THE THREAT IS EXTREMISM, NOT ISLAM
(HOW TO IDENTIFY AMERICA’S ENEMY)
by Tony Brown
“THE TWO FACES OF ISLAM”
For those WLS listeners (Chicago, Sat., 10AM-Noon CT; Internet: www.wlsam.com, Sat., 11AM-1PM ET) who could not find the Muhammad Z. Q. review of “The Two Faces of Islam” by Stephen Schwartz that I mentioned last week, it is because I gave out an email address instead of the URL. I apologize. However, I am now sending the document to you directly. (See reviews below from: Muhammad Z. Q.; The New York Times; Publisher’s Weekly; and Kirkus Reviews.)
For those who said they are frustrated and angry because they believe traditional U. S. Muslims are not opposing extremist Muslims who have murdered Americans around the world since Wahhabist Osama bin Laden publicly declared war on the U. S. 10 years ago, Muhammad Z. Q., a Sunni Muslim and a Ph. D. student in the U. S., should satisfy this call for action with his review of Stephen Schwartz’s book below. (My upcoming book, “What Mama Taught Me,” includes a section on U. S. terrorist sleeper cells or an American Fifth Column; it also documents which U. S. Muslims’ patriotism may have avoided a civil war on 9-11.)
For those who emailed their opinions and evidence on the vices and virtues of Islam, I am not sending this information to necessarily agree or refute any of your logic or evidence. My motive here is strictly to share information which can help us learn how to determine the identity of the terrorist threat -- which group wants to do us harm.
I believe the trick is not to compare Islam theology to Christian theology -- if you want to enhance national security and if you understand the value of tolerance. In fact, it is outright inflammatory and politically counter productive for Christian leaders to attack Islam and its Prophet as terrorists, as some are doing. If Americans are to defeat the fascists who are exploiting Islam (the Islamo fascists), we will need the people of goodwill who believe in traditional Islam to help us do it. This has been done before. Muhammad Z. Q. explains below how, during the early days of Islam, the Khawarij, the first extremists (or terrorists) in Islam, were “silenced by orthodox Sunni scholars' (`ulema) condemnations and refutations against them...Therefore, to Schwartz, Islam itself is not the problem, but the militant interpretation of Islam, as espoused by the Wahhabis and the Sa'udi monarchy, is what needs to be stopped.”
No one knows better than traditional Muslims how wretched and perverse it is to teach young Muslim men to believe that God wants them to hate rather than love; to prefer death (where 72 Black-eyed Virgins will marry them) over life; commit suicide in order to avoid marriage and family responsibility for a permanent jihad of violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, Christians and Jews; and pursue the death of everyone in the world who is not a Wahhabi extremist to install a totalitarian one world order. According to “The Two Faces of Islam,” Wahhabis have even rejected the four established schools of Islamic jurisprudence and they particularly hate Sufism’s tolerance of other religions and cultures and its adherence to pluralism.
Bad Christianity and bad Islam have evil in common. Good Islam and good Christianity have God in common. Bad Christians persecute good Christians every chance they get and bad Muslims persecute good Muslims every chance they get. Good Americans and good Arabs are at war with bad Americans and bad Arabs who intend to install totalitarian rule over the world in order to satisfy their perversions and lust for power. A universal good and bad: That is the natural order of things. Violence and hatred are abhorred by all reasonable people and institutions.
When people become aware of Wahhabism’s beliefs, Schwartz says that Wahhabis will often call themselves “Salafis” (with whom they only differ in terms of the Wahhabis “paying more attention to Western injustices against the Islamic world”). International Wahhabism has been “exported, thanks to Saudi oil revenues” under the appropriated “‘Salafi’ name as a cover, much as European Communists taking direction from Moscow call themselves ‘Socialists’.”
The “Islamo fascist” Wahhabi Foreign Legion (known as Al Qaeda); the Saudi Wahhabization of many U. S. (and global) mosques (and madrassas, Wahhabi propaganda schools); fanatical clerics (imams) who incubate poor boys into future suicide bombers, jihadists and 9/11 skyjackers; and Fifth Columns that produced U. S.-bred terrorist John Walker Lynn as Al Qaeda combatants (and, perhaps, the suspected Buffalo 6) are all explained in “The Two Faces of Islam.”
Schwartz says he can help us identify the terrorist enemy. Osama bin Laden’s death will not end this war because he is merely a symbol of the runaway extremist Wahhabism – “narrow, rigid, tyrannical, separatist, supremacist, and violent,” Schwartz writes. (p. 163) Oppose that hellish agenda with that of traditional Sufi Muslims who are “ever renewed, happy, filled with love of God and humanity, seeking to enable believers into the monotheistic faiths, always committed to the defense of human dignity” and you will know how to recognize the two faces of Islam. Schwartz says that Wahhabism carries war and terror to local Muslims who believe in their traditional virtues and practice pluralism and tolerance.
In a practical sense, Schwartz’s book can help U. S. intelligence officials know where to spend their precious resources – and not scatter them by trying to profile all Muslims. It is a waste of time and money to try to place the entire Arab/Muslim community or the entire nation under surveillance.
Schwartz argues that had U. S. policy makers understood the difference between traditional Islam and Wahhabi-influenced fundamentalism and separatism -- “the two faces of Islam”—there may not have been a 9/11 terrorist attack or today’s life of fear because the U. S. would not have jumpstarted the current worldwide Wahhabi jihad with a Saudi-Wahhabi victory over the Russians in Afghanistan. “Why did U. S. policymakers fail to understand the conflict within the Afghan resistance? The error was colossal.” The Washington policy community “stupidly” ignored “the significance of the conflict between traditional Islam and Wahhabism,” Schwartz writes. “The refusal of Western academic and media experts on the Saudi kingdom to understand and warn the world about Wahhabism was clearly a major issue.” (After all the West missed Hitler and so far its has missed Wahhabism.)
