Our Reliance *on* the Traveler

My immediately previous essay, noting a nearly unique instance of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream noticing, and appropriately rejecting, the wiles of a Better Cop (in this case, Michael Devolin writing for Jihad Watch about the sophistry of supposed Muslim "reformer" Tarek Fatah), called for the Counter-Jihad to take this incipient baby step up a notch -- not only to suspect all the other Better Cops, but also to realize that any Muslim "reformer" no matter how sweet his taqiyya is, is to be rejected on the basis of axiomatic prejudice -- i.e., without recourse to evidence at all, other than the fact that he or she is Muslim:  a Zero Tolerance for all Muslims.

Beyond that, I say we should stop looking to this or that Muslim intellectual to tell us what we already know -- that their Islam is pernicious.

Speaking of looking to Muslim intellectuals, Devolin begins his piece on Jihad Watch, revolving around the principle that Islam cannot be reformed, with a reliance on “Syrian poet” Adonis Asbar, respectfully quoting him:

“You can not [sic] reform a religion. If they are reformed, [the original meaning] is separated from it. Therefore, modern Muslims and a modern Islam is already impossible. If there is no separation between religion and state, there will be no democracy especially without equality for women. Then we will keep a theocratic system. So it will end.”

Why are we even citing a Muslim to tell us what we already know about Islam?  Because some of us don't yet fully grasp how disastrously pernicious Islam is?  Why would respectfully citing the words of a Muslim move them to see what they haven't seen already?  Are they that reliant on the word of Muslims that they cannot trust their own white Westerners to relay the mountains of evidence that damns Islam?

Secondly, there's a subtle problem going on here.  Even if someone in the West, relatively deformed by PC MC, after mulling over the words of this “Syrian poet”, would grudgingly grant that a “modern Islam” and a “modern Muslim” are impossible, the learning process would not be over.  There still lurks another way to salvage the Muslim from our condemnation, by redefining him according to various permutations of Muslims who somehow are not all that Islamic -- to wit:

the Lax Muslim

the Muslims Who Don’t Know Their Own Islam  

the Muslims Who Are Too Afraid To Come Out of the Secularist Closet 

 the MINO ("Muslim In Name Only", echoing the RINO, the "Republican In Name Only" or false Conservative).

The vast majority of Muslims who support the literal interpretation even if they do not have the strength of conviction to carry it out [I kid you not, this is a quote from a Jihad Watch reader]

 the (relatively) Non-Observant Muslim

the Muslim Ignorant of His Own Islam

-- and then the various variations on these, developed by ex-Muslim Bosch Fawstin (who should know better -- or does he already...?), including the surreal climax: 

the “essentially non-Muslim Muslim” (I kid you not!).

The “Escape Valve” 

While that last formulation strikes one as bizarre, it is actually the very gist of the entire list of these permutations.  And it represents an escape valve, as it were, to allow the person who is waking up to the full horror, the full catastrophe of Islam (and what it means for our appraisal of all its followers) to avoid condemning all Muslims.  How many Muslims would be spared our criticism & condemnation through this escape valve?  And on what basis could we be sure they really are what we so anxiously would like them to be?

Those are questions which the Counter-Jihad Softie will never answer.  Such answers, just like Islamic reform, are impossible, because they are predicated on the implicit assumptions that 1) we can tell the difference between the Harmless Muslim and the Dangerous Muslim, and that 2) there is no unified, concerted, global revival of jihad unfolding in our time in direct continuity with the “Longest War” -- the war Muslims have been waging against the West from the 7th century A.D. to our present now in the 21st century, with no end in sight other than our destruction or their deportation.

The “Better Traveler”

As to the title of this essay of mine here today:  it refers to a manual of Islamic law which has become increasingly well-known in the Counter-Jihad -- “Reliance of the Traveler” -- whose full Arabic title is ‘Umdat as-Salik wa ‘Uddat an-Nasik.

Salik is the word translated as “Traveler”.  I think the term may be more centrally, even officially, relevant to Islamic Jihad -- particularly that one type of Jihad we have come to know all too well, the “Jihad of the Feet” (or Immigration).

Thus, the “Traveler” of that title may well refer to the Muslim migrations, which have been going on for 1,400 years (only increasing since 911, then dramatically, alarmingly spiking these past couple of years and showing no signs of abating).  Migrations joined at the hip with Islam's supremacist expansionism -- whether by hook (violence) or by crook (stealth); or both, as in our time.

I.e., in Islam, a Muslim be definition is a pilgrim in this world, penetrating outside the ever-expanding Dar-al-Islam in the never-ending desideratum to conquer the world -- for there is always more Lebensraum for the Muslim to expand into in order to restore the earth to Allah’s control. This would not be the pilgrimage of the Christian “Pilgrim’s Progress” -- ultimately an interior journey -- but one intimately interlocked with the militant, supremacist expansionism of Islam.

The “Syrian poet” whom Michael Devolin of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream cites respectfully, approvingly, reliant upon his perspective & diagnosis of the problem of Islam, is himself a Muslim Traveler (he lives in Paris these days, and he recently received the prestigious Goethe Literary Award in Frankfurt, Germany) -- a “Better Traveler” we could say, fooling even the Counter-Jihad Mainstream into thinking that, because he criticizes his own Muslim world in seeming dismay, he is not, as a Muslim, deep down yearning for the day Islam takes over the West.  And Michael Devolin is not the only one impressed by this  “Syrian poet”:  take a look at this Google page of other venues (e.g., Breitbart News) hailing this Noble Savage upon whom we ought rely. And Adonis Asbar is not the only one.  The article on his winning the Goethe Prize goes on to note:

As well as Adonis's Goethe Prize, there's the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize in Osnabrück for Tahar Ben Jalloun in September, the Peace Prize of the German book trade for Boualem Sansal in October [Sansal is the “ponytailed Muslim” I wrote about recently], and the PEN Club's Hermann Kesten Prize for the Egyptian publisher Mohammed Hashim.
 
Conclusion:  

In our reliance upon him and other Muslim “reformers” we are predisposing ourselves to accept, as a fait accompli, innumerable Muslims into the fabric of our societies, because their mere existence, and their mirage of moderation -- and our anxiously gullible need to avoid being prejudiced against all of them -- reinforces the false cogency of the escape valve I noted above.  This in turn softens up (or reinforces the already existing softness in) the Counter-Jihad, just to make sure the one area of the West -- this still preciously small and beleaguered microcosm where our Reawakening is converging and trying to expand to prod awake the vast rest of the West -- itself never wakes up to the dire exigency of a Zero Tolerance for All Muslims.