Islamic New Year Quotes

Forty is a most beautiful age for both men and women. Did you know that in mystic thought forty symbolizes the ascent from one level to a higher one and spiritual awakening? When we mourn we mourn for forty days. When a baby is born it takes forty days for him to get ready to start life on earth. And when we are in love we need to wait for forty days to be sure of our feelings. The Flood of Noah lasted forty days, and while the waters destroyed life, they also washed all impurity away and enabled human beings to make a new, fresh start. In Islamic mysticism there are forty degrees between man and God. Likewise, there are four basic stages of consciousness and ten degrees in each, making forty levels in total. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days and nights. Muhammad was forty years old when he received the call to become a prophet. Buddha meditated under a linden tree for forty days. Not to mention the forty rules of Shams. You receive a new mission at forty, a new lease on life! You have reached a most auspicious number. Congratulations! And don’t worry about getting old. There are no wrinkles or gray hair strong enough to defy the power of forty!

It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its “false idols.” It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.

During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of transformations: but he finally found the Truth and then Allah took him home. But if he lived longer, I think he would have called out the Arabs.

If liberalism, nationalism, Islam, or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering but also to incorporate them into a new and meaningful narrative.

And so all the time the European brain has held onto two contradictory things. The first is the dominant established narrative of a generation: that anyone in the world can come to Europe and become a European, and that in order to become a European you merely need to be a person in Europe. The other part of the European brain has spent these years watching and waiting. This part could always recognise that the new arrivals were not only coming in unprecedented numbers but were bringing with them customs that, if not all unprecedented, had certainly not existed in Europe for a long time. The first part of the brain insists that the newcomers will assimilate and that, given time, even the most hard-to-swallow aspects of the culture of the new arrivals will become more recognisably European. Optimism favours the first part of the brain. Events favour the second, which increasingly begins to wonder whether anyone has the time for the changes that are meant to happen.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its “false idols.” It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it. 1

Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position was particularly poor in Greece, for example—a fact that Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchal attitudes of the Orient.

The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area).

If liberalism, nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms and bioengineering – it will also need to incorporate them into a new meaningful narrative.

Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.

Christian reformism arose originally from the ability of its advocates to contrast the Old Testament with the New. The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a good mood (the classic attribute of the dictator). Whereas the cobbled-together books of the last two thousand years contained handholds for the hopeful, and references to meekness, forgiveness, lambs and sheep, and so forth. This distinction is more apparent than real, since it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist, the son of god is revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam.

When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God “out there,” there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has greeted various remarks by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, even though these ideas are commonplace in academic circles. Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, has also been dubbed “the atheist priest”: he finds the traditional realistic God of theism unacceptable and proposes a form of Christian Buddhism, which puts religious experience before theology. Like Robinson, Cupitt has arrived intellectually at an insight that mystics in all three faiths have reached by a more intuitive route. Yet the idea that God does not really exist and that there is Nothing out there is far from new.

Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon.

Similar stories are told about the other great goddesses—Inana, Ishtar and Isis—who search for the dead god and bring new life to the soil. The victory of Anat, however, must be perpetuated year after year in ritual celebration. Later—we are not sure how, since our sources are incomplete—Baal is brought back to life and restored to Anat. This apotheosis of wholeness and harmony, symbolized by the union of the sexes, was celebrated by means of ritual sex in ancient Canaan. By imitating the gods in this way, men and women would share their struggle against sterility and ensure the creativity and fertility of the world. The death of a god, the quest of the goddess and the triumphant return to the divine sphere were constant religious themes in many cultures and would recur in the very different religion of the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Radicals have value, at least; they can move the center. On a scale of 1 to 5, 3 is moderate, 1 and 5 the hardliners. But if a good radical takes it up to 9, then 5 becomes the new center. I already saw it working in the American Muslim community. For years women were neglected in mosques, denied entrance to the main prayer halls and relegated to poorly maintained balconies and basements. It was only after a handdful of Muslim feminists raised "lunatic fringe" demands like mixed-gender prayers with men and women standing together and even women imams giving sermons and leading men in prayer that major organizations such as ISNA and CAIR began to recognize the "moderate" concerns and deal with the issue of women in mosques. I've taken part in the woman-led prayer movement, both as a writer and as a man who prays behind women, happy to be the extremist who makes moderate reform seem less threatening. Insha'Allah, what's extreme today will not be extreme tomorrow.

Constantine, moreover, was not yet a Christian when he uttered the appeal to conquer in the sign of the cross; and while the warrior kings of Israel may have drawn strength from the old Covenant in their small and local wars, the Christians of the new Covenant were to agonise for centuries over the issue of whether warmaking was morally permissible or not. Christians, indeed, have never found unanimity in the belief that the man of war may also be a man of religion; the ideal of martyrdom has always been as strong as that of the justified struggle and remains strong to this day. The Arabs of the conquest years were not caught on that crux. Their new religion, Islam, was a creed of conflict, that taught the necessity of submission to its revealed teachings and the right of its believers to take arms against those who opposed them. It was Islam that inspired the Arab conquests, the ideas of Islam that made the Arabs a military people and the example of its founder, Muhammad, that taught them to become warriors.

In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests. God could be present in the humblest home as well as in the Temple. Consequently, they lived like the official priestly caste, observing the special laws of purity that applied only to the Temple in their own homes. They insisted on eating their meals in a state of ritual purity because they believed that the table of every single Jew was like God’s altar in the Temple. They cultivated a sense of God’s presence in the smallest detail of daily life. Jews could now approach him directly without the mediation of a priestly caste and an elaborate ritual. They could atone for their sins by acts of loving-kindness to their neighbor; charity was the most important mitzvah in the Torah; when two or three Jews studied the Torah together, God was in their midst. During

According to one Islamic model, the soul has three stages. In the first seven years, it is known as the appetitive soul. The primary concerns of children in this stage are eating and wanting attention. The second stage is the next seven years, the age of anger, when kids react strongly to stimuli and are annoyed easily. The third is the rational stage, when reasoning and discernment reach their full capacity. ʿAlī ibn AbīṬālib encouraged parents to play with their children during the first stage, to indulge them, for they are discovering the world. They had been in a spiritual realm and have only recently entered the realm of the sensory. In the second stage, Imam ʿAlī counseled that parents should focus on training and discipline, for, in this stage, young people have a heightened capacity to receive and absorb information and thus learn new things. In the third stage, parents should befriend them and form a relationship that is amicable and full of kindness and companionship. After this, their children, now adults, should be set free.