Fighting the 1991 war in the Gulf on behalf of the Saudi Wahhabi power in an attempt to contain the Wahhabi’s Shite enemy, Iran, was America’s next faulty contribution to this current Wahhabi jihad called Al Qaeda. Ayotollah Khomeini of Iran, a Shite Muslim leader, accused the Wahhabi Saudi power of being a “Satanic power…who sham Islam” and distort “sacred verses to serve their devilish ends.” (p. 165). Khomeini also called America “the great Satan.” That made it easy for the Saudis to convince anxious Americans that Shite Iran was our true enemy in the region and that Iran would export its anti-American Islamic revolution around the globe. It did not, and for a very good reason.
Schwartz explains that “the Western powers failed to understand that the Iranian revolution could not be effectively internationalized, based as it was on Shi’ism, a minority tradition in Islam, and in the Iranian nation, which is not Arab. Thus while Hezbollah, a Shi’a militia in Lebanon, had been financially assisted by the Tehran regime, its concerns were local. The real exporters of international Islamic extremism were the Saudis. Nevertheless, the Saudis did not miss the opportunity to stoke the Western fear of Iran in order to bolster their false image as Arab ‘moderates.’”
As a result of the ignorance of Islam and its history and an aversion to meddling in a religious war, the United States policy makers upgraded its role as stooge to the Wahhabi Saudi power, Schwartz believes. “The spoiled victories of Afghanistan and Kuwait, combined with the challenge of Iran to Wahhabi pretensions, made a difficult situation intolerable. Wahhabism owed the West far more than it was owed in return, but its perverse world view allowed for no balancing of accounts. Wahhabism was in trouble. Unlike the Arab oil producers, the Wahhabi clerics would not allow their blackmail to be paid in cash; nothing less than blood would do. It thus became necessary for the Saudi rulers to again divert the energies of the younger fanatics by assisting bin Laden in further extending the Wahhabi ‘jihad’ abroad.”
A succession of American presidents fell, he writes, for the ploy that Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, is a U. S. ally and that its state religion is the traditional and moderate branch of Islam. Even within the U. S., Schwartz believes, the American government has legitimized Saudi-sponsored organizations and spokespersons (that make up a “Wahhabi Lobby”) that pretends to represent traditional Islam. Instead, it manipulates American public opinion to favor Wahhabi colonization of the U. S. Muslim community. The same thing happened previously in Afghanistan. The Wahhabi Saudi and Pakistan governments established the Wahhabized Deobandi sect (the source of the Taliban, which means students from the Wahhabized madrassas of Pakistan) which took over the entire country of Afghanistan, where the majority practiced traditional Islam, Schwartz writes.
Somehow, according to an article in The New York Times (Nov. 19, 2002), the American people first started seriously suspecting Saudi Arabia after it became known that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Wahhabi Saudi nationals. Public opinion has turned against the Saudis: “Many Americans blame Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of state-sanctioned Islam (Wahhabism) for breeding militancy,” the Times reported.
“INSIDE THE NATION OF ISLAM”
To a caller named Mike, who wanted to get Louis Farrakhan’s take on all of this, I recommend “Inside the Nation of Islam” (“Personal Testimony By A Black Muslim”) by Dr. Vibert L. White, Jr., a former Black Muslim and currently a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield. This book has taken on an added dimension since the allegation was recently made in the media that Iraq’s dictator Sadaam Hussein and Colonel Mu’ammar Qadhafi, the Libyan dictator and Arab financial supporter of the Nation of Islam, who, according to White, also offered NOI members weapons to fight America (There is no evidence that anyone accepted this offer.), are suspected of working closely together and storing “dirty bombs” and weapons of mass destruction in Libya.
Professor White states that after one $5 million loan was made to the Nation Of Islam (NOI) and the State Department placed the repayment in an escrow account until Qadhafi changes his “political policy on international terrorism,” the Reagan administration blocked another pledge to NOI of $1 billion “from Qadhafi to mobilize blacks, Arabs, Muslims, and Native Americans to influence America’s foreign policy and to exert pressure on the ultimate outcome of the presidential elections. In referring to the Libyan president as his friend and Muslim brother, Farrakhan endorsed Qadhafi’s views that Farrakhan and the Nation could become Qadhafi’s agent within the fortress called the United States.”
White’s theory is that the closer Farrakhan gets to radical anti-American Arab leaders such as Qadhafi, the greater the NOI’s shift away from Black nationalism (when Fard Muhammad was God and Elijah Muhammad was the Messiah). The author states that Farrakhan has demoted the NOI’s “two greatest leaders, Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, from being divinities of the Quran to being merely great Muslims. Throughout the history of the Nation its members, including Farrakhan, considered Master Fard Muhammad as Allah and Elijah Muhammad as the last Messenger and Christ of God.”
Now, Professor White claims, “Farrakhan’s Nation placed Prophet Muhammad Ibn Abdul-lah as the last and greatest of God’s messengers, affirming to the audience that only through the Sunna or teachings of Prophet Muhammad of Saudi Arabia could the world know true Islam.”
Read both “The Two Faces of Islam” and “Inside the Nation of Islam” and decide for yourself.
Muhammad Z.Q. (mqamar@gmu.edu), a Ph. D student in the United States, Nov. 7, 2002
A Sunni Muslim's Review of Stephen Schwartz's
"The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror."
