Osama Comes Out of the Closet

MIR ALI, Pakistan (SNN) - In a surprise move, Osama bin Laden has announced that he and Ayman al-Zawahri plan to wed in one months time. "I am a gay Muslim," he announced in a newly released video, proudly displaying his engagement ring. "I want to show my support for my brothers and sisters in California. Stay strong!"

Seriously, though, you'd think that the folks at As-Sahab would know better than to use such an effeminate color scheme. I realize that this particular tape was intended primarily for an Arab audience, but they must have known that it would reach the West as well, and that it is difficult to terrorize somebody when your communiqués look like advertisements for Mattel's new Jihadi Barbie. They're usually a pretty professional outfit; I'm not sure what went wrong this time.

Regarding the message's actual content, the focus on Palestine is consistent with what appears to be a trend by al-Qaeda to portray itself as a more mainstream terrorist organization, dedicated to defending Muslims from their wicked oppressors, rather than as a bunch of frothing psychopaths out to destroy civilization. I doubt that this represents an actual change in priorities, but the Iraq debacle has forced al-Qaeda to accept that it has a major PR problem. It remains to be seen how effective this rebranding will be.

Hirabah versus Jihad

Rescuing Jihad from The al Qaeda Blasphemy

By Jim Guirard

Over two months ago, with little or no comment or praise—either then or later—from the Bush Administration, the West Europeans, the media, the foreign policy experts or the Muslim-American community, the traditionally soft-on-terrorism Saudi Arabian government did a rather remarkable thing.

Its harsh condemnation of the May 12, 2002 suicide bombings in Riyadh contained unprecedented Islamic religious frames of reference—charging al Qaeda terrorists with not only a secular and ideological crime but with a heinous and mortal sin against Allah, as well.

According to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz: “This is because the Saudi people, will not permit a deviant few to shed the blood of the innocent which God almighty, in his infinite wisdom and justice has sanctified.”

The Saudi chief-of-state went on to proclaim: “As revealed in the Holy Qur’an, ‘He who kills a resident living in peace among you will never breathe the air of Heaven.’ “ And he concluded: “These messages, which do not require any interpretation, provide clear evidence that the fate of these murderers is damnation on earth and the fury of Hell in the thereafter.”

By repeatedly injecting the element of Hellfire into the picture, the Saudis were at least for the moment rejecting the pseudo-religious, Wahhabi-supported language of so-called “Jihadi martyrdom.” Mindlessly parroted by all too many Westerners and Muslims alike, this is the patently false mantra which paints a highly seductive picture of so-called Jihad (Holy War) by so-called mujahiddin (holy warriors) and shuhada or shahiddin (martyrs), supposedly on their way to Paradise.

On its face, the Saudi assault on this al Qaeda scam implies that if Osama bin Laden and his suicidal killers are not waging a truly holy “Jihad,” they must be waging unholy war, instead. Indeed, according to the Crown Prince, it is warfare so unholy and so evil as to be leading its fomenters into eternal Hellfire—the Islamic term for which is Jahannam.

In this situation, three major questions need answering:

• First, will we Americans support and join in this new Saudi line of attack aV which relies not only on Western secular words but also on the language of the Qurfan to condemn al Qaeda suicide mass murderers as the Jahannam-bound evildoers and blasphemers they really are?

• Second, will Saudi Arabiafs intolerant and reactionary Wahhabi sect of Islam, which has been all too supportive of al Qaeda-style terrorism, quietly acquiesce in this new interpretation—or will it be attempting to undermine those who have spoken such religiously-powerful words? (Already, an indication of the latter seems evident in the Ministry of Information’s May 27 firing of the outspokenly anti-al Qaeda editor in chief of the provincial Al Watan daily newspaper.)

• Third, if we Americans fail to support this appropriate new Qur'anic condemnation of al Qaeda at a time when the Wahhabis are surely quite busy protesting and undercutting it, will the Saudi government be bold enough to repeat and to strengthen this message?

If Not “Jihad,” What Is It?

Only time will answer these inter-connected questions. But in order for any of us to begin changing the proper terminology for al Qaeda-style terrorism from holy to unholy and from godly to satanic, we urgently need to call it what it is—rather than carelessly calling it what it is not.

Although not in the typical Muslim's active vocabulary, this is the ancient word Hirabah—pronounced hee-RAH-bah. Not found in the Qur’an because it came later, its meaning in the Islamic Jurisprudence, the Fiqh, is that of “unholy war” and forbidden “war against society.”

Used in centuries past to condemn barbarians and brigands who would pillage, terrorize and decimate entire tribes and communities, renowned University of Michigan scholar Abdul Hakim (a.k.a. Sherman Jackson) reports that it became for a time “the most severely punished crime in Islam.”

