Taqiyya: The Lie About the Lie
How a narrow Islamic doctrine of survival was turned into a weapon against Muslims
Politics of Islam in the West Series — Part I
Every fight in Western politics — the mayor of London, the mayor of New York, a Black US president, immigration, criminal gangs, violence in the streets — summons the same stream of pundits, politicians, preachers, influencers and YouTubers to defame one thing: Islam. In a political climate this charged, moving at the speed of a meme, thick with people claiming to be in the know — some styling themselves ‘scholars’ — this series talks about what no one else will: the sleight of hand, the propagandist’s hand in your pocket while the other points at a horizon that isn’t there. It is not apologetics. You do not have to believe a word of Islam to see you are being lied to about it. That is where Fireline Press lives and works: between what is true and what is scorching the political landscape of the West.
SOMEONE posts it like a trump card. A thread about Islam, a fight about immigration, a comment under a news story — and there it is. Taqiyya. Dropped with the confidence of a man who thinks he has found the cheat code to an entire religion. Muslims are allowed to lie to non-believers. It’s called taqiyya. Look it up.
He hasn’t looked it up. He couldn’t name the verse, or the man it was revealed for, or a single condition that governs it. He doesn’t know that most of the world’s Muslims have never used the word in their lives. But he doesn’t need to know any of that, because the word isn’t doing the work he thinks it’s doing. It’s doing a different job, for people he has never heard of.
The word travels a long way from that comment section. It’s the reason a Muslim’s reassurance gets heard as a threat, and his denial as a confession. It’s why a professional of the counter-Islam movement can look at the most peaceful Muslim in the room and call him the most dangerous — because the quiet ones, the argument runs, are the ones doing the concealing. Taqiyya isn’t an insult. It’s an instruction: whatever the Muslim in front of you says, don’t believe him.
That instruction wasn’t improvised in a comment section. It was built and paid for. Here is the key.
The Skeleton Key
Taqiyya reaches the comment section from an industry. Not a figure of speech — an industry, with revenue and a paper trail. By the count of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, working from public tax filings, more than a thousand charities channelled money to thirty-nine counter-Muslim organisations between 2014 and 2016 — an apparatus with a combined revenue capacity of at least $1.5 billion.¹ Some of it came from cranks. Much of it moved through household donor funds — Fidelity, Schwab — and faith-based charities that let the giver stay anonymous. That is the scale of the thing. And of everything the money buys, taqiyya is the one claim it cannot do without.
It’s the claim the professionals never surrender. The Middle East Forum has published taqiyya as a standing doctrine of deception — permitted, sometimes obligatory, aimed at the non-believer.² Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy told its readers that every practising Muslim engages in it, and defined it as religiously mandated lying.³ Robert Spencer built a following on a single line: that a Muslim cannot take an oath of office honestly, because his faith commands him to lie.⁴ Clear away the footnotes and the reports, and the message underneath runs to one sentence. Don’t believe them.
They never surrender it because it’s the key to everything else on the shelf. Every other accusation can be checked, and most of them fail the check. Taqiyya is the one claim built so that it can’t. Watch it turn. A Muslim says something reassuring: that could be taqiyya. He denies the charge: that’s taqiyya. A scholar sits down and explains what the word actually means: advanced taqiyya. Whatever the Muslim says, the key turns and the words fall away — because saying anything at all is treated as proof of the thing. It needs no evidence. It survives all of it.
That is what taqiyya is for. Not to describe Muslims — to pre-empt them. To turn a man’s own words into the case against him before he has finished speaking, and to leave anyone who reads the rebuttal feeling naïve for having read it. It’s a rule for refusing to listen, passed off as a fact about Islam. Every other lie in the catalogue leans on this one, because every other lie can be corrected — unless the correction has been ruled inadmissible before it’s spoken.
So it’s worth taking the key apart. Not because the people holding it can be talked out of it — they can’t — but because the man with the screenshot can be, and because the word, once you actually read it, turns in the hand and convicts the people wielding it. What follows is the verse they cite, the man it was revealed for, the law that governs it, and the plain fact that the accusers’ own scriptures and their own history run on the very thing they call uniquely Muslim.
Start with the word itself.
The Wrong Word
Take the word apart, and the first thing that falls out is where it comes from.
