It’s happened again: venomous Islamophobes have called for the monitoring of mosques. That’s right: racist bigots, seething with unaccountable hatred for their fellow citizens who happen to be mosque-attending Muslims, are calling for unconscionable restrictions upon Muslims’ religious freedom, and a cloud of suspicion to be cast upon the entire Muslim community, as they have called for law enforcement authorities to step up their monitoring of Muslim houses of worship.
Here’s the story:
JEDDAH: A number of religious scholars and academics have stressed the need for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call and Guidance to beef up monitoring of places of worship. It followed the recent report of a Riyadh mosque serving as a facade for manufacturing explosives.
These “religious scholars and academics” have a valid point. After all, in recent years we have seen mosques used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the U.S.) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and more.
American authorities have as much reason as Saudi authorities to be concerned. Four separate studies all found that 80% of U.S. mosques were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians. There are no countervailing studies that challenge these results. In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.”
Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.
And in the summer of 2011 came another study showing that only 19% of mosques in U.S. don’t teach jihad violence and/or Islamic supremacism.
A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and dogma calling for violence against non-believers. Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshiper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques. Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad. The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.
Yet U.S. officials continue to ignore this and to assume that all Muslims in the United States completely abhor the jihadist and Islamic supremacist imperative to bring Sharia to the West. They consider mosques to be simply houses of worship, full of civic-minded and proud American citizens and immigrants to the United States who are anxious to pursue the American dream and grateful for constitutional freedoms and protections.
The Saudis “religious scholars and academics” who called upon the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call and Guidance to monitor mosques in the Kingdom are more realistic. They know that jihadist point to numerous texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence, and that warfare against unbelievers is not a twisting or hijacking of Islamic doctrine, but something that is taught by all the mainstream sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Consequently they know that only careful monitoring can ensure that jihad plotting will not go on in the nation’s mosques – and of course, in calling for such monitoring, they are not hampered by politically correct dogma that would label any such call “Islamophobic.”
Indeed, Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manie, whom Arab News identified as “a member of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars and adviser at the Royal Court,” rooted his call for monitoring of the mosques in Islamic teaching, saying: “Those who seek to destabilize the country and fight against security forces come under the category of ‘those who rebel against Allah and His Messenger’ and a country’s legitimate government and hence should be punished severely.”
Sheikh Abdullah was referring to the Qur’an, which says that “the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land” (5:33). He wasn’t objecting to the waging of jihad against unbelievers, but only to the directing of jihad activity against the Saudi royals.
Nonetheless, it is striking that for whatever reason it was issued, a call could go out in Saudi Arabia for the monitoring of mosques, when anyone who raises the issue in the United States is immediately branded as a racist paranoiac raising unjust suspicions against loyal citizens. Yet as the surveys of mosques in the U.S. have established, what is happening in mosques there could be happening in mosques here. If only we had a Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call and Guidance to keep mosques in the U.S. on the straight and narrow – but then again, the way things are going, we will soon enough.
