Dare to Speak: Islam vs Free Democracy and Free Enterprise (II)
Section 11.
Relations between governments and peoples in the “House of Peace”
Bloody borders, or just plain bloody?
In Samuel P. Huntington’s famous report, The Clash of Civilizations, he coined a well-known phrase: “Islam has bloody borders.” Unfortunately, history has shown that Huntington was being polite, because Islam is bloody inside and out. While the Koran has declared an eternal state of war with non-Islamic nations, relations between and within Islamic nations are rarely much better. This is because Islamic scripture offers little guidance to help people transcend hatred, tribalism, religious intolerance, or predatory nationalism. It even sets the stage for strife between Islamic factions. What follows is a brief and partial sketch of inter-Muslim strife over the past one-hundred years:
The Ottoman Empire’s weakness was largely due to tribal battles between its various ethnic groups, particularly between Arabs, who believed themselves to be the rightful stewards of Islam, and the Turks who ruled over them, but also between Arabs, Kurds, and Persians.
Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran have long battled their nations’ leaders for independent homelands.
Pakistan was originally carved from the Eastern and Western extremities of India, but the two regions were unable to reconcile their differences and soon split into Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Iraq had a bloody 8-year war with Iran, and then launched a war against Kuwait.
Iraq’s attack on Kuwait was repelled by a coalition that included Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Syria, Turkey, and The United Arab Emirates, as well as a number of Western nations, led by the United States.
Despite its dramatic success, this first Gulf War ended at the border of Iraq. This premature termination left a Shiite rebellion against Saddam Hussein with minimal outside support, and Saddam crushed it ruthlessly. Why did the Coalition stop at the border? Because the Islamic nations fighting Saddam were mostly Sunni, and they did not want to aid the Shiites against Saddam’s Sunni leadership.
Pakistan’s Sunnis and Shiites terrorize each other when they are not terrorizing people of other faiths, blowing up each others’ places of worship with dismal regularity.
The situation is similar in Iran, except that Shiites have the upper-hand.
In the spring of 2004, General Muammar Qaddafi of Libya joined with Al Qaeda in an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Crown Prince Abdulla, ruler of Saudi Arabia.[1]
In Saudi Arabia, Shiites are treated as Apostates.
These conflicts do not stop at the national level. They descend through ethnicities, tribes, clans, and even families. In fact, the very characteristics that made Muslims unconquerable in former days appear to make them ungovernable today, except through repressive displays of force. An extreme example of Islam’s culture of conflict comes from Land of the Pashtun, an article from the December 2004 issue of National Geographic, which describes a major ethnic group in Pakistan and Afghanistan:
The Pashtun may be the most ungovernable people on Earth. They are divided into dozens of tribes and hundreds of clans, which are usually at war with each other. The presence of an invader (even a pair of journalists from National Geographic) unites the tribesmen just long enough to drive out the interlopers. Then they go back to shooting at each other. The only time the Pashtun are at peace with themselves, it is said, is when they are at war.
In the tribal areas, the typical Pashtun home is built like a fortress, with high watchtowers and 20-foot walls. And no self-respecting Pashtun is without his personal armory. A powerful household might have an antiaircraft gun mounted in the watchtower, a mortar or two, a .50-caliber machine gun, a dozen or so AK-47s, and a stack of rocket-propelled grenades. With all this firepower, a spat between neighbors often turns into a pitched battle.
While extreme, this sort of culture is not unusual in the Muslim world. It echoes familiar descriptions of the Chechens and Somalis, and can be seen in the Janjaweed’s murderous treatment of their black Muslim brothers in Darfur, Sudan.
Pakistan must also deal with separatists in its Baluchistan region. The Baluch are another Muslim ethnic group that uses terrorism. In their case, as with many others, terrorism is being used by Muslims against a Muslim state: [2]
…Baluchistan has been troubled by a growing insurgency by tribesmen seeking greater autonomy and more benefits from the province’s natural gas resources, Pakistan’s main source.
Insurgent attacks
On Saturday, militants fired more than 100 rockets into the town of Sui, killing two military guards and six civilians, and damaging 16 houses, police said. Sui is near Pakistan’s main gas field and about 450 miles southwest of Islamabad.
