Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

War on Terror Should Not Become a War on Islam; U.S. Policy Should Seek to Separate the Moderate Moslem Majority from Extremists

The Islamic extremists who have launched a terrorist assault against the United States and the West represent a small minority of Moslems. It is essential that our war against them not be seen as a war against Islam. Instead, we should seek to separate the moderate Muslim majority from the extremists.

The fact is that Islamic fundamentalism would hardly be the threat that it is if it were not for the financial support of the government of Saudi Arabia, to which we have for too long a turned a blind eye.

On November 20, 1979, a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists posing as religious pilgrims seized control of the Great Mosque in Mecca and proclaimed an end to the al-Saud dynasty and the coming end of the world. It took more than two weeks for Saudi troops to quell the resistance. This, in turn, led to a closer alliance with radical clerical leaders as an insurance policy against future revolts.

In his book, Preachers of Hate, Kenneth Timmerman writes that,

Keeping the Wahhabis on their side required more than just money. The royal family needed to display adequate passion and commitment to spreading Wahhabi doctrine to Muslim communities around the world. . . . To placate the clerics, the Saudis established the Muslim World League to build Wahhabite mosques around the world and propagate the faith. . . . They added the activist World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which opened offices in 60 countries, distributing scholarshships to young Muslims who accepted the Wahhabi doctrine that “Jews are the source of all conflicts in the world, that Shia’s Muslims are part of a Jewish conspiracy, and the Muslims, Jews and Christians cannot live together.

These organizations spread the works of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the sect’s 18th century founder, as well as those of the leading contemporary Wahhabi scholar, Sayyid Abdul-Ala-al-Mawdudi (1903-1979), who condemned all Muslims not embracing the Wahhabi doctrine as apostates and unbelievers. The Wahhabis reserved special damnation for “Crusaders and Jews,” who were considered implacable enemies of Islam. Al-Mawdudi also argued for abolishing the protected “dhimmi” status of religious minorities living in Islamic countries, a suggestion the Saudi family adopted. Saudi officials regularly boast that the kingdom is “100 per cent Muslim.”

According to Timmerman,  

Al-Mawdudi’s doctrine of jihad and his messianic vision of Islam conquering the world inspired a generation of young jihadis who flocked to his native Pakistan following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Like Ibn Abd al-Wahhab before him, al-Mawdudi made clear that his notion of Islamic Holy War was not an internal spiritual struggle but war. “The Islamic party does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement the goal,” he wrote in a 1927 text. “Islam seeks the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the whole universe.”

The Saudis have spent billions of dollars building an entire network of religious schools in Pakistan and throughout the world where the next generation of Wahhabi extremists would be trained. Young men sent to these schools learned little about the outside world, focusing instead on Wahhabi interpretations of the Koran. It was here that the Taliban was spawned.

The most famous of these schools, Jihad and Dawa University in Pakistan, was the headquarters of Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, an Afghan Wahhabi who was a major recipient of Saudi aid. It was here that Osama bin Laden reportedly recruited Khald Sheikh Mohammad, the man who went on to mastermind the September 11 attacks. In one of his earlier attempts to attack America, Mohammad sent a young nephew from Baluchestan who called himself Ramzi Yousef to orchestrate the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

The Saudis in recent years have set up an extensive network of apparently non-government agencies that in reality were funded and controlled by Riyadh. Says Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmad:

They call this effort to spread the Wahhabi sect jihad al-talab, the holy war against unbelievers. The Saudis believe that all non-Wahhabis are infidels. Their philosophy is very simple: conquest, subjugate, or die.

In the U.S., King Fahd built 15 Islamic centers and major mosques. In Canada, the Saudi government built mosques in Calgary and Ottawa and contributes $1.5 million each year to the operating costs of the Islamic Center in Toronto. In Europe, the Saudis have been active for decades, building mosques, cultural centers, lecture halls and madrasses. King Fahd personally donated $50 million to cover 70 percent of the building cost of an Islamic Center in Rome.

The U.S. Government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service has begun to translate Friday prayer sermons from Mecca that are broadcast live around the world by the Saudi government over satellite radio and T.V. networks. On May 31, 2002, for example, Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Abdul Aziz al-Sudais, chief iman of the Great Mosque at Mecca, called on the Muslim world to unite against a vast conspiracy of Jews, Christians and “idol-worshipping Hindus” he claimed was trying to subvert Islam through Western-style globalization.

He said:

The nation has never been in such a dire need to follow the example of the Prophet in this age of tribulation, sedition, open challenges, and mean plotting by the enemies of Islam. I mean especially (the Jews) who God cursed, got angry with, and turned into monkeys, pigs and tyrant worshippers. . . . Their course is supported by the advocates of credit and worshippers of the Cross, as well as those who are infatuated with them and influenced by their rotten ideas and poisonous culture among the advocates of secularism and Westernization.

In his treatise, “The True Religion,” Abdul Rahman ben Hamad al-Omer elaborates on the theme that “Judaism and Christianity are deviant religions.” Good Muslims should never befriend unbelievers, he warns, because it is against the faith.

The Iman Mohammed Ibn-Saud Islamic University in Riyadh is a seminary for the training of clerics in Wahhabism. This institution was the alma mater of three of the September 11 suicide hijackers. The Wahhab Koran, translated at this university, alters the words and meanings of this holy book. Consider the opening chapter, or surah, also known as Fatiha, which is recited in Muslim daily prayer. The four final lines of the Fatiha read, in a normal rendition of the Arabic original:

Guide us to the straight path,

The path of those whom You have favored,

Not of those who have incurred Your wrath,

Nor of those who have gone astray.

The Wahhabi Koran renders the lines this way:

Guide us to the Straight Way. The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who have earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).

