The Devil We Don't Know

by Nonie Darwish

  The tension between what Islam really demands of Muslims and trying to get along with the West has always been a problem that Muslim leaders must deal with, whether they are in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, or elsewhere in the Middle East. This tension has been building for a long time, lurking on the horizon, and it finally exploded. Although the revolt was inspired by events in Tunisia, it had strong roots in Muslim society and customs. The spark that caused the downfall of the twenty-three-year-old dictatorship of the Tunisian leader Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was an incident of gross injustice to the common man. A policewoman slapped a twenty-six-year-old street vendor and confiscated his goods for a permit violation. Note that when a woman in the Muslim world is given the chance to have a man's job, the oppression that she feels in that world often causes her to oppress those weaker and poorer than herself. It is the opposite of what we see in Western movies, when a woman slaps a man and his reaction is not humiliation but a smile. In the Muslim world, a man would feel the utmost humiliation after being slapped on the face by a woman. In Tunisia, the policewoman's uniform was her only protection against being slapped back. The street vendor was not only humiliated in public, but his livelihood was also taken away, in a country that suffers from extreme poverty and a high rate of unemployment. Out of desperation, he set himself on fire in public and died. Many of his countrymen identified with him, and a revolt spontaneously erupted. The street vendor became a martyred symbol of the revolution.

  The tragedy struck a chord across the Muslim world with those who identified with the poor man's humiliation, hopelessness, and despair. In Islamic chat rooms, people called the policewoman's behavior “un-Islamic” and explained that this is not how Muslims should behave toward one another. The word un-Islamic has become a common expression used by Muslims who want to separate themselves from the misbehavior of other Muslims. They use the word as a way to defend Islam and to deny that this religion is responsible for what Muslim society has produced. That stance ignores the reality of how a totalitarian religion such as Islam influences the entirety of how a society functions with its good, bad, and ugly sides. The Islamic system has clearly failed to channel the problem of human aggression and oppression toward one's fellow man and instead has perpetuated it. It has failed to promote love and respect for mankind as a whole as the basic principle from which all love and respect emanate. Islamic commandments clearly restrict compassion and friendship only to fellow Muslims and advocate mistreatment, hatred, and violence to non-Muslims. This distinction between how to treat Muslims and all others does not bring out the best in the human character and leaves Muslims in a state of confusion in their interpersonal relationships.

  Being a citizen of a Muslim country is a challenge to one's ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle. I remember watching horrific scenes of police brutality on the streets of Cairo, where poor people and those with menial jobs were slapped and humiliated by not only the police but any person of authority and power. This is still true today. Anyone who had money to bribe the authorities could literally get away with murder. Others, and they are the majority, had to endure a grinding life of constant abuse and oppression from the top down. The oppression could not have become so prevalent in the political system and the police without having first infecting all levels of Muslim society. Maids are often still treated as slaves; slavery has always been an important Arab institution, which was never abolished by Islam and was legally practiced in Saudi Arabia until 1962.

  While mosques are busy teaching Muslims how to hate Jews and mistreat Christians, they make no time to preach to them about forgiveness, redemption, and how to treat one another and to value individual rights and human dignity. What makes the problem even worse is that Muslims are told by sharia that they have the right to force its law on others. Muslims are told that they will not be prosecuted for killing an apostate or an adulterer, and that their law gives the Muslim individual, in many cases, the right to be judge and executioner. Such religious laws encourage the creation of little dictators in all ranks of society, from top to bottom.

  Life in Muslim society is oppressive on every level. Men are forced to perform violent jihad, and the oppression of women, gender segregation and taboos, the criminalization of free speech, and polygamy are almost universally practiced. Not all of this is the fault of the government or the police, but every type of oppression arises from the basic laws of Islam. Yet the majority of Muslims do not see the link between their oppression and sharia, which Muslims are entrusted with enforcing. Abuse and hostility can erupt from anyone in a position of power: bosses over workers, husbands over wives. Child abuse is at an epidemic level, and even neighbors feel entitled to spy on other neighbors. Gossip is rampant and has a huge impact in a shame-based culture.

  The Islamic state is the direct cause of such social ills, which, when compounded, can cause unbearable pressure on the psyches of Muslim citizens. Left with no coping mechanisms—dealing with shame without punitive consequences, freedom to speak one's mind and respect for individual dignity and privacy—the Muslim turns to warped measures to avoid detection. When distrust and anger prevail in a society, democracy and freedom will necessarily suffocate, only to be replaced with tyranny. Even if it is tyranny with the best intentions, it sets in motion a cycle of boiling rage, similar to a pressure cooker in which steam must be released periodically through violence and revolutions. One simple lesson in human behavior—respect for all mankind—that free societies learned from the outset to minimize instability was never learned in ancient civilizations such as Persia and Egypt. Unfortunately, Islam has not enabled Muslim society to escape the fate of rogue states and banana republics.