As an orthodox Sunni Muslim who has studied Wahhabism, the Al-Sa'ud, and their favorite role model Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya who lived a couple of hundred years before the Wahhabi-Sa'ud alliance in the 1700s, Schwartz's book is informative and new material long overdue. Schwartz eloquently traces the roots of extremism in Islam and how it sprouted in the very early days of Islam to divide the unity of the Muslims. In particular, Schwartz dwells on the first extremists (or 'terrorists') in Islam, the "Khawarij," who declared both Imam Ali and Mu'awiya 'blasphemors' and heaped accusations of unbelief (kufr) on Muslims who differed with them. Using material from orthodox Sunni scholars (`ulema) Schwartz appropriately argues that the extremist approach of the Khawarij has not ceased to exist, but has continued to survive over time in many parts of the world, though isolated. These "Khawarij" were silenced by the orthodox Sunni scholars' (`ulema) condemnations and refutations against them. Schwartz rightly elaborates on Ibn Taymiyya (1200s-1300s), the foremost figure emulated by the founder of the 'Wahhabi' movement in the 1700s, Muhammad ibn `Abdl-Wahhab. Although Ibn Taymiyya was silenced and even jailed for preaching and spreading many unorthodox heresies in matters of creed (`aqeedah) and worship (`ibadat) in Islam, his unorthodox interpretations gained currency in Arabia where the Wahhabis originated (in Najd, modern day Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). Under the patronage and wealth of the al-Sa'ud -- due mainly to wealth generated by the discovery of oil in the 20th century -- the unorthodox and extremist interpretations, reminiscent of the early Khawarij, found global expression. Khawarij-like fanaticism now exists as modern day 'Wahhabism,' and, according to Schwartz is the terrorizing force that sweeps all corners of the world from Saudi Arabia across the Atlantic to the United States. 'Wahhabism' has thrived worldwide due to heavy and generous funding by Wahhabi organizations in the guise of 'charity' or 'humanitarian' groups. For instance, in reconstructing war-torn Yugoslavia and Albania, Saudi-funded 'charity' groups inhabited the regions for the express purpose of changing (and attempting to eradicate) traditional customs and practices (such as Sufism) to rigid, fanatical, pro-Wahhabi customs and practices. 'Charity' has therefore made way for Wahhabi terrorism and the attempted imposition of a Wahhabi world order. To better understand the threat of Wahhabism, Schwartz rightly points out that Osama bin Laden and his "al-Qa`eda" terrorist network is Wahhabi (also known as 'salafi'), and that many hijackers of 9/11 were nationals of Saudia Arabia -- where Wahhabism originated. To Schwartz, Wahhabism can only be stopped if its funding is stopped and when it is overwhelmed by the moderate traditional Sunni literature that most Muslims worldwide follow (the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali). Therefore, to Schwartz, Islam itself is not the problem, but the militant interpretation of Islam, as espoused by the Wahhabis and the Sa'udi monarchy, is what needs to be stopped. While admiring Schwartz's book and agreeing to almost all of what he states, there are some statements that are completely wrong or misleading. For example, Schwartz says, "Ibn Taymiyyah also declared total war on Sufism..." (pg.55). Although Ibn Taymiyyah has never been representative of orthodox Sunni Islam (or the science of Sufism), it has been noted in his own books that he not only praised Sufis at times, but also claimed to be an adherent of the Qadiri Sufi order of Abdl-Qadir Jeelani (found in Ibn Taymiyya's "Mas'ala at Tabriziyya"). An example of a misleading statement by Schwartz is his portraying Hamza Yusuf -- a traditional Sunni scholar -- as an example of a Muslim who preaches "intolerance" in Friday sermons (pg.241). He, in fact, is opposed to the entire Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and had been a student of a great moderate Sufi. It is the Wahhabis who are first to discredit him as a reprehensible innovator because of his pro-Sufi and traditional Sunni positions. Hamza Yusuf and Wahhabis should therefore not be put in one and the same light of intolerance and unorthodoxy. Overall, Schwartz's book is a welcome contribution and eye-opener to both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences that I recommend without hesitation. Also recommended: I enjoyed Schwartz's book on "Kosovo" very much.
The New York Times, November 8, 2002 “The Saudis’ Brand of Islam and Its Place in History” by Richard Bernstein
In April 2002, eight months after the attacks of Sept. 11, a Saudi cleric named Sheik Saad al-Buraik, preaching in a mosque in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, called for the enslavement of Jewish women by Muslim men. "Do not have mercy or compassion toward the Jews," Mr. al Buraik said. "Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours." Mr. al-Buraik, it is important to note, was a member of the official Saudi delegation that accompanied Crown Prince Abdullah during his visit to President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at the end of April 2002. And Stephen Schwartz argues in "The Two Faces of Islam" that the closeness to power of one who proclaims Jewish women to be Muslim slaves illustrates the deep hypocrisy and corruption of politics in Saudi Arabia, a country that promotes and fosters an extreme, intolerant, terroristic Islamic cult even as it presents itself, in Crawford and other places, as pro-Western and moderate.
It has always been thus there, Mr. Schwartz contends, or, at least, it has been thus since the 18th century when an obscure, vengeful, narrow vagabond-cleric named Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab became the spiritual leader of a Saudi tribe, the House of Saud, that eventually became masters of most of the Arabian peninsula. Mr. Schwartz's book is essentially a history of Wahhabism, which is still Saudi Arabia's official, exclusive and, in Mr. Schwartz's view, darkly medieval religion.
His central theme is that Wahhabism has over the centuries waged a bitter struggle against all other variants of Islam, most particularly the tolerant, peaceful, poetically mystical schools of thought that, in Mr. Schwartz's view, are the true and admirable historic Islam. Moreover, he maintains that Wahhabism, which gave rise to Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban among others, is the most dread menace faced in the world today by the forces of tolerance and pluralism, whether Muslim or otherwise.
