Is there an
irrefutable connection between terrorism and Islam? Most people hold a definitive opinion one way
or the other already. Of course, some
may say, look at the news; all of these attacks, from 9-11 to Charlie Hebdo,
the bad guys are Muslims. On the other
hand, others clearly believe that Islam is a religion of peace, or at least not
any more prone to aggression than other faiths.
“Every man
armed for war, before God to battle.” This is just one of many violent
religious phrases which are found in the ancient holy text known as the
Bible. Yes, the Bible. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Surely many
people know the violent nature of Biblical times, and yet they do not judge
Christianity as a violent religion, despite the fact that the Christian Faith
was a catalyst for the bloody Christian incursions into the Middle East (known
as the Crusades) as well as for the violent subjugation of peoples throughout
the world by European powers during the Colonial period of history. Despite
that rhetoric and that history, we choose to view the Christian religion as a
relatively peaceful force in society, while Islam is considered by many as an
aggressive faith. How does the history
of Islam show its supposedly violent nature?
Islam did
have a violent start in the 8th century, when Mohamed and his
followers took military control of Arabia. By the Middle Ages Islam had been
established as a major world religion, along with and alongside of Christianity
in the shadow of the long since fallen Roman Empire. That period saw the Crusades, followed
centuries later by the Ottomans’ conquering of the former Christian Byzantine
Empire, and a number of other conflicts between Muslims and Christians, with
alternating and/or disputable culpability between each side. However, the level
of Muslim-Christian violence throughout history never really went beyond that
of Christian-Christian violence, or Muslim-Muslim violence, or Hindu-Buddhist
violence for that matter. For, as we all
know, at the time kings, queens, princes, and others fought for power and honor
in Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of the world, during a time that all
historians would label as much bloodier than ours.
For
thousands of years there was no indisputable tangible Muslim antagonism towards
the Christian West. The Muslim Ottomans did seek to expand their empire all the
way to Central Europe on the backs of cavalries and the blades of swords, but
their Christian contemporaries also used their armies to increase their power
throughout the world. World War I was the last occasion in which a Muslim state
declared war on a European one, when the Ottoman Empire joined the Christian
Austro-Hungarian Empire along with Germany and Bulgaria to take on the Allied
Powers which included most of the rest of Europe, and eventually the United
States. Few if any paint the Ottoman participation
in the Great War as some sort of jihad, and the Ottoman Empire was dismantled
after its defeat. What followed for Muslim world was a period in which almost
all Muslims lived under Christian colonial power- to over simplify it a bit,
most of the Middle East and Africa were divided among the French and British,
while Great Britain alone held South Asia, and the world’s largest Muslim
country, Indonesia, was still a Dutch colony.
The Second
World War brought about an end to colonialism and for Muslim countries the
beginning of a period of instability that still continues today. The newly
independent Muslim countries did not establish theocratic Islamic republics (of
which, the only one in history is the Islamic Republic of Iran, founded in
1979.) Instead, some countries became
hereditary monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, many maintaining close ties to their
former colonial powers, while others, such as Egypt, became modern republics,
which to a great degree modeled themselves after and allied themselves with the
Soviet bloc.
A new conflict
appeared during this period, and persists to this day, which can sometimes be
seen as religious: the Arab-Israeli conflict. While this situation is far too
complicated to sufficiently summarize here, one can understand that the
settling of millions of European Jews in land already inhabited by Arab Muslims
and Christians was, and is, an extraordinary spark to conflict. The Western powers, Christian nations like
the US, Great Britain, and France, explicitly and materially sided with the new
State of Israel against the Arab states who threatened, and attacked numerous
times, the new Jewish nation.
At the same
time, in the context of the Cold War, the West supported the often oppressive
pseudo-monarchies throughout the Muslim world, and generally opposed
left-leaning Arab-nationalist republics. Initially, people throughout the Arab
world who wanted to resist the pro-Western oppression allied themselves with
leftist Arab governments like those of Gamal Nasser in Egypt and Muammar Gadhafi
in Libya, but Egypt moved over to the Western alliance after Nasser’s death,
and by the 1990’s the fall of the Soviet Union basically ended worldwide
revolutionary leftism. Thus, Islamism and Islamic terrorist groups gained steam
as the best option for resistance against the oppressive, pro-Western
governments as leftism faded at the end of the 20th century. Likewise, in the 1990’s Islamic terrorism
began to rise. Again oversimplifying to
some extent, we have the backdrop of the modern Muslim-Western conflict, though
we are mostly speaking in the context of Arab nations, who only make up a
fraction of the Muslim world.
