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The Hijacking of Islam

The following talk by Bob Leonard was given to the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of San Miguel de Allende (Mexico) on April 18, 2010.  Leonard has had a long career in development work for various government and international agencies.

Good morning everybody. 
First off, I would like to explain why I have felt compelled to make this talk, but also to state  that this paper does not pretend to be a balanced presentation of issues, but rather an opportunity to raise events and concerns that are almost entirely overlooked by the press and media. 

So now the why?  Every day we hear or read about suicide bombers, UXOs, drones attacking the Taliban, moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, pushing Karzai to cut out corruption, pushing Pakistan to move against the Taliban, and all the while our congressional committees bring in the “observers” and listen to their expertise and advice, and the American people keep asking, “Why do they hate us,” and say, “Islam is a violent religion.”  The simple answer is, “We have invaded two of their countries, and of course, this is critical.”  But I see this as way too simple.  We are only looking on the surface.  We see only the symptoms of a much larger picture.  Let’s imagine we are seeing events on top of a shelf, but we say, “Hey, wait a second, let’s look under the shelf, let’s dig deeper and see what else is going on.”  Today, we will look under this shelf and explore some of the underlying issues that are almost never mentioned in the press or media.

You people here in this room are amazingly well read, well traveled and are acutely aware of so many of the world problems. Most of you know that Islam has been hijacked by a small segment of the Islamic world called extreme fundamentalists.  Most of us are aware that the invasion of Iraq awakened millions of fundamentalists to take up jihad against us and the West.  Thousands of people were frustrated in their desire to radically change the basic structures of their individual governments – to create Islamic states under Islamic law and to reject what they see as the corruptive values of West. They have felt that the US and the West were one of the key elements holding them back.  So there was this simmering of frustration within the fundamentalists.  With the invasion of Iraq, it was like we took a sledge hammer and burst the hornet’s nest setting the fundamentalists off on their holy jihad.  As the war went on it was like a call to the faithful to join the ranks against the oppressors.  It was a chain reaction – a call to all people who believe in their God and their country – it was their patriotic duty to take up arms – to go to training camps and fight against the infidels who have invaded sacred Muslim land.  These are not typically the under privileged and uneducated, but rather many are the young intellectuals and idealists.  So what was once a very small group of extremists has been expanded to perhaps millions and many more millions that are sympathetic to their movement.  Has it doubled --- tripled – perhaps 5 – 10 fold?  Who knows?

Estimates are that we have killed up to one million Iraqis, mostly women and children, and now there are over two million Iraqis in refugee camps in Syria, Jordan and Iran and two million more who are living in other areas of Iraq and don’t dare to go back to their homes.  UNHCR estimates that there are a total of 4.7 million refugees in Iraq.  This is the equivalent in our country of 45 million people.  Think of that.  This is what we have done.  We have created a new paradigm in our relationship with the world of Islam.

But there is more, and this is what we want to talk about this morning.  Why 9/11?  Why Osama bin Laden?

We will explore several factors that make up this matrix:

• Historical relationships between the Christian West and Islam going back hundreds of years
• Power struggles within Islam – fundamentalist vs. secularist and modernist
• Desire for democracy vs. totalitarianism
• The State of Israel and Palestine
• The US coup d'état in Iran against a democratically elected president
• Our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan

But before we explore these issues, let’s go back to the time of the Prophet and see what the situation was like then, do quick review of what he really taught, and then see how his teachings have been altered for political purposes.  Since I gave a talk about “Islam and its Misconceptions” about a year and a half ago, I will only do a quick review. 

Setting the stage

• The world that the Prophet grew up in had 360 deities, and none of them had any moral message or guide to social behavior.  There were continuous tribal wars, vendettas, and corruption in government.  The community of Mecca had become very prosperous – but only for the very rich and the politicians – a real disparity had developed between the rich and the poor.  Family and tribe were all important, and honor and revenge were the paramount core values. 
• Women were nothing but commodities with no rights
• Law was at the whim of politicians and tribal leaders

 
Teachings of the Prophet

• Muhammad was a rebel, and from the very beginning of his teachings he denounced the status quo and called for social justice for all, with particular focus on women, children and the poor.  He called on the people to reform their communities and their lives based on the teachings of the one God.  Loyalty was to be to God – not to tribal leaders.  Think about this.  Your loyalty for hundreds and thousands of years has been to your tribe, and now this guy is calling on you to change all this.  Your loyalty is now supposed to be to God.  This undermined all the traditional tribal political authority.  Leaders were outraged, and he received ever increasing threats; his life was in constant danger.
•  I said God - and wait a second – the God he was talking about is the same Christian and Jewish God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus.  He called them, “The people of the book.” The Quran was greatly influenced by the Torah and the Gospels.  He recognized Jesus as a great prophet but felt that Christianity had taken a wrong turn when they made him the Son of God and established the Holy Trinity.  Man, he felt, corrupted Christianity.  
• Muhammad recognized all religions, and in fact, never encouraged people of other religions to become Muslims for he thought that other religions have had revelations from God, and as long as they paid their taxes (although non-Muslims had to pay an extra tax), they were citizens in good standing.  Similar to the Jewish religion, Muhammad felt that theology was not important since every man/woman has his own concept of God and what each specifically believe is not important.  The key is to be close to God, live a good life, pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and take care of the poor.  There is no such concept as original sin in Islam.  Also, whereas Christianity has always focused on belief, the Prophet, focused on what one practiced and how one behaved.  This concept is similar to the Jewish faith, and this concept allowed scientific exploration and advancement during the Golden Age of Islam while Christianity shut out scientific inquiry with its obsessive insistence on people believing exactly what the church wanted and threatened them with death throughout the Inquisition if they didn’t. 