"Wahhabism exalts and promotes death in every element of its existence, the suicide of its adherents, mass murder as a weapon against civilization, and above all the suffocation of the mercy embodied in Islam," Mr. Schwartz writes. "The war against Wahhabism is therefore a war to the death, as the Second World War was a war to the death against fascism. But triumph over death is the victory of life."
As that paragraph indicates, the emphatic Mr. Schwartz, a journalist and scholar who writes for several American publications, minces no words. The 4,000 members of the Saudi ruling family are, as he puts it, "a vast mafia of princely parasites." He holds the Western oil companies, especially the Aramco partners and "the American political and media elites that have served them," responsible for "the continuation of dishonesty and injustice in Arabia."
Contrary to the standard view of him, Mr. Schwartz writes, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wahhabi extremism and actually represents "the pluralist face of Islam."
All of these assertions will bring rejoinders from those who have different views, but Mr. Schwartz's opinions are not just forcefully expressed; they are also born out of a sophisticated and informed vision of history, and he merits both an open mind and a close reading. His book demonstrates a comprehensive mastery of history and historical connections, as well as a deep humanistic concern for those who have been oppressed by Wahhabi ruthlessness.
When, for example, Mr. Schwartz turns to the powerful influence of Wahhabism during the years of the anti-Soviet "holy war" in Afghanistan, he not only shows that he understands Afghan politics, but he also makes a strong case that the American failure to understand the complexities of global Islam are one of the main reasons that Afghanistan fell into the Taliban-bin Laden camp.
In Mr. Schwartz's version of events, the Americans failed to understand that "two faces of Islam" were present in Afghanistan from the beginning. "On one side, there was the bright aspect of Sufi traditionalism, ever renewed, happy, filled with love of God and humanity," he writes. "On the other was the ugly visage of Wahhabi fundamentalism, narrow, rigid, tyrannical, separatist, supremacist and violent." The Taliban, the products of Saudi-financed Wahhabi schools in Pakistan, clearly represented this second visage, and Mr. Schwartz contends that they could have been avoided altogether had American policymakers only understood that.
But Mr. Schwartz argues that "Islam, especially in the days of Khomeini, remained too alien and frightening" for the State Department to make such distinctions. Or, if American policymakers did make distinctions, he says, they made the wrong ones, preferring the Saudi-backed guerrillas to anyone who echoed Khomeinism. Still, Mr. Schwartz writes, "The real exporters of international Islamic extremism were the Saudis," though "the Saudis did not miss the opportunity to stoke the Western fear of Iran in order to bolster their false image as Arab 'moderates.' "
One might argue here that Khomeinism, which dispatched the terrorist Hezbollah, or Party of God, into the world, did its share of exporting extremism, as it did when it called on good Muslims to execute the writer Salman Rushdie for the crime of blasphemy. And while Afghan traditionalism may have been filled with love of God, over the centuries it produced its share of blood-letting even without the help of the Saudis. In other words, some of what Mr. Schwartz writes makes you want to argue with him, or at least raise some questions.
Nonetheless, there is an admirable shrewdness, a suffer-no-fools briskness, to his analysis, and he has that ability to make the hard-to-see historical parallels. Among the most interesting of them: in the first half of the 20th century, the Saud-Wahhabi alliance came to supreme power in Saudi Arabia by cleverly aligning itself with British imperialism; how similar that now seems to the Saudi ability to enlist unwitting American support for putting into power the Wahhabi faction in Afghanistan (at least until it was dislodged after Sept. 11). It is fascinating suggestions like this that give "The Two Faces of Islam" some of its value -- along with its more general ability to engage the mind, making it grasp matters in a new way. http://www.nytimes.com
From Publishers Weekly
Schwartz challenges President Bush's "axis of terror." "The real exporters of international Islamic extremism and terror," he says, are not Iraq or Iran, but an American ally: the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is dominated by Wahhabism, which journalist Schwartz (Kosovo: Background to a War) labels a "fascistic" cult. And the West, he goes on, has "nurtured this serpent in [its] very bosom" by supporting the Saudis in the belief that they were "moderate." (On sale Oct. 15) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
From Kirkus Reviews
A provocative entry on Islam, from Schwartz (From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind, 1998), who lays blame on the Saudi regime for the attacks of 9/11. The main lines of Schwartz's charge are these: the governing ideology of the House of Sa'ud, the Wahhabi strain of Islam, is grounded in xenophobia, intolerance, and belief in lethal varieties of jihad; exported once at swordpoint to other parts of the Muslim world, this ideology has yielded untold misery for centuries; today, exported "from Pakistan and India to the Balkans, the Philippines, Western Europe, and America itself" at a cost of billions of petrodollars to the Saudi ruling elite, Wahhabism is the principal source of Islamic terror; and by propping up the Saudi royal family to keep Saudi oil flowing westward, the US is doing itself and the rest of the world no favors, but instead ought to be stirring up domestic revolution in the streets of Medina and Riyadh. Schwartz traces the US-against-them Wahhabist stance to the inhospitable environment of the Saudi interior, "a hotbed for early factionalists in Islam, particularly the Khawarij, known for their extreme pietism while preparing rebellion and mass murder." The interior peoples eventually grew in power, and their ways became the norm for all Saudi society-and for militant Islamic groups worldwide. Though historians may take issue with some of its oversimplifications, Schwartz's analysis is more sophisticated than much of the media punditry since September 11, and certainly more sympathetic to in-the-street Islam, for which, he says, the Saudi royal family and its allies, including Osama bin Laden, have no regard: "In the highly stratified Arab and Muslim nations, the street counts for nothing, which is the main reason people often crowd it yelling hateful slogans." A ringing condemnation of "Wahhabi obscurantism and its totalitarian state" that is sure to cause controversy-and perhaps inspire a few contingency plans in the Pentagon.
