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Exploiting Western Dhimmitude
By Jacob Thomas
I couldnıt believe my eyes! As I was surfing the Internet on 31
January, 2008, my eyes caught the headline of an article that appeared
in the daily online, Elaph, ³Bidayat Tahawwol Fikri fi America Hiyal
al-Islam.² The Beginning of Rethinking about Islam in America.
The author was commenting on Professor Graham E. Fullerıs article in
Foreign Policy journal. He was delirious with joy to discover one
Western intellectual who truly understood Islam, and defended it
against the calumnies of Americans and other Westerners.
I would like to share with you excerpts from his article, adding my
analysis and comments.
³Professor Graham F. Fullerıs article in the January-February, 2208,
issue of Foreign Policy, represents an im****tant intellectual change in
the United States, specifically, and in the West, generally. It is a
truthful re****t that does justice to Arabs and Muslims; after the total
injustice that has been inflicted on them, both practically and
theoretically.
³The appearance of such a vision that approximates the truth vis-à-vis
the Arabs and Islam is an indication that truth cannot be falsified or
hidden forever. Some Western circles are trying to see the truth as it
is; with patience and more hard work, the truth will be known.
³The im****tant question now is: are these indications that manifest a
proper understanding of Islam, going to impact the political circles in
the West, before it is too late? In other words, unless this rethinking
about Islam takes place, a total rupture would result between Muslims
and the West, as we may notice from the events in that vast expanse
between Jakarta and Casablanca.
³The author of the article is not an academician living in an isolated
ivory tower; he was a deputy director of the C.I.A, and was charged
with forecasting future events. At present, he is professor of history
at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver. In 2003, he published his
famous book, ³The Future of Political Islam.²
³While we do understand that the interests of states may be in conflict
in certain areas, nevertheless, to deny the truth does not help even
those states whose interests are in question. In fact to persist in
ignoring the truth would eventually lead to the destruction of these
interests. For example, to keep on ignoring the legitimate rights of
the Palestinian people, and to sup****t the occupation of their land,
leads to what the West calls Irhab (terrorism). Actually this response
is nothing but a type of self-defence that has lost its way and led to
self-destruction. It is what the weak have to resort to, as they feel
their impotence and despair, having no other means to express
themselves, except by resorting to acts of violence.
³Professor Fuller employs a unique way of showing the truth as he
attempts to convince the reader to visualize a world without Islam, a
world where Islam had never risen. Violence and wars would still have
happened. Ethnic clashes from the dawn of history have been going on;
the wars between the Persians and the Greeks, Eastern and Western
Christians, had nothing to do with Islam.
³Indeed, what is very disturbing, especially after the events of 11
September, 2001, is that Western discourse has been transfixed by
Irhab, without any prior mental or psychological preparation for
understanding the causes of terrorism.
³Graham Fullerıs article indicates that a change in the Western
attitude towards world events is happening. It goes against the
ideology of the Neoconservatives who see in Islamofascism, as they
claim, the new foe of the West. Professor Fuller reminds Western
Christians that they were the first to persecute the Jews for more than
a thousand years, ending with the holocaust.
³The Westıs preoccupation with terrorism, claiming its connection with
Islam, ignores that it has manifested itself long ago in many parts of
the world. Terrorists are not just Arabs and Muslims. Here is a list of
terrorist acts in recent history: Jewish violence against the British
in Palestine, Tamil Tigers accts in Sri Lanka, the assassination of
Rajiv Gandhi in India, the Sikhıs murder of Indira Gandhi, the IRA
terrorism in Northern Ireland, the Mau Mau crimes in Kenya; all these
historical events point to the fact that terrorism has been a universal
phenomenon.²
Analysis
The Elaph article belongs to a genre of Arab and Muslim apologetic
writings that loves to find a Western author come to the defence of
Islam. No sooner had the Foreign Policy issue with Graham Fullerıs
apologia for Islam appeared, than a Mideastern writer jumped to the
occasion, heralding the hoped-for beginning of a Western change of
attitude vis-à-vis Islam.
