The Challenge of Islam
Mordechai Nisan
Islam, as a later and last monotheistic
faith appearing in Arabia in the seventh-century, never considered itself just
another religion, but the last and final religion totally complete in doctrine
and superior in rule.1 The Muslim believers
sought power for Islam as the supra-successor faith to Judaism and
Christianity, and the ultimately universal faith for all of mankind. The
frenzy of religious struggles in history would, from that moment on, set Islam
on an ineluctable course to conquer the world. The Qur`an elucidated
the religion’s warring spirit by praising those Muslims “who fight for the
cause of Allah” (4:95-96) rather than those who avoid the battle and prefer to
stay at home. In distinction from Judaism and Christianity, the Muslim
community considers that “the holy war is a religious duty because of the
universalism of the mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam
either by persuasion or by force”; and this, added the classical 14th century
historian Ibn Khaldun, is because “Islam is under obligation to gain power
over other nations.”2
Islam cannot be compared with any other
religion or understood by analogy. It bears a unique militant ethic from its
origins. This cannot be said of ascetic Buddhism or otherworldly Hinduism.
Judaism, though equipped with “commandments for war”, did not promote conquest
or experience power in any exceptional way. Christianity was born beset with
sin, preaching poverty and practicing withdrawalism by fasting and virginity,
pining for martyrdom through persecution.3
Islam evoked a far different collective
sensibility. It brandished the sword, yelled Allah Akbar (God is Great)
– as at Qadisiyya in southern Mesopotamia/Iraq in 637 – charged into battle,
and plundering its spoils with delight.
We live at the beginning of the 21st
century when the “return of Islam” has raised the challenge against the Jewish
state of Israel, Christianity world-wide, Buddhism, and virtually all and any
other belief systems and faith communities. Islam, far more than just a
traditional faith, has resurfaced in Muslim and some non-Muslim lands as
social energizer, political protest, and military catalyst. Muslim
bellicosity against Christians has been evident in Nigeria and Sudan in
Africa, Indonesia and the Philippines in the Far East, Chechnya and Azerbaijan
in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent, Lebanon and
Egypt in the Middle East, and Kosovo and Macedonia in the Balkans. In
Afghanistan, the Taliban movement destroyed Buddhas. In India, Muslims fight
for Muslim rule in Kashmir. The tried and tested methods of Islamic struggle
and victory from the past are evoked today: conquest, colonization, and
conversion.
The legendary abuse of Jews in Muslim
history was illustrative of the inferiority of dhimmis who were by law,
however, to enjoy protection under Islamic domination. There were some bright
moments in the Muslim Orient, two examples being: the role of a Jewish
mercantile class in Abbasid times centered in Iraq beginning in the
eighth-century,4 and the Ottoman Turk “open
door” policy welcoming Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492. But the
evidence of co-existence is mixed and the daily toll of humiliation should not
be overlooked. Muslim soldiers housed their horses and donkeys in a Tiberias
synagogue in 1852 and the enlargement of a synagogue in Jerusalem in 1855 was
forbidden. When a Jew merely passed in front of the Great Zaytuna Mosque in
Tunis in 1869, he was killed on false charges that he intended to enter it: a
would-be “crime against Islam” [sic.] was preempted by an act of cold-blooded
murder.5
The Strategy of Muslim Victory
In its early emerging period for the
first hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632, Islam conquered the
lands of the Middle East, like Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, while penetrating into
Europe and Central Asia.6 The Arabs of
Arabia, who founded the faith and initially manned the armies of Islam, then
settled en masse in their conquered lands: mosques hovered high above older
churches, Arabic replaced native languages, and Muslim states arose as
representative of a new brand of religious imperialism in history. The local
Berber peoples of North Africa and the Persians of Iran, among others, adopted
Islam as their religion and thereby joined their masters.
For Jews and Christians, and especially
for the premier monotheists stubbornly rejecting Muhammad’s prophetic claim
and Qur`anic revelation, life was precarious and humiliating. A
powerful Jew like Samuel the Nagid, secretary and counselor to the Muslim
Sultan in Spain in the mid 11th century, was suddenly murdered in Granada in
1066.
