All right, folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And our next guest is Dean Ahmed.
He is the president of the Minaret of Freedom Institute and is the author of so many books I didn't even try to write them down, I just left the Amazon.com page open here, Islam and the West, A Dialogue, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World, Allah, Transcendent Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology, Islam and the Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane, co-written with Rose Wilder Lane, wow, and Signs in the Heavens, A Muslim Astronomer's Perspective on Religion and Science.
Isn't that incredible?
And the website, minaret.org.
Welcome to the show, Dean.
Well, thank you very much, Scott.
Pleasure to be with you.
Wow, that's a pretty exciting list of books, it looks like there.
I was talking with your son, Arlo, and I said, well, I guess I just want to interview your dad mostly about, you know, Islam and the West.
And Arlo said, well, he wrote a book called that.
Well, I edited a book called that.
What it was is a series of roundtable discussions that I moderated in which leading non-Muslim American experts on the Muslim world spoke to an audience of Muslim intellectuals and activists and had a very frank roundtable discussion about issues that you don't see so frankly discussed elsewhere.
Well, good.
I want to get to some of those, and I think probably most of those to me are unknown unknowns.
As Don Rumsfeld says, questions I don't even know that I need to ask.
But I guess just overall, let me ask you this to start.
Is it necessary that we have a massive global clash of civilizations?
Is the terrorist threat, as resembled by Osama bin Laden, the cutting edge of massive new war that must be fought?
The answer to the first question is no, a global conflict of civilizations is not necessary.
And what's interesting is that the popularizer of the phrase conflict of civilizations, Samuel Huntington, himself admitted when his initial article was challenged that he was not claiming that it was inevitable.
He was hoping to avoid it.
However, one of the problems you have in trying to avoid a conflict of civilizations is that most of the misunderstandings we have is not so much because people don't know much about the other, although people certainly don't know much about the other.
But the really serious problem is what Mr. Dooley used to say was things you know for sure but ain't so.
Right.
Yeah, such as there's an Islamo-fascist caliphate of crazy terrorist extremists who want to cut off all our heads and convert all our kids and that we have to conquer their countries, basically, and modernize them if not Christianize them in order to protect ourselves.
Right.
What you have is a kind of mirror image of paranoia on both sides of people who are so afraid of the motives and the objectives of the other that they fear that they're entitled to engage in aggressive activities in the name of self-defense, preemptive warfare if you will.
And this is on both sides.
Right, it is, although at least on their side they can argue that we do have combat forces in their countries where they don't have combat forces in ours.
All of our self-defense is in the name of basically one big attack.
Yeah, you're certainly correct that there's a lopsidedness in this asymmetric warfare as it's been called.
That basically what you have are professional troops or mercenaries, contractors, whatever they may be, who have been deployed around the world from one side and then you have a handful of guerrillas on the other side who on one or two instances may have gotten into the Western sphere.
Well now, I guess the official war party slogans of course are that this has nothing to do really with earthly matters at all.
This isn't about combat forces in people's countries.
As Tony Blair used to say, it's a poisonous misinterpretation of Islam.
It's an ideology, basically just a religious belief that motivates all this terrorism.
Is that right at all?
Not really.
There is a problem with a misinterpretation of Islam as on the other side we have a misinterpretation of Christianity on the part of the religious right that seems to be devoted towards trying to promote an Armageddon in order to hasten the return of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him.
But that's not the problem on either side.
The problem, all you have to do is look at Osama Bin Laden's declaration of war on the United States to see what he articulates as being the problem.
And he lists quite clearly the time, the presence of the American troops in Saudi Arabia, the embargo of Iraq, and one must always remember that an embargo is an act of war that he claimed caused perhaps 100,000 children's deaths, and of course the American support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
These three factors are all questions, allegations of injustice or interventionism by the West into the affairs of the indigenous peoples.
No point in that document did he claim that the reason for declaring war on the United States is because he had a religious obligation to spread Islam to the West.
And furthermore, my program assistant, Alejandro Butel, has been conducting an investigation of the published words of Osama Bin Laden, doing a study to see how much time he spends on religious justification and how much time he spends on political justification.
