Muslim Heretics Conference

In October 2005, with the war in Iraq headed off the rails and his own visions of a democratizing Middle East crumbling, George W. Bush tried to rally the nation with a call against a new global enemy: “Islamofascism.” In a series of speeches, he described America’s disparate enemies as a united force, bound together by a common vision. Unless America rose to the challenge, he argued, jihadists would realize their ambition to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”

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Juan Cole

ENGAGING THE MUSLIM WORLD

By Juan Cole

Illustrated. 282 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. $26.95

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Juan Cole’s Blog

Bush’s effort to equate America’s amalgam of new enemies to the Axis powers of World War II quickly fizzled. Even some in the White House admitted privately to embarrassment, and the word “Islamofascism” was stricken from presidential speeches. Evil? Yes. But not an organized force — and Bush’s speeches quickly came to be regarded as a huge mistake because they inflated the power of America’s enemies rather than dividing them by playing off their longstanding rivalries. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that the Iraqis and the Iranians were fighting a bitter war. And Bush was lumping Osama bin Laden’s Sunni extremists with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of a nuclear-capable Persia.

Juan Cole’s “Engaging the Muslim World” maps those fault lines, and one can only wish Bush had mulled over such material (in fact, much of it was contained in his briefing papers) before the misadventures of the post-9/11 era began. Like Lawrence Wright’s remarkable “Looming Tower,” published almost three years ago, this field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements, whose violent offshoots are still morphing into new forms. Along the way, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of “Islam Anxiety” in the United States and “American Anxiety” in the Arab world.

Readers of Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, will find many of the arguments familiar, though they are well assembled here, with essays on the myths surrounding Saudi Wahhabism, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the unintended side effects of American meddling in Iran. Cole starts his book in the right place: America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, which has skewed policy and often led us to support dictators we would ordinarily put on the list of human-rights violators. (The Saudis would probably qualify.) And he declares a truth that should be sobering to President Obama: “The fact is that we are likely to become more dependent on Islamic oil in the coming decades, not less,” he writes, noting that 11 of the top 15 exporters of oil are countries with Muslim majorities.

Oil, he points out, got us into Iraq in the first place. Faced with a coup in Baghdad in 1958 that overthrew a friendly government, President Dwight Eisenhower declared, “We have to act or get out of the Middle East.”

Cole is at his most effective in making the case that Western politicians who talk of Islamofascists not only insult an entire religion, they also misidentify the enemy. The terror groups we face are trying to hijack a religion. Cole argues that it makes no more sense to describe them in religious terms than to have called the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin a “Judaic terrorist” or Francisco Franco a “Christofascist.”

The Arab societies that fascinate us the most are the ones — like Egypt — where “Desperate Housewives” is a hit, enjoyed by the same television viewers who denounce the encroachment of Western values into their culture. Like all of us, they want to have it both ways, indulging guilty pleasures and still hoping to prevent “libertinism — casual sex, drugs and violence — from invading their neighborhoods.”

One of those upscale neighborhoods is Giza, the home of the father of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11. A Cairo attorney, the elder Mohamed Atta had initially denied that his son was involved. Four years later, he went on CNN to express approval that the young man had started a 50-year-long religious war, setting up cells that were like a “nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking.”

But in seeking to explain such sentiments to Americans, Cole sometimes reaches for the wrong analogy. He compares the 9/11 hijackers to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who read white supremacist works before bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. To Cole, the two men “bear a number of striking similarities to members of such radical Egyptian groups as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping of the Blind Sheikh.” They all railed against “Jewish control of the U.S. government” and attacked tall buildings that were symbols of power. They all belonged to “fringe, if significant, movements.”

Did they? George W. Bush may have overinflated the power of Islamofascism, but certainly the radical Muslim movement, in all its incarnations, has a membership that is bigger and better financed than the American fringe groups, and with a presence in more countries than those home-grown extremists who threaten domestic terrorism.

There is a reason that we have tens of thousands of American troops on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan: to stop radical groups from taking over either state, which would create a sanctuary for planning attacks around the world, and — in the case of Pakistan — to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons. Those are problems of a vastly different scale than apprehending the next Timothy McVeigh. And they explain why a new president who came into office as the anti-Bush, ready to use diplomacy first, is extending American military action in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For Obama, the real test of his plans to engage the Muslim world comes in the place where there has been no real engagement for three decades: Iran. He has begun the process with a very public gesture, a message to the Iranian people in mid-March reassuring them that he has no intention of seeking regime change and respects their need for a restored place in the world of nations. It was the right gesture: as Cole notes, “Iran’s thirst for independence, political and technological, goes far beyond that of the other Gulf oil states.”

Obama’s message left open the question of how to slake that thirst and still fulfill his campaign commitment that he would never let Iran obtain a nuclear weapon — or even a nuclear-weapons capability. (It is already perilously close to that capability.) No one — not Obama, not the international inspectors — takes much solace in the declaration of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, that American allegations about Iran’s program are “a sheer lie,” or in his assurances that “we consider using nuclear weapons” to be “against Islamic rules.”

