Hey guys I became a Muslim about 15 years ago solely for the sake of its spiritual practice known as Sufism. Then went to Egypt and later to Saudi Arabia, all told for about 10 years. When in Egypt I married a nice young lady from the American University in Cairo who is a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
It is clear to anyone who lives there for a while that the situation is much more complex than might appear. One problem for others trying to understand is that there are no denominations among Muslims and not near as much difference between Sunnis and Shiites as we have been led to believe.
In that part of the world religion is still a very powerful factor in the daily life of almost everyone (even when they are less sincere.) The governments, both colonial and post-colonial, knew this well and have been systematically trying to weaken the religious authorities. The tradtional scholars were very visible and were dependent upon trust-properties (awqaf)established over the centuries for the maintenance of a particular school, mosque, hospital, etc. The governments early on nationalized these independent sources of funding and began appointing its own "authorities" to high positions. These people were there to pacify the people and to help the government lead them into modernity (read: lukewarmness). As most of these countries are poor, the traditional Muslims did not have the private ability to continue to teach the religion on a large scale.
But fortunes change and the Saudis later amassed fortunes. The now royal house of Saud aligned itself with a "reformer" in the mid-18th century named Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahab. There was nothing like him before, his nearest doctrinal predecessor having been rioted against in 13th century Cairo, when all the shaykhs marched through the streets to protest his intolerance of differing, traditional views and his very anthropomorphic ideas. A famous traveler from the period, Ibn Battuta, said this man "had a kink in his brain". The grandpa Saud married ibn Abdul-Wahabs daughter and the arrangement then as now is that the Saud's rule and the descendents of that shaykh set the tone of the religion there. A perpetual tug-of-war since not all of the royal family subscribe to this fundamentalist deviency. Still I could no more openly practice Sufi Islam in Saudi Arabia than a Chrisian could openly practice Christianity there, or a Jew Judaism , a Buddhist Buddhism, etc.
Saudi money has flowed into the vacuum from one end of the Islamic world to the other in support of their narrow, exclusivist view of Islam. It seems accurate to say that the lion's share of (non-Afican-American) mosques in the US are controlled by those that the Saudis favor, since many groups here cannot survive without Saudi financial assistance. The leaders are fundamentalists, but most of the people in the mosques are not, yet over time...
Afghanistan is a microcosm of the Islamic world, in the sense that the weakening of the traditional leadership that occured over the last 100 years in Egypt happened in a couple of decades in Afghanistan. Most of the traditional scholars in this previously tolerant country, made of multiple ethnic groups and of both Sunnis and Shiites, were killed during the war with the Soviets. The educational system having collapsed, the only formal religious training the people were receiving was in the numerous schools built just inside the Pakistani border. Guess who paid for them? Right, the Saudis. The leaders of the Taliban grew up in these schools. Their "movement" started as they were asked to assist in righting certain wrongs done by the corrupt "Mujahideen" warlords, themselves either somewhat fundamentalist or purely opportunist, as for instance the Uzbeki General Dostum. These small-scale rescues carried out by these students ("Taliban" is the local plural word coming from the Arabic "talib" meaning student) snowballed into a larger military operation that people supported at the time because it seemed to promise stability, personal security, and an end to war. Gradually the people began to realize what sort of Islam the Taliban stood for as they began to enact the previously undreamt of restrictions on the people of Kabul, such as the ones against women's rights and freedoms that we are all aware of.
But they have done much else beside. Vehemently anti-Shiite, which is one reason why Pakistan largely through its intelligence service, the ISI, has given it such enormous support even to the detriment of their own country's welfare, when they took the Shiite city of Mazar-e-Sharif, they told the people that they had either to convert to Sunnism, leave, or die (the latter two being roughly equal). This choice, however, was only given to those who survived the two-day killing spree that followed the city's capture. Previously and later, the Taliban used food as a weapon against these people, the Hazaras. In the midst of the Taliban-imposed famine of the region, Pakistan which had contracted to send the Taliban 600,000 tons of grain did not even ask them to allow food to pass to the Hazaras. Silence also from the Saudis, who of course persecute their own Shiite minority in the Eastern section of the country. It might be interesting to note that the Buddhist statues that were destroyed were located in Bamiyan. Now to show to contrast between traditional and extremist Islam, these Buddhas has stood in peace through a 1000 years of Muslim rule, but the Taliban extremists, like extremists everywhere, have only scorn for other religions, even for their most holy manifestations. Another motive for the Taliban was the fact that the UN had wanted to develop that area into a tourist attraction to help the Afghanis economically. What they did not give sufficient attention to was that Bamiyan is in a Shiite area and the Taliban would never have allowed them such a cash-cow.