And in all of the papers that were directed at would-be followers or at people outside his own immediate circle, invariably the overwhelming majority of comments, the overwhelming majority of words, are devoted to political claims.
Now, see, I think that's a very important point.
It's something that one of the guests on the show pointed out last week, that it really doesn't matter what Osama Bin Laden thinks or believes in his own heart or anything like that.
What matters is what's effective propaganda for him.
Is he citing virgins in heaven and a great reward for your hopeless life if you'll only give it in a suicide attack?
Or is he pointing out actual things that happen on earth?
You know, whether he describes them correctly or not, I guess it's a different matter.
But are these earthly matters we're arguing about, or is this all a war in heaven?
That's correct.
The only times that he mentions religious issues are to encourage people not to be afraid of the West.
Kind of a, you know, fear God, not the power of the mighty armies engulfing us from the West kind of approach.
And of course, you know, that's not unusual in history.
That's very often how religion is appealed to, to bolster the morale of troops.
All right, now, poisonous misinterpretations aside, I'd like to just, I guess, learn a little bit about Islam.
I know some, but not too much.
One thing I noticed when you used the name of Jesus, you said, peace be upon him.
I think that's something that probably most Americans don't understand, that Muslims believe in the divinity of Jesus.
Is that right?
Well, divinity is not the right word.
What Muslims believe is that Jesus was the Messiah.
However, before Christians jump to the conclusion that that means we believe he was the son of God or God, Muslims certainly do not believe that Jesus was God.
Christians forget that when the Jews are waiting for the return of the Messiah, they're not waiting for an incarnate God.
They're waiting for a messenger who is promised to them to, you know, get them back on track.
And Muslims believe that Jesus was that messenger, that the Jews had strayed from the teachings that we believe God sends messengers to every people, and that God's message is always the same, basically, that there is none worthy of worship but he, and that we're all brothers and we should try to be just towards one another and helpful to one another, which is, as Jesus himself put it very strongly when he argued there are only two commandments.
He said, love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And we believe that that's what made him the Messiah, that he had come to fulfill the promise to the Jews.
But we also believe that he was not the only messenger or the last messenger, and that we believe that another messenger came after him, who is Muhammad.
And when I say this, bear in mind that I'm saying that Muslims believe in all of the messengers, not just Jesus, but all of the Hebrew prophets in the Old Testament.
We say, peace be upon them when we mention their names, because we, according to Quran, we are those who do not distinguish among the prophets.
Muhammad is believed to be the last messenger, because we believe that God sent him at the dawning of the global village, when all the nations of the world would know one another, and that his message is the same as that of the previous ones, love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself, but with a special emphasis on the fact that this message is for everybody, and that we are all equal in the eyes of God except in our piety.
So I mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean to, you know, dumb this down to too kindergarten of a level or anything, and I certainly don't mean to, you know, make an enemy out of these other religions I'm going to mention, but I just want to say, you know, it seems kind of important, or it should matter somehow, that Islam is not that alien a religion from what most Americans believe, not even as alien as Buddhism or Hinduism or, you know, something like that.
It's actually, Muslims call Christians and Jews people of the book, the same book.
That's right.
It's a term of respect, meaning that we recognize that God sent a revelation to other people before he sent Muhammad to mankind in general, and that those people have their own books.
And the special regard for the Christians and the Jews to which you refer, and you're correct in that, is because Christianity, Judaism, and Islam share something in common in that all three religions look to the prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, as a sort of archetype of the prophetic figure.
We all respect and revere Abraham, and therefore we have that in common, which should make us people who want to not despise one another, but compete with one another in trying to outdo one another in fulfilling the mandate that the Abrahamic prophets gave to us.
And now what about violence in Islam?
Jesus was basically a preacher.
Muhammad was a military commander, right?
Right.
Muhammad was not just a preacher, although he did preach, but he was also a military commander.
He was also the head of state.
He was also a merchant, which is an interesting fact.
In fact, he was a merchant before he became any of those other things.
Muhammad's place in history is not just as someone who brings a message, which we refer to as the Qur'an.
