Extremists Put Own Twist on Faith

What kind of religion is this? How can Islam be used to justify both peace and war?

The recent terrorist attacks, which authorities have blamed on Islamic extremists, have highlighted the tensions and contradictions in the practices of the world’s 1 billion Muslims. Muslim leaders quote Koranic verses against aggression, while Osama bin Laden ignores such commands and cites other exhortations in the book to slay the infidels. Muslim women have ruled countries like Pakistan, while the Taliban of Afghanistan denies them the right to work or attend school.

The religion has produced world empires, a civilization of stunning beauty and a theology of peace and submission to God. But it is also plagued with images of ruthless jihadi warriors, chopped-off hands, forced conversions--and now, hijacked airplanes blasting into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Since the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, diverse Islamic practices have flourished in the absence of a central religious authority. Extremist ideology has flourished as well.

“The crumbling of the Islamic civilization has removed the established institutions to seriously challenge the extremists,” said Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA acting professor of Islamic law. “Extremists have always been there in the Islamic tradition, but they tend to be very powerful when the institutions of society weaken and crumble.”

Most Muslims--and non-Muslim experts on Islam--are quick to say that extremists are distorting the faith and violating its fundamental principles of peace for political gain.

“Nothing in the Koran, Islamic theology or Islamic law in any way, shape or form justifies ramming two airliners into civilian buildings,” said Hamid Dabashi, chairman of the Middle Eastern languages and culture department at Columbia University. “In every great religious tradition, you can launch the most humanistic, loving ideas, or the most violent terrorist actions.”

He and others say Islam is no more inherently violent than Christianity, which produced followers who carried out brutal campaigns of extermination during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Violence in Northern Ireland between Roman Catholics and Protestants is not a product of the religion, experts note. Judaism did not produce the strife in Israel, any more than Hinduism is at fault for fundamentalist violence against Christians in India.

But Dabashi and other experts said the Islamic religious texts lend themselves to manipulation by extremists because they are filled with fiery references to war, exhortations to fight oppression and mandates to mobilize against the enemy.

In the Koran’s ninth chapter and fifth verse, for instance, Muslims are exhorted to “fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them. And seize them and beleaguer them and lie in wait for them,” according to an English translation. (The passage also instructs that Muslims must embrace those who repent, “for Allah is oft-forgiving, most merciful.” And, in other verses, Christians and Jews are explicitly exempted from attack, embraced as kindred “people of the book” qualified for paradise.)

The militant verses are a product of the times in which the faith emerged in the Arabian desert almost 1,400 years ago. The leading city of Mecca was in chaos, with drunken orgies, a scarcity of goods, political deadlock and a prevailing religion of animistic polytheism, according to Huston Smith, a scholar of world religions.

The man who would later be called the prophet of God and challenge the Meccan corruption was born about AD 570, orphaned at an early age and named Muhammad--”the highly praised.” He is regarded as a descendant of Ishmael, linking Islam with Judaism and Christianity as one of the three great monotheistic faiths stemming from Abraham, Ishmael’s father.

Muhammad became a trader known for his honesty and integrity. He was a believer in one God and would often retire to a cave to meditate. At about age 40, the event that would change the world occurred: According to Islamic belief, the angel Gabriel visited Muhammad while he was meditating, told him that God, or Allah, had chosen him as a messenger and revealed to him the first few words of the Koran.

Over the next several years, Muslims believe, the entire holy book would be revealed to Muhammad and form the scriptural basis of the faith, along with a collection of more than 100,000 accounts of the prophet’s words and actions, known as hadith.

In a climate of widespread inequity and idolatry, Islam was a revolutionary message of equality, justice and peace. It also featured several militant scriptures--particularly after Muhammad moved to Medina to escape a death plot hatched against him by the Meccan elites in 622. For the last 10 years of his life, he and his band of Muslims battled relentlessly to establish their faith against the Meccan establishment and other Arab tribes. The Koran and hadith reflect their environment, with numerous verses urging them to fight for Allah.

“Islam naturally includes a lot more material in its most classic, basic sources that are militant because that is the world they lived in--a world of successful military campaigns,” said Reuven Firestone, a professor of medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and USC.

The Islamic sacred texts not only include exhortations to fight, they also lay out detailed rules of engagement. Experts say the terrorists broke every rule in the Islamic sacred books. The tradition expressly prohibits the killing of noncombatants: women, children, the aged, hermits, even trees. It forbids suicide. It even requires notice before attack.

Sheik Yusuf al Qaradawi of Qatar, in a condemnation of the attacks as a “grave sin,” cited a hadith in which Muhammad sees a woman killed in the battlefield and condemns the action. The Egyptian-born Qaradawi, one of Islam’s most influential authorities, also said that even if the terrorists were driven by anger over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it was not permissible under Islam to shift the confrontation outside the region.

The Islamic rules of engagement, however, seem to be lost on the terrorists. UCLA scholar Abou El Fadl has closely analyzed the religious references used in the literature and speeches of extremists, including a year-old interview with Bin Laden rebroadcast last week on an Arabic TV channel.

