essay
Islam,
My Islam
I gave
the Anglican Church a try. Pretty
close to perfect attendance every
Sunday for about six months. One
of the
priests (there were three) was a woman.
It seemed, on my part, a very Christian act to endure what
I considered
to be a near-blasphemous (all right, a completely
blasphemous) reality:
a woman ordained as a Minister of God delivering a sermon. My cross to bear (nyuck
nyuck nyuck). One
among many as it turned out. For
every exhilarating surprise among the
hymns (“Holy, Holy, Holy”—where on earth
did I remember that one from?)
there would be a half dozen that made me wish I’d brought my
own crucifix or
vial of holy water (Get back! All of you!
I’m not afraid to use these!).
The break point for me came, ultimately, over communion. I tried to stay as
open-minded as I could as
everyone else filed up to the front to indulge in a little metaphorical
cannibalism, reminded myself and reminded myself of the undoubted
validity of
the ritual, prayed my own prayer and tried (in vain) to ignore the fact
that
communion occurred only in the somewhat (to me, anyway) ambiguous
Synoptic
Gospels (the Jesus of John’s Gospel
washes the feet of his disciples: no
transubstantiation ritual). But
mostly I
just sat there being very, very, very resentful on
behalf of the
Jews. The Jews with
their
strict/stricter/so strict you could plotz dietary
laws (No. Blood. “For
the blood is the life thereof.”)
And
yet…and yet!…for centuries
upon centuries the Christians had accused the
Sons of Jacob of holding secret rituals where they devoured the flesh
and blood
of Christian babies. And
there
the…goyim…were: up at the front—waiting
their turn to nosh on Baby Jesus Bits.
Oy
gevalt.
That was the break point. There were smaller straws
that didn’t in
themselves break the camel’s back but
which sure put a kink in his
hump. The
sparseness of the scriptural
readings, for one. One
from the Torah
(excuse me, the Old Testament) and one from the
New Testament. One
chapter or one Psalm, usually (Psalms? What are they reading from
the Psalms
for? Oh, right. Jesus’
Great-Great- Great-to-the-ninth-power
grandfather: “Iesus,
thou sonne of
Dauid.”). Chapter
three from Prophet A
this week. Chapter
nine from Prophet
X—who had lived five hundred years prior or subsequent to
Prophet A—the next
week. How do you
say “whiplash” in
Hebrew? I’d
go home and read Isaiah.
Takes about six or seven hours.
Scripture, to me, is a meal, not a snack.
Put away the Baby Jesus Bits and read
something all the way through,
f’cryin’ out loud.
I’m making mock here, I freely admit it
and I freely confess that that is a very bad thing for me to be doing. It sure
isn’t because I lack respect for
Jesus or his revelation to the world.
Exactly the opposite.
Whatever
fault I find with the various Christian churches and denominations, Jim
and
Tammy Faye Bakker, Creflow Dollar
(you
think I’m making that name up.
Check him
out on your local faith channel sometime)—and it seems more
difficult each day
to find any modern-day incarnation of Christianity
that I don’t find
completely abhorrent—still,
Bottom Line:
Jesus got nailed to two really, really big
pieces of wood with three really, really big spikes.
And there wasn’t a moment in the last years
of his life that he had any illusions but that that was exactly
what he
was headed for on his way to somewhere nicer.
Even allowing for the fact that there would have been
voices in his head
assuring him everything was going to be okay,
the “fix is in” (or whatever it was
that They) (back in the Age of
Prophets which I believe ended with death of Muhammad in 632) (told
someone who
had been selected to be one of God’s
Messengers)…voices that (allowed
him? encouraged him? compelled
him?) to keep moving, one foot in
front of the other, on the straight and narrow path…even
allowing for the Existence
Of and the Reassurance Provided
By those
voices…there was (evidently) also no shortage of voices and faces
that
would come leering out of the jostling awe-stricken crowds,
“Iesus, thou sonne
of Iesse…aren’t thou come before thy
time?” Attempting
to sow doubt and fear about the
central reality of his own task, the central reality of his own nature,
the
central reality by which he must needs keep moving, one foot in front
of the
other, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, month-by-month,
year-by-year, on the straight and narrow path to those two really,
really big
pieces of wood and those three really, really big spikes.
Courage?
There isn’t a word large enough to describe that
kind of courage. Faith?
There isn’t a word large enough to describe that
kind of faith. Which
is why I find so much of the subsequent
Christian…navel-gazing…both inexplicable and
appalling. ‘Was
Jesus God?” “Was
he the Son of God?” “Was
he half-human and half-God?”
“How much was he human and how much was he
God?”
What are you talking about? You have a documented
record of The Single
Greatest Combined Act of Courage and Faith ever enacted by
a… “I think all us
Church Leaders should get together in Nicae and vote on this, so we can
come up
with a definitive answer as to how much he was human and how much he
was God.”
VOTE on it? VOTE? On it? “Yeah.
It’s three hundred and twenty-five
years later and it’s really getting to be a problem. Inquiring minds want to
know.”
Vote. On
it. What a
perfectly…goyish…thing to do.
Jesus had such absolute and unshakeable faith in what he
was doing,
in what he was told to do that he kept moving in a
straight line for
years knowing that he was going to get big spikes
driven through his
wrists into a big piece of wood and another big spike driven through
his ankles
into another piece of wood and he was going to get hauled aloft with
only the
splintered remains of his wrists and the splintered remains of his
ankles to
support his entire weight until
he died from the sheer,
physically crushing burden of…
“Right now it looks as if
‘Triune God’ is
going to win out. We’re
just putting the
finishing touches on the winning
declaration.”
Courage. And Faith. That’s
it, to
me. The rest of
what has been attached
to it over the last two millennia…as you can
see…makes it very difficult for me
to contemplate The Courage and The Faith without making jokes about the
(to me?
frankly? Appalling) sideshow which has attached
itself to Them.
The Koran assures us that Jesus did not die on the cross. A substitute sacrifice
died on the
cross—metaphorically like the Ram with its horns caught in a
thicket which was
given to Abraham to sacrifice in place of his son, Isaac (which event,
the
Koran also assures us, happened with Ishmael,
Abraham’s son by his
wife’s Egyptian slave, Hagar, and not Isaac, his second son,
whose mother was
Sarah. The not-unconvincing Islamic case? That even in Genesis, Abraham
is
instructed to sacrifice “thine onely
sonne”. Given that only
Ishmael could ever be accurately described as Abraham’s
“only son”—and was
indisputably so until he was fourteen—and that Isaac could
only realistically
be described as Abraham’s second son or one
of his two sons…as
I say, the case is not unconvincing).
