(In our October 8th issue, we ran Mustafa Akyol’s article Still Standing for Islam - and Against Terrorism. Below is a response from Bat Ye’or, followed by a rejoinder from Mr. Akyol, and then a final word from Bat Ye’or. – The Editors)
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Spare Us Another “Golden Age” By Bat Ye’or
The hope inspired by Mr. Mustafa Akyol’s long article in Front Page Magazine is tempered by his deception. Mr. Akyol speaks of the necessity to re-interpret the fundamental teachings and scriptures of Islam, particularly the hadith and sira (the biography of the Prophet). Finally we see here a potential Muslim effort to continue and improve the critical exegesis initiated by the great Orientalists of the 19th century, particularly Ignaz Goldziher, whose work has since become anathema to the Muslim intelligentsia. However, Mr Akyol does not explain on what authority a selection of hadith and events of the sira will be made, since, he himself, in the course of his argumentation, simply uses them to prove the justice of Islam.
Disputing the veracity of the claim in the sacralized biography of Muhammad regarding the massacre of the Qurayza Jews is most welcome since it negates the Muslim command to kill Jews in order to emulate the Prophet. This assertion must be fully encouraged, because the treatment of the Jews by the Prophet has became the standard by which the classical Muslim jurists formulated their policy toward non-Muslims, as embodied in the Shari'a and in the jihad’s rules. Hence, when non-Muslims (primarily Hindus and Christians) were killed in Bali, Amrozi, the Indonesian terrorist, invoked the fate of the Jews in the oasis of Khaybar, perhaps confusing them with the mass slaughter of their co-religionists, the Qurayza. Although many of the Jews of Khaybar were killed in an unprovoked jihad campaign by Muhammad, those vanquished Khaybar Jews who surrendered were not killed, but were dispossessed and became exploited dhimmi tributaries, until, within a decade later, they were expelled by the "Rightly Guided" Caliph Umar.
In fact, there is no way for us, in the 21st century. to know what really happened in a small Arabian oasis in the seventh century given the lack of contemporary evidence. But Mr. Akyol again contradicts himself by implying that the Qurayza’s punishment was justified, because they acted treacherously while of course there are no objective proofs for such accusations, which rest merely on the demonization of the victims. Moreover the problem does not concern only the Qurayza Jews but the Jews and Christians throughout the Hedjaz, who were, soon afterward dispossessed, and within a decade of Muhammad’s death, expelled, according to his professed (i.e., again, in the sira) deathbed wishes.
As Mr. Akyol stated rightly, this was not exceptional at that time. The problem now is that such acts have been attributed to the Prophet Muhammad who is the model to be emulated by all Muslims. Hence, while even worse wars might have been perpetrated in the world by rulers long since forgotten, the acts and sayings of Muhammad concerning non-Muslims are still binding for over a billion Muslims today. To decry Dr. Bostom’s analyses, based on 13 centuries of Islamic teaching and writing, and accepted today in all Muslim countries, is almost surrealistic.
It is true that now we see an effort by Muslim theologians to contextualize the actions and words attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, and thereby introduce an element of relativity between the seventh century, and the present. But this timid and belated tendency has not the slightest influence on the current jihadist war of terror against the West overwhelmingly approved in the Muslim countries.
Mr Akyol’s explanation of jihad itself is particularly disingenuous. In a democracy “a final jihad on western secular materialism” is shocking. This is especially concerning given that the word “faith” can be understood in its Muslim sense which states that the only true faith is Islam. (Qur’an 3:17).
