Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: The Jerusalem Post
Date: May 9, 2001
Those Moslems variously known as
fundamentalists or Islamists often appear to outsiders to be the most authentic
adherents of their faith. They refer constantly to God and conspicuously
pray in public. Men sport full beards and women wear veils. They urge Moslem
solidarity and demonstrate a suspicion of non-Moslems.
A closer look, however, finds that
Islamists are hardly model Moslems.
Preoccupied with gaining power (and
succeeding in several countries - such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan),
they often show more talent at politics than at living by Islam's precepts.
In fact, Islamists, for all their ostentatious piety, tend to be severely
deficient as believers.
Financial probity, for example,
is a recurring trial for them. On the grand scale, the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International (BCCI) was the Islamist bank par excellence; when
it failed in 1991, spawning perhaps the largest and most complex banking
scandal in history, its seemingly devout owners had embezzled billions
of dollars from 1.3 million mostly Moslem depositors in over 70 countries.
On a slightly lesser scale, the
"Islamic capital-investment companies" that flourished in Egypt in the
1980s also collapsed from corruption, as did similar institutions in Turkey.
And a recent University of Texas study finds that "Islamic banks in Iran
and Sudan are avenues for corruption and embezzlement."
Nor are Islamists above petty theft.
As the two men who carried out the suicide attack on the USS Cole in October
2000 prepared for their operation, they knew they would not be returning
to their rented living quarters, so they cheated their Yemeni landlord
out of the last month's rent. "I was angry," commented their landlord,
adding almost unnecessarily: "There was nothing Islamic in that."
But it is Islam's strict code of
sexual modesty that Islamists most often transgress. Islamist terrorists
kill in the name of Islam, but frequently are hardly models of Islamic
probity. The man who directed the World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef,
once lived in the Philippines where, his biographer Simon Reeve recounts,
he was seen "gallivanting around Manila's bars, strip-joints and karaoke
clubs, flirting with women." Rashid Baz, convicted of killing a Hassidic
boy on the Brooklyn Bridge, was described by his father as someone who
"never went to a mosque in his life. He likes girls and cars and sports."
Drawn to pornography like moths
to light, Islamists integrate dirty pictures even into their terrorism.
In one case, US law-enforcement officials found that a wide variety of
Islamist organizations - Osama bin Laden's, Hamas, Hizbullah, and others
- had placed encrypted information such as maps, photographs, and instructions
within the X-rated pictures on pornographic Web sites.
In offices, Islamists are known
to be sexual harassers. Thus did a female employee at the Saudi mission
to the United Nations in New York publicly complain last September about
enduring years of sexual harassment from "male fundamentalist members"
of the Saudi mission.
When in authority, Islamists exploit
women. The Iranian government recently arrested the head of an Islamic
revolutionary court on charges of running a prostitution ring involving
runaway underage girls.
Perhaps the most appalling instance
of Islamist sexual degeneracy takes place in the course of hostage taking,
when rape is common. Recently in the Philippines, for example, Islamists
violated at least one of the Western women whom they held hostage on Jolo
Island.
"It was without doubt the worst
thing that happened there," a fellow-hostage commented afterwards, adding
that the act of sexual molestation "was particularly surprising" because
otherwise the hostages were relatively well treated.
This pattern of misbehavior is important
because it reveals the Islamists' true profile: these are ruthless, power-hungry
operatives who cannot rightly claim the aura of piety they strenuously
assert. They are less observant Moslems than they are political extremists.
This record of stealing and fornicating
has another implication: as the analyst Khalid Duran notes, Islamist demands
for power are based not on worldly experience, technical accomplishments
or policy sophistication, but on their allegedly higher moral standards.
The sort of flagrant misconduct documented here completely undercuts such
claims to authority.
For true Islamic ethics, one needs
to turn to those many traditional Moslems who live according to the precepts
of a faith as it organically developed over 14 centuries. Not radical,
not inclined to force their vision on others via violence, these are pious
Moslems who deserve respect.
