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https://pointdebasculecanada.ca/images/data/pdf/cair-can_2007.pdf
From 2001 to 2013, Jamal Badawi has been a CAIR-CAN director. When the organization changed its name to the National Council of Canadian Muslims, Badawi’s name disappeared from its list of administrators. No formal notice seems to have been published to announce his departure.
In April 2012, then CSIS director, Richard Fadden, stated that the main threat to Canada’s safety comes from Sunni Islamist extremism. Mr. Fadden was referring to the terrorist threat. Jamal Badawi’s incitement to Muslim judges to disregard their code of ethics is a reminder that the Islamist threat is not limited to terrorism but includes non-violent activities of infiltration carried out notably within government agencies.
Badawi’s incitement to favor sharia over Canadian laws is also aimed at Muslim civil servants who are authorized to enforce legal provisions (police officers, Crown prosecutors, immigration officers, income tax employees, school administrators, human rights Commissions members, etc.)
PART 1– Jamal Badawi: “He [A Muslim] can use his judicial discretion to achieve the greatest amount of justice as compared to a non-Muslim or a person who does not believe in Shariah.”
PART 2 – A Muslim Brotherhood’s internal document identifying Jamal Badawi as one of its leaders advocates “destroying the Western civilization from within”
PART 3 – The alarm bell should ring at CSIS and elsewhere when the main Sunni Muslim leader in the country quotes Ibn Taymiyya to determine how Muslims should behave in Canada
PART 4 – Jean-François Revel about the vulnerability of Western democracies against an internal enemy
PART 1– Jamal Badawi: “He [A Muslim] can use his judicial discretion to achieve the greatest amount of justice as compared to a non-Muslim or a person who does not believe in Shariah.”
Jamal Badawi is the main Sunni Muslim leader in Canada if we consider the number of organizations that he currently leads, has led and influences in the country, as well as the positions that he occupies in major international Muslim organizations. Badawi and the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi are members of the European Council for Fatwa and Research based in Dublin (Ireland), an organization that strives to impose a parallel legal framework to Muslims living in Europe.
During an interview whose date is not specified but that was first archived by Web Archive in 2002, Badawi addresses the political involvement of Muslims living in North America (Muslim participation in North American politics). In this interview, Badawi encourages Muslims to take part in the various facets of political life, including the administration of justice, although many laws currently enforced are opposed to sharia, he remarks.
Badawi even encourages Muslims to become judges in the non-Muslim societies where they live. He quotes Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) in order to justify his position. Although Ibn Taymiyya is recognized as an ideologue of armed jihad, he nevertheless took into consideration that, in certain circumstances, violent methods are not always the most effective to further the implementation of sharia in a non-Muslim environment. Like the Islamists today, in his time Ibn Taymiyya was able to consider the situation on the ground and the weaknesses of his own side in given circumstances. This is what led him to advocate that Muslims should accept to become judges in non-Muslims societies in order to limit the scope of non-Islamic laws.
Badawi states that a judge who does not believe in sharia and fully applies non-Islamic laws “bring[s] greater harm to people” than a Muslim judge who uses his own judicial discretion and does not apply provisions of current laws that are opposed to sharia. Badawi’s call constitutes nothing less than an incitement to Muslim judges currently on the bench in North America to disobey their code of ethics. Not applying provisions of laws that are incompatible with sharia is only the first step to applying sharia rules themselves, of course.
In his interview, Jamal Badawi also alludes to the leeway that a high-ranked civil servant had in pre-Islamic Egypt. The implication is clear: Jamal Badawi encourages not only Muslim judges but also Muslim civil servants operating in governments not ruled by sharia to take advantage of their position for not applying provisions of laws that are opposed to sharia. Police officers, Crown prosecutors, immigration officers, income tax employees, school administrators, human rights Commissions members, and others come to mind.
In recent years, Tarek Fatah and security expert David Harris reported three cases of unacceptable behaviour by Muslim police officers towards anti-Islamist Muslims. In a National Post article entitled Some death threats don’t count, Tarek Fatah reported that after he and Tahir Gora, another anti-sharia Muslim, complained about death threats they were getting from Islamist websites, they were interrogated by Muslim investigators who showed little interest despite the mountain of evidence.
Tarek Fatah concluded that “The Toronto police, in their wish to promote an image of diversity and outreach, have dedicated themselves to serving and protecting the radical Islamist elements within our city.”