In modern-day parlance, such wanton killing might best be called genocidal terrorism or crime against humanity. Its perpetrators are the “evildoers” (mufsidoon) of whom President George Bush speaks and the “deviants” (munharefoon) of whom Crown Prince Abdullah speaks.

In Islamic religious context, both of these words mean essentially the same thing. In effect, they are evildoers because of their willful deviancy from authentic Islam, and their deviancy consists of their ruthless and unIslamic evildoing. The words are two sides of the same coin.

Among other transgressions against the “peaceful and compassionate and just” Allah of the Qur'an, here are several of the most sinful—earning for their perpetrators what Crown Prince Abdullah calls “the wrath and curse of Allah” --

•Wanton killing of innocents and noncombatants, including many Muslims;
• Committing and encouraging others to commit suicide for the purpose of intimidation;
• Fomenting hatred and envy among communities, nations, religions and civilizations;
• Waging genocidal warfare against nations where Islam is freely practiced;
• Falsely defining all Christians and Jews (and many Muslims) as “infidels”—when authentic Islam calls them all “Children of the Book” (the Old Testament);
• Issuing unauthorized and un-Islamic fatwas (religious edicts), especially bin Laden’s illegitimate 1998 call to aggressive military “Jihad;”
• Misquoting and distorting passages of the Qur’an and the Islamic Jurisprudence, the Fiqh.

Confirming the blasphemous nature of such offenses and the Hellfire awaiting those who commit them, Executive Director Dr. Sayyid M.Syeed of the Islamic Institute of North America (ISNA) has explained in authoritative terms: “The Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet emphatically distinguish the term Jihad from Hirabah, a destructive act of rebellion committed against God and mankind. Hirabah is an act of terrorism, a subversive act inflicted by an individual or a gang of individuals, breaking the established norms of peace, civic laws, treaties, agreements, moral and ethical codes.... Individuals and groups indulging in Hirabah are condemned as criminals, subjected to severe deterrent punishments under Islamic law and warned of far more punishment and humiliation in the life after life.”

Professor Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, confirms in equally expert fashion: “Properly understood, this is a war of ideas within Islam—some of them faithful to authentic Islam, but some of them clearly un-Islamic and even blasphemous toward the peaceful and compassionate Allah of the Qur’an.... As a matter of truth-in-Islam, both the ideas and the actions they produce must be called what they actually are, beginning with the fact that al Qaeda’s brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions and cultures do not constitute godly or holy “Jihad”—but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of Hirabah.”

Eventual End of al Qaeda

Imagine, then, how difficult it will be for al Qaeda’s mufsidoon (evildoers) to inspire the suicidal zealotry of young Muslims—or to sustain the sympathies of their families, friends and faithful Muslims of any sort—once their forbidden Hirabah (Unholy War) and their tajdeef shaitaniyah (satanic blasphemy) against Allah and the Qur’an are widely recognized as such.

And imagine their own well-deserved terror—repeat, T-E-R-R-O-R—once they envision themselves spending eternity not in a virgin-filled Paradise but in a demon-filled Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire), instead.

At long last—but with virtually no acknowledgement or words of encouragement from us—the Saudi government, long viewed by many as part of the problem rather than part of the solution, has begun to paint this new true-to-Islam picture. Surely, it is high time that we, too, begin changing our language with reference to the al Qaeda scam of so-called “Jihadi martyrdom.”

For us to continue calling the al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other suicide mass murderers “Jihadists” (in effect, “holy warriors” and “martyrs” on their way to Paradise) makes no more sense than our pathetic decades-long mistake of calling the fascist-left Soviets, Maoists and Castroites “people’s democrats” and “liberationists” and “progressives.”

Lenin and Stalin called this American and West European practice of linguistic self-destruction “useful idiocy.” The late, great Senator Pat Moynihan complained of it as “semantic infiltration”—our tendency to use the language of our enemies in describing political reality. They were all correct.

Of equal importance to U.S. military might, the fundamental elements of truth-in-language and truth-in-Islam are best able to solve the long-term crisis—by gradually turning all faithful Muslims against the pseudo-Islamic blasphemy of bin Ladenism. Who, after all, are better able than properly motivated Muslims themselves to root out these deadly enemies of Islam from their midst?

In this context, their holy motivation in the Will of Allah would not be that of “saving America or the West” or “bringing criminals to justice” or even “promoting world peace” but of saving their own beloved religion from being perverted into nothing but a hate-filled perpetual killing machine.

Now that the Saudis have belatedly begun the process of demonizing The al Qaeda Blasphemy in Islamic religious terms, we can ill afford to stand by in ignorance and in silence—or to continue relying only on Western secular terms which mean little or nothing to “the Arab Street.”

Via The American Muslim

Time to forget the Crusades

The following is an editorial written by John Tolan for Al Jazeera:

French historian Joseph Francois Michaud (1767-1839), in his Histoire des Croisades, affirmed that the Crusades had proven the superiority of Europeans over Muslims and showed the way to the conquest and civilisation of Asia.

