To Hell With Muslim Terrorism
By Abid Ullah Jan
August 24, 2005
________________________________
Pope Benedict is the latest figure who joined the chorus of other
self-appointed advisors to Muslims. Some Western analyst call his
remarks blunt while others consider these as "quite understated."[1]
In fact, Pope Benedict's August 21, 2005 address to Muslim leaders in
Germany is no less than the bull of Pius II, in which he announced a
new Crusade shortly after ascending the throne of St. Peter, in 1458.
There are very strong reasons for that.
First, the Pope serves, at least in Catholic theory, as the final
living arbiter of Christian doctrine. Secondly, His words are coming
at a time when all Muslims � from the unacceptable Hizb ut Tahrir to
the acceptable Muslim dictators and "moderates," and "fundamentalist"
sheikhs and mufties � have been relentlessly condemning terrorist acts
for the past four years. The only thing they didn't do is rubbing
their noses in the ground, literally and publicly.
Thirdly, lecturing Muslims on the need to put their house in order and
castigating them to denounce terrorists has become a vogue. After
Blair's firebrand statements and countless media pundits' threatening
all Muslims, the proverbial straw on the camel's back are the front
page headlines that read: "It's your job to stamp out terrorism, Pope
tells top Muslims. Steer Young Muslims away from 'barbarism, cruel
fanaticism,' he instructs leaders."[2]
Fourthly, the dangerous aspect of Pope Benedict's comments is that it
legitimizes actions of those who have already taken lives of at least
150,000 civilians alone since September 9/11. These war lords have set
aside their lies. They are now using the same excuses as justification
for their slaughter which Pope Benedict highlighted in his words. Like
earlier papal bulls, such words from Pope Benedict carry the potential
for new holocaust.
Muslims' collective denunciation of terrorism and full page apologies
in leading newspapers are clear signs that they have accepted the
official stories about all that happened from 9/11 to 7/7. They have
pleaded guilty on behalf of whosoever may have committed these crimes.
Unfortunately, what Muslims cannot do is to revive victims of the
alleged and real Muslim terrorism. Too sad for them!
At this point one wishes how nice it would have been, if Muslims could
somehow revive and return the dead, and pay for all the associated
damage before making the West listen to understand the root causes and
identify the real culprits behind the global mess.
Let us agree that occupation of Palestine is not one of the root
causes. Let us agree that occupation of Iraq and Afghan came after
9/11, so this could not be causes of grievances either. Let us agree
that the indirect occupation of Saudi Arabia and supporting other
dictators in Muslim countries are also mere excuses of Muslim
fanatics.
However, let us not forget that so far no evidence has been provided
to establish without a reasonable doubt that Muslims are solely
responsible for 9/11 and other terrorist attacks. When Pope speaks of
the "new barbarism" he must keep in mind that there has been no bull
issued by a highest authority in Islam, exhorting Muslim hordes to
descend on Europe and America. Still, let's assume that Muslims are
the terrorists. No person in his right senses, however, would agree
that there is no other cause and it is simply 'poisonous
interpretation" of Islam that is driving Muslims to become terrorists.
If we keep in mind the background of Pope and others' courage at
directly holding Muslims responsible for the global mess, we may
notice that the basis for their allegations hardly goes beyond 9/11.
Therefore, we have to compare the turmoil of the last four years with
all that has been happening for the past five centuries. It will help
us see if the world just turned upside down after 9/11 and now it is
Muslims' responsibility to bring an order to it, or the mess is far
deeper and far older than we actually recognize.
Those who are lecturing Muslims today, totally ignore that the state
of the world today is the result of a history of colonial atrocities
and resultant exploitative systems and structures erected. The story
goes back to 15th century, when the colonialists launched their bloody
campaign under the grand auspices of Vatican Church.
David Warren of Ottawa Citizen writes that the 1458 papal bull was
meant "to check the advance on Europe of ye Infidel Turk."[3] Let us
agree with him as well. However, may we ask, what about the subsequent
bulls upon bulls to justify colonialist adventure for civilizing
people other than "infidel Turks" in Africa, Asia and America.
According Steven T. Newcomb, Director of the Indigenous Law Institute,
Pope Alexander VI delivered the Inter Cetera papal bull on May 4,
1493.[4] Accordingly, this document, issued shortly after Columbus'
first voyage to the Caribbean, expressed the pope's earnest desire
that "barbarous nations be subjugated and brought to the faith
itself," "for the spread of the Christian Empire." Earlier such
crusading Vatican bulls called for "perpetual slavery" of Africans, by
capturing, vanquishing, and subduing them, and by taking away all
their possessions and property.
