The Third Jihad
When radical Muslims distort Islam.
by Stephen Schwartz
04/28/2008, Volume 013, Issue 31

Jihad and Jew-Hatred
Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11
by Matthias Küntzel
Telos, 180 pp., $29.95

Army of Shadows
Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948
by Hillel Cohen
California, 352 pp., $29.95

Hitler’s New Disorder
The Second World War in Yugoslavia
by Stevan K. Pavlowitch Columbia, 256 pp., $34.50

The German historian Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred is an important contribution to the analysis of radical Islam. Like Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (2003), but with greater attention to historical detail, Jihad and Jew-Hatred argues that present-day Islamist extremism is, in great part, directly imitative of Nazism and other European fascist movements. Also like Berman, Küntzel appears to have crafted his discourse to appeal to Western liberals and leftists for whom fascism was anathema.

Further, as with Terror and Liberalism, Jihad and Jew-Hatred is concerned with the political aspects of Muslim radicalism rather than its theological background, or alleged justifications, in Wahhabism and other fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. Küntzel, echoing Berman, correctly assumes that, in the longer scheme of Islamic history, radical interpretations are newer rather than older, and modern rather than ancient. Islamist extremism is also utopian rather than conservative, and reformist or “purificationist,” rather than traditional. All these insights should be implicit in any serious discussion of Islamofascism.

Unlike Berman, however, Küntzel concentrates on that aspect of radical Islamist ideology with the highest profile in the West: Muslim Jew-baiting. Not all Muslim radicals have selected the Jews or Israel as a single or even main enemy. Extremists claiming the legacy of Muhammad find the greatest number of their victims among Muslims who do not accept their interpretation–only then followed by the believers in other faiths, including Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus, as well as Jews and the nonreligious.

Still, Küntzel finds a rationale for his own focus on the Egyptian Muslim -Brotherhood, or Ikhwan–as Berman did before him. Founded in 1928 by a then-obscure figure called Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood proclaimed the revival of an imaginary original purity in religion, asserting that a diluted and distorted Muslim devotion had undermined Islamic resistance to European imperialism. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood was modernistic in its reaction against modernity, adopting the characteristics of competing leftist and rightist militias in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It flourished as an aggressive, paramilitary formation, and established a network in the Arab East, India, Turkey, and Indonesia. While some of these branches were no more than fantasies typical of radical conspiracies, the Muslim Brotherhood did become an open ally of Hitler in seeking enhanced German influence in the Islamic world. Decades later, its Palestinian wing gave birth to Hamas, one of its most successful offshoots, and it has grown very powerful in many Muslim countries.

The Muslim Brotherhood introduced an innovation to the concept of jihad in which civil/political organization assumed priority over military action. While it has been common in Islam to distinguish between a “lesser jihad” of armed combat and a “greater jihad” of spiritual discipline, the Brotherhood looked toward an entirely novel “third jihad.” This entry into the world of ordinary politics was a predictable development in an Egypt governed within the British Empire. (The failure of the 1857 Indian mutiny against the British similarly gave rise to the fundamentalist Deoband school of Islam, which eventually produced the Taliban in Afghanistan.) The Muslim Brotherhood’s third jihad also found imitators in Iran.

Unfortunately, the political jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood, replacing military means, has fooled some Western commentators into support for the jihad of the ballot over the bullet, with arguments for Western accommodation of the Brotherhood as well as the disastrous welcome granted Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian general election. The principle of a third, political jihad is also visible in radical Islamist agitation in some Western countries, including the demand for introduction of sharia law in Britain. While there are differences in tactics between the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their aim–a purificationist Islamic state–remains identical.

Still, distinctions persist in the universe of radical Islam, and should be neither ignored nor exaggerated. While the Muslim Brotherhood doubtless embodies a nearly undiluted political Islam, Saudi Wahhabism and Pakistani-Afghan Deobandism (mainly seeking influence in the religious life of Muslims) also have recourse to politics through the Saudi monarchy, the “emirate” of the Taliban, and in its most virulent form, the terrorism of al Qaeda. In addition, the Khomeini regime in Iran has long provided the quintessential realization of this third jihad.

Küntzel has performed an exhaustive search through German sources to establish the links between the Third Reich and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the various forms of propaganda employed by each. He has emphasized the appeal of Nazism to Arab subjects of the British, and the general spread of political radicalism in the Middle East as seen in the secularist Baath movement in Syria and Iraq. Finally, he has given considerable attention to a prominent figure, Haj Amin al–Husseini (1895-1974), who was appointed the grand mufti of Jerusalem by the British but became a notorious German agent and anti-Jewish figure in the Middle East.

