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Islam faces its demons

Jamiat Ulma e Islam

Young Pakistani activists from Jamiat Ulema e Islam shout slogans during a rally against an anti-Islamic film in Islamabad this week. Source: AFP

THE battle is on for the Islamic soul, and it is a crucial battle of our age. Primarily it involves Arabs, who must decide what kind of people they wish to be and what sort of contribution they will make to the rest of humankind.

They cannot answer such questions without also deciding the part played by Islam, their historic faith, in affirming their identity and its role in modern civil society.

A billion other Muslims, from the US to Europe, Asia to Australia, are watching and waiting. Depending which way the battle goes, the West will have a willing partner or an implacable enemy. The stakes could hardly be higher.

One of the most confusing factors at work is that many Muslims don't really know what to think of the West. They often imitate what they say they hate.

Not so very long ago, the Muslim world, with the exception of some deserts and mountains, had fallen into the hands of Europeans. Those Europeans set up a number of nations as they saw fit and off-handedly put an end to the caliphate that was supposed to be ruling the entire Muslim community.

The introduction of new-fangled ideas such as democracy, with political parties and elections and the rule of law, were so many invitations to Arabs and Muslims to come to terms with the present time. But the invitation was spurned.

The sight of British, French or Soviet troops on Arab streets led to the perception that Muslims could have allowed such a scandal to happen only because they were inferior, victims through no fault of their own.

In a culture that mandates shame for coming off second best in any encounter, it's pointless telling people that there's no shame attached to the course of history, and that the world is as it is. Shame is put to rest, and honour recovered, only when some action levels the score.

This was a tall order but in one Muslim country after another, army officers set about winning the independence that would certify honour. They succeeded. The societies they then built were centralised and militarised, in fact imitations of the totalitarianism that had done such damage to Europe. The intention to modernise and reform ended in brutality and vandalism.

Arab philosophical and political equivalents of a Locke, a Montesquieu, a Jefferson, might have helped launch an experiment in democracy, but they did not emerge. There are writers and academics today, such as Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya, who are brilliant expositors of what's wrong, but to my knowledge there are no thinkers analysing what a modern Arab society would be like and how to achieve it.

The Muslim Brotherhood wanted to achieve the same ends of independence and dignity but by different means.

For them, a rightfully ordered Islamic world satisfies the laws God decreed for the faithful in the Koran, and these are closed to the slightest modification, his words unalterable forever.

Obedience is the demand placed on the faithful, with the death penalty obligatory in cases of disobedience. Scholarship long ago took the mystique of divine revelation out of the Christian Bible, but nothing like that has been done with the Koran. Like communism, Islam is an ideology with no conceivable half-measures.

Originally just a handful of friends in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has grown into an international body, representing the Sunni branch of Islam in at least 60 countries. One of the Brothers, Sayyid Qutb, was the author of many books arguing that only a return to the Islam of the early caliphate would restore Muslim power and dignity.

Promulgated everywhere, the Brotherhood program is regressive and totalitarian: "Allah is our objective, the prophet Mohammed is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way. Death for the sake of Allah is our most exalted aspiration."

For several decades Islamist extremists such as the Muslim Brothers have fought it out with the army, the former assassinating secular military figureheads, the latter imprisoning and executing Islamists, including Sayyid Qutb.

This power struggle expanded into a global issue once Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had seized power in Iran in the coup of 1979. Tall and gaunt, he was forbidding in his black robes and turban, devising a constitution that made him Supreme Leader, a clerical dictator.

Iran is the leading Shia country, but Khomeini appealed to the Sunni majority to unite into a single Muslim identity. The proposed Islamic Awakening Front would drive the US and Israel out of the Middle East and spread the word of Allah until the whole world was united under Islam. Khomeini openly rejoiced in the use of violence: "Islam says kill all the unbelievers, just as they would kill you all."

Quite probably Khomeini was acting in bad faith over his Islamic Awakening Front. His revolution, he said, was not about lowering the price of watermelons but subjecting the world to Allah. This was quickly perceived as promotion of the Shia cause exclusively.

In Lebanon, Iran has been arming and financing Hezbollah, a Shia militia of 10,000 volunteers with an arsenal estimated at 60,000 missiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel. Spokesmen for the regime up to and including Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader and his President keep promising in Hitlerite language to wipe out Israel. The development of the Iranian nuclear program is a threat to Sunnis as well.

Nouri al-Maliki, leader of one of the main Shia parties in Iraq, and Prime Minister there, has sentenced, so far in absentia, his Sunni counterpart to death.

Syria has a Sunni majority but two dictators, Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar, belonging to the Alawite minority, between them have ruled for 40 years. Alawites are affiliated to Shi'ites, and the Assads voluntarily turned Syria into an Iranian protectorate.