Deuteronomy had listed a number of obligatory laws, which had included the Ten Commandments. During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated into a complex legislation consisting of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Pentateuch. These minute directives seem off-putting to an outsider and have been presented in a very negative light by New Testament polemic. Jews did not find them a crushing burden, as Christians tend to imagine, but found that they were a symbolic way of living in the presence of God. In

One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call “fundamentalism” in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right. Fundamentalists campaign for the abolition of legal abortion and for a hard line on moral and social decency.

the technological revolutions will gather momentum in the next few decades and will confront humankind with the hardest trials we have ever encountered. Any story that seeks to gain humanity’s allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech. If liberalism, nationalism, Islam, or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering but also to incorporate them into a new and meaningful narrative.

Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith. Thus Rabbi Meir Kahane, the most extreme member of Israel’s Far Right until his assassination in New York in 1990: There

Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give each other protection. News of this extraordinary new ‘supertribe’ spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.

We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The

The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration “from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law.”3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilization is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality, and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day European Union, celebrating twenty-five hundred years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilization for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilization? In truth, European civilization is anything Europeans make of it, just as Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make out of it. And they have made of it remarkably different things over the centuries. Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old and new into a single yarn.

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today. Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet. Islam and the New Millennium

There is a growing intolerance of inadequate images of the Absolute. This is a healthy iconoclasm, since the idea of God has been used in the past to disastrous effect. One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call “fundamentalism” in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right. Fundamentalists campaign for the abolition of legal abortion and for a hard line on moral and social decency. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority achieved astonishing political power during the Reagan years. Other evangelists such as Maurice Cerullo, taking Jesus’ remarks literally, believe that miracles are an essential hallmark of true faith. God will give the believer anything that he asks for in prayer. In Britain, fundamentalists such as Colin Urquhart have made the same claim. Christian fundamentalists seem to have little regard for the loving compassion of Christ. They are swift to condemn the people they see as the “enemies of God.” Most would consider Jews and Muslims destined for hellfire, and Urquhart has argued that all oriental religions are inspired by the devil.

At the same time that he was devising a response to the Afghanistan incursion, Carter had to confront a much more acute crisis in Iran, where he had brought the greatest disaster of his presidency down upon himself. In November 1977, he welcomed the shah of Iran to the White House, and on New Year’s Eve in Tehran, raising his glass, he toasted the ruler. Though the shah was sustained in power by a vicious secret police force, Carter praised him as a champion of “the cause of human rights” who had earned “the admiration and love” of the Iranian people. Little more than a year later, his subjects, no longer willing to be governed by a monarch imposed on them by the CIA, drove the shah into exile. Critically ill, he sought medical treatment in the United States. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance warned that admitting him could have repercussions in Iran, and Carter hesitated. But under pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and the head of the National Security Council, Zbigniew Brzezinski, he caved in. Shortly after the deposed shah entered the Mayo Clinic, three thousand Islamic militants stormed the US embassy compound in Tehran and seized more than fifty diplomats and soldiers. They paraded blindfolded US Marine guards, hands tied behind their backs, through the streets of Tehran while mobs chanted, “Death to Carter, Death to the Shah,” as they spat upon the American flag and burned effigies of the president—scenes recorded on camera that Americans found painful to witness.

Like other people in the ancient world, the Babylonians attributed their cultural achievements to the gods, who had revealed their own lifestyle to their mythical ancestors. Thus Babylon itself was supposed to be an image of heaven, with each of its temples a replica of a celestial palace. This link with the divine world was celebrated and perpetuated annually in the great New Year Festival, which had been firmly established by the seventeenth century BCE. Celebrated in the holy city of Babylon during the month of Nisan—our April—the Festival solemnly enthroned the king and established his reign for another year. Yet this political stability could only endure insofar as it participated in the more enduring and effective government of the gods, who had brought order out of primordial chaos when they had created the world.

The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity. Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years. Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that. ... The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?

He counseled vigilance, “because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously.” This answer did not fill me with confidence. The next day, President-Elect Trump offered Lieutenant General Michael Flynn the post of national security adviser and picked Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as his nominee for attorney general. Last February, Flynn tweeted, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” and linked to a YouTube video that declared followers of Islam want “80 percent of humanity enslaved or exterminated.” Sessions had once been accused of calling a black lawyer “boy,” claiming that a white lawyer who represented black clients was a disgrace to his race, and joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.” I felt then that I knew what was coming

The Israelites called Yahweh “the God of our fathers,” yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs. He may have been the god of other people before he became the God of Israel. In all his early appearances to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El Shaddai. This insistence may preserve the distant echoes of a very early debate about the identity of the God of Moses. It has been suggested that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan.17 We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The teachings of impermanence and lack of independent existence are not difficult to understand intellectually; when you hear these teachings you may think that they are quite true. On a deeper level, however, you probably still identify yourself as “me” and identify others as “them” or “you.” On some level you likely say to yourself, “I will always be me; I have an identity that is important.” I, for example, say to myself, “I am a Buddhist priest; not a Christian or Islamic one. I am a Japanese person, not an American or a Chinese one.” If we did not assume that we have this something within us that does not change, it would be very difficult for us to live responsibly in society. This is why people who are unfamiliar with Buddhism often ask, “If there were no unchanging essential existence, doesn’t that mean I would not be responsible for my past actions, since I would be a different person than in the past?” But of course that is not what the Buddha meant when he said we have no unchanging atman or essential existence. To help us understand this point, we can consider how our life resembles a river. Each moment the water of a river is flowing and different, so it is constantly changing, but there is still a certain continuity of the river as a whole. The Mississippi River, for example, was the river we know a million years ago. And yet, the water flowing in the Mississippi is always different, always new, so there is actually no fixed thing that we can say is the one and only Mississippi River. We can see this clearly when we compare the source of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota, a small stream one can jump over, to the river’s New Orleans estuary, which seems as wide as an ocean. We cannot say which of these is the true Mississippi: it is just a matter of conditions that lets us call one or the other of these the Mississippi. In reality, a river is just a collection of masses of flowing water contained within certain shapes in the land. “Mississippi River” is simply a name given to various conditions and changing elements. Since our lives are also just a collection of conditions, we cannot say that we each have one true identity that does not change, just as we cannot say there is one true Mississippi River. What we call the “self ” is just a set of conditions existing within a collection of different elements. So I cannot say that there is an unchanging self that exists throughout my life as a baby, as a teenager, and as it is today. Things that I thought were important and interesting when I was an elementary or high school student, for example, are not at all interesting to me now; my feelings, emotions, and values are always changing. This is the meaning of the teaching that everything is impermanent and without independent existence. But we still must recognize that there is a certain continuity in our lives, that there is causality, and that we need to be responsible for what we did yesterday. In this way, self-identity is important. Even though in actuality there is no unchanging identity, I still must use expressions like “when I was a baby ..., when I was a boy ..., when I was a teenager. ...” To speak about changes in our lives and communicate in a meaningful way, we must speak as if we assumed that there is an unchanging “I” that has been experiencing the changes; otherwise, the word “change” has no meaning. But according to Buddhist philosophy, self-identity, the “I,” is a creation of the mind; we create self-identity because it’s convenient and useful in certain ways. We must use self-identity to live responsibly in society, but we should realize that it is merely a tool, a symbol, a sign, or a concept. Because it enables us to think and discriminate, self-identity allows us to live and function. Although it is not the only reality of our lives, self-identity is a reality for us, a tool we must use to live with others in society.

