Muslims face Mecca while praying at Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.
Photo by Antonio Melina/Agência Brasil.
1. Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It offers a Total Regulation of life, with rules set out for everything from dress, to food, to sexual mores and practices, to relations among family members, to the most intimate details of toilet hygiene, to how to pray, and when and why and how to fight the Unbelievers.
Many non-Muslims have heard of the Five Pillars of Islam, the rituals which are said to be the main duties owed by a Believer to Allah. These five are: Shahada (Profession of Faith), Salat (five daily prayers),Zakat (charity), Hajj (making the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime, if you have the means), Ramadan (daytime fasting for a month every year). Non-Muslims enjoy learning those exotic names: Shahada, Salat, Zakat, Hajj, Ramadan. But too often the Five Pillars are a soothing substitute for the kind of substantive knowledge about Islam that we really need to know. And what we most need to know, at this moment in the history of the imperiled and giddy West, is what the texts and teachings of Islam have to say, and as we will discover, at great length, about the duty, incumbent upon all Muslims, to wage Jihad against the Infidels (Unbelievers, Kuffar), until Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
If you attend a Meet-Your-Muslim Neighbor event– they’re all the rage — you will undoubtedly be told about the Five Pillars, for they seem so familiar and so innocuous. After all, many in the West say prayers, engage in charitable giving, observe fasts, make pilgrimages. Or if your child is enduring a “unit on Islam” in school, he or she will undoubtedly be told, before all else, and perhaps instead of anything else, about the Five Pillars.
The first important thing that you will NOT be told by your Meet-Your Muslim “neighbor,” nor will your child be told in school, is that Zakat, alms-giving to the needy, is supposed to be given only to fellow Muslims. The only non-Muslims to whom Zakat might, in rare instances, be given, are those who show signs of wanting to convert, if the giving of that Zakat encourages them to embrace Islam. And one other piquant detail: Infidels should know that one of the purposes for which Zakat can be given is not just to help the needy, but to support the mujahideen, the Jihad warriors of Islam. In Islam there is not that omnidirectional charity that we in the West assume as a matter of course. And few in the West would imagine that Jihadists could be considered worthy recipients of Islamic alms. But they are.
The second thing you will not be told, nor will your child, is that in the course of praying the requisite five prayers a day, an observant Muslim will recite the Fatihah, the first surah of the Qur’an and the most common prayer in Islam, seventeen times. The final two verses of the Fatihah ask Allah: “Show us the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast favored; not the [path] of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.” The traditional Islamic understanding of this is that the “straight path” is Islam — cf. Islamic apologist John Esposito’s book Islam: The Straight Path. The path of those who have earned Allah’s anger are the Jews, and those who have gone astray are the Christians. No Muslim will offer this information, and if you bring it up, he is likely to po-facedly deny it. But there it is: the dutiful Muslim saying his prayers is cursing the Kuffar, seventeen times a day.
2. There is one other duty in Islam, a duty so great that it has been called the Sixth Pillar of Islam. This is the duty to participate, directly or indirectly, individually or collectively, depending on certain circumstances, in the struggle, or Jihad, to remove all obstacles, everywhere in the world, to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. The traditional weapons of Jihad are conventional warfare, or qitaal, and terrorism. There are 109 Jihad verses in the Qur’an that command Believers to fulfill the duty of Jihad, which means the “struggle” to defeat and subjugate the Infidels, by violence. But there is also the Jihad of “pen, tongue,” which means propaganda on behalf of Islam. There is the Jihad of “wealth,” where money is deployed to further spread Islam, as when mosques and madrasas are built. There is also a new form of Jihad, as yet imperfectly recognized, the Stealth Jihad, which in the West is conducted by Muslims attempting to subvert our laws and customs, to make Western countries adopt Islam-friendly policies (from women-only swimming pools, to halal meals for all students, to Muslim-only prayer rooms, to attempts to silence critics of Islam by labelling them as “Islamophobes”).
Finally, there is what might be called the demographic jihad, the result of what is a Muslim invasion of Europe, where there are now more than twenty-five million Muslims. This “jihad” has had spectacular results. In Italy, for example, the number of Muslims increased 1,000 times between 1970 and 2015, from 2,000 to 2 million. And in the two years since, that Muslim population in Italy has almost doubled, from 2 million to 3.7 million. In 1974 the leader of Algeria, Houari Boumedienne, declared at the United Nations that “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.”
And while Boumediene’s prediction seemed bizarre at the time, it now seems, alas, far-seeing. His prediction seems to be on track, and other Muslims have made similar triumphalist statements. Muslim migrants keep on arriving, the Western world keeps on accepting them, reluctantly, but unable or afraid to call a halt. Once in the West, in what Muslims call Dar al-Harb (the Domain of War, where Infidels still rule), and settled behind what they are taught to regard as enemy lines, these Muslims outbreed the indigenous non-Muslims by a considerable degree. Each year, the Muslim percentage of the European population goes up by 1 percent, or 10 percent by each decade. Well before the end of the century, if this trend continues, Europe will have a Muslim majority. What would that mean for Western civilization? For America? Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to even think about it. It’s all too upsetting.
Muslims face Mecca while praying at Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.
Photo by Antonio Melina/Agência Brasil. 