That
tendency of ours to view the Muslim world in an exclusively or predominately
Arab context is somewhat forgivable. Islam started in Arabia, and spread out to the
countries that today are considered Arab countries, from Syria to Morocco, and
also to Africa and Central Asia, where the Turks, Persians, and other non-Arabs
became Muslims, as well as to South Asia where millions of people in the Indian
Subcontinent converted to Islam. Islam also took root in the island nations of
Malaysia and Indonesia, the latter being home to more Muslims than any other
country. When you think about all of the
nationalities are Muslims, why is it that Muslim terrorists tend to be
Arabs? Could it be more about the
political context than the religious?
If we
explore the question more we can see that the former Ottoman Empire was the
last frontier of European world domination, to use a bold expression. By the
end of the 19th century, most of the Americas, Africa and Asia had been
colonized by Europeans. Thus, a power structure convenient to Europe was in
place, and European values were already understood, and often accepted, by a
great number of people outside of the Arab world. So, as the 20th
century saw Western Europe and the US became superpowers, first dismantling the
Ottoman Empire and eventually defeating their Soviet rivals, the Arabs were
somewhat left in the past as they looked to tradition and religion rather than
accept the value system of their oppressors, especially when socialism failed
to fill the political void left by the Ottoman collapse. The Turks themselves
reacted very contrarily, purposefully choosing to model their new secular
republic after the West, and forcefully abandoning much of their ancient
traditions, even adopting a Western Latin-style alphabet. Other non-Arab
Muslims were mostly under long-standing British or French colonial rule in
Africa and Asia, the biggest exception being the Iranians, who were under the
rule of the Western-allied Shah, who successfully oppressed opposition for most of his rule until Islamists toppled him in 1979.
The Gulf
States, such as Saudi Arabia, are often viewed as enemy states in anti-Muslim circles
in the West. However, these former provinces of the Ottoman Empire are
monarchies that have maintained close ties to the Western powers, the principal
consumers of the main source of these states’ wealth: oil. Prior to the exploitation of oil, mostly in
the latter half of the 20th century, this area of the world was
extremely underdeveloped. People lived an ancient tribal style of life that to this day has
not completely disappeared. To varying degrees these kingdoms are today ruled
very oppressively by royal families who rose to power just as the colonial
period came to an end. In some cases those ruling tribal families were
handpicked by the exiting colonial powers. That link between the ruling
families in the Gulf States and the West can be seen in the fact that the US
and UK have military bases built inside those countries.
At the same
time, there are rival families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE etc., who
hold uneasy alliances with the rulers. Many individuals in these families, who
do boast vast amounts of oil wealth, seek to change the balance of power by supporting,
openly or clandestinely, anti-Western groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, terrorist groups who use that
money to finance armies and propaganda. The Gulf States, having been one of the
culturally most isolated places in the world, practice a form of Islam that is
very predominate in society and which reflects what could fairly be called less
enlightened social norms. That form of Islam, often known as Wahhabism, is
exported to the rest of the Muslim world with Gulf-financed Islamic schools
opening around the world, out of which spring many of the ideas and actions which
we criticize in Muslims. It is important
to note that before the surge of petroleum-based wealth in the Persian Gulf,
Islamic terrorism didn’t really exist.
Today we do
see Islamic terrorism as a threat, but it is important to recognize the terrorist
acts that shock us are undeniably linked to the ultra-orthodox jihadism
exported from the Persian Gulf states, while Muslims in other parts of the
world do not exhibit such behavior. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey
are example of large Muslim countries whose governments and peoples have for
the most part distanced themselves from terrorism and other Islamic aggression.
Large Muslim minorities live in China and India who have generally lived at
peace side-by-side the rest of the population of those countries. The US is
also home to a couple million Muslims, of which only the tiniest fraction has
ever displayed support towards the violent ideas many argue is an intrinsic
part of Islam.
