Many say that the Quran revealed the importance of this principle to Muhammad. Surah 3, Ayah 159 (Al Imran, “the Family of Imran”) says:
It is part of the Mercy of Allah that you dealt gently with them; Had you been severe or harsh-hearted, they would have broken away from you: so pass over (their faults), and ask for (Allah’s) forgiveness for them; and consult them in affairs (of moment).
The spoils of war in seventh-century Arabia must have included noncombatants, women, and children, and the Quran was encouraging dealing with them “gently.” POWs in Vietnam, the Second World War, and even Iraq have never been dealt with gently.
Was the Quran the best defense for itself? Yes, except for a few instances where it contradicts itself.
The Quran I had loved today faces grave challenges. Islam apologists (usually Muslims raised in the West) come equipped with hastily crammed parts of the Wikipedia canon of Islam. They love to “quote” a cable-ready fragment from a parsed 2:256 (Al Baqarah, “The Cow”) verse. I, too, have used it.
“There is no compulsion in matters of faith, says the Quran,” they quote, smiling benignly. This is the kind of “good Muslim” cable likes to parade. Are we as Muslims living in the West guilty of not practicing Quranic exegesis? Unfortunately true. In addition, our best efforts are drowned out by the din of Islamophobia.
Some Islamophobes have done their homework. They point to more than 100 verses in the Quran that they claim sanction violence. We need to find a larger number and demolish their arguments verse by verse. Has the violence inherent in all monotheisms been studied and compared fairly? It has. But the academy of the West speaks to no one in Deoband, for example.
Let’s try exegesis in verses 190 to 193 of the same second chapter.
2:190 says, “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.”
2:191 says, “And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have Turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith.”
2:192 says, “But if they cease, Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.”
2:193 says, “And fight them on until there is no more Tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah. But if they cease, let there be no hostility except to those who practice oppression.”
This part of the Quran seems to make clear that if there is a fight at all, it should be against the aggressors. A Medinan verse, it must surely allude to a period after Muhammad’s Hijra forced by the Quraysh who had devised his gruesome assassination. There is an emphasis on not fighting unless attacked. The same Ayah 191 that uses “slay” as a verb also says, “Tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter.”
“Those who suppress faith,” also in Ayah 191, refers to the Quraysh and other Bedouin tribes Muhammad had yet to convert, not Jews and Christians, as is wrongfully interpreted. The Quran, Islamophobes need to be told, goes to great lengths to command kinship with the Ahl al-Kitab (“The People of the Book”), Jews and Christians.
This messy but poetic book has some answers, not all. But the contradictions of the book and its canon need to be used in its favor. An ideal world would be a Saudi-free curriculum at every school where Muslims learn.
Does Islam have a problem with violence, carried out in its name, using as justification verses from its book, the Quran? Any reasonable Muslim (and I hope I am one) would answer yes.
It seemed I had grown up with a faith of fear. Mecca killed my fear of faith. Post-Hajj I feel a blessing always in propinquity. I was glad that my Hajj was not a product of mere taqlid, or blind following. It was born from a centuries-old, innate Muslim thirst for knowledge. And perhaps it was my solitary attempt to become a mujtahid, even if to a very small extent.
In addition, my thesis that poverty and illiteracy are Islam’s biggest problems has never been stronger. I am even able to admit that most Muslims I grew up with would not understand most of this book’s content. Europe is once again home to massacres of the innocents. The carnage in Paris was just five days old, and this particular film festival that had invited me asked if they should go ahead with the screenings. When I said yes, they added two. Sold out every time and long debates afterward.
“Is this a battle of civilizations?” asked a reporter from Le Monde.
I told him I couldn’t answer him with a soundbite, adding, “But what I can say to you is that I am not willing to make statements like ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ because they are reductive.”
“So you are saying Islam is not a religion of peace?” he persisted.
“I never said that. You are twisting my words. I said the time to make such reductive statements has run out.” I was wearing a “Je Suis Paris” T-shirt, numbers of which were probably being hastily manufactured in Bangladeshi or Chinese sweatshops and sent by shiploads to the West. I wore it thinking it protected me from xenophobia, which is now rampant in contemporary Europe.
I was protecting myself, in my own little way. It was a Friday and I found a dingy little basement mosque to go and perform Zuhr prayers. It was almost empty. I had never been surrounded by fewer than 150 people at any Jummah I ever attended. Did the Daesh suicide bombers realize that they had launched a full on attack on Islam as well? Was this even an organization, or was it open season for any psychopath to find guns, commit massacres, and invoke “ISIS”? Paris disturbed me deeply. It was so hard to buy guns in Europe. Mass murder was gun-obsessed America’s expertise.
I was traveling to many EU nations (including what was then pre-Brexit UK) with my film, A Sinner in Mecca. Traveling in and out of the US with frequency to Europe, I was detained by US Customs more than once, agents even recalling my checked bags to examine every article of underwear I possessed. I felt violated. Was I racially or religiously profiled? Probably both. Did my new status as a US citizen make me feel safer? Not for a minute.
