July 30, 2010
The Attacks on Islam
Living in the United States since 9/11 for Muslims has been a challenging experience. One of those constant challenges has been the never ending stream of attacks on our religion. They began in the first week after 9/11 and have continued to the present day, and have even been used against Obama, with many conservative Americans convinced that he is a Muslim. The attacks are varied, and come from many different sources. American Muslims should be aware of these different attacks, and what the real motives are of the perpetrators.
There are many different ways in which Islam is attacked. One strain is attacks on the Qur’an itself. In these cases, the main technique is to take specific verses of the Qur’an out of context and use them as proof of the bloodthirsty nature of Muslims and Islam. To make these attacks work, the real message of the Qur’an, both with regards to the specific issue, and with its main theme, have been suppressed and ignored.
Commonly what is cited is verses having to do with war, or a few verses critical of certain Jews at certain times. But the main theme of the Qur’an, which is to do justice above all else, is bypassed. Even with regards to war, the Qur’an commands Muslims to never be the aggressor, to make peace even when it is risky, and to uphold treaties. The Jews are criticized for specific actions, like turning their backs on Moses and worshipping the Golden Calf, but the Qur’an also permits marriages to Jews, and says that Jews have nothing to fear from God if they worship only God and do good works.
A second type of attack is to go after the Prophet. Usually this is done by taking at face value alleged actions of the Prophet, and then emphasizing critical versions of those stories. For example, the Treaty of Hudabiyya is portrayed as a sham by the Prophet to buy time after which he broke the treaty at the first opportunity. Or the story of Bani Qurayza is used to prove that the Prophet was engaged in slaughtering Jews. Or the story of his marriage to Aisha, in which it is claimed that Aisha was merely nine years old, thereby making the Prophet a pedophile. These types of attacks are wrong on two levels. First, we have no written evidence documenting any of the life of the Prophet outside of the Qur’an. The Sira was put together by Ibn Ishaq around 90 AH, and the first collections of Hadith came after that. We simply have no way of knowing whether any of these historical details are even remotely accurate. Most Muslims do not accept the story of Bani Qurayza as being true, even contemporaries of Ibn Ishaq were highly critical of it. The age of Aisha at marriage is unknown, one Hadith of poor quality put it at 9, but many others point to an age in the late teens.
A third type of attack is to use the worst practices of any Muslims around the world as evidence that all Muslims are bad. Often the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia or Iran or under the Taliban is used to indict Islam or Muslims in general. There are certainly examples of intolerance of other religions that can be found. And there are cases of massacres and other terrible events in Muslim countries. Samuel Huntington in the 1990’s wrote that the Muslim world had “bloody borders” in his book “The Clash of Civilizations”, but didn’t really try to analyze that claim too closely.
These attacks are often factually correct, but are cherry-picked to make the Muslim world look evil in comparison to the United States in 2010. But if we take a broader look at history, clearly there has been more religious freedom in Muslim lands than in Europe for each of the last 14 centuries since Islam began. For that matter, more than 10 times as many people have died in wars started by Christian nations in the last hundred years than by Muslim nations. And while we can certainly find plenty of bad things going on in the Muslim world, there are also plenty of good things too. Who is more authentic representative of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, or Shirin Ebadi, the courageous Muslim woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of human rights in Iran?
The attacks on Islam are coming from four main quarters. First are pro-Israeli groups. Their main goal is political. They see the rising number of Muslims in the US and the West in general as a political threat to their dominance of US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. In order to keep Muslims out of the political process, they must be seen as beyond the pale and not legitimate voices that should be heard and heeded.
The second group is evangelical Christians. For them, Islam is seen as a competitor and threat. Islam continues to grow around the world, and there is a good chance it will be the world’s largest religion by 2050 or 2060. Evangelicals see Islam as threatening to their goals of spreading Christianity, and so seek to attack and criticize it whenever they can.
The third group is hardline Hindus. They see Islam in South Asia as a foreign presence, and the cause of partition that they still have not fully accepted. They also see Islam as motivating Kashmiri separatism and Pakistan’s support for the Kashmiris. For these reasons they have made common cause with hardline Zionists in attacking Muslims. The goal is to delegitimize the political demands of the Palestinians and the Kashmiris by portraying them as religious fanatics under the clutch of a ruthless intolerant religion, rather than the oppressed victims that they really are.
The last group is the neo-conservatives in the US. They are not primarily motivated by religion, but they want the US to dominate the Muslim world as part of maintaining America’s global preeminence. This requires maintaining public support for an aggressive policy toward the Muslim world. To achieve this, the public must be convinced that Islam and Muslims represent a backward, barbaric, and dangerous element which requires vigilance on the part of the US. This task was greatly facilitated by 9/11 and by terror attacks since then around the world by Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. In fact, Al-Qaeda has been the greatest friend and tool of the enemies of the Muslim world.
Comments can reach me at Nali@socal.rr.com
