TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
- (September 2006)
Islam: my version of the facts.
I have an article on my version of the facts about the historical Jesus. It is based not on faith but on historical records and on logic.
Here is a similar guess about Mohammed, the man whom Muslims believe to be
a prophet sent by their god.
There is no question that Mohammed prayed towards Jerusalem and was heavily
influenced by Jewish traditions.
Despite Saudi Arabia's program of scientific destruction of the archeological
record (see Unspeakable Islamic terrorism), it is difficult to deny that Mohammed adopted a Jewish religion (the Old
Testament), prayed towards the Jewish capital (Jerusalem) and worshipped
a Jewish shrine (Mecca). Before the fanatics of the Arabian peninsula made it
illegal to portray Mohammed, there were countless portraits of Mohammed, and
they consistently depicted him as a Jew, not an Arab (e.g., he rides a donkey
not a horse). Therefore he either was a Jew himself or he was very close to
the Jewish community. Therefore it makes sense that he decided to adopt a
monotheistic religion. But therefore there was no reason to choose Allah
as his god: why not choose Yahweh himself, the god of the Jews? Allah is the
Arab name for Enlil, an ancient Mesopotamiam god (See A history of Islam). He was one of the many gods
worshipped at Mecca. Mecca, before Mohammed, was a model of religious tolerance:
a place where all gods were respected and accepted. (A good idea for the United
Nations would be to rebuild the original Mecca shrine,
as a tribute to religious coexistence around the world). Both Jews and
Christians worshipped their gods at the Mecca shrine.
Mohammed could have chosen Yahweh: why choose Enlil/Allah?
The family that went on to establish the Umayyad dictatorship over the newly
founded Islamic empire used to be a tribe of powerful warlords of Mecca.
Mohammed fought them and defeated them.
But two generations later the Umayyad destroyed Mohammed's family and seized power.
(The first Umayyad caliph, Muawiya, was the son of Abu Sufyan,
whom Islamic historians themselves considered the fiercest enemy of
Mohammed because he both strongly opposed the new religion and tried to
exterminate its early followers in series of famous battles).
Sunni Islam as we know it today was largely defined by the Umayyads.
(Shiite Islam is, theoretically,
closer to what Mohammed really wanted). Back in Mecca, before Mohammed invented
Islam, the Umayyads were probably worshipping Allah. One cannot help wondering
if it is possible that Mohammed was a Jew or at least believed in the Jewish god
Yahweh and simply founded a movement of Jewish religious revival that was
later hijacked by the Umayyads and turned into a worship of their god (not
Mohammed's god) Allah.
After all, the first century of the Islamic empire was a century in which
brutal warlords fought for control of it (three of the four early caliphs
were murdered), not a century of smooth propagation of the faith.
The Quran was written by at least two people. The Quran is divided into two periods, the revelations in Mecca and the revelations in exile, in Medina.
The Meccan revelations are peaceful.
The Medina revelations are not. The former sounds like a paraphrasis of the
Christian literature of Syria (not surprising given the similarities between
the Syriac script and the early Arabic script). The latter sounds like a manual
of war. I wonder if it is possible that the Quran is nothing but the combination
of a book written by the Christians of Syria and a book written by the Umayyads
to justify their imperialist campaign.
Unfortunately, the Islamic world has fallen under the control of Saudi Arabia.
For centuries Islam was controlled by the more enlightened regimes of Egypt,
Turkey and Iraq. Saudi Arabia has decided to erase any possible discussion
and create a Sunni dogma. It is doing so by destroying anything that
archeologists, historians or linguists could use to reconstruct what truly
happened.
This only increases my suspicions that Islam was hijacked once before,
at the very beginning, and that one billion Muslims are praying to a
god that their prophet Mohammed wanted to destroy.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (August 2006)
Not Islamic fascism but Islamic denial.
George W Bush, who never misses an opportunity to inflame the world's public
opinion, referred to the Pakistani terrorists of London as "Islamic fascists".
The term is probably more appropriate than Muslims would like to admit (one
can find similarities between the political ideology contained in the "Quran",
if taken literally, and Hitler's "Mein Kampft"),
and it is
encouraging that Bush is beginning to see the whole of Islam (not a few crazy
individuals) as "the" problem (the West has its own mass murderers, just like
the Islamic world has its own, but the real difference between the Western
and the Islamic worlds is their ideologies, which are probably incompatible).
However, the real issue was not that "Islamic fascists" tried to blow up
civilian planes in the Atlantic ocean. The real issue is the way the Islamic
world reacted to the news: the usual denial.
(See
The Muslim masses in denial and
Connecting with the Muslim majority).
Muslims live in denial of everything that happens in their own backyard, not
to mention of everything that Muslims export to the rest of the world.
Problems will not be solved for as long as one billion Muslims deny that
terrorism exists and take sides (with us or against us).
The first reaction of millions of Muslims worldwide is to deny that anything
actually happened. Just like most Muslims believe that the prisoners of
Guantanamo are all innocents and should be simply released, they now believe
that the plot uncovered in London is all a fabrication by the British and
USA governments to humiliate Muslims.
To understand this reaction one has to realize the state of denial in which
millions of Muslims live. To them, a Muslim is innocent by definition.
There cannot possibly be a guilty Muslims. Whenever a Muslim is accused by
infidels of a crime, their first reaction is to take the side of the Muslim,
regardless of what the accusation is and what the charges are. Even when the
victims of the Islamic terrorist are Muslims (as was the case with Zarqawi's
terrorism in Iraq and Jordan), the first reaction by the Muslim
masses is to deny that the terrorist attack was carried out by the
Islamic terrorist and to accuse Israel or the USA or both of being behind
the carnage.
Note that the very same Muslim who supports terrorists is ready to deny the
existence of terrorists. The very same Muslim who goes to the mosque every
friday and asks for revenge against the infidels will be the first one to deny
that any Muslim could have possibly plotted to kill infidels.
There are certainly many causes of terrorism, and certainly the West has
much to blame itself for it. But the root cause of terrorism remains the
state of total denial in which the Muslim masses live. A terrorist is in
a win-win situation: a terrorist gets support from the Muslim community,
and then never gets blamed by the Muslim community, no matter what he or she
does. The Islamic world makes it too easy for terrorists to do their job
and get away with it.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (July 2006)
The Middle East out of control.
There were success stories. The USA overthrew Saddam Hussein (2003).
Libya surrendered
its weapons of mass destruction (2003). Israel withdrew
from Gaza (2005). Iraq had its first democratic elections (2005). Palestine
had its first democratic elections (2005).
Syria withdrew from Lebanon (2005) and the anti-Syrian coalition won
Lebanon's elections (2005).
Iran and Syria were surrounded by USA allies and less and less capable of wreaking havoc in the region. The other Arab governments, from Morocco to Egypt to
Saudi Arabia to Jordan were becoming friendlier to the USA and Israel.
Then (also in 2005)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won presidential elections in Iran and started the sharpest
confrontation with the USA and Israel since the times of Khomeini.
Whether he realized that all this peace offered a unique opportunity for war
or he was just a demented demagogue in the right place
at the right time, his election was the beginning of the end for the USA's
dream of a peaceful and democratic Middle East.
Within a year the Palestinians installed a prime minister of Hamas, mostly
famous for suicide bombings and a darling of Iran.
Iraq descended into even more chaos.
Iran refused to stop its nuclear program.
And finally both Palestinian and Hezbollah militiae attacked Israel, causing
the most massive military Israeli-Arab escalation in a decade.
The trend is towards a nuclear-armed Iran dominating the region, funding
continuous warfare against Israel, and Israel retaliating by annihilating
its neighbors, while the Iraqi civil war drags on for years.
This is not exactly the goal for which USA taxpayers spent bllions of dollars.
Syria and Iran not only regained their influence on the region, but now look
like the keys to any peaceful resolution. In other words, they (not the
new democracies of the region) look set to call the shots.
