It is worth considering these points, because the continuation of the hearings this week had some curious aspects. Let’s start with what was not presented. As I detailed in a column last week, the most important recent development in our understanding of Islamic “radicalization” — the stated focus of the hearings — is a new study by the “Mapping Sharia” project, headed up by David Yerushalmi of the Center for Security Policy and Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar. It shows that 81 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamic literature that endorses jihadist violence and that imams actively recommend these tracts to worshippers in nearly 85 percent of these mosques.

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Read the article at National Review…

Researchers Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi reported in the Summer 2011 issue of Middle East Quarterly about a new survey that found that “51% of mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Sharia-based political order or advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim.”  Another 30% of mosques in the United States “had only texts that were moderately supportive of violence,” while only “19% had no violent texts at all.”

This yet again contradicts the universally held assumption that U.S. mosques are completely benign institutions, in all respects equivalent to churches and synagogues.  As long ago as 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States.  Then he gave testimony before a State Department open forum in January 1999 declaring that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America.

Continue reading at Human Events…

On one level, I approach a new study on violence and Islam in the Middle East Quarterly in much the same way. That is, I’ve lived through 9/11 and the 17,298 Islamic terror attacks since (as tabulated by the website thereligionofpeace.com). I’ve seen pictures of Muslims rampaging around the world over a cartoon. I also understand Islam’s animating role in the terror and subversion designed to extend Islamic law (Shariah) to a point where an Islamic government, or caliphate, rules the world.

But there is something transfixing about the new study, “Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques.” The authors have amassed a solid bank of peer-reviewed data attesting to the presence and promotion of literature advocating violence in the majority of 100 randomly selected American mosques. And yes: that’s majority of “American” mosques. Not Saudi mosques. Not Pakistani. Not Iranian. Not Turkish. Not even British mosques.

American mosques.

There goes that post-9/11 myth — the one that tells us that American Islam is a happily assimilating creed, wholly different from the aggressive Islam transforming Europe. The new data collected by Israeli scholar Mordechai Kedar and attorney David Yerushalmi of the Center for Security Policy (and one of my 18 co-authors on the book “Shariah: The Threat to America”) indicate that most American mosques are sanctioning, if not also promoting, the study of material of similar peril.

For me, the six tables of data boil down to two simple and stunning facts. More than 80 percent of the mosques in the study feature Islamic literature that advocates violence. (The authors divide the “violence-positive material” into two categories: 30 percent “moderate” violence, and 51 percent “severe” violence.) Further, 85 percent of the imams recommend this literature — both lay-written and authoritative Islamic texts (not including the Quran or Sunnah, writings said to be words and deeds of Mohammed). It is a slim 19 percent of the mosques that don’t feature such violent materials, and an even slimmer 15 percent of the imams who don’t recommend it. I guess it is in these small fractions where we might find the real “tiny band of extremists” — perhaps among the followers of the four imams in the 100 mosques who, the authors point out in a footnote, “instructed against the study of violence-positive material.”

The authors follow a line of inquiry into whether signs of adherence to Shariah (Islamic law) within the mosque — for example, sex-segregated prayer, regimented prayer lines, bearded imams — indicate the presence of inflammatory material. Take sex-segregated prayer. They found that 95 percent of the mosques where men and women pray separately contain violent literature. At the same time, however, so do 74 percent of the mosques where men and women pray together. Similarly, 94 percent of the imams presiding over sex-segregated congregations recommend the study of violence-positive material; but so do 80 percent of the imams leading co-ed services. So, yes, Shariah-adherence is a sure-fire indicator, but it’s not the only indicator.

No wonder the authors consider the conclusions to be drawn from their survey as “dismal at best.” But what will those conclusions be? What should they be? I conclude, just for starters, that there is an urgent need to halt Islamic immigration to ensure that the demographic for more such mosques doesn’t grow. But having dug up the hard data on the textual embrace of Islam-inspired violence within organized Islam in America, the authors almost seem content to throw it all away: “This survey suggests that, first and foremost, Muslim community leaders must take a more active role in educating their own faith community about the dangers associated with providing a safe haven for violent literature and its promotion.”

The data may be new, but this is the same old mistake we’ve made since 9/11: outsourcing our response to the ideological threat posed by Islam to “Muslim community leaders” — and usually linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. This isn’t an internal Islamic problem. These alarming data on the promotion of violence within Islam in American mosques are for the wider, still non-Islamic society to address, and before it’s too late.

