Author: Martin Kramer

Media Maulana

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 87-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

On October 5, Oprah Winfrey devoted her television show to Islam. The program claims to have more than twenty million viewers, who got to hear Queen Rania of Jordan and Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington reassure them about the peaceful nature of Islam.

But the show was also the big American debut of Akbar S. Ahmed, Pakistani anthropologist and the new Ibn Khaldun Professor of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington. True, it was not the most edifying exchange. Oprah: “How in the name of Islam does something as horrifying as what happened on September 11 happen?” Ahmed: “That’s a very difficult question you ask, Oprah, and a very complex question, but an important question. There is obviously something driving them.” Ahmed left it at that, except to say that it was “not Islam, because Islam clearly says that the killing of one innocent life is like killing all of humanity. It is just not allowed in Islam.”16 Following Ahmed’s appearance, his book Islam Today skyrocketed to the top forty in Amazon’s rankings.

The New York Times later misspelled his name (“Okbar”), but they’ll get it right eventually, because Akbar Ahmed is the Muslim media maven. During a decade in Britain (Selwyn College, Cambridge), he became the great talking head of Islam. BBC television and radio adored him (he narrated a six-part documentary for the BBC, Living Islam). On the eve of the Kuwait war, he gave a private lecture to Princess Diana at the Royal Anthropological Institute. (“I’m not Diana’s guru, says top academic,” screamed one tabloid.) “I was in danger of becoming the instant expert, the media guru, Mr. Know-All,” he acknowledged. 17

Twenty years ago, Ahmed wrote with authority about the Pashtun tribes of northern Pakistan. A decade ago, he wrote with some passion, but still with authority, about contemporary trends in Islam, and about Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. He now writes only with passion, and a large dollop of hubris, about America.

Some examples: America “seems within the short span of a few years to have collapsed.” It is a place where “society itself is threatened as never before in history.” The O.J. Simpson trial was “symptomatic of imperial decay. … We are plunging into an era of uncertainty and O.J. confirms it for us.”18 The country’s mass media “have achieved what American political might could not: the attainment for America of world domination. Hollywood had succeeded where the Pentagon had failed.”19 (One wonders why al-Qa‘ida bothered to fly an airliner into the Pentagon. Perhaps the victory in Afghanistan is just a special effect.)

But this most recent observation, on the American reaction to September 11, tops them all: “Commentators associated Muslims with the attacks from the moment the news broke … If a Peruvian or a Japanese cult had stepped forward and claimed that they had organized the attacks, they would not have been believed. In the public mind, Islam was to blame.”20

As for the first part, it is simply untrue: commentators showed impeccable restraint in not jumping to conclusions. As for the last part, it is also untrue: the public did not blame Islam per se. And what can one say about the absurd part in the middle? While Professor Ahmed was punting on the Cam back in 1993, an earlier group of terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and they were not members of a Peruvian or Japanese cult. It is always astonishing when Muslims, who recall every grievance going back to the battle of Poitiers, rebuke Americans for having any memory at all.

Americans do have memories, but they also give newcomers the benefit of the doubt. There is no reason not to extend the same courtesy to Ahmed. He left Britain (where he served briefly as Pakistan’s ambassador) under a cloud of controversy. But Pakistan has not always been fair to its great men, and Ahmed may be one of them. In that spirit, it would be fitting for Ahmed to return the same courtesy to a country that has given him a very big break. “American University is ideally placed,” he has said. “Perhaps I can help clarify for policy makers what the pitfalls, the dangers [are], what the landscape is like.”21 That sounds useful and promising—providing the new star practices a bit more caution in interpreting the complex landscape of America.

Welcome to Washington, Professor Ahmed. Break a leg.

16 At http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/tows_past_20011005_c.jhtml.
17 Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (London: Routledge, 1992), p. viii.
18 Akbar S. Ahmed, “Where the Normal American Meets the Muslim Cleric,” New Perspectives Quarterly, Spring 1995, at http://www.npq.org/issues/v122/p13.html.
19 Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam, p. 241.
20 Akbar Ahmed, “I’ve spent my life trying to repair the image of Islam. Has it all been in vain?” The Independent (London), Sept. 20, 2001.
21 Sally Acharya, “‘Ambassador for Islam’: Akbar S. Ahmed Works to Connect Two Worlds,” American Weekly, Oct. 2, 2001, at http://veracity.univpubs.american.edu/weeklypast/100201/story_6.html.

Get thee to a madrasa

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 87-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Many academic commentators on September 11, anxious to exculpate Islam itself, announced that bin Ladin was not really a Muslim. Coming from a lot of professors who don’t profess Islam—and a few who do, but whose foreheads haven’t touched a mosque floor in years—it was a bit much. Actually, being a Muslim is a bit like being an Islam “expert”: the status is easy to acquire if you make a simple profession of faith, and you keep it regardless of whatever folly or evil you later perpetrate.

