Political Islam and Muslim Ethos

Posted by johnhouk on Jul 11, 2009
 John R. Houk
© July 11, 2009

Gary H. Johnson, Jr. critiques Bill Warner’s article, “Official Islam.” You can read the SlantRight.com post of Bill Warner’s article HERE.

Gary’s critique is entitled, “Islam’s Golden Rule.”

You should read the Warner piece before you read Gary’s piece.

I have a few words about Warner and Johnson. Both individuals obviously are obviously well versed in the ways of Islam. I find most of Warner’s articles at his website Political Islam. Johnson’s articles and informative essays are at his website United Against Islamic Supremacism.

To be honest Warner’s website is very good because the information he provides is some what written on a level that the grazing Internet surfer can grasp. Johnson’s website is extremely informative however Johnson writes on a level best suited for Internet seekers searching for the details of Islam from a Western perception yet with the Islamic perception in mind. Therein might lie a difficulty for the curious web surfer looking for understandable information for the reasons that Islam seems to so volatile toward Westerners, Jews and non-Muslims in general. Johnson often uses a Muslim conceptual word that nails the essence of his essays yet you might need to Google what that nail (word) means in understandable English.

My simplistic understanding of Johnson’s “Islam’s Golden Rule” is that he believes that Warner utilizes statistical information about the negative acts executed in the name of Islam. Johnson believes Warner’s emphasis political Islamic ideology is deficient in the larger picture of the “Muslim Ethos.”

When you tackle Johnson’s essay (and you really should!) it seems to me there are two words you should become familiar with: 1. Hisba 2. Jahaliya. I think more the former than the latter.

1. Hisba:
    a. (simple): hisba. Office of accounting or public inspection. See muhtasib.

    Muhtasib: The officer in charge of the hisba, whose duty, among other things, is to ensure the proper conduct of people in their public activities.

    b. (summation of the book “Public Duties in Islam: The Institution of the Hisba” by Ibn Taymiyah): An exposition of the theory of Hisba in the wider context of a just society and an efficient market economy. Al-Haisba is a moral as well as a socio-economic institution in Islam through which public life is regulated in such a way that a high degree of public morality is attained and the society is protected from bad workmanship , fraud , extortion and exploitation.

    In Part II - Toward a Just Society, Ibn Taymiya spells out the different stipulations of the Quranic command of amr bi’lma’Rif wa-n-nahi 'anil-munkar.

    …

    • Commanding Good and Forbidding Evil

    • Strategy for Reform

    • Men and Movements

    • Society and Leadership

    • Summing up on Knowledge, Justice and the Duties of the Rulers and the Ruled.

    c. (Hisba Institution): The Hisbah is a religious institution under the authority of the state that appoints people to carry out the responsibility of enjoining what is right, whenever people start to neglect it, and forbidding what is wrong, whenever people start to engage in it. The purpose of this is to safeguard society from deviance, protect the faith, and ensure the welfare of the people in both religious and worldly manners according to the Law of Allah. Allah has made it obligatory upon all Muslims to enjoin good and forbid wrongdoing to the extent of their knowledge and abilities. (Click on “Hisba Institution” to read more)

    See Also: Hisba: A Historical Overview and Notes on the Muhtasib.


2. Jahaliya (or Jahiliyya or various spelling):

    a. Jahaliya or ignorance, is how Muslims term the customs and culture in Arabia before the advent of Islam. (Yahiya Emerick; The complete idiot's guide to understanding Islam. p 193. Google Books)

    b. Sayyid Qutb on Jahiliyya: Qutb argued that the entire world, including the Muslim, was in a state of jahiliyah, or ignorance where man’s way had replaced God’s way.

    According to Qutb, since jahiliyah and Islam cannot co-exist, offensive jihad was necessary to destroy jahiliyah society and bring the entire world to Islam. Until jahiliyah is defeated, all true Muslims have a personal obligation to wage offensive jihad. When Qutb added offensive jihad to the widely accepted concept of defensive jihad, Qutb broke with mainstream Islam and ridiculed Muslim scholars:

    Those who say that Islamic Jihad was merely for the defense of the home land of Islam diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life and consider it less important [than] their homeland. . . . However, [Islamic community] defense is not the ultimate objective of the Islamic movement of jihad but it is a mean of establishing the Divine authority within it so that it becomes the headquarters for the movement of Islam, which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind . . . (mumbai-central.com)

    c. RELIGIOSCOPE - Another key concept in Qutb’s work is the concept of jahiliyya. Could you please explain its traditional meaning and the meaning Qutb gives to it?