In the year of the Columbus quincentennial, these papal documents were
instrumental in the injustices committed against the peoples of the
Americas, Oceania, Africa, and Asia. Such papal bulls directly
sanctioned colonization, the slave trade, and bloody campaigns that
resulted in the deaths of millions. Scholars have correctly identified
the Inter Cetera bull as the historic cornerstone of colonialism
worldwide.
The Indigenous Law Institute (http://ili.nativeweb.org/) wrote a
letter in 1993 to Pope John Paul II, calling upon him to formally
revoke the Inter Cetera bull of 1493,[5] and to thereby explicitly
overturn the Church's doctrine of conquest and subjugation. But until
the last available information, the Institute received only a stony
silence from the Vatican.
None of the Muslims went out with a "bull" from a highest religious
authority in the Muslim world to civilize the barbarians of the West
through complete genocides. On the other hand, Samuel Eliot Morrison,
a Harvard historian and Columbus biographer, admits "the cruel policy
initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in a
complete genocide".[6]
We hope that those who do not get tired of lecturing Muslims and
holding their faith responsible for all the wrongs in the world, would
find out how their co-religionists with the papal bulls decimated an
estimated population of 80 million at the time Columbus discovered
America "to a low of 210,000 in the 1910 census."[7] There victims in
these places were not Muslim barbarians for sure.
Someone might ask, but what has it to do with terrorism today? The
answer is: study the history of the Church-legitimized colonialism and
see its fruits in the present world order. You will find that the
turmoil is far less than what it should have been or soon will be.
Even Pope Benedict himself has acknowledged in a meeting with Rome's
clergy: "We have to confess that Europe has exported not only faith in
Christ, but also all sorts of vices, the sense of corruption, and
violence that devastates" the African continent.[8] In fact, Africa is
not alone, nor is that the end of the discussion.
Previous colonial adventures allowed imperialists to gradually
institutionalize their global dominance not only in Africa but
everywhere. Despite the apparent decolonization after four centuries,
the Western powers have managed to maintain this global dominance and
influence on the affairs of non-Western nations. Exploitation of their
wealth and resources continues till this day. The interference in the
internal affairs of Muslim states in particular has been more
intrusive because of the perceived ideological threat.
None of those who are obsessed with Muslim terrorism can deny that
today's international politico-economic structures are the logical
culmination of colonial history. The Western academic world and the
present day advisors to Muslims totally disregard genocides, plunder
of resources, introduction of class system and other legacies of their
colonial past. It would be total disregard of the facts to say that
colonial adventures did not provide foundations for the building of
the contemporary unjust world order.
Pope Benedict's admission about the link between violence and
corruption in Africa and colonialism gives us important clues. One,
that what he described as the problem are just symptoms of a deeper
malaise and hidden volcano. Second, the Pope is criticizing or holding
all Christian responsible for the deeds of many generations of the
colonialists. Instead, if one carefully reads words of Pope Benedict
XVI, he gives credit to colonialists for spreading Christianity, yet
he clearly separates their misdeeds from their faith.
Pope's voice adds further legitimacy to the ongoing killing spree in
the Muslim world. None of the Popes have been able to condemn ALL
Christians for the adventures of their colonialists co-religionists
for the simple reasons that they didn't want to reflect bad on the
their faith and also because they didn't want to expose the fact that
it was done with Vatican's authorization. History is repeating itself
with the Pope speaking the same language as the lairs who made their
way to butchering thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This approach is not only in total contrast to the way, Muslims'
crimes are directly associated with their faith, but it also shows how
role of the Church in colonialism is totally taken out of the
discussion.
Problems created by the four centuries of colonialism are not limited
to corruption and violence, as Pope Benedict acknowledges. An in-dept
study shows us that the same problem leads to the present adventures
of the US and its allies.
Like the 1458 papal bull, once more the focus is on Islam and Muslim
majority areas. Considering Muslims savages and lecturing them to
behave and get civilized is nothing new. Deliberate blindness towards
the past makes all those who attempt to lecture Muslims make wild
statements. They ignore that the seeds for the present destabilization
in the former colonial lands were sown centuries ago in the form of
imposing highly exploitive trading terms; indulging in undisguised
looting; transferring enormous amounts of wealth to Europe;
engineering and adapting these continents according to their own
interests in extending European hegemony.
As a result, the colonialists not only consolidated economic dominance
that continues till this day, but also political and cultural
dominance, which is one of the main root causes of unrest and friction
within the former colonies and in their relations with the former
colonial masters.
To gauge the cumulative impact of colonial adventures, think of a
hundred years of continued occupation of Iraq by the US from now. Like
the US, the former colonialists also boasted of introducing
parliamentary democracies, legal structures, educational systems, and
so on. But it is nothing more than mere modeling of a country's
structures upon the West, even in name only, to give the impression
that the country has undergone 'development'.
