Author: Srdja Trifkovic
Publication: Taki's Magazine
Date: June 8, 2009
URL: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/obamas_happy_muslim_rainbow_tour/
"As the Holy [sic!] Koran tells us, Be
conscious of God and speak always the truth," President Obama told his
audience at the beginning of his much heralded speech in Cairo last week.
It was a remarkable performance: not a single
significant statement he made on the nature of Islam, or on America's relationship
with the Muslim world, or on the terrorist threat, complied with the quoted
command of the prophet of Islam.
Obama's two immediate predecessors have done
a lot of respectful kowtowing, of course. Bill Clinton declared before the
United Nations in September 1998, "There is no inherent clash between
Islam and America." Three years and several thousand American lives later,
President Bush said, "there are millions of good Americans who practice
the Muslim faith who love their country as much as I love the country."
Four years after 9-11 he continued insisting "the evil" unleashed
on that day "is very different from the religion of Islam," and
its proponents "distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder
against Christians and Jews and Hindus."
Obama brings a new quality to the continuum,
however. He is developing the theme in Islam's heartland. He is doing it in
a manner likely to raise geopolitical expectations that cannot be fulfilled,
and certain to cement even further the Muslim myth of blameless victimhood.
It is the greatest favor any recruiter for the cause of global jihad could
hope for.
Is Obama deluded or mendacious? In view of
his middle name and family history, the question is more legitimate than it
would have been with Clinton or Bush.
"How About Something Light? Here's a
Pamphlet on Muslim Intellectual Achievement"
"It was Islam-at places like Al-Azhar-that
carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for
Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment," Obama asserted. In historical
fact, a number of medieval thinkers and scientists living under Islamic rule-by
no means all of them Muslims either nominally or substantially-have played
a useful role of transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic fruits of
knowledge to the West… but it was the Westerners who were able to make
good use of them. Their assertions were subjected to rigorous testing by a
recognized adversarial method of proof. They were thus able to proceed to
"the invention of invention," the institutionalization of research,
resulting in the exponential growth of knowledge.
It is said that when the Caliph Umar conquered
Alexandria he had its huge library burned, saying that if the writings contained
within were in agreement with the Koran, then they were redundant and therefore
useless; if they disagreed with the holy book of the Muslims, then they were
blasphemous and must be burned. Modern Muslims delight in debunking this apocryphal
story as anti-Islamic slander; yet it was not invented by Christians or Jews,
but by Umar's twelfth century successors to justify the end of critical inquiry,
ijtihad.
After the brief period of flourishing-first
in Baghdad and then in Spain-the "light of learning" was thus extinguished
and a long decline started, almost a thousand years ago. It still continues.
The Golden Age of Islam was "golden" only on its own terms; whatever
flourished, it did in spite of Islam. It never encouraged science-disinterested
inquiry-because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge. By claiming
that it is otherwise, Obama is not doing us-or them-any favors. The late Oriana
Fallaci offered a resolute reply to "the fatal question" of what
is behind the other culture: "We can search and search and find only
Mohammed with his Koran and Averroe with his scholarly merits, his second-hand
Commentaries on Aristotle"-all worthy but, on the whole, pretty second-rate
stuff, really.
TOLERANCE!
Obama's claim that "Islam has always
been a part of America's story… and since our founding, American Muslims
have enriched the United States" is ridiculous, of course, but can be
dismissed as relatively harmless rubbish. By contrast, his assertion that
"throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the
possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality" is outrageous.
It was merely compounded by his claim that "the Holy [sic!!] Koran teaches
that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and
whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind."
What Islam has demonstrated throughout history
is that it contains a highly developed doctrine, theology, and legal system
of mandatory violence against non-believers. It was the first political ideology
to adopt terrorism as a systemic tool of policy, not as a temporary and unwelcome
expedient. While it is possible to dispute the details of al-Qaeda's theological
justifications for terror, it is not possible to dispute that its arguments
are based on standard Islamic sources, precedents, and methods of deduction.
