August 25, 2008
Exclusive: As the West Sleeps, Islamists Work on Establishing a Worldwide Islamic State: (Part Two of Two)
In Part I, we began a discussion on the not-so-subtle attempts recently by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the “obvious Godfather” and leading imam of the Muslim Brotherhood, of spreading the central ideology of Islamism – the establishment of the Islamic state. His discussions are not on his English site, nor on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English site. His most recent columns on July 13th and July 22nd were only in Arabic. In the last column, I reviewed a few of the most salient points he mentions in his Arabic diatribe concerning the Islamic state in his first column of July 13thentitled, “the Islamic State is a civil state which derives its authority from Islam.” This column will review and critique the subsequent piece in Arabic on July 22, 2008 entitled, “the Islamic State is in line with the essence of democracy.” Oddly, if that publication wasn’t enough, he renamed the piece “the Ultimate Democracy” and republished essentially the same column this week on August 19, 2008 – just with a different title; basically verbatim but shorter. Either he and his staff are growing exceedingly lazy by recycling the same diatribes on the Islamic state, or Qaradawi is using the oldest of brainwashing techniques upon his readers – the incessant repetition of central tenets of ideology. Let’s look at the ideas in his recycled piece.
Qaradawi’s Islamism – a Grand Deception
Qaradawi…(snip)…states that “they (Islamists) have significant reservations against capitalism because of its ‘teeth’ and they also have reservations against liberalism (or absolute freedom)”. He is a typical demagogic politician who exploits religion and scripture for his own delusions of grandeur. (SNIP)….
…Thanks to the internet and sites like FamilySecurityMatters.org, anti-Islamists can expose his real agenda and the vacuity of his arguments whether he likes it or not.
The Devil is in the Details – Qaradawi promotes socialism and attacks capitalism and liberalism
It is instructive to review some of the specifics of Qaradawi’s arguments which he conveniently makes in Arabic. He first states that ‘capitalism is unacceptable for us’ and then quotes from three different verses in the Koran which he believes support his premise. He implies that “capitalists” are those that refuse to acknowledge that their property belongs to God. All of his citations are intentionally misleading, manipulative, and classically theocratic in their myopia. He conflates moral guidance and caution from God with economic freedoms. (SNIP)…
We need to translate Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, or Friedrich Hayek’s, The Road to Serfdom, into Arabic and let Qaradawi’s audience hear another voice and understand that capitalism has no conflict with enlightened Muslim interpretations and reason.
But we must understand that Qaradawi’ and his Muslim Brotherhood (MB) are less about Islam than they are about socialism. Qaradawi is cut out of the Sayyid Al-Qutb mold of political Islam and socialism …(snip)…
The Islamist Attack on Traditional Liberalism
Qaradawi then attacks liberalism and freedom stating,
“The liberalism, meaning absolute freedom, is also unacceptable to us. There is no absolute freedom in the whole existence. Every freedom in the world is bound by some restrictions, (snip)… our discussion on democracy in the Muslim community is about adhering to the law of God in the shar’ia.” (translation by AIFD)
He is positioning Islamism between dictatorship and freedom. He absurdly equates freedom with dictatorship saying it is the ‘absolute rule of the individual’. This is exceedingly instructive and exposes how the ideological motivations of the MB and Islamists are actually a false democracy. Their ideas are anti-freedom and represent the promotion of an oligarchy where the ruling class is only checked by their version of elections. The law, in Qaradawi’s concept of nation, is based not in humanism and natural law but rather in shar’ia (Islamic jurisprudence centrally rooted in clerical interpretation)…snip…
The clerics exert domain over Islamic jurisprudence and shut out the rank and file Muslim as unqualified while also completely excluding non-Muslims from any hope of leadership or equal participation before the law.
He later deceptively spins the Western ideology of freedom into an extreme category stating:
Those who call for unrestricted democracy believe that Western democracy is the panacea for our countries and our nations and peoples with all their descriptions of social liberalism, economic capitalism, and political freedom. They do not restrict their democracy from anything. They want to install that in our country, as in western countries, a system not based in any ideology, not derived from sharia, nor believing in fixed values, but with a separation between science and ethics, between economics and morality, between politics and morality, and between war and morality. (translated by AIFD)
This is classic Islamist spin which intentionally ignores the inherent and genuine religious freedom in Western democracies. Qaradawi and his ilk are ignorant of how pious classically liberal systems which respect individual freedoms are or can be. (snip). Islamists paint the West as “anti-God” and “anti-Islam” when in fact there is no society more conducive to a pious faith-based community than the United States.
People of any faith thrive in America. It is the Islamists which can derive no oxygen from our Jeffersonian system. They know this and instead spin Western democracy as “ungrounded” and “chaotic” in order to pave the way for their supremacist Islamist system. The Islamist system is hopelessly doomed to failure since it suffocates the individual freedom (given by God) and necessary for real human creativity.
Countering Islamism
Qaradawi and the MB (snip… the MB’s project has already been secretly working for decades to counter the threat they see from liberal democracies.
It is time for liberal democracies to respond and mount a counter-project to the MB and their fellow Islamists.
(snip) The U.S. government recently straight jacketed itself by reducing the lexicon in the war to meaningless terms like extremist or radical when trying to describe the enemy. (snip)
…the Muslim perception of freedom… If we allow Qaradawi’s narrative to go unchecked … we will eventually lose this war. We … urgently need hundreds of websites and organizations offering a Muslim anti-Islamist narrative to the rantings of the likes of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.
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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist. He can be reached at Zuhdi@aifdemocracy.org.