The next sound heard ringing out over Oxford’s dreaming spires may not be church bells, but the ullulations of the Mohammedan muezzin summoning the faithful to pray five times (not three times) a day.

Public proclamations (in Arabic) that “There is no God but Allah” and that “Mohammed is the prophet of God” may well strike some as signals of Islamic domination, which the battles of Tours and Vienna ought to have effectually prevented.

The Daily Mail reports resistance:

Muslim plans to broadcast a loudspeaker call to prayer from a city centre mosque have been attacked by local residents who say it would turn the area into a “Muslim ghetto”.

Dozens of people packed out a council meeting to express their concerns over the plans for a two-minute long call to prayer to be issued three times a day, saying that it could drown out the traditional sound of church bells.

But a spokesman for the Central Mosque said that Muslim’s also have the right to summon worshippers.

Dr Mark Huckster, who lives in Stanton Road and works at East Oxford hospice Helen House, told the Oxford Mail: “The proposal to issue a prayer call is very un-neighbourly, especially in a crowded urban space such as Oxford.

“I have lived in the Middle East and a prayer call has a very different feel to church bells and I personally found the noise extremely unpleasant, rather disturbing and very alien to the western mindset.”

He added: “If an evangelical Christian preacher proposed issuing sermons three times a day at full volume there would be an outcry.

“There could be a sense of ghettoisation of East Oxford. Cowley Road would have a Muslim flavour and could become a Muslim ghetto which is contrary to what we want in a multicultural society.”

Dr Huckster was among six residents speaking in opposition to the plans, revealed in the Oxford Mail in November.

Allan Chapman, who lives in East Oxford, said: “We are concerned with civil liberties and civil peace and the right to be able to live in our own space.

“I do not want preaching at. It is not the tradition of this country or the tradition I subscribe to.

“I find this totally, utterly unacceptable and I plan to do whatever I can to stop it.”

Roger Kimball describes how Western courts are being successfully used to suppress criticism of Islamic extremism.

Last summer, Cambridge University Press announced that it would pulp all unsold copies of its 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by Robert O. Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, and J. Millard Burr, a retired employee of the State Department. Why? Because Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, filed a libel claim to quash the book. According to a story in The Chronicle for Higher Education [reg req’d], Cambridge instantly capitulated, paid “substantial damages” to Mr. Mahfouz, and even went so far as to contact university libraries worldwide to ask them to remove the book from their shelves. They seem to have been successful in their request: I have searched high and low for the book in academic libraries and public libraries and have found that, although it is listed as “not checked out,” it is nowhere to be found.

Suppressing books he doesn’t like seems to be a hobby of Mr. Mahfouz’s. His web site lists successful actions against three other books Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden and Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It. As Robert Spencer explained in The Washington Times, one notable feature of Mr. Mahfouz’s legal actions is that he has sued various American authors in Britain, where libel laws favor the plaintiff.

AFP photo

The Guardian:

Carrying swords and machetes and waving green Islamic flags, protesters marched through the streets of Khartoum yesterday demanding the execution of British teacher Gillian Gibbons. “No one lives who insults the prophet,” read one of the banners outside the British embassy.

More than 1,000 Muslim demonstrators in the Sudanese capital called for her to be shot or stabbed for insulting Islam after her pupils called a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gibbons, 54, of Liverpool, was sentenced on Thursday night to 15 days in jail followed by deportation in a case that has attracted international condemnation. …

While many in Khartoum thought the arrest was harsh – the Sudanese blogosphere is awash with derision aimed at the authorities – leaflets were distributed at some mosques calling for protests against Gibbons after Friday prayers.

Some protesters arrived at Khartoum’s central mosque on foot, waving knives, clubs and ceremonial swords. Others came on the back of pick-up trucks, covered in printed banners and flags. Initially, the atmosphere was jovial, as the first groups of men moved towards Martyrs Square in front of the president’s palace in central Khartoum. Passersby shook their fists in encouragement and motorists honked their horns. But the mood soon darkened as the crowd swelled to more than 1,000.

Organisers shouted encouragement through megaphones. The crowd responded with traditional Islamic chants, extolling Allah, urging the death of anyone who insulted the prophet Muhammad. Newspaper pictures of Gibbons were burned on a makeshift stage at the heart of Martyrs Square. One protester was seen making a stabbing gesture with his sword. A group of men shouted: “She must be killed by the sword.”

