A God Who Hates (24 page)

The most important traditions written and handed down about Muhammad concern his raids and what happened in the course of them. All his teachings stem from the realities of the world he lived in and are the indisputable product of it.

If you read the biography of the Prophet from beginning to end you will find no trace of any kind of moral authority. Some people may protest that it has to be read in its historical context. But morals, by definition, do not change with the changing times. Unlike culture, they are not subject to the dictates of time or place, but remain applicable everywhere, at any time. Morals are a common code shared by all peoples of the world at all times in all places. What is moral in Beverly Hills will be considered moral in the tribes of Africa, and vice versa. Culture may vary from nation to nation and country to country, but the moral code is almost identical everywhere at all times.

The moral code is a set of natural laws that enjoin people to do what is right and avoid what is wrong. When nature drew them up, it equipped people with a rational or instinctive ability to distinguish between right and wrong, so that they could adhere to these laws. Following this code helps the human species to survive in safety.

Fear, of all the emotions, is one of the most destructive to the human spirit. When people fall victim to fear they lose their ability to tell right from wrong, as their every action is reduced to a reaction to their fear. In the desert environment that gave birth to Islam, human thought and behavior reflected the fears characteristic of life in those surroundings. The fact that people did not feel safe gave rise to all the customs that dominated that time and place, as a reaction to this destructive emotion.

The great catastrophe came with the advent of Islam, which gave these customs divine sanction and laid a sharp divisive sword between those who accepted them and those who did not. Anyone who openly rejected any one of these Islamic customs was considered an apostate and was punished by death. Islam resorted to the use of fear as a means of controlling its adherents and added to their existing fear of their arid desert environment the fear of the sword, and it was this that deprived Muslims of the ability to tell right from wrong.

A society in which people lose their ability—rational or instinctive—to distinguish between right and wrong becomes a curse to all humanity. All religions undermined Man’s ability to tell right from wrong when they taught him to fear God’s punishment should he consider rejecting any of their teachings.

Islam, however, differs from other religions in that it threatens its followers not just with hell but also with death, in order to speed their journey to hell. People are more frightened of death than they are by the idea of being punished by God. Muslims followed Muhammad’s teachings blindly, for fear of feeling the sword at their throat. Muhammad told his followers in a hadith: “Drink camel urine, it contains the cure for all ills.” Muslims can graduate from the most famous medical schools in the world yet still believe that camel urine can cure illness. Their belief does not stem in most cases from scientific conviction but from fear of the deadly sword.

In fourteen hundred years no Muslim has dared candidly to exercise his ability to distinguish right from wrong and tell his fellow believers: “Don’t drink camel urine!” Primary-school teachers read their pupils the account which relates: “The Prophet Muhammad married the Jewish woman Safia on the day her husband, father and brother were killed,” without engaging in any discussion of the morality or legitimacy of such a marriage. Muslims believe, as an article of faith, that everything that the Prophet Muhammad said and did was inspired by God. Islam does not permit any one of its followers to doubt that these words and deeds are right by the moral standards of all times and places.

Let me relate a story from Ibn al Athir, an Arab Muslim historian, on the life of Muhammad: “Muhammad, God bless him and grant him salvation, sent five of his men to kill Kaab Bin al-Ashraf who had been lampooning him and inciting the tribe of Quraysh against him. One of the five was Kaab’s brother Abu Naila. Muhammad accompanied them to a place named Baqi’ al-Gharqad then sent them off, saying, ‘Go in the name of God. May God aid them’ and then returned home.

“When the five men reached Kaab’s camp, Abu Naila called out to him and Kaab jumped up in his blanket and came out, feeling safe because he had heard his brother’s voice. But the men betrayed him and killed him. They took his head and made their way back to Baqi’ al-Gharqad (that is, the place where Muhammad had left them), and said ‘God is great.’ Muhammad, God bless him and grant him salvation, heard them and said, ‘God is great,’ for he knew that they had killed Kaab. When they reached Muhammad, God bless him and grant him salvation, he was at prayer. He told them, ‘You have succeeded honorably,’ and they flung Kaab’s head into his hands.”