Qur'an is an Arabic word meaning literally reading, or it could mean recitation, and is a reference to the revelation that Muhammad received.
But he did more than that.
He actually tried to found a society based on the principles in the book, in founding the city-state now known to the world as Medina.
And he not only governed Medina in the sense of acting as its chief of state, but he also engaged in its defense as the head of its armed forces.
And Muslims believe that when you study how he did these things, that he was trying to set an example for how one could apply the principles of the Qur'an in one's everyday life.
The idea is that politics and military matters should be subservient to ethics.
And therefore, when we look at how Muhammad acted as a military leader, Muslims believe that he was trying to abide by the principles that today we would call a just war theory.
The Qur'an itself, for example, when one looks at the differences between the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad, Muslims believe that you're not seeing an essential or fundamental difference, you're only seeing a difference in emphasis.
So, for example, when Jesus says, turn the other cheek, he is emphasizing mercy only because he had come to a people who were so absorbed with the letter of the law that they'd forgotten its spirit.
And therefore, he wasn't there to explain the letter of the law to the Pharisees and the scribes, because they all knew the letter of the law.
He was trying to get them to understand that by being overly literal, they were departing from its spirit, which was a spirit of mercy.
Now, when Muhammad comes along, the situation is different.
And now he's trying to strike a balance between the Old Testament idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and Jesus' idea of turn the other cheek.
The Qur'an says quite clearly that when someone does an injury to you, you have a right to retaliate, but it is better for you if you should forgive.
After all, don't you want God to forgive you?
And besides, if you are forgiving, then you can create a love in the hearts of the other people, or rather God will create a love in the hearts of other people for you, in your enemy, that you would not have anticipated.
When one looks at Muhammad's practice as a military leader, you find that he was following the verses of the Qur'an that say, fight in the way of God those who fight against you, but do not aggress, for God loves not the aggressors.
And if your enemy inclines towards peace, then do you incline towards peace and trust in God?
Well, you know, I guess it's pretty much the same with any holy book, that there will be passages here that would seem to contradict passages there, at least in or out of context, or probably regardless.
Of course, you know, a radio show host like me will always have emails in my box quoting passages of the Qur'an that say, you know, kill them all unless they convert, you know, or until they convert, and that kind of thing.
Are those simply out of context, or are they just outright misquotations, or what?
Oh, yeah, they're totally out of context.
One of the most fun I have is when someone who is, you know, honestly seeking the truth has listened to one of these accusations come to me and say, well, what's going on here?
I just show them the passage in the Qur'an in context, and invariably it's immediately obvious what, you know, how the text is being savaged.
I'll give you one of the most extreme examples I know of.
A man came to me once and he said, I heard a radio show host, who was some member of the religious right, quoting from the Qur'an a verse that says, kill all the Christians.
And he gave me, you know, a verse and a surah number.
So I said, okay, here's a copy of the Qur'an, and I said, before I give you the historical context, just look at the textual context for yourself.
First I said, look at the translation.
What he said meant, kill all the Christians, actually says kill all the pagans.
Nowhere in the Qur'an does it say, I'm sorry, it says kill the pagans, not all the pagans, kill the pagans.
Nowhere in the Qur'an does it say to kill Christians.
Now, what it says in killing the pagans, however, that might seem pretty bad in itself, until you look at the context.
And the context was, it was saying, now that the pagans have violated the peace treaty, you should give them a four-month respite to realize what they've done wrong, and to make amends for their violation of the treaty.
If they do not repent and change their ways after four months, then you should fight against them, and you should kill them.
But, it says, only kill those who have aggressed against you.
Do not fight against those who have remained faithful to the treaty, because God does not like injustice.
And then furthermore, when you add the historical context, which was that this was in the context of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, where the Muslims had made an agreement with their enemies that there would be a peace treaty for ten years, and that treaty was broken when a band of the pagans killed a group of Muslims camping out in their sleep.
And therefore, the Muslims wanted to know, are we still bound by the treaty?
And the Qur'an was just basically answering the question, saying, you're bound by the treaty to those who do not aggress against you, but when someone breaks the treaty, you can fight them and kill them.