What is it that radicalizes Muslims, including American Muslims? Is it American foreign policy? Israeli “occupation” of the ancient Jewish territories of Judea and Samaria? Cartoons depicting the warrior-prophet as a warrior? Korans torched by obscure Florida pastors? The life of Osama bin Laden, or, perhaps, his death? Any of a thousand claimed slights, real or imagined, that purportedly provoke young Muslims to “conflagrate” — if we may borrow from the forgiving rationalizations of Faisal Rauf, would-be imam of the would-be Ground Zero mosque?

Here is the unsettling but sedulously avoided truth: What radicalizes Muslims is Islam.

Political correctness requires that we becloud this simple truth with a few caveats that, in most any other context, would be regarded as distractions by sensible people. So it is necessary to say that there is more than one interpretation of Islam. We must further note that the fact that Islam itself is the radicalizing catalyst does not mean that all, or even most, Muslims will become radicals. But here is another disquieting truth: Even the terms “radicalization” and “radical Islam” get things exactly backwards. The reality is that the radicals in Islam are the reformers — the Muslims who embrace Western civilization, its veneration of reason in matters of faith, and the pluralistic space it makes for civil society. What we wishfully call “radicalism” is in fact the Islamic mainstream.

These are the principal takeaways from an important study just competed by Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. As detailed in a just-published Middle East Quarterly essay, “Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques” (available here), the authors’ “Mapping Sharia” project surveyed 100 randomly selected mosques across the United States. Onsite, fully 81 percent of the mosques featured Islamic texts that advocate violence. In nearly 85 percent of the mosques, the leadership (usually an imam or prayer leader) favorably recommended this literature for study by congregants. Moreover, 58 percent of the mosques invited guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.

Kedar and Yerushalmi sought to study two intimately related sets of correlations. The first focused on sharia, the Islamic system of law that is based primarily on the Koran and the Sunnah (i.e., the words, deeds, and traditions of Mohammed). The authors homed in on observable sharia-compliant behaviors. These are not actions unique to terrorist groups but conduct reflective of the broad consensus of sharia jurisprudence that cuts across the Sunni/Shiite divide — for example, women wearing the hijab or niqab (respectively, the head covering or full-length covering of the entire female form), the segregation of men from women during communal prayer, and the enforcement by imams of the requirement that male worshippers form up in tight, straight lines during mosque prayer.

The survey probed whether there was a statistically significant correlation between these sharia behaviors and the availability at the mosque of “violence-positive” literature. Significantly, although violence pervades Muslim scripture, the authors did not include scripture (the Koran and the Sunnah) in this violence-positive category. Instead, they confined it to “normative and instructive tracts,” because “a believer is free to understand scripture literally, figuratively, or merely poetically,” unless it has become an Islamic norm or a legal obligation through incorporation in sharia.

Thus the focus on violent-positive tracts, which are interpretive of scripture. They were ranked in accordance with their promotion of violence as “severe,” “moderate,” or “nonexistent.” The “severe” is easy enough to spot: It includes tracts that affirmatively call for brutality against non-Muslims (and deviant Muslims) by such 20th-century ideologues as Muslim Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb and his fellow polemicist Abul Awa Mawdudi. Similarly straightforward is literature that does not approve of, much less incite, violence. Most disheartening is the “moderate” category. These are tracts written by widely respected sharia authorities that, though predominantly concerned with “the more mundane aspects of religious worship and ritual,” express “positive attitudes toward violence” — implicitly endorsing it even if they have not incited it in the manner of Qutb and Mawdudi.

The authors found that 51 percent of the mosques featured severely violence-positive literature; an additional 30 percent distributed moderately violent tracts; and 19 percent offered nonviolent materials. What’s more, there was a strong correlation between sharia-compliant behavior and the presence of severely violent (as well as moderately violent) tracts. And while the mosques that were not as sharia-compliant (e.g., mosques that did not segregate the sexes during prayer or enforce straight prayer lines) featured less in the way of violent materials, the percentages of even these mosques that had violence-positive literature on site was disturbingly high. (See Table 2 of the MEQ essay.)

The second, related correlation the study examines is between the presence of violence-positive materials at a given mosque and the recommendation of these materials to worshippers by the mosque’s imam — a direct promotion of violent jihadism. To cut to the chase, if these materials are on site, the imam is nearly always found endorsing them. The more observably sharia-adherent the imam, the more certain this conclusion. For example, 93 percent of imams who sported the traditional full beard were found to recommend violence-positive literature. Nonetheless, more than three-quarters of imams who did not manifest similar indicia of sharia-compliance were still found to endorse the pro-violence literature if it was on site.