Comments
I have already commented in my article, ³A Confused and a Misleading
Forecaster² on Graham Fullerıs contribution to Foreign Policy, having
read about it in Wall Street Journal. Naturally, at the time, I did not
know that Fullerıs apologia was to be made known in the Arab world so
quickly, thanks to the Internet! (See FFI of 31 January, 2008, for my
previous comments on Fullerıs article)
The Elaph article is full of misrepresentations of the facts of
Arab-Islamic history. At the very time when in our globalized and
interdependent world, candor and honesty are in great need, here we
have a Western dhimmiıs article being exploited and praised as
pioneering a Western rethinking movement regarding Islam!
I donıt want to comment on every paragraph in the Elaph article.
Instead, I quote from some well-known scholarly sources regarding
Islamic history, as a rebuttal to the panegyric of Islam as chanted by
Graham Fuller.
First I turn to a book that appeared in 1993, ³Islam and War: A Study
in Comparative Ethics,² authored by Professor John Kelsay, published by
Westminster/John Knox Press, in Louisville, KY.
³The territory of Islam is theoretically the territory of peace and
justice. ... Islam provides the best and most secure peace available to
humanity... The peace of the world cannot be fully secure unless all
people come under the protection of an Islamic state. Thus there always
exists an imperative for Muslims: to struggle to extend the boundaries
of the territory of Islam. Thus ... the classical Sunni perspective on
peace involved a program of action. The struggle to extend the
boundaries of the territory of Islam is the jihad.² P. 34
³[For] Sunni intellectuals, a normalı war is connected with the effort
to extend the boundaries of Islamic territory. This struggle, for which
the preferred means is the spread of the Islamic message through
preaching, teaching, and the like, may nevertheless take on the
character of war. When it does, there is a collective obligation laid
upon the Muslim community to supply the necessary manpower for a
successful military action. ...the territory of Islam --- really, the
world --- could not be a secure place until and unless Islamic hegemony
was acknowledged everywhere. To secure such hegemony was the goal of
the jihad, or struggle in the path of God.ı According to the Sunni
theorists, war or jihad by means of killing is justified when a people
resists or otherwise stands in opposition to the legitimate goals of
Islam.² P. 61
More than a decade after Professor Kelsayıs book appeared, ³Islamic
Imperialism: A History² of Professor Ephraim Karsh, was published by
Yale University Press. Here are some pertinent quotations: [One school
of thought regarding the root causes for the Islamistsı attacks that
have taken place in many parts of the world claims these] ³attacks were
a misguided, if not wholly inexplicable, response to Americaıs arrogant
and self-serving foreign policy by a fringe extremist group, whose
violent interpretation of Islam has little do with the actual spirit
and teachings of this religion.² Pp. 1, 2
³The worlds of Christianity and Islam, however, have developed
differently in one fundamental respect. The Christian faith won over an
existing empire in an extremely slow and painful process and its
universalism was originally conceived in purely spiritual terms that
made a clear distinction between God and Caesar. By the time it was
embraced by the Byzantine emperors as a tool for buttressing their
imperial claims, three centuries after its foundation, Christianity had
in place a countervailing ecclesiastical institution with an abiding
authority over the wills and actions of all believers. The birth of
Islam, by contrast, was inextricably linked with the creation of a
world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did
not distinguish between tem****al and religious powers, which were
combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his authority directly
from Allah and acted at one and the same time as head of the state and
head of the church. This allowed the prophet to cloak his political
ambitions with a religious aura and to channel Islamıs energies into
its instrument of aggressive expansion, there [being] no internal
organism of equal force to counterbalance it. ³Whereas Jesus spoke of
the Kingdom of God, Muhammad used Godıs name to build an earthly
kingdom.² P. 5
³Arab rulers and Islamist ideologues systematically convinced their
peoples to think that the independent existence of their respective
states was a tem****ary aberration that would be rectified in the short
term. The result has been a violent dissonance that has haunted the
Middle East into the twenty-first century, between the reality of state
nationalism and the dream of an empire packaged as a unified Arab
nationı or the worldwide Islamic umma.ı² Pp. 7, 8
³As in countless other cases of imperial expansion throughout the ages,
the quest for booty had been a central impetus behind the Islamic
conquests, enabling the Arab aristocracy to live in great luxury. But
