@SavoirFaire – It’s great that your wife is a scholar of Islam. Maybe you should show her the following excerpt from the book ‘The Crisis of Islam’ by Bernard Lewis. He is one of the top scholars of Islam in the US:
“From the lifetime of its founder Muhammad, and therefore in its sacred scriptures, Islam is associated in the minds and memories of Muslims with the exercise of political and military power. In the Muslim perception, the Jews and later the Christians had gone astray and had followed false doctrines. Both religions were therefore superseded, and replaced by Islam, the final and perfect revelation in God’s sequence. Islam has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught men of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It has inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievements, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that we have to confront part of the Muslim world while it is going through such a period, and when most, though by no means all, of that hatred is directed against us. There are still significant numbers, in some regions perhaps a majority, of Muslims with whom we share certain basic cultural and moral, social and political, beliefs and aspirations.
In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam. It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations. Islam as such is not an enemy of the West, and there are growing numbers of Muslims who desire nothing better than a closer and friendlier relationship with the West and the development of democratic institutions in their own countries. But a significant number of Muslims are hostile and dangerous, not because we need an enemy but because they do. In recent years, there have been some changes of perception and, consequently, of tactics among Muslims. Some of them still see in the West in general and its present leader, the United States, in particular, the ancient and irreconcilable enemy of Islam, the one serious obstacle to the restoration of God’s faith and law at home and their ultimate universal triumph. For these there is no alternative to a war to the death, in fulfillment of what they see as the commandments of their faith. There is a second category of Muslims, who, while remaining committed Muslims and while being well aware of the flaws of Western society, nevertheless also see its merits such as its inquiring spirit, which produced modern science and technology, and its concern with freedom, which created modern democratic government and free speech. Those belonging to this category, while retaining their own beliefs and their own culture, seek to join the West in reaching toward a freer and better world. Then there is a third category who, while seeing the West as their ultimate enemy and as the source of all evil, are nevertheless aware of its power, and seek some temporary accommodation and bide their time in order better to prepare for the final struggle. They pose as moderate Muslims and are often able to fool people in the West.
The rules for war against apostates are somewhat different and rather stricter than those for war against unbelievers. The apostate or renegade, in Muslim eyes, is far worse than the unbeliever. The unbeliever has not seen the light, and there is always hope that he may eventually see it. In the meantime, provided he meets the necessary conditions, he may be accorded the tolerance of the Muslim state and allowed to continue in the practice of his own religion, even the enforcement of his own religious laws. The renegade is one who has known the true faith, however briefly, and abandoned it. For this offense there is no human forgiveness, and according to the overwhelming majority of jurists, the renegade must be put to death. Militant leaders have proclaimed a double jihad against both foreign infidels and domestic apostates. Most Muslim rulers whom we in the West are pleased to regard as our friends and allies are regarded as traitors and, much worse than that, as apostates by many if not most of their own people. A good example was Anwar El Sadat, the third President of Egypt, serving from 1970 until his assassination by fundamentalist army officers in 1981. A key figure in the development that led to the assassination was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who became a leading ideologue of Muslim fundamentalism and an active member of the fundamentalist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, he studied in Cairo and for some years worked as a teacher and then as an official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. In that capacity he was sent on a special study mission to the United States, where he stayed from November 1948 to August 1950. His fundamentalist activism and writing began very soon after his return from America to Egypt. He wrote about his shocked response to the American way of life based on sinfulness and its addiction to what he saw as sexual promiscuity (Qutb outlined the contrast between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism and is considered to have been a major influence to Osama bin Laden). So the most powerful accusation of all is the degeneracy and debauchery of the American way of life, and the threat that it offers to Islam. This threat, classically formulated by Sayyid Qutb, became a regular part of the vocabulary and ideology of Islamic fundamentalists, and most notably, in the language of the Iranian Revolution. This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur’an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer and the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men.