Perhaps the most jarring finding in the study involved mosque attendance. As the authors observe, “mosques that contained written materials in the severe category were the best attended, followed by those with only moderate-rated materials, trailed in turn by those lacking such texts.” We are not talking small divergence here: Severe-material mosques were found to have a mean attendance of 118 worshippers at services, while no-violence mosques had 15. The moderate-violence mosques came in around the middle, at 60.

In this aspect of the study may lie whatever modest silver lining there is. The Kedar-Yerushalmi survey examines what goes on in the mosques. It does not account for what happens outside the mosques or for how many American Muslims actually attend mosques with any regularity. That is to say, the fact that only 19 percent of mosques actually reflect what Islamic apologists portray as a vibrant, predominant brand of “moderate Islam” does not necessarily mean that only one in five American Muslims is a moderate.

Thousands of Muslims pray privately, as Islam permits. They visit mosques rarely, if at all, and when they go it is more for social or cultural purposes than for instruction. If they are Westernized, pro-American Muslims, they may resist the mosques precisely to avoid the influence of rabble-rousing clerics who have been recruited or trained by Saudi-backed Muslim Brotherhood elements. The study does not account for these Muslims. Their number would edge up the percentage of Muslim moderates, perhaps considerably.

But that is not the Islam Muslims are getting in American mosques. In sum, the study shows: The more sharia-compliant the mosque and its imam, the more virulently anti-Western is apt to be the Islam being preached there. Nor can it be ignored that this promotion of a pro-violence and anti-Western Islam in more than 80 percent of American mosques is of a piece with polling conducted of Muslims living in Islamic countries. As Messrs. Kedar and Yerushalmi remind us, a 2007 survey conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org found that substantial majorities in Morocco, Egypt, and Pakistan — and a majority even in reputedly moderate Indonesia — favored the implementation of sharia law and the insulation of their countries from Western values.

It is time to stop pretending that there is some other cause for this. Many things can prompt a tinderbox to conflagrate, but it has to be tinder in the first place. Islam is the tinder. We can hope that brave Muslim reformers can build on the small but far from invisible havens where a nonviolent, pluralistic Islam has taken root. But to deny an obvious nexus between the mainstream Islam of the mosques, the violent jihadism of the terrorists, and the stealth jihadism of Islamist organizations is to remain willfully blind.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

How’s this for a wake-up call: America’s most cherished civil liberties and the Constitution that enshrines them are actually enabling Muslim Brotherhood operatives and other Islamists who have the declared mission of destroying our freedoms and government “from within…by [our] hands.”  Specifically, our enemies are using our tolerance of religion to create an infrastructure of mosques here that incubate the Islamic holy war called jihad.

If this revelation is not exactly news to those who are serious students of the Brotherhood’s decades-long, stealthy “civilization jihad” in this country (for more, see the best-selling “Team B II Report” published late last year by the Center for Security Policy: Shariah: The Threat to America), it will almost certainly come as a shock to the average American. Yet, the phenomenon of our rights being used to pursue our destruction has become undeniable – particularly now, thanks to an assiduously researched, peer-reviewed study published on June 6th by the highly respected journal, Middle East Quarterly.

Entitled “Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques,” this paper describes an ominous jihadist footprint being put into place across the nation.  It is made up of ostensibly religious institutions, entities that, therefore, enjoy constitutional protection.  But, according to the data examined by this study, most mosques in the United States are actually engaged in – or at least supportive of – a totalitarian, seditious agenda they call shariah.  Its express purpose is undermining and ultimately forcibly replacing the U.S. government and its founding documents.  In their place would be a “caliph,” governing in accordance with shariah’s political-military-legal code.To be sure, some American mosques are not part of the jihadist enterprise.  And most Muslims in the United States, like most adherents of other faiths, are not regular attendees at their places of worship.

Still, according to this study’s two formidable authors – my colleague (and fellow Big Peace contributor), David Yerushalmi, one of the nation’s foremost non-Muslim experts on the totalitarian Islamic doctrine known as shariah, and a highly respected Israeli academic and expert on Islam and Arabic culture, Dr. Mordechai Kedar – on-site investigations of a random but representative sample of American mosques in fourteen states and the District of Columbia produced chilling insights into the threat posed by many such institutions.