What exactly is “western secular materialism”? Will that be replaced by a Shari’a morality? Much of Mr. Akyol’s reasoning seems inspired by the International Institute of Islamic Thought set up in 1983 in the U.S.A. to teach the Islamization of Knowledge. This program, financed by Saudi Arabia, was developed under the guidance of, among others, Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, a Palestinian Professor who taught at Temple University. A document from the Islamization of Knowledge program summarized its objectives:
“The new reform effort should present a systematic and methodological approach to rebuild Islamic knowledge on the same firm foundation that supported Islamic Civilization in its first cycle. The Muslims, being an Ummah (nation) of a Divine message, can only rise to civilization dominance if they carry the message in its original clarity, purity, and relevance.”1
The program to reform Islamic religious thinking thus aims at reinforcing traditional teaching through modern reasoning. Thus, one is imprisoned within a circular argumentation which goes back to its Islamic starting point. While I understand the difficulties of reforming a religion, a process that takes centuries, and does not relate to Islam alone, I deplore the violent animosity displayed against those writers and researchers in the West who denounce, very courageously, the brazen acts of terrorism perpetrated throughout the world, primarily against non-Muslims, by Muslims invoking the very texts that Ibn Warraq, Bostom, Spencer, and so many others have analyzed, and brought to public attention.
Mr. Akyol denies their self-evident interpretations, and that is his right, but he should try to convince – not a Western audience – but over a billion Muslims who curiously share the views of the Muslim texts and authorities quoted by the courageous authors mentioned above. Mr. Akyol prefers to try and persuade Westerners of the perfection of Islam, simply denying that the horrors that occurred in Muslim history, chronicled with great accuracy by Dr. Bostom, either didn’t happen, or were not done by Muslims. This sort of twisted logic is little removed from the warped thinking which justified the bizarre accusations that the CIA, Americans, or Zionists must have perpetrated 9/11 because Muslims could not commit such horrors. Many books elaborating this preposterous thesis were disseminated in Europe, and in the Muslim world.
It would be meaningless to answer all of Mr. Akyol’s affirmations, accusations and denials, including the genocide of the Armenians. His total rejection of the history of dhimmitude, despite copious documentation by both Muslim and non-Muslim sources, and its replacement by a glorification of a just and peaceful Islamic rule over tens of millions of subjected, non-Muslim peoples, precludes any understanding between those who call a jihad a genocidal war, and those who call it a liberation (even having the temerity to deny the jihad genocide of the Armenians). Mr. Akyol invokes testimonies which are contradicted, multiple times over, by others he chose to ignore.
A mass of documents from a vast array of sources describe throughout the centuries and even till today, the trials of populations - Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists - vanquished by the Muslim armies. The affirmations of modern scholars that he quotes, just confirm the political rewriting of history but do not suppress, by overlooking them, the veracity of the facts enunciated by Dr. Bostom. Mr. Akyol’s affirmation that it was not Muslims who perpetrated the acts described is merely his personal opinion based on his current appreciation of Islam. Finally, while Mr. Akyol’s efforts to modernize religious beliefs are praiseworthy, they should be directed exclusively at convincing his coreligionists, not attempting to persuade the non-Muslim victims of Muslim aggression that their ordeal did not happen or was an idyllic era for which they should be grateful. Spare us another “Golden Age”.
Notes
Amber Haque ed., Muslims and Islamization in North America: Problems & Prospects, Amana Publications, Maryland, 1999, p.19.
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Inviting Bat Ye'or To Consider Fairness
By Mustafa Akyol
It appears that both Ms. Ye'or and Mr. Bostom believe that terrorists such as al-Qaeda spring from and represent the supposedly inherent violence of Islam. I argue, on the other hand, that the current "Islamic terrorism" we face stems from a distortion of the true Islamic faith.
In order to defend my case, let me shortly answer the questions, counter the criticisms and unveil the misjudgments of Ms. Ye'or.
The first issue is about the traditional, post-Koranic Islamic sources. Ms. Ye'or welcomes my critical approach to the hadith and sira traditions but criticizes me for failing to "explain on what authority a selection of hadith and events of the sira will be made." (Hadiths are sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad and sira are his biographies.) I feel free to question these traditional sources, because they are very late constructs. The earliest sira was written about 150 years after the Prophet. Hadiths were compiled even later. And it is already known that these sources include many fake, irrational stories. I just argue that the inauthenticity is wider than commonly acknowledged.
