This week we are going to go into what the word Islam truly means.
How many times
have we heard, “Islam is a Religion of Peace?”
They then go on to say, in fact, the word Islam actually means
peace. However, that is not true.
Muslim
apologists will claim the root word of Islam is “al-Salaam,” which means “peace”
in Arabic. However, a word in Arabic
only has ONE root. The root word for
Islam is “al-Silm,” which actually means “submission” or
“surrender.”
There is no
disagreement about this among Arabic or Islamic scholars. al-Silm (submission) does not mean the
same thing as al-Salaam (peace). Otherwise,
they would be the same word.
In our culture,
submission has a much different meaning than peace. We do not believe that peace is gained by submission to others. As the
modern-day Islamic scholar, Ibrahim Sulaiman, says, "Jihad is not
inhumane, despite its necessary violence and bloodshed. Its ultimate desire is peace which is protected and enhanced by the
rule of law."
In truth, the
Quran not only commands Muslims to submit
to Allah, but it also orders them to subdue
those of other religions until they submit to Islamic rule. This has led to the aggressive history of followers
of Islam to conquer other cultures and bring them under the rule of Islamic law.
The Quran says all
will be judged by Allah. However, this
does not mean all have equal rights or are
judged by the same standards.
There is no doubt
in the teachings of the Quran, the life of Muhammad, or Islamic law as to the
inferiority of women to men. No matter how
hard apologists today try to say there are verses that teach otherwise, there is
NO such progressive interpretation found in the Quran.
Muhammad would often
hand out captured women as war prizes to his men after military conquests. In at least one case, he ordered the women be
raped in front of their husbands. Then
those captured women were made into sex slaves by the same men who had killed
their husbands and brothers. There are
four verses in which Allah makes clear that a Muslim Master has full sexual
access to his female slaves, yet there is not
one that prohibits rape.
The Quran also gives
Muslim men permission to beat their wives for disobedience. However, not
one verse commands love in marriage (although it does say love
exists). The verses plainly say Husbands are a degree above their wives.
The Hadith says women are intellectually inferior to men, and the
majority of Hell’s occupants are women.
Under Islamic
law, a man may divorce his wife at his choosing. If he does this twice, then wishes to remarry
her, she must first have sex with another man.
Men are exempt from such degradations.
Muslim women are
not free to marry whomever they please as Muslim men are. Their husband may also bring other wives and/or
slaves into the marriage bed. A wife must also be sexually available to her husband
at any time.
Muslim women do
not inherit property in equal portion to males.
This is somewhat ironic since Islam owes its existence to the wealth of
Muhammad's first wife.
A woman's
testimony in court is considered to be worth only half that of a man’s,
according to the Quran. Unlike a man,
she must also cover her head, and often her face.
If a woman claims
to have been raped, there must be four male witnesses to corroborate her
account. This is mandated by strict
Sharia Law. Otherwise, she can be jailed or stoned to death for confessing to adultery. You see, it’s not rape without the four male
witnesses.
All this clearly
shows there is NO equality under Islam.
This claim is merely a ploy designed for those unwilling to accept the
truth and reality of Islamic law and history.
Jihad is mentioned over 200 times in the
words of Muhammad. In Arabic, jihad means struggle. However, in Islam,
it means HOLY WAR.
This constant
argument of who the true Muslims are is foolish because the
Quran clearly distinguishes the true
Muslim from the pretender in
Sura 9 and elsewhere. In this, one of the
last chapters of the Quran, the true believer strives and fights with
their wealth and persons while the hypocrites
are those who sit at home, refusing to join the jihad against unbelievers
in foreign lands.
Muhammad
organized 65 military campaigns in the last ten years of his life and
personally led 27 of them. The more
power he attained, the smaller the excuse needed to go to battle, until finally, he began attacking tribes merely
because they were not yet part of his growing empire.
Muhammad left
his men with instructions to take the battle
against Christians, Persians, Jews, and
polytheists, which came to include millions of unfortunate Hindus. For the next four centuries, Muslim armies, attacked
unsuspecting neighbors, plundering them of loot and slaves, and forcing the
survivors to either convert or pay
tribute at the point of a sword.