For the purpose of their analysis, the authors examined data collected by surveyors who “were asked to observe and record selected behaviors deemed to be shariah-adherent. These behaviors were selected precisely because they constitute observable and measurable practices of an orthodox form of Islam, as opposed to internalized, non-observable articles of faith.”  Such behaviors included, among other readily discernible indicators: “a) women wearing the hijab (head covering) or niqab (full-length shiftcovering the entire female form except for the eyes); b) gender segregation during mosque prayers; and c) enforcement of straight prayer lines.”

For the purpose of their study, the authors evaluated support for jihad by considering the presence in mosque bookstores, libraries and among recommended materials  “literature encouraging worshipers to engage in terrorist activity, to provide financial support to jihadists, and to promote the establishment of a caliphate in the United States.  These materials also explicitly praised actsof terror against the West; praised symbols or role models of violent jihad; promoted the use of force, terror, war, and violence to implement the shariah; emphasized the inferiority of non-Muslim life; promoted hatred and intolerance toward non-Muslims or notional Muslims; and endorsed inflammatory materialswith anti-U.S. view.”

Employing this methodology, Mr. Yerushalmi and Dr. Kedar found that:

• More than 80 percent of U.S. mosques advocate or otherwise promote violence.  “Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all.”

• “In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts.  The leadership at shariah-adherent mosques was morelikely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-shariah-adherent mosques.”

• “[O]f the 51 mosques that contained severe materials, 100 percent were led by imams who recommended that worshipers study texts that promote violence.”

• “Fifty-eight percent (58%) of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad.  The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who wereknown to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.”

[See the website MappingSharia.com for more information on each of the books surveyed, including a breif analysis of each book's importance, excerpts, their availability, and even downloadable PDFs.]

In short, such findings strongly suggest that shariah-adherence is a useful predictor of sympathy for – and, in some cases at least, action on behalf of – jihad, to include both the Islamists’ violent or stealthy forms of warfare aimed at supplanting the U.S. Constitution and government.  Indeed, the study confirms the anecdotal reports by Muslims themselves and earlier, less rigorous empirical studies of Saudi hate-filled literature permeating mosques in the United States.

The UK government has just announced that, pursuant to a update of its counter-terrorism program known as “Prevent,” it now recognizes non-violent forms of Islamist extremism can be every bit as dangerous as the violent kinds.  We need to do the same – especially since the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow shariah-adherents are successfully using not only mosques, but academia, the media, financial institutions, political groups and interfaith “dialogue” to pursue their pre-violent yet seditious, and therefore anti-constitutional and illegal, agenda.

This is not the standard view of a mosque in the United States. Most Americans — not just progressives, but average well-meaning citizens of all political persuasions — assume that a mosque is just like a church or a synagogue. Yes, it has different architecture and decorations, and its congregation uses different scriptures. But surely it must be like other place of worship — a gathering place where the faithful pray, enjoy fellowship with one another, and then depart refreshed, ready to do good deeds in the larger world.

Regular readers of this blog know better, but the average American has imprinted the feel-good multicultural ideal about Muslims and their mosques, and the ten years since 9-11 have not shaken it. Thanks to the journeywork of George W. Bush, reinforced by the appeasement of Barack Hussein Obama, Islam is understood to be a positive, tolerant, peaceful spiritual discipline, and contains only a tiny minority of extremists who behave otherwise — and theirs is not the “true Islam”, anyway.

In order to counteract such deeply-entrenched error, rigorous empirical investigation is necessary. If a researcher is not to be labeled a “bigot” or a “hater”, he must present well-attested facts based on careful research.

Continue reading at Gates of Vienna

The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.

Cited ^[6] appropriately by successful ^[7] opponents of minaret construction in Switzerland ^[6], such rhetoric should now resonate uncomfortably in America with the online release ^[8] Monday June 6, 2011 of alarming survey data from a representative national sample of US mosques.