When a Muslim reads this story, no matter how well educated and informed he may be, he finds nothing in it that makes him curious enough to ask: “Where in this story is the mission with which God entrusted his prophet?” When terrorists in Iraq and other Muslim countries behead their hostages without any apparent qualms, the world asks: “Why do they do it?” Muslims who describe themselves as moderates reply: “These terrorists have misunderstood the teachings of Islam.” But I ask: Have they misunderstood the story of how Muhammad’s companions killed Kaab Bin al-Ashraf, then tumbled his head into Muhammad’s hands?

If Zarqawi has misunderstood what Muhammad has said, as some Muslims claim, has he also misunderstood what he did? Hundreds of stories like the account of Kaab’s murder fill biographies of the prophet, which serve as the main—if not the only—source of learning in the Muslim world. Umm Qirfa was a woman who, most Muslim historians agree, was over a hundred years old when Muhammad’s followers, at his request, because she had written a poem against him, tied her legs to two camels and drove them in opposite directions until she was torn limb from limb. Muslims take pride in this murder, which they regard as an indication of Muhammad’s followers’ loyalty to Islam. This cultural fund of Muhammad’s words and deeds has remained for fourteen centuries the “moral compass” of every Muslim, wherever he may be.

An Arab proverb says: You can extricate a man who has sunk into a quagmire, but it is impossible to remove a quagmire that has sunk into a man. People in the Islamic world have absorbed the quagmire in its entirety and are experiencing a moral crisis. They badly need to be able to feel guilt for the sins they commit. Some people may ask: What has Islam to do with this crisis? Islam remains what it has always been: the main, if not the only, source of education in the Muslim world, and people are the product of their education.

When I delve into the Muslim books that were the main source from which we quenched our thirst for cultural knowledge, I begin to doubt the efficacy of the methods America and the rest of the world are using to combat terrorism. The Americans went to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and announced that they had found none. They found none not because they did not exist, but because the searchers did not know where they were hidden. Had they opened any Muslim book they would have found in it vast quantities of such weapons.

The danger lies not in the weapons themselves, but in the hand that grasps them. American troops cannot remove this threat that faces all humankind unless the world remains alert and is aware of where in the Islamic world the weapons of mass destruction lie concealed. The schools responsible for creating the terrorist mentality in the Muslim world are more dangerous than any weapons factory on earth. These schools have destroyed people’s minds, and this destruction has a greater effect on their own lives than its does on the lives of others. The terrorist mentality is a barren one, which can produce nothing of any worth, and so it has a greater effect on the lives of those who adopt it than it does on the lives of their enemies.

No Westerner can fully comprehend the truth of what I have said here, because Westerners do not live in the Muslim world and so find it hard to imagine the extent of the moral disintegration afflicting all aspects of life in these societies. People in these societies have lost their ability to feel guilt for their misdeeds. From their earliest youth they have been brainwashed by teachings that have convinced them that God has created them to be slaves.

As long as he prays, fasts, and reads the Koran, a Muslim feels that he has done his duty, as his sense of responsibility does not extend beyond the performance of these specified commandments. The rulers of all Muslim countries lie to their subjects and plunder, murder, and torture them. But on Fridays and religious holidays they never fail to go to the mosque and pray. No Muslim clergyman will utter a word of criticism of the behavior of these leaders—unless, of course, the leader happens to belong to a different religious denomination. Saddam Hussein murdered hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites, but the only Muslims we have heard protesting against his crimes have been Shiites.

Anyone who browses through the pages of Muslim history from the day Muhammad first declared his new religion until the present day will see at once how bloody it has been. Muslims themselves have spilled more of one another’s blood than anyone else. As young schoolchildren we would recount the stories of fighting and killing we had learned from our history books and books of Muslim teachings with the same enthusiasm that we played hide and seek. We took as much delight in repeating the phrase “then he drew his sword and cut off his head” as an American child does in a bar of chocolate, but we experienced no sense of fear as we did so, nor did we question the legitimacy of all that killing.

