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In
response to the dastardly attack on America’s homeland on
September 11th, Americans are beginning to ask, “What have we
done? Why would anybody want to do this to us?” In
the immediate aftermath at this writing the media have not yet
responded to this inevitable inquiry. The political leaders
must first respond to the anger of the American public.
The
American government must respond by action, not by words, and by
action that will make a difference, not by dropping a few bombs to
show that we are a powerful country and cannot be intimidated.
We are facing not an isolated incident, but a new era of
threat.
Our
response must be part of a long-term strategy to address the fact
that we now are living in an era when weapons of mass destruction,
especially chemical and biological agents, can be delivered to
America’s homeland, despite the best efforts to defend against
them. Perpetrators of
mass-destructive terrorism now have access to technologies
superior to those of even the most powerful governments, because
private-sector technologies are superior and these technologies
are for sale in a globalized world.
Most
importantly, we are facing an opponent who cannot be deterred, as
was the Soviet Union for half a century, an enemy who welcomes
death and for whom even the blowback of biological warfare is not
self-deterring.
The
new era of American vulnerability to massive destruction by
terrorists challenges us to graduate from our Maginot line
mentality, which simply assumed that our actions abroad are too
far away to risk retaliation against American cities.
And we must recognize that terrorists have access not only
to all the money necessary for sophisticated operations, but to
the creative genius of desperate people, who introduced fuel-laden
commercial airliners as a new, though only interim, weapon of mass
destruction.
The
greatest challenge to our commitment, courage and creativity lies
not in enforcing stability through military might, which can never
succeed in the long run, but in building security through foreign
policies that address the roots of terrorism.
Since the modern era of global terrorism is a long-term
phenomenon, the policies to undercut or eliminate its causes must
be long-term. Our
success will come only from a commitment to promote justice as the
root of stability, and from the courage to change any policies
that may have political support in Congress but nevertheless may
increasingly threaten the American people with mass destruction.
America’s
bizarre complicity in the genocidal destruction of Chechnia, its
tacit support of India’s incredibly brutal occupation of
Kashmir, its passivity in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, and even
America’s insistence on zero casualties in stopping the ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo all contribute to the terrorist mentality that
is growing all over the world.
Most
challenging to American policy-makers, however, is the support
given to the Zionist enterprise in the Holy Land.
Anti-American movements are motivated primarily by active
U.S. support of secularized and xenophobic Zionism, which has
abandoned the spiritual essence of the Judaic religion revealed
anew by Prophet Isa (pbuh), Jesus the Christ.
This is compounded by the knee-jerk reactions of American
policy-makers against opponents of Zionism, the so-called rogue
states, and by American efforts to control countries in the Middle
East that in the future might give tacit or active support to a
coalition against Israel.
Unfortunately,
at least until recently, few Americans have been aware that the
menace of terrorism is growing.
And fewer still are aware of the fact that their own
government has been a major cause.
American
naiveté about the threat has been dispelled, probably
permanently, by the spectacularly successful attack on the twin
towers of the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon.
These are the primary financial and military symbols of
what many in the world consider to be American policies to control
the world and to maintain or promote the rampant injustices from
which they are suffering. The
political symbols fortunately remain, but for how long?
Although
Americans have had the first wake-up call about the threat, they
are still innocent about the causes.
The naiveté about the role of American policy-makers and
of the strategic think tanks that guide them in alienating opinion
leaders and billions of people around the world cannot continue
for long. Some
Americans are already asking, why?
When they learn why, they will ask why American politicians
are willing to expose American civilians to the threat of mass
destruction. Our rude
entry on September 11th into the era of unconventional,
global warfare with weapons of mass destruction has posed
questions that must be and will be answered.
The prosperity and even the survival of Americans will
depend on the commitment, courage, and creativity of America’s
opinion makers and political leaders in addressing these questions
and in finding and acting on the right answers.
