by Peter Falkenberg Brown
September 14, 2022
Because of decades of propaganda by Islamapologists, it is now a reality that the very first prob-lem with any discussion of Islam is that many people believe that no one is ever supposed to criticize it. In the West, one is immediately called an anti-Muslim bigot, hater, racist, and Islamophobe. In Islamic countries, one’s fate is much worse, with death as a common outcome. Thus, we have to establish why it is acceptable to criticize Islam.
The primary reason is simple. It is valid to criticize anyone and anything because every person has the sacred, inviolable rights of free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, and many other rights that stem from those central concepts. If anyone says that you cannot criticize a person or a topic, then you must vigorously correct that person, for that way lies totalitarianism. It simply can’t be said more clearly than with the words of the American patriot Patrick Henry when he declared on March 23, 1775, at the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond, Virginia:
“Give me liberty, or give me death!”[1]
Let’s start with this question: Are Muslims Free? If they are not, should they be free?
It’s a reasonable statement to say that all human beings have the intrinsic right to be free, and thus we can demand: “Freedom for Muslims, Freedom for All.”
However, it is unfortunate for Muslims that the vast majority of people living under Islam are not free. They are repressed by a form of totalitarianism that I describe as “the Ultimate Tyranny.”
Stating that Islam is the Ultimate Tyranny will undoubtedly offend Muslims and many non-Muslims as well. Thus, I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not “anti-Muslim.” In fact, I am pro-human-being and would like to help the human beings who just happen to be Muslim to escape the tyranny under which they suffer.
As any honest and informed Muslim will tell you, and as I document below, Muslims live as slaves to Allah, to Mohammed, and to Islam. Muslims are victims and slaves of a system that com-mands and teaches them to victimize and enslave the citizens of the entire world. Even Mohammed called himself a slave:
“Do not exaggerate in praising me as the Christians praised the son of Mary, for I am only a Slave. So, call me the Slave of Allah and His Apostle.” (Sahih Bukhari 4:55:654)
How can one say that Muslims are slaves when some people convert to Islam willingly and Mus-lims in the West seem to be quite free? Muslims acknowledge that “Islam” means “submission,” yet many Western Muslims are non-orthodox, which, from the viewpoint of orthodox Muslims, means that they are unfaithful Muslims. Orthodoxy in Islam is not the same as in Judaism, within which you have Orthodox Jews and Reformed Jews as two distinct and legitimate groups. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, stated:
“There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. There is only one Islam.”[2]
It has been popular in the West to refer to Islamic terrorists as “radical,” but that term is incor-rect. Stephen M. Kirby, Ph.D. is the author of six books about Islam and states:
“How can you use the term radical without first identifying the norm? Normative Islam is based on the unabrogated commands of Allah in the Koran, and the examples and teachings of Muhammad (the Sunnah). If the Koran and the Sunnah support a Muslim’s actions, that Muslim is not radical, he is devout.”[3]
I prefer to use the term “orthodox” and am thus focused on orthodox Islam and the Muslims who live under that system (which can also include a family or community anywhere in the world). Let’s look then at what it means to be “a slave of Islam.” Of course, under Islam, Muslims can also own their own slaves, who live in even worse conditions of life. First, let’s just focus on Muslims. “Slave” is defined in the dictionary as:
– “a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another and forced to provide unpaid labor.
– a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person.”[4]
Some of the essential qualifications of a “free person” are that the person has the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to exercise their beliefs, freedom of political af-filiations and economic activities of their choosing, and freedom of movement and travel. Muslims are not granted all of these rights by Islam. Muslim men have some of them, such as economic ac-tivity and travel, but Muslim women are oppressed as second-class citizens and, in strict Islamic en-vironments, cannot leave their homes unless they are accompanied by a male relative.
