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July 23, 2002
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US:
Oppression Abroad Means Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
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July
24, 2002
Challenging Ignorance on Islam:
a Ten-Point
Primer for Americans
by
Gary Leupp
"We should invade [Muslim] countries,
kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Columnist Ann Coulter,
National Review Online, Sept. 13, 2001
"Just turn [the sheriff] loose and have him arrest every
Muslim that crosses the state line."
Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA),
chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland
security and Senate candidate, to Georgia law officers, November
2001
"Islam is a religion in which God
requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is
a faith where God sent his Son to die for you."
Attorney General John Ashcroft,
interview on Cal Thomas radio, November 2001
"(Islam) is a very evil and wicked
religion wicked, violent and not of the same god (as Christianity)."
Rev. Franklin Graham, head
of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, November 2001.
"Islam is Evil,Christ is King."
Allegedly written in marker
by law enforcement agents on a Muslim prayer calendar in the
home of a Muslim being investigated by police in Dearborn, Michigan,
July 2002.
People with power and influence in the U.S. have
been saying some very stupid things about Islam and about Muslims
since September 11. Some of it is rooted in conscious malice,
and ethnic prejudice that spills over into religious bigotry.
But some is rooted in sheer historical and geographical ignorance.
This is a country, after all, in which only a small minority
of high school students can readily locate Afghanistan on the
map, or are aware that Iranians and Pakistanis are not Arabs.
As an educator, in Asian Studies, at a fairly elite university,
I am painfully aware of this ignorance. But I realize it serves
a purpose. It is highly useful to a power structure that banks
on knee-jerk popular support whenever it embarks on a new military
venture, at some far-off venue, on false pretexts immediately
discernable to the better educated, but lost on the general public.
The generally malleable mainstream press takes care of the rest.
I don't mean to suggest that the academic
cognosenti, as a "class," habitually
counter this ignorance and protest the imperialist interventions
that Washington routinely undertakes. Some of them may indeed
support the venture, cynically asserting that the advertised
pretext fulfills some sort of valid function, regardless of the
lies and distortions that surround it. (I think of the depiction
in the media of the "Rambouillet Accords" concerning
Yugoslavia in 1999 as "the will of the international community,"
when one Contact Group member, Russia, rejected the U.S.-dictated
plan for Kosovo outright, and several European states only signed
on after their arms were twisted nearly out of their sockets.
I think of the calculated, extreme exaggeration of the number
of Kosovar victims of Serbian forces as the bombing of Yugoslavia
began. The lies surrounding that bombing were obvious to anyone
studying the situation, but even some rather progressive academics
were all for "Operation Allied Force.") American academe
is---unfortunately--- whatever its right-wing critics may contend,
not particularly left or anti-imperialist. In any case, such
ignorance is not just a national embarrassment; it's really dangerous.
Raw material for a made-in-USA version of fascism.
To understand the contemporary world,
we all need to know something about Islam-beyond the inane contribution
of the Attorney General cited above. So I have prepared this
little primer on Islam for Americans (suitable for ages 13 and
above, so appropriate for high school use), dealing not with
its theology so much as its general character as an important
force in the world, presently encountering unprecedented, unprincipled
attack from various quarters. (Oh, and by the way, I'm not a
Muslim, but what those on the Christian right revile as a "secular
humanist.")
1. Islam has been around for approximately
1400 years. Established on the west coast of Arabia 900 years
before European settlement in America, and spreading rapidly
throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa soon thereafter, it
was not designed as an anti-U.S. movement!
The basic teachings or requirements of
Islam are not difficult to grasp. They constitute the "Five
Pillars of Islam": (1) profession that there is no God but
God ("Allah," in Arabic), and his Prophet (the last
of the prophets, the "seal of the prophets") is Muhammad;
(2) daily prayer; (3) fasting during the month of Ramadan; (4)
charity; and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca. Whatever you may think
of this package, it's not terribly threatening to the non-Muslim.
2. Islam's teachings are contained in
a fairly compact book, the Qur'an, which Muslims believe was
dictated to the Prophet Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. They
believe of it precisely what Jews and Christians believe of their
scriptures: that is, it's the Word of God. This book, like the
Bible, demands belief in monotheism; refers to Adam, Noah, Abraham,
Jesus, etc. (far more space is given to Mary, mother of Jesus,
in the Qur'an than in the New Testament); has a substantial legalistic
component reminiscent of the Old Testament Book of Leviticus,
and poetic content as beautifully uplifting as the Book of
Psalms. For religious and secular scholars alike, it is
absolutely clear that Islam stems from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Indeed, we should think in terms of the "Judeo-Christian-Islamic
tradition."
(Some fundamentalist Christians, of course,
see Islam as the work of Satan, and medieval Christians in Europe
saw it as a heresy rather than as "paganism. The
point is---for better or worse---Muslims have a whole lot more
in common with the dominant religious trends in the U.S. than
do, say, Buddhists or Hindus.)
