Sulayman’s Stories

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A few months before the [Abu Ghraib] scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to “the little people.” (Source: Newsweek)

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Our Lord! Impose not on us that which we have not the strength to bear, grant us forgiveness and have mercy on us. You are our Protector. Help us against those who deny the truth. (2:286)

Our Lord! Bestow on us mercy from Your presence and dispose of our affairs for us in the right way. (18:10)

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“(Bush is) just a sick f***. I think we’d be hard-pressed to get someone worse than Bush. I think if you had to sum it up he’s an incredibly selfish man and his administration in my opinion puts Americans ahead of people in other countries.” — MCA from the Beastie Boys (source)

“(George Bush) betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!” — Al Gore (source)

“…George Bush is not Hitler. He would be, if he f*cking applied himself.” — Margaret Cho at a MoveOn Award Ceremony (source)

“Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss.” -Mark Crispin Miller, biographer and author of Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (source)

“[Bush] has been painted to be this hero, and he’s got our troops over there dying for no reason . . . I think he started a mess . . . He jumped the gun, and he f**ked up so bad he doesn’t know what to do right now . . . We got young people over there dyin’, kids in their teens, early twenties that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam 2. Bin Laden attacked us, and we attacked Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers.” –Eminem, Rolling Stone interview

“George W. Bush has built a durable reputation as the most dishonest president since Richard M. Nixon” –Al Gore, speaking on May 26, 2004 at NYU

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From Tasawwuf.org: a true shaykh of tasawwuf (sufism) never breaks even the smallest tenets of the shariah or the sunnah. Rather, he sees them as the means of his progress towards his Lord. In fact, he prefers death over falling into even a minute sin.

I saw a holy man on the seashore wounded by a tiger.
No medicine could relieve his pain; He suffered much, 
but he nevertheless constantly thanked God, the most high, saying,
”Praise be to Allah that I have fallen into a calamity and not into sin.”

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Protocol 1 of the 1977 Geneva Conventions, Part IV, Section 1, Chapter III, Article 52: … 3. In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.

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From Peccavi « Muslihoon

In 1843, under General Charles. James Napier the British conquered Sindh (which is now inside present-day Pakistan). It is said that he announced his conquest with one word: “Peccavi”.

In Latin, “peccavi” means “I have sinned,” a play on General Napier’s intended message, “I have Sindh.”

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Last week some fool posted a silly op-ed in the Washington Square News, ranting about Muslims coming to “infect” America and how the West is too weak to stop it. It touched upon Iraq but not coherently, jumping from topic to topic and not really backing his assertions up with anything. In the end, it was a xenophobic tirade with poor logic.

I wrote a reply, and it was published, albeit cut down to half the size. I thought maybe I should post the full thing, which I couldn’t have done without my friends Haroon and Jawad.

Last week an author named Sam Gilbride wrote a piece on these pages called “In the war on terror, failure means the end of our world.” Title aside, he changed his argument to a “war on Islamic fundamentalism,” launching into a polemic about Muslims and how nearly 1/3 of humanity are bogeyman coming to get him. First, I think his premise is misinformed; it’s not a war on islamic fundamentalism, its a “war on terror.” As a Muslim, I know that someone who believes in the peaceful fundamentals of Islam cannot be confused with someone who’s a violent terrorist. Murder is a sin according to my religion; those who do so violate the clear language of the Qur’an. Anyone who can’t tell those two groups of people apart shouldn’t be writing editorials.

I won’t call it “the war against Islamic fundamentalism” as he did. It’s a common myth that all terrorists are Muslim, and he 
seems to buy this. All religious extremism is equally dangerous; Christian fundamentalists were convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, Jewish 
fundamentalists assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, Hindu extremists went on pogroms against minority Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, etc. While terrorism is certainly an important issue, as Bush loves to remind us, terrorists have never won against any government yet. Instead, governments fall from within through domestic forces, e.g. the Nazis used the terrorist attack on the Reichstag building as a justification for seizing power and suppressing rights.

