. Muhammed is the last prophet, and Islam is the last religion, the one which will rule all until the Day of Judgement.
'Praise be to Allah', Abdul said as he walked into the tent of Abu Said el-Zarqawi leader of the most powerful militia in the country, an organization which had grown a hundred fold since its inception. It commanded respect, money, and absolute allegiance; and in return it would do God's plan to eliminate the Jews from the face of the earth and to pave the way to hope and glory in the coming days of universal Muslim rule.
The pact was one of blood, a compact of victory or death, but one which Abdul readily accepted. He bowed his head as he was anointed with the bloody sword of Zarqawi, knighted in the Army Of Allah, soldier of divine fortune, courageous crusader and emissary of holy order.
Liberal critics still insist that Islam is a religion of peace and amateur Margaret Mead anthropologists go hunting for clues to its message of good will. During Ramadan Muslims make the rounds of the homes of the disabled, elderly and infirm, bring them tea and sweets. Is this not an expression of Muslim love and compassion? The five daily prayers are all about consideration, hope, well-being, and spiritual enlightenment. The daily life of ordinary Muslims is all about respect, charity, and good works.
Yet behind it all, behind the faith of the most moderate Muslim, is the Quranic injunction to propagate, expand, insist, and make the world ready to accept the one true god and his last prophet. These quietly faithful want the extermination of Israel, the defeat of Christianity, and the establishment of a uniformly pious, obedient, and faithful society.
Abdul trained with the Zarqawi militias in the desert - firing ranges and prayer, thanks be to God and prayers for the defeat of the infidel, the cleansing of the earth of the Jew, and the way made clear for the forces of righteousness. He not only learned the martial arts but lost any doubts about the true religion and its inevitable world rule. He became a terrorist's terrorist, willing to die for Allah, give his life for the one true religion.
Unsubstantiated reports had him in Syria, Iran, eastern Turkey, the Maghreb, and the Sahel; but he had completely lost any individual identity and was but a soldier in the service of Allah, one of many in jihad.
A peaceful religion? Far from it, whistlin' Dixie, blowing in the wind, as airy fairy and baseless as a rumor, a childish aspiration, a dream. Islam is a brutal, aggressive, bloody and resolute force with little to do with salvation, redemption, or the eyes of God. 'Allahu Akbar!' shouted Abdul from a rocky outcropping in the western Sahara as he and his comrades were about to descend upon a convoy of government troops on mission to find and destroy them.
One by one the armored personnel carriers, trucks and tanks were blown up by rockets launched from above by Abdul and his crew. When the convoy had been completely destroyed and Abdul and his crew picked through the ruins, the corpses, and the cargo, he took a moment to pray. 'God is Good', he said over and over again, inestimably thankful.
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