In 2006, Egyptian bloggers witnessed hundreds of men thronging the streets to celebrate the end of Ramadan, harassing women with or without hijabs, ripping off their clothes, encircling them, and trying to assault them.48 Girls ran for cover in nearby restaurants, taxis, and cinemas. As protests continued in Tahrir Square in 2012, mob attacks against women became more organized. Men formed concentric rings around individual women, stripping and raping them.49 Some Egyptian women spoke out, taking their accounts and video evidence of sexual assaults to police, but little headway was made until laws against sexual harassment were introduced in 2014.50 The rape game crossed the Mediterranean in December 2015. During New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, as we have seen, more than a thousand young men formed rings around individual women, sexually assaulting them.51 When the victims identified the perpetrators as looking “foreign,” “North African,” and “Arab,” they were pilloried as racists on social media.52 The local feminist and magazine editor Alice Schwarzer’s dogged reporting established that the young men had coordinated and planned the attacks that night “to the detriment of the Kufar [infidels].”53 Schwarzer was vindicated twelve months later, when Cologne police chief Jürgen Mathies confirmed that the attacks had been intentionally coordinated to intimidate the German population.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

John Quincy Adams on Islam: “In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.” (Emphasis in the original)

Last year, I did a comprehensive study of T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence played a pivotal role in the development of the modern Arab world. He was both pro-Arab and a Zionist. Unlike today, during this time period, this was not a contradiction. I read the entirety of Lawrence’s tome, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as well as his personal letters. Colonel Lawrence had a comprehensive and personal relation with the emerging Arab political leaders during World War I. He also encountered the Persians (the Iranians of today). He made an interesting and important observation regarding their unique view of Islam. Lawrence observed that the “Shia Mohammedans from Pershia . . . were surly and fanatical, refusing to eat or drink with infidels; holding the Sunni as bad as Christians; following only their own priests and notables.” Each of these three leaders provides valuable insight into the intrigue that is the Middle East today, because the lessons they learned from their leadership in their eras can instruct us on the challenges we face in our own time. A new alliance has developed in the last few years that has created what I call an unholy alliance. History often repeats itself. We no longer have the luxury of simply letting history unfold. We must change the course of events, rewriting the history if needed, to preserve our constitutional republic. In this volume, I discuss and analyze the history and suggest a path of engagement to end what is the latest in a history-spanning line of attempts to export Sharia law and radical jihad around the world. We will win. We must win. We have no option.

Rather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don’t think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago,” she said.5 Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.6 Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.

But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

Mostly religious sectarians bury Islam in the grave of hatred and ignorance; however, reborn of Islam occurs every new Islamic year on the tenth day of the month Moharram regardless weathers, such practice is from centuries, killing each other for nothing. The majority of the Muslims, fail to qualify themselves accordingly as the teachings of the Holy Quran. Unfortunately, Muslims organize and celebrate the sad and happy occasions, but neither learn nor apply it practically upon self.

But when the agricultural villages of the Neolithic expanded into larger towns that grew to more than two thousand inhabitants, the capacity of the human brain to know and recognize all of the members of a single community was stretched beyond its natural limits. Nevertheless, the tribal cultures that had evolved during the Upper Paleolithic with the emergence of symbolic communication enabled people who might have been strangers to feel a collective sense of belonging and solidarity. It was the formation of tribes and ethnicities that enabled the strangers of the large Neolithic towns to trust each other and interact comfortably with each other, even if they were not all personally acquainted. The transformation of human society into urban civilizations, however, involved a great fusion of people and societies into groups so large that there was no possibility of having personal relationships with more than a tiny fraction of them. Yet the human capacity for tribal solidarity meant that there was literally no upper limit on the size that a human group could attain. And if we mark the year 3000 BC as the approximate time when all the elements of urban civilization came together to trigger this new transformation, it has taken only five thousand years for all of humanity to be swallowed up by the immense nation-states that have now taken possession of every square inch of the inhabited world. The new urban civilizations produced the study of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, history, biology, and medicine. They greatly advanced and refined the technologies of metallurgy, masonry, architecture, carpentry, shipbuilding, and weaponry. They invented the art of writing and the practical science of engineering. They developed the modern forms of drama, poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. They built canals, roads, bridges, aqueducts, pyramids, tombs, temples, shrines, castles, and fortresses by the thousands all over the world. They built ocean-going ships that sailed the high seas and eventually circumnavigated the globe. From their cultures emerged the great universal religions of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Hinduism. And they invented every form of state government and political system we know, from hereditary monarchies to representative democracies. The new urban civilizations turned out to be dynamic engines of innovation, and in the course of just a few thousand years, they freed humanity from the limitations it had inherited from the hunting and gathering cultures of the past.

Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the Talmud and Christians the Bible—and, in Muslim countries, it uses the Quran explicitly as the basis for legal codes. Just before we elected our forty-fourth non-Muslim president in a row, people on the right began fantasizing that American Muslims were scheming to supplant U.S. jurisprudence with Islamic jurisprudence. The definitive text is a 2010 book called Shariah: The Threat to America. Its nineteen authors included respectable hard-right conservatives and national security wonks. We’re “infiltrated and deeply influenced,” the book says, “by an enemy within that is openly determined to replace the U.S. Constitution with shariah.” The movement took off, and in short order the specter of sharia became a right-wing catchphrase encompassing suspicion of almost any Islamic involvement in the U.S. civic sphere. The word gave Islamophobia a patina of legitimacy. It was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabs but rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny. It was also a shiny new exotic term, a word nobody in America but a few intellectuals knew.

In 571 Mohammed was born in Mecca, and at his death in 632 the religion of Islam, of which he was the founder and prophet, had spread over the greater part of Arabia. Islam, or “submission to the will of God”, had as its creed: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet”. It utterly repudiated images or pictures of any kind. Its book, the Koran, contains many confused references to persons and events spoken of in the Bible. Abraham as the Friend of God, Moses the Law of God, Jesus the Spirit of God, are all venerated, but are excelled by Mohammed the Prophet of God. This religion was mercilessly spread by the sword, and such was the resistless energy of the new enthusiasm that in less than a hundred years from the death of Mohammed, the dominion and religion of his followers stretched from India to Spain. The choice of conversion to Mohammedanism or death constantly reinforced the armies of Islam, but untold numbers died rather than deny Christ.

