The Battle for Men’s Minds

 The Battle for Men’s Minds

Muhammad H. I. Dobinson

The Third World War, the great “Battle for Men's Minds”, is a political and ideological war and is being fought here and now, not with conventional or nuclear weapons (nuclear war would inevitably mean the total destruction of the world and life as we know it, and has therefore been rejected by the Great Powers as impractical and undesirable), but with the weapons of psychology, “indoctrination, intimidation, subversion, etc. It is, therefore, the bounden duty of every thinking Muslim (especially those living in non-Muslim countries) to engage in this battle, and fight it with every means in his power and without cessation, for the sake and survival of Muslims the world over and their Islamic socio-religious system—the “Third Force”-else peace, justice, freedom, happiness and progress will vanish from the world for ever if either of the other sides should win. It must be made a veritable Jihad in the Way of Almighty Allah, and fought by every Muslim and friend of Islam, on every front and on every possible occasion and in every conceivable way—and fought, Insha-Allah, to a glorious and victorious conclusion for Islam, for the sake of the whole of mankind and the very survival of all those eternal verities which free men everywhere hold most dear to their hearts.

Islam, and the Islamic way of life, is the same and natural social, economic, legal and religious system for mankind, and the only one which makes any sense to man's intellect as compared with the other two great systems prevailing today, viz. Western Judeo-Christian Capitalism and materialistic Marxist Communism. Islam is the greatest emancipator of men's minds, souls and bodies the world has ever known, or is ever likely to know, and it is proposed here to list briefly the more salient virtues of Islam in relation to the other two systems, and show its manifest superiority over both the other two.

The Prophetic Tradition and Holy Writ.

Unlike Judeo-Christianity, which is in the Priestly Tradition, Islam is in the Prophetic Tradition, Muhammad ibn-Abdullah, the Holy Prophet of Islam (ﷺ), being the Kattam, or the Seal of Prophet hood. He is an historical prophet, indeed not only an historical figure, but a maker of history, whose biography is known as is that of no other world personality. Similarly, his Book, the Holy Qur’an (the final revelation of God to man), is preserved as is that of no other scripture, not one jot or one title of the sacred text having been altered since it was revealed by God to His Holy Prophet more than 1,300 years ago, as can be proved by examining the most ancient Qur’anic manuscripts still extant.

The same cannot be said of either the Torah of Moses or the Injil (Gospel) of Jesus, both these books having suffered interpolation and alteration at the hands of unscrupulous priestly editors, and other wicked men, in the course of being handed down to us. The Jews have broken the Covenant Moses made with God, and modern church Christianity is a far departure from the pure and true religion of Jesus, due mainly to the unjustified interference of people such as St. Paul. He was largely responsible for turning the religion of Jesus into something akin to the ancient Mystery Religions (such as Mithraism), and founding the Christian church, which has evolved as one of the biggest and most oppressive police-state type organizations the world has ever known. As for the Communists, the only book they possess is “Marx Gospel”—and it is not a very good or reliable “scripture” at that! Even Communism, as expounded by Karl Marx, has suffered alteration, differences of interpretation and adaptation by those who have come later such as Engels, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. The Maoists call the Russians “innovators” and “deviationists" and there is bitter rivalry, even leading to the brink of a shooting-war between them as to which of them is the more perfect in its interpretation of Marxism!

In Islam, on the other hand, there are no “mysteries” such as the doctrine of the Trinity, and no serious argument as to the correct interpretation of the Holy Qur'an or the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). There is no priestly class to come between a worshipper and his Maker, neither are there any sects or variant churches in Islam to cause divisions in the ranks of the Muslims as exist in Judeo-Christianity or Marxist Communism. By its very purity and homogeneous nature, Islam has freed men's minds from doubt and uncertainty, error and deviation.

The Oneness and Universality of God and Religion

Islam is the most fiercely monotheistic religion in the world, and teaches that the Supreme Deity (God), whom the Muslims call by His personal name of Allah, is not only One, but Universal. The Jews believe that they are the “Chosen Race”, specially favoured by God, and that all non-Jews are their servants, relegated to an inferior position and entitled to be exploited and trampled upon by the Children of Israel. Their God, Jahweh, is regarded by the Jews as being only for them, and is therefore nothing more, or better, than a tribal God. Christians believe in the Trinity, or that God is divided into three parts, and in me Incarnation, or that Jesus was the “son of God”. Communists have abolished God altogether, and have also tried (unsuccessfully) to abolish religion itself, calling it the “opiate of the people”, and believe only in atheistic dialectical materialism and relatives, not absolutes, substituting for the religion of God a vile and pernicious state-organized “religion” called Marxism-Leninism.

