Controversy has been swirling for months around one of the largest mosques in Texas, the East Plano Islamic Center, and its plan to construct a large community in the Dallas area, featuring 1,000 homes as well as a mosque. The Houston Chronicle reported with palpable disgust Monday that “conservative Christian politicians” have been spreading “unfounded claims on social media” against the Center, and that Muslim leaders in the area claim that they have been “becoming increasingly targeted by Islamaphobic [sic] threats and attacks.”
The community might not have sparked so much opposition, however, if its leaders hadn’t been so quick to resort to the left’s tried-and-true tactic of claiming victim status at the sign of the slightest opposition, and if they had been a bit more honest and aboveboard about their intentions. The Chronicle sneers that those “conservative Christians politicians” have even made the wild (according to the Chronicle, that is) claim that “the project discriminated against Christians and Jews and intended to create a Muslim-only community that would impose Islamic law on residents.”
The Chronicle presents these charges as if they were self-evidently ridiculous, but are they, really? Take, for example, the “resident scholar” of the East Plano Islamic Center, the renowned imam Yasir Qadhi, who is a native of Houston. Back in March 2011, Qadhi penned a defense of Sharia, Islamic law, that was designed to reassure jittery non-Muslims but only ended up arousing more concern than it allayed, as it was a masterpiece of deceptive, disingenuousness, and dishonesty.
Qadhi started with a straw man, claiming that a bill to ban Sharia defined it incorrectly as “a system of legal, political, military and religious laws that calls its followers to overthrow the United States’ government through brutal force, acts of terrorism, and ‘holy war’ (i.e., jihad), in order to establish itself as the sole political and religious power in the world.”
That’s not what Sharia is, and Qadhi even went so far as to declare: “If I did not know any better, I would be the first to jump on the bandwagon and support any effort to ban such a nefarious system.” Sounds great, but this was more deception than patriotism. Sharia does actually call upon Muslims to strive to establish it as the sole political and religious power in the world, as the Qur’an directs Muslims to fight unbelievers “until religion is all for Allah” (8:39). If, however, this can be accomplished without “brutal force, acts of terrorism, and ‘holy war (i.e., jihad),” there is no problem with that. Qadhi frames the objections wrongly so that he can dismiss them on false pretenses.
Qadhi then claims that “the bulk of the shariah, approximately 70 percent, deals with rituals of worship,” and that “approximately 25 percent of the shariah deals with dietary restrictions and personal economic and family laws.” That leaves only five percent for laws that are “intended for application at a national level, and include punishments for murder and theft…. However, these laws are intended to be applied in a system of government that derives its rules from Islam.”
That’s swell, but these percentages don’t really establish that Sharia is benign. If someone delivers a ten-minute speech and only 30 seconds of it is about how he is going to kill or enslave people, that doesn’t mean that he is a peaceful fellow. Qadhi compounds the deception by assuring his readers that Sharia’s laws that are “intended for application at a national level” are only to be applied “in a system of government that derives its rules from Islam.” The issue at hand is whether any Muslims in the U.S. or elsewhere in the West are working toward establishing governments that derive their rules from Islam in their new home countries.
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Yet that imperative for conquest is part of the Sharia that Qadhi is busy whitewashing. A manual of Sharia that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, the leading authority in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, states unequivocally, as part of Islamic law, that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians … until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” (Reliance of the Traveller, o9.8).
There is no caliph today, but defensive jihad needs no state authority to initiate it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (Reliance of the Traveller, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden declared jihad against the United States on the basis that American troops had trodden on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, where Muhammad had said that no non-Muslims should be allowed. In that context, the 9/11 attacks were defensive. This jihad must continue until non-Muslims submit to Islamic hegemony and the denial of some of their basis rights, and “enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)… while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (Reliance of the Traveller, o9.8).
The Chronicle will never tell you this, but Qadhi’s piece on Sharia is yet more evidence that there is every reason for non-Muslims to be concerned about the East Plano Islamic Center. Yet were any journalist to have the temerity to ask mosque officials about any of this, he’d be run out of the Center faster than you can say “Islamophobia.”
The media’s never-ending efforts to whitewash Islam and demean Christianity are tiresome, and you don’t need to keep patronizing those propaganda outlets. You have an alternative: Join PJ Media VIP now, get 60% off with code FIGHT.