He chides the weakness of the liberal model without defining it. If Mr. Gilbride believes the Western liberal model is weak, then why is he defending it? 
Let me do it for him; The strength of the USA is our ability to accept difference and allow diversity in a society. If a society can’t show genuine 
tolerance and acceptance, then it is diseased. Until that’s fixed, people will always look for an external enemy.. In this case, Mr. Gilbride is trying to target Muslims. He’s appealing to emotion not reason; if Americans don’t deal with the Muslims, they’ll “infect our civilization,” as he put it. There’s nothing to respond to, it’s just fluff. He apes Hitler, only substituting “Jew” with “Muslim.”

Mr. Gilbride profoundly misunderstands the Muslim world. It’s not Islam that hates the West, although Islam hates injustice wherever it appears. People aren’t fighting for Islam as an ideology, but fighting against what they perceive as injustice. How come Al Qaeda never attacks Sweden? He also overgeneralizes; none of the thousands of Muslims I know hate the West. Albanians are Muslim, but they greeted Bush last year like he was a rock star. People in Iran wear Levi jeans. MTV is popular in Egypt. Mr. Gilbride doesn’t seem aware that the so-called “clash of civilizations” has been debunked years ago.

Mr. Gilbride, why not lay blame on those who place us in danger? Our CIA financed and trained Afghani fighters, who years later joined Al Qaeda. Iran’s democracy was toppled in a CIA-led coup, later backfiring spectacularly against us. We with France overthrew democracy in Algeria in 1992, in Palestine in 2006, appearing as hypocrites in the world. Bush reacted to 9/11, but he never addressed any causes. Instead, with Iraq he created armies of terrorists, feeding Al Qaeda’s air supply, he fanned the flames. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were gasoline on his fire.

At the least Gilbride might define his terms within the title: What is he considering a “loss” in the war on terror?
 Would giving Iraq more craters than the moon be a loss, or withdrawing? When America lost in Vietnam, did America cease to 
exist? Did disgruntled Vietnamese bomb America in retaliation for the millions of deaths in their country? No.

According to him, these ‘bogeyman’ Muslims don’t respect Western freedoms. That’s odd, aren’t these freedoms the Bush administration is curtailing? All civil liberties progress since Martin Luther King has been wiped out in Bush’s war; there’s talk of resurrecting COINTELPRO, racial profiling is now endorsed by some politicians, people are calling for segregating Muslims at airports, 39% of US citizens want Muslims to carry special ID. It’s an odd irony of life that Muslims strongly endorsed Bush in the 2000 election; he promised an end to Clinton’s “secret evidence” laws and championed Arab-American rights.

Here I am, having to rebut an absurd argument that pretends the West is under siege from the Islamic world. This is especially aggravating when Mr. Gilbride presumes to tell us that we have not faced a threat so great since Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany was the most powerful military and largest economy arguably of its time, at least the most sophisticated. Nazi Germany was able to conquer most of Europe and drive deep into Russia in the span of a few years; the United States could never have defeated Nazi Germany alone. Now we’re supposed to imagine that countries like Iran or Pakistan represent a similar threat to the world. Are we using drugs? The total annual military budget of Pakistan, the only nuclear power in the Muslim world — is about the same as the Harvard University’s endowment ($20-30 billion). The US spends over $124 Billion on its Navy alone. In other words, they are simply too weak to cause serious or long-term harm to the West.

If the West “loses” the war on terror and we all wind up in a dictatorship, it will be by our own actions, not by others. Foreign forces don’t create police states, it’s the populations within that give up freedoms and arrive at that outcome.

In the words of Russ Feingold, when he was one of the few who voted against the Patriot Act in 2001, “Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.”

