HINDUS, JEWS, AND JIHAD TERROR IN MUMBAI

Sixty hours of jihadist terror depredations throughout India's financial capital, Mumbai—during which nearly two hundred innocent victims were murdered, and three hundred were wounded¹—apparently ceased this Saturday, November 29, when Indian commandos slew the last three gunmen inside a luxury hotel, while it was still ablaze.

The root of the word jihad appears forty times in the Koran and in subsequent Islamic understanding to both Muslim luminaries—from the greatest jurists and scholars of classical Islam, to ordinary people—meant and means “he fought, warred or waged war against unbelievers and the like.” As described by the seminal mid-nineteenth-century Arabic lexicographer E. W. Lane, “Jihad came to be used by the Muslims to signify wag[ing] war, against unbelievers.”³ A contemporary definition, relevant to both modern jihadism and its shock troop mujahideen was provided at the Fourth International Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research at Al Azhar University, Cairo—Islam's most important religious educational institution—in 1968, by Muhammad al-Sobki:

[T]he words Al Jihad, Al Mojahadah, or even “striving against enemies” are equivalents and they do not mean especially fighting with the atheists...they mean fighting in the general sense.⁴

Contemporary validation of the central principle of jihad terrorism—rooted in the Koran—(for example, verses 8:12, 8:60, and 33:265)—that is, to terrorize the enemies of the Muslims as a prelude to their conquest —has been provided in the mainstream Pakistani text on jihad warfare by Brigadier S.

Islam views the world as though it were bipolarized in two opposing camps—Darul-Salam (Islam) facing Darul- Harb—the first one is submissive to the Lord in co­operating with God's purpose to establish peace, order, and such other pre-conditions of human development, but the second one, on the other hand, is engaged in perpetuating defiance of the same Lord. Such a state of affairs which engages any one in rebellion against God's will is termed as “Fitna”—which word literally means test or trial. The term “Fitna” refers us to misconduct on the part of a man who establishes his own norms and expects obedience from others, thereby usurping God's authority—who alone is sovereign. In Sura Infa'al Chapter 8, Verse 39, it is said “And fight on until there remains no more tumult or oppression and they remain submissive only to God.” To the same effect are the words used in Sura Taubah Chapter 9, Verse 29, “Fight those who believe not in the Lord, nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which has been forbidden by the Lord and His Apostle nor acknowledge the religion of truth (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” Many Western scholars have pointed their accusing fingers at some of the above verses in the Quran to be able to contend that the world of Islam is in a state of perpetual struggle against the non-Muslims. As to them it is a sufficient answer to make, if one were to point out, that the defiance of God's authority by one who is His slave exposes that slave to the risk of being held guilty of treason and such a one, in the perspective of Islamic law, is indeed treated as a sort of cancerous growth on that organism of humanity, which has been created “Kanafsin Wahidatin” that is, like one, single, indivisible self.

This text—widely studied in Islamic countries, and available in English, Urdu, and Arabic—has been recovered from the bodies of slain jihadists in Kashmir.⁹ Brigadier Malik emphasizes how instilling terror is essential to waging successful jihad campaigns:

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him..

“Jihad,” the Koranic concept of total strategy. [d]emands the preparation and application of total national power and military instrument is one of its elements. As a component of the total strategy, the military strategy aims at striking terror into the hearts of the enemy from the preparatory stage of war.. Under ideal conditions, Jihad can produce a direct decision and force its will upon the enemy. Where that does not happen, military strategy should take over and aim at producing the decision from the military stage. Should that chance be missed, terror should be struck into the enemy during the actual fighting.