Let’s look at your average American Muslim, someone like Siraj Wahaj, the recipient of the American Muslim community’s highest honors. Mr. Wahaj had the privilege in June of 1991 of becoming the first Muslim to deliver a daily prayer before the U.S. House of Representatives. In his prayer he recited from the Koran and appealed to almighty God to guide America’s leaders ‘and grant them righteousness and wisdom.’ The same Wahaj spoke to a Muslim audience a year later in New Jersey. This time Wahaj was singing a different tune to a different audience, and his words were far from his moderate ones in front of the U.S. House of Representatives. ‘If only Muslims were more clever politically,’ he told his New Jersey listeners, ‘they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. If we were united and strong, we’d elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us." If Wahaj is the example of the American Muslim community and the receiver of its highest honors, who needs enemies? If this is whom our government calls a ‘moderate’ and invites to deliver a prayer before the House of Representatives, we have ignorant elected officials sitting in our capital running our country. Do you feel safer now knowing that not all Muslims are plane-flying, bomb-wearing, or car-driving terrorists? Talking about overthrowing our government and replacing it with an Islamic caliphate is terrorism of a different kind, but it is still terrorism. This is the more dangerous kind, the kind that circles you slowly, so that by the time you realize you are about to be killed, it’s already too late to do anything about it. Where is the outrage? Have we lost our sense of patriotism and loyalty to America? Do you consider this ‘moderation’? A highly respected, award-winning Muslim from the Islamic American community calling to overthrow the United States government?

Nigeria is not alone, either in the prevalence of child marriage or in attempts to end the practice. In September 2008, Moroccan officials closed sixty Koranic schools operated by Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al-Maghraoui, because he issued a decree justifying marriage to girls as young as nine. “The sheikh,” according to Agence France-Presse, “said his decree was based on the fact that the Prophet Mohammed consummated his marriage to his favourite wife when she was that age.”23 It should come as no surprise, then, given the words of the Koran about divorcing prepubescent women and Muhammad’s example in marrying Aisha, that in some areas of the Islamic world the practice of child marriage enjoys the blessing of the law. Time magazine reported in 2001 that “in Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys,” and notes that “the law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move.”24 Likewise, the New York Times reported in 2008 that in Yemen, “despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old.”25 (The characterization of proponents of Islamic law as “conservatives” is notable—the Times doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that “conservatives” in the U.S. are not typically advocates of child marriage.) And so child marriage remains prevalent in many areas of the Islamic world. In 2007, photographer Stephanie Sinclair won the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition for a wedding photograph of an Afghani couple: the groom was said to be forty years old but looked older; the bride was eleven. UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler explained, “The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age. Most of theses child brides are forever denied a self-determined life.”26 According to UNICEF, about half the women in Afghanistan are married before they reach the age of eighteen.27

Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest times, Christianity had developed in the particular social and economic world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and networks of church organization and mission followed the familiar routes of trade and travel. Also, this social world was founded upon cities, which were the undisputed centers of the institutionalized church. Mediterranean Christianity was founded upon a hierarchical system of metropolitans and bishops based in cities: even the name metropolitan suggests a fundamentally urban system. Over time, though, trade routes changed and some cities lost power or vanished altogether. Between the fifth century and the ninth, these changes had a special effect on the Mediterranean, as sea routes declined in importance and states tended to look more inland, to transcontinental routes within Asia and Africa. This process was accelerated by the impact of plague, particularly during the 540s, and perhaps of climate change. Cities like Carthage and Antioch shrank to nothing, while Damascus and Alexandria lost influence before the new rising stars of Baghdad and Cairo.11 These changes coincided with the coming of Islam rather than being caused by that event, but they had immense religious consequences. Churches that remained wedded to the old social order found themselves in growing difficulty, while more flexible or adaptable organizations succeeded. Nestorians and Jacobites coped well for centuries with an Eastern world centered in Baghdad and looking east into Asia. Initially, too, the old urban framework adapted successfully to the Arab conquest, and Christian bishops made their peace quite easily. Matters were very different, though, when the cities themselves were faced with destruction. By the seventh century, the decline of Carthage and its dependent cities undermined the whole basis of the North African church, and accelerated the collapse of the colonial social order. Once the cities were gone, no village Christians remained to take up the slack. The Coptic Church flourished because its network of monasteries and village churches allowed it to withstand changes in the urban system.

The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution. New Masters Reading sympathetic accounts of the spread of Islam, we can forget that this was a movement of armed conquest and imperial expansion, which on occasion involved ferocious violence. The battle of Yarmuk in 636, which gave the Muslims control of Syria, was one of the great military massacres of antiquity, costing the lives of perhaps fifty thousand soldiers of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And while cities were generally spared, the invaders showed little mercy to surrounding villages and settlements.

In Saudi Arabia in 2010, there was “public outrage” when a Romanian soccer player kissed the tattoo of a cross he had on his arm after scoring a goal. In October of the next year, a Colombian soccer-player “was arrested by the Saudi moral police after customers in a Riyadh shopping mall expressed outrage over the sports player’s religious tattoos, which included the face of Jesus of Nazareth on his arm.”233

In August 2011, in distant Uganda, a Muslim father imprisoned and starved his fourteen-year-old daughter, Susan Ithungu, because she converted to Christianity.

Buddhist tradition rooted itself in our land before Islam, rising to prominence under the Pala kings, who ruled from the years 750 to 1161, until the Sena warriors who hailed from Karnataka in South India overruled them, establishing their new Sena dynasty. They instated a rigid Brahminical social order in Bengal, and, slowly, Buddhism started to wane.

The lack of a functioning, trustful community also heightened the refugees’ fears of being abducted by the extremist organization Islamic State. Many initially refused to move to Azraq camp, and although the numbers have increased more recently, Azraq is still far below the 130,000 capacity for which it was built. It’s fitting then that this pop-up city, in real need of some functioning social capital, is now the scene of a radical experiment in new models of community governance, institution-building, and the management of resources. At the heart of that effort is blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger-keeping system that underpins the digital currency bitcoin and promises a more reliable, immediate way to trace transactions. The World Food Program (WFP), a UN agency that feeds 80 million people worldwide, is putting 10,000 Azraq refugees through a pilot that uses this system to better coordinate food distribution. In doing so, the WFP is tackling a giant administrative challenge: how to ensure, in an environment where theft is rampant and few people carry personal identifying documents, that everyone gets their fair share of food. Among those participating in this project was forty-three-year-old Najah Saleh Al-Mheimed, one of the more than 5 million Syrians forced to flee their homes as the brutal, ongoing civil war has all but destroyed their country. In early June 2015, with mounting food shortages and reports of girls being kidnapped by militias in nearby villages, Najah and her husband made the drastic decision to leave her hometown of Hasaka, where their families had lived for generations. “It was an ordeal that I pray to God no human will ever witness,” she said in an interview conducted on our behalf by WFP staffers working in the Azraq camp.

