Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous. Quran 9:123
George Rebane
Republican candidate Dr Ben Carson set off the most recent political dust-devil predictable with his response to whether he would support a Muslim becoming President of the United States. However, the question of devout Muslims serving in governments is an important issue today when radical Islam and Islam colonizing the west have become the world’s most destabilizing socio-political forces against which secular humanism and collectivist ideologies are not only helpless but actually abetting.
To examine this issue we must first look at man’s belief systems regarding his cosmology and ideology. By cosmology we mean the entirety of his picture of existence ranging from the structure of the universe(s) to the humongous Planck scale ocean of quantum events in which we all swim and derive our being. Cosmology also subsumes or is subsumed by a person’s religion.
By ideology we mean a person’s set of structured tenets that describe his vision or preference of a particular socio-political order that guides, controls, and informs human activity on earth. Here we divide such ideologies into loose categories of collectivism – e.g. communism and socialism of the international or national kind – and classical liberalism as bequeathed by our Founders and clarified by, say, Frederic Bastiat’s The Law.
Over the years RR has been fortunate to be a forum for the arguments from heartfelt adherents of a wide range of ideologies and cosmologies/religions embraced by its readers and commenters. And as such, these debates again underline that a devout person’s religion trumps his ideology – God’s plan and druthers supersede that of Man. In all nations with a religious citizenry allegiance is paid to ‘God and country’ in that order.
Religions divide themselves into ‘End-timer’ cosmologies and all others. The End-timers believe that man is a transcendent critter in the sense that his existence transcends his current travails on earth, which itself is a proving ground wherein Man makes his decision for God or Evil/devil and is then judged by God on his efforts. But the common denominator in the greater scheme of things is that human life on earth is an interlude that precedes a stable eternity fashioned variously depending on religious teachings. All that we see here and in the reaches of space will someday (maybe soon?) come to an end as God the Creator takes us into the next phase of his plan for us.
End-timer religions also differentiate themselves as to what Man’s agenda should be while on earth. For example, Christians have the Great Commission in going to the nations and teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the historical incarnation of God. Their scriptural guidance on socio-politics is sparse in details and summarized in the strong yet still vague “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” (KJV)
To understand Islam’s teachings, one must first be aware of ‘The Doctrine of Abrogation’ regarding the Quran, which simply directs the believer to hold the later entry as truth when encountering an obvious contradiction between earlier and subsequent parts of the scripture. This is important because about 20% of the Quran was written in Mecca when the Prophet Muhammad was first revealing the new religion. Islam was then weak and sought adherents with a message of peace and hope. The remaining 80% of the Quran was written after Muslims overran Medina and the faith was finding success in its forceful dissemination. The ‘Medina Quran’ reveals that Allah has little mercy for those who reject Islam and those who become apostate. Death to the infidels is a common and oft repeated theme in that part of the book.
Allah also spells out that Islam’s great commission is the creation of the Caliphate, a one-world Islamic theocratic state under which man is ruled by Sharia law. A devout Muslim holds most dear such a future for all humankind, and must seek to bring it about before Allah terminates this phase of his plan for us. And the Quran teaches that the community of believers – The Ummah – must work tirelessly to bring about the Caliphate by either conquest or conspiracy. In the latter approach all Muslims may use any and all forms of dissimulation to achieve their end. These means are called Taqiyyah and Kitman and described in the Quran.
A devout Muslim holds these tenets most dear to their heart since they are the explicit desires and dictates of Allah. Neither I nor anyone of whom I know has the ability to discern whether a Muslim we meet is dissembling or not. In today’s politically correct public forums we are not even permitted to question someone’s faith in its make-up and practice. But given its tenets, Islam is definitely not a faith whose teachings are in concordance with western values, mores, or its liberal forms of governance.
I cannot blame Muslims for the practice of their faith. Were I to believe that my God wants me to work for the Caliphate, and possibly sacrifice myself in the process so as to earn the eternal gift of paradise, then my commission and reward could not be more clear and definite. Given the means Allah has blessed me with, I would do what I could – colonize, proselytize, work patiently among infidels, practice taqiyyah/kitman, fight, or even blow myself up – to do his will.
It is in light of these arguments that responsible and courageous national leaders like Dr Carson state that they would not support a Muslim as our president. He did give some caveats under which he would support Muslims in Congress (perhaps since two of them are already ensconced there). My own position is much stronger – I do not support a devout Muslim having any public office or post that may put him in a position to do harm to our nation and advance the cause of Islam which in the large I oppose.
[25sep15 update] That Islam is a religion still mired in its own middle years is clear to most westerners. That the belief system is toxic to western civilization is disputed only by the ever-blind Left. Most certainly today’s dominant Islamists (joined by the Muslim main street) don’t deny that toxicity, and see a future in which the world, through their efforts, belongs to Allah.
The question I raised above expands on the one posed to Dr Carson. The Islamic problem is outlined sufficiently to invite serious discussion of how a liberal sovereign nation-state protects itself against its own citizens (and legal residents) embracing such a belief system. The problem is made more complex because of the endemic provisions of Islam – e.g. Abrogation and Taqiyyah/Kitman – that exhort its adherents to dissemble their beliefs, and to commit widespread random acts of violence/terror in the name of their god. (Consider the value of a poll of America’s Muslims.)
Because of that, as Islam grows in the Mideast and Africa, and European colonization proceeds a pace, it can be argued that our indigenous Muslims will evolve into a virulent and palpable fifth column within our borders. We are already witness to early evidence of that.
It is established common wisdom that we deny the full franchise of citizenship to individuals who subscribe to socio-political ideologies inimical to the continued existence of our constitutional America. And most reasonable people understand the hierarchical primacy of cosmology/religion being the dominant informer and motivator of human behavior. For religionists it’s acceding to the will of their God; for secular humanists it’s the cosmological frame that makes them first ‘citizens of the world/earth/Gaia’ before they are Americans.
Yet given this, we have no innate policy to deal with those whose stronger conviction– their faith – dictates our demise as a nation. Indeed, we seem to be hamstrung by our founding document that proscribes a person’s religion for having anything to do with their permitted and condoned conduct in the public domain. That this provision (Art3/3) was embedded to address a different problem and achieve a totally different end in our republic seems to be beyond the ken of many of us, primarily of the progressive persuasion. And no reasonable person would argue that the Constitution was meant to serve as a national suicide pact.
So there is a lot of discussion and debate that this serious issue invites before we again find ourselves in extremis as in days of yore, and then in panic cobble together public policies that herd people into the next network of nationwide Manzanars – federal plans already provided for in the National Defense Authorization Act and detailed by various FEMA and DOD manuals.
However, we see in the lamestream media and even in the RR comment streams the utter inability of the Left to enter into a cogent discussion of this matter. Their participation immediately calls for diversion and dissolution of ‘Islamists as a fifth column’ into convoluted arguments of separation of church and state, the Second Amendment, and God knows what else that can be dredged up to avoid the issue and denigrate those who dare raise it. A common tactic to dissemble is to demand that commentaries like mine are attributed proposals for specific policies the implementation of which must be spelled out before discussion can commence. Even the casual reader (of goodwill) can see that neither I nor Dr Carson put forth any such proposals, but merely raised the issue to invite further discussion.
But as with so many other national concerns, the gulf between the Left and Right has widened to the extent that no reasonable and focused discussion is possible on matters such as healthcare, America’s role as hegemon, preventable global warming, role of government, income/wealth inequality, competing economic systems, … . To that we now add what I will name the West’s Problem with Islam (WPI). Its very existence will be denied until the next thousands die en masse within our borders, and then …
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