The Jew is Not My Enemy (27 page)
Read The Jew is Not My Enemy Online
Authors: Tarek Fatah
To the Islamists, it all made sense. If Muslims were to remodel their lives according to the teachings of the Saudi hardliners, if they forced their women to cover their faces and forced their sons to inculcate within themselves the spirit of armed jihad, they too would be rewarded by Allah with the oil wealth and riches of the kingdom. If not, they would live in poverty like the Bangladeshis and Chadians.
The middle-class Muslims of Egypt and Pakistan, Turkey and Lebanon, who until now had scoffed at the Saudis, using the derisive term “bedoos” of the Arab deserts, were now subservient to them. Allah had spoken. If the Muslim world wished to end its miserable lack of enterprise and education, literacy and liberty, all it had to do was emulate the Saudis, follow in the footsteps of those Wahhabi clerics, and inshallah, the heavens would rain down the bounty. And if this did not happen, that would be evidence that the Muslims had not yet emulated the Saudi example to its fullest.
Thus, 1973 marked a turning point in the Muslim narrative. The last quarter of the twentieth century would slowly undo the progress we Muslims had made in the preceding century. Our intellectual and cultural revival was stifled by the forces unleashed in Saudi Arabia and which are perhaps best captured by the late Saudi king Ibn Saud, who told an Anglo-American delegation: “The Jews are
our enemies everywhere. Wherever they are found, they intrigue and work against us.”
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So, what is to be done? In any conflict, it takes two to tango. When history is written, the twenty-first century will be remembered as the great struggle between the Muslim world on the one hand and the West on the other. My ummah will be reflected in the jihadi terrorism of al Qaeda, the tyranny of theocratic Iran, and the medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Western civilization, meanwhile, will be epitomized by Israel and world Jewry with its ally, the United States of America.
During the first ten years of this century and the clash of civilizations, while anti-Semitism has flourished across the Muslim world and wherever Muslims live as minorities, it is equally true that a deep suspicion of Muslim intentions is giving rise to resentment against Muslims in Europe and North America. In this prophetically foretold struggle till the end of times, the two sides that need to end this conflict are the state of Israel and the Muslim intelligentsia, academia, clerical establishment, and politicians.
For Israel, the only action that matters is a specific and tangible step: end the occupation of the Palestinian territories and cooperate in creating a sovereign Palestinian state. Once this happens, the most powerful excuse used to whip up anti-Semitism and hatred against Western civilization will lose its potency and cease to be the rallying cry of despots eager to distract attention away from their own follies. Not that Islamist Judeophobia will disappear, but the oxygen that nourishes it will be cut off. Admittedly, the task for Israel isn’t easy, but compared to what the Muslim world must do to get its act together, it is simple and doable.
Muslims today need to wake up from their hate-induced slumber of distrust, suspicion, superstition, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and tribalism and walk away from the lure of conspiracy theories that have
made them such a laughingstock. If we don’t change our attitude, we may waste another century waiting for Allah to intervene on our behalf.
As we start to pick up the pieces of the shattered hopes of Muslim society, we cannot be unmindful of the failure of its leadership to develop the social structures and institutions that have taken root in comparable non-Muslim developing countries. Take, for example, two former French colonies, Vietnam and Algeria. After decades of French occupation, followed by thirty long years of fighting the American occupation, Vietnam is today a wonderfully resilient country brimming with hope and good prospects in all sectors of development. Meanwhile, Muslim vs. Muslim violence has left Algeria mired in conflict and stunted progress.