Much of this material has been previously worked over by historians, but Küntzel has rendered a service in presenting this fresh summary. You have to wonder whether the liberals/leftists to whom his work is addressed have not become too compromised to pay serious attention to him, through their alliance with isolationists, neofascists, and Islamists, and their opposition to the global democratization of the Bush administration–and, especially, the Iraq war. But Küntzel makes several important points that will be unfamiliar to many Western readers. One is that the Muslim Brotherhood’s hostility to Jews was novel in Egypt, which had a history of good relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Another point is that, notwithstanding broad Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionism, many village sheikhs in today’s West Bank opposed anti-Jewish campaigns in the 1920s and signed petitions favoring increasing Jewish immigration.

In dealing with this issue -Küntzel cites the important work of Hillel Cohen in Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, which has just appeared in English. Cohen’s book is a treasury of data suggesting new approaches to the history of Arab-Jewish relations. His work is epitomized by one stunning disclosure: In 1947-48, while the Grand Mufti al-Husseini and others called for Arab war against the new state of Israel, Palestinian “Arabs were in no hurry” to join the battle: “Only a minority of Arabs were involved in offensive activities,” writes Cohen. “This unwillingness to fight was frequently buttressed by agreements with Jews in nearby settlements.” The main Arab leader in Baqa al-Gharbiya, for example, offered a peace agreement to the Jewish settlements in his district–and Baqa today is home to the Al-Qasemi Academy, a Muslim school and college organized on the spiritual principles of Sufism.

Drawing, like Küntzel, on official sources, Cohen reveals a substantial Muslim record of cooperation with Jewish immigrants to Palestine. And his style is more precise, as well as less polemical, than that of Küntzel’s, who occasionally falls into minor factual or interpretative errors. (Küntzel recycles a commonly accepted canard that Amin al-Husseini was a significant figure in recruitment of a Waffen SS unit in Axis-occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina during World War II.)

Stevan K. Pavlowitch, a leading historian of the Balkans, has never been accused of understating the crimes of the Germans and their collaborators in Yugoslavia. Hitler’s New Disorder, like Küntzel and Cohen, benefits from new access to archives. Pavlowitch notes that Bosnians were exhorted by al-Husseini to volunteer for the German armed forces, but those who did were sent for training to southern France, where they mutinied, and their distaste for Nazi mobilization was backed up by a series of declarations by Bosnian Muslim clerics protesting German atrocities.

The practical lesson of all three of these volumes is that recent archival work will redefine many historical presumptions. (In this way they join Robert Satloff’s useful Among the Righteous, which touches on opposition to Nazi anti-Jewish crimes among Arab Muslims in North Africa during the Holocaust, and which was reviewed by Roger Kaplan in the Jan. 1, 2007 WEEKLY STANDARD.) But the important consequence of this new historiography is a recognition that Islam is neither monolithic nor uniformly radical, providing hope that the “clash of civilizations” may be avoided, and the “long war” against terror shortened–and won.

Stephen Schwartz’s latest book, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony, will be published by Doubleday this summer.

PREVIEW: The Third Jihad

The `Useful Idiots` of Militant Islam

Filed under

Technorati Tags: Islam,Islamic history and culture,Muslim Zionism,Opinion Editorials,Islamic fundamen

talism - on Sunday, April 20, 2008 - By: Ibrahim, Youssef

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Somewhere during Lawrence of Arabia?s blockbuster career, his bosses wondered if he was becoming ?more Arab? in the desert to which they sent him to lead a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. In an endearing cue to imperial haughtiness, Field Marshal Lord Allenby asks if his man had ?gone native.?

Indeed the spymaster and legendary British officer became quickly enmeshed in the tangled web he weaved back at the turn of the last century.

Likewise, when communism dawned in the 1920s, Vladimir Lenin ordered a strategy of nurturing ?useful idiots? ? by which he meant a contingent of communist Lawrences in the West. It worked, spawning hundreds of thousands of enamored scholars, intellectuals, experts, and dreamy romantics waving the red flags of Bolsheviks over the 70 years of the Cold War.

Today?s Islamist Lawrences are being cultivated among a broad swath of political analysts, scholars, anthropologists, pundits, missionaries, and even spies dissecting militant Islam and Islamofascism. While most carry out illuminating and necessary work, the fish they bait ends up ensnaring many.

A few recent catches: the archbishop of Canterbury urging the introduction of Sharia law in Britain; Harvard University, a bastion of secular scholarship, shutting its gym to men to accommodate Muslim women; authorities at Minneapolis?s international airport negotiating for months with 700 Somali Muslim taxi drivers who refused to pick up passengers carrying liquor or depending on guide dogs.