Men wearing traditional robes and turbans leaned out of car windows waving swords and machete-like blades. Individuals shouted threats at western journalists, shouting: “You must go”, and drawing their fingers across their throats.

There was little doubt the protest had been carefully orchestrated. The banners waved by marchers and tied to the front of vehicles had all been pre-printed. Before the verdict, imams across the city also focused on the case in their sermons. One address, broadcast on national radio, accused Gibbons of purposefully comparing the prophet to a bear – an animal that was “alien” to Sudan, he said. “She deserved what she got,” he added.

The police did not intervene, indicating that the protest received the official approval of the authorities. Unauthorised protests held by opposition and other groups in Khartoum have in the past been broken up with teargas.

Thomas F. Madden in his New Concise History of the Crusades:

For a thousand years after the death of the Prophet, the Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world, continued to wage jihad successfully against the Dar al-harb, the abode of war. In that time Muslim armies conquered three-quarters of the Christian world, despite the efforts of generations of crusaders to halt or turn back the relentless advance. An impartial observer at the time might well have concluded that Christendom was a doomed remnant of the ancient Roman Empire, destined to be supplanted by the more youthful and energetic religion and culture of Islam. Yet that observer would have been wrong. Within Europe new ideas were brewing that would have dramatic and unprecedented repercussions not just in the Mediterranean, but across the entire world. Born out of a unique blend of faith, reason, individualism, and entrepreneurialism, those ideas produced a rapid increase in scientific experimentation with immediately practical applications. These included such world-changing devices as the printing press, gunpowder weaponry, and ocean-going vessels. By the seventeenth century European wealth and power was growing exponentially. Europeans were entering a new and unprecedented age.

It is one of the most remarkable events in history that the Latin West, an internally divided region seemingly on the brink of conquest by a powerful empire, suddenly burst forth with amazing new energy, neutralizing its enemies and expanding across the globe. Amazingly, the specter of advancing Muslim armies, which for centuries had posed such danger, no longer constituted a serious threat. Indeed, as the gaze of Europeans spanned new global horizons, they soon forgot that such a threat had existed at all. The Muslim world was no longer viewed as a dread enemy, but simply one more backward culture. From that perspective the medieval crusades seemed distant and unnecessary—a discarded artifact from the childhood of a civilization.

Reuters:

Saudi Arabia executed on Friday an Egyptian man convicted of “sorcery”, desecrating the Muslim holy book and adultery, the official news agency said.

The Saudi Press Agency said Mustafa Ibrahim was put to death in Riyadh in a controversial case which has drawn criticism from rights activists.

It said Ibrahim had been accused by another foreign resident of practicing magic in order to separate him from his wife and said evidence had been found in his home, including books on black magic, a candle with an incantation “to summon devils” and “foul-smelling herbs”.

“He confessed to adultery with a woman and desecrating the Koran by placing it in the bathroom,” the agency said.

Saudi media first reported the case in April, saying mosque worshippers had complained that a pharmacist in the northern desert town of Arar had placed copies of the Koran in washrooms. No accusation of adultery was mentioned at the time.

Clerics of Saudi Arabia’s austere form of Islam, known as Wahhabism, take accusations of sorcery seriously and recently held a conference in Riyadh on how to combat it.

Fjordman is back with a new, and characteristically pessimistic, essay.

We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s “head,” the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this “head” is cut off from the rest of the body?

In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find… yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia.

Read the whole thing.

The damaged Swat valley Buddha is thought to date from the seventh century AD

The Telegraph reports:

Islamist radicals in Pakistan have attempted to destroy an ancient carving of Buddha by drilling holes in the rock and filling them with dynamite.

The 23ft high image was damaged during the attack, which brought back memories of the Taliban’s destruction six years ago of the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan, in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The Buddha, in the Swat district of north-west Pakistan, is thought to date from the seventh century AD and was considered the largest in Asia, after the two Bamiyan Buddhas.

The explosion on Monday night damaged the upper part of the rock.

