Muslim Perspective: Conclusion of a 3-Part Series

What was the Muslim perspective after World War II? At first, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen agreed with Britain's suggestion to form an Arab League to protect their independence from outside threats, especially from the Soviet Union. But a common opposition to the new Israeli state proved to be a stronger unifying force. Muslim countries that had no part in murdering Jewish prisoners in the Holocaust were unwilling to recognize Israeli independence. They responded with a declaration of war, when a UN resolution ended Britain's Palestinian Mandate and created the new state of Israel on May 15, 1948. The United States, with the largest concentration of Jewish people outside of Israel, went to the aid of Israel.

     After Mohammed's death, Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims took different directions and became bitter enemies (For an explanation of the rift, see the section, Mohammed's Legacy, in the earlier post, "This We Believe."). Both Muslim sects had splinter groups determined to annihilate Israel, and, by extension, Israel's ally, the United States. The new fundamentalist Shi'ite regime that took over in Iran in 1979 permitted militants to hold 62 Americans in the U.S. embassy for over a year. Israel viewed exiled Palestinian Sunnis and Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shia in Lebanon as terrorists. To rid its northern border of the threat posed by both groups, Israel supported the 1982 raid by Maronite Christian militias that resulted in a refugee camp massacre.

     Seen as an ally of the Israeli forces behind the 1982 raid, the United States became an Hezbollah target. After a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives into the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in April, 1983, Iran directed another suicide operation that killed 241 at the U.S.Marine barracks there in October. Tel Aviv, which had destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, pressured Washington to see that Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear bomb would not succeed.

     Only because of a blatant invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 was President George H.W.Bush, with UN backing, able to assemble the international force that took just four days to defeat Iraq and liberate Kuwait. In other circumstances, the U.S. was a target in 1993 for Muslim terrorists who set off a bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York and for the terrorists, trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, who bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. With a successful "business plan" in hand, the Muslim mastermind behind these attacks traveled to Sudan in 1995 to remind Osama bin Laden how effective suicide bombers could be against Americans. (For additional information about the Muslim perspective, see the earlier post, "Why Do They Hate Us?")



   

Fight, Flight, or Something Else

We all have enemies. The alarm clock that tells us it's time to get up, when we'd prefer to sleep in. The bully who terrorizes us on social media. Our usual reaction is fight or flight. And we know the results. Violence leads to more violence and destruction, a shattered alarm clock. Flight can result in the kind of isolation from all people and depression that Sebastian Junger describes veterans suffer, when they return home after their tribal bonding with buddies in a war zone.

     When unusual circumstances make fight and flight impossible in a prison situation, we get a glimpse of a third way to deal with enemies. If it helps avoid violence and loneliness, it could be worth a try.

     While reading Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, I came across the report of an interrogation between Ali Soufan, a Muslim FBI agent, and Abu Jandal, who served as an Osama bin Laden bodyguard. After listening to Abu Jandal describe himself as a revolutionary trying to rid the world of the evil that came mainly from the United States, Soufan realized Abu Jandal had a very limited knowledge of the United States. He gave him a history of the United States in Arabic. Since Soufan had learned Abu Jandal was a diabetic, he also brought him sugarless wafers with his coffee.

     The sugarless-wafers-and-coffee-gesture reminded me that I had read Nelson Mandela had done something similar during the 27 years he was locked up in a South African prison. When one of his guards came in to run the projector on a movie night, Mandela heard him complaining that the tea he was carrying was cold. On the next movie night, Mandela was able to provide the guard with a cup of hot tea and cookies. Mandela would later invite the guard to his inauguration as President of South Africa.

     While in prison, Mandela learned the Afrikaans language of the Dutch descendants who imposed the apartheid restrictions on blacks in South Africa. He also studied the Afrikaner history and philosophy.

     Being a Muslim himself, Soufan could engage Abu Jandal in a discussion of the Quran 's instructions for the honorable conduct of warfare. "Are not women and children to be protected?" he asked. Soufan went on to point out al-Qaeda even killed Muslims in the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa and in New York.  Abu Jandal insisted, "The Sheikh is not that crazy. It was the Israelis." When he could no longer deny what the overwhelming evidence showed to be true, Abu Jandal provided information about the structure of al-Qaeda, locations of hideouts, and escape plans.

     My granddaughter, who will be a high school senior this fall, is on the "Senior Citizens" committee created to help freshmen feel at home in the new surroundings that house 2,200 students seven hours a day. Since her mother had been on a similar high school committee, she passed on some advice about what to tell freshmen. I told them, if they see me in the hall, don't be afraid to come over and tell me how things are going or to ask for advice. Introduce me to your friends. I'm not a big bad senior who knows it all. A few years ago I was a freshman and next year I'll be a freshman again in college. Fight, flight, or understand.