    IA-R - Jahiliyya is a term used by the Quran for describing the pre-Islamic conditions in Arabia. Roughly, it means ignorance or the phase of ignorance. Islam was supposed to supplant all the different traditions, practices, and ideas of jahiliyya with a new Islamic system that is far different from jahiliyya. Qutb, especially when he was in prison, used the term jahiliyya to refer to the Muslim world in the 20th century, that refused to implement the sharia or establish an Islamic state. That was full of jahiliyya according to him. But it seems to me that he did that under extreme circumstances, and this is the part the Jihad people in prison picked that up in the 1960s and the 1970s, and that became a dominant part of the Islamist discourse especially, in Egypt in the 1970s, 1980s. Many of these people who had that kind of discourse went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, and now they are a part of the Qaeda. Somebody like Qutb must have had a major impact on somebody like Bin Laden, for example, or Ayman al-Zawahri, or others. (Interview with Professor Ibrahim Abu-Rabi)


Now if my selections to give the reader an idea of “Hisba” and “Jahaliya” don’t match Johnson’s view, I am certain he will let me know.
So take a look at “Islam’s Golden Rule”.

JRH 7/11/09
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Islam’s Golden Rule
An Engagement Chronicle

Gary H. Johnson, Jr.
United Against Islamic Supremacism
July 7, 2009

On June 29th, 2009, Bill Warner, the Director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, released an article concerning the “Official Islam”. His reference to the “Big Lie” of Mein Kampf was not the first time I had read this reference by the intellectual vanguard of Western liberty. Ali Sina’s work at Faith Freedom International and his powerful 2008 release “Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah’s Prophet” have pulled on this kernal of Hitlerian prison rot to demonstrate the parallels between the tyranny of the Nazis and the totality of Shariah Law and the Clerical Establishment driving Political Islam, today. In essence, there is great truth in the recognition of Muhammad’s Sunna-driven brand of jihad as a big lie. However, if we be true to our hearts and our reason, we, as Americans, must come at last to admit that the truth in this reckoning has nothing whatsoever to do with Political Islam and everything to do with the Muslim Ethos.

In full, the Study of Political Islam is a doorway to understanding the ideology of the Muslim “Faith”…it is not the ideology, itself…and it is not the only doorway. One cannot look solely to the statistical analysis of jihad within the Sira, the Hadith and the Koran and find the soul of this Supremacist Movement. Moreover, one cannot find meaning in the dualities of the Islamic Rationale simply by leaning on a political interpretation of the texts at the heart of the matter, whilst swelling one’s chest with the pride of an ill-conceived perception of the writ of abrogation, religiously or clerically speaking. Without understanding the Muslim Ethos, understanding the nature of the Big Lie is impossible. Indeed, without understanding the Muslim Ethos, delineating the caveats within the Ideology of Islamic Supremacism is the equivalent of tilting at windmills.

At base, the terror we face is not a tide of fascist warriors set on establishing their rule; rather, we face a tsunami of mercantilist slavers bent on establishing Allah’s Dominion over the Laws of Men.

Presently, as it stands, we Free Men and Women of the West, have one soot covered shrinking window of daylight left on these shores of promise, dedicated to the creative capacity of humanity. If reason’s rays find their path sealed tight, if the light of individual liberty fades, how will we judge right from wrong in the shadow of a memory? How will we find truth in the dark of a desperate equality? And it is in this vein that one must look to the shuttering window, sliding shut, and refuse to accept the dying of the light and as an act of volition must take a sledgehammer to the wall the darkening window sits within, as a measure of selflove, with the passion of friendship’s first gleaming. Afterall, Fate is the foremost veil of Islamic Supremacism’s arsenal, while Promise is Hope’s opposite. We free men and women of the West are not fated to accept the shuttering of our windows; rather, we hold within our minds the power to break through the walls that cage and breathe the promise of the dawning as we walk through, upright, shoulders back, chin high. Hope is the resolve of a prisoner. Promise is forged by the merits of a free mind. And, regardless of which chords are intoned by the Obama Presidency in the Muslim lands, America’s Dream is not satisfied with the Hope for change within our gilded cages…America’s Dream is only Satisfied by a limitless sky and the boundless promise of individual flight. In full, the antidote for Islamic Supremacism is and always has been the American Dream. While the Muslim Ethos incites Jihad, the American Dream excites Reason. While the Muslim Ethos aspires to the capacity of World Dominion, the American Dream inspires the invention of Worldwide Emancipation. Faith in Reason, then, is not a far off thing…however, it is a volitional thing.