In a chapter of a book dedicated to the Islamist threat (pp. 219-220), David Harris reports the case of Homa Arjomand. This anti-Khomeini activist living in Canada is originally from Iran. She was once confronted by an Iranian-born Ontario police officer who told her in Farsi that she was not allowed to demonstrate against the Iranian regime. Although, she asked him to speak English so that the other people accompanying her could eventually testify, he refused. Harris adds that Homa Arjomand “is concerned about the security implications of this and about the extent to which Islamists may have infiltrated Canadian police and security agencies that limit their screening of police recruits largely to checking criminal records.”
While this article is being published, Jamal Badawi’s interview by Samana Siddiqui is still available on its original website SoundVision.com. It is also archived on Web Archive and Point de Bascule.
According to her LinkedIN profile, the interviewer Samana Siddiqui graduated in journalism from Concordia University (Montreal) in 1996. In 1999, a woman with the same name was listed in the Quebec Registry of Enterprises (File 3346439360) as an administrator of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Montreal). CAIR-Montreal was registered in January 1997, struck off the Registry in May 1999, replaced by CAIR-Ottawa, and by CAIR-CAN in 2000. Samana Siddiqui still works for the Islamist organization Sound Vision but does it now from Chicago.
Here is the portion of the interview in which Jamal Badawi answers a question about the opportuneness for Muslims to take part in the political process in non-Muslim countries.
Samana Siddiqui’s question to Jamal Badawi
“So would you say there are some rules or some boundaries perhaps in Islamic jurisprudence which could help us find an answer to whether or not Muslims should participate in the political process in our context of a non-Muslim society?”
“Particularly, I mean those Muslims who object to participating, and scholars who object often argue that number one, not only is it a non-Islamic state but this non-Islamic state often makes policies and perpetrates policies against Muslims in other parts of the world. I think the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, in the case of the United States, is a very good example.”
“How can we reconcile, for example participating in the political process of a state which is enforcing a deadly embargo on fellow Muslims?”
Jamal Badawi’s answer
[…] “[T]here is no denial on the basis of the Quran and Sunnah that one has to weigh the harms or benefits just like when the Quran speaks about drinking or intoxication. Wa ith ma huma akbaru min naf ayma. There is benefit, there is harm, but the harm is greater than the benefit.”
“So the idea of weighing harms and benefits of any particular decision is a very legitimate rule of Shariah. To give a little bit more detail on that: what happened when one thing has to take place, in other words, you’re given two choices. You have no third choice. One of them would bring more harm. The other would be harmful but the harm would be less.”
“Obviously, the sensible rules of Shariah here is to accept lesser harm to end a greater harm.”
[…] “One of the great scholars of Islam, actually many give him the title of Shaikh ul Islam Ibn Taymiyya […], while some people might consider him to be conservative on some issues, in fact he has been so open-minded to the point that he gave a verdict when he was asked.”
“He said suppose the enemies of Islam invade Muslim lands and rule according to their own law. In other words, they frustrate the application of Shariah, and they’re ruling according to their own secular non-Islamic or maybe anti-Islamic type of laws. And then they go to a Muslim to serve as a judge. Should he accept the position or not? I would not tell you how Ibn Taymiyya answered that question, but I can tell you what some people today might say. What do you think they would say?”
“They would say how come? If he accepts, he would be a Kaffir. He would be outside of Islam. Why? Because he accepts to be the implementor, as a judge, of a law other than the law of Allah, knowingly. He should refuse.”
“But do you know what Ibn Taymiyya said? He said that he should accept. Do you know the reason he gave?”
“He said, all right, under the circumstances, the presence of a Muslim judge who fears Allah, even though he cannot control, of course, the law, that’s beyond his ability, but his presence in his position, is more likely in comparative terms, to bring greater justice because you know any judge can use his own judicial discretion. There is some area of flexibility. He can use his judicial discretion to achieve the greatest amount of justice as compared to a non-Muslim or a person who does not believe in Shariah or does not fear Allah, he could be an oppressive judge following the system fully and wholeheartedly, who would even bring greater harm to people.”
For Badawi and Ibn Taymiyya, “greater justice” means more conformity to sharia, and “an oppressive judge” is a judge who follows “fully and wholeheartedly” a legal system incompatible with sharia.
After the appointment of the first Muslim judge in Maryland (District Court), Nihad Awad, the Hamas-linked and Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations Executive Director, stated that the “appointment shows that Muslims are entering and having a positive impact on every level of American society.”
Considering Jamal Badawi’s statements on the way he wishes Muslim judges to carry out their responsibilities in North America, and considering the links between Awad and Badawi, it is legitimate to be on our guard when one of them or their allies welcome the appointment of a Muslim judge.
