Propaganda and Islam: What you’re not Being Told
Justin King
Propaganda is the wheel by which the government steers the bus of a nation; typically driving it into war or off the cliff of humanity. It is amazing to see how many people who are otherwise rational human beings will blindly follow the herd on the matter of how subhuman a perceived national enemy is.
The western media wonderfully paints Islam as a death cult bent on world domination. Over and over again the American populace is shown footage of the atrocities committed by fanatics or of Arab men burning American flags. The problem, of course, is that this isn’t remotely representative of the Islamic population of the world. Are there Muslims who employ terrorism? Of course. Are there Christians who employ terrorism? Of course. There are even Buddhists who employ terrorism.
Some general facts about Islam might help break the noose of wartime propaganda that rests around America’s neck. Below are a list of statements this journalist has seen in the last week on social media, followed by the data to put that statement in perspective.
“All [or most] Muslims are terrorists.”
There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. The much-discussed ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) organization, which has been described as the “richest terrorist group in the world” can only field between 7,000 and 15,000 troops in its battle to create a fundamentalist homeland. Even taking the highest estimate of their troop strength means that fewer than 1 out of every 106,000 Muslims from all over the world are actually willing to take up arms and fight for the fundamentalist dream. The Iraqi army, however, can field 250,000 soldiers to fight against that fundamentalist vision. That figure does not include irregular forces allied to the Iraqi army. The premise that all Muslims are terrorists falls flat by a mere study of the numbers. It isn’t a majority of Muslims. It isn’t even 1% of Muslims.
“Muslims want Sharia law.”
While many Muslims believe in Sharia law, what is considered Sharia law is not universal. In Lebanon, which has been considered a hotbed of Islamic terrorism ever since the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, 38% of Muslims don’t even believe it is the Word of God. Among those that do believe it to be the direct Word of God, only 29% believe in making it the legal system for the country, and a majority of Lebanese Muslims don’t believe Sharia law should apply to non-Muslims. Even among those that believe whole-heartedly in Sharia law, they don’t necessarily believe in some of the more violent aspects. The crime of adultery is punishable by stoning under some forms of Sharia law. Some quick and simple math shows that in Lebanon, less than 3% of Muslims believe that punishment should be applied to the population at large. Meanwhile in America’s heartland, a political candidate has advocated or silently endorsed the idea of stoning homosexuals. The vast majority of Muslims believe that Sharia law should be used to settle family or property disputes among Muslims.
Some countries have higher rates of belief in using Sharia law, and some have lower. Lebanon was chosen because it falls in the middle as far as averages go.
“They beat their women.”
First, the very phase “their women” suggests that the individual might fall close to the more radical elements of Islam in regards to the belief that women are property. Yes, some Muslim men beat “their women.” In the United States 25% of women will be beaten by “their men” in their lifetime. This is not an Islamic issue, this is an issue rising from the idea that women are property and somehow belong to the men. If this is justification for war, the United States might consider invading Belfast, where 60 cases of domestic violence are reported daily.
“They are stuck in the Stone Age, and they want to stay there.”
This statement marginalizes the thousands of Muslim men and women who sit in prison for attempting to change their government and those that died in the attempt. Political prisoners throughout the Arab world sit rotting away for attempting to bring about change in their nations. They are Muslims. Four Saudi Princesses are currently being starved to death by the King for speaking out in favor of women’s rights. Countless journalists and bloggers sit behind bars for questioning their governments. The US government continually props up these brutal dictatorships with multi-million dollar arms deals and keeps the power in the hands of those that don’t want change.
“Muhammad was a pedophile and his wife was only 6 [or 7].”
Most historians agree that Aisha and Muhammad were married after she reached puberty. They place her age, on average, around 13 years old at the time of marriage, though she may have been betrothed to him much earlier. Americans need to keep in mind that while they might not have heard of Islam prior to September 11th, Muhammad lived in the early 600s A.D. It might surprise them to learn that marriage at such an early age was extremely common not only in the Arab world, but the Western world as well. King John of England married a 12-year-old around 1198. Romeo’s love, Juliet, was only 13. No subset of people is more hated in the West than pedophiles. An attempt to cast the founder of the perceived enemy as a pedophile would certainly benefit the war effort.
