Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  In sum, bin Laden has identified a set of U.S. policies, which are the daily focus of Western and Muslim media, that can be steadily and effectively used to persuade Muslims that the U.S. government is attacking Islam and that, at the same time, are the one set of U.S. government policies that is least liable to substantively change at any point in the foreseeable future. As I have written on previous occasions, U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world is the only indispensable ally of bin Laden and the Islamists, and at this time they have no cause whatsoever to worry that their ally will leave them high and dry by changing policy. Parenthetically, the current wartime situation faced by American taxpayers must be a unique one in their history; because of the policies and actions of our governing elite, Americans today fund the enemy’s war effort via their consumption of Arab oil and provide the basis for their enemies’ motivation. For U.S. leaders, this must be seen as a negative and self-destructive achievement of truly epic proportions.

  While the Islamists’ ally in the form of U.S. policy appears entirely reliable, bin Laden and his lieutenants—good, forward-looking strategists that they are—have been looking for some redundancy in allies, and they may have found another that again is being provided by the United States and Europe. Polls taken in the Islamic world by reliable Western firms, Pew, Gallup, BBC, Zogby, etc., over the past fifteen-plus years invariably find two consistent realities. First, enormous majorities in Muslim countries, usually in the 60 to 90 percent range, express hatred for the same set of U.S. and Western foreign policies that Osama bin Laden and other Islamist leaders have identified as mortal attacks on Islam. Overall, the University of Maryland’s spring 2007 poll showed 80 percent of Muslims worldwide agree with bin Laden in seeing America as hostile to or an enemy of Islam.16 Second, majorities (sometimes sizable ones) in the same Muslim countries express admiration for the striving of Americans for political and social equity for all citizens, for American generosity after natural disasters, and for the ability of American parents to find work and housing, education, and health care for their children. Taken together, these poll results strongly suggest that U.S. leaders are lying when they tell Americans that they are being attacked for how they think and live and not for what their government does overseas.

  Beyond that leadership’s lie, however, Americans have cause to worry about how long these two sets of poll results will show the same level of dichotomy. While the high percentages showing hatred for U.S. policies are rock solid as long as the policies are constant, those showing that Muslims do not hate Americans as Americans may prove softer and less durable. Since 9/11, Washington’s prosecution of the war on terror has produced a series of subsidiary events that have deeply dented the reputation of Americans for evenhandedness and decency. The handling of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison; the CIA’s rendition program—which I helped author and then ran for nearly four years; the burning of the bodies of dead Taliban fighters; the awarding and subsequent withdrawal of the Dubai ports deal; the publication in Europe of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad; the remarks of Pope Benedict XVI regarding Islam; Britain’s knighting of author Salman Rushdie; and the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan often have been handled in the U.S. and European media as instances of Bush administration lawlessness and Western Islamophobia, or as mistakes made in the confusion of war evidencing the U.S. military’s lack of respect for human rights and by Christendom’s history toward Muslims. The Muslim and Islamist media have portrayed them as interrelated parts of a comprehensive U.S. and Western attack on Islam.

  It seems necessary these days to follow a recitation of such events by saying that one is not trying to shame, embarrass, or denigrate America by raising these issues. Indeed, as a principal architect of the CIA’s rendition program, I have been outspoken in identifying and defending its successes and urging its continuation.17 But I am also fully aware that the U.S. government is both too fearful and too politically correct to even publicly admit that the United States has a problem with Islam, let alone build a focused, multifaceted attack on the faith.18 Still perception is always reality, and across the Islamic world—and in parts of the U.S. media, Europe, and the Democratic party—the litany of these events is seen as part of an anti-Muslim campaign that is based on the West’s hatred for the Islamic faith and its followers, a hatred that both denigrates the Islamic religion and Muslim society as medieval, imperialistic, and barbarous and that assigns a far higher worth to non-Muslim lives than Muslim. The latter is a point on which al-Qaeda has focused for more than a decade and that was driven home in the summer of 2006 for Muslims when they perceived the West to be standing aside and allowing Israel to inflict casualties in Lebanon at a rate of more than ten Lebanese for one Israeli. “O My Muslim nation,” Ayman al-Zawahiri said at the time, “it has become known to you without doubt that the governments of the Arab and Muslim states are not only helpless, but also involved in collusions [against you]. The institutions are paralyzed and you are left in the field alone.”19

  While these events have yet to cause a precipitate decline in Muslims’ positive views of Americans (as opposed to the U.S. government), it behooves U.S. officials and citizens to think about how to handle the unavoidable negative repercussions of these events and similar others that are bound to occur in the confusion and emergencies of war. To date, Washington has tended to regard the events as public relations problems that can be handled by a fuller public explanation of U.S. intent, a public apology, or the payment of cash to aggrieved parties, such as those individuals who lost family members in mistaken U.S. attacks on several wedding parties in Afghanistan. Such measures provide a temporary moderation of anger, but the Cold War is long over, and America today does not have the bottomless we-are-the-good-guys account that it had to draw on when confronting the Soviet Union. Over time these events have a cumulative negative impact and leave a wide and broadening perception across the Islamic world that Washington regards Muslim life as cheap and inconsequential. Once lodged in the Islamic culture’s collective perception, any U.S. public diplomacy argument to the contrary is likely to meet an impervious wall of made-up minds. At that point, polls would likely begin to show that Muslims are beginning to regard Americans in a less favorable light. Given that Washington is being overwhelmed by an Islamist opponent whose hatred for U.S. foreign policy is shared nearly unanimously among Muslims, anything that advances the tendency of Muslims to hate Americans simply because they are Americans would greatly complicate already-failing U.S. efforts to protect American interests at home and abroad.

