Prof. As’ad Abukhalil takes on the latest reliance by The Economist on “lazy cliches” regarding Islam and Muslims in relation to apostasy and Atheism.
Abukhalil takes issue with its essentialization based on anecdotal stories, inaccurate relaying of the facts as well as relying on the testimony of Islamophobic bigots such as Ibn Warraq who have a clear agenda.
There are so many obsessively redundant stories about Muslims and Islam. They are too familiar: stories about the veil, Jihad, the status of women, minorities and apostasy. Western reporters love to search and find a Muslim in the West who tells a story of persecution by Muslims. These stories are sexiest when the person elaborates on his new freedoms in the West and how he/she was not able to breathe until their arrival in the West. They tell about their past suffocation and how they could only read and enjoy “Lolita” in Western countries.
But the stories of apostasy still resonate. Westerners don’t know that apostasy laws were common at the time when they were promulgated in Sharia. The Economist is sometimes reasonable, but other times indistinguishable in its resort to lazy clichés about Muslims. The new issue of the Economist has a long article about “Atheists and Islam.” In the article, all the familiar clichés are squeezed in to draw a most dramatic picture that is worthy of movies about medieval Europe. It operates under the classical premise: that one story about one Muslim suffices to tell the story about all Muslims. And in singling out a story or two about Muslims in the West, the writers don’t know that they often fall victim to deception.
In the last few decades, Western governments developed asylum laws which permit a person to obtain legal status if she/he can establish real concern for safety in his/her homeland. I have served as a consultant to many lawyers and law firms in the West and saw the most bizarre stories by people who are desperate to stay legally in the US. Some people talk about how their tribes (even when “the tribe” does not even apply in Damascus or Beirut) will kill them, because they once told a cousin that they are secular. Another claims that his tribe – again – kills its members if they exhibit effeminate tendencies. And many have stumbled on the legal premise of fear of apostasy. They tell a judge (with no background or knowledge of the Middle East) that governments there typically behead apostates.
The Economist’s article belongs to this genre. It talks about how only in Turkey and Lebanon atheists can live safely, but only quietly. Where do they get this information from? This doesn’t seem to be from someone who know people in the region. I, for one, became an atheist in my teens. My friends and comrades in Lebanon (Lebanese and Palestinians) were also vocal atheists, and none of us faced persecution or even harassment for our views. There is no evidence for any such persecution. Many of my “Facebook friends” are young Arabs who identify their religion as “atheists.” And no one is persecuting them. The Saudi government is a rare exception in this case. But Saudi Arabia is often the exception, although it gets good press here in the US. TheEconomist says that eight states in the region have apostasy punishment on the books, but does not say that no one can find one case of implementation of the law in this case, even if you go back decades in time. There is a clear concoction of a dramatic alarmist sensationalism that does not conform to the facts.
The Economist in fact admits that “such punishments are rarely meted out” but does not admit that they are NEVER meted out. The Economistin this article befitting Fox News or the National Inquirer, even talks about “vigilantes inflicting beatings or beheadings,” but gives no examples or specifics. And the article assumes that the rise of the Islamists is adding to the dangers ostensibly faced by atheists, but fail to notice that atheists and secularists have in fact become more assertive and more self-confident. And in referring to the past, the article refers to medieval Arab and Persian poets and writers who were atheists, but then adds that “several were famously executed.” But such judgment has now been discredited by historians. We don’t believe, for example, that Ibn al-Muqaffa` or Bashar Bin Burd were executed for their atheism, but for their political inclinations or for their involvement in palace politics.
The shoddy quality of the article is further revealed when it concludes with an interview with “Ibn Warraq,” who is a right-wing Zionist propagandist who lives in the West under a false name because Muslims around the world – according to his tale – are chasing him because he is an ex-Muslim. But I have been an ex-Muslim since my mid-teens and I have not been chased by Muslims: not in the Middle East and not in the US, and I never hid behind a pseudonym.
The question is this: Why are some Western reporters so easily fooled, especially in cases when the lie and tale befits the paradigm of hostility to Islam and Muslims?