Individual Liberty is an earned thing, and only by engaging one another will we inspire the possibility and promise. The rate at which we, in the West, are gaining ground on understanding the nature of contemporary jihadism and Islamic Supremacy is beset on all side by the fatalist whispers of corrupted reason. Whether we realize it or not, we are fighting amongst ourselves, divided, leaderless, rudderless, with no direction home. At first blush, this engagement chronicle may appear to dash the validity of the study of Political Islam, when in reality, this journal champions the heroic resolve of Bill Warner’s foundational efforts. His ability to recognize the utter delusion necessary to swallow the pill of Obama’s “Official Islam” is not only commendable, it is rare and priceless gem.

Bill Warner’s assessment of President Obama’s Cairo rendering of “Official Islam” denotes a startlingly clear understanding of Barack Hussein Obama’s Engagement policies of Dhimmipolitik. However, without a full breakdown of the Muslim Ethos and the ideological driving doctrines of Islamic Supremacism, the assessment is not actionable. In all reality, Bill Warner’s assessment demonstrates this weakness in the declaration that not one line of the “Official Islam” is totally true. In this, I beg to differ, that I might lend a sledghehammer to my friend.

Islam has a Golden Rule, Bill. The Golden Rule of Islam is the cornerstone of the Institution of the Hisba. This Public Duty in Islam is denoted in the Koranic Constitution of the Muslim Psyche by the ayat “Enjoin Good and Forbid Evil”. To deny the value system of Islam is to destroy the Western ability to ideologically defeat the Political Islamists and Militant Jihadists ‘neath the umbrella of Islamic Supremacy. The word “enjoin” means “command or demand from a position of authority”. Therefore, the Golden rule of Islam, the source of the Muslim Ethos is based on Commanding the Good and Forbidding the Evil from a position of Authority. A statistical analysis will not yield this definition, nor will scientific reasoning create a mental bridge which allows the Western thinkers tarrying in your footsteps to divine the nature of that authority, or the nature of Political Islam’s dedication to it. Sure, 90% or more of the time in the Koran, when Jihad is mentioned it is aimed at militantly coercing the submission of unbelievers and taking converts into the fold…but that does not change the fact that the first verses of the Koran are found in Sura 96, and that verse imparts to the world that Allah made men from a clot and taught men by the pen what they knew not.

Only by understanding that this “new knowledge” handed down directly by Allah is the source of Authority can one expect the Western world to comprehend the depths and ethics of Jahaliya rationale. Moreover, only when the Western world grapples with the Koranic assertion that Allah made men and djinn solely to worship Him can one place any context to the value of prayer as the ultimate “Good” in the Muslim framed Ethos. Islam’s Ethics delivers and imparts an affirming faith in the grace of transmission found in the exemplar of the Prophet, whose will to submit generated Gabriel’s presence and alburaq’s flight to Jerusalem. Only by placing Political Islam in this framework, can the supremacy espoused by the clerical elites of modernity be understood, reasonably, as a measure of engagement. Without Hisba, Islam is a religion. With Hisba, Islam is a socio-economic totality, with a prepackaged, precharted avenue toward Islamic Supremacy. The key to the recognition of the Islamic golden rule is to defy ALL attempts to give it creedence and moral equivalence to the Judeo-Christian version: “Do unto others”.

In full, the Hisba destroys individual rights and replaces them with the capacity of man to aspire to Allah’s fatefully prescribed Limits. Allah’s Rights supercede Human Rights in this frame of Ethical Authority. Shariah Law, then, holds supremacy over all constructs of manmade law under the yoke of Hisba’s tyrannical construct.

The weakness of Political Islamic studies in comprehending the ideology of Jihad and Islamic Supremacism is akin to that of an old wind up alarm clock. Time’s tumblers must be pressed back into line. Old wind up alarm clocks are not designed for long term accuracy…they have three gears and must continually be wound and reset. But what of the clocks in Big Ben and the massive clocks around the world that will operate far beyond our lifetimes and will always measure time to the accuracy of one one thousandth of a second? What is the difference? Gears. The number of gears increase and as the number of connections and teeth increase, accuracy is fractionalized over and over and over and over, making the clock more and more and more efficient and accurate. Political Islamic studies as laid down by Bill Warner are the primary gears of a Big Ben clock; however, to achieve complete understanding on the depths of Islamic Supremacist thought and to accurately surmise the path the West should take to guarantee its individual liberties in the wake of the constant challenges associated with the demographic expansion of the Islamic Faith, we must fractionalize our misunderstandings of the Muslim Ethos. We must, as a guild of tinkers, build an accurate clock…only in this way will the cartography of contemporary jihad yield anything of lasting worth in the long run as America’s best and brightest gear up for the intellectual revolution.