• Women - Perhaps the most misunderstood of all aspects of Islam.  We must go back to the time of Muhammad.  Women were treated as commodities.  They had absolutely no rights, and when Muhammad instituted some of his reforms concerning women, it caused a tremendous uproar, including threats on his life.  He gave women the right to own and inherit property and the right to divorce, several centuries before this was given in the West. He also protected a women’s dowry.  There is nothing in the Quran about women being required to wear veils or burkas.  According to the Quran, monogamy is the general rule, and polygamy is only a provision for emergencies such as the war between Median and Mecca when many women and children were left unsupported by their husband’s death.  It was not to satisfy the lust for women.

• Many men in Medina (where the Prophet lived) were killed fighting in the war with Mecca, leaving a shortage of men.  Because of this shortage , the remaining men were encouraged, if they had the means of support, to take on more wives, not for lust, but to give support. 

• Jihad is to struggle to find God and to put God into practice in your life as well as to encourage your community to be just and righteous. "Striving in the way of Allah.”  It is the struggle to promote justice and to implement a just society.  Karen Armstrong, the religious scholar, says that there is far more violence in the Bible than in the Quran.  The Quran forbids war except in defense.  It also prohibits the killing of children, women and non-combatants as well as the destruction of property.  Think of what the extreme fundamentalist are doing today.  Finally, the Holy Wars of Islam that conquered so much of the world came after the death of Muhammad.

I want to clarify that this paper is to show what his teaching were compared to where some people are taking the religion, and in particular, what the extreme fundamentalist are now preaching and doing - killing of innocent civilians, which is absolutely forbidden in the Quran.  The other is to begin to clear up the misperceptions that we in the West have of Islam.

Crucial Events in History

• The Glory of Islam:  For 750 years, the Islamic world was the center of civilization at a time when the West was primitive and backward. Muslim cities such as Baghdad, Istanbul, Cairo, Tripoli and Cordoba became cultural and intellectual centers where theologians, scholars, scientists, artists, writers, philosophers, mathematicians and others convened for scholarship, experimentation and discovery. The significant achievements made by Muslims from approximately 750 to 1500 A.D. led to the naming of this period as the Islamic Renaissance, or the Islamic Golden Age.  Its reach extended from Spain to Central Asia, and it maintained and developed the tradition of wealth, cultural and artistic achievement, and thriving urban life that it had absorbed from its predecessors, the civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Persia and the ancient cities of the Middle East.  This age was halted by the Mongol invasion through Central Asia and the Middle East which ended with the Battle of Baghdad in 1258, the city which for 500 years had been the center of Islamic power.   From that time on the world of Islam declined while the Western, Christian world began its rise with the Renaissance and the Ages of Enlightenment and Reason.   Islam rose again during the Ottoman Empire but started to break apart in the late 19th century and was finally dashed during World War I.

• The Crusades – One might think it silly to go back centuries to 1091 AD?   It’s important because for hundreds of years, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Pagans lived together peacefully throughout the Muslim world.  When the first crusade captured Jerusalem and slaughtered the whole city, including women and children and Christians, this set the stage for Muslims thinking of Christians as “Christian Barbarians.”  Steven Runciman, perhaps the most famous historian on the Crusades said, “High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed.  The Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God."  Osama bin Laden tells fighters in Iraq that they are "God's trusted soldiers who will liberate [Muslims] from the serfdom of the crusaders." 

• The Partition – During World War I, the British promised the Arabs an Independent Arab state after the war if they would help defeat Turkey, a member of the Axis powers.  They also promised that there would be no State of Israel if the Arabs joined the British.  Instead, Britain “stabbed them in the back,” through the Balfour Declaration and the Pinot- Sykes treaty.  Not only did these documents eliminate the possibility for an Arab state, but in addition, they laid the foundation for a state of Israel.  The British and French also cut off a sizable section of what is now Syria, and called it Lebanon because a large Christian population was there.  Later with the French, the Americans squelched efforts to free Syria from French colonial rule and helped put down uprisings that demanded Syrian independence.

