On Islam, from Within

Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former dean of the shari’a and law faculty at Qatar University, has recently published several articles in Gulf papers about terrorism and its root cause. This excerpt from an op-ed published by the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa on May 15 was translated by Middle East Media Research Institute: (http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD162507).

The young people who have become tools of murder and human bombs are the sons of the culture of hatred, the outcome of a fanatical culture and extremist ideology that sees life, its pleasures, and its beauty as unimportant. Ultimately the political, economic, social, and religious motives that push [the young people] to blow themselves up lie in a single main cause - and that is the culture of hatred.

These young people, at the age of flowering, have become the enemies of their society, avenging, hating and exploding. They are our terrorist sons, raised in our bosoms, suckled by our culture, taught in our schools, and taught religious law from our religious pulpits and by the fatwas of our clerics.

What, then, has made them prefer death to life? I have no answer except the fact that we have not managed to make them love life. We have taught them to die for the sake of Allah, but we have not taught them to love, to build, to create and to help society for the sake of Allah. We have taught them that nationalism [means] attacking America and opposing imperialism, but we have not taught them that nationalism is love, loyalty and belonging to the homeland…

How can this miserable creature called the Arab and Muslim individual not turn to extremism, when he is surrounded by an overall atmosphere of extremism, bound by the shackles of repression and prohibitions, and girded by the ideas of intimidation and terrorizing, and of almost endless torment? These accompany this creature from birth to death, beginning with dire warnings about the torments of the grave and enemy plots lying in wait for Islam and the Muslims, [as well as] the long list of prohibitions that has made blessed life - the gift of the Creator - into a prison of pain from which the individual seeks to escape to Paradise and to the lovely maidens in it.

AS IF ALL this were not enough, we even employ religious police to follow the people, to restrict their freedoms, to spy on them, and to interfere in their personal affairs. So how can there not be widespread phenomena of tension and worry in the souls [of the people]?…

Go to hear a Friday sermon, and you will find a preacher who is enraged at the world, angry at civilization, spreading the poison of hatred and enmity.

Then you will leave [the mosque] tense and angry!…

The world’s young people engage in music, art and enjoyment of the pleasures of life. They create, discover and participate in building the strength and the culture of their society - while we engage our young people in religious law disputes on the veil, the beard, how long garments should be, and how to greet Christians - or we engage our young people in adults’ political and ideological disputes, or push them to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to commit suicide!

Hatred is a culture of prohibitions, and the result of our viewing the world as an enemy lying in wait [for us.] Many factors have played a part [in shaping this world view], including the religious messages anchored in fears of plots, the educational messages that have produced in young people alienation from the [modern] era, and a great number of publications by the Muslim Brotherhood and by the nationalists, which have, for the past 50 years, spread hatred of the other and conspiracy theories [against the Muslims].

We need a culture that will restore the importance of life and the value of the individual, and will make young people love the arts and the humanities…

Saying that Islamic terrorism is somehow rooted in injustice implies that the movement actually represents the people of the Middle East. The abuse-excuse rationalisation of the Islamic movement vying for power and not really "religion" is absurd. Following this logic, "America's (or Colonial policies) foreign policy being the culprit", then all Latin American and South American countries should be producing suicide bombers on a daily basis and chant "death to America" every Sunday...but they don't...Or even Japan who was nuked by the U.S....do they integrate hatred and revenge from the West as the main policy of their state into every aspects of their daily lives and institutions... Or they have become one of America's biggest creditors instead of manufacturing martyrs? (that was of course, a rhetorical question:) )
None of these holy men (e.g., Khamanie, Nassrallah, Sistani) are interested in the welfare of their own people. They are merely religious gangsters hiding behind religious facade to impose their will on a cowed populace so they can loot and line their own pockets freely and with impunity.

Please, PLEASE reform. The individual Muslims I have known have been fine people.
Stop tolerating your angry, xenophobic, ethnocentric, testosterone-and-propaganda-poisoned young men's hatred of arbitrary differences between West and East (which only benefits the corrupt ayatollahs and clergies and their warmongering and profiteering IRGC) to divide and conquer. Shut your rabble-rousing Imams up. Abandon your well-earned cultural inferiority complex, endless perpetuating cycle of victim hood and truly join the 21st century.

You were once the pinnacle of world civilization. Then you lost your minds, crawled into your own navels, and stayed there for the next 800 years. Then the West made the ghastly mistake of buying your oil instead of just taking it. You were transplanted into a 20th century that your society was totally unable to deal with. And, like spoiled, hyperactive children let loose unsupervised in a museum whose contents baffled you, you began ululating and destroying things. The sad irony is that if it weren't for the technological and industrial advancement of Western cultures to extract and refine the oil and create and develop markets, industries and innovations for oil related services and products, countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia will only be depositing camel and donkey excrement on top of their oil fields and the population would be dirt poor.

Choose: Become civilized or extinct. You leave the rest of the world only those options for you.
I know it sounds as if I hate you all. I do not. But I so thoroughly hate the destruction you sow in the world. You're only digging your own graves faster. I end by a commenter's keen observation from another blog:

The sad fact is that terrorists and suicide bombers aren’t madmen or “dead souls.” They are alive and carried along by transcendant, ecstatic religious faith. The last emotions of Atta et al were almost certainly joy.

That’s the real horror of political Islam: it is a vast, organized belief system which perverts the basic human emotions to a purpose which can only be called evil. Love between man and woman is perverted into cruelty, paranoia, and slavery. Faith in God, which in other cultures sustains people and gives them hope, is perverted into nihilistic violence. Creativity and reason are perverted into mindless ritualism and endless study of one dead man’s rantings. Progress and hope for the future are perverted into an obsession with the past — in Islam it is always A.D. 632.
We must not delude ourselves by thinking the terrorists are stupid or crazy. They are not. They have shown themselves to be extremely sane, extremely clever, and extremely patient. We cannot depend on them making mistakes, and we cannot allow them the luxury of developing their plans against us. We must destroy them and the vast system of evil which produces and sustains them.

Our traditions of religious freedom and tolerance make this hard — how can a nation devoted to freedom of religion wage a crusade? And yet it is becoming a matter of survival. For a century the world has been waiting for Islam to adjust to modernity, and in that time Islam has only grown more violently xenophobic, more mired in its own pathologies, and more dangerous to the rest of humanity.

We can fight Islam now, while we are very strong and they are weak, or we can wait for them to gain new weapons, wear down our allies, and sabotage the global economy. But the fight will come, whether or not we want it, and we will someday be faced with the choice of fighting or submitting. Once I would have confidently predicted we would fight and win, but now I am not so sure.