Free The Devil We Don't Know by Nonie Darwish Page B

States, the first thing I heard on Al Jazeerah TV was a cry for vengeance for his death.
    Minding One's Business
    Minding one's business and respecting the privacy of others are rare in Muslim society. The personal life of an individual is constantly under assault; one's business is everyone else's business. What you wear and eat, how you dress, whom you talk to or befriend, and what you say or do are subject to scrutiny, even punishment, by others; such punishment can range from rejection and ruining a person's reputation to physical abuse or even honor killing. This is because Islam entrusted the Muslim individual with the task of monitoring the actions of others in how they conform or don't conform to Islamic law. That can often lead some people to take the law into their own hands.
    In Muslim society, a person feels perfectly justified to spy or snitch on others, from relatives to neighbors and coworkers. A Muslim individual is given too much power over fellow Muslims and is told by sharia that he will not be punished for killing apostates and adulterers. That concept of encouraging individual Muslims to police and tell on one another has transformed an Islamic state into a police state, turning brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor.
    Reforming Others, Rather than Oneself
    Muslims are focused on how to fix the outside world, rather than on fixing what is in their own. The Koran itself sets the example. More than 61 percent of the Koran deals with the sins of those who do not believe in Islam. Most Islamic preaching and Friday sermons dwell on how nonmembers of the religion, the kafir , are evil and sinful for having rejected Islam. The Koran is full of horrific descriptions of the kafir: subhuman, inferior, unclean, apes, pigs, and deserving of mistreatment, torture, and death, all at the hands of Muslims. Yet little attention is directed to the sins of Muslims and how to nourish their souls. When things go wrong, the blame immediately is placed on the great or little Satans in the outer world who are out to get Muslims. In the eyes of Islam, Muslims earned their pride and glory, and non-Muslims earned their shame and sin.
    The theory of jihad is the ultimate manifestation of a culture that does not mind its own business. Jihad is defined as “to war against non-Muslims, derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare , to establish the religion.” 7 Muslims will not rest until they reform non-Muslims and make them like Muslims. The fact that others do not want to act like Muslims greatly bothers the core believers of Islam. As a result, the theory of jihad, which is the core theory of Islam, is save non-Muslims from their sins by forcing Islam on them—first through inviting them, then, if that does not work, through war, terror, killing, enslavement, or heaving taxation on them, while humiliating them.
    Islam exhorts its people to reform others, rather than to reform themselves, to hunt out people who don't conform to Islam; these nonbelievers are the prey who deserve every evil action. Holiness in Islam is attained by following Allah's jihad commandment, which entrusts Muslims, with their own hands, to rid the world of the sinful nonbelievers or those who reject sharia. It is not Muslim sins jihadists are looking for, but the sins of others.
    Blaming Others
    Taking it upon yourself to reform others implies that there is nothing wrong with you. This results in a chronic state of blaming others, a state that has reached pathological levels in Muslim society. Because of the severe and humiliating punishment that awaits sinners, Muslims are left without socially acceptable mechanisms to deal with sin, other than to hide it. Whether it is by the Islamic virtue police or vigilante street justice, Muslims are constantly reminded never to admit guilt. As a result of chronically keeping shameful behavior a secret, Muslims have developed a mechanism of denial. Actions that cause embarrassment, shame, or