From www.tonybrown.com.
by Tony Brown
“THE TWO FACES OF ISLAM”
For those WLS listeners (Chicago, Sat., 10AM-Noon CT; Internet: www.wlsam.com, Sat., 11AM-1PM ET) who could not find the Muhammad Z. Q. review of “The Two Faces of Islam” by Stephen Schwartz that I mentioned last week, it is because I gave out an email address instead of the URL. I apologize. However, I am now sending the document to you directly. (See reviews below from: Muhammad Z. Q.; The New York Times; Publisher’s Weekly; and Kirkus Reviews.)
For those who said they are frustrated and angry because they believe traditional U. S. Muslims are not opposing extremist Muslims who have murdered Americans around the world since Wahhabist Osama bin Laden publicly declared war on the U. S. 10 years ago, Muhammad Z. Q., a Sunni Muslim and a Ph. D. student in the U. S., should satisfy this call for action with his review of Stephen Schwartz’s book below. (My upcoming book, “What Mama Taught Me,” includes a section on U. S. terrorist sleeper cells or an American Fifth Column; it also documents which U. S. Muslims’ patriotism may have avoided a civil war on 9-11.)
For those who emailed their opinions and evidence on the vices and virtues of Islam, I am not sending this information to necessarily agree or refute any of your logic or evidence. My motive here is strictly to share information which can help us learn how to determine the identity of the terrorist threat -- which group wants to do us harm.
I believe the trick is not to compare Islam theology to Christian theology -- if you want to enhance national security and if you understand the value of tolerance. In fact, it is outright inflammatory and politically counter productive for Christian leaders to attack Islam and its Prophet as terrorists, as some are doing. If Americans are to defeat the fascists who are exploiting Islam (the Islamo fascists), we will need the people of goodwill who believe in traditional Islam to help us do it. This has been done before. Muhammad Z. Q. explains below how, during the early days of Islam, the Khawarij, the first extremists (or terrorists) in Islam, were “silenced by orthodox Sunni scholars' (`ulema) condemnations and refutations against them...Therefore, to Schwartz, Islam itself is not the problem, but the militant interpretation of Islam, as espoused by the Wahhabis and the Sa'udi monarchy, is what needs to be stopped.”
No one knows better than traditional Muslims how wretched and perverse it is to teach young Muslim men to believe that God wants them to hate rather than love; to prefer death (where 72 Black-eyed Virgins will marry them) over life; commit suicide in order to avoid marriage and family responsibility for a permanent jihad of violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, Christians and Jews; and pursue the death of everyone in the world who is not a Wahhabi extremist to install a totalitarian one world order. According to “The Two Faces of Islam,” Wahhabis have even rejected the four established schools of Islamic jurisprudence and they particularly hate Sufism’s tolerance of other religions and cultures and its adherence to pluralism.
Bad Christianity and bad Islam have evil in common. Good Islam and good Christianity have God in common. Bad Christians persecute good Christians every chance they get and bad Muslims persecute good Muslims every chance they get. Good Americans and good Arabs are at war with bad Americans and bad Arabs who intend to install totalitarian rule over the world in order to satisfy their perversions and lust for power. A universal good and bad: That is the natural order of things. Violence and hatred are abhorred by all reasonable people and institutions.
When people become aware of Wahhabism’s beliefs, Schwartz says that Wahhabis will often call themselves “Salafis” (with whom they only differ in terms of the Wahhabis “paying more attention to Western injustices against the Islamic world”). International Wahhabism has been “exported, thanks to Saudi oil revenues” under the appropriated “‘Salafi’ name as a cover, much as European Communists taking direction from Moscow call themselves ‘Socialists’.”
The “Islamo fascist” Wahhabi Foreign Legion (known as Al Qaeda); the Saudi Wahhabization of many U. S. (and global) mosques (and madrassas, Wahhabi propaganda schools); fanatical clerics (imams) who incubate poor boys into future suicide bombers, jihadists and 9/11 skyjackers; and Fifth Columns that produced U. S.-bred terrorist John Walker Lynn as Al Qaeda combatants (and, perhaps, the suspected Buffalo 6) are all explained in “The Two Faces of Islam.”
Schwartz says he can help us identify the terrorist enemy. Osama bin Laden’s death will not end this war because he is merely a symbol of the runaway extremist Wahhabism – “narrow, rigid, tyrannical, separatist, supremacist, and violent,” Schwartz writes. (p. 163) Oppose that hellish agenda with that of traditional Sufi Muslims who are “ever renewed, happy, filled with love of God and humanity, seeking to enable believers into the monotheistic faiths, always committed to the defense of human dignity” and you will know how to recognize the two faces of Islam. Schwartz says that Wahhabism carries war and terror to local Muslims who believe in their traditional virtues and practice pluralism and tolerance.
In a practical sense, Schwartz’s book can help U. S. intelligence officials know where to spend their precious resources – and not scatter them by trying to profile all Muslims. It is a waste of time and money to try to place the entire Arab/Muslim community or the entire nation under surveillance.
Schwartz argues that had U. S. policy makers understood the difference between traditional Islam and Wahhabi-influenced fundamentalism and separatism -- “the two faces of Islam”—there may not have been a 9/11 terrorist attack or today’s life of fear because the U. S. would not have jumpstarted the current worldwide Wahhabi jihad with a Saudi-Wahhabi victory over the Russians in Afghanistan. “Why did U. S. policymakers fail to understand the conflict within the Afghan resistance? The error was colossal.” The Washington policy community “stupidly” ignored “the significance of the conflict between traditional Islam and Wahhabism,” Schwartz writes. “The refusal of Western academic and media experts on the Saudi kingdom to understand and warn the world about Wahhabism was clearly a major issue.” (After all the West missed Hitler and so far its has missed Wahhabism.)