I take refuge in reason’s first principles. History is a study in ethics and ethical movements. Politics, economics, militancy, diplomacy, and civility spring forth from the ethical lessons of a people’s cultural heritage. Ethically, the American Dream is the only champion capable of vanquishing the Islamic Supremacy inherent in the Muslim Ethos.

-signed…a Black Swan.

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Update: As I was working on Gary’s “Islam’s Golden Rule” last night, I noticed he had posted another essay connected to his thoughts on Bill Warner. Read below:

JRH 7/11/09
*********************
Mapping Islamic Supremacism

Gary H. Johnson, Jr.
United Against Islamic Supremacism
July 10, 2009

Bill Warner,

In early 2008, I picked up Walid Phares’ The Confrontation: Winning the War Against Future Jihad. I probably picked up the first copy out of the box at Barnes & Noble in Macon, GA. I had already tackled his earlier works of the trilogy: Future Jihad and The War of Ideas. I remember saying to Chris Carter, “You know, I agree with 98% of what Walid Phares is saying in Future Jihad.” His response was “What is the 2% you disagree with?” I answered simply, “Democracy”.

In Future Jihad, I found Phares’s analysis of the terrorist strategies being utilized to tear down Western Civilization powerfully argued and his understanding of Fatah to be accurate yet incomplete due to his desire to break things down for an American audience which he apparently perceived as rivoted by the lessons of the Lord of the Rings films. However, when it came to his arguments for the advancement of Democracy in the Muslim world, my instincts and everything in my being was saying, “Stop, Walid! You are throwing gasoline on a fire!” Jahaliya denies the validity of Democracy; so, in all reality the Democratization strategy to counter the threat is composed out of the very fuel that drives the enemy. The questions simply cascade in the “jahaliya aware” line of reasoning from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. Do you think Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is just fooling about when he declares that Hezbollah will never accept imposed tutelage? Do you think a ballot box is going to somehow impound Hezbollah’s 30,000 rockets? What part of “Hezbollah will never relinquish its rockets” don’t our diplomats understand? Did not the Base’s Ayman al Zawahiri declare Democracy to be a religion in Takfiri disdain?

Moreover, if it is not obvious that Democracy in the Arab world is translated into Populist Islamism then blinders exist in the witness; for, what better proof of this lesson exists than the creation of a Hamastan in Gaza? Face it, we all watched the value of advancing Democracy at the center of the Bush Doctrine dive into the teeth of the beast the moment Iraq’s educated elite, post Baathist government create a constitution under duress, which holds Shariah Law as the source and authority of legislation. The purple fingered victorious peace sign of the Iraqi voters kinda loses its luster in that light. How gullible were we to swallow that idealism, that belief in Democracy’s magical powers? Not at all … we were romanticizing our ideals. But demonstrably, Democracy, if ill conceived, can lead just as easily to a Hitler as to a Reagan. Organizing sovereignty is a weighty thing. Jihad’s nature is that of a destabilizing magnetic force in a war of cosmic influence with the gravity of manmade law and order.

With these questions and preconceptions at the ready, it was with an admitted sense of disgust, then, that I picked up his book War of Ideas on the shelf at Booksamillion one afternoon in late 2007. I was working through two histories of Muhammad and two histories on the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” at the time, but I remember saying something like “Son of a…” and violently jamming the hardback into its nitch on the shelf when I realized that the subtitle was “Jihadism Against Democracy”. “Great,” I thought, “he made the one thing I disagreed with in his treatise the focal point of his next argument.” The fact is, though, Jahaliya is a doctrine that is not up for debate in the minds of the jihadists. One can’t wish it away. It isn’t likely that a jihadi tiger is going to change his ideological stripes handed down from on high for the golden opportunity of becoming an apostate along the path of Allah. Takfiri Jihadists tend to be rather unforgiving.

Democracy is not an ideology designed to counter Jihad’s call of totality.

