Rice University sociology professor Craig Considine, a self-proclaimed “Islamic apologist,” likes to quote the dubious hadith that the “ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.” In his argumentation, this canonical narrative about Islam’s prophet Muhammad evinces Islam’s pacific nature, yet Muslim scholars often inspire the shedding of martyrs’ blood.
The Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s clearly demonstrated this nexus in Islam between the pen and the sword. House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare Director Yossef Bodansky analyzed this phenomenon in his 1999 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. Herein he examined the relationship between Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and one of his spiritual mentors, Abdullah Azzam.
Bodansky set the scene for their partnership:
In the late 1970s Afghanistan, a desolate and backward landlocked country, was ruled by a Soviet-sponsored Communist government being challenged by Pakistani-sponsored Islamist subversion. With the Communist regime increasingly unstable, the Soviet armed forces marched into Afghanistan, occupied the country’s strategic infrastructure, assassinated the president, and replaced him with a docile Soviet puppet. They also began a systematic campaign to suppress the Islamist subversion.
The Soviet invasion was the first time since World War II that non-Muslim forces had occupied a Muslim country—and these were anti-Islamic Communists to boot. Little wonder that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the last days of 1979 shocked the entire Muslim world to its core. The occupation of a Muslim state by Communist forces insulted the most basic sensitivities of Islam. But however immense the shock and however great the condemnation by the Arab states, little was actually done.
In contrast, “Osama bin Laden was one of the first Arabs to go to Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion,” Bodansky wrote. “In retrospect, bin Laden now considers the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a turning point in his life,” he added. “In our religion, there is a special place in the hereafter for those who participate in jihad,” bin Laden told an Arab journalist; “One day in Afghanistan was like one thousand days of praying in an ordinary mosque.”
With his background as a construction mogul, bin Laden proved himself an effective jihad organizer, Bodansky detailed:
On arrival bin Laden was appalled by the chaos in Pakistan and the lack of Arab unity and devoted himself to political and organizational work, establishing a recruitment drive that over the next few years would funnel thousands of Arab fighters from the Gulf States to the Afghan resistance. At first he personally covered the travel costs of these volunteers to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but more important, he set up the main camps to train them. In early 1980 bin Laden established Ma’sadat Al-Ansar, then the main base for Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, Bodansky continued, bin Laden came
into contact with Sheikh Abdallah Yussuf Azzam, who was key in establishing what is today the International Legion of Islam—the highly proficient and dedicated hard core of international Islamist terrorism. Azzam was born in a small village near Jenin, Samaria, in 1941. His pious family sent him to get religious schooling from an early age. After receiving most of his early education in Jordan, he entered Sharia College of Damascus University, where he obtained a B.A. degree in Sharia (Islamic law) in 1966. After the 1967 Six Days War, during which Israel captured Azzam’s hometown, Azzam escaped to Jordan and joined the jihad against Israel. He found his calling not on the battlefield but in education and incitement. Toward this end he was sent to Egypt, where he received a master’s degree in Sharia from the prestigious al-Azhar University. In 1970 he began teaching at Amman University but returned in 1971 to al-Azhar on scholarship and in 1973 obtained a Ph.D. in principles of Islamic jurisprudence.”
A few years later, Bodansky related, the learned
Azzam went to Saudi Arabia to teach at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, a hub of Islamist scholarship that had a strong influence on Saudi youth. Osama bin Laden was studying at the university at the time, and there is evidence that he attended one of Azzam’s lectures. In Jeddah, Azzam formulated his doctrine of the centrality of the jihad to the liberation of the Muslim world from the stifling embrace of Westernization.
This was not an academic discussion for Azzam, Bodansky explained:
In 1979, with the declaration of the Afghan jihad, Azzam left the university and went to practice what he had been preaching, becoming one of the first Arabs to join the Afghan jihad. But the Pakistani and Afghan leaders in the jihad urged him to resume teaching rather than take part in battle. Azzam was first appointed as a lecturer at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, but he decided to move to Peshawar, closer to the Afghanistan border, and devote all his time and energy to the jihad in Afghanistan.
“In Peshawar, Sheikh Azzam founded the Bait-ul-Ansar, which received and trained the first Islamist volunteers pouring into Pakistan to participate in the Afghan jihad,” Bodansky wrote. There Azzam formed a dynamic duo with bin Laden. As Bodansky observed:
Bin Laden had money, knowledge, and enthusiasm and implemented Azzam’s ideas. Azzam and bin Laden established the Makrab al-Khidamat—the Mujahideen Services Bureau-which bin Laden soon transformed into an international network that sought out Islamists with special knowledge, from medical doctors and engineers to terrorists and drug smugglers, and recruited them for service in Afghanistan.