The
Challenge to the Muslim Umma
Muslims
have an even greater challenge, because they must address and
overcome the terrorist mentality in their own global community,
which has been moving in recent years from the fringes to the
mainstream.
Many
Muslims reacted with mixed emotions to the image of thousands of
innocent people falling to their deaths in the two giant symbols
of America’s financial power, and had no emotions in reaction to
the bombing of the seat of America’s military might.
Many Muslims sub-consciously or silently believe that a
violent response to the perceived injustices in the world is the
only response. Few
are aware of this premise underlying their own thinking.
And among those few, very few are willing to admit it
openly. This is the
emotional underpinning of global terrorism.
Among
Muslims, as well as among radicalized non-Muslims, the ideological
underpinning for the blind resort to violence is being laid by
some brilliant intellectuals who use Islam as a front and as a
tool of their own evil madness.
Their message is that violent response to injustices is not
only inevitable but preferable.
In other words, their message is that global terrorism is
not blind.
Perhaps
the most evilly brilliant is a certain non-Muslim who has visited
eighty countries during the past ten years studying the dynamics
of globalization and spreading his message of hatred in a
wide-reaching network. Like
Salman Rushdie before him, this person is so brilliant in
manipulating the human mind that the only adequate adjective to
describe him is “satanic.”
His informal network includes people and institutions as
unlikely as the Israeli embassy in Washington D. C., which likes
to exploit his caricature of Islam, but his target are the
idealistic but misled Muslims who claim to be Islamic but de facto
ascribe all power to materialistic forces, political, economic,
and military. This,
of course, is the very opposite of the divine message revealed in
every one of the world religions.
On
September 10th 2001, the day before the attacks on the
symbols of American power, this person sent by e-mail a brilliant
justification of global terrorism as both inevitable and
essential. His
e-mailed article, entitled “Israel in Retreat and
Disintegration: The Rise of Islam, Unconventional War, and the
World Economy,” propagated his parody of Islam as the perfect
religion of terrorism and war.
His thesis is that Muslims will control the world precisely
because they recognize the alleged reality that all change
historically has and must come from violence.
This
alleged reality is his first basic premise, presented on page 8 of
his call to arms. “War,”
he writes, “is the most important behavior in the human
condition,” because “war, despite its horror and destruction,
is the great and illustrious touchstone of humanity which compels
people to identify what is real and what is illusory [and to
recognize that] change can take place only through violence and
war.” He has driven
home this basic premise in every one of the many articles and
monographs that he has disseminated during the past four years,
sometimes to an enthusiastic audience.
His
second basic premise, stated on page 6, is that, “While all
religious faiths are underpinned with the uncontrollable forces of
revolution and war, Islam appears to be the religion that gives
these forces greater power or a greater sense of what is possible.
Islam offers inspiration.”
This
definitional assertion that Islam is by nature warlike and even
proudly so places him at the furthest end of one extreme in the
spectrum from evil to good. His
approach to reality is the distilled essence of evil.
His genius lies in his power to make this attractive to
Muslims, just as Hitler and Heinrich Himmler did for the Germans
earlier in the last century.
The
real threat facing America is not the technicians who can master
the intricacies of modern weapons but the intellectual leaders who
exploit the frustrations of the hundreds of millions of people
around the world whose desperation has overcome their reason.
These include not only the Muslims under Israeli occupation
and those under the boot of secular, so-called moderate regimes in
the Middle East allied with the United States, but especially the
Muslims on the periphery of the Muslim world in the so-called
“ring of fire.” These
are seeking self-determination and liberation from the Russian,
Chinese, and Indian empires, which conquered them in the period of
Muslim weakness. Without
intellectual leaders who offer salvation the perpetrators of evil
cannot sustain any movement.
Without the intellectual leaders, the Osama bin Ladens
would be impotent.
