Female relatives of Islamists jailed in Lebanon held Korans Tuesday as they demanded
the Lebanese parliament pardon the imprisoned. (Photo: Wael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency)

Gates of Vienna:

Centuries ago the Roman Catholic Church burned heretics at the stake. The most famous victim of this practice was Joan of Arc, who was put to death in France at the age of nineteen almost six hundred years ago.

Like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of heretics is a former practice of the Church that is used against it by those who would declare a rough equality between Islam and Christianity. However, although Christians gave up such barbarity hundreds of years ago, Islam persists in similar practices right up to the present day.

What makes the following gruesome story particularly appalling is that the young woman was executed by her own father, an officer of the Muttawa, who was obliged by honor to cleanse his family of his daughter’s shame. According to ANSAmed:

The sentence could not be appealed: guilty for converting to Christianity, a young Saudi woman was set alight by her father, who first had cut her tongue.

Not an ordinary father, but a member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Against Vice [the Muttawa], a sort of police watching over the moral behaviour of the citizens of Saudi Arabia and the full compliance with the rules of the rigid Wahabi doctrine, by using whiplashes on the legs for too high heels and arresting men and women not linked by marriage or family bonds for meetings in restaurants.

To the injury of the conversion, the woman had added also the insult of the written word, by writing articles with Christian-religious content on blogs and regional websites. The brutal news reported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)’s daily Gulf News reflects the reality of Saudi Arabia, a conservative and intransigent country, and throws ice-cold water on the image of an oil kingdom which says to be ready to open up partially to other religions, an image painted by the recent gestures of the king Abdallah Bin Abdelaziz.

Little by little, Mark Steyn’s dark predictions about western civilization surrendering to Islam are coming true.

The most senior judge in England yesterday gave his blessing to the use of sharia law to resolve disputes among Muslims.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said that Islamic legal principles could be employed to deal with family and marital arguments and to regulate finance.

He declared: ‘Those entering into a contractual agreement can agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.’

In his speech at an East London mosque, Lord Phillips signalled approval of sharia principles as long as punishments - and divorce rulings - complied with the law of the land.

But his remarks, which back the informal sharia courts operated by numerous mosques, provoked a barrage of criticism.

Lawyers warned that family and marital disputes settled by sharia could disadvantage women or the vulnerable.

Low European birthrates combined with Islamic immigrants (required to pay for the unsustainable Ponzi-scheme social programs) with high birthrates portend a grim future unless immigrants assimilate in a meaningful way.  Helping them set up separate religious courts is no help.

“One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”

– Algerian President Boumedienne, speaking to the UN General Assembly in 1974

I’m currently reading America Alone in which Mark Steyn makes the case that Europe’s future will be Islamic  — demographics do not lie.

How will this shift play out for the rest of the civilized world? It’s certainly bigoted to assume that all Muslims are primitives. And yet Steyn asks quite reasonably:

“What does it mean when the fastest-growing population on the planet is a group that, to put it at its mildest, has a somewhat fractious relationship with the characteristics of a free society?”

Denmark is a tolerant society except for those raving Muslims who rioted over cartoons in a Danish newspaper and threatened death. As a means of promoting goodwill, they held a “Miss Headscarf 2008″ competition. The winner is interviewed below.

The comments on the blog post are worth reading. Young Huda wears the scarf by choice and considers it a compliment to women in her culture/religion. Consider Paris Hilton rising to fame because of a homemade porn tape and you can see Huda’s point.

Yet how much tolerance is intolerable? Allowing genital mutiliation? Wife beating (even if the wives ”approve”)?  Such will be the discussions of the future.

In No god, but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Reza Aslan argued that modern Islamic terrorism was a symptom of a struggle for the soul of Islam among believers in which the West is more of prop than a player.

Aslan’s book is a well-written introduction to Islam’s history and future — a very good and easy read. His point accords with a meaty article by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker about Dr. Fadl, an Egyptian surgeon and contemporary of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s #2 guy.

Dr. Fadl also wrote the book, literally, that paved the way for today’s jihad.

Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.

But now Dr. Fadl, sitting in an Egyptian prison, has reconsidered his theological arguments that justified so much mayhem and has a new book that says true Muslims are prohibited from committing aggression.

Fadl’s ideas carry weight and his reversal has set off an ideological war.

The roots of this ideological war within Al Qaeda go back forty years, to 1968, when two precocious teen-agers met at Cairo University’s medical school. Zawahiri, a student there, was then seventeen, but he was already involved in clandestine Islamist activity. Although he was not a natural leader, he had an eye for ambitious, frustrated youths like him who believed that destiny was whispering in their ear.

1968 again. What a rotten year that’s turned out to be. The New Yorker piece is really too long to excerpt. It’s all online; print it out and have a read.

Daniel Pipes talks the odds. The chance that immigrant Muslims and indigenous Europeans find a way to live in harmony? Five percent, says Pipes. The chance that Europe becomes Eurabian, part of the Muslim world? Forty-seven-and-a-half percent. The chance that Europeans reassert control over the continent? Forty-seven-and-a-half percent, once more — and Pipes says it won’t be pretty.

That describes Chapter 5 of this interview.

To see the video from the beginning, start here.