Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (25 page)

One of the bold proclamations of the new Zeitgeist was an article published in the official magazine of the Syrian military,
Army of the People
. It described Islam as “a mummy in the museum of history” and called for the advent of the “new socialist Arab man.”
²³

The most enthusiastic admirer of Atatürk was probably Reza Shah of Iran. He came to power in 1925 via a British-supported coup against the Qajar dynasty, which had been ruling Persia for the previous 130 years. Encouraged by the Kemalist Revolution, the shah launched a modernization program like that of Atatürk, but he was even more radical in its implementation, ordering the forceful unveiling of all women. As a result, Tehran police started to assault veiled women, tearing off their clothes. Local authorities around the country were instructed to prevent veiled women from entering shops, cinemas, and public bathhouses; Iranian writer Reza Baraheni recalls how his father used to carry his mother and his wife to the public bathhouse secretly in a sack, until the day when they were caught by a policeman.
²⁴
Veiled women were also barred from receiving diplomas, accepting government salaries, riding in horse-drawn carriages and cars, and receiving treatment in public clinics. Government employees were fired if they did not bring their unveiled wives to official ceremonies. Ironically, the ban even resulted in creating diplomatic tensions with Great Britain, which defended the right of Indian Muslim women to visit Iran in their traditional garb.
²⁵

What Reza Shah hoped to achieve with this ban on the veil was to Westernize the society and demolish gender barriers. But his tyrannical methods proved counterproductive. Rather than mix with men, “many observant women remained at home,” further isolating themselves from society.
²⁶
The most desperate even committed suicide.
²⁷

As would be expected, Iran’s powerful clerics, the Shiite
ulema
, were horrified by such a frontal attack on their traditions. This sparked their protests, which led to further persecution. Public religious festivals and celebrations were banned, and the
ulema
were forbidden to preach in public. In one instance, in March 1928, Reza Shah personally drove from Tehran to Qum, the city of the ayatollahs. He entered the city’s Holy Shrine wearing his boots—an insult to any Muslim sanctuary—and manhandled a number of seminarians before ordering a whipping for the cleric who had criticized him.
²⁸
In Mashad, in July 1935, a group of angry but peaceful protesters was encircled by the military at the Gowharshad Mosque, shot and killed indiscriminately, and then buried in mass graves.
²⁹

G
OD’S
P
EOPLE
U
NDER
S
IEGE
—T
HEN AND
N
OW

For a conservative Muslim living in the late 1920s, the world must have looked grim. The Ottoman caliphate was destroyed and most Muslim peoples had become slaves to European or, worse, Communist rulers. The few independent nations, such as Turkey and Iran, were overtaken by authoritarian regimes that suppressed the faith of their own people. Moreover, the “infidel” culture was penetrating Muslim societies via imposition by the secularists and the seduction of materialistic Western mores.

This was probably the biggest crisis the
umma
had ever faced. Now, some Muslims thought, was the time to resist, and even fight back. Here lay the origins of twentieth-century Islamism, the reactionary ideology created in the name of Islam, and jihadism, its terrorist offshoot.

The late Turkish social psychologist Erol Güngör offered one of the best interpretations of this trauma. Inspired by British historian Arnold Toynbee, Güngör likened the crisis of Islam in the twentieth century to one that had occurred two millennia earlier: the plight of the Jews during the time of Christ.
³⁰

The Jews, like Muslims, believed that they were God’s chosen people, and they had an inherent sense of superiority over the Gentiles. But this belief in what ought to be conflicted strongly with what is, as the Jews gradually lost their power in the Holy Land and became totally subjugated by the infidels. The Roman Empire, the superpower of the time, occupied the land of Israel in the first century BC, defiling not just the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem but also the dignity of its people. Consequently, Israel was turned into a Roman province ruled by the client kingdom of the Herodian dynasty—a secular collaborator of pagan Rome that persecuted its own people.

Every revolt the Jews launched to get rid of foreign rule was brutally crushed. Even worse, the political and military superiority of the invading infidels was accompanied by their cultural seduction. Those who were attracted to the Roman ways, known as Hellenized Jews, adopted Greco-Roman speech, manners, and habits, including “debauchery and riotous living.”
³¹
In the eyes of the more conservative Jews, Hellenized Jews were traitors who had become “sinners,” “scoffers,” and “wicked and ungodly men.”
³²
God’s people were besieged from without and within.

According to Erol Güngör, this two-millennia-old Jewish crisis is very similar to the one Muslims faced in the twentieth century. In the latter case, the new version of pagan Rome was the secular West; the new Hellenism was Westernization; and the new Herodians were the secularist dictators in Muslim countries.

The ways Muslims reacted to this crisis also mirror those of the Jews. Among the latter, four distinct camps emerged in the face of Roman power. The Sadducees decided to cooperate with Rome and adopt some of the Hellenistic attitudes—just as some Muslims today have done vis-à-vis the secular West. The Essenes preferred to renounce the world and devote themselves to a mystical life in isolation—like today’s Sufi-minded Muslims. The third Jewish party, the Pharisees, refused to cooperate with Rome and engaged in passive rejectionism, which led them to a very strict observance of Jewish law. This, too, is very similar to what the more conservative Muslims decided to do in the twentieth century: cling strictly to the Shariah and reject anything new and foreign.

