Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (25 page)
Read Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Online
Authors: Michael Scheuer
Today the evolution of such cooption has created an environment in which Muslim citizens or subjects perceive the senior levels of the religious establishment as an arm of the government, not as independent clerics fulfilling their role of ensuring that the regimes govern according to Islamic law—preventing vice and promoting virtue, as it were. Again, this has been a slowly evolving popular perception, but the breaking point, after which clerical establishments were no longer given the benefit of the doubt, can be found after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when the senior Saudi council of clerics endorsed King Fahd’s religiously invalid decision to allow U.S. and Western military forces to have bases on the Arabian Peninsula. This decision was clearly a case of claiming black is white, because nothing is clearer to Muslims than that their Prophet, on his deathbed, forbade such an infidel presence in Islam’s birthplace, and he pledged to remove it if he lived. In the years since 1990 Arab governments have persuaded their senior clerics to sanction the expansion of the Western military presence on the Arabian Peninsula; negotiations and agreements with Israel; support for non-Muslim invasions of Muslim states and the provision of bases and other assistance to facilitate those actions; almost unimaginable governmental corruption; and the apprehension and incarceration of mujahedin fighting to protect Muslim lands. To even illiterate Muslims, these actions are un-Islamic and have validated the clerics as the mere paid mouthpieces of corrupt, apostate regimes.
This negative popular attitude toward the clerical establishment certainly would have been present with or without Osama bin Ladin. However, bin Laden has given Muslims a loud, persistent, passionate, and credible voice that invariably attacks the un-Islamic decisions and lifestyles of those he terms “the king’s clerics.” His public criticism has been a consistent theme of his rhetoric since he began speaking publicly in 1996, but the ferocity of his commentary has increased over the years. Initially bin Laden was reminding the religious establishment of its duty to enforce Islamic law, treading carefully around the traditional propensity of Muslims to respect and obey Islamic scholars, a tendency he fully shared before 1990. Bin Laden’s rhetoric gradually took on a much more condemnatory, adversarial, and finally dismissive tone. In late 2001, for example, he warned young Muslims “not to fall victim to the words of some scholars who are misleading the ummah” by denying that a defensive jihad is obligatory for all.
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Still shy of declaring war on those he described as “the authority’s scholars and ruler’s clerics,” bin Laden in late 2002 harshly reminded them that they were failing in their duty to God as “the inheritors of the Prophet.”
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Calling on young and independent clerics to put themselves at the “head of the ranks [of the mujahedin], and lead the action, and direct the march,” bin Laden said that much of the ulema had sided with the regimes and were practicing “deception and misguidance” of the people. They had, he said, “sold their faith for temporal gain.”
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By mid-2003 bin Laden essentially declared war on the ulema of the rulers. “Great evil is spreading throughout the Islamic world,” he argued,
The imams calling people to hell are those who appear more than others at the sides of the rulers of the region, the rulers of the Arab and Islamic world…[F]rom morning to evening, they call people to the gates of hell. They all, except for those upon whom Allah had mercy, are busy handing out praise and words of glory to the despotic rulers who disbelieved Allah and His Prophet…The true danger [to Muslims and their faith] is when the falsehood comes from the imams of religion who bear false witness every morning and evening and lead the nation [ummah] astray.
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The confluence of decisions by the ulema that many Muslims thought theologically invalid and bin Laden’s pointed attacks on these invalid judgments has drastically undercut the authority of senior ulema in many Muslim countries. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, assemblies of senior clerics have repeatedly called for the cessation of the violence pitting Muslim against Muslim, which all have been ignored by those doing the fighting. The eroding credibility of the religious establishments across the Arab world is producing an environment in which the Muslim leaders that Washington counts as allies will be able to do less and less to shape by religious fiat their peoples’ understanding of U.S. policies and actions in the Islamic world. And they will, in turn, be even less able to control the actions their subjects take in response to U.S. activities.