We became familiar with the language of murder and terrorism and grew addicted to it. We were as proficient in it as a surgeon is at opening a patient’s chest to remove a growth. An ordinary person does not split open another’s person chest unless he is either a criminal totally lacking in human conscience or a surgeon whose medical knowledge and scientific expertise guide him as he carries out his humane mission. We no longer condemn the language of killing and terrorism, which has become a way of life for us. It has become a skill that we practice with the same delight that the surgeon takes in his work.

Just imagine an American child standing in class and saying to his teacher: “I’ll cut my enemy’s head off with this sword.” How would the teacher and the other pupils react? All aspects of life in our Islamic culture are a reflection of this philosophy of death. In 2005 I paid a visit to Syria. In Damascus, while I was sitting in the bus waiting to leave for a neighboring town, I watched a small boy of no more than eight get on carrying a bundle of newspapers to sell to the passengers. “Forty American soldiers reported killed in a heroic suicide bombing in Baghdad!” he shouted, in an attempt to arouse their interest. I quickly took a paper and scanned it keenly while the boy jumped off the bus and vanished into the crowd.

I went through the paper from beginning to end but found no mention of the death of any American soldiers. In the midst of my astonishment I overheard another passenger say, “The little bastard duped us!” Even a boy as young as eight fully understands the psychology of his people and knows precisely how to play upon their emotions. The death of forty American soldiers in Baghdad is hot news that Syrians will pay the price of a loaf of bread to read about in the paper.

The average Syrian today cares about nothing beyond making a living. He exists in a state of appalling mental lethargy, is uninvolved in world events, and appears to be unconcerned by them. Nonetheless, the death of forty American soldiers is a hot topic that can penetrate even his apathy. Children in Syria are an important source of family income. From a very early age they are aware of market forces and fully understand which issues kindle the interest of their fellow countrymen. It is very sad that even children as young as eight are so profoundly affected by the prevailing mental disintegration that they make up news in order to sell papers! Men in the Arab world lack responsibility for the moral growth of their children.

A high-ranking officer in the Syrian army ran over my six-year-old niece as he drove his car at an insane speed through a busy part of town. Once, by chance, I heard him speak about the accident. He laid the blame on the little girl, who, he said, had crossed the road on her way to school without checking to ensure that the way was clear. He also tried to discredit the family by claiming that her parents had been negligent and had failed to teach her how to cross the road properly.

I can still remember the lack of respect with which some members of our emergency room medical staff used to treat the crushed bodies of road-accident victims. I recall how, on one occasion that I shall never forget as long as I live, a ten-year-old girl was brought into the emergency room where I worked as a doctor. She was a servant in a private home, and her master had sent her out to buy a pack of cigarettes from the nearby shop. As she crossed the road a garbage truck ran her down and cut off one of her legs. The little girl died on the operating table, and her family took possession of her body. A couple of hours later, as I was throwing away some soiled bandages, I was hor-rorstruck to see the girl’s leg in the trash can. Investigation revealed that the orderly responsible for taking patients to the operating theater had, without any pangs of conscience, thrown the leg away as, he said, there was no point taking it into the operating theater with her as the doctors could not reattach it.

Never in my life have I heard or read of a Muslim man’s expressing feelings of guilt about something he has done, even in fiction. People feel guilt only when they feel a sense of responsibility and acknowledge that they have made a mistake. But Muslims are infallible: The mere fact that they are Muslim makes their every error pardonable. A man’s adherence to Islam is defined not by his actions and responsibilities, but only by the profession of faith he recites: “I testify that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.” As long as he continues to repeat this profession of faith he will continue to be a Muslim, and no crime he may commit against others can diminish this. Saddam Hussein was one of the great tyrants of history, but most Sunni Muslims consider him a martyr. At his funeral they chanted: “To paradise, oh beloved of God.”