A God Who Hates (19 page)

In order to ensure that Muslims would obey their rulers implicitly and without reservation, Muhammad told them in a hadith: “Obey your emir even if he flogs you and takes your property.” Fearing that some Muslims would rebel against such unquestioning obedience, he justified it by saying in another hadith: “If a ruler passes judgment after profound consideration and his decision is the right one, he is rewarded twice. If he passes judgment after profound consideration and his decision turns out to be the wrong one, he receives a single recompense.”

Muhammad was trying to persuade Muslims that the ruler spent time in deliberation and reached a decision only after profound thought. His decision might be right or wrong, but, whichever it was, God would reward him, because he had reached the decision he firmly believed best served Muslim interests. When he made the right decision, God recompensed him doubly, and when he made the wrong one, he gave him a single recompense.

When Saddam Hussein scorched the Kurds of northern Iraq with chemicals and annihilated the Shia in the south, he committed no crime under Muslim religious law. According to the Sharia, he, as ruler, reflected at length before reaching the decision to burn and exterminate. His only punishment under Muhammad’s law was that God recompensed him only once. That is, if he made the wrong decision—but who can tell? Perhaps it was in the interests of Islam and the Muslims to burn and exterminate Iraq’s Kurds. Never in the history of Islam has a Muslim cleric protested against the actions of a Muslim ruler, because of the total belief that obedience to the ruler is an extension of obedience toward God and his Prophet. There is only one exception to this: A Muslim cleric of one denomination may protest against the actions of a ruler who belongs to a different one.

How can a Muslim escape the grasp of his ruler when he is completely convinced of the necessity of obeying him? How can he protest against this obedience, which represents obedience to his Prophet and therefore also to his God? He cannot.

Islam is indeed a despotic regime. It has been so since its inception, and remains so today.

Is there a relationship more representative of the ugliest forms of slavery than that between a ruler and a populace whom he flogs and whose money he steals while they themselves have no right to protest against his behavior? The ruler acts by divine decree, and the people obey him by divine decree. The United States did not create the dictatorships in the Muslim world. I have no doubt that it supported some of the most despotic Muslim regimes, such as that of Saddam Hussein, but it did not give birth to him. Saddam Hussein was conceived in the womb of Islamic culture. He was sired by the Muslim people, which creates its leaders in accordance with Muslim religious law and in accordance with the master they require. No ruler anywhere in the world can oppress his people unless that population is educationally, culturally, mentally, and psychologically prepared to be oppressed. In the Muslim home oppression starts as soon as a child first sees the light of day, and the acculturation process continues throughout life to the point that, should the subject find himself confronted with his ruler, he will be overwhelmed to the point of being utterly unable to function.

In Islam, children are property, not a responsibility. Islam defines the relationship between child and parents and emphasizes the necessity for blind obedience to them.

A boy’s relationship with his father reflects upon his relationship with all other adults in his environment. He takes this relationship with him from his home into the street, the mosque, his school, and all other institutions in his society and uses it to construct similar relationships in which he regards himself as obliged to obey anyone older or more important than himself

The child is the slave of his teacher, his neighbor, and his relatives—and when he grows up he is the slave of his boss and every other authority figure in his environment. Consciously and unconsciously he accepts this slavery, which represents obedience to God, his Prophet, and those who have authority over him. A boy leaves home and goes to school oppressed and deprived of the basic ability to protest, or just say “no.” At school he hears every day what he has heard at home: that God has decreed that parents and those in authority must be obeyed, and he behaves as he has learned to do at home. Everything he learns is instilled in him in a manner that brooks no question that may contain even the hint of a threat to the legitimacy of that obedience. Islam concerns itself with fathers’ responsibility for their sons only where religious obligations and duties are concerned. Muhammad said in a hadith: “Teach your children to pray at the age of seven and beat them if they don’t at the age of ten.”

Here, once again, we see the oppressive relationship manifesting itself even between Man and God: If Man does not pray voluntarily, he has to be forced to do so! I have a Muslim Irani an friend who lives here in the United States. He suffers from severe depression and a number of other psychological disorders which none of the currently available treatments can relieve. He once discussed these issues with me and he told me: “My childhood still haunts me. When I was a boy of seven, my father used to wake me at five in the morning for the dawn prayer. We had no bathroom, and he used to force me to go outside in subzero temperatures to perform the ritual ablution in the waters of the well near our home. I remember that once I just dipped my arms into the pail of water I had drawn up from the bottom of the well then ran toward the house in an attempt to convince my father that I had washed as prescribed, but he was watching me from the window. He took his leather belt and beat me unmercifully while my mother looked on from afar and cried, because I was screaming so loudly.”

My Iranian friend continued: “I hate God more than I hate my father. My father and I are both victims of that criminal called Allah.”

Saddam Hussein was his victim, too.

Was Saddam Hussein not completely convinced that he represented God and his Prophet on earth? Did he not believe that the Kurds and the Shia should be crushed because they had not obeyed him, even though God had ordered them to obey their ruler? Why should we put Saddam Hussein on trial before trying that “God”? Why should Saddam suffer in jail while that “God” sits at liberty on the mountaintop in our village waiting to pounce on his next victim? The United States was accused by Muslims of supporting dictatorships in their countries, and to defend their ground and relinquish their guilt America decided to bring down Saddam Hussein’s throne. But though the throne has gone, the objective has not been attained, and the Iraqi people are still embroiled in the nightmare of that “God,” who orders them to obey their leaders. America miscalculated, and the inescapable question now is: Can it do anything to remedy the political situation?