As Cole points out, the international community is going to need access to the thousands of Iranian scientists at work in the nuclear project. But he overstates the freedom inspectors have had to visit Iran’s facilities, leaving the impression that they have seen everything they have asked to see. The inspectors tell a very different story.

In the end, Cole backs very pragmatic approaches — confidence-building with Iran, and the kind of wooing of enemies that allowed Gen. David Petraeus to begin to tame Iraq. But mostly, he urges us to tear away our blinders. “The bigoted way in which some politicians have dealt with Islam,” he concludes, is bound to fail.

David E. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent of The Times, is the author of “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.”

Book Review - ‘Engaging the Muslim World,’ by Juan Cole - Review - NYTimes.com

Does Islam Need A Reformation?

Some are trying to understand Islam from the perspective of the history of Christianity. To answer Thom Hartmann’s question: No, Islam does not need a Reformation. But some Muslims do, notes Hesham A. Hassaballa.

One day recently, I heard progressive radio host Thom Hartmann speak about whether Islam needs a “reformation” similar to that in Judaism or Christianity. It happened in the wake of the pirate attacks on American ships in the Indian Ocean, and the implication that al-Qaeda was behind the pirates (a dubious claim). In fact, Hartmann had been posited this question to a number of Muslim callers on his show during those days: “Is it time for a reformation in Islam?”

It does seem to me that given the often terrible news about Islam, it is understandable why this question would be raised in the first place. When people see constant references to vicious barbarity: beheadings, suicide bombings, public flogging, “honor killing” — all done explicitly in the name of Islam — it is only natural to wonder whether Islam itself is the problem. Yet, as tempting as it is to apply the Christian experience as analogy, it is a flawed premise.

The Protestant Reformation was a movement during the 16th and 17th centuries to reform the Catholic Church. It sought to change various beliefs and practices that were fundamental to the Church at the time, such as purgatory, particular judgment (the judgment of a soul immediately after death), devotion to Mary, devotion to the saints, most of the sacraments, mandatory celibacy, and the authority of the Pope. Of course, in Great Britain, the divorce of the Church of England from Rome was performed by Henry VIII, after he was denied an annulment from his wife by Pope Clement VII. Even in this case, it was a new church started in reaction to ‘wrong’ beliefs in the Roman Catholic Church.

That is the problem in trying to understand Islam from the perspective of the history of Christianity. There is no such corollary in Islam: The barbarity that is done in the name of Islam is a deviation from fundamental beliefs, principles, and traditions of Islam. Extremism in the name of Islam is nothing new to the faith: It began soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad with the Kharijites, who ended up killing the fourth Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib. After the Kharijites came the Hashasheen, or “Assassins,” who were Islam’s first “suicide terrorists.” They terrorized the Muslim populace for decades. And in contemporary times, we have the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Yet, throughout Islam’s history, these extremists have always been a tiny fringe minority who follow clearly heretical belief systems and are always rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. The Islamic mainstream has always endured and won out against the extremists. Today, there are some people who want the world to think that the Muslim extremists are somehow the “mainstream.” Yet, only a criminal mind could cite the Qur’an to justify the murder of innocent people having lunch at Sbarro’s, or worshipping at a mosque on Friday, or buying fruit at the market. Just because a terrorist says “the Qur’an says so” does not make it the truth any more than it does if a terrorist used verses from the Bible.

Let us take suicide terrorism as an example. Everything about it violates Islam and its principles. The Qur’an says: “And do not take a life that God has made sacred, except for just cause” (17:33). In no way, shape, or form could the taking of innocent life be considered “just cause.” Moreover, as in Jewish and Christian scriptures and traditions, suicide is a grave sin:

“And spend for the sake of God, and do not invest in ruin by your own hands. And do good, for God loves those who do good” (2:195).

“And do not kill yourselves, for God has been merciful to you” (4:29).

Thus, the crime of suicide is clearly a deviation from Islamic faith and practice — therefore, rejected by the vast majority of Muslims.

If Islam needed a “reformation,” that would mean that suicide terrorism against “non-believers” is part of Islamic belief and needs to be “expunged” in the interest of bringing Islam into the 21st century. But, the truth is suicide terrorism has never been part of Islamic belief; it has always been an ugly deviation.

This does not mean, in any way, shape, or form, that a good number of Muslims are not in need of reformation. On the contrary, there needs to be a wholesale reformation of Muslims on a number of fronts. But whenever we see Muslims acting like barbarians, they are betraying the principles of Islam, they are violating the letter and spirit of the faith.

If every Muslim everywhere had kept to the principles of Islam, there would be no suicide terrorism; there would be no beheading of people in front of a banner saying “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger”; there would be no “honor killing.” Sadly, however, these things do happen, and it is because some few Muslims have strayed from the straight and narrow path of Islam — or are faithlessly using the religion in an abominable way.

So, to answer Thom Hartmann’s question: No, Islam does not need a Reformation. But some Muslims do.

Hesham A. Hassaballa is a physician and writer living in Chicago. He is co-author of The Beliefnet Guide to Islam (Doubleday).

Middle East Online