Shlomo Avineri, the Israeli academic whose 1968 book,
The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
, was one of the first texts I read as I explored Marxism, has made some poignant remarks about the failures of Muslim society as reflected in the Palestinian struggle. Analyzing the failed 1970 Palestinian uprising against Jordan’s King Hussein, he writes:
There was a deeper cause for the total failure of Al Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (
PFLP
) in their test of strength with the Jordanian army, a cause which many observers, especially those favorable to the guerrilla movement, chose to overlook. When Al Fatah and the
PFLP
claimed to be as effective as the Algerian revolutionaries and the Viet Cong, there were few Israelis, even among those who favor an independent Arab Palestinian state on the West Bank, who took this claim seriously. The failure of the guerrilla movement is related to the failure of Arab society in general to come to terms with its social structure and to combine its ideological nationalism with a praxis of social transformation. Even among the Palestinians who lingered in camps for 20 years, no
attempt has been made to create nuclei of social transformation; not one case is known of an attempt to organize, among the refugees, the social infrastructure that would herald a new Palestinian Arab society.… No experiments at new forms of communal and social reconstruction, have ever been undertaken. The dream of the Return was never accompanied by a social vision, and no attempt has been made to create within the womb of the old society the embryo of the new.
Palestinian nationalism remained, like other expressions of Arab nationalism, purely political; it viewed military action (and sheer terrorism) as its main embodiment. The guerrillas were successful at arming teenagers, especially when western television photographers were around, but they never became a movement of social transformation, which the Viet Cong accomplished so successfully very early in its career.… Thus Yasser Arafat, George Habash and Naif Hawatmeh showed no better judgement than previous Palestinian military leaders – Fauzi Kaukji in 1948 and Ahmed Shukeiry in 1967. For those who still had illusions about the guerrillas, the events of September 1970 were the final proof that all the left-wing rhetoric of the guerrillas was just so much hot air. The social praxis was totally lacking.
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Since 1971, when Professor Avineri penned his analysis, it seems neither his views nor the inability of the Palestinians to rectify their mistakes has changed. In 2008, Avineri wrote this for the left-wing Israeli newspaper
Haaretz:
“While Palestinians may see themselves, with much justification, as the victims of the Zionist movement’s successful establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, the reasons for their historical failure should be sought elsewhere: in the inability of the Palestinian national movement to create the political and social
institutional framework that is the necessary foundation for nationbuilding. The history of national movements teaches us that national consciousness, strong as it may be, is not enough: Movements that could not create the institutional system vital for their success failed.”
He was commenting after yet another round of Palestinian vs. Palestinian bloodletting in Gaza: “The de facto shattering of the Palestinian Authority following the Hamas coup in Gaza is the extension of this failure. Even now the Palestinians are inclined to blame Israel, the Americans, the international community; but the real, essential responsibility ultimately lies with the Palestinians themselves. Elections were held, Hamas won, Fatah lost – and both groups have been unable to sustain a framework whose legitimacy is accepted by both sides.”
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It is not just outside observers of the Arab scene who have recognized this morass. The Arab poet Adonis has joined a new breed of intellectuals who are critical of the political discourse in the Arab world and Palestine. In an interview that aired on Dubai television in 2006, the Syrian poet made critical observations about Arab society and the mixing of religion and state.
When asked about his views on democracy in Palestine, which had brought Hamas to power, Adonis said, “I support it, but I oppose the establishment of any state on the basis of religion, even if it’s done by Hamas.” When asked by the interviewer if he would oppose the mixing of religion and politics “even if it liberates Palestine,” Adonis remarked, “Yes, because in such a case, it would be my duty to fight this religious state.” (This was long before Hamas’s military takeover of Gaza in June 2007, when its militia committed war crimes by executing in cold blood wounded fighters belonging to the rival Fatah.)
Painting a bleak picture of the Arab world, Adonis told his audience, “If I look at the Arabs, with all their resources and great capacities, and I compare what they have achieved over the past century with what others have achieved in that period, I would have to say that we
Arabs are in a phase of extinction, in the sense that we have no creative presence in the world. We have become extinct. We have the quantity. We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world.”
When the interviewer interjects, saying Adonis’s views are “very dangerous,” he makes an even harsher prognosis. “That is our real intellectual crisis. We are facing a new world with ideas that no longer exist, and in a context that is obsolete. We must sever ourselves completely from that context, on all levels, and think of a new Arab identity, a new culture, and a new Arab society.… Imagine that Arab societies had no Western influence. What would be left? Nothing. Nothing would be left except for the mosque, the church, and the commerce, of course.… The Muslims today – forgive me for saying this – with their accepted interpretation [of the religious text] are the first to destroy Islam, whereas those who criticize the Muslims – the non-believers, the infidels, as they call them – are the ones who perceive in Islam the vitality that could adapt it to life. These infidels serve Islam better than the believers.”
