A God Who Hates (8 page)

In any relationship a Muslim conducts with a non-Muslim, voluntarily or from necessity, the Muslim will remain on the defensive, prepared for the clash with what the unknown elements in this relationship may have in store for him. The Muslim assumes this defensive position because of his fear of the other and his doubts as to the purity of that other’s intentions. Such a relationship, no matter how profound it may be or how firmly it may establish itself, can never reach the stage at which it will allow the Muslim to trust the other and like him.

The Muslim will agree to the establishment of such a relationship only in one of two possible situations: to promote his own interests or to harm the interests of the other. When this relationship imposes itself on the Muslim he will display an awesome ability to conceal his feelings. I used to get involved in word battles with some of my expatriate Muslim friends here, especially over their attitude toward Americans and American culture, and would find myself surprised by their terrifying opinions, which revealed enough resentment to destroy not only the towers of the World Trade Center but the whole of America. But should one of my American acquaintances happen along while I was in the company of that same resentful person—in a fraction of second he would become more American than Abraham Lincoln.

I was driving from La Jolla in San Diego to Riverside with my Iraqi friend Amal who had lived in this country for no more than three years. She and her family fled Saddam Hussein’s merciless repression of the Shiites in the south and sought refuge in Saudi Arabia, which did not welcome them. They left after America responded to their request for permission to immigrate.

At the entrance to the side road we took on our way to her house a homeless man was standing begging from passersby. My Iraqi friend looked at me and said derisively, “Look at that beggar. That’s the America you’re so crazy about!”

“My dear, do you really think that’s all America has to offer?” I replied.

This was not my first difference of opinion with Amal over our attitudes toward America and its culture. We got into an argument that ended only when we reached her doorstep. I said good-bye to her and left shaking my head, disapproving of every word she had uttered. I have visited a great many different countries but I have never seen a more beautiful stretch of road than that which links La Jolla to Riverside in the state of California, as far as both the natural beauty of the surroundings and skillful planning are concerned. But when my friend Amal looked through the car window at the paradise that surrounded us, she saw only that beggar as representing America.

She deceived others, though, and I always wish that good Americans could see what I see before it’s too late. Amal was an employee of a famous American company. Once, at a party I was invited to, I met the head of the department where she worked, a very cultured and refined American lady. In the course of our long conversation we touched on the topic of emigration and the difficulties emigrants faced when moving to a new country, and I was surprised to hear her say: “What I like about Amal is her love for this country, her great admiration for American values, and her gratitude for what this country has given her.” I nodded my head in agreement, while a silent voice inside me murmured: “You poor Americans! If you only realized what Amal thinks of the United States, you’d realize that you’re digging your own graves with your naïveté!”

The Muslim’s fear of the outside world to a great extent reflects the Bedouin’s fear of the desert environment which surrounded him. It was, and still is, a fear of the unknown. In order to triumph over the desert and the unknown he created an ogre larger than his fears in the hope that this ogre would be able to protect him from them, and to offer him a degree of reassurance. But when he created his ogre he was only replacing his existing fear with a greater one.

All Koranic verses that describe paradise portray it as having rivers flowing below it. The desert was very sparing with its water, and death from thirst was one of the greatest dangers of the unknown. The promise of rivers sent a message of reassurance and repose to the Bedouin burdened by fears of death from thirst. The desert had few crops, produced little, and provided almost nothing in the way of food, while Islam promised its followers gardens of date palms, grapes, and other fruit. Nonetheless, fruit and food are less frequently emphasized than rivers, because fear of death from hunger was less pressing than death from thirst. Paradise in Islam assumed the guise of existing need. It appeared in the form of rivers and fruit to provide reassurance for the Bedouin who feared death from hunger and thirst.

Raiding, which I talked about earlier, was another important source of fear of death and extinction, but at the same time it was the only means of survival. The tribes fought one another in their quest for water and food. The Bedouin did not know a single moment of security. Arab history books are stuffed to bursting with descriptions of raids and of how the tribes would intentionally foment disputes so as to justify their acts of aggression against one another. Raiding was a source of both fear and security. Each tribe was afraid of being raided and felt secure when it got the opportunity to raid someone else.

Being raided meant increased poverty and deprivation for the victim, while for those responsible for the raid it was a source of booty and plunder. Then Islam came and tried to regularize raiding operations, justifying raids by its Prophet and followers, but proscribing raids by others. Open any book about the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic and the first thing you will read about are the Prophet’s raiding expeditions. Each of his raids was given a name and described in elaborate detail. The perceptive reader will easily understand that the main objective of these raids was the seizure and division of booty.

Islam tried to justify these raids by regarding them as death in God’s cause. Nonetheless, it could not disguise the basic aim, which was, indeed, gain and booty. The Koran mentions booty more than once. It does not forbid it: On the contrary, it entitles the Prophet to take a fifth of it and, so that his followers will not be angry at the size of his share, the name of God is appended to that of the Prophet, and the verse was revealed as follows: “And know that out of all the booty that ye may acquire [in war], a fifth share is assigned to Allah, and to the Messenger, and to near relatives, orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer.” (8:41).

In his commentary on the Koran Al-Qurtubi
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explains the phrase “and know that out of all the booty ye may acquire” as follows: You took something from the unbelievers by force. This indicates that booty was seized against the will of its rightful owners. Muslim commentators on the Koran could not agree as to how God could take his share of the booty and to whom his share would be given. They simply gave the Prophet the right to dispose of God’s share.