The Book [Koran] does not visualize war being waged with “kid gloves.” It gives us a distinctive concept of total war. It wants both, the nation and the individual, to be at war “in toto,” that is, with all their spiritual, moral, and physical resources. The Holy Koran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test of utmost preparation lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of the enemies.¹⁰

The Islamic correctness of most mainstream media outlets—which refused to consider such ideological motivations, rooted in jihad¹¹—did not apply, however to Hindus, or Jews—targeted infidel victims of the attacks.¹² Blithely ignoring obvious Islamic and Muslim connections—credit taken for the attacks by a mujahideen organization;¹³ or testimony from a Turkish Muslim couple (Meltem and Seyfi Muessinoglu) briefly apprehended and then released unharmed by the jihadists because, “[w]hen the Muezzinoglus said they were Muslims, their captors told them that they would not be harmed”¹⁴—some media (e.g., NPR) even voiced their own “speculations” about the possible culpability of “Hindu extremists,”¹⁵ an absurd calumny, stated in full paranoid transference mode by the Muslim Brotherhood:

A photograph published in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched.¹⁶

Yet these same media offered no speculation about Islamic Jew-hatred as an obvious potential motivation for the transparently selective attack on Mumbai's Chabad House¹⁷—a focal-point symbol of the miniscule Jewish community of five thousand (or 0.03 percent) in a city of some fifteen million inhabitants. More egregiously, this neglect of any hateful Islamic motivations for the targeted murder of such innocent Jews—including a young Lubavitcher Rabbi and his wife—was accompanied by consistently dehumanizing and demeaning references to these victims as “Ultra-

Orthodox,” and their entirely false characterization as “missionaries.”¹⁸

This current Jewish tragedy within a much larger non-Muslim, primarily Hindu tragedy, reminded me of the Indian Sufi “inspiration” for The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,¹⁹ Ahmad Sirhindi.

The biographical information I could glean about Sirhindi provided, among other things, no evidence he was ever in direct contact with Jews, so his very hateful remark suggested to me that the attitudes it reflected must have had a theological basis in Islam—contra the prevailing, widely accepted “wisdom” that Islam, unlike Christianity, was devoid of such theological Anti-Semitism.²⁴ Having originally intended to introduce, edit, and compile a broader compendium on dhimmitude in follow-up to The Legacy of Jihad, this stunning observation inspired me instead to change course and focus on the interplay between Islamic anti­Semitism, and the intimately related phenomenon of jihad-imposed dhimmitude for Jews, specifically.²⁵

Of course Jew-hatred was merely a sidelight to Sirhindi's hatemongering Islamic “ethos.” He was an intensely anti-Hindu bigot, as revealed by these words:

Cow-sacrifice in India is the noblest of Islamic practices. The kafirs [Hindus] may probably agree to pay jizya but they shall never concede to cow-sacrifice.. The real purpose in levying jizya on them [Hindus] is to humiliate then to such an extent that, on account of fear of jizya, they may not be able to dress well and to live in grandeur.

Completely uninformed about (and stubbornly resistant to any informed discussion of) the motivating Islamic ideology for the Mumbai attacks, the media “meta-narrative,” repeated ad nauseum, is also oblivious to the living historical legacy of jihad on the Indian subcontinent. Thus journalists and even policymaking elites appear to accept at face value, and uncritically, the “rationale” for this wantonly murderous jihadism as stated, for example, by one of the Muslim perpetrators:

Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?.Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims?²⁷

The Muslim supremacist, jihad-inspired conflict in Kashmir—really a tragic ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Hindus by Muslim jihadists which began in earnest during the fourteenth century²⁸—reemerged in late June of this year [circa 2008] when the Indian government had the “temerity” to want to transfer ninety-nine acres of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, a trust running the popular Hindu shrine (including the cave that houses a large ice stalagmite itself, revered by Hindus as an incarnation of Siva, the god of destruction and reproduction). Hundreds of thousands of Hindus visit the area as part of an annual pilgrimage to the cave.²⁹

Please view the poignant, elegantly produced video by Kashmiri filmmaker Ashok Pandit, And the World Remained Silent, which chronicles in gory detail the brutal ethnic cleansing of some 350,000 indigenous Hindus from Kashmir during early 1990, orchestrated by Pakistan and its prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.³⁰ (Focus on the time period 2:15-4:00 minutes, from part 1, and witness the jihadist speech³¹ of the late, much- ballyhooed “modernist reformer” Ms. Bhutto. She was a jihadist, plain and simple;³² the head of what remains a jihadist state.³³)

