ISLAM : What it is

By
Hassan S. Karmi

The onslaught on Islam

The Jews have what they call the “holocaust”, but the Muslims have the “onslaught”. The word means in essence “a violent attack to destroy” and this is exactly its meaning when applied to the Jewish and Christian onslaught on Islam.

This onslaught started as early as the seventh century, with the rise of Islam. It started in earnest in the eighth century during the reign of Charlemagne in the West and the reign of Haroon Al Rashid in The East. Charlemagne is said to have sent an expedition into Spain to fight the “infidels”. His troops were defeated by the Muslims at Roncesvalles, a village in North Spain in 778 A.D. In the east the Byzantine Empire was locked in a series of bloody campaigns with the Muslims until the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Turks. The Spanish wars of reconquest in Spain lasted nearly a century, and culminated in the occupation of Granada in 1492, and was followed by the expulsion of the Muslims. Then came the corsair forays in the Mediterraneans, and the Balkan Wars, and finally the wars of colonization. In the meantime the Church was active against everything Muslim, religion and culture.

Of the chief religions of the world, none has been exposed to a venomous constant hostility as Islam. Normally hostility is directed against some movement known to be really nefarious and savage, bent upon destruction, murder and devastation. Islam was not like that, in word or in deed and therefore the cause of this dread hostility should be sought elsewhere. It should be sought in the hearts of those who are hostile, and it is true to say that Islam is sinned against than sinning. Islam seems to be like Bulaiq, a famous Arab horse, which was always a winner and yet it was always dispraised. It was not the fault of the horse that it was always a winner, but the dispraise was because it was always a winner. Islam has been dispraised and will continue to be dispraised. It has been condemned without trial, and the dogged refusal to give it a fair trial, especially in the Jewish and Christian quarters, can only mean bigotry and blind cussedness, even in the days of enlightenment and supposed supremacy of reason.

When Islam rose early in the 7th century it rose in an explosion which took the area by surprise and which made the peoples around listen and sit up. It was a stunning challenge to all, carrying with it a call to look round and see if everything in life and in belief is right. It was a reasoned negation of all beliefs as being inchoate or erroneous. The belief in one only god was not yet solidly formed, and social relations were not regulated yet. The poor and the needy were given scant thought. The relationship between the ruler and the ruled were still unformulated. Woman was degraded and excluded from society and was deprived of an identity of her own. The family in its present form was then unknown. Those and many other conditions were then ripe for reform. Islam when it arose had all those in mind.

But Islam leaders generated for it the hatred of all Christians and Jews in the West. They thought of Islam as enemy, and not as just another religion which could be treated with indifference. They shunned Islam as they would shun an infectious disease. The hatred turned into a will to destroy, to kill without mercy, with venom. Muslim peoples under colonialism were either exploited or trampled upon. Those of them who refused to submit were made to submit with unmitigated cruelty. A Muslim, the colonialists would say, is different, and he must be sat upon. The Jews’ fault, in the eyes of the Christians, was twofold. They did not see the Light, and when they saw it they did not believe in it. The Muslims, in the eyes of the Jews and Christians are worse; they saw the Light, but they refused to believe in it. Therefore, they were regarded as fanatic, obdurate, inflexible, inconvertible, wrong-headed, uncivilized, indomitable, strong-headed etc. etc. This venomous attitude never abated, but only camouflaged. Muslims are attached by word and deed, everywhere in the West. The fault of a Muslim country is magnified ten times, but not so the fault of the non-Muslim one, Iraq, Libya, Iran and the Sudan are being punished severely for no genuine reason. The Bosnians are being annihilated in Yugoslavia alone, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese are being the victims with murderous attacks. The Sudanese are being attacked from the south and the east. Muslims are still in refugee camps. They number about 70% of all the refugees in the whole world. By contrast, Israel is sinless and is the apple of the World’s eye.

There was a plan agreed upon consciously or unconsciously, by the colonists to the effect that the Muslims on the Mediterranean coast should be pushed back to the hinterland. After the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain and Portugal, the Spaniards and the Portugese thought of pursuing them into their new homelands and attack them. The Portugese had it in their mind at one time to lay siege to the Muslim countries and then invade them. They began their siege in the Gulf where they built fortresses along the Arabian Coast there. The Portugese seized the Canary Islands from Morocco, which later passed to Spain. The Spaniards occupied the southern strip of the Moroccan Atlantic Coast, and part of the Moroccan Mediterranean coast. Tangiers in Morocco was an international zone. Algeria was seized by France, and later turned into a French province. Tunisia was seized by France. The Tunisian Mediterranean coast was appropriated for French settlers.

