Two more Arabic words to learn from the global insane asylum called Islam

 Introduction:

The words are iqtiham and inghimas.

Why are these two recondite words from a medieval desert language important to us?

Because an influential Muslim scholar who lives in London (yes, in this 21st century, not the 18th, or the 13th, or the 7th) wrote:

"On the one hand, we use the proofs and the texts calling for bravery and penetrating [iqtiham] and storming [inghimas] enemy lines - but this without being foolhardy - and [this is permitted] even if it leads to one's being killed by the enemy, so long as there is in one's storming [enemy lines] an overriding benefit to the jihad, to Islam, and to the Muslims. On the other hand, we have the proofs and the texts that forbid one to kill one's self. The reconciliation [of these two groups of texts] is possible and easy, and there is absolutely no need to have recourse to limiting [the application of] or abrogating [texts]!"

Doesn't this Islamic scholar have better things to think about?

Of course he doesn't.  My apologies for that silly question.  Onward.

The words are, unfortunately, important because this modern Islamic scholar living in the West is parsing the proprieties and niceties of how and why to kill us.

Background:

A manual of Islamic law, Reliance of the Traveler, approved today in the 21st century (not in the Middle Ages) by the most prestigious Islamic university in the Muslim world, Al Azhar Madrassa in Cairo, states:

"There is no disagreement among scholars that it is permissible for a single Muslim to attack battle lines of unbelievers headlong and fight them even if he knows he will be killed." 
(q2.4(4))

Literally, the word inghimas, as we see in its Persian cognate, means:

Being plunged into water.  

And the word iqtiham, means:

Rushing headlong...

(From: A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, ed., Francis Joseph Steinglass)

Both words, as used by our scholar of the Religion of Peace, seem to be rough equivalents, in terms of a particularly fierce and ferocious battle tactic.

The former, inghimas, then acquired the meaning of "plunging into", as an intransitive verb, denoting a person plunging into a crowd -- which, for non-Muslims, would mean in some happy, celebratory capacity (say, going moshing at a rock concert); but for Muslims, ever obsessed about the Enemy around them and how to kill them, is meant in the more deadly-serious way, as a plunging into a crowd of the Enemy in order to kill them with your sword (before the Infidels helpfully invented explosives for Muslims to pirate).

Discussion:

To get back to our mainstream Islamic scholar living in London.  His full Arabic name is Sheikh 'Abd Al-Mun'im Mustafa Halima, but he is known for short as Al-Tartusi, and that's what we'll call him, avoiding the unpleasant mouthful of his more official Islamic moniker.

As the excellent website Memri.org tells us, Al-Tartusi is a Syrian expatriate living in London (though perhaps more recently he has decided to plunge back into his homeland to help out with the Arab Spring there), "considered to be a prominent theoretician of the Salafi jihadist trend in Islam [i.e., mainstream Islam]. On August 24, 2005 he posted, on his eponymous website, an article that included a fatwa against suicide attacks."

Al-Tartusi's fatwa primarily deals with the analysis of the distinction between suicide (unlawful in Islam) and the aforementioned impetuous military tactic:  it is not suicide (intihariya), says the modern Muslim scholar, but rather martyrdom (istishhadiya) -- a-ok in Islam; indeed, a veritably honorable achievement, guaranteeing Paradise to the Mohammedan ever anxious about whether he will be sent to Hell to be tortured, or to Paradise to have sex and eat fruits and drink wine forevermore.

At first blush, when reading this fatwa, one gets the impression that Al-Tartusi is trying to delegitimize suicide bombing as... suicide.  However, on a closer reading, we see that when he is making this distinction,  he is not on Islamic grounds objecting to the headlong plunge into enemy lines that will result in the Mohammedan being killed as he valiantly kills the enemy: he only objects to the Mohammedan doing this in order to be killed -- i.e., when, that is, suicide unrelated to the jihad would be an ulterior motive for plunging into battle.