• Iran – The former proud Persian Empire:  - After struggling and fighting for over 40 years against the tyranny of the Shah, Iran set up a democratic government and elected its first president under free elections.  The new president, Mohammad Mossadeq, who was known for unquestioned honesty and brilliance, tried to negotiate with the British concerning revenue sharing in the British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  The British (still in their arrogant mood) refused to negotiate and also refused to allow independent audits of the oil company accounts.  America had just finished working out, what was considered at the time, a reasonable revenue sharing agreement with Saudi Arabia that included independent audits. The British refused to budge, so Mossadeq nationalized the oil company and eventually kicked the British out of the country.  After that, the British pushed and pushed the American government to instigate a coup to topple Mossadeq, but Truman and Acheson refused and even admired what Mossadeq was doing.  Two weeks after Eisenhower was elected the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, talked a very hesitant Eisenhower into allowing them to stage a coup.  In 1953, with “Operation Ajax,” the CIA, under Kermit Roosevelt (the grandson of Teddy) overthrew the first democratically elected government Iran had ever had.  They kicked out Mossadeq and put the Shah back in, helped to reestablish the Savak secret police and for the next 25 years there were mass killings, terror and corruption. The Shah banned veils on women, one could see soldiers ripping off the veils with their baronets, to insure a secular government.  The tragedy is that, before the coup, most Iranians saw the British as the oppressors and looked to the Americans as the bastion of hope and freedom in the world.  Now is there any wonder that Iran rejected a secular democracy and adopted a radical Islamic state, which by the way, they never had before?  And now we call them one of the evil empires, and we wonder why the Iranians don’t trust us. 

• Iraq – US helping Saddam: Quoting the Global Policy Forum, “US intelligence helped Saddam’s Ba`ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Evidence suggests that Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against an Iraqi strongman. In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in Iraq’s invasion of Iran that lasted eight years with a loss of  one million lives, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors.

• Israel: It would take several books to deal with this subject, but one thing that must be kept in mind, whichever side of this elusive fence one is on, is that from an Arab or Palestinian prospective, Israel is occupying Arab land which is considered sacred by all Arabs and most Muslims.  It should also be kept in mind that in 29 separate cases between 1972 and 1991 in the UN Security Council, the United States has vetoed resolutions critical of or condemning Israel. Regardless of how we feel, that is the perception of the Arab and Muslim world.  Forty years of American involvement have unfortunately served mainly to allow Israel to create illegal settlements in the West Bank and to assist them in avoiding international sanctions or criticisms, thus contributing to the anger and radicalization of Islamic society. 

• Lebanon – The establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees into Lebanon (around 10% of the total population of the country) helped create an unstable situation.  In 1958 the American military made three incursions into the country, and beginning in 1982, we allowed Israel to invade this country twice.  The outgrowth of the first invasion was the establishment of Hezbollah, which never existed before.  The second invasion (we called it an incursion) two years ago was meant to destroy Hezbollah, but only made it stronger. 

• Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bin Laden – As we know, 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.  After the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, Osama bin Laden opposed the United States using their military base from which to launch the invasion of Iraq in the first Gulf War.  Bin Laden strongly objected to having infidel foreign forces on holy Muslin soil that contained the most holy of all sites, the city of Mecca.  Many observers think this was the key, or one of the key reasons for his attacking the U.S. on 9/11.  One CIA analysis who specializes on al-Qaeda, stated that al-Qaeda’s attacks on us are not based on “who we are,”  but rather, “what we do.”

• Afghanistan - In Afghanistan under the Soviets, the CIA armed the various Mujahedeen with sophisticated weapons and money, and after the Soviets left, we also left, leaving the country to fight among the various factions with disastrous results.  The Taliban came in to fill the vacuum and create stability but with a brutal regime. We know what happened after 9/11 with our invasion and how we pushed the Taliban towards Pakistan.  But then we left again to go invade Iraq after promising to rebuild Afghanistan.  Now we are back with a better and more humane approach, but --- who knows.

• Iraq - We have destroyed their country and set up a Western style government that may or may not work.  We expect their major source of income, oil, to rebuild the country that we have destroyed.  We shall see.

• Western Values:  In much of the Islamic world there is fear that Western values, including globalization, are encroaching on their traditional values and way of life; and see America as the driving force behind this.  In their tradition, family and extended family are the fundamental foundations of life, followed by their community and tribe. They see the breaking up of American families, women in the work place, single mothers, consumerism, individualism,  violence (most observers say that Muslim cities are much safer than Western ones), promiscuity (American women are often seen as prostitutes) and the American obsession with success and making money.

Finally in summing up ---

• Muslims, particularly in the Middle Eastern countries, feel humiliated by the West and recently by America;
• Before Iraq, the fundamentalists were just a small fraction of the population;
• The more we interfere in their world, the more we radicalize these people and move them towards the extremist camp.  Since Iraq, this move has been spectacular;
• The vast majority of Muslims want a secular government, democracy and the modern way of life, but because of recent events, many are moving towards an Islamic state under Islamic law;
• Question:  If we hadn’t implemented the coup in Iran in 1953, would Ahmadinejad be prime minister, or instead, would there be a secular, democratically elected regime in Iran?
• Would there have been a 9/11?
• We can only speculate.

Thank you all for listening

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