During August 2007, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released “Radicalization in the West — The Homegrown Threat.” This insightful 90-page report ^[9] evaluated the threat that had become apparent since 9/11/2001, analyzing the roots of recent terror plots in the United States, from Lackawanna in upstate New York to Portland, Ore., to Fort Dix, NJ. Based upon these case-study analyses of individuals arrested for jihadist activity, the authors concluded ^[9] that the “journey” of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadists began in so-called “Salafist” (“fundamentalist” to non-Muslims) mosques characterized by high levels of Sharia—Islamic Law—adherence. The landmark study just published, “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” (Kedar M, Yerushalmi D. The Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2011, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 59-72) sought to expand considerably upon the NYPD’s post-hoc, case study approach ^[9]—systematically gathering objective survey data, with much greater methodological rigor—and address these two a priori questions: I) Is there a robust association between observable measures of religious devotion, coupled to Sharia-adherence in US mosques, and the presence of violence-sanctioning materials at these mosques?; and II) Is there a robust association between the presence of violence-sanctioning materials at a mosque, and the advocacy of jihadism by the mosque’s leadership via recommending the study of these materials, or other manifest behaviors?

Full details of the sampling methodology, extracts of representative jihad ^[10] promoting materials (texts), and specific Sharia-compliant behaviors recorded, are provided in the accompanying appendices, reproduced from the full study (which will be available here ^[8] 6/6/11). In brief, survey data were collected from a nationally representative, random statistical sample of 100 US mosques, covering 14 states, and the District of Columbia. This concise overview of the basic data collection procedures—including a self-critical, honest caveat by the authors about “completeness” of the available information on US mosque locations—is reproduced verbatim from the report (p. 68):

A surveyor visited a subject mosque in order: (a) to observe and record 12 Sharia-adherent behaviors of the worshipers and the imam (or lay leader); (b) to observe whether the mosque contained the selected materials rated as moderate and severe; (c) to observe whether the mosque contained materials promoting, praising, or supporting violence or violent jihad; and (d) to observe whether the mosque contained materials indicating the mosque had invited guest speakers known to have promoted violent jihad. Thus, the survey only examined the presence of Sharia-adherent behaviors, the presence of violence positive materials in mosques, whether an imam would promote the study of violence-positive materials, and whether a mosque was used as a forum to promote violent jihad. Since there is no central body to which all mosques belong, it was difficult to ascertain that the sampling universe list was complete. This may have introduced bias into the sampling although the authors find no evidence of any systemic distortions.

The study’s results provide clear—and ominous—affirmative answers to the a priori questions posed. Sharia-adherence was strongly associated with the presence of jihad-violence sanctioning materials, and the presence of jihad-violence sanctioning materials was in turn robustly associated with advocacy of jihadism by mosque imams—religious leaders. This key summary finding was highlighted by the authors:

…51 percent of mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari‘a-based political order or advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim; 30 percent had only texts that were moderately supportive of violence like the Tafsir Ibn Kathir and Fiqh as-Sunna; 19 percent had no violent texts at all.

Thus 81% of this statistical sample representative of US mosques were deemed as moderately (30%) to highly (51%) supportive of promulgating jihad violence to impose Shari’a.

Additional profoundly troubling findings emerge when the data are explored in depth beyond these summary observations. For example, only 4.7% of Muslim worshippers attended mosques where jihadist materials were not provided because Sharia-compliant mosques promoting jihad were the most heavily attended. The authors also describe these specific details indicating that the preponderance of US mosques sanction jihad terrorism and its ultimate goal of a Caliphate ^[10] (i.e., the transnational imposition of strict Islamic law in current Muslim nations, and ultimately global imposition of Islamic Law, including in the US), if one includes advocacy of financial support for this sacralized violence (from pp. 67-69).

The survey found a strong correlation between the presence of severe violence-promoting literature and mosques featuring written, audio, and video materials that actually promoted such acts. By promotion of jihad, the study included literature encouraging worshipers to engage in terrorist activity, to provide financial support to jihadists, and to promote the establishment of a caliphate in the United States. These materials also explicitly praised acts of terror against the West; praised symbols or role models of violent jihad; promoted the use of force, terror, war, and violence to implement the Sharia; emphasized the inferiority of non-Muslim life; promoted hatred and intolerance toward non-Muslims or notional Muslims; and endorsed inflammatory materials with anti-U.S. views… [O]f the 51 mosques that contained severe materials, 100 percent were led by imams who recommended that worshipers study texts that promote violence.

[M]osques containing violence positive materials were substantially more likely to include materials promoting financial support of terror than mosques that did not contain such texts. A disturbing 98 percent of mosques with severe texts included materials promoting financial support of terror. Those with only moderate rated materials on site were not markedly different, with 97 percent providing such materials.

These results were comparable when using other indicators of jihad promotion. Thus, 98 percent of mosques that contained severe-rated literature included materials promoting establishing an Islamic caliphate in the United States as did 97 percent of mosques containing only moderate rated materials.