I had read many of Phares’s online articles and came to the conclusion that his Democracy focused NGO was an albatross around his neck – but I had trouble faulting the man for his choice of economic support in this new internet media atmosphere which has literally dried up the desire of magazine editors to pay for solid script, scholars have to eat too; more or less, isn’t that succor of largesse primarily how Wahhabism has been deported from Saudi Arabia for the last few decades? Talented Clerics (sympathetic to the radical Wahhab) in need of a meal ticket often find a willing sponsor in a Faisal or an Abdullah, especially if their drive and capacity is suited to the establishment of a mosque or a madrassa abroad. Welcome to the Muslim favor society.

I eventually read the second text of the Phares trilogy while sitting in an Atlanta Borders and told myself that I would buy the paperback when it came out. I read The War of Ideas immediately followed by another book, called Taliban by Ahmed Rashid, and was struck that Chapter 7 of Phares’ book was about “Gender Apartheid” and Chapter 8 of Rashid’s was about “The Vanished Gender” – and they were written 7 years apart (one pre- and one post-9/11 account) yet no one in the West was apparently paying any more attention to the fact that the rights of women were in large part under siege throughout the Muslim lands. The reach of Van Gogh’s Obsession obviously didn’t find an action oriented audience. I knew it was necessary to buy both the Phares and Rashid books and eventually annotate them; and that, for maximum effect, they deserved to be studied and broken down into pieces that could be managed in their particular essence and cross referenced.

When I picked up Phares’ The Confrontation not six months later, I was focused on making sense of Hezbollah and the Taliban in what I called “the epicenters of jihad” (Lebanon and the NWFP/FATA) and was focused on placing down the ideological planks of jihad into a definitive form, since no one was accurately defining and depicting the fight against the jihadis and the US government was growing fearful of even using the word “Jihad” in their official correspondence; and, let’s face it, both “Global War on Terror” and “Long War against Islamofascism” were far from accurate representation of the battle at hand. Walid Phares was partially right, it was a “War of Ideas”; however, since a caliphal lust drives the jihadist mentality, it is also a “War of ideals” – the caliphate is an ideal, romanced. What happens, then, when ideas and romantic ideals merge? Ideologies form. Therefore, to counter the ideology of Islam’s isms, it is necessary to concentrate and chronicle the ideas and romantic values within the ideals that drive each set of Islamic radicals – to find their intellectual commonalities and departures and begin to fight a “War Against the Ideologies of Jihad” from a position of strength against specific intellectual targets for principled existential reasons. Statistical analysis it seems will not identify the ideas and ideals which merge into Democracy.

Typically, when I pick up a book, I flip it open and read a paragraph to see if it stands on its own.

I cracked The Confrontation to page 15 and read the following graph:

“At the dawn of the new millennium, the key factor in the War on Terror is the awareness of democratic societies. If they don’t believe that they are in the middle of a global confrontation with their nemesis, they will fail to resist, and so they will lose the will to survive. The long and violent history of the human race has shown that a failure to address a challenge in one generation will automatically transfer it to future ones. In crude terms, if international society today doesn’t confront terrorism, and more specifically the threat of contemporary Jihadism, with every means available to it, its principles will be delegitimized, its communities bled, and its freedoms shrunk, until a more clairvoyant generation undertakes a laborious resistance and somehow manages to salvage or restore its foundation.”

I snapped the book shut and went to the teller.

The words “a more clairvoyant generation” and “somehow” rolled around in my brain until later that week when I finally had a day to read and quickly came to page 21 in which Phares argues “if engaged democracies can ’see’ the global map of Jihadism, they can defeat it.” His simple equation for the victory was “If we want to win the War on Terror, we have to defeat the phenomenon of Jihadism.” 16 hours later, I closed the Phares Call to Action and set about the complexities of mapping the threat of Jihad. Somehow. Somehow, we have to defeat the phenomenon of Jihadism.

The basic question came to me: “Where is contemporary Jihad’s terror generally originating and eminating from?” The answer: “The 57 OIC states.” The inevitable realization struck me. If I were to sit down and study the history and cultures and ethnicities and economics and alliances and personages and legal discourses and heroes and tribal lineages and ethical lessons and constitutions of each state in that group to root for the wellsprings of the terrorists in the extant literature, if I were to spend just one month learning the ins and outs of each individual geopolitical player…it would take almost 5 years of dedicated work to fully familiarize myself with just the surface of the source of the threat, and that effort would require constant updates moving forward while digging backward to find the highlights and lowlifes of a 1400 year romp. Mapping Future Jihad, geographically, is then, in a word, a superhuman task. It is the ultimate in attempting to draw order out of multiplying chaos – the province of an NGO thinktank with deep pockets or a well organized guild of passionate, dedicated tinkerers on well conceived individual missions. With these thoughts in mind, I tackled both Robin Wright’s new release ,i>Dreams & Shadows and Sandra Mackey’s release Mirror Of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict.

