by Wafa Sultan
My Iranian friend continued: “I hate God more than I hate my father. My father and I are both victims of that criminal called Allah.”
Saddam Hussein was his victim, too.
Was Saddam Hussein not completely convinced that he represented God and his Prophet on earth? Did he not believe that the Kurds and the Shia should be crushed because they had not obeyed him, even though God had ordered them to obey their ruler? Why should we put Saddam Hussein on trial before trying that “God”? Why should Saddam suffer in jail while that “God” sits at liberty on the mountaintop in our village waiting to pounce on his next victim? The United States was accused by Muslims of supporting dictatorships in their countries, and to defend their ground and relinquish their guilt America decided to bring down Saddam Hussein’s throne. But though the throne has gone, the objective has not been attained, and the Iraqi people are still embroiled in the nightmare of that “God,” who orders them to obey their leaders. America miscalculated, and the inescapable question now is: Can it do anything to remedy the political situation?
The answer is not only that America can, but that it must! I am not talking about the political or military aspects here—I am no politician and know nothing of military constraints. But I firmly believe that it is in America’s interests to redress the balance, at least insofar as the demands of behavioral science and mental health are concerned. If it was America’s intention to use its war in Iraq to help spread democracy throughout the Arab world, in order to make amends for having supported dictatorships there, we have to ask the following question: How can we hope to impose democracy on people who have believed for the past fourteen centuries that they are obliged by divine decree to obey their rulers, even when these rulers persistently violate their rights? What we see happening in Iraq, unfortunately, provides us with the answer to this question.
For this crisis does not involve a democratic leader. It is the crisis of a nation and of a religious law whose decrees and teachings have permeated the convolutions of the brain and stamped themselves on the genes of the people of that nation. Another question raises itself here: What is the solution, and what choices does America have in its war in Iraq? The answer, without going into detail, is, quite simple: The only option it has is to strip this ogre of its power! Free the clergy of their ogre, free the ruler of the clergy, free men of their ruler, free women of men, free the slave of his master—in short, free the people of their fear! What freedom can a man who worships an ogre ever have? If the United States wants to free Muslims from the dictatorship of their rulers, it must first of all strive to free them from the dictatorship of their ogre.
In order to free Muslims from their fears it will take more than any country’s army and naval fleets. It’s going to require the services of its medical and scientific laboratories and of its experts on behavioral science, social psychology, and sociology. Everyone from popular psychologists like Dr. Wayne Dyer and Dr. Phil McGraw to researchers doing work in colleges and universities will have to be enlisted to work on ways of ridding the Muslim people of their ogres. These experts on behavioral science and psychology will have, in their proposals, to strive for scientific and ethical accuracy, throwing political correctness out the window.
Many psychologists and behavioral science experts in the United States have studied how children’s behavior is affected by the violence they see on television, and have found a correlation between the two. However, from my close observation of what many of them choose to study, I have found they don’t have the same desire to investigate the nature of the relationship between violence and reading matter.
Whatever has been said in the past and will be said in the future about the role of television in shaping a person’s convictions, I do not believe that it has played or ever will play as important a role as books do. And this is even truer when the book in question is a religious one, and when it is the sole source of knowledge for people who are bedazzled by reading it. There can be no doubt that violence among children in America, or any other Western society, is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and one worthy of study and the most serious consideration. But in no society in which it occurs does it constitute a danger comparable to that presented by Islamic terrorism. America and the whole civilized world will have to pay greater attention to this phenomenon by studying the reasons behind it and ways to deal with it, so as to protect the world, including Muslims themselves.
The Arab heritage has to be acquired from Arab books. I say “Arab,” not “Muslim,” so as to ensure that the student will read the primary sources of Islam. For if a researcher deals with Islam as it is presented in Muslim works in languages other than Arabic, he may not succeed in reaching the truth. I say this even though I have never read such books myself, but my close acquaintance with many non-Arab Muslims and my reading of English translations of the Koran have led me to form this conviction. My life in the United States has brought me into professional and social contact with many Muslims who are not Arabs, and these relationships have enabled me to delve deeply into their understanding of Islam and the extent of their knowledge of its teachings. I emerged convinced that there is a great deal of difference between Arab and non-Arab Muslims.
The Koran is an Arabic book, and Islam forbade its translation into any other language. This means that many non-Arabic-speaking Muslims read the Arabic text without learning to understand the Arabic language. They pronounce the words of the Koran without understanding their meaning; as far as they are concerned it is gibberish. In other cases they read the Koran in Arabic transliterated into their own alphabet, as when an American pronounces the word madrassa transliterated into Latin letters without any idea of what the word means in Arabic. Although the Koran has been rendered into other languages, these translations are not completely faithful, and Islam, as I mentioned above, forbids translation of the Koran. Because of this prohibition, translators refer to their work as “An English translation of the meaning of the Koran.” Naturally, in their work they try to convey the meaning with the greatest political correctness.