nowhere was the splendor of Islamic empire more extravagantly
pronounced than under the Abbasids, not only during Harunıs reign
(786-809), widely considered the golden age of the Abbasid era, but
continuing well after the caliphs had lost their prowess: the
gem-studded golden dishes on the caliphıs table, the thousands of
gilded curtains at the royal palace, and the golden tree and the
ruby-studded golden elephant in the caliphıs courtyard are only some of
the more ostentatious possessions that bear witness to this
extravagance.² P. 43
³I was ordered to fight all men until they say There is no god but
Allah.ı With these farewell words the Prophet Muhammad summed up the
international vision of the faith he had brought to the world. As a
universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which
all humankind will life under Muslim rule as either believers or
subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is in***bent on
all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle
in the path of Allah,ı or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the
world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode
of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only
end with Islamıs eventual triumph. In the meantime, there can be no
peace between these two world systems, only the tem****ary suspensions
of hostilities for reasons of necessity or expediency.² P. 62
³The quest for Allahıs empire thus passed from the monarchs to
political activists and ideologues, or Islamists as they are now
commonly known, who set their sights far higher than their
predecessors. For the monarchs, the caliphate meant little more than
added legitimization of their ambitions for a regional empire. They had
little interest in the deeper inculcation of Islamıs precepts in their
Muslim subjects, let alone in spreading Allahıs message beyond the
House of Islam. The Islamists, by contrast, modeled themselves on
Islamıs early conquerors, and aspired to nothing less than the
substitution of Allahıs universal empire for the existing international
system. The power to rule over the earth has been promised to the
whole community of believers,ı argued the prominent Islamist Abul Ala
Mawduddi (1903-79), founder of the fundamentalist Jamaat Islami in
Pakistan.ı² Pp. 207, 208
³In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden
represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin. The House
of Islamıs war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable,
quest that is far from over. Only when the political elites of the
Middle East and the Muslim world reconcile themselves to the reality of
state nationalism, forswear pan-Arab and pan-Islamic imperialist
dreams, and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of
political ambition will the inhabitants of these regions at last be
able to look forward to a better future free of would-be Saladinıs.² P.
234
Finally, I turn to the dean of Middle East scholars, Bernard Lewis and
quote from his ³The Political Language of Islam² published by The
University of Chicago Press.
³According to Muslim teaching, jihad is one of the basic commandments
of the faith, an obligation imposed on all Muslims by God, through
revelation. The basis of the obligation of jihad is the universality
of the Muslim revelation. Godıs word and Godıs message are for all
mankind; it is the duty of those who have accepted them to strive
(Jahada) unceasingly to convert or at least to subjugate those who have
not. The obligation is without limit of time or space. It must continue
until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or
submitted to the power of the Islamic state. ³Until that happens, the
world is divided into two: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam), where
Muslims rule and the law of Islam prevails; and the House of War (dar
al-Harb), comprising the rest of the world. Between the two there is a
morally necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war,
until the final and inevitable triumph of Islam over unbelief.² P. 73
How sad, even tragic, that an article in a Western journal that
exonerated Islam from its age-long impulse for world supremacy, and
acts of terrorism that occur frequently in Iraq, Algeria, Afghanistan,
and Gaza, all done in the name of Islam, are ³explained² away by a
Western forecaster of the future, and joyfully picked-up by an Arab
journalist. I leave it to the readers of my article to judge between
the historiography of Graham Fuller and that of Bernard Lewis, Ephraim
Karsh, John Kelsay, and a host of other writers on Islam, such as V. S.
Naipaul, David-Pryce Jones, and Robert Spencer. At the very moment when
Arabs and Muslims need to view their history properly and objectively,
a Western interpreter of Islam intervenes with a flawed article that
gets instantly translated into Arabic, and uploaded on the most
widely-read Arabic daily, further adding to the confusion of the
subject. What a pity!
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