A God Who Hates (23 page)

“Good morning neighbor. I was wondering if you could possibly help me with something.”

“What is it?”

“My gardener’s Mexican and doesn’t speak English, and I can’t speak Spanish. Could you possibly translate what I want to ask him to do?”

“But I can’t speak Spanish!”

He replied in amazement, “Don’t you speak Spanish? Aren’t you from South America?”

“No, I’m from Syria.”

“Syria! Don’t you speak Spanish in Syria?”

“No. We speak Arabic.”

“I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

Ninety percent of Americans do not think much about where Syria is on the map of the world, while 90 percent of Arabs believe that Americans spend most of their time spying on them and plotting to destroy Islam, so as to seize control of their oil and their resources.

In 1984 my husband and a group of his fellow lecturers were sent to England by the Syrian ministry of higher education to spend three months studying teaching methods at one of the universities there. While he was there, the British university lecturer responsible for the delegation invited the Syrians to lunch at his home, and proved himself a gracious host. A few months after my husband’s return, this British lecturer visited Syria and stopped over at the university where my husband taught. To show our appreciation of his earlier hospitality, my husband and I invited him to lunch at a restaurant near our home, at a cost equivalent to my husband’s monthly salary. The lecturer’s visit happened to coincide with our son’s third birthday, and we had to put off buying the cake and the present until the following month.

But the financial pressures were not the only problem this visit caused us: The questions the university chancellor asked my husband about the invitation were even more stressful. The most distressing of them was: Did you consider, before you issued the invitation, that this man might be a British spy in the pay of international Zionism, and be planning to steal the university’s scientific secrets or—who knows—perhaps military secrets, too? My husband and I experienced a period of anxiety that brought us to the verge of mental breakdown. Accusations of being Zionist agents—even if these were no more than rumors—could most certainly have destroyed our reputation and our future, if not our lives.

When I remember my childhood and reflect at length on our teachers’ and clergymen’s accusations against Jews in particular and Christians and other non-Muslims in general, I say to myself: If learned Muslims could replace the enormous quantities of hate contained in our schoolbooks, both religious and secular, with studies that focus on loving other people regardless of their religion, racial origin, or nationality, they would help to save the entire Muslim world from its backwardness, hunger, poverty, and ignorance. That hatred could well destroy us before it destroys our “enemies.” For hatred is like acid in that it burns the container that holds it more than it damages the surface it is spilled upon.

When I criticize this style of education, most Muslims accuse me of being in the pay of the Jews and of receiving enormous sums to defend them. Of course, this accusation does not worry me in the least, as it is above all evidence of their inability to confront me with logical arguments. I am not defending the Jews so much as protecting the Muslims themselves. Why must children all over the Arab world drink in this hatred and waste the best years of their lives on thoughts of murder and revenge?

My three children received their primary education in American schools. None of them ever came home and told me their teachers had taught them that Muslims were terrorists and should be fought against. None of them learned that Christianity was the only true religion and that anyone who did not profess it was a heretic and an enemy. None of them learned in school that God hates Muslims.

I always ask myself: Why have my children, the product of American education, grown up to respect others, no matter what their religion, race, or origins? Why was I burned by the fires of hatred until late in life, and why are people in my homeland still being burned by that fire? Why should people in the land of my birth not learn to love, so that they can be productive, efficient, and happy like people in other countries that teach love? Why should people in my homeland not learn to accept people who do not profess the same religion as they do, so that they can live with others in peace and harmony? We have learned to hate others, and this hatred has hurt us more than it has hurt anyone else.

When I was in fourth grade in primary school, Syria received aid from the UN food aid agency that included trucks of Nestlé’s powdered milk manufactured in the United States. One of the conditions attached to this aid would appear to have been that the milk had to be distributed free to primary schoolchildren since, if this condition was not attached, Syrian offi-cials would sell the trucks of milk and pocket the money as usual. The milk began to be distributed to us schoolchildren at an average rate of one glass per pupil per day, which we had to drink before the end of that school day. I remember our teacher telling us at every lesson, “Can you imagine what’s happening here? America donates milk to Syrian children to fool the world into believing it’s generous, but to Israeli children it donates tanks!” Most of us did not drink the milk; instead we poured it out on the unpaved earth of the playground.

