A Misnomered War on Islam

By Abid Ullah Jan

ccun.org, February 7, 2008

 

We live in the age of lies. The wealth of knowledge in the field of international relations and the number of people who enjoy rapid and easy access to it is unparallel in human history, and yet the foremost of all the forces that drive the world is falsehood.

President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair told us more than a dozen times that they are attacking terrorism and its supporters. That may be. Many Muslims fear, however, that the alliance intends more than that. As the campaign unfolds, their fear is fast turning into reality as all the media, academic, political and military guns are directly targeting Islam to reduce it to merely a set of private rituals.

One of my non-combatant American friends, who does not believe in any religion, paraphrased my 1800-words article "Cry of the Muslim soul" into a 9000-words essay. Besides other contacts, he forwarded it to a combatant American, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Instead of giving a serious thought to the content, Mr. Friedman immediately came out with a total declaration of war on Islam in his November 27 article, titled "The Real War." The non-combatant American expressed his disappointment in the following words: "I used to think Friedman was the voice of wisdom. He's been pretty disappointing to me in the aftermath of September 11. Predictable, knee-jerk reactions." I wish it were limited to knee jerk reactions. Instead what we observe is a total, albeit misnomer, war on Islam, in which Thomas Friedman is a frontline solider on the media front against Islam. He declares: "if 9/11 was indeed the onset of World War III, we have to understand what this war is about. We're not fighting to eradicate "terrorism." Terrorism is just a tool. We're fighting to defeat an ideology: religious totalitarianism. World War II and the cold war were fought to defeat secular totalitarianism - Nazism and Communism - and World War III is a battle against religious totalitarianism…," which he believes cannot be fought by armies alone; "it has to be fought in schools, mosques, churches and synagogues, and can be defeated only with the help of imams, rabbis and priests."

This is the daisey cutter of media arsenal filled with pure lies for creating rifts and confusion among the Muslims. Unlike Democracy, liberalism and Americanism, Islam is, undoubtedly, a code of life. However, there are no classes in Islam. Any war declared on "extremist" Islam is simply a war on Islam. Those who claim themselves to be "moderate" do not even know how to define "moderate Islam." The best example, suffice to end this confusion, is the description given by General Musharraf in his interview to Carla Power of the Newsweek (March 4, 2001). He said: "I'm a Muslim. [Gesturing at a general on a nearby couch] He's a Muslim. He may pray five times a day, and I may have a different approach, but the voices of the moderates are not heard." Leaving aside an obligation, for which the Holy Quran has instructed no less than 70 times, certainly is a "different approach," but definitely not a "moderate" Islam.

Just imagine the value of the least repeated Quranic injunctions in the eyes of self-proclaimed "moderates" to whom anything instructed 70 times is a trivial affair. Does it make Quran redundant for a "moderate" Muslim? Or does it mean "moderates" simply pick and choose from the Holy Quran what they like, and disregard what they don't? This partial approval of the Quran is not Islam at all. This example clearly shows that no matter how the West may label it, the Muslims, at the very least, have to follow the Holy Quran in full and any war declared on them under the label of fighting "totalitarianism" or "extremism" is a war on Islam.

Mr. Friedman's war is already on -- on all fronts. Jihad related verses from the Holy Quran have already been removed from school curriculum. Government officials are tightening the noose around religious institutions. Leaders of the religious parties are behind the bars. Banning religious organisations is already in progress. The News (November 28) reported on front page that a government plan and policy is "in offing to curb extremism in Pakistan" - without defining what actually extremism is all about. Does it mean that any one who criticises the government or its policies would be treated like Bush's doctrine that "he who is not with us is against us"?

In this complex world opinions vary widely. Requiring everyone to react the same is simply unrealistic. It is patently unfair for the Muslim and Western leaders to ignore the genuine grievances of the Muslim masses and simply overrule the root causes with a demand that, regardless of one's living conditions, one must either be "for" or "against" the American way of doing things. The Muslims most directly affected by the US policies have the right to reserve judgment without immediately qualifying as "totalitarians."

