Radical Islamists have perverted the traditions of Islam

By: Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi    

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[Republished (October 10, 2001) from the "Middle East Quarterly"
on the web site of the association called "Islamic Supreme Council of America",
lead by Sheikh Hisham Kabbani]

http://islamicsupremecouncil.org/MediaCenter/IntheNews/wtc_tragedy/palazzi.htm

The danger is that radical groups could become the official representatives of Muslim immigrants in the West

WESTERN observers, both among the general public and the media, commonly make the mistake of thinking that Islamism is the same as traditional Islam. Even Western researchers describe Islamism as a resurgence of traditional Islam. In contrast, moderate Sunni Muslims are characterised as those whose faith is mitigated, influenced by syncretism, or diluted by a certain amount of secularisation and Westernisation.

But this turns reality upside-down. In fact, Islamists depart in important ways from the Islamic tradition. Indeed, some outstanding traditional Muslim scholars see Islamism as a symptom of secularisation and as a reshaping of their religion into a modern, ideological totalitarianism. I share this view. The distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism can be seen in many specifics. Tradition attributes to the ruler the right to appoint competent scholars as authorised interpreters of the Islamic law; Islamists do not recognise any authority apart from the leaders of their own groups. Tradition makes the authority of a scholar dependent on the possession of written documents of appointment signed by his predecessor; Islamists regularly install people bereft of any theological or legal education into positions of Islamic authority.

Another point: Sunnis do not see Islam as an organisation dependent on a centralised leadership; Islamists, on the contrary, see their leading militants as the Islamic leadership, thereby cutting out the need to refer to traditional scholars for guidance. Perhaps most important of all is the Islamists' subordination of religion to politics. Khalid Duran notes the distinction between traditional Islam and its political counterfeit by underlining their different understandings of the relationships between religion and politics: "Whether Islamists like the term fundamentalists or not, their understanding of religion resembles the fundamentalists in other religions. This is not to say that Islamists are more religious or more genuinely Islamic than other Muslims . . . Islamism is a late 20th century totalitarianism. It follows fascism and communism, picking up from those and seeking to refine their methods of domination . . .

"Few Muslims would deny that political commitment is part of Islam ethics, but most disagree with the Islamist insistence that there exists a clearly defined 'Islamic system', different from all other political systems."

Islamists draw on modern European models that posit a scientific revolutionary movement, an elitist scheme of ruling society by means of secret cults that act behind the scenes, and a manufacture of consensus by propaganda. They reject those aspects of the Islamic tradition that do not fit with this political outlook.

Theirs is, in fact, an extremist ideology; they consider their organisations and militants as custodians of the projects for Islamising the world, and whoever criticises them (be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim) is immediately accused of being "Islamophobic". Unwilling to be ruled by non-Islamist Muslims, Islamists adopt an approach characterised by political supremacism.

Like other totalitarian ideologies, contemporary Islamism is blindly utopian. It implies a wholesale denial of history; the Islamists' model of an ideal society is inspired by the idealised image of 7th-century Arabia. It rejects modern concepts of pluralism and tolerance. And it ignores a history of Islam rich in models of adaptation to the times.

The traditional view understands the role of politics in terms of what the Koran teaches. It indicated that prophets were sent to humans to teach them truths about God, ethics, ways to achieve prosperity in this world, and beatitude in the hereafter, and to warn about the consequences of injustice and sin.

The Koran uses different titles to describe the prophet Mohammed but none of them refers to his political function. Verses 33:45-46 say that he was sent as a witness (shahid), a bearer of glad tidings (mubashshir), one who warns (nadhir), as someone who calls to God (do 'i ila Allah), and as a shining light (siraj munir). Nowhere does it say he was sent as a political leader or a head of state.

Islamists, however, have a very different interpretation. For them, building an Islamic state is the central achievement of the prophetic mission. Conflating the role of the Muslim scholar with that of a political leader, they hold that the spread of Islam cannot be separated from the creation of what they call the Islamic state.

THEY argue that Islam is both religion and government and this serves the basic description of their creed. They neglect to mention, however, that this expression is found in neither the Koran, the Hadith (sayings and doings of the prophet Mohammed), or in any other of the authoritative Islamic sources.

