One of the remarkable aspects of the War on Terror is the degree to which those who sympathize with movements with which the United States is in armed military conflict operate openly in America, particularly in Academia.
“Each Muslim, male and female, must realize the need for resistance (known as jihad in Islamic terminology) is as important as prayer and fasting,” Kaukab Siddique, an English professor at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, writes in Dajjal: Superpower U. S. A.. Originally published in 1991, the 31-page booklet went into its second printing in 2002, seven months after the September 11th, 2001 attacks upon the United States that claimed more lives than were lost in the 1941 attack upon Pearl Harbor that started World War II.
That Siddique would reprint his 1991 thesis in 2002, after a full decade of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings of western and Israeli targets, hardly signifies attitude adjustment on his part. That he can do so openly puts him in marked contrast to the Nazi spies of the World War II and the communist cells of the Cold War, which mostly operated furtively in the United States.
The Dajjal of the title of Siddique’s monograph refers to what the author describes as the deceiver or enemy of Islam—namely the United States. In the pamphlet, Siddique writes eerily of “the two streams which Dajjal will have with him: the stream of fire and the stream of refreshing water.”
“The stream of fire is the real challenge for the Muslim: he/she will be awed by it but those with real faith will step forward and drink from it,” Siddique writes. “This could be the stream of martyrdom which leads to peace in this world and the Hereafter, for as long as the Muslims are afraid of Dajjal’s fire, they cannot enter Paradise.”
Indeed, Siddique himself is, at best ambivalent about the dangers of dictatorships and totalitarian rule. He even compares democracies unfavorably to one-party-states.
“Upward mobility at any cost is a Pakistani and American phenomenon,” according to Siddique, “In lands like Nigeria this drive is still restricted to the ruling class but the time is not far when the dam of human dignity and self-respect will break and the deluge of ‘upwardly mobile materialism’ will sweep over the surviving indigenous peoples.”
Siddique has also served on the Committee to Free Shaikh Omar ‘Abdel Rahman. Sheikh Rahman was convicted in a U. S. court for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