For example, “according to the Maldives Religious Unity Regulations, it is illegal in the Maldives to propagate any faith other than Islam or to engage in any effort to convert anyone to any religion other than Islam. It is also illegal to display in public any symbols or slogans belonging to any religion other than Islam, or creating interest in such articles.”16 Violating the Religious Unity Act carries stiff penalties—fines and imprisonment for two to five years. This is the position of a modern and moderate Muslim nation.

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them.

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them. One of the husband’s best friends abducted and tortured him and beat his wife. “[One] should have the freedom to choose the religion one wishes to follow,” lamented the husband.36

None the less some of the young men of the day had begun to turn away from Islam as a political, as distinct from a religious, force. In its place was arising a new concept of nationalism, which put race before religion and saw Turks, for the first time, as Turks. Hitherto the name of Turk had been used, even among Turks themselves, as a term of contempt applicable only to the more menial strata of the Anatolian peasantry. There was even a certain conscious irony in the coining by Kemal, years later, of the patriotic phrase, 'Happy is the man who calls himself a Turk'. But now the name was acquiring a new and more noble significance. Young Turks, in their search for fresh roots, began to reach back to a racial past in the Central Asian steppes. Here, where they were Turks before they were Ottomans and Moslems, they would surely find a common social and cultural heritage on which to build a common future.

Historically, the Palestinian liberation movement trended for many years toward the secular and leftist, and always contained a strong Christian component. The failure of secular forces to deliver liberation moved some people toward the political Islamic groups, some Christians as well, not necessarily in support of their dogma but simply in order to try a new approach.

In Iowa, the American Future Fund began airing an ad created by Larry McCarthy that Geoff Garin, the Democratic pollster, described as perhaps “the most egregious of the year.” The ad accused the then congressman Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat and a lawyer, of supporting a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, which it misleadingly called a “mosque at Ground Zero.” As footage of the destroyed World Trade Center rolled, a narrator said, “For centuries, Muslims built mosques where they won military victories.” Now it said a mosque celebrating 9/11 was to be built on the very spot “where Islamic terrorists killed three thousand Americans”; it was, the narrator suggested, as if the Japanese were to build a triumphal monument at Pearl Harbor. The ad then accused Braley of supporting the mosque. In fact, Braley had taken no position on the issue. No surprise for a congressman from Iowa. But an unidentified video cameraman had ambushed him at the Iowa State Fair and asked him about it. Braley replied that he regarded the matter as a local zoning issue for New Yorkers to decide. Soon afterward, he says, the attack ad “dropped on me like the house in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ” Braley, who won his seat by a margin of 30 percent in 2008, barely held on in 2010. The American Future Fund’s effort against Braley was the most expensive campaign that year by an independent group.

In Iowa, the American Future Fund began airing an ad created by Larry McCarthy that Geoff Garin, the Democratic pollster, described as perhaps “the most egregious of the year.” The ad accused the then congressman Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat and a lawyer, of supporting a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, which it misleadingly called a “mosque at Ground Zero.” As footage of the destroyed World Trade Center rolled, a narrator said, “For centuries, Muslims built mosques where they won military victories.” Now it said a mosque celebrating 9/11 was to be built on the very spot “where Islamic terrorists killed three thousand Americans”; it was, the narrator suggested, as if the Japanese were to build a triumphal monument at Pearl Harbor. The ad then accused Braley of supporting the mosque. In fact, Braley had taken no position on the issue. No surprise for a congressman from Iowa. But an unidentified video cameraman had ambushed him at the Iowa State Fair and asked him about it. Braley replied that he regarded the matter as a local zoning issue for New Yorkers to decide. Soon afterward, he says, the attack ad “dropped on me like the house in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ” Braley, who won his seat by a margin of 30 percent in 2008, barely held on in 2010. The American Future Fund’s effort against Braley was the most expensive campaign that year by an independent group. After the election, Braley accused McCarthy, the ad maker, of “profiting from Citizens United in the lowest way.” As for those who hired McCarthy, he said, they “are laughing all the way to the bank. It’s a good investment for them…They’re the winners. The losers are the American people, and the truth.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The letter was given to Sharon by Bush to help Sharon justify his unilateral withdrawal of 9,480 Jewish residents and the Israeli Army from Gaza, as part of a ‘peace’ effort to create a new separate Palestinian state, as part of a future ‘two state solution’. Sharon relied on Bush’s letter. In the letter, Bush made four promises to Israel: 1.) The borders of the new Muslim state to be created would not encompass the entire West Bank (referring to Israel as “Judea” and “Samaria,” including Jerusalem), despite Muslim leaders demanding the complete withdrawal from the areas Israel captured when it was invaded in 1967; 2.) Jewish towns and villages in the West Bank would be incorporated into the borders of Israel; 3.) Muslims would have to forego their demand to be given the right to immigrate to Israel; and 4.) Israel’s existence as a Jewish state would be assured. Unfortunately, four years later, in 2008, the Bush administration abandoned these assurances made to Prime Minister Sharon in 2004. Secretary of State Rice told reporters in Israel on the occasion of Israel’s 60th Anniversary as a re-born State that the 2004 letter “talked about realities at that time. And there are realities for both sides…” In an interview in the Oval Office with David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, President Bush had to be reminded of the letter by his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, who said in briefings that “Israel has tried to overstate the importance of a rather vague letter.” (Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2008).

This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the “war on terror” had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments.

But while these are all important determinants in explaining the tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has washed over Europe and North America in recent years, there is another, more fundamental factor that must be addressed. It involves a 2010 poll showing that nearly a quarter of Americans continue to believe that President Barack Obama is himself a Muslim, a 10 percent jump from a similar survey taken in 2008. Among registered Republicans, the number is nearly 40 percent; among self-described Tea Party members, it is upward of 60 percent. In fact, polls consistently show that the more one disagrees with President Obama’s policies on, say, healthcare or financial regulation, the more likely one is to consider him a Muslim. Simply put, Islam in the United States has become otherized. It has become a receptacle into which can be tossed all the angst and apprehension people feel about the faltering economy, about the new and unfamiliar political order, about the shifting cultural, racial, and religious landscapes that have fundamentally altered the world. Across Europe and North America, whatever is fearful, whatever is foreign, whatever is alien and unsafe is being tagged with the label

The weeks following the fall of Baghdad are crucial to understanding the rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and later Islamic State. The post-invasion mayhem and looting would soon be compounded by decisions taken by the new interim bodies that would run Iraq on behalf of the US-led coalition, decisions that would prove disastrous for years after they were taken.