The USA is struggling to turn so many failures into a success
(the "birthpangs of the new Middle East" as Condoleezza Rice put it) but
that depends on so many unlikely factors (that the Iraqis suddenly stop
slaughering each other, that Iran suddenly surrenders its nuclear program,
that Syria suddenly makes peace with Israel, that Israel destroys the
terrorist groups that it has never been able to destroy) that nobody seriously
thinks Rice will succeed diplomatically.
It looks more and more inevitable that the USA can only do two things: 1. withdraw and let the Middle East go to hell (almost literally) with the danger that
Iran will become a world power and possibly unify the Islamic world against the USA; 2. increase (not decrease) its military
involvement in the region, attacking directly both Iran and Syria.
Neither is an appealing scenario for a USA public opinion that is tired of wars
and hungry for cheap Middle Eastern oil.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (April 2006)
Connecting with the Muslim majority
First, the good news: the vast (vast) majority of Muslims in the world are
peaceful and, in fact, much friendlier than the average westerner. Just travel
around the Islamic world and judge by yourself.
Now the bad news. There is indeed a problem in communicating with the masses
of the Islamic world. The problem is not Osama or Zarqawi (who are criminals
by any standard, Muslim or otherwise). The problem is the average Muslim,
the so called "moderate".
The problem begins with the denial. Muslims who are peaceful people (again,
the ultra-vast majority) live in denial of what the Quran actually says.
This is due to two simple facts: 1. most of them never read it, 2. almost all
of them never read any other religious book of any other religion (thus they
cannot compare). The vast majority of Muslims in the world are convinced
that Islam means "peace". Some of them even play word games with "islam"
(which means "submission" and was used by Mohammed to ask for an enemy's
surrender) and "salam" (which means, more or less, "peace"). The good news,
again, is that these Muslims are strong believers in peace, and twist their
religion to turn it into a religion of peace. The "denial" lies in the fact
that Islam is just the opposite. No matter how you "interpret" it, there
is no question that Mohammed is the only founder of a major religion who
personally killed people, who personally launched a war of conquest, who
personally founded a political entity (the Arab empire). There is no question
that his followers went on a rampage and conquered a large area of the world
from Spain to Iran in the name of his religion. There had been empires before,
and all of them had been as brutal as the Arab empire, but the Arab empire
was the first one to be "religious" in nature. The Egyptian, Persian, Roman empires
did not use religion as a pretext to invade their neighbors: they invaded
their neighbors because they wanted to expand. (In fact, they did not care
what religion the conquered people wanted to continue worshipping).
The followers of Mohammed
were the first ones in history to kill, invade, conquer and annex in the name of a god. (Their great
invention was later copied by the Christians).
Ultimately, Mohammed's followers carried out all these bloody wars
because that is what Mohammed commanded, that is the essence of the Quran.
Any non-Muslim who reads the Quran is shocked by the violence that it contains.
It is even more shocking to hear Muslims who claim that there is no violence
in the Quran. Needless to say, that "is" the problem. If you think that
killing is not an act of violence, then you indirectly justify terrorism,
which, by these standards, is not a big deal. (Muslims are routinely offended
by anyone who calls Mohammed a "terrorist", but Mohammed himself said that
his goal was to inspire "terror" in the heart of the infidels: isn't that
precisely the aim of today's terrorists?).
Paeceful ("moderate") Muslims have to deny these simple facts. They are
offended if you tell them "Mohammed killed" (a fact that no Islamic scholar
ever denied) or if you tell them that all the territories from Morocco
to Iran are "occupied territories", occupied by the Arabs (Muslims routinely
think of "occupied territory" as a territory that used to be Muslim and it
is now controlled by a non-Muslim country, such as Israel or Spain).
Muslims get upset if you tell them that the Christian Crusades were simply
a reaction to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands (it was legitimate that
Muslims invaded the lands of other nations, but it was a crime for other
nations to try to get back those lands).
Muslims even resent it if you tell them that they are Muslims only because
someone won a war (had the Arabs lost the war, the people from Morocco to
Syria would still be Christians and Iranians would still be Zoroastrians).
The people of Morocco to Pakistan are Muslims not because
Allah wanted it but because Arabs (and later Turks) killed more
efficiently than the other kingdoms.
This denial leads to the "Muslim double standard": it is not ok for the
rest of the world to do what the Muslims did. It was perfectly ok for
Muslims to conquer Palestine, the homeland of the Jewish and Christian
religions. It is not ok for, say, one USA soldier to step into Saudi Arabia,
the homeland of the Islamic religion. The Muslims of the world find it
perfectly reasonable that the Palestinians (Muslims) want to control
Palestine, despite the fact that Jesus (the founder of the Christian
religion) was born there and despite the
fact that Jews lived there a thousand years before the Muslims.
On the other hand, Muslims would strongly oppose (presumably sacrificing
their own lives) any attempt by a non-Islamic country to invade Saudi Arabia,
the homeland of the Islamic religion.
If Muslims control Bethlehem and the other Christian areas, why shouldn't
Christians control Mecca?
If Muslims want half of Jerusalem, the Jewish capital, why shouldn't Jews
control half of Mecca?
If Muslims control the Indus valley, the homeland of Hinduism (a land now
entirely inside Pakistan), why shouldn't Indians control Saudi Arabia?
How would your Muslim friend react if a Christian, Jewish or Hindu army invade
the homeland of the Islamic religion? Does your Muslim friend realize that
Islamic armies have invaded and are still occupying the homelands of the Christian, Jewish and Hindu
religions?
Muslims who live in denial of their roots and their history cannot answer
these simple questions.
Muslims who accept their roots and their history (such as Osama and Zarqawi)
have a simple answer: because Mohammed said so, because the Quran says so,
because Islam is a violent ideology of world domination.
Thus the good news is that the vast majority of Muslims want peace and twist the
words of the Quran and the history of their religion in order to prove that
Islam means "peace". The bad news is that, by twisting the very nature of
their religion, Muslims apply a double standard, one for Muslims and one
for the rest of the world.
Last but not least, the problem is one of mindset. Islam invented the religious
war, that, basically, did not exist before Mohammed.
The religious war has remained very much in the minds of all Muslims.
It is part of their education.
It is not that they are trained to carry out a religious war: they are trained to
"interpret history" in terms of religious war. They see religious war every time
there is a problem between a Muslim community and a non-Muslim community.
Where westerners, Russians, Chinese and Indians see only a problem between
two entities (regardless of their religion), Muslims see a problem between
a Muslim and a non-Muslim, and therefore a religious war.
Christians have never been united on anything. The world wars were wars
among Christians. Christians do not think of their country as a "Christian"
country. Not even Christian fundamentalists in the USA, who gladly insult
France any time they can. Not even the Pope, who prefers Islam to the
USA lifestyle. Muslims, instead, look at religion first. They first look
at the religions of the people involved in the issue, and then take sides.
And guess which side they take. There is literally no Muslim who sides
against a fellow Muslim anywhere in the world. Religion prevails.
Every Muslim in the world sides with the Kashmiri independentists, with
the Kosovo Albanians, with the Palestinian Arabs, with the Chechnyan
separatists, with any Muslim group from the Philippines to Morocco.
Where westerners are divided on most of these issues, Muslims are 100%
behind the Muslim side, regardless of what the issue is. For a Muslim the
issue is always a religious war, and therefore her/his duty is to side with
the Muslims. For a Muslim the "issue" that the other side discusses is not an
issue: it is only a pretext to wage a religious war against the poor Muslims.
(When no Muslims are involved in the dispute, the average Muslim of the world
is simply indifferent: ask your Muslim friends what they think of the civil
war in Nepal or in Sri Lanka: they probably hardly know that there is anybody
dying there).
Thus the almost complete Muslim support for the Iraqi insurgents in Iraq. It is not
a matter of whether the Iraqis are better off with Saddam or without Saddam.