The idea that it was not until 19th century European Imperialism arrived on the shores of Muslim majority countries that Saladin was remembered is a novel concept. It is also one that is being taken up in a distorted manner by the anti-Muslim movement.
Let’s take a sample from an article posted on JihadWatch on June 8, 2012. The self-declared ex-Muslim turned anti-Islam polemicist and Western supremacist who goes by the pseudonym “Ibn Warraq” continues his well-worn, unoriginal, selective-copy-and-paste usage of Orientalist scholarship.
According to “Warraq,” Muslims in Saladin’s own homeland had “largely forgotten” about him until novelist Sir Walter Scott and German Emperor Wilhelm II reintroduced him to the benighted, forgetful Mooslims. In fact, in Warraq’s world the supreme “irony” is that they not only forgot Saladin but remembered Richard the Lionheart:
It is ironic that while Richard the Lionheart [1157-1199], the King of England and leading Christian commander during The Third Crusade [1189–1192], is remembered in the Islamic world right up to the nineteenth century, his main rival in the latter conflict, the Muslim Kurd known in the West as Saladin [c.1138-1193], was largely forgotten in his homeland. Forgotten until he was made known again to the Muslim world largely thanks to the German Emperor Wilhelm II’s visit to Saladin’s tomb, to pay his respects in 1898, and above all the novel, The Talisman [1825] by Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832].
Warraq’s claim appears in a series of short JihadWatch blog posts titled, Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History.
Again this is not an original “Ibn Warraq” observation. The claim that Saladin was “forgotten” can also be found on the Wikipedia page for Saladin (exposing the hazards of relying on the online community encyclopedia), with a citation credited to Johnathan R. Smith‘s book, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam.
Smith’s works on the Crusades have been generally well received and this is not the article to discuss them; however, the main thrust of Smith’s book is quite simple and straight forward,
Crusading features prominently in today’s religio-political hostilities, yet the perceptions of these wars held by Arab nationalists, pan-Islamists, and many in the West have been deeply distorted by the language and imagery of nineteenth-century European imperialism.
This is an intricate topic, but let us confine ourselves to Warraq’s rehashing of Smith’s claim that Saladin was “forgotten.”
The reality is Saladin was not “forgotten.” Diana Abouali, professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literature at Dartmouth wrote an interesting article titled, “Saladin’s Legacy in the Middle East before the Nineteenth Century,” published in the 10th volume of Crusades. In it she recounts his memory up to that point in Ottoman Jerusalem.
I also solicited a comment from professor As’ad Abukhalil, who in the past eviscerated Warraq’s shoddy work (see Abukhalil’s 2004 article in the Middle East Journal: “‘The Islam Industry’ and Scholarship: Review Article”). Prof. Abukhalil is not at all impressed with Warraq’s claim, telling LoonWatch,
I normally would not engage with people who are not trained in Middle East and Islamic studies. The person in question has regularly revealed his ignorance of matters Islamic and he insults the person (a free thinker) after which he named himself (very undeservedly). The notion that Saladin was discovered by Arabs/Muslims after some contact with Westerners is too ridiculous to respond to. In reality, it is the other way round: Westerners took note of Saladin because of the significance that he occupies in Arab/Islamic history and imagination. Saladin has been immortalized and lauded in many Arabic books and references, from Kitab An-Nawadir As-Sultaniyyah wal-mahasin Al-Yusufiyyah, which is a biography of Saladin from the 13th century. Ancient Arab historians like Ibn Khallikan and Abu Shamah and Ibn Wasil all appreciated the significance of Saladin. A history of Arab publications in the 19th century and 20th century is full of books and articles dealing with him. To be sure, the Arab-Israeli conflict did inspire a revival of attention to Saladin among Arabs and Muslims. But then again: this is not the first time when the natives are told that only the White Man can inspire them and influence them. (emphasis added)
In the hands of Islamophobes like Warraq claims about Saladin and the Crusades are easily weaponized and used as one more instrument to bludgeon Muslims and Islamic civilization. Indeed the whole premise of Warraq’s series found its genesis in the polemical attempt to rebut Edward Said’s famed work Orientalism. Edward Said, of course is the object of much “scorn” in the anti-Muslim movement.
