Syria’s foremost Islamic leader calls for protection of Jews, Christians
In Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz today is a story which quotes Syria’s highest Islamic leader.
“If the Prophet Mohammed had asked me to deem Christians or Jews heretics, I would have deemed Mohammed himself a heretic,” Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun, the Mufti of Syria, was quoted as telling a delegation of American academics visiting Damascus.
Hassoun, the leader of Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community, also told the delegates that Islam was a religion of peace, adding: “If Mohammed had commanded us to kill people, I would have told him he was not a prophet.”
Religious wars were the result of politics infiltrating systems of faith, he said[.]
This past year President Obama renewed sanctions against Syria because of its “supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining U.S. and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq.”
So what does the above quote from Hassoun tell us?
Perhaps it tells us that Syria is useful as a case study of a Mideast nation which the US has formally declared as an enemy (and which Israel still partially occupies). Perhaps it tells us that we need to stop thinking about our enemies in the Middle East as Islamic, or even as “Islamic extremists.” Surely the language and ideology of Islam is harnessed by our enemies there, but Islam is not what propels them. Politics — anti-Western politics, grounded in a view of the West as having meddled and plundered the Middle East into poverty throughout the last hundred or so years — is what propels them.
Perhaps we ought to consider what calling Middle Eastern terrorists “Islamic extremists” does rhetorically: it makes salient their religion and conceals their politics. In Western secular society this is a prudent tactic because we tend to view religion as incompatible with reason — in literal terms, this rhetorical strategy constructs the terrorists as having no “reasons” for what they are doing. It frames them as somehow inherently violent and their threat as thus eradicable only by violence — rather than contrary reasons of our own, or changes in policy which might render their reasons no longer valid.
I remember Ehud Barak, Israel’s current Defense Minister, saying something along these lines last year during the Gaza offensive: “the terror attacks from Gaza are contrary to reason, and they don’t stand a chance.” Regardless of whether their reasons are valid or not, or their arguments for war are well-constructed or not, should we really deny our enemies the faculty of reason itself?
And we wonder why our War on Islamic Terror has been a total disaster?
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Are you saying that our enemy is not a religious enemy but rather a political one? That the enemy doesn’t define himself by religious definitions and not by political definitions? Are you asking us to define our enemy by different definitions than our enemy defines themselves? If we do so, do we accurately define our enemy? Isn’t that a misdiagnosis of our enemy? Doesn’t that lead us to fight a war against something that doesn’t exist? Does one leader that seems to make sense mean that all of our enemies must be redefined? Are our enemies in the Middle East Islamic? Are they extreme? By whose standard? Ours? Their own? Doesn’t Islam propel them? What is preached in Mosques? These are but some of the many questions I have of my enemy.
Calvin, good post, and good foundation for thought and discussion. Perhaps-related is this post ( http://www.ericsiegmund.com/fireant/2010/01/100115-terrorfinancing.html ) from friend of mine about economist/journalist/author Loretta Napoleoni, and her suggestion that, “most terrorists couldn’t care less about the ideology of the group with which they’re aligned – they’re in it for much more self-serving reasons.”
Calvin, I understand the idea that we step on the toes of all Muslims when allegations are made that Islam is the reason behind the violence. However, I do believe to the radicals commiting acts of Terrorism, their perspective of Islam, right or wrong, is the motivating force behind their Actions. Nadal Hasan lived his entire life in a Western Nation and had not problem with Capitalism, but shouted “Allahu Akbar” before killing 13 people in Fort Hood Texas. Al-Shabaab isn’t cutting off the hands of Moderate Somalis as an act against Westernization, they do so out of their narrow view of Islam. They now refuse to allow Somali citizens in their provinces to fly the Somali national flag, mandating that only the flag with the Islam profession of faith may be flown. No, not all Muslims are evil, and no Islam is not inherently a violent faith. But an extremist interpretation of it certainly appears to be a prime motivating factor behind today’s terrorist activities.
Jeff, I don’t have time at the moment to watch Loretta’s TEDtalk but will definitely watch it later. Nevertheless, I’ll just say off the bat that she’s not really coming from where I’m coming from. I DO think terrorists have ideologies that inform their activities, I just question whether we should think of it as predominantly religious or predominantly political. I believe the latter is a more sane way of thinking about it.
I guess what I’m trying to say — and this serves as a response to you too, Adam — is that the larger powers (think of Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.) which are guiding these young men toward extremism are doing it for political reasons, out of a deep-seated hate for Western interventionism and colonialism. And like I said in my post, certainly they do harness the language and symbols of Islam to influence them — although, something that just occurred to me is that many of these young men and their leaders are coming from predominantly Islamic nations… so isn’t it kind of a given that they’d hang onto their faith in times of great struggle and war, just like certainly many US soldiers do? Couldn’t the reason that Hasan shouted that phrase simply be because he was born Arab and Muslim?
Also, we should be careful to distinguish between capitalism and colonialism. Hasan is a Palestinian-American — the West Bank and Gaza, despite their abject poverty, have market economies. The Palestinian anger at Israel comes from their seeing Israel as an occupying, colonial power. So no, Hasan did not have a problem with capitalism, but perhaps he had a problem with Western interventionist war. And I’m not saying that makes what he did — or what any other discontented Arab does — okay. I just think it might be useful for us to understand it a bit better if we wish to understand why what we’ve been doing since 2001 — fighting two interventionist wars and paving the way for more — brought us Fort Hood and the Underpants Bomber last year.