For the Muslim masses, that was only a pretext for the USA to wage a religious
war against the Muslims. Very few Muslims are interested in discussing what
was best for the Iraqi people. Almost all Muslims are interested, first and
foremost, in an immediate withdrawal of the USA. Saddam is ok (in fact,
there never was a jihad against Saddam, there never were mass demonstrations
against Saddam, there never were Al Jazeera reportages of Saddam's massacres).
A USA occupation is not ok, no matter what benefits it could bring to the
Iraqi people. For a Muslim the issue is not the well-being of the Iraqi people
but the confrontation between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Thus Muslims are sympathyzing and honestly suffering for the Iraqi people
(and not so much for the Iraqi people who are trying to create a viable
democracy and for the Iraqi soldiers who are trying to maintain order).
But the same Muslims care absolutely zero about the people of Darfur, despite
the fact that the number of people who are dying is almost the same and Darfur
is much smaller. Muslims don't care about Darfur because it is Muslims who
are doing the killing. Muslims interpret everything as a religious war.
If Muslims kill Muslims, then it is not a religious war, then it is not
worth getting too upset.
If one USA soldier by accident kills one Iraqi civilian,
that "is" worth getting very upset about it.
Muslims never demonstrated against the massacres of the Taliban, but they
demonstrated when the USA accidentally bombed a village in Afghanistan
during the war against the Taliban. This has nothing to do with a Muslim's
willingness to live under the Taliban: most likely, only a tiny minority
of Muslims would like to live under the Taliban. But most Muslims conceive
the USA invasion of Afghanistan not as a liberation of "people" oppressed
by brutal dictators, but as a religious war waged by a Christian power against
"Muslims".
Thus we never see Muslims demonstrating in the streets against whatever
crimes other Muslims commits. There have never been massive Muslim
demonstrations against the terrorism in Kashmir or in Israel, or against the
dictatorships of Syria and Iran. The only demonstrations against terrorism
take place when the victims are Muslims (for example, recently in Jordan)
and they routinely turn into demonstrations against Israel and the USA (in
the face of the evidence that the perpetrators were Muslims).
The Muslim mindset is that all these unpleasant events are part of a religious
war. Since even the worst terrorists are, ultimately, on the side of Islam, and
even the best infidels are, ultimately, enemies of Islam, then the "moderate"
Muslim has to find excuses to justify the terrorists and excuses to criminalize
the infidels.
kosovo was a case in which a Christian country (the USA) bombed a Christian
country (Serbia) to protect an Islamic community. There was no Muslim in the
world who complained about this USA attack against Serbia.
The same Muslims who protest against the liberation of Afghanistan or Iraq
were more than happy to see the USA defend the Muslims
of Kosovo.
The same Muslims who march in the streets whenever the USA accidentally
kills an Afghani civilian were more than willing to accept that some innocent
Serbian civilians would die in the USA bombing of Serbia.
Muslims are brainwashed as children to think of every world event as a
religious war, and a Christian who bombs a Christian is not a religious
war, therefore it is ok. Not only ok: it fulfills the Quran's will.
No Muslim has stopped one second to ponder that Kosovo is the homeland of
the Serbs. How would the same Muslims react if a non-Muslim minority
became a majority in Mecca and the USA bombed Saudi Arabia to protect
that minority against the Muslims?
Thus the first problem is one of denial. The second problem that derives from
the first one is the double standard. And then the Muslim perception that
every crisis in the world must be viewed as a religious war: Islam against
non-Islam.
Then we have the clash between Muslims
and the rest of the world (USA, Europe, Russia, China, India, Philippines,
you name it). Wherever there is Islam, there is a war.
De facto, Islam is the last problem left in the world. The great powers are
at peace for the first time in the history of the world.
But don't expect Muslims to realize that their religion is the last
problem in the world. For them it is the rest of the world that is at war
against their religion. Their religion means "peace".
Unfortunately, the only way to change this situation is to teach Muslims
the truth that they never wanted to learn about their prophet and their
religion: that Islam means "war". When Muslims face this fact (the same
way that Catholics eventually faced the truth about the Popes), we will
be on the right track to solve the last major problem, and we will be very
close to a world without wars.
Sooner or later, Muslims have to start telling their children the truth.
The truth is actually very simple.
In those days it was good to kill enemies.
Every Muslim historian of the past centuries emphasized that Mohammed
personally killed his enemies (and raped their women). In those days it was
considered a good thing to do. That "is" what made Mohammed credible to the
yes of his people: he killed his enemies and won the war.
Trying to deny that Mohammed killed is like trying to deny that Julius Caesar
or Napoleon killed. They all killed because in those days it was good to kill,
even to kill people who had not hurt you. They all built empires because
they killed the people who did not want to "submit" (islem).
His companions continued his religious war and forced all the people from Spain to
Iran to "submit" (islem). In those days it was considered a good thing that
some warriors defeated so many people and conquered so much territory.
In those days nobody doubted that it could be reprehensible to kill so many
innocents. It is pointless to try to deny that it happened, just like it
would be silly to deny that the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire or the
British Empire killed a lot of innocents.
That is how Islam spread. That is why a Muslim is a Muslim: because her or his
people were subjected by the Muslims.
The Quran embodies this imperial philosophy.
Sooner or later, Muslims have to start telling their children this very simple
truth. There is actually little to be ashamed, because all civilizations
did the same, and in any case we live in age in which children are not
considered responsible for the sins of the fathers.
Muslims need to face the simple fact that Mohammed was a warrior, that
his followers were an army, that Islam was an empire (the first religious
empire), and that today we live in a different world, in which warriors,
armies and empires are no longer welcome.
The rest of the world too has to help by stating loud and clear that the
behavior of Darius, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, etc is something of the past,
and today we don't believe in invading neighbors at will.
We can blame the Muslims for not telling their children the truth about
Mohammed and the Islamic empire, but we also have to blame the French
prime minister Villepin for hailing Napoleon as a hero and thousands of
Italian teachers for teaching that Julius Caesar was a hero.
The entire planet has to agree once and forever on what is "good" and what
is not "good". Invading, killing and destroying people who have not provoked
us is not good in our age. It was accepted and even encouraged in the past,
but today we do not want anyone to be inspired by those brutal conquerors,
whether it was Darius, Caesar, Mohammed, Napoleon or the British army.
We want peace. Not Islamic or Roman or Persian or British or USA peace:
"real" peace.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (March 2006)
Why USA citizens don't trust Islam anymore.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, the percentage of USA citizens who
believe that Islam causes religious violence has more than doubled in the four
years since the terrorist attacks of 2001 from 14% to 33%.
While this is still less than 50%, it is nonetheless a significant jump in just
four years.
Muslims will claim that this is all because of some distorted portrayal of
the facts by the western media.
But it really doesn't take a genius: Shiites and Sunnis are blowing themselves
up by the dozens in Iraq (and, for that matter, in Pakistan too), based on
religious affiliation, and thousands (if not
millions) of Muslims rioted in the streets in the name of their religion when
a Danish newspaper published cartoons deemed offensive to their religion.
All the conflicts that involve Muslims are fought in the name of Islam
(unlike, say, the Nepalese civil war or the Colombian civil war or the many
wars in black Africa, where neither party invokes their religious affiliation).
Call it the way you like, but it is the perpetrators themselves who dedicate
their violence to Islam.
Denying that Islam is related to so much world-wide violence is like denying
that communism has anything to do with lack of human rights in North Korea,
Cuba and mainland China.
Most USA citizens believe that Islam preaches hate. Muslims will argue that
this is not true, but talk to any mosque-goer in any part of the world,
and most likely you will hear very confrontational opinions that do not
differ that much from Osama's opinions, although they are routinely wrapped
up in a "Islam means peace" kind of statement.
Mosque-goers rarely doubt the terrorists, but always doubt western leaders.
Mosque-goers rarely blame a Muslim for an event, and almost invariably
blame non-Muslims for it.
Etc. Like it or not,
Osama bin Laden is, de facto, a spokesman for the peoples of the mosques.