Then there was President George Bush launching his Muslim initiative last June from the Islamic Center of Washington, a Saudi institution distributing educational material instructing Muslims to segregate themselves from other Americans.

Among other things, the Saudi-funded publications admonish Muslims in America ?to dissociate from infidels, hate them for their religion, never to rely on them for support, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.? The question: how was it that among the estimated five million Muslim Americans with hugely varied institutions, the president?s advisors picked a Saudi Islamofascist ghetto as a venue?

This cluelessness is spreading into the academy and the arts too.

Witness the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Louvre of Paris, along with Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and multiple U.S. institutions, rushing to open branches in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where laws institutionalize bigotry against women, Sharia bans images, and the government condones grievous violations of human rights for millions of expatriates of other religions.

Imagine the contortions of folks at Yale, Stanford, or Oxford when they have to explain founding campuses in Riyadh where women are not allowed or can participate only via closed circuit TV.

Useful idiocy reaches a higher plane among Western pundits who propagate the Saudi view of reverse progress, namely that Islamic societies have ?particular requirements? and are evolving as ?different models,? of which we should not be ??judgmental.?

Fundamentalist creep is engulfing bastions of respectability in Western media too. At the start of Turkey?s slide away from secularism last May, the Wall Street Journal glossed over Prime Minister Erdogan?s aggressive Islamization, criticizing his secular opponents instead. The Economist argued his policy is tolerable, ?even if it means enduring a bad, ineffective, corrupt, or mildly Islamist government.?

Last April a major New York Times Magazine article by James Traub argued fervently on behalf of ?Islamic democrats? singing the praises of a reborn Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This was followed by a major essay in Foreign Affairs, a weighty establishment publication, by Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke titled ?The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.? The piece declared the fundamentalist group acceptable, among other things, as some of its leaders were interviewed in English, appeared reasonable, listened to classical music, and knew of Shakespeare. The article was so lacking in inquisitiveness it merited being posted on the Muslim Brotherhood website ? ikhwanonline.com ? as part of their propaganda.

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, a recent book  authored by respected Mideast analyst of the New Yorker Steve Coll, presents the human side of Osama bin Laden, who adopted modern technology in his terror and whose wealthy contracting father employed Christians and other infidels in his business.

We should come back to reality.

Mild Islamism is an oxymoron. Sharia law, which sanctions beating of wives and stoning for adultery, is irreconcilable with human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood founded Hamas, calls suicide bombings a good thing, and is the 21st-century version of the organized fascism of Hitler and Mussolini in the last century.

Israel News : The `Useful Idiots` of Militant Islam

People Of The Cloth?

By:  Rabbi Naphtali Hoff

Date Posted: April 2, 2008

A few years ago, I found myself in a very uncomfortable situation. One of the students at the suburban Chicago congregational school of which I was principal had clearly prioritized his love for organized sports over his need for a Jewish education.

Traveling baseball, flag football, ice hockey, you name it, he was there. Hebrew school, however, was a different story altogether.

As part of my administrative duties it had become necessary to inform this young man’s parents that their oft-truant son would not graduate from our program and, even worse, not be allowed to celebrate his bar mitzvah in our congregation if he did not significantly increase his attendance at school.

The father was incredulous. We were going to mandate Hebrew school attendance? The conversation quickly escalated from uncomfortable to antagonistic, as the father cajoled, yelled, and eventually demanded that we work out some form of alternative tutorial arrangement in lieu of regular classroom attendance.

I held my ground. Finally, out of sheer desperation, the father uttered something that really threw me for a loop.

“You know, rabbi, you people of the cloth can be so inflexible!”

I can only speculate as to what the father really meant with that statement. Needless to say, I was struck by his lumping together an Orthodox rabbi dressed in contemporary attire, and, say, certain Christian clergymen who adorn themselves in ecclesiastical robes and related apparel.

The Torah (Leviticus 18:3) makes clear the need for Jews to distinguish themselves in appearance as well as in action from the nations of the world in order to guard against assimilation:

After the doings of the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, you shall not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you, you shall not do; nor shall you walk in their ordinances.

Rambam (Mishnah Torah, Hilchos Akum, 11:5) explains that a Jew “should be distinguished in [his] dress and actions just as he is distinct in his knowledge and understanding.” Already during the exile in Egypt we find that Jews took special pains to maintain a distinctive outside appearance, which helped them preserve their unique identity despite residing amongst the world’s most acculturated nation for more than two centuries.

“In the merit that they did not change their names, clothes, and language they were redeemed [from Egypt]” – Yalkut Shimoni.

Centuries later, during the first Temple period, prophets continuously admonished Jews who had failed to adhere to this precept. Consider this warning from the prophet Zephaniah (1:8): “And it shall come to pass in the day that God will slaughter, that I will punish the princes, and the king’s sons, and all such as are clothed with foreign apparel.”