Islam is a universal world socio-religious system and the only one which teaches that Allah, the Eternally Besought After, is one and Universal, the God of all mankind, irrespective of colour, race or social class. Muhammad (ﷺ), moreover, is a world prophet, unlike Moses or Jesus who were prophets only 10 the Israelites, or like Karl Marx, who was a “prophet” only to the proletariat! Islam, therefore, is the emancipator of man from the schism, sectarianism, tribalism and materialism that exists amongst Christians, Jews and Communists, and the polytheism and pantheism of Hindus and Pagans.

Religion, Science and Learning

Islam is the only world religion which is completely compatible with modern science, indeed the very foundations of modern scientific thought and discovery were laid down by the Muslims, who led the world in this field until the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the West. Education, and the acquisition of knowledge, is a religious duty imposed upon Muslims, the Holy Prophet of Islam (ﷺ) himself having instructed his followers to seek knowledge of every kind and of all kinds even if it means going to China to find it! The Muslims kept the beacon of learning alight when Christian Europe was groping helplessly in the Stygian murk of the Dark Ages. The Christian Church, on the other hand, it persecuted, excommunicated, and even executed, scientific men who have gone against the teachings of its priests and Popes and their interpretation of the Bible. These prelates have subsequently recanted, so where is the eternal truth in their teachings, or how can they be relied upon?

In more modern times, the Christians, Jews and Communists (and their fellow-travelers, such as the Hindus of India) have woefully misused the great discoveries of science for their own ulterior motives and wicked selfish ends, and thus have prostituted the intentions of pure and applied science, and brought untold evil into the world and wholesale misery to millions of mankind. As the renowned Muslim poet and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal, has said, “Religion is the only answer to the misuse of science, and the only way the limitations of science can be recognized alongside its usefulness, and this is possible only within the Islamic discipline.”

In this field also, Islam being the only religion which appeals directly to man’s reason and intellect, is the emancipator of men’s minds from untruth, ignorance and evil, and is therefore the only world religion suited to the 20^th Century—and indeed the future as it is a sane, rational and scientific religion and way of life as well as being a revealed one, or more correctly, because it is a revealed one.

Economics and Politics

Islam favours wholly neither the Capitalism of the West nor the Communism of the East. It favours instead a mixed economy along the lines of the Islamic Socialism being currently practiced in Pakistan, one of the leading and most populous of Muslim states. Islam rejects Capitalism, where in a Capitalist state, with its class boundaries and status symbols (of which being a “pillow” of the local church is one), there is a constant confrontation between management and labour which is both unseemly and unnecessary. Under this system the employer and worker are both out for the maximum of profit, in terms of money, for the minimum of outlay in capital and labour. It is the Philosophy of extreme economic greed, and the doctrine of convenience applies universally within and throughout it.

The objection to Communism, with its constant strife between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (or middle classes), is that it stifles private enterprise and thereby lowers efficiency all round, fails to provide sufficient incentive to individual creative genius and, above all, upsets the economic and social order of things that has evolved naturally throughout the ages. It is an artificial and charlatan philosophy, essentially atheistic and materialistic in character, and is similarly rejected by Islam.

In the economic sphere, Islam has forbidden usury, thus eliminating one of the prime causes of the rampant inflation so prevalent in the world today. Jews are allowed by their holy law to take interest from non-Jews, but not from other Jews, so their attitude towards usury is somewhat ambivalent. On Christian, there is no restriction whatsoever as to the giving or taking of interest. In Hindu India, the moneylender is very much part of the way of life there, extorting from the poor hapless borrower excessive rates of interest on loans. Dividends on investments are permitted by Islam under certain circumstances, as a fair return for capital invested in this way is considered legitimate and is acceptable. Muslims are also forbidden to exact repayment of debts if it would bring hardship to bear on the debtor, but are enjoined instead to release the debtor altogether from his obligations in this eventuality, as a form of charity.

In the socio-religious system of Islam, no distinction whatsoever is made between the sacred and the secular, the religious and the mundane. Islam, on the other hand, and its Holy Prophet (ﷺ), originated the whole concept of pure communism and the true equality of man and man irrespective of their social position, race or colour. In Islam, all lawful work, however menial, is tantamount to being an offering to God and all equally acceptable in His sight. Islam touches that the only thing of real value in the sight of the Almighty is the righteousness of a man and how good a Muslim he is, not his worldly wealth or his social position, and all honest work done in the name of God is a veritable Jihad, and all lawful sustenance of good repute, however it is come by.

Thus it can truthfully be said that Islam, the originator and preserver of true communism and equality, is the emancipator of mankind from economic. political and social thralldom.