If some Muslims, Arabs and Westerners stand accused of “romanticizing” Saladin, we can easily see its antecedent, with the Crusades and Richard the Lionheart being “romanticized,” serving as twin symbols for today’s wannabe “Crusaders.” Hate-groups across Europe and the USA are engaged in exactly this type of ahistorical methodology, tying the romanticized image of the Crusades with their bigoted political agenda (just take a look at the rhetoric, images and symbols employed by members of Stop the Islamization of America). At the forefront of such “romanticization” of Crusaders are the likes of Robert Spencer. So it is fitting that Warraq would publish his posts on Robert Spencer’s JihadWatch.
After all, it is not for no reason that “Knights Templar” terrorist Anders Behring Breivik chose to initiate the so-called “counter-Jihad” to “reclaim” the West from the “evil-Mooslim” hordes by citing Spencer, and other neo-Crusaders hundreds of times in his manifesto.
In the end, it is safe to say that Saladin was never forgotten by Muslims and Arabs. His memory still shone over the centuries, he was “immortalized,” even as his image, his importance and story has been reshaped due to encounters between East and West, and today, between Israel and Palestine.
Bill Maher and George Bush: Closer in thought than we ever knew?
You might be reading the title, Bill Maher Sounds Like Jerry Falwell and thinking to yourself, “What?! Bill Maher hates religion, and if I recall he blasted Jerry Falwell at the time of his death for being an intolerant, huckster con-man.” It is true that Maher has made a lot of money out of mocking religion, all religion, he made a movie about it called Religulous. In fact, Maher is constantly seen with his anti-religion crew promoting atheism and agnosticism.
So how could he possibly sound like a Christian fundamentalist such as Jerry Falwell? An analysis of Maher’s work and comments about Islam reveal he has a special and unique bias against Islam that goes well beyond his condemnation or mocking of other religions, which is unfortunate because he has a lot of hilarious and witty things to say about various topics.
Maher’s bias leads to moments where he loses his rationality and rather than comment with his usual sardonic logic, he falls into emotion and repeats worn out stereotypes and caricatures of Islam and Muslims. If that weren’t egregious enough, he also makes statements that are flat out empirically false.
So how does an atheist who prizes rationality and empirical evidence fall so hard off of the beaten path? Some might say it’s the weed but let’s look at the evidence for a second.
The first piece that I want to draw to your attention is a five minute section of the New Rules portion of Bill Maher’s Real Time.
Maher is on the wrong foot from the very beginning. He starts his monologue by creating an exclusive frame that depicts Islam as the “other,” something that is “outside” and does not belong to the West. This might have something to do with Maher’s ignorance of history since Islam has been a part of the West for over a millennium now. There is no need for me to go into detail about the historical interplay and exchange of commerce, goods and ideas between the Muslim world and the West, nor of the presence of Muslim communities, but if the construct of the “West” is to mean anything it has to include Islam and Muslims.
Omar Baddar makes just such a point and a further rebuttal in his excellent article in the Huffington Post on Maher’s recent confusion,
The implied premise that Judaism and Christianity belong to a cohesive unit called “the West” which stands in distinction from another cohesive unit called “the Muslim world” is absurd. But even if one accepted this false dichotomy, why did Maher’s example of “the craziest religious wackos we have here in America” stick to nonviolent fanatics? Why not abortion clinic bombers?
Structural constraints are another obvious factor to consider. You see, the Taliban can act like they do because they live in a lawless state, and extremist settlers can act like they do because of a culture of impunity provided by the structure of Israeli apartheid. So while Pat Robertson may seem harmless, by comparison, when he issues a death fatwa on Hugo Chavez, or when he blames a hurricane or an earthquake on gay sex or a pact with the devil or something, a useful question to contemplate is whether he and his followers would be as benign (if one could describe them as such) if they could get away with worse behavior. Thankfully, we live in a system that can enforce law and order; and our wackos have the alternative outlet of lobbying the government for wars against Iraq and Iran, and they send over 100,000 emails to the White House for the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so direct violence from them is somewhat less likely.
