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Robert Spencer. ONWARD MUSLIM SOLDIERS: HOW JIHAD STILL THREATENS AMERICA AND THE WEST. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003.
9 February 2004
Richard P. Richter
the
"globalization" homepage
JIHAD & DHIMMITUDE: DO TRADITIONAL QUR'ANIC DOCTRINES PREVENT ISLAM AND THE WEST FROM FINDING COMMON GROUND?
When Islamist extremists rammed highjacked jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, they changed the lives of every American, one way or another. In my case, they awakened me to an abysmal ignorance. I had spent little time theretofore reading about Islam or the tortured political story of the Middle East and other far-flung Muslim lands east and west of Mecca.
In the moments after impact, when my wife phoned to tell me what she was seeing on TV, I was just sitting down in my office to read James H. Mittelman’s The Globalization Syndrome. The question in my mind was how to reconcile the irresistible force of economic globalization, driven by America, and the social uncertainties it brought around the world. I was wondering how to square Western Enlightenment energy, still churning through globalization, with the critique of the Enlightenment pretensions to universal validity found in postmodernist theory. (See Globalization & Postmodernism Complement and Contradict One Another.)
Far from my mind was the prospect that our drive toward globalization, representing the latest push toward a universal culture, was clashing head-on with an Islamic universalism rooted in fourteen centuries of glorious and inglorious history and now being fueled with new energy in the post-colonial conditions of the last third of the twentieth century. Watching the towers fall, I was astounded largely because I had omitted from my inquiries into the state of the world any serious consideration of the cultural and political force of Islam across a vast expanse of the globe and its relevance to life on American shores.
Like many Americans, I tried to catch up in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. My reading brought me to a superficial understanding of the resurgent ideology of Islamism in the writings of Sayyid Qutb and others. I learned about the birth and spread of the Muslim Brotherhood and came belatedly to grasp something of the logic of Islamist theology that fueled the violence against the US through the 1980s and 1990s.
A consistent theme in these discoveries was that the violence of bin Laden and Al-Qa’ida resulted from their extremist reading of the doctrine of jihad—war against Jews and Christians and other unbelievers--found in the historic traditions of Islam. One Catholic student of Islam, for example, said in a 1998 book, “[T]he vast majority of Muslims would say that people who commit violent acts of terrorism have very definitely lost hold of the fundamentals of their faith….[M]ost Muslims would likely agree that a life based on the fundamentals of Islam cannot embrace extremist behavior.” (John Renard. 101 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON ISLAM. New York: Gramercy Books, 1998, p.44) Muslim apologists told us that jihad rightly understood was the inner struggle of the Muslim to be a good person in the eye of God; it was not the use of the sword against infidels. Trying to focus America’s response to 9-11, President Bush drew a sharp line between the evil terrorists and what he called the peaceful religion of Islam.
I was encouraged by such assurances about the nature of Islam. I wanted to believe that 9-11, however violent, was a beginning of a new and far-reaching “engagement” between the West and Islam that ultimately would transcend violence. Armed with some hasty reading on Islam by such scholars as Bernard Lewis and John Esposito, I developed the optimistic view that a productive and positive period of accommodation would occur after we finished the necessary military actions against Al-Qa’ida terrorists. Somehow (I did not know how), this cultural accommodation would flow into the rising stream of globalization. It was possible for me to imagine, however vaguely, that the human community around the world in the long run would move in a good direction in the aftermath of our tragedy. Economic, political, and cultural relationships would become positive as the global community knitted itself more closely together in an environment keynoted by the revolution in communications technology.
Dark notes, however, certainly rose out of my hasty inquiries. In Esposito’s comprehensive book on Islam, for example, I learned that some Muslims feared any genuine dialogue on basic religious issues or interfaith accommodations with non-Muslims. They did not want to appear to be unfaithful to Islam by allowing the possibility that it had not already said the last word. Muslims suspected that Christians would try to convert them. When I read V. S. Naipaul’s Beyond Belief, my pessimism about a mutually forthcoming Islam-West engagement deepened. His report of excursions among the non-Arabic “converted peoples” of Islam hammered home the stiff-necked sense of exclusivity fostered, as he saw it, by Islamic doctrine. Mohammed Iqbal, the Indian Muslim poet who inspired the partition of British India into the new independent states of Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, got to the heart of the problem, as Naipaul interpreted him: “Muslims can live only with other Muslims.”
Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s run-up to a preemptive attack on Iraq fractured the sense of unity with other Western nations and sympathetic nations elsewhere that arose in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. The Bush strut in the war on terrorists seemed to exacerbate anti-American feelings in the Muslim world. When our military forces rolled into Baghdad, I recognized it as cultural engagement, all right—but it was a long way from what I had been imagining. It became impossible for me to see beyond the fog of war and occupation toward a peaceful accommodation of ideas and beliefs.
I came to some clarity by simply disagreeing with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. We will defeat the terrorists who wounded us, I said, by staying focused on their organization, Al-Qa'ida, and its increasingly mythical leader, bin Laden. We should minimize the Iraqi misadventure as much as possible. After removing the Al-Qa’ida extremists from the scene by force, we then will be free to pursue the peaceful engagement of ideas between Western voices and moderate Islamic voices.
I still assumed that such voices had a place at the center of Islamic thought—despite the dark warnings I had glimpsed. And I still assumed that Al-Qa'ida remained an extremist fringe group that was exaggerating the violent meaning of jihad—war against unbelievers--and the superiority of believers over non-Muslims. In short, I was reaffirming the peaceable view of mainstream Islam that so many of us grasped for immediately after 9-11.
Robert Spencer's Onward Muslim Soldiers calls into question this comforting way of marginalizing the Muslims who seek to destroy Americans and the Western way of life by violent means.
Spencer devotes his entire book to arguing that Al-Qa'ida and similar groups do not stand at the margins of Islam but take their vitality from its theological center. These radical Muslims do not seek the violent destruction of America and the West simply to rectify economic wrongs left over from colonialism and exacerbated by globalization. They have not been "twisting and abusing Islamic theology" in order to rationalize their terrorist activities against us. (xi) Rather, their message of "jihad" is straight out of "the old-time religion." (xi) Spencer says:
Samuel Huntington puts it bluntly in The Clash of Civilizations: "Some Westerners, including President Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamic extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise." Jihad constitutes an ongoing and global threat to the / West—a threat that, as Huntington points out, key Western analysts and policymakers persistently refuse to face on its own terms. (xi-xii)
Spencer tries to wake us up to the reality of the threat that he perceives by examining in detail how today's doctrine of violence against unbelievers—mainly Jews and Christians-- derives from unaltered and largely unrepudiated beliefs rooted firmly in the Qur'an and the Hadith.
“Jihad is a central duty of every Muslim,” Spencer says. (5) “Violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history.” (10) He cites from the four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence to demonstrate how the obligation of Muslims to undertake jihad finds its roots in the Qur'an and commentary on it. (The schools are Shafi’i, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Maliki, which receive attention in Esposito’s account of the history of Islam.) For example, he quotes a Maliki philosopher and legal theorist, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406):
In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. (9)
Spencer takes a critical look at Muslims in America today to discover how deeply the doctrine of jihad touches them. He finds that textbooks used at mosques and Islamic schools in America contain the Saudi-funded Wahhabi teachings about non-Muslims. Jews are enemies of Islam, descended, as a Qur'an reference indicates, from apes and pigs. (19) Spencer cites various statements by Muslims that their first loyalty is to Islam, not to the United States. He allows that “most American Muslims are like everyone else; they want to live quiet and peaceful lives.” (26) Still, he maintains that imams in America abound who “advocate violence in the name of Islam.” (26)
Spencer usefully shows how Muslims throughout the world presented “the war on Iraq as a war on Islam.” (27) They cast Americans as “crusaders” coming to invade a part of the blessed land of Islam. A sheikh in Baghdad called for “every individual Muslim” to make jihad in accordance with the sacred obligation to repel infidels from the holy places. (41)
A major theme in Spencer’s study is that purportedly moderate Muslim groups, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), are making no effort “within the Muslim community in the United States or abroad to counter extremist understandings of jihad.” (50)
Looking beyond the US, Spencer finds in Europe a festering situation. Growing Muslim minorities are raising serious doubts about the fate of Europe. The doubt lies in the direction these minorities will follow in their allegiances. If they adhere strictly to a desire for traditional Sharia law and the foundation of an exclusionary Islamic society, there will be conflict without accommodation. (83) Meanwhile, the issue surfaces in conflicts like the one in France over the banning of religious clothing in schools.