As we’ve already covered in this series, by the
time of the Crusades when the Europeans began to fight back, the so-called Religion
of Peace had conquered two-thirds of the
Christian world by the sword, from Syria to Spain, and across North Africa. Millions
of Christians were enslaved by Muslims, and tens of millions of
Africans. The Arab slave-trading routes would
stay open for 1300 years until pressure from Christian-based countries forced
Islamic nations to declare the practice illegal. To this day, the Muslim world has never
apologized for the victims of Jihad and slavery.
There is not
another religion in the world that consistently produces terrorism in the name
of their God as does Islam. The most
dangerous are those who interpret the Quran most transparently. They are the fundamentalists or purists of the faith
and believe in Muhammad’s mandate to
spread Islamic rule by the sword, putting to death those who will not
submit. In the absence of true infidels,
they will even turn on each other.
The holy texts
of Islam are full of verses commanding violence and hatred toward those outside
the faith, as well as the hypocrites, who
are Muslims, who don't act like Muslims
by following the commands of Muhammad. In
earlier verses of the Quran, violence was forbidden, then as it progressed violence
was permitted, and then finally it was mandatory. The handful of previous verses that spoke of tolerance is overwhelmed by the later ones that carry a much different
message. While Old Testament verses of
blood and guts are generally bound by historical context within the text
itself, Quranic imperatives to violence usually appear open-ended and subject
to personal interpretation.
From the history
of the faith to its most sacred of writings, one who wants to believe in a peaceful
Islam has a lot more to ignore than do those who want to perform acts of terrorism. To be completely honest, the Religion of
Peace has been the harshest and bloodiest religion the world has ever
known. In Islam, believers say there will
be no peace unless Muslims are in power.
What Muslims
call tolerance, others would consider institutionalized discrimination and enslavement. The consignment of Jews and Christians to dhimmis
under Islamic rule means they are not allowed the same religious rights and
freedoms as Muslims. They cannot share
their faith, or build houses of worship without permission.
Historically,
dhimmis are forced to wear distinctive
clothing or cut their hair in a particular manner. This is to mark their position of inferiority
and humiliation, such as how the Nazis labeled
the Jews. They do not share the same
legal rights as Muslims, and must even pay a poll tax called the jizya. Then they are killed or have their children
taken from them if they cannot meet the tax collector’s requirements.
For hundreds of
years, the Christian population in occupied Europe had their sons taken away
and forcibly converted into Muslim warriors known as Jannisaries by the Ottoman
Turks.
For those who
are not the People of the Book, such as Hindus and atheists, there is very little tolerance to be found once Islam
establishes political superiority. The
Quran commands Muslims to fight in the
way of Allah until religion is only for Allah. Then those who find themselves conquered face death if they do not establish
regular prayer and charity in the Islamic tradition according to the pillars of
Islam, which is what is being taught in many of our schools across this country
today.
Tens of millions
of Hindus and Buddhists were displaced or forcibly converted over the last
thousand years. Islamists in Somalia
today behead Christians, and in Iran, they are jailed.
There are about 500 verses in the Quran that speak of Allah’s hatred for non-Muslims and the
punishment he has prepared for them.
As for Sura 109,
any true Quran scholar will point out that the purpose of the verse was to
distinguish Islam from the Gods of the Quraysh, one of which was named Allah,
rather than to advocate religious tolerance for non-Muslims.
At the time he
narrated this very early verse, Muhammad
did not have any power, and thus no choice but to be tolerant of others. However, no real
tolerance was shown once he returned to Mecca many years later and demanded the
eviction or death of anyone who would not convert to Islam. In fact, he physically destroyed the
cherished idols of the very people he addressed in Sura 109.
We are told to
believe that Islam teaches to be tolerant and peaceful, but as you can see by its history and actions of those professing
their belief in its teachings, then Islam
is fundamentally the most intolerant
religion we are facing today.
Don’t allow
those pushing the false narrative about Islam.
Don’t let them guilt you into silence.
We are fighting not only for our lives
but our futures. Do we want to live as a
free people to worship and live as we choose, or do we want to submit to Islam
and live a life of fear?
Next week we
will cover the myth told by Muslims of how Islam has fostered a rich heritage
of scientific discovery, which paved the way for modern advances in technology
and medicine.
