I’ve mentioned Tawfik Hamid before and his latest article, a first hand account of the development of a jihadist worldview, is well worth reading. Hamid explains how his own religious education laid the ground for his later involvement with the terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiya. Here’s a brief extract:
I attended the private Al-Rahebat primary school in the area of Dumiat, which is about 200 kilometers north of Cairo, when I was six years old… Before each Islamic lesson began, the teacher would dismiss the Christian students, who were then obliged to linger outside the room until the lesson was over… it was the first time I perceived that my Christian friends were not my equals… In secondary school I watched films about the early Islamic conquest. These films promoted the notion that “true” Muslims were devoted to aggressive jihad…
I remember one particularly defining moment in an Arabic language class when I was sitting beside a Christian friend named Nagi Anton. I was reading a book entitled Alshaykhan by Taha Hussein that cited the Prophet Muhammad’s words: “I have been ordered by Allah to fight and kill all people [non-Muslims] until they say, ‘No God except Allah.’” Following the reading of this Hadith, I decisively turned toward Nagi and said to him, “If we are to apply Islam correctly, we should apply this Hadith to you.” At that moment I suddenly started to view Nagi as an enemy rather than as a long-time friend…
These doctrines [of jihad] are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue. They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic educational systems in the Middle East as well in the West. Moreover, there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an alternative to the passages I have cited.
A flavour of the school textbooks to which Hamid refers can be found in an essay I posted here last year:
During a recent visit to San Francisco, the Dalai Lama told a group of religious leaders that “[Islam is] like any other tradition – same message, same practice. That is a practice of compassion.” Certainly compassion and horror can be found among adherents of any religious ideology. But there is a difference between monstrous acts that ignore or invert the exhortations of a religion’s founder and monstrous acts that are entirely in accord with that founder’s stated vision.
For instance, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood directs young believers to a children’s website that celebrates homicidal ‘martyrdom’, just as Muhammad is said to have done, and exhorts young Muslims to imitate a prophet who “waged jihad against the infidels.” The site also informs youngsters that “the Jews” are responsible for all of the “corruption and deviance in the world” and that “murdering children” is “part of the Jewish religion.” It’s not clear how this message is to be reconciled with the Dalai Lama’s statement, or with the claims of the Brotherhood’s vice-president, Khairat el-Shatir, who, in an article titled No Need to be Afraid of Us, informed Guardian readers that “the success of the Muslim Brotherhood should not frighten anybody; we respect the rights of all religious and political groups.”
The Dalai Lama is presumably unaware of the severe limits to compassion demanded by several Islamic schoolbooks. One Egyptian textbook, Studies in Theology: Traditions and Morals, Grade II (2001), cites Muhammad and reminds children of their duty to “perform jihad in Allah’s cause, to behead the infidels, take them prisoner, break their power and make their souls humble…” (pp 291-22). Young readers are also reminded that “the concept of jihad is interpreted in the Egyptian school curriculum almost exclusively as a military endeavour… It is war against Allah’s enemies, i.e., the infidels.” Another cheering gem, Commentary on the Surahs of Muhammad, Al-Fath, Al-Hujurat and Qaf, Grade II (2002), warns youngsters against being “seized by compassion” towards unbelievers.
Contempt for non-Muslims is also commonplace in Saudi school textbooks. In July 2004, the Guardian reported the persistence of supremacist indoctrination, despite assurances to the contrary from the Saudi foreign minister. Six-year-olds are instructed that “emulation of the infidels leads to loving them and raising their status in the eyes of the Muslim, and that is forbidden.” Similarly xenophobic instructions have been found in contemporary schoolbooks in Palestine, Jordan and Pakistan, and in judicial texts endorsed by Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the nearest thing to an Islamic Vatican. Again, the size of an extremist ‘fringe’ and its relationship to mainstream conceptions of the faith have to be considered as they actually are, not as one might wish, or assume.
Andrew Bostom has more.
Tawfik Hamid is the author of The Roots of Jihad. His writing and audio material can be found at his website.
Hi David,
The Ummah views our children much as Mao viewed China’s peasants: as blank paper on which it can write whatever it wishes.
As an ex-pat American kid living in Saudi Arabia, I remember my visceral reaction when I was discouraged from drawing a dog on my Arabic homework. I was told that the peninsula’s form of Islam forbade artistic representations of nature – hence Arabia’s artistic obsession with calligraphy and geometry.
Something deep inside my 10-year old body quaked when I learned this. Maybe it was my Welsh Grandmother’s inheritance, but deep down I felt that there was something terribly wrong with the confinement of children’s artistic impulses to well-worn, rectilinear artifices
Later on, because of this abject lesson in comparative cultures, I had a much greater appreciation of the importance of the artistic gains Europe achieved during the Renaissance, and for the artistic licenses I enjoy in my own county, the US of A.