Warfare against the West, Spencer writes, is universal and unlimited in time so long as the world remains less than solidly Muslim. (85-112) That is because their religion drives Muslims to jihad--not the familiar motives for war derived from economic, social, and political conflict. We think of war as the extension of politics; combatants can negotiate terms. Islam thinks of war as the expression of religious faith; the terms of negotiation are severely limited by religious law. Muslims can give unbelievers just three choices, defined by Muhammad: convert to Islam, accept Muslim protection in return for paying a tax and accepting "dhimmi" status (inferior to Muslims), or die.
The reverse side of this aggressive action toward the non-Muslim world is a fierce defense of what many refer to as the Muslim nation—those lands where Muslims predominate. Muslims bent on defending Islamic lands seem to reach paranoid levels of feeling against any and all forces, particularly American and Israeli, that might threaten to occupy them, especially the land of the holy places on the Arabian Peninsula.
To illustrate, Spencer quotes what Sheikh Nasser Muhammad Al-Ahmad, a Wahhabi cleric, said about the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives. Al-Ahmad said that it would be dishonorable for Muslims to negotiate. "Jihad for the sake of Allah" against the Israelis was the only way to regain the holy sites of Jerusalem. (96)
Another sheikh identified "globalization" as a "deadly weapon" of Jews, Christians, and their hypocritical allies. It would "gnaw away at the body of the [Muslim] nation." (98)
Saudi Arabia commands Spencer's special attention because of its special role as the birthplace of Islam and the protector of the holy places, Mecca and Medina. Since 9-11, the American press and some in Congress have puzzled over the paradoxical nature of the Saudi-US alliance. The US protects the regime militarily in the region and receives the benefit of its oil production. Yet, the regime that we protect spawns religious-based hatred of the US through Wahhabist mosques and schools. Saudi Arabia permits no non-Muslim religious practice anywhere in the kingdom.
Spencer quotes a Saudi sheikh to illustrate that traditional Islamic law justifies hatred of the US because it "implanted the tyrants in our land" and seeks to oppress believers. (99) The presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia figured largely in Osama bin Laden's logic for destroying the "Crusaders." (107)
Spencer traces the paradox of Saudi Arabia straight to the words of Muhammad. On his deathbed he said that "no two religions are allowed in Arabia." He also said, "I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslims." (108)
"Is war the will of Allah?" (115) Spencer explores the Qur'an and Muslim history to determine whether or not sacred Islamic text underpins extremist attacks such as 9-11. (115-146) Given our tradition of religious tolerance, we Americans want to believe that Islam is indeed, as President Bush said, a religion of peace. Spencer, however, gives us small comfort. While a theme of peace and tolerance is not absent from the Qur'an, it comes in the context of "dhimmitude." Muhammad would not kill those who refused to convert if they paid Jizya to the Muslims, the God-ordained tax, and behaved in a "subdued" manner in the sight of Muslims—"disgraced, humiliated, and belittled", in the words of a famed Islamic commentator, Ibn Kathir. (139) If they diligently remained in this second-class posture, they would benefit from the "protection" of the Muslims. (The word conjures images of a Mafia-style system of extortion.)
