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Clad in her trademark butch safari suits
(one khaki; another red), Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international
correspondent, took off “in
the footsteps of Bin Laden.” In the eponymous documentary, Amanpour
proves to be a good track dog, digging up everything from bin Laden’s
English teacher in Saudi Arabia, circa 1968, to the minutes of the first
al-Qaida meetings.
A trailblazer she is not. “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden” is ultimately
a dhimmi documentary. Amanpour cleaves dogmatically to the
permissible narrative: bin Laden has hijacked, not heeded,
Islam. Whenever a Muslim commits odious acts in the name of his faith,
these must be deemed—post haste and post hoc—a
manifestation of the inauthentic Islam.
As Amanpour and her experts have it, there is nothing in the faith
Alexis de Tocqueville reviled as “the principal cause of the decadence
so visible today in the Muslim world” that could hothouse the likes of
bin Laden. De Tocqueville had the finest and fairest mind. He had
“studied the Qur’an a great deal,” and “came away from that study with
the conviction that”:
[B]y and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to
men as that of Muhammad… and, though less absurd than the polytheism of
old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be
feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a
form of progress in relation to paganism itself.
Amanpour’s snow job gets off to a good start. She notes bin Laden was
“the only child his mother had with Mohammad bin Laden before they
divorced.” Bin Laden senior “had many wives, about 20 all tolled [sic],
repeatedly divorcing and re-marrying” (emphasis added). Divorce
based on irreconcilable differences, maybe? Not a chance. In Islam,
women live or die by a man’s whim, to whose basest instincts Islamic
jurisprudence is exquisitely tailored. What Amanpour dignifies with the
divorce designation is really a legally enforced, involuntary polygamy
that sees a wife replaced or rotated at a pace commensurate with the
rapacity of her overlord’s libido.
Papa bin Laden followed in the footsteps of the Prophet Mohammad, not
only in his voracious appetite (and enmity) for women, but in his love
of “alarmingly young wives.” Mohammad married Aisha when she was six,
consummating the union when the girl was nine (and he 54). The Qur’an
says it’s kosher (Qur’an 65:4).
Extreme devotion to various faiths, depending on their teachings, will
lead devotees in a certain direction: a Buddhist into a monastic life of
meditation and moral improvement (murder is out, not even if Gautama
Buddha is maligned); a Jew to a Yeshiva; and a Christian on a mission of
mercy to the Sudan.
As a dreadfully devout Muslim, it was not unnatural for bin Laden to
have progressed to Jihad. It’s “the highest duty of Muslims,” exhorted
to in “over a hundred verses in the Qur’an,” writes the heroic Robert
Spencer in “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the
Crusades).” “When a Muslim asked [Mohammad] to name the ‘best deed’ one
could do…the Prophet responded, ‘To participate in Jihad in Allah’s
Cause.’”
Islamic literalism has ensured that no reformation is yet in the offing.
Yet to Amanpour, “it is something of a mystery why [bin Laden] was drawn
to such rigid religious beliefs.” Perplexed, she ponders: “how did Osama
bin Laden's love of God become a mission to kill?” Our Ulama (scholar)
then promptly answers: bin Laden’s peerless pursuits are utterly
idiosyncratic—his own “ultra strict interpretation of the holy Koran.”
His own and Syyid Qutb’s of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Amanpour
relates how bin Laden was swept up in a religious movement known as
“Sawa,” the Islamic awakening. Qutb’s 1964 book, "Milestones," was
particularly pivotal in bin Laden’s “awakening.” Amanpour claims the
book “challenges the long accepted belief that holy war should only be
waged in response to an attack. Qutb justifies something new,” asserts
Amanpour: “holy war that attacks the enemy first.”
Bin laden is “armed with a radical, new ideology”—that’s the theme that
runs through the documentary. So how spanking new is the
aggressive-jihad imperative?
Over 600 years old, at least, says Spencer:
“In ‘Milestones,’ Qutb endorses the Qur'anic exegesis of the medieval
Islamic scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350). Qutb writes: ‘[A]ccording to the
explanation by Imam Ibn Qayyim, the Muslims were first restrained from
fighting; then they were permitted to fight; then they were commanded to
fight against the aggressors; and finally they were commanded to fight
against all the polytheists.’ It’s hard to see how Amanpour could have
gotten the idea that by advancing an exposition of the Qur'an that was
over 600 years old (and Ibn Qayyim did not originate it either), Qutb
was justifying ‘something new,’” Spencer told me.
Ibn Qayyim's gradualism parallels the progression in the Qur'an—and is
embodied by the Prophet’s path. Mohammad went from plain preaching to
raging against those who mocked his prophetic claims (his tribe, the
Quraysh, as well as the Jews and Christians), graduating to
Allah-“ordained” looting and liquidating. Once he arrived at this
pinnacle, Mohammad never looked back. Since earlier Qur'anic edicts are
abrogated in Islamic law in favor of later edicts, aggressively
spreading Islam is also state-of-the-art Islam.
Islam à la Amanpour—now that’s another matter entirely.
©2006 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
September 15
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