When you read the Koran in English or in any other language, you are reading not a literal translation but, rather, the meaning that the translator wants to impart to the text. Not all Arabic works which deal with Muhammad’s life, conduct, and thought have been translated into the languages spoken by non-Arab Muslims, and what translations do exist are not faithful to the original. The works have been abridged, and the translations have been adapted to conform to what the translator considers morally suitable and acceptable. My work once brought me into contact with three non-Arab Muslim women doctors. Our jobs required us to spend long hours together, and these were interspersed with numerous discussions of Islam and its teachings. I was amazed at the facts I learned in the course of these conversations.
Their knowledge of Islamic teaching was not only limited; it was also very different from my own. They had grown up in a religious environment more fanatical and closed than mine. Non-Arab Muslims pray in Arabic without understanding it. They repeat the words parrot fashion. This is also the case when they read the Koran. I have not the slightest doubt that many Christians who live in the Arab world know a great deal more about Islam than non-Arab Muslims do. What is more, Christians who live in Arab countries are more influenced be-haviorally and intellectually by Muslim culture than non-Arab Muslims are.
This explains to a great extent why Islamic terrorism is the product of the Arab heartland. Arab Muslims have a more profound understanding of the Koran, and of the life and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and what has been written about him. As a result, they have been more exposed to the application of Islamic teachings than have non-Arab Muslims. When an Arabic-speaking Muslim prays, he understands what the prayer means, while a non-Arab Muslim repeats the prayer without understanding it.
A Muslim prays five times a day, and on each occasion he recites the Fatiha, the first verse of the Koran, a number of times. This verse describes Christians as “th
ose who have gone astray” and Jews as “those who have incurred Your wrath.” We see from this that Muslims execrate Christians and Jews a number of times in the course of a single prayer, which they repeat five times a day. Non-Arab Muslims are unaware that they are cursing the Christians and the Jews, because they pray in Arabic without understanding what they are saying. This means that the quantity of hatred they absorb from their prayers is less than that absorbed by Arab Muslims, who are aware of what they are saying.
Most non-Arab Muslims I have met in the United States do not know the meaning of this verse that they repeat dozens of times daily in their prayers. However, if you were to ask an Arab boy in the first year of primary school what it meant, he would tell you that the Christians are those who have gone astray while the Jews are those who have incurred God’s wrath. Terrorism was born in the Arab world and spread from Saudi Arabia to other Muslim countries with the ideological and financial support of the Arabs. Islamic terrorism is led by Arabs, and those non-Arabs who aspire to leadership are Arab trained.
The Afghans are famous for their saying, “We are at peace only when we are at war.” This tendency to strife has penetrated deep into Afghan culture, perhaps because of the tribal nature of Afghan society. But they did not become a source of world Islamic terrorist activity until they came into disastrous contact with the Arab mujahideen, who brought with them a terrorist philosophy and Arab money. When I discussed this issue with Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today, who is of Muslim Indian descent, she did not like the idea and asked me in irritation, “So am I to understand from what you say that non-Arab Muslims are less Islamic than Arab Muslims?”
I replied at once, “No, they are less damaged.”
Non-Arab Muslims are not less Islamic than Arab Muslims, if faith and devotion to their religion are the criteria. But if we measure their degree of adherence to Islam by the extent of the mental and psychological damage they have sustained from its teachings, then they are less Islamic. For non-Arab Muslims, generally speaking, do not sink as deeply into the morass of these violent teachings as Arab Muslims do. I am not attempting to deny that there are non-Arab Muslims who are better acquainted with the teachings of Islam and more zealous in their application of them than many Arab Muslims: I am simply trying to make it plain that in the vast majority of cases, Islamic teachings have penetrated the mind of Arab Muslims much more deeply than they have non-Arab Muslims. This fact has to be taken into consideration when formulating a strategy to combat Islamic terrorism. Although Arab Muslims make up no more than 20 percent of the world Muslim population, the reformation of Islam can take place only through them. The reformation of Arab Islam is much more difficult than the reformation of non-Arab Muslims, but it is more important, as they are the source population. This task has to be undertaken before Arab funding “Arab-izes” Islam everywhere in the world as it has in Afghanistan.
I return here to an earlier point: the necessity of studying terrorism as a phenomenon in the laboratories of behavioral psychology in order to discover the connection between violence and reading matter. Muslim culture, from its Arab beginnings, has canonized violence at all levels. Language is the means by which a culture imposes itself, and members of the community are a linguistic product, and therefore also a cultural one.
I am no expert on linguistics, but I believe that every language in the world contains expressions and terms sufficient for speakers of that language to understand one another and express themselves. Each language contains positive and negative expressions. Muslim culture uses language in a way which focuses on negative expressions, and so helps to create people with negative attitudes. This is immediately obvious to anyone who reads the Koran or the sayings of the Prophet with the eye of a linguistic researcher.