It is erroneous, Spencer remarks, "to equate the stipulations of Islamic law with modern-day notions of freedom of thought and tolerance." (139) Elsewhere, he attacks the "modern myth of Islamic tolerance." (185-212) He trains particularly heavy guns on those who evoke pre-1492 Muslim Spain as a shining example of Muslim openness. He marshals evidence to contradict the picture of Andalusian Muslim peace, mutual respect, and diversity. Muslims lived peaceably and productively with Jews and Christians, he says, because they kept them successfully in Qur'an-sanctioned second-class status. This should give no comfort to present-day Westerners yearning to find compatible values at the center of Islam and hoping to marginalize extremist terrorists.
Spencer acknowledges that there are nations with Muslim majorities that do not impose second-class status on non-Muslims by national law. He argues, however, that unreformed Islamic law remains in the wings as an alternative. A nation that becomes "Islamic" and replaces national law with the Sharia reinstates intolerance against Jews and Christians:
The coming of Islamic law to a nation doesn't herald the reappearance of the mythical tolerance of al-Andalus, but rather the reality of discrimination and persecution that is modern Pakistan. (212)
It is one thing to defend the Arabian homeland of Islam against the invasion of infidels such as the Americans. But jihad is not just a defensive strategy, Spencer says. He describes the resurgence of the call of jihad in the twentieth century after the eclipse of Muslim power during colonial and post-colonial periods. For ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb, it was not enough to defend Islam. The Qur'an called for more. Muslims should mount a movement from the center of Islam in the Arabian peninsula "for the total freedom of man" under Islamic law. (233) Said Qutb:
This religion is not merely a declaration of the freedom of the Arabs, nor is its message confined to the Arabs. It addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth….This religion wants to bring back the whole world to its Sustainer and free it from servitude to anyone other than God. (233)
There is an Orwellian turn to Qutb’s thinking about the mandate from God to universalize Islam: the peace of Islam demands that Muslims go to war. Spencer says, “For Qutb, violent jihad is a necessary part of establishing true peace, which equals the supremacy of the Sharia.” (234)
Spencer links the violent thinking of Qutb to that of Osama bin Laden through bin Laden’s friend and colleague, Abdullah Azzam. He tries to show how suicide bombing, despite Islam’s prohibition of suicide, is supported by the traditional doctrine of jihad. The religious basis of suicide bombing is “founded on traditional concepts and rooted in the deepest longings of many Muslims.” (261) Contrary to wishful thinking in the West, Islamic scholars around the world have not dismissed radical Islam as a discredited aberration. (266)
Spencer inveighs against what he sees as a public relations attempt to cover up the truth about the mainstream religious basis of “holy war” against America. He accuses the Council on American Islamic Relations of erroneously denying that in many mosques in America, Muslims hear support for extremist ideology. (268) And he offers details about the personal statements and actions of CAIR officers that support jihad. Spencer becomes highly critical of liberal Protestants and of academics in the US who support the view that jihad is primarily an “inner struggle” for personal virtue and submission to God. (270-1) John Esposito, one of my early sources, comes in for scathing rebuke by Spencer for failing to explain the violence at the center of Islamic theology. (273) It all adds up in Spencer’s view to a “whitewash of jihad in the West.” (275)
In a penultimate chapter, Spencer argues that a strange alliance between radical Islam and post-1960s leftists in the West gives strength to the great “whitewash.” The new left blames the US for conflict in the world (an extension of the anti-war movement of the 1960s). This “anti-antiterrorist” stance of non-Muslims further distorts the real threat posed by worldwide jihad. Noam Chomsky, quintessential leftist, says Spencer, mistakenly blames American policies for creating “the problem of modern-day Islamic terrorism.” (281) By blaming America for terrorism, Chomsky and those like him blind themselves to its underlying Islamic religious imperative; they are wrong to see nothing but economic and political oppression as a cause. (281) Spencer concludes:
Freedom is under attack by the warriors of jihad; and the battle lines do indeed resemble those of the Cold War, a fierce division between the West, standing for freedom, and the East, standing for a totalitarian society. (287)
In his final chapter, Spencer makes some suggestions for fighting this “final battle.”