Despite the brutal Islamization of India—dating back to the initial eighth-century Arab Muslim jihad ravages, and the subsequent more extensive campaigns under the Ghaznavids (Islamized Turkic nomads who annihilated the indigenous Hindus of Afghanistan by the mid-ninth century), through the Delhi Sultanate period (1000-1525 CE)³⁴ during which an estimated seventy to eighty million Hindus were slaughtered³⁵— due largely to bowdlerized educational and public discourse on Islam,—even many modern Hindus remain ignorant of both this history and the Koranic injunctions which inspired the brutal waves of jihad conquest and Muslim colonization of India.

The Muslim chroniclers al-Baladhuri (in Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) and al-Kufi (in the Chachnama) include enough isolated details to establish the overall nature of the conquest of Sindh (in modern Pakistan) by Muhammad b. Qasim during 712 CE. These narratives, and the processes they describe, make clear that the Arab invaders intended from the outset to Islamize Sindh by conquest, colonization, and local conversion. Al-Baladhuri, for example, records that following the capture of Debal, Muhammad b. Qasim earmarked a section of the city exclusively for Muslims, constructed a mosque, and established four thousand colonists there. The conquest of Debal had been a brutal affair, as summarized from the Muslim sources by the renowned Indian historian R. C. Majumdar. Despite appeals for mercy from the besieged Indians (who opened their gates after the Muslims scaled the fort walls), Muhammad b. Qasim declared that he had no orders (i.e., from his superior al-Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq) to spare the inhabitants, and thus for three days a ruthless and indiscriminate slaughter ensued. In the aftermath, the local temple was defiled, and “700 beautiful females who had sought for shelter there, were all captured.”— The capture of Raor was accompanied by a similar tragic outcome.³⁸

Muhammad massacred 6000 fighting men who were found in the fort, and their followers and dependents, as well as their women and children were taken prisoners. Sixty thousand slaves, including 30 young ladies of royal blood, were sent to Hajjaj, along with the head of Dahar

[the Hindu ruler]. We can now well understand why the capture of a fort by the Muslim forces was followed by the terrible jauhar ceremony (in which females threw themselves in fire [they] kindled.), the earliest recorded instance of which is found in the Chachnama.

Practical, expedient considerations lead Muhammad to desist from carrying out the strict injunctions of Islamic law and the wishes of al-Hajjaj by massacring the (pagan) infidel Hindus of Sindh. Instead, he imposed upon the vanquished Hindus the jizya (Koranic poll-tax, pace Koran 9:29) and associated restrictive regulations of dhimmitude. As a result, the Chachnama records, “some [Hindus] resolved to live in their native land, but others took flight in order to maintain the faith of their ancestors, and their horses, domestics, and other property.”³⁹

Thus a lasting pattern of Muslim policy toward their Hindu subjects was set that would persist, as noted by Majumdar, until the Mughal Empire collapsed at the end of Aurangzeb's reign (in 1707):

Something no doubt depended upon individual rulers; some of them adopted a more liberal, others a more cruel and intolerant attitude. But on the whole the framework remained intact, for it was based on the fundamental principle of Islamic theocracy. It recognized only one faith, one people, and one supreme authority, acting as the head of a religious trust. The Hindus, being infidels or non-believers, could not claim the full rights of citizens. At the very best, they could be tolerated as dhimmis, an insulting title which connoted political inferiority.. The Islamic State regarded all non-Muslims as enemies, to curb whose growth in power was conceived to be its main interest. The ideal preached by even high officials was to exterminate them totally, but in actual practice they seem to have followed an alternative laid down in the Koran [i.e., Q9:29] which calls upon Muslims to fight the unbelievers till they pay the jizya with due humility. This was the tax the Hindus had to pay for permission to live in their ancestral homes under a Muslim ruler.⁴⁰