A fatwa written by Ibn Taymiyya entitled “The permissibility [for a Muslim] of assuming public office in an unjust [non-Muslim] state” has been added by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi to his book Priorities of the Islamic movement in the coming phase. This book details many principles behind the gradualist approach adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood to penetrate the Western societies where its members began to settle in the fifties.
PART 2 – A Muslim Brotherhood’s internal document identifying Jamal Badawi as one of its leaders advocates “destroying the Western civilization from within”
A 1991 internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum established (point 20) that Jamal Badawi is a leader of the North American Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure. Badawi’s name also appears in a 1992 Muslim Brotherhood leadership phonebook. Both documents were produced for evidentiary purposes in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial that led to the conviction of all those who were accused of terrorism financing.
The memorandum also encourages Muslim Brotherhood supporters to destroy the Western civilization from within. Jamal Badawi’s incitement to Muslim judges and civil servants not to apply current legal provisions incompatible with sharia actively contributes to the realization of this plan:
Point 4.4 of the 1991 memorandum The Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
Tariq Ramadan is another popular and influential Muslim Brotherhood leader. In recent years, he referred to the same project of Islamic conquest in front of supporters in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2011, in Dallas, he stated that “It should be us, with our understanding of Islam, our principles, colonizing positively the United States of America.” In December 2013, at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit in Toronto, he said that “We are not here to be accepted. We are here to change the society.”
The arrival of Muslim judges and civil servants committed to Jamal Badawi’s idea of preventing the application of laws contrary to sharia constitutes an effective means to implement the project of conquest and colonization described by the 1991 memorandum and Tariq Ramadan.
Like Jamal Badawi who spoke about Muslim judges, Tariq Ramadan has also addressed the importance for Islamists to penetrate the legal system of non-Muslim countries, such as Canada. In an interview given to the Egyptian periodical Egypt Today in 2004, Ramadan described the Canadian legal framework as “one of the most open in the world.” He suggested to Islamists to capitalize on this feature to subtly and gradually introduce rules of sharia in Canada. At the time, Tariq Ramadan strongly urged Islamists operating in Canada not to openly mention their commitment for sharia: “The term shariah in itself is laden with negative connotations in the Western mind,” said Ramadan. “There is no need to stress that. […] For the time being this is not how we want to be perceived,” he added.
In the same interview, Ramadan criticized the “lack of creativity” of the Islamists who openly invoked sharia in the early 2000s when they demanded an Islamic arbitration of family conflicts amongst Muslims in Ontario without foreseeing that their request would be met by a strong opposition in Canada.
The recognition by Ontario’s authorities of sharia principles in family law would have constituted a dangerous legal precedent. It would have eventually affected all Canadian jurisdictions. Conscious of this reality, Fatima Houda-Pepin, a member of the Quebec National Assembly, presented a motion condemning the introduction of sharia in family law in Ontario and had it unanimously adopted by Quebec parliamentarians on May 26, 2005.
In 2004, Tariq Ramadan thus not condemn the Islamists’ project of introducing sharia law in Ontario. He criticized the open approach without dissimulation that they adopted to do so. In 2013, in front the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit, Tariq Ramadan said that “jihad is the way we implement sharia”. This definition has the advantage of including the violent facet of jihad and its non-violent facet associated with infiltration.
PART 3 – The alarm bell should ring at CSIS and elsewhere when the main Sunni Muslim leader in the country quotes Ibn Taymiyya to determine how Muslims should behave in Canada
When he encourages Muslims to become judges in non-Muslim countries, Jamal Badawi demonstrates his respect towards Ibn Taymiyya by calling him a “Sheikh of Islam.” In recent years, other Muslim leaders, such as Osama bin Laden (p. 249) and Youssef Qaradawi in his book Priorities have used the same title to show their respect.
IBN TAYMIYYA – AN HISTORICAL PRECEDENT TO MODERN ISLAMISTS
Islamists and anti-Islamists alike acknowledge the importance of Ibn Taymiyya as scholar. Daniel Pipes agrees with the idea that today’s Islamists “didn’t appear in a vacuum.” He presents Ibn Taymiyya, who died almost seven hundred years ago, as an historical precedent to modern Islamists.
ARMED JIHAD
Aside from his position on Muslims who should accept to be appointed judges in non-Muslim societies in order to limit the reach of non-Islamic laws, Ibn Taymiyya is mostly known as the ideologue par excellence of armed jihad. A report submitted by a group of experts to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 2013 presents Ibn Taymiyya as the “author of the key jihadi text, The Religious and Moral Doctrine of Jihad.” An English translation of this text is available and large excerpts have been reproduced in an easily accessible compendium of texts on jihad : Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam by Rudolph Peters (Princeton, Marcus Wiener, 2008).