So what is truly surprising of this poll is that 67% of USA citizens do not
think so. One wonders if they are so well informed about Islam to decide
that Islam does not preach violence, or if they simply do not know enough
about what is going on. I suspect the latter is more true than the former,
and that, with time, the percentage will only increase, as more and more people
learn about the reasons that trigger violence in the Islamic world.
I suspect that many USA citizens have a confused idea of what is going on in
Iraq, blaming it mostly on a small group of terrorists and on Bush's inept
policies. I suspect that the
vast majority of USA citizens has not heard anything about the cartoon protests.
And i suspect that, when they do, the numbers of these polls will double again.
What is worse is that a similar poll in Europe would most likely show an even
greater increase in distrust for Islam. The backlash from the cartoon protests
is likely to be much bigger than the backlash from September 11 or even the
Madrid bombings, because it showed the face not of a handful of terrorists
but of a much larger population of Muslims.
The other factor, that is almost never mentioned in these statistics, is
the mounting awareness of non-Muslims about the content of the Quran. Muslims
routinely invite non-Muslims to read the Quran, but those Muslims have never
read the religious books of other religions and do not realize the effect
that the Quran has on the people of the world. There is hardly a more violent
book in the history of human religions, but Muslims who never read the Hindu
Upanishad, the Buddhist scriptures and the Gospels are convinced of the
opposite. By inviting non-Muslims to read the Quran, they create their
own problem. Christians, Buddhists and Hindus who read the Quran are
appalled by the sheer violence that is contained in it, ostensibly the
words of the very prophet of Islam. Read the Quran and it will be obvious
why so many Muslims (out of a population of one billion) resort to extreme
violence.
Muslims can scream, as usual, that this is discrimination and prejudice.
Or they can look into the mirror and see that the world is simply judging them
based on the facts. Yes, it was only a small minority of Muslims that burned
Danish flags and asked for the extermination of Danish people (plus Israel
and the USA, that are always added for good measure in any Muslim protest),
but the Islamic society at large did nothing to stop them. And make sure to
add: "as usual". In most Islamic
countries the few intellectuals who dared defend the Danish government and
downplay the incident were fired and even arrested.
(See Islam vs freedom of the press).
Yes, most Muslims are in favor of "interpreting" the Quran, not sticking to
the letter: but they keep telling "us" (non-Muslims) not "them" (the radical
Muslims). How many Muslims march in the street to protest against the radical
interpretation of Islam? How many Muslims burn the flags of Iran to protest
against the radical interpretation of the ayatollahs? How many Muslims
burned Taliban flags to protest against the Taliban's radical form of Islam?
Let us face it: one billion Muslims never did anything to show their
opposition to the radical Islam implemented (not only theorized) by the Taliban
and by the Iranian ayatollahs.
Yes, there are very few Muslims who side openly with Al Qaeda, maybe even less than 1%, but the majority of Muslims is perfectly happy to watch Al Jazeera,
whose ideology is very similar to Al Qaeda's and whose role is pretty much one
of articulating the
ideological justification for suicide bombers (as in "the Islamic world is
perfect and all the evils of the world are caused by non-Muslims" and
"Muslims only have their bodies to use as weapons").
How many Muslims complain that Al Jazeera takes every word by Osama as
truth that doesn't need to be verified while it implies that every word by
non-Muslim leaders is a lie?
Muslims have a long way to go to convince the West, Russia, China and India
that theirs is a peaceful religion.
They, not us, have to do the homework.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (February 2006)
The rise of the Quran.
The world (not only the Christian world) has been shocked by the reaction
of some Muslims (including governments) to some cartoons published in an obscure
newspaper of a small European country.
The shock has reverberated from China to India to, of course,
Europe. Each continent (and almost each country) has its own grievances against
crowds of rioting Muslims who, at some point or another, feel "offended" by
the behavior of their hosts or their neighbors and try to impose the will of
Islam on other people.
Muslims such as the president of Iran have involved the Jews (who had
nothing to do with this episode). So it has now become a "global crisis", as
the prime minister of Denmark correctly said.
The old theory of the "clash of civilizations" has been resurrected to explain
why Muslims (not only the extremists) keep missing the point.
See Decolonization and the Islamic civil war for my opinion on the "clash of civilizations".
The way Islam dominates the societies of the countries from Morocco to Pakistan
is indeed unique. And that "is" the issue. The life of a Muslim (not necessarily
a radical Muslim) is (on average) much more under the influence of the Quran than the life
of a Christian is under the influence of the Gospels or the life of a Buddhist
is under the influence of the Buddhist scriptures. Over the last few centuries,
the Islamic world has not followed the same path as the rest of the world
towards emancipation from the power of organized religion, but viceversa.
Examples:
- Portraits of Mohammed are now "really" banned (they were commonplace until a few centuries ago)
- Non-Muslims are leaving Islamic countries by the millions, leaving those countries entirely in the hands of Muslims
- For the first time in centuries, there is an Islamic state (Iran). There were actually two until september 2001 (the Taliban in Afghanistan). And there might be two again, depending on whether one considers Palestine (now ruled by Hamas) as a state.
- Suicide bombers were invented in the 1980s. Martyrs of Islam have always existed, but suicide bombers (who blow up mainly civilians, including Muslim civilians) had never existed before.
- Any discussion on the origin of the Quran is banned from the Islamic world (for example, see this summary of research on variants of the Quran, or this book on the similarities with Syriac religious texts)
There is a very visible dimension of the growing importance of the Quran.
Most people in the world are very private about their religious beliefs.
Most christians who own a Bible keep it in a drawer, as if they were ashamed
of it. And they will probably turn down a conversation on Christianity.
The vast majority of Christians has never read the Bible, and no intention of
reading it.
Most practicing Buddhists in Japan carry out their religious functions quietly,
so much so that it is not easy to guess the religious affiliation of a Japanese.
The vast majority of Buddhists has never read the Buddhist scriptures, and no
intention of reading it.
The vast majority of Hinduists has never read the Upanishads.
Large areas of the world (such as China) are virtually devoid of any religious
practice.
Today's Muslims, instead, proudly display their copy of the Quran, loudly
declare their allegiance to Islam, and warmly identify with fellow Muslims.
Christians wish Merry Christmas to everybody, but (during equivalent religious
holidays) Muslims wish well only to fellow Muslims.
The majority of Christians and Buddhists and Hinduists are a bit ashamed of
the superstitions written in their holy books, and they are fully aware that
all religion is superstition.
Muslims are not ashamed at all of the Quran. They treat it no more and no less
as the rest of the world treats a book by Shakespeare or by Einstein: something
that one should be proud of having read and one should quote in every
intelligent discussion.
Furthermore most people on this planet are curious about other religions.
Europeans and Americans routinely read books about other religions (including
Islam). Countries like India and China are melting pots of different religions
(including Islam). Muslims, instead, tend to know very little about the other
religions. In fact, the average Muslim never read a line of any religious
book other than the Quran. Because Muslims never read the holy books of other
religions, they cannot compare the Quran to other holy books.
(Thus Muslims routinely fail to understand the reaction of non-Muslims who
read the Quran, a reaction that is usually very negative).
While the rest of the world has undergone a period of rapid development
in both the Sciences and the Arts, the Islamic world has had virtually no
developent at all in either the Sciences (not a single discovery) or the
Arts (not much literary, architectural or musical innovation compared with
the rest of the world). While the rest of the world has clearly broken
with the past, the Islamic world still lives very much in the past.
Thus Islam is moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the world,
towards stronger (not weaker) religious dominance. No surprise then that the
rest of the world is moving towards peace whereas the Islamic world is getting
involved in more and more wars. For the first time in centuries, there are no
wars between the world's powers (notably between Christian powers).
With the small exceptions of Colombia and Nepal, the only wars that are still going on (Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Sudan, Philippines, Kashmir, Al Qaeda)
involve Muslims (This is not a statement about who is right or wrong in those
wars: Italy is probably right in claiming that Corsica belongs geographically
to Italy, but it does not start a war with France over Corsica. Spain
is probably right that Gibraltar should not belong to Britain, but does not
start a war with Britain over Gibraltar. Etc. There are countless grievances all around the world that do not result in wars).