One person who has acquired the status of an Islam “expert” by means of osmosis is Karen Armstrong, a prolific British writer on comparative religion (and a former nun), who discovered Islam in the 1990s and wrote a biography of the Prophet Muhammad and a short history of Islam. Her books sell like rosaries in Rome, presumably because she already enjoys a reputation as a spiritual seeker. Armstrong’s argument seems to be that Islam is just about the best variety of monotheism, since it makes do without a church or a chosen people. Of course, it does have this problem of murderous fanatics who give it a bad name. But they aren’t authentic Muslims. “It would be as grave a mistake to see Usama bin Ladin as an authentic representative of Islam as to consider James Kopp, the alleged killer of an abortion provider in Buffalo, N.Y., a typical Christian.”13

Who, then, are the “authentic representatives” of Islam? Perhaps they are our Muslim allies, the enemies of bin Ladin. Sorry, it’s not them either. Here is Armstrong on CNN’s Q&A: “A lot of Muslims are laboring under highly undemocratic regimes, many of them, unfortunately, supported by the Western world—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria—countries that have rulers that are not Muslim, really, in any way.”14 In any way. One begins to get a sense that no Muslim really understands Islam with the same profundity and spirituality as … well, as Karen Armstrong.

So there you have it: a charge of apostasy against those Muslim rulers most supportive of the United States (including the sovereign of Mecca), made on CNN by an ex-nun and self-described “freelance monotheist.”15 And you thought you had heard everything.

13 Karen Armstrong, “The True, Peaceful Face of Islam,” Time Magazine, Oct. 1, 2001.
14 “Q & A with Zain Verje,” aired Dec. 5, 2001, at http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0112/05/i_qaa.01.html.
15 Karen Armstrong, Through the Narrow Gate, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. xvi.

New Age jihad

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 87-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Jihad is perhaps the most loaded word in the lexicon of Islam’s relations with the West. Over the last twenty years, it has been invoked by a succession of Muslim movements to justify their violence. Terrorist groups, some of them infamous for suicide bombings, have even named themselves “Islamic Jihad.” And Usama bin Ladin described his terror campaign as a jihad. After September 11, America looked expectantly to its “experts” to explain what jihad means for those who invoke it.

They never got an answer. Instead, they were told that Usama had it all wrong: jihad has nothing to do with war or violence. Listening to the academics, jihad began to sound like a traditional self-help technique—perhaps an Islamic version of controlled breathing.

Consider, for example, a New York Times op-ed written by Roy Mottahedeh, the Gurney Professor of History and chairman of the Committee on Islamic Studies at Harvard. Mottahedeh began by citing Muslim clerics who had condemned September 11 as a violation of Islamic law. Indeed, some did condemn it. But then he made a leap. “Some politicians and imperfectly educated Muslim clerics have used the word jihad loosely in the sense of armed struggle,” he complained. But “this meaning is rejected by most modern Muslim scholars, who say it properly refers to the struggle against the distortion of Islam.” According to Mottahedeh, “a majority of learned Muslim thinkers, drawing on impeccable scholarship, insist that jihad must be understood as a struggle without arms.”9

Jihad—unarmed struggle? How so? Barbara Stowasser, professor of Arabic at Georgetown University, elaborated at a forum held on her campus in October. “Jihad,” she stated, “is a serious personal commitment to the faith,” a struggle against “evil intentions,” and a “working toward the moral betterment of society.” Only at the very end of the Qur’an is it used to denote armed struggle, and even then, she added, Muslims are enjoined only to engage in defensive war. In Stowasser’s view, al-Qa‘ida “goes against the majority of Islam and against most of Islamic legal theory.” They were a group that “picks and chooses in its approach to the Qur’an.”10

Well, of course they do, but so do the American scholars who have picked and chosen their way through the Qur’an and Islamic legal theory, in a deliberate effort to demilitarize both, or even to turn Islam into a pacifist faith—a kind of oriental Quakerism. This interpretation is as tendentious as al-Qa‘ida’s. Emile Tyan, author of the article on jihad in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, described this approach as “wholly apologetic.” “Jihad consists of military action with the object of the expansion of Islam,” he determined; presenting it as peaceful persuasion or self-defense “disregard[s] entirely the previous doctrine and historical tradition, as well as the texts of the Qur’an and the Sunna.”11 In fact, someone has to be “imperfectly educated” to argue that jihad must be understood as struggle without arms. As Rudolph Peters wrote in his book on the doctrine of jihad, it is the idea of pacifist or defensive jihad that is new; Islamists (like bin Ladin) are much closer to classical doctrine.12 And that doctrine has enjoyed an obvious revival over the past twenty years.

When it comes to explaining foreign terms, the usual business of scholarship is to show how their meanings range over time and space. The problem with the Islam “experts” is that they are so enamored of their subject that they feel compelled to shore up its defenses, to the point of posing as Islam’s reformers. It’s a professional deformation with a long history in Islamic studies. One might question whether the reform of Islam is the proper job of American university professors, who are paid to explain. But they prefer to plead and apologize, and who can stop them? If only real Islam did conform to the Islam of the American academy. Even New York’s skyline would attest to it.

9 Roy Mottahedeh, “Islam and the Opposition to Terrorism,” The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001. The author was more cautious in a study that informed the op-ed: Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid, “The Idea of the Jihad in Islam before the Crusades,” in Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, eds., The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), pp. 23-29.
10 Paul Dyer, “CCAS Hosts Open Forum: The War on Terrorism, The Middle East Dimension,” CCAS News, Oct. 2001, p. 7.
11 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2 ed., s.v. “Djihad.”
12 Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), p. 131. In fundamentalist and classical texts, “views on the relationship with unbelievers are essentially identical.”