  An Islamic Reformation That Brings Not Peace But the Sword?

  Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, the growth of Islamist power, popularity, and violence has been strengthened by bin Laden’s success in defining resistance to the United States as a Koran-justified defensive jihad that requires the obligatory participation of all Muslims. Bin Laden’s success in this regard is vitally important not only because it has pushed the anti-U.S. jihad from words to deeds and provided the glue of unity for the diverse Muslim world, but also because it has demonstrated to Muslims around the world that the Afghans’ defeat of the Soviet superpower was not a fluke, and that the United States, its allies, and their own local governments can be successfully challenged by the relatively lightly armed mujahedin. The actions of al-Qaeda and bin Laden’s rhetoric have inspired Muslims worldwide to jihad, but this inspiration has been magnified in such places as Thailand, Nigeria, and Bangladesh by local grievances that have few or no direct links to the United States or its foreign policy, unless Washington, in its wisdom, chooses to make someone else’s fight America’s. The combination of bin Laden’s leadership, Muslim hatred for U.S. foreign policy, and long-festering localized Muslim grievances, usually against oppressive regimes, has yielded a Muslim world awash in inflammable materials and potential.

  Another important but less quantifiable factor that is facilitating bin Laden’s success in incitement is the declining influence of Is
lamic clerics, scholars, and jurists who work with and are employed by Muslim governments, especially those in the Arab world. When comparing Islam to Christianity’s many sects, it has long been a commonplace to claim that the former does not have the centralized, hierarchical leadership that the latter have established in Rome, Canterbury, and elsewhere. While this claim remains true, each Muslim country has long had a hierarchy of senior Islamic clerics to whom the population looks for religious guidance on issues ranging from the pedestrian to the earthshaking. Again, this is especially true in the Arab world. For most of the post-1945 period, these clerics had tremendous power over the decisions and actions of their national populations, as well as the manner in which those populations interpreted and understood domestic and international events. The clerics, in other words, have been the Arab regimes’ most important, nay indispensable, spinmeisters. That power is ebbing, however, and as it does, the Islamists’ campaign to win people to a more conservative brand of Islam and to jihad will become easier.

  Why the ebbing? Part of the answer lies in the success that Arab governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates have had in coopting a large number of their country’s leading Islamic clerics, scholars, and jurists. Through their control of the state’s financial resources, censoring apparatus, and security services, these regimes have used carrots and sticks to control and influence their religious establishments. Clerics who reliably find Koranic justifications to validate the regime’s policies and actions, especially those that allow the immense corruption of various royal families, find themselves well paid and housed, comfortably ensconced in the pulpits of large and ornate mosques, as distinguished members of university faculties, and even as advisory members of their government’s ruling clique. Those clerics who have trouble finding immediate, on-demand religious validation for regime actions, however, tend to lose their pay, pulpits, professorships, and oft-times their freedom.

  Today the evolution of such cooption has created an environment in which Muslim citizens or subjects perceive the senior levels of the religious establishment as an arm of the government, not as independent clerics fulfilling their role of ensuring that the regimes govern according to Islamic law—preventing vice and promoting virtue, as it were. Again, this has been a slowly evolving popular perception, but the breaking point, after which clerical establishments were no longer given the benefit of the doubt, can be found after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when the senior Saudi council of clerics endorsed King Fahd’s religiously invalid decision to allow U.S. and Western military forces to have bases on the Arabian Peninsula. This decision was clearly a case of claiming black is white, because nothing is clearer to Muslims than that their Prophet, on his deathbed, forbade such an infidel presence in Islam’s birthplace, and he pledged to remove it if he lived. In the years since 1990 Arab governments have persuaded their senior clerics to sanction the expansion of the Western military presence on the Arabian Peninsula; negotiations and agreements with Israel; support for non-Muslim invasions of Muslim states and the provision of bases and other assistance to facilitate those actions; almost unimaginable governmental corruption; and the apprehension and incarceration of mujahedin fighting to protect Muslim lands. To even illiterate Muslims, these actions are un-Islamic and have validated the clerics as the mere paid mouthpieces of corrupt, apostate regimes.

  This negative popular attitude toward the clerical establishment certainly would have been present with or without Osama bin Ladin. However, bin Laden has given Muslims a loud, persistent, passionate, and credible voice that invariably attacks the un-Islamic decisions and lifestyles of those he terms “the king’s clerics.” His public criticism has been a consistent theme of his rhetoric since he began speaking publicly in 1996, but the ferocity of his commentary has increased over the years. Initially bin Laden was reminding the religious establishment of its duty to enforce Islamic law, treading carefully around the traditional propensity of Muslims to respect and obey Islamic scholars, a tendency he fully shared before 1990. Bin Laden’s rhetoric gradually took on a much more condemnatory, adversarial, and finally dismissive tone. In late 2001, for example, he warned young Muslims “not to fall victim to the words of some scholars who are misleading the ummah” by denying that a defensive jihad is obligatory for all.20 Still shy of declaring war on those he described as “the authority’s scholars and ruler’s clerics,” bin Laden in late 2002 harshly reminded them that they were failing in their duty to God as “the inheritors of the Prophet.”21 Calling on young and independent clerics to put themselves at the “head of the ranks [of the mujahedin], and lead the action, and direct the march,” bin Laden said that much of the ulema had sided with the regimes and were practicing “deception and misguidance” of the people. They had, he said, “sold their faith for temporal gain.”22 By mid-2003 bin Laden essentially declared war on the ulema of the rulers. “Great evil is spreading throughout the Islamic world,” he argued,

  The imams calling people to hell are those who appear more than others at the sides of the rulers of the region, the rulers of the Arab and Islamic world…[F]rom morning to evening, they call people to the gates of hell. They all, except for those upon whom Allah had mercy, are busy handing out praise and words of glory to the despotic rulers who disbelieved Allah and His Prophet…The true danger [to Muslims and their faith] is when the falsehood comes from the imams of religion who bear false witness every morning and evening and lead the nation [ummah] astray.23

  The confluence of decisions by the ulema that many Muslims thought theologically invalid and bin Laden’s pointed attacks on these invalid judgments has drastically undercut the authority of senior ulema in many Muslim countries. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, assemblies of senior clerics have repeatedly called for the cessation of the violence pitting Muslim against Muslim, which all have been ignored by those doing the fighting. The eroding credibility of the religious establishments across the Arab world is producing an environment in which the Muslim leaders that Washington counts as allies will be able to do less and less to shape by religious fiat their peoples’ understanding of U.S. policies and actions in the Islamic world. And they will, in turn, be even less able to control the actions their subjects take in response to U.S. activities.

  The cynical use of Islam by Muslim rulers, the clerics’ hypocrisy and corruption, and the constant urging of Muslims by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to ignore the “rulers’ ulema”24 and to think and decide for themselves about how to best protect their religion seems to be reinvigorating Islam’s original status as a literal, everyman’s religion—a faith that is between God and an individual who has no need for clerics either to interpret God’s word or to mediate and manage the relationship. “Muslims do not consider the Messenger of Islam [the Prophet Muhammad] a mediator between God and people,” the noted scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan has written. “Each individual is invited to address God directly, and although the Messenger sometimes did pray to God on behalf of his community, he often insisted on each believer’s responsibility in his or her own relationship with the One [Allah].”25

  The al-Qaeda chief’s success in reducing the impact of establishment clerics on individuals appears to be substantial.26 “Bin Laden hijacked Islam from the jurisprudence scholars,” argues the distinguished Saudi academic Dr. Madawi al-Rashid, “and broke their monopoly of jurisprudence, which was established under the umbrella of the state.”27 Here Dr. Madawi argues not that bin Laden has hijacked the religion of Islam, as do so many in the West, but that he has worked to return Islam to Muslims, thereby destroying much of the power of each Muslim regime’s ulema to control their populations. “Bin Laden,” Dr. Madawi continues in her brilliant, ground-breaking essay,

  has been able to transfer Islam from the local to the international arena in an era that has its own peculiarities. The most important of these peculiarities are information, media, intellectual [activities], and economic communication. He also
has been able to transfer Islam from the hands of the jurisprudence scholars and their monopoly to those of the simple ordinary Muslim.

  Bin Ladin’s address[es] is [sic] popular in the Islamic world, even the Western experts themselves testify to this, because he transferred from the jurisprudence assembly to two domains: the first domain is the entire world, and the second domain is the private individual. The interactions of the Somali in Somalia, the Pakistani in Leeds, the Egyptian in Germany, and the so-called Saudi in Mecca with these address[es] indicate clear privatization. With bin Ladin, Islam has become an individual project beyond the restrictions of the jurisprudence scholars or of political authority; a project that this individual could carry with him to the port of Aden or Mombassa, or to the noise of Bangkok or New York. The individual could also travel with this project through the Al-Nafudh Desert [in Saudi Arabia], and settle down with it in the mountains of Mecca, or take it with him to the cold land of Chechnya, and the jungles of the Philippines and Bali.

  This privatization and individualization [of Islam] has broken the shackles of the local identities, be they sectarian, tribal, or regional. Despite the fact that the followers of bin Ladin insist on their local aliases and titles that indicate their roots, they are people who rebelled against the local tribal, sectarian, and even geographical aspects. They represent the traveling and immigrating Muslim running away from the homeland, the shackles and improvisations of the jurisprudence scholars, and the oppression of [nation-state] authority and its men.28