Wednesday word: Mujâhid

Like the definitions I’ve added to Money Jihad’s glossary for riba and nisab, this definition comes from Muslim translators of Islamic texts:

“Mujâhid (Plural: Mujâhidûn) A Muslim warrior in Jihâd.”

This concise explanation appears in the appendix of the Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari.

Remember what Islam and its fundamentalist spokesmen say about the mujahideen and the money jihad?

“Your duty is to support the Mujahideen with money and men. I have experienced Jihad myself and I know how costly it can be. The Zakat of one affluent Muslim merchant is enough to finance all the Jihadi front against our enemies”—Osama Bin Laden.

“Collecting money for the mujahideen was not a donation or a gift but a duty necessitated by the sacrifices they made for the Muslim nation”—Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

“When  you use your money for the sake of Allah…you are a mujahid for the sake of Allah”—Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Palestinian Authority.

Oh, and zakat contributions “are only for the Fuqara’ (poor), and Al-Masakin (the poor) and those employed to collect (the funds), and to attract the hearts of those who have been inclined (towards Islam), and to free the captives, and for those in debt, and for Allah’s Cause (i.e. for Mujahidun – those fighting in a holy battle), and for the wayfarer (a traveller who is cut off from everything); a duty imposed by Allah.”—Koran (Sura 9, Verse 60).

Some of these quotations deserve a special new place in our blog’s sidebar as a reminder of what “jihad with money” is all about.

10,000 reasons to say “thank you”

As of today, Money Jihad has received just over 10,000 hits since launching in October 2009.  Thanks especially to our top 10 referring sites:

1. The Religion of Peace
2. Shariah Finance Watch
3. Jihad Watch
4. Susan Loone’s Blog
5. Atlas Shrugs
6. Danger Room
7. Creeping Sharia
8. WordPress
9. Google
10. BlogCatalog

Those are all great resources—please support them.  An honorable mention also goes to Skeptical CPA.  Cheers!

Clinton says peace plan would de-fund terror

Never mind that the Koran commands Muslims to “Go forth, light-armed and heavy-armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah!” (9:41).  The real inspiration behind terrorist financing isn’t Islamic law and jihad…it’s a stalled Israeli peace process!  At least according to Bill Clinton.

Clinton, who lives in a mental fantasy land of his own invention, declared on ABC’s “This Week” program on Apr. 18 that “half” of terrorist funding comes from angst over the “Palestinian” issue.  Furthermore, Clinton argues that if Pres. Obama announced a peace plan of his own, that would mean a “whole different story” for terrorist financing:

TAPPER: You’ve come closer than any president in recent history in brokering a mid-east peace plan. President Obama is in a situation right now where he is getting a lot of conflicting advice. Do you think it’s time for President Obama to put a peace plan on the table?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I’m reluctant to give him public advice. I talk to the president and the secretary of state and Mr. Emanuel and others privately. But let me answer you this way because I don’t want to do anything to foreclose their options. The argument against doing that is that the current Israeli government with its current coalition almost certainly would reject it.

And the argument is that that makes us look weak. I think it’s the — it may be — they may decide it’s more important to have clarity. And to do something that will be an action forcing event to put them back to the table.

And if he decides to do it, I will support it. And I think if he decides to do it, he should acknowledge that they may come up with a deal that’s slightly different than the one he proposes. But we need to do something to deprive both sides of any excuse not to engage in serious negotiations.

Look at the ramifications of this. Half of the energy coming out of all this organization and money-raising for terror comes out of the allegations around the unresolved Palestinian issue. If there were a Palestinian state working in partnership, with the policies Mr. Fayyad’s following on the West Bank, it would be a whole different world.

All the Arabs would identify with Israel.

Palestinian Authority extols jihad with money

This slipped by me.  MEMRI transcribed the remarks of Mahmoud Al-Habbash, minister of religious endowments (waqf) for the Palestinian Authority, who delivered a sermon on Palestinian television last month saying, “When you use your money for the sake of Allah, in defense of the religion of Allah, of the Muslims, of their countries, and of all that is sacred to them – you are a mujahid for the sake of Allah.”

That, folks, is the essence of the money jihad, or Al Jihad bi-al-Mal.  For anybody who doesn’t know, a “mujahid” is a Muslim holy warrior–a jihadist.  These comments echo statements made by Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Osama bin Laden.

Mild milestone

As of this evening, Money Jihad has been viewed over 4,000 times in the less than four months since we launched.  Thank you to all the readers!  It’s gratifying to see steady and growing readership.

But the best part is that as the word spreads, the lights are shining brighter and brighter on the darkness of terrorist financing.

MJ’s international growth

It’s hard to believe that Money Jihad has only been around for three months.  Although this blog is about rather dreary topics of terrorist financing and Islamic taxes, I’ve had a blast, and judging from growing readership here, apparently many of you are enjoying this site as well.  I’m looking forward to continued blogging in throughout 2010.

I’d like to highlight several other websites that have helped spread the word around the world about my blog over the past month.  Please check out the Malaysian human rights/feminist Susan Loone’s blog at sloone.wordpress.com, the Swedish & English language pro-Israel, anti-jihad blog IceViking at icevikings.blogspot.com, Swedish anti-Islamist blog Jihad I Malmö, and although I’ve acknowledged them before, Sharia Finance Watch and fellow WordPress-user Creeping Sharia.  Also, I welcome the readership that has been coming to us lately through folks via LinkedIn.

Thank you, all—the more we can work together to expose the roots of jihadist finance, the better!

Just got your 1040? Well set that aside & check out THIS tax chart!

Researchers periodically stumble upon Money Jihad searching for information about tax rates under Islam.  The search engines have sent us folks looking for information on things like “jizya rates, ” “hadith taxes” and “ushr tax.”