Taqiyya is Arabic, from a root that means to guard, to shield, to protect oneself.⁵ Its home is Shia Islam — the minority tradition, roughly one Muslim in ten — where it hardened into a formal doctrine for a plain reason. The Shia spent centuries as a hunted minority under Sunni rule, and a hunted people learns to conceal what it believes in order to stay alive. That is the soil taqiyya grew in. Persecution. Not conquest.⁶
The counter-Islam writers know the word turns up in Sunni books too, and they’ll say so the moment you call it Shia. They’re half right. The term surfaces in Sunni commentary on the Qur’an, and Sunni exegetes have discussed it for centuries.⁷ But the ordinary Sunni Muslim has never organised his life around a doctrine called taqiyya; most have never had cause to use the word at all. The Sunni ground for the same question — what is a person excused for when something is forced out of him — is called idtirar: necessity. It’s the rule that lets a starving man eat pork, a dying man drink wine, a man with a blade at his throat say whatever will spare him.⁸ It isn’t a strategy. It’s the recognition that God does not hold a person to account for what is torn out of him under duress.
So set the sectarian point aside; it isn’t where the case turns. Shia doctrine or Sunni principle, the thing on the page is the same, and it’s small: permission to survive when your life is the price of telling the truth. That is the whole of it. There is no version — Shia or Sunni, ancient or modern — in which it means lie to your neighbour, deceive the man who trusts you, hide a plot behind a smile. They took a doctrine about the blade at the throat and recast it as a doctrine about the knock at the door. They didn’t misread the word. They inflated it — from what a man may do to stay alive into what every Muslim is supposedly commanded to do to everyone else, always.
And then they fixed that inflation onto nearly two billion people, most of whom would not know the word if you said it to them.
The Man in the Verse
So read the verse. Every accusation about taqiyya runs back to one passage of the Qur’an — chapter 16, verse 106 — and the ones who wave it have never told you where it came from. Here is where it came from.
Makkah, the earliest days of Islam. The faith had no army, no state, no power of any kind. Its first followers were the people with the least to lose and the least to shield them — the poor, the enslaved, the ones no tribe would stand up for. The Quraysh, the tribe that ran the city, did not argue with them. They tortured them.
Among the first to believe was a family of slaves with no protection at all: Yasir, his wife Sumayyah, and their son Ammar. When the Quraysh learned they had converted, they made an example of them. The family was dragged into the open under the midday sun, beaten, stretched across the burning sand, and told the price of their faith was pain and the price of relief was to renounce it.
Sumayyah would not. Abu Jahl — one of the most powerful men in Makkah, and among the cruellest enemies of the Prophet — ran her through with a spear. She died refusing to hide what she believed. Islam remembers her as its first martyr. Not a warrior. A slave, and a woman, killed for the very thing the accusers say her faith licenses her to conceal.
Yasir was killed as well.
Ammar lived — but not whole. They broke his body until, as the sources tell it, he no longer knew what his own mouth was saying, and under that he spoke the words they demanded: a curse on the Prophet, praise for their gods. Then they let him go.
He went to Muhammad in tears. Not frightened of the Quraysh — frightened of God, certain the words torn out of him had cost him his soul. The Prophet asked him one question. How do you find your heart? Ammar answered: firm in faith. And the Prophet told him — if they do it again, do the same.
Then the verse came: whoever renounces God after belief is condemned, except one forced, while his heart holds firm.⁹
That is the origin of taqiyya. Not a scheme. Not a licence to work into a man’s trust and betray it. A dispensation handed to a tortured man so the words beaten out of a breaking body would not damn him. Permission to survive.
And even that permission has a ceiling. Al-Tabari, whose Qur’an commentary is about as authoritative as Sunni scholarship gets, reads the verse narrowly: concealment is excused only under mortal danger — and even then, the one who refuses to conceal and accepts death has taken the nobler road.¹⁰ The door opens both ways. God permits survival; he honours the martyr more. Neither door leads where the accusers are standing.
So look again at where the verse was born. A woman run through with a spear because she would not conceal her faith. Her son forgiven for concealing his, only because his body had been broken first. The whole account is about people who would sooner die than hide — and a God who would not condemn one of them for breaking under torture. On that, the counter-Islam industry has built a doctrine of infiltration and betrayal. They took the verse revealed over Sumayyah’s body and turned it into proof that her descendants cannot be trusted to tell you the time.
The Man at the Bottom of Hell
Set the exception aside now and look at the rule, because the rule is the thing they need you never to see.
