The Rapists of Islamic State

Sahih Muslim 3371—We went out with Allah’s Messenger on the expedition to the Bi’l-Mustaliq and took captive some excellent Arab women; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, (but at the same time) we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing azl (withdrawing the male sexual organ before emission of semen to avoid conception). But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah’s Messenger is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah’s Messenger, and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.
Sahih al-Bukhari 4138—We went out with Allah’s Apostle for the invasion of Bun Al-Mustaliq and we received captives from among the Arab captives and we desired women and celibacy became hard on us and we loved to do coitus interruptus [same as "azl" above]. So when we intended to do coitus interruptus, we said: "How can we do coitus interruptus before asking Allah’s Apostle who is present among us? We asked (him) about it and he said: "It is better for you not to do so, for if any soul till the Day of Resurrection is predestined to exist, it will exist."
Sahih Muslim 3384—Jabir bin Abdullah reported that a person asked Allah’s Apostle saying: I have a slave-girl and I practice azl with her, whereupon Allah’s Messenger said: This cannot prevent that which Allah has decreed. The person then came (after some time) and said: Messenger of Allah, the slave-girl about whom I talked to you has conceived, whereupon Allah’s Messenger said: I am the servant of Allah and His Messenger.

SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty

The purity of Islam as it was revealed by the Prophet Mohammad and the example he set through bloody conquest and slavery, and rape of girls and women whom Muslims were informed were their personal possessions,is being repeated to the present day among jihadists. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant prides itself on the purity of its brand of Islam. Daesh is notorious for its brutality and its sanctimony, proud of its exploits reflecting historical Islamist advances in conquering non-Muslim tribes, and making off with their women and their children after slaughtering the men.

The plight of the Yazidis of Iraq in particular has demonstrated the seriousness with which Daesh takes its entitlements as brutal oppressors and Hadith-inspired slave-masters and rapists. Girls and women who have escaped their captivity tell their personal harrowing stories of sex-slavery, their victimization by men who view captured women and girls as their rewards for zeal in persecuting and terrorizing despised non-Muslim ethnic minorities.

The ISIL terrorists acquire their slaves through slave markets where captured, helpless women and children are displayed and prices of acquisition placed on them, giving opportunities to ISIL fighters to become owners of female bodies, deliberately oblivious of the fact that with the body is an individual, a human being with a mind and emotions in whom their plight has instilled well-earned trepidation and fear for what the future holds.

In Islamic law, popularly cited by Islamic State, a man has the obligation to make certain the woman he has acquired as a slave is not pregnant; only then may he have intercourse with her. This is the manner in which Islamic State has interpreted sexual slavery based on the Prophet Mohammad's own practice. Hundreds of the thousands of captured and enslaved Yazidi women managed to escape their imprisonment as slaves and they have described the agony they were forced to undergo.

Doctors examining some of the escapees have observed that among the 700 rape victims of the Yazidi ethnic group seeking treatment at a United Nations-linked clinic, five percent became pregnant during the period of their slavery. Dr. Nagham Nawzat, the gynecologist involved in the examinations noted that the normal fertility rate for a young woman falls between 20 and 25 percent.

One captured teenage girl who later escaped had been sold no fewer than seven times among the Daesh jihadis. Anyone interested in acquiring her as a sex trophy asked first whether she was pregnant, whereupon her current owner would proffer as proof, a box of birth control pills. The third man who bought her asked her the date of her last menstrual cycle, ordered her to take a morning-after pill, administered a syringe of Depo-Provera, then raped her.

Thousands of women and girls of the Yazidi sect remain captives of this soul-destroying group of psychopathic religious fanatics, since their abduction from their ancestral homeland near Mount Sinjar in 2014. While hundreds have since managed their escape, their futures remain uncertain, living among their communities in tents, as refugees. One 18-year old, initially slave to the ISIL governor of a city in northern Iraq, described her experience: "Each month he made me get a shot. On top of that he also gave me birth control pills. 'We don't want you to get pregnant'", she was told.

When she was sold again, to a fighter in another Syrian city, the man's mother took her to the hospital. This woman informed her son with huge enthusiasm that the Yazidi girl was not pregnant, in this way validating his right to rape her. Even sex with a child is permitted, according to a pamphlet published by Daesh, asserting that it is 'legal' for a man to rape a woman he enslaves, under any circumstances.

SHADI, 18. From Kojo, Sinjar. Captured August 15, 2014. Held for five months 

Obama: We're No Better than Islamic State

by Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPage Magazine
February 6, 2015

^{Originally published under the title, "Obama: Christianity No Different Than the Islamic State."}

President Obama, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5

As the world reacts with shock and horror at the increasingly savage deeds of the Islamic State (IS)—most recently the immolation of a captive—U.S. President Obama's response has been one of nonjudgmental relativism.
Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Obama counseled Americans to get off their "high horse" and remember that Christians have been equally guilty of such atrocities:

Unless we get on our high horse and think this [beheadings, sex-slavery, crucifixion, roasting humans] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

There is so much to be said here. First, the obvious: the wide gulf between violence and hate "justified in the name of Christ" and violence and hate "justified in the name of Muhammad" is that Christ never justified it, while Muhammad continuously did.