The social, economic, military, scientific and cultural decline of the
Islamic world is well documented. What is not well documented is the
parallel process: the rise of Islam. The importance of the Quran has increased
proportionally with the decline of the Islamic world. No surprise then that
the reactions of the Islamic world to actions by non-Muslims have become
more and more violent. The reason is that today
Muslims feel much stronger
(than a thousand years ago or 500 years ago)
about the word of the Quran
and the fact that it should be obeyed even in non-Islamic lands.
A series of revolutions "demoted" the status of religion in pretty much
every part of the planet, except the Islamic world. The American revolution of
1776 clearly stated that people should be free to believe any superstition
they like to believe, but that superstition should not interfere with public
life.
The French Revolution of 1789 made it even more explicit by persecuting
religious people. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution
of 1911 were "materialist" revolutions that replaced religious morality with
state morality. Right or wrong, the effect of these revolutions was to
emancipate all these regions of the Earth from the old religions.
The Islamic world (with the exception of Turkey) did not have any revolution of this kind.
In fact, the Islamic world is the only region in the world where non-religious
people feel persecuted: on "must" be a good Muslim to be respected by the
community.
(To be fair, one Islamic country did have an anti-religious revolution, and
that country is, by far, the most progressive of the Islamic world, producing
plenty of writers, philosophers and scientists: Turkey).
Whether it was a cause or an effect, the progressive emancipation from
religion coincided with the triumph of the West (and, later, of Russia and
of China and now also of India).
The rise of the West caused the decline of the Islamic world,
that had dominated the Middle East and Northern Africa for many centuries.
The military decadence of the Islamic world had started earlier. Perhaps the
key event was the defeat of the Ottomans in 1683 (the second time they tried
to take Vienna). Under pressure from the emerging western powers, the Ottoman
empire started to unravel. At the same time
the Safavid empire (centered around Iran) was beginning to implode (last but
not least because of Russia's expansion). The last major decision by the
Safavids was religious in nature: to adopt Shiite Islam instead of Sunni Islam
as the state religion (thus today Iran and most of Iraq are Shiite).
But the real blow to the Islamic world came from countries that did not even
bordered on Islamic countries, such as Portugal, Holland and Britain. These
small European countries had found a way to trade with the Far East by sea,
without having to cross the Islamic lands. This fact completely changed the
nature of world trade, making western Europe more and more relevant while the
Islamic world was becoming less and less relevant. An accidental consequence
of the new European sea trade had been to "discover" America, a fact that,
within two centuries, made the Islamic world even less relevant.
The Islamic world also missed the scientific revolution that was propelling
the industrial revolution. Besides leaving the Islamic masses much poorer
than the European masses, this fact also accounts for the inferior ships and
weapons of the Islamic world. There is no question that Islam played a major
part in this decision: the Islamic establishment opposed the printing press
(other than for printing religious books) and opposed the translation of foreign
books. To this day, the Islamic world has (by far) the lowest percentage
of foreign books and of non-religious books in the entire world.
The first printing press in the Islamic world was founded in Istanbul only
in 1727 and was torched a few years later by Islamic fundamentalists.
The decadence of the Islamic world has been going on since at least the 17th
century, and continues today. It is likely that today is the lowest point of
the Islamic civilization since its birth, and that the decline is continuing.
The decadence did not involve non-Muslim people living within the borders of the
Islamic world. Both Jews and Christians (and Hindus and Buddhists in the East)
benefited from the economic boom of western Europe. They had no problems
adopting the modern views of Europe. While they were still not considered
equal citizens (non-Muslims were tolerated but did not have full rights),
the non-Muslim populations were getting much richer than the Muslim population.
Eventually, the Islamic world resorted to genocide (notably against the
Armenians) and to ethnic cleansing (still going on throughout the Islamic
world) to get rid of non-Muslims who, because they were not living the Islamic
life, were getting richer and richer.
The Ottoman empire kept shrinking. The Iranian state kept shrinking.
Both tried (too late) to adopt the Western lifestyle, with its emphasis on
education and technology.
Egypt and all of North Africa became a European colony.
Somehow a side effect of this global loss of power was a new emphasis on
pure Islam, on the literal interpretation of the Quran.
The reasons are more psychological than political. The Muslims of the Islamic
world probably felt a mixture of anger, envy and humiliation. On one hand
they got poorer and weaker by not adopting the Western lifestyle. On the other
hand it was humiliating to adopt the lifestyle of non-Muslim people whom Muslims
had dominated (culturally) for so long.
Muslims envied the success of the Christian people, but refused to copy the
Christian way of life, and therefore tried to achieve the same success using
a different system, the system of the Quran.
Instead of identifying the cause of the problem (Islam), they stuck stubbornly
to the very cause, thus making the problem only worse, more insoluble.
Whichever the cause, the effect was to rapidly increase the importance of the
Quran within the Islamic world. For example, portraits of Mohammed came to be
forbidden (they had been commonplace for centuries) and anything that has to do
with entertainment became suspicious (the Taliban even forbade the radio).
(The prohibition of images was in fact a further cause of cultural decline, because it made painting and sculpture irrelevant. Islamic mosques were bare buildings when Christian, Buddhist and Hinduist religious buildings were the glorious summa of the cultures of the European, Chinese and Indian societies. The prohibition of images de facto deprived the Islamic civilization of one of the main drivers of cultural development in all other civilizations).
It didn't help that the culturally advanced regions of Iran, Egypt and Turkey
became as poor as the culturally backward region of Saudi Arabia (which had
been virtually lawless from the 9th century till the Saudi family unified
most of the peninsula under the fanatical Wahabi ideology). Previously
Muslims had
rarely taken inspiration from Saudi Arabia (the Umayyads and the Safavids
created empires centered around Damascus and Baghdad, not Mecca, and the
armies of the Seljuqs and the
Ottomans paid almost no attention to this desolate region).
But now that the old Islamic regimes were collapsing there was no reason to consider
Saudi Arabia a land of stone-age tribal warlords. Alas, Saudi Arabia was rapidly
falling under the influence of the Wahabi sect, preaching a return to Ibn
Hanbal (strict obedience to the Quran and the Hadith). Instead of the advanced
societies of Turkey and Iran influencing the backward society of Saudi Arabia,
the opposite started happening (and is still happening). The discovery of
oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 helped push Saudi Arabia to the top tier of
Arab states, for the first time since Mohammed. Not only were Muslims around
the world more motivated to pay attention to Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia
now had the money to make itself heard all over the Islamic world.
The other oil-rich country that had money to waste was Iran, that happened
to be the first country to become an Islamic republic (1979). The outcome of that
revolution (initiated on totally different grounds) was both an effect and
a cause for the Islamic revival. On one hand, the Islamists won because
the Iranian people identified Islam as the alternative to Western civilization.
On the other hand Khomeini's victory became another cause of the further
Islamization of the Arab world. Besides the example that they set, Iran and
Saudi Arabia could flood their neighbors with oil money to support all sorts
of Islamic movements. Thus Iran (opposed to the USA) supported Palestinian
terrorism and Saudi Arabia (opposed to the Soviet Union) supported the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s had not caused the same kind of seismic
readjustment because they were inherently different.
Even after Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist program (1952) and the Algerian civil war against French colonialism (1962), which were the two spectacular events of
the previous decades, there were still millions of Christians and Jews in
north Africa and the Middle East, and relatively few people were willing to
die in the name of the Quran. Even the earlier Palestinian terrorists, led by
Arafat (1969), were more interested in getting a homeland than in Islam.
None of these leaders cared much for Islamic orthodoxy.
Nasser, Ben Bella and Arafat were not fighting in the name of Allah but
in the name of self-determination and independence (and even socialism,
religion's public enemy number one).