Azzam’s mentorship of bin Laden explodes the myth that jihadists like him have no proper understanding of Islamic doctrine, as Michael Scheuer, the director in the years before and after 9/11 of the CIA’s unit for tracking bin Laden, noted. Bin Laden always presented himself as a “simple Muslim” merely following established Islamic teachings, Scheuer wrote, along with many other Muslims who waged jihad in Afghanistan from countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Many other Muslims would follow Azzam and bin Laden’s call to turn Afghanistan into a base for global jihad, as the next article in this series will examine.
Doomer says
Craig Considine ( Catholic ) is typical of the “intellectuals” and “scholars” who write about Islam, who are ignorant or worse concerning how evil Islam is.
Another example is Lebanese writer AMIN MAALOUF ( also Catholic ) . He has written several historical novels. He was born in 1949,so he is 72 years old. He is Not 18,20,25.
He has the reputation of being a wise man. And is a member of the Academie Francaise ( highest position a French-language writer can attain )
In 1983 ( he was then 34 ) he published “The Crusades Through Arab Eyes “. There he shows what Muslims said about the Crusaders, calling them cruel, savage, ignorant and culturally backward.
However,he never shows,and I think, he was utterly ignorant of, how the SAME and WORSE , and inspired by the Quran, applied to those Muslims: cruel, savage, ignorant and culturally backward
( polygamy, sexual slavery, slavery in general, beating wives, judeophobia ( sura 5:64 ) and christianophobia ( sura 5:14 ) ).
In 1998 ( then 49 ) he wrote “Les Identités meurtrières”, awkwardly translated as “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong”
There is a passage that proves how stupid this wise, savant man is,in the book he says,ignorant of basic Christianity:
” That which I fight, and will always fight, is the idea that there is on one side, a religion,
the christian one, destined, to give modernism, liberty, tolerance ,and democracy,
and on the other side, a religion,the Muslim one,
destined, from its origin, to give despotism, and obscurantism.
It is erroneous and dangerous. ”
The guy doesn’t even know that the idea of human rights as a RIGHT ( not favor,not concession, not gift of charity ),
is based on the fiction ( except for those who are Christians: including Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses,Unitarians ) that humans are literally, I repeat literally,in the Image of God.
Maalouf is a guy who has read a few books, thinks it makes him an expert,but has not gone deep,and never will.
gravenimage says
I’m no fan of any of this Muslim apologia, but at least Amin Maalouf has more of an excuse, because he is a dhimmi living in an oppressive Muslim-majority country. The appalling Craig Considine has no such mitigataion. He is just a moron.
libertyORdeath says
Considine doesn’t seem to understand the true spirit of the hadith he quoted. The reason the ink of the scholar is more valuable than the blood of the martyr is the same reason that a General is more important to a war than a private. The islamist scholar has the responsibility of crafting convincing arguments in support of a particular jihad by using islamic source materials to justify the cause. His work will then be used as propaganda to motivate, and as Mr. Harrod said, incite the masses into joining their cause and shedding blood for it if necessary. Every war needs propagandists, and a good one is worth more than even a military General in some cases (Goebbels comes to mind). Therefore, the hadith is not about the celebration of peaceful islamic scholarship, as Considine dubiously asserts, but rather about the value of dogma, propaganda and islamic support for the current jihad.
Doomer says
One example,the SUFIS, a mystical group that is emotional. Today they present themselves as Pacific and Peaceful, loving.
a) But historically, All the Sufi groups Approved of Sharia Law: death for apostates, holy war, death for blasphemy,
second-class status for non-Muslims, even approval of SLAVERY and SEX-SLAVERY.
b) In fact, the JANISSARIES (elite soldiers of the Ottoman empire) were All, literally All, members of the BEKTASHI Sufi order.
Yes, they were sufis, and they approved of Sharia law and sex slavery and slavery for non-Muslims.
c) Every 5 years Muslims would force Christian parents to give up their best sons ( aged 8 to 12 ), in Greece and the Balkans.
Those children would be Forcefully CIRCUMSCISED, made to live for 2 years with a Turkish peasant family ( to learn Turkish), then it was military training. A very few, the smartest, were chosen to become government officials.
Technically,they were the Sultan’s SLAVES and also they were Forbidden to Marry.
d) It was called DEVSHIRME and lasted for some 300 years, then,in the late 16th century, the Janissaries forced the sultan to:
1. Allow them to get married.
2. Allow their sons to inherit their position. It was the end of the devshirme system.
e) The most famous was SINAN ( 1490-1588), an Armenian, forced to become a janissary at age 21 ( very late for the time), and who became the Most Gifted Architect in Ottoman history: he created the Selim Mosque and the Suleiman Mosque.