But, notice it says, but first you have to give them a period of time in which they may repent and realize their mistake, and try to come up to you and make amends in some way.
Well, and I guess this is why Osama bin Laden always offers us all a chance to convert before he kills us, doesn't it?
Isn't that why?
Well, yeah, because see, Osama has a lot of opposition, even from among those Muslims who are unhappy with Western imperialism, that they fear, they accuse him of going beyond these rules of just war.
And in my opinion, they correctly accuse him of doing so.
So he feels the necessity to try to defend himself, and so he will try to make arguments and to sort of lay the groundwork by making such statements as these, so that when he's criticized, he can say, well, no, I'm trying to abide by the Qur'an, the trouble is that these Westerners are so warlike that they only understand the message of force and violence.
All right, now, on the context of Muhammad actually being the head of state, I think this is something that is most alien to Americans, is theocracy.
And here we have a tradition of the separation of church and state, and we don't really like the idea of our priests having police power, that is, priests and police are by themselves.
So, you know, is that not a problem in the lives of Muslims around the world, that they live under theocratic states, mostly?
Well, the thing is, first off, as a matter of fact, most Muslims do not live under theocratic states at all, they live under intensely secular states.
There are a handful, however, of theocratic states in the Muslim world, and I would agree that they are problematic.
In order to reconcile this issue, what one has to remember is that Muhammad was not a priest.
Islam, in fact, bans priests, there are no priests allowed in Islam.
Muhammad was a prophet, and he is not the first prophet to have been head of state.
Remember David, who at least the Muslims consider to be a prophet, was king of Israel, and Solomon, similarly.
It would be a mistake, and it is a mistake, for Muslims to assume that simply because Muhammad, the prophet, was a head of state, that that meant that the head of state was supposed to be a religious figure.
It can't be a priest, since we have no priests.
Well, does that mean it can be someone who in some other way is a vested religious figure?
Muslims have usually assumed so on the grounds that the first four leaders of the Muslim community after the death of Muhammad were religious people, not in the sense that they were priests, because they definitely were not, but they were companions of the prophet, and therefore had an intimate knowledge of the religion that they learned from him.
However, early Muslim history from the beginning did not give these people an unchecked or authoritarian power.
The very first person to head the Muslim community, Abu Bakr, who was Muhammad's closest friend, another merchant like himself, was elected to office.
And when he was elected to office, in his inaugural address, he said, It is true I have been elected your emir, although I am not the best of you.
Emir, by the way, literally means commander.
It's usually translated as prince in an attempt to force it in the Western modes of government.
He said, It's true I've been elected your emir, although I'm not the best of you.
If I give you a command that is in accord with the Quran and the practice of the prophet, then obey me.
But if I give you a command that departs from the Quran or the practice of the prophet, then correct me.
Because truth is righteousness, and falsehood is treason.
Now, as far as I know, this was the first time in history that a leader claimed that anything other than disobeying his orders was treason.
Clearly, the point to Abu Bakr's address was that the leader of the community, the emir, is not above the law, and that rule of law has to prevail.
And that if the emir violates the rule of law, then it is up to the people to correct him and bring him back into line.
All right.
Now, this organization of yours, the Minaret of Freedom Institute, is all about promoting Islamic libertarianism.
Is that about right?
That's about right.
Yeah, I think one would include also to say free markets, although we consider that to be part of libertarian thinking.
But there are some people who are not strict libertarians supportive of free markets.
We're trying to do a couple of things, one of which is to help move the Muslim world in the libertarian direction.
My very strong belief is that the fundamental teaching of Islam embodies the principle of individual responsibility of the human person to God, a direct responsibility.
And that that is the premise on which libertarian theory stems.
When we look at, for example, the writings of John Locke, and we see his insistence that there is such a thing as a natural law and the denial that the state can have any powers other than those which have been delegated to it for reasons of expediency by the people that the state is to protect, he's reflecting an Islamic principle.
And it's very interesting to me that Locke, who started out his career as a philosopher, as a pragmatist, only adopted natural rights theory apparently after becoming familiar with the great Muslim scholar Ibn Tufayl's work, Alive the Son of Awake.