As well as this admonition from the prophet Yirmiyahu (4:3): “What do you gain, that you clothe yourself with scarlet, that you adorn yourself with ornaments of gold, that you enlarge your eyes with paint? In vain do you make yourself fair.”

(This is not to say that Jews are required to wear distinctive, uniquely Jewish apparel in contemporary society. Rav Moshe Feinstein [Igros Moshe, Yorah Deah, 1:84] rules that there is no prohibition to dress in the modern fashion since it does not specifically identify the wearer as gentile or Jew. Nor is it rooted in idolatrous gentile mores. The primary issue with contemporary style is whether it compromises our ever-present need for modesty and humility.)

Our sages also looked to preserve national uniqueness by imposing restrictions on Jewish consumption of foods cooked or baked by gentiles, as well as gentile wine. They understood that even casual fraternization – typically accompanied by food and drink – can lead to deeper relationships and even intermarriage.

Historically, God has taken an active role where necessary to ensure that His chosen people not lose their distinctive identity. Often, He has even recruited gentiles to force us into a position of separateness, by imposing the threat of annihilation or restrictive legislation.

If the Jewish people do not repent from their own volition, the Holy One, blessed be He, will cause to rise against them a wicked king whose decrees will be as cruel as that of Haman. He will subjugate them, and consequently they will repent. (Midrash Tanchuma, Bechukosai 3)

Consider God’s response to the Jews of Shushan, who had engaged in excessive intermingling at Achashveirosh’s feast.

Eighteen thousand and five hundred went to the banquet and ate and drank and became drunk and conducted themselves inappropriately. Immediately, Satan rose up and accused them before the Holy One, blessed be He, saying, “Master of the Universe, how long will You cleave to this nation who turn their heart and their faith from You? If it pleases You, destroy this nation from the world, because they do not repent before You.”…God did indeed consent to wipe out Israel. (Esther Rabbah, 7:13)

The Talmud asks (Megillah 12a), Why were the Jews in that generation deserving of extermination? The answer: Because they partook of the feast of Achashveirosh.

Such a development would repeat itself routinely throughout subsequent centuries.

Beginning in the 4^th century CE, the Church took a series of steps to ensure meaningful separation between Christians and Jews. At the Council of Elvira in 306 CE, Church leaders decreed that intermarriage and social intercourse with Jews were forbidden. Eating together was also outlawed.

A few decades later, in 325 CE, at the Council of Nicea, the papacy took additional steps to diminish Christian-Jewish relations by reducing Christian dependency on the Jews and their calendar. They did so by marking the date for Easter in a way so that it would not correspond with Passover, as it had previously for many Christians.

The feast of the resurrection was thenceforth required to be celebrated everywhere on a Sunday, and never on the day of the Jewish Passover, but always after the fourteenth of Nissan, on the Sunday after the first vernal full moon. (Phillip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume III: Nicene and Post-Nicene.)

The basis for this change – Jews as perpetrators of deicide (murder of their lord) – was made clear by the Roman emperor Constantine:

It was, in the first place, declared improper to follow the custom of the Jews in the celebration of this holy festival, because, their hands having been stained with crime, the minds of these wretched men are necessarily blinded…. Let us, then, have nothing in common with the Jews, who are our adversaries…. Therefore, this irregularity must be corrected, in order that we may no more have any thing in common with those parricides and the murderers of our Lord…no single point in common with the perjury of the Jews. (From “The Epistle of the Emperor Constantine,” quoted by the 5^th century bishop and author Theodoret.)

Conversation and fellowship between Christian clergy and Jews were also forbidden at that time.

Later, in 364 CE, the Church Council of Laodicea furthered efforts at separation by ordering that religious observances were to be conducted on Sunday, not Saturday, with Sunday becoming the new Sabbath.

These distinctive practices remained in place for many centuries, only to be reinforced and expanded during the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 CE. In an attempt to again protect against intermarriage between Christians and non-believing “infidels,” the council took steps to ensure that Christians, Jews, and Saracens (Muslims) remained outwardly distinguishable. To that end, it called for those of other religious denominations to dress in a manner that was noticeably different from that of Christians.

In some provinces a difference in dress distinguishes the Jews or Saracens from the Christians, but in certain others such confusion has grown up that they cannot be distinguished by any difference. Thus it happens at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women. Therefore … we decree that such Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.(Canon 68)

Muslims were also anxious to preserve meaningful distinction between themselves and the dhimmis (protected people of a secondary status, i.e., Jews and Christians) who lived among them. In the Pact of Omar I (c. 637 CE), the Muslims set down a series of legal restrictions and obligations for the dhimmis, including payment of a special head tax, restriction from holding government office, inability to repair places of worship or erect new religious structures, as well as to not imitate Muslim dress, make use of their expressions of speech, or adopt their surnames.

