By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 6, 2002; Page A45
Is Islam an inherently violent religion? A debate on this subject has
received much attention in the United States. The question is absurd. It
is like asking whether Christianity is a religion of peace. Well, there
is Francis of Assisi. And there is the Thirty Years' War. Which do you
choose?
Religions are interpreted by the people of their time and thus change
over time. Scripture can be invoked to support almost any position. Islam
has its periods of violence and its periods of tolerance. The Ottomans
gave refuge to the Jews expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492. Today the
Arab world is the purveyor of the most vicious anti-Semitic propaganda
since Nazi Germany. (Egyptian state television is currently showing a
41-part television series based on the notorious czarist forgery "The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.")
Which stands for the real Islam? The question is not just unanswerable,
it is irrelevant. The real issue is not the essence of an abstraction --
who can say what is the real Christianity or the real Judaism? -- but the
actions of actual Muslims in the world today. And there is no denying the
fact, stated most boldly by Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," that "Islam has bloody
borders."
From Nigeria to Sudan to Pakistan to Indonesia to the Philippines, some
of the worst, most hate-driven violence in the world today is perpetrated
by Muslims and in the name of Islam.
Muslim mobs respond to an offensive newspaper article by burning down the
newspaper's offices, massacring innocent Christians and issuing a fatwa
on the article's author.
In Sudan, the Arab government in Khartoum has for decades been conducting
a genocidal campaign against the Christian and animist blacks in the
south -- a campaign that includes mass starvation, the bombing of
hospitals and slavery.
In Pakistan, Muslim extremists have attacked Christian churches, killing
every parishioner they could. Just last month in Lebanon, an evangelical
Christian nurse, who had devoted her life to caring for the sick, was
shot three times through the head, presumably for "proselytizing."
The Bali disco bombers have confessed to a series of previous church
bombings. In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf specialize in kidnappings
and beheadings of hostages in their terrorist campaign against the
predominantly Catholic central government.
On the northern tier of the Muslim world, even more blood flows -- in
Pakistani-Kashmiri terrorism against Hindu India, Chechen terrorism in
Russian-Orthodox Moscow and Palestinian terrorism against the Jews. (The
Albanian Muslim campaign against Orthodox Macedonia is now on hold.) And
then of course there was Sept. 11, 2001 -- Islamic terrorism reaching far
beyond its borders to strike at the heart of the satanic "Crusaders."
This says nothing about inherent violence; most Muslims are obviously
peaceful people living within the rules of civilized behavior. But the
actual violence, bloodletting against nearly every non-Muslim
civilization from Hindu to African animist, demands attention.
lost its rightful place of dominance, the place it enjoyed half a
millennium ago. Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Zawahiri's allusions to the loss of
Andalusia (medieval Spain) reinforce Osama bin Laden's promise of revenge
and redemption.
This feeling of a civilization in decline -- and the adoption of terror
and intimidation as the road to restoration -- is echoed in a recent
United Nations report that spoke frankly of the abject Arab failure to
modernize. It is one thing for the Arabs to have fallen behind the West.
But to fall behind South Korea -- also colonized, once poor and lacking
any of the Muslim world's fantastic oil wealth -- is sheer humiliation.
Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and leader of perhaps
the largest Muslim society in the world, traces Islamic radicalism not
just to a failure of self-respect and self-identity -- deep feelings of
inadequacy and loss -- but also to an enormous failure of moderate Muslim
leadership. The murderers speak in the name of Islam, and the peaceful
majority cannot find the courage to challenge them.
"The Islamic world today is being held prisoner," writes Salman Rushdie,
"not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a
world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open." And "the majority
remains silent."