Fighting the 1991 war in the Gulf on behalf of the Saudi Wahhabi power in an attempt to contain the Wahhabi’s Shite enemy, Iran, was America’s next faulty contribution to this current Wahhabi jihad called Al Qaeda. Ayotollah Khomeini of Iran, a Shite Muslim leader, accused the Wahhabi Saudi power of being a “Satanic power…who sham Islam” and distort “sacred verses to serve their devilish ends.” (p. 165). Khomeini also called America “the great Satan.” That made it easy for the Saudis to convince anxious Americans that Shite Iran was our true enemy in the region and that Iran would export its anti-American Islamic revolution around the globe. It did not, and for a very good reason.
Schwartz explains that “the Western powers failed to understand that the Iranian revolution could not be effectively internationalized, based as it was on Shi’ism, a minority tradition in Islam, and in the Iranian nation, which is not Arab. Thus while Hezbollah, a Shi’a militia in Lebanon, had been financially assisted by the Tehran regime, its concerns were local. The real exporters of international Islamic extremism were the Saudis. Nevertheless, the Saudis did not miss the opportunity to stoke the Western fear of Iran in order to bolster their false image as Arab ‘moderates.’”
As a result of the ignorance of Islam and its history and an aversion to meddling in a religious war, the United States policy makers upgraded its role as stooge to the Wahhabi Saudi power, Schwartz believes. “The spoiled victories of Afghanistan and Kuwait, combined with the challenge of Iran to Wahhabi pretensions, made a difficult situation intolerable. Wahhabism owed the West far more than it was owed in return, but its perverse world view allowed for no balancing of accounts. Wahhabism was in trouble. Unlike the Arab oil producers, the Wahhabi clerics would not allow their blackmail to be paid in cash; nothing less than blood would do. It thus became necessary for the Saudi rulers to again divert the energies of the younger fanatics by assisting bin Laden in further extending the Wahhabi ‘jihad’ abroad.”
A succession of American presidents fell, he writes, for the ploy that Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, is a U. S. ally and that its state religion is the traditional and moderate branch of Islam. Even within the U. S., Schwartz believes, the American government has legitimized Saudi-sponsored organizations and spokespersons (that make up a “Wahhabi Lobby”) that pretends to represent traditional Islam. Instead, it manipulates American public opinion to favor Wahhabi colonization of the U. S. Muslim community. The same thing happened previously in Afghanistan. The Wahhabi Saudi and Pakistan governments established the Wahhabized Deobandi sect (the source of the Taliban, which means students from the Wahhabized madrassas of Pakistan) which took over the entire country of Afghanistan, where the majority practiced traditional Islam, Schwartz writes.
Somehow, according to an article in The New York Times (Nov. 19, 2002), the American people first started seriously suspecting Saudi Arabia after it became known that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Wahhabi Saudi nationals. Public opinion has turned against the Saudis: “Many Americans blame Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of state-sanctioned Islam (Wahhabism) for breeding militancy,” the Times reported.
“INSIDE THE NATION OF ISLAM”
To a caller named Mike, who wanted to get Louis Farrakhan’s take on all of this, I recommend “Inside the Nation of Islam” (“Personal Testimony By A Black Muslim”) by Dr. Vibert L. White, Jr., a former Black Muslim and currently a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield. This book has taken on an added dimension since the allegation was recently made in the media that Iraq’s dictator Sadaam Hussein and Colonel Mu’ammar Qadhafi, the Libyan dictator and Arab financial supporter of the Nation of Islam, who, according to White, also offered NOI members weapons to fight America (There is no evidence that anyone accepted this offer.), are suspected of working closely together and storing “dirty bombs” and weapons of mass destruction in Libya.
Professor White states that after one $5 million loan was made to the Nation Of Islam (NOI) and the State Department placed the repayment in an escrow account until Qadhafi changes his “political policy on international terrorism,” the Reagan administration blocked another pledge to NOI of $1 billion “from Qadhafi to mobilize blacks, Arabs, Muslims, and Native Americans to influence America’s foreign policy and to exert pressure on the ultimate outcome of the presidential elections. In referring to the Libyan president as his friend and Muslim brother, Farrakhan endorsed Qadhafi’s views that Farrakhan and the Nation could become Qadhafi’s agent within the fortress called the United States.”
White’s theory is that the closer Farrakhan gets to radical anti-American Arab leaders such as Qadhafi, the greater the NOI’s shift away from Black nationalism (when Fard Muhammad was God and Elijah Muhammad was the Messiah). The author states that Farrakhan has demoted the NOI’s “two greatest leaders, Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, from being divinities of the Quran to being merely great Muslims. Throughout the history of the Nation its members, including Farrakhan, considered Master Fard Muhammad as Allah and Elijah Muhammad as the last Messenger and Christ of God.”
Now, Professor White claims, “Farrakhan’s Nation placed Prophet Muhammad Ibn Abdul-lah as the last and greatest of God’s messengers, affirming to the audience that only through the Sunna or teachings of Prophet Muhammad of Saudi Arabia could the world know true Islam.”
Read both “The Two Faces of Islam” and “Inside the Nation of Islam” and decide for yourself.
Muhammad Z.Q. (mqamar@gmu.edu), a Ph. D student in the United States, Nov. 7, 2002
A Sunni Muslim's Review of Stephen Schwartz's
"The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror."
