Læs Lars Hedegaards tale ved Trykkefrihedsselskabet konference 8. maj.Islamic expansionism
It is impossible to imagine that Islam could maintain its expansionist momentum without the subjugation of women.
If you consider the conditions of women under Islam – both as they are formally expressed in sharia law and as they are practiced in daily life – it becomes clear that these "peculiar institutions" and cultural traits are part and parcel of Islamic expansionism and imperialism.
In fact, Islam's commandment to all Muslims that they participate in jihad until Allah's religion reigns supreme everywhere in the world would be impossible to fulfil if Muslim women were to obtain the same degree of freedom that Western women enjoy.
Let me just mention a few of the examples of women's subjugation that I have in mind. I will not say much about them because I'm sure that you are well aware of such conditions.
Here I am talking about the canonical legal state of affairs as it is expressed in Sunni-Islamic sharia law.
I am well aware that the actual treatment of women will vary from place to place and from woman to woman.
So I am talking about ideal Islam as expressed in The Reliance of the Traveller – an authoritative law book that has been granted imprimatur by the al-Azhar University in Cairo.
As you know, al-Azhar is considered the most august institution in Sunni-Islam, which comprises 90 pct. of all Muslims.
For reasons of brevity I leave out Shia-Islam. Suffice it to mention that there are no grounds to think that Shia-Islam's treatment of women is any better.
The subjugation of women
The most decisive features of women's legal status under Islam is the fact that women have no control over their own lives.
They are expected to stay in their houses and may only leave when it is absolutely necessary, and if they do, they must bring their prison with them in the shape of their hijab.
They are also required to obtain permission from their legal guardian before they venture outside.
They are forbidden from making contact with men outside their immediate family.
They cannot choose their own husband.
Their offspring belongs to their father's family or clan. If a Muslim man divorces his wife – which he may do whenever he wishes – she loses her children.
If a husband divorces her, she must wait for a certain period before remarrying. This is in order to determine who is the father of the child she may be carrying.
If she turns out to be pregnant with the child of her former husband, she will be forced to hand over her baby after the nursing period is over.
All of this is consistent with a warlike society bent on conquest. We may even say that this treatment of women is a precondition of successful Islamic jihad.
According to Islam, women have no value as human beings but only as vehicles for procreation – and this procreation is the necessary precondition for Islam's ability to wage war.
It is easy to understand why: A tribe that cannot match the demographic growth of other tribes is doomed to lose. The same applies to a tribe that cannot defend its ownership of the women.
Every woman that defects to enemy tribes or is conquered by them represents a loss of future power because her male descendants can no longer be counted on in the constant battle for power and wealth.
The genius of Muhammed
The genius of Muhammed – or whoever created Islam – was to substitute the old tribes with an amalgamation of tribes, which came to form the umma – that is the nation of Islam, which must be seen as a gigantic tribe.
Muhammed didn't quite succeed. So today we are facing the umma – the nation of Islam – and individual tribes or clans within the umma.
They are still fighting their old wars against each other but that has not prevented the umma from conducting jihad against all surrounding cultures.
It is important to note that this umma basically operates according to ancient tribal traditions as far as their women are concerned.
The same may be said of Islam's treatment of non-Muslim women. Islam's slave-taking, rape, abductions and forced conversions that have been going on for 1400 years simply continue the old tribal way of warfare.
How Islam wins
Now, if one takes a long-term view of Islamic world conquest, it becomes clear that the decisive instrument of conquest has not been war in out Western sense of the word, but two other features:
1) Demographic expansion of the Muslim population – which has of course been aided by slave-taking and forced conversion.
2) The emulation by non-Muslim men of Muslim customs – especially as regards the treatment of women.
Clearly, we cannot expect non-Muslim men to simply watch how Muslim men are allowed to treat their women. At some point non-Muslim men will demand the same rights as Muslim men enjoy.
Mr. Jensen from Varde will at some point ask why Muslim men are allowed four wives and the right to beat and control them plus have sex with any non-Muslim woman they fancy if Mr. Jensen does not enjoy equal rights with the men of the umma.
Islam's treatment of women is not only the real core of the ideology but also the main component of Islam's expansionist urge.
First of all, the possibility of capturing an unlimited number of women in addition to your four wives encourages men of primitive culture to join the jihad.
Secondly, due to men's license to have more than one wife at a time, there will always be a deficit of women, which will act as a spur for those unfortunate men who have not been able acquire wives because all the good women are taken. So they have to make incursions into the territories of the infidels.
For the reasons just mentioned, the strategic key to our defence against Islamic conquest is the liberation and emancipation of Muslim women.
Before that happens, there is no reason to believe that there is any democratic potential in the current turmoil in the Arab world.
Our Moslem Sisters
When I was preparing this presentation, I came a cross a book that was published in 1907. The title is "Our Moslem Sisters" and the book contains a great number of witness reports by female Christian missionaries to Muslim societies all over the world.
The introduction quotes the learned Muslim jurist Kasim Amin from Cairo. Here is what he wrote a hundred years ago:
"Man is the absolute master and woman the slave. She is the object of his sensual pleasures, a toy, as it were, with which he plays wherever and however he pleases. Knowledge is his, ignorance is hers. ... His is to command, hers is to blindly obey. His is everything that is, and she is an insignificant part of that everything.
Ask those that are married if they are loved by their wives, and they will answer in the affirmative. The truth, however, is the reverse.
I have personally investigated the conditions of a number of families that are supposed to be living in harmony, peace and love, and I have not found one husband who truly loved his wife, or one wife who evinced a sincere affection for her husband."
This Muslim jurist goes on to say that wives are either ignorant or simply allow themselves to be used as ordinary chattel without uttering a word of protest.
That was what a leading Islamic scholar observed one hundred years ago. Have things changed in the meantime? I don't think so. At least we can say for certain that Islam with its sharia law hasn't changed one bit.
And let me quote from the book's first chapter:
"Mohammedan law, custom and the example of their founder place women on a level with beats of burden and no nation rises above the level of its women."
I seem to recall that there was a man who said something similar not so long ago and was convicted for it in a Danish court of law.
Why do Danish women love Islam?
What amazes me even more is the near total silence of Danish women who are in for a rude awakening when they find out what fate Islam has in store for them and their daughters for generation after generation after generation.
It does not surprise me that our so-called experts from universities and research institutions think that Islam is wonderful and in fact the religion of the future.
Our universities have long ago turned into repositories of stupidity and as propaganda centres for various totalitarian ideologies and they are absolute right to think that Islam is the very best in that department.
But why should women actively work for the introduction of the very same conditions under which Muslim women live all over the world?
Why do they on election day overwhelmingly vote for parties that want to increase the influx of Muslims into our country and who in the past have proved willing to grant the imams and other religious strongmen any concession they have demanded?
That is the true mystery of our time – and one for which I have no good answer.