The events that dramatically altered the ideological landscape were the
oil crisis of 1973, that accidentally propelled the more conservative Arab
countries (such as Saudi Arabia) to the forefront of international politics,
and the Islamic revolution of Khomeini in Iran (1979), that offered a new
ideological motivation for the many troubles of the Islamic world.
SLowly but steadily the disease spread to the rest of the Islamic world:
The Algerian civil war (1992), supported by Iran, the Taliban revolution in Afghanistan (1996), supported by Saudi Arabia, and the second Palestinian intifada
(2000), led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad (that were religious institutions,
unlike the original Palestinian Liberation Organization),
introduced a new levels of ferocity inspired by Islam because they belonged
to a new phase.
The Christian powers, busy fighting each other in the Cold War,
paid little attention to the radicalization of the Islamic world.
This is the time when the exodus of non-Mulims became irreversible.
The escalating faith in the letter of the Quran was
paralleled by a combined population shift: 1. a population boom in the Islamic
lands that pushed Muslims towards and against their non-Muslim neighbors
in a way that never happened before; 2. a mass emigration of poor Muslims
towards non-Muslim countries in search for work, resulting in the establishment
of undesired Muslim communities well inside the non-Muslim world;
3. a global form of Islamic ethnic cleansing that has greatly reduced the
number of non-Muslims living within the Islamic world. This third phenomenon
ranged from the expulsion of Jews and Christians from Algeria in 1962 to the
expulsion of Jews from Iraq
during Saddam Hussein's tyranny to the mass exodus of Jews and Christians
from Iran after the Islamic revolution to the ethnic cleansing of Buddhists
carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan to the current exodus of Christians
from Iraq. When Pakistan was created, the percentage of Hindus was 24%:
today it is less than 2%. (By contrast, India's Muslims have increased from
10% to 13% of the population).
Christian churches are being burned on a monthly basis all over the Islamic
world, from Egypt to Iraq. There are virtually no Jews left outside of Iran.
There are 5,000 Jews left in Morocco, less than 100 in Algeria, Egypt and Iraq,
and zero in Saudi Arabia (even in historically Jewish areas, ask Mohammed in
person). The Islamic country with the largest population of Jews is Iran, with
18,000. These are lands where Jews even outnumbered Arabs in ancient times.
(See World's Jewish population).
These non-Muslim communities had a beneficial influence on the Islamic world
because they reminded Muslims that there are other religions, with other
values, and indirectly taught them religious tolerance. (In fact, the Arab
world used to be more tolerant than the Christian world).
Needless to say, this population shift has sent abroad the Muslims who are not
strict about the Quran.
Therefore the Muslims who still live within the Islamic world are the
ones who tend to be more conservative and now they don't even have the example
of non-Muslims to show them different religions. They are getting used to the
idea that there is only one religion, and that the Quran is the only important
book in the world. And they brainwash their children. So each generation is
more fanatical than the previous one, even if they think that they are
"moderate" Muslims (they are not moderate at all compared with the Muslims of
five centuries ago).
Thus the growing importance of the Quran. I doubt the Quran was ever so
important for a Muslim in 1,400 years of Islam.
I doubt that the Islamic world was ever dominated by the "culture" of the Arabian peninsula
at any point in its history as it is today.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (January 2006)
Islam vs freedom of the press
A small Danish newspaper published some cartoons that caricatured Mohammed, the founder of Islam. According to modern Islamic clerics, it is a sin (a mortal sin) to depict Mohammed, and of course it is a sin to make fun of him.
Demonstrations against Denmark have been spreading throughout the Islamic world,
with governments (not only fanatics) joining the choir of protests.
The government of Denmark has replied that a democratic government cannot
tell a newspaper what to print or not to print. This has only increased the
violence of the protests.
A number of newspapers from several western European countries (notably none
from Britain) have reprinted the cartoons to show solidarity towards freedom
of the press.
That has only increased the violence of the protests. Protesters in Palestine
shouted: "Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up". Basically, they
advocated the extermination of the entire Danish people for the action committed
by one Danish newspaper.
To be fair, we do not know what percentage of the Muslim population is
involved in these protests, but very few Muslims have spoken out "against"
the protests.
One (one) newspaper in the entire Islamic world has dared publish the cartoons,
asking Muslims to be reasonable about the fact that these are just cartoons,
and that Westerners routinely caricature everybody, including Jesus, the Pope
and their own political leaders. The editor of that
newspaper was fired the following day and now risks going to jail.
Here is what the world has learned from this display of Islamic belligerence:
- As far as the importance of religious subjects, the Islamic world is proceeding in the opposite direction from the rest of the world: religion matters less and less around the world, but more and more in the Islamic world (see The rise of the Quran).
- Some Muslims have a unique way to create a war out of nothing. Then they blame it on everybody else except their own actions. (The other Muslims are not any better if they don't speak out against this violent "minority").
- Westerners live in free societies, and they want to continue to live in free societies. Year after year, some Muslims prove to the West that this very simple concept is too difficult for Muslims to understand. We may be approaching the point where Westerners (and not only westerners) will stop trying to convey the message and will use Sharon's method (metaphorically if not physically): build a fence all around the Islamic world.
- Incidents like this increase the world's xenophobia against Muslims. Paraphrasing a Danish citizen interviewed on television: "Muslims of the world: leave us alone. Go back to your countries and live the life you want to live, but let us live our lives the way we want to live them." This is the message that one hears more and more often from Portugal to the Philippines, from Australia to Malawi.
- Westerners don't burn Egyptian flags if one Egyptian does something that Westerners condemn. It is scary to see Muslims burn Danish flags because of something that a Danish person did. This is precisely the worst image that Islam has around the world: stone-age people who still live according to tribal rules. (A few years ago a French newspaper published a portrait of Jesus, naked and wearing a condom, and a famous movie depicts Jesus as the lover of a prostitute: some Christians wrote letters of protest, but they didn't torch buildings and didn't demand the beheading of all French people).
- Some Muslims have a unique way to turn a debate about different moral values into a debate about fact versus superstition. Muslims from different countries are comparing the cartoons that make fun of Mohammed to the theories that the Nazist extermination of Jews (the Holocaust) never took place. In other words: if the world does not believe in what Muslims believe, then Muslims feel free to stop believing in the science, history, mathematics and maybe even geography in which the world believes. (These Muslims are so ignorant they don't even know that the Danish are Christians, not Jews: an Iranian newspaper has promised to publish cartoons about the Holocaust in retaliation for the Danish cartoons about Mohammed. This ignorance is even funnier than the cartoons). A leader of the Danish Muslim community asks if Americans would be offended by cartoons making fun of the victims of September 11... If you want to "retaliate", why not make fun of Jesus or of the Pope, i.e. of the equivalent superstitions of the Christian world? Muslims have a unique (and truly terrifying) way of confusing facts (september 11 really happened, regardless of what is your religion) and superstition (Mohammed is a prophet only if you believe in the superstition that there is a God and this God had nothing better to do than speak to this citizen of Medina).
- We care for the life of a living Danish (or Moroccan or Australian or Brazilian or Iraqi or...) citizen much more than we care for the status of an imaginary prophet. These Muslims care more for the status of the imaginary prophet than for the life of a living human being (Danish or Australian or Brazilian or Iraqi or...).
- The reasoning by these Muslims is that something should be forbidden just because it offends millions of Muslims. Well, Islam is offensive to hundreds of millions of people (from France to Japan, from India to Russia) who read the Quran and were shocked by its philosophy, and it is particularly offensive to hundreds of millions of women who perceive being denied civil rights and even paradise by the Quran. Does this mean that Islam should be forbidden all over the world because it offends so many people?
- Instead of the Islamic world solving its problem with Islam (the fact that Islam dominates their societies), the Islamic world is exporting the problem to the non-Islamic world. It is bad enough that the Islamic world lives under the dictatorship of Islam, but now these Muslims also want to export the dictatorship of Islam to non-Islamic countries.
