You don't know us

On the Muslim mind

Almost 40 years later, it remains one of my most vivid memories.

Watching a crowd of mothers on TV, chanting and screaming in ecstatic celebration that their sons have been killed.

It was the late 80’s and the Iran-Iraq war was ongoing. Ruhollah Khomeini had declared that all martyrs can expect entry into paradise, where they’d find a beautiful and spacious place filled with eternal bliss, and enjoy unlimited favors from Allah, in a garden with flowing rivers, abundant fruits, and a life free from pain and sorrow, reserved for the righteous and obedient. And, of course, 72 virgins.

Eagerly, zealous Iranian parents would send out their sons to be mine sweepers for the artesh (army), knowing full well that they’ll most likely return home with limbs missing or, frequently, in a body bag.

Iranian child sacrifices

It is estimated that 550, 000 children were sent to the war as child-soldiers, 36, 000 of whom met their fates as a result of entering the minefields. And there, on TV, were the mothers euphorically celebrating their children’s deaths.

I recount this story to underline a fact that is always missing in the discourse on the Middle East, or Western conflicts with Islam; the recognition that we are not like you.

Listening to Western apologists talking about Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or any other Islamic opposition, it never ceases to amaze me how ignorant they are of the nature of the very people they claim to defend. In their uneducated minds, they believe that we are all the same, want the same thing, love our children the same, aspire for the same values and freedoms, revere the same principles and reject the same evils.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and until this foundational fact is understood, we will continue down the same fruitless path.

What Islam does

Look up the worst societies on earth according to any of the principles we in the West value; Freedom of Speech, Gender Equality, Freedom of Assembly, Democratic elections, Minority Rights, Gay and Lesbian protections etc - and you will find the Islamic world dominating the bottom percentiles. This is as blatant as it is uncontroversial.

Islam is inherently anti-liberal.

Cultures do not appear from a vacuum, but from foundational values. Countries which see the philosophies of John Stuart Mill, David Hume and Adam Smith as their North Star, will inevitably produce liberal, free and equal societies, albeit imperfect and failing along the way.

One which considers its head of state as an infallible deity who must be worshipped at all costs produces the Kim Dynasty’s North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet, Mao’s China, or Idi Amin’s Uganda.

Equally, a society which considers an illiterate, misogynist, racist, pederast Bronze Age warlord as the perfect example for all men to follow for all time will produce Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. There is no mystery here.

Yet, in the West, talking heads from all sides of the political isle insist that Muslims are immune to this cultural sculpturing. When Muslims tell us, in the plainest possible terms, that they love death more than we love life, that they kill us for our values (and not foreign interventions), that they happily sacrifice their children for the cause of Allah - we still have to listen to Western liberals explaining why that’s not the case, and it has to do with economic challenges, or political grievances.

This is not a matter of anecdote. It is measurable.

The Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index consistently places Muslim-majority countries at the bottom of every category that Western liberals claim to care about. The countries applying Islamic law most stringently; Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Sudan score worst on women’s freedoms, freedom of expression, and religious liberty. The UAE, Iran, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all score approximately 2 out of 10 on religious freedom. (Cato Institute, Freedom in the Muslim World, 2020)

In 2013, the Pew Research Center published the results of 38,000 face-to-face interviews across 39 Muslim-majority countries. The findings were not ambiguous. Majorities in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia favour the establishment of sharia as the official law of the land. In Afghanistan, support is 99%. Iraq, 91%. The Palestinian territories, 89%. Pakistan, 84%. (Pew Research Center, The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society, 2013)

The same survey found that 79% of Afghans, 76% of Pakistanis, and 86% of Egyptians support the death penalty for apostasy. For leaving the faith. This is not what the radical fringe believes, these aren’t abstract opinions. They have consequences in the real world, daily.

In Pakistan, blasphemy is officially punishable by death. According to Human Rights Watch, in 2020 there were 11 registered blasphemy cases. By 2024, that number had risen to at least 475. What happens in the meantime is not always adjudicated in a courtroom. In December 2021, Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan factory manager working in Sialkot, was tortured and burned to death in the street by a Muslim mob after an accusation of blasphemy for allegedly desecrating stickers containing the name of the Prophet. In February 2022, a mentally unstable man named Mushtaq Ahmed was stoned to death by more than 300 villagers in Punjab for allegedly burning a copy of the Quran. In February 2023, a mob stormed a police station in Nankana Sahib and beat Muhammad Waris to death after he was brought in for his own protection following a blasphemy accusation. These are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern, repeated across decades, consistent in their logic, consistent in their justification.
But the Western mind, hearing all of this, reaches instinctively for an explanation that preserves its assumption of universal human psychology. “It must be poverty/illiteracy/the legacy of colonialism/American foreign policy/the settlement expansion in the West Bank.”