Steveaz,
“The Ummah views our children much as Mao viewed China’s peasants: as blank paper on which it can write whatever it wishes.”
I wouldn’t think in terms of the Ummah or how “it” views things, as it were. The idea of a vast collective abstraction – supposedly of one mind – seems very much part of the problem. (The notion, for instance, that one can somehow “humiliate Islam” and thus insult billions of people by apparently telepathic means.) Though of course there’s no shortage of people claiming to know what the Ummah should be doing and claiming to act on its behalf, generally in appalling ways.
But Hamid makes it difficult for those who maintain, for reasons of preference rather than proof, that jihadist atrocity and associated ugliness is somehow unrelated to how Islam is taught and conceived by a great many people.
It appears the Dalai Lama is suffering the same affliction that so many others are – religious correctness. It’s difficult for most to fathom the term, religion, being nothing more than a cloak for a morally degenerate, expansionist and foundationally violent ideology.
There is only one Quran and accompaning texts – the Hadith and Sira – that all Muslims are commanded to study and follow. There is nothing moderate about these texts. Any mention of compassion is reserved for the faithfull and typically male, exclusively.
So all the memes such as ‘religion of peace,’ a ‘great religion hijacked,’ and ‘one of the three great Abrahamic faiths,’ are worse than nonsense, they are downright dangerous.
“Islam is like any other tradition – same message, same practice. That is a practice of compassion.”
Oh yes, that is so exactly what Islam teaches.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/005959.php
Irwin,
“It appears the Dalai Lama is suffering the same affliction that so many others are – religious correctness.”
It’s not exactly surprising. The Dalai Lama is part of the same racket, as it were. And the bulk of “interfaith dialogue” seems premised on a tacit agreement not to think critically, at least not out loud, and not to blow each other’s cover, which would be bad for business.
The ridiculous thing is, if you ARE a Christian or a Buddhist, then by definition you don’t believe the Koran was the literal word of God and MUST believe Mohammed was either a conman or a madman. After all, if you did believe that you would have to be a Muslim. There’s no other logical position you can take, certainly none that’s remotely “respectful” of Islam.
Ah, but the idea is to *pretend* to be “respectful”, and to get others to pretend the same thing. It’s a mutual dishonesty. That way, no-one’s truth claims, however ludicrous or objectionable, are subject to unflattering scrutiny.
They might all wish to contemplate the zen koan … “If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him.”
Preferably for a lifetime…. then we could all relax, perhaps
Mr Shifter,
There’s an unintended irony to the Dalai Lama’s claim that all theologies are much the same. If memory serves, the Buddha is supposed to have suggested that his devotees “question everything, even me.” Muhammad seems to have had a much less enquiring disposition and often took a rather different, and more ruthless, approach to questioning and dissent.
Still, as I said, it’s all about pretending.
You are quite correct.
I think the main concern that occupies zen philosophy, is authenticity, and being one’s own authority.
And these people seem to go in the opposite direction.
Mr Shifter,
It seems to me there’s a broader expectation that one should become dishonest, or at least stupid, in order to seem “respectful” and “fair”. To point out the obvious, or fairly obvious, distinctions between religious figures and the theologies they’ve shaped is now widely regarded as scandalous or malign. Thus, there’s a strong incentive to be “inauthentic” in this matter.
I’m not sure how dishonesty sits with Buddhism, but the Dalai Lama is either implausibly ill-informed or peddling bullshit like a trooper.
David and Shifter,
The trait I associate first with Buddhism is stoicism. So, in this light the Dalai Lama is playing true-to-form.
This stoicism, I think, is a cultural manifestation of Indo-Chinese cultures rubbing-up against militant Mohammedan Islam over the centuries. Not to overstate the point, it could be called the mindset of an yoked oxen under a load.
Waves of blood-letting “Jihad” have washed over India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, SW China, Persia, Arabia, the Philippines, et al, for hundreds of generations. And wherever the tides recede they leave the indigenous populations cowed in some way. Buddhism is one culture’s adaptation to this. The struggling Animists of coastal East Africa another.
Related, while the terms of violent “Jihad” are part of our everyday lexicon now, its meta-tactics are not. Viewed as a whole, in order to parasitize and indemnify the West (ie, Dhimmitude), the modern jihad movement is utilizing ages-old technologies derived from the region’s millennia of camel and elephant-taming.
The thinking is, if you integrate traditional “animal taming” techniques with the modern media’s well-honed powers of hypnosis, then, exploiting the average Westerner’s appetite for dissociation (some call it “entertainment”), you can entice even the mighty American Mustang to slip its head through your harness.
And once we’re corralled and harnessed, we’ll stoically pay the Dhimmi-tax, too. Some might say we’re already there.
Schoolbook Jihad
Schoolbook Jihad