American analysts frequently speak as though Islam were a cult with a single purpose in mind. This attitude tends to encourage the thought that Muslims are "them" versus "us." Interestingly, the American opposition to Islam seems to have grown much more fierce in recent years. The Americans certainly found the world easier to understand when every nation seemed either "communist" or "free." Thus the so-called "rise of Islam" is something of a relief to the lonely experience of being a sole superpower. Now they know who the enemy is: now they can gear up for the next war. Islam has been rising for more than a thousand years, but suddenly -- as during the Crusades -- it has caught the attention of the West. Can anyone be surprised that Muslims are somewhat anxious about how Washington plans to handle this new ideological conflict? Are any Islamic nations volunteering to be the next Vietnam, the next theatre for a clash of big-power theories?

One would think that the Western media would be seeking out ways in which to defuse the tension between Islam and the West. Sadly, this is not the case. Much to the contrary, the media in the US and Europe continue to depict Islam as an "ism." It is as though the same writers who wrote about "godless Communism" in the past are writing about Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan today. They despise our godliness as much as they despised godlessness of the communists. Perhaps one cannot expect better than this from a market-driven press. It is not that the American public wants to hear about Muslims mostly in the context of terrorism, fundamentalism, holy war, and other extremes. It is simply that the media addict them to hear such stuff.

Until the American public gains a greater awareness of the world, it will continue to support the anti-democratic urges of its power-hungry leaders in media, politics and armed forces. Mr Friedman knew like other American leaders that the Shah of Iran, for instance, was a bad ruler; the US saw the Iranians demonstrating against him; and yet somehow the US persuaded itself that all was well. A comparable situation now exists in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, and once again America is putting itself on the wrong side of history under the pretext of fighting "totalitarian Islam." Thus, despite the good intentions of its people, the United States becomes a force for evil in the world.

The American media represents only a fraction of the weaponry that the US employs in its new crusade against Islam. Military might is another such tool -- not only when used invasively, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also as a shadow across the entire Middle East. Will a Palestinian boy live until tomorrow? It depends in part upon the weaponry, possibly American in origin, used by the Israelis. Will Iraqi children obtain food? The answer to that may be no, if the American naval forces blockade the ports through which the country might earn foreign exchange. Have Saudi rulers become corrupted by the funds proffered in exchange for allowing American military bases on their soil? If so, they would not be the first, nor will they be the last.

Islam is blamed to be totalitarian in nature if followed to the full extent. How much, really, does the average American media-person care about whether the rulers of a Muslim country display any concern for huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? If I say that most pro-Western governments in Muslim countries do not represent the beliefs and attitudes of a majority of their citizens, would the average American know whether that is true? Would he or she care? And if he or she knew, and cared, would that produce any visible change in American policies toward totalitarianism in the Muslim world? The evidence is pretty clear on all these questions.

Mr. Friedman's attempt to mislead the American public is not new. The situation in Afghanistan reminds us of the well-intentioned American boys, ignorant of the world at large, who believed they were fighting totalitarianism in Vietnam; and besides maiming themselves psychologically and physically, they also helped to destabilize Cambodia. Those well-intentioned boys were, in the end, the pawns who enabled a rogue government to seize power and to murder a million of their own citizens. At that late date, unfortunately, the American energy was spent, so that while tens of thousands died to ravage Vietnam, virtually none gave their lives to bring peace to Cambodia.

Similarly, America came out to wage a war on terrorism; moved on to eradicate the Taliban; and now plans to eradicate "totalitarian Islam." For the sake of eliminating a people, the US has once again destabilized the whole region. In Afghanistan, Washington's hypocrisy and the media's ignorance combine to give the world an image of a poor, benighted country badly in need of superior Western help, both material and philosophical. The tune is familiar; viewers have heard it before, and they will dance to it once again. Islamic Sudan is poor; it would be better off without its "totalitarian terrorists," and to prove this point the US will bomb a pharmaceutical plant that helps countless of those Sudanese poor stave off disease. Islamic Algeria is violent, the Americans know, but the part they won't hear is that perhaps, as they did earlier in Central America, they have implicitly supported the ruling butchers' totalitarianism as long as they do not threaten the US interests.