It is never the thing the perpetrators themselves name as the cause.

In their own words

Dabiq was the magazine published by Isis in its heyday, partially as a recruitment tool, partially as their means of communication about their project to the outside world. In 2016, they published an article “How I Came to Islam,” by Umm Khalid al-Finlandiyyah, a Finnish female convert to Islam. This is someone who only knew The West, exposed almost exclusively to Western Enlightenment values, born and raised in the happiest country on earth (according to World Population Review). Yet, when she came to Islam, her values shifted. Here follows her testimony (copied directly from my friend Kyle Orton’s excellent Substack):

“How I Came to Islam,” by Umm Khalid al-Finlandiyyah

I come from Finland, a “Christian” nation where the people do not strongly adhere to their corrupted religion. Most of them say they are Christians but don’t really practice their false faith. They might go to church when there’s a wedding or a funeral, but most of them don’t know much about their distorted religion, even though they are proud of it; so I wouldn’t see Christianity visibly manifested in their day-to-day lives.

In my case, I was pretty much the same as everyone else. Everyone had to study the religion at school, which is how my knowledge of it grew. Before that, however, my mother would send me to Sunday school, even though she wasn’t religious herself. I myself would only go there for the stickers, and I don’t think I actually learned or understood anything there. I did learn more in school, but Christianity nowadays tends to be very confusing.

What they mainly teach is that if you merely believe in Jesus as your Savior, who supposedly died for your sins, then you will be saved. And this was hard to accept because it really didn’t make sense to me. Despite this confusion, I always believed in the Creator. My parents, much like everyone else, never really talked about religion. We would celebrate Christmas and Easter, but Christianity otherwise didn’t have much of an impact on my life. At the age of 16, I was sent to a type of camp where you would have to embrace the religion again, but do so independent-mindedly. Once again, the teachings didn’t make sense but because my parents sent me, I did it for them, and also for the fact that there would be a big party at the end where you would get all sorts of gifts.

The main thing that didn’t make sense to me about Christianity was the Trinity. I would wonder, how could the “son” of God be crucified? How could a “part” of God—according to the Trinity—be crucified? How could a human being be God, and then become humiliated and have a humiliating death? I was always very confused, and never prayed to Jesus. When I did pray, I would pray to God. When I was young, I didn’t really pay much attention to these thoughts. I did think about it all here and there, but I didn’t know how to delve deeper and explore these thoughts, and I didn’t have confidence that I was on the true religion. Then at school, they introduced things like evolution and the big bang theory, and this just caused even more confusion. At the end, I was left not knowing what to believe in, but I always had faith in the Creator and that He should be worshiped alone.

I first heard about Islam when we were doing religious studies at school. We covered a number of different religions, including Islam. In the very first class, the teacher—who wasn’t even a Muslim—recited the shahada in Arabic and then explained to us that this was the Islamic testimony of faith. We learned about the five pillars of Islam on a very basic level, but some things were portrayed in a manner that seemed nonsensical to me. For example, we were told that during the fasting month of Ramadan, Muslims don’t eat and drink all day but they stay up all night eating and partying. My next encounter with Islam was when I got married. My husband was brought up in a Muslim family but he wasn’t practicing at all. We had children together but got divorced a few years afterwards. At that point, I really wanted to learn about Islam, and because of the blessed events of September 11th, I would always see Islam mocked in the media, but I was still curious and wanted to find out more about this religion. At the same time, I had a neighbour who had introduced me to Islam a few years earlier. So she let me borrow a copy of the Qur’an that was translated into my own language. The translation wasn’t so good, but she was good at explaining, so if I didn’t understand anything she would clarify it for me. What struck me most as I was reading the Quran were the verses about Hellfire and the punishment in the Hereafter.

