Syria’s foremost Islamic leader calls for protection of Jews, Christians

In Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz ^[1] today is a story ^[2] 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 ^[3] 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 ^[4] (and which Israel still partially occupies ^[5]). 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only by violence — rather than contrary reasons of our own, or changes in policy which might render their reasons no longer valid.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 ^[6]: “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?