“Muslims take child brides and rape children.”
Does it occur in the Muslim world? Sure. It occurs in the United States as well, typically deep in America’s heartland. The Catholic Church is well-known for its abuse of the youth. Again this is a worldwide issue, not an Islamic one. There is not a single Middle Eastern country listed among the top 20 nations with a high prevalence of child brides.
Conclusion:
Most of the information that is spread via social media is simply not accurate. It only serves to plant the idea in the American psyche that somehow the United States must save the Muslims from themselves. The goal of this propaganda is to make Americans believe that Muslims are somehow lesser people. After all, it’s easier to condemn people to die in air strikes if they aren’t really human. Before clicking the share or retweet button on an inflammatory article, try to determine if the information being presented is an accurate portrayal of the Muslim world, or if you are simply furthering the government’s march towards war.
The Islamic world is not without its problems. The struggle for equal rights for women and homosexuals continues to meet roadblock after roadblock on the streets of Amman, Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran; however, if the United States seeks to use this as justification for intervention, maybe it should invade Mississippi or Arkansas.
http://theantimedia.org/propaganda-and- ... eing-told/
Propaganda and Islam: What you’re not Being Told
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Re: Propaganda and Islam: What you’re not Being Told
http://www.rediff.com/news/column/islam ... 160208.htm
The ideological struggle for the future had begun two centuries before. Two theologians, one Indian and the other Arab, born in the same year, 1703, offered theses that control the narrative till today.
Shah Waliullah, born in Delhi, died in the 1760s; Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahab was born in Najd and died in 1787.
After witnessing Mughal impotence in 1739, Shah Waliullah offered a salient prescription: Shias were apostates (murtadd) who had betrayed Islam and hence beyond trust; he urged Sunni unity; traced Sunni decline to dynastic monarchies which had abandoned the practice of consensus in the choice of caliph; blamed Mughals for wasteful expenditure on monuments rather than public welfare (The Taj Mahal had been built rather recently); and, most significantly, accused Mughal elites of deviation by adopting Hindu practices, and allying with Hindus and Shias. This was shirq, or compromise with polytheism.
His list of 'sins' is in fact recognition of Mughal inclusiveness, which so perturbed Aurangzeb and which certainly outlasted him.
His resolution for shirq was a physical and cultural 'theory of distance' between believer and infidel, and advocated a line that resonates powerfully in ontemporary below-the-radar discourse: 'Nearer to Arabia, closer to Allah.'
His political contribution was significant. When the Marathas entered Delhi in 1758, he invited Ahmad Shah Abdali to cross the Khyber and save Muslim rule. This is, interestingly, a 'threat' which would be repeated for generations, in the rhetoric of leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad and prominent figures of the Muslim League in the pre-Partition phase.
A new force soon overshadowed such concerns. In 1803, Lord Lake entered Delhi. Shah Aziz, Shah Waliullah's son, responded with a famous fatwa declaring India a Dar ur Harb, or House of War. The British represented, in his view, a threat to Islam. Aziz's disciple, Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi [1786-1831] launched the jihad in the 1820s that would continue under his successors till the 1870s.
Barelvi's manifesto, written in 1818, shows how close the ideologies of Waliullah and Abdul Wahab were, although Barelvi met Wahabis only when he went on Haj between 1822 and 1824. Barelvi attacked Indians who indulged in shrine worship (going to a dargah) and 'obnoxious' behaviour like singing and dancing during weddings.
It is easy to see why the Taliban venerate his shrine at Balakot, despite the injunction against 'shrine worship.'
In Arabia, Wahabis might have withered but for a charismatic disciple, Muhammad ibn Saud, emir of Najd who stunned the Ottomans by conquering Mecca and Medina by 1804. In India, the British began to describe Waliullah's followers as Wahabis, and were forced into bitter battles against the 'Fanatical Host.'