He said the Saudi-born militant heavily focused on the Koranic verses about fighting oppression and that he asked, “What greater oppression is there than the American imperialist forces within driving distance of the holy shrines?” That was a reference to U.S. forces that have been stationed in Saudi Arabia in the decade since the Gulf War.

Bin Laden told the interviewer from the Al Jazeera network that the holy shrines were under occupation by infidel forces who were spreading AIDS in the holy land, and he cited Koranic verses conveying God’s permission for victims of injustice to throw off the yoke of oppression, according to Abou El Fadl.

The extremist leader appears to have memorized several Koranic verses, and cited them selectively and incompletely, but with calm and confidence, Abou El Fadl said. In the interview, Bin Laden dismissed as inauthentic the more spiritual Islamic traditions that the highest jihad is an internal struggle to purify the heart, not a fight against unbelievers. When the interviewer presented him with opinions by Muslim jurists against killing noncombatants, Bin Laden implied that they had been co-opted by corrupt governments, Abou El Fadl said.

And when Bin Laden cited a Koranic verse about fighting infidels, he left out the part requiring Muslims to seek peace if opponents do. Abou El Fadl said that all Islamic scriptures on waging war are tempered by the command not to commit transgressions but that extremists ignore it.

“Unless you know the Koran, you will not be able to say, ‘Wait a minute, where’s the rest?’ ” Abou El Fadl said. “Bin Laden speaks in a way that if you’re not already steeped in the tradition, you would not think that there was any other possible interpretation. You’re talking about an aura.”

The UCLA scholar, who has written extensively on extremism and, growing up in the Mideast, personally debated radicals, said their common justification is that Islam is so endangered that the war to save it must be won by any means. Only after that, these radicals suggest, can Islamic ideals of mercy and justice be applied, Abou El Fadl said.

Columbia University’s Dabashi said that examining religion as a factor in terrorism was a red herring, since extremists are waging a political struggle against the perceived effects of colonialism and simply veiling the effort in the language of God. But Abou El Fadl disagreed.

“Of course religion influences this,” Abou El Fadl said. “It gives you a sense of empowerment, entitlement and self-righteousness.

“Extremist theology,” he added, “is a combustible brew of puritanism, ethical and moral irresponsibility and rampant apologetics.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Articles of the Faiths

Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe in one God. The three monotheistic religions are known as Abrahamic faiths because they trace their heritage to Abraham, a biblical patriarch.

Islam

Laws and guidance

The Koran is Islam’s holy book. Transmitted to the prophet by the angel Gabriel, the Koran (meaning recitation) is viewed as the culmination of God’s revelation, continuing the revelations found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

*

God’s representative on Earth

The prophet Muhammad, born about AD 570, was God’s messenger. The Arabic term for God is “Allah.” Jesus is viewed as a prophet but not divine.

*

Practice of values

There are five “pillars of Islam,” which followers are expected to observe:

(1) the creed: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet”; (2) praying five times daily; (3) charity; (4) observance of the holy month of Ramadan; and (5) pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one’s lifetime if one is physically able. Muslims believe in repaying evil with good, unless one is physically attacked. Self-defense, either by an individual or society, is permitted.

*

Judgment and afterlife

Muslims believe in a final judgment of God, when all humans will be held accountable for their deeds and intentions in life.

Christianity

Laws and guidance

Scriptures are composed of the Hebrew scriptures, called by Christians the Old Testament, and the New Testament, which recounts the life and teaching of Jesus, the apostles and the early church. Christians follow the Ten Commandments.

*

God’s representative on Earth

Christians believe that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah and son of God who was both fully God and fully human.

*

Practice of values

Good works are emphasized in the here and now, including loving one’s neighbor as oneself. But different churches place different emphasis on the role that good deeds play in a believer’s salvation. Jesus’ admonition to “turn the other cheek” has been variously interpreted by different churches, resulting in differing degrees of pacifism. Just war is generally permitted.

*

Judgment and afterlife

Christians believe in a last judgment by God. Those who believe in Jesus as the son of God and savior of the world will, by God’s grace, receive eternal life. Interpretations of hell vary, from a real place of unending pain, to being forever without God.

Judaism

Laws and guidance

Religious life is guided by Scriptures, including the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible. Biblical laws are followed, chief among them the Ten Commandments, along with rabbinical teachings.

*

God’s representative on Earth

Traditional Jews await the coming of the Messiah. The expected messiah is not seen as divine. More liberal Jews look for a messianic age rather than a personal messiah, brought about by human goodness.

*

Practice of values

Jews are obligated to fight injustice and immorality. Self-defense is morally imperative. Revenge, as opposed to justice, is immoral.

*

Judgment and afterlife

Views differ within Judaism about an afterlife or final judgment by God. Many see judgment day as occurring in the present life: Every year at Yom Kippur, Jews make amends and ask forgiveness to restore relations with others. By being reconciled with each other, Jews are reconciled with God.