Muslims who leave Islam are marked for death under the crime of apostasy. Mohammed was unequivocal:
“[In the words of] Allah’s Apostle, ‘Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.’” (Sahih Bukhari 9:84:57)
Muslims who submit to Islam (voluntarily or otherwise) go through a one-way door. Under or-thodox Islam, there is no way out. This may not be readily apparent in the West because, in the West, many Muslims are not orthodox, preferring the freedoms of their non-Islamic countries. However, orthodoxy lurks behind the scenes and becomes visible when we hear of so-called “honor killings” for leaving Islam, as this 2015 article in The Christian Post detailed:
“Most recently, Ali Irsan of Texas was charged last week with capital murder of Iranian activist Gelareh Bagherzadeh and Coty Beavers, his son-in-law. Nesreen Irsan, Ali’s daughter, converted to Christianity with the help of Bagherzadeh, and left home and married Beavers, a Christian. Ali Irsan’s wife, Shmou Ali Alrawabdeh, and his son, Nasim, were also charged with murder.”[5]
As reported by Jessica McBride in the 2019 Heavy.com article “Nesreen Irsan & Ali Irsan Now: Their Lives Today,” Nesreen, the apostate daughter, barely escaped and is now in hiding:
“. . . authorities alleged that Ali Irsan also planned to kill Nesreen and others but didn’t pull that off before his arrest.”[6]
Islamic advocacy groups in America, such as CAIR (the Council of American-Islamic Relations), routinely dismiss Muslim honor killings as simple domestic violence having nothing to do with Islam. However, this has been disproved. Writing for the 2009 Middle East Quarterly in the article “Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?” Phyllis Chester stated:
“And, unlike most Western domestic violence, honor killings are carefully planned. The perpetrator’s family may warn the victim repeatedly over a period of years that she will be killed if she dishonors her family by refusing to veil, rebuffing an arranged marriage, or becoming too Westernized. Most important, only honor killings involve multiple family members. Fathers, mothers, brothers, male cousins, uncles, and sometimes even grandfathers commit the murder, but mothers and sisters may lobby for the killing. Some mothers collaborate in the murder in a hands-on way and may assist in the getaway. In some cases, taxi drivers, neighbors, and mosque members prevent the targeted woman from fleeing, report her whereabouts to her family, and subsequently conspire to thwart police investigations. Very old relatives or minors may be chosen to conduct the murder in order to limit jail time if caught.”[7]
Muslims in orthodox Islamic countries, communities, or families must follow a strict set of laws called “Sharī‘ah.” They cannot criticize Mohammed or Islam; they cannot draw a picture of Mo-hammed; and they cannot live as they wish, especially if they are women. It is true that men under Islam enjoy a certain amount of freedom. Some are immensely wealthy and do not seem to be in chains. Yet they are still slaves to a religious-political system that will turn on them in an instant if they violate its laws.
Muslims in the West may object to this description of their status, but they must acknowledge that they are largely protected from the repression of Sharī‘ah law by the laws and freedoms of the West. In spite of those privileges, many orthodox Muslims want to replace the US Constitution with Sharī‘ah law, which would eliminate the freedoms that non-orthodox American Muslims currently enjoy.[8]
Muslim Women Are Slaves of Slaves
Women under Sharī‘ah Islam are second-class citizens who can be forced to undergo female genital mutilation, be married off to strangers before puberty, and then be beaten by their husbands. They are “slaves of slaves.” These traditions started with Mohammed, who had sex with a nine-year-old girl when he was fifty-four:
“The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death)” (Sahih Bukhari 7.62.88)
Mohammed’s “perfect example” has given an excuse to Muslim men to have sex with little girls for fourteen hundred years. The Ayatollah Khomeini married a ten-year-old girl and lowered Iran’s minimum age for girls to be married to nine.[9] The age of Khomeini’s child bride is in dispute, with Islamapologists trying to raise her marriage age. I believe the math reveals that she was nine.
In Chapter Five of the 1985 biography of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini titled The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution by Amir Taheri, the author writes that when Ruhollah Khomeini was twenty-seven, in the summer of 1930, he married Batul (nicknamed Iran and later sometimes referred to as “Khadijeh”), the daughter of one Ayatollah Saqafi, residing in Shahr-e-Rey, near Tehran, Iran.
“One of Saqafi’s daughters, Batul, who was nicknamed Iran, was, at the age of ten, the most likely bride-to-be. . . .
A small ceremony was organized in which Saqafi himself performed the marriage rites. . . . Before leaving for Qom, Ruhollah was allowed a glimpse of his wife’s face—the smiling face of a healthy child.”[10]
Although Taheri’s biography of Khomeini states that Batul was ten at the time of her marriage, he writes on the next page:
“In January 1931, Batul began her eleventh year and was already expecting her first child.”[11] At least according to Western counting, when one begins their eleventh year, it means that they just turned ten, which means that Batul was nine in 1930 when she married Khomeini. This follows the pattern of Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha.
However one might explain away the age of Aisha in seventh-century Arabia, it is very clear that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries having sex with young girls must be classified as pedo-philia. Sit with this phrase describing Khomeini’s new bride for a moment, and then imagine if that described the wife of a modern, Western, Christian man. The words “pedophile” and “jail time” eas-ily come to mind. “. . . his wife’s face—the smiling face of a healthy child.”
Many people in the West are in the habit of excusing behavior like this because it’s coming from “a third-world, Muslim civilization, so we can’t use our Western standards of judgment.” But that viewpoint is balderdash, nonsense, and an arrogant expression of the bigotry of low expectations. We cannot and must not use silly excuses like that when it comes to protecting the victims of pedophilia, rape, or abuse. They need us to defend them instead of apologizing away the crimes of their sexually twisted abusers.
This is the reality: a nine-year-old child bride of a Muslim man has to obediently lie there while the adult and sometimes very old male comes on top of her and inserts his sexual organ into hers. This is not acceptable, civilized behavior. What is the adult Muslim male thinking? Is he regarding the spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being of that young girl with a heart of unselfish and compassionate love? No, not at all.
