The assassin's master sermon

Westerners identify readily with secular Muslims such as Ayaan Hirshi Ali, member of the Netherlands' parliament and the late Theo van Gogh's collaborator in a film attacking Islam's treatment of women, or with the Canadian Irshad Manji, the lesbian "Muslim refusenik" who published The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith. But they have something to learn from the letter that Mohammed B pinned with a knife to van Gogh's corpse after he murdered him with knife and pistol on November 2.

The text can be found at FaithFreedom.org, along with commentary by informed readers.

"An Open Letter to Hirshi Ali" opens a window into the great theological conflict of our times. Most Western readers would stop after the first 10 lines, for it begins with paranoid Jew-hatred copied from Islamist websites and petty complaints about Ayaan Hirshi Ali's immigration policy. But the core of the "Open Letter" is an admonition from a believing Muslim to an atheist apostate, with a unique exposition of the faith of radical Islam. Some secular critics wrongly claim that Islam is not a religion, but only a political ideology, a position I challenged in an August 10 essay (Islam: Religion or political ideology?). The "Open Letter" evinces not merely a religious position, but, however abhorrent, a profound religious sensibility.

Failure to confront Islam as a religion, I maintain, is the Achilles' heel of Western strategy. Ayaan Hirshi Ali has my entire sympathy, but to her antagonists I accord the respect due to a lethal enemy. US conservatives applaud secular Muslims for being reasonable, but at the same time admire the religious impulse of the American Christians. One may argue, of course, that Americans should have a religion while Arabs should not, but the fact is that they do have a religion. Antagonistic modes of faith underlie the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. The assassin Mohammed B, by delivering this message attached to the corpse of a prominent figure in European culture, demands that we consider this antagonism in earnest.

The "Open Letter" begins execrably, with an anti-Jewish screed based on misquotes from rabbinical commentary, but soon enough comes to its core argument, namely the failure of secularism: There is one certainty in the whole of existence; and that is that everything comes to an end.

A child born unto this world and fills this universe with its presence in the form of its first life's cries, shall ultimately leave this world with its death cry.

A blade of grass sticking up its head from the dark earth and being caressed by the sunlight and fed by the descending rain, shall ultimately whither and turn to dust.

Death, Miss Hirshi Ali, is the common theme of all that exists. You, me and the rest of creation can not disconnect from this truth.

There shall be a Day where one soul can not help another soul. A Day with terrible tortures and torments. A Day where the injust shall force from their [tongues] horrible screams. Screams, Miss Hirshi Ali, that will cause shivers to roll down one's spine; that will make hairs stand up from heads. People will be seen drunk with fear while they are not drunk. Fear shall fill the atmosphere on that Great Day. The lines above might have appeared in a Sunday sermon by an old-fashioned American preacher. All religion responds to the inevitability of death, which means not merely individual death, but also the death of the cultural continuity that makes it possible for the individual to live on in memory. The "Open Letter" elaborates this theme with verses from the 81st Sura of the Koran, which portrays a Day of Judgment (stars fall, the sun is overthrown, hell is lighted, and so forth), and then continues: You as unbelieving extremist of course won't believe in the above described scene. For you the above is merely a made-up drama piece from a book like many. And yet, Miss Hirshi Ali, I would bet my life to claim that you are sweating with fear when you read this. You, as unbelieving fundamentalist, of course do not believe that a Supreme being controls the entire universe.

You do not believe that your heart, with which you cast away truth, has to ask permission from the Supreme being for every beat.

You do not believe that your tongue with which you deny the Guidance from the Supreme being is subject to his Laws.

You do not believe that life and death has been given you by this Supreme being. Until this point, the "Open Letter" follows the conventional form of a believer's admonition to an unbeliever, in terms familiar to Jew and Christian. But then the writer attaches a challenge born of existential despair: if you believe so firmly in your secular view of the world, are you happy to die for it?

If you really believe this, then the following challenge should be no problem for you. I challenge you with this letter to prove you are right. You don't have to do much:

If you will not accept this challenge; know then that my master, the Most High, has unmasked you as an unjust one. The writer invokes the 94th and 95th verses of the Koran's 2nd Sura, addressed to false prophets: [2.94] Say: If the future abode with Allah is specially for you to the exclusion of the people, then invoke death if you are truthful. [2.95] And they will never invoke it on account of what their hands have sent before, and Allah knows the unjust. The "Open Letter" then concludes with a death threat to Ayaan Hirshi Ali:

"To prevent that I were to be accused of the same, I shall wish this wish [death] for you."

If you are so convinced of your philosophy, asks the writer, why do you not wish for death? We jihadis, he implies, welcome death, and if your conviction is as strong as ours, you should do no less. Westerners should think twice before despising this line of reasoning. Socrates, after all, argued that the true philosopher should wish for death before he drank the hemlock, and he chose the hemlock over exile because he could exist as nothing other than an Athenian. I made this point in Socrates the destroyer (May 25), an essay that attracted virtually no readers because its conclusions are so unsettling. After the Peloponnesian War, which doomed Athenian culture, Socrates' existential choice was rather more understandable.

The presentiment of death (Franz Rosenzweig's phrase) haunts the Arab mind. A senescent culture that has fallen behind in every aspect of human endeavor - economic, scientific, cultural and military - faces absorption into the hostile world of globalization. As I wrote on August 10 (Islam: Religion or political ideology?): Traditional society is the locus of the vast majority of the world's billion Muslims. Global communications and the social freedoms embodied in the US system threaten the existence of these societies. For most of the world's Muslims the United States is a menace, not a promise, threatening to dissolve the ties that bind child to parent, wife to husband, tribesman to chief, subject to ruler. Traditional society will not go mutely to its doom and join the Great Extinction of the Peoples, blotting out ancient cultures and destroying the memory of today's generation. It will not permit the hundreds of millions of Muslims on the threshold of adulthood to pass into the world of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and lose the memory of their ancestors. On the contrary: it will turn the tables upon the corrupt metropolis, and in turn launch a war of conquest against it. Radical Islam stems from despair in the face of cultural death; precisely for that reason it bespeaks a ghastly indifference toward individual death, analogous to the Mut der Verzweiflung, or courage borne of desperation, that impels the soldiers of a defeated army toward a final charge at the enemy cannon. Absolute certainty informs the faith of the assassin Mohammed B, but it is the certainty of cultural extinction that makes the death of the individual the supreme test of faith. Existential despair inspires the conclusion that better than defeat is to fight to the death. Peace is to be achieved when those who hold this view will have had the opportunity to do so (More killing, please!, June 12, 2003).

Further commentary:

** Islam is absolutely and definitely a religion. It is a religion that was created as a direct attack on the legitimacy and truth of both Judaism and Christianity. One can argue whether or not it was Muhammad's creation or a supernatural revelation (and if the latter, whether the Revealer was a good angel as Muhammad believed or a deceptive demon). But Islam is a religion. However, unlike Christianity and Judaiam, both of which recognize a separation between religious authority and temporal authority (in Biblical Judaism, between the kings and the priests/prophets; in Biblical Christianity between the apostolic authority of individual believers and the temporal authority of the Roman State), Islam expressly requires the use of State authority in ALL Muslim lands to protect, uphold, and enforce Islam and support proselytization of non-Muslims. It denies the State authority to pass laws -- only sharia is genuine law. The decress of the state -- constitutions, laws, regulations, orders from the ruler -- come second to the sharia in all situations. Islam is NOT a political movement in the sense that Marxism-Leninism or fascism or socialism are poltical movements. The ultimate punishments and rewards of Islam are in the next life, not in this world. The key difference between Islam and, say, evangelical Christianity, is GRACE. Islam and Christianity agree that the flesh will die and the eternal soul be judged, but where that is as far as it goes for Muslims, Christians have the assurance that if they have been saved in Jesus Christ, they are forgiven and redeemed from the doom of judgment for their sins and eternal torment (for all have sinned, none are perfect save Messiah Jesus Himself).

My comment:

Jesus himself confronted the the angel/demon said to have inspired Mohammed and mentioned by the assassin--in Jesus three temptations. The third temptation is:

Matthew 4:5-7 - Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple. And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at anytime thou dash thy foot against a stone, Jesus said unto him, *It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. *Deut. 6:16

http://www.elijah.org/perfecting/thretemp.htm LUST OF THE FLESH - hatred, usurper - this temptation is a sin against God the Father.

Note: The separation of religious belief from state power came from Jews carried off to Babylon, and from Christians who were forced to live under Pagan Rome.

The separation is one way to preserve religion while surviving. Separation was not the belief of the Eastern Roman Empire, *(One G-d, one faith, one empire)* and for that reason Jews, Coptic Christians, and others who were oppressed by the Orthodox or Catholic Christian governments often chose dhimmi status under Muslim rule.

The solution to triumpant Islam may be, as Daniel Pipes has recommended, to use Darwinian principals to breed a moderate Islam, destroying the extremist variant ruthlessly, and tolerating the moderate and tolerant variants. Accordingly the tolerant variants live in India, Turkey, and other places around the world, and destruction must be visited on the Wahabi and more extreme Shiite variants.

Because we have the dead sea scrolls we know that jesus was well versed in the events that lead up to the destruction of the first temple. Judging by the way revelations uses the imagry from the the book of daniel John too knew what was coming.

Found also among the essene archives was a book only found today in the etheopian bible. That's the book of enoch. I'm guessing that of John's images show up there as the book of enoch is said to be a retelling of genesis only this time with lots of/too many/more than you can shake a stick at -- angels and demons.

Give unto caesar that which belongs to caesar and give unto God that which belongs to God. Another way of saying this is that weak morals and weak boundaries are two sides of the same coin.

The destruction of the Temple built by Herod didn't happen until 70 AD or so (CE if you prefer). The putative death of Jesus was at age 30.

Destruction of the first temple was by the babylonians. The second temple was destroyed by greeks. The third temple was destroyed by Romans.

Minor amusement: The current Dome of the Rock was built on the site of the Roman stables, not destroyed in AD 70. The third temple was built a bit north of that.

The Muslims replaced the largest and oldest structure on the temple mount with their temple. That structure was the Roman Stables, which is the only building that remained after the Jewish rebellion.

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