ISLAM: FROM A RELIGION OF PEACE

TO THE VERSES OF THE SWORD

by Mahathir Muhammad

When Prophet Muhammad first received his revelations from Angel Gabriel he was in seclusion in a cave deprived of sensory stimulation and in a state of exhaustion and hunger. These states of sensory deprivation by an individual deprived of social contact, frequently induces hallucinations, and since Prophet Muhammad was predominantly of the Judeo-Christian faith, it is only natural that these hallucinations revolve around some form of Christian revelation, and that the nature of these revelations constituted what basically can be termed a heretical account of the bible in new clothing, reflects the ardent nature of his faith.

Armed with the Quran, the Prophet attempted to convert the masses of Jerusalem but faced heavy resistance. Since, he had what amounted to a slim following, he had no choice but to live in peace and harmony with the Jews, who constituted the bulk of the population of Jerusalem. He bid his time, waiting for the opportune moment to spread his religion through a megalomaniac conquest of much of the world. Hence, Islam at that time advocated living in peace and harmony with one’s neighbors; but it can also be found in the Quran the concept of taqiyya schooling Muslim to conceal their true feelings of animosity against non-Muslim, who constitute their neighbor, while they are in a position of weakness – until such a time as when their religion is in the ascendency before they follow through with an attempt to wage a Jihad against these self-same neighbors.

This period of weakness when Prophet Muhammad advocated living in peace and harmony with his neighbors is the period in Mecca.

Subsequently, Islam began to amass a huge following, and with the religion in ascendency in Medina, Prophet Muhammad added new verses to the Quran called the Verses of the Sword (of which there are approximately 100), which in effect rendered all the peaceful verse that came before null and void. In order to reconcile the contradiction between the text of the Quran, Prophet Muhammad came up with the concept of progressive revelation – in which he claims that Allah is revealing the bigger picture by advancing progressively more complicated teachings which can only be revealed when the audience is wiser and more receptive. All the earlier verses calling for one to live in peace and harmony with one’s neighbors had been abrogated by the Verses of the Sword, calling for Jihad against kefirs (non-believers).[i]

Jihad describes fighting or the motives behind it, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the words and actions of Prophet Muhammad and the Quran. Surah 25 Verse 52 advocates, “[…] strive against [the disbelievers] with this, a great striving,” thereby dictating that all Muslims embrace the duty of striving against those who disbelieve in Allah. With the progression of time, Prophet Muhammad had the distinction of winning for himself more and more enemies and, as they arose, the Quranic statements advocating Jihad were revised to take these new adversaries into consideration.

After Prophet Muhammad introduced the Verses of the Sword which had been interjected into the Quran to justify his megalomaniac conquest of non-Muslim lands, one of his loyal followers by the name of Sulaiman b. Buraid would utter, “Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war.…” “….invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you [shall] accept [….] and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept [….] and desist from fighting against them. Invite them to migrate from their lands to the land of Muhairs and inform them that, if they do so, they shall have all the privileges and obligations of the Muhajirs. If they refuse to migrate, tell them that they will have the status of Bedouin Muslims and will be subjected to the Commands of Allah like other Muslims, but they will not get any share from the spoils of war or Fai' except when they actually fight with the Muslims (against the disbelievers). If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya (tax for non-Muslims). If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them.”

This represents the transformation of Islam from a religion of peace to the Verses of the Sword where Prophet Muhammad divides the World into two halves: The House of Islam and the House of War, the former of which has Muslims and those who embrace Islam or non-Muslims who submit to Muslims in abject denigration as Dhimmis (second class citizens) and willingly pay the Jizya live in peace and harmony and the latter in which war is declared upon non-Muslims who do not wish to conform to those terms.

From then on, Prophet Muhammad embarked upon his megalomaniac conquest of the world to Islam, all in accordance with the divine injunction of Allah and massacred Jews in Banu Qurayza, Medina in 627, where 600 – 900 Jews were slaughtered in the name of Allah, the  children sold into slavery, and the spoils of war equally divided among the Muslims.

This signifies the declaration of Jihad by Muslims against non-Muslims which can be documented by atrocities committed by Muslims against kefirs.

·       Christians beheaded in Córdoba, Spain (850 – 859) accused of ‘blasphemy against Islam.’

·       The massacre of two thousand Jews in Cordoba in 1011.

·       The massacre of five to six thousand Jews in Morocco in 1033 and the subsequent massacres in Fes in 1276 and 1465.

·       The massacre of more than 1,500 Jewish families, amounting to 4,000 persons in Granada on 30^th.  December 1066, during which time, a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace, crucified Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and decimated almost the entire Jewish population of the city.

·       Periodic raiding expeditions against Christian Iberian kingdoms, for example the raid against Lisbon in 1189, where Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Cordoba took 3,000 Christian slaves in an attack upon Silves in 1191.