Pardon me for dragging on like this, but I think that one last point that I would like to explain has to do with why so many Muslims across the East are showing such hostility now toward the US. On one level it is completely hypocritical and their own version of racist which, like everything else there, is religious. Where were these marchers when Saddam invaded Iran and began a war that killed over a million? Or when he gassed Iranian villages? Why did they not protest and attack Russia after it invaded and had no regard whether it targetted civilians or not? Hundreds of thousands died. Where were they later when Russia attacked Chechnya and began to do the same thing there?
There are two reasons America is disliked in the region. (And by the way, Americans themselves and its pop culture are liked very much in most of these countries. Egyptians were friendly with me immediately and in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia I was safer than I would have been in many US or European cities.) First, our government is disliked for interfering in the region. We supported the Shah of Iran in order to contain the USSR. This man was brutalizing his own people, quietly through the SAVAK (secret police) and openly to the point of stafing demonstrators from helicoptor gunships. How could the people not dislike a government that provides their ruler with the means to torment them while preaching human rights elsewhere? Then, after the Shah fell, the goal became to contain the Iranian revolution. So, over time we built up Saddam Hossein in Iraq and encouraged him to attack the Iranian threat. Then on the other side, we deliberately directly somewhat, but mostly through our Pakistani ISI "friends", actively encouraged fundamentalism in order to build up the fervor of Jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan. Pakistan told its embassies to issue visa for Mujahideen to come no questions asked. Over 30,000 non-Afghans from 40 Islamic countries answered the call. Mostly radicals before they arrived, more so after trained by the fundamentalists, US sponsored training was like a university degree in guerilla warfare and terrorism. As if to announce that all Islamic radicals the world over would be given free training and the opportunity to form international links with others of the same ilk in exchange for a fews years of military service. During this period 100,000 others were trained in the Pakistani religious schools. In short, to solve one problem real or unreal the US has a way of causing others equally bad but certainly most real.
The second reason, also viewed as hypocritical is the US's unswerving support of Israel. No doublt their land during certain periods recorded in the Old Testament, with the exception of the time that God himself caused them to be defeated and deported for their disobedience and unrepentance after generations of warnings from many prophets, the land was not empty when the Zionist movement decided upon it as the future location for a Jewish state. European Jews came and settled in that land, just as other Europeans had colonized other lands in the region. After the war, the Jews were often forced to go to Palestine, at a time when many would have rather gone to the UK or to the US where they had relatives. Can anyone, apart from illusioned Christian fundamentalists, blame the local people for resisting a colonizing invasion of their land? When the UN partitioned the land, leaving the poorer part to the Palestinians, does anyone see that as a reason for the local people to consider themselves fortunate that they were allowed to keep about half of what they had? If one remembers these origins of the conflict, then interpreting current events is much easier and really very simple. Does this mean that Yassir Arafat is a good man or would make a good ruler? Certainly not. But the people there need justice and this is an issue the US should support regardless of race or creed. That it does not, and has not, and has perpetuated the myth of a little Israel perpetually under threat, whereas in fact it is and has been armed to the teeth and in very little real danger, riles Muslims from one end of the world to the other. A fact that is made especially dangerous by the fact that, as I mentioned above, the Muslims by and large lack the traditional religious leadership that would be able to help the people do the right thing even in the face of adversity.
Muslims now stand at a crossroads when the definition of their faith must be decided. In many ways American Muslims, and I mean those who are really American regardless of ethnicity, are in a better position to separate the political from the relgious, as well as the merely cultural from the heart of the faith and to help Muslims elsewhere to do the same. To help, the US could start by pressuring Saudi Arabia to stop its public and private funding of fundamentalism outside of its own borders. That would severly limit the fundamentalists ability to train a next, and larger, generation in their ways. Then we need to find some way to support traditional Islamic scholarship at home and abroad. Finally, after the fruit of the former begins to appear, and gradually even from the start, we must pressure the governments of Muslims countries to move toward a democracy truly represenative of their peoples. All this is not so much to interfere as it is to return things somewhat to the way they were before interference started. Then we need to leave people alone to follow their own destinies. -in my humble opinion.
Do I get an award Uncle Bill for the longest posting ever?
