Where were you on 9/11? I was about to play a weekly round of golf with some buddies at a local municipal golf course. The television in the club house was tuned to the news and I saw an airplane hit the World Trade Center. On first glance like many people I thought it was some kind of weird accident. The golf pro who had been watching longer said to me “it was no accident.”
Part 9: The Rise of Radical Islam
More were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that began the Second World War for the United States. The aggressors on 9/11 were foreign but they were not Japanese imperialists or communist radicals. They were Islamic radicals from a hitherto obscure group called Al Qaeda, led by an equally obscure Islamic radical named Osama bin Laden. The group and the leader are no longer so obscure.
The immediate response to the 9/11 attack on America was an international outbreak of sympathy with the United States. A headline in the leading French leftist newspaper in Paris read: “We are all Americans now!” On the other hand there was jubilant dancing in the streets of many Arab and Islamic countries now that Bin Laden had struck such a deadly blow to the “Great Satan” America.
In their attack on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the Islamic radicals demonstrated their contempt for capitalism, free trade, western values and democratic ways of life.
Not too long after the attack there came another response both in Europe and in some literary, academic and leftist circles in the U.S. that reminded one of the similar anti-American, pro-Soviet and “controllable Marxist” statements of fellow travelers in the cold war era in the U.S. and Western Europe.
In response to the attack prominent novelist Normal Mailer, for instance, added his insult to our injury when he said of the twin towers: “They were like two huge buck teeth and now that they are down the ruins are more beautiful than the buildings were.”
In response to the attack on the Pentagon, a professor at the Univ.of New Mexico was quoted as saying: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” A professor at Rutgers piled on: “We should be aware that the ultimate cause for 9/11 is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.”
A radical activist in Seattle was quoted as approving the goal and the methods of the terrorists but mildly complaining: “Why couldn’t they have picked a weekend when there wouldn’t have been so many people there?”
A significant number of other celebrities and ordinary citizens claimed that “we had it coming.”
Comments like these from American intellectuals suggest to me that maybe the German Enlightenment philosopher, Georg Hegel (a thinker Karl Marx got some of his ideas from) was right when he said that “the only thing we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
It is certainly true that American foreign policy has not been mistake-free. The chasm, however, between the American foreign policy “mistakes” compared with the hideous crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and other communist and fascist leaders is too vast for any rational person to take claims like the above seriously.
To understand this “war on terrorism,” this war against Al Qaeda, this war against radical Islam, we need to go back not one hundred and sixty years but over a thousand and five- hundred years!
Following (and contributing to) the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. it was the Christian vision that triumphed in the western world. A hundred years later an Islamic vision, founded by a prophet in what is now Saudi Arabia named Mohammed, challenged the Christian world. And thus it was that over a thousand and five-hundred years ago—fifteen centuries ago—followers of Jesus and of Mohammed, Christians and Muslims, laid the religious foundations for rich civilizations that still flourish today in the 21st century.
Both Islamic and Christian civilizations were dominated by strong monotheistic religious ideas that had a common origin in the Jewish Biblical lands of ancient Israel. Neither Christianity nor Islam encouraged the pursuit of earthly happiness since both religions preached the ultimate importance of salvation, life after death. Both Islamic and Christian civilizations, on the other hand, could lay claim to fostering ideas that eventually would lead to modern democracy’s belief in the “inalienable rights” of individual human beings given them by Islam’s Allah or by Christianity’s God and not to be abrogated by human rulers.
This was the theory. In practice both Islamic and Christian civilizations were strongly aristocratic and maintained some of the same class distinctions and tyrannical rules bequeathed by the Roman, Greek, Jewish and Arab civilizations from which they grew.
Both Christianity and Islam honored a strong warrior class as essential to the civilization’s survival and power. Both were founded in an agricultural age and saw wealth in terms of land, shepherds, laborers and gold. Both believed in a jealous god and fought many barbaric wars through many dark centuries trying to prove their religion was the one true religion, their god the one true god.
One difference was the way they viewed government. For Christians religion and state were not the same. Jesus said “give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” In matters spiritual, the Pope in Rome was supreme. In matters secular, nobles and kings in small feudal kingdoms throughout medieval Europe and western Asia ruled by divine right, but separate from the supreme spiritual authority.
In Islam, on the other hand, religion and government were never separate. They were one and the same. Since all of life must be governed by the laws of Allah, not of men, no distinction was made between religion and state. Islam did not have priests or a Pope, but it did have religious leaders called caliphs who ruled supreme in both temporal and spiritual affairs in all the provinces of a vast Islamic Empire that once extended from Spain in the West to what is now Indonesia in the East.
There were other differences. Islam did not condemn slavery and Islamic countries for many centuries considered slavery natural and ordained by Allah. Islam did not believe that women should be accorded equal status, rights or privileges as men. Islam did support science and technology so long as it did not infringe upon religious dogmas and throughout the Middle Ages – the time roughly between 600 and 1300–Islamic countries were world leaders in medicine, in agriculture, in astronomy, mathematics and physics.
Islamic countries also placed a higher status on trade. The Prophet Mohammed himself, founder of Islam, had been a merchant. In medieval times Islamic countries also tended to be more tolerant of Jews and of Christians (they called them “people of the book”) within their borders than the Christian countries were toward Jews or Muslims within their borders.
