Brad Alles

This series continues, looking at the future according to Islam.  In this worldview, all of the Earth will be turn to Islam either by conversion or coercion.

How pervasive is this desire for jihad to bring about an Islamic world? The Heritage Foundation reported fifty terrorist attacks in the United States alone in the ten years following 9/11. Furthermore, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly noted that in the nine years following 9/11, over 40,000 people had been killed across the globe in more than 17,000 attacks. This body count doesn’t include American soldiers that served in Iraq and Afghanistan. On average, twelve people die across the globe in five terrorist attacks every day.

It is essential to grasp this: jihad is not reserved for America alone. While the United States is seen as the biggest obstacle, standing in the way of a global Islamic state, terrorism is a worldwide threat. Yet America is the prime target not only because of the Quran, but because of the writings of a man who was the “main ideological influence” to Osama bin Laden and other jihadists, Sayyid Qutb. Sayyid Qutb had visited the United States in the late 1940’s and found it be spiritually poor, decadent, and materialistic. It was the opposite of the pure Islamic state that he and others envisioned. Mark Hartwig notes:

Qutb asserted that mankind will never find salvation in manmade laws…Salvation can only be achieved by replacing manmade laws and institutions with God’s rule alone. Mankind must adopt Islamic law in total, and give up such notions as democracy, which derives its authority from people rather than God.

Qutb’s writings, most notably Social Justice in Islam, inspired the likes of bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Khomeini introduced the term “the Great Satan” to describe America in 1979. David Horowitz explains why: “As the world’s only superpower—secular and liberal at that—the United States stands in the path of the revolution and earthly redemption…This fact—not any particular crime the United States may be said to have committed—is the primary source of the anti-American fury of radical Islam.”

Osama bin Laden held the same view of America. In June 2002, months after the 9/11 attacks, an Al-Qaeda’s spokesperson wrote an article entitled, “Why We Fight America.” It clearly described “the truth, motives and the goals” of their jihad:

The entire earth must be subject to Allah… to no ideology and to no path except for the path of Allah… America is the head of heresy in our modern world, and it leads an infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of religions and state, and on ruling the people by the people via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and permit what Allah has prohibited.

This series concludes with the next blog of Islam’s vision of the future.