Hypocrisy
A
tragedy perhaps even greater than the murder of thousands of
innocents in the World Trade Center is the wide-spread tendency,
especially among Muslims, to judge America only by its role as a
“national security state” and as the producer of media,
especially films and TV, that affront the sensibilities of moral
people everywhere. This
continuing media blitz is attacked as blatant and craven worship
of idols, especially the false gods of power, prestige, pleasure,
and plutocracy. Yet
nowhere are the American media more worshipped than in the Muslim
world. Of course,
this vulnerability of Muslims to such decadence is one reason why
the fanatics are convinced that even Armageddon is preferable to
continuation of the status quo.
Feeding
this hypocrisy are disenchanted American intellectuals who attack
the sincerity of America’s founders and conclude that the entire
basis of the great American experiment in governance based on
divine revelation and natural law is a sham.
Thomas Jefferson taught that freedom in any society can
survive only if the people are educated, that education consists
primarily in teaching virtue, and that virtue can have meaning and
motivation only if rooted in recognition of a higher authority
than any individual person or human collectivity.
He spent his life enlivening the message of all the
prophets that human happiness can come only from reliance on the
divine mercy and guidance that surpass human understanding.
Yet the iconoclasts in American academia, and their puppets
in the media, discount the authenticity of Jefferson’s message
because he did not practice what he preached.
This
malevolent skepticism is mirrored by billions of persons around
the world who see the enormous good and good will that America has
offered to those in need, but conclude that it all must have a
hidden agenda of global conquest.
The Marshall Plan in 1947 was instrumental in rebuilding
Europe, yet the skeptics insist that its only purpose was to
combat Communism. The
Point Four program was inaugurated to promote economic prosperity
in the Third World, and the Peace Corps was launched by President
Kennedy to provide an outlet for America’s idealistic youth.
Yet the same people who come to America for education and
career opportunities sometimes take the lead in trashing
everything that Americans have done selflessly to help others.
Unfortunately,
the cold-blooded strategists who prosper in the Washington
political environment sometimes regard America’s philanthropy
and advocacy of freedom and democracy as mere window-dressing for
the real agenda, which is to secure the status quo in the world,
with all of its injustices. For
a century, from the inspiring campaigns of the populist William
Jennings Bryan, who failed three times as the Democrats’
presidential nominee at the turn of the last century, until the
presidency of George W. Bush at the beginning of the present
century, the very word justice was absent from the American
foreign policy lexicon. It
has returned, at least in the mind of the president, but
apparently has not penetrated the circles around him.
Hypocrisy
and both apathetic and radical nihilism are contagious diseases.
They spread to their victims and back again to their
originators. Eventually
one cannot distinguish between cause and effect.
On a global scale this is the pandemic that led up to the
attack on the symbols of American power on September 11th
and, in a vicious circle, may lead to more of the same.
Strategic
Response
Response
to the intellectual threat and to the emotional blindness of those
who think America can do no good is the responsibility primarily
of the world’s intellectual and spiritual leaders.
Muslims, especially, must put their own house in order
before they can credibly criticize others.
Some
of the opinion leaders in the Muslim umma talk glibly about
founding think tanks, but without any idea of why, what, or how.
They are narcissistic to the extent of conceiving that a
Muslim think tank should address only issues that directly concern
Muslims. They treat
Islam as a special-interest group rather than as a universal
religion divinely revealed to bring balance in our stewardship of
the earth, mercy to the poor, justice to all, and wisdom to the
powerful.
One
function of think tanks is to explore and evaluate different
options for action. For
example, spiritually aware people, which Muslims generally claim
to be, should consider satyagraha and the man who made it
respectable. The
would-be financiers of Muslim think tanks have never heard of the
man who probably is the twentieth century’s greatest Muslim
mujahid or warrior, the Badshah Khan of the Northwest Frontier
Province located at the pivot of Asia in what is now Pakistan.
His life as a leader of the war-like Pathans is recounted
in Eknath Easwaran’s book, A Man to Match His Mountains:
Badshah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam (Nilgiri Press,
1984), 240 pages.