Not long afterwards, I knew that this religion really was the truth. I started learning to pray on my own because I thought I had to learn everything before becoming Muslim. I have to admit though, I was scared and nervous because I didn’t understand a lot of things. I would think to myself, “How would my parents react if I were to become a Muslim? How would my colleagues react?” It felt like a big ordeal even though I knew in my heart that I had to do this. So when I was coming back from work one day and I saw my neighbour on the bus, I asked her, “Would you like to teach me how to pray?” She replied by asking, “Do you want to become a Muslim?” At that moment, I felt myself thinking, “Yes, I do.” So I said, “Yes,” and both her and her husband began crying. I pronounced the shahada in their home and they began teaching me how to pray. It was a wonderful feeling. After continuously searching for the truth, finding it was just such a relief. I felt so much peace.

I can’t say that things were easy after becoming a Muslim, but it did bring pleasure to my heart nonetheless. Things weren’t easy with my parents. At first, they didn’t react much, but one year later when I remarried, they began having a problem with it. When I started wearing hijab, they would make things difficult. They would argue, “Even Muslims that were raised Muslim don’t wear it, so why do you?” They were not happy, and it was funny how their Christianity came out more than ever at that point. Before that, they wouldn’t speak about Christianity at all, but suddenly they were mentioning it more frequently, saying things like, “This is the religion of our forefathers.” All of this was to try to bring me back to their religion. I felt the same with my colleagues, who would ask me why I had made this decision. This was the case because I was the only Muslim they would see regularly.

I lived in the capital, and although there were Muslims there, it wasn’t the same as in other European countries; the Muslim community was very small. Because of the small size of the community, in that first year before I got married when I was trying to learn more about Islam, I wouldn’t have a lot of access to knowledgeable people. It was hard to find someone to teach me because it could be anyone teaching anything, and, of course, when you’re new, you don’t know all that much. Since I didn’t have any strong Muslims around me, I was trying to do the research on my own, and it was hard to find the right information, but despite that, Allah would always facilitate a way for the truth to become apparent to me. Things became a little bit easier after I got married because I had some support at home. At one point, my husband started telling me about jihad and about having the sound creed.

I later became involved in da’wa. I would take part in organizing sisters’ and children’s events at the local mosques and I would hold events for new Muslim sisters. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking about hijra (emigrating to the land of Islam), but that would soon change. What finally woke me up was when the disbelieving authorities arrested my husband for terrorism. They arrested him on the street. I was at home with my children and they came in and started raiding the house. It was a big shock. They ended up keeping my husband in prison for quite a while as they continued investigating the matter. As difficult as it was, it was probably the best thing that happened to me because it opened my eyes to the importance of hijra, but the whole ordeal made things difficult.

Alhamdulillah (all praise is due to Allah), there were some brothers and sisters who were on the sound creed and were a strong source of support. They weren’t many, but because they were on the proper methodology, it didn’t matter. When the Caliphate was announced, we knew where to go and what we wanted. As Muslims, we need to disavow the disbelievers and live under the Caliphate. The Prophet said, “I have nothing to do with any Muslim who resides amongst the pagans.” His companions asked, “O Allah’s Messenger, why is that?” He replied, “They should not be able to see each other’s camp fires (or lights)” (Abu Dawud and at-Tirmidhi).

After my husband came out of prison, we thought it would be difficult to perform hijra because every country would likely be alerted of his intent to travel. He was trying hard to find a way to come to the Caliphate and, alhamdulillah, when Allah wills to open the path for someone, nobody can close it. And so we were able to perform hijra without any problems. We were dreaming about it and praying for it for so long until Allah made it easy for us.

I can’t even describe the feeling when you finally cross that border and enter the lands of the Caliphate. It is such a blessing from Allah to be able to live under the Caliphate. There are so many people who made several attempts to come but just haven’t been able to make it yet. Of course, when you come to the Caliphate, after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, you’ll continue to be tested. You’re going to see hardships and trials, but every day you’re thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform hijra and to live under the shari’a. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties and hardship, you’re not used to the food or the change of life, you may not know the local language, you hear bombings and the children may get scared, but none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here.