This is not just a theoretic point; it is the very reason that Muslims are still committing savage atrocities. Every evil act IS commits—whether beheading, crucifying, raping, enslaving, or immolating humans—has precedents in the deeds of Muhammad, that most "perfect" and "moral" man, per Koran 33:21 and 68:4 (see "The Islamic State and Islam" for parallels).

The wide gulf between violence "justified in the name of Christ" and violence "justified in the name of Muhammad" is that Christ never justified it, while Muhammad continuously did.

Does Obama know something about Christ—who eschewed violence and told people to love and forgive their enemies—that we don't? Perhaps he's clinging to that solitary verse that academics like Philip Jenkins habitually highlight, that Christ—who "spoke to the multitudes in parables and without a parable spoke not" once said, "I come not to bring peace but a sword." (Matt. 10:34, 13:34).

Jesus was not commanding violence against non-Christians but rather predicting that Christians will be persecuted, including by family members (as, for example, when a Muslim family slaughters their child for "apostatizing" to Christianity as happens frequently).

Conversely, in its fatwa justifying the burning of the Jordanian captive, the Islamic State cites Muhammad putting out the eyes of some with "heated irons" (he also cut their hands and feet off). The fatwa also cites Khalid bin al-Walid—the heroic "Sword of Allah"—who burned apostates to death, including one man whose head he set on fire to cook his dinner on.

Nor is the Islamic State alone in burning people. Recently a "mob accused of burning alive a Christian couple in an industrial kiln in Pakistan allegedly wrapped a pregnant mother in cotton so she would catch fire more easily."

As for the Islamic "authorities," Al Azhar—the Islamic world's oldest and most prestigious university which cohosted Obama's 2009 "New Beginning" speech—still assigns books that justify every barbarity IS commits, including burning people alive. Moreover, Al Azhar—a religious institution concerned with what is and is not Islamic—has called for the cutting off of the hands and feet of IS members, thereby legitimizing such acts according to Islamic law.

Pope Urban II ordered the first crusade in response to the same kinds of atrocities being committed by the Islamic State today.

On the other hand, does Obama know of some secret document in the halls of the Vatican that calls for amputating, beheading or immolating enemies of Christ to support his religious relativism?

As for the much maligned Crusades, Obama naturally follows the mainstream academic narrative that anachronistically portrays the crusaders as greedy, white, Christian imperialists who decided to conquer peace-loving Muslims in the Middle East.

Again, familiarity with the true sources and causes behind the Crusades shows that they were a response to the very same atrocities being committed by the Islamic State today.

Consider the words of Pope Urban II, spoken almost a millennium ago, and note how well the portions in italics perfectly mirror IS behavior:

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians [i.e., Muslim Turks] … has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country [as slaves], and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion …. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent…. On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily activity, and strength…

If the crusaders left their own lands and families to come to the aid of persecuted Christians and to liberate Jerusalem, here is Obama portraying them as no better than the Islamic State—which isn't surprising considering that, far from helping persecuted Christians, Obama's policies have significantly worsened their plight.

The true lesson of the Crusades is that Islamic violence has been remarkably consistent, down to its very patterns of persecution. And, according to primary historical texts—not modern day fantasies peddled by the likes of Karen Armstrong—Muslim persecution of Christians was indeed a primary impetus for the Crusades.

As for the Inquisition, this too took place in the context of Christendom's struggle with Islam. (Isn't it curious that the European nation most associated with the Inquisition, Spain, was also the one ruled longest by, and heavily populated with, Muslims?) After the Christian reconquest of Spain, Muslims, seen as untrustworthy, were ordered either to convert to Christianity or go back to Africa whence they came. Countless Muslims feigned conversion by practicing taqiyya and living as moles, always trying to subvert Spain back to Islam. Hence the extreme measures of the Inquisition—which, either way, find no support in the teachings of Christ.

Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, called for the murder of his enemies, incited his followers to conquer and plunder non-believers, and kept sex slaves.

Conversely, after one of his jihads, Muhammad had a man tortured to death with fire in order to reveal his tribe's hidden treasure and "married" the same man's wife hours later. Unsurprisingly, the woman, Safiya, later confessed that "Of all men, I hated the prophet the most—for he killed my husband, my brother, and my father," before "marrying" her.

In short, Obama's claim that there will always be people willing to "hijack religion for their own murderous ends" is patently false when applied to the Islamic State and like organizations and individuals.

Muhammad himself called for the murder of his enemies; he permitted Muslims to feign friendship to his enemies in order to assassinate them; he incited his followers to conquer and plunder non-believers, promising them a sexual paradise if they were martyred; he kept sex slaves and practiced pedophilia with his "child-bride," Aisha.

He, the prophet of Islam, did everything the Islamic State is doing.

If Muslims are supposed to follow the sunna, or example, of Muhammad, and if Muhammad engaged in and justified every barbarity being committed by the Islamic State and other Muslims—how, exactly, are they "hijacking" Islam?

Such is the simple logic Obama fails to grasp. Or else he does grasp it—but hopes most Americans don't.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).

Related Topics:  Anti-Christianism, History, Islam, US policy  |  Raymond Ibrahim