Another Jew, Saad Al-Dawla, who headed
the administrative bureaucracy in a late 13th-century Muslim regime stretching
across Iran and Iraq, was also suddenly killed. These individual cases suggest
that personal advance unleashed the wrath of the Muslim populace. In the
20th century, pogroms burst upon the Jews of Baghdad in 1941, and in Libya
and Aden before the decade ended.
Paying the jizya poll-tax, as
prescribed in the Qur`an (9:29), demonstrated that the hierarchy of
power and social status depoliticized and impoverished the dhimmis.
Undeterred and unintimidated, Maimonides nonetheless definitively rejected
Muhammad in his Epistle to the Yemenite Jews, as did European Christian
authors who considered him an imposter.
This did not, however, dissuade
Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed from respectfully pondering
Muslim philosophical and theological works that dominated the intellectual
climate of the era.
The methods of conquest, colonization,
and conversion are today the very same methods of Muslim struggle and victory
in the world. In the earlier Islamic centuries, conversion struck down
subjects shamed by the poll-tax, tempted by public opportunities, and
attracted by the simplicity of the conversion process.7
In our days, conversion is influenced by the modern Western spiritual plight
that has convinced many to find meaning in an Islam radiating tranquility and
unity, communal vitality and self-assertive power. In America, Black
conversion to Islam is bound up with the identity of White Americans with
Christianity: choosing Islam is a way to avenge the history of Negro slavery
in the United States.
It was reported that the startling impact
of September 11 attracted new Muslim converts in Europe. The sweep of Muslim
power on the continent includes the independent Muslim state of Bosnia in
Europe following the dissolution of Serbia-dominated Yugoslavia; Kosovo,
NATO-protected, may follow suit as the next Muslim state in the Balkans.
Chechnya is fighting for its Muslim
independence from Russia. Europe is home to over 15 million Muslims, of which
at least six million reside in France. While initially seeking migrant job
opportunities, the Muslim influx has acquired a broader significance as the
vanguard of mass Muslim colonization in Europe. Low birth rates and a loss of
integral Christian faith ill prepare the Europeans to withstand the long-term
impact of a strident and enveloping Muslim presence across the continent. Yet,
anti-immigrant sentiments are growing in Europe, as we witness the forces of
reaction resonating in France, Denmark, Holland, Britain, and elsewhere.
Unlike other minority immigrant
communities that have made their way to America, the Muslims do not want to
integrate and adopt America as their home in an emotional and political
fashion. Basically, the Muslims want to reshape America in their image rather
than themselves be shaped by the reality of America. Of growing importance is
the institutionalization of Muslim influence in American public affairs, and
this will become an increasing electoral factor in local and national
politics. The so-called “Jewish vote” will be overtaken by the role of Muslim
voters in Michigan, California, and other states.
The Muslim jihad in all its
aspects is now mobilized to redress Islamic losses suffered at the hands of
the West centuries ago. The Muslims had earlier impotently witnessed Europe’s
arrogant entry into the lands of Islam. By the 19th century, France
controlled North Africa while Britain conquered the Nile Valley countries and
the Persian Gulf emirates. In the period of World War I and its aftermath,
France expanded its Middle Eastern possessions into the Levant, Syria and
Lebanon, and Britain captured Iraq and Palestine.
But perhaps the central lesson of Islamic
history is that even when the Muslims lose, they are really not defeated.
The Crusader interlude in the Holy Land, that began in 1099 and finally ended
in 1291, left no impression on Muslim social, political, let alone religious
or cultural life. In the modern period, following the termination of European
imperialism and colonialism in the Muslim Arab lands of the region, one could
not identify any major foreign Western impact on the deeper recesses of Muslim
thought and belief, or in the arenas of politics and ideology. Turkey is a
special exception whereby secularism is the bedrock constitutional principle
since the Republic’s modern founding in 1923. Christianity made hardly a
mental dent at all, and secularism was rebuffed by the spiritual sturdiness of
Islam.
