The Two Faces Of Islam
By Richard Davis (12/07/03)
President Bush recently released his annual Ramadan message to commemorate the start of the Muslim holy days in which he reiterated the official public dogma that Islam is a “peace-loving faith.” On the same day, Islamists responded with their own Ramadan message to the president: four suicide bombings in Iraq, a rash of other attacks, 45 dead and a call for all Muslims to join the holy war against America as a duty of their religion, which the Islamists certainly know better than does Bush.
Of course, Bush was addressing his message to the so-called moderate Muslims, the very silent majority, who he has been courting for political reasons since before 9/11. Which message did they find more agreeable?
Actually, both messages may have originated with the Islamists. Writing in the Washington Times the week before Ramadan, columnist Frank J. Gaffney Jr. observed that “one of the most successful gambits to date” of the Islamists “has been the promotion of the notion at the highest levels of the U.S. government that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’.”
Some confusion at those high levels may result from an inadequate understanding of the meaning of peace. To the Islamist, who bases his definition on Islamic scripture, true peace can be obtained only after nonbelievers have been subjugated, converted or killed. The Qur’an prescribes all three remedies. Only when mankind has succumbed entirely to Islamic domination, to the triumph of the umma, the body of the faithful, can peace be achieved. Until then, it’s every Muslim’s sacred duty to wage jihad against the unbeliever. "Islam," after all, means submission, not peace.
Moderates know this traditional, scriptural meaning of peace in Islam, too, though they say little about it publicly. They seem to say little about anything publicly.
Americans have been told repeatedly in the past two years that the silence of the moderates in the face of Islamic terror is a result of their fear of reprisals from extremists. We do have a few examples of intimidation, though fewer examples of reprisals. Canadian author Irshad Manji recently was slandered and threatened repeatedly following the publication of her book, The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change.
But in truth we don’t have that many examples.This explanation of why moderates are silent emanates almost exclusively from reporters and commentators, not Muslims. We hear absolutely nothing on the topic, for instance, from the many Muslim advocacy groups, which bill themselves as “civil rights” organizations. The slightest hint of profiling or any action whatsoever toward a Muslim provokes howls of protest from these groups, yet the wholesale suppression of one of America’s most cherished civil rights, free speech, under the threat of death no less, causes not a single whimper of protest. (Many of these groups have disturbing ties to terrorist causes and may thus be intimidating themselves into silence on the issue of intimidation.)
Daniel Pipes wrote a few weeks ago, “Anti-Islamist Muslims -- who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas and violent visions of jihad -- are on the defensive and atomized. However eloquent, their individual voices cannot compete with the roar of militant Islam’s determination, money (much of it from overseas) and violence. As a result, militant Islam, with its West-phobia and goal of world hegemony, dominates Islam in the West and appears to many to be the only kind of Islam.”
That may be true, yet too often when moderate Muslims do speak out the results are ambiguous at best. They’re always quick with a justification or an equivalency argument to rationalize the violence. Outright condemnation of any terrorist act, even those that slaughter women and children, is rare. (One exception came after latest bombing in Saudia Arabia, which killed mostly Muslims.) There’s always a qualification. Thus we repeatedly hear that Islam “prohibits the killing of innocent civilians,” the key word being “innocent"? Does that include Jews? Americans? Critics of Islam? In Israel, to cite just one example, all civilians are considered legitimate military targets.
We’re told that the moderates oppose terrorism, but they openly support the same causes supported by the terrorists without exception and complain bitterly when any action here or abroad is taken to combat terrorism, almost regardless of what that action is. They offer no alternative ideas or suggestions, only that we abstain from any action involving Muslims. At a convention of a “moderate” Muslim group last year, speaker after speaker offered prayers and support to fellow Muslims fighting in Palestine, Chechnya and Kashmir. In all three locations, Muslims are waging campaigns of terror, which they initiated in order to obtain autocratic control over the areas and their populations. In Kashmir alone 60,000 people have been killed.
Silence can represent fear, acquiescence or approval -- or a combination of the three. Are the moderates moderate because of how they behave -- that is, because they don't physically participate in terrorist activities -- or because of what they think? There’s an important difference. Do they have a countervailing ideology to the Islamists’? What are the points of disagreement? Perhaps this moderate majority is only a figment of our worried imaginations.
One of the crucial lessons of the past century is this: Silence in the face of fascist intimidation at some point becomes complicity in the crimes that inevitably follow. Germany was filled with moderates as Hitler rose to power.
If widespread intimidation is taking place, the govenment should aggressively investigate and prosecute the intimidators. Would we do less, say, if blacks were being intimidated by white extremists?
The truth is probably much less dramatic. The relationship dynamic between moderate and Islamist should be considered less antagonistic than familial. If a family member turns to violence, the family may not condone it, but he’s still family and everyone else isn’t. Factor in the psychological, scriptural, cultural and political circumstances surrounding Islam today, and the silence isn’t hard to understand. The last thing we should understand, however, is that it is benign or that it represents, or at some point will represent, opposition to the Islamist agenda.
