Politics

Jihad in Brussels

Political Islam is indeed already very much a part of the picture in Europe, but not quite in the way Mogherini imagined it.

The political and military doctrines of Islam -- the political Islam to which Mogherini so casually refers -- are codified in Islamic law, sharia, as found in the Quran and the hadiths. Unlike prevailing misconceptions on Islam, these doctrines are not, in mainstream Islam, subject to mitigating interpretations, as often preached and practiced.

The Islamic injunction to perform jihad, both violent and non-violent, seems an aspect of sharia the West refuses to internalize. CIA director John Brennan, in a 2010 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, when he was deputy national security advisor for homeland security, described jihad as,..