All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and I'm now joined on the line by Dean Ahmad from the Minaret of Freedom Institute.
Welcome to the show, Dean.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
It's a pleasure to be with you again.
Well, I appreciate you joining us now.
It's a really strange thing.
The Pew poll came out last week and asked the question, which this was strange in itself, I thought.
Is it possible that American wrongdoing, the wording of the poll, that American wrongdoing in the Middle East helped bring about the September 11th attacks against this country?
And 43 percent answered yes.
So right on, we're making progress.
And they compared it to earlier polls that were done right after September 11th.
And this is a much higher percentage of people who are coming close to comprehending this truth, that Bill Clinton can only starve so many little children to death from Saudi Arabia before somebody comes to try to knock our towers down.
But at the same time, the polls show that Americans hate and fear Muslims more than ever before.
And I think Anthony Gregory is correct that the prime reason for this is, well, there's a couple, but the two biggest ones are that George Bush is no longer the head conservative in the country saying, no, no, no, it's not about Islam.
It's just this twisted, weird interpretation of Islam believed in by these few or something like that.
So so don't blame Muslims in general, George Bush, you say.
And now the lid is off that pot.
And plus, of course, you have all the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama being Osama bin Laden's secret agent to take over the country and all this crap.
And so now the numbers show that Americans hate and fear Muslims and I guess Islam itself more than ever before.
And I was thinking that maybe you could explain to us maybe what Islam is really about if it's not, in fact, about cutting off my son's head and converting my daughter to Islam.
Well, what Islam is about is it is part of a family of religions we call the Abrahamic faith.
These are monotheistic religions that all attribute their origins to the prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, who taught that there is only one God.
In that same line, we find Judaism and Christianity.
Now, there are obviously differences among these faiths, but their similarities are much, much stronger than the differences, although the differences can be important.
But the differences are theological for the most part.
They do not have to do with the kind of things that you keep hearing the Islamophobes propagating.
The fundamental similarities between these three religions are, again, the respect for Abraham, belief in the Hebrew prophets, although the Christians also believe in the validity of the New Testament as well as to the Old Testament, and the Muslims believe that the Koran and the prophet Muhammad are also valid media of the revelation of God to mankind.
In fact, the Muslims believe that the Koran is the final revelation that has been preserved.
The differences are matters of emphasis in part.
For example, in Judaism, we find a strong emphasis on the law.
In Christianity, you find a strong emphasis on mercy.
In Islam, you find a strong emphasis on brotherhood.
Other differences can be theologically controversial.
The Jews, for example, see themselves as a chosen people who will all be saved as long as a small remnant of them remains loyal to the teachings of Moses.
The Christians see themselves as the beneficiaries of a vicarious atonement and believe that God incarnated himself in order to be crucified on a cross and in order to save mankind with a blood sacrifice.
And the Muslims believe that man has no original sin, that we're all born innocent, and that it's only our weakness rather than an inherent tendency to do evil that causes our potential downfall.
And these are very, very theologically important differences.
But you'll notice they have nothing to do with what these discussions that you see, the presentations that you see being made, for example, to the FBI about claiming that Islam is not a religion at all, but is some kind of conspiracy dating back to the 7th century to take over the world.
This has its roots mainly in a political agenda today, although there is one tiny way in which there's a teeny bit of truth to it, and that is this, that the Muslim religion sees itself as a way of life, not as an otherworldly religion, and sees that the purpose of mankind on Earth is to improve the world, and that therefore it sees Islam as touching not just on how to pray and how to fast and how to make pilgrimage and how to engage in charity, but also in a mission to do good in what is called in Arabic, the doing of good deeds in this world and improving the world, which can extend to and include political life as well.
So there are, of course, certain problems in the Muslim world today.
Certainly there's a lot of backwardness, there are a lot of bad ideas floating around.
Muslims are certainly suffering from authoritarian dictatorships around the world.
But the fact is that pious Muslims, as well as more secular Muslims, are in the vanguard of the resistance to that kind of authoritarianism.
For example, look at the Arab Spring.
Look at Egypt.
It was both pious Muslims and secular Muslims who were in the forefront of the demonstrations against Mubarak and demanding change there.
Mubarak, who was an American and Israeli-backed secular dictator.
That's correct.
Mubarak was secular and he was very strongly backed by both the Americans who send him almost as much money as they send to Israel every year.
And of course, by the Israelis who found him a very compliant interlocutor in their attempts to deal with the Arab world.
Well, speaking of Hosni Mubarak, back when he first came to power, he tortured Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri within an inch of his life, which obviously has a lot to do with why Ayman al-Zawahiri merged Islamic Jihad with bin Laden's group and became the terrorist leader that he is today.
And along those lines, I wonder if you can explain square the circle about the role of the Islamic faith in Zawahiri's mission.