The Koran also assures us (repeatedly) that the resolution
of these
disputes between the Torah, the Gospels (The Evangel as it is called in
the
Koran) and the Koran will be made plain in the next world.
On the offhand chance they let me in, I’m
bringing a notebook full of
questions with me.
Not being a Jew (for more on this see my essay,
“Jew”, in Cerebus 269)
and not looking remotely Jewish (I’m about as goy-looking as
you can get
without wearing a Wonder Bread t-shirt),
I couldn’t picture myself going into a synagogue
to pray once it became
obvious to me that I would not be going back to the Anglican
Church. I have my
own prayer that I
wrote (running time: 10 mins.). I always pictured the
rabbi—or whoever would be
in there—looking over at the goy (who wouldn’t look
out of place in a Wonder
Bread t-shirt) on his knees praying and that (whoever they were) they
couldn’t
help but think that I’m probably praying
for the souls of all these
Christ Killers: that God should please send a big bolt of lightning
that would
cause them all to die on the spot and go straight to hell, thus making
the
world safe for all us good and decent devourers of Baby Jesus Bits,
Amen. And, really,
who could blame them for
thinking that? It’s
not as if I would be
the first, by any stretch of the imagination. And wouldn’t
they have a right
to be suspicious? I
mean, I do mention
Jesus and Muhammad in my prayer, you know, favourably.
Very favourably.
[I thought of writing out my prayer when I was going to
the Anglican
Church and saying to the senior priest, sort of, “Say, is it
okay by you if I
pray this prayer in here?”
But then I
thought, what business is it of his?
This is between me and God.
And
then I thought, well, yeah, but this guy was obviously tight with the
whole
Anglican thing when I was still getting my theology
out of Foolbert
Sturgeon’s New Adventures of Jesus and Jesus
Joins the Armed Services
comic books. And
it is
an Anglican Church. Paid
for by Anglican
worshippers with a handy book of Anglican rules and regulations right
there in
every pew. And I
did mention the Koran
to him in one of those “Thanks for coming out” en
passé deals after one
service and he definitely got that gastric upset look on his face that
Margaret
Thatcher perfected back in the 1980s.
What if he has to send my prayer to “head
office” for approval and it
comes back full of deletions? What
if he
says, “What’s wrong with the lord’s
Prayer?” I
mean there’s a can of worms. “I’m
sorry, father, I just can’t ask God to
‘lead us not into temptation’.
What sort
of an awful thing is that to say to God?
When has God ever led anyone
into temptation? Does
that sound to you like something
God would do?” And
then I figured we’d
get into a big ruckus over the Synoptic Gospels
and…well…I just prayed my
prayer. But, as
casual as I tried to be
about it, there was a definite illicit quality to thanking God for His
Glorious
Koran while kneeling in an Anglican Church.
So I thought the same thing about the synagogue. Excuse me, rabbi? Is it okay by you if I
pray this prayer in
here?
It starts off good: Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy (the goy names for the Books of
Moses)
followed by Moses, Peace Be Upon Him (so maybe the rabbi
doesn’t get out much
and he wouldn’t recognize the “Peace be upon
him” as being Islamic, nu?)…all
the way down to Malachi (I won’t bore you with the whole list
of The Books of
the Prophets, I’m
sure you know them as
well as I do). I
pictured the rabbi
pointing to Malachi. “Tell
you what,
Wonder Bread, howzabout you call it a day when you get this far and
then beat
it the hell out of here?”
Worst-case scenario?
Nono. The worst-case scenario would be
finding myself in a
synagogue that turns out to be one of those new, improved, modern
synagogues (Pardon me, rabbi, is this synagogue Orthodox or Deformed?). Like the Reverend
Dupas’
In a mosque, of course, just praying verbally
on my knees in a
fixed position would stick out like a sore thumb.
I have seen the sequence of body postures and
gestures enacted hundreds of times on television.
They used to demonstrate the movements on Reflections
on Islam (the only thing I genuinely miss about not having
television
anymore: Reflections on Islam at 11:00 a.m. and Passages
—except
when they would have a chick-and-a-rabbi instead of two
rabbis—at 10 p.m. every
Sunday) at least once a year. At
least. That
part never stuck with me (although I
remember hearing that there’s a “prophetic
tradition” that the body postures
imitate the Arabic letters which spell Adam’s name). I prefer to pray out loud,
I prefer to pray
my own prayer and I prefer being by myself when I do it. Which is definitely
frowned upon (and
possibly haram—forbidden) in Islam,
depending on whose prophetic
tradition you’re listening to.
“God
wants to see every King and every commoner, with their prayer mats
touching,
praying in unison, one man’s feet at the next man’s
head.”]
[I’ve got this two-inch stack of news
clippings on Islam I’ve been
pulling out since late September in anticipation of writing this series
of
essays. So…
Speaking of prayer mats:
This is from a dispatch dated 11 November 2001 by Montreal
Gazette reporter, Levon Sevunts, filed from Chaghatay,
Afghanistan about his
encounter with another couple of reporters, one of whom was Volker
Handoik a
writer for the German magazine, Stern:
Commander Muhammad Bashir…immediately ordered
three tanks to open fire
on the Taliban positions…The tanks fired with a deafening
thud, releasing an
enormous flash and disappearing in a cloud of smoke and dust. Four armoured carriers
started moving up the
hill, their tracks screeching on the sand and rock.
Satisfied by the performance of his troops, Bashir pulled
out his prayer
mat and started his prayers.
Looking at Bashir bending and kneeling on the mat, Volker
complained he
was suffering from back pain. I
offered
him some Motrin that I always carry with me in a first-aid kit.
I’ve managed to lose the rest of the
article, but Volker Hanoik died
about twenty minutes later. Shot
or
blown up—I forget which.
He looks at
Bashir praying which reminds him…his back hurts. And he bums
a pill off
somebody. Twenty
minutes later he’s
dead.
I could write ten pages about why I find that
story inescapably—and
spiritually—poignant and never get within
a country mile of an adequate
explanation.]
Having read the Torah, the Gospels and
the Koran before I started going to the Anglican Church—and
being a devoted
viewer of Reflections on Islam—I was
aware of the five “pillars” of
Islam. One of the
“pillars” became
another source of friction in my church-going.
My motivation in going to church was to receive what I
hoped would be
insights into the Gospels…
(Particularly as regards their translation from Aramaic
and Ancient
Greek into English, a problem comparable to what I was finding with the
translation of the Torah from Hebrew into English.