Islam’s baseline on lying isn’t soft, or partial, or hedged. It’s a flat prohibition, stated and restated across the most widely taught collections in the faith. The Prophet: truthfulness leads to righteousness and righteousness to Paradise, and a man keeps telling the truth until God records him as truthful; falsehood leads to wickedness and wickedness to the Fire, and a man keeps lying until God records him as a liar.¹¹ Elsewhere, flatly: whoever cheats is not one of us.¹² The honest merchant, another hadith promises, will stand on the Day of Judgement among the prophets and the martyrs.¹³ This isn’t a faith that treats a lie as a tactic. It treats it as a road to Hell.
And it keeps a particular place in that Hell for one man above all: the hypocrite. The munafiq — the man who shows one face and hides another, who says with his mouth what he doesn’t hold in his heart — is no minor offender in Islam. The Qur’an sets him beneath the open disbeliever, in the lowest depths of the Fire.¹⁴ The Prophet drew his portrait in three strokes: when he speaks, he lies; when he promises, he breaks it; when he is trusted, he betrays.¹⁵
Read that portrait again, slowly. A man who lies as a matter of course, breaks his word, and betrays the trust of everyone who relies on him. That isn’t the Muslim of the faith. It’s the Muslim of the accusation — the taqiyya-practising infiltrator of the blog posts and the videos, smiling while he deceives. The counter-Islam industry has drawn its portrait of the typical Muslim, and it’s line for line the portrait the Qur’an draws of the man it sends to the bottom of Hell.
Even the exceptions refuse to help them. Islam does allow a lie in a few narrow places, and the hadith that lists them — on the authority of Umm Kulthum bint Uqba — gives the complete set: to make peace between two people at odds, to speak in war, and between a husband and wife to keep a marriage whole.¹⁶ Three. That is the entire list. Read it a hundred times and you will not find deceive the non-believer on it, or hide your faith to convert his children, or lie your way into his institutions. The exceptions are as narrow as the rule is broad, and there is no room in either for the thing the accusers describe.
So this was never a misreading. A misreading gets the emphasis wrong; this gets the faith backwards. They took the one figure Islam damns below all others — the two-faced man, the liar, the betrayer of a trust — and fixed his face onto every Muslim alive, and called that the doctrine. They didn’t misunderstand taqiyya. They took the man Islam sends to the bottom of Hell and told you he was the man in every mosque.
The War They Need
There’s one card left in their hand, and it’s the only one worth playing. The list of permitted lies has war on it, and war, they’ll tell you, is exactly the point — because Islam considers itself at war with the West. So the war-licence covers you: the neighbour, the commuter, the man at the next desk. This is the sophisticated version of the argument, the one the professionals reach for when the crude version fails. It fails too. It fails on the meaning of the word, and then it fails on what it reveals about the people making it.
Start with the word. The hadith says war is deceit, and the word behind “deceit” is khud’a — a battlefield stratagem, a ruse. Al-Nawawi, explaining it, is plain: it means misleading the enemy in combat, and it’s permitted in the state of war.¹⁷ It’s the feint, the false position, the army that looks weak the night before it strikes. And there’s nothing Islamic about it. The Hague and Geneva Conventions permit the ruse of war in so many words; every commander from antiquity to the last century has used it; Washington used it, and so did Eisenhower.¹⁸ Even the Middle East Forum’s own man, laying out the case against taqiyya, concedes that Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and Hobbes all sanctioned deceit in war. Deceiving an enemy on a battlefield isn’t a Muslim doctrine. It’s soldiering.
Now the part they never quote. The same scholars who permit the ruse draw a hard line through the middle of it. Al-Nawawi again: deceive the enemy in war by any means — except by breaking a treaty or a trust. That is forbidden.¹⁹ Treachery has its own name in Islamic law, ghadr, and it’s condemned outright; the Qur’an curses those who break their covenants, and the tradition warns that God hands the treacherous over to their enemies. Read that against the caricature. The smiling infiltrator who wins your confidence and betrays it — the very portrait they paint of the taqiyya-practising Muslim — is the one act the war-rule expressly outlaws. They reached for the exception that convicts their own picture.
