September 11, 2006
The
Curse of Radical Islam as a Political Religion
"Muslims must…educate their
children to Jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the
children to Jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels;
educating the children to Jihad and to revival of the embers of Jihad in their
souls. This is what is needed now…"
Sheikh Muhammad
Saleh al-Munajjid, an imam in Saudi Arabia
"Islam makes it incumbent on all
adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare
themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is
obeyed in every country in the world…"
Ayatollah
Khomeni (1902-1989), religious leader of Iran
"The leader
who needs religion to govern his people is weak... We have to rid ourselves of
superstition. Anybody is free to believe in anything, but we need freedom of
thought."
Atatürk (1881-1938), founder of
modern Turkey.
Some readers have told me that I do not
write enough about the political side of Islam, especially as it relates to the mixing
of religion and politics and to the fringe element of radical Islam which is
supportive of international terrorism. As a matter of fact, I have written
extensively on the question, but in French (see my 2001 book "L'Heure
juste"). Here, then, is my position on this topic.
All proselytist religions tend to mix politics and religion
because one of their objectives is to control how people think and behave. On
this score, I would say Islam ("submission" or "surrender" in Arabic)
doesn't fare well, because it tends to institutionalize a symbiosis between
politics and religion. It is a religion that tends theoretically to concentrate
temporal and spiritual authority in a single entity. Structurally, in Islam,
the Caliph and the Sheik are supposed to be the same person, wielding spiritual
and political powers over the people. Mind you, something approaching the same
result prevailed in Christianity after the 4th century, when the Church and the
Throne formed close alliances, the clergy confirming the power of kings and
emperors, and the rich and powerful aristocracy protecting the equally rich and
powerful religious hierarchy. It is only with the advent of the Renaissance
that Christian Europe began talking about democracy as the most humanist
form of government.
The more progressive and modern Muslim countries that have
advanced the most economically, socially and politically, such as Turkey, Malaysia
or Indonesia, are those that have
rejected the unhealthy, near complete mixing of religion and politics that is
called for by fundamentalist Islam. In other Muslim countries, such as Saudi
Arabia and Qatar, a more extreme brand of Islam prevails. This movement in Sunni Islam, (the dominant form of
Islam), is called Wannabism
or "Salafism", and it distinguishes itself by not only
refusing Western values and ideologies, such as nationalism, socialism and
capitalism, but also by rejecting the Western concepts of freedom, liberty,
economics, constitutions, political parties, revolution, social justice and the
very idea of a rationalist, secular culture. The
other minority branch of Islam,
Shia Islam can also be considered extremist,
especially in contemporary Iran, in the sense that it reserves to the clergy a
dominant political role in an Islamic country. It is mainly concentrated in
Iran, although Shiites also live in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
Afghanistan and India.
It can be argued that before Islam, which appeared in the
early part of the 7th Century, Arab civilization
was more advanced and more peaceful than after the imposition of the new faith
through violence. It had participated fully in the rich Greek, Assyrian,
Persian, Chaldean and Babylonian civilizations, to which we owe mathematical
breakthroughs, such as the concept of zero
found in the Greek and Hindu decimal systems and the Pythagorean Theorem
in Babylonian mathematics. Regarding Islamic respect for science, it has to be
said that one of Muhammad's successors, the Caliph Omar of Damascus,
distinguished himself by having centuries-old literary treasures destroyed,
besides setting afire the large Egyptian library of Alexandria, a wonder of
the Ancient World. Caliph Omar is
reported to have justified his order to destroy the books in the library of
Alexandria by saying that "they will either contradict the Koran, in
which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are
superfluous."
—Since many religions have theologies that stress so-called divine
revelation over human reason, it is not surprising that religious extremists
can be opposed to human intellectual progress, especially if such progress is
perceived as a threat to their political power. Not surprisingly also, such a
bias against the human intellect and against scientific achievements is bound
to have a detrimental influence on the economic, social and political
development of countries that embrace such an attitude. Indeed, the absence of
intellectual freedom and censorship
are the two biggest enemies of human progress.
During the 9th and 10th
centuries, Islamic civilization redeemed itself somewhat by having many ancient
scientific and philosophical tracts translated from ancient languages,
especially Greek, into Arabic. It is these translations which were imported
into Europe and which played such a central role in bringing about the European
Renaissance, from which Western civilization still draws most of its
inspiration.
Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time
of Muhammad
(c. 570–632), in the 7th century, the means of Muslim expansion was
always the sword and military conquest. Islam, at least at the beginning, was
not a "religion of peace", to mimmick the expression used often by
President George W. Bush. It was fundamentally a military movement that used
forced conversion to Islam to expand its dominion. Muhammad began the first
violent movement in Medina, after a declaration of a Jihad against so-called 'infidels'.
There, for example, the Jews who refused to convert to Islam were driven from
the land or beheaded. Approximately fifteen years later he marched on Mecca
with an army of about 20,000, and later against the Assyrians, the Armenians
and the Coptics in Egypt. Those who converted to Islam were spared. Those who
refused to convert were beheaded. So much for a compassionate Islam. —It
has been argued convincingly that the imposition of Islam upon the Arabs was a
regressive development. With Islam, the Arab civilization lost much of the
scientific accomplishments and the tradition of intellectual vitality that it
had inherited from the Greek and Assyrian civilizations.
The fundamental question of the religious foundation of
violence and terrorism needs attention. It
is the most pressing, because the world is not going to tolerate very long
being subjected to blackmail and having its prosperity and freedom threatened
this way. —It is no surprise that terrorist leaders use the mask of
religion to diabolize their enemies and to cloak their cruelties and atrocities
in a pious justification. The cover of religion to justify terrorism,
especially suicide terrorism,
and the killing of innocent people also has the advantage of making it easier
to recruit so called martyrs and fanatics, if not utterly deranged people, who
would not be as easily mobilized for a purely political cause. That may be one
reason why today's religious-based terrorism is more deadly than the
nationalist-based terrrorism of 40 or 50 years ago.
Extremists in any
religion can find passages in their 'holy books' that condone violence against
others. Suffice it to say that
they overlook the book's other teachings about "peace",
"justice", "kindness", "courtesy", and
"compassion" toward others, to concentrate on the admonitions which
call for intolerance and aggression against so-called "infidels".
Some religious ideologues can reinforce the violent
tendencies of the most exalted people by emphasizing the most violent religious
teachings. For instance, an Egyptian scholar, Sayied Qutb, argued in the
1950s, in his book of Quranic interpretation entitled
"Fe-zelal-al-Qur'an", that a state of permanent war is normal between
Muslims and non-Muslims, ignoring that the Qur'an (Koran) dictates that its
teachings be understood in full, not in bits and pieces (Surah 20:114), as it
relates mainly to individual morality, not to politics. The religious-based Al Qaeda terrorist movement
takes its violent inspirations from such impractical subversive teachings. It
is part of the Jihadist ideology of hatred and
destruction.
Faced with the threat of Islamist terrorism, the important task for the rest
of the world is to avoid antagonizing the moderate Muslims who are largely in
the majority in their countries. Both for reasons of domestic support and for
acceptance by the Muslim masses, governments anxious to fight and contain
international terrorism should, now more than ever, retain the moral high ground and
not be the aggressors. They should reject the negative, misleading and
self-fulfilling propaganda rhetorics of "Islamo-Fascism", "war
of civilizations" or even worse, of "war of religions", and
concentrate on concretely assisting Muslim countries in acceeding to modernity
and prosperity, while supporting their efforts in combating anti-modernity
religious-based terrorism.
Therefore, to pursue a policy of openness, assistance and
fairness toward Muslim countries would seem to be the most just and the most
constructive approach, while simultaneously maintaining a firm attitude against
gratuitous international terrorism, as represented by the Al Qaeda network. Sad
to say, this is not the kind of rational and sophisticated policy being
followed by the current American administration, which seems bent on glorifying
and multiplying the most extremist Islamist organizations, while alienating and
silencing the most reform-minded people in the Muslim world. —On this score, the best thing the
Bush-Cheney administration could do in fighting international Islamist
terrorism would be to announce a phase out of its military occupation of Iraq,
while persuading its close ally, Israel, to end its own military occupation of
Palestine, and take concrete steps to solve once for all the rotten
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the other hand, the worst thing the
Bush-Cheney team could do would be to start bombing Iran. The latter would be a
most counter-productive move and would feed both extremism and terrorism.
________________________________________
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor
emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com.
He is the
author of the book 'The
New American Empire'.
Visit his
blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's
Website:www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Posted,
September 11, 2006, at 5:30 am
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