English is a pretty versatile language but
its limitations become quite apparent quite quickly in studying the
Torah and
the Gospels. As an
example, the
translation of Simeon and Levi’s transgression in
Iacob’s deathbed address to
his sons (Genesis 49) is that they “digged down a
wall”. The
alternative translation in the margin is
that they “houghed oxen.”
I had to go to
the Big Dictionary at the Library to find out that
“houghed” is an antiquated
English term meaning “hamstrung”.
Whatever the phrase was—and is—in
Hebrew, English wasn’t up to
the task of finding even a close approximation of it.
The senior priest was familiar with Aramaic,
Ancient Greek and Hebrew and would, very, very occasionally, digress
into a
discussion of a specific term or usage of a term.
Very occasionally.)
…but, for the most part, the
two-hour
service was taken up with ritual, organ-playing, singing and homey
little
sermons which (in my view) twisted the point of every one of
Jesus’ parables
and every Gospel episode into a valuable lesson about Mum, Dad and the
Kids
which, in good politically-correct fashion, was always skewed to
flatter Mum at
the expense of Dad and was, thus, appreciably no different, to me (in
terms of
spiritual content) than what I was able to extract from television
commercials. Or the
sermons would be
about the necessity to be generous and kind and assist in a variety of
church-sponsored social programs.
It
seemed to me that Islam, with the zakat, the
“stated alms” I’ve
discussed elsewhere, the right of the community to 2.5 percent of each
person’s
accumulated wealth—had it “all over” on
Christianity in that regard. Muslims
are exhorted to ask each other, “Did you
pay the zakat?” and, in answer,
“Did you?”
Very
matter-of-fact. Very
central to the faith. One
of the five pillars. You
can’t be a good Muslim unless you pay the
zakat. You have to “purify your
wealth” by donating 2.5 percent of your
total wealth to feeding the poor in your community.
If you don’t do so, your wealth is impure and
you have no cause for complaint if it evaporates or gets you into some
serious
trouble. “You
didn’t purify your wealth
this year? What’s
the Arabic word for
‘putz’?”.
There
is, therefore, no overwhelming need
(I would guess) to discuss the zakat at any length
during Friday prayer
services in the Mosques. Anymore
than it
is necessary to deliver a sermon in a synagogue or a Church that
starts, “‘Thou
shalt not kill.’ Isn’t
that the truth? Let’s
all make an extra special effort not to
kill anyone on our way home today.”
In
Islam, the centrality to the faith of the mandate incumbent
upon each
individual to feed the poor—occupying as it does
the same centrality to the
faith that the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
occupies in Judaism and
Christianity—thereby doesn’t interfere with or
supersede the equally pressing
need for prayer—salat, another of the
five pillars—the way that
discussing caring for the poor does have a tendency
to do in Judaism and
Christianity so that it is easy for a given church or synagogue to
erode from
the exalted state of Beth-El (God’s
House) into little more than another
largely secular, largely humanist social service agency (this is
particularly
true, I believe, as women are allowed to play a greater role in the
churches:
the Triune “God” of women being more Darwin, Marx
and Freud than Father, Son
and Holy Spirit). Once
you are a literal
Muslim—“one who submits to the Will of
God” is the literal translation of both
“Islam” and
“Muslim”—by definition, the poor and
disadvantaged are never far
from your thoughts. “Lend
to God a
goodly loan,” the
Koran exhorts
repeatedly, meaning, of course, that it is always advisable and
praise-worthy
to exceed the minimum of the zakat to find favour
in the sight of
God. Once you
actually see the effect
firsthand of “Lending
to God a goodly
loan” it’s
very easy to get carried
away. Small wonder
that The Koran Sura,
The Night Journey (17:31), cautions: “Let not thy hand be
tied up to thy neck;
nor yet open it with all openness, lest thou sit thee down in rebuke,
in
beggary.” There’s
a wonderful
traditional story of Abu Bakr (later, the first Caliph of Islam after
the death
of the Prophet) giving all of his money away to
the poor. And
Muhammad, a little aghast, asking him,
“Didn’t you keep anything for
yourself?”
To which Abu Bakr, reportedly, replied, “I have
given my money to the
poor and kept the Word of God for myself.”
At this point Muhammad turned to Omar (later, the second
Caliph
of Islam) and said, “What about you?”
And Omar replied, “I have given half of my
wealth to the poor, and I owe
God the other half.” “No
one ever went
bankrupt paying the zakat,” is another
prophetic saying. “God
will not wrong you so
much as the husk of a date stone.”
A pretty precise calibration of reward.
Uncertain
as I was (and am) that
synagogue, church or mosque attendance is a central—or even
tangential—
necessity in serving God, having
chosen
to observe a shabbath, a day of rest and prayer
(at first, I alternated
between a Jewish shabbath, Saturday, and a
Christian Sabbath, Sunday,
which meant I was working five days one week, followed by a day of
rest, and
seven days the following week, followed by a day of rest. I ultimately settled on
Sunday—literally from
midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday—although I keep thinking
I should probably
switch to the Jewish observance, “between the two
evenings”: sunset Friday to
sunset Saturday), continuing to pray twice daily, paying the zakat,
by
the fall of 1999 I had a sense of something missing.
Whatever I might’ve thought, ultimately, of
the Anglican Church, the decision not to attend church regularly had
left a
hole in my life of which I was very much aware.
At some point in late 1999 I read some reference to the
fact that
Ramadan was beginning December 9th.
“Fasting in the sacred month” is, of
course, another of the five pillars
of Islam. I was
only vaguely aware of
the rules which governed fasting.
Early
on I had set myself the task of seeing how late on my Sabbath I could
leave
breakfast—how late before I allowed myself to eat anything. I could usually make it
until about four or
five in the afternoon but, ultimately, I found that my hunger and
thirst were
so overwhelming by then that I was scarcely able to perceive the
scriptures and
commentaries that I was reading—which seemed more than a
little spiritually
counter-productive. Also,
it appealed to
the “sports guy” side of me a little too much.
Hah! I
broke my last week’s
record by forty-eight minutes. Not exactly the
sort of spiritual
nourishment one associates with ritual fasting.
George Petrou (hi, George!) told me about his mother
fasting in the
Greek Orthodox Church, where she only allowed herself fruit juices or
water
during the day for…Lent?…I think it was Lent.
