First published in FrontPage Magazine in 2008

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Mohammad Asghar, an ex-Muslim who came out of Islam after discovering its true teachings. Together with studying the Qur’an for over twenty-five years, he has also been writing his commentary on its verses – an endeavor, he hopes, that will help non-Muslim leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, understand the true messages they convey to Muslims.

FP: Mohammad Asghar, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Asghar: Thank you for inviting me to the Frontpage interview.

FP: Tell us about your background and your upbringing as a Muslim.

Asghar: I was born in a practicing Muslim family of Bangladesh. My parents adhered to almost all the tenets of Islam and they made sure that while growing up, I also learned all of them so that I could practice them in my own life. Like many other Muslim children of my neighborhood, I also attended a Madrassa and learned how to read the Qur’an without, of course, understanding what I was reading.

In my youth, I tried to live the life of a true Muslim. I said my Islamically mandated prayers, though not on a regular basis; visited, and prayed at, the tombs of the Muslim saints; celebrated the birthday of the Prophet of Islam, even though nobody knows even today the year of his birth; celebrated his ascension to the Gardens (Jannat) or Heaven and sang his praises, laden with amorous feelings towards him, whenever my parents and our neighbors organized Mehfil-e-Milad – which is a gathering that Muslims of the Indian sub-continent arrange to reinforce Islamic teachings in the Muslim attendees. I strongly believed that the things I was then doing were part of the duties I owed to Allah and His Prophet and that without pleasing both of them, I would not enter the Garden on the Day of Judgment.

FP: What is the point of teaching children to read the Qur’an without explaining it to them?

Asghar: According to some unconfirmed reports, there are over 1.565 billion Muslims in the world today. Out of these Muslims, only about 300 million understand and speak Arabic. Since a good part of the Qur’an is written in colloquial Arabic, spoken by the tribe of Quraish of the 7th century Mecca, understanding it even by many modern-day Arabic speaking Muslims is not an easy task.

The bulk of the remaining 1.2 billion Muslims live in the Indian sub-continent and south-east Asia. Almost all of them do not know Arabic. Even those people, known as Hafez-e-Qur’an, who commit the whole Qur’an to their memory, do not understand the meaning of the words they so assiduously memorize over a long period of time.

This being the reality, the question is why do Muslims read or memorize the Qur’an without understanding it? The answer to the question lies in the fact that most of them, especially those Muslims who live in the non-Arabic speaking countries, depend on their Mullahs for learning the essential doctrines and practices of their faith. They do what they are told by their Mullahs. This is more so in case of those Muslims who are illiterate and poor. A casual observation of Muslims of the Indian sub-continent will make this fact clear to any interested observer.

These Mullahs tell the ordinary Muslims that reading or reciting the Qur’an in Arabic is the easiest way to earn the pleasure of Allah, a condition without fulfilling which, no human or Jinn would enter the Garden (Jannat in Arabic) on the Day of Judgment. This leads not only the illiterate and poor Muslims, but also the highly educated and rich Muslims to read the Qur’an in Arabic without trying to understand what they are reading or reciting in their prayer. These Muslims, in their turn, require their children to read and also memorize a few short chapters of the Qur’an that they need to recite while saying their daily obligatory prayers.

FP: This is mind-boggling: people engaging in a religion by repeating things they do not themselves understand.

So what made you start questioning the Islamic faith?

Asghar: About 25 years ago, I got the jolt of my life when a Maulvi (Muslim cleric) refused to let me lay the dead body of my mother to rest, as, according to him, the dress I was wearing at the time, was not an Islamic one. This dress is known as Lungi to the Bangladeshis, and it resembles the one the Malaysian and the Burmese men wear all the time (unlike the trouser, its lower part is wide open, and as such, one can see the wearer’s private parts, if one deigns to look upward from the earth).

FP: Why do people wear the Lungi and why would a person want to keep one’s private parts exposed? Why were you wearing it?