The Ethics of War

The ethics of war as followed by the Muslims are somewhat different, to put it mildly, from those followed by men of other persuasions (such as Christians, Communists, Zionists and Hindus), as history testifies to. For a start off the followers of Islam (the very word ‘Islam’ means peace) must always first try to find a peaceful solution to a dispute, resorting to arms only when this utterly failed to produce a satisfactory solution, and then engage only in purely defensive warfare if it is necessary to defend their sovereign integrity. Muslims must never engage in anything which remotely resembles aggressive warfare. Only fighting in the way of God and Jihad is permitted to Muslims, and then the fighting must be only against strictly military targets and between soldier and soldier, civilians and their property being left severely alone. When Muslims engage in war, they do not commit any of the excesses practiced by, for instance, the Christians at the time of the Crusades, the great Muslim General, Salah al-Din (Saladin), showing a glorious example of chivalry and magnanimity in comparison with the behaviour of the followers of Jesus—the preacher of the Gospel of Love—in Jerusalem, and the Israelis and Indians in subsequent upheavals.

Non-violence is also rejected by Islam as not being a practical solution to each and every problem and it is certainly not practiced on every occasion by the followers of Gandhi, the archpriest of “non-violence” and “passive resistance”, so by those Communists, who preach “peaceful co-existence”. Since creation is violent and life is not one of effortless existence, man must be ready to take up arms and fight if necessary in defence of his person, property and rights against any would-be aggressor.

The rights of captured peoples and non-Muslim minorities are, and always have been, fully respected and guaranteed by Muslim rulers and Islamic states. It should be obvious then, that Islam is the emancipator of the victims of war, whom it has freed from the fear of that sort of excesses carried out by non-Muslim aggressors; and of the enemies of Islam from the fear that Muslims will not conduct the fighting in as human a way as is possible under prevailing circumstances, and that it will not treat its defeated foes with justice, tolerance and mercy.

Wealth, Food and Drink

Islam teaches that the riches of the world are to be shared by all men and that a Muslim must spend of his substance “in the way of Allah” and for the benefit of his fellow-men as well as himself, as he is not the owner of the world’s wealth, only its custodian.

Usury, gambling, betting and games of chance are strictly forbidden in Islam by the Holy Qur’an. Muslims are expected to earn lawful sustenance by the sweat of their own brows, unearned income of the sort obtained from football-pools, pontoons, lotteries and horse and dog-race betting being unlawful in Islam. These evils, which abound in non-Muslim countries, are forbidden by Islam because they are harmful to the private purse and the public economy, and also with the purpose of teaching Muslims the value of honest work, and to discourage them from being lazy and indolent in the hopes of making a quick and easy fortune out of others.

One of the Five Pillars of Islam is Zakat, or Poor-due, which compels a Muslim with capital assets over a certain level to donate, once a year, a specific proportion (usually 2 ½ % in cash or kind) to charity. It is to the great credit of Islam that, unlike other religions which have merely recommended it, Islam has made the giving of charity an obligatory part of its system, mainly to relieve the suffering and hardship of the poor and indigent. Hoarding money (or food and goods so as to create an artificial shortage and thus inflate their market value) is also strictly forbidden by Islam. A Muslim must at all times give fair weight and measure and be honest in all his business dealings, and keep his given word—in the spirit as well as in the letter.

The Holy Qur‘an invites Muslims to partake to the full of the good things of life (but not to excess!), but forbids those foods and drinks which would harm a person more than they would benefit him. In this category are: the eating of pig-flesh and blood, the drinking of alcoholic beverages and the taking of harmful drugs. The pig is an unclean animal which feeds of refuse and wallows in muck and can and does cause disease, so the reason for the prohibition does not need enlarging on here, neither do the evils of drinking alcohol and taking drugs, but Christians and Communists eat pig-flesh, and Christians and the Jews both use wine as an integral part of their religious ceremonies, and the Russian Communists celebrate everything and anything with the heavy imbibing of Vodka and other forms of alcohol. Doctors in the West and Communist countries have succeeded in finding cures for tuberculosis and other killer diseases, but not for the widespread alcoholism and drug—addiction which exist there, the only sure remedy for which is to abstain from taking the harmful concoctions in the first place which is the remedy applied by Islam.

Islam is therefore the emancipator of man from want and poverty; greed, gluttony and drunkenness; as well as from much unnecessary sickness and disease.