Reflections on Islam did a piece on
Ramadan fasting around that
time: No food or
drink from sunrise to
sunset. And, of
course, the five daily
prayers. The five
daily prayers I had a
lot of trouble picturing, particularly coupled with the ritual
ablutions—after
changing into clean, light-coloured clothing, washing the face from the
crown
of the head to the chin, then washing the right hand up to the elbow,
the left
hand up to the elbow, washing out the inside of the ears, rinsing out
the
mouth, inhaling water into both nostrils (you can’t
be serious), washing
the right foot to the ankle, washing the left foot to the ankle,
wetting the
scalp. Using water
or clean
sand. Water,
thank God, I had. Then
the prayers. Five
times a day.
I remembered the Anglican service which is a little tough
on
rookies. The Book
of Common Prayer, the
Hymnal, the New Improved Book of Common Prayer (what is
it with
Christians and this new, improved kick?
Did Madison Avenue really look that sensible to church
authorities back
in the days of the Second Vatican Council?
Or did they just envy Madison Avenue’s
sheep-herding abilities?). For
two hours, I was always at least thirty
seconds behind everyone else in finding the right page.
This bit is on page 59 of the New,
Improved Book of Common Prayer not page 59 of the
Old, Not
Improved Book of Common Prayer. It’s
Hymn
number 203 but it’s on page 188.
Page 203 has hymn number
217 which doesn’t sound remotely
like this one. What
are the words? Can
I allow myself to sing these words?
Scan the words. “Listen,
all of you. Get
back.
I have a crucifix and some holy water and I’m
not afraid to use
them.” The
Nicene Creed. Always
scanning ahead a couple of lines:
I allow myself to recite this next part.
The two lines after that I won’t allow myself
to say. (“I’m
serious. This is
actual holy water. Get
back.”).
It wasn’t easy.
If most of the
rituals and recitations and hymns didn’t seem to have even
the remotest bit of
relevance to the books of scripture that I was reading and re-reading
at home,
there was a certain satisfaction in making the effort, getting the hang
of it,
and most especially (hopefully) pleasing God in the
process—although I
found it difficult to get a reading on the reactions of The Primarily
Judaic
God that I picture and pictured in my head.
I was never quite sure if He was saying, “I know. Do you believe this? And they really think this
is a way to
worship Me” or “The important motivation is deeper
than the skewed
content. You
can’t perceive your own
motivations at that depth as God can.
You have to stick with it” or
“It’s just something I thought you should
see. Not, you know,
every Sunday for six
months. F’Cryin’
out loud, did you read
the words to that last hymn? Go
home! Read some
Scripture!”
I wasn’t sure if Ramadan made the
“Anglican Two-Step”
(sit, stand, recite, kneel, sit, listen,
stand, sit, stand, sing, sit, kneel, stand, listen) look easy or the
other way
around. I became
evasive. “Aren’t
there, like, specific prayer
times in Islam? I
won’t know what the specific
prayer times are.
I’m pretty sure
you can’t just do five prayers in a row when you get up in
the morning and call
it a day, prayer-wise (and I only had to do the ritual ablutions once! Nyuck nyuck nyuck). If I’m just arbitrarily
picking
prayer times, aren’t I basically
transgressing in the same way? Isn’t
the ethical difference
just a matter of degree?
What if
the specific times are central
to the efficacy of
the prayer? Is it not inconceivable…is
it not, in fact,
a probability or, in further
fact, a likelihood that arbitrary
prayer times could represent
a…an insult to God,
in that case? Heaven
forfend that I
should insult God! (I
can really get
to “chewing the scenery”, bringing to my on-going
interior monologue-to-God
just this kind of histrionic Talmudic scholar quality when I want to
let myself
off the hook about something. The
sheer
effort that’s required when I know that’s what
I’m doing, when God knows
that’s what I’m doing, and when I’m not
fooling either of us can be
exhausting). So I
decided to leave it up
to God. If God
would send me a sign that
I should fast in Ramadan, then I would fast in Ramadan.
Asking a sign from God verges, I’m pretty
sure, on blasphemy so I really don’t recommend it as, you
know, a lifestyle.
If you do ask,
however, it’s important to pay
attention and—in
a case where the sign seems subtle or ambiguous—to err on the
side of believing
in the sign instead of doubting the sign.
The next day, an envelope (from Reflections on
Islam) arrived at
my apartment. Inside
was a printed form
containing the prayer times for Ramadan under the heading “Oh
you who believe!
Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you,
that ye
may fear God.” (2:179). Subtle, I grant you, but I
decided to give
God the benefit of the doubt.
PART
II
Lengthy digression before we get back to my first Ramadan
fast:
Of course, the reason that I got the prayer times for
Ramadan from Reflections
on Islam is because I contribute to them financially (I also receive an
“Eid Mubarak” card from
them on the occasion of Eid-al-Fitr—marking the end of the
Ramadan fast. The
cards are, inevitably, addressed to “Dave
Sim & family” which amuses me to no end: in Islam,
being childless, I would
be considered a “man without a tail”: which, you
know, suits me fine). In
the aftermath of 11 September as Canada
and most of the world—and all of the civilized
parts of it—moved with
decidedly undemocratic swiftness to clamp down on terrorist fundraising
organizations, I patiently waited to find out if Reflections
on Islam was
a cover organization for Hamas, Hezbolleh, Islamic Jihad, Egyptian
Jihad,
al-Qaeda or any of the other cornucopia of terrorist organizations
within the
Nation of Islam. I
assumed that if that was
the case, I would probably merit a phone call
from someone at the RCMP, CSIS or some other Canadian
security
agency. A
“mind if we take a look
around?” visit, however unlikely (unless they just wanted to
be able to tell
the guys back at the office what a Muslim named
“Dave” looks like)—to a
democratic purist like myself—might easily cross the line
from a quasi-legal
to a genuinely illegal infringement of my civil
rights. Still, in
my own mind, there was no question
that I would undergo whatever came my way without a word of complaint,
with
full cooperation and with no idea of seeking redress in the aftermath.
Why is that, you ask?
To answer that makes this lengthy digression a good deal
lengthier:
It is probably best to begin with Linda Frum’s
article (National
Post, 20 October 01) on
Steven Emerson who is, according to the article,
“widely recognized as America’s
foremost
independent investigative expert on Islamic terrorism.
According to the former head of FBI
investigations and counter-terrorism, Oliver Revell, he is better
informed
about the activities of terrorists in America than the FBI
itself”. It
goes on to say that although Emerson was
“once shunned by mainstream U.S. media as an extremist and a
racist, he is now
in constant demand by major U.S. news outlets.”
(thus ever with the laughably shifting sands of what
passes for
integrity at the major U.S. news outlets, eh?)