Here is another example of deception,by JAVED HASHMI-DANIOS,who debated Robert Spencer on violence in Christianity and Islam.
a) Hashmi said something about that the Christian concept of Just War,according to a book by a scholar, justified IMPERIALISM. That was the basic idea, and “that included Vitoria”.
Vitoria is the father of international law, founder of the philosophical school called The School of Salamanca. Here is the deception by Hashmi:
Vitoria proposed the RIGHT to INGERENCE / Humanitarian Intervention. The term itself first appears in 1979 by French philosopher Jean-Francois REVEL ( droit a l’ingerence ).
It also appears in GROTIUS book ( De jure belli ac pacis)(1625). Grotius was the first to propose a SOCIETY of NATIONS, Countries to maintain international peace.
Vitoria said that in extreme cases, where a nation commits atrocities on its OWN CITIZENS, like cannibalism, human sacrifice, it was justified
to intervene militarily to stop it. THAT is what Hasmi calls “imperialism”.
Of course, Vitoria would also agree it applies to what happened in RWANDA (genocide), Somalia ( hundreds of thousands dying of HUNGER because of the policies of its government). Would That constitute “imperialism based on the Christian Just War Theory” for Danios?
b) Danios failed to mention that LAS CASAS also believed in the Just War concept. Danios does NOT say:
Las Casas is the originator of the PRINCIPLE of LEAST HARM.
That means, even if in a country they are committing human sacrifice, it is not justified, for him, to send a Great Army and causing great destruction,to stop it.
Rather, it is best to Stop It but at the SAME time causing as Least Harm to the people of the country as possible: diplomacy, threats , psychological manipulation, minor military attacks.
c) Not that Las Casas was as stable as desired, in his crusade, he actually told the lie that Spaniards had killed 11 MILLION indians, later he said it was 24 MILLION.
We have good reason to believe he greatly exaggerated the abuse of Indians by Spaniards. How? THREE intellectuals who personally knew the situation were Openly Against him. They were:
1.GONZALO FERNANDEZ de OVIEDO: he became the royal historian, charged with writing a book. It was the “General History of the Indies”( full of scientific and historical info)
Oviedo thought Indians were inferior to Europeans, in the sense of being Less Intelligent, but he was for protecting their liberty and property and lives.
He proposed a system where the New World ( both natives and Spanish colonists ) would be ruled by a religious order made up of aristocrats ( people of education and status). In fact, very similar to what Las Casas proposed ( only the religious order would be open to all).
2. TORIBIO DE BENAVENTE or MOTOLINIA: a Spanish priest who learned Nahuatl and was a missionary in Mexico. He wrote a LETTER to the Spanish king, saying Las Casas was a man who was troublesome, and exaggerating all the time.
He wrote a history and cultural description of the Aztecs “History of the Indians”, and “Memorials”,where he described their culture and customs.
As proof he was a man of principles, in the last 40 YEARS of his life, Motolinia had to live in HIDING, there was a reward for his capture.
Why? Because he was very much against the DIEZMO, that natives should pay 10% of their income as taxes to the government.
3. INCA GARCILASO DE LA VEGA: he was the son of a Spaniard and an Inca princess. He wrote a history of the Inca empire, and another of Spanish rule in the ex-Inca empire, called “The Royal Commentaries”.
Plus a history of the Hernando de Soto expedition in what in now the US ( he traveled through Florida, Tennessee, Georgia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama ).
He also wrote against Las Casas.
libertyORdeath says
Good post with some great examples. Thanks for adding that to the discussion.
gravenimage says
And note that “Hadith Answers” doesn’t consider this Hadith to be Sahih (“reliable”, or with a good “Isnad chain”)–in other words, it is not considered authentic.
https://hadithanswers.com/the-ink-of-the-scholars/
libertyORdeath says
Thanks for the extra info GI.
gravenimage says
Thanks, libertyORdeath. .And Doomer is right about the Sufis and Jihad.
somehistory says
The idiot should read this article by Mr. Raymond Ibrahim
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/perverse-profanities-and-warped-logic-islams-raymond-ibrahim/
Walter Sieruk says
Any jihadist be he of the Taliban in Afghanistan or of Hamas in Israel, just after his Islamic suicide /homicide attack right after he died ,to his shock and horror, he found himself trapped and suffering in the fires of an awful place the Bible calls “hell.” Luke 16:19-31.