The answer is not only that America can, but that it must! I am not talking about the political or military aspects here—I am no politician and know nothing of military constraints. But I firmly believe that it is in America’s interests to redress the balance, at least insofar as the demands of behavioral science and mental health are concerned. If it was America’s intention to use its war in Iraq to help spread democracy throughout the Arab world, in order to make amends for having supported dictatorships there, we have to ask the following question: How can we hope to impose democracy on people who have believed for the past fourteen centuries that they are obliged by divine decree to obey their rulers, even when these rulers persistently violate their rights? What we see happening in Iraq, unfortunately, provides us with the answer to this question.

For this crisis does not involve a democratic leader. It is the crisis of a nation and of a religious law whose decrees and teachings have permeated the convolutions of the brain and stamped themselves on the genes of the people of that nation. Another question raises itself here: What is the solution, and what choices does America have in its war in Iraq? The answer, without going into detail, is, quite simple: The only option it has is to strip this ogre of its power! Free the clergy of their ogre, free the ruler of the clergy, free men of their ruler, free women of men, free the slave of his master—in short, free the people of their fear! What freedom can a man who worships an ogre ever have? If the United States wants to free Muslims from the dictatorship of their rulers, it must first of all strive to free them from the dictatorship of their ogre.

In order to free Muslims from their fears it will take more than any country’s army and naval fleets. It’s going to require the services of its medical and scientific laboratories and of its experts on behavioral science, social psychology, and sociology. Everyone from popular psychologists like Dr. Wayne Dyer and Dr. Phil McGraw to researchers doing work in colleges and universities will have to be enlisted to work on ways of ridding the Muslim people of their ogres. These experts on behavioral science and psychology will have, in their proposals, to strive for scientific and ethical accuracy, throwing political correctness out the window.

Many psychologists and behavioral science experts in the United States have studied how children’s behavior is affected by the violence they see on television, and have found a correlation between the two. However, from my close observation of what many of them choose to study, I have found they don’t have the same desire to investigate the nature of the relationship between violence and reading matter.

Whatever has been said in the past and will be said in the future about the role of television in shaping a person’s convictions, I do not believe that it has played or ever will play as important a role as books do. And this is even truer when the book in question is a religious one, and when it is the sole source of knowledge for people who are bedazzled by reading it. There can be no doubt that violence among children in America, or any other Western society, is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and one worthy of study and the most serious consideration. But in no society in which it occurs does it constitute a danger comparable to that presented by Islamic terrorism. America and the whole civilized world will have to pay greater attention to this phenomenon by studying the reasons behind it and ways to deal with it, so as to protect the world, including Muslims themselves.

The Arab heritage has to be acquired from Arab books. I say “Arab,” not “Muslim,” so as to ensure that the student will read the primary sources of Islam. For if a researcher deals with Islam as it is presented in Muslim works in languages other than Arabic, he may not succeed in reaching the truth. I say this even though I have never read such books myself, but my close acquaintance with many non-Arab Muslims and my reading of English translations of the Koran have led me to form this conviction. My life in the United States has brought me into professional and social contact with many Muslims who are not Arabs, and these relationships have enabled me to delve deeply into their understanding of Islam and the extent of their knowledge of its teachings. I emerged convinced that there is a great deal of difference between Arab and non-Arab Muslims.

The Koran is an Arabic book, and Islam forbade its translation into any other language. This means that many non-Arabic-speaking Muslims read the Arabic text without learning to understand the Arabic language. They pronounce the words of the Koran without understanding their meaning; as far as they are concerned it is gibberish. In other cases they read the Koran in Arabic transliterated into their own alphabet, as when an American pronounces the word
madrassa
transliterated into Latin letters without any idea of what the word means in Arabic. Although the Koran has been rendered into other languages, these translations are not completely faithful, and Islam, as I mentioned above, forbids translation of the Koran. Because of this prohibition, translators refer to their work as “An English translation of the meaning of the Koran.” Naturally, in their work they try to convey the meaning with the greatest political correctness.

When you read the Koran in English or in any other language, you are reading not a literal translation but, rather, the meaning that the translator wants to impart to the text. Not all Arabic works which deal with Muhammad’s life, conduct, and thought have been translated into the languages spoken by non-Arab Muslims, and what translations do exist are not faithful to the original. The works have been abridged, and the translations have been adapted to conform to what the translator considers morally suitable and acceptable. My work once brought me into contact with three non-Arab Muslim women doctors. Our jobs required us to spend long hours together, and these were interspersed with numerous discussions of Islam and its teachings. I was amazed at the facts I learned in the course of these conversations.

Their knowledge of Islamic teaching was not only limited; it was also very different from my own. They had grown up in a religious environment more fanatical and closed than mine. Non-Arab Muslims pray in Arabic without understanding it. They repeat the words parrot fashion. This is also the case when they read the Koran. I have not the slightest doubt that many Christians who live in the Arab world know a great deal more about Islam than non-Arab Muslims do. What is more, Christians who live in Arab countries are more influenced be-haviorally and intellectually by Muslim culture than non-Arab Muslims are.

This explains to a great extent why Islamic terrorism is the product of the Arab heartland. Arab Muslims have a more profound understanding of the Koran, and of the life and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and what has been written about him. As a result, they have been more exposed to the application of Islamic teachings than have non-Arab Muslims. When an Arabic-speaking Muslim prays, he understands what the prayer means, while a non-Arab Muslim repeats the prayer without understanding it.

A Muslim prays five times a day, and on each occasion he recites the Fatiha, the first verse of the Koran, a number of times. This verse describes Christians as “those who have gone astray” and Jews as “those who have incurred Your wrath.” We see from this that Muslims execrate Christians and Jews a number of times in the course of a single prayer, which they repeat five times a day. Non-Arab Muslims are unaware that they are cursing the Christians and the Jews, because they pray in Arabic without understanding what they are saying. This means that the quantity of hatred they absorb from their prayers is less than that absorbed by Arab Muslims, who are aware of what they are saying.