Today I can find no explanation for our refusal to drink the American milk other than a psychological repugnance for the United States and its milk as a result of the venom that our teachers had poured into our tender minds. Why do we inject our children with this poison? That is the question that has confronted me ever since I began to discover the truth in my new society. When I scream at the top of my voice, “Stop injecting this poison!” I am doing so not just to protect Jews and Christians. I am doing it above all to protect the children of my homeland and save them from being burned by the acid of hatred that scorched my generation.

I can still clearly remember our religious education teacher’s repeating to us sayings and stories of the Prophet Muhammad that deal with Jews and Christians, and I can recall the effect these anecdotes had on our consciences and mental well-being. The story most deeply etched in my memory is the one that relates how Muhammad and a group of his followers heard a far-off sound. The prophet’s followers asked him: “What’s that noise, Oh Prophet of God?” and he replied: “That’s the Jews suffering torment in their graves” (Sahih Bukhari, 1286).

In another hadith Muhammad says: “An imposter will come along and claim to be the messiah, and seventy thousand Jews will follow him, each girt with a sword. But then the messiah will catch him, kill him, and defeat all the Jews. Each and every stone and tree will say: ‘Oh servant of Allah, Oh Muslim, here is a Jew, come and kill him.’ “ The only exception is the salt tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews, and if they hide behind it, it will not reveal their presence. Today there are Muslims who like to spread the rumor that Jews in Israel know the truth of this hadith and have begun to plant salt trees to hide behind.

Whenever Muhammad wanted to stop his followers from doing something, he would say: “God has cursed the Jews because they did that.” He said, for example: “God cursed the Jews because they took the graves of their prophets as a place for prayer” (Sahih Muslim, 823). A man asked one day: “Oh Prophet of God, I have a slave girl whom I desire and to whom I wish to do what a man does, but, for fear she may become pregnant, I ejaculate outside her body. But I have heard that ejaculating outside a woman is considered tantamount to murder of the fetus—is that true?”

He replied in a hadith: “May God curse the Jews, as they said that! Pay no attention to them, and ejaculate where you will. If God wished her to become pregnant you would not be able to ejaculate outside her body.” If education is responsible for shaping the human mind, then the entire mind is the product of education. What sort of mind can teachings such as these produce?

Is not the Muslim the natural product of his education?

THE SEPTEMBER 11TH
terrorist attacks shocked me, but they did not surprise me. Day and night, I had been expecting something of the kind. I had been expecting it because of my involvement with what was being written in the Arabic-language newspapers here and what was being said at our social get-togethers. In the Arab world, there is no such thing as a secret, and everything that is about to happen in the future is preceded by signs and portents in the present. But many people cannot read the signs, for one of two reasons: either conceit or ignorance. American government officials prior to September 11th were conceited and ignorant enough to disregard them.

A traditional Arab folktale tells the story of a man who was riding through the desert when another traveler, who had lost his way, signaled to him to stop and pick him up. Experience had taught the desert Arabs to beware of highwaymen. Nonetheless, the horseman took pity on the wayfarer and stopped to pick him up. After a short time had passed the wayfarer said to the horseman, “What a fine horse you have, my friend.” A little later the wayfarer said again, “This is indeed a fine horse, my friend.” After an additional period of time had elapsed, the wayfarer said, “By God, this really is a fine horse we have here!”