And it convicts them twice over, because the rule was never only about armies and treaties. The Muslim who takes citizenship, leave to remain, or a visa — who agrees to stay for a length of time or live under a country’s laws in exchange for its protection — has entered a covenant, and the Qur’an commands the believer to honour his oaths. This isn’t a concession to the West; it’s a divine command. The Prophet set the precedent himself: when his first followers were hunted in Makkah, he sent them to shelter under the Christian king of Abyssinia, where they lived by their host’s law, kept their faith, and plotted against no one.²⁰ By that standard the Muslim who takes a country’s protection and then turns on it isn’t practising his religion — he’s breaking it. The loyalty they say he fakes is the very thing his faith demands.
And there’s a last turn they never see coming. For a great many Muslims, it is safer to practise Islam in the West than in much of the Muslim world — freer in London or New York than in Riyadh or Cairo, where a sermon against the regime can cost a man his liberty or his life. The very countries the fearmongers say Islam is scheming to bring down are, more often than not, the ones where a Muslim can live his or her faith freely. They have more reason than anyone to keep the covenant. It is the thing protecting them and worth protecting in return.
Which leaves only the bridge, and the bridge is where the whole argument gives itself away. To make a rule about the battlefield reach your neighbour’s kitchen, you have to claim the battlefield is everywhere — that Islam is at war with the West right now, in your street, at your border, in every mosque. That isn’t the belief of mainstream Islam; the Qur’an itself commands the believer to deal justly and kindly with the non-Muslim who is not fighting him.²¹ It’s the belief of Osama bin Laden — the jihadist’s reading of the world, the one that carves it into a house of faith and a house of war and calls the peace between them a lie. The campaigner has to pick up that reading — al-Qaida’s reading — and press it onto two billion people who spend their lives disproving it, as neighbours, as citizens, as the family next door. And when one of them says he isn’t at war with you, the campaigner has his answer ready. Taqiyya.
So follow it all the way down and see where they’re standing. To convict the ordinary Muslim of a doctrine of war-deceit, they must first agree with the terrorist about what Islam is. The Islamophobe and the man in the cave hold the same article of faith — that Islam and the West are locked in permanent war — and every Muslim who denies it stands against them both. One side calls that Muslim an apostate. The other calls him a liar. Neither will let him simply be what he is: a man who is not at war with anyone.
The Only One Charged
Here’s where the whole thing falls apart — not because taqiyya can’t be defended, but because there’s nothing left to defend. The act it describes — conceal what you believe when the truth would get you killed — isn’t a Muslim invention. It’s the oldest survival instinct there is, and every faith and every people that has ever been hunted has practised it. Islam’s one peculiarity is that it gave the reflex a name. For that, and that alone, Muslims are called uniquely deceitful.
Start with the book the accusers say they’re defending. It doesn’t merely permit concealment under threat — it takes the people who lie to save a life and makes them heroes.
When Pharaoh orders the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy, Shiphrah and Puah refuse. Then they stand in front of the most powerful man in Egypt and lie to his face — the Hebrew women, they tell him, are too vigorous, they deliver before we ever arrive. It’s a fabrication, invented to cover a capital act of disobedience. And Scripture answers it in a single line: God dealt well with the midwives, and gave them households of their own.²²
Then Rahab. Two Israelite spies slip into Jericho and shelter in her house, and when the king’s men come to her door after them she has already hidden the two on her roof under stalks of drying flax. She looks the soldiers in the eye and tells them the men were here but left at dusk, and sends them chasing toward the fords of the Jordan while the spies lie flat above their heads. For that lie — not despite it, for it — she and her household are the only souls spared when Jericho falls. And the tradition doesn’t quietly forgive her. The Letter to the Hebrews sets her among the champions of faith, beside Abraham and Moses. The Letter of James holds her up as proof that faith shows itself in action — and the action he singles out, the works that justify her, is the deception at the door.²³ David, hunted and cornered, feigns madness before a hostile king to get out of his city alive, clawing at the gates and letting spit run down into his beard, and Scripture lets the ruse stand without a word of rebuke.²⁴ These aren’t obscure verses. They’re founding stories, and the lesson in each is the same: a lie told to keep a life is no sin in the biblical tradition. It’s counted as faith.
Then the history — and the people who lived it under the same knife the first Muslims did.
