THE CURSE OF RADICAL ISLAM AS A POLITICAL RELIGION
AINA
Assyrian International News Agency.
Posted GMT 9-13-2006 14:33:17
"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." –Ataturk (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 mimic 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 15 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 terrorism 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
rhetoric of "Islamo-Fascism," "war of civilizations" or even worse,
of "war of religions," and concentrate on concretely assisting Muslim
countries in acceding 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. 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 and 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.
By Rodrigue Tremblay Online Journal Guest Writer
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