When Will Muslims Stop Hiding Behind Their Hate?
I am deeply frustrated by the Muslim community's response to questions posed by Westerners about community responsibility, Islamic religious purpose, and terrorism. The responses of the London Muslim interviewed by The Watcher in the Sept. 14 post ( A Peaceful Muslim's Point of View on Islamic Extremism) reminded me of Mike Wallace's 60 Minutes interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran not long ago.
It's not our fault. We're not responsible. We can't be expected to control a few loose cannons. What the extremists say is nonsense and no one believes them. There are no terrorists in our mosque. Muslims are peace loving. The Jews and the Christians are out to get us. The world doesn't understand us.
Of course, these are not direct quotes, but the flavor of the comments. The Islamic refrain is always the same, the world is out to get us. I have been reading, trying to understand where this undercurrent of paranoia comes from. In The Haj by Leon Uris I believe I have found some answers. The Haj is historical fiction, diligently researched by an author well known and respected for his novels on religious strife in modern times. The main characters may be fictional, but they represent the real people and ideas of the Arab world in the 1930-50s. Uris chronicles the historic events of that turbulent time through their affect on one family. It is an most effective way to portray the emotions and motivations of the Arabs and the forces that drive their society. I found Uris' portrayal both compelling and frightening.
"This is not a land of mercy. Magnanimity has no part in our world," explains Ibrahim, Arab leader of his village. "Perhaps Islam looks fanatical to you, but it provides us with the means to survive the harshness of this life and prepare us for a better life hereafter."
To which his protagonist replies, "It need not be that life under Islam is meaningless on this earth and that you are only here for the purpose of waiting to die. Could it be, Haj Ibrahim, you use Islam as an excuse for your failures, an excuse to quietly accept tyranny, an excuse for not using sweat and ingenuity to make something out of this land."
Born in one of the world's harshest environments, Islam embraces the futility and fatalism of the Bedouins who struggled to eke out a living in the hostile desert. Uris writes, "So harsh, so brutalizing were the forces of nature that those people imprisoned upon it were convoluted into forming a society where cruelty was commonplace." Among the Bedouins, who lived in a rigid caste system, every aspect of life was pre-determined. The tribal leader reigned supreme with total power of life and death over all members of his tribe. The eldest son would lead the tribe on his father's death, the next son became the bargainer and attended the family's interests at the market, on down to the lowliest, youngest son who was destined to spend his life tending the goats. Daughters were chattel, bargaining chips used to create tribal alliances. Life was imbued with futility. Improvement in your position in life could only be obtained by the death of those above you. Creativity, individualism, entrepreneurial spirit, all the elements that have enabled other cultures to rise above their environment and create a better life were eradicated from ordinary Arab life. One of Uris' main characters sums up the Arab lifeview:
"Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel."
This is the way the majority of Arabs thought, not in the dark ages, but as recently as 1950. Most could not read or write. All decisions were made by the leader of the clan or the tribe. There was no sense of community, of banding together for the common good, of doing something to benefit your neighbor. From their harsh Bedouin heritage, Arabs created an entirely self-centered universe that repelled attempts to create modern government, as one frustrated official complains in The Haj:
"Our people do not know how to participate in a community. Government to them is a mystical extension of Islam, something that falls out of the sky. They want rulers to take care of them, with no conception that they get only what kind of government they are willing to pay for."
With no sense of community, constantly on guard to protect yourself even from family, your fate determined by the whim of others, is it any wonder that Arab life centers around its religion? Islam is steeped in the futility and brutality of Arab life and history. The Koran spells out in great detail how every moment and action in life must be lived. But it is the imam in the local mosque who interprets these laws and how they apply to daily life. The imams wield tremendous power among a population that was largely illiterate even into the latter half of the 20th Century. They have taken the place of the tribal leader whose edict must be obeyed without question and many use their place to further personal power and ambition. Their message is often one of hate. It is easier to play the victim, to hate someone else for forcing circumstances upon you, than it is to take responsibility for your own actions and change your world. This is the message preached in the mosques -- hate, a volcanic hatred that consumes the Arab world. It is so much easier to fan the flames of hatred than it is to take control your destiny and build a world worth living in. As long as Islam controls the Arab world, as long as Arabs allow the imams to do their thinking for them, as long as Arabs choose to hide behind their hate, there will never be peace in the Middle East.
In The Haj, a tired Arab professor provides Islam's epitaph:
"Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone. We Arabs are the worst. We can't live with the world, and even more terrible, we can't live with each other. In the end it will not be Arab against Jew but Arab against Arab. One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail. We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts. The world will tell us to go to hell. We . . . will find ourselves humiliated as the scum of the earth."