Asghar: Lungi, like Saree for women, is a traditional dress and it is worn by almost all the men of Bangladesh. With it, they cover the lower part of their bodies. Since the lungi’s bottom part remains wide open, many Muslim Mullahs believe that it should not be worn by Muslim men, as, through its opening, the earth can see their private parts. According to them, exposing oneself to the earth is a great sin.

But I have not heard any Mullah saying the same thing about Saree. It is a long piece of cloth, which women wrap around their waists; its bottom part, like lungi, remaining open. The earth can easily see their private parts, if it wishes to do so, but surprisingly, the Mullahs freely let their wives wear it for reasons that only they know.

FP: Um, right. Well, what can I say, perhaps we’ll save this topic for a panel discussion.
So in any case, what effect did the Lungi incident have on you?

Asghar: It led me to find out what Islam really stands for, and what the Qur’an actually teaches its followers. I began to read the Qur’an in English, translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall, as well as its translations in Bengali and Urdu. This I did in order to make sure that what I was reading in English was identical with the Bengali and Urdu translations and that these represented the correct and faithful renditions of the Arabic Qur’an.

What I read in, and discovered from, the Qur’an was, and still remains, mind-boggling to me. I could not believe that Allah, if He exists, could have said things that He is believed to have told Muhammad and his followers. I could not believe, for instance, that the Creator of the Universe could have told the Muslim men the following:

2:223: “Your wives are as a tilth unto you: so approach your tilth when or how ye will: but do some good act for your souls beforehand; and fear Allah, and know that ye are to meet Him (in the Hereafter) and give (these) good tidings to those who believe.”

By telling the Muslim men that they can engage their wives in sexual acts “when or how ye will,” Allah effectively permitted them to rape their wives, for this verse of the Qur’an does not require them either to obtain their wives’ consent, or to engage themselves in foreplays, without which, both men and women can hardly have what is known as consensual sex. To Allah, Muslim men doing “some good act for their souls beforehand” i.e. saying prayer to Him before raping their wives is what He considered to be a pious act that will help Him exonerate them from the crime of rape on the Day of Judgment.

FP: In terms of 2:223 in regards to the sanctioning for a man raping his wife, if God does not instruct this, then where did this come from? Who created these verses and why?

Asghar: In my judgment, the Qur’an is a record of what the Prophet of Islam had done or said during his stay on earth. His followers remembered and narrated them to the collectors of the Qur’an when it was being compiled. Therefore, the content of verse 2:223 should be considered in conjunction with what he had done in his lifetime and what he had told his followers on the issue mentioned in it.

In a storied Hadith (words of Muhammad), we read:

Sahih Muslim, Book 008, Number 3240:

“Jabir reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) saw a woman, and so he came to his wife, Zainab, as she was tanning a leather and had sexual intercourse with her. He then went to his Companions and told them: The woman advances and retires in the shape of a devil, so when one of you sees a woman, he should come to his wife, for that will repel what he feels in his heart.”

What the Prophet had done to his unprepared wife is exactly what is stated in the above verse i.e. Muslim men can have sex with their women with no notice to them, and they can also rape them, if it makes them happy.

FP: So you left Islam?

Asghar: Yes. I am an ex-Muslim. I no more subscribe to the teachings and the doctrines of Islam, as I consider them to be obnoxious and, thus, unfit for good humans.

FP: How did your family and community react to you leaving Islam? Has your life been in danger?

Asghar: I told my family members what I found in the Qur’an and they agreed with me. But it was a different story with the community I was living in; to it, I was a pariah. Most of my friends and acquaintances stopped talking to me, fearing that the information I was trying to disseminate was going to take them out of their religion, while others issued veiled threat against my person. Realizing that I might be harmed, if I continued to live in the country of my birth and talk about the fallacies of Islam, I, along with my family members, migrated to the United States.

Here I feel safe, even though I have already received a couple of threats against my life. The Justice Department of my adoptive country has assured me of all help, should I feel that my life is at risk. My family members and I are obliged to it for standing by our side.