While they did have peasants and serfs, Christian kingdoms for the most part did not have slaves — though there were exceptions. Gypsies, for instance, were enslaved for hundreds of years in many eastern European Christian areas. Men and women from Africa were purchased or kidnapped in Africa by Christians and by Muslims for hundreds of years. Hundreds of thousands of these Africans were forced to become slaves and were transported to North and South America, to all the Caribbean Islands, as well as most of the countries in the Middle East and Asia by Christian and by Muslim slave-traders. When they arrived in their new country they were forced to work on plantations as slave-laborers in Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other religion-dominated communities.
Jews, while not enslaved, were often persecuted, outlawed and even murdered by Christians in times of great natural disasters like the Black Death or in times of great religious and military zeal like the Crusades of the 11th to the 13th centuries.
Though all ancient and agriculturally-based civilizations were male dominated, most historians agree that Christian kingdoms gave a somewhat higher status to women than did Muslim, Chinese or Hindu Kingdoms.
Christian civilizations in Europe were dramatically changed by three important happenings, that for the most part did not happen in Islamic countries– the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In the Renaissance some of the values, arts and sciences of classical pagan civilizations of Greece and Rome were reborn in Christian versions. In the Reformation the Christian world split into two major parts, Catholic and Protestant. Subsequently both of these parts split into the many variations that still thrive today. And then in the Enlightenment, especially in England, new secular values and ideas of science and democracy came to the western European and North American continents that also, with many variations, still thrive today.
Islamic civilizations too changed over the centuries, but for the most part the changes were reactionary rather than progressive. Islamic countries, instead of entering the modern world, have tended to retreat back to a medieval world-view where Islam was still dominant and was aggressively much more powerful on the world stage. Today that reactionary movement in Islam, funded by new oil wealth, has awakened with renewed ferocity and suicidal power in what some call Radical Islam.
Be clear–Radical Islam is not the same as the Muslim religion, today or yesterday. Indeed some predominantly Muslim countries like Turkey, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan and parts of India are changing in a positive way and seem to be moving haltingly to enter the modern world of western democracy. And there are individual leaders in all Muslim countries who are moderate in their views and offer hope that Islam itself will change and accommodate itself to the modern world just as Christianity did two or three hundred years ago.
It is dangerous, however, to delude ourselves that the radical terrorists in so many Muslim countries are simply a small “criminal” group that can be handled the same way we handle criminal groups in the West—by patient and effective police work and normal jury trial procedures. Their leaders are a relatively small group it is true. So were Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the other Bolsheviks when they pioneered the communist cause that led to so many heinous crimes in the Soviet Union, China and the world.
Indeed, the Osama bin Ladens of the early 21st century have much in common with the Bolsheviks of the early 20th century in their messianic zeal, their cunning, their utopian visions, their intellectual power, their demand that state and religion be one and the same, their fierce intolerance and their wholesale embrace of violence. These Islamic radicals do not have the conventional armies that the communists could rely on once the Soviet Union came to power, but they do have a weapon the communists did not have – a plentiful supply of suicide volunteers. And in the 21st century chaos of the Middle East and Southeast Asia they are dangerously close to having nuclear weapons that would enormously magnify the power of their suicidal volunteers.
Also, like pre-revolutionary Russia, the ordinary citizens of many Muslim countries today—over a billion human souls—are in many cases poor, uneducated and exploited. As such they provide rich soil for demagogic leaders. Not to mention the fast-growing populations of more educated Muslims in the Middle East, in Asia, in Europe and in America that offer still richer soil for education in terror. Remember, the terrorist leaders themselves, like the Communists before them, rarely come from the poor. Much more typically terrorist leaders and suicide bombers come from the educated middle class or the wealthy.
Stay tuned for Part 10: What’s To Be Done?
There follows excerpts from a reviews in School Library Journal of one of our newest programs that came out of our trips in the late 20th and early 21st century and relate to the Rise of Islam:
Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment (Democracy in World History Series) video or DVD. color. 31 min. with tchr’s. guide. Hawkhill Assocs. 2006. video, ISBN 1-55979-171-3: $89; DVD, ISBN 1-55979-172-1: $109.
Gr 10 Up–This film describes how the ideas and philosophies of the Renaissance and Reformation gave rise to the Enlightenment ideas of human rights and self-government, resulting in the revolutionary era that created modern self-governing democracies. It briefly reviews the origins and development of the Renaissance and Reformation, and discusses how they transformed traditional medieval cultural beliefs about science and technology, religion and philosophy, and personal property and liberty, and encouraged the new ideas of the Enlightenment. The film also describes the contributions of some of the most important scholars and philosophers of the era, and examines how the beliefs and philosophies of the Enlightenment affected the American and French revolutions and created non-revolutionary change in other countries, notably England. Attractive visuals include period art and portraits and live-action footage of the locations discussed in the narration.–Mary Mueller, Rolla Junior High School, MO
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
P.S. We still have our 2010 sale. 70% discount on all DVDs, 90% discount on all VHS tapes. See: www.hawkhill.com
I Will have to come back again when my course load lets up – nonetheless I am taking your RSS feed so I can read your site offline. Thanks.
“it was no accident” « Bill Stonebarger's Blog is an excellent site and I have to say that I am really impressed.