In 1867, a few ulema from the Waliullah school of thought, led by Maulanas Nanotvi and Gangohi, started a seminary that has become an international force, Deoband.
However, Deoband's Maulanas, having experienced 1857, accepted the need for collaboration with Hindus against British. They remained deeply committed, though, to cultural distance, initiating what has not matured into identity politics.
But simultaneously sections of the elite, led by Sir Syed, felt that the British were here to stay and their best interests lay in partnership with the new rulers so that they could regain the administrative and educational ascendancy they had enjoyed in the past.
Shah Waliullah's inheritance, thereby, broke into two directions: Cultural separation through Deoband, and political separation through Sir Syed. The politics of separation led inevitably to separate electorates in 1909 and Partition in 1947.
After Partition, Pakistan's Muslim League leaders staved off cultural Wahabism for a while, but lost the political argument very quickly, when they accepted Pakistan as an Islamic State in the objectives resolution.
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, from the UP landed aristocracy, thought he was conceding nothing more than words; in fact, he was setting the compass towards General Zia-ul Haq's Sharia-compliant Nizarn-e-Mustafa.
Pakistan is the first Islamic Republic in the post-colonial era, and 'Islamism' has changed not only behaviour but history books and polity.
The failure of Islam to keep Pakistan together in 1971 did nothing to weaken its hold on the social and political imagination. While Bangladesh reinvented itself along linguistic ethnicity, a shattered Pakistan reinforced the belief that Islam was the only glue; that is was not Islam which was to blame, but the inability of Muslims to understand their faith.
The conflation of Islam and nationalism has been a guarantee for instability, because religion has never been the basis for political unity anywhere, including in the history of Muslims. Why else would there be 22 Arab nations?
Reality of Caliphs and Imagined History
Internal conflict, which quickly grew into civil war, broke out even in Islam's pristine age, over succession to the Prophet, leading to the Sunni-Shia divide.
Of the first four 'Rightly-Guided' caliphs, only one, Abu Bakr, died in bed. Umar, Usman and Ali were assassinated.
Umar was murdered by a Persian servant in 644; Usman was killed in 656 by Mohammed, son of Abu Bakr, because of factional quarrels; Ali was assassinated in 660 by a rebel. In 657 Ali, who shifted his capital to Kufa, faced Muawiya at Siffin, Syria, in what is known as the Battle of the Camel.
Muawiya, with the Prophet's Aisha as an ally, accused Ali of instigating the murder of Usman. Muawiya seized power after he forced the resignation of Ali's son Hasan, and established the first dynasty, that of Umayyads.
When Muawiya died in 680, Hasan's brother Husain challenged Muawiya's son Yazid, but, heavily outnumbered, was killed at Karbala in 680, a martyrdom that is central to Shia lament.
Blood and confusion travelled together till the comparative stability of the reign of Abdal Malik.
Caliphates became dynasties; 14 Umayyads, 37 Abbasids; and, in the last phase, 26 Ottomans between 1517 and 1924 when Ataturk abolished the institution and turned Turkey towards modernity. In 1517 Selim the First was unsentimental when he wrested the caliphate from Arabs; he claimed the office by the right of the sword.
As in any dynasty, great names mixed with mediocre ones. The best caliphs had open minds. Harun al Rashid (786-809) had Sanskrit texts and Greek philosophers translated for his House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He also partied with his court poet Abu Nawwas, who wrote classical verse.
The Ottoman Caliph Bayezid sent boats to rescue Jews expelled by the Spanish Inquisition.
In 1839 Abdulmecid the First introduced secular law alongside Sharia, gave non-Muslims equal rights, banned slavery and opened taverns.
Abdulhamid, who ruled between 1876 and 1909 and was the last caliph to exercise genuine power, loved music; his daughters played the piano and sons the cello. On Thursday nights he would join Sufis in dhikr, and the next day his imperial orchestra would play Offenbach on the way home after Friday prayers.