Shortly thereafter, Louis Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, commissioned a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, replete with monumental romanticised paintings of scenes from the Crusades. It is perhaps no accident that at the same time the French were embarked upon the conquest of Algeria.

For numerous French and British of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Crusades were a precursor to their brave new colonial adventures in the Orient.

In reaction, Turkish and Arab writers denounced the European colonial enterprise as a re-enactment of the fanaticism and violence of the Crusades.

The Crusades have long stirred emotions of admiration or revulsion, from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) to Youssef Chahine's film Saladin the Victorious (1963) and beyond.

Arguing the clash

The legacy of crusading, simplified and distorted, is evoked to argue the inevitability of a present and future "clash of civilisations".

When Osama bin Laden speaks of countering the attacks of American and European "crusaders", he taps into a 19th-century European tradition of seeing the medieval crusades as precursors to the colonial (and subsequently post-colonial) relations between Europeans and Arabs.

But, the Crusades played little part in Arab conceptions of history from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

Until that time, the Crusades were a relatively minor phenomenon in the broad sweep of Muslim history. Of course, chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al Qalanisi or al-Maqrizi, close to rulers who fought against the Faranj (rulers like Saladin, al-Kamil, Baibars), made much of the threat posed by the Europeans and the heroic exploits of the sultans who defeated them.

Ibn al-Athir explained that the attack on the Muslim Mashreq (Middle East) was part of a movement of Faranj that included the Castilian capture of Toledo (in 1085) and the Norman conquest of Sicily (1072-91).

Yet for other Arab writers of the Middle Ages, the invasions of the Faranj were a minor inconvenience: they were simply another group of Christians who, like the Byzantines or Armenians, could seize small territories and pose threats to local Muslim rulers.

The Mongol threat

Far more troubling were the invasions of the Mongols, who captured and plundered large swaths of the Muslim heartland, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus several times.

The Mamluks' victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was far more vital than their victories over the string of small and powerless crusader enclaves such as that of Acre, which the Mamluks captured in 1291, ending the Crusader presence in the region.

Ibn Khaldun, in his great works of historiography, the Muqaddima and the Kitab al-'Ibar, has little to say of Crusades and Crusaders, much more about Mongols (including Timur, whom he met) and about the Berber dynasties of the Maghreb.

Few Arab authors of the following centuries take much interest in the Crusades, which are largely seen as a footnote to the sweep of Muslim history.

In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades, and their failure to galvanise and unify European Christendom, were an obsession to many authors. In the aftermath of the loss of Acre in 1291, various Europeans called on kings, princes and popes to organise fresh crusades against the Mamluks and increasingly against the Ottomans.

Most of the anti-Turkish "crusades", like those of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1443) ended in crushing defeat for the European troops. But various European Christian authors continued to use the language of the Crusades to try to fire their co-religionists into attacking the Ottomans or other enemies, including Protestants and "heathen" American Indians.

The historians and philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, in contrast, vilified the notion of war in the name of God: for them, holy war represented the epitome of medieval fanaticism. Voltaire depicts the Crusaders as blood-thirsty fanatics, while portraying their opponents, particularly Saladin and al-Kamil, as wise and just monarchs.

European nationalism

Yet this negative vision of crusading is swept aside in 19th-century Europe by three powerful forces in European culture: Romanticism, nationalism, and colonialism.

The Romantics rehabilitated the Crusades which they portrayed as, at times, bloody and senseless, yet redeemed by a remarkable and admirable idealism. This idea is embodied in the novels of Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the Talisman (1825).

Francois de Chateaubriand, in his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), takes umbrage at those who speak ill of the Crusades.

On the contrary, for him, despite their shortcomings the Crusaders were imbued with a faith and a selfless sense of mission that pushed them to abandon wives, children, lands and material riches to wrest Christ's tomb from the grasp of the Muslims.

In Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chateaubriand was dubbed into the Order of the Holy Sepulcher by a Franciscan friar wielding what was supposed to be the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon, knight and first ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.

Chateaubriand and other Europeans dreamed of a return to the heroic age of the Crusades.

European colonialism

Their dream was not long in the waiting. Beginning in 1830, French troops undertook the conquest of Algeria. French Crusader historians Francois-Joseph Michaud and Jean-Joseph Poujoulat praised kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe as new incarnations of Saint Louis.

In a preface to a school textbook on the Crusades, the authors present the feats of medieval French Crusaders as models for the youth sent off to conquer Algeria: "The narration of the great events of olden times shall serve as lessons of patriotism for our youth."

When Napoleon III addressed the troops ready to set off for Lebanon in 1860, he exhorted them to be "the worthy children of those heroes who gloriously carried Christ's banner into those countries".