When the Spanish Inquisition gave the Jews of Iberia the choice to convert, flee, or burn, thousands took a fourth road: bow to the Church in the daylight and stay Jewish behind the shutters. The Conversos had their children baptised and taught them the Shema in secret; they ate pork at a Christian table and kept Passover in a locked room. No honest person reads that and calls them liars. They’re remembered as heroes of endurance, and their descendants keep their memory still. And every Yom Kippur eve, in synagogues the world over, the cantor chants Kol Nidre — the prayer that releases a soul from its vows — which Jewish memory has long bound to exactly those forced converts and the oaths wrung out of them under threat.²⁵
Now watch what was done with that prayer, because you’ve already seen it done once in this piece. For centuries, antisemites held Kol Nidre up to the world as proof of what they had decided in advance: that a Jew’s word is worthless, that here in his own liturgy he unbinds himself from his oaths on the holiest night of his year, that no promise a Jew makes can be trusted because his own religion dissolves it. They lifted the prayer clean out of its history of persecution and waved it as evidence of something rotten in the blood. They even had the mechanism wrong — Kol Nidre releases vows made to God, not promises made to other people, a distinction the rabbis had spelled out for centuries to anyone honest enough to ask.²⁶ Read that back slowly, and it’s the taqiyya playbook, entire: a prayer of the persecuted, torn from its context, stripped of its real meaning, and brandished as proof that a whole people is deceitful by blood. Same distortion, same theft, same conclusion — a different minority, an earlier century. The ones who sell taqiyya today are running the exact play their forerunners ran on the Jews, and failing to see that is how you fail to see it running now.
The Christians lived it too, wherever the power turned on them. In the first centuries they buried their dead and held their rites in the catacombs beneath Rome, and scratched a fish on the wall to tell a friend from an informer, because to be known was to be sent to the arena.²⁷ In Elizabethan England, Catholic families cut hidden chambers into the walls of their houses — priest holes, some barely larger than a coffin — and when the priest-hunters came hammering at the door, they lied, and held the lie steady while a man crouched silent behind the panelling for two days at a stretch. We don’t call those families deceivers; their church calls a number of them saints.²⁸ In Japan, after Christianity was outlawed in 1614, the Hidden Christians kept the faith alive for two and a half centuries with no priests and no churches — disguising the Virgin Mary as Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, so a statue on the shelf would read to the authorities as devotion to the wrong god, and passing the prayers down by mouth, in secret, generation after generation, until missionaries returning in the 1860s found them still there.²⁹ And within living memory, when Europe filled with cattle cars, Christians across the continent forged baptismal certificates, wrote false names into parish registers, and lied to the Gestapo across a kitchen table to keep the family in the cellar out of the ovens. We have a name for those people. We call them the Righteous Among the Nations, and their names are cut into stone at Yad Vashem — honoured for the courage of the lie.³⁰
And beneath all of it, quietly, the law itself agrees. Every Western legal system throws out a confession wrung from a suspect under duress, on the plain and ancient understanding that a man will say whatever he must to stop the pain, and that words forced out of him are not the truth. That’s taqiyya — the whole principle of it — sitting in the statute book of every country now being taught to fear the word.³¹
So here it is, laid flat. The principle is human, not Muslim. The Jews lived it and were smeared for a prayer about it. The Christians lived it and are canonised and memorialised for it. The law wrote it into its own foundations. Islam gave it a name — and for the single offence of naming what the whole human race has always done, its followers alone are branded the liars. The accusation was never about the doctrine. If it were, it would have to charge Rahab and the midwives, the Conversos and the priest-hole families and the Righteous of Yad Vashem, and the founding logic of Western law, all in the same breath. It charges none of them. It charges only the Muslim. Which tells you, in the end, what it always was. Not an argument about lying. An argument about who.
Who Holds the Blade
Return to the man with the screenshot — the one who posted the word like a trump card. Look at what’s left in his hand.
Nothing. No book called taqiyya to hold up. A Shia dispensation born of persecution, and a Sunni principle of necessity in the face of danger — neither of which means what he was told. A verse revealed to console a man tortured half to death, whose mother had been murdered for refusing to hide her faith. A religion that sends the liar to the bottom of Hell, and a battlefield rule that forbids the very treachery he thinks it commands. A principle every hunted people on earth has lived, and every court in the West has written into its law. Turn the accusation over, and there’s nothing on the other side of it.
So why does the lie hold? Because it was built to.