- According to these Muslims, from now on Islam will decide what the world (not just the Islamic world) can write, read and think: anything that Islam considers "offensive" must be forbidden, not only within the boundaries of the Islamic world but all over the planet (and presumably in every corner of the universe).
- How is it possible that millions of Muslims have nothing more important to protest about than a religious superstition? Are these Muslims burning flags of their country to protest against the corruption and stupidity of their regimes? Are these Muslims burning copies of the Quran to protest against the miserable conditions in which their clerics make them live? How is it possible that these Muslims have nothing better to protest against than some cartoons published by a small newspaper in a small remote country? Days after the riots started a suicide bomber blew up 23 people in Pakistan: the Islamic world has an infinite number of problems to solve, but it chooses to focus only on the non-problems. Maybe that is a reason why the problems don't get solved.
- One simple reason why there is no freedom of the press in the Islamic world, why Muslims get government-controlled newspapers and "news" channels such as Al Jazeera, is that, ultimately, that "is" what many of them want.
- These Muslims who claim to have been offended by the cartoons would be more credible if they had protested when the Taliban destroyed (not just made fun of) two giant Buddhas in Afghanistan. Didn't that offend hundreds of millions of Buddhists (and of non-Buddhists too)? How many Muslims marched in the streets to protest against this act by the Taliban? How many Muslims burned Taliban flags in the streets? How many Muslims burned copies of the Quran to protest against the actions of the Quran-inspired Taliban?
- Muslims claim that it is blasphemous to picture Mohammed, but never question why. Why is it blasphemous? (No, it is not in the Quran, see the P.S.) How can millions of people blindly believe something just because the clerics told them so? How can millions of people not wonder why? Why were all the portraits of Mohammed destroyed in the Islamic world? Why were all traces of Mohammed's life scientifically destroyed by Saudi Arabia? Why are Islamic clerics so afraid of showing the face of Mohammed? What is Islam afraid of? (If you want my opinion, and if you are not a fanatic Muslim, read Why are portraits of Mohammed banned?).
- These same Muslims usually complain that they are always depicted as the culprit. Maybe it is because they never miss an opportunity to "be" the culprit. The day that the Islamic world produces great scientists and writers, instead of terrorists, dictators and rioting crowds, the world will be happy (very happy) to hail those scientists and writers.
- Muslims have no sense of humour. This doesn't make Muslims more appealing to the rest of the world: who wants to mingle with people who may launch into an extermination campaign of you and your family and your entire nation if you or one of your relatives or one of your compatriots happens to do or say something that happens to offend them? (I recently tossed in the recycling bin my old copy of the Quran because i found a better copy at a library sale: does that mean that one billion Muslims are offended that a library was selling a Quran for one dollar and that i threw a copy of the Quran in the garbage? Do i want to have a Muslim neighbor, knowing that he may get offended by my ordinary actions?)
- Muslims keep encouraging the rest of the world to study the Quran to learn about Islam. It is about time that Muslims start doing what they tell others to do: study the other religions. How many Muslims have read the Upanishad of Hinduism, the Buddhist scriptures or just the Christian Gospels? If Muslims studied the other religions, they would better understand why so many Muslims (and not so many Hindus, Buddhists or Christians) call for extermination of others out of the most trivial of matters.
- Last but not least, most of the world had their own revolutions against organized religious superstitions. How many centuries will it take for Muslims to start their own revolution against their religious superstitions that have enslaved one billion brains?
- Basically, the protests and burning of Danish flags are proving that the Danish cartoons were not just caricatures: they are very real. Right or wrong, this is what the world understood. It is up to one billion Muslims to prove that we understood wrong: march in the streets in support of the government of Denmark that defended the freedom of the press. That is how Islam can gain our respect.
- What is going to be next month? Every month there is an issue with thousands of Muslims burning some kind of flags and demanding the extermination of this or that nation. The world is getting tired.
A footnote: Europeans routinely accuse the USA of not knowing how to deal with
the Islamic world. This incident will help clarify who knows and who does not
know how to deal with the Islamic world.
Maybe it is Europe that, so used to be the colonial power, has never learned
how to deal with the Islamic world as an equal partner, whereas the USA, a
former European colony, knows exactly how to.
But please check the page of the Good News and
look for "February 2006": the rest of the world is mainly moving towards peace, not war.
And one of the best news is that several Muslim journalists risked their lives
to condemn the Muslims who protested the cartoons (see below).
P.S.
Note that, technically speaking, the Quran (the book that Muslims obey) does
not say that Mohammed cannot be depicted.
The Quran prohibits idol worship (XIV: 35; XXII: 30)
but it does not forbid making portraits:
all it says is that a Muslim cannot worship them, not that
one cannot make them. (So much so that for centuries Muslims published
portraits of Mohammed in all sorts of books, which are preserved in libraries
and museums all over the world).
Nor does the Quran say that one should not make fun of Mohammed: there is
no section of the Quran that prohibits sense of humour.
Furthermore, the prohibition of idol worship applies to every object, which
includes... the Quran itself: when a Muslim objects to a copy of the Quran
being mistreated, the Muslim is performing idol worship, which is a mortal sin
according to the Quran itself...
These Muslims who feel "offended" don't realize how they have been brainwashed
by the modern Islamic establishment to believe in things that were never part
of their religion.
They should indeed feel offended, not by some distant Danish newspapers but
by their Islamic leaders. Instead of feeling offended they should just feel
ashamed of their own gullibility.
P.P.S.
Note that the cartoons were published in september, and went mostly unnoticed
by everybody. It was only months later that Egypt's foreign minister
Ahmed Aboul Gheit started talking about it. (Egyptians are very unhappy with
their government, and their government never misses an opportunity to change
the subject). Fanned by Al Jazeera's inflamatory coverage, the news spread to
all Islamic countries and caused all the uproar.
Without that foreign minister and (more importantly) without Al Jazeera's
massive campaign, nobody (in the Islamic world or in Europe itself)
would have noticed. Other governments that have domestic problems (such as
Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran, not to mention terrorist groups such as the
Taliban) joined in the protests. Then the protests
spread to ordinary Muslims. But it should be obvious that these Muslims are
simply being "used" by their governments... obvious to everybody except to
these Muslims themselves.
Again, these Muslims should be ashamed of their own gullibility.
P.P.P.S.
Last but not least, note that someone did speak up in the Islamic world.
(See this article).
Eleven journalists in five Islamic countries accused the Muslims of
everything i have written in this article.
The Jordanian journalist Jihad Momani wrote: "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?"
The Yemeni journalist Muhammad al-Assadi wrote: "Muslims had an opportunity to educate the world about the merits of the Prophet Muhammad and the peacefulness of the religion he had come with... Muslims know how to lose, better than how to use, opportunities."
The Egyptian writer Said al-Ashmawy said: "With the Islamization of the society, the list of taboos has been increasing daily. You should not write about religion. You should not write about politics or women. Then what is left?"
The sad news, of course, is that they have all been suspended or even arrested for defaming Islam.
Even more important was a statement (largely ignored by the Arab news channels: Aljazeera.com deleted the webpage where it originally reported it) from eleven well-known religious leaders of Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait, Indonesia, Egypt, India and the USA: "We appeal to all Muslims to exercise self-restraint in accordance with the teachings of Islam. Violent reactions can lead to our isolation from the global dialogue." (See this article).
The Egyptian journalist Adel Hammoude lamented that: "Egyptians do not go out on the street in protest about what happened in the case of the sinking ferry or against corruption".
In countries where one gets killed for the slightest offense, these words count ten times more than anything that has been written in Western media.
We honor the courage of these Muslims.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (January 2006)
Why are portraits of Mohammed banned?
The outrage over the Danish cartoons of Islam's founder Mohammed
(see Saudi Arabia tells Europeans what to publish), which is escalating to ridiculous proportions due to the
fanaticism of some Muslims and (mainly) the intolerance of the regimes of the
Islamic world, is only partially due to the ironic content of the cartoons.