I would just add one more comment to the prescient points raised by Baddar above. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did and do have an active religious component in them. How else can we characterize the war briefings read by Donald Rumsfeld that were always headlined with quotes from the Bible? The Daily Times reported at the time,
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a fight for freedom against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
But for former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his elite Pentagon strategists, it was more like a religious crusade.
The daily briefings about the progress of the war that Mr Rumsfeld gave to President George W Bush were illustrated with victorious quotes from the Bible and gung-ho photographs of U.S. troops, it has emerged.
….
One of the top-secret ‘worldwide intelligence updates’, which were hand-delivered to Mr Bush by Mr Rumsfeld, includes an image of an F-18 Hornet fighter jet roaring off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.
On it were the words of Psalm 139-9-10: ‘If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast, O Lord.’
The cover of another featured pictures of U.S. soldiers at prayer with a quote from Isaiah: ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Here I am Lord, Send me.’
A photograph of Saddam Hussein included a quotation from the First Epistle of Peter: ‘It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.’
The religious theme for briefings prepared for the president and his war cabinet was the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a committed Christian and director for intelligence serving Mr Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In the days before the six-week invasion, Major General Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers for the briefings to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle.
But as the body count rose, he decided to introduce biblical quotes.
…
Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, believed the invasion was a ‘mission from God’.
Another of his briefings included the words ‘Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed’ alongside a photo of a U.S. marine with a machine gun.
And on an image of U.S. tanks rumbling through the Victory Arch monument in Baghdad was a quote from Isaiah: ‘Open the gates the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps the faith.’
A photograph of U.S. tanks in Iraq used a further passage from Isaiah: ‘Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung, their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels are like a whirlwind.’
…
These are wars that have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and were instigated and supported in large part by right-wing Christians and Zionists. It is also salient to mention the involvement of Erik Prince the leader and founder of Blackwater, a security service hired by the State Department and who many consider to be nothing more than a squad of mercenaries. Prince himself is a Christian supremacist and in an affidavit from a former employee is accused of viewing “‘himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,’ and that Prince’s companies ‘encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.’”
So the claim that Muslim “wackos” are somehow uniquely more dangerous or wacky than extremists in other faiths is not only false, it is disingenuous.
However, Maher’s bigoted rant didn’t stop there, it also included his preaching about how “our culture” is better than their “culture.” I thought Maher would have realized by now that NOT ALL MUSLIMS are alike. Not all Muslims speak Arabic, live in caves, beat their wives 24-7, etc. It’s a point that As’ad Abu Khalil made painfully obvious to Maher and his guests ten years ago when Maher hosted Politically Incorrect (video at bottom). Did Maher just forget that convenient fact or is he just fulfilling the buffoonish American caricature he so often loves to lampoon?
Omar Baddar commented on Maher’s incoherence quite succinctly,
I described Maher’s tirade as incoherent because the “them” in Maher’s equation shifted from “the developing world” at one point, to people whose culture “makes death threats to cartoonists,” to “the Taliban,” and eventually to “Muslims” (not exactly interchangeable terms). None of these categories can be lumped into a “Muslim culture” because the Muslim world is simply too vast to collapse into a cultural category. From Eastern Europe to Africa, from Lebanon to Pakistan, and from Iran to Indonesia, we are talking about completely and fundamentally different cultures. In all five Arab/Muslim countries where I grew up (and went to school with girls in all of them), women are an integral part of public life, and many of them dress like Western women do. So I can assure Maher that many of these societies are not waiting for “the West” to lecture them on whether women can work.
