The War Against Arabs and Muslims

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Western leaders and their media never tire of insisting that the war in Afghanistan is against terrorism and not against Arabs and Muslims. Some Arab governments and intellectuals — especially those who run centers funded by the West — and some clerics who work for the sultans, or who view bin Laden as a rival leadership trying to give religion its own special interpretation, echo this insistence. But events prove these claims false, and the statements are meaningless in the face of how things have unfolded, both historically and today.

The days reveal the true intentions of the United States and its allies toward the Arab and Islamic region through the gradual designation of Arab and Islamic organizations and associations as terrorist or cooperating with terrorism. At the start of America’s campaign of revenge for what happened on its soil, the United States designated a limited number of associations as terrorist and, together with its allies, worked to freeze their assets and pursue investigations into their activities. It then began speaking of Arab and Islamic states that practice or support terrorism, in attempts to gauge Arab reactions and prepare Arab peoples and governments alike for what the coming days would bring. The circle expanded to include Lebanese and Palestinian organizations and movements, and had it not been for the sensitivity of the Pakistani leadership’s position, Pakistani parties and associations would have been declared terrorist as well. In the end the terrorism designations reached even the Al-Baraka and Al-Taqwa associations.

The coming days will see further expansion of the American list, accompanied by threats, preparation, and pressure on Arab governments to fall in line with American demands. This expansion will remain entirely consistent with the main lines of the West’s historical policy toward Arabs and Muslims, a policy built on: fragmentation, the installation of pro-Western governments, and cultural subversion.

Since the era of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Western powers have stood against Arab and Muslim unity and against their progress in every field except consumerist modernity and intelligence modernity directed against the sons of the nation; and they work against Arab-Muslim cooperation and solidarity unless it occurs at an official level designed to give people the illusion that good is coming, or that it benefits the Western states themselves. For example, Arab governments spend more on imported chocolate and biscuits than they spend on scientific research. Likewise, Arab governments cooperate far more in pursuing those who wish to wage jihad against Israel than they cooperate in mobilizing capabilities to reclaim Palestinian rights, rights that are merely spoken of in media statements.

The Western powers conspired to fragment the Arab homeland: they divided Greater Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, the Nile Valley, and North Africa; they expelled the Hashemites from Mecca so that they would not carry moral and religious weight in the holiest place in Islam, and installed some of them as agents working on their behalf; they seized Arab lands for the benefit of the nation’s enemies; they set Arab tribes against one another and spread further hatred and enmity among different groups of people; they brought in rulers who take their orders from them and carry out their policies at the expense of the peoples and their causes; they supported one party against another and stirred up numerous strifes and wars; and they pursued every person, group, or party that heralded change and the possibility of people rallying around it. They fought nationalist movements such as Nasserism, the Ba’ath, and the Arab Nationalist Movement, and invested great effort in killing the union between Syria and Egypt and in preventing the unification of Arab states. They landed forces in Lebanon to defend a regime that did not even recognize Arabism and Islam, and sent their forces into Lebanon to celebrate over the ruins of the Palestinian resistance forces, and threatened to land forces in Jordan to defend the regime against Palestinian and Syrian forces. They besieged Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Sudan, and bombed numerous states. The list of Western crimes is long, too long to count.

America and those with it are not fighting Islam alone; they are fighting Arabism as well, and are prepared to fight Arab communists or any other group should they gain enough strength to unify the Arabs, or a number of Arab states. Religion and Arabism do not mean much to them as long as they remain confined to a romantic space, revered on the pages of a worn-out history, without turning into any active dimension capable of changing the face of the Arab homeland and the Islamic world. America is prepared to support the building of mosques, to provide funds for printing copies of the Holy Qur’an, and to take part in mawlids, dhikr gatherings, and holiday celebrations. I have no doubt that the American president is prepared to fast during Ramadan — though not the whole month — to host iftar banquets, to go to Reagan Airport to bid farewell to pilgrims heading to the House of God, and to receive them on their return with a cup of Zamzam water and a date from the Holy Land. The condition is clear: Islam must remain confined to rituals and supplications, cut off from humanity’s problems in this worldly life. In other words, religion must remain exactly as the Arab rulers want it.

But none of this absolves the West and the United States of the charge of waging war on Arabs and Muslims, based on the following evidence:

First: the standard history textbooks taught in Western schools are replete with expressions of derision toward Arabs and Muslims, mockery and ridicule. This does not stop at the defeats of Arab rulers before Israel but extends into the historical and civilizational depths. It is true that some of the deeds Arabs and Muslims have done, or continue to do, are shameful, but the objectivity that requires mentioning both negatives and positives is largely absent.

