Political Islam and Religious War

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

We hear a great deal about “political Islam,” always in an alienating, unflattering context, yet we never hear of “political Christianity,” or “political Judaism,” or of political Sikhism or Buddhism. Is it Islam, then, that establishes flawed political standards, or does the flaw come from various intellectual, ideological, and religious quarters?

We have witnessed, at the global level, political capitalism and political communism, yet we have never witnessed the same alienating rhetoric directed at these currents — we have witnessed it only regarding Islam. So why should others have the right to politicize their ideas and their ways of life, and promote them, while Muslims are denied that same right?

Many amateurs of political thought — not yet intellectually mature — believe themselves great minds when they speak spitefully and contemptuously of “political Islam,” as though this Islam were the cause of every ethnic disturbance at the global level. It is regrettable that many media outlets lean the same way, believing they are spreading awareness in people’s minds so that they embrace Islamic rituals while rejecting the Islamic essence.

The Naivety of the Term

The term “political Islam” is extremely naive, never rising above the level of political adolescence. What, after all, is required of a religion, philosophy, or intellectual system that sees itself fit to be a way of life, other than that it act? Is it required merely to speak in theory, or to work at awakening human consciousness, in the hope that the system might be translated onto the ground and actually become a political, social, and economic way of life?

Did the adherents of communist and socialist thought not work to apply their ideas, leading many societies — at the global level — according to the standards of communist and socialist thought? Was the Soviet Union not built on the foundation of Marxist thought? Did other states — China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, and the states of Eastern Europe during the Soviet era — not do the very same thing?

Did Arab states — such as Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, and Syria — not adopt socialist thought, working, unsuccessfully, to apply the foundations and principles of socialism? Are there not Christian Democratic parties in Europe that contest elections and win, as happened in Germany? And what of the state of the Zionist entity?

The Zionist movement began as a nationalist one, and found no way forward except to use the Jewish religion to encourage Jews to join it and emigrate to Palestine. The Zionist movement found itself unable to expand without a religious element permeating its intellectual argument, and so Jewish clerics stood beside the Zionist movement, using their religious energies, concepts, and teachings to push Jews toward Palestine.

Now, in Palestine, the Zionist religious parties command great political power, and, very often, support the formation of one government or bring down another. Were it not for the strength of the religious parties, the current government could never have survived — the strength of the Zionist entity’s government stems, first, from the strength of the religious parties that believe Palestine is the holy land, designated for Jews alone, and that Palestinians are mere impurity and filth who must be expelled from the holy land.

As one senior cleric in the entity described them, they are mere venomous snakes that must be gotten rid of. It is these religious figures who embrace settler ideology, and it is they who push the government toward confiscating land, building thousands of settlement units, and increasing the number of settlers in the West Bank.

Yet despite the threat religious Jews pose to global and regional security and peace, we never hear of “political Judaism.” This leads us to believe that many of our media outlets, writers, and intellectuals blindly follow Western terms and labels, without recognizing the dangers these expressions carry. Western expressions invade minds and hearts, causing cultural and intellectual shifts that inflict great harm on the Palestinian cause and on Arab causes generally.

We might find an excuse for some politically adolescent minds confining politicization to Islam, but it is incomprehensible to find major writers following the same path as Western and Zionist wishes. The Zionist entity, and the colonial people of the West alike, are hostile to Islam — a hostility that did not begin with the Islamic State organization (ISIS), the Nusra Front, and al-Qaeda, even though all of them, note, took part in creating these very organizations.

All of these carry ideas and positions against Islam and Muslims, and ever since the battles of Yarmouk and Tours, they have been teaching their own children, in schools and universities, rancor and hatred toward Muslims, and their creation of terrorist organizations in Islam’s name was nothing but part of their campaign against Islam and Muslims.

Why the Term?

The West has created organizations that have done great harm to Islam’s image, deepening the negative view of Arabs and Muslims. The creators of these terrorists have proven to generations, across the breadth of the world, that the negative view found in books toward Muslims is backed by a painful reality everyone sees on television screens.

With this bleak picture the terrorist organizations have painted, it became necessary to develop suitable terms and concepts to implant a conceptually shackled awareness in people’s minds about the barbarism of Islam and Muslims. These new concepts are taken up in the media and in school curricula, becoming part of societal cultures in many countries, and Islam turns into an obscurantist, barbaric, savage religion. Many Arabs and Muslims have come to go along with these concepts, and will certainly pay their price, along with others, as the days pass.