Regarding the Islamization of Hindu Kashmir, although Mahmud of Ghazni made brutal forays into Kashmir in the early eleventh century,⁴¹ it was not until the mid-fourteenth century when the ruling Hindu dynasty was displaced completely by Shah Mirza, in 1346, and Kashmir was brought under Muslim suzerainty.⁴² During the reign of Sikandar Butshikan (1394-1417), mass Islamization took place as described by the great historian K. S. Lal:

He [Sikandar Butshikan] invited from Persia, Arabia, and Mesopotamia learned men of his own [Muslim] faith; his bigotry prompted him to destroy all the most famous temples in Kashmir—Martand, Vishya, Isna, Chakrabhrit, Tripeshwar, etc. Sikandar offered the Kashmiris the choice [pace Koran 9:5] between Islam and death. Some Kashmiri Brahmans committed suicide, many left the land, many others embraced Islam, and a few began to live under Taqiya, that is, they professed Islam only outwardly. It is said that the fierce intolerance of Sikandar had left in Kashmir no more than eleven families of Brahmans.⁴³

Lal also notes that,

His [Sikandar Butshikan’s] contemporary the [Hindu] Raja of Jammu had been converted to Islam by [Amir] Timur [the jihadist, Tamerlane], by “hopes, fears, and threats.”⁴⁴

When the Moghul ruler Akbar annexed Kashmir in 1586, the majority of the population was already Muslim.⁴⁵ Lal summarizes the chronic plight of the Kashmiri Hindus during a half millennium of Islamic rule, through 1819, which explains the modern demography of Kashmir:

When Kashmir was under Muslim rule for 500 years, Hindus were constantly tortured and forcibly converted. A delegation of Kashmir Brahmans approached Guru Teg Bahadur at Anadpur Saheb to seek his help. But Kashmir was Islamized. Those who fled to preserve their religion went to Laddakh in the east and Jammu in the south. It is for this reason that non-Muslims are found in large number in these regions. In the valley itself the Muslims formed the bulk of the population.⁴⁶

There is also a modern-era nexus—rooted in jihad— between the Hindus of Islamized Kashmir and the Jews of Islamized Palestine. Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland and destroy world Jewry, was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements.⁴⁷ Urging a “full struggle” against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress, he stated: “We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.”⁴⁸

And el-Husseini's jihadist, Koran (and hadith)- inspired Jew-hatred⁴⁹ was shared by a seminal modern Muslim ideologue from the Indian subcontinent, Maulana Mufti Muhammad Shafi (d. 1976), a major late twentieth-century Koranic commentator. An eminent scholar, Maulana Muhammad Shafi served as a professor and as a grand mufti of Darul-Uloom Deoband, the well-known university of the Islamic sciences in pre-Partition India. In 1943, he resigned from Darul-Uloom because of his active involvement in the Pakistan movement. When Pakistan came into existence, he migrated to Karachi, devoting his life to the service of this new Muslim state. He also established Darul-Uloom Karachi, an renowned institute of Islamic Sciences patterned after Darul- Uloom Deoband and considered today as the largest private institute of Islamic higher education in Pakistan.⁵⁰ Here is Maulana Muhammad Shafi's commentary on the central anti-Semitic motif in the Koran, sura (chapter) 2, verse 61 (reiterated at Koran 3:112):

