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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The White House says that a war with Iraq has nothing to do with Islam, but imams all over the world are calling for a holy war.
Mar 20, 2003 | In Libya, French President Jacques Chirac is being compared in the official state newspaper with Saladin, the legendary Muslim military leader who defeated the Crusaders in the 12th century, recapturing Jerusalem for the Muslim world. In Russia, the Iraqi ambassador reports that thousands of Muslims are flocking to Iraq to join the jihad, or holy war, against the Crusaders of the West. Throughout the Muslim and Arab worlds, imams and scholars are issuing fatwas, or religious edicts, saying that it is the obligation of every Muslim to take up arms to defend Islam. Muslim men, mainly young men, are heeding their call.
While much is unknown about the geopolitical dice President George W. Bush is about to roll, one thing is as clear as the moustache on Saddam Hussein's despotic face: However much the White House claims a war with Iraq does not represent a war against Islam, throughout the world that is precisely how it is seen. It is being portrayed in the starkly religious language of the Crusades, pitting Christianity against Islam in a holy war. And this cannot be blamed entirely on our enemies.
North of London, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the head of Al-Muhajiroun and one of the U.K.'s leading Islamists, tells Salon that the war hasn't even started yet and young men are flocking to Iraq to fight the United States. Bakri says that he himself knows individuals who have sneaked into Iraq from Iran, Syria, Turkey and Jordan -- "the gate to Iraq is open," he says -- because "imams in the mosques, the scholars, and the muftis have called for jihad." While the governments of various Arab countries stay mum on the pending Iraq war, "they let their own religious institutions call for jihad," Bakri says, rattling off a list that includes the muftis of Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Salafi mufti in Kuwait. Mujahedin, or religious holy warriors, "from Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, those who were fighting in Afghanistan -- all of them are there. Many people from Yemen, many Egyptians have entered -- you [in the U.S.] are just facilitating this atmosphere for mujahedin."
Bakri says that the religious justifications for taking up arms against the West in Iraq are well-known to most Muslims. "The Koran says, 'All believers, if you see disbelievers attacking you, stand firm together and fight them back and don't sell your Muslim brother.' More than that, the Prophet Mohammed said, fight to defend your own homeland ... your own brother."
Imams all over the world are also citing the Hadith, or the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, Bakri claims, citing a passage from al-Bukhaaree, in the Book of Trials, that supposedly foresees Iraq being at war for 12 years under corrupt rulers when "the People of the cross will gather together to attack you ... Massacres will be everywhere." Marius Deeb, a professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who specializes in Islam and politics, says that Bakri is citing a passage that applies to the Byzantine era -- "Iraq has been around for a long time, after all" -- but that it isn't meant to be a prophecy, though certainly some might use it that way.
But that's exactly how many Muslims see it -- as the Crusades, Part 2. Last November, a consortium of scholars and intellectuals all over the Arab world posted a statement on a Web site stating that the "U.S. administration's insistence on using force against Iraq and attacking countries of the region brings to the minds crusade campaigns and colonialism ... That dreadful era invited Jihad and legitimate resistance and ended with the defeat of the evil forces of the invading crusaders."
"It's a wonderful opportunity for the extremists to build their base," says Richard Murphy, senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, President Reagan's assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs and a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia. "Because now the television will be filled with Western missiles, Western aircraft, and Western soldiers operating inside an Arab country."
"The irony is that the Iraqi leadership has been the most secular of all in the Arab world," Murphy says. "Saddam has been merciless in killing off the religious leaders of Iraq over the years. But there is a market for the accusation that the U.S. is back as a colonial power, as a 'crusading' power."