Recent history has told a similar story, with the advent of Reform Judaism ushering in a new challenge to Jewish distinctiveness. Beginning in the early 19^th century, Reform leaders introduced Western (i.e., Christian) standards of aesthetics and decorum in an attempt to modernize the Jewish religious service.

In Germany, they abbreviated the prayer liturgy, retaining only what they deemed to be the relevant components. Omitted, among other things, were the traditional prayers for a return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple. They further supplemented the standard Hebrew liturgy with prayers in the German vernacular. In addition, they introduced the Christian concept of the sermon. Choral singing with organ accompaniment, trademarks of Church service, were added as well.

Further, many Reform rabbinic leaders began to shun the traditional rabbinic garb for attire commonly associated with members of the Christian clergy. The Berlin Reformgemeinde went even further, introducing an all-vernacular service, bareheaded worship, and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath on Sunday.

The motivation for all this was a burning desire to leave behind the “outdated” and isolated world of traditional Judaism and move forward with mainstream German society into the progressive 19^th century.

Ever since the beginning of our present [19^th] century, they had come to view our ancestral faith as old fashioned…. Old style Judaism was always in the way, so oddly out of place at the fraternities and assemblies, at balls and dinner parties, at concerts and salons…. Is it any wonder, then, that this “ancient, inhibiting” religion should have been shaken off without hesitation in the rush to join in the “progress”? (Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Collected Writings Vol. VI, Feldheim, 1992.)

In America, Reform Judaism also advocated wholesale transformation of traditional Jewish worship. Changes included following each Hebrew prayer in the service with an English translation, adding new prayers that reflected contemporary American society, instituting a weekly English sermon, and shortening the services.

Other, later changes included abandoning the second day of festival observances, family seating rather than the separation of men and women, and the use of the organ and mixed choirs. In 1874, Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, then spiritual leader of the Chicago Sinai Congregation, introduced weekly worship services on Sundays rather than on the Sabbath.

Such reforms were not limited to houses of worship. Reform leaders of the time also spoke out against the ultimate protectors of Jewish exclusivity, marriage within the faith and circumcision.

In the words of Dr. Kohler, “We must discard the idea as altogether foreign to us, that marriage with a gentile is not legal.”

He also declared, at the seminal convention of Reform rabbis held in Pittsburgh in 1885 that ultimately produced Reform’s famous Pittsburgh Platform, “I do not for a moment hesitate to say it right here and in the face of the entire Jewish world that…circumcision is a barbarous cruelty which disfigures and disgraces our ancestral heirloom and our holy mission as priests among mankind.”

The reformers did not stop there, but also took aim at uniquely Jewish diet, purity, and dress.

As in the past, God did not allow this trend to continue completely unchecked. In Germany, the Nazis passed the Nuremburg Laws (1935), which set out to redraw the line between German and Jew. These laws stripped Jews of German citizenship, forbade intermarriage, barred Jews from most professions, and ordered that the letter “J” be printed on their identity cards. In time, Jews would be forced to wear distinctive badges identifying them as Jews. Ultimately, most were murdered, going to their deaths as despised Jews, not as proud, assimilated Germans.

Thankfully, American Jewry has not been subjected to such a forceful reminder of its true identity and purpose. There is no question, however, that much of the basis for the alarmingly high rate of Jewish intermarriage and assimilation that plagues American Jewry stems from a lack of Jewish pride and a weakened appreciation for what being Jewish is all about.

Some may suggest the problem exists only within the realm of the non-observant. I don’t believe this to be the case. Certainly, the degree of outward distinctiveness as well as internal spiritual connectivity is significantly higher within the Orthodox camp. But we all struggle with this issue of Jewish exclusivity in the open, inviting society in which we find ourselves. And while many aspects of American culture are not in conflict with our Jewish values, there can be no doubt that many others are.

It is imperative that we approach the surrounding culture with a critical eye. We must be prepared to ask ourselves if the ideas and trends espoused by the general society in such basic areas as fashion, entertainment, education, and social values really conform to the Torah’s exacting standards.

Our history clearly shows that if we do not take the necessary steps to maintain a distinctive identity on our own, the reminder may, God forbid, come from a different, less compassionate source. Let us hope we will not need such cruel, outside forces to remind us of our true mission as God’s holy nation.

Rabbi Naphtali Hoff, M.Ed., is an instructor of Jewish history at Hebrew Theological College (Skokie, Illinois) and serves as associate principal at Yeshiva Shearis Yisroel in Chicago. More information about Rabbi Hoff can be found on his website, www.rabbihoff.com.