In short, it is Islam that keeps Muslim countries poor, totalitarian and violent. If other Third World nations, from the Caribbean to the Caucuses, are also experiencing poverty and violence, the West attributes that to their failure to achieve complete capitalist democracy, and everyone hopes they will someday come to be as smart and enlightened as the Americans are. Nobody blames their religion for that. But in the case of an Islamic nation, the discussion quickly degenerates to a patronizing imitation of concern for "those people." The concern is not real -- if it were, the world would have seen a decade of American assistance in Afghanistan.

Over the years, the US, not Islam, has demonstrated its willingness to buy totalitarians and betray the people in nations around the globe. It seems fairly certain that no other government or ideology in the history of the world has been so subversive. Unfortunately for America, this is the path of weakness. Make real friends, and they will be there when you need them; but if you rely on bribes and deception, you had better fear the day of reckoning. Afghanistan is a case in point. The warriors who have lately turned on America were once its allies against the Soviet Union. Plainly, they did not see a convincing and attractive demonstration of American principles of peace and justice, as distinct from American methods of war making.

Why should it be "totalitarianism" when, at long last, the peoples of Egypt and Pakistan remove the cruel dictators who could not rule over them without American support? One can only wonder whether advocates of war on Islam, like Thomas Friedman, must see a replay of Iran and Afghanistan in every Muslim nation, before Americans finally remember the principles that once made their country great. It is simply appalling to see that, at this very moment of opportunity, the US seeks to give second-hand justice to Taliban prisoners of war by subjecting them to an American military tribunal rather than allowing them a civilian trial. The US could hardly choose a more visible way to demonstrate its own lack of faith in the justice and anti-totalitarianism mantra.

Islam is proved to be totalitarian by linking it to the Taliban's rule. Once again, if Americans were honest with themselves and curious about the facts, they would quickly arrive at the conclusion that almost any political structure-particularly after 20 years of war and anarchy -- requires some instances in which the ruling power uses force to control the behaviour of its citizens. Democracy certainly does, especially in the US. Nobody who has lived there can deny that it is a deeply authoritarian country. The weapons wielded by its hundreds of agencies are frequently more painful and deadly than the sticks of the Taliban, and they are still employed disproportionately against minorities and the poor. Yet, Islam breeds totalitariansm.

Of course, the Taliban's rules came from religious scriptures, while the rules governing American police come from legislators elected with the help of corporate donations, and from the courts whose brand of justice has received such a rousing vote of confidence from President Bush. Again, the theory is that religious strictures are medieval and counterproductive, while the rules of secular authorities are more even-handed and intelligent -- to which one might reply, again, with the realities of American rates of crime, divorce, and litigation. Not even the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church, in the darkest centuries of their bureaucratic histories, ever employed remotely as many agents, cranking out so many laws, as the United States does today. Rarely, if ever, have the lawyers and judges enforcing any empire's laws been so overwhelmed and baffled by their complexities and inevitable contradictions; rarely have ordinary people had to wait so long, on average, for justice; rarely have the citizens of any nation been so afraid to speak freely (and yet so convinced that they enjoy freedom of speech) for fear of being attacked or sued.

This, unfortunately, is the mentality with which such a generation now approaches the accused of the Muslim World. Do Muslims say and do things the Americans find offensive? Then they must be punished. That is the face that America now presents to the world's Muslims. It is strange that the Western mindset toward Islam has changed so little since the Crusades. One can only hope that now, as then, wise Muslims in Baghdad and in other centres of Islamic culture will be able to remind Europeans, who had long since lost any consciousness of Aristotle, that not even he, a European, was entirely confident of the democratic system so much in fashion now. But perhaps American leaders sense this already; this might explain their eagerness to reinstall an old king in Afghanistan.

ABID ULLAH JAN [www.ilaam.net]