Also, unless you’re living here you don’t realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure. When you’re in Dar al-Kufr (the lands of disbelief) you’re exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray. Here you’re living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don’t need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of us being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, “If I stayed in Dar al-Kufr what kind of end would he have had? What would have happened to him?” Alhamdulillah, he was saved from all that, and what could be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it’s not easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him

I advise the Muslims in Dar al-Kufr not to be intimidated by the media, and to instead listen to the words of Allah and His Messenger. Everything is very clear in the Book of Allah and in the Sunnah of the Prophet. And I sincerely advise every Muslim to perform hijra. It’s not even allowed nor is it good for you to reside in the lands of the disbelievers. You may think that you’re able to practice your religion, but if you’re truly following the teachings of the Quran and the Sunnah, you really can’t practice your religion there.

I also want to warn you that once you begin thinking about performing hijra, you’ll find many obstacles. You’ll be scared, and you’ll be worried about how everything is going to work out. You need to understand that many of these obstacles are just in your head and they’re the work of Satan. When you take the first step, Allah will take care of the rest. As for those people who cannot perform hijra, I advise you to attack the Crusaders and their allies wherever you are, as that is something that you are able to do. Don’t be tricked by the apostate “scholars.” The truth is out there and it isn’t hard to find as long as you open your heart to it.

Finally, I wish to advise the Christians in Finland and elsewhere: A lot of you don’t practice your religion because you know it’s not the truth. You say you just need to believe in Jesus and you’ll go to Heaven, but how does it make sense that somebody died on your behalf and then you’re free to do whatever you please, whatever bad things that come to your mind, to live without any rules or regulations and then expect to be taken to Heaven? It doesn’t make any sense. I advise you to open your heart and find out about the religion of Islam. Don’t trust what the media says about it. Just turn to the translation of the Quran and take it from there. Whatever hardship you may face on that path will be worth it. In the end, you’ll be so happy you found the truth, because what you’re going to gain after embracing Islam is better than anything you might lose or sacrifice.

Where a Westerner or non-Muslim will undoubtedly feel a bone-chilling shudder, the devout Muslim will likely nod in agreement over a mother who rejoices the death of her own son as a shaheed, and who encourages other Muslims to “…attack the Crusaders and their allies wherever you are, as that is something that you are able to do.”

This is how the virus of Islam distorts and corrupts the human conscience. This is how a woman who was born and raised in Finland, who only knew Western values, who would never have imagined celebrating the death of her own child had she not been infected with the Mohammedan religion, finds herself in The Levant as a propagandist for the most barbaric society of the last several centuries.

To the Western liberal mind, this is unfathomable. They must rationalise it by somehow shifting the blame on The West itself, or deploy their pseudo psychoanalysis to explain this away as an anomaly, and not representative of the devout Muslim mind. This is how you get an ignoramus like Dave Smith saying that extremism is caused by US and Israeli “terrorism”.

But the problem is, this is not a deviation from Islam. This is the logical outcome from true faith in the doctrines of Muhammad. This is what hundreds of millions of Muslims genuinely believe, which is why the Islamic world looks the way it does. It’s not an accident that the more devout and committed a people are to Islam, the worse their societies are when measured against Western, liberal values.

You don’t know us

In 2018, John Allen Chau, a Christian missionary, wanted to preach the Gospel to the Sentinelese tribe - often referred to as the most isolated people on earth. Chau had become convinced that it was his life’s mission to reach the Sentinelese, and convert them into Christianity, ensuring their saviour. It is fair to assume that he concluded that, if they only heard him out, they’d see the error of their ways and accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

But Chau operated with the wrong premises, assuming that, just because the Sentinelse are people like the rest of us, they must want the same things. On the 17th November, on his third attempt to reach the secluded Andaman island in the Bay of Bengal, Chau was shot and killed by a Sentinelese arrow.

For the tribes people, this was completely logical behaviour. They have had their population decimated by intruders in the past, who brought with them diseases to which they had no immunity, as well as hundreds of them being captured and brought to the mainland.

When taking their worldview seriously into account, their actions make perfect sense, and Chau’s seem irrational, if not downright irresponsible.

The Western commentariat makes Chau’s error, endlessly and without correction. They project their own interiority onto people whose inner world is structured around entirely different foundations. When a Hamas fighter says he loves death more than you love life, the Western liberal hears rhetoric. Propaganda. A performance for the cameras. He doesn’t hear a sincere theological conviction, transmitted across generations, reinforced daily by mosque and madrasa, and demonstrably true in its behavioural consequences.