As I finished Mackey’s work, the May 2008 Beiruti coup witnessed Hezbollah’s resistance weapons turned inward upon a sovereign Lebanese Government, which sought to weaken the Shia militia’s power to operate as a “state within a state” by making illegal its microwave telecommunications network and by ending its control of security on the runways of Lebanon’s primary airport; the resultant Doha Accord was a travesty which took an 18 month civil disobedience campaign by the workers unions allied with Hezbollah interests off the streets and into the machinery of state – the Wilayat al Faqih subjects had earned the veto power through their will to defy UNSCR 1701. I was incensed, outraged, and appalled that the Shuras of the Arab League waltzed in to iron out the episode in favor of Hezbollah. It seemed as though no one in the West realized that the authority of the UN was being trumped right before the eyes of the world by Shariah Law as the terms of Suleiman’s rise to the presidency were hammered out for a March 14 democracy movement held hostage, with an army, intelligence and secret service apparatus overrun and fully infiltrated by Hezbollah henchmen.

Hezbollah’s weapons weren’t negotiable. Doha enshrined the validity of the 1989 Taif Accord and the legitimacy of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s jihadi shock troops. What was worse, both the European and American press, aching for peace at any cost, were willing to welcome the outcome of the May putsch without critically examining what was happening. A terrorist outfit, whose 2006 miscalculations had ended in the destruction of large swaths of Lebanon in its war with Israel, was now the puppetmaster of a pseudo-Democracy with Northern and Eastern borders which pumped katyusha rockets into Hezbollah weapons caches at alarmingly high rates. By 2006, after a quarter century of armed resistance, Hezbollah had amassed between 12,000 and 20,000 rockets. By May of 2008, Melanie Philips reported in Spectator Magazine that Hezbollah had rapidly been rearming and that it had close to 45,000 rockets. 4,000 rockets were fired in the July War of 2006 into Northern Israel…so simple math tells the West that in less than two years, Hezbollah’s capacity to wage war had tripled – all while a UNIFIL force was established to “enforce” UNSCR 1701, which called for the disarmament of Hezbollah and the full control of Lebanon by its government and armed forces. In short, then, Doha was the undoing of the authority of the UN and the sovereignty of the Lebanese state.

Israel’s response to Doha was simple: Lebanon would now be treated as the Hezbollah State.

Ahmadinejad in Iran was feeling the oats of the Shia regional ascendance and upped his rhetoric against the Zionist state while ratcheting up his Nuclear ambitions. Israel, with a Hamas government in Gaza on its southern border, a Fatah government on its eastern border, a seething Syria over the Golan Heights, and now a Hezbollah controlled government on its Northern border, began gearing up for the coming confrontation with Iran with practice sorties out into the Mediterranean. As the rhetoric heated up, Hezbollah’s leader declared that if Iran was attacked that within one minute Israel would be at the receiving end of 11,000 rockets. Lebanon was held hostage. Where was our Cowboy President Bush on the matter? Why was the White House so silent about the organization which its officials considered the A-team of terror as it ruffled its paraphanalia of totalitarianism right smack in our faces? Following 9/11, terrorists of global reach and those who harbored them were identified as the enemy in the War on Terror. So, why in the nation of Tar were US soldiers not on the ground in Beirut in 2008 to back the Cedars government? Why were US gunships not pummelling the Bekaa valley during the July War? Why was the United States allowing Israel to twist in the wind? Why were the porous and troubled borders of Lebanon not manned by Predators and monitored by satellite imagery by the United States to ensure the katyusha ratlines were forced into a policed snare? Why wasn’t Hezbollah targetted by U.S. troops on the road to a Saddam Hussein ouster in Iraq?

