Jihad war is part of basic instruction in Egyptian high schools

Here are two passages from contemporary Egyptian textbooks, quoted by Andrew Bostom in a 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine:

Studies in Theology: Tradition and Morals, Grade 11 (2001) pp. 291-92:

This noble [Qur’anic] Surah [Surat Muhammad] … deals with questions of which the most important are as follows: “Encouraging the faithful to perform jihad in God’s cause, to behead the infidels, take them prisoner, break their power, and make their souls humble—all that in a style which contains the highest examples of urging to fight. You see that in His words: “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Then grant them their freedom or take a ransom from them, until war shall lay down its burdens.”

Commentary on the Surahs of Muhammad, Al-Fath, Al-Hujurat and Qaf, Grade 11 (2002) p. 9:

When you meet them in order to fight [them], do not be seized by compassion [towards them] but strike the[ir] necks powerfully…. Striking the neck means fighting, because killing a person is often done by striking off his head. Thus, it has become an expression for killing even if the fighter strikes him elsewhere. This expression contains a harshness and emphasis that are not found in the word “kill,” because it describes killing in the ugliest manner, i.e., cutting the neck and making the organ—the head of the body—fly off [the body].

With the sheer sadism of killing non-Muslims in as ugly and brutal and dehumanizing a way as possible, this sounds pretty much like what the late Zarqawi was up to in Iraq, when he got his hands on Nicholas Berg and other unfortunate victims and sawed their heads off. But if this jihad war with its maximum cruelty to the infidel is taught as a routine matter as the essence of the Islamic faith to 16-year-olds in the “moderate” Muslim country of Egypt, and is not just something practiced by “Islamic fascist” terrorist insurgents in Iraq, is it really “Islamic fascism” we’re looking at here, or is it plain old Islam—exactly the same Islam that has been around since the 7th century? I posed that question to Tony Blankley, who used to be friendly to me, but he declined to answer. It’s no wonder. Blankley has recently gone backward from a relative degree of realism on the subject to the PC line that Islam is a marvelous religion infected by a handful of bad apples, uh, fascists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 24, 2006 01:14 AM | Send