FP: Your thoughts on Islam’s impact on Muslims and on non-Muslims?

Asghar: Muslims themselves are the victims of Islam. Many of them have knowingly become its victims, whilst a vast majority of them have fallen into its trap without knowing anything about its true nature and teachings. Islam has turned them into robots; most Muslims do only what, they believe, Allah told them to do. This is evident from the fact that most, if not all, Muslims do nothing in their lives without first saying “Bismillah …” i.e. beginning everything in Allah’s name, without whose help, so they believe, they can achieve nothing in their lives.

Since Allah has asked the Muslims to believe in the Unseen and to remain steadfast in their prayer (the Qur’an; 2:2), most of them spend a colossal amount of their valuable time on prayer to Him. Believing that mustering the teachings of the Qur’an is what they needed in their lives, they helped produce in the past, and are still helping produce, a large number of Islamic clerics, instead of good scientists and scholars of other subjects that are essential for the good, and the survival, of mankind. The following statistics throws a light on the state of the ‘man-given knowledge’ in the Muslim world:

There are 57 member-countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around 500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims. The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities, and intriguingly, not one university from the Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.

This clearly tells us that the Muslims lack in education; this being the result of their Islamic beliefs, as a consequence of which, over the past 105 years, only three Nobel Prizes have been won by about 1.4 billion Muslims (other than the Peace Prizes), while approximately 14 million Jews have won 180 Nobel Prizes during the same period.

FP: What is behind this teaching about keeping everyone praying all the time? If this isn’t God wanting it, and let us suppose this is man-made, what was the intention here? Why teach this kind of stuff?

Asghar: Before the advent of Islam, the Pagans of the Arabian Peninsula prayed three times each day; about sunrise, at noon and about sunset, turning their faces towards the Ka’aba (Washington Irving, Mahomet & his Associates, p. 31). Muhammad retained this pagan ritual in Islam and, in some unguarded moments, he told his followers to pray twice, thrice or four times in a day. Since the norms to be followed while saying these prayers were well known to his followers, he did not mention them in the Qur’an. For want of clarity on the number of prayers that Muslims must offer everyday to Allah, Sunnis believe it to be five; Shias, by and large, consider it to be three (Dr. Rafiq Zakaria; Muhammad and the Quran, p. 74).

The Prophet of Islam, retained daily prayers in Islam for a specific reason: being militarily and economically weak, he needed to tell the Pagans of Mecca that the religion he was preaching was not drastically different from the one they themselves were practicing and, as such, they should accept it without resistance. He continued to follow his policy of appeasement even after his arrival in Medina, where the Jews vehemently opposed most of the precepts of his religion. In order to win them over, he changed the direction of the Muslim prayer from Ka’aba in Mecca to Jerusalem. When the Jews refused to budge, he expressed his mild displeasure by asking his followers to face Ka’aba at the time of saying their prayer.

The Muslim prayer achieved a new dimension, and importance as well, after Muslim rulers embarked upon conquering others’ lands. Once miserably poor and destitute, neo-Muslims from the desert of Arabia found themselves dazzled by the wealth and affluence of the countries they were able to conquer and plunder just a few years after the death of Muhammad. The fair and beautiful women of the conquered countries was another reason that induced them to fight valiantly against their foes.

Al-Baladhuri, the most judicious of the historians of the {Muslim} conquest, declares that in recruiting for the Syrian campaign Abu Bakr “wrote to the people of Makkah, al-Taif, al-Yaman and all the Arabs of Najd and al-Hijaz summoning them to a ‘holy war’ and arousing their desire for it and for the booty to be got from the Greeks {booty consisted of all things captured from the vanquished as well as their women}. Rustam, the Persian general who defended his country against the Arab invasion, made the following remark to the Muslim envoy: “I have learned that ye were forced to what ye are doing by nothing but the narrow means of livelihood and by poverty.” A verse in the Hamasah of abu-Tammam has put the case tersely:

No, not for Paradise didst thou the nomad life forsake;
Rather, I believe, it was thy yearning after bread and dates.
(Quoted from Phillip K. Hitti’s History of the Arabs, p. 144).