Obviously, just like the Bush administration like to dress up the war over there as a defense of our Western Christian civilization, they certainly do a lot to try to wrap up Islam with their own political agendas.
And so you can see how the American War Party has plenty to cherry pick out of the statements of these terrorists to make it seem like what this war is about is really Islam's offensive, as you said, conspiracy to take over the world that we are, you know, defending ourselves from to prevent from being overrun.
Well, indeed, the Zawahiri, like so many radicals who are trying to appeal to a religiously oriented group, will attempt to defend his views, his actions and his arguments and to cloak them in Islamic clothing.
This is to be expected.
It's again, as you correctly pointed out, it's analogous to Bush's referring to the attacks on the Muslim world as a crusade.
The difference is that in the case of Bush, he is the it was the president elected president.
I know some people dispute that part about being elected, but set that aside.
He was the elected president of the United States, a secular country, and therefore it was on a number of grounds inappropriate for him to use that kind of language.
Whereas Zawahiri is a revolutionary leader who is just trying to recruit more militants to his cause and who has to confront the fact that he is under constant attack from more scholarly Muslims.
And by the way, I want to emphasize this is Zawahiri is a medical doctor.
He has no scholarly credentials.
But those who have scholarly credentials have criticized his arguments, saying not only that can't he justify his actions by appealing to Islam, but that certain actions of his, such as the attacking of civilians, is in flat contradiction to Islamic law.
Right.
All right.
We'll have to hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Dean Ahmad from minaret.org.
All right, welcome back to the show, wrapping up anti-war radio for the day with Dean Ahmad from the Minaret of Freedom Institute, the libertarian Muslim think tank.
And sir, before the break, you were explaining about how Ayman al-Zawahiri actually has no religious credentials whatsoever, but he does try very hard to mix his terrorist agenda with an Islamic one.
Yeah, he's a follower of a man named Faraj, who was an Egyptian Islamist, although again, not one with any particular religious credentials, but who wrote a book claiming that there was a sixth pillar of Islam.
And Islam is traditionally thought to have five pillars, the ritual requirements, the declaration of the faith, to pray, to fast, to give charity, and to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.
He claimed there was a sixth pillar, which is doing jihad.
Now, this is right off the bat, even before he gets any further, a misunderstanding.
Jihad simply means struggle.
And it is certainly an Islamic duty to struggle to do whatever we do well and to struggle against evil.
But making it into a pillar of the faith was an innovation in religious thinking.
But he didn't stop there.
He then goes to specify a particular kind of activity as jihad.
He focuses not on the general doing of good, but he focuses on warfare, that one should struggle in warfare.
He had in mind struggling against the colonial powers that were colonizing the Muslim world at the time.
Zawahiri has taken that idea one step further and basically says not only does he want Muslims to struggle against the occupation forces in their lands, but to take the war home to the occupiers or their funders, specifically thinking of the United States, of course.
Well, and so how many people buy this interpretation of Islam?
Well, even the Islamophobes admit that, well, some of them admit that it's a minority, but they're concerned that there are so many Muslims, there are one and a half billion, that even if it's only one one thousandth of a percent, that's a lot of people.
Unfortunately, we have now this new flavor of Islamophobia, which doesn't stop at saying, well, even one thousandth of one percent of one and a half billion people is hundreds of thousands of people.
But instead says, well, no, that's not the problem at all.
The problem is that Islam itself is the problem, that it is not just a peculiar and extreme and violent interpretation and adaptation of the religion that's at fault.
It's not Muslim extremists abusing the religion, as one might say of old Christian abortion clinic bombers saying that even though they invoke the religion to justify what they're doing, that they are an extreme fringe of the religion.
No, they claim that everything about Islam is for violence and they go to ridiculous extremes to justify this.
For example, they will take quotes of the Koran encouraging people to fight for their rights out of context and say this is a declaration of war on all non-Muslims when people knowledgeable about Islam will counter that claim by saying, but look, here's another verse that says, for example, the verse that says, let there be no compulsion in religion.
Surely the other verse that you're quoting is being misrepresented and taken out of context.
And they will say, oh, no, no, this is an example of abrogation.
Some parts of the Koran abrogate other parts of the Koran.
And the verse that says there's no compulsion in religion is an early verse, while the verse that says fight is a later verse.
Well, actually, that is an outright lie on two counts.
First off, although there are unfortunately many Muslims who do believe in abrogation, it is not universally accepted.
And in fact, it has been shown to be incorrect.
Since Muslims believe the Koran is the preserved word of God, question of any verse being abrogated is fundamentally the most un-Islamic thing you could say about the Koran.
But furthermore, their claim that the verse, let there be no compulsion in religion, is an early verse is simply wrong.
It's not true.
You know, everybody's entitled to their own opinions, but nobody's entitled to their own facts.
That is a later version from what is called the Medinan period, the latter part of the prophet's life.