(1) “End our myopic complacency and accept the nature of the threat of radical Islam.” Acknowledge that Islamic doctrine against us is a direct threat. (290)
(2) End alliances with any states for which Sharia is the law of the land. (290)
(3) Monitor mosques in the US for traitorous teachings. (291)
(4) Further tighten controls on the immigration of Muslims.
(5) Persuade Muslim immigrants that to be in America they must assimilate “to the American ideals enumerated in the Constitution.” (298) Specifically, call upon them to “make a formal renunciation of jihad and dhimmitude theology….”(299) Any Muslim who wants to be an American citizen must “accept the Western ideals of toleration, freedom of thought and association, republican government, due process, and secular law.” (299)
(6) Encourage moderate Islam at home and abroad. Stop “pretending Islam is something it isn’t….” (299) Stop being merely politically correct by referring to “Judeo-Christian-Islamic values.” Moderate Muslims must be persuaded to “admit the role of the Qur’an in the propagation of violence,” according to Ibn Warraq, an ex-Muslim scholar cited by Spencer (302). Persuade Muslims to acknowledge the Qur'an as “a human text, containing serious moral, historic, and scientific errors.” (302) Islam must undergo “a definitive and universal reform.” (304)
(7) Encourage moderate Islam by declaring that Sharia transgresses the UN universal declaration of human rights of 1948. (304)
Is Spencer onto something that escapes our policymakers and our ever-optimistic citizenry? Or is he blowing traditional Qur'anic text out of proportion and overlooking the incredibly complex context of contemporary Muslim culture around the world?
I don’t know enough to judge. But I have come across one finding that looks directly into the heart and mind of Al-Qa'ida itself, our unequivocal enemy. And the finding supports Spencer's view. Al-Qa’ida members think of their plans for violence against their enemies as an expression of Islamic doctrine firmly rooted in the Qur'an.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been translating and publishing excerpts from The Voice of Jihad. This is a biweekly online magazine published by Al-Qa'ida members in Saudi Arabia. It deals with "Jihad and the Mujahideen in the Arabian Peninsula."
On 27 January 2004, MEMRI published on its website excerpts from issue No. 9 of this Al-Qa'ida internet publication. Two topics predominated:
(1) the implicit meaning of Osama bin Laden's recent broadcast on al-Jazeera television;
(2) the pros and cons of the argument within Al-Qa'ida over attacking Saudi Arabia (this debate came after the heavily damaging terrorist bombing in Riyadh).
Virtually everything Al-Qa'ida says about these issues in this publication resonates with the Qur'an-based worldview that Spencer explicates.
A Saudi Al-Qa'ida ideologue writing under a pseudonym interprets the bin Laden speech. This interpretation depicts a clear-cut strategy for fundamentally changing the international balance of power. Al Qa'ida's next "mighty" blow at America, the author says, will destroy the current alliance between it and the hopelessly corrupt regime now in power in Saudi Arabia. The US will deliver a "vengeful response" to the blow. (No doubt our response to 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, gives Al-Qa’ida reason to believe we will react similarly again.) The US will invade and occupy the kingdom to secure oil sources and get rid of the present Saud regime. This will open the way for Al-Qa'ida to establish a new "Authoritative Council"—a new revolutionary government. The Council will crown "an Imam from among the Muslims who will manage the affairs of the direct confrontation with the Crusaders [i.e., Americans]…." The war with America presumably will lead to its withdrawal from the Arabian Peninsula. The victorious new government will rule in accordance with the traditional vision of Islam espoused by Al-Qa’ida.
After reading Spencer's study, one sees how this scenario resonates with the traditional teachings of Islam. The present Saudi rulers have violated the principles of Islam by allying themselves with the infidel Americans. Their implementation of Sharia is a half-measure that fails to make up for the perfidy of their alliance with the devil. They are therefore rightly considered targets of jihad, false Muslims, along with their infidel allies themselves. The scenario calls for the protection of Muslim territory, in this case the holiest territory, against non-believers. And it affirms an offensive strategy of jihad. Though it does not say so, one might extrapolate: when the "Authoritative Council" rids the peninsula of Americans and their discredited Saudi allies, it will be in position to go on the offensive and spread Islam even to American shores.
