"One Foot in al-Andalus and Another in China"

Three weeks ago, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, since 2010 grand imam of Egypt's leading Islamic scholarly institution,  Al-Azhar, and portrayed as a voice of moderation, responded forcefully to a speech by Professor Mohamed Othman Elkhosht, president of Cairo University.

To quote the uploader and translator, Memri TV:

'Professor Mohamed Othman Elkhosht, the President of Cairo University, said at a January 28, 2020 conference that was streamed live on Al-Azhar University’s YouTube channel that the religious sciences are in a state of stagnation, and he criticized the fact that critical analysis, scientific analysis, and methodologies from the humanities and social sciences are not used in this field.

 He said that Islamic scholarship has failed to enter a new era and called for interdisciplinarity.

 Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, responded that shari’a law, Islamic jurisprudence, and the Islamic heritage that Professor Elkhosht criticized were the same things that united a bunch of warring Arab tribes that “couldn’t tell right from left” and enabled them to expand as far as Al-Andalus and China.

 Sheikh Al-Tayyeb also said that Islamic heritage barely plays a role in people’s lives today and that the Arab and Muslim identity is meaningless.

 He further argued that Western leaders such as Trump and Netanyahu make all the decisions for the Arab world, that the conflict between modernity and the Islamic heritage is made up by the West in order to hold the Muslim world back, and that there is an “accursed and vicious machine” directing the way people view Islam.'

Read Raymond Ibrahim on this topic here

"The Impurity of Jews & Infidels": A western imam tells (video)

Vraiment?

 A former vice-chairman of the Canadian Council of Imams, Sheikh Yusuf Badat, explains on what terms the "filthy" can enter the masjid (mosque).

 A Vlad Tepes video:

"This video is part of a series exposing how Islam is taught in mosques and Islamic schools in North America. This video focuses on the Islamic view of Jews and unbelievers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM6uDoQ9bhw

[Update: I don't know what happened to that video, but here's another from Vlad Tepes, illustrating the high status in which women are likely to find themselves in the new and improved Europe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow49B6kCYPw]

And on his website here Vlad Tepes has an excerpt from QandA, the ABC's answer to the BBC's Question Time (and just as stacked, audience and panel) with confirmed leftists, well-known journalist Chris Kenny talks sense about the Islamist threat while a strident lefty panellist bristling with outrage, Vanessa ('Van') Badham (a contributor the The Guardian and its ilk, and needless to say a foe of [western] patriarchy) tries to shout him down.  (More on the Jim Molan incident mentioned, here)

A Palestine-born Scholar of Islam's Advice for President Trump (video)

"Dear Mr President," begins the following video, an address in the form of an Open Letter by Professor Sami Aldeeb, a much-published Swiss scholar of Islam who happens to be of Palestinian Christian background.

'Your country, like Europe, the region where I come from, and the world are facing the rise of violence in particular by various Islamic terrorist groups. This violence is one of the causes of immigrant waves breaking on the shores of Europe, the US and other countries. In your statements, you highlighted these two issues.

 You  described “radical Islamic terrorism” as an “evil” unseen before, adding that it should be just “eradicated off the face of the earth”: “we gonna end it. It’s time. It’s time right now to end it”. But you have not said how you will achieve this goal. You also called Angela Merkel’s open door policy to refugees a “catastrophic mistake”, saying that Berlin, instead of hosting refugees, would have done better to advocate more for the creation of no-fly zones in Syria in order to protect the local population from the bombing. “The gulf states should have had to pay for them. After all, they have money like hardly anyone else has”.

Let me give you my humble opinion on these two issues.

Regarding radical Islamic terrorism, it is certainly necessary to fight it with weapons, but weapons alone will not suffice. It is also particularly important to eliminate the ideology on which radical Islamic terrorism is based, namely the Islamic ideology. To take adequate action we must call things by their name.

The radical Islamic terrorism is based on the Koran, the Sunnah of Muhammad and the teachings of Islam. Radical Islamic terrorist groups are only putting into practice what universities, Islamic centers, schools and mosques have been teaching for fourteen centuries in all Muslim countries, and even in Western countries, including yours. Egyptian journalists and intellectuals continue to denounce this teaching, which is the source of terrorism that destabilizes Egypt. This teaching is conveyed by mosques, schools and universities of Al-Azhar, the most important religious institution in the Sunni world. Without a radical change of this teaching, it is impossible to end the radical Islamic terrorism. But how to proceed?'

View the video to find out, or read Professor Aldeeb's post here

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuJaCvdLh4)

"ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorist groups faithfully apply the teachings of Islam. Western leaders who claim that the practices of these terrorist groups have nothing to do with Islam are misled and are in turn misleading their citizens. This is why they fail to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism. A doctor who wrongly diagnoses a disease exposes the patient to fatal danger...."

Pertinent advice for Theresa May, wouldn't you say?