Fear of Muslim refugees was rampant. At one film screening in Copenhagen, an older gentleman showed up with a sheaf of papers. He had waited to talk to me, so we sat down for a coffee. He waved printouts from a website I knew well called religionofpeace.com. It was an extreme right-wing attempt at molding Islam the way one group saw it: the single biggest threat to humanity. The Islamophobic “David Horowitz Freedom Center” had been incredibly smart to grab the name while it was still available. Why would Islam and peace connect, anyway? Islam’s apologists literally fed this website’s raison d’être.
I decided to go to a section of his sheaf, “What would Muhammad do?” I took it from him and said, “OK, let’s try to look at it reasonably. It says Muhammad would have sex with a nine-year-old girl, behead people, require women to cover their faces, own slaves, marry his daughter-in-law, approve of prostitution, gluttonize, recommend wife-beating, beat his own wife, kill prisoners of war, advocate suicide attacks, tell sick people to cure themselves by drinking camel urine, beat children for not praying, have boys as young as thirteen beheaded, have eleven wives at one time, approve of sex with children, lie, enslave women and children, stone adulterers to death, torture someone out of greed, steal, kill someone for insulting him, extort money from religious minorities, keep women as sex slaves, force conversions to Islam, encourage acts of terror, kill a woman, capture and rape a woman, and encourage the rape of women in front of their husbands! Wow, what a long list!” I said, knowing where I needed to go with him. I asked him if he considered the majority of humanity as reasonable human beings. He replied yes.
“OK, so now let’s take Islam. Did you know there are 1.7 billion Muslims? Almost a quarter of humanity is Muslim.” He knew.
“OK, let’s look a little further into this religion. It has been there for fourteen centuries. It created many worldly empires. It did so much for mathematics. It has always had intellect, arts, poetry, architect
ural wonder, and so much more.” He grudgingly agreed.
I said I wished I had more time but ended by saying, “Let us be in a situation where we take a majority of these contemporary 1.7 billion Muslims as reasonable human beings. If you consider that their faith has survived so long and given so much to the world, then, my friend, nothing on this irrational site would make any sense.” I named a few basic books I remembered and asked him to read them instead. I even said he should read Islam For Dummies. In him, I had one more reason to believe that future scholars of Islam could rightly claim that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were a second Islamic jahiliyah. Meanwhile, “Eurabia” fears in this continent were being stoked with renewed vigor. Xenophobia was being normalized. A hijabi woman (now almost the norm in some cities) was becoming a symbol of the oppression, violence, and darkness of Islam. Mere ijtihad was not going to solve this intractable problem.
A film festival in Prague gave me a “guide” for the day. As we strolled the beautifully preserved streets of this ancient capital, she made her feelings clear.
“I saw your film and you are very brave, so don’t get me wrong,” she said, adding, “We don’t want those refugees here. The Czech Republic is a very small country. We need to preserve our values and our social structure.” Almost immediately we came across graffiti that said, “Who wants to destroy Europe?” I had seen the very same in German scrawled on a Vienna wall.
I pointed at the graffiti and said gently, even though I was seething inside, “When the poor, the disenfranchised, the homeless, the hungry are literally washing up on the shores of Europe, some dying instantly, is it not the responsibility of the ‘civilized’ world to look after them?”
Her answer to that was, “Why don’t the rich Saudis or the rich Gulf countries take them in? Why should it be us?”
Everywhere I went from Warsaw to Stockholm to Vienna, I seemed to be thrust into the uncomfortable position of speaking for the refugees just because I was Muslim. In hindsight, it is the product of the real xenophobia that walks the streets of the endangered, post-Brexit continent. In these small countries live eerie signs, from right-wing election-winning politicians to increasing numbers of hijab-embracing women. The chauvinistic right has longed for this time. I was exhausted being a Muslim on display, yet I did Q&A after Q&A for my film.
“Do you think your film will promote Islamophobia?”
“How can you defend Islam when all these Muslim refugees bring intolerance and homophobia with them?”
On the latter, I cannot be duplicitous: The majority of Muslims in Europe, either settled or coming in, are presumably homophobic.
“What will happen to our values of freedom, of peace, of equality?” asked another.
I answered, “Well, the Fifth Republic right here in the heart of Western Civilization said it best. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Keep that close to your heart and maybe you will know what to do when a downtrodden refugee shows up at your doorstep.”
Daesh “soldiers” have no Quran-study time. They hang at a McDonald’s drive-through of Islam, where they pick and choose—an affront to fourteen centuries of learning. I was not surprised when I read reports that copies of Islam For Dummies was found in possessions belonging to the bombers in Paris and Brussels. For the ignorant, unemployed, semi-literate “radicals” of this imaginary caliphate, books such as these help cram basics like, “How do Muslims pray?” Replacing pray with prey, in this case, would induce the black humor Adham and I share. On their website, the Dummies people say, “Islam For Dummies helps you build bridges of understanding between you and your neighbors in the global village.” Destroying rather than building bridges is what Daesh clearly prefer. And their “global village” would be the delusory caliphate.
