A Taxonomy of Jihad

... Even now, twenty-five years later, how many Americans grasp that acts like the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Orlando Pulse club massacre, and the Boston Marathon bombing are, in fact, not the work of people who've hijacked or misunderstand Islam but, rather, of people who understand the dictates of the Koran perfectly and are determined to carry them out...

But never before, so far as I'm aware, has any writer on the subject constructed such an elaborate taxonomy of jihad as has Aynaz Anni Cyrus...

Cyrus, let it be said at the outset, is an elegant, no-nonsense scribe: short, succinct sentences, brief bullet points, snappy formulations, no shilly-shallying around, and not a trace of academic fustiness. Her constant aim is to convey every piece of vital information as clearly, crisply, and urgently as possible. And one of the first things we need to know is that all forms of jihad "are part of an integrated playbook: normalize, enshrine, educate, entrench."...

Then there's a form of jihad that too many Westerners still get wrong - namely, "migration jihad." If Muslims move West, it's not just to collect welfare; it's to do their part in serving the Islamic strategy of hijrah, which Cyrus defines as "a deliberate shifting of populations to create new centers of influence, reshape societies from within, and slowly tilt political power toward Islamic governance."

It's an old story, yet Western governments still don't get it. And thanks to their ignorance, many European neighborhoods are now sharia-run enclaves...

And on it goes. "Deception jihad" entails the use of "concealment, manipulation, and misdirection" to gain the upper hand over infidels. "Political jihad" consists of "the deliberate, organized use of electoral and governmental mechanisms to advance, protect, or normalize Islamic ideological objectives."

Not so "civilization jihad," which involves the gradual transformation of an infidel society - morally, culturally, politically, and institutionally - "until the population no longer remembers where the original lines were drawn." Let me explain: older non-Muslims, such as myself, who never saw a hijab in our youth, have since seen them proliferate, and therefore are intensely aware of how dramatically the West has changed; but young Western people around us have never known a world without hijabs...

This kind of jihad, writes Cyrus, "thrives today for one reason: the modern West created the perfect environment for it": once, "societies were fortified, identities were cohesive, and cultural boundaries were rigid"; now, "tolerance, diversity, inclusion, religious neutrality, and personal autonomy" make Islamic subversion easy.

Sharia is not a personal or optional add-on to Islam but is Islam itself - a complete, compulsory divine system of law, governance, and social order that every believing Muslim is religiously obligated to strive to implement wherever they live, making any permanent acceptance of secular law a doctrinal impossibility.

Most Westerners instinctively treat "Islam" and "Sharia" as two different things. They assume a devout Muslim can be like a devout Jew or Christian: personally religious, privately observant, but perfectly able to live under secular law without trying to replace it.

After all, a religious Jew can follow Halacha at home and still accept American, Canadian or British civil law. A religious Christian can follow Canon law in church and still accept the Criminal Code. So why, they wonder, can't Muslims do the same with Sharia?

That assumption is a category error. It is the false dichotomy that lies at the heart of Western confusion about Islam.

In a modern times lecture titled Sharia: Barbaric or Perfect?, Dr. Haitham al-Haddad - one of the most senior Islamic jurists in the English-speaking world - explained the orthodox Islamic position with unusual clarity and honesty...

This is why Islam functions, much as does communism, as an entirely different system of thinking - not merely another parallax view of the same reality.

Therefore, attempting to understand Islam as a threat, or even its miscibility to Western Civilization through the lens of Western concepts is suicidal...