The “anti-terror” imam who wants Muhammad’s birthday to be a national holiday in America.
Yesterday, Monday, March 5, 2012 a small, but much ballyhooed rally and press conference touted as the first event of its kind held by Muslims in support of the NYPD, took place outside police headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
One of the approximately 35-40 persons featured at the rally was Qazi Qayyoom, an imam of the Muhammadi Center in Jackson Heights in Queens. At the rally, the good imam was interviewed, and stated,
The police, they come to us and say, “Is everything OK? How can we help you?” They are not trying to hurt us. For this, I want to say thank you and tell them I support them.
Much appreciated words indeed.
But in a story published just the day before (March 4, 2010), in the Times Ledger of Queens, Qayyoum revealed his dogged determination to make the birthday of Islam’s prophet Muhammad a national holiday—not in his native, increasingly radicalized Muslim state of Bengladesh—but here in the US. He expressed his aims with an audacious clarity—and patience:
We want one day, an annual holiday like Christmas…Prophet Muhammad said, “I am not the prophet of only Muslims. I am the prophet of all human beings….
Qayyoom intends to formally announce his national campaign April 22 at the second planned “Interfaith Harmony and World Peace” event in Jackson Heights, but claimed the effort is already underway, with plans to reach out to elected officials and leaders of other faiths. He gushed, “Everywhere I’m talking, they’re welcoming it,” concluding, “I think it will work. [But] It will take a little time.”
The mind boggles at what “aspects” of Muhammad’s life Qayyoom would have us whitewash and conveniently ignore.
W.H.T Gairdner, the great Arabic linguist and scholar of Islam noted with understatement in 1915, what is readily apparent from Muhammad’s actual biography (as opposed to the treacly Muslim hagiography), based exclusively on the pious Muslim sources:
As incidents in the life of an Arab conqueror, the tales of raiding, private assassinations and public executions, perpetual enlargements of the harem, and so forth, might be historically explicable and therefore pardonable but it is another matter that they should be taken as a setting forth of the moral ideal for all time.
Reinforcing Gairdner’s earlier observation, another major scholar of Islam, Arthur Jeffery, in his review of A. Guillaume’s seminal 1955 English translation of the earliest pious Muslim biography of Islam’s prophet, “The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah”, remarked:
Years ago the late Canon Gairdner in Cairo said that the best answer to the numerous apologetic Lives of Muhammad published in the interests of Muslim propaganda in the West would be an unvarnished translation of the earliest Arabic biography of the prophet. In this present volume such a translation is put into our hands in a beautifully printed and produced book…Byzantine, Syriac, and Armenian writers who mention him say only that he was a merchant who appeared as a prophet and sent the Arabs out on their wars of conquest
Apparently, in our aggressively conditioned state of non-Muslim dhimmitude, we are to ignore the bitter, tragic irony that an ostensible avatar of peaceful coexistence (or is it Pax Islamica?), imam Qayyoum, wants America to “celebrate” as a national holiday on par with Christmas, the Muslim figure mainstream, authoritative Islam has always recognized as the prototype for jihad, including jihad terrorism. (And for a modern vision of this same paradigm, see, “The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model”)