   

   

Why Do They Hate Us?

Let's begin by recognizing that Indonesia, a country where 86% of its estimated 252,812,245 population is Muslim, is a democracy with a traditional commitment to religious diversity. Despite opposition from extremists, Time magazine (April 27/May 4, 2015) noted that Indonesia's President Joko Widodo appointed a Christian woman as a district chief in Jakarta. In other words, hate for the West is not an emotion shared by all Muslims.

     Zak Ebrahim, whose father murdered a militant Jewish Defense League rabbi and helped plan the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, observed in his book, The Terrorist's Son, "murderous hatred has to be taught...forcibly implanted. It's not a naturally occurring phenomenon." It is, therefore, not to justify or condemn the feelings of Muslims who hate the West but to lay out the reasons Ebrahim's father, El-Sayyid Nosair, and those in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, give to explain why they hate the West.

     Wright reminds us that Muslims went in two different directions after the death of Mohammed. The vast majority of Mohammed's followers are Sunnis who believe caliphs, Islamic clerics, should be elected. In contrast Shia Muslims, such as the Iranian Muslims who are Persians rather than Arabs, expected a hereditary caliphate, rule of Islamic clerics, to begin with Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Within the Sunni majority, a fundamentalist subset of Salafists believe the only valid Islamic practices are the "early Muslim" (Salaf) ways followed during the time of Mohammed (See a description in the earlier blog post, "This We Believe."). In Egypt, Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brothers in 1928 in order to form an Islamic state where the government, a Sharia legal code based on 500 immutable verses from the Quran, and lives would be centered on God. The Muslim Brotherhood came to be seen as a social service agency that provided jobs, schools, and hospitals and as an organization willing to achieve an Islamic state through the political process and compromise. Within the Brotherhood, a "secret apparatus," or army, also was formed to achieve this aim by violent means. The Ayatollah Ruhollan Khomeini, who formed a rigid theocratic state in the wealthy, modern country of Iran in 1979, sanctions this kind of terror and the use of the sword by warriors in a jihad, holy war, against infidels. Iran became a model for those who would impose religious dictatorships by force.

     To devout Muslims, infidels are those who practice a full array of godless, immoral behavior: homosexuality, adultery, divorce, the sexual freedom of women who flirt and wear enticing colors, close male and female dancing, jazz that arouses primitive instincts, drinking liquor and drunkenness, racism, violent sports, individualism, and materialism. Muslims believe Islam will triumph over both capitalists and communists, because modernity in the West, rather than focusing all aspects of life on God, has separated the secular and sacred, mind and spirit, state and religion, and science and theology.

     However, Muslim aspirations for forming an Islamic theocracy in Egypt were crushed by the secular regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser; Israel's swift victory in the 1967 Six Day War; and Anwar al-Sadat's secular democratic state, his ban on religious student organizations and traditional Islamic garb worn by university women, and Egypt's peace agreement with Israel. When a military plot to kill Sadat was successful in 1981, thousands were imprisoned in a 12th century dungeon where they were severely tortured. Among the prisoners was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a member of an underground cell that kept alive the idea of a jihad movement that would establish an Islamic state. When Zawahiri, who was a doctor, first went to Pakistan in 1980 to care for Afghan refugees who fled across the border following the Soviet invasion, he noted the training received by the Afghan freedom fighters or holy warriors, the "mujahideen," and how the area could serve as a base for recruiting an army of jihadists to take over Egypt and ultimately the West, considered to be the enabling force behind the Egyptian regime and state of Israel. Zawahiri's organization, which was strapped for money, would join forces with Osama bin Laden in the well financed al-Qaeda organization.

     The divide between supporters of secular governments and Islamic theocracies shows itself in a variety of countries. In Bangladesh, the secular Shahbag movement squares off against Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, a group with ties to al-Qaeda in India. Al-Qaeda is taking credit for the May 12, 2015 murder of Ananta Bijoy Dash, who wrote for the Free Mind website that promotes secularism in Bangladesh.. Earlier, other Bangladesh bloggers, Avijit Roy, Oyasiqur Rhaman, and Ahmed Rajib Haider also had been killed by young Islamic activists. Dash had told friends that he did not expect anyone to kill him in his home in Sylhet.

     It should be noted that religion is not the only cause for the rise of what has become known as Islamic fundamentalism. Racism, and in some cases colonialism, has had an impact on non-whites.
In Egypt, for example, the poverty, disease, and illiteracy of the local population stood in stark contrast to the sporting clubs, hotels, bars, casinos, movie theatres, restaurants, and department stores that catered to the English upper classes and troops who began coming to Egypt when it became a British Protectorate in 1882. In fact, British troops continued to maintain a base in the Suez Canal Zone throughout half of the 20th century.