Really?
Yes, there was.
I have to admit, I'm kind of skeptical when I hear things like that because I always hear academics claim that, oh, no, you know, it was the Iroquois who wrote the American Constitution and that kind of crap.
Yeah, well, there's a tendency by some people to exaggerate some of these things.
However, in this case, it's certainly not a settled issue of history.
But let me give you the evidence and you can judge for yourself.
All right.
There's a book called The Arabic Interest in 17th Century Britain that explores the extreme interest that 17th century Brits had in Muslim scholarship.
One has to remember now, you need a context for this, you have to remember that Europe had been in the Dark Ages until its contact with the Muslim world in Spain and Italy exposed it to not only Muslim learning, but even the ancient Greek learning of the West, which Europe had forgotten during the Dark Ages and became reintroduced to.
And scholars like Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa introduced these ideas into the West, which sparked initially the scholastic movement and then later the Renaissance.
So in 17th century England, they were still trying to catch up with a lot of this Muslim scholarship.
And Locke, in his diaries, in 1671, which is the year he changed from pragmatism to natural rights, he said, I changed my mind on these issues after attending a party given by a professor at the University in London.
Now, we don't know for sure who this professor was, but in that book, a strong argument is made that the professor was Edwin Pocock, who was translating Hayy ibn Yaqzan out of Arabic into Latin as the Philosophicus Autodidactus.
Now, if you read the Philosophicus Autodidactus, you will find a lot of Locke's ideas articulated there by Ibn Tufayl, including the idea of man being born tabula rasa, including the idea of natural rights.
The story by itself is a fascinating story that dates back to an earlier Muslim philosopher, Ibn Nafis, known to the West as Avicenna.
In Avicenna's works, he had written something called the Story of Perfect, about a perfect reasoning being who is miraculously, spontaneously generated on a deserted island.
Having perfect reasoning abilities, he reasons out all of the laws of nature, and he even reasons out that there must be a God who has created all these things and made the natural law that everything adheres to.
However, he can't figure out whether man should worship God or not, because there doesn't seem to be any point in it.
God certainly doesn't need to be worshipped, since he's almighty, and what benefit it might have for man is not at all clear to him.
Then, some people crash, a ship crashes on the desert island, and for the first time, he meets other people, and he finds them fascinating.
They think of things he never thought of.
For example, they wear clothing.
They cook their food, which he finds interesting.
It not only preserves the food, but adds a little flavor to it.
And so he decides that even though these human beings don't have his perfect reasoning ability, nonetheless, he might learn something by going with them.
And so he travels with them to their society, where they put him up in this ivory tower, literally, where he looks down on society and watches how they interact.
And as he's watching their behavior, he suddenly realizes why it's necessary for man to worship God.
And that is that there are laws of behavior, laws of ethics, laws of politics, laws of economics, and so on, that govern human interactions, and that while he is a perfect reasoning being, can figure these things out for himself, the best of human reasoners can only figure them out imperfectly, and the masses of human beings don't necessarily see why they should obey these laws, since they can't understand them at all.
But if God sends a series of prophets who confirm the truth of these natural laws, and the necessity of human beings abiding by them, then it becomes possible for men to deal with one another as free and equal beings, and to have a society that would be prosperous.
Hence the rule, love your neighbor as yourself, that sort of thing.
Which is the root of all the other rules that we like to talk about, like the non-aggression principle, and so on.
In some of your writing you mention a guy named Ibn Khaldun.
He was a guy who helped influence economics in Spain, is that right?
Right.
Ibn Khaldun was part of a Spanish Arab family that was of great repute and highly respected.
But he himself was one of the greatest social scientists in history.
No less a figure than Toynbee considered him to be the father of modern sociology.
And in my humble opinion I think he's also the father of modern economics.
Because although there were other really good economic writers among the Muslim society before he, he is one of the first ones to argue about economics not simply in normative terms, but in scientific terms.
And he articulated all these ideas in his mammoth work the Muqaddimah.
The Muqaddimah means introduction.
He was a historian mainly, and he wanted to write a history of the world.
