Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

The Paris attacks are an act of war – against Islam itself

UPDATE: Watch Dr Ahmed discuss this article on CNN here 

The appalling attacks in Paris last night were, as Francois Hollande said, an act of war. They were Islamism’s declaration of war on free society – but, crucially, they represented something else. An act of war, by Islamists, upon Islam itself.

As Douglas Murray says, it is lazy and wrong to argue that these attacks had nothing to do with Islam. The repugnant creed of the Islamic State is certainly related to Islam – but it is also inimical to Islam. The scenes in Paris will shock Muslims world over; indeed, when we Muslims hear of gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” before committing the very acts of murder explicitly prohibited by the Koran, our repugnance is joined with a sense of desecration.

To assert that this Islamism is un-Islamic is not a kneejerk response to the atrocities we saw last night, and so many times around the world. It is the only conclusion that can be drawn after serious consideration of its principles. The Damascene Muslim scholar, Bassam Tibi, identifies six tenets of Islamism – all quite new, and none can be honestly described as Islamic.

  1. Seeking a new world order through a new dictatorial global ‘caliphate’. (It matters little that the word ‘dawla’ — Islam as state — appears nowhere in the 80,000-word document that we accept as the revealed Quran.)
  2. The  establishment of Islamism within democracies — Islamists are keen to stand for election, but once they get into power they want to shut the democratic gate behind them.
  3. Positioning Jews as Islam’s chief enemy, thereby making anti-Semitism central to the Islamist project (as Hamas’s founding charter attests).
  4. The mutation of classical jihad into terrorist jihadism — with which the world has, alas, become all too familiar.
  5. Sharia law. Not sharia as described by the Quran, but a concocted version used to impose a form of totalitarian rule which is without historical precedent.

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Qanta Ahmed
Written by
Qanta Ahmed
Dr Qanta Ahmed is a British American Muslim physician and journalist, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

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