The Mediterranean Coast in Libya was dotted with Italian settlements which had the effect of  barring the Libyans from the sea and of pushing them in consequence into the interior. The native Libyans were prohibited from entering Tripoli, the main city in Libya.

In Egypt, Alexandria was hardly an Egyptian city. Port Said was having the same fate. And farther east. Palestine was colonised by the Jews, with the result that Muslims were pushed back from the sea into Transjordan as refugees. Lebanon in the north was turned by and large into a Christian dependency under the French mandate and there was a thought of carving a Christian State there. Syria in the east was deprived of Alexandretta and thus deprived of access to the sea in the north west. In the settlement after World WarI, Turkey was partitioned in such a way as to give Cilicia on the South east coast to Italy, and western coast to Greece. Constantinople was occupied by the Allies. Musstafa Kamal of Turkey was forced to agree to the abolition of the Khalifate the use of Latin characters in writing instead of the Arabic ones, and the secularisation of Turkey. The change over to Latin characters was intended to prevent Muslims there from reading the Qur’an. A most sinister measure for the same purpose in Algeria by the French was to propogate a local Algerian dialect to replace the classical Arabic. The Berber language was promoted in both Algerian and Morocco as a rival to the Arabic language in order to draw the Berbers at least away from reading the Qur’an.

This rabid campaign against the Qur’an and Islam was also waged in Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Somalia, apart from French speaking countries in Africa. In the Sudan, the campaign took a different form. The British cut off the south from the rest of the country, and disallowed the teaching of Arabic and Islam, on the plea that the south was not Arab like the north. The British allowed thousands of Christian missionaries (12 thousand in 1950) to roam about in the south preaching Christianity. The Sudan was a condominium, ruled by both Britain and Egypt. The result of that proselytising scheme is the armed conflict going on now between south and north and the miseries and loss of life on both sides.

Of late, to put the lid on it, Islam is now being accused of fundamentalism, and the Muslims are accused of being terrorists. The dating of the birth of this charge coincides with the rise of Israel. But the charge is also music to the ears of the Christian powers, especially the United States, thanks to the active and dominant Jewish lobby. To add insult to injury the Arabs and the Muslims in the United States are subjected to a virulent campaign of vilification and false misjudgements. This is not conducted in relation to any crime which can be laid at the door of the Arabs and the Muslims who were humane during their rule in treatment of religious and racial minorities. This is not the fault of the Arabs and Muslims but they are now punished for their innocence.

Now fundamentalism, as a divergent form of religiosity, originated in the United States early in the 20th century as a Protestant movement to combat modernism. The main tenets of this religious movement are as follows :

1.  The innerrancy of the Bible in all matters and its literal and historical truth is unchallengeable.

2.  The virgin birth of Christ is literally true.

3.  The resurrection of Christ from the dead is a physical fact.

4.  The atonement by the death of Christ is literally true.

5.  The second coming of Christ is a fact.

6.  The Bible that is the Old and the New Testament is inspired and therefore true.

7.  The story of creation as set out in the book of Genesis is historically and scientifically true.

These tenets obviously raise many historical doubts and questions.

But the strange thing in the charge levelled at Islam in the West is that Islam is equated with the Protestant Fundamentalism. Therefore Islam is unreasonable, fanatical, a social threat to civilization. This is of course a lie, as is the allegation that it is terrorist. The whole thing is motivated by hatred and politically undeserved and therefore evil.

Fundamentalism in Islam, if any, is simply adherence to the creed, the moral teachings of Islam and the Islamic law. In all this, there are no fables, no myths, no miracles and no legends.

With regard to terrorism, one would like to distinguish between two kinds of terrorism: defensive and offensive. The defensive one should be regarded as lawful, but not so the offensive one. The defensive one is carried out peacefully, with sympathy and a desire for redress. The other terrorism, like organised crime, should be countered with force. The resistance movement during World War II was legitimate, a kind of freedom fighting. To resist occupation, aggression, expansionism, colonization, oppression, racism, and the like is legitimate. It follows that any terrorism against colonization by colonial powers or against conquest, occupation and oppression as by Israel is legitimate. Reagan, the former president of the United States, used, strangely enough, to call the African in South Africa terrorists. The American government still calls the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians and the Iranians terrorists, indiscriminately, while they bless the Israeli acts of aggression and terrorism. Perhaps this double standard is the measures in the law of the jungle prevailing then in the world. Or is this measure partly in compliance with the rule of the Gospel that those who are not with us are against us. The other injunction of the Gospel in this respect is that those who have will be given more and those who do not have will have to give some of what they have. The Iraqis are punished for something they do not have, but the Israelis are rewarded by giving them more of what they have (of mass-destruction weapons).