But as the time passed and the lust to procure more wealth and women became very acute in the soldiers of Allah, Muslim rulers became worried, and feared loss of control over them, if they took no action to check their overflowing passion. Finding a solution to their problem in prayer, they raised its number to five; prescribed recitation from the Qur’an as well as various movements and gestures in order to prevent their minds from thinking about the non-Muslims’ wealth and women for a number of hours of each day.

This was like the indoctrination that the dictators of our time have used to keep their military under control. Muslim rulers succeeded in their attempt and eventually, the daily five prayers became an integral part of the Muslims’ lives. In the hope of pleasing Allah, they not only waste a colossal amount of their valuable time, they also put off their important duties in order to perform their prayers, thereby greatly harming their own and their nations’ economic well being. The sooner Muslims realize this fact the better it would be for them as well as for the rest of the world.

FP: A large part of the Muslim world is also engulfed by poverty. This also has something to do with Islamic theology, right?

Asghar: Of course. Poverty is a virtue for Muslims. Most of them believe that they get what Allah gives them. Therefore, in contrast to other people and nations that have struggled hard to ameliorate their economic conditions, and then became wealthy, most Muslims deemed it appropriate, due to their religious convictions, to keep on inflicting poverty upon themselves. Indeed, many Muslim nations bartered away their self-esteem, political independence, and sovereignty to please those benefactors whose charity they needed for their economic survival.

But without taking responsibility for their own failures and follies, they blame the affluent and wealthy non-Muslims and the non-Muslim nations for all the ills they suffer from today; these, they contend, having been inflicted upon them mostly by the unjust and treacherous Christians. The Qur’an bolsters the Muslims’ hatred towards the Christians by telling them that Allah gives them wealth not for attaining prosperity on earth, but to punish them in their next life. (cf. the Qur’an; 10:69 & 70).

Inspired by this and similar teachings of the Qur’an, Muslims not only hate those non-Muslims who are rich, they also look forward, albeit, silently to the day when they will be able to obliterate Christianity, and other religions as well, from the face of the earth.

FP: This is founded on the war that Islam teaches Muslims must wage on unbelievers.
Asghar: Yes. As we all know, Islam has divided the earth into two camps: Darul Islam and Darul Harb i.e. the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world. Since the Muslims are Allah’s foot soldiers and they are required to fulfill His plan, as it is enunciated in the Qur’an, for earth and mankind, the Muslims must not only recover the land that the non-Muslims occupy today, they are also required to force them into Islam or kill them, if they refuse to become Muslims (see the Qur’an; 9:29). It is, in fact, “a notable declaration of State policy promulgated {by Allah} about the month of Shawwal. A. H. 9, and read out by Hadhrat Ali at the Pilgrimage two months later in order to give the policy the widest publicity possible. …” (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Quran, as corrected by the King of Saudi Arabia, p. 494).

This teaching of the Qur’an effectively and automatically turns the Muslims against the Christians; the former having also been told by it not to take the latter as their friends or protectors, as they (the Christians) and the Jews are friends of each other and, thus, both of them are in collusion against the Muslim Umma (Nation) and their religion.

Apart from the Jews and the Christians, the Muslims also hate the Pagans {Mushrikun in Arabic) from the core of their hearts, as they, according to the Qur’an, are unclean (see the Qur’an; 9:28), and, thus, unworthy of living on Allah’s earth. Therefore, the Muslims must kill them whenever they get the chance to fulfill the instruction Allah gave them through the Qur’an (see verse 9:5). This is a very dangerous instruction, and it is not at all good for those inhabitants of the earth, who worship deities other than Him.

This and other truths about Islam, therefore, must be brought to the notice of the non-Muslim communities of the world in order to prepare them against the deadly hazards that Islam is likely to put them in, when its followers becomes, in future, a dominant force on earth. Paying keen attention to what is written in the Qur’an is not only in the best interest of the present-day non-Muslims of the world, it would also help them protect their descendants from the Allah-inspired wrath of the Muslims in days to come.