Look at what taqiyya actually requires, then watch the ones who wield it fail every part of it. Taqiyya needs a blade at the throat — mortal danger, real compulsion. It needs a heart that stays true beneath the forced words. And it answers, in the end, to God, who sees what the tongue hides. Real taqiyya is a frightened man’s dispensation, accountable to heaven for every use of it.
Now the industry. No one holds a blade to Robert Spencer’s throat. No one compels the Middle East Forum to cut the verse from its context, drop the story of Ammar, bury the war-rule’s own limits, and hide the plain fact that every scripture on their own shelves rests on the thing they call uniquely Muslim. They conceal all of it — freely, safely, for profit. Concealment without a single one of the conditions that ever excused it. They do the very thing they accuse, stripped of the only circumstance that ever made it forgivable.
That’s the case in one sentence. Taqiyya is what a man does when there’s a blade at his throat. What they do is hold the blade — and call him a liar for flinching.
And here’s why they can afford to. What they sell was never a fact; a fact can be checked, and thrown out when it fails. It’s a permission never to listen — a claim built so that every answer a Muslim gives counts as proof against him. A claim like that never wears out. It keeps a man suspicious for life, deaf in advance to every correction, sealed off from every Muslim who might have told him the truth. That’s why they need it in the air, and why they need you never to notice you’re the one breathing it.
The key only turns in your hand. That’s the trick, the whole of it: the claim works for exactly as long as you hear a Muslim’s answer as a confession instead of an answer. Every time you do, you turn it for them. Refuse, and it’s scrap — a key is nothing without a hand to work it, and the hand is yours to take away. You’ve read where the word comes from now, met the man it was revealed for, watched the war-rule forbid the very treachery it was supposed to license. You know the key for what it is.
So it’s already dead in your hand — not because the ones who forged it were argued out of anything, but because it was never built to work on a reader who lets a Muslim’s answer be an answer. That’s the one thing it can’t survive. You’ve become that reader.
But not everyone will. Some have already decided that a paid stranger on a screen knows a Muslim’s faith better than the Muslim does — and no verse reaches a man who picked whom to trust before the evidence arrived. Leave them. They were never the ones in play, and you don’t need them. The ones in play are the crowd behind them, far larger: the people who repeated the word once without staking anything on it, who can still be shown what it costs to carry. So put it in their hands and make them look. The ones who sell the lie have survived being wrong for years — what they can’t survive is being ignored. Every hand you reach is a hand that never closes around the key again. And a lie this size doesn’t die in an argument. It dies when the room stops filling.
Image: An auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition and the execution of sentences by burning heretics at the stake in a market place.” Engraving by Bernard Picart. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hijacked by Hate: American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network (Washington, DC: CAIR, 2019). Figures for 2014–2016 drawn from publicly available IRS tax filings via GuideStar and the Foundation Directory Online, including the donor-advised-fund and faith-based-charity channels (Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, the National Christian Foundation, the Jewish Communal Fund).
² Raymond Ibrahim (associate director, Middle East Forum), “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War,” Middle East Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Winter 2010); see also “Islam’s Doctrines of Deception,” Middle East Forum, 2009.
³ Center for Security Policy, Shariah: The Threat to America (2010), which casts taqiyya as religiously mandated deception practised by observant Muslims; documented in Center for American Progress, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America (2011).
⁴ On Robert Spencer’s use of taqiyya to argue that Muslims cannot swear oaths honestly: Southern Poverty Law Center, extremist-files profile, “Robert Spencer.”
⁵ Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. “Taḳiyya”: the term derives from the Arabic root w-q-y, “to guard” or “to protect oneself.”
⁶ On the Shia as roughly a tenth of the world’s Muslims: Pew Research Center, Mapping the Global Muslim Population (2009). On taqiyya’s development as a formal doctrine among the Shia under Sunni-majority rule: Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī-Shīʿī Views on Taqiyya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975).
⁷ On the term’s presence in Sunni Qur’anic exegesis, see al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 3:28.
⁸ Qur’an 6:119 (”He has detailed to you what He has forbidden you, save that to which you are compelled”); idtirar (necessity) and ikrah (coercion) are the Sunni juristic categories governing what is excused under duress.
⁹ On the family of Yasir, the martyrdom of Sumayyah bint Khayyat, and the revelation of Qur’an 16:106 in response to Ammar ibn Yasir’s ordeal: the sira of Ibn Ishaq and the occasion-of-revelation (asbab al-nuzul) tradition, as recorded in the tafsir of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir on the verse.