Those sources and principles are independent of any dubious or capricious
interpretations of the Koran or the Hadith. The gap between the pillars of
respected "mainstream" Islamic thought at Cairo's Al-Azhar University
and "the Evil" of 9-11 does not compare to the gap between Pope
Benedict and Eric Rudolph, but merely to that between Vladimir Ilich Lenin
and Pol Pot.
Obama's view that colonialism and the Cold
War had denied rights and opportunities to Muslims, prompting blowback from
"violent extremists," reflects the prevailing dogma of the Western
elite class which sees the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should
be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. Predictable failure
of this approach merely leads to ever more pathological self-scrutiny and
morbid self-doubt.
Even Obama's Koranic quote was a distortion
of verse 5:32, which states that "if anyone slew a person-unless it be
for murder or for spreading mischief in the land [emphasis added]-it would
be as if he slew the whole people." Immediately thereafter follows a
list of horrid torments for those who create "mischief," including
death by crucifixion. That loophole embraces all those who resist the establishment
of the Muslim rule or who disobey the sharia once it is established. Furthermore,
Obama should be told-unless he knows well, but does not want us to know-that
one single Koranic verse, "the Verse of the Sword" (9:5, which gives
the infidel the choice between conversion or death) abrogates all 124 earlier
verses, the ones that are quoted most regularly by Islam's apologists to prove
its tolerance and benevolence.
Great Muslim Inventors
There need not be contradiction between progress,
development, and Islamic tradition, Obama said, but his assertion is belied
by history. For some centuries now the Muslim world has failed to resolve
the tension between the view of man's destiny as the fulfillment of Islam
and its triumph everywhere on the one hand, and the reality of the squalor
and decadence on the other.
The problem has always been in the Islamic
tradition. The spirit of critical inquiry essential to the growth of knowledge-without
which there can be no "development"-is completely alien to it. When
the Ottomans finally grasped some two centuries ago just how badly they were
lagging behind Europe, their view of knowledge was that of a commodity that
could be imported and used. Ever since that time Western engineers, military
officers, and doctors trained their Muslim students, but the latter never
managed to produce more than what was imparted to them.
"Contradiction" does exist, and
it remains insoluble: the Muslim world wants the fruits of Western culture,
but not the culture characterized by self-discipline, cohesion, ingenuity,
and delayed gratification of free men willingly coming together for a purpose,
from Greek hoplite squares to Italian guilds and American research labs. Getting
the results but avoiding the undesirable trappings of democracy, of the spirit
of critical inquiry and debate, is not possible. Saudi royal kleptocrats are
no better at squaring the circle today than the Sultan and his advisors in
the 1850s, when Turkish regiments acquired field guns and steamboats plied
the Bosphorus, but there was no creative spark from within that could use
foreign novelties to transform the society and jumpstart it into modernity.
The contrast with Japan in the period of Meiji
Restoration is startling. The Japanese could make the transition because even
without "democracy" it possessed a culture inured to discipline,
approving of delayed gratification and self-restraint. By contrast, as Bernard
Lewis has pointed out, Islam-fatalistic, hypersensual, and still puzzled by
its own failures-was struggling even to limp along. Always reliant on the
plunder of its neighbors and institutionalized robbery of its non-Muslim subjects,
Islam remains as unable to create wealth today as it was unable to do so a
thousand years ago. Attempts to copy Western methods of production will continue
to fail for as long as they are not accompanied by the essential changes of
social, political, and legal structure. Yet a society willing to accept such
changes would no longer be Islamic…
Making Egypt Safe for The Brotherhood
It should be added that a dozen members of
the Muslim Brotherhood were invited to hear Obama's speech in Cairo, reportedly
at the insistence of the U.S. State Department and with the President's explicit
approval. This was taken by the media as "a clear sign that the Obama
administration is willing to publicly challenge Egypt's commitment to parliamentary
democracy." Indeed, just as Jimmy Carter publicly challenged the commitment
of the Shah thirty years ago, with the results that are still with us today.