In his text, Ibn Taymiyya refers to Koranic verses 2:193 and 8:39 and stresses that “Whoever has heard the summons of the Messenger (Muhammad) and has not responded to it, must be fought, until there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s entirely.”
Today, this principle is still being invoked by Islamists to justify the imposition of sharia on non-Muslims.
In these circumstances, the invocation of Ibn Taymiyya by Jamal Badawi, the most important Sunni Muslim leader in the country, to determine how Muslims should behave in Canada should trigger an alarm bell in Canada’s security agencies.
FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATIONS
Ibn Taymiyya also defended genital mutilations of women as a method to reduce their sexual excitement. Sheema Khan, the founder of the Islamist lobby CAIR-CAN (renamed the National Council of Canadian Muslims in July 2013), mentioned this fact in an article published by the Globe and Mail on April 21, 2010:
Ibn Taymiyya advocated female circumcision, ruling that “its purpose is to reduce the woman’s desire; if she is uncircumcised, she becomes lustful and tends to long more for men.”
Sheema Khan resigned (p. 11) her position as CAIR-CAN founding Chair in 2005. CAIR-CAN’s annual reviews show that, from 2001 to 2005, Sheema Khan and Jamal Badawi were together on the organization’s Board.
ASSASSINATION OF CHRISTIAN MONKS LIVING IN MUSLIM TERRITORIES
Ibn Taymiyya also promoted the killing of Christian monks who do not live secluded and maintain contacts with Muslims living in the vicinity of their monasteries. In his fatwa, the “Sheikh of Islam” quoted numerous Muslim scholars who lived before him and considered monks like “Imams of unbelief” who are guilty of leading Muslims away from “the true religion.”
In 1996, European media gave a large coverage to the killing of seven Roman Catholic Cistercian monks (known as Trappists) who were living in a monastery in Tibhirine (Algeria). Shortly after this dramatic event, an old fatwa written by Ibn Taymiyya was translated from Arabic into French by a Belgian convert to Islam named Yahya Michot who used the pseudonym of Nasreddin Lebatelier. His real identity was established only later. At the time, Michot led an organization linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Belgium.
The French daily Le Monde described the translation of the fatwa and Michot’s presentation as “a justification of the assassination of Christian monks, an acquittal pure and simple of the assassins, those of the GIA [Algerian Armed Islamic Group] or those who handle them, based on legal expert Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), one of the Islamist literature’s favorite authors.”
At the same time, the British periodical The Tablet (text – scan) reported that Lebatelier/Michot’s comment established a connection between the Algerian terrorist GIA group’s communiqué 43 justifying the murder of monks and Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa on the subject.
After his identity was revealed, Yahya Michot withdrew from circulation copies of his booklet containing his own comments about the kidnapping and the murder of Algeria’s monks that had been commented by Le Monde and The Tablet. Later, Michot republished the French translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa without establishing a link with the 1996 murders of monks in Algeria this time.
In spite of his background, Yahya Michot is considered a valid interlocutor by many Christian organizations involved in interfaith dialogue. The St. Thomas University in Minnesota, for example, mentions his participation, as well as Jamal Badawi’s, to interfaith activities on its campus. The naiveté of Christians involved in ecumenism or interfaith dialogue with Muslim Brotherhood operatives and their supporters is without limits.
For the Muslim Brotherhood, interfaith dialogue has always an ulterior purpose. In an interview given to a Qatari newspaper, MB spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi stressed that “We only carry out dialogue with them [Christians] in order to find common grounds that serve as a basis for further action.”
In this interview and in his book Priorities, Qaradawi mentions four of these “further actions” that justify interfaith dialogue with Christians:
- Improving the image of Islam;
- Converting Christians;
- Rallying Christians against Israel;
- Discouraging Christian leaders from supporting fellow Christians involved in conflict with Muslims. Qaradawi mentioned specifically Sudan and the Philippines.
Jamal Badawi is a close collaborator of Youssef Qaradawi, notably at the European Council for Fatwa and Research and Yahya Michot has endorsed the book Priorities in which two of the above objectives are listed as a “must-read […] for anyone interested in modern Islamic thought and activism of the via media [the middle way]”. Youssef Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood describe their doctrine as one of “the middle way” although it leads them to justify the assassination of apostates from Islam and homosexuals, female genital mutilations, to describe Hitler as “Allah’s envoy who came to punish the Jews for their corruption,” etc.