¹⁰ Al-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan, on Qur’an 16:106: concealment is excused only under mortal danger, and the one who refuses and accepts death takes the nobler course. The same preference for martyrdom over the dispensation is recorded in Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari).
¹¹ On truthfulness leading to Paradise and falsehood to the Fire: Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim (narrated by Abdullah ibn Mas’ud).
¹² “Whoever cheats is not one of us”: Sahih Muslim.
¹³ On the truthful and trustworthy merchant standing among the prophets, the truthful and the martyrs: Jami’ al-Tirmidhi.
¹⁴ Qur’an 4:145 (”the hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire”).
¹⁵ On the three signs of the hypocrite: Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim (narrated by Abu Hurayra).
¹⁶ On the three circumstances in which a lie is permitted — reconciliation between people, war, and speech between spouses: Sahih Muslim, on the authority of Umm Kulthum bint Uqba (no. 2605).
¹⁷ “War is deceit”: Sahih al-Bukhari (no. 3029) and Sahih Muslim (no. 58). Al-Nawawi, in his commentary on Sahih Muslim, glosses khud’a as a stratagem for misleading the enemy, permitted in the state of war.
¹⁸ On the ruse of war as lawful in the international law of armed conflict: Hague Regulations (1907), Art. 24, and Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Art. 37(2) (ruses permitted; perfidy prohibited). On the universality of military deception across commanders and traditions: Joel Hayward, “War is Deceit: An Analysis of a Contentious Hadith on the Morality of Military Deception” (Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre); the same universality — Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes — is conceded in Ibrahim’s article at note 2 above. On the two commanders named: George Washington’s battlefield deceptions in the War of Independence (feints and inflated estimates of his strength), and Eisenhower’s Operation Bodyguard — its Fortitude component the fictional army group that fixed German forces at the Pas-de-Calais and away from Normandy in 1944.
¹⁹ Al-Nawawi: deception of the enemy in war is permissible by any means “except breaking a treaty or trust,” which is forbidden. The principle of amān (safe-conduct) binds the one who receives it: a person admitted under a guarantee of safety may not betray it — a rule the classical jurists of siyar, al-Shaybani and al-Sarkhasi, apply to anyone who enters under protection, and which modern scholars extend to a visa or residence granted by a host state, so that betraying the country one lives under is itself treachery. On the prohibition of treachery (ghadr) more broadly: Qur’an 8:56–58, and the report of Ibn Abbas in Malik’s Muwatta (”no people betray their covenant but that God gives their enemies power over them”).
²⁰ On the command to honour oaths and covenants: Qur’an 5:89 (see also 5:1; 16:91). On the first migration to Abyssinia — the Prophet sending his persecuted followers to live under the Christian king (the Negus), where they kept their host’s law and practised their faith unmolested: the sira of Ibn Ishaq.
²¹ Qur’an 60:8 (”God does not forbid you from being righteous and just toward those who do not fight you over religion or drive you from your homes”). The reading that places Islam in a state of perpetual active war with all non-Muslims (dar al-Harb) is the militant one, exemplified in the bin Laden statements marshalled in Ibrahim’s article at note 2 above.
²² Exodus 1:15–21 (the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah; “God dealt well with the midwives”).
²³ Joshua 2 (Rahab conceals the spies); Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25 (”justified by works”).
²⁴ 1 Samuel 21:10–15 (David feigns madness before Achish, king of Gath).
²⁵ On the Conversos (Marranos) of the Spanish Inquisition: standard histories. On Kol Nidre: the prayer is attested well before the Spanish Inquisition (Geonic period, 8th–9th centuries), and its popular association with forced conversion is traditional rather than a settled historical origin. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. “Kol Nidrei.”
²⁶ Kol Nidre annuls only vows between a person and God, not obligations to other people — a distinction rabbinic authorities have stressed for centuries against precisely this misreading.
²⁷ On the early Christian catacombs and the ichthys (fish) as a covert identifier: standard histories of the early Church.
²⁸ On Catholic recusancy and the concealment of priests (”priest holes”) in Elizabethan England: standard histories.
²⁹ On the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) of Japan — the faith outlawed in 1614, the surviving communities rediscovered in 1865: standard histories.
³⁰ On the Righteous Among the Nations, honoured at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
³¹ On the inadmissibility of confessions or testimony obtained under duress, a foundational principle of Western legal systems.