To help meet that need, and just as a handy reference for all of us, I’ve added a new Islamic tax chart page to the blog today breaking down the major types of taxes under Islam, who is subject to the tax, what kind of wealth is taxed and at what rates, whether any deductions or exemptions apply, when the taxes are due, and what the basis for the taxes are under Islamic law.

I’ve kept a draft paper copy of this chart on my desk for a while which has been invaluable.  So take a look!  You can click on the link within this post or on the “Islamic tax chart” link on the right-hand sidebar.

New glossary released

Bayt al-Mal?  FATF?  Ushr?  WTF?!

“Enough, already!” you’re thinking.  “Why must you torture me with all these bizarre terms?”

Worry no more.  If my posts get too hairy to follow, check out Money Jihad’s new glossary of counterterrorism and Islamic financial terms.  In order to keep it reasonably objective, the definitions are verbatim excerpts from established, mainline reference materials (with full attributions to the authors, of course).

There are still a lot of important words to add to the page—concepts like jizya, hawala, and riba—which I’ll start rolling out slowly by posting a new “word of the week” every Wednesday or so.  (And a special thanks to the reader who made this suggestion—you know who you are!)

Since it’s the namesake for this blog, I’d like to highlight just one of the terms in the glossary in today’s post—“money jihad.”  This excerpt from a great article (available on The Terror Finance Blog) written by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen is more of an explanation than a classic dictionary entry, but my goal with the glossary is to find descriptive definitions like this that are still succinct enough not to bore you.

Money jihad:

Funding the jihad, i.e., financial jihad, or Al Jihad bi-al-Mal, is mandated by many verses in the Qur’an, such as chapter 61, verses 10.11: ‘you . . . should strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives,’ and chapter 49, verse 15: ‘The [true] believers are only those who . . . strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah.’ This has been reiterated throughout Islamic history and in recent times. ‘Financial Jihad [is] . . . more important . . . than self-sacrificing,’ according to Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood (MB) spiritual leader Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi.

Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most prominent Sunni scholars in the world today, reiterated the legal justification for ‘financial jihad [Al-Jihad bi-al-Mal]’ in a lecture he gave on 4 May 2002 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to him, ‘collecting money for the mujahideen (jihad fighters . . . ) was not a donation or a gift but a duty necessitated by the sacrifices they made for the Muslim nation.’

If you want to know more about a word or concept that isn’t included (and some words just aren’t explained very well by the Googles, Wikipedias, and Dictionary.coms of the world), just contact me, and I’ll be happy to research it and share what I find out with this blog’s readers.

Ten most revealing terror funding stories of 2009

If the FBI can do a top ten list of terror in 2009, we can come up with a list too!  Money Jihad selected these ten stories because they help expose the threat of jihadist financing in 2009 the best.

10.  Zakat funds jihad:  Candor alert—the leader of jihadists in the Caucasus let the cat out of the bag by admitting that most of his groups funding comes from forced zakat collections from the local populace.  Oops, or was it Muhammad that let that cat out centuries ago?  (And yes, this story also made my top 10 list of zakat scandals in the past five years.)

9.  WMD risks mount:  The Brits predicted that more money, more technology, and more mobility would lead to an increased threat of dirty bombs & illicit materials being used against us.  Najibullah Zazi and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab are proving them right.

8.  President is zakat enabler?  Despite ample warnings of the dangers of modern zakat-giving, including the funding of the 9/11 terrorist attacks through zakat, Pres. Obama promised in Cairo to help Muslims fulfill their zakat obligations.

7.  Abysmal zakat accounting throughout the year as documented in the short history of this blog here, here, and here.  Why is this a problem?  If you don’t really know where zakat is going, then you don’t really know where zakat is going.

6.  Palestinian aid scandal:  United Nations humanitarian “aid” to “Palestinian refugees” is revealed to give “services to people who simply don’t need the charity, and many are not refugees, and some are not even Palestinians” and even to use medical aid for military purposes.  This fiasco serves as a perfect case study in what Islamic fundamentalists do with “charity”—they funnel it into holy war.

5.  Jizya lives in Pakistan.  In accordance with the Hadith, Non-Muslims who wouldn’t pay the jizya (and even some who did), faced the ransack or eviction from their property, or even death.  The facts were so disturbing that even the accommodating U.S. State Department was forced to condemn Pakistan in its annual religious freedom report.

4.  Philippine ransom spree & beheading bloodbath.  Abu Sayyaf beheads those who won’t pay or can’t afford ransom payments as authorized by the Koran.

Just the beginning

“Big things have small beginnings, sir” said Claude Rains in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Mr. Rains: advocate of big things

As Money Jihad observes its own two-month anniversary, that classic line comes to mind.  There have been over two thousand views of Money Jihad and our daily readership average has increased.  After some initial hiccups with Yahoo!, we finally got indexed by its search engine.  We’ve experienced a corresponding uptick of traffic through search engines (according to our WordPress’s data). 

I thought it might be entertaining to share some of the more unexpected phrases that people have searched for to stumble across our blog:

• david headley photo (these words or variations of this search were used many times to find us because this is one of the few websites that has an image of Headley)
• italy & jihad (what does that tell you about Italy?)
• sugar smuggling in the U.S. (sounds like an interesting topic!)

Anyway, I would also be remiss not to mention Blogcatalog and its roll in pointing additional readers here.  Thanks to all, as usual!

Open sesame

Got a question about Money Jihad?  Check out our brand new FAQ page here.

Like the old magician said to Aladdin, “Beneath this stone lies a treasure which is to be yours.”  Just say the magic words.

Actually just click the link–it’ll work better that way.