The attack followed a similar rocket blitz on Friday and Saturday in the nearby town of Dera Bugti. The area’s senior government administrator, Abdul Samad Lasi, said militants also blew up a section of gas pipeline and a water pipeline in Dera Bugti overnight, while a landmine blast on Sunday morning killed a civilian…in nearby Kohlu district.
…
The latest violence came after President Pervez Musharraf demanded on Friday that Baluchistan’s tribal leaders disband their “private militias.”
Interestingly, these kinds of conflicts take place throughout the “House of Peace,” and they are conducted with shockingly ruthless brutality. The West is familiar with the horrors committed by its own aberrations, such as Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, but those masters of terror at least tried to conceal their depravity. In the “House of Peace,” opponents shamelessly demonstrate levels of barbarism that would make Hitler and Stalin blush. A quick survey of their tactics uncovers:
The murder of diplomats from non-belligerent nations
Indiscriminate bombings that kill civilians on all sides of a rivalry
Targeted bombings of hospitals, mosques, and funerals
Attacks on vacationers
Double- and triple-bombings, designed to kill rescuers helping victims
The use of innocent civilians, women, and children as human shields
What follows is a small sampling of newspaper headlines describing such attacks:
Bali [Indonesia] death toll set at 202[3]
30 Iraqi children, 215 wounded in Red Crescent hospital bombing[4]
Four car bombs explode in Casablanca [Morocco] [5]
Bomb explodes in Afghanistan mosque; 16 wounded[6]
Jakarta [Indonesia] car-bomb explosion kills 14[7]
Latest Baghdad [Iraq] Bombing Comes as Thousands Attend Hakim Funeral[8]
Istanbul [Turkey] rocked by double bombing[9]
Riyadh [Saudi Arabia] bomb toll hits 17[10]
Bomb Kills Six at Iraqi Mosque[11]
Bomb Explosion at Mosque Kills 3 in Bangladesh[12]
Karachi [Pakistan] mosque attack kills 15[13]
Bomb Kills 16 at Shiite Mosque in Pakistan: Karachi Attack Follows Slaying of Sunni Cleric[14]
Suicide Bomb at Funeral Kills 14: Official’s Brother Slain 2 Days Earlier; Allawi [Iraq] Vows Hard Line[15]
Bomb blast kills 9 near Australian embassy: Big terror strike in Jakarta [Indonesia] [16]
Deadly Double Bombing In Pakistan[17]
Four Killed in Pakistan Mosque Bombing[18]
Bombing Kills 10 Near Shiite Shrine; Karbala [Iraq] Cleric, Apparent Target, Is Hurt[19]
Bombers Again Strike Iraqi Shiite Worshipers; Attacks Kill 30 and Injure 40 On Last Day of Annual Rite[20]
14 killed in terrorist attack in Algeria[21]
Attackers strike twice near Cairo [Egypt] tourist sites: Women open fire on tour bus after blast near museum[22]
Car bomb kills 25 at Iraq funeral[23]
5 Dead In Pakistan Mosque Bombing[24]
20 Killed in Afghan Mosque Bombing[25]
Bombs hit Arab section of an Iranian Province[26]
In Darfur [Sudan] , foraging means risking rape[271]
Probe: Truck Bomb Killed Lebanon’s Hariri [20 others also killed] [28]
Top Egyptian diplomat in Iraq seized, killed by insurgent group[29]
Egypt resort blasts kill 49[30]
Iraqi terrorists say they killed Algerian envoys[31]
Doctors in the Cross Hairs: Iraq’s physicians are increasingly targeted by violence[32]
Karzai [Afghanistan] orders ‘human shield’ probe[33]
Algeria bombs kill 3, injure 24[34]
These headlines are only a snapshot of the mountain of atrocities that have taken place in the past few years. They are a strange monument to a religion that boasts of teaching Europe the concept of chivalry. [35]
Also note that these bombings and attacks are not restricted to Iraq, but are throughout the House of Islam. After reviewing how Muslims of different sects destroy each others’ mosques, hospitals, funerals, diplomats, and religious leaders, it is ironic that Iraqis are outraged whenever Coalition forces accidentally damage a mosque. Moreover, Muslims die far more frequently and horribly at each other’s hands than at the hands of Israelis or Americans, yet those nations are thought of as Enemy Number One and Enemy Number Two.