It was traditional in those days that when you would write a book, that you would write an introduction of a few paragraphs or a few pages.
His introduction ended up being three volumes.
And the reason that it was so massive was because he claimed that he had found an important principle that societies rise and fall because of their adherence to or abandonment of certain fundamental principles.
And these principles included certain very important economic principles.
His idea was that a dynasty starts usually when some people of what he called Bedouin inclinations, by Bedouin he meant that they did not like luxury, would develop a spirit of social solidarity.
And they would set up a dynasty ruling on sound principles that would succeed in making the dynasty prosper.
However, he said, after several generations, their offspring, leaders of a very successful dynasty which happened to be very rich, would require a taste for luxury.
And they would begin to think that the purpose of rulership is not to enforce these sound principles of governance, but instead to take the surplus wealth of society and hand it out to their friends as they would confiscate it through taxation and other methods and extend their empire.
And that this betrayal of the principles that made the society prosperous in the first place would result in the downfall of society.
And as society began to decline, they would only get worse in their methods of rulership.
For example, as tax revenues declined because the economy was suffering, they would raise taxes, which of course would only cause the economy to suffer further.
It's fascinating to me that a libertarian would just love the titles of Ibn Khaldun's sub-chapters.
For example, Why Government Involvement in Commerce Will Destroy Society.
Wow, so what economic legends were influenced by this guy?
Well, unfortunately, it's hard to trace the direct impact.
The most important probable link, and there's no smoking gun to prove this, but if you look at the very early...
Murray Rothbard, a great libertarian economist, did a study of the history of economics.
Now, he only did European history.
He went back as far as Spain under the Reconquista.
And he said that among the best of the economists in Spain was the School of Salamanca in Spain, which existed, you know, about 50, 100 years, something like that, after Ibn Khaldun.
Well, now...
And I believe Western economists picked up from the School of Salamanca many of these ideas.
Okay, now hang on one second, because this is something that's kind of very important to the story of Austrian economics and Rothbard's career, right, is that he kind of denounces John Locke, I mean, pardon me, not John Locke, Adam Smith, and says that this guy came up with this labor theory of value when actually the economists in Spain had already figured out that the value is determined by the customer, basically, you know, from a subjective point of view, and that really what Adam Smith did was he took everything backwards, and that if you really want to look at the proto-Austrian economists, they come from Spain.
Now, what you're saying is it looks to you like these proto-Austrian economists in Spain were picking up from the Arabic scholars, and particularly this guy, Ibn Khaldun.
Yeah.
Again, the evidence is only circumstantial, but as Thoreau says, sometimes circumstantial evidence is very strong, such as when you find a trout in the milk.
Here's the trout in the milk in this case.
Ibn Khaldun had an argument that was the first reasonable argument in history about something that had puzzled economists since the ancient Greeks, at least.
Why is it that diamonds are more valuable than water?
Water is much more necessary to human life than diamonds, and yet, invariably, diamonds are more valuable than water.
Why is this?
And economists have struggled with this question.
Ibn Khaldun seems to know what the answer is.
Ibn Khaldun answers that, in fact, and this is where I think you see this Austrian insight, the Austrian insight that prices are always relative.
And Ibn Khaldun says, let's talk about the fact that relative prices between necessity and luxury.
Diamonds are clearly a luxury, and water is clearly a necessity, which is why we puzzle over the fact that a luxury should be more valuable than a necessity.
And he says that, in fact, this is a good sign, because all prices are relative.
If diamonds are more valuable than water, he says, it means that diamonds must be harder to come by than water, which is what you want to be the case.
If you're in a situation where diamonds are easier to come by than water, or food, or some other necessity, then you have a very economically sick society, because you have an inversion of the normal structure of relative value.
Right.
And, of course, anybody who is about to die of thirst will trade all the diamonds in the world for a drink of water.
That's right.
And so that means that a society that is in a normal or healthy economic situation had better be one where these necessities are cheap.
And, of course, in a society where necessities are cheap, then taking care of the poor is a lot easier than it is in a society where the necessities are expensive.