·       The massacre of an estimated 80 million Hindus between the years 1000 and 1500 as documented by Prof. K.S. Lal in his book Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India.

·       The genocide committed against Hindus at Kol (modern Aligarh), Kalinjar and Varanasi, where according to Hasan Nizami's Taj-ul-Maasir, 20,000 Hindu prisoners were slaughtered and their heads offered to crows.

·       Timor’s execution of more than 100,000 captives in the battle of Delhi as documented in his memoirs:

In a short space of time all the people in the [Delhi] fort were put to the sword, and in the course of one hour the heads of 10,000 infidels were cut off. The sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels, and all the goods and effects, the treasure and the grain which for many a long year had been stored in the fort became the spoil of my soldiers. They set fire to the houses and reduced them to ashes, and they razed the buildings and the fort to the ground.... All these infidel Hindus were slain, their women and children, and their property and goods became the spoil of the victors. I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death.

One hundred thousand infidels, impious idolators, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasiruddin Umar, a counselor and man of learning, who, in all his life, had never killed a sparrow, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus, who were his captives....on the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the baggage, and that it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set these idolaters and enemies of Islam at liberty...no other course remained but that of making them all food for the sword.

·       The Bahmani Sultans genocide on Indians between 1347 –1480 when he declared Jihad against the infidels. As historians assert, “[t]hese wars were fought in the true spirit of Jihad [with] the total annihilation or conversion of the non-Muslims.”

·       The massacre of 30,000 Indians after battle for Chitod on 24^th.  February 1568.

·       The slaughter of thousands of Shiites in their holy city of Kerbala, in Iraq in 1802 by the Ikhwan who subsequently waged a jihad against other Muslims in Arabia during which they killed or wounded 400,000 Arabs.

·       The massacre of approximately ten thousand Assyrain men, and the taking captive of the women who were subsequently sold as slaves or bestowed as presents to influential Muslims, between 1840 – 1860. ‘During the incident, the aged mother of Mar Shimun, the Patriarch of the Church of the East, was seized by them, and after having practiced on her the most abominable atrocities, they cut her body into two parts and threw it into the river Zab, exclaiming, “go and carry to your accursed son the intelligence that the same fate awaits him.”’

·       The massacre of 30,000 members of the Assyrian Christian community in 1847, which represented an example of the Khalifah (Ottoman) State complicity in massacres of Christians, which was succeeded by another in 1896.

·       The massacre of 25,000 Bulgarian Christians, maybe even up to 100,000 as some claim, by Islamic Turks, who also burned sixty to seventy villages during the April uprising of 1876 – 1912.

·       The Jihad against the Shiites in Afghanistan in response to the Harara uprising of 1892 by the Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman Khan where the local Shiite population was severely massacred as documented by S. A. Mousavi who unequivocally states,

"thousands of Hazara men, women, and children were sold as slaves in the markets of Kabul and Qandahar, while numerous towers of human heads were made from the defeated rebels as a warning to others who might challenge the rule of the Amir".

·       The first near-genocidal series of atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian population in 1894 – 1896 where an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 were killed and thousands more maimed or rendered homeless. According to scholars, ‘The leader of the mob cried, “Believe in Muhammad and deny your religion.” No one answered…. The leader gave the order to massacre,”’ concluding that the 1894 – 1896 Jihad against Christians claimed 250,000 lives. Many Armenian women were forced into harems, while some were sold as slaves.

·       The massacre of 1,400,000 Greeks conducted throughout Anatolian Turkey by the Committee for Union and Progress, later to be known as the Young Turks, in conjunction with the nationalist Kemalists led by Mustafa Kemal ‘Atat'rk’ between 1914 – 1923.

·       The massacre of Assyrians in Iran by Ottoman (Turkish) troops between September 1914 and August 1915, where Kurdish tribal forces “pillaged, burned villages, destroyed farmsteads, slaughtered Christians, and fulfilled […] other obligations conceivably intrinsic to jihad.” From first-hand accounts of the barbaric jihad around Lake Urmia, we note that:

All Christians were now branded as traitors, and any caught behind the Turkish lines were liable to be savaged by Turkish troops and their Kurdish auxiliaries in a cruel jihad sweeping Asia minor..... By January 1917, when Semenov and the Transbaikal Cossacks arrived in the area, the Ottoman jihad had disfigured the landscape with scorched villages, wells stuffed with decaying corpses, meadows littered with human bones and tufts of drifting hair, gorges lined with mummified cadavers of the menfolk, and river banks coughing up the swollen remains of children. The countless crime scenes of brutal, individual murders contrasted sharply in scale and emotion with the endless fields of mass slaughter wrought by machine guns and artillery on the Eastern Front. Gaunt survivors, Assyrian and Armenian men and boys for the most part, weakened by typhoid and hunger, stumbled out of the hills to hail the Cossacks as saviors and beg for food. Girls and women were few and far between; most had been gang-raped and carted off to slavery in neighboring Muslim villages.

