“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you” goes the age-old sage advice. This counsel is lost on U.S. “ally” Qatar, however, as it’s counseling Muslims living in non-Islamic nations to despise their “infidel” benefactors.
Thus reports Raymond Ibrahim, an author, scholar, and senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute who is fluent in Arabic.
The anti-“infidel” directive is found at widely read Islamweb.net, which Ibrahim says is funded and directed by Persian Gulf emirate Qatar. The directive states that “any Muslim who lives in a non-Muslim nation is obligated to hate his adopted nation and its ‘infidel’ citizens (even while receiving benefits from them),” writes Ibrahim.
The injunction “comes in the form of a fatwa (an Islamic sanctioned decree) titled ‘Conditions that Legitimize Residing in Infidel Nations’ (all translations in this article my own),” Ibrahim informs. “Along with ‘preserving and upholding his Islam,’ the ‘first condition’ for any Muslim who lives among non-Muslims is that he have ‘enmity and hatred for the infidels,’” the writer quotes the fatwa as stating.
“This, incidentally, applies to those millions of Muslim migrants voluntarily immigrating into and flooding Western Europe,” Ibrahim continues. “If they take their Islam seriously, they are duty-bound to hate and be disloyal to those nations welcoming them and providing them with free food, shelter, and health care.”
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Islamweb.net justifies its prescription for ingratitude by citing the Koran. “You will never find a people that truly believes in Allah and the Last Day loyal to those who defy Allah and His Messenger — even if they be their parents, children, siblings, or extended family [Koran 58:22],” Ibrahim also related, providing the Koranic reference.
“Oh you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends and allies, for they are friends and allies of each other; and whoever among you befriends them is from among them,” goes the second passage. “Allah does not guide the unjust people [Koran 5:51].”
Ibrahim further tells us that after “quoting Muhammad in a sahih (authentic) hadith, saying, ‘Whoever loves a people is from among them,’ the fatwa concludes by saying, ‘Loving the enemies of Allah is among the greatest dangers for a Muslim, for loving them necessitates cooperating with and following them, or at least not rejecting them — hence why the prophet said, ‘Whoever loves a people is from among them.'”
What this means, asserts Ibrahim, is that one is an enemy of Allah just by virtue of being non-Muslim.
The scholar additionally points out that far from being a fringe notion, this teaching is actually mainstream in Islam. Notable here is that Qatar isn’t some camel-herding backwater, but boasts the globe’s third-highest per-capita GDP and the Arab world’s third-highest Human Development Index.
The teaching also is nothing new. Islamic thought divides the world into two zones, the first being Dar al-Islam; it’s where Muslims dominate and is considered a “territory of peace.” The other is Dar al-Harb, or non-Muslim lands — they’re classified as “territories of war or chaos.”
Getting an object lesson in this mentality was the early United States, which, like other non-Muslim nations in Dar al-Islam’s orbit, was being menaced by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. Just consider, for example, the answer Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, gave when asked in 1785 why his people would “make war upon nations who had done them no injury.”
As Thomas Jefferson related at the time, “The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners.”
So what we’re seeing here is the difference between marketing and ingredients label. It’s unlikely you heard the Qatar story reported by mainstream media, which give us a skewed view of reality (“Muslims are innocent victims of Western imperialism!”). But honest Arabs fluent in Arabic who translate what Mideastern Muslim sources actually say paint a different picture.
Aside from Ibrahim, another good example is Dr. Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian Opposition Coalition leader living as an asylee in the United Kingdom. Warning in 2015 that the massive Muslim migration into Europe is the “soft Islamic conquest of the West,” he said, “I have to be honest: you read Arab magazines and Arab newspapers [and] they are talking about, ‘Good job! Now we’re going to conque[r] Europe.’”
Really, though, it’s easy conquering a foe with a penchant for suicide. To use a play on an old saying, a fool and his civilization will soon be parted.