Why is this? Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia provided a glimpse of the answer in his speech at the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference, quoted at the beginning of this series:
…If we are to recover our dignity and that of Islam, our religion, it is we who must decide, it is we who must act…To begin with, the Governments of all the Muslim countries can close ranks and have a common stand, if not on all issues, at least on some major ones, such as on Palestine…
From being a single ummah we have allowed ourselves to be divided into numerous sects,…each more concerned with claiming to be the true Islam than our oneness as the Islamic ummah…the Muslim civilization became so weak that…the Europeans…could do what they liked with Muslim territories. It is not surprising that they should excise Muslim land to create the state of Israel to solve their Jewish problem…
In other words, in the face of inter-Muslim strife and chaos, a rare consensus exists on Islam’s malice toward Jews, Christians, and Infidels in general. Thus, in their search for a unifying cause, Islamic leaders have decided to harness this hatred. One can infer from President Mohamad’s speech that his goal was not to bring peace to the world, but only to redirect Muslim aggression away from other Muslims and toward Jews, Americans, and Europeans.
Before going further, it is important to recognize that relations between Christian sects have at times been just as dismal as those between Islamic sects. What is hard for Western nations to accept, however, is that their hard-won lessons in peacemaking do not transfer readily to the House of Islam.
It is even harder to accept that those lessons will not transfer at all. Unfortunately, as long as Muslims believe that the Koran is divine, and Muhammad is exemplary, this is the case. Westerners do not want to accept this fact, but history confirms it. Traveling into the House of Islam can be like stepping into the chaotic and tribal world of another millennium, except that it has been updated with imported technology, much of it deadly.
A recipe for conflict: Mix Church with State; bind tightly
There is another issue that contributes to rampant strife within the Islamic world: a tight binding of church with state. When church and state are unified, a person cannot change their religion without changing their relationship to the state. This makes conversion tantamount to treason. In this sort of world, people of different faiths are viewed as subversives, and missionary work is an act of insurgency, or even war.
Sayad Abul Ala Maududi was mentioned earlier in this series as a prominent Islamic thinker. He was actually much more. Maududi was a founding father of Pakistan and a war hero, whose commentaries on the Koran are among the most respected in the world. As a founder of Pakistan, he wrote extensively on the subject of religion’s relationship to the state. One of his works is The Punishment of the Apostate According to Islamic Law. In it, he wrote:
If, at some time in the future, an Islamic order of government is established, the law of executing the apostate is implemented, and all [apostates] within the confines of Islam are…imprisoned…, no doubt in this situation the fear will arise that a very great number of hypocrites…who will pose as a permanent threat for every kind of treason.
In my opinion its solution…is to notify the Muslim population in the area where an Islamic revolution occurs that people who…have defected from Islam and wish to remain as defectors should formally disclose their non-Muslim identity and leave…within a year…After this period, all those who are born of Muslim lineage will be considered…Muslim, they will be subject to all Islamic laws,…and then whoever steps outside the fold of Islam will be executed. [36]
…
An organized society which has chosen the form of a state can hardly provide a place…for people who differ from it in fundamental matters…it is very difficult to give people a place in society… if they completely oppose the foundations on which the…society and the state are established.
In this matter Islam has practised a degree of tolerance which no other order in the history of the world has ever practised. All other orders either force those who differ on fundamentals to conform to their principles or they destroy them. [37] Islam alone, while making them tributaries…, gives them place within its borders and tolerates many of their activities that directly conflict with the foundation of the Islamic state and society.
The sole cause of this toleration is because Islam does not despair of human nature. It operates with an enduring hope…that when those who…do not see the light of the true religion will have an opportunity to…experience its…blessings, they will finally accept this truth. Therefore it works patiently and continues to tolerate those obdurate elements which do not assimilate into society and the state, hoping that at some point they will experience transformation…
But the sole treatment for the person whose hard heart, once transformed, has again hardened and who demonstrates no capacity whatever to assimilate into society’s order is to cast him out. In any case, the value of the individual, however great it be, cannot be great enough to allow the whole order of society to be corrupted because of it. [38]
Sayad Abul Ala Maududi’s writings show that, according to his interpretation of Islam, church is state and state is church. Islam controls all aspects of life, and those of other faiths are “obdurate” Infidels who are tolerated only by the patience of Islam, which does so in hope of eventual conversion. Strangely, he appears to believe that this form of “tolerance” is the most liberal in the world.