Mahatma
Gandhi stated that without Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Badshah, his
own liberation mission against British occupation of India could
never have succeeded. The
Mahatma taught that passive resistance by the weak is weakness,
but non-violent resistance by those who have proven themselves
through armed combat in reliance on spiritual power can be
stronger than any opposing force, because this force, which Gandhi
called satyagraha, is not passive and can be irresistable.
In
the spring of 1930, the inhabitants of Peshawar protested the
arrest of some of the Badshah’s lieutenants by declaring a
general strike and massing in the town center, the Kissa Khani
Bazaar. The British
troops fired at the crowd, which refused to leave.
More volleys ensued, but the Badshah’s followers, who had
been trained in his army of spiritual power, the Khudai
Khidmatgars, stood their ground as one front row fell to the
bullets only to be followed by another front row of people who
moved up to replace them. According
to the account of this decisive battle by Gene Sharp of Harvard,
“When those in the front fell down wounded by the shots, those
behind came forward with their breasts bared and exposed
themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as
21 bullet wounds in their bodies.”
According to the official view, “this state of things
continued from 11 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon.”
When some of the elite Indian troops in the British army
refused to fire any more, they were hand-cuffed, and imprisoned,
and one was sentenced to banishment in an overseas penal colony
for life.
The
impact of this daring battle of non-violence was so great in
Britain that some historians say it spelled the death-knell of the
entire British Empire. Could
such a strategy produce the same affect on Americans today?
Unfortunately, almost no Muslims nowadays remember the
Badshah Khan and, even if they did, few would take his satyagraha
or spiritual power seriously.
The
Jihad al Kabir
In
Islam there are three kinds of Jihad.
The first two are found in the hadith or history of the
sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
These are the Jihad al Akbar or greatest Jihad, which is
the struggle to overcome one’s unruly self.
The second is the lesser Jihad, the Jihad al saghir or
asghar, which is the armed battle to defend the human rights of
one’s own people and of people everywhere.
The third Jihad, mentioned only by the word of God in the
Qur’an, is the Jihad al Kabir or Great Jihad.
This Jihad is called for in the exhortation wa jihidhum
bihi jihadan kabiran, which means “struggle with it [divine
revelation] in a great struggle.”
This is the intellectual Jihad, which normally follows the
first two.
In
the modern era, when the instinct to defend oneself with armed
force can be self-defeating, the call to a great Jihad requires
Muslim intellectuals to counter the impending clash of
civilizations by providing the intellectual basis for cooperation
among civilizations in the articulation of common principles and
the pursuit of common goals.
The
scholars of Islam have a four-fold task, which is to: 1) develop a
framework of thought consistent with the universal principles of
classical America’s founders and of the classical scholars of
Islam (every one of whom was imprisoned for daring to say that the
emperor has no clothes); 2) address the major issues of conscience
in the world within the framework of these principles, known to
Muslims as the maqasid al shari’ah; 3) enlist the leaders of
interfaith dialogue, without which there can be no real
civilizational cooperation and renewal; and 4) from this position
of strength, engage the deep but destructive thinkers, who
otherwise will develop a counter-culture on their own, cut off
from the perennial wisdom that produces civilization.
The challenge to the Muslim umma or community worldwide is
nothing less than to mount a movement of global civilizational
renewal at a time when the barbarians are not only at the gates of
civilization but entrenching themselves inside.
Both
Muslims and those of all the world religions should take heart in
the reminder by the Archbishop of Canterbury on September 13th
that the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor is still “shining
brightly as ever.” He
concluded his message to the American people, however, with the
profound warning that “the tree of liberty must be planted in
the soil of justice.”
Dr.
Robert Dickson Crane is president of the Islamic Institute for
Strategic Studies. His
works include “The Muslim Challenge in America and the World,”
35 pp. and “The Grand Strategy of Justice,” 83 pp., both are
selected policy papers. His
books include Planning the Future of Saudi Arabia (Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, CBS, 1978) and Shaping the Future:
Challenge and Response (Tapestry Press, 1997).
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