There\’s Nothing Wrong with Some Real Islam in Policy

Western Islamophobia, nurtured by repressive Arab regimes as well as Israel, is alive and well. Islamophobic talking heads are once again all over the news, casting Islam in a negative light, fueling America’s greatest fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will surely prevail in any free and fair elections held in an Arab country. The West seems to want Arabs to have democracy, but on its own terms. How else to serve its own economic and geopolitical needs? Repeated calls for free and fair elections in places like Lebanon, Algeria and Palestine were disavowed by American when Islamic parties made major gains.

And yet, the American Bill of Rights was heavily influenced by the Quran, as Jefferson and four other signers of the Constitution had studied that good book. They correctly recognized, among other meritorious teachings of the Quran, the concept of equality in Islam. The issue is not Islam in the War on Terror, any more than Christianity was during the Crusades, but rather how some people practice it.

The renowned Islamic scholar, Muhammad Abduh, when he returned from exile in Paris in 1888, and in 1899 was named Grand Mufti of Egypt, and thus the most senior cleric of Sunni Islam, said “I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam.”

There isn’t one Egyptian on the street who doesn’t know this quote, who doesn’t agree with this quote. Islam’s not the problem. The problem is that the Muslims on center stage, i.e. the vast minority, have hijacked it. Also true, and perhaps consequently, many haven’t been/aren’t being properly guided, led, or even educated. Too many imams are concerned with ratings, so they make it about sex and alcohol. The number-one question asked in the Al Azhar online forum has to do with “informal” marriages, which means it’s all about sex.

Rarely will you find anyone promoting the real foundations of Islam, which include charity and integrity and a work ethic. Perhaps it didn’t suit the many foreign occupiers of the Islamic world over the years. As the British always said, divide and conquer, and what better way to divide a country or global community than with religion.

Egypt’s not Iran! If anything, Iran has been the perfect example to the Egyptian people of what they don’t want in political Islam. The Egyptian people are more than capable of deciding, through a home-grown democratic process, just how much Islam should factor into their new republic. The world seems to accept that Israel, the first but not for long the only democracy, in the Middle East is a Jewish state. And Turkey, on its way to inclusion in the EU, is a secular state ruled by an elected Islamic party Parliamentary style. 

One has only to recall how the Jews, from Cairo to Baghdad to Damascus, were protected during World War II when the Christian West stood by and watched their demise. I’d take a little of that Islam, wouldn’t you?