But how will we judge these sources, as Ms. Ye'or rightly asks. Robert Spencer raised the same question, too. My answer is the Koran. The Koran must be the sole infallible Islamic criterion and hadiths should be compared with its verses and the overall message. There are some modern scholars who reach this conclusion. Professor Hayri Kirbasoglu, a theologian in Ankara University and an expert on hadiths, argues that a new method is necessary to evaluate the hadith collection and compatibility with the Koran -- a criterion much neglected before – should be its basis. The same holds for sira as well.
With this reasoning, I see the sira and hadith accounts about the massacre of the men of Bani Qurazya as incompatible with the Koran. Thus I reject it.
Ms. Ye'or welcomes my rejection of this story, but finds another reason to accuse me:
But Mr. Akyol again contradicts himself by implying that the Qurayza’s punishment was justified, because they acted treacherously while of course there are no objective proofs for such accusations, which rest merely on the demonization of the victims.
There is a logical inconsistency here. Ms. Ye'or says that there "are no objective proofs" showing that Bani Qurazya was treacherous, but there is no objective proof for the rest of the story as well. We can either take the story at face value or doubt or reject it completely. By taking the killing as granted but by doubting its accepted reason, Ms. Ye'or stealthy walks away from fairness.
Ms. Ye'or also questions my effort to redefine jihad as an intellectual stance against atheism, and its philosophical underpinning, i.e. materialism. First of all, she asks what this is. Put simply, materialism is the idea that matter is all there is, God is imaginary and we humans are the products of a blind process of evolution.
Ms. Ye'or then asks whether I want to replace the materialist morality with a "Shari'a morality". The latter term is an oxymoron[i] and it is not my vision for any society. But, yes, I would love to see a transformation from the materialist morality, which feeds hedonism and selfishness, into a theistic morality -- which depends on the recognition that we are not mere animals in a struggle for survival and our lives have a meaning beyond earthly mundane existence.
This topic is undoubtedly related with science and Ms. Ye'or noticed that. Good. Yet, she traced my ideas to the "Islamization of Knowledge" project that was launched by International Institute of Islamic Thought. Probably to add an alarming detail, Ms. Ye'or also notes that the institute in question was "financed by Saudi Arabia."
Yet, this is totally unrelated to me. The scientific project that I believe in and actively support is not the ""Islamization of Knowledge," but the "Intelligent Design Theory." And it has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia; it is in fact a brainchild of several prominent American scientists and thinkers and is spearheaded by the Discovery Institute in Seattle and the Intelligent Design Network based in Kansas. Intelligent design theorists argue for a paradigm shift to liberate modern science from the materialist dogma. This is desperately needed because of the overwhelming scientific evidence against materialist theories of origins such as Darwinism.[ii] In my article titled Why Muslims Should Support Intelligent Design, I explain why this theory is a common intellectual stance for all theists, whether they be Christian, Jewish or Muslim.
In short, I am not trying to "Islamize" knowledge as Ms. Ye'or assumes, rather I seek objectivity and argue that knowledge -- in the form of scientific data -- is already compatible with the basic tenets of theistic religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
After her suspicions about my scientific endeavors, Ms. Ye'or employs a straw man argument against me. She makes a caricature of what I have said in my recent reply to her colleague, Andrew Bostom, and then attacks that caricature.
According to her, I "affirmed that it was not Muslims who perpetrated the acts described" by Mr. Bostom. I was "simply denying the horrors that occurred in Muslim history", and I was asserting that those horrors "either didn’t happen, or were not done by Muslims." From here, she goes on to equate me with bizarre conspiracy theorists who pointed to the CIA or the Mossad as the force behind 9/11.