People Of The Cloth?

Double Standards and Dialogue

Talk of ‘Muslim society’ – as if it were one unified ethnic or national body – is out of touch with reality and I just wanted to show the diversity that has existed at the geographical level since ancient times. Persians, Turks and Arabs are not a homogenous group that is held together by religion, says Georges Corm.

BONN, Germany - Georges Corm is convinced that as long as the West pursues double moral standards and applies international law unequally, its attempts to establish dialogue with the Muslim world cannot be taken seriously. Mona Sarkis, a freelance journalist, spoke to the social scientist and former Lebanese Finance Minister:

Mr. Corm, in your most recent book, Histoire du Moyen Orient (History of the Middle East) you devote a lot of attention to what you refer to as the geographic “arabesque” that historically characterises the Middle East, by which you mean the present Arab territories, the Mashriq, Turkey, and Iran. Why devote so much space to this concept?

Georges Corm: Because talk of “Muslim society” – as if it were one unified ethnic or national body – is out of touch with reality and I just wanted to show the diversity that has existed at the geographical level since ancient times. Persians, Turks and Arabs are not a homogenous group that is held together by religion. It is absurd to view Moroccan and Iranian society as one and the same. This presupposes that Islam is a living, unified being that exists in a precisely defined territory.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, authors like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have done their best to make the world believe in the existence of mega identity blocks such as “Islam” and “the West” – and unfortunately their efforts have been quite successful – but that is precisely the reason why reality must be quoted again and again.

In fact, Islam is – as scholars of the calibre of Michael Hodgson, Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson, or Ernest Gellner have demonstrated – only one aspect of the development of what is referred to as “Muslim societies”. The fact that numerous potentates exploit it in order to preserve their power is not the fault of the religion.

Among these potentates I not only count dictators or emblematic Muslim fundamentalist leaders, but also the successive governments of the United States. In the final stages of the Cold War, a young generation of radical Arab Marxists made the United States worry that the resource-rich region might fall under Soviet control. To prevent this, they encouraged the political Islamic activists, thereby setting in motion a dynamic development that can no longer be stopped.

Yet you disagree with the concept of “re-Islamicisation”…

Corm: Because it underpins the notion that Islam is a monolithic block. Until the 1960s, Iraq, Egypt and Syria all promoted secular nationalism, but they failed altogether with the collapse of pan-Arabism. Pan-Arabism was then replaced by varieties of pan-Islamism that were not uniform, but were shaped by either Shi’ism or Sunnism. The difference between the two was responsible for the devastating eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.

This in itself reveals the limitations of Huntington’s concept of a “civilisation” as a coherent political and military unit. Nevertheless, the West continues to address the “Muslim region” with this concept. The United States, for example, classifies Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea as the “axis of evil” despite the radical differences between these very different countries, political regimes, and cultures.

Georges Corm is former Lebanese Finance Minister and the author of Histoire du Moyen Orient (History of the Middle East). This interview was conducted by Mona Sarkis, a freelance writer based in Berlin. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service and can be accessed at GCNews. It originally appeared in www.qantara.de.

Middle East Online

Just what do they dislike, and why?

Apr 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Debates on Muslim grievance are generating more heat than light

Technorati Tags: Muslim polls,gallup

THE question of what exactly inspires ultra-militant Muslims to hate America has been a contentious one, to put it mildly, ever since George Bush gave his own sonorous explanation, in an address to Congress after the 2001 terrorist attacks. What enraged America’s foes, Mr Bush said, was its tradition of liberty: its freedom of religion, assembly, election and open disagreement.

Mr Bush was careful, in that speech, to insist that “they” referred to terrorists, not to all Muslims. Of Islam, he said: “Its teachings are good and peaceful…” But since then, American debates about Islam have blurred the distinction that he made. It has become much more respectable to assert that the Muslim faith turns people violent.

There are political as well as theological reasons why Western debates on the nature of Islam are so charged. If it can be shown that Islam itself is anti-freedom and pro-violence, then it makes less sense to take Muslim opinion into account when deciding policy. If you can prove that “they hate us whatever we do”, all efforts to assuage Islamic sentiment are futile. But the opposite case can also be made.

It is into this minefield that Gallup, a polling organisation based in Washington, DC, has entered by making the analysis of Muslim opinion a flagship activity. Its latest offering, presented in London earlier this month, is a slim volume entitled “Who Speaks For Islam?” written by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, respectively a senior adviser to and executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies. Gallup has described the study as an exercise in “data-driven” analysis of a topic where prejudice can easily prevail.