Their “Emir” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head-honcho of horror, notably said:
Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State is spearheading it. It is the war of Muslims against infidels. Muslims, go to war everywhere. It is the duty of every Muslim.
Even Baghdadi invoked the specious Islam-apologist argument! Any lone ranger can claim allegiance to Daesh with the latter only learning about a new carnage via the media. In addition, unlike in Europe, Daesh recruitment in fortress America protected by the Atlantic has been sparse at best. The pattern is clear. Islam is being invoked to kill innocents. The perpetrators usually possess EU passports and were born and bred in Europe. I used to joke with friends that the UK is now Englandistan. But the time for jokes is over. A Wahhabi extremist like Anjem Choudary wants sharia in the UK, where he was born and raised. He openly praises Daesh. America has its own version in Maryland-based “Imam” Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa.
Men like these are the products of post-colonial mass migrations, where their poor parents or grandparents reliably fled to the countries that had once ruled them—not a historic novelty. They got what are now EU or British passports but little else. Decades of state-sanctioned disenfranchisement followed. Naked and systemic racism prowled the streets in Western Europe where the children of these immigrants went to schools, never colleges, and then grew up with no access to jobs. The glass ceiling in Europe is much lower than in the UK, where the mega-city of London elected a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. But the England that elected Khan also has extremist South Asian Muslim voices like Choudary. Majority atheism was Europe’s primary religion for decades. But ironically that very same Europe created a few young Muslims ready to blow themselves up in the name of Daesh. Many never got to meet the (allegedly killed) Baghdadi or had even been outside Europe. Like Trump, Baghdadi needs no recruiters.
Daesh is more than happy to be linked to any terrorist attack. Not being state actors, they behave like the famous hacktivist collective that no government has yet been able to defeat.
Daesh is the Anonymous of Islam.
Islam’s war against itself isn’t unusual in the history of the religion. But twenty-first-century Islam doesn’t possess its historical correctives. It is too late to turn the clock back on worldwide Wahhabi indoctrination.
Some Western scholars have (rightfully) said that combat is ordered only against those who are attacking or killing innocent Muslims or fighting against a Muslim state. Do they know “radical Islamic extremists” use the same argument? The West declared war on Muslim lands like Afghanistan and then Iraq, and therefore “combat” against these “aggressors” is justified, Quranically. Daesh recruitment grows exponentially each time Trump says he won’t let Muslims into America.
In classical and Quranic Arabic, the word fitna was used to denote trial and affliction. As is common with the many differences between classical and colloquial Arabic, in modern times today, depending on context, the word can mean charm and enchantment. I am interested in its use as a Quranic principle, and have often used it in this book to mean a state of “strife” or “chaos” that is feared by modern-day Arab power structures and invoked often by them, when challenged by people power.
In a very different time (2008), a Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, got worldwide fame with a poorly produced anti-Islam video called Fitna. There was precedent. In 2004, a little-known Dutch filmmaker named Theo Van Gogh and his subject, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had done similar Islam-bashing with their video Submission. Van Gogh was savagely murdered and his subject gained instant stardom in the US, writing several books. It was said that she, labeled an infidel, became a paid pawn of the right-wing in the US. To me, the video was distasteful because verses of the Quran were written all over Hirsi’s naked body. Cinematically like the former, it offered no particular vision and rudimentary filmic skills.
In 2005, a Danish newspaper published twelve editorial cartoons mocking the Prophet, one even depicting him with a bomb in his turban. I saw those again as a deliberate attempt to create controversy and stoke anger. Islamic aniconism was not a novelty. It h
ad been known for centuries. Charlie Hebdo, whose consequences I personally view as a carnage, was using familiar European anti-Muslim provocation. The aftermath was savage, because Daesh is. It is interesting that the most visible “attacks” for “Islam” happened in Europe. An enormous chunk of the Muslim world was rightfully fearful because riots and savage murder could not be condoned. But the idea of a “backward” religion, a trope used against Islam repeatedly, was back in fashion. These “attacks” are seen as “war” in the world of Daesh. Only in these instances do they avoid universal condemnation. But is modern Islam in an almost ceaseless struggle with itself in addition to fitna? Unfortunately, that is true. But to make simplistic statements like “Islam is several centuries behind” reveals a problematic Orientalist mindset. Because historically Islam was always ahead.
Unlike the “glorious” Islamic history of wealth—be it material, physical, or intellectual—today reliable figures are often thrown around at economic conferences saying that half of the world’s poor are Muslim. Muslims form a quarter of humanity, and a sizeable majority live in abject poverty. The most poverty-stricken countries on the planet include Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Mozambique, and, importantly, India. So eight of the poorest nations in the world include seven with Muslim majorities. The numbers are really mind-boggling and get worse. I highlight India because by 2050, it will have the world’s largest Muslim population and is now at number three. The right-wing Hindutva brigade that rules India today often blames Muslim-poverty statistics similar to these as the reason that “Islam is bringing India down.” What will really happen in 2050 when India has the world’s highest number of Muslims—who will rule whom?
Almost 800 million of the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims are illiterate. More than six in ten cannot read. For the Christian West, literacy is at 78 percent.
A Sinner in Mecca Page 31