A story some time ago about a mosque in central Connecticut with a 400-student Muslim Sunday school offered a house blend of victimhood and resilience.
More guards are on patrol these days. And for the older students in the transition class, talking about Islamophobia is not only welcomed, but encouraged. The teenagers are in their final years of high school and will be heading off to college soon.
In the first sentence, the theme of Muslim insecurity is introduced: “more guards are on patrol these days” around the mosque. Muslims are threatened, Muslims need to be protected. The next sentence supplies “islamophobia,” that mendacious word used to great effect in order to inhibit all legitimate criticism of Islam.
So before they head out into the “real world,” they aren’t just learning the tenets of Islam, said Dr. Reza Mansoor, their teacher on a recent Sunday. He’s coaching them on how to defend their faith from misconceptions.
“By the way, As-Salaam alaikum,” Mansoor greeted them. “If you use an Arabic term and you don’t translate, dinged one point, OK? So As-Salaam-Alaikum means God’s peace be with you all.”
Mansoor is president of the mosque, called Islamic Association of Greater Hartford, and he is big on translating Islamic phrases and words. Take jihad, for instance. It means a struggle — usually a personal, spiritual one — but if you hear jihad in the media, he said, it’s almost always associated with extremists who commit violence in the name of Islam, like the 9/11 terrorists.
“If you use jihadist for terrorist, you unfortunately give the terrorists… a position much higher than what they are,” Mansoor told his students.
Mansoor, like so many apologists for Islam, wants non-Muslims to believe that “Jihad” refers to a “personal, spiritual struggle.” But 109 Qur’anic verses commanding Muslims to wage violent Jihad, and 1,400 years of many Jihads, conducted uninterruptedly somewhere in the world, against Unbelievers, suggest otherwise. He laments the fact that “when you hear jihad in the media…it’s almost always associated with extremists.” But why shouldn’t it be? Since the Muslim terrorists themselves describe their attacks as Jihads, why shouldn’t we take them at their word? Are we to ignore how members of Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al Shebaab, Al-Nusra Front, Abu Sayyaf, Hamas, and Hezbollah all refer to their respective campaigns as ‘’jihads”?’
“People tend to fear what they don’t know. And when Islam is viewed as a threat, that makes Muslims a target.”
Mansoor’s sympathy is limited to Muslims. It is they who are “a target”; it’s so unfair that Islam should be “viewed as a threat.” Possibly Reza Mansoor is unaware of the nearly 36,000 attacks carried out by Muslim terrorists since 9/11. Given that, it would be madness for people in the West not to view Islam as a “threat.”
Mansoor’s remark that “people tend to fear what they don’t know” has it backwards in the case of Islam. People who know little about Islam — Merkel, Macron, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Pope Francis — are the ones who are most susceptible to minimizing its menace, and remain the most sanguine and the least anxious about the tens of millions of Muslims who have been allowed to settle in the West, deep behind what they have been taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb. It is those who have taken the trouble to read and make sense of the Qur’an and the most important hadith, in the authoritative collections of Al-Bukhari and Muslim, who in addition have learned something about the 1,400-year history of Muslim expansion, who are most alarmed by the steady encroachments of Islam in the West. When it comes to Islam, the more you learn, the more alarmed you become.