What I said in fact was totally different. The exact wording in my article in question include statements such as, "there of course were many kinds of 'Muslims' who looted and pillaged simply for profit and other worldly gains" and "Muslims can do evil, not because Islam directs it, but because they themselves individually choose to do so." What I did was to distinguish between the Muslim acts for the sake of Islam and the Muslim acts for the sake of worldly interests. I accepted all the horrible massacres committed by such figures as Tamerlane, Mahmud Ghaznavi, Mohammad Ghori, early Seljuks, and so on. But I explained that these people were hardly good representatives of the Islamic faith. In a more illustrative example, I showed that the sacking of Thessalonica in 904 was not a "jihad campaign," as Andrew Bostom portrayed, but rather the work of Arab corsairs which acted simply for world profit -- the same motive that drew the "Christian corsairs" of the Caribbean.
I really can't understand how Ms. Ye'or overlooks what I have said, distorts it so overtly and then expects to be persuasive.
I am sure she can do better than this.
Ms. Ye'or also criticizes me for speaking to the Westerners about Islam. "While Mr. Akyol’s efforts to modernize religious beliefs are praiseworthy," she kindly says, "they should be directed exclusively at convincing his coreligionists." That is indeed true and I am indeed trying to appeal to my co-religionists, too. But the struggle for the soul of Islam has become, especially after September 11, a global issue in which non-Muslims have a share to say. The outcome of that struggle is very much related with Western, and especially American, policies towards the Islamic world. That's why I think that a fair assessment of Islam in the West is crucial and I am trying to be helpful to that assessment. We should also keep in mind that many opinion leaders of the Islamic world are either living in the West or are affected the Western intellectual climate; so it is not odd to argue for an Islamic renewal in this medium.
But Ms. Ye'or believes that I am not being helpful. Interestingly, she accuses not just me, but also many prominent Western scholars who study Islam. According to her, "the affirmations of modern scholars" that I quote from, "just confirm the political rewriting of history." Political rewriting of history for what? To luster Islam? And by the many American, British, Italian historians that I quote from? Let me remind that the scholars in question are not the usual guests of the "Campus Watch," rather they include names like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes. What could compel such historians to engage in a distortion of history for the sake of a religion that they don't adhere to? Who could stir such a global conspiracy? The learned elders of Mecca whose protocols are discovered by Ms. Ye'or and her colleagues?
A better explanation – of the Ockham's Razor type – might be that in fact it is Ms. Ye'or and her colleagues who are engaged in a political rewriting of history.
I hope they are not. Or if they are, that they will reconsider their stance. They should not see such self-criticism as an indignity. Abrahamic monotheism, whether it be in the Jewish, Christian or Islamic tradition, teaches us that it is indeed a great virtue to retreat from a mistake.
And I will pray to better witness the virtues of Ms. Ye'or.
Notes:
[i] The term sharia refers to Islamic law. I don't see it as the source of an Islamic morality, because I believe that morality should stem from personal faith, not penal law. The "enforced morality" we can see in the horrible example of the Taliban, and in the Saudi regime, can only achieve hypocrisy. In a forthcoming article of mine, titled Deconstructing Islamic Radicalism, I deal with this issue in detail.
[ii] Intelligent Design is not creationism. The latter is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, do not refer to religious texts, it is based purely on scientific data. Intelligent Design theorists criticize Darwinism not because it is against the Scripture, but rather because it is against the recent findings of modern science.
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Inviting Mr Akyol to Consider Intellectual Integrity, Without Triumphalism
By Bat Ye’or
Let me begin by answering Mr. Akyol’s accusation of a “logical inconsistency” which is entirely his own. He implies that I take for granted the killing of the Banu Qurayza while in fact I said that “there is no way for us, in the 21st century to know what really happened in a small Arabian oasis in the seventh century given the lack of contemporary evidence.” It is Mr. Akyol who rejects – a welcome attitude – the hadith version that describes the execution of all the Jewish males and the enslavement of their women and children. But a little later he, himself, accuses the Qurayza Jews of having being treacherous, hence justifying a treatment that he has previously denied. Mr. Akyol has assumed from his own imagination that I take for granted a massacre, and on this distorted and gratuitous allegation, has accused me of unfairness.