In similar fashion, the Islamists deform the meaning of jihad. In traditional Islam, military jihad and all other forms of material jihad constitute only the external aspect of jihad, while the inner dimension of jihad is the struggle that a Muslim undertakes to purify his soul from mundane desires, defects and egotism. Jihad is not limited to the military arena, but denotes striving hard towards a worthy goal.

According to some sayings of the prophet Mohammed "the best jihad for women is performing a valid pilgrimage", while "the jihad for someone who has old parents is taking care of them". The traditional understanding also includes a military meaning, but military jihad is strictly regulated by rules concerning its purpose, means and resolution.

Koranic verses permitting military jihad (22:39-40) indicate that it is not a vehicle to expand Islam but to defend the rights of those who are persecuted because of their religion including "monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of God is commemorates in abundant measure".

Note the inclusion here of not just mosques, but "monasteries, churches, synagogues" as places where God's name is frequently mentioned and places that must be protected, if necessary by recourse to war. These lines indicate a militant defence of the right to religious freedom.

The term "self-defence" means just that and must not be stretched. Military jihad must be waged by a regular Muslim army against another army. Terrorist acts against civilian populations are not included in the definition of jihad. When a former enemy is ready to stop hostilities and is looking for an opportunity for peace, Muslims must stop fighting and also look for a peaceful solution. The Koran says: "If they incline towards peace, incline thou also towards it, and put thy trust in God."

This traditional understanding of jihad as warfare to defend the weak, using armies and open to reaching an accord, has been replaced by an aggressive, guerilla-style warfare that rejects anything less than total victory and a total defeat of the one who is perceived as the enemy (whether non-Muslim or non-Islamist Muslim). The Islamist version of jihad includes and legitimises terrorism against civilian targets such as churches, synagogues, and cemeteries and even against elderly people, women, and babies. Not withstanding the clear Islamic prohibition on suicide, it also commits suicide operations.

The origins of modern Islamism trace back to the beginnings of the Wahhabi movement in the early 18th century. Wahhabism was a puritanical uprising based on reinterpreting written Koranic law without the enlightened support of expertise embodied in the Koran and the Hadiths, known as the Sunna. Wahhabis pay lip service to adherence to the Sunna, but in reality reshape it according to their ideology. Many prophetic sayings which constitute the immediate source of Sunna are rejected by means of captious arguments, as soon as they result in tenets incompatible with Wahhabism.

Sheikh Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, describes the rise and the development of Wahhabism as follows: "The premise of this new, narrow ideology was to reject traditional scholars, scholarship and practices under the guise of 'reviving the true tenets of Islam' and protecting the concept of monotheism."

Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab encouraged a new interpretation of Islamic law and permitted his own acolytes to apply it in light of their own understanding, regardless of their level of expertise in juridical matters.

Whoever did not agree with this revolutionary approach he considered outside the fold of Islam -- an apostate, disbeliever, or idolater -- and thus someone whose blood could be shed, whose women could be raped, and whose wealth could be confiscated.

The dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I gave Wahhabis an opportunity to impose their beliefs and their rule on Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, which they did not lose. The Wahhabis first conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, transforming these two sanctuaries from centres for the transmission of the Sunni heritage into places for propagating a primitive and literalist cult to Muslims coming from every part of the world. Second, the Wahhabis set up the Saudi state.

Third, expansionist Wahhabism, like other forms of totalitarian ideology, seeks not just to take possession of the whole Muslim world by replacing Sunni Islam with the so-called Salafi school but even to expand its influence beyond it. Dogmatic uniformity has since then began to suffocate the humane and enlightened Islamic tradition. Since the 1950s, the Muslim Brethren (al-lkhwan al-Muslimum), an organisation founded in Egypt in 1929, has been the main instrument for propagating Wahhabi influence internationally.

After Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in the mid-1950s, the Saudis needed allies against his secular revolutionary policies. So the Saudi leaders supplied financial support to the Brethren. From then on, the vast majority of Muslim Brethren adopted Wahhabi doctrines.

