Abdo’s Loyalty to Muslims Always Meant Disloyalty to Americans
16th August 2011
One of the dirty little secrets of Islam — actually, it isn’t all that secret — is that a Muslim’s first loyalty is always to the Ummah; everything else comes after.
To anyone familiar with Muslim doctrine, Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo’s actions — from refusing to deploy to Afghanistan lest he kill fellow Muslims to plotting a terror attack to kill fellow Americans — make perfect sense and accord well with Islam’s dichotomous doctrine of wala wa bara, often translated as “loyalty and enmity.”
Built atop numerous Koran verses and backed by Sharia, wala requires Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims, and explains why Abdo refused to deploy to Muslim nations.
While loyalty may appear admirable, it has a flipside, bara, which requires Muslims to disassociate themselves from non-Muslims — to be disloyal to them (see al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 60 page treatise titled “Loyalty and Enmity” in The Al Qaeda Reader for details).