We certainly do have a problem with jurisprudential Islam, largely confined to questions of permitted and forbidden, since Muslims have not yet developed Islamic thought, nor derived it fully from the Noble Qur’an. They pushed thinkers and theorists out of the Islamic scene from the very beginning, pursuing philosophers, declaring them unbelievers, and making life difficult for them.

The jurists monopolized the Islamic religion, turning it into a vast heap of forbidden and permitted things, going into excessive detail on human conduct until the Muslim became paralyzed in his public life, thinking of nothing but the tally of good deeds he has racked up or the tally of bad deeds pursuing him. They paralyzed him until he suffered intellectual paralysis, loss of personality, and social simple-mindedness, and boxed him in with his own actions until he came to look to other people’s standards to determine his own conduct.

The Muslim is no longer himself, but what people want him to be — a mere actor trying to apply the standards and convictions of others. For this reason, it is easy for the Muslim to be manipulated by his enemies, and easy for Islamic organizations and parties to be deceived and diverted from the goals and principles they were founded on. This is clear in the reckless religious interpretations that leave no room for a person to exercise intellectual, social, or political freedom.

The jurists have led Islam into an intellectually blind tunnel, turning it into rigid molds that accept neither the other opinion nor the other person himself, so that the religion has become racist without the racist even feeling that he is racist.

They suppressed freedoms until the Muslim became enamored of Western systems, even though Islam, intellectually, places no limits on human freedom, and considers freedom natural, a matter of creation, far broader than the concept of freedom in democracy. Freedom in Islam is the unity of the subjective and the objective, a matter requiring extensive explanation.

Religious teaching, whether at home, at school, or at university, produces a naive, simple Muslim, who monopolizes paradise, the Lord of the Worlds, and the houris, while being intellectually paralyzed, easily led, and quick to shift intellectually if he finds someone to instill a different way of thinking in him — and it was no surprise that organizations bearing Islamic labels emerged, yet doing harm to Islam, Muslims, and Arabs.

Religious War

Members of these organizations have committed hideous crimes in the name of Islam, dragging Muslims down to the abysmal level of decay we now witness. For this reason, our task now is not to deepen the negative image of Islam and Muslims, but to work at erasing the negative impressions of Islam that have accumulated at the global level.

At the same time, Islamic thought needs to be developed, and the jurists must stop declaring people unbelievers and pursuing them, so that the field remains open for free discussion, and for modernizing the Muslim mind. The Muslim mind is afflicted with rot, and must be brought out into the open air.

In this same vein, there are those who speak against religious war, wanting Muslims to remove religion from their military vocabulary. By the same token, why does American President George W. Bush have the right to describe his war on Iraq as a religious Crusade, while Hassan Nasrallah has no right to wage a war against the Zionists under the banner of the Qur’an?

Why do the Zionists have the right to wage Jewish religious wars in the name of the Lord for the sake of the Promised Land and the land of Greater Israel, while Muslims have no right to wage a war for the sake of Al-Aqsa? Some say religious war is destructive for everyone, but they have not offered any example of a war laden with roses and basil instead.

The people of the West invented this term and sold it to Arabs and Muslims, because they know the extent of Muslim resilience in combat, and know he does not turn his back and hates to be killed from behind. A single Hezbollah or Hamas fighter is capable of confronting several Zionist soldiers, and a battalion of them can defeat an armored Zionist brigade. The West wants a soldier who does not believe in his cause, has no doctrine, so that he is not resistant to defeat. They want a soldier without awareness, without a goal, without a cause, one who can easily turn and flee.

The cause of Palestine is a sacred cause at the level of Islam and at the level of Christianity, and we are required to develop religious awareness among our children, so that they understand that their holy sites are being violated, and that responsibility falls on their own necks first, before anyone else’s.

Our battles are not at the United Nations but on the ground, and we must not submit to others’ deception, letting them divert us from our own moral system, our belonging to our homeland and our holy sites, and our commitments toward our cause.

We need to renew our thinking, because intellectual revival gives rise to a practical human revival that carries us in a qualitative leap from superstition to the world of truth, and takes us out of the world of slumber and laziness into the world of vigilance and action. Our war has many facets, the religious facet foremost among them.

Al Jazeera Net

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الإسلام السياسي والحرب الدينية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.