CHAPTER 19

Reaches America

Dr. Daniel Pipes has written an epochal warning for America. Quotes from it may one day be inscribed in stone in a commemorative hall in Washington, D.C. Its title is Militant Islam Reaches America.1

Dr. Pipes was formerly an instructor at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. He has also served with the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense. The author of 10 prior books, he is now director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum. He is also a columnist for both the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post.

First let me explain what Dr. Pipes does not attempt in his book. He does not critique the Koran, as I do. In all his 309 pages, I found only three phraselength quotes from the Koran. Nor does he closely examine Mohammed’s deeds and the evident motives behind them—with one exception. Dr. Pipes describes a dubious stratagem related to the breaking in A.D. 630 of a pact Mohammed had ratified 22 months earlier with the people of Mecca—the Treaty of Hudaybiya.

Dr. Pipes does not seem to see the importance of the Western world confronting radical Islam by publicly exposing Mohammed as a self-discredited prophet and the Koran as a self-discrediting book. What a shame if radical Islam’s Achilles’ heel—Mohammed and the Koran’s weird selfdiscreditation —should be wasted as a means of self-defense by the world they threaten.

Nor does Dr. Pipes anywhere mention the tens of thousands of radical Muslim madrasas that are providing militant Muslim leaders with a wealth of manpower resources that moderate Muslims do not have and are not even interested in seeking.

Dr. Pipes seems not to have read Bat Ye’or. He praises the accomplishments of Islamic civilization in past centuries as if it was all one unified, well-governed Eden.2 He seems unaware of the violence, the kidnappings, the huge slave industry and the dire oppression through extortionary taxation of captive Jews and Christians during those hellish eras. He imagines that Islam became violently radicalized only in this century.

Dr. Pipes observes, “A militant Islamic state is almost by definition a rogue state, not playing by any rules except those of expediency and power, a ruthless institution that causes misery at home and abroad. Islamists in charge means that conflicts proliferate, society is militarized, arsenals grow, and terrorism becomes an instrument of state. . . . Islamists repress moderate Muslims and treat non-Muslims as inferior specimens.”3

Clearly Dr. Pipes does not realize that what he thinks describes only a modern Islamist state precisely describes innumerable Muslim caliphates and sultanates down through the centuries! When Dr. Pipes writes of “winning the war for the soul of Islam,”4 one must reply, “Please tell us, professor—exactly when and where did that ‘soul of Islam’ ever find political manifestation? We need to know so we can recognize and applaud it if it ever recurs.”

If Dr. Pipes’s “soul of Islam” means noble character in idealistic Muslim individuals, that is believable, but that is not a political accomplishment one can try to duplicate. The sad truth is that there has never been even one enduring Muslim government that can be cited as a role model for a benign “soul of Islam” kind of state—certainly not under Mohammed, nor under the caliphs, the sultans or any government of the 55 Muslim nations existing today.

Alas, the good professor’s vision of an ethereal yet somehow recoverable soul of Islam is only a pipes’-dream.

Yet in spite of the above omissions, Dr. Pipes strikes a thunderously loud gong. He documents the Islamic threat looming over America with startling quotes and lucid comments that swirl like snowflakes in a storm. In chapter 10, I cited Ibn Warraq’s quotes from Kalim Siddiqui, director of London’s Muslim Institute. Here are some of Dr. Pipe’s comments about the teachings of an American Muslim activist with a like-sounding but differently spelled surname—Shamim A. Siddiqi:

Siddiqi [in writings Pipes finds available on Islamic web sites] argues that Muslims taking control of the United States has more importance than such goals as sustaining the Iranian revolution or destroying Israel, for it has greater impact upon the future of Islam.5 Other Siddiqi opinions paraphrased by Pipes are: To permit Islam to attain its rightful place requires that “the ideology of Islam prevail over the mental horizon of the American people.” . . . Establishing militant Islam in America would signal the triumph of [militant Islam] . . . over its only rival, the bundle of Christianity and liberalism that constitutes Western civilization.6

Note that Siddiqi does not take Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc., as seriously as Christianity and Western liberalism when it comes to naming rivals Islam must overcome:

American Muslims . . . have the paramount responsibility of bringing Islam to power in their country.7 Siddiqi sees Islamists in power in Washington before 2020.8