“His organization, The Investigative Project, is
a non-profit outfit
that tracks the activities, statements and fund-raising of Islamic
terrorist
groups operating in the U.S., as well as the mainstream, tax-exempt,
charitable
organizations which serve as their fronts.
“‘What do they want?’ asks
Emerson. ‘It runs in varying degrees.
One, they want political influence.
Two, they want to see the U.S. become a
Muslim country. ..’”
Undoubtedly, this raises an eyebrow or two among my
readership where it
doesn’t provoke outright hilarity, but Mr. Emerson is quite
correct, as we’ll
see in the later parts of these essays.
“‘…three, they want the
U.S. to be sensitive to the legitimate interests
of Muslims around the world, which they define as support for the Jihad
in
Palestine, the Jihad in Chechnya, the Jihad in the Philippines, the
Jihad in
Saudi Arabia.’
“Mr. Emerson has devoted the last seven years of
his life to recording
what U.S. Islamic leaders say among themselves.
For example, Muzammil Siddiqui, the former president of
Islamic Society
of North America and Imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County in
California, was invited to the Oval Office by George W. Bush on Sept.
26 so
that the President could thank him for his participation in the
national day of
mourning and remembrance. Siddiqui
told
the President: ‘The Muslim community has unanimously
condemned and deplored the
crime committed on Sept. 11, 2001.
It
was a most horrible crime against our nation and against
humanity.’”
Of course, the Imam is referring to the nation
of Islam in
his quote and the widely-held belief among Muslims that the attacks on
the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon were executed by Israel’s
Mossad
intelligence agency—that is, that the
“crime” of 11 September was the
“framing”
of the Nation of Islam for the terrorist attacks.
The quote just doesn’t ring true otherwise:
no Muslim Imam would refer to the United States as “our
nation”. Any
such reference by a Muslim cleric to any
nation other than Islam would be considered
heretical in the least
close-minded Islamic factions and completely and unforgivably
blasphemous by
the vast majority of the Muslim leadership.
By contrast, another quote of Siddiqui’s does
ring true: from his
address at the 2000 Jerusalem Day rally in Washington:
“We want to awaken the conscience of America,
because—if you remain on
the side of injustice—the wrath of God will come. Please, all Americans, do
remember that: that
Allah is watching everyone. If
you
continue doing injustice, and tolerating injustice, the wrath of God
will
come.”
[The use of the name “Allah” when the
speaker or writer is addressing me
in English really grates on my nerves in a serious way.
I don’t worship “Allah” for
the same reason
that I don’t worship “Dieu” or
“Mungu”.
Each language has an equivalent term for
“god”. Capitalize
it and away you go. That’s His
Name, but only if you are speaking that language. If you’re
speaking Arabic,
His Name is Allah. If you’re speaking French, His Name is
Dieu, if you’re
speaking Swahili, His Name is Mungu,
if
you’re speaking English, His Name is God.]
Steve Emerson on Siddiqui:
“Siddiqui is the leader of one of the largest
Islamic groups in the
United States. He
talks a nice
game. Everyone says
he’s a nice
guy. But the level
of naivete and denial
[among Americans] is nothing short of astonishing.
It’s very difficult to get a sense of the
dimension of what we’re up against because of the level of
deception. There
isn’t a moderate Islamic
leadership. There
isn’t. And
someone has got to say it. We
deny it at our peril.”
Exactly. There.
Is. No.
Moderate. Islamic. Leadership.
Steve Emerson again:
“There was a
major meeting the other day between twenty Democratic [italics
mine]
Senators and representatives of militant Islamic groups. It was just obscene. The Islamic leaders now
come crying under victimhood
status and as being the subject of hate crimes.
But no one has demanded that the price of coming to the
table is that
they thoroughly repudiate Islamic terrorism.”
This is an ongoing problem in the Western democracies, in
my view. The Irish
Republican Army represents a
comparable level of ridiculousness when it comes to
“negotiations”.
It seems fundamental to me that getting the
IRA or Islam to repudiate violence should only be
considered the first
baby step in the right direction towards the
negotiating table. Actual
access to the negotiating table
should hinge on purging their own ranks of those who refuse to
repudiate
violence and those that they know have committed acts of
violence—or it needs
to be done on their behalf with the full acquiescence of the leadership. That is, the IRA
leadership should give Her
Majesty’s Special Forces a list of names and addresses and
get out of the way.
At the conclusion of which those who have
repudiated violence—and who
have not themselves ordered or committed violence—can sit
down and begin to
negotiate.
George Jonas had a column around this time that seems, to
me, distinctly
relevant to the situation, entitled “A lesson from the
professor and the
station master”:
The story of the Turkish station master was told to me by
the Hungarian
icon, the poet George Faludy, now in his 90s.
He heard it from Rustem Vambery, the noted lawyer and
diplomat when they
were both in New York at the end of the Second World War. The incident itself
happened a long time ago,
and it involved Vambery’s father, Arminius, the 19th-century
Orientalist. Professor
Arminius Vambery was a severely
crippled man who had to use crutches.
This didn’t stop him from becoming an explorer
of note, and the author
of several important books on Central Asia.
There were no private jets in those days, but VIPs often
travelled by
private railway carriage. Passing
through Turkey as the Sultan’s guest one year, the professor
had his own
carriage attached to the train. After
the engine stopped at a small station in Anatolia, on the Asian side of
the
Marmaran Sea, a Turkish station master entered the carriage. He sized up Vambery with a
sly glance, bowed
perfunctorily, then informed the professor that, regrettably, his
carriage
needed to be uncoupled from the train.
Vambery was travelling with a friend.
They looked at each other.
“Why?”
Vambery asked.
“Regulations, effendi,” the
station master replied with a smirk.
“We
need to leave your carriage behind on the siding.
For a slight consideration, though, an
exception can be made.”
With that, he calmly held out his hand for baksheesh
[a bribe].
The station master was a huge brute, as it
happened. His
immense palm made a good target, so
Vambery immediately whacked it with his crutch.
Then he struggled to his feet, striking the Turk
repeatedly with all his
might.
The station master—who could have snapped the
professor in half—didn’t
even try to ward off the blows. “Effendi,
I didn’t know, forgive me, I didn’t
realize,” he muttered, bowing deeply and
backing off. “In
your case, of course,
regulations don’t apply.”
“Didn’t you see the size of that
fellow?” Vambery’s
friend asked, shaken, after the
genuflecting giant had backed out of the car.
“Weren’t you afraid to hit
him?”
“Of course,” replied Vambery,
“but this is the Orient.
I would have been far more
afraid not to hit him.”