Virulent anti-Western Arab nationalism as
a native ideological sentiment erupted on to the political stage. Under the
charismatic leadership of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser (1953-70),
Pan-Arab politics converged comfortably with socialist economies, political
dictatorships, and pro-Soviet alliances as their national panoply. Islamic
fundamentalism, as another nativist belief-system, proposed a radical program
for a comprehensive and integral religious way of life. Iran’s revolution in
1979 illustrated that choosing Islam provided the symbol for opposing the
United States. We recall the torturous tale of 50 US hostages held for 444
days in Tehran by revolutionary youth. Donning old “cultural costumes”
constituted a way to counter the alien culture of Western civilization.
Fundamentalism was, therefore, not just a
return to God but a cultural statement against the godless West.
The Mystery of the Muslim Culture Code
The hard fiber of Islamic faith and proud
Muslim identity has defied any disruption or erosion when in contact with
other peoples or religions. And it is this formidable fact that will always be
the springboard for challenging and threatening the Western world, and Israel.
Forums in search of Arab/non-Arab cultural coexistence and
Islamic/Christian/Jewish ecumenical religious dialogue confront the obdurate
Muslims, proud and impenetrable. All cultures, but Islam emphatically, are
incommunicable to the outsider. There is a certain concealed Muslim/Arab
mental domain (batiniyya) that a stranger cannot enter. It is closed
cultural territory, while housing a defiant and mendacious well of subtle
seduction and deception. Carleton S. Coon, noteworthy anthropologist of the
Middle East, had once remarked that among the Arabs “two kinds of personality
are at play: that which your man presents to the outside world and that which
is known to his kin.”8
A few examples can illustrate the
dexterous political practice of Muslim stratagems.
Muhammad, the prophet of Islam himself,
carried out a paradigmatic ruse by numbing his Quraysh opponents when agreeing
to the Hudaybiyya Agreement in 628, only to nullify it when he felt powerful
enough less than two years later and overwhelmed his adversaries.
The story is told of the Muslim Umayyad
Caliph Mu’awiya in the latter part of the seventh-century who, with great
patience and dexterity, trapped a Byzantine Christian and took revenge for an
insult he had much earlier administered to a Muslim.9
Richard Burton, that insightful British traveler to the Muslim Orient in the
mid-19th century, hid his travel itinerary from his friends, recalling
the advice of an Arab proverb: “Conceal Thy Tenets, Thy Treasure, and thy
Traveling.”10
In the contemporary political arena, the
culture-code is no less relevantly subtle and effective. In 1990, Saddam
Hussein told Husni Mubarak that Iraq’s contentions and claims against Kuwait
would be resolved without resort to force. A few days after the conversation,
Kuwait was conquered and occupied by Saddam’s army. In 1993, Yasser Arafat
promised Yitzhak Rabin to amend the PLO covenant so that it would not
contradict the peace process codified with the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Despite Arafat’s political theatrics performed in front of President Clinton
in Gaza in 1998, the covenant was never nullified as the Palestinians acquired
territories and weaponry to enable them to engage in incessant terrorism
against Israel. Approximately 850 Israelis had been murdered by Palestinian
terrorism from the beginning of Intifada al-Aqsa in October 2000 and
until three years later, by late September 2003.
The Arab/Muslim art of rhetorical deceit
remains incomprehensible to most Americans, even Israelis, and certainly
collaborative Europeans. When Muslims offer peace to an adversary, explained
Majid Khadduri, this is typically “a device to achieve certain objectives,
since the state of permanent war was the normal relationship between Islam and
other nations”.11 Indeed, when President
Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, the
Al-Azhar Islamic University of Cairo penned - undoubtedly with Sadat’s
approval if not command – a traditional
religious judgment (fatwa) to justify this otherwise politically
unthinkable act. The Islamic scholars merely listed the concrete benefits
accruing to the Muslim and Arab peoples from this agreement, with no reference
to the ideal of peace. No less a sophisticated ruse was the argument proposed
by Egyptian thinker Muhammad Sid Ahmed who, in his book, When the Guns Fall
Silent, in 1974, explained that peace with Israel is acceptable because in the
process, Zionism will dissolve.
