A Look at Islam

by Dr. Frank Creel (Virginia)

October 12, 2001

While the military campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan appears to be going well, it may be a while before we can claim to be achieving our political objectives. If unrest in Muslim countries continues to rise, and especially if even one of the governments of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Indonesia is replaced by a radical Islamic government, then Osama bin-Laden will emerge as one of the most prominent Muslim leaders since Saladdin.

It is critical to the success of our broader war against global terrorism that this not be permitted to happen. My personal confidence in our ultimate success is weakened by two considerations.

First, President Bush, while he has provided generally good leadership and clearly enjoys the overwhelming support of the American people, persists in mischaracterizing the interior motivation of the enemy. This is not wise, if only because the first rule of warfare is to know your enemy. Such mischaracterization can also cause confusion for the people you are trying to lead to victory and can give the enemy opportunities for success in the propaganda war.

For example, the President asserts that terrorists like bin-Laden hate America because they hate freedom and democracy. Not so. Osama bin-Laden was radicalized largely by his personal experience with the repressive Saudi regime, which, over the resistance of substantial public sentiment in Saudi Arabia, permitted us to establish a permanent military base and station thousands of our troops there following the Gulf War.

That regime pays the salaries of a large internal police force whose sole duty is to enforce Islamic dress codes for women, ensure that they are accompanied by a responsible male in public places, prevent the use of wine and other intoxicants, and brutally repress the practice of any religion except Islam. Our troops there may not display crosses on their necks. No one can give anybody else a free Bible. Women may not drive cars.

The Saudi government that radicalized bin-Laden, in short, is not appreciably more attuned to modernity and religious liberty than the Taliban themselves are. All political authority rests in the hands of a clan of despots.

The governments of Egypt and Pakistan are comparably autocratic, and Indonesia does not lag far behind in terms of democratic norms and cultural tolerance.

And these are our "allies" in the war against bin-Laden and Al Qaeda. It really is not very sophisticated of our President to pretend that everything and everybody in our camp is sweetness and light and, on the other side, nothing but unadulterated evil.

Bin-Laden has shown himself capable of exploiting this weakness. He has let it be known that he also hates Saddam Hussein because the Iraqi dictator is not a good Muslim. When he addresses "all Muslims everywhere" in his call for support, he implies that this will inevitably involve popular uprisings against the corrupt governments that are helping the infidel Americans. Even the editorial writers at the Washington Post acknowledge that the generalized discontent exploited by bin-Laden in the Muslim world arises largely from the repression, corruption and economic stagnation that characterize most of the lands of Islam.

The Muslim "street" (referring to what passes for public opinion in those countries) is very much in vogue these days among media elites. You can be sure that our "street" would be very much inflamed if our government were as repressive and controlling and unresponsive as the Saudi government. We would warm very quickly to a charismatic leader who had the courage to attack such a government and its foreign backers.

Osama bin-Laden clearly understands the nuances of these ideological dynamics and is astutely playing them to his advantage. We need our President to better understand this dynamic, as well, and to exhibit his command of the propaganda side of the war.

The second consideration weakening my confidence is that our media have, in general, shown themselves to be comparably amateurish in the PR war. On October 11, the mensiversary of 9/11, a news article in the Washington Post admitted that bin-Laden is winning the propaganda war. Small wonder when the Post itself, from which many of the nation's newspapers take their lead, seems so thoroughly befuddled.

To my knowledge, not a single commentator or columnist has yet made the point that it is not sufficient for us simply to assert that our war is not against Islam and that we must forcefully press the claim that it is bin-Laden who wars against Islam by undermining its global respectability. This point must be made so repetitively and so forcefully that the mosque (by which I mean official Islam, its mollahs and imams, its ulama and its preachers) has no choice but to confront the Muslim "street" with that bald fact, namely, that if the bloodthirsty terrorism of the world's bin-Ladens is legitimized by Islam, then it will be Islam itself that loses its moral legitimacy and pretensions to universality.

On September 21 I sent the following op-ed piece to the editorial page editor of the Washington Post:

(Editorial note: Arabic does not have the letter "o" in its alphabet. Rather, the "vav" (which looks like a large comma) does double duty for the "o" and the "u". Therefore, in European language transliteration a name like "Osama" could also be rendered "Usama". In the following piece, I used the spellings as I found them on the Internet.)

Islam has no pope. An opinion about Islamic law (a fatwa) can be issued by anyone having the scholarly credentials to do so. Whether or not such an opinion might be taken as authoritative depends very much on how many other scholars agree with the opinion, on how sound is the analogical reasoning (qiyas) supporting it, and on how well grounded it is in the consensus of previous generations of Muslim scholarship (ijma).

Probably the best known of Muslim fatwas in the West was the one by Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Salman Rushdie to death for insulting Islam in his Satanic Verses. That the fatwa was defective under the above criteria might be gathered from the facts that Iran's revolutionary government later withdrew it and that Rushdie, many years later, is still making book tours.