Mr. Jonas’ conclusion drawn from the anecdote
seemed particularly
pertinent last fall and just as pertinent now even though his more
specific
point—at the time—was addressed to the ridiculous
idea (then circulating) that
America might consider suspending its air attacks against the Taliban
in the
sacred month of Ramadan:
Vambery’s assessment of what is to be
feared more, firmness or
appeasement, holds true in many parts of the world, not just the Orient. Except in the East
it’s more than a rule of
thumb. It’s
one of the fundamentals
which Westerners—especially Americans—have trouble
appreciating…What Americans
find hard to understand is that gestures of magnanimity are not seen as
such in
Eastern cultures. In
fact, they have the
opposite effect…
…There’s a bewildered question
Americans, and Westerners in general,
keep asking after 9-11: “Why
do they
hate us so?” The
question also has an
unasked corollary: “Why don’t they respect us
more?’
The answer may be that we haven’t yet learned
when to whack the station
master and when to offer him baksheesh.
It’s a little more complicated than
that
when it comes to the relationship between the United States and Islam. Being a devoted fan of
both entities, maybe I
can offer a little insight: The
disaster
of 11 September can be attributed, I think, in no small part to Osama
bin
Laden’s previous successes against the United
States—or those actions which
could be construed as successes by an Islamic terrorist. Whether bin Laden himself
or some other
Muslim terrorist organization was behind the bombing of the U.S. Marine
barracks in 1983, the hotel bombing in Aden in 1992 (where U.S.
military
personnel were stationed), Mogadishu in 1993, the Khobar Towers bombing
in
Dhahran in June, 1996 (where nineteen American soldiers died and five
hundred
others—including native Saudis—were injured), the
bombing of the American
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 and
the attack on the USS Cole off Yemen in
October of 2000—in each case, the setback was followed by a
U.S. withdrawal of
its forces. From
this side of the big
pond, this is easy to understand as an implication of the Vietnam
Syndrome: the
assumption that the American people have a very low tolerance for
American
military casualties unless a good reason for them can be
explained—to their
satisfaction —between commercial breaks on the CBS, NBC, ABC
and Fox Evening Newscasts. That’s
a bit glib, I admit, but only a bit.
Nor am I casting aspersions.
The United States of America is the first
great democracy in human history, the country that wrote—and
continues to
write—the book on what democracy is.
And not just theoretical democracy
(the Greeks were great
at theory) but practical application. When the final judgement
in all matters of
government policy resides with “We the People” it
is entirely within the rights
of “We
the People” to demand that any
military adventure contemplated by its elected representatives and/or
the head
of its Executive Branch be explained in two-and-a-half minutes before The
Simpsons comes on. I
might think it
an inadvisable approach to governing The Great Republic and certainly
there is
no shortage of elected representatives and/or former Presidents who
have failed
to pass the two-and-a-half minute network news test with any number of
policies
(when Lyndon Johnson lost the support of Walter Cronkite, he knew he
had lost
the support of the American people) and who wished
that there was some other
way to reach the American people than through two-and-a-half minute
segments on
network television news. Some
of those
policies may even (in a hypothetical nation arranged along different
lines of
priority) have proved to be darned good ideas.
Ronald Reagan’s decision to send a contingent of
Marines into Beirut in
1983 and to house them onshore, rather than offshore, may have been one
of
those darned good ideas. However,
once
two hundred or so of those marines died in an Islamic terrorist
truck-bomb
attack, the idea had had its chance and—given President
Reagan’s sound
political instincts—it wasn’t possible for him to
withdraw the remaining troops
fast enough. A good
example of American
democracy in action. But,
arguably
(bearing in mind George Jonas’ station master anecdote) the
first bad
United-States-to-Nation-of-Islam signal.
A bad signal, but inescapable, given the nature of the
world’s Vanguard
Democracy. Whatever
damage the bombing
of the Marine barracks did to President Reagan’s Gallup Poll
numbers, those
numbers would not have been assisted by departing Beirut with a
Scorched Earth
policy. Given the
nature of Islam, the
nature of the Middle East, the nature of (may God have mercy on us all)
Beirut,
Scorched Earth or some variation was the only sensible act before
departing. Someone
had to
pay. In fact, at
least two hundred
someone’s had to pay if American prestige was to be
maintained in the
area. Given the bad
signal that
immediate withdrawal would, inevitably, send to all parts of the
Islamic world,
several thousand someone’s would
probably have been a more strategically
effective number (ten of you is worth one
of us).
But, again, from this side of the pond, the
very idea is ridiculous. President
Reagan would’ve been impeached.
At the
very least, his credibility would’ve suffered a disastrous
blow if he had just
arbitrarily picked an Islamic sector in Beirut and bombed the hell out
of it
killing several thousand Muslims.
I may
be wrong, but I think we would be a lot closer to peace in the Middle
East over
the last decade or so if he had.
But,
clearly, 1983 was a different time period and such a level of
retaliation would
never have “passed muster” with President
Reagan’s boss: the American
people. The result,
however, was to
plant the seed of perception within the Nation of Islam that America
was weak,
that the corruption of its myriad vices had left it hollow and with no
stomach
or heart for conflict. Each
successive
withdrawal of U.S. military forces only reinforced the perception. No matter how formidable
the United States
may appear (went Islamic reasoning), one good
truck bomb explosion and
they turn tail and run away. In
defence
of the “is The Simpsons on
yet?” American public, I think that their
acceptance of these atrocities—while misconstrued by the
Nation of Islam as
weakness—in actual fact, gave proof of a very broad-minded,
cosmopolitan and
philosophical magnanimity. A
democracy—a
good democracy—is always going to have a
love-hate relationship with its
military, tending toward the
latter more
often than the former. At
the time of
the attack on the USS Cole, you wouldn’t have had to look far
to find an
American whose view of the attack was “well, it serves us
right for all of our
meddling in foreign countries.”
In most
of New York City, in the Democrat half of Washington, in Hollywood, in
the
colleges and universities you couldn’t, I would maintain,
swing a dead cat at
the time of the attack on the USS Cole without hitting an American
whose
viewpoint tended in that direction.
Not
too long ago, any citizen expressing aloud just such an opinion in any
of the
countries which make up the civilized world would have, more likely as
not,
found themselves prosecuted on a charge of treason.
