This Will Fix Everything: Suspected Jihadi Ordered to Live at Mosque

How insane is today’s public discourse regarding Islam and jihad? This insane: imagine that it’s 1943, and the battle against National Socialism is raging with no near conclusion in sight. In the middle of the fight, a spy is caught in an Allied nation. He was sending messages back to Berlin, where they were used against the Allies in various ways. Placed on trial, a judge releases this fellow on bail, with the stipulation that he live under house arrest in a National Socialist reading room.

Crazy, right? That never would have happened in 1943. It is, however, not so crazy today, at least in the eyes of one judge in Ontario. Canada’s Global News reported Wednesday that “a Yemeni arrested as he was allegedly trying to leave Canada to join a Middle East terrorist group has been released on bail to live under house arrest at a Toronto mosque.”

Now, you may immediately object to my analogy. Releasing a National Socialist on bail and telling him to go live in a National Socialist reading room is not at all the same thing as releasing a suspected jihadi and telling him to live in a mosque, right? After all, we all know that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists, right? The jihadi in question, Husam Taha Ali Al-Sewaiee, will presumably have time while he is living in the mosque to get acquainted with the true, peaceful Islam, and discard the twisted, “extremist” version that led him to try to join a jihad group in the first place.

You may not go that far. You may, by this time, reading the publications that you frequent, know very well that Islam is not actually a religion of peace, and that it teaches warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers. And yet there are millions of Muslims who are not waging jihad and will never be waging jihad, so it must have a peaceful core of some kind, right?

No, it actually doesn’t. There are, however, millions of Muslims who either don’t know or don’t care about Islam’s teachings of supremacy, dominance, and violent subjugation. We can all be grateful that such people exist, but unfortunately, they do not have a theological leg to stand on within Islamic tradition. If Husam Taha Ali Al-Sewaiee begins to study his religion in depth while he is being forced to “‘reside at the mosque’ in Toronto’s North York district,” he could very well emerge more of a convinced jihadi than he is already.

Husam Taha Ali Al-Sewaiee will have a golden opportunity to immerse himself in Islam 24 hours a day, seven days a week: “he is not allowed to leave the mosque except when accompanied, and must also wear an ankle monitor, surrender his travel documents and stay 300 metres away from airports and border crossings.” This is because when he was arrested, Husam Taha Ali Al-Sewaiee “had attempted to leave Canada to join a terrorist organization.” Authorities were mum about exactly which one, but it was certainly “an Iranian-backed faction” of a jihad group.

The Islam that is taught at this North York mosque is unlikely to differ in any significant way from the Islam that is taught all over the world. This mosque has the same Qur’an that every other mosque all over the world has. That would be the one that tells Muslims to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60) and to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91, cf. 9:5). It’s the same Qur’an that tells Muslims to “strike the necks” of unbelievers (47:4). It’s the same Qur’an that says: “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are ruthless against the unbelievers and merciful among themselves.” (48:29)

The judge who decided on this bail condition clearly has no idea that the Qur’an teaches any of that (and there are plenty of other violent and hateful passages where those came from). He or she likely assumes that it teaches love, kindness, tolerance, and magnanimity. And so now Husam Taha Ali Al-Sewaiee has been given the chance to further and deepen his training as a jihadi. When this particular court case is over and he is a free man once again, will he put what he has learned into practice? If he does, will this judge be called to account? Or will the denial and willful ignorance simply continues as always? You know the answer to that.