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Both the Arab poet Adonis and the Jewish professor Avineri point to fundamental problems that plague the Muslim world, which shows no sign of moving away from the lure of medieval battle cries to the reality of post-modern civic society. Muslims must seriously examine the chances that they have so successfully managed to miss. Caught between a tornado and shelter, how do we always choose to be in the tornado’s path? How do we ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past?
Acknowledging defeat and accepting reality would only be the first step. The mistakes Muslims have made all through the Palestinian crisis are not specific to one isolated conflict. Hating the Jew has a lot to do with
how Muslims have incorporated racism and the doctrine of racial superiority within the Muslim community itself – a doctrine that propelled the genocide in Darfur, the persecution of the Shia Muslims in the Arab world and Pakistan, the carving up of Kurdistan among four Muslim countries, and the genocide committed by Pakistan in Bangladesh.
At the root of this doctrine of racism, tribalism, and ethnic superiority is the opinion voiced by a man who is considered the patriarchal guru of world Wahhabism and the Islamist jihadi movement: the fourteenth-century Damascus scholar Ibn Taymiyya. The man who is also referred to as Sheikh ul Islam was of the opinion that Arabs are superior
(afdal)
to non-Arabs, and he claimed this was the view held by the majority of Islamic scholars of his time. Ibn Taymiyya put the finishing touch on a racist doctrine that ran counter to the teachings of the Quran yet appeased the ego of the defeated Arabs after their caliphate in Baghdad fell to the Mongols. Ibn Taymiyya not only declared the Arab to be superior to the non-Arab, but declared the tribe of the Quraysh and their descendants superior to other Arabs. Further, he narrowed the hierarchy of racial superiority to mean that within the Quraysh tribe of Arabs, the clan of the Bani Hashim were the most superior. Of course, this doctrine has nothing to do with Islam or the teachings of Muhammad, but it was used on the night of the Prophet’s death to delegitimize the claim of Medina Arabs, the majority, over those of the Arabs of Mecca who would take over the caliphate for the next eight hundred years as a matter of birthright.
It is this belief in tribalism and racism that makes our imams pray to Allah to defeat non-Muslims at the start of every Friday prayer, a ritual of hate that is not spared even in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, where once Jews congregated but cannot any more, or the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. This dangerous doctrine of Arab superiority over non-Arab Muslims plays itself out from Dubai to Darfur. It is one of the reasons bin Laden and his Arab-Afghan terror
network finds protection among the Pashtuns, some of whom have been brainwashed to believe the Arab is superior and that it is therefore their destiny to serve and protect Arab jihadis.
Not until Muslims shed this notion of some Muslims being better than others because of race and sect will we be able to eradicate from our hearts the hatred of the Jew, the Hindu, the Sikh, the Christian, or the atheist. Nor will we eradicate the innate ability to compound this racism by denying that it even exists.
One could argue that these theories of racial and tribal superiority are part of medieval history and that contemporary Muslims are free of such racist baggage. If only this were true. SunniPath: The Online Islamic Academy is one of the West’s leading Islamic education centres, which conducts online courses in Islam for North American Muslims. In December 2006, a student asked the resident online scholar whether “Arabs [were] preferred over other nations.” In his answer, the Palestinian Sheikh Amjad Rasheed replied from Jordan: “The fact that Allah Most High has chosen the Arabs over other nations is affirmed in rigorously authenticated hadiths of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and give him peace.… So this hadith is a primary text about the preference of Arabs over others and the preference of some Arabs over other Arabs.… Therefore the preference of Arabs over other nations, and the preference of some Arabs over other Arabs is affirmed in the Sacred Law.… It is obligatory on a Muslim to believe that Arabs are preferred over other nations because there is a proof for it. However, this is not one of the pillars of our religion such that if someone rejected this, they would be considered outside of Islam. But if one does reject this, one has sinned for not believing in it because it is an affirmed [tradition].”
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