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Americanization of Islam:
Revamping of Islam in the image of neocons
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
“Direct confrontation and military conquest are now secondary tools to dominate cultures and markets. Habits and lifestyles are primary targets of change in order to guarantee an open market based on a free consumer who has an open mind.”
This premise sets the tone of the agenda-driven study of Rand Corporation, a Washington-based think tank, about Islam and Muslims. The study, titled “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies,” is written by Cheryl Benard, a sociologist and fiction writer.
As US Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, a leading newcon, confided on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003: "We need an Islamic reformation and I think there is real hope for one." The Rand Study, released on March 18, 2004, apparently unveils the newcons’ plan for global revamping of Islam.
Cheryl Benard, arguing that Islam is not necessarily a very “accessible” religion, arbitrarily compartmentalizes the 1.4 billion Muslims into four categories depending on their degree of affinity for Western values and concepts:
1. Fundamentalists, who reject democratic values and contemporary Western culture.
2. Traditionalists, who want a conservative society. They are suspicious of modernity, innovation, and change.
3. Modernists, who want the Islamic world to become part of global modernity. They want to modernize and reform Islam to bring it into line with the age.
4. Secularists, who want the Islamic world to accept a division of church and state in the manner of Western industrial democracies, with religion relegated to the private sphere.
Although Benard arbitrarily divides all Muslims into four categories – fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists and secularists – but pay attention to what’s there, but not spelt out. For her objectives all Muslims, except modernists, are virtually the same.
Benard says that though the secularists should be our most natural allies in the Muslim world because Western democracies are premised on the separation of church and state but the problem has been, and continues to be, that many important secularists in the Islamic world are unfriendly or even extremely hostile to us on other grounds. “Leftist ideologies, anti-Americanism, aggressive nationalism, and authoritarian structures with only quasi-democratic trappings have been some of the manifestations of Islamic secularism to date.”
Therefore, Benard suggests that Moderanists are our allies in the Muslim world. This group is most congenial to the values and the spirit of modern democratic society.
With the goal of selectively ignoring or rejecting elements of the original religious doctrine of Islam she also defines parameters for Muslim modernists:
- Modernists believe that Islam is responsible for the underdevelopment of the Muslims because prosperity and progress depends on modernity and democracy.
- Modernists believe in the historicity of Islam, i.e., that Islam as it was practiced in the days of the Prophet reflected eternal truths as well as historical circumstances that were appropriate to that time but are no longer valid.
- Modernists do not regard the original Islamic community or the early years of Islam as something that one would necessarily wish to reproduce today.
- Modernists believe that some verses (suras) may have been falsely or inaccurately recorded in the Quran.
- Modernists believe that the Quran is legend.
Benard questions the authenticity of the Qu’ran itself.
In the chapter on “The Hadith Wars” she says that two verses were lost in the process of recording of the Quran after the death of the Prophet. To authenticate her argument, she quotes from chapter 11 of an eminent scholar of Islam, Allama Ghulam Ahmed Parwez’s book entitled: The Status of Hadith . . . The Actual Status of Hadith - Holy Quran According to Our Traditions. Ironically, this chapter is written to refute the premise that the Quran was recorded after the death of the Prophet. The references of Hadith in this chapter were given for argument’s sake which Benard misquoted to prove her argument. Allama Parwez points out that the Quran was recorded in its present shape during the lifetime of the Prophet. He questions the authenticity of collections of Hadith which were collected by the Persian scholars more than 200 years after the death of the prophet.
Benard’s “research” on Quran is the latest attack on the authenticity of the holy book of Islam. In July 2003, Newsweek launched a similar attack with an article entitled “Challenging the Qur’an.” The punch of the article was that in the West, questioning the literal veracity of the Bible was a crucial step in breaking the church’s grip on power—and in developing a modern, secular society and the Muslims should follow this. The Newsweek article referred to the “research” of a pseudonymous German scholar Christoph Luxenberg who claims that the original language of the Qur’an was not Arabic but something closer to Aramaic.
Practical guide to create a defanged version of Islam:
A close reading of Benard’s work indicates that the main thrust of the study is to create a defanged version of Islam - to develop a Western Islam, a German Islam, a U.S. Islam, etc.
Now how to achieve this objective?
The daunting and complex task of religion-building (or revamping Islam in America’s image) will include the necessity to depart from, modify, and selectively ignore elements of the original religious doctrine of Islam, Benard argues.
After establishing her case against Islamic tenets as practiced or accepted today by almost all the Muslims Benard provides a Machiavellian formula to achieve the goal of creating a defanged version of Islam acceptable to America and the West:
Support the modernists first, support the traditionalists against the fundamentalists, confront and oppose the fundamentalists and selectively support secularists.