The primary guiding motivation, for the representative of the Religion of Peace, should be killing, with one's consequent death being fully accepted but not primarily sought out.  So, you see, Muslims are capable of complex logical arguments.  The problem is not that they are all stupid barbarians; the problem is that their religious and cultural authorities use their intellectual training and tradition to analyze questions and issues pertaining to concerns that are, to the non-Muslim, monstrously unethical and fanatically dangerous.

Thus, for example, Al-Tartusi writes of:

...proofs and the texts calling for bravery and penetrating [iqtiham] and storming [inghimas] enemy lines - but this without being foolhardy - and [this is permitted] even if it leads to one's being killed by the enemy, so long as there is in one's storming [enemy lines] an overriding benefit to the jihad, to Islam, and to the Muslims.

Al-Tartusi in his fatwa "against suicide bombing" goes on to more closely examine the distinction between "storming [the enemy's ranks]..., and killing one's self, as in suicide attacks...":

One who storms [enemy ranks] is killed by the enemy, whereas one who carries out a suicide attack kills himself, and so in this they are not equal.

At this particular juncture, Al-Tartusi is being a bit sophistically literal. At the very least, he would have to present an argument that proves that the death resulting in attack has to be directly inflicted by an enemy.

That the one who storms enemy ranks will be killed is probable, but not certain, since many of those who storm the ranks of the enemy disperse their army and succeed in their mission without being killed. There is no better witness to this than the history of jihad in Islam. In contrast, someone who blows himself up in a suicide attack has killed himself for sure, and so in this they are not equal.

I guess Al-Tartusi then would congratulate the Mumbai jihadists, for the fine Islamic example they demonstrated in killing the enemy the old-fashioned way.

...one cannot say that [this is because] our forefathers did not have explosives at their disposal so as to be able to draw the analogy, since there was no shortage of ways of killing one's self, and they are plentiful in every time and place.

Al-Tartusi is ignoring the precise difference between modern explosives (and airplanes), and what was available to pre-modern Muslims. Pre-modern devices and weapons were not conducive to simultaneously inflicting casualties on an enemy and killing oneself (we are not considering here malfunctioning catapults that may have fired backwards) -- whereas modern explosives are perfectly suited to the carrier of explosives doing so.  And this gains advantage when a human carrier of explosives is more capable of effectively penetrating enemy lines -- i.e., crowded areas where Unbelievers (= Enemies) are gathered (particularly Unbelievers who are glibly gullible in preening themselves about how multiculturally "tolerant" they are of the Other).

Al-Tartusi's main complaint with suicide-bombers is that they are not scrupulously following the stipulations in the Sunna (he also disingenuously tries to piggyback onto that a claim that suicide-bombings are not strategically effective, as well as the anxiety that they are bad for the image of Islam, and that they tend to foment discord among Muslims). And yet, he notes a fact that is "very discomfiting" -- namely, that over 90% of suicide attacks by Muslims are deficient in adherence, so he claims, to all the proper jots and tittles of the Sunna. Even if Al-Tartusi is correct about the Islamic unacceptability of suicide attacks, his own admission that over 90% of such attacks are not following his version of Islamic compliance shows that there is obviously a monstrous problem in Islamic education conducive to such a rampant culture of violence that is, of course, threatening us Infidels. If exploding Muslims aren't listening to Al-Tartusi, then what good is he? At any rate, he believes in killing the Enemy -- properly -- and that should be all we need to know.

Back in 2005, Walid Phares wrote in an essay published in The Washington Times (also reported by Jihad Watch) that: 

Sheik al-Qardawi went as far as linking today's suicide bombing to what he called "inghimass" (to throw oneself against the enemy). According to him, this has been permitted by religious teaching since the early days of Islam. A fatwa issued in the West or in the United States must respond to Sheik al-Qardawi and the jihadists theologically, and not state globally what international law and 52 Muslim countries subscribe to already.

And if the reader doesn't know how popular and mainstream Qaradawi is, this report from the mainstream media shows that Qaradawi was at the epicenter of the recent Egyptian Revolution, and in an unprecedented rally of over 200,000 in February of last year, he delivered the solemn Friday prayers to all those Egyptian “secularists” gathered there. The writer of that news article also notes that Qaradawi is “spiritual leader to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt, and is “very much in the Sunni mainstream”.