Pakistani troops have stepped up recent operations against militants in the fertile Swat valley, where thousands of locals are in thrall to Mullah Fazlullah, a rabble-rousing cleric who has called for suicide attacks and holy war. Fazlullah’s men have continued to wage an offensive against what they deem ‘un-Islamic’ activity, last week blowing up dozens of music, video and cosmetics stalls at a market.

AgenceFrance story.

Charles Johnson notes the irony of such observance “In the city that suffered the worst Islamic terrorist attack in history.”

JCM comments: “How about lighting the windows in a bullseye pattern?”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch explicates the recent Bin Laden videos, identifying both the invitation to convert to Islam and the dyed beard as signals of an imminent attack on the US.

Juliusz Kossak, Sztandar proroka [The Prophet’s Standard]
1882. Watercolor. 22 x 37.2″ (56 x 94.5 cm)
National Museum, Warsaw.

Adam Zamoyski describes the relief of the Siege of Vienna:

He’s badly camped — we shall beat him!” said (King Jan III Sobieski), turning to his generals. …

Just before dawn on the following day, 12 September 1683, the King of Poland attended Mass in the ruins of an old convent on the Kahlenberg and then dictated the ordre de bataille. The left wing was given to the Duke of Lorraine. It consisted of three corps of Imperial and Saxon infantry under Count Caprara, the Duke of Baden, and the Elector of Saxony, supported by a large force of Polish cavalry under Stanislaw Lubomirski. It was to advance along the Danube to relieve Vienna itself. The centre, under the Prince of Waldeck, was made up of troops from Franconia and Bavaria — with the young Elector going into his first battle as a mere soldier. The right wing, lost from sight throughout most of the day as it swept round through the Vienna Woods, consisted of Polish infantry and cavalry under Stanislaw Jablonowski. Only the Polish artillery had been nimble enough to haul their ordnance over the mountain roads, so their twenty-eight guns would have to race about from one corner of the battlefield to another- at one stage they were to run out of wadding and had to commandeer the fine wigs of some indignant French gentleman-volunteers. Only about one third of the 68,000 troops were Polish – the rest were Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Scots and Irishmen. It was a crusading army, come together from all corners of the Christian world to face the Infidel, and in its ranks fought no fewer than nine sovereign princes.

As they began their descent from the Kahlenberg, a Turkish force came out of the camp to face them. The janissaries took up defensive positions on hillocks, along gullies and in vineyards, and the Christian troops had to pick their way through difficult terrain to dislodge them. It was a sweltering day, and by early afternoon when the Christian army had pushed the Turks off the last foothills, the men were thoroughly exhausted. Around three o’clock there was a lull in the fighting, as they consolidated their new positions and the Turks fell back to regroup.

The king felt tempted to put off the decisive battle to the following day, even though this would give the Turks time to turn the heavy guns bombarding Vienna to face his army. Through his telescope he saw fresh Turkish regiments being drawn up and a red tent being put up behind them. Beside it stood a pole bearing the horse-tails which were the sign of the Grand Vizir’s rank. At about four o’clock Kara Mustafa unfurled the banner of the Prophet, emblem of Ottoman victory, to loud cries from the ranks of Janissaries. Instinct made the king change his mind, and he sent a galloper to Jablonowski on the right wing. Then he rode forward himself.

As Sobieski’s mounted figure appeared on a prominent hillock in the front line, over to the right the leafy gloom of the Vienna Woods burst into blossom, as a few, then a few hundred, then a few thousand brightly-coloured lance-pennants thrust out between the branches. One by one, the glittering squadrons of the Polish heavy cavalry, the Husaria, detached themselves from the mass of the woods and trotted forward. Led by senators and senior dignitaries of the Most Serene Commonwealth of Poland, its ranks made up exclusively of the highest-born, this great war-machine shimmered with the wealth of vast acreages. Each rider was helmeted and plumed; his breastplate encrusted with gold and gems; cloaked with leopard-skins; winged with great arcs of eagle-feathers rising over his head; mounted on a magnificent charger caparisoned in silk and velvet embroidered with gold. Each husarz carried sabres and pistols with jewelled handles, and a twenty-foot lance with streaming pennant. As they broke into a lumbering canter and lowered their lances, the pennants and the wings on their backs set up an evil hiss while the ground shook with the pounding of fifteen thousand hooves.