On February 23, 1998, Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin, joined by four other Muslims in the "World Islamic Front," issued his infamous fatwa proclaiming "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders." Citing the Quranic verse to "fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them," the statement lists as facts "known to everyone" that the United States had for more than seven years occupied the holy place in the Arabian Peninsula, used the Peninsula as a "staging post" for aggression against the Iraqi people, resulting in the death of more than a million Iraqis, and was endeavoring to make "paper statelets" of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan in order to "guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."

The statement continues, "in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim."

While I do not pretend to be a scholar of Islam, I know enough to be able to point out two serious defects in bin-Laden's fatwa. First, Jews and Christians are not regarded by Islam as "pagans" but as "people of the Book," rendering inapposite the Quranic citation. Second, the killing of civilians in wartime has never earned the approbation of the Muslim ijma.

Shaykh Ibn Baaz, a Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia who died May 13, 1999, was of the opinion that hijacking airplanes was "an extremely great crime" and that it was obligatory on governments and scholars alike "to exert themselves as much as possible in ending this evil." Ibn Baaz also condemned the Jamaa'atul-Jihaad, a terrorist group, saying "they are to be cut off from, and the people are to be warned against their evil. Since they are a fitnah (tribulation) and are harmful to the Muslims, and they are the brothers of Shaytaan."

Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen, addressing the phenomenon of Muslims "tying explosives to themselves and then approaching disbelievers and detonating them," called such an act suicide and "Allah's refuge is sought," meaning that the suicide will be condemned to Hell, citing the hadith (saying) of the Prophet that "whoever kills himself with an iron weapon then the iron weapon will remain in his hand, and he will continuously stab himself in his belly with it in the Fire of Hell eternally, forever and ever."

Last April 21, Shaykh Abdul-Aziz, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, stated that suicide bombings "have no basis in the Shari'a" and that hijacking planes and frightening passengers are also against Islam's holy law. Six days after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, Abdul-Aziz described the terrorist acts as "nothing but oppression and tyranny," adding the hope that "Muslim scholars should explain...that the religion of Islam does not endorse such acts."

After Black Tuesday, the head of Saudi Arabia's Islamic judiciary, Shaykh Saalih al-Lehaydan released this statement: "Killing a person who has not committed a crime is one of the major sins and terrible crimes...What happened in America is...undoubtedly a grave criminal act which Islam does not approve of and no one should applaud." He added that Islam strictly forbids bloodletting and does not condone the killing of innocent people, especially in a collective manner."

Inspired by these unambiguous opinions, I would like to propose the following fatwa for the consideration of the world's Muslim scholars:

"All praise is due to the Lord of the Worlds, and prayers and peace be upon the noble Prophet and Messenger, and upon his family and his companions.

"To proceed:

"On September 11, 2001 horrendous acts of terror were committed against people working in their offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Four different airplanes carrying almost 300 passengers and crew members were hijacked and then deliberately piloted into buildings. More than 6,000 people died. Most of them were Christian, people of the Book, but the victims included citizens from more than 50 countries, and more than 200 Muslims were counted among them.

"The identities of the perpetrators have not yet been definitively established, but there is a high likelihood that they were Muslim themselves. While he has disclaimed responsibility, Osama bin-Laden, a Saudi national reportedly living in Afghanistan, issued a fatwa more than three years ago claiming that it was the duty of Muslims everywhere to kill Americans, military and civilian, wherever it was possible to do so.

"Allah, free is He from all imperfection, has rather commanded justice and benevolence, and He forbids from obscene and evil deeds and oppression. The religion of Islam invites all Muslims to rectitude and uprightness and justice and goodness and counsels the removal of evil and deceit.

"Whereas the perpetrators of these crimes, if they are Muslim, disregarded the commandments of Allah; deliberately murdered thousands of innocent people of the Book in addition to hundreds of their fellow Muslims; seduced Muslims into thinking that committing suicide in the process of committing these crimes would gain them the status of shahid and, therefore, entry into Paradise, while the consensus of the community has always been that killing oneself would subject the suicide to Hell-Fire; and, by their evil deeds, brought the religion of Islam under suspicion and into disrepute throughout the world; these perpetrators are guilty of fighting against Allah and His Prophet (PBUH).

"We, therefore, call upon all Muslims everywhere, and especially those who know the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity and against Islam and can touch them, to act decisively for the restoration of justice and the good name of Islam."

I suspect that most Muslim scholars and divines would be happy to endorse such a fatwa, certainly more than signed that dirty little business of bin-Laden's in 1998. Muslims in every land need to be taught the truth, that the twin towers of the World Trade Center, now emptied of their innocent victims, stand in hell, where they can be collided into, over and over for all eternity, by planes emptied of all but the deluded terrorists.

(End of op-ed)

I'm sure the Post had good reasons for not publishing this particular piece. But what can be its reasons for not publishing something similar? In the long run, America's success in the war against terrorism and the safety of its citizens for all time to come depends on making this very point over and over again, with more and more power and precision, just like those bomb-laden jets streaking off our carriers.

Dr. Creel is Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Independent National Committee, and the Virginia contact for the Independent American Party.