My answers are mere questions, locked on targets at the length of my exposure. Therefore ever expanding exposure is the key. The marathon to catch up weighs heavy on my mind – twenty days behind, nineteen now, frame Nasr’s The Shia Revival, seventeen now, frame Sandra Mackey’s The Iranians, push, push, twelve, frame Charles Allen’s God’s Terrorists, drive, drive, seven, longframe Gilles Kepel’s Jihad: Trail of Political Islam, I can almost touch it, frame Andrew Bostom’s Legacy of Jihad locked up halfway, can’t look at it anymore…this evil…ok, take a break and enjoy Zack’s The Pirate Coast…cry through Brigitte Gabriel’s Because they Hate…ok, now, let it out! The tragedy of the Basij. The nature of the jihad cult. The ethnic cleansing of Lebanon. Find everything available on ibn Taymiya; look up the word “enjoin”, take a week off. May 15th through June 15th 2008. Engagement is an earned thing. I know that much.

The nature and value of authority, borders, and democracy are concepts currently at the crux of the confrontation between Jihadism’s nodes and the West.

Knowledge of the nature of the terrain in a battle provides the power of advantage for the wise general, this is certain. What, then, is the topography of the battle we are in? It is necessary to map the terrain in stratas of nation state and nonstate actors at the political, military, diplomatic, religious, economic and cultural realms. A simple topography map would find Lebanon and the NWFP/FATA region as key focal points equivalent to a North and South frame of reference. The Shia Crescent extends from Iran through Iraq and into Lebanon, with Syrian, Hamas and Fatah bagmen along the ratlined way. So, Qom/Tehran is the Religious/Politico-Economic hub of the Ayatollah, while Beirut and the Bekaa are proxy arms of the Radicalized Dawa of Najaf. The export of Radical Islam is notably truncated in the Shia realm, focused on organizing the labors and martyrs (and votes if need) be of the dispossessed in a Sunni dominated area from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Lebanon and the GCC – all in a quest for the justice of Ali in the liberation of Palestine and a vanquished Zion. The Sunni majority finds its heart in Mecca and Medina, the Ulemas of the Wahhab and the Muslim Brotherhood(s) from Libya through Egypt and upwards into the Palestine lands of Jordan southwards into Eritrea and Yemen dot along the Saudi Coast and hop the sea into the Baluchi heart of Qetta and radicalize the ISI and its Talibani Frankensteins, with Russian, Iranian and US haggling over borders and governance and extremists. The Indonesian and Malay and Bangladeshi corridor of Islam’s broke masses find headway North into Uighur territory, East into India with abandon and Southward through the archipelago of the Philipino, with a mesh of ethnic and cultural waving offshoots of Jamaat Islamiya and Deoband Light.

Geopolitical understanding of the loose topographical rendering finds a Tehran cut off from Western Finances, backing the underground play from North Korea through Sudan and into Venezuela; with the dalliances of these dictatorships pitching rocket practice, money laundering and counterfeiting, human trafficking, and drug running through the black market bazaars of Gwadar (the black pearl of the Orient), and blessing the tariff culture of the Ismael Khan checkpoint pirate dens from Afghanistan to Azerbaijan and on into Russian Mafia turf through a Hezbollah/Qaeda syndicate in Chechnya. Chinese Mercantilist influence haunts the Indian Ocean’s ports in an as of yet unsung or recognized coastal cold war with the West.

Transbordered, Nationalist Movement swaths run the Baluchistan’s steppe culture from India through Iran, Kurdish agitation from Turkey to northern Iraq and Iran into Afghanistan, Pashtun sympathizers straddle the 1893 Durand line, and the growing specter of Uzbek nationalism spreads through the entirety of the Caucuses, the Central Asian Republics into Western China, sponsored by opium traffic and Western speculators after a touch of naural gas or oil or gems in the landlocked poverty stricken mountains…all remnants of the organizations spawned in the pre-American experience of British colonization. The topography of the battle reveals the nature and value of authority, borders and perceptions of western intervention in the minds of the wholly unworldly and uneducated, led to broil by what appears to be the raving lunacy of clerics, muftis, mullahs, ayatollahs, wazirs, pirs, and jurists across ethnic, language, and cultural divides – the brew largely steeped in the sporatic propaganda of Marxism – reaches West through the Algerian, Turkish and British Gates, softening the ground with an assault on media and intellectual circles from Denmark to Canada, driving into the international legal sphere to hobble the UN with the Cairo Declaration and to lay siege to Catholocism, breaking the Anglican mind over the barrel of Shariah Law, filtering technocrats for the Hawaladar highway from the World Bank and the IMF through Donor Conferences and International Zakat Organizations right into the coffers of mosques and madrassas on zealous missions, hitting the streets and running the A.N.S.W.E.R. show, clutching a brace of Western NGOs in the anti-American vicegrip of punishment.