FP: Are you optimistic and pessimistic in the West being able to confront the Islamic agenda?

Asghar: I am saddened by the fact that the West has not learned anything from the Qur’an, the history of Islam and from its adherents. The following examples describe Muslims’ mindset and what Allah wants them to do for taking over the earth from the Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Polytheists and the followers of other religions:

1. Muhammad came to Medina as a fugitive from Mecca and within ten years, he became its absolute ruler after killing and uprooting the Jews of the city and by converting the Pagans to his faith. By his action, he taught his followers that it is the number of Muslims that matters and that it is their number that will help them establish their rule over the whole of the earth. Had he known that a time will come when number of men will be replaced by gun, he would have advised his followers to arm themselves with it first and then rampage the whole world.

2. Abyssinia, a Christian country in the seventh century, was the first country to give shelter to Muslims of Mecca. When Muslims became numerous and strong, they forgot the favor its Christian ruler had done to them and took it over as their possession and converted its Christian inhabitants to Islam. They also conquered almost one-third of the earth and would also have overrun the whole of Europe, had they not been defeated by the Christians at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

3. Allah has promised to Muslims that He will make them the inheritors and the rulers of the earth and also help them establish Islam all over it (the Quran; 24:55,57). To achieve these objectives, He has commanded them to engage in battles with those who refused to accept Islam; to smite their necks, and after overpowering them, to take them prisoners, whom they may either set free as a favor to them or ransom them for money after the hostility is over (the Quran; 47:4).

Instead of taking lessons from the past history of Muslims, most leaders and the people of the West believe that Islam is a religion of peace and its followers are as good as they appear to them. Many of them took no lesson even after seeing the destructions and deaths some Muslims inflicted on New York and Washington, D.C; they laud Islam’s good teachings even after knowing that a film director lost his life to a Muslim fanatic for the crime of making a supposedly anti-Islam film. They also praise the so-called tolerance that Islam teaches its adherents even after being informed that an American publisher refused to publish a book that contains an account of Prophet Muhammad’s wife after receiving threats of dire consequences from Muslims, if it published the book.

Many leaders of the West and its citizenry brushed off the president of Iran after he called for the complete annihilation of Israel, saying that he was a mad man. In reality, it was not his madness that had made him call for Israel’s destruction; rather, it was his hatred of the Jews that made him say what he believes Allah wants him to say and do to destroy them and their state.

How Muslims intend to destroy Israel and also, how they are going to take over the earth from the followers of other religions, when they do not have the necessary wherewithal to achieve their objectives? Here are the answers to the questions:

-Iranian and other Muslims will continue with their efforts to acquire deadly weapons, which they will need in days to come to destroy Israel – a desire that Dr. Mahathir, the former prime minister of Malaysia, had clearly expressed in his speech before the Muslim delegates to the OIC Summit, held in his country in 2003, saying:

“…It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter-attack. As Muslims we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years’ struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do. … We must build up our strength in every field, not just in armed might. Our countries must be stable and well administered, must be economically and financially strong, industrially competent and technologically advanced. This will take time, but it can be done and it will be time well spent. We are enjoined by our religion to be patient. Innallahamaasabirin. Obviously there is virtue in being patient.”

While preparing themselves to attack the Jews, Muslims are gradually taking up residence in the affluent countries of the West, with two main objectives in their minds. The first one is to earn money and the second is to sow the seed of Islam among the people of their host countries. Together with converting criminals and disgruntled folks to their faith, they also seek to increase their own number by having as many children as their women can produce. In cases where they have no women of their own to produce children for them, they trap the Western women and, after converting them to Islam, they produce their desired number of children with them.

After their number, in this way, has become large and politically powerful, they will seek autonomy, or demand complete independence for those regions of their host countries in which they will be living. This has already happened to India, and it is happening right now to the Philippines, Thailand and China.