Let us take a chapter of the Koran, read it, and sift through its phrases. If we take “The Cow,” (2:1–286) the longest chapter, what do we find? “They were unbelievers … they do not believe … great torment … they deceive God … in their heart is sickness … they lie … they are the corrupters … it is they who are the fools … in their tyranny … they were not rightly guided … God has taken away their light … deaf, dumb and blind … snatches away their sight … bewares the fire … break God’s covenant … refuse to believe in God … will shed blood … Satan caused them to fall … destined for the fire … fear Me … a great trial from the Lord … we drowned Pharaoh’s men … you wrong … a thunderbolt struck you … God’s wrath … you would have been among the lost … your hearts became as hard as rock … woe unto those … humiliating punishment … you are wrongdoers … ,” etc. Moreover, the word kill and its derivatives appears at least twenty-five times in the course of this chapter, which is no more than fifty pages long.
If we disregard the Koran’s positive content and the ends to which negative concepts are used, there still remains the linguistic style that predominates in Islamic teachings and which has contributed to the creation of a negative violence-prone personality even in its most positive attitudes. Were an expert on behavioral science to study normal conversation as engaged in by Arab Muslims, he would be surprised by the negative terms in which such conversation is conducted. When an Arab Muslim wants to tell you it’s a fine day, he tends to say: “The weather yesterday was worse than it is today.” The Koran, to put it mildly, is sadly lacking in positive terms that fall gently upon the ear. For example, in the following Koranic verse from the chapter mentioned above we read: “There is sickness in their hearts which God has increased; they shall be sternly punished for their lying” (2:10). A Muslim may object to my comments, saying: “But in this verse God is trying to demonstrate the importance of truthfulness as a virtue by emphasizing the punishment for lying.” My response is this: “Can God not use more positive language to demonstrate the importance of truthfulness?”
Islam forbids usury. If we examine Muhammad’s hadiths which confirm this prohibition, what do we find? “He who engages in usury is like one who copulates with his mother.” “He who engages in usury is like one who fornicates thirty-three times.” “He who engages in usury is like one who swallows a snake.” “He who engages in usury will be raised up as a madman on the day of judgment and will wander confounded like Satan.” I look at the language used here and ask myself how one can mold a psychologically, morally, and mentally healthy person with words and expressions like these. Are expressions such as “copulates with his mother,” “fornicates,” “swallows a snake,” and “a madman who wanders confounded like Satan” absolutely necessary in order to deliver the message that usury is forbidden? Muslims are the inalterable product of what they read. They are negative people, and their negativism is reflected in all their attitudes toward life.
On the plane from Amman to New York I passed the time by leafing through a book I had borrowed from the Arab lady sitting next to me. The book was entitled Arab Lovers, and it recounted tales of love and passion among the Arabs in the first centuries of the Muslim era. It was a medium-size book with big print and I expected it to contain exquisite stories in beautiful language which I would enjoy reading. But I found myself instead distracted by the frequency with which the phrase “Then he drew his sword and cut off his rival’s head” occurred: I was surprised to find it appeared twenty-five times in the first sixty pages. If this is true of a book in which Muslims talk of love and passion, one can only imagine what happens when they speak of jihad and of the need to defend God’s religion and uphold his authority! The language of violence and strife has extended into all areas of life in the Arab Muslim world. An arithmetic textbook in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed the following question to third-grade primary-school pupils: “Our brave soldiers killed 1,500 members of the enemy Iranian forces, wounded 1,800 others, and took 150 captive. What was the total extent of enemy losses, including dead, wounded, and captured?” Can arithmetic be taught to third-grade students without the inclusion of a body count?
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war a Moro
ccan military unit fought alongside Syrian troops. After the war, rumor spread of the heroism displayed by the Moroccan soldiers; this, however, was merely a lie invented by the Syrians to show their appreciation for the Moroccans’ participation in the war. Teachers of classes of all ages were full of praise in their description of their heroism to us pupils. I remember how our religious education teacher elaborated on the heroic exploits of that military unit, and how he insisted that he had seen one of its members carrying a large number of fingers, ears, tongues, and eyes around in his pocket, which had been removed from the bodies of Israeli soldiers killed in the war. We would applaud our teachers happily as they described these “valiant deeds” to us.
Some people accuse Hollywood of bringing more and more violence into our culture. Well, I don’t believe that the American film industry centered in Hollywood has ever, in the course of its entire history, succeeded in reproducing so much as a fraction of the violence embodied in the Muslim Arab heritage. There is a difference between the child who sees a violent film on television and the child who hears about it from her teacher or sees that violence enacted all around her in everyday life. All aspects of life in Muslim societies reflect the culture of violence and the negative influence of immersion in a language full of negative words and violent expressions.
Islamic culture invites violence. In most cases it does so openly, in others subtly.
I spoke earlier at length of the background from which Islam emerged: an arid environment with meager resources, daily life shrouded in fears of the unknown, whose inhabitants depended on raiding as a means of survival. The prevailing philosophy in that environment was one of “kill or be killed.” Islam adopted the language of that environment, appropriated its negativity and violence then proceeded to legitimize and canonize them.
