Article Critiquing 2

[Al-Indunisiy]

:salam2:
Ok, the last time I made a criticism thread I brought only one article. But now I bring multiple quotations to be criticised. Anyone are allowed to state his/her opinion regarding the quotations (or some/some part of them) below. Even though I can clearly see that the quotations are in majority view Islam in a negative light, so maybe the in next thread I shall quote positive articles.(Opinions with the reasons thereof written alongside it is prefered)

Article 1: So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-

liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:

'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise...' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.

For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history - a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance - of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.

Article 2: The roots of Islamic terrorism
By Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2005
LONDON Fundamentalism and fascism



Most commentators argue that Islamic terrorism is a fanatical perversion of Islam which deviates from its true teachings. They call for a Western-style modernization of the Muslim world, hoping thereby that radical Islam will be tamed.

This analysis misses the point. The nature of the terrorist threat is unambiguously Islamic and is not so much a deviation from Muslim tradition as an appeal to it. Al Qaeda's ideology draws on two traditions to legitimize itself: one classical, the other modern.

Regarding classical Islam, the oft-quoted remark that Islam is a religion of peace is false. It is historically illiterate to claim that war is foreign to Islam and it is theologically uninformed to argue that jihad is merely a personal inner struggle with no external military correlate.

On the contrary, Islam is linked from the beginning with the practice of divinely sanctioned warfare and lethal injunctions against apostates and unbelievers. Islam experienced no period of wandering and exclusion; from its inception, Islam formed a unitary state bent on military conquest.

The Prophet died a successful military leader who created a single Islamic polity that expanded - through warfare - all over the known world. The caliphate combined the double logic of a religious community and an imperial state.

This dual identity explains how Islam can be simultaneously peaceful and warlike. While the Koran enjoins that there shall be "no compulsion in religion," Islam still regards it as a holy duty to extend militarily the borders of the House of Islam against the demonic world of unbelievers: "He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief."

Coupled with this irreconcilability between Islam and its enemies is an extreme territorial sense of the sacred. Hence bin Laden's principal demand for the departure of all infidels from holy Muslim lands. When extremists say they are killing in the name of Islam, they are in part appealing to Islamic traditions of long standing. Al Qaeda's modern origins go back to Wahhabism, named after the revivalist movement founded by Muhammad Ibn'Abd al-Wahhab in 1744. Wahhab called for a return to a pure and unadulterated form of Islam closer to the ideals of the Prophet.

Faced with a decadent society, Wahhabism (not unlike some radical Protestant sects) reduced Islam to a scriptural literalism, an absolutism utterly hostile to other more medieval traditions. In this sense of direct rule by God, Wahhabism is a truly modern theology. Not unlike Descartes and Kant, it argues for the unmediated and total knowledge of its object.

Al Qaeda then blended this theology with fascism. The Indian Muslim Abu Ala Maududi (1903-1979) condemned the degraded nature of all contemporary Muslim communities. He characterized Muslim governments that did not implement stringent Islamic law as apostate and commanded true believers to wage jihad against them.

Maududi was a decisive influence on Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like Maududi, Qutb fused the history of Mohammed's travails with a revolutionary vanguard-type ideology that removed medieval limits on warfare by championing a modern death cult in the quest for a revivified caliphate.

The ideology instigated by these two figures is fuelled by dreams of a prior Islamic golden age. Al Qaeda sympathizers avidly read European fascist literature and pursue religious ends via atheist methods. Recruits to the cause are not the excluded uneducated poor, they are intellectuals with a radical critique of Western society and its impact on Islam.

Neither the "war on terror" nor political negotiations will overcome Islam's totalitarian turn. Western repression is everywhere fuelling the ranks of radical Islam. Equally, there can be no accommodation with an ideology that seeks to fashion the whole world in its own image. The essentially Islamic nature of this terror demands nothing less than a reformation in the name of an alternative Islam.

Islam, with good reason, will never embrace Western secularization. But it could begin to develop a critique of its history by recovering some of its aborted traditions. Islam must place true religious conversion (like that of Sufism) over territorial conquest.

Islam needs to restore the legislative authority of communal consensus to allow Muslims to develop along with, rather than against, the future.

(Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.)

Article 3: The instrument of this is Jehad — "the most glorious word in the vocabulary of Islam" — which both the author and President Zia describe as total war. "Jehad is a continuous and never-ending struggle waged on all fronts." Another point that Brigadier Malik makes is that the war should be carried out in the opponent’s territory. "The aggressor was always met and destroyed in his own territory," he tells us. It is puzzling that he should call this a ‘defensive war’, until one recognizes the Orwellian sense in which it is used to mean aggression. And what is the goal of this aggression — or of ‘defense’ as the book calls it? Here the author leaves no room for doubt.

