An Appeal to Cultural Muslims
There are some 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the overwhelming majority of which are Cultural Muslims who are generally called moderate Muslims. Muslims are born into Islam, where a great many never go through the process of deciding for themselves if they want to be Muslims. It is not a religion that they choose, it is a belief they inherit. For whatever reason, this great majority of Cultural Muslims are Muslims of sort without fully toeing the line of Islam. The real Muslims are the jihadists, a small minority who lives and dies by the dictates of the Quran and the Sunna, the life examples of Muhammad.
The free world, rightfully alarmed by ever-varied and escalating assaults of the jihadists, myopically has directed its tentative and haphazard effort at countering them, believing that by so doing it can eliminate their threat and at the same time remain on good terms of live-and-let-live multiculturalism with the Cultural Muslims. This is a dangerous assumption that, if not abandoned, will likely culminate in an Armageddon-kind of conflagration.
There is virtually no chance of reasoning with the brain-dead jihadists whose eyes are fixed on the promised lush paradise of Allah. It isn’t that they love death, just for the sake of death itself as Muslim leaders such as Hasan Nasrullah, the head of Lebanon’s Hizbollah proclaimed. They love death and happily embrace it because of what they have been brainwashed to believe is awaiting them as a reward.
Death in carrying out the work of Islam earns them entry into Allah’s eternal sensuous male paradise, so they believe. It is in keeping with propagating this fraud of afterlife paradise that portraits and names of Muslim killers, glorified as martyrs, festoon the length and breadth of Muslim cradles of Islamism such as Iran and Palestine. To the wild-eyed robot jihadist even a day on this “heap of dirt” earth is simply another day of unbearable delay from winging to the lasting abode of lust. Why else would tens of thousands of Iranian Shi’a fools, for instance, sign up to be martyred?
For as long as there are millions of fanatical fools, the Islamic handlers will have an endless supply of foot-soldiers to spread and impose the savage doctrine of Islam and its Sharia on the people of the world. Just this week, for instance, under the Sharia law, a Saudi Arabian court sentenced a 75-year old widow to prison and lashes for having “mingled” with two men who were not related to her. The two men reportedly brought the woman some bread. This is the kind of Sharia law that awaits us all down the road if we fail to reach out to the Cultural Muslims and help them leave the real Islam altogether, since they are already partly there.
But is the real Islam indeed a peaceful religion?
Are people such as Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, and Dr. Ali Sina Islam bashers? Is the real Islam completely innocent of all the charges liberty-honoring civilized people level against it? Read what Hamid Hafez, a former jihadist himself, has to say about Islam.
Tragically, over the years, media pundits, leftist academics, and politicians have constructed a formidable alliance that successfully keeps both the Cultural Muslims as well as the non-Muslim general public in a slumber of complacency.
All along, the campaign of the jihadists has been moving forward. On the one hand are the well-financed Islamists with their hordes of simpletons who are ready to die for the cause. The horrific acts of these villains are daily occurrences in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and Pakistan. On the other hand are the people of the free world who are lulled into the complacency they seek and lack the will to confront the deadly danger of Islamism.
The Cultural Muslims hold the balance of power in their hands. They are not active jihadists. Yet, they knowingly or unknowingly, constitute the most vital support for the Islamists. It is this majority that projects an image of normalcy and even tolerance of others while supplying funds as well as foot-soldiers to the work of the Islamists.
Islamic apologists often point to Muslim communities in non-Muslim lands as peaceful religious communities like any other and deny that these Muslims pose any threat to the way of life of the free people. Yet, the facts convincingly argue against this fraudulent contention because, when the jihadists gather enough local strength, the Cultural Muslims like docile sheep will submit to the rule of their co-religionist killers. This is not a hypothetical prognostication. The capitulation of the Cultural Muslims has already played out in many parts of European towns and cities.
It is worth repeating that as Islamists wage their war under the banner of Islam, they receive immense direct and indirect support from the rank-and-file of Cultural Muslims. Their support is the life-blood that keeps the Islamists alive.
Dear Cultural Muslim, this is the 21st century. The vast planet earth of the time of Muhammad has shrunk into a global village. The greatly diverse and disparate peoples of the world are now neighbors in the same village. This new tribe of the global village is facing immense challenges and opportunities. The resources and the talents of the various clans can no longer be squandered on internecine fighting. You, the Cultural Muslim are indeed the critical force that can prevent the blaze of Islamism from engulfing the world by completely severing your connection with a religion that has decayed into nothing more than a cult of death.