Not to mention all the other Western leaders in denial:

"Regarding immigration, it is extremely likely that if Western countries open their doors, some hundred million Muslims will emigrate to escape the hell of the Arab and Muslim countries. Thousands of Muslims are trying to cross the borders risking their lives and finding themselves in inhuman situations. These Muslims carry the ideology that destroyed their own country, an ideology that will ultimately destroy the West too. On the other hand, many Muslims are incarcerated in Western prisons where they are further radicalized. It is estimated that 70% of prisoners in France are Muslims. When these prisoners will leave their prisons after they have completed their sentences, they will destroy the West. Terrorists who committed attacks in Europe and in your country went through these prisons, which are real terrorist nurseries."

Meanwhile, at Birzeit University near Ramallah:

"O Shabiba, this is a call to arms!"

 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Eb6CfMKIg)

To quote the translator and uploader, Memri.org:

'The Birzeit University "Shabiba" student movement marked the 52nd anniversary of the establishment of Fatah with military parades and festivities. Armed and masked men in fatigues marched and shouted slogans, such as "Blow up the head of the settler!" Footage was uploaded to the Facebook page of Birzeit University's Shabiba in January.'

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

Have You Washed Behind Your Ears?

You may not believe your ears with this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9tIVQ8hdFs

 Egyptian researcher Ragheb El-Sergany said that Europe became acquainted with science and with moral values only through the Muslims. According to El-Sergany, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine of Cairo University, it was the Muslims who brought the notion of cleanliness to Europe, where people used to wash themselves only twice a year, he said, adding that the bidet is evidence of this. The interview with El-Segany was broadcast on Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV on November 24.

(Memri.org video)

"Heading Towards a Great Big Leftwing/Islamist Alliance Iceberg Full Steam Ahead" (video)

Emphatically not politically correct, Paul Weston, chairman, Liberty GB, predicts a grim future for the once great nation whose people, in the stirring words of an eighteenth-century lyricist, "never never never shall be slaves":

Australian Politicians Condemn Plans For Anti-Islam Party

Here's Geert Wilders, congratulating the anti-Islam Q Society of Australia on its work:

He's due in Perth, Western Australia, next year, in order to launch a new political party, expected to be called the Australian Liberty Alliance.

Says Wilders:

"Like you, good people in Europe, America and Canada have had enough of politicians who don't share our values and foolishly declare that all cultures are equal and who lack courage to speak the truth and say that Islam is the biggest threat to freedom today.

It may seem like a big task to turn around. But the winds are changing .You too will soon have the opportunity to turn the tide in Australia."

It's reported that Debbie Robinson, President of the Q Society, will stand as a candidate for the new party at the next federal election, which must take take place before September 2016.

Observes Q Society spokesman Andrew Horwood:

"We can see what's happening with Islam around the world and we would like to initially have a 10-year halt in Islamic immigration until Australia can get a handle on how to deal with the issue of Islam or there is a bit of a reformation with the Islamic faith and it can deal with living in the 21st Century."

Not surprisingly, politicians across the political divide have condemned the mooted Australian Liberty Alliance.

Read and see more here

A Motherland Mired in Madness

Observes Douglas Murray in a recent article of characteristic insight and intellectualism that should be mandatory reading for ostriches (or should I say Oztriches?) with their heads in the sand, who look with equanimity upon the prospect of increased Islamic migration to Australia:

'.... I have ... travelled across Europe, and must admit that it can be terrifying to see the way in which the unsolved problems which Islam brings with it are dangerously simmering. Every European country is now experiencing this in the same ways. From the streets of Scandinavia to the outskirts of Paris, the northern cities of England to the East End of London, we have a set of societies in our midst about which even the use of the word "integration" must be regarded as some cosmic joke.

.... What has been created are not multicultural societies but parallel societies. Every country faces similar challenges and all are going through similar debates.

Yet .... They encourage Muslim leaders to "condemn" extremism but do little to tackle it. They praise "moderates" when they should be insisting on Muslim progressives. Lacking the resolve to change this, we all cling to an unfounded hope that the absorption of tens of millions of Muslims into Europe will change nothing very significantly....

 Britain had no significant Muslim presence until the latter part of the last century. There was a negligible Muslim presence in Britain until postwar immigration brought waves of migration predominantly from the Indian subcontinent, and Islam played no important role in our history.

By the 2001 census, there were around 1.5 million Muslims in England and Wales. By the 2011 census, that number was 2.7 million. Over a single decade the Muslim population had doubled — and that is not including the hundreds of thousands of people who are here illegally. 

If anyone in power had wanted to alter the vast increase in Muslim immigration during the post-9/11 period, to work on absorbing the people who were already here before welcoming in any more, they could have done so. But they did not and no politician looks set to do so in the near future....

Today Britain's Muslim community is growing ten times faster than the rest of the population. Half of British Muslims are under the age of 25. And among young people under 25, one in ten are now Muslim. Conversions of Britons to Islam are also at an unprecedented high. In the decade since 9/11 more than 100,000 British people converted to Islam. Three-quarters of these were women....

[I]f current trends continue, in the next 20 years or so there will be more Muslims in Britain than Christians. Some demographic studies suggest that on current trends Britain could have a Muslim majority by the middle of this century....