The Israelites were thus being ungrateful and impertinent. Even otherwise, it was so usual with them not only to transgress divine commandments but also to deny them outright. They had also been slaying a number of prophets at different times—they knew they were committing a misdeed, but their hostility to the truth and their stubbornness in disobedience made them blind to the nature of their conduct and its consequences. Through such persistent and willful misdemeanor they drew upon themselves the wrath of Allah. Disgrace and degradation settled upon them for ever. That is to say, they no longer had any respect for themselves. One form of this disgrace is that temporal power had been taken away from them for ever.. [W]hen the Day of Judgment will have come close—the Dajjal [the Muslim Anti-Christ] belonging to the Jewish race, will have an irregular dominion like that of a robber. This cannot be described as having temporal power, in the proper sense of the term. Allah had made it quite clear to the Jews through Moses that if they continued to be disobedient, they would always live under the domination of other nations. Says the Holy Quran: “And when your Lord proclaimed He would send forth against them, unto the Day of Resurrection, those who should visit them with evil chastisement.” (7:167).. As to how the Companions, their successors and the great commentators have interpreted the disgrace and degradation which has settled on the Jews, let us present a summary in the words of Ibn Kathir [d. 1373, the renowned historian and Koranic commentator]: “No matter how wealthy they grow, they will always be despised by other people; whoever gets hold of them will humiliate them, and attach to them the emblems of servitude.” The commentator Dahhak Ibn Muzahim reports from the blessed Companion Abdullah Ibn Abbas that the Jews will always remain under the domination of others, will be paying taxes and tributes to them—that is to say, they will themselves never have power and authority in the real sense of the term.. Another verse of the Holy Quran also speaks of the disgrace of the Jews, but with some addition: “And disgrace has been stamped over them wherever they are found, unless (saved) through a rope from Allah.” (3:112).. Now the “rope” or means from Allah refers to the case of those whom Allah Himself has, through His own commandment, saved from the disgrace—for example, children, women, or those who are totally devoted to prayer and worship and never go to war against the Muslims. The “rope” or means from men refers to a treaty of peace with the Muslims, or a permission to live in a Muslim country on payment of the Jizyah. Since the Holy Quran uses the expression “from men” and not “from Muslims,” a third situation is also possible—the Jews may make political arrangements with other non-Muslims, live under their backing and protection, and thus be in “peace.”.Verse 3:112 helps to elucidate Verse 2:61, and also dispels the

doubt which sometimes arises in the minds of the Muslims at the sight of the so-called “Israeli state” imposed on Palestine. For, they find it difficult to reconcile the two things—the Holy Quran seems to indicate that the Jews will never have a sovereign state, while they have actually usurped Palestine and set up a state of their own. But if we go beyond the appearances, we can easily see that “Israel” is not an independent sovereign state, but only a stronghold of the Western powers which they have established in the midst of Muslim countries in order to protect their own interests; without the backing of these super-powers the Jewish “state” cannot survive for a month, and the Western powers themselves look upon the Israelis as their henchmen. The “Israeli state” has been living, as the Holy Quran says, “through a rope from men,” and, even at that, living as a parasite on the Western powers. So, there is no real occasion to have a misgiving about what the Holy Quran has said on the subject. Moreover, the half of Palestine which the Jews have usurped and the parasite state they have set up there is no more than a spot on the map of the world. As against this, we have vast expanses of the globe covered by Christian states, by Muslim states, and even by the states of people who do not believe in Allah at all. Can this tiny blot on the map and that too under the American-British umbrella, negate the disgrace which Allah has made to settle upon the Jews?⁵¹

Nearly six decades ago, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958), the preeminent historian of Mughal India, wrote admiringly of what the Jews of Palestine had accomplished once liberated from the yoke of jihad- imposed Islamic law. The implication was clear that he harbored similar hopes for his own people, the Hindus of India, and those of their Muslim neighbors willing to abandon the supremacist, discriminatory, and backward mandates of Islam:

Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule. (See Kinglake’s graphic description). Today Jewish rule has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the modern civilised life have been made available in this little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there from the countries ruled by the Shariat [Sharia; Islamic law]. This is the lesson for the living history.⁵²

The jihadist carnage in Mumbai, and some 12,327 other acts of jihad terrorism since Septemberll, 2001— —motivated by supremacist Islamic doctrine, and the atavistic hatred of Hindus, Jews, and other non­Muslims it inculcates—provides ugly living proof that Sarkar’s wistful admonition from 1950 remains almost entirely unheeded.

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