I was 13, sitting in a barbershop in Amman with my younger brother, transfixed by what we were witnessing on the television, when the men around us began to chant “Allahu Akbar.” It took a moment for a dozen grown men to realize what they were watching: a victory for Islam and our people.
As the towers fell, as the Pentagon burned, as the civilized world reacted in horror, we rejoiced — America, the Great Satan, had fallen.
Since then I have heard “Allahu Akbar” again and again — from men beheading captives in Iraq, from those who burned people alive in cages in Syria, from suicide bombers who walked into Israeli and Parisian cafés, and in gay bars and synagogues in America when terrorists opened fire on innocence.
I eventually heard it coming out of my own mouth, marching with thousands through the streets of Amman against a Danish cartoonist who had dared to draw the Prophet.
Allahu akbar. God is greater. What we understood it to mean, as ordinary Muslims, not radicals, not some secret cell, but as schoolchildren, as boys in a mosque on Friday, was that we were greater. Islam was greater. It was a supremacy shot through with grievance and rage, and it was not preached to us in a back room by a masked man. It was the air. It was the curriculum. It was the sermon.
Today the West is told the lie that September 11 was a response to American foreign policy, that October 7 was a response to occupation, that tens of thousands of Islamic attacks each had some local cause. Or, in the words of a Democratic Senate candidate, “hurt people hurt people.”
It is a lie meant to normalize what sits at the core of the doctrine: that as a Muslim you are superior, you are just, you are right, and no one else is. The question is not whether every Muslim obeys this. Most Muslims do not. But it is the core of the ideology they follow.
Recently I listened to a German man, a former Muslim of Turkish descent, describe what he was taught at home as a child: Jews and Christians are infidels; they must know their place, pay the jizya, the tax of the humiliated, and if they refuse to convert, they die. He grew up in Düsseldorf. I grew up in Amman. We had never met, yet we had learned the same thing.
This ideology is older than America, older than Israel, older than the grievances invented to explain it away — a doctrine that spent 14 centuries erasing civilizations, enslaving Africans and Europeans, and burying the dead by the millions.
Every human being has the capacity for evil.
Most religions restrain it, setting moral boundaries against violence and cruelty. Christianity commands its followers to love their enemies and refuse vengeance. Judaism, despite its people’s long persecution, never formed a doctrine commanding global conquest or the extermination of non-Jews.
Islam does the opposite. When an ISIS fighter beheads a captive, he is not acting outside his faith. He is following the Koran and the example of Muhammad, a warlord who personally oversaw the beheading of hundreds of Jewish men in Medina and the rape and enslavement of their wives and daughters.
When Hamas slaughters festivalgoers, they are not betraying Islam; they are fulfilling the doctrine of jihad, which commands war on the infidels until Islam rules the world.
A Christian who murders violates his faith. A Muslim who kills an infidel is fulfilling his highest calling. It is a mistake to think this is just another religion, rather than the most dangerous ideology the world has ever known.
Now, 25 years later, we must acknowledge the danger in our midst.
Don’t be fooled: this doctrine rejects, and holds in contempt, the Western values of pluralism, equal rights under law, women’s equality, freedom of conscience, free speech, religious freedom, and reciprocal tolerance. Those who take this ideology’s medieval teachings seriously — those who view us all as infidels — are taking positions of power by concealing their goals in the language of a civilized society. They are using democratic and liberal language they do not believe in to disarm a society that does.
I am not warning you as an outsider. I am warning you as someone who once stood on the other side… now, as a man, changed by the grace of God, I live here in this nation that is a “city on the hill.” Islam hates our liberty and commands its followers to wage war on it.
To this doctrine, you are already an infidel, whether you know it or not. I know it, because I once thought this about you.
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Danny Burmawi is the author of “Islam, Israel, and the West” and is the founder of the Ideological Defense Institute. He is leading a coalition of former Muslims from September 11 through October 7 to mark Infidel Awareness Month, to teach the West what it means, and to stand with every infidel who has suffered. Learn more at InfidelAwareness.com
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