http://www.juergensmeyer.com/files/Faraj_The_Neglected_Duty.pdf

Equally important is the booklet ‘The Neglected Duty’ by Abd al-Salam Faraj. He was an Egyptian writer whose book, Al-Faridah al-Gha’ibah (The Neglected Duty), played an important role in the development of Islamic extremism in the modern era. According to Faraj, jihad had become a “neglected duty” among contemporary Muslims. This book was first published and distributed to students in Cairo in the early 1980s where it influenced an entire generation of youth. The Egyptian made possession of the pamphlet a crime. J.J.G. Jansen translated this pamphlet as ‘The Neglected Duty’.

http://www.religioscope.com/info/dossiers/textislamism/faraj_jansen.htm

Dossier
TEXTES FONDAMENTAUX DE L’ISLAMISME
FARAJ AND THE NEGLECTED DUTY
Interview with Professor Johannes J.G. Jansen
Johannes J.G. Jansen used to be the Director of the Dutch Institute in Cairo. Since 1983, he has been an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Leiden University. His first book, The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), has been translated into Bosnian and Turkish, and even printed recently in Indonesia. In addition to a number of articles and several books in Dutch, he has written two other books in English: The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan, 1986) and The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (London: Hurst & Company, 1997). J.J.G. Jansen is also the author of a translation of the Quran in Dutch. He writes regularly for a weekly newspaper and has a weekly column on the religion page of several provincial newspapers.

RELIGIOSCOPE – A number of authors dealing with fundamentalism claim that we should only see it as political ambitions masquerading in the guise of religion. But you emphasize that “fundamentalism is undeniably religious too” (Dual Nature, p. 2). You remark that one cannot understand fundamentalism without taking into account its theological dimension (p. 5). You also observe that there is a major difference with political mass movements, because fundamentalism is a religious dream, and the Hereafter is taken very seriously (p. 5-6). Could you please elaborate?

(read whole interview at link above)

“The PENALTY THAT THE SHARIA PRESCRIBES for leaving Islam is DEATH. This sentence has preferably to be pronounced by a court, but even without a clear court decision to this effect, a religious enthusiast may mete out the death penalty informally. In such cases, according to Sharia law, payment of the usual indemnity is not required, and the act of the murderer is qualified as only iftiyaat, an ‘offense’. According to the handbooks, it is not a crime. Most serious handbooks of Islamic law will confirm this, e.g., N.H.M. Keller, The Reliance of the Traveller, Beltsville 1994, p. 596.

It is, however, not only the books that say so. The prestigious Egyptian cleric Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali was consulted as an expert on Sharia law when the assassin of Farag Foda stood trial in 1993. To the amazement of many, the expert declared in court that according to Islamic law KILLING AN APOSTATE SHOULD NOT BE JUDGED TO CONSITUTE THE CRIME OF MURDER. The Egyptian writer Farag Foda had been killed informally in the summer of 1992 for his alleged apostasy from Islam, see my The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, London 1997, p. 170-171. In his expert testimony, the learned Sheikh actually used the word iftiyaat, ‘offense’, and added that he did not believe Islam had a punishment in store for people guilty of this ‘offense’.

All this has the effect of making Muslims who would prefer to stop presenting themselves as Muslims, extremely circumspect and careful. Many apostates would not even consider coming out of the closet. The mere existence of a prescribed ‘fixed’ punishment for apostasy from Islam makes, moreover, all statistics on the number of Muslims in a region or period unreliable. All numbers ever quoted anywhere must be too high.

If we are allowed to pass over the semantic games about who may be called a Muslim and who may not be designated as such, and what constitutes ‘Muslim terrorism’, and what does not, it is safe to say that the world would have been a less dangerous place if the acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam by Muslims (in whatever meaning of that word) had not occurred. Millions of expenses, millions in whatever currency, could have been put to better use than guarding against destruction, robbery, murder and other acts widely seen as crimes.

Johannes J.G. Jansen, ‘Religious Roots of Muslim Violence’, in: Gelijn MOLIER, Afshin ELLIAN & David SUURLAND, eds., Terrorism: Ideology, Law and Policy, Dordrecht 2011, pp. 165-185.

NOTE: I have edited this comment to remove repeated material. — Alan Ireland

Either way, the cultural Muslims win from jihad and from the threat of jihad.

The only Muslim academic institution that I have had dealings with is the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, England, for which I reviewed some history books in the early 1990s. I didn’t have any problems with them – until I wrote a review of “Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security”, by Nadav Safran. They rejected this as “too hard on/critical of” the Saudis. (I can’t remember their exact words.) So I wrote another review, making all the same points but in a more diplomatic, circumspect manner, and they accepted that with profuse expressions of gratitude for my “graciousness”. They were always exceedingly polite to me, both when I corresponded with them and when I spent a day at the foundation in 1998. They told me they didn’t involve themselves in polemics: “We just monitor the situation.”

I can’t help feeling the criticism of Muslim “intolerance” is a little hypocritical. After all, how tolerant is the secular state in the paranoid, hysterical aftermath of 9/11? One can now be prosecuted in Britain for merely possessing Sayyid Qutb’s “Milestones”, which has been described as “an important text in the development of Islamist political thinking in the 20th century”. And in the US, as we have seen, one can now be prosecuted for downloading jihadi videos from the internet and translating Islamist documents found online. How does all this sit with our paternalistic lectures to Muslims on the importance of freedom of speech and freedom of academic inquiry?

Thanks for the links to information on Sven Kalisch. I only wish there were more than those few, skimpy details.

Your supposed scenario is contradicted by the reality of Sharia. Conservative Arab money to universities would stop if they didn’t play along to prevent liberal interpretations of Islam being taught.

Sharia law is clear that an apostate should be put to death, such as Rushdie. When there is no Islamic state, the sentence of the mullahs may be carried out by the Muslim closest to the apostate. Students in Egypt and Syria have tried to kill their profs when they mention the latest research that suggests falsehoods in the source texts. Rage isn’t the only response to questioning Islam, but the principle one, because that is the way Mohammed behaved. The other response is liberalism of the ‘Koran only’ group, i.e. the text is talking about a situation that occurred at the time of the text and is no longer happening. This group teaches the peaceful Koran of Mecca, not the violent Koran of Medina.

There are two distinctly different parts of the Koran. The first part was written in the 13 years in Mecca when Mohammed was powerless. It tells him to be patient. The last part (25% of the total text) was written in Medina in the last ten years of Mohammed’s life when he brought together a band of ruffians to raid, rape and pillage. This portion abrogates and overwrites the first Koran according to orthodox Islam. The second Koran makes Islam a totalitarian state. Muslims have to live in denial of the violence in order to avoid being executed for apostasy. They then create their own version of Islam…an Islam-à-la-carte. They claim that any part of Islam that is objectionable to modernity is invalid. The criterion for their deletions is personal taste, rather than scholarship. They are not orthodox Muslims and they are only able to speak in the West where there is no religious censorship. They are a tiny group. They are close to losing their faith in Islam altogether.

Being ‘articulate’ is no proof of one’s opinion. They are heretics, deviants and ‘innovators’ according to orthodox Muslims. All such are considered worse than apostates and they should also be executed. Mohammed said: ‘Far removed from mercy the one who changes the religion after me.’ Islam cannot be changed because the original Islam was perfect, complete and eternal recorded in the eternal Koran before the beginning of time.

I encourage you read about Sven Kalisch who was going to write a book about the non-historicity of Mohammed but changed his mind when he realized how many would get killed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven_Kalisch
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Sven_Kalisch
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/what_does_it_mean_to_say_muhammad_existed/