Saudi Arabian kings and princes have
cultivated Washington political elites and administrations while pursuing
their Wahhabi Islamic version of religious-cum-terrorist campaign in
Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Wahhabism, an 18th century
doctrinaire and violent Arabian movement, provides the contemporary religious
leitmotif for the Saudi regime and its global Islamic outreach. This includes
extensive mosque construction and university endowment chairs in Islamic
Studies in many Western countries.
This religious expansionism constitutes
in itself a certain defiance of the values and universality of Western
civilization. But more “Wahhabist” yet is Saudi funding of Palestinian
terrorism and Syrian arms purchases, though the oil-rich desert kingdom
continues to feign friendship for the United States.
September 11, moreover, was very much a
Saudi production. Fifteen of the 19 active terrorist attackers were Saudi
nationals while Al-Qa’ida, headed by Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi
citizen, was financed by the Saudis over many years. This is true also for the
Afghani Taliban regime which provided sanctuary to bin Laden and his
murderers.
Yet Washington, naively or otherwise,
historically accommodated Riyadh’s central role in the global spread of
militant Islam.
A remarkable sense of superiority is at
the root of Muslim self-confidence and mastery boldly displayed over history.
The fantastic story of Wilfrid Thesiger, a mythic European who discovered
Arabia with his Bedouin companions in the mid-20th century, offers a personal
narrative to express the point. His Bedouin friends recognized that Thesiger,
among his other positive qualities, was able to tirelessly withstand the
desert challenge. But, in the end, they considered themselves better than him in
just one way, saying: “in that we were Muslims”.12
That is the religious heart of the entire
matter.
War is War, and Peace Too
We now draw the logical conclusion that
it is futile and demeaning to engage in any political dialogue or discussion,
negotiations or agreements of any kind with the Arabs. It confuses, drains
human energy, and is highly dishonorable. To take seriously Arab peace offers,
when they are nothing but wile in action, is a self-inflicted humiliation.
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah floated his
“peace initiative” in March 2002 as a call for normalization with Israel. But
before the ink was dry on the paper, the word “normalization” was removed, and
the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” was validated by explicit
reference to United Nations Resolution 194 from December 11, 1948. Thus,
coopting international legitimacy and combining it with the rhetoric of
peace-making becomes a lethal concoction in the armory of Arab diplomacy. To
flood Israel with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees is the Arab
formula for peace with Israel. This is of course a peace without Israel.
For others to politically shun the Arabs will convey that their masquerade of
manipulation is exposed and finished.
The Muslims’ assault world-wide cannot be
expected to die a natural death. Believing their religion to be dictated from
Allah on high is not as innocuous as it may sound to other monotheists and
believers in revelation. For the Muslims, we are learning, really take their
religion seriously. They cull their determination and fire from a source that
is exempt from outside influence or interference. At home, in Arab countries,
the Muslim fanatics confront repressive state regimes which block their
advance to power. This is the case in Egypt, Algeria, and Syria. Foiled and
frustrated from grabbing power in the Middle East, as scholar and commentator
Fouad Ajami explained, the Muslim terrorists seek with evermore venom to vent
their hated for the West on the turf of infidel Christianity itself.
The vocabulary of our era resonates with
Islam and its references. We speak of Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad;
Israel contends with the Intifada whose shahid martyrs glorify
the Palestinian struggle; Ayatollah Khoumeini and Sheikh Nasrallah are on our
lips; and even nominal terms like a fatwa (legal decision) and hijab
(woman’s veil) fill the public atmosphere. Arafat’s Muqat’aa Ramallah
headquarters assumed the glory of a Palestinian stalingrad in the face of
Israel’s siege. The Islamic century has made non-Muslims anxious for
the future.