In the 21st century, every member of every clan of the global village, irrespective of gender, race, or any other consideration, is entitled to full citizenship that bestows privileges and demands responsibilities. Radical Islam claims to be the true Islam and strives to force humanity into submission to a system of beliefs and practices of Sharia which are anathema to freedom. Even Muslims who do not agree with the extremist Islam are intimidated, pressured into silence, and even condemned to death by the fanatics.
It is wishful thinking on the part of the non-Muslims to believe that one can be a Muslim moderate, given that Islam is radical at its very core. To be a moderate Muslim demands that the person explicitly renounce much of the violent, exclusionary, and radical teachings of the Quran. By so doing, the individual issues his own death warrant in Islamic countries, is condemned as apostate if he lives in a non-Islamic land, and may even earn a Fatwa on his head. Yet, if the masses of the Cultural Muslims, in ones, twos, and droves leave Islam, the Islamists will be eviscerated since the Cultural Muslims are indeed their life-blood.
It is deadly, in any confrontation, to assess the adversary through one’s own mental template, because the two templates can be vastly different from each other. People in the West are accustomed in relativistic rather than absolutistic thinking. To Westerners, just about all matters range from black to white with an array of gray shades between the two poles. To the real Muslims, the Islamists, by contrast, nearly everything is in black and white and with virtually no shades of gray. The former type of thinking is typical of more mature minds, while the latter is that of young children and the less enlightened.
This absolutist thinking is enshrined in the Quran itself. When the starting point for a Muslim is the explicit fanatical words of Allah in the Quran, then the faithful are left with no choice other than literally obeying its dictates or even taking it to the next level of fanaticism. Good Muslims, for instance, do not shake hands with women, even though the Quran does not explicitly forbid it. Although the Quran stipulates that men are rulers over women, good Muslim men take it upon themselves to rule women not much better than they treat their domesticated animals.
It is not uncommon to observe Muslims, anywhere in the world, who are indeed exemplary in many ways. They are kind, generous and much more. These are the Cultural Muslims who are, in effect, only part Muslim. They do not live by the full text of the Quran and elect to live as decent civilized human beings. But in Islam, one cannot be a pick-and-choose Muslim when the real Muslims take over. Clear instances of the rule of real Islam are seen in places such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, parts of Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia.
Dear Cultural Muslim, while you remain silent out of fear, lack of organization, or apathy, the Islamists work around the clock and around the world to further their agenda. Hardly a week passes without a Grand Mufti or an Ayatollah issuing pronouncements in support of radical Islam. The rank-and-file Islamist clergy, for their part, transmit these Fatwas and edicts to their flocks in mosques and hammer them into the minds of impressionable children in madresehs. Through this grass-roots process, radical Islam is recruiting greater and greater numbers of adherents. On the one hand, the Islamists engage in acts of violence to disrupt the functioning of societies, while on the other they cleverly exploit the freedom they enjoy in non-Islamic lands to subvert them from within.
Dear Cultural Muslim, you belong to free people. You cannot have it both ways. You can’t enjoy the fruits of liberty and at the same time hedge your bet that by being somewhat of a Muslim you are staying in the good graces of Allah. Allah is very non-forgiving of even the least disobedience, Muhammad preaches. You need to make a clean break with Islam and be an upright decent human being because it is the best reward that one can have. No one really knows about the confabulated Allah’s paradise. Don’t help the Islamists in their effort to make hell out of this world hoping to find admittance into Allah’s purported paradise.
Dear Cultural Muslim, Moderate Muslim, or any other kind of Muslim who is not a jihadist, please courageously do what is right: Abandon Islam altogether and enlist in the ranks of the free where all members of the human tribe can live in peace and harmony.
Dear Cultural Musli
m, I am appealing to you. You hold the key. You hold the balance of power. Please withdraw from Islam completely, as countless numbers already have, and lend your invaluable support to the free people of the world who are eager to embrace you with open arms.
Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. Imani is a columnist, literary translator, novelist and an essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. He and his family escaped Iran after the radical Islamic revolution. His observations on the growing Islamo-fascist threat need to be heard and understood by as many people as possible if we are going to stem the tide.
NOTE: Mr. Imani recently appeared on our radio program, "Meet the New Press" . Click here to download the podcast.