Muhammad did not want to leave room for argument with his followers regarding the division of the spoils, and so suggested that these be split five ways, with himself and God receiving one fifth. Had Muhammad suggested that he alone receive a fifth there would have been widespread protest: How could one individual take a fifth of the spoils for himself and leave four fifths for the thousands of others. But when he said “a fifth share is assigned to Allah and to the Messenger,” the problem faded, and the others found it hard to arouse dissent. If Almighty and Exalted God had agreed to share his fifth portion with the Prophet, why should the others, however numerous, not be satisfied with the other four fifths?

Here, once again, we see the survival instinct playing a decisive role in the teachings and rulings of Islam, which emerged in an environment dominated by the shadow of the unknown, where death from hunger and thirst posed a constant threat to its inhabitants. Another saying attributed to Muhammad in this connection is: “the killer has the right to his spoils,” meaning that when a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, he has the right to despoil him. This
hadith
(Muhammad saying) has caused differences of opinion among Muslims. Some wondered how the killer could be entitled to the spoils when the Koranic verse orders the booty to be divided five ways.

In an attempt to find a compromise between the differing views, some suggested that if there was little to plunder, what little there was belonged to the killer, while if there was a lot, it was divided into five parts. This emphasizes once again the struggle for survival.

In America, when you commit a crime, the first thing the investigators look for is the motive behind the killing. If the victim’s wallet and money are found on his body, and if everything in his home is where it should be, the investigators will say, “Basically, theft was not the motive; there would appear to be other motives.” But when they establish his possessions are missing, the investigation takes a different turn, as the motives for the murder are different in this case, and it can be surmised that theft is the most important motive behind the killing.

While Muslims justify the Prophet’s raids by saying that they were carried out in self-defense, I don’t believe that they can justify the theft and the spoils that were gained as a result of this raiding. If someone attacked you suddenly in the dark and tried to kill you and you managed to kill him instead, you could, in such a case, justify your killing him as self-defense. But if you were to steal his wallet and his money after you had killed him, would you be able to justify that by saying: I stole his wallet in self-defense? If you were speaking the truth when you said that you had killed him in self-defense, would you be speaking the truth when you said you had stolen his wallet in self-defense, after you had killed him, too?

The raids Muhammad carried out in his lifetime occupy the major part of his biography. Part two of Ibn Hisham’s biography of the Prophet mentions that Muhammad carried out twenty-seven raids in the course of his life, though some Muslim historians report a higher figure. I am not concerned here with following the historical account of these raids. But anyone who has an opportunity to read it from beginning to end will easily be convinced that there can be only two reasons for such raids. The first and most important is the acquisition of booty. The second, necessitated by the first, is to inflict harm upon the tribe that is the victim of the raid.

When the thief ambushes his victim he will be sure, in the course of the crime, to inflict as much damage as possible on him, to ensure that he cannot fight back. Fear of death from hunger and thirst was the main motive for raiding. Causing harm was another objective, and this was done in order to guarantee that the raider’s enemy had been deprived of his ability to resist. Islam legalized it, legitimized it, and justified it with an edict from the ogre it had created in order to overcome its fear of the environment that threatened its survival and its very existence.

For me, understanding the truth about the thought and behavior of Muslims can only be achieved through an in-depth understanding of this philosophy of raiding that has rooted itself firmly in the Muslim mind. Bedouins feared raiding on the one hand, and relied on it as a means of livelihood on the other. Then Islam came along and canonized it. Muslims in the twenty-first century still fear they may be raided by others and live every second of their lives preparing to raid someone else. The philosophy of raiding rules their lives, the way they behave, their relationships, and their decisions.

When I immigrated to America I discovered right away that the local inhabitants were not proficient in raiding while the expatriate Muslims could not give it up. After I had been in the United States for only a few weeks, an Arab neighbor of mine took me to the supermarket in an attempt to familiarize me with the area we lived in. We went into a Vons market and, once there, she began to open every packet she could, then she began to make holes in the lids of cartons of milk, Jell-O, and cream. Then she made holes in a number of bags of potato chips, packets of paper handkerchiefs, and packets of spaghetti.

I shouted at her disapprovingly: “Dina, what are you doing? “

“May God curse them. They stole our land!” “And are you doing this to try to get it back?” “I’m trying to hurt them! You’re still new here. Don’t you know the own er’s Jewish?”

That happened over fifteen years ago when I was a newcomer here. But today I am more firmly convinced than ever that time can do nothing to change this mentality, and that the less able a Muslim feels to adapt to his surroundings the more he feels the need to go raiding. He is convinced that he has come to this country to despoil it and cause harm.

The municipality of the town where I live in California gives each household three garbage cans: one for nonrecyclable refuse; one for glass, paper, and metal recyclables; and a third for garden refuse. I was once invited to a luncheon party at the home of a Muslim woman friend. When the party was over we began to clear the table and she started to collect the refuse and throw it in the garbage can. I asked her in surprise, “Don’t you sort the rubbish into its different cans?” She replied angrily, “God curse them! Do you expect me to help them look after their environment? Don’t you know what they did in the first and second Gulf War? They poisoned our country’s environment with their waste. Have you heard about the prostitutes with AIDS whom Israel sends to Jordan and Egypt so as to spread AIDS in our countries?”

In an attempt to silence this recital, which I was weary of hearing, I said, “Yes, I have.”

My friend knows that she will live her whole life in this country, she knows that this will be the home of her children, her grandchildren, and her grandchildren’s grandchildren. Yet she seems to care nothing for the state of its environment, for she is here only to pillage and cause harm to her enemies. The idea or philosophy of raiding has taken root in her mind as well and was a motivating factor in her immigration to this country. She regards the comforts here as her own private booty and her actions, to me, seem to be just one more Muslim attempt to harm others.