Fatma Yilmaz was a polite, God-fearing, devout and considerate Muslim who fasted, prayed, and read the Quran. She visited the elderly, sick and shut-ins during Ramadan, observed all the Muslim holidays in a generous spirit of family and community, and hoped that Allah would smile upon her faith and good works.
She was critical of selective readings of the Quran, those Suras that urge death to the infidel, speak of the hateful, insidious and genocidal nature of the Jews, demand an unquestioning faith in the will of Allah, and foresee an ultimate world Islamic caliphate realized through the force of arms.
'Nothing of the sort', she insisted. These verses have only to do with Islamic solidarity, unified faith in Allah and the hope for a spiritual Utopia and the rest of the Quran reflects the central ethos of Islam, that it is a religion of peace.
'Islam is a gutter religion' said social critic Christopher Harkins in a speech to the Athanasius Society, 'a theocratic bulldozing Genghis Khan juggernaut masquerading as faith. A nonsensical, hysterical, absurd quackery with the gall to claim divine inspiration. The sooner the world is relieved of this insensate crock, the better'.
Easier said than done, of course, since Islam continues to attract adherents - 'marginalized cultural derelicts in the sinkholes of the Third World' who, desperate for some mantle of respectability and social promise, have taken to 'the world's religious freak show'.
When Israel countered the Hamas terrorist attacks on Jerusalem, Fatma demurred, insisting on the divine right of Islamic destiny, the necessary elimination of the Jews, and the expansion of Islamic rule throughout the Middle East and the world
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The expansionist, hegemonistic, aggressive move to spread Islam by any means possible and to create a world sanctioned by Allah with no dissenters was inspired, ineluctable, and certain.
Most of the Islamic world is illiterate, uneducated, and dying of preventable disease. It is a failed culture, said Harkins, a humiliating example of ignorant, bullheaded, reflexive faith.
Fatma was vehement in her objection. Islam was a civilizing force, spreading the world of Allah and the divine principles of the faith worldwide. ISIS, al-Shabab, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis were not terrorists but divine emissaries, crusaders as anointed and holy as any of Pope Clement's crusader armies.
Why were Muslims always getting the short end of the stick? Why after medieval brilliance, algebra, zero, and astronomy, had Muslims fallen so far off the rails. Why in the Middle East were Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese Muslims still stuck in mud while Israelis enjoyed a European standard of living? Why was backwardness endemic in Muslim communities? And why this persistent, viral, bilious hatred of Jews?
'Many of my friends are Jews' said Mehmet Erdogan, Turkish weaver and manager of Istanbul Fabrics, proprietor of a wholesale garment warehouse in Bethesda. Mehmet Bey had made his fortune in America, but he was exaggerating his inclusive, multicultural claim. All the Jews he had known were money-grubbing weasels, sniveling little hawk-nosed miscreants out only to make a buck.
'Enough of this bullshit' said Fatma's brother Ahmed, a tailor at Mehmet Bey's establishment, who was bound and determined to test the inter-cultural waters. 'Jewish women are women', he said to Mehmet Bey and made overtures to Esther Pilchman, assistant cutter at a rival factory, in a calculating measure of inter-ethnic harmony.
The whole idea of a Jewish lover - kinky hair, smelling of smoked fish, sallow skin and a watchmaker’s hunchback - was repulsive, but he had to know. Thee must be some commonality. After all Islam and Judaism were both Abrahamic religions, neither community ate pork, and both were halal and prayed to one God.
'Don't ask', he replied to his brothers who said, 'Disgusting Jew', but he had been tempted by those full Syrian lips, the swarthiness of Palestine, and the eagerness of a New York Jewish princess. He never let on how taken he was by The Jezebel of Orchard Street.
On Friday at the mosque he prayed with his Muslim brothers but noticed for perhaps the first time, the absence of women. Of course the Quran pronounced them unclean harlots, trollops, and common whores and his sexual life would be one of cold penury - wife Mariam lying under the sheets to preserve her dignity while he labored over her.
Better a Jew than one of these bagged, passionless Muslim hags.
And then he met Marlise Finch, as white, Christian, and wholesome as could be, a woman who could strip him of his faith and Muslim identity and leave him standing there naked, alone and desperate for more.
She had always wanted to sleep with a Muslim. They couldn't all be 9/11 bombers, ISIS terrorists, and incarcerating Saudi camel-jockeys, and so it was that she and Mehmet Bey began their brief, exhausting experimental affair in her Soho loft walkup.
She, according to the Quran was an infidel, a non-believer, a dismal variant of the divine canon. She was a free spirit - just what he wanted.; but just as he was getting used to the sight of a naked woman welcoming his advances, a wave of guilty apostasy choked him, stunted his curiosity and desire. He was a Muslim eunuch.
'Allah has condemned me', he said, 'consigned me to a Muslim purgatory. Here I am a good Muslim desirous of ridding the world of apostasy but only a failed, shameful Christian idolater.
After Friday prayers Mehmet sought out the imam of the mosque and confessed his fall from grace. 'I have sinned, Blessed One, I have consorted with a Jew and a Christian harlot'.
Now, confession is not within the Muslim catechism, so the imam was taken by surprise at the young man's candor.
Frustrated in love and hating the Jew even more because of it, he joined a radical Muslim political group hewing to the Islamic party line and became a crusader, a man in the avant garde of the movement to establish a Muslim caliphate and to rid the world of infidels.
'Whoever said Islam was a religion of peace?', he asked. 'We are militants, crusaders, Turkic soldiers in the neo-armies of Genghis Khan. Heads on stakes is our meme'.
Liberals in America shout 'Islamophobia' when conservatives call out the rising, violent militancy of Islam; but soon progressive heads will roll. Inclusivity is the Devil's playground, and Islamic zealots cannot wait to take scalps from the credulous American dupes.
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