It is unsurprising but nevertheless depressing
that Obama, too, hopes to effect the democratic transformation of the Middle
East. Even if Mubarak's tentative "commitment to parliamentary democracy"
is pushed further, the end result would be detrimental to U.S. security-in
Egypt and everywhere else in the region. He would be swept from power and
the Muslim Brotherhood would turn Egypt into an Islamic Republic, without
ever thanking Obama for the favor.
Obama's claims about Islam's compatibility
with democracy reflect his failure to grasp that this particular model of
governance is not feasible outside of the framework of ideas that sustain
it. These ideas, in the case of the West, are rooted back into the history
of the polis of Greece, the Scriptures, the Enlightenment, the notion of liberty,
of individual responsibility resulting from the existence of individual free
will, of collective creativity embodied in the rendering of classical symphonies
and the launching of space missions.
Ultimately, the reason traditionally Christian
societies have been able to develop democratic institutions while traditionally
Muslim ones have not is the Christian concept of governmental legitimacy,
which accepts the possibility of two realms. Christ Himself recognized the
realm of human government as legitimate when he said, "Render therefore
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."
In Islam there is no such distinction. It condemns as rebellion against Allah's
supremacy the submission to any other form of law other than Shari's. It is
noteworthy that the term "democracy" did not have an equivalent
in any Muslim language until a century ago. Its fundamental principle, equality,
is equally absent from the Muslim vocabulary.
As Middle East specialist Leon Hadar points
out, Washington's policy of cozying up to The Broothood and its ilk seems
less "crazy if you take into consideration the current U.S. alliance
with the pro-Iran Shiite fundamentalist parties in Iraq." The Iraqi scenario
entailed replacing an unpleasant secularist autocrat, Saddam Hussein, with
Ayatollah Sistani's people. In a similar vein, to bring down Bashar al-Assad-another
secularist autocrat who presents no threat to America-Washington is cultivating
some presumably "moderate elements" of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Damascus.
The quest for a "moderate" variety
of the Muslim Brotherhood is as absurd as the hunt for the unicorn. It is
an organization based on a simple credo: Allah is our objective. The Prophet
is our leader. Qur'an is our law. jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah
is our highest hope. It was founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, an Egyptian
school teacher nurtured on Wahhabism, as an Islamic revivalist movement that
opposed the ascendancy of secular and Western ideas in the Middle East. An
Ikhwani tried to assassinate Nasser in 1954 and four others succeeded in killing
his successor Anwar al-Sadat in September 1981.
During the Cold War Washington routinely pandered
to various Islamists as a means of weakening secular Arab nationalist regimes.
In the mid 1950s the Americans even promoted the idea of forming an Islamic
bloc, led by Saudi Arabia, to counter the Nasserist movement. So Obama's hope
that the Islamists be co-opted into the system has a long bipartisan history.
President Carter secretly authorized funds to help create an Islamist network
that would destabilize the Soviet Union. By 1989, the jihadists thought that
they had destroyed the Soviet Union and that led them to believe that they
could triumph everywhere. The genie was released, but few Westerners knew
this before it reached New York, Washington, Madrid, and London.
* * * * *
It is not the jihadists who are "distorting"
Islam; the apologists and appeasers of Obama's ilk are. Islam, in Muhammad's
revelations, traditions and their codification, threatens the rest of us.
It is the religion of war and intolerance. It breeds a peculiar mindset, the
one against which Burke warned when he wrote that "intemperate minds
never can be free; their passions forge their fetters." Until the petrodollars
support a comprehensive and explicit Koranic revisionism capable of growing
popular roots, we should seek ways to defend ourselves by disengaging from
the world of Islam, physically and figuratively, by learning to keep our distance
from the affairs of the Muslim world and by keeping the Muslim world away
from "the world of war" that it seeks to conquer or destroy. It
is a fair-minded, morally sound, and eminently achievable strategy. Obama,
Bush, and so many presidents before them have been leading America in the
opposite direction.
Obama was right to assert in Cairo that relations
"between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it
is not." He is not telling the truth about what Islam is and what it
is not, however. He is quite unworthy of our trust regarding relations between
America and the greatest threat the Western world faces in the century ahead
of us. That colossal failure alone makes Barack Hussein Obama wholly unfit
for the post he currently occupies.