In the last couple of years the leaders of all three main political parties have conceded that it is not racist to have concerns about immigration. But they neither know what to do about the next step, nor can get beyond generalities about the need for "debate" or the sending around — as during this past summer — of occasional dog-whistles to pretend something is being done while the issue truly remains unaddressed....

There is a blockage of common sense or assertion of values....

Last year Mohammed was the second most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales. In the country as a whole it was narrowly beaten to the top spot by Harry (which received a boost from the popular prince and a member of the pop group One Direction). But the figures also show that Mohammed is now easily the most popular name for baby boys in many areas of the country, including London and the West Midlands....

Tell Muslim leaders not just to "condemn" acts of violence but to stop them. Tell them that the era of ifs and buts about the extremists must end. Tell them to put the concerns of the state foremost in the minds of young Muslims, to have a picture of the Queen and say a prayer for the royal family in mosques as it is said in synagogues every Saturday. Tell them to teach their young that if they feel an urge to get involved in a struggle, they can join up for one the best armies in the world — the British army.

In particular, tell them to create swiftly and purposefully a type of British or Western Islam which not only is not in the hands of fanatics, but cannot be reclaimed by them. Lock the fanatical scholarship out as strongly as historically it has been able to be locked in. I say all this with a sense of hopelessness. There has been no sign, in a dozen years, that any Western country is willing to do anything like this....

Yes, it will be true that we will have access to a greater variety of food, languages and cultures than we had half a century ago. And we will have to get used to the downside that there will be more forced marriage, female genital mutilation and beheading than there used to be.

My suspicion, not to be too flippant, is that a lot of people, especially those in positions of power, have already made their peace with that deal. There is no plausible reason, if they have not, why so much attention is paid to muffling those voices who raise criticisms of Islam and so much help given to those often highly regressive figures who carry water for the fundamentalists.

....There may be tinkering, and lone voices speaking out against such developments, but there will be no significant force from inside or outside Islam persuading Muslims that the path of segregation and separation denoted by the veil is wrong.

Our politics will inevitably follow the same sectarian lines. Already there are stories — I know of two cases, from different political parties — where Jewish candidates have not been chosen to contest certain parliamentary seats because the proportion of local Muslims is too high. [Emphasis added; is that, incidentally, what we wish to see in Australia?]

With one in ten young Britons being Muslim, there is already a change in the pressures on politicians. What will it be like when it is two in ten? Will some of our closest political alliances survive?

The best we may be able to hope for is the right to pursue the type of British lives that our ancestors lived. You can see this, in rural and other communities in Britain where the concerns of the global battle for Islam, even when they are in a nearby town, appear to be thousands of miles away.

.... As the recent history of the English Defence League may have shown, any non-Muslim, grassroots yet non-racist resistance to Islamic extremism may well be impossible....

In any case, it certainly appears to have become the view of the British governing class that, if there is a problem within or from Islam it is beyond the control or influence of the political class, let alone any single here-today gone-tomorrow politician. The pretence is now so strong that it is assumed that Islam is like all other religions, that suspicion of Islam is as dangerous as suspicion of any other religion....'

Read the entire article here

Also worth a sobering  read is British Muslim Mehrdad Amanpour's "The Quiet Death of Moderate Islam" on Harry's Place (taster below):

'....When I was a child, my relatives would tell me that the hadud punishments of stoning, beheading and limb amputation weren’t part of modern Islam – such practices belonged to another time, in the same way that burning witches in Europe belonged to another time. I was told that the only Muslims that supported such practices were ‘backward’ and the only places that practiced them were ‘barbaric’ – in time ‘education’ would enlighten these simple folk and drag them into modernity.

Yet I’ve grown up and seen the opposite happen....

The gutless media. The unprincipled trade unions, universities and student unions that turn a blind eye to the wickedness being promoted in their midst. The hypocritical ‘anti-fascist’ organisations that enable and defend hate. Most of all, the lickspittle political class. Shame on them all.

‘Extreme’ has quietly become ‘moderate’ whilst Europeans have been too polite, too unprincipled or too cowardly to object....

During the past two decades, the Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad.

At the same time, competing fundamentalist Shia and Sunni movements have been promoted aggressively throughout Europe, with massive funding from countries such as Iran and Qatar.

Moderate Islam is as good as dead. It didn’t stand a chance....'

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

"I stitched up a comedy on the morals of the harem. As a Spanish author, I thought I could mock Muhammad without a care. Instantaneously, an envoy... from where I don't know, was complaining that I offended by my verses against the Sublime Porte [Ottoman Imperial Court], Persia, part of the peninsula of India, all of Egypt, the kingdoms of Barca, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers [Barbary corsair ports], and Morocco. And right away, my comedy was put to the fire in order to please the Muhammadan princes, not one of whom – I believe –  knows how to read, and who harshly strike our shoulder blades, calling us: Christian dogs...."

What's that all about, then?

Click here to find out and to discover an interesting pro-Israel blog to boot.