Western Viewpoint

Even as Islamic Voice has been explaining and interpreting Islamic tenets and contextualizing the issues faced by the community, it has always reserved space for self-criticism and introspection within the community. Breaking insularity of the community is one among its objectives. However pristine one might get by attempting to be authentic and original with one’s faith and beliefs, the issues of the larger world play a dominant part in shaping the future of any community. Insularity is therefore as much a threat to a community as is the deviation from the core of its doctrines. Under the ‘Western Views’, the Islamic Voice would like to highlight such views and opinion that figure out the West’s reading of the Muslim mind, promote inter-faith understanding and lay down a road for the future.

Editor

As I have travelled the world the last two years on behalf of America’s public diplomacy, I have often met people whose faith has inspired them to do great good. I’ve met Muslim American doctors who traveled to Pakistan to help earthquake victims, Catholic nuns who helped families left homeless by mudslides in Central America, and several others. I have seen firsthand that there are people of goodwill in all faiths and cultures.


In America, people of many different faiths–and those of no faith–live side by side and try to respect each other’s views. We are not perfect, and religion is sometimes a source of division, but respect for each other’s diverse beliefs is our goal–and in the aftermath of September 11, many Christian, Jewish and Muslim Americans reached out to better understand each other.


I have found that people of all faiths have much in common. As a Christian, my highest commandments are to love God and love my neighbor–my Muslim and Jewish friends tell me the same is true for them. The open letter this fall from 138 Muslim scholars to Christian leaders expressed the exact same thought. It said love of God and love of neighbour–“the two greatest commandments”–are “an area of common ground and a link between the Qur’an, the Torah and the New Testament.”


While there are significant theological differences, ultimately, I believe the vast majority of people of every faith and culture want similar things for themselves and their families–education and health care, a safe neighborhood, a good job–and most people want their lives to make a difference, to leave our world a little better than before. These are not dreams unique to any nation or people, but shared human dreams. Despite differences of language or culture or skin colour, so much more unites us than divides us.


I have found two major misperceptions around the world. First, in many Muslim-majority nations, people worry that the war against terror is directed at them. I want to assure our friends across the world that this is not the case. Most Americans recognize that terrorists do not represent–but instead pervert–all faiths with their barbaric acts. Many of America’s citizens have roots in the Arab world; others come from virtually every culture and faith. Islam is also part of the West and several million American Muslims live, work and worship freely in the US.


The second major misperception comes from my fellow Americans. Contrary to a common perception, Muslims do speak out against terrorist violence–often and forcefully. Afghanistan‘s President Karzai has condemned suicide bombing as contrary to Islam and says terrorists “cheat children” by recruiting them. The secretary-general of the OIC speaks out strongly against terrorist acts. In Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, a leader of the “Sahwa” reform movement, sent an open letter condemning Usama bin Laden for murdering innocents: “This religion that protects the sanctity of blood–even that of the birds and animals–can never approve the killing of the innocent whatever the reasons or motives might be.”


The time has come when good people of all faiths must join together to state clearly that killing oneself in order to kill others is wrong and a matter of shame–never honour. There are many legitimate grievances in our world, but none can justify the murder of innocents.


America wants to be a partner in interfaith dialogues. We are working to highlight the many voices speaking out against terrorist violence and for greater interfaith understanding. We are encouraging conversations among cultures. In a new program called “Citizen Dialogue,” we’ve sent Muslim American citizens across the world to engage with citizens in Muslim communities. We’ve sponsored summer programs for young people, teaching respect for diversity. We’ve sent out musicians to promote tolerance and to show that differences can enrich rather than divide.


We all are part of an increasingly interconnected world that calls on us to work for peace, life, and hope. As the open letter from 138 Muslim scholars notes, “our common future is at stake” and we must “sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony.” This year, the world is celebrating the 800th anniversary of the birth of Rumi, the great Sufi poet, who wrote, “When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in their hand.” Through dialogue, we are lighting candles–and I hope their light will burn brightly across the world.


(The author has served as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2005-2007)

One of the most essential and most little known aspects of contemporary Islamism is the role of eschatological or millenarian beliefs within it. This millenarian dimension of Islam has often been minimized by commentators, sometimes for polemical reasons: Christianity is presented as the only religion that is oriented towards the beyond, whereas Islam is supposed to be characterized by strictly this-worldly preoccupations.


This forgotten dimension of the Islamist phenomenon is key to understanding the current resurgence of a triumphalist Islam, since it cuts across all the divisions within the Muslim world: between Sunnism and Shiism, between traditional Islam and contemporary Islamism. As the French historian Pierre Lory explained in a recent lecture at the Sorbonne, “Eschatology represents one of the fundamental traits of the Muslim religion. The imminence of the end of time and of the final judgment is one of the oldest and most constant Qur'anic themes and is found throughout the sacred text of Islam.” In as much as Muhammad is the last Prophet (bearing the “seal of prophecy”), his advent inaugurates the last period of universal history: i.e. the eschatological period.


In his collection of Hadith titled “The Major Signs of the End of the World from the Prophet to the Return of Jesus,” Abdallah al-Hajjaj cites a saying of the prophet, who, raising his hand, is supposed to have affirmed that his mission and the final hour were as close as his middle and index fingers. This belief in the imminence of the end of time is a fundamental aspect of the contemporary Islamic reawakening, in both its peaceful and belligerent forms.


It is sometimes suggested that only the Shia version of Islam assigns importance to eschatological considerations, and it is true that the motif of the return of the hidden Imam, the central element of Shia belief, lends itself especially easily to millenarian interpretations. Since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, millenarian aspirations have been at the center of developments in the Shia Muslim world. The belief in the imminence of the Final Judgment helps to explain both the suicidal forms of behavior that proliferated during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the current attitude of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.


The Millenarian Dimension of Sunni Islamism

But eschatology is equally a part of Sunni Islam and it has played a central role in the development of Islamist movements of Sunni inspiration. All the various components of contemporary Islamism from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to the nebulous al-Qaida network share the hope of seeing the Islamic caliphate reestablished and consider the “renewal of Islam” to be the manifest sign of the truth of the prophecies concerning the final victory of Islam and its propagation throughout the world.


As an example, we can cite here the following fatwa of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most important ideologues of the Islamist movement and the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research:


The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?” He answered: “The city of Hirqil will be conquered first’ that is, Constantinople. . . . Romiyya is the city called today “Rome,” the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens. (Cited from MEMRI Special Dispatch, no. 447.)


It would be easy, of course, to dismiss out of hand such a prophecy about the conquest of Rome, considering it to be no worthier of serious consideration than the prophecies of Nostradamus. But this would be to miss the point. What is important is not to take seriously the prophecies of Muhammad reported in the Hadith, but rather to recognize the significance that Muslims themselves could attach to them. Ever since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, has been convinced that it incarnates the renewal of Islam and that its role is to hoist the flag of Islam across the five continents. To present the Muslim Brothers as an example of “moderate Islamism” thus amounts to denying the most deeply-held convictions of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood themselves.


(*Eschatology is any system of doctrine that pertains to last or final matters such as death, judgement or future state. It also applies to the branch of theology that deals with the final days of humanity etc.)


Paul Landau is the author of the recent study of Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood “Le sabre et le Coran” (Editions du Rocher, 2005). The above article was translated from French by John Rosenthal.