That jihad minded Muslim of ISIS was dangerous to self and others because that he was indoctrinated with and likewise believed in the doctrine found in the Quran, 44:54. 55:56. 78;31.,of a lust –filled sex paradise with many virgins, in in for his use only, because he died as a “martyr” for the cause of Islam. That jihadist will discover the hard way that he was instructed in and put his faith in a false doctrine that is from a false religious book of false religion
.This doctrine of a paradise for the jihadist who died fighting for Islam was only an enticing religious story of fiction. The Bible does give warning against giving “heed to fables…” First Timothy 1:4. [N.K.J.V]
As for dying in a murderous jihad attack, in spite, of the Muslim clerics falsely calling it a “martyrdom operation.” That jihadist after in dies in a jihad murder attack, and learn too late, the truth of Bible with informs its reader that a murderer “will not inherit the Kingdom of God.” Galatians 5:21.
In addition, such false teachers, as those imams and mullahs, who teach and ingrain false yet enticing doctrines as that a lust /sex fill place with virgins into the hearts and minds of others had been predicted in the Bible. For it is written, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine , but according to their own desires , because they have itching ears , they will heap up for themselves teachers ; and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables.” Second Timothy 3,4.
Walter Sieruk says
What the West needs in this “war of ideas” is a strong foundation and defense that is far superior to something as weak and worthless as just “opinion.”
What the West needs is wisdom. As the Bible instructs “Wisdom is better than strength.” Ecclesiastes 9:16. [N.K.J.V.]
Likewise, this same book of the Bible also teaches in 9:18 “Wisdom is better than weapons of war.” Therefore, wisdom is in strong contrast to opinion. Also greatly opposed to wisdom is folly and deceit. As the Bible in Proverbs 14:8 informs the reader ‘The folly of fools is deceit.”
This deception of deceit may be seen, by all those who are willing to see, in the Islamic doctrine of a virgin filled paradise designed specify for the male Muslim jihadist who dies in the jihad for the cause of Islam, in what they so inappropriately call a “martyrdom operation.” Many a times a jihadist/Muslim is so very deluded the he actually put on his video recording that after he dies in the jihad as a “martyr” he will then in paradise have a “wedding with virgins.”
This firm but blind unquestioning folly is the result of such a man believing in deception of a false doctrine. With Light of the Wisdom of Jesus a belief in a “wedding with virgins.” is the outcome of a person accepting as the “truth” an invalid and false. For Jesus taught “you are mistaken, not knowing the Scripture nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angles in heaven.” Matthew 22:29,30.
A jihadist will after dies and such a murderous way will have a very hard and harsh “reality check” In that “his expectation will perish…” Proverb 11:7. For he will then discover that he was deceived by false doctrine and lie of “a paradise with virgins” and to his shock and horror he will find himself trapped and suffering ,with no hope of escape, in the fires of hell. As the Bible teaches a murder “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” Galatians 5:21. This is sad and tragic but nevertheless it’s the reality of the truth.
gravenimage says
Walter Sieruk wrote:
What the West needs in this “war of ideas” is a strong foundation and defense that is far superior to something as weak and worthless as just “opinion.”
…………….
Agreed, Walter. And we should stand by our civilized values and ethics–all too few in the West do that these days.
gravenimage says
Scholars’ Ink, Martyrs’ Blood in Afghanistan
…………….
The literacy rate in Afghanistan is only 43%, and even worse among women.
And it is only *this good* because of the recent American presence. Literacy level were less than 32% in 2011.
Not a lot of “scholars’ ink” flowing in Afghaistan–not even of the dubious Islamic variety.
Alfredo says
Only willfully blind imbeciles can believe the a-Haddith are meant to spread a message of peace and love.
The purpose of those writings of which the foremost exemplar is Sahi Bukhari, which is a compendium of so-called authentic sayings of the so-called prophet of the so-called religion of peace. It must be emphasized with the qualifier so-called, because those writings cannot be trusted as genuine, since even the compiler Muhammad al-Bukhari had to whittle them down from over 600,000 to just under 3,000.
That’s over 98% of the material discarded as daif (weak) or unreliable. If the overwhelming majority of the so-called sayings had to be rejected, how reliable is this material? Not very reliable.
The answer for any sane person not suffering brain damage inflicted by relentless indoctrination, is that not even the time of day can be believed of those who profess said writings are authentic, and not fabrications added several hundred years later.
Any one who has taken the time to do even basic research will soon find out that the so-called prophet died in 632 AD. That is the 7th century and the Hadiths started appearing in the late 800 hundreds, 859 in Bukhari’s case.
That is late 9th century.
That’s how these people do history.
They don’t go as close as possible to the events they refer to, but close to 300 hundred years after. Is that how you do history? No, that’s not how you do history. That’s how you do fiction.