MENTOR OF SAUDIA ARABIA’S FOUNDER
Ibn Taymiyya was also the intellectual guide of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792). An alliance between Wahhab and the Saud family led to the establishment of Saudi Arabia. At the time, Muhammad ibn Saud (1710-1765) provided the military means required to enforce the implementation of Islamic principles promoted by Wahhab and, before him, by Ibn Taymiyya.
Today, Saudi Arabia propagates its Wahhabi doctrine by funding mosques and schools in the non-Muslim world, by disseminating jihadi literature, etc., as prescribed by Ibn Taymiyya. For a long time, Saudi Arabia used the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) as a relay to radicalize Muslims in Canada. On February 2, 2012, the Canada Revenue Agency revoked WAMY-Canada’s charitable status after it discovered that it had funded an organization linked to Al-Qaeda. In the past, WAMY transferred funds to the Dar al-Iman school in Montreal and to the Muslim Association of Canada, the main Muslim Brotherhood front in Canada. This is also WAMY that sponsored the launch of the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conventions that are organized in Toronto on an annual basis since 2003 and that feature speakers linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. A list of money transfers made by WAMY to Canada-based Muslim organizations is available on Point de Bascule.
OTHER FACETS OF SHARIA ADDRESSED BY IBN TAYMIYYA
Many other aspects of sharia were studied and commented by Ibn Taymiyya.
While Christians are being persecuted in the Muslim world and their churches are being vandalized and sometimes demolished, Raymond Ibrahim examined one of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwas that is frequently used as a justification by today’s Islamists. Ibn Taymiyya stressed that “Wherever Muslims live and have mosques, it is impermissible for any sign of infidelity to be present, churches or otherwise.”
Andrew Bostom commented another of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwas that states “If a male unbeliever is taken captive during warfare or otherwise, eg., as a result of a shipwreck, or because he has lost his way, or as a result of a ruse, then the imam may do whatever he deems appropriate: killing him, enslaving him, releasing him or setting him free for a ransom consisting in either property or people. This is the view of most jurists and it is supported by the Koran and the Sunna.”
Tarek Fatah wrote a message on Twitter to draw the attention on a fatwa by Ibn Taymiyya advocating the superiority of Arabs over other Muslims.
Another of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa rules that Alawites (a Muslim minority to which current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad belongs) “are greater infidels than Christians, Jews, and idolaters.” Over the centuries, this fatwa has frequently been used as a justification by the Sunni majority to persecute its Alawite minority.
PART 4 – Jean-François Revel about the vulnerability of Western democracies against an internal enemy
In 1990, in a speech given in Algeria that was the base for his book Priorities, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi encouraged Muslims living in the West to partially give up their interest in applied sciences in order to get more expertise in fields that have a more direct influence on public opinion, such as journalism, law, etc. Almost twenty-five years later, numerous Islamist sympathisers operate in very sensitive positions in the media, Western government agencies, etc. Jamal Badawi’s incitement to Muslim judges and civil servants not to apply current legal provisions that are opposed to sharia must be examined in this context.
At the beginning of the eighties, Jean-François Revel dedicated his essay How democracies perish to describe the threat posed by the USSR’s ideological and material penetration in the West. Today, Islamists operating in the West present a threat similar in nature as they try to channel the large Muslim immigration to further their totalitarian program. These Islamists are also frequently subsidized by Western governments who believe that, by doing so, they promote “the integration of new immigrants.”
The first chapter of Revel’s book explains how the openness of Western societies and their acceptance of a legitimate political opposition make these societies vulnerable to those who wish to destroy them from within.
Although they aimed at curbing the communist threat, Revel’s remarks are still useful today to enlighten us on the characteristics of democracies used by Islamists to advance their own totalitarian program.
“Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high.”
(…) “Paradoxically, democracy offers those seeking to abolish it a unique opportunity to work against it legally. They can even receive almost open support from the external enemy without its being seen as a truly serious violation of the social contract.”
“The frontier is vague, the transition easy between the status of loyal opponent wielding a privilege built into democratic institutions and that of an adversary subverting those institutions. To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.”
“What we end up with in what is conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries.”
Further reading
Point de Bascule: File Jamal Badawi
Point de Bascule: File Youssef Qaradawi
Point de Bascule (November 11, 2010): While the movie Of men and gods is being released: How does Koranic exegesis justify the murder of monks (En marge du film Des hommes et des dieux : Comment l’exégèse coranique justifie le meurtre des moines)