The governments of some Muslim countries, knowing that human and civil rights, democracy and equality between men and women could represent the end of their power, supported Islamism. They work against peace between Israel and its neighbours, fearing that a pacified Middle East could create serious problems for autocratic and feudal systems.

NOT surprisingly, the Palestine Hamas is one of the important Muslim Brethren-controlled organisations based in the Middle East.

These problems are now also found in the West. Local branches of the radical organisations that promote terrorism in the Middle East are taking root in Western countries. They represent not more than 10 per cent of the total Muslim population in those countries, but they control the main Muslim organisations and most of the mosques in western Europe and North America. They are a worldwide, organised network, using acronyms, but always ensuring that the Muslim Brethren is the inner circle behind the scenes. They claim to represent all Muslims and get a respectful reception from non-Muslims, who know no better.

The situation has many causes, but the principal is one that while traditional Islam is multifaceted and spontaneous, Islamism is forwarded by a worldwide network of activists funded by the Saudi and some other Gulf governments. Those looking for ways to prevent Muslim minorities in Europe and North America from turning to Islamism find that the Gulf countries represent the main obstacles.

Ironically, then, the structure if the Muslim Brethren is supported, in other worlds, mainly by those countries that are regarded as friends of the West. Muslim Brethren are often appointed as imams of important mosques, especially in democratic countries where there is no ministry of religious affairs to check their orientation.

The West is both loved and feared by Islamists. They cannot hope to defeat it militarily so instead they aim to influence it from within. In part, this means that Islamists divide their work between militants and more moderate-sounding types. Militants execrate the US government and call for its destruction, while the more moderate Islamists are honoured guests at the White House.

The danger is that radical groups could become the official representatives of Muslim immigrants in the West. In the United States, Sheikh Kabbani, of the Islamic Supreme Council of America and a disciple of Nazim 'Adil al-Qubrusi, declared at the US State Department: "We would like to advise our government, our congressmen, that there is something big going on and people do not understand it. You have many mosques around the United States . . . So the most dangerous things are going on in these mosques that have self appointed leaders throughout the United States. The extremist ideology makes them very active. We can say that they took over 80 per cent of the mosques in the United States. . .This means that the ideology of extremism has been spread to the youth and the new generation."

Sheikh Kabbani is trying to show Westerners the reality behind the deceptive facade. The great majority of all mosques in democratic countries -- not only in North America, but in most of western Europe -- are controlled by extremists. Looking at two organisations in specific, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brethren organisation in the United States that lobbies against journalists and scholars who dare to write anything about Islam at variance with the Brethren's Islamist agenda. Notwithstanding CAIR's evident connection to Hamas, it is accepted by the US Government as a legitimate representative of the Muslim American community. Likewise, the American Muslim Council (AMC) is another branch of the Muslim Brethren. According to Khalid Duran: "The AMC's most remarkable feat was to obtain the monopoly on the training of Muslim chaplains for the US Army (which is like Tehran entrusting the training of its revolutionary guards to the US Institute of Peace)."

Thus, while non-Islamist Islamic organisations like the Association for Islamic Charitable Projects are more or less ignored by the US Government, Muslim American soldiers receive spiritual assistance from Islamist chaplains.

The best means to limit the influence of Islamist factions if by supporting the teachings of traditional, moderate Islam. In the former Soviet republics the muftis are starting to understand that Wahhabi infiltrations threaten to change the face of their society; they seem to be willing to join forces in a common project of prevention. The president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has recently founded a new Islamic University in Tashkent which has among its main goals the education of moderate imams specially trained to refute Wahhabism and to promote dialogue between Muslims and other monotheists.

In September 2000, the mufti of Russia, Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, in co-operation with the muftis of Chechnya, Daghestan, Ingushetia, Bashkiria and Siberia, established in Kazan the first Islamic university in Russia; the goal of this university is also to fight extremist influences coming from abroad. This can be understood as a sign that the followers of traditional Islam are starting to realise how such a global menace necessarily calls for a co-ordinated self-defence.

Non-Muslims must overcome their tendency to assume that real Islam is the one propagandised by the Wahhabis and their Islamist network. They should increase their dialogue and work with those traditional Muslims who join them in seeing radicalism as a disease, and who have ideas for an appropriate therapy to heal those afflicted by it.

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