  The Islamic state has one mechanism it uses to release the built-up pressure caused by the tyranny of Islamic law: it channels the people's rage and frustration to explode outside of the system in a continuous confrontation with the non-Muslim world. In this dynamic, villains must be found outside the system: Israel, the United States, past injustices, colonialism, or the Crusades are or have been good excuses for Islamic violence. The outside world has become the great Satan that is always conspiring against Muslims to cause a fitna, which means “disbelief and chaos.” For instance, the threat that Osama bin Laden posed to the Saudi kingdom was channeled toward the West with the blessings and all of the financial and moral support of the Muslim world. The end result is that a majority of the people are confused, their trust and moral standards are shattered, and their concept of reality distorted.

  When I was a citizen of the Muslim world, I never connected the dots between the duty of jihad; the lack of freedom; the hatred of non-Muslims, especially Jews; the totalitarian control of the Islamic state; and the sacred cows that all Muslims must worship. This colossal scheme whitewashes the requirements of sharia and protects the totalitarian system, while at the same time providing an outlet to dump blame and built-up anger outside the system. It's a plan brilliantly designed to let Muslims have their cake and eat it, too, but how long can this warped situation continue? So far, it has succeeded for fourteen hundred years without collapsing and has its roots in the harsh tribal Arabian Peninsula culture.

  The propaganda, the lies, and blaming the outside world can go only so far. Sooner or later, Muslims will revolt against the symbol of their system, the head of the state. This pattern has continued for generations. No one asks why Muslims have a chronic system of dictatorship or investigates other factors in their religion or culture that contribute to the dysfunctional vicious circle of tyrannies and revolutions. The Muslim mind has been trained for centuries to look outside for reasons for Islamic failures. No one can dare publicly blame oppression on sharia, because doing that is considered an act of apostasy punishable by death. That is true tyranny, the religious tyranny of sharia, when the public is not even aware of or allowed to consider who its true oppressor is.

  During the Arab Spring, not one person among the more than 10 million citizens of Tunisia, the 80 million Egypti
ans, or the more than 350 million citizens of all Arab countries combined had the guts to carry a sign that dared to look beyond the dictator. No one dared to openly demand the removal of sharia as the basis of law for Islamic governments. Whether it was the Egyptian revolution of 1919, 1952, or 2011, the change demanded has only been cosmetic and has always been about removal of the leader or the British. Somehow, the Muslim mind freezes whenever it considers the underlying religious ideology that is the foundation on which its systems are erected. As I watched the TV coverage of the massive protests, I was desperately searching for a brave poster proclaiming something new and daring—a poster that demanded reformation of the system and not merely removal of the dictator, along with slogans of freedom and democracy—but I could not find any. This is what I wanted to see: “Separation of mosque and state,” “Removal of sharia from the Egyptian constitution,” “Equal rights for all,” or “Equal rights for women”—better yet, “The beating of women is not a husband's right.” To my disappointment, I did not see any signs like this. As a result, I was not optimistic about how the revolution would turn out.

  The anger manifested in the Arab Spring, as the uprisings were dubbed, has been bubbling for a long time. The game of blaming the West and Israel could no longer put a lid on the steam rising from the Arab street. Sadly, however, that still did not stop some in the media and the government, who live in constant denial, from accusing Israel of conspiracy and espionage and of causing the uprisings. Yet promoting jihad against the West and terrorism all over the world, especially in Israel during the last decades, was not enough for people to release their building tensions. What Arab leaders have dreaded the most was not the presumed threat of Israel, but what has erupted within their countries. Their efforts to redirect the people's anger toward Western “Satans” could no longer work. Like wildfire, the flames of the Tunisian uprising spread eastward and westward to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. It produced a civil war in Libya and major protests in Morocco, Algeria, Oman, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and some of the Gulf States.

  So far, the main hot spots of the revolt that succeeded in removing their dictators are Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. In the case of the first two instances, the dictators were not Islamists and refused to make the West their enemy, as a good Muslim leader should in the eyes of the Islamists. Less tyrannical Muslim dictators who do not support the jihadists were the easier targets to take out. That explains why Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were ousted much more easily than Gaddafi was in Libya, plus Al Assad of Syria and Ahmedinejad of Iran are still in power. Shock waves progressively rocked Muslim governments, which rushed to suggest new reforms or promised to step down at the end of their current terms. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir announced that he would not seek reelection in 2015; Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, after violent demonstrations demanding his immediate resignation, also announced that he will leave office at the end of his term in 2014. Even King Abdullah of Jordan, in the face of protests, promised reforms, dissolved his cabinet, and appointed a new prime minister to form a new government. Another leader, President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, announced that he would step down within thirty days in exchange for immunity, but that has not yet happened.

  As I mentioned earlier, such quick changes in government are not a new phenomenon in the Middle East. Revolutions, counterrevolutions, assassinations, and coups d'etat are commonplace in the Islamic political system. Many Muslim leaders have come to power after forceful takeovers, and, surprisingly, that is not illegal under Islamic law. Actually, it is perfectly legitimate, and when it succeeds, the masses are often jubilant and satisfied with the change. No one ever publicly accuses such new governments of illegitimacy, not even the media. An important factor in the acceptance of tyrants who take power by force is that under Islamic law, seizure of power is a legitimate way to become the ruler of a country. Sharia states, “A Calipha [Muslim head of state] is allowed to hold office through seizure of power, meaning through force” (o25.4, p. 644). I have no doubt that not one of the protesters across the Middle East ever connected this law with the political chaos of the Middle East. I have never read a single article by an Arab intellectual linking sharia to the lack of stable democracies across the Muslim world.