And Memri.org has also documented how Qaradawi presided over a discussion at a major conference among Islamic clerics held in 2003 in Stockholm) in which he supported the following statement articulating the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the justification for terror attacks:
  
It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the "Realm of War" -- i.e., all non-Muslim lands] is not protected. Because they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of [their] blood and [their] property…

Postscript:  "Running Amok"

I recall, a few years before 9/11 while working in a doctor's office, I was looking through a Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary (26th edition, 1985), my eyes happened to alight on the word "amok" (a word I never would have expected to see in a medical dictionary).  The definition provided an intriguing multicultural glimpse:

[Malay "impulse to murder"] a psychic disturbance seen chiefly in Malaysia, the Philippines,and parts of Africa, marked chiefly by sudden homicidal mania, screaming, and attacks on people and inanimate objects, tending to result in social retribution and leading to the death of the individual.

While I commend the 1985 Dorland's medical dictionary for being so "culturally incorrect", I suspect they, and the Western medical and anthropological community in general have not even bothered to consider the Islam factor in explaining this "psychic disturbance" -- particularly as the regions cited are all heavily influenced by Islamic demographics and historical conquest.

More recently, I checked the charming "Hobson-Jobson" reference, subtitled A Glossary of  Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and found some interesting entries for "amok" (and its older variant, "amuck").  We see that the problem of running amok also included India.  Hm; another place where millions of Muslims live.  Coincidence?

On pages 18-19, for example, we read:

 

A MUCK, to run, v. There is we believe no room for doubt that, to us at least, this expression came from the Malay countries, where both the phrase and the practice are still familiar. Some valuable remarks on the phenomenon, as prevalent among the Malays, were contributed by Dr Oxley of Singapore to the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, vol. iii. p. 532; see a quotation below. [Mr W. W. Skeat writes --

"The best explanation of the fact is perhaps that it was the Malay national method of committing suicide, especially as one never hears of Malays committing suicide in any other way. This form of suicide may arise from a wish to die fighting and thus avoid a 'straw death, a cow's death'; but it is curious that women and children are often among the victims, and especially members of the suicide's own family. The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British Possessions in the Peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood. I remember hearing of only about two cases (one by a Sikh soldier) in about six years. It has been suggested further that the extreme monotonous heat of the Peninsula may have conduced to such outbreaks as those of Running amuck and Latah.]"

The word is by Crawfurd ascribed to the Javanese, and this is his explanation:

"Amuk (J.). An a-muck; to run a-muck; to tilt; to run furiously and desperately at any one; to make a furious onset or charge in combat." -- (Malay Dict.) [The standard Malay, according to Mr Skeat, is rather amok (mengāmok).]

Sounds like inghimas to me.

Pages 19-21 have more on the Indian origins and incidences, as well as Javanese -- though of course never do the sources, even old ones before the dominance of PC MC, consider Islam as a root cause.  One even went so far as to conjecture that the Indian climate was to blame.  How can people be so dense?

Then we have this evidence from the Muslim history of the Philippines, concerning the 16th century (though can we doubt it continued to flare up in the following centuries...?):

With the possible exception of Japan's kamikaze pilots in the closing days of World War II, warfare has rarely known a more frightening phenomenon than the juramentados. Known as sabers by the Maranao and sabils by the Tau Sug, juramentados were [Muslim] fanatics who, believing that they would enter Paradise if killed in battle against infidels, would whip themselves into obsessed states of self-hypnosis and, kris [a dagger] in hand, charge blindly into the ranks of the enemy, be he Spaniard, American, Japanese or Filipino. In this semimystical trance the juramentados often raced directly into heavy volleys of rifle fire, shrugged off incredible wounds, and had to be killed on their feet literally, before their attack ended.

Sounds like inghimas to me.

The article adds that:

These slashing attacks kept the Spanish in a constant state of terror...

Yep.  That's the Islamic idea.