Mizan Rahman
Ottawa, Oct. 11, ‘14
It is heartening to see that President Obama
has all but declared an all-out war against the evil forces of ISIS that are
threatening to take us all back to the middle ages, primarily by decapitating
every human being on earth except those they call the believing Muslims, and
also by removing all modern areas of learning (social sciences and theory of
evolution, for instance) from the school curricula. The question is: is there
a chance he will win the war? Or, even if he does, is it going to be as hollow
a ‘victory’ as his predecessor George W. Bush’s victory of Baghdad on April 9
of 2003? For one might argue that the apparent ‘victory’ in Iraq, hailed by
everyone in the Bush administration at that time as “Mission Accomplished”, set
in motion a chain of events that led almost directly to the ultimate calamity
in the Iraq-Syrian region that we are witnessing today. One might also point
out that the Western powers, in particular, the US, have never shied away from
patronizing the most radical elements of
Islam (remember the Operation Cyclone of 1979 in Afghanistan?) including the
continued support of the epicenter of Islamic extremism, Saudi Arabia. Furthermore,
despite their avowed aim of “democratizing” the entire Middle East, they have
managed, perhaps inadvertently, to subvert the few democratic institutions that
ever dared raise their heads, such as in Iraq under the ruthless dictator
Saddam Hussain, and Libya under the enigmatic madman Colonel Gaddafi.
Leaving aside those vexatious
political issues the recent threat to humankind from the hilly tracts of Iraq
and Syria cannot be taken lightly by anyone.
Starting as a group of relatively small disgruntled Sunni jihadists, the
ISIS has now grown into a global behemoth aiming to annihilate everything that
is generally associated with modern civilization. One of its leaders, Abu
Muhammad Al-Adnani, said in a recently
released 45-minute video: “If you can kill a disbelieving American, or
European----especially the spiteful and filthy French----or an Australian, or a
Canadian,…..kill him in any manner or way.” That’s a chilling death sentence on
a fair chunk of the human race! And a very ironic one when you consider the
fact that a great number of Mr. Al-Adnani’s fellow “believers” have sought and
found safe refuge in the very countries he has vowed to destroy.
The most alarming part of the ISIS (or, more
accurately, ISIL, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, Levant
being a group of separate countries that includes Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel,
Palestine, Cyprus and part of Southern Turkey) is not their apparent goal of
re-enacting the crusades of the middle ages, only this time determined to win
it all back, but the strange fascination this has created for the young, very
young, Muslim boys and girls all over the world. Almost every day we keep
hearing of teenagers in the Arab countries, in Pakistan, in Malaysia, in
Bangladesh and India, lining up to enlist themselves as jihadists alongside
their brothers in Iraq and Syria, hoping to restore the lost glories of
Islamic Empire. Amazingly, the list also includes not too few young men, born
and brought up in the affluent West and having gone through an entire system of
secular and liberal education in good western schools, who are volunteering to
give up everything---- their comfortable life, their career, their friends and
family---- just for the thrill of joining the jihad that may mean
beheading a few of the same people they grew up with. It must be a real challenge
for anyone trying to look into the root causes of this strange phenomenon. It
is tempting to surmise that the ideological vacuum created by the fall of the
Soviet Empire in 1989 is now being filled, at least for these young men, by the
fatal attraction for a violent movement that aims to engulf the entire globe.
The role played by Marxism-Leninism in the fifties and sixties is being played
by Islamic Radicalism----except that one was directed at social justice, while
the other to a distorted sense of historical justice. Strange as it may seem,
it would not be entirely unthinkable to have some sympathy for these young
people, had it not been for the murderous way they are trying to achieve their
goals. Everything that is despicable in human nature seems to have become their
modus operandi-----beheading the infidels and all who dare to oppose them, in full
view of the public, using the young girls captured in raids on enemy
territories as sex objects, selling them in the slave markets, raising an army
of child soldiers, raising money and supplies from rich shaikhs and landlords who share their view of a grand
revival of the glory days of Islamic power, and generally creating a reign of
terror wherever they go. Whether or not they can be stopped by anybody is a
good question: the united campaign of air-raids by the western powers is not
likely to subdue this diabolical monster. What we are facing is a very large
group of die-hard fanatics who honestly believe that dying for the sake of Islam
will guarantee them a secure place in heavens, even if that dying happens to be
after having killed a number of innocent human beings. They cannot be defeated
by dropping a few scraps from the sky. At the very least one needs to face them
on the ground, and hope to outlast them in a long protracted battle right on
their own territory. The question is: who is going to do that? The US? I hardly
think so. The combined forces of UK, France, Netherlands, Canada and Australia?
It will be a combined display of total impotence, in my opinion.
No, this feeble, safe-from-a-distance approach
of the West isn't the answer to this serious problem. I think the most
effective way of stopping this menace is if the Muslims themselves decide to
stand up to them as a combined force. Particularly the ones who have chosen to
escape to a western country and raise their families in a secure, free and
secular environment. Especially those who have permanent residence in the US,
UK and France, since the militancy of the Muslim youths in these countries
seems to be the highest, and also because the social pressure on their
respective governments to curtail the Muslim immigration seems to be the
strongest there. Muslims, at the moment, are not among the most popular bunch
of immigrants in the West, and, contrary to what many community leaders tend to
believe, not all of it is due to real or imagined prejudice against the
religion of Islam itself. For once we should take a look at our own attitude
instead of automatically pointing fingers at others for everything that has
gone wrong with our community. For once we should learn how to take
responsibility. Above all, we must make a clear choice between western
modernity and oriental medievalism.