3. Muslims are about 20% of the world's
population; Christians, about 30%. (The U.S. Muslim population
is estimated between 5 and 8 million; U.S. Jews between 5 and
6 million). The global Jewish population is statistically quite
small, so one can say the Judeo-Christian-Islamic population
is roughly half the world's total. The consequences
of a protracted religious war, pitting Christians and Jews against
Muslims, are highly unpleasant to consider.
4. The Qur'an depicts Jews and Christians
as "People of the Book," meaning that they have their
own scriptures bestowed upon them by God (Allah is simply
the Arabic world for God, related to the Hebrew Elohim;
we should see it as analogous to the German word Gott,
the French Dieu, or the Spanish Dios. It's not
the personal name of a deity within a pantheon, like Thor, Aphrodite
or Siva.)
Muslim scripture counsels respect for
these communities, and indeed, in the history of Islam, within
Islamic societies Jews and Christians have fared FAR better than
non-Christians in Christendom. Muslims ruled all or part
of Spain from around 800 to the late 15th century, when Columbus'
great patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella "drove
the Moors (Muslims) out of Spain," forced everybody to embrace
Catholic Christianity (or be killed), and promoted the exquisite
Christian tortures of the Inquisition. Under Muslim rule, Christian
and Jewish communities generally flourished from Spain to Iraq.
On the other hand, until recent times, Christian intolerance
prevailed throughout Europe.
5. The Qu'ran does NOT call upon Muslims
to KILL all non-Muslims. It calls for the destruction
of "infidels," meaning principally Arabs who, during
the time of Muhammad, practiced idolatry and polytheism. Again:
this is a seventh-century book, produced in a specific historical
context! It, and the Muslim religion, should be studied and understood
objectively, dispassionately. Islam emerged very quickly, and
within decades united under its banner-the banner of monotheism---the
various tribes of Arabia. Its violent rejection of idolatry,
however offensive to the modern, secular, humanist mind, is hardly
unique. It can be compared to the ferocious suppression in Christian
Europe of paganism (often associated with witchcraft).
And for perspective, while the Qu'ran
does call for the extermination of "infidels,"
the Old Testament is replete with its own exhortations to genocide.
According to the Biblical narrative (of dubious historicity,
but believed by hundreds of millions), the Hebrews under Joshua's
leadership, invading Canaan from Egypt, killed twelve thousand
"men and women together" in the town of Ai-because
God wanted them to (Joshua 8:25). The Hebrews put all the people
of Hazor to the sword (they "wiped them all out; they did
not leave one living soul." Judges 11:14). The poetics of
hatred are as conspicuous in the Bible as in the Qu'ran. A personal
favorite of mine, from Psalm 137, refers to the Babylonians:
"A blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against
the rock!" Such references are characteristic of Judeo-Christian-Islamic
literature, and are best examined in historical perspective.
6. Islamic "fundamentalism"
is not a species apart from other fundamentalisms, including
the Christian, Jewish, and Hindu varieties. They are all
anti-modern, anti-science, anti-intellectual, rarely harmless
and potentially (if not necessarily) fascistic. They demand belief
in received dogma, inscribed in texts, rather than open-ended
scientific inquiry. They either legitimate the existing order,
or call for a return to a past social order in which class and
gender relations were properly sorted out in line with the Divine
Will.
Some (including non-religious people
in or from Muslim countries) criticize Islam (appropriately,
in my view) for what they consider backward and reactionary features.
This is not the place to deal with such criticisms, nor am I
the right person to do it. I will merely observe what many others
have observed: Christendom underwent the Enlightenment-an evolution
towards secularism, rationalism, and scientific thought in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-which the Islamic world,
in general, has not yet experienced. To become "modern"
(more specifically, to become capitalist), the West had
to become more ideologically tolerant (i.e., less religious),
and allow a freer market in ideas than had been possible when
the Church monopolized learning. If mullahs monopolize education
in much of the Muslim world, they serve a function identical
with that of Europe's medieval Catholic clergy.
But our own Enlightenment is not irreversible.
Top U.S. officials reject the theory of evolution in favor of
the ludicrous "theory" of "creationism,"
and seek to criminalize abortion on the grounds that a fetus
is a human being created by God. Recent changes in U.S. law (allowing
the use of vouchers to support religious schools at taxpayer's
expense), and the failure of the courts to prosecute behavior
which plainly violates the constitutional separation of church
and state, demonstrate that medieval thinking and fundamentalism
retain a strong hold in sections of U.S. society, and are well
represented in the Bush administration. The American people are,
I submit, far more threatened by Christian fundamentalism
than its Islamic counterpart. And for a Pentecostalist Christian
like John Ashcroft, who believes every word of the Bible literally,
to inveigh against Islam (as he has) is (to use the English proverb)
the "pot calling the kettle black."
7. Islamic fundamentalism (or what
some, including CNN Moneyline's Lou Dobbs calls "Islamism,"
meaning a specifically political Islam) has NOT, historically,
posed a great threat to Western interests (by which I mean corporate,
oil, and geopolitical interests) but rather been exploited to
SERVE those interests. Remember Lawrence of Arabia?
