NYC Letter: Islam Will Come To Us All

The shahadah is the recitation of the two basic tenets of Islam. Its pronouncement effects the conversion to Islam of the believing reciter. It is the most profound act in the whole of Islam.

FOX JOURNALISTS RELEASED BY CAPTORS IN GAZA

JERUSALEM August 27, 2006 (VOA) - Two journalists [Fox television correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig], who have been held for nearly two weeks by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, were freed unharmed on Sunday. The abduction of the two journalists was the longest kidnapping to date of foreigners in Gaza.

Just hours earlier, the two men had appeared in a video, in which they criticized Israeli policies in the Gaza Strip, and said they had converted to Islam. Centanni told Fox Television on Sunday that he and Wiig were forced at gunpoint to make the statement.

Centanni, a veteran American journalist said that he and New Zealand-born Wiig were harshly treated during their initial period of captivity, saying they were tightly bound in painful positions, forced to lie face down on a garage floor and prevented from speaking with each other.

For the shahadah to effect conversion there are seven conditions that must inform the recitation:

1. Al-`Ilm: Knowledge of the meaning of the shahadah, its negation and affirmation.
2. Al-Yaqeen: Certainty – perfect knowledge of it that counteracts suspicion and doubt.
3. Al-Ikhlaas: Sincerity which negates shirk (scil., the worship of anything else)
4. Al-Sidq: Truthfulness that permits neither falsehood nor hypocrisy.
5. Al-Mahabbah: Love of the shahadah and its meaning, and being happy with it.
6. Al-Inqiad: Submission to its rightful requirements, which are the duties that must be performed with sincerity to God (alone) seeking His pleasure.
7. Al-Qubool: Acceptance that contradicts rejection.

Oh, yes. And an appreciation for the AK-47.

UPDATE 08.28.06: Video of Messrs. Centanni and Wiig freely converting to Islam and -- in a politico-spiritual two-fer -- the Islamite Weltanschauung. There is a lot of spiritual energy at the business end of a gun.

Elsewhere, DEBKAfile identifies the evangelical kidnappers:

Palestinian warlord Zakaria Dughmush kidnapped the Fox News journalists on behalf of Hamas. [Dughmush is] a former follower of the late Jemal Semhadana, head of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees who was killed in Rafah by rockets fired from an Israeli warplane on June 8, 2006.

After Semhadana’s death, his PRC fragmented into several small militias, one of them led by Dughmush, a rabid fundamentalist who set up base in Gaza City. He was adopted by Hamas, but also draws funds and weapons from al Qaeda and Hizballah elements working together in the Gaza Strip.

Because neither set of abductors wanted Palestinians branded as kidnappers of Americans, they invented a group no one had heard of, calling it the Brigades of the Holy Jihad.