  Amazingly, the general reaction to the Arab Spring among most Arab intellectuals was one of euphoria and high hopes. Most did not recognize the similarities to prior Islamic revolutions. Many of these began with unrealistic expectations and a denial or a fear of mentioning the true reasons for the failure of the Islamic political system. Every revolution has started with a belief that this will be the true one and that the people have finally found the formula for success. Very often in a revolution, the name of the country and its flag, its constitution, and its national anthem are changed and even history books rewritten. The narrative is always about the evil regime the revolution has overthrown and not about the religious, political, and cultural foundations of the country.

  That is exactly what happened in the 1952 Egyptian revolution, but no live coverage existed to record every aspect of it, as there is today. Nasser, who headed that revolution, actually renamed the largest center of downtown Cairo “Tahrir Square,” which means “Freedom Square,” to signify what he claimed were the most important principles of his new revolution—freedom, democracy, and prosperity for all Egyptians. Previously, it had been called “Ismaelia Square,” named after the nineteenth-century ruler Khedive Ismael, who presided over the opening of the Suez Canal. Nasser also quickly moved to change the name of Egypt to the United Arab Republic, to show that he viewed it more important to be linked to the Arab world than to Egypt's ancient history. In fact, the word Egypt was originally the name of the Coptic Christians of Egypt, but sometime after the Arab invasion and the Islamization of Egypt, its name was changed to “Misr,” which was what the Koran called it. The West retained the traditional biblical name of Egypt until today, but Egyptians have rejected it for Islamic reasons.

  In addition, Nasser changed the constitution, the national anthems, and the history books, which were rewritten to focus on the bright future of the revolution and the dark evil past of King Farouk, whom Nasser called a traitor and a puppet of the West. Nasser also changed the flag of Egypt from green with a crescent and stars to three big stripes, black signifying the dark past, white the revolution, and red the bright future. The whole Arab world adored and was inspired by the new charismatic leader; the media, artists, and singers glamorized him, and songs expressing the devotion and adoration of Nasser were heard everywhere.

  Yet Nasser's revolution did not bring what Egyptians had hoped for. President Anwar Sadat, who succeeded him, made some reforms and changed the name of Egypt to include the word Egypt or Misr in Arabic. It is now the Arab Republic of Egypt. In actuality, Nasser's revolution brought one of the darkest periods of Egyptian history, with wars of aggression, poverty, tyranny, a police state, and military rule from 1952 until 2011. Since 1952, Egypt has been ruled by only three men: Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak.

  Despite Nasser's failures, however, the Egyptian revolution inspired other uprisings in the region, including the 1969 Libyan coup under Moammar Gaddafi, which ousted what he and his supporters termed the reactionary regime of King Idris. Gaddafi renamed the country, changing it from the United Kingdom of Libya to the Libyan Arab Republic. The Libyan flag was redesigned to be similar to that of Egypt's. The revolution promised to its “free brothers” a new age of prosperity, equality, and honor. In 1977, Gaddafi, extremely fearful of coups against him, promised reforms and yet again renamed his country, this time the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

  We can even go further back in time for other examples of the cycle of revolts against tyranny. We all remember the movie Lawrence of Arabia, which portrays T. E. Lawrence's support for an Arab revolt against Turkish rule in the Hijaz and a demand for autonomy from the weakened Ottoman Empire. That paved the way for a movement away from Pan-Isl
amism, symbolized in the Ottoman Empire, and toward Pan-Arabism, which took off later in the mid-twentieth century and eventually produced the 1952 Egyptian revolution. That revolt inspired Arabs' pride in their culture and ousted King Farouk, whose family went back in history to the Ottoman Turks and the Albanian Muslims. Yet before the overthrow of Farouk, shortly after the Arab Revolt led by Lawrence, Egypt in 1919 rebelled against the British and to establish an identity separate from the Ottoman Turks.

  With the weakening of the Ottomans, Turkey officially ended the Islamic caliphate in 1922, which had held sway since 1517. The last sultan, Mehmet, was exiled, and Kemal Ataturk became the first president of the Turkish Republic. Ataturk moved quickly to turn Turkey into a secular state with a European cultural identity, rather than an Islamic or Arab identity, and even changed the Turkish alphabet to Latin, rejecting the Arabic alphabet of the Koran. The loss of the Islamic caliphate and the Turks' abandonment of their strong Islamic ties to the Arab world created a power vacuum in the Middle East. That was probably a strong factor behind Arab eagerness to find a new identity in Pan-Arabism. The loss of an Islamic unifying identity, however symbolic, was also a factor in the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt.