“You must strike the crowns of the heads,” explains Egyptian Shaykh Safwat Hejazi on his Arabic-language program “Age of Glory,” which airs on the Egyptian al-Nas satellite television network. “Strike and split the head, and cut it in half.” Hejazi further quotes a hadith from ‘Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad and the fourth caliph of Islam, in which he tells his sons: “Go, fight, and please your grandfather [i.e. Muhammad]. Let him be pleased with you. Fighting is what pleases the prophet (peace be upon him).” Also featured in this video are candid comments from Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the highly-popular Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated shaykh who hosts “Shari’a and Life” on al-Jazeera, lamenting the fact that Muslims are more eager to fight and die for Allah than they are to live and serve others.

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(thanks to Nonie Darwish for finding the clip)

It is shocking to see these brazen calls for violent jihad in English. Yet those few of us here in the West who understand Arabic are sadly not surprised at this–it is actually quite common to hear this type of language coming out of the Middle East. The reason it is so shocking to hear these things in English is because Muslim spokesmen in the West are very adept at smoothing over the violent, intolerant, and otherwise shocking aspects of Islam in order to dupe their Western audience into believing that they have nothing to fear from Islam.

I recently found a perfect example of this in an Arabic-language fatwa from the website IslamOnline.net, which was founded by Yusuf al-Qaradawi and is currently listed as the sixth-most popular Islam-related website. The fatwa frankly admits that Islam makes it “permissible to have sexual intercourse with a prepubescent girl”; because, the fatwa continues, “It is true that the prophet (peace be upon him) entered into a marriage contract with A’isha when she was six years old, however he did not have sex with her until she was nine years old” (emphasis in original).

A fatwa on the same topic found on the English-language version of the website, however, cleans up this bit of Islamic history to make it more tenable for a Western audience: “As for the Prophet’s condition before this marriage, it clearly explained what we’ve said that it was a purely sublime aim and purpose that motivated him to marry `Aisha. That’s why the marriage was not consummated until sometime after the emigration to Madinah, when she had reached maturity” (emphasis added).

The author of this article certainly knew that Muhammad had consummated his marriage with ‘Aisha when the latter was nine years old, as it is recorded thusly in Sahih al-Bukhari, the most authentic collection of Islamic hadiths. Then why the deception?

This is all part of a well-defined Islamic strategy called “taqiyya,” or dissimulation, which makes it permissible for Muslims to lie if necessary to advance Islam. This is partly based on the following verse in the Qur’an: “Let not the believers take infidels as allies rather than believers. Whoever doeth this, the same has nothing with Allah; except when taking precaution against them in prudence” (Qur’an 3:28, emphasis added).

Returning to the topic of jihad, we often hear in the West that it is merely an “inner spiritual struggle.” Consider the following statement from noted Islamic apologist John Esposito, the founding director of the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (a truly Orwellian name): “…jihad’s primary religious and spiritual meaning [is] the ‘struggle’ or effort to follow God’s path, to lead a good life…”

Yet in the Arab world, jihad is almost never spoken of as being a spiritual struggle. Arabs understand that jihad, which literally just means ‘struggle,’ in an Islamic context means one thing: fighting to establish the word of Allah. This was explicitly stated in a fatwa issued recently by another Egyptian Shaykh, Dr. ‘Imad Mustafa from al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is widely considered the foremost legal authority for Sunni Muslims throughout the world. Dr. Mustafa declared, “Fighting against non-Muslims is what is known in Islamic jurisprudence as Jihad in the path of God. Jihad is a prescribed duty in cases of aggression from the infidels against Muslims, for we must resist them, make jihad against them, and defend against them. This is according to the text of the Qur’an…” He even went on to declare that, “offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure Islam’s border, to extend God’s religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it…and to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula” (emphasis added).

The best way to defend against Muslim deception is to get educated. You don’t need to know Arabic—read the Qur’an and find out for yourself what Islam really teaches. Don’t be duped.

al-Mutarajjam
Arabic linguist
Owner, translating-jihad.blogspot.com