But that is exactly what it is.

This is what I am trying to tell you when I describe those mothers I saw on the television screen all those years ago. They were not performing. They were not suffering from some pathological grief response dressed up as faith. They were, by any honest assessment, sincere. They genuinely believed their children had been elevated. That the mines and the body bags were not tragedies but tickets. And what the Finnish woman in the Dabiq article demonstrates, with brutal clarity, is that you don’t need to be born into this world to arrive there. She had no cultural inheritance to blame. No poverty. No colonialism. No foreign policy grievance. She arrived at the exact same place, celebrating the death of her own child as a blessing from Allah, through pure theological conviction, starting from a suburb in Helsinki.

That destroys the entire Western explanatory framework in a single case study.

The psycho-cultural species question

So what is it, exactly, that produces this? What is the mechanism by which an ordinary human being - a mother, a factory worker, a Finnish convert, a Pakistani villager - comes to inhabit a moral universe so alien to our own?

It is not genetics, race, or even culture in the broad sense. It is doctrine. Specifically, a doctrine that accomplishes something no other major religion has managed to do at scale: the systematic subordination of every natural human instinct, including the most powerful of all, the survival of one’s own children, to the will of God as defined by a 7th century text and its interpreters.

The mother who celebrates her son’s death has not lost her maternal instincts. She has been given a framework in which his death is not a loss but a promotion, not an ending but a beginning, and one that reflects well on her. She is the mother of a martyr and, as such, she is to be congratulated. Within the internal logic of Islam, her joy is not pathological - it is rational.

This is the thing that the Western liberal is constitutionally incapable of accepting. He assumes that beneath every cultural difference lies a universal human substrate that will, if properly engaged, respond to the same things he responds to. Reason, self-interest, the love of one’s children, the desire for peace and so forth.

But doctrine, when sufficiently total as Islam is, does not sit on top of human nature. It reshapes it.

And the data bears this out. The Pew survey didn’t find 99% support for sharia in Afghanistan because Afghans are stupid, or poor, or traumatised, or haven’t been exposed to better ideas. It found 99% support because the Islamic doctrine there is total, the community that enforces it is total, and the psycho-cultural environment it produces is total. The individual raised within it does not experience sharia as an external imposition. He experiences it as the correct ordering of the universe. The mothers on that television screen were not victims of propaganda in any meaningful sense. They were true believers. There is a difference.

The conclusion

None of this means that every Muslim holds these views. It doesn’t. The Pew data itself shows significant variation between countries and regions, and it has been repeated ad nauseum how many Muslims are incredible people.

What it does mean is this: Islam, in its orthodox and doctrinally consistent form, produces a distinct psycho-cultural type. One that is not merely different in custom or tradition, the way a Swede differs from a Japanese person, but different in its foundational orientation toward life, death, the individual, and the claims of God. One in which the death of a child can be a cause for celebration, in which leaving a religion is a capital offence, in which the word of a 7th century warlord and child-rapist takes precedence over every other source of moral authority, including a mother’s love for her son.

Until the West is willing to look at those mothers on the television screen, and at the Finnish woman in the Dabiq article, and at the Pakistani mobs dragging blasphemers from police custody, and call all of it by the same name - the logical and inevitable product of a specific doctrine, functioning exactly as designed - it will continue to misunderstand the problem entirely.

Sources:

• The horrifying way Iran used kids to clear mines: https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/iran-iraq-war-child-soldiers-mines/

• Children at war: https://www.csmonitor.com/1987/1028/ekids.html

• Child Soldiers in Iran: https://borgenproject.org/child-soldiers-in-iran/

• Amnesty International - Iran child soldiers: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/04/iran-recruitment-of-child-soldiers-as-young-as-12-amounts-to-a-war-crime/

• UN Refworld — Child Soldiers Global Report, Iran: https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2001/en/64522

• NCRI - Iran’s Lost Children: https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/terrorism-a-fundamentalism/irans-lost-children-tens-of-thousands-of-students-sacrificed-in-the-iran-iraq-war/

• Cato Institute Human Freedom Index 2024: https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2024

• Pew Research Center - The World’s Muslims, 2013: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/

• Human Rights Watch - Pakistan blasphemy laws: https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/06/09/conspiracy-grab-land/exploiting-pakistans-blasphemy-laws-blackmail-and-profit