The real crux of the matter is that Islam
forbids any representation of Mohammed. Needless to say, the rest of the world
wonders why there is such a ban. What is the secret all about? What does Islam
have to hide?
Explanations vary, but my favorite is based on the fact that the destruction
of anything related to Mohammed has increased dramatically after the Arabs
decided that Jews are evil. Portraits of Mohammed were common in ancient times
(at least two are still visible in Istanbul's museum, and many are visible in
medieval manuscripts preserved in libraries of Europe).
It was only during the last few decades
that Islamic clerics from Saudi Arabia (and recently from Iran and
Afghanistan) became so strict about
forbidding any representation of Mohammed, and this coincided with their
campaign against the Jews.
In my opinion these Islamic clerics are trying to hide a simple truth: that
a lot of evidence points towards Mohammed being a Jew. See my old article:
Unspeakable Islamic terrorism.
The more we know about Mohammed, the way he looked and the way he lived, the
more he looks like a Jew and not like an Arab.
Needless to say, for that article i have received death threats from
some Muslims (the ones who never miss an opportunity to prove that Islam is
not about peace at all).
The Quran prohibits idol worship (XIV: 35; XXII: 30)
but it does not forbid making portraits:
all it says is that a Muslim (a Muslim) cannot worship them, not that
one cannot make them. So much so that for centuries Muslims published
portraits of Mohammed in all sorts of books.
(And the Quran doesn't say anything about non-Muslims).
Whether my suspicion is correct or not (i guess i will never be able to prove
it, because all the evidence has been destroyed),
the "owners" of the Islamic religion have their own agenda, and need to
hide the face of Mohammed. What is shocking is that hundreds of millions of
Muslims around the world let these clerics brainwash them, and then side with
the clerics, instead of rebelling against them.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (January 2006)
Al Jazeera on the Palestinian elections.
I have been privileged with meeting a Palestinian dissident (a Palestinian
who sides with Israel on most political issues). Needless to say, he cannot
disclose his identity or would be immediately killed (such is the freedom
of speech in the Islamic world). He described to me how Al Jazeera covered the
Palestinian elections. Fearing a victory of the pro-USA elements, Al Jazeera
consistently derided the Palestinian elections as a farce. Only when it
turned out that the anti-USA party Hamas won the elections did Al Jazeera
change tone and a) recognize the elections as free and fair, and b) demand
that the rest of the world recognizes them. Until the previous day, Al Jazeera
had a) not recognized the elections as free or fair, and b) demanded the
rest of the world did not recognize them.
- Al Jazeera emphasized that the majority of Palestinians are excluded from voting because they live in exile. This statement is technically true and infuriates the Arab masses. But Al Jazeera fails to emphasize that the Palestinians who do vote are among the very few Arabs who are allowed to vote. Previously to the invasion of Iraq by the USA, the only Arabs who were allowed to vote in free elections were the Arabs living in Israel, the USA and Western Europe. After the USA invasion of Iraq, some Arabs can finally vote in free elections in their own countries (namely Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese). All the other Arabs who still live in their own countries are not allowed to vote in free elections. Thus the fact of living in exile is not relevant: Arabs who do not live in exile cannot vote in free elections. Another aspect that Al Jazeera hides is that no Arab leader has even asked for the right of Jewish refugees to return to their countries: millions of Jews were forced to leave Egypt Iraq, Iran, Yemen and other Arab countries (only less than 50,000 Jews remain in the Islamic world). In fact there might be more Jewish refugees than Palestinian refugees. The difference is that Jewish refugees are given a nice home by the Jewish state of Israel, whereas Palestinians refugees are shunned by all Arab countries. So Al Jazeera's statement is technically correct but obviously its purpose is only to infuriate the Arab masses with a distorted view of the facts and to produce suicide bombers for the terrorists.
- Al Jazeera emphasized that the Palestinians who are voting are living under Israeli military occupation. Al Jazeera manages to present this simple fact (that tells a very important truth) in a way that completely changes its meaning: the only Arabs who have obtained the right to vote are the Arabs who lived under foreign military occupation. It should be something for Arabs to meditate on, and, incidentally, for which to be grateful to Israel. If someone brings you a gift, do you shoot him or do you thank him? But Al Jazeera manages to present the right to vote as something terrible. The way Al Jazeera presents the fact that only Arabs under military occupation are allowed to vote is meant to simply produce more suicide bombers not to make Arabs admire Israel and revolt against their own tyrannical regimes.
- Al Jazeera equated the free elections in Iraq that yielded an Islamic majority (hardly what the USA hoped for) with the Syrian-controlled elections in Lebanon that yielded a pro-Syrian majority. Al Jazeera equated the free elections in Palestine that yielded a victory by Hamas (Israel's worst enemy) with the old farces in Lebanon that always yielded the government that Syria wanted. One has to wonder how stupid the Al Jazeera viewer must be to consider that one election under military occupation is as good as any other: if one man protects you with a gun and another one robs you with a gun, are they both doing the same thing to you just because they are both holding a gun?
- Al Jazeera routinely refers to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank as colonists, invaders, occupiers, etc. Al Jazeera rarely explains to its viewers why those settlers live there. In fact, most Arabs have no idea why Palestine is called "Palestine" (it was the Roman name for the land of the Jews). Most Arabs have no idea that there never was a Palestinian state under the various Arab and Turkish empires. The Arab masses are left with the impression that "Palestinian people" is an expression that makes perfect sense, whereas Israel does not make any sense in Palestine.
- Al Jazeera routinely omits to mention the many places in the Arab world where free elections are NOT allowed. Despite the terrible conditions in which they live, the Palestinians managed to stage wonderful democratic elections. Again, Al Jazeera does not mention that the only Arabs who manage to stage wonderful democratic elections are those under military occupation. Just a coincidence? How come Libyans, Saudis, Syrians and Sudanese cannot stage the same wonderful democratic elections? Does it take a genius to answer such a simple question? Because all Arab regimes were and are much worse for the Arab people than Israel and the USA. Arab regimes treat their own people worse than Israel treats Palestinians (and infinitely worse than the USA treats the Iraqis). Palestinians and Iraqis have NEVER been treated so fairly in modern times (the Palestinians weren't even considered a people when they were subjects of other Arab states).
- Al Jazeera emphasized that Hamas supported a Christian Palestinian candidate. This is supposed to be a sign of how open-minded the Arab world can be. Christians are supposed to be grateful that, in the homeland of Christianity, one (one) Christian was allowed to stand for election. How would Al Jazeera comment a Christian invasion of Saudi Arabia after which Christians allowed one (one) Muslim to stand for election? As religious tolerance?
- Al Jazeera basically told the Arab people that Fatah lost the elections because it was corrupt. Isn't that was Israel said all the time? Isn't that the very season that Israel stopped dealing with Arafat? Now the Arab masses finally hear in Arabic what the rest of the world has always known. Do the viewers of Al Jazeera realize that the same may be true of everything else, that Al Jazeera is the last organ to admit the obvious truths that Israel and the USA keep repeating? Al Jazeera's insistence on defending the most corrupt Arab regimes is only meant to produce suicide bombers. When the need has disappeared for other reasons, then Al Jazeera has no problem telling its viewers the truth. (Of course, Al Jazeera never adds "...as Israel always told us").
- Al Jazeera comically claims that the USA media are biased. Al Jazeera rarely explains which (of the thousands of USA media) would be biased, but almost always uses USA or British sources (New York Times, BBC News, Michael Moore, assorted British opposition figures) to prove its anti-USA points: if the "USA media" (whatever than means) are biased, why does Al Jazeera find so much truth in their articles?
- Al Jazeera keeps repeating the mantra that USA policy is shaped by Israel via powerful lobbies such as AIPAC and the Christian "Zionists" (Arabs love the term "zionist"). Not a word, of course, about the much more powerful Arab lobbies that are very close to the Bush family and to all the companies of the Dick Cheney mafia.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- Articles on the Arab world of 2005
- Arabs till 2004
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