"The central theme behind the causes of war as spelt out by the Holy Quran, was the cause of Allah… In the pursuit of this cause, the Muslims were first permitted to fight but were later commanded to fight the Way of God as a matter of religious obligation and duty." As a result, those who resist it are the aggressors, and it becomes necessary to fight a defensive war to overcome them in their own territory!

The principal tactical tool to be used in achieving this divinely ordained mission is terror. "The Quranic military strategy thus enjoins us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost in order to strike terror into the heart of the enemy, known or hidden, while guarding ourselves from being terror-stricken by the enemy." It is not hard to see that Pakistan has put this terror doctrine into practice in its proxy war in Kashmir, as it did in Punjab earlier and in Afghanistan recently. Its recent atrocity of returning the mutilated bodies of captured soldiers is part of the same strategy — of striking terror in the heart of the enemy.

But the terror doctrine does not stop here, for Brigadier Malik tells us: "Terror struck into the hearts of the enemy is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved… Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him." That is to say, the enemy is to live in a state of perpetual terror. This is necessary in order to bring ‘justice and freedom from oppression’.

Article 4:
Speaking of the Islamist understanding of freedom- some quotes from an article at the Hizb ut-Tahrir website Khilafah.com:

In the Arab world, nationalists when referring to liberation from Western colonialist invaders used the word hurriyah. Sati al-Husri, the Syrian social philosopher who first formulated the ideas of Arab nationalism in the 1920’s, was influenced by 19th century German nationalist thought which opposed liberty. His view was “patriotism and nationalism before and above all … even above and before freedom”. Husri’s ideas were adopted by Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba’athism, which again used the word in the sense of an anti-imperialist struggle. The same can be said for the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who used the term in his speeches to ostensibly mobilise the masses against Western imperialism in order to consolidate his authoritarian rule. The advent of Western-backed Arab satellite stations and newspapers has only recently led to the use of hurriyah in the sense of liberty.

Although it can be traced back to ancient Greece, freedom as understood today originates with the Renaissance when there was a rediscovery and reappraisal of Roman and Greek ideas. This period marked a clear shift away from viewing the world as being centred on the Creator, to a viewpoint that emphasised man and how he could succeed in life by dominating and exploiting his environment. The humanist philosophers of the period criticised Christianity as being a barrier to material progress. Machiavelli, for example, attacked religion for not valuing ‘worldly honour’. He held that man should be free to achieve power and glory without the constraints of religion, even if it necessitated murder as in the case of the legend in which Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome.

The modern-day concept of freedom was perhaps first clearly defined in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan: “Liberty, or freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion”. Hobbes continued ‘One is free when he is not hindered to do what he has a will to do’. This definition was reiterated by a number of political theorists, among them the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who, in his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), wrote: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. To them…we refer all our desires, every resolve we make in life.” Bentham further declared that ‘Every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty’.

The word freedom in its basic form means to think and act as one desires. Bertrand Russell defined freedom as ‘the absence of obstacles in the realisation of desires.’ In the political context, Orlando Patterson, a Harvard professor and award-winning author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, states in his book that freedom is the ‘supreme value of the Western world’. He describes it as the ‘catchword’ of Western politicians, the ‘secular gospel’ of free market economics and as the foundation of Western culture.

Freedom is viewed the world over as a natural concept and consequently, it has become the clarion call of the Western states to those who live under occupation in Iraq and Palestine and indeed for those who live under oppressive Muslim rulers. The political culture of Western countries is built upon the bedrock of liberal-capitalist values. Ideas which form the pillars of liberal democratic societies such as personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, right to own property are all drawn from liberalism, which per se is built upon the secular thought of division between the spiritual and the temporal.

...Some modern day Muslim scholars and thinkers have been seduced by the concept of freedom due to the relentless barrage from the West to promote their values. Some have even written extensively in an attempt to reconcile Islam with the notion of freedom. There are many methods employed from such endeavours ranging from a rather crude view that Islam created freedom as an idea per se, and the rather more sophisticated, but equally false idea that somehow Islam can adapt to accept foreign ideas that are dominant. What then is the correct understanding of freedom in Islam? Is man free to act as he wishes? Can a Muslim subscribe to any of the freedoms mentioned and be a Muslim in the true sense?