The authors rehearse several arguments that make sense to anybody who knows the Muslim world. Rather than despising Western freedom, many Muslims admire it, but they scoff at Western claims to be promoting democracy. Muslim women want greater equality, but they are attached to their faith and culture, and hackles can rise when Westerners set out to “liberate” them. The minority of Muslims (7%) who fully approve the September 2001 attacks are not much more pious than average; so religiosity doesn’t seem to be what makes them violent. In one survey, over two-thirds of Muslim respondents called America aggressive, while the proportion who took a similar view of France or Germany was under 10%. So democracy as such isn’t a Muslim bugbear.

One problem with Gallup’s “fact-based” approach is that it has not, as yet, offered the public the full array of facts to chew over. Its Centre for Muslim Studies regularly issues press releases that cast tantalising rays of light on Islamic opinion. These insights are gleaned from the annual Gallup World Poll, which poses a vast array of questions to respondents in over 140 countries; the new book reflects Gallup’s own surveys over the past seven years, plus other organisations’ polls. But the full results of the World Poll are available only at a price—it starts at $28,500, according to the Gallup website—so it’s hard for ordinary folk to judge exactly how fair the authors have been in mining their own data.

The results of a more narrowly focused survey, by another American pollster, were released this week. They are a troubling read for the Bush administration. A poll by Zogby International of 4,000 people in six Arab countries—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—found rising numbers had a “very unfavourable” view of America. And compared with a similar poll in 2006, an increasing number (67% versus 61%) thought Iran had every right to pursue its nuclear activities. Whatever one believes about the Muslim soul, Mr Bush’s efforts to court the Sunni world, ahead of a possible showdown with Iran, seem not to have impressed the Arab street.

Muslim opinion | Just what do they dislike, and why? | Economist.com

CAIRO, Egypt - It was a boyhood of miniskirts and stern-faced imams. As Ahmed abu Haiba grew into a man, he felt a kinship with the clerics who recited the Quran in badly lighted television studios, but he feared they didn’t stand a chance against the new Western temptations of pop divas pouting about carnal pleasures and broken hearts.

The screen beyond abu Haiba’s clicker was changing; the iconic images that defined Islam were being challenged in the 1990s from the Internet and Hollywood fantasy absorbed by tens of millions of satellite dishes humming on rooftops across the Middle East. It was an alluring cacophony that abu Haiba, a playwright and TV producer, warned would tug the Arab world further from its culture.

“The Islamic media was so poor, so traditional,” he said. “It wasn’t television. It was televised radio, a man in front of a camera speaking for hours and hours about obscure religious texts with no appeal. … Words with nothing connected to life.”

Abu Haiba rejected the West’s secular message but sought the power of its style and marketing. His creation, the latest in the struggle of faith, globalization and identity between East and West, is a music video channel that features Muslim piety through a slickly produced prism of Arabic rhythms.

“I want a new Islamic media,” said abu Haiba, 39. “My point is not to condemn the West but to build my culture with its own seeds, its own matrix. … I am more worried about Western culture than politics. … If I lose my culture, I become a stranger in my own country.”

It is difficult to escape the West’s imprint on Muslim society: Plastic surgeons are re-creating pop stars in Lebanon; independent women are appearing in Tunisian and Moroccan films; blogs are chiding political regimes from Cairo to Amman, Jordan; Facebook and text messaging are circumventing religion-based dating rules; and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, unveiled blond women peddle shampoo in commercials.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Iraq war hardened the lines between the United States and the Arab world, accentuating what many scholars and diplomats say is a clash of civilizations. But despite President Bush’s rhetoric against Islamic militants and Osama bin Laden’s screeds on infidels, Western culture was flourishing from Mecca to Tripoli.

A crude, yet telling, sign of this was glimpsed in an Internet cafe in northern Iraq days before U.S. cruise missiles would strike Baghdad in 2003. A bearded militant visited two Web sites during his 30 minutes of surfing - one sponsored by the terrorist group Ansar al Islam, the other featuring English-language porn.

The anecdote is an extreme illustration of the cultural schizophrenia Muslims in the Middle East say they face.

“It’s the search for an Arab identity, but we don’t have an identity,” said Emile Slailaty, who directs music videos and commercials in Beirut, Lebanon. “They want to be free and Westernized, but at the same time they want to be conservative.

“Look at what they’re doing with the hijab. They’re tying it different ways and doing more things with it to make it more sexy, fashionable. This is so trendy; young ladies can have lots of color but still be wearing a veil.”

It is this in-between cultural landscape that abu Haiba and other moderate Islamists want to seize from the provocative imagery and iconography of the West.

