RAMADAN : “A Month of Calamity.”
By Paul Merkley.
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Last year about this time the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council issued this advisory: “According to Islamic practice, sacrifice during Ramadan can be considered more valuable than that made at other times, so a call to martyrdom during the month may hold a special allure to some.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-warns-of-month-of-violence-by-isis-during-ramadan, June 9, 2016.)
What explains the need for the U.S. State Department to address in this public way the theology of any one of the religions being practised in that country today? We all know how desperate are all official and political bodies to avoid any suggestion of a connection between the faith of Islam and the terrorist actions happening every day in every part of the world in the name of Allah. In that light, this documents stands out for its reckless candour. Is it possible that official bodies committed to the security of the public have at last reached the limit of their willingness to sacrifice public safety to political correctness?
No one on earth knows how many Islamist terrorist organizations exist today. Members of each of these gangs pride themselves on their absolute refusal to cut corners on the instructions that Muhammad left fourteen centuries ago in the Qur’an and in the collections of His Sayings (haditha)to be followed by all men everywhere. Osama bin Laden and his elves were especially adamant on this theme. Serious Muslims attach special virtue to those injunctions that seem least relevant to the current world, such as instructions regarding personal hygiene, diet and sexual relations that obtained in the deserts of Arabia in the 7th century.
One of the things that all followers of Islam have in common is their contempt for the works of Satan; yet it does not seem paradoxical to them that they enforce their will on the rest of us with weapons invented and manufactured in the corrupt West, nor that the many cells of their terrorist networks maintain contact and distribute their plans of action by means of modern internet technology – which owes absolutely nothing to Islam. We have all seen al-Qaeda’s recruitment and propaganda videos in which spokesmen recommend to us the blessings of submission to Allah while promising to murder all of us who decline the invitation. In these videos, Allah’s spokesmen are always fondling Russia and America sub-machine guns, rocket-launchers, etc… — that they are confident will make possible the triumph of Islam everywhere. Yet to the manufacture of these items Islam made absolutely no contribution. Neither is there a traceable linkage between modern hi-tech, the internet – or for that matter the radio! –and Muslim science. For their wholesale work of accomplishing the conversion of all of us they rely, without evident embarrassment, on the products of Satan: Western science and industry.
As I write, we are midway through the ninth month of the Islamic calendar – a lunar calendar, that dates from the Hijra (Muhammad’s flight to Medina, which is regarded as the beginning of the story of Islam.) The present year is 1437 AH.
As it happens, Ramadan this year falls between May 27 and June 24. Total fasting is required from dawn to dusk. Given that we are now into the season of longest days, the burden of fasting is at its greatest – and the significance of the root of the word Ramadan in the Arabic root ramiḍa, which means scorching heat or dryness, is hard to avoid. Ramadan compounds the Muslim’s motive for isolation from the non-Muslim culture and society in which he finds himself. Meeting the challenge of fasting, frequent recitation of the Qur’an, and special attention to deeds of charity multiplies spiritual rewards.
Our news-media and our politicians go into overdrive at this time to spread their blinkered and dogmatic message that Islam is, like Christianity, a message of peace, seeking the broadest realization of human fellowship; and it is in this light that they frame their coverage of Ramadan 2017. For a more authoritative explanation of Ramadan we might go to one of the Muslim world’s most authoritative voices: ‘Ali Gum’a, the Grand Mufti of Egypt. In an article published in the Egyptian daily AlAhram in July 2012, he wrote:
Throughout the history of] Islamic civilization, Ramadan has been not only a month of worship and of growing close to Allah the Almighty, but also a month of action and jihad aimed at spreading this great religion… throughout [Muslim] history, Ramadan has been a month of great conquests, which were an important factor in spreading Islam, [with] its righteousness and tolerance, across the world ( AlAhram, July 2012.)
This is the voice of “moderate” Islam – one that speaks from one of the most eminent and influential pulpits today. As we all know, there are other voices, growing in strength and influence, and ambitious to unite all Muslims as they imagine that they were united in the earliest days of Islam. In 2012, a Muslim Brotherhood member, Hussein Shehata, a lecturer at Al-Azhar University considered the world’s leading center for Sunni Islamic learning proclaimed:
Ramadan is the month of victory for those who wage jihad for Allah. Ramadan has seen the following battles, conquests, and victories: the great Battle of Badr [624 CE],… the conquest of Mecca [630 CE]… We call upon those who fast… to remember their brothers, those who wage jihad for the sake of Allah: in Palestine, against the Jews, the descendants of apes and pigs; in Iraq, against the Americans; in Bosnia-Herzegovina, against the crusader Serbians; in Chechnya, against the Russians; in Kashmir, against the idolatrous Indians… everywhere in [the lands of] the Islamic ummah [community], against those who fight the Muslims”. (Ramadan: “A Month of Great Conquests” by Judith Bergman, www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10437.)
Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Muhammad Badi’ wrote on the movement’s website in August 2012:
Allah did not mandate [the fast] of Ramadan so that [we] sit idly and avoid jihad, action, and da’wa for the sake of Allah… It is a month of action and movement, of conquests and victories the month in which most of the defeats of the nation’s enemies occurred.
A year ago, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al Adnani, called on faithful Muslims to “make it [Ramadan] a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers. And indeed Ramadan 2016 was one of the bloodiest in recent times. It is estimated that at least 421 people were killed and 729 wounded in nearly 15 countries by Islamic zealots during that month alone.
We are clearly on path to exceed this count: On Friday, May 26, the day that Ramada began this year, jihadists in Egypt attacked a bus filled with Coptic Christians travelling to a monastery in Egypt, murdered 29 of them and injured another 23. The day after the beginning of Ramadan, May 27, a Taliban suicide bomber murdered 18 people in Afghanistan, two of them children. Meanwhile, the Philippine jihadist group Abu Sayyaf has murdered 14 Christians and wounded more than 50 in bombing attacks since Ramadan began on May 26.
ISIS has appealed to supporters in a Youtube message
Muslim brothers in Europe who can’t reach the Islamic State lands, attack them in their homes, their markets, their roads and their forums… Do not despise the work. Your targeting of the so-called innocents and civilians is beloved by us and the most effective — so go forth and may you get a great reward or martyrdom in Ramadan.
As I write, June 21, Religionofpeace.com reckons 1350 killed in terror attacks in the name of Allah since Ramadan began.
While jihadists wage war on the West during Ramadan, the West pretends that Ramadan is just another religious holiday of purely spiritual significance. In the UK, for example, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), which represents more than 18,000 head teachers and college leaders insists that jihad and holy wars are ‘myths.’
Jihad in the Arabic language… means …striving… where the cause/objective is goodness & justice…Holy war [is] not an expression in the Qur’an: War is NEVER holy.
People like this, who imagine themselves angels of light by reason of their insistence on calling Islam “a religion of peace,” are standing in the way of the only solution to this madness. Our governments should be holding public inquiries – on at least the scale as the ever-lasting inquisition into the alleged abuses of the churches in their residential schools a century ago – during which all the leading imams and all the leading spokesmen for Islam in Canada should be called upon to explain the reasons for the enormous disproportion of deadly violence caused today by individuals and organizations under the banner of Islam.
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