The Islam-is-peace-and-love mantra has been perpetuated mostly by the media, the same people who waste no opportunity to inform us about how much Muslims in other countries hate us and want to see us dead. Do Arabs do anything but stand in the street and scream for muderous revenge for some perceived affront? Apparently, hatred for Westerners, especially Americans, doesn’t diminish their love.
An American Muslim leader told gatherers at the convention mentioned above that he had been asked so often by journalists after 9/11 to corroborate that Islam was a religion of peace and love that after a while he found it hard to respond. He had become annoyed, he said, not only because of the persistent demand that he answer as expected but also because he believed the first tenet of Islam is not peace and love. It is justice. That’s something different entirely.
In any case, is Muslim love the same brotherly, love-thy-neighbor love of Christianity? A cursory look at the treatment of nonMuslims within Islamic countries, the rabid anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world, the treatment of perceived apostate Muslims and the vicious anti-Americanism, hate and intolerance exhibited throughout Islamic societies, makes one wonder.Tough love, this Muslim variety.
But isn’t this religion being hijacked by a fringe group of extremists who have subverted the true message of Mohammad for their own violent purposes? There are two major problems with this hypothesis -- the past and the present. For one thing, this is one mother of a fringe, encompassing at least 100-150 million people and major population segments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Pakistan and many other countries. Add the silent sympathizers worldwide, and the fringe theory begins to look more like wishful thinking than objective social science.
In any case, the vast majority of believers of any totalitarian ideology are peaceful, law-abiding citizens, far outnumbering the inevitable fringe, the vanguard of true believers who are quick to resort to any means to achieve victory. And always the majority’s attitude toward this fringe is ambivalent, molded by both sympathetic comraderie and intimidation.
Focusing on the majority and ignoring the fringe, or believing it is an anomaly rather than a component of the whole and something that ultimately can be controlled, is a fatal mistake many societies have made with devastating consequences. Is the West repeating that mistake with Islam? Shouldn’t we at least be asking that question?
Clearly this violent fringe isn’t just an aberrant response to present social conditions, as some would have us believe, and it’s time we stop excusing it as such. One scholar, Ernest Renan, said about the Islam he encountered, “Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror.” He wrote that 130 years ago. (Renan went on to say that because Muslims are the “first victims” of Islam, to “liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.” Imagine a professor writing that today.)
So is violence endemic to Islam? Certainly it has been a salient feature of the religion since its inception and is immortalized and extolled throughout scripture, unlike anything found in Christianity.
Muhammad’s first acts as a leader involved attacks on trade caravans and nonMuslim communities. Islam spread through military conquest, with little quarter given to the vanquished. In one early victory, against the Jewish tribe of Banu Quarayzah, 600-900 male prisoners were methodically beheaded, an atrocity that took all day, after which Muhammad and his men raped the victims’ women. Comments by the Rev. Jerry Falwell on 60 Minutes last year that Muhammad was a “violent man, a man of war” provoked outrage, riots, killings and death threats. One thing they didn’t provoke was a refutation. The facts are a little too complicated for that.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said recently that the president “flat out disagrees with any notion that the war of terror has anything to do with religion.” What does he flat out think it does have anything to do with? Random acts of psychopathic anarchists?
Bush’s reluctance to identify the terrorists ideologically, we are told, stems from a fear that to do so might imply to moderate Muslims worldwide that America is attacking Islam itself. Why that would be so we’re not told. Thus while moderates are intimidated by extremists, Bush is intimidated by moderates. Everyone knows who the terrorists are. The choice is to support them, even through silence, or to join us in a fight against them.
Pretending religion isn’t involved only makes our motives seem more suspect and reinforces the us/them mentality so coveted by the militants. It also betrays the moderates, who need our support not our patronization. By saying nothing we rob them of a powerful ally. Our silence only makes the extremists’ voices appear louder and uncontested.
That we’re being politically correct is no consolation, though politics is clearly on Bush’s mind as election time approaches. According to one of the more disturbing stories from the last election Bush won a majority Muslim vote in his bid for the presidency for the sole reason that Al Gore chose a Jew (Joe Lieberman) as his running mate. For that little bit of fortuitous anti-Semitism Muslim groups have been rewarded with undeserved deference and White House access. (Bush also won the Neo-Nazi vote for the same reason, though there have been no reports as to when the skin-heads will be coming to dinner.)
Despite the pandering, Bush will probably have more trouble winning the Muslim vote in 2004, unless the Jew wins the Democratic nomination, which seems doubtful at this point. The Muslim community has been assiduously cultivating its victimhood status since 9/11, and in America that status comes complete with a membership card to the Democratic Party. Those advocacy groups aren’t registering voters to re-elect Bush.
There’s evidence that at least some members of the administration understand that this is as much a war of ideas as one of tactics and smart bombs. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield stated recently, “To win the war on terror we must also win the war of ideas -- the battle for the minds of those who are being recruited across the globe.” He also said, “[Our] ideas are important and need to be marshaled, and they need to be communicated in ways that are persuasive to the listeners.”
Let’s all second that. The refusal to engage the ideological dimension of this conflict has left us without our most effective weapons -- our principles and ideals. Instead, we deploy only our military, which alienates friend and foe and whose superior force appears, in isolation, to be brutish and imperialistic. It may win some battles for us, but winning the war should be our goal.
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