Okay, and so then these Spanish scholastics then use those very same arguments out of this guy's text, basically?
Well, again, it's circumstantial, but here you have these Spanish writers writing in this way, and you have this scholar whose work was in Spain under the Muslims just a few decades earlier.
Doesn't it look like they have simply picked up what was left behind?
Well, I know that there's kind of a blackout on that history.
Most people don't even know that the Muslims ever conquered southern Europe at all.
But anyway, so here we are back where we started from.
Does this indicate, as it sounds to my ears, it indicates that there's no necessary clash of civilizations at all, that actually when we talk about exporting our best virtues, such as free market economics, to that part of the world, that this ought to be an extremely receptive audience.
We might not even have to hold a gun to their head at all.
Agreed.
One of the things that people forget, and that's why I mentioned it earlier but I didn't state its significance, that Muhammad was a merchant.
The kind of hostility that some religions have expressed towards people whose job it is to make money in the marketplace doesn't exist in Islam, because all Muslims highly revere and regard the Prophet Muhammad, and his job was to make money.
And the Prophet himself, peace be upon him, is quoted as saying that the honest merchants will be in paradise next to the martyrs and the prophets.
Well, so you think that ideologically we can sell libertarianism, say for example, if we didn't have a worldwide empire attempting to shove modernity down people's throats over in the Middle East and in the Muslim world, you think it's an easy sell?
Absolutely.
When I was in Turkey participating in libertarian conferences and free market conferences there, and we would meet hostile audiences, I found that the audiences never, ever, ever challenged any of our claims about economics or about economic freedom.
Invariably, what they wanted to know, what they were demanding to know, is why it seemed to them that we were defending the West's imperialist foreign policies.
And I finally came to the conclusion that the only reason Marxism was ever popular in these areas was because the advocates of Western liberal theory had forgotten about liberalism's anti-colonialism.
They had ignored it and suppressed it, leaving that field wide open to the Marxists.
And the Marxists claimed a monopoly on being opposed to this concept of the permissibility of aggression by one nation against another, or by one culture against another.
And so, I mean, that really is the leftist critique, right, is that there is no capitalism that isn't really a mercantilism or a fascism.
The state will always protect the private interest.
That's what capitalism really is, is state capitalism.
Right.
The argument of the Marxists is precisely that, that the purpose of the state under capitalism is in order to make sure that property always remains in the hands of the ruling elite and doesn't, you know, beyond the necessary minimum required for survival, get in the hands of the masses.
And that, as Lenin argued, the advanced state of capitalism was imperialism because the capitalists were having a hard time preventing the workers at home from getting a piece of the pie.
So instead, they just exported the oppression to foreign countries, which nobody in the West cares about.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I have to admit, they sort of sound like they got a point there.
Well, our behavior certainly makes it seem that way.
And that tells us exactly what we have to do in reforming our foreign policy in order to be more influential in reforming these other parts of the world.
The fact is that the Muslim world had admired the United States for a very, very, very long time.
It always shocks me when people look at certain anti-Western Muslim radicals.
For example, Sayyid Qutb.
They try to explain how he became a radical, and they say, oh, it's because he saw some people in Utah, men and women, dancing together.
Well, while that may have become symbolic in Qutb's mind, the fact is Qutb turned from being a pro-Western educational expert into being an anti-Western radical in 1948, the year that Israel occupied Palestine with American collaboration.
Well, we'll just leave that out of the story.
That doesn't have anything to do with anything.
All right, I'm sorry.
I know you've got to go, and that's the end of the show.
Thank you very much for your time.
I hope we can do this again, everybody.
That's Dean Ahmad.
The website is minaret.org.
That's the Minaret of Freedom Institute.
He's the author of Signs in the Heavens, a Muslim astronomer's perspective on religion and science, Islam and the Discovery of Freedom, co-written with Rose Wilder Lane, wow, and a hundred other books.
You can look them all up at Amazon.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thank you.
All right, folks, that's Anti-War Radio for today.
We'll be back here tomorrow, 11 to 1 Texas time, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Quick note, you guys could tell I was being sarcastic there at the end, right?
Okay, good.