Discussing the merits of attacking people within Saudi Arabia even before the war with America occurs, the newsletter says:
(1) Young mujahideen in Saudi Arabia should prepare for impending martyrdom against the House of Saud.
(2) Immediate jihad in Saudi Arabia, such as that in Riyadh, is required according to the Qur'an. The House of Saud is agreeing to concessions with the “Crusaders.” The Qur'an forbids this. Muslims must resist “a pinch of religion, a pinch of Sharia law, and a pinch of religious ritual” offered by the corrupt regime as a compromise. Allah brooks no compromise: “it is not possible to stop the fighting if part of the religion is for Allah and another part is for someone else.” Muslims must wage jihad even against countries tolerant of Islam, such as the US.
The newsletter goes on to present the case for acting against America “now before the US controls Mecca.” The author of this piece, Yahyah bin Ali Al-Ghamdi, declares that the Muslims are growing weaker and weaker as “every day America attacks us in another country.” It is better to act immediately, before Muslims “see an American soldier arranging the worshipers’ entrance into the mosque in Mecca.”
Finally, Abu Abdallah Al-Sa’di condemns those who reject the jihad movement simply because it has not yet succeeded. The Qur'an prohibits such a defeatist attitude, he says. It enjoins Muslims to obey Allah’s commandment to wage jihad irrespective of success or failure. Jihad is the legitimate way for an Islamic state to arise. “Yesterday, we did not dream of a state; today we established states and they fall [e.g., the Taliban in Afghanistan]. Tomorrow, Allah willing, a state will arise and will not fall…”
In sum, a sense of religious obligation permeates the Al-Qa’ida newsletter. The political action that emerges out of this sense of obligation is extreme. We might assume that it is not shared by the majority of Muslims. However, if Spencer’s insights are on the mark, the majority of Muslims would understand Al-Qa’ida’s sense of religious obligation because it is akin to their own.
That pervasive understanding throughout the Muslim world of the terrorists’ motives surely confounds us as we pursue the war to protect our homeland. Even if Spencer’s view of Islam is casuistical and overly suspicious of Muslim motivations around the world, he helps us to see that our enemies are not abstractly evil. They embed their intent to destroy us in a web of beliefs that over the centuries has defined vast portions of the human race and remains a powerful force.
It may be that hope for engagement and accommodation lies in the breadth and variety of people who live under the vast tent of Islam. Spencer has explicated and illustrated the rigid theology that justifies war against us. However, the lives of Muslims the world over spill out beyond rigid theology. Perhaps among many the desire for daily bread and material well being in their lives remains more powerful than the "love of death" trumpeted in the call to jihad by bin Laden. The theology of violent jihad, we might hope, does not have a uniformly firm grip on their minds and hearts, despite its roots in the Qur'an..
Spencer lays down an aggressive agenda for changing Muslim attitudes and beliefs. He believes that there are moderate Muslims in the world who can effect positive change. It would have been helpful if he had taken an additional step. He might have suggested more explicitly how Americans should behave in reaching out to those moderate Muslims--what we should and should not do.
Spencer’s book has not altered my feeling that our precipitate invasion of Iraq did next to nothing to encourage moderate Muslims to seek accommodation with us. It has certainly encouraged more extremist Muslims to do battle against us. We are learning in the uncontrollable aftermath of invasion that the Islamic world has roots and branches undreamt of in the Pentagon’s philosophy. Robert Spencer’s cautionary tale about jihad omits much about that complex and far-flung world; but it helps explain some things.
See also:
Islam & the West: Will They Learn to Live Together?
Can Islamic Lands End the Blame Game and Make a Future Themselves?
9 February 2004 Richard P. Richter