Accusations of “distortions”, “unfairness”, “selectivity”, in my analyses of dhimmi history manifest an unwillingness to acknowledge the violent history of Islamic expansion. What we are now seeing in Sudan echoes the Muslim chronicles of jihadist expansion over the centuries across Asia, Africa, and Europe. I am used to such ad hominem indictments because I have refused, deliberately, to accept the Islamophile stratagem that deflects the jihad violence onto the victims of jihad, or minimizes the victims’ trials, by specious arguments. I have explained this position in chapter 10 of The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude.
As a researcher on dhimmi peoples (the non-Muslim indigenous populations subdued by jihad conquests), I tried to recover their testimonies from the ashes of their past. Mr. Akyol’s negationist view on the Armenian genocide, and his whitewashing of the historical jihad illustrates both his lack of objectivity, and his contempt for the detailed historical records of a multitude of non-Muslim populations. His refusal of John of Nikiu’s account which he attributes to an alleged xenophobic Egyptian character as a whole is spurious and racist. The horrors of the Arab conquest in Armenia, narrated by local historians, corroborate similar accounts, including that of John of Nikiu, a distinguished member of the Coptic clergy. In fact, the descriptions that recount in detail the warfare: slavery, massacres, deportation, destruction, cities or villages razed, usually come from Muslim chroniclers. Such events are referred by Mr. Akyol as “liberation wars”. It looks as if Mr. Akyol has an encyclopedic knowledge of both Western and Islamic civilizations regarding every “historical episode”, allowing him to assert that Islam has a better record than the West, - after he rejects any event he dislikes.
The numbers of former non-Muslims involved in jihadist operations against their own people, throughout history, under whatever pressures (including for example, the gulam/devshirme enslavement systems for Christian children under the Seljuks and Ottomans, which, combined persisted for over 500 years), are beyond calculation. But, like the contemporary examples of the American “Taliban” John Lindh, or the British “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, they represent individuals propelled along by a 13 centuries old jihad system which they have neither invented, nor engineered. This system embodies an ideology of world domination and world governance based on specific strategies and tactics conceived from the 8th – 9th centuries as a war machine against the infidels. Patrick Sookdheo’s excellent book Understanding Islamic Terrorism 1 examines in detail from its inception till today, the Muslim framework of relations with non-Muslims.
Historical contingencies and accidental enrolment or participation of Christians or others in this theological warfare machinery cannot hide the basic and perennial structural configuration that has destroyed through massacres, slavery or oppression countless populations. Peoples recording their own history – i.e., Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Bahais, Assyrian Christians, Armenians, Copts, Maronites, Greeks, African and Mediterranean Jews and Central Europeans Christians – contradicts the Islamophilic re-casting of history that designates imperialistic Islamic expansion through jihad war- a “liberation”. Such historical obfuscation has nurtured modern Islamic “fundamentalism” and terror. Free nations today find themselves engulfed in a 13 centuries-old jihadist war about which they know almost nothing – being oblivious to both its ideology, and its tactics.
I do not know what Mr. Akyol means by “saving the soul of Islam”. If it implies a projection on others of the negative aspects of one’s own history or their negation, such a salvation seems to me doubtful, indeed. A recent debate in Cairo (October 5-6) discussed the way to implement a radical revision of Islamic scholarship and Jusrisprudence and called for both religious and political reforms. This may be a positive harbinger for progress, if religious hierarchies do not succeed in condemning it. 2
A little less triumphalism and certitude, and a little more humility will pave the way toward an intellectual integrity that forbids equating massacre and liberation.
Notes:
1 Patrick Sookhdeo, Understanding Islamic Terrorism, with a foreword by General Sir Hugh Beach, Isaac Publishing, Pewsey, U.K., 2004.
2 MEMRI, Inquiry and Analysis – Egypt/Reform Project, October 22, 2004, N° 192.
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