The topography of the battle, alone, reveals, through a wisened lens, the threat Americans face to be far more advanced than Jihad and Political Islam. Seeing the map of contemporary Jihad is a challenging prospect, a laborious struggle for content and context.

By the close of summer 2008, my thoughts on contemporary Jihad had gelled. What we were facing was an ideological nexus of deceit. In late 2007, I read the direct words of Zawahiri and bin Laden in The Al Qaeda Reader, and in my American Thinker review of Ibrahim’s work I surmised that Loyalty & Enmity was the cornerstone of cultural doctrine within Jihad, because…they hate. Also, Jahaliya and Taqiya were principles that figured prominently…along with the suicide-bomb justifying plank of Abrogation. Add to this brute nexus of Jihad, then, Phares’ expose on Fatah, as the “opening” or “conquest” rung of expansion into Dar al Harb. These ideological principles, institutions, and doctrines all figure prominently in Jihad’s Legacy. By September, I had finished reading Hamas by Matthew Levitt. In my opinion, the book should have been entitled “The Da’wa of Hamas”. The social consciousness element of Da’wa is the source of spiritual connection between the Jihadists and the Umma. Da’wa is the legitimizing seed of Jihad for deluded Westerners willing to be blinded by the veil.

With the machine crashed on tilt, the Western mind is struggling to understand the sights, sounds and sinews of offensive and defensive Jihad, lesser and greater Jihad, drunk with the self-deprecating paradox of equating submission to peace, unable to decisively pinpoint the ideological nexus of deceit made up of Political Islam’s tenets – Fatah, Dawa, Jahaliya, Abrogation, & Enmity…principled and spackled, grouted with Taqiya resolve and Takfiri determinism into a Pillar beneath a veil of media shirk, both positive and negative, but chiefly of omission, the veil bedecked and lined with the silvern strands of NGO activism and hardluck dreams, proliferating the spin of victimization. The ideology holds a form, and it is made up of bricks that are intelligible. Jihad is not “Convert, pay the Jizya or die” – that is the Dawa brick, the call, the arrogantly piratic invitation to the folds of a conquering Islam. This ideological nexus of deceit must necessarily find outlets in different manners from different interpretations based on authority, borders, and the lines of Fatah. State actors, non-state actors, cloaked actors, financiers, intelligence operatives, military infiltrators, stealth insurgents, and martyr factories at the tribal and international stage mix and mesh in a variety of topical and subdermal combinations throughout the geopolitical jihadscape of the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region.

To define Jihad, though, one must find its ethical root. What does it mean to be a good man or woman to the Islamic Faith? What does it mean to commit evil? If Jihad is a “spiritual struggle along the Path of Allah” what does a good human life entail? What are the ethical boundaries of good and evil? What is Islam’s Golden Rule? Is there common ground to be found between Jihadism and the West? Islam and the West? Moreover, what does the economic history of Islam down through the ages and into modernity look like? What is Shariah Compliant Finance? Is SCF a new birth for Jihad?

It was while I was looking for the answer to these questions that I began reading the online works of Jeffrey Imm. I delved into Steven Emerson’s works American Jihad and Jihad Inc. as well as Paul Sperry’s work Infiltration. Paying attention to the counterterrorism community online, I noticed a split was forming throughout the think tank world as the inevitability of a Democratic President overtook the “engagement” crowd of diplomacy-first advocates, pushing the hardliners to the fringe and off the battlefield altogether. I finally scored the interview “Strange Rumblings in Lebanon” with W. Thomas Smith, Jr. and beat my head against the wall trying to get through to Brigitte Gabriel’s desk. Attempting to catch up with the scope and depth of Jeffrey Imm’s effort was akin to reading two or three books; and, surveying his 6 years worth of article research would no doubt take a year without distractions.

It didn’t take long to make the leap…I was not mapping jihad, I was merely defining it. I was mapping, instead, Islamic Supremacism. At this point, my mind upgraded the work of Walid Phares: If engaged men and women of the West can “see” the global map of contemporary Islamic Supremacism, they can defeat it.

I sought out Jeffrey Imm and scored an interview. Chris Carter did the same.

Seeing the possibility of bridging the anti-jihad community’s mental muscle, I put up a flag – United Against Islamic Supremacism.

For the first time, after two and a half years of independent research, I knew my enemy’s name.

signed…the right sort of eye,
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 Political Islam and Muslim Ethos
John R. Houk
© July 10, 2009
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United Against Islam Supremacism

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