Pre-dating Muhammad, Arab descendants of Ishmael worshipped various ‘gods’, numbering at least one for each day of the year. “One of these was the moon god, the male counterpart to the female sun god. The moon god was called by various names, one of which was Allah, and it was the favorite god of Muhammad’s family. …The literal Arabic name of Muhammad’s father was Abd-Allah…As Muhammad began to promote his new religion, it was only natural that he would choose to elevate the moon god, Allah, and declare him to be the one true god…in establishing and spreading his religion of Islam, Muhammad slaughtered thousands of people who resisted conversion.” (What in the World is Going On? David Jeremiah, Thomas Nelson)

In the intervening thirty years since Sadat’s death at the hands of Jihadists, thousands of terror attacks have occurred in nations across the globe. Two years after Sadat’s death the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was bombed, killing 63. Six were killed in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City on February 26, 1993. The next month, 250 civilians died in the attacks on Bombay, India.  A year later, three members of the Armed Islamic Group hijacked Air France flight 8969 in Algiers, killing seven. In 1996 the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed, killing 19 U.S. Air Force airmen living in the towers.

Later, the Pentagon indicated that the relatively new terrorist group named al Qaeda, formed eight years before, was responsible for the Khobar Towers attack on U. S. military personnel. In 1998 U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, killing 224, and wounding over 4,000. On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked, killing 56. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four U.S. commercial aircraft, bringing down both World Trade Center Towers, and crashing into the Pentagon, with the fourth assumed to be headed for either the U.S. Capitol or the White House, brought down by passengers in Pennsylvania. 3,000 died. America’s innocence regarding Jihadists’ plan to conquer the world for Allah also died at the same time.

A LATTER DAY NATION “Behold, the hindermost of the nations shall be a wilderness, a dry land and a desert.” (Jeremiah 50:12 (b) – KJV). It was only about 500 years ago that the new world was discovered by the ‘civilized world’. And it’s only been about 230 years since our founding fathers declared that we were a separate nation.

the Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which it had spent $41.6 billion in the three years since 2011. But this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading

The New Yorker (The New Yorker) - Clip This Article on Location 1510 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015 5:42:23 PM FICTION THE DUNIAZáT BY SALMAN RUSHDIE   In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi , or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town. The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of tinajas , the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and, because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveller had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.” Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.

Pre-dating Muhammad, Arab descendants of Ishmael worshipped various ‘gods’, numbering at least one for each day of the year. “One of these was the moon god, the male counterpart to the female sun god. The moon god was called by various names, one of which was Allah, and it was the favorite god of Muhammad’s family. …The literal Arabic name of Muhammad’s father was Abd-Allah…As Muhammad began to promote his new religion, it was only natural that he would choose to elevate the moon god, Allah, and declare him to be the one true god…in

America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today:   ·                    America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; ·                     Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) ·                    Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; ·                    The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. ·                    Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. ·                    Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” ·                    Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). ·                    The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. ·                    The Federal government’s debt was manageable.            American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.

I thought I would never be able to experience what the ordinary, moral German felt in the mid-1930’s… Don’t forget that Germany was the most educated, cultured country in Europe. It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories and universities. And in less than six years – a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. Presidency – it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors. All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them.” (Pam Geller, former Associate Publisher, The New York Observer, at AtlasShrugged.com)

Koenig disclosed that in the last few years God has caused/allowed “natural disasters” to occur in the United States, immediately after the United States violated His prohibition against forcing Israel to give up the land that God had given to Israel. God has been warning America, in these “natural” events, against pressuring Israel to give up its land, and we have been ignoring His warnings. For example, Hurricane Katrina and the loss of thousands of homes in New Orleans, came the very next day after the US pressured Israel to push the residents of Gaza out of hundreds of their homes, in which they had dwelt for decades.

The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. For example, in recent years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or are murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country.

The conflict has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany four hundred years ago. Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid a defeat. In Syria, as in Germany between 1618 and 1648, all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory. Many Syrians now see the outcome of their civil war resting largely with the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In this, they are probably right.

Revelation Chapter 18 details the many goods which are sold through the Daughter of Babylon’s ports. The lengthy list appears in Revelation 18:11-13. Take any one of those goods listed by John two thousand years ago and ask this question: is any other nation the center for world trade in those commodities, except for the United States? Where else does one find exchanges as important as the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and numerous other exchanges for currency, coffee, sugar, tea, cocoa, soybeans, oats, wheat, cattle, hogs, lumber, diamonds, iron, ivory, marble, spices, cosmetics, steel, tin, zinc, rubber, etc. Those exchanges, through which the world’s commerce is passed daily, are all located in one country. They’re not in Iraq, nor in Rome.

In the past, the states best able to manage events beyond their borders have been those best able to avoid the temptation to overreach. Great powers remain great in large measure because they posses wisdom to temper active involvement in foreign interventions - to remain within the limits of a national strategy that balances ambition with military resources. The first principle of the strategic art states simply that the greatest weight of resources be devoted to safeguarding the most vital interests of the state. If a vital interest is threatened, the survival of the state is threatened. Generally, the most vital interest of a liberal democracy include, first and foremost, preservation of the territorial integrity of the state. The example of the attacks on New York and Washington should send a message to those of similar ambitions that the surest way to focus the wrath of the American people against them would be to strike this country within its borders again. The second strategic priority is the protection of the national economic welfare by ensuring free and open access to markets for vital materials and finished goods. Other important but less vital interests should be defended by the threat of force only as military resources permit. Outside the limits of U.S. territory, the strategic problem defining the geographic limits of U.S. vital interests becomes complex. While the United States may have some interests in every corner of the world, there are certain regions where its strategic interests, both economic and cultural, are concentrated and potentially threatened. These vital strategic "centers of gravity" encompass in the first instance those geographic areas essential to maintaining access to open markets and sources of raw material, principally oil. Fortunately, many of these economically vital centers are secure from serious threat. But a few happen to be located astride regions that have witnessed generations of cultural and ethnic strife. Four regions overshadow all others in being both vital to continued domestic prosperity and continually under the threat of state-supported violence. These regions are defined generally by an arc of territories along the periphery of Eurasia: Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and north East Asia. For the past several centuries, these regions have been the areanas of the world's most serious and intractable conflicts. Points of collision begin with the intersection of Western and Eastern Christianity and continue southward to mark Islam's incursion into southeastern Europe in the Balkans. The cultural divide countries without interruption across the Levant in an unbroken line of unrest and warring states from the crescent of the Middle East to the subcontinent of South Asia. The fault-line concludes with the divide between China and all the traditional cultural competitors along its land and sea borders. Other countries outside the periphery of Eurasia might, in extreme cases, demand the presence of U.S. forces for peacekeeping or humanitarian operations. But it is unlikely that in the years to come the United States will risk a major conflict that will involve the calculated commitment of forces in a shooting war in regions outside this "periphery of Eurasia," which circumscribes and defines America's global security.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