The refutation is that a slave cannot serve two masters. In Islam, a believer’s declaration of faith (shahaada) requires him to submit unconditionally to the laws of Allah (subhanahu wa ta'aala) in all aspects of his life. This coincides harmoniously with the purpose of his life:

مَا أُرِيدُ مِنْهُم مِّن رِّزْقٍ وَمَا أُرِيدُ أَن يُطْعِمُونِ
“I have not created Jinn and mankind but to worship me.” [TMQ 51:57]

Muslims cannot therefore be ‘free’ in any sense of the word if they have sincerely accepted the supremacy of Allah (subhanahu wa ta'aala) to legislate. A believer cannot indulge in intoxicants or be promiscuous because he is ‘abdallah,’ the slave of Allah (subhanahu wa ta'aala) and not the slave of his desires. The Muslim is explicitly prohibited by Allah (subhanahu wa ta'aala) from doing so...

The West’s vision of economic freedom is analogous to rape and exploitation; its freedom of expression and religion is a farce; its value of individual freedom produces misery, chaos, perversity and sexual depravity. Islam seeks to liberate humanity from the slavery of man, globalisation and individual freedom to the worship and obedience of Allah (subhanahu wa ta'aala).

Taken from this article.

I have to repeat myself again: understanding the Islamist interpretation of what constitutes freedom is essential to understanding Islamism itself as a political and social phenomena, as well as its goals. Their definitions of what constitutes freedom and what constitutes oppression are NOT the same as those used by the Westerners, and those who think that the whole big deal is about Western policies in the Middle East is being severely misled.

Quotation 1: To elaborate on the notion of freedom...

There is a saying in Arabic which is roughly translated as "100 years of despotism is better than a year of anarchy". I think I read it in Raphael Patai's "The Arab Mind" (not sure though).

One among many reasons why many muslim societies (a significant proportion anyway) are tolerant of dictators.
As for your request to elaborate on the ideology of pan-Islamism, I think a few quotes from Sayyed Qutb's "Milestones" on the matter will be in order.

Article 5: Throughout every period of human history the call toward God has had one nature. Its purpose is 'Islam', which means to bring human beings into submission to God, to free them from servitude to other human beings so that they may devote themselves to the One True God, to deliver them from the clutches of human lordship and man-made laws, value systems and traditions so that they will acknowledge the sovereignty and authority of the One True God and follow His law in all spheres of life. The Islam of Muhammad - peace be on him-came for this purpose, as well as the messages of the earlier Prophets. The entire universe is under the authority of God, and man, being a small part of it, necessarily obeys the physical laws governing the universe. It is also necessary that the same authority be acknowledged as the law-giver for human life. Man should not cut himself off from this authority to develop a separate system and a separate scheme of life. The growth of a human being, his conditions of health and disease, and his life and death are under the scheme of those natural laws which come from God; even in the consequences of his voluntary actions he is helpless before the universal laws. Man cannot change the practice of God in the laws prevailing in the universe. It is therefore desirable that he should also follow Islam in those aspects of his life in which he is given a choice and should make the Divine Law the arbiter in all matters of life so that there may be harmony between man and the rest of the universe. [See Towards Understanding Islam, by A. A. Maududi, for an explanation of this point.]

Jahiliyyah, on the other hand, is one man's lordship over another, and in this respect it is against the system of the universe and brings the involuntary aspect of human life into conflict with its voluntary aspect. This was that Jahiliyyah which confronted every Prophet of God, including the last Prophet-peace be on Him-in their call toward submission to One God. This Jahiliyyah is not an abstract theory; in fact, under certain circumstances it has no theory at all. It always takes the form of a living movement in a society which has its own leadership, its own concepts and values, and its own traditions, habits and feelings. It is an organized society and there is a close cooperation and loyalty between its individuals, and it is always ready and alive to defend its existence consciously or unconsciously. It crushes all elements which seem to be dangerous to its personality.

Do not be fooled by the seemingly "liberationist" rhetorics. "Jahiliyya", as interpreted by Qutb, means no less than any society governed by man made laws. This is the central idea of Islamism- opposition to the "jahili systems", all societies and political structures that are not governed strictly by the Islamic law.

Throughout every period of human history the call toward God has had one nature. Its purpose is 'Islam', which means to bring human beings into submission to God, to free them from servitude to other human beings so that they may devote themselves to the One True God, to deliver them from the clutches of human lordship and man-made laws, value systems and traditions so that they will acknowledge the sovereignty and authority of the One True God and follow His law in all spheres of life.


