Catastrophe - Dick Morris [116]
Meet Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani. He is a prominent Islamic scholar and former justice of the Pakistani Shariah Appellate Court. In 1999, in addition to his Pakistani judicial role, Sheikh Taqi Usmani got a new day job: Dow Jones, HSBC, and many other top financial institutions hired him to advise them on where to invest hundreds of millions of dollars! And this was no short-term trial run: in March of this year, Dow Jones announced its “celebration” of the program’s tenth anniversary (although Usmani recently had to resign).
Unfortunately, Usmani has a bad habit of issuing radical, troubling fatwas—legal opinions about personal and public behavior based on Islamic law that are deemed to be binding on all Muslims, regardless of where they live. Flying in the face of the oft-expressed notion that Islam is a peaceful religion, Sheikh Taqi Usmani has a different position: he urges “that Muslims living in the West conduct violent Jihad against the infidels at every opportunity.”437
Lest there be any doubt about who those infidels he’s referring to are—he means us. That’s right: Sheikh Taqi Usmani advocates killing as many of us as possible, at every opportunity—until we all surrender. He is a man with a mission: to eradicate every religion except Islam. In his book Islam and Modernism, he proclaims that, in the West, the “killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay Jizyah after they are humbled or overpowered.”438 Jizyah is a tax collected from every non-Muslim adult living in a Muslim land; the tax is meant as a symbol of subjugation to the Islamic state and laws.
So the sheikh’s intent is to kill as many of us as possible; to tax the rest of us; and to subject the living to Muslim rule, regardless of their own wishes.
Why? To ensure the general freedom to preach Islam? No—to show us who’s boss. That he is. That his religion is the only religion. And that no other religions should be tolerated. It’s all very clear to him: “If the purpose of killing was only to acquire permission and freedom of preaching Islam,” he says, he would have called on the world to murder the infidels “until they allow for preaching Islam.” But his designs are more far-reaching: “The obligation of Jizyah and along with it the mention of their subordination is a clear proof that the purpose is to smash their [other religions’] grandeur.”439
His rant continues, chillingly: “At least in my humble knowledge there has not been a single incident in the entire history of Islam where Muslims had shown their willingness to stop Jihad just for one condition that they will be allowed to preach Islam freely. On the contrary, the aim of Muslims as declared by them in the battle of Qadsia was, ‘To take out people from the rule of people [i.e., representative government] and put them under the rule of Allah.’”440
By the “rule of Allah,” Sheikh Taqi Usmani is referring to what is often known as Shariah law, the legal framework based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence that encompasses civil and criminal actions and personal and moral behavior. The sheikh works tirelessly to spread the acceptance of Shariah law wherever possible. And he has been among the leading proponents of extending that rule beyond our churches, synagogues, and mosques to our wallets, bank accounts, and life savings.
In 1987, Sheikh Taqi Usmani was one of the issuers of a fatwa that announced a series of Islamic preconditions for Muslim investment in publicly traded stocks. This was a new concept, and in the intervening years it is one that has taken hold in the United States. And the sheikh, who does not hide his contempt for non-Muslims, has become a leader in what has become known as Shariah-compliant financing.
And, until very recently, he sat on the advisory boards of some of our major financial institutions.
Americans are uniquely vulnerable to paranoia. We have such a wonderful country that we are always worried about the potential that some new conspiracy may be lurking around the corner