What was his objective other than to forge a British alliance
with the Hashemites, who would certainly qualify as "Islamists"
by Lou Dobb's standards, during World War I? Later, the British
boosted the Saudi royal family (patrons of the Wahhabi school
of Islam, usually described as among the most conservative, embraced
by Osama bin Laden as well as the Saudis in general) into power.
The U.S. inherited Saudi Arabia as a client state after World
War II, and we all know how well U.S. oil companies have done
there ever since. (Aramco alone, prior to its nationalization
in the mid-1980s, yielded some $ 3 trillion from the Arabian
reserves.)
The U.S. helped create, recruit, and
finance the fundamentalist Mujahadeen, including some 30,000
young volunteers who came from throughout the Muslim world to
fight "godless Communism" in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The U.S. encouraged them to view their war as a jihad
(in the sense of a "Holy War," a meaning the term
usually does NOT carry), and put many in contact with young Osama
bin Laden, then an ally. The Reagan administration was in love
with fundamentalist Islam, so long as it served its purposes.
The California-based company Unocal was
cordially negotiating right up to Sept. 11 with Afghanistan's
Taliban for an oil pipeline through Afghan territory, State Department
official and oilman Zalmay Khalilzad was arguing up through 1998
that the Taliban were friendly, potential business partners who
did "not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism
practiced in Iran."
8. Muslims of the world have many
thoroughly LEGITIMATE reasons to resent U.S. policy. Nearly
absolute support for the settler state of Israel in its relationship
with the indigenous Palestinian people. Imposition of brutal
sanctions on Iraq, contrary to logic and morality. Maintenance
of bases throughout the Persian Gulf, in defiance of local sensibilities
and interests. Support for brutal regimes, including that of
the Shah of Iran and that of Indonesia's Suharto (who unquestionably
has more blood on his hands than even that arch-villain and former
U.S. buddy Saddam Hussein).
9. Muslims typically DO NOT hate the
U.S. as an abstract concept, reject U.S. culture in toto, or
seek the destruction of American civilization. Many are,
indeed, uncomfortable with some aspects of American behavior,
as are most people in the world, from Central America to Japan.
But a Zogby International poll, released June 11 of this year,
shows that in nine Muslim countries, including Bangladesh and
Malaysia, the most admired foreign country is the U.S.
10. Muslims and Jews in Palestine/Israel
have NOT always hated one another, and the current Middle East
conflict does NOT go back many centuries. Rather, it began
with the influx of foreign Jews into the region after World War
I, which became a flood as a result of the Holocaust, and with
international support resulted in the formation of Israel as
a specifically Jewish state in 1948. Jewish settlement and terrorism
(well-documented by the Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe)
resulted in the displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs (including
both Christians and Muslims). The Arab-Israeli conflict is not,
fundamentally, about Islam, or a clash between Islam and other
faiths, but about this-worldly land grabbing, settlement, dispossession
and oppression that has enraged the Muslim world, as it should
enrage any thinking, moral human being. Unfortunately, fundamentalist
Christians in this country tend to depict this history of injustice
as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and they will brook
no dissent when it comes to the Zionist cause that they have
embraced as their own. ("God gave them the land,
so don't bother me with historical details. End of discussion.")
Hard to imagine a delusion more injurious to world peace and
to the cause of justice.
Finally: In understanding Islam, Americans
should give some thought to one of the pivotal episodes in world
history, the Crusades, or Wars of the Cross, that ripped up the
Holy Land between 1096 and 1291. During these two centuries,
European Christians seeking to "win back for Christendom"
territory that had fallen to the Muslim Turks-territory that
had been ruled by Muslims since the early seventh century anyway,
on terms generally agreeable to Jews and Christians as well as
Muslims-committed unspeakable atrocities. In July 1099 Jerusalem
was conquered, the Roman Catholic soldiers massacring all the
Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, including women and children.
Nor was the Crusaders' zeal exhausted upon non-Christians; frustrated
at lack of success in Palestine in 1204, they instead sacked
Constantinople (modern Istanbul), then the center of Eastern
Orthodoxy. In comparison, the behavior of the Muslim armies was
chivalrous, the twelfth-century Kurdish leader Saladin in particular
winning high praise from Christians and Muslims alike for his
humanity.
The Islamic world remembers the Crusades;
George Bush, like many Americans, is clueless about them. Hence
his amazingly dim-witted reference to the "War on Terrorism"
as a "Crusade" last September 16-a statement that produced
immediate, widespread outrage in the Muslim world. No offense
intended, no doubt. But such ignorance, in action, in a world
where religious prejudice generates idiotic action from Belfast,
to the Balkans, to Gujarat, to the Moluccas, is perilous ignorance
indeed.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Today's Features
Bill Christison
The Disastrous Foreign Policies
of the US:
Oppression Abroad Means Repression at Home
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil and the Taliban
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
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