The fourth element among the Jews of the time of Christ was also interesting—and quite relevant. These were the Zealots, a more radical offshoot of the Pharisees, who decided to wage an armed struggle against not just the Romans but also their Jewish collaborators. According to Josephus, a Jewish historian of the time, these men were passionately insistent that “God is to be their only Ruler and Lord.”
³³
They, in other words, wanted to push out the infidels and their allies and establish a theocracy—just as the militant Islamists of today wish to do.

Certain members of the Zealots were called Sicarii (daggermen), because they hid small daggers under their cloaks. They would stab their victims in popular assemblies and then vanish into the crowd. Their targets were not just Roman soldiers and officials but “any person who appeared too friendly towards the Roman oppressor.”
³⁴
They even killed the Jewish high priest Jonathan, “a man whose moderate views they refused to tolerate.”
³⁵
They were, in our contemporary language, “religious extremists” and “terrorists” who “hijacked” the peaceful faith of those like Jonathan.

After the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD, the Zealots took refuge by capturing the Roman fortress of Masada. After three years of repeated sieges, the Roman military finally gave up trying to seize the fortress intact and burned down the walls. When the Romans stormed in, the Zealots and their families had all committed suicide, rather than surrender. If there had been bombs in that era, the Zealots probably would have used them—to kill not just themselves but also their enemies. And the Romans probably would have labeled them “suicide bombers.”

W
HY
D
O
T
HEY
H
ATE
Y
OU
?

The aim of the preceding tale is certainly not to justify terrorism in the name of Islam. There can never be any valid excuse for terrorism—i.e., violent attacks on civilians. Rather, I want to demonstrate that the Muslim extremists who resort to, or sympathize with, such deplorable violence did not come out of the blue. The political history of the past two centuries of Islamdom holds the key to their emergence. The question of why Islamic liberalism—which shared such promise in the late nineteenth century—succumbed to a radical wave of Islamism cannot be answered by examining the internal dynamics of Islam alone. The intrusion of Western powers, and the secular dictators they supported in the Muslim world, are also partly responsible.
³⁶
Both the Romans and the Herodians, one can say, had a share in the creation of the Zealots.

What this also means is that Islamism, and its violent offshoot, jihadism, is more of a political phenomenon than a religious one. These movements certainly refer to the more violent and authoritarian strains and themes in the Islamic tradition, but what makes them choose those elements, and not others, is the way they experience and interpret the current state of affairs in the world. In her article, “The Revolt of Islam,” Nikki R. Keddie is wise to suggest:

We must accept the probability that many young educated Muslims do not so much reject the West because they are Muslims, but, rather, become Islamists largely because they are hostile to Western dominance. . . . We can speak of radical anti-imperialism, including cultural anti-imperialism, leading to Islamism as much as or more than the other way around.
³⁷

That dynamic probably explains why even religiously indifferent but politically irritated Muslims can sometimes sympathize with the jihadists. “Even young Arab girls in tight jeans,” an American scholar observes, “praise bin Laden as an anti-imperialist hero.”
³⁸

Such “anti-imperialist heroes” gather support with an alarming message: the
umma
, the global Muslim community, is under attack. The evidence, within their selective and biased reading of recent and current history, is abundant. Osama bin Laden, for example, routinely refers in his pronouncements to locales where Muslims have been humiliated, oppressed, or killed by non-Muslims (led, supposedly, by the United States), such as in Palestine, Chechnya, or Kashmir.
³⁹
Then he calls all Muslims to join the
jihad
, which he defines as “an individual duty if the enemy destroys Muslim countries.”
⁴⁰
(In other words, although there is a concept of
offensive jihad
in the tradition as well, what bin Laden and his ilk mainly refer to is
defensive jihad
.)

Therefore, an effective way for Westerners to render Islamism and jihadism ineffective would be to convince the world’s Muslims that Islam as a religion is
not
under attack. An additional reassuring message would be that Muslims are also not targets of enmity, insult, or discrimination in the West—and that their mosques, minarets, and veils are
not
banned.

Most Westerners may think that they already are spreading this message of peace and respect—and some, like President Obama in his helpful 2009 speeches in Ankara and Cairo, actually do. But the message does not get across enough, for several reasons.

First, most Muslims believe that U.S. rhetoric does not correspond to actual policies, and they point to certain aspects of American foreign policy that they perceive as harmful to Muslim nations. The four-decade-long plight of the Palestinians, which has become an iconic Muslim tragedy, is often at the top of the list, as the United States is perceived in the Muslim world as unilaterally, and unfairly, pro-Israel. Since 2000, the situation has worsened, in large part because of the civilian cost of the “War on Terror.” Westerners euphemistically refer to “collateral damage,” but most Muslims see this as the killing of innocents. “One man’s collateral damage,” after all, as one critic put it well, “is another man’s son.”
⁴¹

On the other hand, in regions where U.S. foreign policy is seen as supportive of Muslims, such as in the former Yugoslavia, America is cherished. Kosovo, which is more than 90 percent Muslim, is one of the most pro-American countries in the world. In my country, Turkey, the United States was very popular in the late 1990s, when it was seen as a peacekeeper and a bulwark against Serbian aggression, but anti-Americanism skyrocketed among Turks after 2003, when the Iraq War made the United States take on the image of an aggressor. (In other words, while some fanatics in the Muslim world might be hating America for what it
is
, most Muslims really look at what America
does
.)