Social Customs and Law

Of the many reforms introduced by the Holy Prophet of Islam (ﷺ) amongst the greatest were those which dealt with social customs and law. Polyandry was outlawed and polygamy limited, and the family became the basic unit of the Islamic society. No more beautiful description of marriage and the relationship between man and wife is to be found anywhere than in the following verse of the Holy Qur’an (Surah 2:l87): “Your wives are your garments, and you are their garments". Moreover, Mohammad himself (ﷺ) has said that a man perfects half his religion when he marries. The Christian church teaches that celibacy (forbidden in Islam) is the ideal and marriage an evil necessity, and St. Paul once proclaimed that it was better to marry than to burn: women were emancipated and raised from their previous inferior position (Christian bishops once solemnly debated whether or not women had souls, but to their eternal credit decided that they had!) and their rights, und those of children and orphans, were defined and protected. In Communist countries children and the family are subjugated to the state, and women do heavy men‘s work in factories and sweeping the roads. In Israel, women of military age are made to carry lethal weapons and serve alongside their menfolk in the armed services. Laws of inheritance were laid down, so that now Muslim women enjoy more rights and legitimate freedom (as distinct from license), and are more genuinely emancipated than is the common lot of their non-Muslim sisters in the West and elsewhere in the world.

Modesty was enjoined and enforced and conduct between the sexes regulated. Prostitution and fornication were made illegal as well as being sins whereas, although they are preached against by Christian and Jewish priests, few people need them. and these evils are carried on quite openly in many parts of the Non-Muslim world. In Christian America and Europe, the call-girl system is wide-spread, and in Hindu India, the temple prostitute is part of the religious way of life—along with the money-lender.

The freeing of slaves taken as war-booty was made a religious virtue by Islam more than 1,300 years ago. Islam being the only religion to advocate this, whereas William Wilberforce, the 19^th century English emancipator of British wives, had to fight the established Christian church before he could get his reforms married through the British Parliament! the Americans fought a bloody civil war in the l860’s over the issue of slaves, the ripples of this war still being apparent to this very day in certain parts of the USA where the black—man, who has descended from those same slaves is still regarded as being inferior to the white-man and segregated from him and generally discriminated against! In the police-state of Christian South Africa, the obscenities of the prevailing system of Apartheid are too generally well-known to need elaborating on here, and in Christian Rhodesia, the lot of the black-man is not much better than in South Africa—in spite of his being in the majority in both these states.

In the course of the mission of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), laws were enacted which now, together with the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah, form the basis of the Shariyah, or Muslim Holy Law. This Holy Law has been framed for the benefit of man and his private and public good, and for the establishment and preservation of a satisfactory social and economic order. There is no problem which confronts man, or is ever likely to confront him, which cannot be solved satisfactorily for all concerned by the provisions of the Shariyah, and, no finer code of law has ever been devised—or ever will be! If the whole world lived by the Shariyah, and did as Islam and the Muslims do, it would be a happier, healthier and more peaceful, stable and progressive environment in which to live, work and play. Islam is, therefore, manifestly, an emancipator of man from cruel, unjust and oppressive legislation, and a preserver of the inalienable rights of men, women and children.

Fighting the Battle

The Islamic Revival has already begun und is well under way and its momentum must be maintained all over the world without flagging. The “Battle for Men’s Minds” (or “How to win Friends and Influence People for Islam”!) must be fought relentlessly by all Muslims (especially those living in non-Muslim countries) as a Jihad, and with all the militancy and weapons used by the Christians and the Communists and their lackeys, namely the Zionists and the Hindus respectively and ultimately won, Insha-Allah, by the Muslims for the noble and sacred cause of Islam and the benefit of all mankind.

There are innumerable battle-fields upon which the fighting can be conducted; at work or leisure; in the factory, office and on the farm; in clubs and through the mass-media; by writing letters to influential people; in one‘s own or the enemy’s home; by precept and example and by all and every sane, rational and constitutional means available. Advantage must be taken of each and every opportunity which presents itself to spread the gospel of Islam, and each Muslim must make the propagation of the One True Faith his personal Jihad. Seed out other Muslims and, if necessary, band together with them for this purpose, altogether avoiding un-believers. “Let not Believers take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than Believers, except by way of precaution that they may guard themselves from them”, (Surah 3:28).

The more intelligent and better educated Muslims must instruct and inform their less well endowed and fortunate brother and sisters in Faith, in language and by methods which they can most readily understand, so that they too can be enabled to play a useful and worthwhile part in the fighting. Our leaders in every sphere of Islamic life must truly lead, and be the generals who show the rest the way ahead. They must make their voices ring loud and clear in the assemblies of the world, proclaiming in unequivocal terms the unassailable case for Islam. They must unite all Muslims, and keep them grasping tightly to the “Rope of Allah".

Above all, place implacable faith in Almighty God, pray to Him fervently for strength and victory (“But Allah cautions you to remember Him; for the final goal is to Allah”), and take as your example the most perfect exemplar of all time Muhammad (ﷺ). Teach by personal example and practical demonstration, and thus convince non-Muslim of the superior and ineluctable virtues of Islam, and by these means victory will surely be (Insha-Allah) for Islam, and the way of peace justice and progress will be established in the world, for the supreme benefit of the Muslims in particular and mankind in general.