And even if abrogation were possible, then that would abrogate any verse that might be construed or interpreted to the contrary.
Well, now, I'm no expert on this, but I remember reading an article by a member of the John Birch Society shortly after September 11th, who, G.
Edward Griffin, the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, who, you know, is a conservative Christian flag-waving American bircher, you know, and he said, look, I've read the Koran and I know all about this.
And let me explain something to you.
Yeah, there are some violent sounding verses out of context, but they're all from chapters describing actual wars going on in Arabia.
And if you just keep reading, you'll see that Muslims lived in peace.
Right.
I mean, Muslims under Mohammed's command while he was alive, lived in peace near Christians and Jews.
Once the war was over, he never did anything to say we have to convert them all or kill them all or anything like that.
Yes, Mohammed never employed coercion to convert people, nor did any of the early Muslims, nor overwhelmingly did any of the later Muslims, although there were occasional exceptions, but they have never been endorsed as acting in accord with the general teachings of Islam.
Look, the Muslims occupied India for centuries, and yet India remained a mostly Hindu country at the end of the occupation.
The Muslims occupied Spain for 800 years, and yet the Jews lived peaceably in Spain and the Christians remained Christians in Spain for the most part.
Of course, there were occasional converts, as there are any time people of different religions come into contact with one another.
When the Reconquista took place in Spain and the Jews were driven out of Spain, as were the Muslims, it was the Muslim world that invited the Jews to come and live amongst them.
The Sultan of Turkey issued an invitation that he had sent all the rabbis of Spain saying, come here where you'll be allowed to freely practice your religion, to engage in business, have your property and your livelihoods protected.
In fact, when I was on a visit to Turkey, I was very intrigued by a letter that was displayed at the Jewish Museum in Istanbul.
It was a letter that the Sultan sent to an admirer of King Ferdinand, in which the Sultan contemptuously said, this king whom you admire impoverishes his own kingdom in order to enrich mine.
He was referring to the expulsion of the Jews.
All right.
Now, I want to try and see if I can clarify a little something in here, a point of confusion and interpretation, and probably a lot of it just has to do with language.
But it seems like to me that the idea that what we're dealing with in the form of the terrorist movements around the world and whatever are from an extreme interpretation of Islam, even if, as you say, you know, all of Islam is the real problem, is obviously even worse of a falsehood.
But it seems to me like the propaganda is that once somebody is a Muslim, then there's this grayscale of how extreme their belief is, how much they believe in Islam.
And the more you believe in Islam, the more likely you are to turn around and kill somebody with it, I guess.
That's what the FBI is teaching people, according to the Wired Danger Room blog today, for example.
And it seems to me like Michael Shoyer has a point when he says it's not about Islamic extremism at all, that that the bin Laden interpretation of Islam isn't itself that extreme.
It's just his choice to apply it here and in this way and against innocent civilians in office towers, for example.
That's beyond the pale.
The tactic is beyond the pale.
But that, in fact, our choice, the way Shoyer puts it, is between war and total war, that if we keep going on acting as though our enemy is Islam, we are going to find that our enemy is Islam and that we are going to find a billion plus Muslims who already agree to a great extent with the bin Ladenite goals will end up, if forced, adopting his tactics.
Well, look, it should be self-evident that there's no better way to make somebody your enemy than to treat them as one and to aggress against them.
Surely one of the main reasons, not the only one, but one of the main reasons so many Americans are so hostile to Islam is because of what happened on 9-11.
I don't see how you can evade that.
But then by the same notion, you can't evade the fact that the reason so many people in the Muslim world, even if they are only one thousandth of one percent, but even that many, support the violent people like Al-Qaeda is because of the violence being done to the Muslim world, and it has been done to the Muslim world.
The sanctions against Iraq that caused hundreds of thousands of people to die, the occupation of Palestine that continues to this day, and the presence of American troops fighting in places where they really cannot achieve even their professed goals, like Afghanistan or in Iraq.
Have we have we made Iraq safe for democracy?
What's going to happen when the American troops withdraw from Iraq?
Is the whole country going to fall apart?
In Afghanistan, has the Taliban been eliminated?
Has a functioning democracy been been set up?
Or are we rather in the position the Soviets were in when they tried to occupy that country and they tried to impose their ideas of an ideal society on a country whose culture they neither understood nor knew?
Right, so then I guess so on the question then of how extreme of a Muslim do you have to be to agree with the goals of expelling the United States from the Middle East?
I think you're saying it's not a matter of extremism, really, that basically any Muslim could agree, not necessarily that they should, you know, all of a sudden join up and start carrying out this agenda, but they would agree then with Zawahiri that they owe it to other Muslims to resist occupation.
I don't see it as being an issue of extremism in the sense of that there's a linear scale of piety and people on one end who are, you know, extremely unpious, are extremely pacific, and on people on the other end who are extremely pious or extremely violent.