As an orthodox Sunni Muslim who has studied Wahhabism, the Al-Sa'ud, and their favorite role model Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya who lived a couple of hundred years before the Wahhabi-Sa'ud alliance in the 1700s, Schwartz's book is informative and new material long overdue. Schwartz eloquently traces the roots of extremism in Islam and how it sprouted in the very early days of Islam to divide the unity of the Muslims. In particular, Schwartz dwells on the first extremists (or 'terrorists') in Islam, the "Khawarij," who declared both Imam Ali and Mu'awiya 'blasphemors' and heaped accusations of unbelief (kufr) on Muslims who differed with them. Using material from orthodox Sunni scholars (`ulema) Schwartz appropriately argues that the extremist approach of the Khawarij has not ceased to exist, but has continued to survive over time in many parts of the world, though isolated. These "Khawarij" were silenced by the orthodox Sunni scholars' (`ulema) condemnations and refutations against them. Schwartz rightly elaborates on Ibn Taymiyya (1200s-1300s), the foremost figure emulated by the founder of the 'Wahhabi' movement in the 1700s, Muhammad ibn `Abdl-Wahhab. Although Ibn Taymiyya was silenced and even jailed for preaching and spreading many unorthodox heresies in matters of creed (`aqeedah) and worship (`ibadat) in Islam, his unorthodox interpretations gained currency in Arabia where the Wahhabis originated (in Najd, modern day Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). Under the patronage and wealth of the al-Sa'ud -- due mainly to wealth generated by the discovery of oil in the 20th century -- the unorthodox and extremist interpretations, reminiscent of the early Khawarij, found global expression. Khawarij-like fanaticism now exists as modern day 'Wahhabism,' and, according to Schwartz is the terrorizing force that sweeps all corners of the world from Saudi Arabia across the Atlantic to the United States. 'Wahhabism' has thrived worldwide due to heavy and generous funding by Wahhabi organizations in the guise of 'charity' or 'humanitarian' groups. For instance, in reconstructing war-torn Yugoslavia and Albania, Saudi-funded 'charity' groups inhabited the regions for the express purpose of changing (and attempting to eradicate) traditional customs and practices (such as Sufism) to rigid, fanatical, pro-Wahhabi customs and practices. 'Charity' has therefore made way for Wahhabi terrorism and the attempted imposition of a Wahhabi world order. To better understand the threat of Wahhabism, Schwartz rightly points out that Osama bin Laden and his "al-Qa`eda" terrorist network is Wahhabi (also known as 'salafi'), and that many hijackers of 9/11 were nationals of Saudia Arabia -- where Wahhabism originated. To Schwartz, Wahhabism can only be stopped if its funding is stopped and when it is overwhelmed by the moderate traditional Sunni literature that most Muslims worldwide follow (the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali). Therefore, to Schwartz, Islam itself is not the problem, but the militant interpretation of Islam, as espoused by the Wahhabis and the Sa'udi monarchy, is what needs to be stopped. While admiring Schwartz's book and agreeing to almost all of what he states, there are some statements that are completely wrong or misleading. For example, Schwartz says, "Ibn Taymiyyah also declared total war on Sufism..." (pg.55). Although Ibn Taymiyyah has never been representative of orthodox Sunni Islam (or the science of Sufism), it has been noted in his own books that he not only praised Sufis at times, but also claimed to be an adherent of the Qadiri Sufi order of Abdl-Qadir Jeelani (found in Ibn Taymiyya's "Mas'ala at Tabriziyya"). An example of a misleading statement by Schwartz is his portraying Hamza Yusuf -- a traditional Sunni scholar -- as an example of a Muslim who preaches "intolerance" in Friday sermons (pg.241). He, in fact, is opposed to the entire Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and had been a student of a great moderate Sufi. It is the Wahhabis who are first to discredit him as a reprehensible innovator because of his pro-Sufi and traditional Sunni positions. Hamza Yusuf and Wahhabis should therefore not be put in one and the same light of intolerance and unorthodoxy. Overall, Schwartz's book is a welcome contribution and eye-opener to both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences that I recommend without hesitation. Also recommended: I enjoyed Schwartz's book on "Kosovo" very much.
The New York Times, November 8, 2002 “The Saudis’ Brand of Islam and Its Place in History” by Richard Bernstein
In April 2002, eight months after the attacks of Sept. 11, a Saudi cleric named Sheik Saad al-Buraik, preaching in a mosque in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, called for the enslavement of Jewish women by Muslim men. "Do not have mercy or compassion toward the Jews," Mr. al Buraik said. "Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours." Mr. al-Buraik, it is important to note, was a member of the official Saudi delegation that accompanied Crown Prince Abdullah during his visit to President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at the end of April 2002. And Stephen Schwartz argues in "The Two Faces of Islam" that the closeness to power of one who proclaims Jewish women to be Muslim slaves illustrates the deep hypocrisy and corruption of politics in Saudi Arabia, a country that promotes and fosters an extreme, intolerant, terroristic Islamic cult even as it presents itself, in Crawford and other places, as pro-Western and moderate.
It has always been thus there, Mr. Schwartz contends, or, at least, it has been thus since the 18th century when an obscure, vengeful, narrow vagabond-cleric named Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab became the spiritual leader of a Saudi tribe, the House of Saud, that eventually became masters of most of the Arabian peninsula. Mr. Schwartz's book is essentially a history of Wahhabism, which is still Saudi Arabia's official, exclusive and, in Mr. Schwartz's view, darkly medieval religion.
His central theme is that Wahhabism has over the centuries waged a bitter struggle against all other variants of Islam, most particularly the tolerant, peaceful, poetically mystical schools of thought that, in Mr. Schwartz's view, are the true and admirable historic Islam. Moreover, he maintains that Wahhabism, which gave rise to Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban among others, is the most dread menace faced in the world today by the forces of tolerance and pluralism, whether Muslim or otherwise.