These are the hard data that make plain why the “see no Sharia ^[11] in America” mindslaughter ^[12] redolent across the political spectrum amongst our policymaking, academic, and journalistic elites, is so dangerously delusive.

Indeed such disturbing survey results from a nationally representative sample of US mosques demonstrate Islam’s doctrinal and behavioral consistency across nearly 14 centuries, past as prologue to the present. Over 17,000 ^[13] jihad terror attacks have been committed by Muslims worldwide since the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism committed against the United States itself on September 11, 2001. These data should remind us that there is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad ^[10] despite contemporary apologetics. Jahada, the root of the word jihad, appears 40 times in the Koran. With 4 exceptions, all the other 36 usages in the Koran as understood by both the greatest jurists and scholars of classical Islam (including Abu Yusuf, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, and Al Ghazali), and ordinary Muslims—meant and mean, “he fought, warred or waged war against unbelievers and the like.”

The Muslim prophet Muhammad waged a series of proto-jihad campaigns ^[10] to subdue the Jews, Christians and pagans of Arabia. Numerous modern day pronouncements by leading Muslim theologians (see Yusuf Al-Qaradawi’s “The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model,” 2001) confirm that Muhammad remains the major inspiration for jihadism today. Jihad has been pursued continuously since the 7^th century advent of Islam, through the present, because it was institutionalized by seminal early Muslim theologians based on their interpretation of Koranic verses, and long chapters in the “hadith,” or acts and sayings of Muhammad. Within a century of Muhammad’s death, violent jihad conquests—achieved by religiously sanctioned massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation—Islamized a vast swath of territory, extending from modern Pakistan to Portugal. The permanent goal of jihad is to bring humanity, en bloc, under the jurisdiction of Sharia—a totalitarian system of religious governance, particularly oppressive to all non-Muslims, and women.

American Presidents John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt each possessed a remarkably clear, uncompromised understanding of the permanent Islamic institution of jihad war—both its doctrinal basis, and history. Regarding jihad, Adams states in an 1829-30 essay series ^[14],

…he [Muhammad] declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind…The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.

Roosevelt offered this historical perspective ^[15] in 1916 on the consequences for Western civilization of succeeding, or failing to repel jihad conquerors:

The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization…[including] those of Charles Martel in the 8th century [over Arab jihadists] and those of John  Sobieski in the 17th century [over Ottoman Turkish jihadists]. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier [Martel] and the Polish king [Sobieski], the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any ‘social values’ whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence [is]…concerned.”

Also writing in 1916, C. Snouck Hurgronje ^[10], the great Dutch Orientalist, underscored how the jihad doctrine of world conquest, and the re-creation of a supranational Islamic Caliphate remained a potent force among the Muslim masses:

…it would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated…the canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam’s greatness. The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam-the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] by submission.

Hurgronje further noted that although the Muslim rank and file might acknowledge the improbability of that goal “at present” (circa 1916), they were,

…comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms…

Thus even at the nadir of Islam’s political power, during the World War I era final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hurgronje observed how

…the common people are willingly taught by the canonists and feed their hope of better days upon the innumerable legends of the olden time and the equally innumerable apocalyptic prophecies about the future. The political blows that fall upon Islam make less impression…than the senseless stories about the power of the Sultan of Stambul [Istanbul], that would instantly be revealed if he were not surrounded by treacherous servants, and the fantastic tidings of the miracles that Allah works in the Holy Cities of Arabia which are inaccessible to the unfaithful. The conception of the Khalifate [Caliphate] still exercises a fascinating influence, regarded in the light of a central point of union against the unfaithful (i.e., non-Muslims).

Nearly a century later, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data released April 24, 2007 in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey ^[16] of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007-1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians-reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed-almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”—desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”), including 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Sharia law in every Islamic country.”

Such Caliphate dreams—to be achieved through jihad conquests—have always been nurtured in mosques. The authoritative Brill Encyclopedia of Islam entry on “masdjid,” or mosque, highlights the mosque’s primary socio-political functions—including holding war councils—since the advent of the first Muslim polity under Islam’s prophet-warrior and ruler, Muhammad, in Medina:

The mosque was the place where believers assembled for prayer around the Prophet, where he delivered his addresses, which contained not only appeals for obedience to God but regulations affecting the social life of the community; from here he controlled the religious and political community of Islam…From the Medina mosque was developed the general type of mosque.

