Salim Mansur, a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario, has written an intriguing opinion piece in the Toronto Sun: "Islamism: Dirty little secrets." (Via Mathaba.net, with thanks to Ruth King.) I am not sure that he can sustain his contention that Muslim leaders have discarded the principles of Islam and reduced it to a nationalist entity, since from its beginning Islam has been political and has formed the basis for the laws of nations. But he is absolutely correct about Muslim anti-Semitism, apologies for tyrants, and the suffering that modern-day political Islam has caused for Muslims themselves.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the struggle for Islam's soul turned most bloody and relentlessly continues that way.The seeds for this were sown in the first half of the last century, when most Arab-Muslim lands were under European rule.
It was then that many Muslim enthusiasts for reconciling traditional Islam with the scientific and democratic values of the modern world embraced the doctrines of nationalism in their most reactionary form, as found in post-1914 Germany.
The result reduced Islam into a nationalist identity for Arabs and Muslims. Many Muslim fundamentalists later incorporated this reactionary nationalism for their own purpose of constructing totalitarian states.
The pernicious effect of such a fusion of nationalism with religion was to empty Islam of its transcendent message of faith in a supreme God as the common ground of unity among all people.
In India, for instance, Islamic nationalism generated the whirlwind of communal carnage in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent. Wounds of that bloody division remain today.
But it was in the Middle East where nationalism fused with Islam into a political ideology - Islamism - whose effects have brought ruin to the region - and beyond.
The dirty secret apologists for this tragedy in North America and elsewhere refuse to address is how Muslims have suffered as a result of Islamism, have been driven from their homes, tortured and killed across the Arab-Muslim world.
There has been no systematic collection of this horrible data over the past five decades, but the numbers run into millions.
It matters little within the larger context of the struggle for Islam's soul whether Muslims have been primarily the victims of tyrannical authority in Muslim majority states, or of Islamists waging battles against corrupt power elites.
No one in the Arab-Muslim world during this period exceeded the bloody-mindedness of Iraq's fallen despot, Saddam Hussein, who blended a Nazi-type nationalism with his version of Islamism into a sheer hell for Iraqis.
The world also witnessed many Islamists and Muslim apologists rallying to Saddam's defence with contorted arguments of anti-imperialism in all of its variations.The other dirty secret is the continuing victimization of Palestinians by many of their fellow Arabs, and of their being used as pawns in the war of Islamists against Jews and Israel.
Neither Islam, nor Muslims, have any quarrel with Jews and Israel.
The conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis was, and remains, a nationalist contest over land.
This contest could have been avoided, or settled at any time since the full reality of the Holocaust became known, if Arab Muslims in a position to lead had chosen to live by the principles of Islam.
Instead, they opted for the German model of nationalism in opposing Jewish demands for a homeland in historic Palestine.
Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was the leader of the Palestinians during the years between the world wars of the last century.
His embrace of the German fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, during World War II was not a whimsical choice.
Islamists deliberately incorporated the racist doctrine of the Nazis into their thinking and politics, and brazenly propagated anti-Semitic literature as a tool in their war against the Jews and Israel.
Consequently, the damage Islamists have done to the very legitimate grievances of Palestinians is immense.
Moreover, many Muslims, in supporting Palestinian rights without repudiating the rabid anti-Semitism of the Islamists, have contributed to the undermining of Islam as a religion of peace and coexistence and sabotaged their moral authority to speak of justice in Palestine, or elsewhere.
This internal conflict raging among Muslims during the past 50 years was bound to spill over into the outside world with devastating effects on 9/11.
Now America has become involved in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world as never before. Ironically, or by providential design, the future of Islam and of Muslims if they are to be free of the fanaticism of the Islamists, is bound to America's success in this war on terrorism.
Like many well-meaning "moderates," this Muslim simply cannot admit, to himself or to others, that it is not a perversion of Islam, but Islam itself that naturally leads to hatred of non-Muslims and to violence. Islam was created in the seventh and eighth centuries, probably not in the Hijaz (as Western scholars sucha as Patricdia Crone have adduced evidence) to justify Arab conquest of far more advanced and populous civilizations. It took elements of Christianity, Judaism, and also of Zoroastrianism and Manichaenism, blended them with pre-Islamic Arab belies (from the time of the jahiliyya, or Ignorance), and offered the mix up as a way to entice those peoples being conquered to assent to their own conquest, and the destruction, over time, of their civilizations.
Few Muslims -- Ibn Warraq is one counter-example -- dare to question Islam itself. Some, such as Irshad Manji, appear to believe that somehow Islam can be "changed." (How, pray tell?) Others carefully avoid the matter of Islam (Kanan Makiya, Fouad Ajami), even if they are brave and outspoken on the matters of distempers in the collective Arab mentality. They hew to sentimental ideas about their "grandmother's piety" or about the myth of Andalucian tolerance (Ajami, normally so sensible, glowingly reviewerd the fantasy-history of Andalucia concocted by Rosa Maria Menocal-- one wonders if he really believes, or simply wishes to believe, that Andalucia was this place of harmony of three faiths, when there is so much evidnece of Muslim massacres and intolerance -- why did Maimonides flee, after all?) Filial piety, as well as embarrasment, keeps otherwise brave and intelligent people from recognizing the truth about Islam. They do NOT want to know; they will not consult the scholarly literature in the Index Islamicus; they will content themselves with cherished myths.
The failure of even the most westernised, and advanced Muslims to look unblinkingly at Muslim doctrine, and Muslim history except in sanitized versions, and through rose-colored lenses, is extraordinary. But, if non-Arab Muslims -- Persians, Pakistanis -- are sometimes capable of doing so,for Arab Muslims it involves their avery being. It would require them to see something most unpleasant at the heart of what they take to be their own civlization. So while Ajami is good at analyzing one kind of "dream palace of the Arabs" he cannot allow himself to analyze the larger dream -- the myh of a tolerant Islam, instead of the much grimmer story that real historians provide (in the case of Andalucia, see, e.g. Evaritste Levi-Provencal).
More on this topic, at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/01/03/international1318EST0521.DTL Palestinian refugees: Championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts
Hugh - Good post. Very informative. Do you have a source, or better stlll, a link, as I could not find Evaritste Levi-Provencal in a Google search? Thank you.
Hugh: kudos to you! This is the kind of very coherent analysis and very useful information that many of us are looking for.
Excellent analysis, sir!
Ron
From the link that Ella posted:
"Kuwait expelled hundreds because Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."
That is incomplete. Kuwait expelled some of them because they actively supported the invading Iraqis.
The Gaza Strip is one of the areas on the negotiating table for eventual return. What Israel should do IS return it - to the original owners, Egypt.
jay