The sole objective and ultimate result of the colonial escapades has
been disfiguring and destroying the original cultures and
philosophies, and indeed enslaving them to dependence on, and
allegiance to, a self-interested West. Keep this fact aside and you'll
have nothing but Islam or Muslims to blame for the misdeed of those
who took hundreds of millions of lives to bring the world to the
present state.
Like the present myth of moderating and democratizing the Muslim
world, colonialists invented some convincing myths of benefiting the
colonies. According to Director of the Africa Business Information
Service, Tunde Obadina, observes: Whatever may have been its pluses
and minuses, colonialism was a dictatorial regime that denied peoples'
right of self determination. It brought death, pain and humiliation to
millions of its victims. The notion that colonialism was a civilizing
mission is a myth - the system was propelled by Europe's economic and
political self-interest.[9]
Pope Benedict's lecturing Muslims today to hold their "fanatics" for a
peaceful world is in a way paving the way for brining back to the
Muslim world the scenes, which Mark Twain described in these words:
"In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to
death... in many countries we have burned the savage at the stake...
we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mother
with dogs and guns... in many countries we have taken the savage's
land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every day, and
broken his pride and made death his only friend, and overworked him
till he dropped in his tracks." In fact, worse than this sort of
inhuman treatment is meted out to Muslims today. A proof of which lies
in the fact that the US government is not releasing new pictures from
Abu Ghraib because before them Mark Twain's description of man's
inhumanity to man would pale by comparison.
The colonial legacy has left Muslim populated regions with a legacy so
entrenched that the people there find it hard to extricate themselves
from the legal and economic bondage. Self-rule has become an
impossible-to-realize dream for them. For example, if they want to
live by Islam, they find it almost impossible to say no to Riba
because the prime legacy of colonialism was the integration of
colonies into the international capitalist economy. Dictator Musharraf
had to go to the Supreme court to make Riba permissible.
The social, political and economic institutions which the colonialists
left behind and the continued interference since their strategic
withdrawal in the name of giving independence never let Muslims in
particular live independently. Self-rule remained a dream for them.
We need to stop talking about Muslim terrorism and holding all Muslims
responsible for crimes against humanity without proper investigation.
We should objectively compare the extent of the alleged Muslim crimes
and the proven record of the West.
It is too sad that those who are lecturing Muslims do not see what
Director of Research of the California-based Institute for Economic
Democracy, Dr. J. W. Smith, has observed. According to Dr. Smith,
through the devastating historical process, Western civilization has
been "responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since
WW II and causing the death of 100s of millions more as their
economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to
restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and
recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout
colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of
capital from 1945 to 1990." He adds that, "One hundred and fifty
thousand to 300,000 of these were tortured and killed by death squads
set up by Western intelligence agencies, primarily the CIA."[10]
Those who are lecturing 1.2 billion Muslims would do better to dig the
root causes of present turmoil and realize the Muslims are not
responsible for the present unjust global order. The political,
economic and cultural processes that began with colonialism,
culminated in the institutionalization of an international global
political economy dominated by the Western powers at the expense of
the rest of the world, which as Marc Ferro observes, began "replacing
a visible presence by the invisible government of the big banks: the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and so on": a system which
Ferro describes as "multinational imperialism".[11]
All the problems that we set aside in the beginning, Palestine,
occupations, dictators, US presence in Saudi Arabia, all come back as
logical corollaries and outputs of the darkest age of colonialism.
If Muslims are guilty at all of anything, they are guilty of not
living by Islam. That led to their fall since centuries. That
negligence is responsible for their touching the depth of humiliation
today. If they were colonized and exploited in the past, it was due to
their own weakness of faith and if they are facing their historic
humiliation today, it is because of their following others' way of
life and running away from Islam.
The reactive movements and violent elements are the direct product of
Muslims staying away from Islam and colonialists' never-ending
adventures in the Muslims world. The lecturers would do Muslims a
favor if they could ask their co-religionist, neo-colonialists to
leave Muslims alone and give them an opportunity for real independence
and self-rule.
David Warren of Ottawa Citizen complains that there is no one who
could say, he speaks for all Muslims. He believes the reason is that
Khilafah as abolished in 1924. So, let give Muslim a right to
self-determination and self-rule. Let there by Khilafah and a Khalifa,
so that he could say, I speak for all Muslims and this is our stand on
different issues.
http://www.ilaam.net/Main/AbidUllahJan.html
Abid Ullah Jan is author of The End of Democracy. His book, The
Genesis of Final Crusade in Afghanistan, will be released soon.