What is likely to happen to the West, if it continues to follow its present policy of ‘political correctness’ and apathy towards the hostile teachings of Islam, the American Historian and Philosopher Will Durant (1885-1981) has described it for us in the following words:

“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

FP: What advice do you give the West?

Asghar: Knowing that what Will Durant has said is true, I suggest that the West must take the following steps to counter the threat that Muslims pose to its independence, and to its people’s ways of life without further delay:

1. It must curtail the inflow of Muslims to its territory and should allow only those Muslims to come to its shore who are willing to adapt themselves to the secular lifestyle of its citizens.

2. It must not permit Muslims to build more mosques and religious seminaries on its soil, as these are the institutions where Islamic Fundamentalism breeds and where the minds of young Muslim children and youths are poisoned against the Jews, Christians and the followers of other religions by the Islamic clerics.

3. The West must monitor the mosques to find out what the Muslim Imams say in their Friday sermons together with watching what the Muslim children are taught in their religious seminaries. Any Imam or religious teacher, who might be found delivering hateful sermons or imparting hateful lessons to his or her students, must be vigorously persecuted and punished.

4. Together with fighting the Muslim terrorists in places, like Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the West must also ask the governments of all the Muslim countries to stop their religious teachers from teaching hateful lessons to their students. It must not hesitate to use its political and economic powers on the Muslim governments, if they refuse to comply with its request.

The West has no option, but to succeed with the Muslim countries, if it wants to contain the Muslim threat against it and its allies. Its failure will prove catastrophic for the entire world – a prospect that neither the West, nor other non-Muslim countries in the East and elsewhere will be able to contain without great sacrifice of lives and destruction to their economies. The West, therefore, must not rest until it has succeeded on this front.

FP: How can the West do these things that you recommend and still remain a place that allows freedom of religion and individual liberties?

Asghar: In order to protect its citizens from Islamic terrorism and from the future risk of being overrun by Muslims, all the West needs to do is to follow its own existing rules and laws and bring about some changes to its thinking process. Let me elaborate:

1. Each country of the world has its own Visa Rules and it permits only those persons to enter its territory it considers eligible. The West can easily check the inflow of Muslims by being more careful at the time of issuing visas to them.

2. There are enough mosques and religious seminaries in the West to meet the needs of its Muslim population. Since it is a proven fact that many Muslim Imams and teachers have been using them to plant hatred of non-Muslims, particularly of the Jews, Christians and the Polytheists, into the minds of the Muslim children and young men and women, the West has the right not to grant permission for building more of them and also to electronically monitor the existing ones for the sake of its own people.

Monitoring the Muslim Imams and teachers is not a violation of religious rights of all Muslims, rather, it is a necessary step (the doctrine of necessity applies here) that will also protect Muslims’ own young from the influence of their rogue Imams and teachers.

Moreover, Islam permits surveillance of bad elements and Allah personally spied on the enemies of Muhammad to protect him from their mischief. Allah admitted this fact by saying in the Quran:

4:108: “They may hide (their crimes) from men, but they cannot hide (them) from Allah, seeing that He {i.e. Allah} is in their midst when they plot by night, in words that He cannot approve: and Allah doth compass round all they do.”

This should silence those Muslims who are likely to oppose the actions of their host governments against their Imams and religious teachers, for when their Allah could spy on Muhammad’s enemies, the law enforcers of the West can also do the same in order to protect their people from the evil designs of their enemies.

Additionally, freedom of religion and individual liberties are for those who value them and respect them. You cannot protest the arrest of a known or suspected criminal – religious or otherwise –, citing his or her religious freedom or liberties, as letting him or her go free will be a dangerous act for the society or the nation in which he or she lives.

Therefore, in the matter of religious terrorism, or religiously inspired incitement to kill the followers of certain religions, the demand for religious freedom and individual liberties should have no effect and the West should do what is necessary to protect its citizens and their properties from those who are bent upon destroying them for the advancement of their own religion.

FP: Mohammad Asghar, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Asghar: Thank you for talking to me.