In the play, “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More questions Mr. Roper whether he would level the forest of English laws to punish the Devil. “What would you do?” More asks, “Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Roper affirms, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that.” More replies: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

I don’t like the idea that Mr. Gilbride is peddling; that Muslims are less than full members of our America. Last I checked, over half of
 all Muslims live in democracies, Muslim Americans are better educated than the national average, and there are thousands of American Muslims serving in 
Iraq. It was just as wrong when Hitler singled out Jews in this manner, and it’s just as wrong to do the same to Muslims today.

–Sulayman F.

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…Many people have the idea that once a limb is amputated the pain stops. That’s not true. Pain from damaged nerve tissue lasts for months, usually longer if a clean amputation is not done soon after the accident, which was always the case in Afghanistan, where painkillers were not always available. Add this to weeks of drugged discomfort, for patients were all but drowned in antibiotics in order to prevent tetanus and other infections caused by mine fragments.

Yet, despite the pain and a missing arm or foot, the patients in these wards looked healthy and normal. There was a vibrancy in their faces, a trace of humor even, and a total absence of embarrassment. “I have given my foot to Allah ,” said a twenty-seven-year-old man, who also had one eye and a burned, deformed hand. “Now I will continue my jihad in another way.” This man had a wife and three children. At first, I dismissed what he said as bravado meant to impress a foreigner. I found it impossible to believe that he really felt this emotion, that he truly accepted what happened to him. His eyes, however, evinced neither the rage of a fanatic, which would have accounted for his defiance, nor the shocked and sorrowful look of someone who was really depressed. If anything registered on his face when I spoke to him, it was bewilderment. He didn’t seem to understand why I thought he should be unhappy. He had lost an eye, a foot, and part of a hand– and that was that.

Soldiers of God
Robert D. Kaplan

quoted in Writing War. Read as part of a class assignment, but I plan on reading the whole thing afterwards

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People keep asking me what led me to study Islam. I keep telling the story a bit differently, depending on what memory or part of the story comes to mind first. What I never got to mention was this; I had read a passage in a novel that made me reconsider what I had accepted as facts in the world:

…
“But the thing is, boys don’t like girls who are too smart.”
Sarah’s eyebrows went up. “Is that so?”
“Well, that’s what everybody says…”
“Like who?”
“Like my mom.”
“Uh-huh. And she probably knows what she’s talking about.”
“I don’t know, Kelly admitted. “My mom only dates jerks, actually.”
“So she could be wrong?” Sarah asked, glancing up at Kelly as she tied her laces.
“I guess.”
“Well, in my experience, some men like smart women, and some don’t. It’s like everything else in the world.” She stood up. “You know about George Schaller?”
“Sure. He studied pandas.”
“Right. Pandas, and before that, snow leopards and lions and gorillas. He’s the most important animal researcher in the twentieth century-and you know how he works?”
Kelly shook her head.
“Before he goes into the field, George reads everything that’s ever been written about the animal he’s going to study. Popular books, newspaper accounts, scientific papers, everything. Then he goes out and observes the animal for himself. And you know what he usually finds?”
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“That nearly everything that’s been written or said is wrong. Like the gorilla. George studied mountain gorillas ten years before Dian Fossey ever thought of it. And he found that what was believed about gorillas was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy-like the idea that you couldn’t take women on gorilla expeditions, because the gorillas would rape them. Wrong. Everything… just… wrong.”
Sarah finished tying her boots and stood.
“So, Kelly, even at your young age, there’s something you might as well learn now. All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they tell you will be wrong.”
Kelly said nothing. She felt oddly disheartened to hear this.
“It’s a fact of life,” Sarah said. “Human beings are just stuffed full of misinformation. So it’s hard to know who to believe. I know how you feel.”
…

That’s a passage from The Lost World, by Michael Crichton. I read it when I was 11, and this lesson stayed in my mind for years. Eventually, with Americans going berserk with panic over Muslims, I somehow remembered this moral out of nowhere. I actually went to the library and tried finding books about Islam. In retrospect, nearly everything I learned about Islam and Muslims was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy. It made it all the more frustrating to explain to people, since they refused to part with those notions.

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