Dr. Pipes names three primary means Islamists in America are counting on to achieve their dream of an Islamicized America: “immigration, reproduction and conversion.”9

Dr. Pipes quotes Siraj Wahhaj, an influential black convert to Islam, as saying to a Muslim audience in New Jersey late in 1992:

“If we were united and strong, we’d elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . Take my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us.” If Muslims were more clever politically, Wahhaj told his listeners, they could take over the United States and replace the constitutional government with a caliphate.10

This from the first Muslim ever invited to offer an invocational prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives! Dozens of similar alarming quotes from American Muslims resound throughout Dr. Pipes’s chapters.

Introducing a chapter called “The U.S. Government: Patron of Islam?” Dr. Pipes writes, “It was one thing to hear individual [pro-Islamic] statements by high government officials stretching back a decade and another thing to collect them, sort them, and ponder them. This latter task suggested a more cohesive and powerful message than had been evident from occasional remarks.”11

Dr. Pipes adds that he and Mimi Stillman, coauthor of the chapter, wrote:

“By dismissing any connection between Islam and terrorism, complaining about media distortions, and claiming that America needs Islam,” we concluded, official spokesmen “have turned the U.S. government into a discreet missionary for the [Islamic] faith.” Assuming that is not their intention, the message of [the chapter mentioned] is that government officials should be much more careful when they speak about Islam.12 Dr. Pipes comments elsewhere, It was not so long ago that Westerners could converse freely about Mohammed, Islam, Muslims and militant Islam, just as they still can about parallel Christian subjects. No longer. . . . Violence and intimidation have shut down the frank discussion of [Islam]. It has reached the strange point that, in a secular, Christian-majority country like the United States, a biographer of Jesus has freedom to engage in outrageous blasphemies while his counterpart working on Mohammed feels constrained to accept the pious Muslim version of the Prophet’s life. I present this silencing as . . . a potential first step toward the imposition of Islamic law [in America].13

Then comes Dr. Pipes’s sadly misplaced confidence that moderate Muslims are the knights who must somehow wage ideological warfare with radical Muslims for Dr. Pipes’s mythical “soul of Islam.” He admits, “Although the moderates appear—and in fact are—weak, they have a crucial role to play, for they alone can reconcile Islam with modernity.”14

Elsewhere Dr. Pipes concedes, “The Internet has hundreds of militant Islamic sites but few traditionally pious ones.”15 Sites operated by moderate Muslims, as distinct from militant or traditional ones, are not even mentioned! Do any exist?

At the end of his tome, Dr. Pipes recommends that Western democracies should pin their hopes on helping Turkey—most democratic of all Muslim governments—launch a propaganda blitz to offer itself as a model for the establishment of democratic governments everywhere in the Islamic world. He acknowledges that Turkey is far from asking to step into the role and may even refuse.

But even if Turkey accepted, even if radical Muslims everywhere dropped their militant agendas and accepted Dr. Pipes’s major American-led proposal, the Koran would still be there to generate anti-infidel hostility in another generation. Mohammed’s example of treacherous atrocity would eventually inspire future Osama bin Ladens to arise.

We have no alternative. We must accept the solution that Mohammed himself unwittingly dropped in our very laps—use his own words, his own historical record to show that he discredited himself. We must learn to use quotes from his Koran to undermine Muslim confidence in him and his writings. Show them that turning away from Mohammed frees them to turn to God in truth. This calls for concerted efforts in winsome debate by millions of non- Muslims internationally. We in our millions must help millions of Muslims to see that what Islam loathes as “the House of War” is simply the human family of which they are an integral part!

Mohammed estranged them from us. Let us undo the estrangement. Win Muslims back into the human family under God!

Notes

1. Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002).

2. Ibid., pp. 4, 74.

3. Ibid., p. 13.

4. Ibid., n.p.

5. Ibid., p. 114.

6. Ibid., p. 114.

7. Ibid., p. 115.

8. Ibid., p. 122.

9. Ibid., p. 118.

10. Ibid., p. 112.

11. Ibid., p. xv.

12. Ibid., pp. xv-xvi.

13. Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii.

14. Ibid., p. xix.

15. Ibid., p. 15.