Selim Girey, Khan of the Crimean Horde, had been waiting to pounce on the right wing of the Christian attack. When he recognised the Polish king and the winged riders who had defeated his Tatars before, he turned about and led his riders away. Everything now hinged on whether the janissaries could stand firm against the Husaria, which lumbered on purposefully, sparing its horses, diagonally across the whole battlefield, making for the landmark of the Vizir’s tent. Idle soldiers on both sides stared in disbelief at the slow, mesmeric charge. Then the Husaria broke into a wild gallop and the heavy mass of men and horses cascaded over the Turkish ranks, bowling over the first, slicing through the second, surging on towards the exquisite red tent, before which the Grand Vizir sat and watched. He saw the Pasha of Aleppo fall and the horse-tail banner of Kara Mehmet of Mesopotamia go down in the fray. Next came the turn of the Pashas of Silistria and Buda. Their janissaries hesitated for a moment, then turned and fled, followed by the rest of the army. The Grand Vizir leapt on to a horse and made his own escape moments before the winged riders thundered up to the tent and the banner was struck.

The entire Christian army moved forward and the king rode into the Turkish camp to take possession. One of the Vizir’s servants handed him a jewelled stirrup which had broken offas Kara Mustafa heaved himself into the saddle to flee. A true galant, the king gave it to one of his young gentlemen, bidding him ride hard all the way to Krakow: to lay it at the feet of his French queen. Another messenger was sent to Rome, to the Pope, bearing the standard of the Prophet; the Jihad had been defeated by the last Crusade.

Baron Bodissey commemorates his admirable blog’s theme, thusly:

On this day in 1683 King Jan Sobieski of Poland arrived at Vienna to break the siege of the Turks and rescue the Christian West from the Hosts of Mohammed. The rout of the Ottoman troops before the gates of Vienna by the Polish hussars gave us a little breathing room, a coffee-and-croissants break that lasted for the next three hundred and eighteen years.

But no longer. From now on in, every day is September 11th.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

ABC News has a transcript of Osama’s remarks, in which the bearded one does manage to come up with one good argument supporting his demand that America immediately convert to Islam.

I invite you to embrace Islam.There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.

Tempting, but alas! 97.5% of the sort of income typically achievable in the backward lands in which intellectual progress and enterprise are stifled by religious superstition would come out to a lot less than the smaller percentages of much larger incomes left to us by our greedy governments.

At least 25 of the 200 newspapers carrying Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip Opus, including the Washington Post, the comic strip’s own syndicator (!), refused to carry the last two weekly episodes.

Editor&Publisher reports that the Post’s Sales Manager explained that “some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor.”

But, as the Chicago Tribune makes clear, it doesn’t seem likely that mere mild sexual innuendo caused panicky editors at 25 newspapers to shun the last two episodes.

Some newspaper editors think cartoonist Berkeley Breathed might have crossed a line when he incorporated sexual innuendo into an “Opus” comic strip about a character’s conversion to radical Islam. But it’s not the first strip by the artist to poke fun at religion.

The cartoon ran in the Tribune, but not in The Washington Post, the strip’s home newspaper, or in a couple dozen other papers that pick up “Opus.”

Editors at the Washington Post reportedly showed the strips to Muslim employees, who disapproved of the depiction of the Lola Granola character dressed in traditional Muslim garb, declaring conservative Islamic views and making a sexual innuendo.

But the same care apparently was not taken with any of the previous irreverent cartoons that referenced Lola’s spiritual quest, which included introducing the Amish to nude yoga. The punch line of an Aug. 19 “Opus” poked fun at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The Weekly Standard wonders:

Why would editors have felt constrained to solicit the views of Muslim staffers?

Were all the Baptists in the Post newsroom consulted about the Jerry Falwell joke? Is “Doonesbury” shown in advance to all the Republicans in the Post newsroom?

6:32 MSNBC video

Islamic-themed comic strips:

26 Aug 07

2 Sep 07

Jerry Falwell-themed comic strip:

19 Aug 07

The same Washington Post which was not afraid to publish leaks disclosing secret National Security operations in time of war behaves like this over… cartoons!