We made you a nation of moderation and justice
-Quran 2:143
There is something very fundamentally wrong with Islam.
Not because 19 Moslems slammed a plane into the World Trade Center killing 5000 people; these were a tiny minority of a whole. Also, while the Quran has its violent moments - famously dividing the world into the
Dar al-Islam and the
Dar al-Harb - most religions have a nasty side. Christians and Jews should take some time and read what lovely things the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament/Torah says we should do.
Islam is in trouble because its inner culture is collapsing. And if you haven't figured it out yet, the whole world is going to pay the price. A religion is a whole collection of things put together under a single label: theology, philosophy, language, physical culture, hierarchy, history, clergy, contradiction, faith, tradition... It's this and more. As Christianity is tied inextricably to the West, Islam is tied to classical Arab history. By now both religions are far more widespread than their original areas, but their core culture shines through wherever they are practiced.
Moslems have been brought up to believe that the world will be theirs, that even though there will probably always be people who cling to inferior religions, they will eventually be ruled by Moslems. The Quran has specific laws for how non-Moslems should be treated in Islamic lands. It only has a few laws on how Moslems living in non-Moslem lands should live, because that situation won't happen often (in their view). After the powerful military and scientific successes of the early Arab-Moslem and the Ottoman empires, it was a severe shock to Moslems to discover that barbaric Europe had surpassed them technologically. This has created tensions ever since in Islam, because the law says this shouldn't be so. Modern Moslems blame all of their ills on the West and its imperial past, despite the fact that other parts of the world who were also ruled by the Western colonial powers have since gone on to great prosperity and can compete with the modern West - Japan, China, India, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, etc. It clearly can be done. At the end of a decade when world-wide economic growth rates have brought development to every major world civilization, the Islamic world has seen its living standards collapse and its fabled oil wealth dry up. Modern Moslems are ruled either by feudal monarchies or harsh dictatorships, both of which have little regard for human life. It is a sad irony observed by some Palestinian intellectuals that for as bad as Israel treats its Arabs, that treatment is still far better than that which is given by almost all of the Islamic governments to their own citizens. Add to this the widespread corruption of these regimes, and it's no wonder so many Islamic youth are reaching for some magic bullet to solve their problems. Their ideas sound crazy when shown the light of day, but they are very desperate. Their religion tells them they are the pinnacle of human achievement in God's world; but they live like the dogs of the world.
Some quotes:
From Amir Taheri, an Iranian journalist in Paris, in his article "Islam Can't Escape Blame for September 11th": There is more. All but one of the world's remaining military regimes are in Muslim countries. With the exception of Turkey and Bangladesh, there are no real elections in any Muslim country. Of the current 30 active military conflicts in the world no fewer than 28 concern Muslim governments and/or communities. Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim countries, which also carry out 80% of all executions each year.
Anyone familiar with textbooks in most Muslim countries would know the twisted view of the world they propagate and the hatred they promote. Anyone who follows the media in the Muslim world would know that the verbal version of the September 11 attacks is an almost daily fare. Go to the internet and check the editorials of virtually any Muslim paper on September 10 and see what they were saying about the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Anyone listening to a sermon in virtually any Mosque, including many in the West, woulde be shocked by the vehemence of the anti-Western, especially anti-American, sentiments expressed.
It is both dishonest and dangerous for Muslims to remain in a state of denial. And yet a state of denial is what we have. When Iran's Khomeinists burned 600 people alive in a cinema, the whitewashers said it had nothing to do with Islam. When the same gang took the American diplomats hostage in Tehran, again the whitewash party insisted that had nothing to do with Islam. And when the suicide bombings bloodied Beirut we were told that Islam had nothing to do with them.
The Muslim world today is full of bigotry, fanaticism, hypocracy and plain ignorance - all of which create a breeding ground for criminals like bin Laden. The principal victims of these criminals are Muslims, who are prevented from developing a modern political culture without which they cannot reform their societies and rebuild their economies.
From Muqtedar Khan in his article "Some Muslims Give Islam a Bad Name":
Another imam, Fawaz Damra of the Cleveland Islamic Center, was videotaped speaking in 1991 to an Islamic jihad fundraiser in Chicago. He urged the audience to direct "a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews." After a local TV station recently aired this videotape, he apologized for making "deplorable" statements in the past.
Such statements are more than "deplorable". They make Muslims look irrational, hateful and kooky. When such statements are made by Islamic scholars, who hold or have held important religious positions, it only gives Islam a bad name but also raises the question, what have these scholars been teaching their congregations?
From Khaled Abou el Fadl, in his article "What Islam teaches about tolerance":
In Islamic law, terrorism (hirabah) is considered cowardly, predatory and a grand sin punishable by death. Classical Islamic law explicitly prohibits the taking or slaying of hostages or diplomats even in retaliation against unlawful acts by the enemy. Furthermore, it prohibits stealth or indiscriminate attacks against enemies, Muslim or non-Muslim. One can even say that Classical jurists considered such acts to be contrary to the ethics of Arab chivalry and therefore fundamentally cowardly.
It would be disingenious, however, to propose that this Classical attitude is predominant or even that familiar in modern Arab-Muslim culture.
[...]
It is disheartening to hear contemporary Arab news agencies, for example, refer to acts of terrorism in neutral terms such as guerilla attacks (amal fida'i) and to suicide bombers as martyrs (shuhuda).
[...]
Most important, a dogmatic, puritanical and ethically oblivious form of Islam has predominated since the 1970s. This brand of Islamic theology is largely dismissive of the classical juristic tradition and of any notion of universal and innate moral values.
[...]
This contemporary orientation is anchored in profound feelings of defeatism, alienation, frustration and arrogance. It is a theology that is alienated not only from the institutions of power in the modern world but also from its own heritage and tradition...
This is what the modern world is up against.