Terrorism
isn’t the only sin we attribute to Muslims.
We also see abuse of women as something very prominent in Islam, from denying
women basic rights to the horrific practice of female genital mutilation. These
may be terrible, indefensible practices, but we must hesitate in attributing
them to Islam. Over a billion people practice Islam, from the Saharan desert to
the tropical islands of Southeast Asia, and to the streets and suburbs of
almost every major city in the world. If we travel the world looking for Muslim
sins and then lump together simply because the sinners were Muslim, we make
every Muslim look outrageous. So, while female genital mutilation is
unfortunately practiced in some Muslim nations in Africa (as well as some
Christian ones), it is unheard of in most Muslim countries, even places that
are considered extremely strict Islamic nations, such as Iran.. And while some
Muslim countries severely restrict women’s political rights, Bangladesh, Indonesia,
Pakistan and Turkey, some of the largest and most powerful Muslim countries,
have elected women to be their respective heads of state, an achievement most
Christian states haven’t managed yet.
Still there
are some things that shock us which obviously stem out of Islamic
teachings. Why should women be required
to cover themselves? While people from the West might ask that of Muslims,
people of more isolated societies might ask of Western Christians or Chinese
Taoists why they cover their torsos with shirts all the time, and why women must
always hide their breasts. If we in the West require women to cover their chests
in public, why is it so bizarre that some Muslims require women to cover their
ears?
But then
there is the question of the polemic cartoons that portray the Prophet Mohamed
and the violent reactions of many Muslims to these works. That is probably a
difficult thing to assimilate into any western point of view, no matter how conservative
or liberal. We must try to understand
the traditional Muslim beliefs about are, and the extent, and intent, of these controversial
cartoons. In Islam, at least in one interpretation of it, it is haram
(forbidden, unholy, sinful) to make images of people (carvings, drawings,
etc.). It is then even more of a sin to make images of the faith’s most sacred
figure, the Prophet Mohamed. If a cartoonist chooses to purposefully violate a
tenant of the religion he most certainly is addressing in his art, and then to
go so far as to use that haram image to ridicule the faith of a billion people,
he cannot be shocked by the confrontational nature of the reaction. Of course, any artist has all the right in
the world to make such art, and no one is justified in committing violence for
such a reason, but quite possibly non-Muslims should be more conscious of the potency
and obviously offensive intention of artwork like that of Charlie Hebdo while
still condemning the violence of those who use their faith as an excuse for
murder.
And suicide
bombing? That is perhaps one of the most shocking acts of Muslim terrorists. It
is not easy to understand or explain what inspires such violence, but it’s
important to recognize that Muslims didn’t invent terrorism, nor are they the most
frequent culprits of it if we really look at numbers. Islam is also not the
only inspiration for self-sacrificing mass murder. Warriors throughout history have been
expected to lay down their lives in the attempt to shed enemy blood. Perhaps it is not Muslims, but humanity in
general that has brought that suicidal killer instinct to a new low.
If we go
beyond the small sample size of recent events and instead look at the 1300
years of Muslim history, we do not see a narrative any more violent than those
of other major religions. When we
continue to examine modern history in a comprehensive fashion, we can also
understand that the surge of Islamic violence today is much more a result of geopolitics
than of religious beliefs. And if we take a deep look at the world today, we
see that there is no one color with which we can paint Muslims, and so we cannot
accurately extrapolate negative conclusions from the actions of a handful of
the most extreme followers of Islam.
We learn
more from questions than from statements, so I leave you with a few:
·
Why
are so many Islamic militants Arabs while so few are Malays or Indonesians?
·
How
is it that Turkey has formed a modern secular republic while other Muslim nations
haven’t?
·
Who
have elected more women heads of state, Muslim countries or Catholic counties?
·
Is
the Ku Klux Klan a Christian extremist group? Why or why not?
·
During
the 18th and 19th centuries, what Muslim aggression took
place against Christians? How does that
compare to Christian aggression towards Muslims in the same time period? Or to
Christian aggression towards other Christians? Muslims toward Muslims?
·
Why
should a woman cover her breasts in public at (virtually) all times but men can
at times walk around bare-chested?
·
Is
there anyone who is as important to Western society as Mohamed is to Muslim
society?