Ali ibn Abi Talib was the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed. He was the fourth caliph and is regarded by Shia Muslims as the rightful immediate successor to Mohammed. Here’s what he thought about women:
“It makes no difference which woman you marry. For all women feel the same, when you mount them in the dark.”[12]
A very large number of orthodox Muslim men are hypnotically obsessed with sex, both during their life on earth and as they look forward to their promised future in “Paradise,” where they believe that they will be permanently sexually aroused without getting tired and will have endless sex with seventy-two sex slaves, as Mohammed stated:
“It was narrated from Abu Umamah that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said:
There is no one whom Allah will admit to Paradise but Allah will marry him to seventy-two wives, two from houris and seventy from his inheritance from the people of Hell, all of whom will have desirable front passages and he will have a male member that never becomes flaccid (i.e., soft and limp).” (Sunan Ibn Majah 37:4481)
Infidel Women Are the Lowest of All
Sex with young girls and an unhealthy obsession with sexual entitlement would be bad enough, but Allah, Mohammed, and Islam also condone the rape of non-Muslim women, revealed by Allah in the Qur’an:
“And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.” [4:24] (M. M. Pickthall)
Rape of infidel women is theologically justified, as was illustrated by the 2015 testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim of an orthodox ISIS Muslim:
“When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
‘I kept telling him it hurts—please stop,’ said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. ‘He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God.’”[13]
Because of this religious belief, the enormous migration levels of Muslim men into Europe have produced soaring rape statistics. Since 1975, when Sweden opened its borders to Muslim immigrants, rape has increased in that country by 1,472 percent (as of 2015).[14] In England, Muslim rape gangs, euphemistically referred to as “Asian grooming gangs,” have been gang-raping thousands of white British teenage girls for decades, while the police and authorities turn a blind eye because of political correctness and the fear of being labeled racist.[15]
It is reprehensible and deeply hypocritical that a majority of Western feminists ignore the tragic plight of women under Islam and the criminal attacks against non-Muslim women by orthodox Muslim men. Why do they ignore the many thousands of female victims? Where is the #MeToo movement?
Islam Is the Ultimate Tyranny
For the reasons explained here, as well as many other problems with Islam, I state unequivocally that Islam is the ultimate tyranny. It is far more pernicious and all-encompassing than communism because it imbues its adherents with a religious fervor and belief that their system of mass slavery must overtake the world at any cost.
Islam was initially unappealing to seventh-century Arabs. It wasn’t until Mohammed decided to use violence and a system of financial and sexual rewards given to the men who joined him in vio-lence that Islam became almost unstoppable. It attracted the worst kind of men: men who were im-pressed by violence and men who were excited by the prospect of unlimited sexual dominance over women. They became the jihadis who committed horrific crimes against humanity and continue to do so today. Those types of men are the ones who keep their Muslim populations enslaved in the twenty-first century.
Islam claims it is the fulfillment of Jewish and Christian history, but Islam does not follow the Ten Commandments, and Islam most definitely does not teach Muslims that they should follow Jesus’ example and “love their enemies.” Quite the opposite.
Yes, there are good-hearted, freedom-loving Muslim men and women who are moral, loving, and nonviolent. Of course there are. I do not state that “Muslims are the ultimate tyranny.” Individuals can be good or evil, and Muslims are themselves victims of Islam, whether they embrace it with in-doctrinated, jihadist fervor, resist it at the risk of death, or ignore as much of it as they can get away with, which is quite a lot in free, Western countries.
No, the problem is with Islam. Frankly, the West should be sympathetic toward the Muslims who feel oppressed by Sharī‘ah and should help them safely leave the tyranny of Islam.
Image: A female beggar in Afghanistan, wearing a burka. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
© 2022 Peter Falkenberg Brown – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Peter Falkenberg Brown: peterbrown@worldcommunity.com
Website: https://peterfalkenbergbrown.com
Endnotes:
Verses from the Qur’an are followed by numbers in brackets which denote the chapter (“Sura”) and verse. The name of the translator is in parentheses. For example: [4:56] (Maududi). Verses that are simply followed by names and numbers in parentheses (no brackets) are from the books of the “Hadith,” the teachings and traditions of Mohammed as related by various authors. For example: (Sahih Bukhari 4:55:654).
1. https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/learn/deep-dives/give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death/
2. https://www.meforum.org/7078/erdogan-no-moderate-islam
3. https://islamseries.org/
4. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave?s=t
5. https://www.christianpost.com/news/are-islamic-honor-killings-a-growing-threat-in-america.html
6. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/nesreen-irsan-ali-now-today/
7. https://www.meforum.org/2067/are-honor-killings-simply-domestic-violence
8. https://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/07/replacing-the-us-constitution-with-the-koran
9. https://robertspencer.org/2019/12/muslim-cleric-allah-permitted-the-prophet-muhammad-to-marry-aisha-when-she-was-9-years-old
10. Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, Chapter 5, “The City of Taghut,” page 90. Pub-lished by Adler & Adler, 1986, Bethesda, Maryland.
https://archive.org/details/spiritofallah00amir/page/90/mode/1up
11. Ibid, page 91.
12. Ibid, page 89.
13. https://robertspencer.org/2015/08/he-said-that-raping-me-is-his-prayer-to-god
14. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape
15. https://robertspencer.org/2018/03/uk-whistleblowers-on-muslim-rape-gangs-in-telford-were-punished-silenced-and-fired-from-their-jobs