Yet remember, that when confronted by a
resolute foe, Muslims often withdraw and founder in fear. Their Bedouin
heritage has trained them to exploit weakness, but to pull back from
confrontation or any real trial of strength. A “hit-and-run” strategy is the
perfect Bedouin mode of action; it is also at the core of Palestinian
terrorism the last 50 years.
The daring Swiss explorer of Arabia, John
Burckhardt, wrote in 1831 that Bedouin stealth is as real as is Bedouin
hospitality: there is no contradiction in these traditional desert qualities.13
Much of Muslim-Arab success in the early history of Islam was facilitated by
the enemy surrendering rather than facing the Muslims in battle. The city of
Mecca succumbed to Muhammad in 630, Iran collapsed in the face of Arab armies
in the early 640s, Spain was penetrated with ease in 711. Damascus, a
Byzantine city, was an exception and resisted the Muslim assaults in 636-37
only to open its gates in the end. Much of Europe today has capitulated, while
posing as the repository of democracy, tolerance, and human rights.
The Muslims are masters of bluff and
bullying, no less of blackmail and threat, in overwhelming a bamboozled
adversary. But when faced in battle, as we saw in Iraq in 1991 and in some
Palestinian towns in 2002, the Muslims virtually capitulate. In the spring of
2003, US forces overran much of Iraq with relative military ease; but the
typical culture-bound Arab response of terrorism was not long in coming.
Classical, legal, and imperial Islam
divides the world by a religious conception: between the Domain of Islam (Dar
al-Islam), where the Muslims rule and Islam officiates, and the Domain of
War (Dar al-Harb), where the Muslims are subject to foreign rule until
effectively expediting the ultimate triumph of Islam. This mental construct is
embedded in the minds of Muslims who pray in mosques in Jersey City and Los
Angeles, Jerusalem and Beirut, London and Marseilles. Where Muslims reside,
they must rule. If Islam will dominate the land of Israel and the lands of
Christendom, then the world will more and more become Dar al-Islam.
Peace will then be the result of conquest.
It was King David who insightfully
implied in Psalm 120 that when the Jews speak of peace with the Ishmaelites,
the latter’s Arab/Muslim descendants will respond with a call for war. This
realization can be a cause for despondency and trepidation. But that same
Ishmael, born of Hagar, Abraham’s maid servant, while defined as a “wild man”,
must be confronted by all his protagonists (yado bakol ve-yad kol bo,
Genesis 16:12). Is not the Biblical narrative a real-life description of the
civilizational clash and challenge in our times?
Endnotes
1 |
M.M. Qureshi,
Landmarks of Jihad, Lahore: Kasmiri Bazar, 1971, points out in the
Introduction that the goal of jihad is to break the enemy’s will and to
get him to accept Muslim supremacy. |
2 |
Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Vol. I, Ch. III, Section,
31, Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 473. |
3 |
See Robin Lane
Fox, Pagans and Christians, London: Penguin, 1988. |
4 |
Norman A.
Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book,
Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979, pp. 33-37. |
5 |
Bat Ye’or,
The
Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, London: Associated University
Presses, 1985, p. 58. |
6 |
See Hugh Kennedy,
The Prophet and the Age of The Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from
the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, London: Longman, 1996. |
7 |
Richard W.
Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 1979. |
8 |
In Raphael Patai,
The Arab Mind, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976, p. 105. |
9 |
Mas’udi,
The
Meadows of Gold: The Abbasids, London and NY: Kegan Paul, pp. 320-324. |
10 |
Sir Richard F.
Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah,
Volume One, New York: Dover, 1964 (orig. 1855), p. 140. |
11 |
Majid Khadduri,
The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani’s Siyar, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1966, pp. 53-54. |
12 |
Michael Asher,
Thesiger: A Biography, London: Penguin, 1995, p. 261. |
13 |
John Lewis
Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, vol. 1, London:
Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1967, p. 157. |
|