My fifth point is that, nevertheless, the experience, memory or imagination of enforced abnegation does play a key role. Years of real or imagined oppression — or a solidarity, even an identification, with those who have been oppressed elsewhere — lead to a rebellion. The question missing from most analyses, however, is that the oppression that is resisted is not only a political oppression of a people — for example, the Palestinians (which almost every Islamic state and militant organisation has conspicuously failed to help beyond very limited points) — but a perceived oppression or denigration of a sense of self and a sense of core belief; and it is perceived as applied personally, but also as systemically applied to the collective manifestation of this core belief. To that extent, it is belief that seems as if it is called upon to fight back, because it is belief and philosophy that have been subject to abnegation. It is not, however, just the philosophy that fights back, but, as mentioned above, the philosophy of the means chosen. Does abnegation justify a sacrificium in which huge numbers of innocent people are swept into death? Does the sacrificium necessarily sacrifice others? In so far as the memory or re-created memory of abnegation is strong and made stronger, it triumphs over the memories and values of self held by others. Terror thus becomes a requital and ruthlessness — requital for sins committed perhaps against self but certainly against self’s historical and contemporary cohorts, and ruthlessness in an exploding outwards.

Around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization—the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources of this legitimacy were the Axial religions, or more broadly ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (and later Christianity and Islam). During this time, gods evolved from capricious projections of human desire (who as often as not squabbled among themselves) into transcendental moralizers concerned above all with prosocial behavior by all, including the rulers. The

Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves, with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and cemetery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of community, one so revolutionary that many years later, when Muslim scholars seek to establish a distinctly Islamic calendar, they will begin not with the birth of the Prophet, nor with the onset of Revelation, but with the year Muhammad and his band of Emigrants came to this small federation of villages to start a new society. That year, 622 C.E., will forever be known as Year 1 A.H. (After Hijra); and the oasis that for centuries had been called Yathrib will henceforth be celebrated as Medinat an-Nabi: “The City of the Prophet,” or more simply, Medina. There

azidis believe that before God made man, he created seven divine beings, often called angels, who were manifestations of himself. After forming the universe from the pieces of a broken pearl-like sphere, God sent his chief Angel, Tawusi Melek, to earth, where he took the form of a peacock and painted the world the bright colors of his feathers. The story goes that on earth, Tawusi Melek sees Adam, the first man, whom God has made immortal and perfect, and the Angel challenges God’s decision. If Adam is to reproduce, Tawusi Melek suggests, he can’t be immortal, and he can’t be perfect. He has to eat wheat, which God has forbidden him to do. God tells his Angel that the decision is his, putting the fate of the world in Tawusi Melek’s hands. Adam eats wheat, is expelled from paradise, and the second generation of Yazidis are born into the world. Proving his worthiness to God, the Peacock Angel became God’s connection to earth and man’s link to the heavens. When we pray, we often pray to Tawusi Melek, and our New Year celebrates the day he descended to earth.

Yazidis believe that before God made man, he created seven divine beings, often called angels, who were manifestations of himself. After forming the universe from the pieces of a broken pearl-like sphere, God sent his chief Angel, Tawusi Melek, to earth, where he took the form of a peacock and painted the world the bright colors of his feathers. The story goes that on earth, Tawusi Melek sees Adam, the first man, whom God has made immortal and perfect, and the Angel challenges God’s decision. If Adam is to reproduce, Tawusi Melek suggests, he can’t be immortal, and he can’t be perfect. He has to eat wheat, which God has forbidden him to do. God tells his Angel that the decision is his, putting the fate of the world in Tawusi Melek’s hands. Adam eats wheat, is expelled from paradise, and the second generation of Yazidis are born into the world. Proving his worthiness to God, the Peacock Angel became God’s connection to earth and man’s link to the heavens. When we pray, we often pray to Tawusi Melek, and our New Year celebrates the day he descended to earth.

Shireen Baraka Barghouti lives in a cauldron of hate that often boils over. She’s never been outside the Gaza Strip even though it’s only twenty-five miles long and three miles wide at the narrowest borders, seven miles at the widest. Qasem Soleimani, until his death in 2020, was the major general over Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who invested monstrous sums of Iranian money in the youth of Gaza. In fact, Hamas simply could not exist without the Iranian money he supplied. And to make sure he covered all the bases, Soleimani also funded the rival Islamic Jihad. Shireen doesn’t hold back when speaking about the climate of death and destruction that has helped create. “In Gaza, terrorism is our number-one export,” she said. “How sad that whenever the Gaza Strip is mentioned, people automatically think of radical Islamic terrorists. But how could they not? Our Gaza government is run by them. Iran gives Hamas thirty million dollars a month. “At different times we’ve had al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in charge, to name just a few. New groups form every year, and our young Gaza boys see these ‘freedom fighters’ as heroes to emulate. “In Europe, people idolize soccer players. But not in Gaza. Here, men dressed in green uniforms, toting AK-47s, and shouting ‘death to Israel’ are featured on billboards. “The explosions are enough to cause you a nervous breakdown. A few years ago Hamas fired over ten thousand rockets into Israel in one extended attack over several months. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Israelis responded, and once we heard the drones humming over Gaza, we took cover. “Hamas has done nothing for the people of Gaza. While they line their pockets with millions of dollars, the people go without eating. They are cruel and intentionally keep us in this senseless war with Israel. “You might think because I live in Gaza and grew up Muslim that I hate Israel. But I don’t. I do detest Hamas, however—and all the other terrorist groups that make life unbearable in the Strip.

On September 11, 2001, there were no more than a few hundred al Qaeda members hiding out in Afghanistan. Three months later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitaries, U.S. Army Delta Force and U.S. Air Force finished bombing them, and Osama bin Laden had escaped to Pakistan, there were not enough of the terrorists left alive to fill a 757. Now, 20 years after that brief, one-sided victory, there are tens of thousands of bin Ladenite jihadists thriving in lands from Nigeria to the Philippines. Recently, and for almost three years, some even claimed their own divinely ordained caliphate, or Islamic State, temporarily erasing the border between Iraq and Syria. Local chapters of their group keep popping up all over the region. The State Department consistently reports a vast increase in the number of global terrorism incidents compared to the pre-September 11th era. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and their “lone wolf” copycats have carried out multiple, deadly attacks in more than a dozen major Western cities in the past decade, including Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, New York City, Pensacola and Corpus Christi. Something must be wrong. The problem is that our government is ignoring and misrepresenting the real causes of the terrorists’ war against the United States.