Hundreds of thousands were the victims of this cruel Muslim inflicted genocide of Assyrians. By the First World War in conjunction with the Pan-Turkic pogrom to ‘Turkify’ all subjects, 500 to 750 thousand Assyrians have been brutally killed and tortured, in what is described as the ‘dark period’ of ethnic and religious ‘cleansing’ of the Assyrians. An Assyrian historian claims that “two-thirds of their population and most of their homelands in northern Mesopotamia [were lost] during WWI" period.” It is estimated that Assyrians have suffered 33 genocides – an average of one every 40 years – at the hands of Muslims since the coming of Islam in 630.

·       The massacre of 1.5 Million Armenian Christians in 1915. As noted by scholars: ‘To promote the idea of Jihad, the sheikh-ul-Islam, the most senior Sunni Muslim religious leader in Turkey, published a pamphlet with these words: “Oh Muslims, ye who are smitten with happiness are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your good for the cause of right.… He, who kills one unbeliever of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or in the open, shall be rewarded by God....”’ This call for Jihad is clearly reflected by the cries of pious Muslims of that era, “Attack them from every side. Whenever you meet them, kill them. Quicken the failing proclamation of the Unity by the fire of your rifles and cannon, and by the blows of your swords and knives. cause the minarets and mountains and wildernesses to resound once more with the cry. “Allah! Allah!” Jihad! Jihad! Oh, Moslems, blow the trumpet everywhere, of people of the Unity. The great God is ordering you to fight with your foes everywhere,” or, “Kill them: God will punish them in your hand and put them to shame; and ye will overcome them. He will rejoice the hearts of believers, and take away the wrath from the hearts of unbelievers.”

·       The murder of 1,513 Jewish residents of British Mandatory by Palestine Arab terrorists during the Arab riots of 1920 – 1921. Subsequent pogroms were launched against Jews in 1929 and between the years 1936 – 1939.

·       The Iraqi government’s massacre and ethnic cleansing of 3,000 Christian Assyrians on August 1933.

·       The jihad waged by the Mufti, Farhud, which took place on Sunday and Monday, of June 1^st.  and 2^nd.  of 1941 against Jews – during which Jews were killed randomly, and hundreds were injured with women and children being raped in front of their relatives, while babies crushed, and children mutilated.

The Jihad declared by Muslims against non-Muslims in adherence to the injunctions of the Quran as taught and advocated by prophet Muhammad can also be seen in Iranian President Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani call for Iranians between the ages of 12 – 72 to volunteer for the Holy War ‘Thousands of children were pulled from schools, indoctrinated in the glory of martyrdom, and sent to the front lines only lightly armed with one or two grenades or a gun with one magazine of ammunition. Wearing keys around their necks (to signify their pending entrance into heaven), they were sent forward in the first waves of attacks to help clear paths through minefields with their bodies and overwhelm Iraqi defenses. Iran's spiritual leader at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini, delighted in the children's sacrifice and extolled that they were helping Iran to achieve “a situation which we cannot describe in any way except to say that it is a divine country.”’

Apart from this, the call for Jihad is also echoed by the Muslim Brotherhood which has a long-standing war on the West. In Egypt, where the group is based, it has engaged in assassinations and terrorism, and has indoctrinated many who subsequently committed acts of terrorism between the years 1948 – 1970. The most notorious of the Brotherhood followers is Khalid Sheikh who was raised in Kuwait and joined the Brotherhood at age 16 and is accused of masterminding the 9/11 massacre of 3,000 Americans at the World Trade Center.

This was in line with Osama bin Laden’s call to America to embrace Islam and renounce all the bourgeois decadent culture of the West as reflected in his Letter to America in which he quotes the Quran (Surah 22 Verse 39), “Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory,” Surah 4 Verse 76, “Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan,” Surah 9 Verse 13-1, “Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them….” and Surah 3 Verses 169 – 171,”Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they are being provided for. They rejoice in what Allah has bestowed upon them from His bounty…. They rejoice in a grace and a bounty from Allah and that Allah will not waste the reward of the believers.”

What Osama and other Islamists want is a return to the former glory days of Islam when the religion was in the ascendency and much of the world had been transformed into a Muslim caliphate and when non-Muslims had to accept the status of Dhimmis in society and had to pay the Jizya with willing submission. To signify that the religion shall once again recapture the days of glory of Islam, they chose September 11^th.  in allusion to September 11^th. 1683 when the Muslim empire was at the height of it glory.

---

[i] Surah 2 Verse 106 states, “Whatever a verse (revelation) do We abrogate or [cause to] be forgotten, We bring a better one or [one] similar to it.”