But seeing near-treason—hell, actual treason—as
just another form of free speech, is one of the more dazzling examples
of purist
democracy that has made the United States “the
shining city on the hill”, a
phrase Ronald Reagan was incapable of using to describe his native land
without
having his eyes mist over (and a feat—I freely
confess—I am unable to manage,
myself, as I type the words). A
democracy which is capable of treating treasonous remarks as free
speech is—say
what you will—a pretty broad-minded democracy. However being
just such a
democracy is a two-edged sword: in
answer to the attack on the USS Cole, all the U.S.
government—all President
Clinton—could do to reflect the will of “We the
People” was to fire a few
cruise missiles in the direction of
the
caves of Tora Bora and wait for The Simpsons to
come on. There was
no real mandate from “We the
People” beyond that. Had
he attempted
any larger military response he would’ve
been committing political
suicide—particularly among his own core constituency (see
above). Bearing
the station master model in mind,
this made an escalation on the part of Islamic terrorists inevitable. If all you get for
disabling the USS Cole is
a cruise missile “slap on the wrist,” the only
question was one of scale. How
much bigger an atrocity could the
Islamic terrorists imagine than the USS Cole attack?
Pretty big as it turns out.
[Arguably, the bombing of the Khobar Towers military
housing project in
Saudi Arabia was the larger—but less public—of the
two catastrophes and,
consequently, the one which more accurately prefigured the attacks on
the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. The sheer devastation which
resulted from
the truck bomb attack was the largest explosion ever investigated by
the FBI,
dwarfing the Oklahoma City bombing by a substantial margin. However, the love-hate
relationship between
the military and the American public cuts both ways—or it
did, prior to 11
September—and the size of the Khobar Towers devastation was
largely kept secret
by the military—with the cooperation of the House of
Saud—in a way that the
Navy couldn’t have managed with the USS Cole, since the Cole
and the effects of
that attack were basically a free-floating photo op in international
waters.]
As Charles Krauthammer of the Washington
Post Writers Group reported in his column of 18 January 2002: as early
as 1996
(the year of the Khobar Towers attack) Osama bin Laden, in his
“Declaration of
War Against the Americans” was gloating, “Your most
disgraceful case was in
Somalia…when tens of your soldiers were killed in minor
battles and one
American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the
area
carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with
you.” Not
one to mince words, bin Laden added
(according to Krauthammer) “You have been disgraced by Allah
and you
withdrew. The
extent of your impotence
and weaknesses became very clear.”
A
misunderstanding on bin Laden’s part of the nature of
democracy, of civilian
control of the military and of the chain of command in the United
States which
originates in “We the People” whose collective will
is enacted through the
President by the implementing of those actions which, in an emergency, he infers to be
the will of “We the
People”: actions
which are then
overruled, modified, curtailed or rubber-stamped by the Congress as
the—no
longer inferred, but now implied—will of “We the
People” becomes clearer in the
short- and long-term aftermath of any emergency.
Rubber-stamped by the Congress in the case of
FDR’s reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour as conforming
to
the will of “We the People” and severely curtailed
in the case of the
escalation and widening of the conflict in Vietnam by Lyndon Johnson
and
Richard Nixon as violating the will of
“We the People”.
In 1993 it didn’t require a rocket scientist
to judge that “We the People” would take a dim view
of a larger military
presence in Somalia when, as Krauthammer so aptly puts it,
“you go into a
country of total strategic irrelevance for solely humanitarian reasons,
then
find yourself being fired upon by thugs and ingrates” as
happened in Mogadishu.
His conclusion, I believe, reflects with complete accuracy what the
will of “We
the People” was, would be and will be under those sorts of
circumstances: “your
tolerance for casualties is—and should be—virtually
zero. You pick up
and get out. This
is not cowardice; this is common sense.”
Osama bin Laden, on an on-going and rapidly escalating
basis,
misconstrued that level of common sense and accountability to
“We the People”
to his own—presumably monumental and
permanent—detriment (wherever he might be
skulking now)
.
His whereabouts, as well as the whereabouts of Taliban
leader Mohammed
Omar, in my view, shouldn’t be of the paramount concern to
the American people
and their leadership that it appears to be.
Although, again, from this side of the pond such paramount
concern is
certainly understandable. Although
my
knowledge of Tribal ways is certainly less extensive than my knowledge
of
Muslim ways—the latter interests me profoundly, the former
not at all—what
indirect awareness of Tribalism I’ve been able to pick up
from my readings of
the Sunnu—the biographies—of the Prophet Muhammad,
my best guess is that most
of the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership has been ransomed and that these
were
the actual negotiations which were taking place at Kandahar and at Tora
Bora—when the Taliban and al-Qaeda membership were
(theoretically) negotiating
terms of surrender—after which everyone just seemed to
“disappear” into thin
air. The ransoming
of captives has a
long history in Islam and among the pagan tribal Arabs which were their
predecessors and the Afghan Tribes which they closely resemble,
structurally. Essentially,
ransoming guarantees
that a warrior of noble birth and from a good family isn’t
going to languish in
prison or face execution in the aftermath of a battle or war. Once it is clear, as was
the case in
Afghanistan, that one side has lost, the two sides enter into
negotiations as
to how much the losing side is going to pay the winning side to recover
the
captives of noble birth and good family.
A price is arrived at, the families in question are
notified, the money
changes hands and the ransomed captives are returned to their homelands
and
their families. I
suspect that the
Taliban and al-Qaeda membership which were turned over to the American
authorities were those Muslims of poorer birth and without monied
families able
or willing to ransom them. This
will be
a bitter pill for most Americans to swallow, but it really
shouldn’t be. The
disgrace of their humiliating defeat in
Afghanistan will follow the ransomed former captives back to Chechnya,
Iraq,
Iran, Saudi Arabia and (I suspect) primarily Pakistan or wherever else
they
came from and I don’t think it a stretch of the imagination
to say that many of
them, as the years go by, will envy as the more fortunate their Muslim
brothers
interned at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay where at least (as they will
see it)
every Muslim gets to live in the same level of humiliation and disgrace
with
nothing to compare it to and no umma—Muslim
community—to be largely
ostracized from and disgraced within: unlike those ransomed
“veterans” of the
Afghanistan debacle who—repatriated to Iraq or Iran,
say—will be viewed,
universally and ill-disguisedly, as something lower and more pathetic
than a
whipped dog by those around them.
Hyperbole?
Hardly. In
both the Torah and the
Koran, the sure sign of God’s favour is the disproportionate
military
victory. Leviticus
26:8: “And
five of you shal chase a hundred and a
hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall
fall
before you by the sword” is directly paralleled by the Sura
(chapter) The
Spoils 8:65-67: “O Prophet!
God, and
such of the faithful as follow thee, will be all sufficient for thee. O Prophet!
Stir up the faithful to the fight.