The focus will be on education and youth, since “committed adult adherents of radical Islamic movements are unlikely to be easily influenced into changing their views. The next generation, however, can conceivably be influenced if the message of democratic Islam can be inserted into school curricula and public media in the pertinent countries.”
It may not be out of place to mention that efforts are already underway to eliminate Quranic verses from school text books in Muslim countries. In Pakistan, Musharraf government is trying to eliminate Quranic verses from school text books amid mounting opposition from religious and non-religious political parties. In 1990s Kuwaiti Education Minister, Dr. Rubai, was forced to resign when he ordered deletion of the Quranic verses from the school text books. To many Muslims deletion of verses from the school text books is an endeavor to open a window for editing the Quran that survived 1400 years of distortion attempts.
Benard advocates another strategy, that will be promoting Sufism - which she includes in modernism - in the Muslim world. “Sufi influence over school curricula, norms, and cultural life should be strongly encouraged in countries that have a Sufi tradition, such as Afghanistan or Iraq. Through its poetry, music, and philosophy, Sufism has a strong bridge role outside of religious affiliations…..Encourage countries with strong Sufi traditions to focus on that part of their history and to include it in their school curricula. Pay more attention to Sufi Islam.”
Apparently, she is suggesting to use Sufism now to counter Wahabi doctrine as Americans used Wahabism in 1980s to launch “Jihad” against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan and also to counter Shiism after the Iranian revolution of 1979.
The fact of the matter is that historically Islamic fundamentalism or the so called “Militant Islam” has not posed a threat to Western interests (corporate, oil, and geopolitical interests) but rather been exploited to serve those interests. Remember Lawrence of Arabia? What was his objective other than to forge a British alliance with the Hashemites during World War I? Later, the British boosted the Saudi royal family, patrons of the Wahhabi school of thought, into power. The U.S. inherited Saudi Arabia as a client state after World War II, and we all know how well U.S. oil companies have done there ever since. Aramco alone, prior to its nationalization in the mid-1980s, yielded some $ 3 trillion from the Arabian reserves. (Challenging Ignorance on Islam: a Ten-Point Primer for Americans by Gary Leupp, an Associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University and coordinator, Asian Studies Program. (August 2002)
The U.S. helped create, recruit, and finance the fundamentalist Mujahadeen, including some 30,000 young volunteers who came from throughout the Muslim world to fight "godless Communism" in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The U.S. encouraged them to view their war as a jihad "Holy War," and put many in contact with young Osama bin Laden, then a US ally. The Reagan administration was in love with fundamentalist Islam, so long as it served its purposes. On June 16, 1986, President Reagan told four Afghan Mujahadeen who were invited to the White House: “I feel I am in the company of the founding fathers of this country.”
The California-based company Unocal was cordially negotiating right up to Sept. 11 with Afghanistan's Taliban for an oil pipeline through Afghan territory, State Department official Zalmay Khalilzad, now US ambassador to Afghanistan, was arguing up through 1998 that the Taliban were friendly, potential business partners who did "not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced in Iran.
Benard’s study completely ignores that cause of anti-American and anti-West attitude and violence in the Muslim world. She holds Islam and Muslims responsible for this. While ignoring the root cause she made a passing remark on this critical issue: “a number of authors believe that fundamentalist hostility to the United States and to the West primarily reflects anger over some aspects of our foreign policy or discomfort over the more-liberal aspects of Western culture. It is important to be aware that, while such concerns play a part, fundamentalism represents a basic and total rejection of democracy and of the core values of modern civil society.”
What she suggests is that Islam and Muslims are against democracy and civil society norms.
As a final thought, the release of the Rand study coincides with the formation of "Islamic Progress Institute" (IPI) by Daniel Pipes, an anti-Muslim and anti-Islam scholar, to articulate a moderate, modern and pro-American viewpoint on Islam. Pipe says: Islam in America must be American Islam or it will not be integrated (read accepted). The Rand Corp. study provides an ideological ground for creating an American version of Islam while IPI hopes to serve as a vehicle to implement that agenda in America.
Within the United States, ''all Muslims, unfortunately, are suspect'', Pipes wrote in a recent book, which called for the authorities to be especially vigilant towards Muslims with jobs in the military, law enforcement, or diplomacy. Last year, he cited as evidence of this insight the arrest on suspicion of espionage of Muslim chaplain Captain James Yee at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility that houses hundreds of prisoners from Bush's war on terrorism. The Army later withdrew charges against Captain Yee. In his grant proposal, Pipes writes that he is working on launching the IPI with ''a group of anti-Islamist Muslims'', whom he does not identify. (US Neo-Cons: From Nation-Building to Religion-Building by Jim Lobe Inter Press Service, April 7, 2004)
April 10, 2004
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