A Brief Amateur History of Islam and Terror

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 8^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 18^th and 19^th 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?