The Arab world has been absorbing and rejecting the West for centuries, since the Crusades and later when Napoleon’s armies marched across the desert with books on the Enlightenment. What’s troubling Islamists today, however, is the consuming nature of Western culture; its capitalism and liberalism are at once dizzying and alarming, especially in the Middle East, where much of the population is poor and angry about its leaders’ inability to improve their lives.

Muslim clerics worry that exposure to such unattainable materialism will weaken religious devotion, from the village prayer room to the city mosque. Their concern marks the crucial divide between a secular West that separates religion and state and a Muslim East where conservatives and many moderates adhere to Shariah law - the belief that religion, government and society are indivisible.

“America targets only your religion, it takes your religion away, it will take everything away from you,” radical Sheik Fawzi Said told worshipers in Cairo. “The devil knows that, and it is the devil that drives the Americans.”

Meanwhile, Arab media moguls, like cultural magpies, borrow from the West to create sophisticated, hybrid television programs, such as reality shows and knockoffs of Friends, to appeal to Muslim sensibilities.

Abu Haiba is distilling his own voice amid the clatter. Urbane, lightly bearded and English-speaking, he talks of the complexities of infusing art with religion. He is careful to show plurality - he happily mentions that he has a Jewish friend - but is insistent that Islam should permeate all aspects of life. During a recent interview, he excused himself briefly to answer the 6:30 p.m. call to prayer.

The intent of abu Haiba’s production company, Light of the East, which has raised $4 million from investors, is to popularize Islam for a younger generation. The music video channel is expected to launch in June. Egyptian authorities closely monitor such ventures by Islamists and abu Haiba has kept an air of secrecy around the project. He wouldn’t give the names of his investors.

Sitting at his desk the other day, abu Haiba played a promo for the channel on a large flat-screen TV. It cited ratings and demographics: In Egypt, 15- to 24-year-olds make up 50 percent to 64 percent of viewers tuning in to nearly 70 music video channels. That age group makes up 0 percent of the religious programming market.

That’s a disturbing statistic for abu Haiba, a mechanical engineer whose religious evolution mirrors that of many professionals of his generation. During his undergraduate years at Cairo University, abu Haiba, who has been writing poems and plays since he was 13, founded a theater troupe. At the same time, he explored different strands of Islam, including extremism, before settling on the political and spiritual fusion espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed party that has widespread support among the middle and educated classes.

Abu Haiba’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, which won 20 percent of seats in Parliament in 2005 and since has seen hundreds of its members jailed, earned him a file with the state security services. He says that the dossier is full of “fairy tales” but that in his artistic work, except for an occasional battle with censors, he has not been harassed. His new play, The Code, a meditation on Western influence in his nation, brought closer scrutiny.

The play tells the story of the invasion of Egypt by a fictional nation strongly resembling the United States. The conquered are controlled by robots and reclaim their freedom and cultural heritage only when they turn to God. The defeated people are powerless, becoming scared, yet seduced by the invader.

“The point of the play,” said abu Haiba, “is to ask the question: What happened to us? We were such a great nation. We lost our souls.”

The America he portrays in The Code was borrowed from years earlier when he put a Muslim spin on one of Hollywood’s most watched and globally successful sitcoms. In 1998, abu Haiba was a marketing manager for Suzuki in Cairo when a colleague introduced him to a group of Saudi investors looking for a manager for a new media production company, Light of the East. Abu Haiba produced a series called Boys and Girls, a chaste, Arabic version of Friends.

The show wasn’t a hit, and abu Haiba teamed up with a neighbor and friend, Amr Khaled, a former accountant turned moderate Islamist preacher who was captivating young professional Muslims, especially women who were seeking a less patriarchal interpretation of the Quran.

In 1999, abu Haiba and Khaled collaborated on Words From the Heart, a mainstream evangelical series that featured uplifting music and spiritual pep-talks from the likes of Soheir Babli, a renowned Egyptian actress who has donned a veil and dedicated her life to Islam. Abu Haiba’s Saudi investors weren’t happy. There were no bearded clerics, no fundamentalist fervor. Other networks weren’t interested, either.

With no distributor, abu Haiba passed tapes of the shows to street vendors. He sold 13,000 copies, and that quickly grew into tens of thousands more. The satellite channel Dream TV offered abu Haiba and Khaled airtime for the four original shows and 11 new episodes.

Abu Haiba is hoping for similar success with his music video channel and sees an opportunity to loosen the grip of the West. In the promo for the channel, the narrator proclaims, “We must exert all effort to defend what’s precious to us. … We can’t turn a blind eye to this ghost who sneaks into our houses.”

Jeffrey Fleishman writes for the Los Angeles Times.

TV producer tries Islamism for moderns — baltimoresun.com