The cynical use of Islam by Muslim rulers, the clerics’ hypocrisy and corruption, and the constant urging of Muslims by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to ignore the “rulers’ ulema”
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and to think and decide for themselves about how to best protect their religion seems to be reinvigorating Islam’s original status as a literal, everyman’s religion—a faith that is between God and an individual who has no need for clerics either to interpret God’s word or to mediate and manage the relationship. “Muslims do not consider the Messenger of Islam [the Prophet Muhammad] a mediator between God and people,” the noted scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan has written. “Each individual is invited to address God directly, and although the Messenger sometimes did pray to God on behalf of his community, he often insisted on each believer’s responsibility in his or her own relationship with the One [Allah].”
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The al-Qaeda chief’s success in reducing the impact of establishment clerics on individuals appears to be substantial.
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“Bin Laden hijacked Islam from the jurisprudence scholars,” argues the distinguished Saudi academic Dr. Madawi al-Rashid, “and broke their monopoly of jurisprudence, which was established under the umbrella of the state.”
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Here Dr. Madawi argues not that bin Laden has hijacked the religion of Islam, as do so many in the West, but that he has worked to return Islam to Muslims, thereby destroying much of the power of each Muslim regime’s ulema to control their populations. “Bin Laden,” Dr. Madawi continues in her brilliant, ground-breaking essay,
has been able to transfer Islam from the local to the international arena in an era that has its own peculiarities. The most important of these peculiarities are information, media, intellectual [activities], and economic communication. He also has been able to transfer Islam from the hands of the jurisprudence scholars and their monopoly to those of the simple ordinary Muslim.
Bin Ladin’s address[es] is [
sic
] popular in the Islamic world, even the Western experts themselves testify to this, because he transferred from the jurisprudence assembly to two domains: the first domain is the entire world, and the second domain is the private individual. The interactions of the Somali in Somalia, the Pakistani in Leeds, the Egyptian in Germany, and the so-called Saudi in Mecca with these address[es] indicate clear privatization. With bin Ladin, Islam has become an individual project beyond the restrictions of the jurisprudence scholars or of political authority; a project that this individual could carry with him to the port of Aden or Mombassa, or to the noise of Bangkok or New York. The individual could also travel with this project through the Al-Nafudh Desert [in Saudi Arabia], and settle down with it in the mountains of Mecca, or take it with him to the cold land of Chechnya, and the jungles of the Philippines and Bali.
This privatization and individualization [of Islam] has broken the shackles of the local identities, be they sectarian, tribal, or regional. Despite the fact that the followers of bin Ladin insist on their local aliases and titles that indicate their roots, they are people who rebelled against the local tribal, sectarian, and even geographical aspects. They represent the traveling and immigrating Muslim running away from the homeland, the shackles and improvisations of the jurisprudence scholars, and the oppression of [nation-state] authority and its men.
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Dr. Madawi’s contention that bin Laden has initiated the return of Islam to each individual Muslim must be seen as extremely worrying both for the United States and for its Western allies, and for all Muslim regimes that have counted on their population’s respect for and obedience to the judgments and guidance of their ulema. If Dr. Madawi is correct, and I believe she is, the West may well be witnessing the Islamic reformation it has long predicted and yearned for, and which it has been sure would yield a pacifist, liberalized, and emasculated Islamic faith. In a century, the noted commentator on Islam Reza Aslan wrote in early 2006, “we may look back at bin Laden not only as a murderous criminal but also as one of the principal figures of an era that scholars are increasingly referring to as an Islamic reformation.” Clear in Mr. Aslan’s prediction is his belief that the eagerly awaited reformation will be in the direction of moderation preferred by the West and hoped for by Westernized Muslims, the sort of full eradication of religion from the public square that is now enforced by law in Europe and championed by the Democratic Party and the multiculturalists in the United States.
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Let us say that Mr. Aslan and others are correct and there is a reformation under way, but let us also pose the question: “What if they are wrong about the direction that the reformation is going to take?” What if the direction suggested by Dr. Madawi, the direction agitated for by bin Laden and other Islamists, toward the individualization and personalization of Islam is where the reformation is headed? What if, to paraphrase the American historian Carl Becker, we are headed toward an environment in which “every Muslim is his own imam”? This reality would negate the rosy expectations of Mr. Aslan et al., which are largely shared by America’s governing elite and its ethnic, exiled, and expatriate advisers, all of whom seem to have forgotten that the hundred-years-of-war-producing Protestant Reformation of Messrs. Luther and Calvin was precisely an effort to restore the direct relationship between man and God and to eliminate the intermediary role played by the corrupt priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. Bin Laden, by slowly negating the ability of regime scholars to put a brake on popular enthusiasm for jihad, has ensured the continuing growth of the worldwide Sunni insurgency he is inciting.