When the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in 1982, Hafez al-Assad killed no fewer than 25,000, probably many more. In a dreadful symmetry, about the same number have been killed under Bashar al-Assad.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt line up for the Sunnis against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah for the Shi'ites, in a reprise of the sectarian confrontation that goes back to the earliest years of Islam. Combatants who once hacked off their enemies' heads in the field are replaced by a pilot flying a Russian jet over one of his own cities and dropping bombs on houses without knowing who is inside. Violence in these circumstances is the natural functioning of a political process that invariably comes down to a test of strength.

Pretexts for provoking Western democracies are easy to manipulate, and they have to be seen as the equivalent of gathering intelligence about the enemy's intentions and willpower, the difference being that innocent people lose their lives.

The crowd wanted to kill Salman Rushdie, for instance, but his novel had been published in English, a language they couldn't read to discover for themselves if he really was blaspheming. A single imam in Denmark reporting on cartoons in a provincial paper showing the prophet Mohammed set off a chain reaction of riots.

None of the crowd that attacked the US consulate in Benghazi had actually seen the mysterious video supposedly libelling the prophet Mohammed, but hearsay was enough for them.

Young women in burkas are seen at demonstrations brandishing placards with wobbly lettering in English, "Behead whoever insults Islam", obviously directed at non-believers.

A French satirical magazine pokes fun at the prophet and France closes 20 embassies for fear of reprisals. The rage behind slogans such as "Death to America!" or "Death to Israel!" is sincere, which makes this political theatre and the culture driving it all the more tragic.

Daily life on the Arab and Muslim street confronts individuals with hard choices and tests. The cruelty and criminality of the ayatollahs and the military dictators has been on a par. To whom should the individual turn for rectifying grievances and injustices? Are army officers or Muslim Brothers the better bet as job providers? Half the population of many Arab countries live on $2 a day, while the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates own their national economies.

And in the rightly ordered Islamic world there is an unequal relationship between Muslims and non-believers, and between men and women. A Christian caught practising the faith in Saudi Arabia is likely to be beheaded in public; a half-million Christians have fled Iraq; Islamists regularly attack and kill Christian Copts in Egypt and burn down their churches.

About half of Arab women are illiterate and in Arab Africa many undergo genital mutilation. No Arab university features on the list of the best 500 universities in the world. The number of books published in Arabic in the past thousand years is the equivalent of a year's publication in Spain. The total gross national product of the Arab world is the same as Finland's. Many of the young face chronic unemployment or the hardships of emigration. Boatpeople, and sometimes empty boats, wash up all along the coasts of Spain and Italy, and Australia.

The Arab Spring at first appeared to be about freedom. Dictators who had been in power for two or three decades, four in the case of Muammar Gaddafi, were forced into exile or lynched. It was unprecedented that former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was not lynched or forced into exile but given a reasonably fair trial and sentenced to prison.

The Muslim Brotherhood promised it would share power. But the leader of the movement has confirmed its ideological aim is "reforming the individual, followed by building the society, the government and then a rightly guided caliphate and finally mastership of the whole world".

A million people assembled in Cairo to listen to SheikYusuf al-Qaradawi, now in his 80s and a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman as influential as Sayyid Qutb had been. He preaches that one day soon Islam will command the obedience of the US, and he has a good word for Hitler's handling of Jews.

In recent elections, the Brotherhood won enough votes to appoint a senior member, Mohammed Morsi, as first civilian President. Installed, he purged the army, the media and the judiciary, while proposing to have a constitution drafted that would leave Egypt in the permanent possession of the Brotherhood.

"Arab Spring? What Spring?" asks one of the many Egyptians disillusioned by the Brotherhood takeover. "I see only an utter and complete rape of the nation that was the cradle of civilisation by an ideology that is the most detrimental factor at the base of misery, repression and loss that humanity has ever seen in all its history." For him and those like him, the Muslim Brotherhood has hijacked a religion to achieve "ruinous and obnoxious goals".

Democracy is the sole credible way of escaping from the totalitarian dead-end in which the Arabs have landed themselves.

President George W. Bush made a brave but dangerous attempt at bringing in key changes via Iraq. President Barack Obama takes the opposite view: that Arabs have to find their own way out of the confusion. His idea of a helping hand is to assent to a conference, also dangerous in its own way, to see whether criticism of Islam might be banned outright.

Statistics are uncertain, but tens of millions of Muslims have settled in Australia, Europe and the US. No doubt the scrapping of all restrictions on entry and work would lead to an emptying of Muslim lands.

The future is with those who are here. Someone among them will have to work out how Islam can become a force for integration rather than separation. In the absence of such a person, the culture clash will turn nasty.

Historian David Pryce-Jones is a senior editor at National Review.


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Original piece is http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/islam-faces-its-demons/story-e6frg6z6-1226479112170


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