The horseman pulled up at once and told the wayfarer, “Get off my horse or I’ll kill you! At first you said what a fine horse ‘you have,’ then you called it ‘this horse,’ and now you said what a fine horse ‘we have.’ In another minute you’ll be calling it ‘my horse,’ and kicking me off its back!” Americans do not have enough experience of highway robbers and so they allow any passing wayfarer to violate the sanctity of their horses! They are not expert at either debate or trickery. They say what they mean and they mean what they say, and have no idea that they are dealing with people skilled in saying what they don’t mean and meaning what they have never said.

Laws alone cannot safeguard a society. For a law to be effective, there must be a moral foundation in the populace, and a nation has to attain a certain moral standard before it can either make laws or apply them. It is a society’s morals that formulate its laws and guarantee their enforcement. Interpersonal relationships within a society are complex, and the laws that govern that society may not be able to deal with every individual case. Only morality can do that. When I moved from a still primitive society to a civilized one I was impressed by the enormous difference between the two. It was then I began to search, as I still do today, for the reasons behind these differences.

I emerged from my search utterly convinced that what we are experiencing in Muslim societies is not a crisis of government, revenue, resources, or even law: It is a moral crisis. Our Muslim societies are governed by a religious law that imposes itself by force and relies on fear as a means of perpetuating and protecting itself. Islam, as I have already emphasized, was born in an arid and desolate environment where people had to struggle to survive. It adopted the customs of that environment and that era, absorbed them, and then refused to allow them to change with the times.

Culture encompasses religion and adapts it to suit the times. American culture was influenced by Christianity and Judaism—and, indeed, it still is—but it changes nonetheless in accordance with the times, and religion changes with it. It is culture that shapes religion, not the other way around. As soon as religion begins to interfere in people’s lives and take them over, it loses its spirituality and reveals its inability to keep up with people’s constantly changing needs. Muslim clergymen confront us on the television screen and talk about Islam’s attitudes to menstruation, the advantages of banks, the Pakistani nuclear bomb, and tsunamis, all in the same breath.

Islam subjugated the cultures of all the peoples it afflicted, but it eradicated all traces of indigenous Arab culture more thoroughly than those of any other. This culture no longer possesses any of its original distinguishing features; over the course of fourteen centuries, it is Muslim law that has delineated its characteristics. A Christian born and brought up in Jordan is more Islamic in his behavior and way of thinking than a Pakistani Muslim. Islam, as I said before, damaged the cultures of all the Muslim peoples, but, since the Koran was written in Arabic and its translation into any other language is forbidden, Islam was unable totally to blot out the characteristics of other cultures in quite the same way it erased Arab culture.

Non-Arab Muslim peoples have managed to preserve the remnants of their cultures and protect them from Islamization. These remnants, sparse and meager though they may be, distinguished these nations from the Arab peoples, who, as they were more profoundly influenced by Islam, were much more seriously damaged. This was the situation from the inception of Islam until thirty years ago, i.e., until the Saudi Wahhabi octopus, with its terrorist ideology and its funding, infiltrated these nations and the non-Arab Muslim nations of their cultures, such as Indonesia.

Islam is a legal code that was created in an era when a mentality of raiding and booty held sway, and, as a result, its pivotal issues are raiding and spoils. It was unable to construct any common foundation of morality; rather, it dealt a death blow to all the finer moral qualities of the pre-Islamic Arabs.

Antara al-Absi, one of the most famous of the pre-Islamic Arab poets, boasted in a self-glorifying poem in which he enumerates his own virtues, that he considered the most important of these to be his “abstinence from spoils.” His era was followed by the Islamic period, which adopted a culture that canonized raiding and incursions and put its prophet Muhammad and God in the same category as far as division of the spoils was concerned, allocating them a one fifth share between them.

Whatever strictures it might contain, this legal code could not escape the limitations of this mentality. Men killed others so as not to be killed themselves, and robbed so as not to die of starvation. Muhammad was a warrior rather than a thinker. He left no moral legacy for his followers to build upon or use as a basis for the societies they founded. Nor did he leave them room outside the boundaries of this law in which they might have exercised their freedom and perhaps, responding to the demands of time, have invented a moral code of their own.