There is a key difference between Islamic nations and Free Democracies with a Christian heritage: The historical foundation of Islam rests on Islamic nationhood, while the historical foundation of Christianity rests on the separation of church and state. [39] Christianity began without governmental authority, and could therefore return to that condition without sacrificing its fundamental tenets. Islam, on the other hand, began with governmental authority, and bound religious matters inextricably with legal ones.
The Koran, the Hadith, and Shari’ah all demand absolute authority for Islam. When it does not have the power to rule – that is, when Shari’ah does not have authority over both Muslims and non-Muslims – it is hobbled and incomplete. In this case, true believers see themselves as repressed, and their religion disrespected and humiliated. Therefore, wherever Muslims represent a substantial portion of a non-Islamic nation, as is the case in the Philippines, Thailand, and India, there will always be an Islamic insurgency. [40] But the “House of Peace” also has internal sources of strife, which began with leadership rivalries that followed Muhammad’s death, as the next section reveals.
REFERENCES FOR SECTION 11:
[1] Al Qaeda behind Libyan plot to murder Saudi prince, Pakistan Daily Times, June 12, 2004.
[2] Bomb kills 12, injures 13 on bus in Pakistan, MSNBC News Services, February 6, 2006.
[3] BBC News, February 19, 2003.
[4] Arabic News, April 3, 2003.
[5] Associated Press, CTV (Canada), May 16, 2003
[6] Associated Press, USA Today, June 30, 2003.
[7] AFP & Reuters, Dawn (Pakistan), August 6, 2003
[8] By Scott Bobb, Voice of America, September 2, 2003.
[9] BBC News, November 20, 2003.
[10] News24 (South Africa), October 11, 2003.
[11] By Naseer Al-Nahr, Al Jazeera, Arab News, January 10, 2004.
[12] By Anjana Pasricha, Voice of America, January 13, 2004.
[13] Al Jazeera, May 8, 2004.
[14] By Kamran Khan, Washington Post, June 1, 2004.
[15] By Doug Struck, Washington Post, July 7, 2004.
[16] AFP, Dawn (Pakistan), September 10, 2004
[17] Associated Press, CBS News, October 7, 2004.
[18] Associated Press, FOX News, October 10, 2004.
[19] By Saad Sarhan and Karl Vick, Washington Post, December 16, 2004.
[20] By Jackie Spinner and Bassam Sebti, Washington Post, February 20, 2005.
[21] India Daily, April 9, 2005.
[22] MSNBC News Services, Associated Press, April 30, 2005.
[23] By Antonia Castaneda, Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, May 2, 2005.
[24] CBS News, May 30, 2005.
[25] CBS News, June 1, 2005.
[26] The Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, June 13, 2005.
[27] By Jennifer Brooks, The Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, June 14, 2005.
[28] By Zeina Karam, Associated Press, Las Vegas Sun, June 17, 2005.
[29] By Andy Mosher, Washington Post, July 7, 2005.
[30] By Lee Keath, Associated Press, July 23, 2005.
[31] By Robert H. Reid, Associated Press, July 28, 2005.
[32] By Scott Johnson, Newsweek, January 9, 2006.
[33] Associated Press, CNN, May 23, 2006.
[34] Reuters, CNN, October 30, 2006.
[35] The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam, by Yahiya Emerick, Alpha Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2002, Chapter 17, section entitled Interfaith Dialogue, page 209-210.
[36] The Punishment of the Apostate According to Islamic Law Section III: The Execution of the Apostate – A Rational Consideration,Part l: Muslims by Birth, by Sayad Abul Ala Maududi, translated by Syed Silas Husain and Ernest Hahn, 1994, page 51.
[37] These completely false statements reveal a remarkable mindset. Imagine being a Pakistani who comes to America with the mindset of a “tolerant” Muslim. Every day in this country would be extremely confronting, and possibly overwhelming.
[38] The Punishment of the Apostate According to Islamic Law Section III – The Execution of the Apostate: A Rational Consideration, Part c: The Natural Requirement of an Organized Society, by Sayad Abul Ala Maududi, translated by Syed Silas Husain and Ernest Hahn, 1994, page 35.
[39] The NIV Study Bible, General Editor: Kenneth Barker, Zondervan Publishing House, 1985, Luke 20:25:
…He [Jesus] said to them, “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
[40] Thailand & International Islamic Front, by B. Raman, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 890, January 9, 2004.
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