It was inherent in the character of Islam, that religion and politics could not be separated. The same individual was ruler and chief administrator in the two fields, and the same building, the mosque, was the center of gravity for both politics and religion. This relationship found expression in the fact that the mosque was placed in the center of the camp, while the ruler’s abode was built immediately adjacent to it, as in Medina.

[W]ar was inseparably associated with early Islam and the mosque was public meeting place of ruler and people…councils of war were held in the mosque.

Richard Mitchell’s seminal analysis ^[17] of the contemporary Muslim Brotherhood—the prototype modern fundamentalist organization—state’s simply, that from its advent,

Throughout the history of the [Muslim Brotherhood] movement the mosque continued to be its principal recruiting office.

This doctrinal and historical context explains why the “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” study results—while immediate, justifiable cause for alarm—are unsurprising, even predictable. Moreover the current findings were augured by a qualitative assessment of US mosques by Sheikh Hisham Kabbani described in 1999, and the localized Detroit area survey of mosques conducted in 2003.

During a 1999 State Department presentation entitled ^[18] “Islamic Extremism: A Viable Threat to U.S. National Security” Sufi Sheikh Kabbani, who heads The Islamic Supreme Council of America, based upon personal visits to mosques across the US, asserted that 80% were run by “militant,” i.e. fundamentalist clerics.  “The Detroit Mosque Study: Muslim Views on Policy and Religion,” was conducted by Ihsan Bagby an Associate Professor  of Islamic Studies at thye University of Kentucky and a fellow at  the Institute for Social Policy Understanding—a Muslim organization. Data were gathered during the summer of 2003 and published online in 2004. These portentous findings were described on page 37 of the report ^[19]:

Mosque participants were asked, whether they agree or disagree with the statement, “Shari’ah should be the law of the land in Muslim countries?”

Apply Islamic Law in Muslim Lands
Strongly Agree — 59%
Somewhat Agree — 22%

(i.e., collectively = 81%)

Somewhat Disagree — 8%
Strongly Disagree — 3%
Don’t Know — 8%

Such data supposedly reflected the Detroit area Muslims views of “Islamic countries,” only. But given the intrinsic, universally supremacist nature of Islam and the  global umma (i.e., as stated in Koran 3:110 ^[20], and the Orwellian-named Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam ^[21], “Ye are the best community that hath been raised up for mankind. Ye enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency; and ye believe in Allah”), once an area  has a Muslim majority it is assumed by Muslims that Islamic Law should prevail—hence the “enclave” phenomenon, even here in the United States.

Publication of the “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” study provides irrefragable evidence that the overwhelming majority of American mosques—consistent with mainstream Islamic doctrine and practice since the founding of the Muslim creed—are inculcating jihadism with the goal of implementing Sharia here in America.

Finally, Whittaker Chambers’ autobiographical opus “Witness,” which chronicles his apostasy from Communism, offers these searing insights that elucidate how American Muslims could rationalize such seditious behaviors—consistent with Islamic doctrine—and why this phenomenon remains largely incomprehensible to American non-Muslims, despite its existential threat to them.

What went on in the minds of those Americans…that made it possible to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as problem of conscience, but a problem of operations…

The failure to understand that fact is part of the total failure of the West to grasp the nature of its enemy, what he wants, what he means to do and how he will go about doing it. It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and hence their conflict is irrepressible.

Link ^[22] to Jihadist Texts Distributed in Mosques Surveyed

Appendices on Methods ^[23]

The survey, on which the report was based, found that 51% of US mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or advocated violent jihad outright; another 30% had texts that were moderately supportive of violence. 19% had no violent texts at all.

The report– culled from years of research, examining scores of mosques in the United States–is a rare opportunity for academics, policymakers, and the American public to understand the phenomenon known as jihadist terrorism and gauge the depth of support for it in the nation’s varied Muslim communities.

The report is the product of the multi-year Mapping Shari’a Project. This website, Mappingsharia.com, is a guide for further research and, specifically, an elaboration of the Islamic texts used to gauge support for violent jihad in American mosques.

The authors of the report note that, prior to this survey, “few empirical studies that attempt to measure the relationship between specific variables and support for terrorism.” Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques measures that relationship based on quantifiable metrics: both behavioral and political aspects of worship and the types of text available or recommended.

To read the report in full, go to Middle East Quarterly.