This pseudo-liberationist dualist view assumes that only one society- the Islamic one- can be seen as a truly free environment, and anything that deviates from Islam is inherently oppressive, even if it is based on free and willing participation of the society members and does not involve compulsion. The very fact of a society not being Islamic is seen as inherently compulsive, as it erects various obstacles on the way to the "true freedom" in its Islamist interpretation. Therefore, the only way to free mankind- and Islamists view themselves as active liberators of entire mankind from Jahiliyya- is to physically destroy all Jahili systems:

It is not the intention of Islam to force its beliefs on people, but Islam is not merely 'belief'. As we have pointed out, Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men. Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another. When Islam releases people from this political pressure and presents to them its spiritual message, appealing to their reason, it gives them complete freedom to accept or not to accept its beliefs. However, this freedom does not mean that they can make their desires their gods, or that they can choose to remain in the servitude of other human beings, making some men lords over others. Whatever system is to be established in the world ought to be on the authority of God, deriving its laws from Him alone. Then every individual is free, under the protection of this universal system, to adopt any belief he wishes to adopt. This is the only way in which 'the religion' can be purified for God alone. The word 'religion' includes more than belief; 'religion' actually means a way of life, and in Islam this is based on belief. But in an Islamic system there is room for all kinds of people to follow their own beliefs, while obeying the laws of the country which are themselves based on the Divine authority.

As you can see, this is a radical redefinition of the concept of freedom, completely different from those offered by the Western philosophy and alien to the Western civilization at all. What Qutb says here, essentially, is that FIRST, people must be forced under an Islam based political system, and only THEN their choice of faith can be considered a free choice- as long as they comply with the Islamic society laws. It is very important to understand this point in order to realise what Bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists mean when they say they are fighting for freedom. They do not mean freedom in the Western sense. They mean freedom in Qutb's interpretation- that is, "freedom" under Islamic compulsion.

Article 6:
That's a very accurate observation. There are many striking similarities between Islamism and fascism. That is no surprise, as the Islamist thought was to a large extent influenced by European romantic nationalism, and later by Nazism and Italian fascism. Like the German fascism was born out of the collapse of German power during World war I, Islamism, too, was born out of the collapse of Muslim powers- the Ottoman empire in the Middle East and the Mogul empire in India. Both fascism and Islamism are movements advocating inherent superiority of a group of people over the rest of the world, and using it as a basis for terrotirial expansion without any pre-defined limits. I suppose a valid comparison can be drawn between the Nazi drive for absolute racial purity and the Islamist drive for absolute piety.

Moreover, during World war II the Nazi and fascist ideology were extremely popular among Muslim Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa ("No more monsieur, no more mister, in heaven Allah, on Earth Hitler", as a then popular song used to go) and had a great impact on both secular and religious thought in the region. Haj Amin AL-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time and one of the key Islamist political figures, has spent the entire World war II in Berlin, recruiting Muslim soldiers for the Nazi SS troops and developing theological foundations for anti-Semitism and racial hatred (his book "Islam und Judentum"- "Islam and Jewishness- more than qualifies for the title of Islamist Mein Kampf).

There are, of course, certain important differences, such as fascism being a secular modernist movement founded on pseudo-scientific ideas mixed with neo-Paganism and Islamism being a religious movement with neo-medieval tendencies. Fascism attempted to deal with modernity by adopting the advances of modernist thought and exploiting them for the benefits of ideology, while Islamism tends to be more on the rejectionist side, yearning for the past Golden Age rather than the all new future one.

Quoation 2: The Qur'an doesn't support anything as simple as democracy. It supports As-Shura (its not Al shura, that would be incorrect arabic), a group effort, a council to guide the people. But it also supports individual groups governing themselves.

So, though the Federal government must obey an islamic structure, there is no need to exclude minorities or other parties of people from having representative power. But, individual groups should focus their rights in their region, their soveriegn areas within the greater muslim nation, like states or pockets.

But the Shariah has been widely mis-implemented, focusing on rules rather than the underlying principles. That is the work of many anti-modernization forces, such as Wahhabism. There is no need to restrict peoples rights with law, for law is always fallible when man is to implement it. Instead, the federal government should push for freedoms, while the lower governments implement law the way they interpret it.
Coincidently, Shariah has always been picked out by bits and pieces, quoting the Qur'an and Sunnah, such that things may be out of context or misplaced. You can't just say "look here" to find a suitable definition of Shariah.