The Wahhabi Koran prints this translation alongside the Arab text, which contains no reference to either Jew or Christians.

Verse 2:62, in its authentic form, states:

Believers, Jews, Christians and Sabaeans—whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does what is right—shall be rewarded by their Lord.”

(The Sabaeans were followers of an ancient religion.) In the Saudi English translation, this passage is footnoted to declare, “No other religion except Islam will be accepted from anyone,” although no such statement appears in the Arabic.

In the original verse 5:65 it is said of the Jews and Christians: “If they observe the Torah and the Gospel and what is revealed to them from their Lord, they shall enjoy abundance.” The Wahhabi edition adds that, in addition to Jews observing the Torah and Christians the New Testament, both must accept the Koran—that is, become Muslims—which nowhere appears in the Arabic text and conflicts with the traditional Islamic theology.

The fact is that mainstream Islam treats the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran as different books, Wahhabism treats the Jewish and Christian scriptures as primitive editions of the Islamic text.

Fortunately, more and more Moslems are speaking out against the extremists who have attempted to hijack their religion.

The most important message is that we condemn all kinds of that speech including anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and that we come out boldly against violence committed by Muslims in Iraq, in Israel, in Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia and that we do all that we can in this war against terrorism . . . 

says Ahmed al-Rahim, chairman of the American Islamic Congress (AIC). AIC was established after September 11 because of a feeling that moderates had been silent for too long in the face of Muslim extremism.

Muslims “have more opportunity in America to practice Islam than anywhere else in the world,” said Musqtedar Khan, director of International Studies at Adrian College in Michigan.

Khan reports that moderate views are more widely accepted since September 11. In the past, “only conservative or narrow-minded” speakers would be allowed to speak at mosques and community centers. But after the terror attacks, moderates felt it was worth fighting to have more moderate views aired. “You can see that the agendas are changing.”

Mateen Saddiqui, vice president of the Islamic Council of America, said some extremist groups--those he described as organizations dominated by Wahhabis--

. . . have hijacked Islam. They are the ones who are trying to push out a negative message, to politicize the religion, and use it for their political focus, which is often not related to the U.S., but to political causes overseas.

 

Asma Afsarrudin, a professor of classics at Notre Dame, declares:

 

We have to get our voices heard because our voices are being drowned out by the extremists. Extremism, militancy and violence all in the name of Islam are gross betrayals of the Islamic traditions.

An Islamic studies expert, Afsarrudin said that scholars must explain the religion so that extremists do not have a monopoly.

In academia, there has been more of a readiness of intellectuals, who generally do not engage in the media, to speak up and make their voices heard. . . . We have to point to historical and textual evidence that we can marshal that sometimes the ordinary person does not have access to.

Events in Turkey point the way to an Islamic society committed to both democracy and human rights. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria notes that,

Turkey’s record of reform is the equal of most previous candidates for EU membership. . . . What is truly being lost is perhaps the most significant point—all these progressive, modernizing moves are being made by a ruling party that represents the people, unlike so many of the liberals in the Arab world, who are an unelected elite. The AK Party has shown that a devotion to Islam is entirely compatible with liberalism, pluralism and democracy. For this reason it is the most powerful symbol of modern Islam in the world today, a symbol that could have resonance of the Middle East, Europe’s own Muslim population and the entire Islamic world.

American Muslims also have a real opportunity to lead by example. Malika Zeghal, a visiting scholar of Islam at the University of Chicago Divinity School, says that it is in America, with its freedoms, that Muslims can reform not just their souls but also their communities. “In the rest of the world, Muslims are making change in the inner world,” she says. “American Muslims also feel empowered to make change externally.

Consider Asra Noamni, a Journalist and author of the forthcoming Standing Alone in Mecca, about women’s place in Islam. In November, 2003, she and her mother and niece walked through the front door of their hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, and prayed in the main sanctuary. “In so doing we defied a policy that women enter through a back door and pray in an isolated balcony,” she writes.

Then, in the spring, my father resigned from the board of the mosque to protest speeches spewed from the pulpit of the mosque that were hateful to non-Muslims. As a result of our protests, our family was vilified by local Muslims. But our protests have also helped bring about a transformation. In May the first woman was elected to mosque leadership. In June mosque authorities publicly reversed policy and said women could enter through the front door and pray in the main hall.

According to Noamni,

Since our actions began, more women attend worship services. In August we won an even bigger victory. A Ph.D. student declared from the pulpit that “one of the most important fundamentals of our religion is to love and be loyal to Islam and the Muslims and hate and renounce the disbelievers,” the “cursed” Jews and Christians. I immediately protested the sermon, as did others. In the past, leaders have looked the other way. This time they called an emergency meeting and did the right thing. They fired the student from his post giving sermons. Those of us pushing for reforms are not seeking to change Islam. We are questioning defective doctrine from an intellectual and theological position, using the Koran, the traditions of Prophet Muhammad and critical reasoning, as ideological weapons in the war over how Muslim communities define themselves. . . . We are in the midst of a struggle for the soul of Islam.

In that battle for Islam’s soul we must do everything possible to encourage moderates and isolate extremists and those who finance them. We are not engaged in a war with Islam but with those who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It is essential that this distinction is clear, particularly in the Muslim world.     *

“We confront a dangerous enemy and it is one which would count the loss of our own freedom as one of its most prized victims. Once more we as a country are called to rise to the challenge in the same way our forefathers were at Lexington, Gettysburg and Normandy Beach, fighting for freedom and liberty--no doubt most were fortified by a belief in a God who is demanding yet just and merciful. Only time will tell if we are truly prepared to grapple with an enemy driven by the fervently held view of a vengeful, unmerciful Allah, who demands total submission of “unbelievers,” particularly Christians and Jews.” –Paul Weyrich