But what are the Muslims doing to counter this unjust onslaught? The struggle is unequal, and forces from all sides are joining in the onslaught against Islam with sophisticated means and sharpened teeth and all motivated by a determined venomous desire to kill. The Muslims watch on, aghast at the ferocity of the attack, wondering why. They feel that this unprovoked aggression is the work of the devil. They have no resort but to seek refuge in their God, in their religion, in their traditions which they regard as the sole bulwarks for defence. The evil forces are now laying siege to these bulwarks to pull them down. The Muslims are now barricaded behind the walls looking for means of protection and a way out in desperation. They are blamed for barricading themselves and they are blamed for their desperation, and the choice is worse than Hobson’s choice, because even if they surrender, the killers will not spare them, and their cries for mercy will fall on deaf ears.

This picture may be deemed too sombre. It may be so, but in actuality this is the situation which the Muslims find themselves in for no fault of theirs, hemmed in as they are by murderers, thirsting for blood.

But why? The answer seems to be obscure, to the Muslims themselves. The lie has been evilly repeated so often that even the Muslims believed it. They believed it because they have been robbed of the ability to refute it. The infrastructure is being shrewdly undermined. The purpose is to reduce the Muslims to automatons, quite apathetic to what is being done to them.

And what is “infrastructure” in this context? It is the basic structure of a society, which comprises its religion, language, literature, history and folklore. This basic structure of a society determines its identity, and the identity of a society distinguishes it from any other society. A society must have identity, otherwise it will be a collection of separate dissociated individuals. A race, a tribe, a community, a people, a nation or a race is a society with an identity. Without identity, a society has no objectives or aspirations and has no will to fight, and no distinction between friend and foe. A colonial power, to govern a country without trouble in the long run has only to undermine its infrastructure, and this is exactly what the colonial powers have sedulously and purposely tried to achieve in the countries under their control. The attempt was met with active resistance in the Islamic countries, thanks to their identity. This lesson was not lost upon the neo-colonialist powers, and they shifted to more subtle ways to exploit what wealth the Muslim countries have, such as oil. The Americans and the Israelis, nevertheless, part ways in this matter, with the Americans being very crude, holding to their method of suppression, either the carrot or the gun. The Israelis are teaching them another classical method, namely the destruction of the infrastructure, with or without the collaboration of  the victim country.

This is the new refined method of neo-colonialism. The Muslim countries will have to resist that before it is too late, and must be warned of the peril. The way is to wake those countries up and then reinforce their identities and strengthen their infrastructure. An example of the implementation of this policy of infrastructure destruction is the secularization drive forced upon the Turkish people, with the help of collaborators recruited from many generals in the Turkish army.

But there is another sinister method of drawing Muslims away from their identity and that is by making them less enthusiastic about their religion, their language, their history and tradition by a system of education designed to achieve this evil purpose. Those who are used as tools for this scheme are carefully chosen to fit the design. They are normally obtuse, venal, thoughtless and indifferent, and their superiors are unscrupulous puppets, completely ignorant of the job they are appointed to do. The principals of universities, colleges or schools are carefully vetted to suit the purpose, and the whole structure is based upon a will to destroy personality, mind, soul and identity.

The indifference, thus created, to national identity engenders an indifference to morality, honesty and honour. The youth, for frustration, fall into vice or resort to drinks or to drugs, quite unchecked. There will be no sense of honour and no restraint from stealing, fraud or debauchery. One might say, however, that this is happening in many countries in the world.

But however fierce the onslaught against Islam is it will never dent it. It is not easy to convert a Muslim to Judaism, Christianity or any other religion. Missionaries, missionary schools and missionary hospitals together with various inducements, failed to convert Muslims. There must be something in Islam which makes Muslims immune against conversion. Muslim students at missionary schools or at European or American universities held on to their religion and nothing could induce them to change their faith or to slacken their hold on Islam. On the contrary, the students develop a closer attachment to their religion and culture and become more ardent in defending their national identity. Nationalist leaders were in many cases graduates of Christian colleges or universities.

There have been attempts by missionaries to weaken the belief in Islam by using certain hostile ideas about it, such as the idea that Muslim nations are backward because of Islam. By this trick they mean to shake belief in Islam or at least to instil doubt in their minds about the truth of Islam. But this has also failed to achieve its end.