"Wahhabism exalts and promotes death in every element of its existence, the suicide of its adherents, mass murder as a weapon against civilization, and above all the suffocation of the mercy embodied in Islam," Mr. Schwartz writes. "The war against Wahhabism is therefore a war to the death, as the Second World War was a war to the death against fascism. But triumph over death is the victory of life."
As that paragraph indicates, the emphatic Mr. Schwartz, a journalist and scholar who writes for several American publications, minces no words. The 4,000 members of the Saudi ruling family are, as he puts it, "a vast mafia of princely parasites." He holds the Western oil companies, especially the Aramco partners and "the American political and media elites that have served them," responsible for "the continuation of dishonesty and injustice in Arabia."
Contrary to the standard view of him, Mr. Schwartz writes, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wahhabi extremism and actually represents "the pluralist face of Islam."
All of these assertions will bring rejoinders from those who have different views, but Mr. Schwartz's opinions are not just forcefully expressed; they are also born out of a sophisticated and informed vision of history, and he merits both an open mind and a close reading. His book demonstrates a comprehensive mastery of history and historical connections, as well as a deep humanistic concern for those who have been oppressed by Wahhabi ruthlessness.
When, for example, Mr. Schwartz turns to the powerful influence of Wahhabism during the years of the anti-Soviet "holy war" in Afghanistan, he not only shows that he understands Afghan politics, but he also makes a strong case that the American failure to understand the complexities of global Islam are one of the main reasons that Afghanistan fell into the Taliban-bin Laden camp.
In Mr. Schwartz's version of events, the Americans failed to understand that "two faces of Islam" were present in Afghanistan from the beginning. "On one side, there was the bright aspect of Sufi traditionalism, ever renewed, happy, filled with love of God and humanity," he writes. "On the other was the ugly visage of Wahhabi fundamentalism, narrow, rigid, tyrannical, separatist, supremacist and violent." The Taliban, the products of Saudi-financed Wahhabi schools in Pakistan, clearly represented this second visage, and Mr. Schwartz contends that they could have been avoided altogether had American policymakers only understood that.
But Mr. Schwartz argues that "Islam, especially in the days of Khomeini, remained too alien and frightening" for the State Department to make such distinctions. Or, if American policymakers did make distinctions, he says, they made the wrong ones, preferring the Saudi-backed guerrillas to anyone who echoed Khomeinism. Still, Mr. Schwartz writes, "The real exporters of international Islamic extremism were the Saudis," though "the Saudis did not miss the opportunity to stoke the Western fear of Iran in order to bolster their false image as Arab 'moderates.' "
One might argue here that Khomeinism, which dispatched the terrorist Hezbollah, or Party of God, into the world, did its share of exporting extremism, as it did when it called on good Muslims to execute the writer Salman Rushdie for the crime of blasphemy. And while Afghan traditionalism may have been filled with love of God, over the centuries it produced its share of blood-letting even without the help of the Saudis. In other words, some of what Mr. Schwartz writes makes you want to argue with him, or at least raise some questions.
Nonetheless, there is an admirable shrewdness, a suffer-no-fools briskness, to his analysis, and he has that ability to make the hard-to-see historical parallels. Among the most interesting of them: in the first half of the 20th century, the Saud-Wahhabi alliance came to supreme power in Saudi Arabia by cleverly aligning itself with British imperialism; how similar that now seems to the Saudi ability to enlist unwitting American support for putting into power the Wahhabi faction in Afghanistan (at least until it was dislodged after Sept. 11). It is fascinating suggestions like this that give "The Two Faces of Islam" some of its value -- along with its more general ability to engage the mind, making it grasp matters in a new way. http://www.nytimes.com
From Publishers Weekly
Schwartz challenges President Bush's "axis of terror." "The real exporters of international Islamic extremism and terror," he says, are not Iraq or Iran, but an American ally: the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is dominated by Wahhabism, which journalist Schwartz (Kosovo: Background to a War) labels a "fascistic" cult. And the West, he goes on, has "nurtured this serpent in [its] very bosom" by supporting the Saudis in the belief that they were "moderate." (On sale Oct. 15) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
From Kirkus Reviews
A provocative entry on Islam, from Schwartz (From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind, 1998), who lays blame on the Saudi regime for the attacks of 9/11. The main lines of Schwartz's charge are these: the governing ideology of the House of Sa'ud, the Wahhabi strain of Islam, is grounded in xenophobia, intolerance, and belief in lethal varieties of jihad; exported once at swordpoint to other parts of the Muslim world, this ideology has yielded untold misery for centuries; today, exported "from Pakistan and India to the Balkans, the Philippines, Western Europe, and America itself" at a cost of billions of petrodollars to the Saudi ruling elite, Wahhabism is the principal source of Islamic terror; and by propping up the Saudi royal family to keep Saudi oil flowing westward, the US is doing itself and the rest of the world no favors, but instead ought to be stirring up domestic revolution in the streets of Medina and Riyadh. Schwartz traces the US-against-them Wahhabist stance to the inhospitable environment of the Saudi interior, "a hotbed for early factionalists in Islam, particularly the Khawarij, known for their extreme pietism while preparing rebellion and mass murder." The interior peoples eventually grew in power, and their ways became the norm for all Saudi society-and for militant Islamic groups worldwide. Though historians may take issue with some of its oversimplifications, Schwartz's analysis is more sophisticated than much of the media punditry since September 11, and certainly more sympathetic to in-the-street Islam, for which, he says, the Saudi royal family and its allies, including Osama bin Laden, have no regard: "In the highly stratified Arab and Muslim nations, the street counts for nothing, which is the main reason people often crowd it yelling hateful slogans." A ringing condemnation of "Wahhabi obscurantism and its totalitarian state" that is sure to cause controversy-and perhaps inspire a few contingency plans in the Pentagon.
From www.tonybrown.com.
posted by Robert at 4:38 PM
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