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…the head [covering], marrying four wives, cutting off the hand of a thief, and beheading, to the point that the ordinary Westerner has come to interpret Islam based on these very issues. As a Muslim, I have my own reservations about the inherited interpretation regarding the head covering and marrying four wives, but I consider the focus on these particular matters to have no purpose other than maligning Islam. Western hostility from this angle has gone as far as attacking women who wear the headscarf, forcing them and their families into difficult social and psychological situations. All of France stood against a girl wearing a headscarf, casting aside everything it claims to preach about the values of freedom and democracy — the goal here is certainly not aesthetic, but civilizational.

As for the Arabs, the West focuses on their wars with Israel in order to paint them as cowardly, weak, and prone to fleeing the battlefield. To them, the Arab is gluttonous, drunk, and skilled at nothing but running away and chasing women. The same applies to their Arab-leader friends, who enjoy no respect, either officially or popularly. To Washington, the Arab leader is a model embodying Arab backwardness and preoccupation with the pursuit of appetites and pleasures.

Third: a number of the movements the West now describes as terrorist were not seen that way in earlier times; rather, they were considered Islamic movements defending human rights. It was America that supported the Islamic movements in Afghanistan, and the Muslim Brotherhood movement (from which Hamas emerged) in Jordan during the Ba’ath Party’s attempt to overthrow the king, and it sympathized with the movement during Abdel Nasser’s era; it is America that provides support to Iraqi Islamic movements to confront Saddam Hussein, and it is America that now supports Islamic movements in Afghanistan against the Taliban.

America also later fights those it once supported. It is fighting its former darlings in Afghanistan, and it will fight its current darlings in the future. It is fighting Hamas now, but it is prepared to help the Muslim Brotherhood movement, should it ask, to fight the regime in Syria or in Iraq. And it now supports the Egyptian government’s measures against the Muslim Brotherhood — the very same measures it used to condemn in the days of Abdel Nasser.

In short, America wants neither Arabism nor Islam, and is prepared to employ Arab and Islamic forces to fight one another in the service of American interests, and Arab interests generally. What matters is that Arab and Islamic regimes remain within the American orbit, even if their rule contradicts the theoretical values that Arabs speak of.

Fourth: if Islam is a religion of tolerance and love, as the United States claims, then why does it not teach it to its friends among the Arab and Muslim rulers? Arab and Islamic peoples suffer under the oppression of rulers and governments, and find from the United States nothing more than a passing mention of it in its annual human rights report. Or does Islam become a religion of tolerance only when Western interests are at risk? Arab rulers violate their peoples’ sanctities every day, in broad daylight, in full view of the Western states, and do not hesitate to issue beautiful fatwas about Islam, especially during their pilgrimages to Washington. We have never heard an American president rebuke any of these leaders for actions that violate the teachings of Islam.

Fifth: the West, and the United States in particular, is pursuing a carefully studied program to conquer the Arab homeland and the Islamic world intellectually and culturally. Some say America does not single out the Arab homeland and Muslims for this conquest but is working to conquer the whole world. Let it be so, but its actions still provoke people because they work to shatter Arab authenticity and replace Islamic culture and thought with Western culture and thought. It is true that Muslim thought is often backward, and there are Muslims who speak in the name of Islam yet, in my view, do harm to Islam and Muslims, and there are fatwas — such as some of the Taliban’s fatwas and those of Arab rulers — that push people further from Islam rather than bringing them closer to it. But the matter of developing Islamic thought and advancing Islamic culture remains a matter for Muslims themselves, not for Bush and Blair.

To reinforce its cultural conquest, the West backs its policies with research centers and associations bearing the banners of democracy, equality, and women’s liberation, whose real concern is to implant Western values at the expense of authenticity and the development built upon it. It lavishes money on these centers so that they may form leaderships for intellectual activity and cultural development that is, in many cases, hostile to Islam and Muslims. This is, of course, no secret; it is known to many intellectuals, and a number of those who profit financially from it admit that they work to erase Arab identity in favor of the identity of the Western cowboy.

What has been said above is not the flight of fancy of an intellectual; rather, it expresses the understanding that ordinary people have of Western and American policies in the Arab and Islamic countries. This understanding did not develop out of intellectual analysis or cultural hostility, but out of long experience spanning decades. There is no conviction among people generally — though not universally — that the West can be a friend, given what they have experienced of its hostile acts. Even regarding Kuwait, few people across the length and breadth of the Arab homeland doubt that America defended the Kuwaiti people out of interest. Had America no interests there, it would never have taken notice that a Kuwaiti people existed at all. This is why the cosmetic gestures made by the American president and Western leaders generally are of no use. If they wish these gestures to be of any value, all they need do is prove their friendship through practical policies sustained over a long period of time, capable of convincing the Arab and the Muslim to move past the past. But for a president to claim he is not fighting Muslims while declaring Hezbollah — considered a great symbol for Arabs and Muslims — to be terrorist, only entrenches enmity and shows no desire for the wellsprings of hatred to recede.

sattarkassem@hotmail.com

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الحرب ضد العرب والمسلمين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.