The incoherent ramble got even more incoherent, after making a mealy mouthed and half-hearted disclaimer that “in speaking of Moslems we realize that the vast majority are law abiding, loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace” Maher went on to preach to Moslems saying,
“but I got to tell ya, civilized people don’t threaten each other…threatening, that’s some old school desert s***, and I am sorry, you can’t bring that to the big city. I am very glad that Obama is reaching out the Moslem world, and I know Moslems living in America and Europe want their way of life assimilated more, but the Western world has to make some things clear, somethings about our culture are non-negotiable and can’t change and one of them is Freedom of Speech, seperation of Church and State is another, women are allowed to work here and you can’t beat them, not negotiable, this is how we roll, and this is why our system is better, and if you don’t get that and you still want to kill someone over a stupid cartoon, please make it Garfield.”
The fact is Muslims didn’t react to the South Park cartoon. This was a controversy completely whipped up by the media that gave a group of four-nobody-morons far more attention than they deserved. If Bill Maher and his staff had done a little research, instead of focusing on Revolution Muslim, they would have asked the far more penetrating and relevant question of why so much attention was given to an unknown group that has zero credibility or support amongst American Muslims. Of course this would not fit into the preset narrative that the “Godzilla of crazy religions” (as Maher would put it) “must be offended and threatening.”
Bill Maher also should be put on notice, about how people who don’t believe in his “us vs. them” mentality roll. He should be put on notice about what democracy really is about. It isn’t about high voltage diatribes, and self-congratulatory head nodding, or putting down “the other”. There is also a duty to uphold justice and equality. Muslims don’t want to “assimilate more,” (last I checked that isn’t a condition for being Western) they are already here, they are integrated and they are contributing, and he should know the highest incidences of domestic violence occur here in America, where 2 to 4 million women are the victims of domestic violence every year and in which a quarter of the population will have been victims of domestic violence in their lifetimes.
After this show Bill Maher was on Anderson Cooper 360, and in my opinion it was one of the worst interviews I have seen in a long time. It was so bad that I wished I was watching Bill O’ Reilly or Glenn Beck. On the show Bill Maher repeated many of things he said on Real Time, but one thing was exceptionally noteworthy:
“I haven’t read the Quran in its original, when you read the translation there are many, many, many passages that are not peaceful at all, that are about killing the infidel and so forth, there are many passages like that in the Bible too, not as many.”
Is he serious? The Quran itself is about the size of the Psalms, and only a few hundred of the 6,000 verses relate to fighting and all of them have a context and explanation. None of them command a Muslim to just “slay the infidel.” However, the Bible is filled with exhortations to violence, wiping out whole nations, slaying pagans, enemies and non-Jews who live in Israel. This is one of the reasons that the Israel-Palestine conflict is so intractable, the view by religious Jews that not one centimeter of historic Israel should be owned by a non-Jew.
I would challenge Bill Maher to find one verse in the Quran equal or even a quarter equal to this odious commandment in the Bible,
“How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock.” Psalm: 137:9
He will be unable to as there are no verses that come close to advocating such horrendous behavior in the Quran. As far as his retort that Jews and Christians don’t follow such things, a simple search on the internet will disabuse him of that and reinforce the fact that there are people who take the Bible literally and are willing to exact Biblical commandments such as the one above (see Sabbath breakers getting stoned, and license to murder babies).
Part of me believes all of this is for attention. It seems that Maher desperately wants a fatwa on his head. He wants the status it would give him: the fame and the soaring ratings. He’ll have ensured himself a position next to Salman Rushdie as one of the victimized on the pantheon of atheist stardom. Maybe it will give him some meaning in an utterly purposeless life?
This whole episode reminds me of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a story in which the pigs lead the other animals in a coup overthrowing the human beings who rule the farm. Once the pigs come to power, they take on the same odious traits of the human beings that had led to the revolt in the first place. The pigs became intolerant, manipulative, chauvinistic, and shallow. Orwell meant it to be a story about the failures and potential flaws of communism but the analogy could be applied equally to many of the new atheists, of whom Bill Maher is one, who rant and rave about the intolerance, shallowness, and wide sweeping claims of the religious but like the pigs are taking on those very same traits.
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Please check out this very instructional episode of Politically Incorrect a few months after 9/11. It is very interesting and highlights the psychology of Islamophobia that languishes deep even in self professed liberals. As’ad Abukhalil really lays it into them,