That's ridiculous.
One of the most pietistic Muslims in history was the man who is known as the frontier Gandhi or the Muslim Gandhi, who was the leader of the Pashtun tribesmen who used peaceful resistance in order to get the British out of India.
This was an extremely pious man.
When you, on the other hand, a number of the hijackers who were responsible directly for 9-11 were people who spent the night before in bars and playing video games and with strippers.
This is not a concept of piety, at least from the Islamic viewpoint.
The question is not one of piety.
The question is one of what kind of arguments people might make to try to bring a religious dimension to what is a political quarrel.
And I think that, for example, if you look at, say, Palestinians who are opposed to the occupation of Palestine by Israel, you know, you have people like the people, the Turks, who participated in the blockade, the attempt to break the blockade last year.
It was, you know, it was a non-violent method of breaking any illegal, broaching the illegal occupation.
They were attacked by Israeli troops.
The Israelis are the ones who initiated the violence, and the Israelis were the ones who killed the Turks.
Now, you have Turkey, which had been one of Israel's allies, has now recalled its ambassador and expelled the Israeli ambassador, and is making statements that it's prepared for a war with Israel, if necessary.
This is not, you know, it's just not a religious question.
These are political questions.
And I just have no, I see no justification for that kind of argument that tries to tie it to a question of piety.
All right, now, we're already over time, so if it's okay for me to keep you a little bit longer, I'd like to ask you about the minaret of freedom and the role of Muslims in American society.
Well, thank you.
I'm very happy to talk about that.
I think that, you know, Muslims in general appreciate American society, America as a land of opportunity.
And I've been told over and over again by immigrant Muslims, I myself was raised in this country, but those who have immigrated here say it's easier to be a good Muslim in America than it is in most of the Muslim countries.
In this land, whether people agree with your religion or not, they respect your right to practice it.
And when I say respect, I mean, of course, at a minimum that respecting your political right not to intervene with it, not to prevent you from fasting when you want to fast or praying when you want to pray.
But furthermore, Americans in general, because of the freedom of religion in this country, have a higher regard for religion in general than people in the rest of the world.
That's why we do not see in America the movement that you've seen in France to ban Islamic styles of women's clothing.
Although, unfortunately, now we have seen the rise of the attempt to pass these idiotic and meaningful prohibitions on Sharia law, which unfortunately I don't think even many of the people who advocate these things realize that this is an abandonment of the First Amendment right of free, free religious practice in this country.
Well, you know, there was a recent, I think, a Pew and then a Gallup poll that showed that more than any other religious group, if you divide them that way, Muslims are optimistic and content and happy with their lives in the United States of America.
You've got to think about why do people come here to the United States in the first place?
And the fact is that that people recognize that America is a land of freedom and Muslims, if anything, envy that.
The study that was done by the Gallup poll showed that not only the majority of, you know, the ninety five percent of so-called moderate Muslims admire American ideals of freedom and of democracy, but even among the so-called extremists, their anger at the United States tended to be not because they didn't like freedom, but because they felt the United States had a policy of preventing them from having any of it.
Well, we saw Faisal Shahzad, the thank goodness attempted only Times Square bomber, who was a naturalized American citizen who had a great job, a great wife, a great house and was living the American dream.
And then he went on vacation to Pakistan to visit family and he saw firsthand the results of an American drone strike and the killing of innocents over there.
And so he decided to join up the war on the other side, apparently had nothing to do with hating freedom at all for him, but hating murder.
You know, this is the unintended consequences of the the American foreign policy that, for example, in our attempt to allegedly stabilize Afghanistan, we have destabilized Pakistan.
America has jeopardized its own alliances in the Muslim world.
And right now, you know, the problems that Afghanistan posed to the United States are going to be minuscule to the problems that are going to be posed if Pakistan completely destabilizes and a nuclear power ends up in the sphere of influence of the violent few.
All right.
Now, to wrap up, please tell us about the Minaret of Freedom Institute at Minaret dot org.
We are an Islamic libertarian think tank.
Our mission is to counter the distortions about Islam, to show the origin of certain modern values that actually came from Islamic civilization, to educate both Muslims and non-Muslims on the importance of liberty and free markets, and to advance the status of Muslims, whether they live in the east or the west.
We do this through educational programs, through academic articles, op-ed pieces, interviews like this one.
We have a website, Minaret dot org, at which virtually all of our academic papers and about half of our op-ed pieces are available.
And we publish a blog, blog dot Minaret dot org, which anyone is welcome to go to and read our pieces on various items.
We also produce a news and analysis link several times a week, providing people links to articles that touch on the intersection of the questions of Islam and freedom.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, thank you for all your great work and for your time on the show today, Dean.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
Everybody, that's Dean Imad from the Minaret of Freedom Institute at Minaret dot org.