Over the past three years, I have heard a lot of stories about other Yazidi women who were captured and enslaved by ISIS. For the most part, we were all victims of the same violence. We would be bought at the market, or given as a gift to a new recruit or a high-ranking commander, and then taken back to his home, where we would be raped and humiliated, most of us beaten as well. Then we would be sold or given as a gift again, and again raped and beaten, then sold or given to another militant, and raped and beaten by him, and sold or given, and raped and beaten, and it went this way for as long as we were desirable enough and not yet dead. If we tried to escape, we would be punished severely.

Iran asserts that Bahrain, though across the Gulf, is a “lost province”—a claim made both by the shah and subsequently by the Islamic Republic. In 1981, two years after Khomeini took power, Iran backed a failed coup. Another coup in Bahrain was averted in 1996. Despite the fact that Bahrain had been ruled by the Al Khalifa family since 1783, Iran renewed its claims to the kingdom starting in 2007. Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani declared that Bahrain was an “Iranian province separated from Iran as a result of colonialism.

Action Exercise: Take out a pen and paper. Either bullet point, or brainstorm all of your goals in this life – no matter how insignificant they may seem. Now, on the other side of the paper, write all of the things you seek from the hereafter (the next life). When writing all of these goals out, make sure that you are very specific. For example: “I want to become a doctor” is not a sufficient goal. Rather you should write something more like: “I want to become a pediatrician in 5 years working in New York City”. This goal is specific and measurable – this is the difference between a tangible goal, and a wishy-washy dream. 3. Next, number each goal according to how important it is to you. If a certain goal is a priority, list it higher up. You are now looking at your priority list: this list is golden. It tells you where you should begin your pursuit for purpose – or perhaps, where you left off.

Beginning in 712 CE, the year the Arabs captured Samarkand, Islam progressively grew to become the region’s only religion, all the way up to the early twentieth century. Prior to their arrival, however, both Zoroastrianism (which was a state religion in Persia) and Nestorianism were well established. The conquerors, realizing just how important trade and money were between the two rivers, decreed that anyone who converted to Islam would be exempt from taxation. A brilliant idea—too brilliant, in fact! So many people renounced their former religion that, in just a few short years, the treasury ran dry. So they decided to levy a new tax, resulting in public outcry and unrest that finally settled down around the year 750.

in May 2011 in Algeria, a judge “stunned the Christian community” by sentencing Siaghi Krimo, a Muslim convert to Christianity (an apostate), to a five-year prison term and a fine of $200,000 Algerian dinars—even though prosecutors had only asked for a two-year imprisonment and a $50,000 dinar fine. Krimo’s crime was to give a CD about Christianity to a Muslim (proselytism), who later claimed the CD insulted Muslim prophet Muhammad (blasphemy).37 Even

currently engaged in a systematic campaign to track down and reconvert or kill those who have changed their religion from Islam.”43 Recently, however, having learned a lesson from the Nadarkhani debacle, Islamic authorities couch their charges against apostates in political language, often accusing them of being in cahoots with foreign powers—though human rights organizations monitoring the situation insist that this is just a cover for the apostasy law. While examples of harassment, imprisonment, and even killings of apostates in Iran are many, just a few examples from recent months follow here: In July 2012, a six-year prison sentence for Pastor Farshid Fathi Malayeri was upheld—though, as Barnabas Aid reported, “the political charges [against him] are a pretext for locking up the pastor, a convert from Islam to Christianity, on account of his faith.”44

When the star of Islam rises, the Jews rise with it to a golden age of intellectual creativity. When feudalism settles over Europe, they open shop as its bankers and scholars. And when the Modern Age struts in, we find them sitting on the architectural staff shaping it. If we now shift our sights from a general view of the history of civilizations to focus on that of the Jews only, we see an equally incredible succession of events. We see Jewish history begin with one man, Abraham, who introduces a new concept to the world—monotheism—which he hands to his descendants. Now Jewish history hits the roads of the world. After a nomadic existence in Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, and settlement of Palestine; after defeat by the Assyrians, captivity by the Babylonians, and freedom under the Persians; after an intellectual clash with the Greeks, strife under the Maccabeans, and dispersion by the Romans; after flourishing as mathematicians, poets, and scientists under Moslem rule; after surviving as scholars, businessmen, and ghetto tenants under feudal lords; after surviving as statesmen, avant-garde intellectuals, and concentration camp victims in the Modern Age, a small segment of these descendants of Abraham return—after a 2,000-year absence—to reestablish Israel, while the rest choose to remain in the world at large in a self-imposed exile. Such a succession of events would be improbable were it not historic fact. What can we make of these events? Are they mere accidents of history? Are they but blind, stumbling, meaningless facts, a series of causes and effects without a definite design? Or is this improbable succession of events part of what philosophers call “teleologic history”—that is, a succession of events having a predetermined purpose. If so, who drafted such a blueprint? God? Or the Jews themselves? Why would God choose the Jews as His messengers for a divine mission? Or, to use William Norman Ewer’s trenchant phrase, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” The equally trenchant rejoinder by Leon Roth is, “It’s not so odd. The Jews chose God.” If God had a need for messengers to carry out a mission, He would have

Once experience is admitted within the theological edifice, the latter begins to crumble – such portion of it, of course, as stands within the experimental domain, for the other wings are safe from any attack by experience. So years, centuries, go by; peoples, governments, manners and systems of living, pass away; and all along new theologies, new systems of metaphysics, keep replacing the old, and each new one is reputed more “true” or much “better” that its predecessors. And in certain cases they may really be better, if by “better” we means more helpful to society; but more “true”, no, if by the term we mean accord with experimental reality. One faith cannot be more scientific than another, and experimental reality is equally overreached by polytheism, Islamism, and Christianity (whether Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, Modernist, or of any other variety); by the innumerable metaphysical sects, including the Kantian, the Hegelian, the Bergsonian, and not excluding the positivistic sects of Comte, Spencer, and other eminent writers too numerous to mention; by the faiths of solidaristes, humanitarians, anti-clericals, and worshippers of Progress; and by as many other faiths as have existed, exist, or can be imagined.

Having long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons could do was to remain silent about the change in their country, at some point in recent years it began to appear as though they were expected simply to get on, silently but contentedly, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and accepting the loss of their country: ‘Get over it. It’s nothing new. You were terrible. Now you are nothing.

Soleiman drank himself to death by the time he was 47 years old. But his successor was no better. Shah Sultan Hossein kept the old vices and added new ones. He sent agents around Iran to abduct attractive women for his huge (and very expensive) harem.