Al-Qaeda has held the United States explicitly responsible for the military takeover in Algeria. Here as elsewhere America, as the dominant power in the world of the infidels, was naturally blamed for all that went wrong, and more specifically for the suppression of Islamist movements, the slaughter of their followers, and the establishment of what were seen as anti-Islamist dictatorships with American support. Here too they were blamed by many for not protesting this violation of democratic liberties, by some for actively encouraging and supporting the military regime. Similar problems arise in Egypt, in Pakistan, and in some other Muslim countries where it seems likely that a genuinely free and fair election result would result in an Islamist victory (in Egypt the prediction came true in 2012). In this, the democrats are of course at a disadvantage. Their ideology requires them, even when in power, to give freedom and rights to the Islamist opposition. The Islamists, when in power, are under no such obligation. On the contrary, their principles require them to suppress what they see as impious and subversive activities. For Islamists, democracy, expressing the will of the people, is the road to power, but it is a one-way road, on which there is no return, no rejection of the sovereignty of God, as exercised through his chosen representatives. Their electoral policy has been summarized as ‘one man, one vote, once’. The outward flow of oil and the corresponding inward flow of money brought immense changes to the Saudi kingdom, its internal structure and way of life, and its external role and influence, both in the oil-consuming countries and, more powerfully, in the world of Islam. The most significant change was in the impact of Wahhabism and the role of its protagonists. Wahhabism is the official, state-enforced doctrine of one of the most influential governments in the Islamic world. The country is the custodian of the two holiest places of Islam, the host of the annual pilgrimage, which brings millions of Muslims from every part of the world to share in its rites and rituals. At the same time, the teachers and preachers of Wahhabism have at their disposal immense financial resources, which they use to promote and spread their version of Islam. Even in Western countries in Europe and America, Wahhabi indoctrination centers may be the only form of Islamic education available to new converts and to Muslim parents who wish to give their children some grounding in their own inherited religious and cultural tradition. The indoctrination is provided in private schools, religious seminars, mosque schools, holiday camps and, increasingly, prisons. Because of the reluctance of the state to involve itself in religious matters, the teaching of Islam in schools and elsewhere has in general been totally unsupervised by authority. This situation clearly favors those with the fewest scruples, the strongest convictions and the most money. Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or some similar group obtains total control of the state of Texas, of its oil and therefore its oil revenues, and having done so, uses this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom, peddling their own peculiar brand of Christianity.
The exploitation of oil brought vast new wealth and with it new and increasingly bitter social tensions. In the old society inequalities of wealth had been limited, and their effects were restrained, on the one hand, by the traditional social bonds and obligations that linked rich and poor, and, on the other hand, by the privacy of Muslim home life. Modernization has all too often widened the gap, destroyed those social bonds, and through the universality of the modern media, made the resulting inequalities painfully visible. All this has created new and receptive audiences for Wahhabi and like-minded groups. It has now become normal to describe these movements as fundamentalist. The term is unfortunate for a number of reasons. It was originally an American Protestant term, used to designate certain Protestant churches that differed in some respects from the mainstream churches. The two main differences were liberal theology and biblical criticism, both seen as objectionable. Liberal theology has been an issue among Muslims in the past and may be again in the future. It is not at the present time. The literal divinity and inerrancy of the Qur’an is a basic dogma of Islam, and although some may doubt it, none challenge it.
Broadly speaking, Muslim fundamentalists are those who feel that the troubles of the Muslim world at the present time are the result not of insufficient modernization but of excessive modernization. From their point of view, the primary struggle is not against the Western enemy as such but against the Westernizing enemies at home, who have imported and imposed infidel ways on Muslim peoples. The task of the Muslims is to depose and remove these infidel rulers, sometimes by defeating or expelling their foreign patrons and protectors, and to abrogate and destroy the laws, institutions, and social customs that they have introduced, so as to return to a purely Islamic way of life, in accordance with the principles of Islam and the rules of the Holy Law.”
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