Islam is a Political Religion

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One of the cherished dogmas of today’s political elites is that Islam is no different from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and other faiths. No number of jihad attacks, and of Muslim clerics pointing to the Qur’an and Muhammad to justify violence and supremacism, can dislodge it. But we continue to ignore and deny the truth at our own peril.

Defenders of the Islamic jihad project today often claim that laws restricting the spread of Islamic law (Sharia) in the U.S. would also restrict the practice of religions with longer histories in America. But this argument glosses over the fact that unlike other modern faiths, Islam is a political religion. Traditionally, Islam recognizes no separation between religion and state. In its canonical texts and teachings, Islam calls on believers to regard themselves as at war with those who will not submit to Allah – a call that numerous clerics regularly reinforce today in their sermons and religious instructions.

In 1990, the member states of the OIC met in Egypt and adopted the “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.” The Cairo Declaration states that “all human beings form one family whose members are united by their subordination to Allah.” To say that Islam will conquer the world or that all human beings are united in subordination to Allah has clear political implications in light of traditional and mainstream Islamic theology and law.

One of the primary modern organizations dedicated to Islam’s political supremacy is the Muslim Brotherhood. Its vision of a liberated society is one ruled by Islamic law (Sharia), institutionalizing the oppression of women, gays, Christians, Jews and all non-Muslims, beginning with the denial of the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience.

Although it now generally (but not universally) eschews violence, but has spawned two of the world’s most notorious jihad terror groups: in its charter, Hamas identifies itself as a branch of the Brotherhood: “The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era.” Al-Qaeda founders Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden, and top leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, were all members of the Brotherhood, or trained by Brotherhood members.

The Brotherhood is an international organization with considerable influence in Western Europe and the United States. Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, its goal is to create a unified global Islamic state in which Sharia is fully enforced. Al-Banna declared that it was “a duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: God is greatest [Allahu akbar]!” The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood puts it succinctly: “Allah is our goal. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.”

The Muslim Brotherhood spelled out its goals for the United States in an internal document that the FBI seized in 2005 in the Northern Virginia headquarters of an Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, was shut down for sending charitable contributions to Hamas. The captured document was entitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”

In it, Muslim Brotherhood members were told that the Brotherhood was working on presenting Islam as a “civilizational alternative” to non-Islamic forms of society and governance, and supporting “the global Islamic state wherever it is.” In working to establish that Islamic state, Muslim Brotherhood members in the United States: “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The Muslim Brotherhood has been active in the United States for decades, and is the moving force behind virtually all of the mainstream Muslim organizations in America: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and many others.

Yet despite its numerous clear statements of its aspirations and goals, infidels in numerous positions of power in the United States refuse to see the obvious, and continue to treat such organizations as benign. To the peril of all of us.