Twenty of you who stand firm shall vanquish two hundred:
and if there be
a hundred of you they shall vanquish a thousand of the infidels, for
they are a
people devoid of understanding. Now
hath
God made your work easy, for He knoweth how weak ye are. If there be a hundred of
you who endure
resolutely, they shall vanquish two hundred; and if there be a thousand
of you,
they shall vanquish two thousand by God’s permission; for God
is with those who
are resolute to endure.”
Of course the “infidels” referred to
in The Spoils are the pagan Arabs
of Mecca who opposed Muhammad and the whole notion
of there being Only
One God—something I’ll be getting to in a little
while—but I think it is far
more worthwhile for the American people to recognize that, from a
Muslim
standpoint, it will soon be inescapable (if it isn’t already)
that God…vehemently…took
the American side in the conflict in
Afghanistan…
[The U.S. Special Forces unit, Tiger 03, as an
example—consisting of ten
Marines—is credited with the death of 1,500
Taliban and al-Qaeda by
calling in pinpoint-accurate-air-strikes on a series of cave complexes. That one
anecdotal fact, I can
guarantee you, is of infinitely greater moment,
significance and concern
to Terrorist Islam than whether or not Osama bin
Laden—glassy-eyed, trembling
and muttering into his own daisy-cutter-punctured-eardrums—is
“at large” in
some Pakistani backwater of a village…or whether he ever
ends up in the
custody of the U.S. government. Osama
bin Laden is the whipped dog di tutti whipped dogs
of the Militant
Muslim world at this point. It
would, I
think, only diminish the lustre of the U.S. victory in Islamic eyes for
the
U.S. to continue to express any…undue…interest in
him.]
…as opposed to the Muslim expulsion of the
Soviets from Afghanistan in
1989, after the Soviets had suffered 17,000 casualties on the ground. In that instance,
the purest of the
Muslim pure (as the Taliban and their Muslim allies had come to see
themselves)
could justifiably say that God was with them in
their efforts and that
the small God-fearing nation had—like a textbook reading of
The Spoils—put
their vastly larger opponent to flight.
No big surprise. A
God-fearing
country will always put a godless country to flight when push comes to
shove. What was of
interest among the
God-fearing at the start of the American bombing campaign, 7 October
2001
was: which side
will God take? Or
will God take either side? My
own view was that the conflict would be a
long one, the air war could be taken only so far and then the ground
war would
have to begin. The
fact that all of the
working models for extricating enemy forces from caves entailed huge
casualties on the part of the attacking force (the vast majority from
“friendly
fire”)…a 10:1 ratio or thereabouts, was what I had
read…meant that the conflict
would only start to get really interesting, militarily, a few months in. From what I was able to
read between the
lines of the heavily censored news we were getting at the time, this
was not
far off the Pentagon’s own best assessment and the motivation
behind President
Bush cautioning the American people repeatedly and
emphatically that
there were going to be a lot of casualties. I assumed this would be
one of the
President’s major roles: to keep
repeating this for the three or four
months of the air war so it wouldn’t come as a shock to
“We the People” when
the body bags started coming home in prodigious numbers along about
February or
March. Slobodan
Milosevic had held out
against the bombardment of Kosovo for a little over eighty days, but
(went my
best thinking) that was in a largely urban environment and in a context
where
it would be noticeable to the leadership that many of the niceties of
their
civilization were taking an awful beating.
As everyone’s quality of life began to
deteriorate something had to give
and it only seemed sensible to surrender Milosevic to the world
community and
sue for peace. Afghanistan
(I thought)
had more in common with Vietnam: insofar as the enemy was effectively
indistinguishable from the civilian population (once he put his gun and
ammunition down). Also—Vietnam-like—when the enemy
is…literally!…able to
subsist on a bowl of rice and a pot of green tea a day, it becomes
exponentially more difficult to punish him in any militarily
significant
meaning of the term. That
is, where
there is no appreciable quality of life beyond mere subsistence, there is no militarily
effective way to erode
the enemy’s quality of life as a strategy. Couple that with praying
five times a day
(you may think it irrelevant: I think it central), complete abstinence
from
alcohol and the fact that for twenty years or more the principle
industry in
Afghanistan had been the waging of war…well, let’s
just say that I was not
alone in my assessment that this was going to be far from a cake-walk.
And yet, a cakewalk it was.
So
much so that it took everyone by complete surprise,
including the
American military leadership. The
air
war was over—not in eighty days, as in
Kosovo—but in thirty-five days. And what was
even more unbelievable, when
the air war was over, the war itself was over for
all intents and
purposes.
As a Deist, as a monotheist, when something happens that
is that…dramatically!…inexplicable,
when the result is so completely and thoroughly at odds with every genuinely
expert opinion from that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to that of the
New York
Times editorial board, there is, ultimately, only one sensible
conclusion to
come to:
God.
How much more eloquently could God have expressed His
preference for
freedom and for democracy over oppression and theocracy? These were the purest of
the purest Muslims,
the most devout and the most battle-hardened and militarily successful
Muslims
of modern times living in and fighting for
the purest Muslim
state since…well, it would be a good exercise in Muslim
scholarship to
determine at what previous point in the history of Islam there had
existed a
more Islamically ascetic, a less Islamically corrupt and a more
avowedly devout
Muslim nation than Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Iran after the Shah was deposed in 1979?
Possibly, but it was still largely Westernized,
still rotten to various of its cores both from a Muslim and Western
standpoint. Afghanistan
had drawn to
itself the purest and most devout Muslims at around the same time but
had, in
recent years, effectively expunged almost every trace of that Great
Satan of
Orthodox Islam: Westernization.
Television? Banned. Movies?
Banned. Music? Banned.
Balloons? Banned. Anything
which
was not Islam, anything which was not widely accepted as having solid
roots in
the Koran, solid roots in the way of life on the Arabian Peninsula in
the
seventh century? Banned.
And it was exactly this form of theocratic rule
which—against all
accepted odds, against even the most optimistic of expert
opinion—suffered the
most disproportionate and absolute military defeat in recent memory. Clearly, to me,
God’s indisputable preference
was for a nation which will always stand for the freedom to choose, the
freedom
to exercise the free will which God has given each of us—even
though vast
numbers of the people of that nation, millions upon millions choose
not to
believe in God. And
to give that
nation an overwhelming… mind-bogglingly
overwhelming and dramatically
disproportionate!…victory over those who
would impose God,
impose belief in
God and impose
the worship of God on others against
their God-given free
will.
Theocracy? No!
Freedom?
Yes!
Next: The
Long Digression
continues…