Robert Spencer: The spiritual journey of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

In PJ Lifestyle this morning I conclude my series on jazz and Islam with some considerations about the musical career of Tamerlan Tsarnaev:

...Tamerlan Tsarnaev wanted to get righteous. He wanted to cleanse his soul and his life of anything that might displease Allah or run counter to Islam. And so his piano playing, as accomplished as it apparently was, had to go.

In which scenario would the world be a better place: one in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev became or remained essentially a Muslim in name only, maintaining an indifference to his faith’s teachings of hatred and violence against unbelievers, and becoming a pianist of some accomplishment, or one in which he rejected all that was sinful and dedicated his life to Islam, such that he eventually got the idea that murdering some infidels at the Boston Marathon would be a capital way to please the god who commanded him to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (Qur’an 9:5) and to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies” (Qur’an 8:60)?

It was, after all, the same commitment to the teachings of Islam that led Tsarnaev to give up music on the one hand and pursue jihad terror on the other.

And yet after the Boston Marathon jihad bombings and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s admission that they were carried out in order to defend Islam, the Atlantic Wire ran a piece titled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim – So?” Predictably, it completely ignored the jihad doctrine of warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers, and the necessity for free nations to formulate effective strategies to defend themselves against jihad terror and Islamic supremacism. Chris Matthews asked: “What difference does it make why they did it if they did it?” And Martin Bashir lamented about how the bombers were “burying the ‘peace, compassion and kindness of the Koran.’”

There is a cost to this politically correct obfuscation. Part of it was paid at the Boston Marathon. Anyone who might have thought at the time that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s giving up music for Islam was alarming would have been branded “Islamophobic” and “hateful.” It is long past time for a searching and thorough public examination of the elements of Islamic piety that encourage violence and supremacism, and for a challenge to be issued to the Muslim community in the U.S. to renounce those elements in word and deed, and to teach against them. It is long past time to stop pretending that the Islamic jihad threat is not real, or has nothing to do with Islamic teachings. Muslim organizations in the U.S. must reject, sincerely and in action as well as words, the elements of Islam that contradict Constitutional freedoms, or face the law enforcement scrutiny that should have been coming to them long ago.
Interspersed throughout this article are four stellar examples of piano jazz that the pious Muslim Tamerlan Tsarnaev would have despised and detested. As this series on jazz and Islam ends, one final thought: free people would be better off without such piety.

There is more. And you can see all the segments of my Jazz and Islam series here (scroll).

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/04/robert-spencer-the-spiritual-journey-of-tamerlan-tsarnaev.html