The charge of backwardness of Muslim countries is not fair in so far as it attributes backwardness to Islam. I agree that Islam has something to do indirectly with this phenomenon in the sense that belief in Islam has the effect of making Muslims inclined more to be conservative and to be more attached to their heritage. They belong to their country, to their history and to their culture so much so that they fear that to adopt another allegiance will have the effect of cutting the ground from under their feet or cutting their umbilical cord, so to speak. It is difficult to make a Muslim accept a foreign civilization, especially when the creed of that civilization is different from that of Islam. This is not peculiar to Muslims. Jews, Christians and followers of other faiths practised a similar insularity. The communists in Russia at the beginning of the revolution regarded with aversion everything that came from the West, including science. It was regarded with suspicion. Religious authorities in Europe until the 18th century set their faces against learning in general, especially infidel learning, and people were sometimes reprimanded for seeking knowledge, even mathematics from a Muslim. The Jews were hostile to the Hellenistic influence for a long time. The Pharisees were singled out in the Gospels by Christ as fanatics for their bigotry and their resistance to Greek civilization.

There is also the Muslim attitude to God, which is different from other attitudes, notably Jewish and Christian. The Muslim attitude to God makes a Muslim less self-reliant and averse to seek wealth in a hell for leather way. Wealth for a Muslim has not been a first desideratum. The law of inheritance has the effect of making Muslims less interested in wealth. Struggle in the history of Islam has not been for wealth as is the case in the West, and since wealth is an aspect of modern civilization Muslims are not in step with this civilization. Hence they are backward.

Muslims are now accused of being fundamentalists, and thus fanatics, and of being terrorists. This is a lie. Muslims have never been fanatics, especially against Jews and Christians. On the contrary, Muslims are enjoined to protect them. The terrorism that Muslims are accused of recently is a fake. Muslims have been the aggrieved party and the target for the onslaught for centuries, without a let-up. They have to defend themselves in some way. They are being despoiled of their land and their resources, and to add insult to injury, they are being accused of terrorism if they raise a finger in defence. The double standard used in dealing with Muslim countries is just, but defence against aggression and state terrorism is terrorism. It is very curious that only Muslim countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and The Sudan should be accused of terrorism.

With regard to fundamentalism in its religious sense, all Muslims are fundamentalists. They believe that their holy book is a revealed, historical and an authentic document, and their prophet is a historical figure, and their god is one only and there is no other god. This is fundamentalism in Islam. The essence of this fundamentalism is the belief that there is one only God who is the maintainer of everything in the universe and the supreme judge. Muslims are enjoined not to take the law into their hands and to always refer cases to this supreme judge, and always to defer to Him and to think of Him as the final arbiter in all cases and to fear His displeasure.

This pious fear of God, called Taqwa, is unique. The concept does not exist in any other religion. A Muslim is supposed to look over his shoulder and always bear in mind that there is a censor, or a monitor, watching. This serves as a check on all actions and all intentions so that one can refrain from evil even at the last moment. Fear of God and of His displeasure should always be present to the mind of a Muslim.

To illustrate the concept from modern history, one would have in mind the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagazaki in Japan. The president of the United States then did not have any idea of the pious fear of God (taqwa) when he ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs. He would have hesitated to give the order and would have shaken in fear of God, the Supreme Judge.

Another example is the granting of a promise to the Jews by Balfour to establish a Jewish home in Palestine. Balfour, who was a devout Christian, had nothing of the fear of God (taqwa) in his heart when he panned that promissory letter to Routhschild. He had only venom and callous indifference to the fate of the indigenous population.

One might multiply such examples from the history of the colonialist West, together with instances of extermination and forced enslavement, physical and spiritual, to show that such inhumane actions would have been averted if those responsible had had only a spark of taqwa or the vaunted claim that Christianity was the religion of love and mercy.

This bond of taqwa between God and man, like the umbilical cord, brings man closer to God and makes him always fearful lest his actions may be unfair and irresponsible. In a world of anarchy, lawlessness and brutality, such as ours, this pious fear of God will serve as a balance, a norm, a measure and a standard against which all actions and intentions would be judged as to whether the Supreme God would approve of them or not.

This is exactly the spirit of Islam, and Islam if taken as a way of life would rid the world of its awful miseries. Fundamentalism in Islam is the solution if only because of the belief that man is not to take the law into his hands and is not to forget taqwa, and to remember to submit to the will of the Supreme Judge and to seek his pleasure. This is what is meant by the word Islam. Islam is the Regulator.