Fortunately there are some encouraging signs,
at least in the West. Quite a few of the Muslim clerics have come out openly to
condemn the violent ways of their Muslim brothers in the Islamic State
movement. Even some Islamic scholars in Egypt and Saudi Arabia are getting
quite vocal in disclaiming the Islam championed by the ISIL to be the true
Islam at all. In their view Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, and not
of hatred and violence (it would be nice, though, if the same opinion were held
by a few non-Muslims). But how effective this disclaimer of a few Imams is
going to be, while the lure of the jihad seems to have set fire in the
hungry hearts of a lot of young Muslim lads all over the world, is a good
question. I have no doubt that most educated (in the sense of modern, secular
education) Muslims are as alarmed by the sudden rise of this diabolical monster
in the East as everyone else, but how many of them are truly sincere in
rejecting the idea of an Islamic state led by some madrasa-educated mullahs is
debatable. Many of these so-called highly-educated Muslims living comfortably
in the West, still believe in their hearts that 9/11 was not the work of the
Muslims, rather a combined Jewish-CIA conspiracy. As far as I know a great
number of Muslims, educated or not, are convinced that most, if not all, modern
western science are already in the Holy Quran, which they strongly believe to
be the source of all knowledge, past, present and future. At every opportunity
they will cite the example of great Islamic scholars of the middle ages, and
how the modern western knowledge has all been an extension of what the Muslims
had discovered more than 500 years before.
Yes, it is true that there were great a number
of highly distinguished men of learning in the Islamic world over a period of
about 800 years beginning the early 9th century, like Abu Nasr
Al-Farabi (872-950), Al-Battami (858-929), Avecinna, or Ibn Sina (980-1037),
Averroes, or Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), Jabir Ibn Haiyan (722-804), Ibn Al-Haytham
(965-1040), Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi (780-850), Ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (801-873), and
many others. However, as far as I know, none of these gentlemen ever claimed
the Holy Book to be a source of their scientific knowledge-----it was all their
own brilliant minds, their ingenuity, their curiosity and hard work,plus a
general environment of free thought, scholarship and critical inquiry that prevailed
in the Islamic societies in those times, which do not seem to exist these days
anymore. People like Al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) raised some radical
questions on the reading of the Holy Quran-----suggesting that the scholars and
ordinary folks do not have to approach it in exactly the same way. In fact, it
is widely acknowledged in the western world that the father of modern
secularism was none other than our own Muslim philosopher-jurist-scientist Mr.
Ibn Rushd (how ironic it is that today secularism should be thought as a purely
western idea, and is inherently anti-Islamic). He is so highly regarded in
Europe that he is the only non-white scholar who appears in the famous Renaissance
painting by Raphael (1483-1520), The School of Athens (around 1510), among
other giants like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
It is true that the Muslims of those wonderful
times were the leaders in almost every area of science, mathematics, astronomy
and medicine, and that the West learned a lot from them, which they readily
admit. In fact, I personally learned a great deal of Arab mathematics of the
mediaeval times by reading books written by western writers and attending
lectures by Jewish mathematicians. However, it is also true that the Muslim
scholars had to rely on the knowledge acquired by their
predecessors----the Greeks and Romans and Indians and Chinese, Jews and
Christians, just as the Greeks had to
learn a great deal of what they knew, including Euclidean geometry, from the
Egyptians, who in turn, learned from the Babylonians and Sumerians, and so on
and so forth. No knowledge had ever emerged from a state of vacuum-----each
civilization had to lean on its predecessors to see better into the future and
build their own wealth of new ideas. Furthermore, Muslims as a modern
cosmopolitan community, would do well paying heed to occasional comments by
historians that are not entirely laudatory of their scientific achievements.
For example the following comments by the eminent French philosopher and
historian Ernest Renan (1823-1892): “Science and philosophy flourished on Muslim
soil during the first half of the middle ages, but it was not by reason of
Islam, it was in spite of Islam. Not a Muslim philosopher or scholar escaped
persecution….. .To give Islam the credit of Averroes and so many other
illustrious thinkers, who passed half their lives in prison, in forced hiding,
in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings were suppressed by
theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the
discoveries of Galileo”. It would be a folly, in my opinion, to dismiss these
negative remarks by non-Muslim scholars as ‘Islam-bashing’, as is our usual
practice.
Nonetheless it is generally agreed
that the medieval times belonged to the Muslims. Likewise it must be accepted
that the modern times belong to the West. In fact the
term modernity is defined in terms of western values and culture, science and
technology. The Muslim world may begrudge this turn of fortune, but this is the
way the wheels of time and history have always rolled, which includes the rise
and fall of Islamic civilization of the bygone era. Now it is the heyday of the
West, and the Muslims better try to learn from them whatever they can if they
wish to build a better future for humankind in general, and not just for
themselves. They can never regain the past glory, but endeavor to create a
future one by building on their western knowledge, just as the west benefited from the Muslim knowledge in the middle ages. Above all, one must abandon the
foolish idea that you can win it all back by guns and swords, and a crazy
war-cry of some holy jihad. We live in a different time now, a time defined by
western technology where average longevity is approaching the impossible mark
of a hundred, and where creating a baby in the laboratory is no longer an
absurd idea, but a real possibility. It’s a time where one can book a flight to
the Moon, even buy a one-way ticket to the planet of Mars. In this time it is
silly to think in terms of ‘infidels’ and ‘disbelievers’, and create all sorts
of walls between one group of people and other. It is time to heed to the
remark made by Isaac Newton: “Men build too many walls but not enough
bridges.” It’s the age of bridges, not of walls.
Mizan Rahman :: মীজান রহমান
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