- Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.
The Challenge of Dawa.
Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2017.
-
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia in 1969. In 1992 she was admitted
to the Netherlands and granted political asylum on the basis of
escaping an arranged marriage. She later obtained Dutch citizenship,
and was elected to the Dutch parliament, where she served from
2001 through 2006. In 2004, she collaborated with Dutch filmmaker
Theo van Gogh on the short film Submission, about the
abuse of women in Islamic societies. After release of the film,
van Gogh was assassinated, with a note containing a death threat
for Hirsi Ali pinned to his corpse with a knife. Thereupon, she
went into hiding with a permanent security detail to protect
her against ongoing threats. In 2006, she moved to the U.S.,
taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute. She is
currently a Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
In this short book (or long pamphlet: it is just 105 pages,
with 70 pages of main text), Hirsi Ali argues that almost all
Western commentators on the threat posed by Islam have
fundamentally misdiagnosed the nature of the challenge it
poses to Western civilisation and the heritage of the Enlightenment,
and, failing to understand the tactics of Islam's ambition to
dominate the world, dating to Mohammed's revelations in
Medina and his actions in that period of his life, have
adopted strategies which are ineffective and in some cases
counterproductive in confronting the present danger.
The usual picture of Islam presented by politicians and
analysts in the West (at least those who admit there is any
problem at all) is that most Muslims are peaceful, productive
people who have no problems becoming integrated in Western
societies, but there is a small minority, variously called
“radical”, “militant”, “Islamist”,
“fundamentalist”, or other names, who are bent
on propagating their religion by means of violence, either in
guerrilla or conventional wars, or by terror attacks on
civilian populations. This view has led to involvement in
foreign wars, domestic surveillance, and often intrusive internal
security measures to counter the threat, which is often given
the name of “jihad”. A dispassionate analysis of these
policies over the last decade and a half must conclude that
they are not working: despite trillions of dollars spent and
thousands of lives lost, turning air travel into a humiliating
and intimidating circus, and invading the privacy of people
worldwide, the Islamic world seems to be, if anything,
more chaotic than it was in the year 2000, and the frequency and
seriousness of so-called “lone wolf” terrorist attacks
against soft targets does not seem to be abating. What if we
don't really understand what we're up against? What if
jihad isn't the problem, or only a part of something much
larger?
Dawa (or
dawah,
da'wah,
daawa,
daawah—there doesn't
seem to be anything associated with this religion which
isn't transliterated at least three different ways—the
Arabic is
“دعوة”)
is an Arabic word which literally means “invitation”.
In the context of Islam, it is usually translated as
“proselytising” or spreading the religion
by nonviolent means, as is done by missionaries of many
other religions. But here, Hirsi Ali contends that dawa,
which is grounded in the fundamental scripture of Islam: the
Koran and Hadiths (sayings of Mohammed), is something very
different when interpreted and implemented by what she
calls “political Islam”. As opposed to a
distinction between moderate and radical Islam, she argues
that Islam is more accurately divided into “spiritual
Islam” as revealed in the earlier Mecca suras of the
Koran, and “political Islam”, embodied by those
dating from Medina. Spiritual Islam defines a belief system,
prayers, rituals, and duties of believers, but is largely
confined to the bounds of other major religions. Political
Islam, however, is a comprehensive system of politics, civil
and criminal law, economics, the relationship with and treatment
of nonbelievers, and military strategy, and imposes a duty to
spread Islam into new territories.
Seen through the lens of political Islam, dawa and those
engaged in it, often funded today by the deep coffers of
petro-tyrannies, is nothing like the activities of, say,
Roman Catholic or Mormon missionaries. Implemented through
groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), centres on Islamic and Middle East studies on
university campuses, mosques and Islamic centres in
communities around the world, so-called “charities”
and non-governmental organisations, all bankrolled by
fundamentalist champions of political Islam, dawa in the
West operates much like the apparatus of Communist subversion
described almost sixty years ago by J. Edgar Hoover in
Masters of Deceit.
You have the same pattern of apparently nonviolent and
innocuously-named front organisations, efforts to influence
the influential (media figures, academics, politicians),
infiltration of institutions along the lines of
Antonio Gramsci's
“long march”, exploitation of Western traditions
such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion to
achieve goals diametrically opposed to them, and redefinition of
the vocabulary and intimidation of any who dare state self-evident
facts (mustn't be called “islamophobic”!), all funded
from abroad. Unlike communists in the heyday of the
Comintern
and afterward the Cold War, Islamic subversion is assisted by
large scale migration of Muslims into Western countries, especially
in Europe, where the organs of dawa encourage them to form their
own separate communities, avoiding assimilation, and demanding
the ability to implement their own sharia law and that others
respect their customs. Dawa is directed at these immigrants as
well, with the goal of increasing their commitment to Islam and
recruiting them for its political agenda: the eventual replacement
of Western institutions with sharia law and submission to a global
Islamic caliphate. This may seem absurdly ambitious for communities
which, in most countries, aren't much greater than 5% of the
population, but they're patient: they've been at it for fourteen
centuries, and they're out-breeding the native populations in
almost every country where they've become established.
Hirsi Ali argues persuasively that the problem isn't jihad:
jihad is a tactic which can be employed as part of
dawa when persuasion, infiltration, and subversion prove
insufficient, or as a final step to put the conquest over the
top, but it's the commitment to global hegemony, baked right
into the scriptures of Islam, which poses the most dire risk
to the West, especially since so few decision makers seem to
be aware of it or, if they are, dare not speak candidly of it
lest they be called “islamophobes” or worse. This
is something about which I don't need to be persuaded: I've been
writing about it since 2015; see
“Clash of
Ideologies: Communism, Islam, and the West”. I
sincerely hope that this work by an eloquent observer who has
seen political Islam from the inside will open more eyes to the
threat it poses to the West. A reasonable set of policy
initiatives to confront the threat is presented at the end.
The only factual error I noted is the claim on p. 57 that
Joseph R. McCarthy was in charge of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities—in fact, McCarthy, a Senator,
presided over the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
This is a publication of the Hoover Institution. It has no ISBN
and cannot be purchased through usual booksellers. Here is the
page
for the book, whence you can
download
the PDF file for free.
August 2017 