The British similarly painted their victories over the Ottomans in the first world war: Richard the Lionhearted, who failed to take Jerusalem from Saladin, appears in the pages of Punch in December 1917, in the aftermath of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, saying "At last, my dream come true!"

One could multiply the examples of British and French authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries who affirmed that their colonial empires were reviving the best traditions of medieval crusading: its idealism, its mission to bear European civilisation into the heart of the Middle East.

Independence dashed

At the Versailles peace conference at the close of the first world war, when the French and British argued over the partition of the Arab lands wrested from the Ottoman empire and the Arab envoys increasingly realised their hopes for independence would be dashed, one of the French representatives tried to ground his claims on French prominence in the Crusades.

Amir Faisal, in frustration, shot back: "Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the Crusades?"

It is through the French and British, principally, that Arabs of the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered the Crusades. Modern Arabic terms for the Crusades, such as harb al-salib, were coined in the 19th century as translations of European terms; there had previously been no Arabic word for "crusade".

Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) warns that "Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us".

The first book in Arabic devoted specifically to the Crusades is Sayyid Ali al-Hariri's al-Hurub al-Ṣalibiya, published in Cairo in 1899. His work is grounded in both European scholarship and in knowledge of the medieval Arabic chroniclers.

Unify the Arabs!

Al-Hariri, like subsequent Arab scholars, accepted Michaud's assertion that the Crusades were a precursor for European colonialism. Arab nationalists responded by drawing their own historical lessons from this comparison: the new crusaders can be defeated just as their predecessors had been by the unification of the Arabs under leaders who, like Saladin and Baibars in the Middle Ages, will expel the intruders from Arab soil.

Since the middle of the 20th century, if Europeans or Americans compare the Crusades to colonialism, it is in order to denounce one, the other, or both. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Westerners tend to see the Crusades as manifestations of violent fanaticism, not as expressions of admirable idealism.

It is now principally in the circles of radical Islam that the 19th-century European paradigm equating Crusades with European colonialism lives on.

Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s affirmed that "the Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners".

Similar statements have been proffered by more recent Islamists, including bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Crusaders and Zionists are implacable enemies with whom one neither speaks nor compromises.

The mirror term among more extreme western writers is Jihadists: Islamists (or for some, more broadly Muslims) are seen to be inordinately hostile to non-Muslims, against whom holy war is a sacred duty.

What clash?

These Manichean world views fuel pessimistic scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations". Yet when one looks closely at the age of Crusades, one finds that the lesson to be drawn is far less simplistic than Huntington or bin Laden would have us believe.

It is a time of trade, when Egyptian merchants bought spices in India and sold them in Spain, when Venetians and Genoese traders sold English or Flemish wool cloth in Alexandria and brought back to Europe Egyptian glass, Damascene metalwork, Indian spices.

Pilgrims - Christians, Muslims and Jews - bound for Mecca and Jerusalem, travelled together on Genoese or Pisan ships, along with merchants, mercenaries and adventurers.

It is a time when storms tossed their ships and all raised their voices to God in a multilingual supplication. Conflict, as always, was endemic, but it often crossed confessional lines.

The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (and the other Crusader principalities) did not, as some have claimed, comprise an "apartheid" regime of boorish European louts lording over cultured but abject Muslims.

Its inhabitants were in fact a cosmopolitan mix of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Normans, Provencaux, etc.

In religion they were Shia and Sunni Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Monophysite, and Jewish.

The Latin rulers gradually "orientalised", marrying the daughters of prominent indigenous Christians, learning Arabic, eating and dressing like natives, making truces and alliances with neighbouring Muslim rulers and promoting commerce.

Yet one should not imagine an idyllic land of tolerance: social distinctions were real, and often followed lines of religion and ethnicity.

Seeking historical understanding

In this, as in the violence with which they imposed and enforced their rule, the Latins differed little from other contemporary interlopers in Syria/Palestine: Turks, Byzantines, Kurds, Egyptian Fatimids and Mameluks.

The historical fallacy of identifying modern struggles with those of the Middle Ages continues to be an impediment to a real historical understanding of Arab-European (and more broadly Western-Muslim) relations.

The motivations for al-Qaeda's violence have more to do with internal Saudi politics and resentment of US policy in the Middle East than with a supposedly eternal clash between "crusaders" and "jihadists".

The roots of Iranian anti-Americanism can be found in decades of American alliance with the Shah, rather than in centuries of a supposed clash of civilisations.

The solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be found in the righting of the wrongs of the past 60 years, not in invoking the age of the Maccabees or Saladin.

It is time to put to rest simplistic notions of the clash of civilisations based on a falsified image of a long-vanished past. Our current problems are real enough to merit being understood on their own terms.

John Tolan is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He is the author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and St Francis and the Sultan: An Encounter Seen Through Eight Centuries of Texts and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; French edition published in Paris: Seuil, 2007).