A final factor belongs in an analysis of the sort of Islamic reformation that is occurring, and that is the notion of liberation from tyranny, a subject that above all ought to be understandable to Americans with an awareness of their own history. I must admit that this is an issue to which I failed to give enough attention in either of my other books, especially in the second. Having documented bin Laden’s aim of inciting Muslims to overthrow Muslim regimes that do not rule by Islamic law, I left the emphasis on the replacement of the rule of apostates by the rule of the Koran. This surely remains the Islamists’ central goal in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Also in bin Laden’s rhetoric of urging the defeat of these governments, however, is a central theme that damns the regimes for their denial of basic natural rights, their corruption, their persecutions and tortures, their nepotism, and the cruelty they widely and liberally apply through security and police services. In some ways these claims, as I have previously said, are not entirely unlike those which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence in the long litanylike indictment of Britain’s George III contained in the “He has done this” and “He has done that” section of the Declaration.
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Consider, for a moment, bin Laden writing in the late summer of 1996:
Today we begin to talk, work, and discuss ways of rectifying what has befallen the Islamic world in general and the land of the two holy mosques [Saudi Arabia] in particular. We want to study the ways which could be used to rectify matters and restore rights to their owners as people have been subjected to grave danger and harm to their religion and their lives…
The same thing has befallen the people in industry and agriculture, the cities and the villages, and the people in the desert and the rural areas. Everyone is complaining about almost everything. The situation in the land of the two holy mosques is like a giant volcano about to erupt and destroy heresy and corruption, whatever their sources. The explosions of Riyadh [November 1995] and Khobar [June 1996] were only a small indication of that torrential flood resulting from the bitter suffering, repression, coercion, great injustice, disgraceful debauchery, and poverty [imposed by the al-Saud family].
They [the people] feel that God is tormenting them because they kept quiet about the regime’s injustice and illegitimate actions, especially its failure to have recourse to the Shariah, its confiscation of the people’s legitimate rights, the opening of the land of the two holy mosques to the American occupiers, and the arbitrary jailing of the true ulema, heirs of the Prophet.
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If I am correct that bin Laden is appealing to Muslims to seek what George W. Bush has correctly called the earnest desire of all people to live freer lives,
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then the reality is that the al-Qaeda chief is tapping not only into hatred of U.S. foreign policy and its impact and an almost genetic eagerness to defend Islam against infidel attack, but also into the desire of Muslims to attain what Jefferson called the “inalienable rights” that the Founders believed to be hard-wired into human beings simply because they are human beings. That is, bin Laden is urging Muslims to liberate themselves from tyranny in order to attain life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in terms that are compatible with their Islamic faith and not dictated by effete but brutal and corrupt tyrannies like the al-Sauds. And while it is true that the record of Islamists after gaining power is a sorry and frequently bloody one that does not reflect the ideals of the American Enlightenment,
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that does not alter the mobilizing and motivating power of the idea of striving to create an environment where Muslims can exercise their natural rights—however they believe Allah has defined those rights—in place of the screw, the rack, and the electric cattle prod; unimaginable royal corruption that impoverishes them; imprisonment without charge; and a religion distorted to protect tyranny. If a component in bin Laden’s rhetoric of incitement urges Muslims to liberate themselves from those attributes of coercion common to all police states, Muslim or Western, then his appeal will be considerably wider and more durable than we—or at least I—had previously estimated. He will strike a resonant chord not only with those who share his piety, but also with those who are nationalists and those who are enraged by the seemingly permanent and arbitrary denial of the natural rights that our Founders believed came from God and on which they predicated the American Revolution and then entrenched in the U.S. Constitution.