Western music was played at imperial banquets. His wife Sehsuvar was painted reclining with Goethe's Faust in her hand -- and not a veil in sight. French was a court language, along with Persian, Armenian and Arabic.
None of them would have been considered 'legitimate' by today's Islamist radicals.
The office of the caliphate has Quranic sanction. It derives from khalf, meaning 'left behind', or inheritor. It might surprise some hardliners to learn that the model caliph in the Quran is King David. Verse 2:30 says: 'Behold, thy Lord said to the angels, I will create a viceregent [khalifah] on earth.'
The first was Adam, the second was David. The great example of faith against odds, and belief in Allah as a prerequisite for victory, is that of David who fought Goliath.
Verse 2:249 says: 'How oft by Allah's will hath a small force vanquished a big one? Allah is with those who steadfastly persevere.'
This verse inspires the conviction that numbers do not matter on a battlefield as long as you have faith. In today's context, therefore, small bands of terrorists believe they can destabilise superpowers, if they are ready to become martyrs.
Since the road to paradise is under the shade of swords, it is a win-win situation for those ready to die for the cause of Allah.
This is jihad fi sabil Allah: War in the cause of Allah [also, incidentally, the official motto of the Pakistan armed forces].
No poet used the phrase, shade of swords, more effectively, or evoked the romance of an Islamic past better that that great poet of loss, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, who is rightly revered in Pakistan as an intellectual architect of the two-nation theory
If the challenge of the 20th century was freedom from colonialism, then the struggle of the 21st is around the content of nationalism.
Will the renaissance come from a modern definition of a nation-State, or from a structure like the doctrinaire caliphate, which despite its flaws in practice still created a historic glory?
The first Muslim leader to answer this question, with astonishing clarity, was Kemal Mustafa Ataturk. He understood the rational causes of Ottoman decline, the loss technological ascendancy, scientific innovation, gender equality and the fact that the caliphate had become defunct as an idea.
On the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman empire had only around 17,000 workers in a population of 25 million: it was still an agricultural economy. Ataturk could ignore the ulema because his credentials as a nationalist who had saved his country from foreign invasion and dismemberment was impeccable. He had the trust of the people.
If we want to understand America's dominations of the 20th century, just list some American inventions from the 19th or 18th: Benjamin Franklin gave us the stove, bifocals and lightning rod; Charles Goodyear, vulcanised rubber, Walter Hunt, the fountain pen, safety pin and breech-loading Winchester; Elias Howe, the sewing machine; Joseph Henry (a professor at Princeton), the telegraph; Graham Bell, the telephone. There were 30,000 miles of railways in America by 1860. How many telephones existed in Istanbul in 1880, when there were 60,000 phone lines in America?
The situation in the Arab world through the 20th century was bleak. Where neo-colonies could not be sustained, the alternative was army-backed dictators or despots who tended to create their own dynasties.
Worse, these armies were repeatedly defeated by the focal regional foe, Israel; the disaster of 1967, despite the advantage of numbers, became an imperishable memory bewildering the citizen and offering opportunity for a Phoenix waiting to arise from the ashes, Islamism.
http://www.rediff.com/news/column/islam ... 160208.htm
The ideological struggle for the future had begun two centuries before. Two theologians, one Indian and the other Arab, born in the same year, 1703, offered theses that control the narrative till today.
Shah Waliullah, born in Delhi, died in the 1760s; Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahab was born in Najd and died in 1787.
After witnessing Mughal impotence in 1739, Shah Waliullah offered a salient prescription: Shias were apostates (murtadd) who had betrayed Islam and hence beyond trust; he urged Sunni unity; traced Sunni decline to dynastic monarchies which had abandoned the practice of consensus in the choice of caliph; blamed Mughals for wasteful expenditure on monuments rather than public welfare (The Taj Mahal had been built rather recently); and, most significantly, accused Mughal elites of deviation by adopting Hindu practices, and allying with Hindus and Shias. This was shirq, or compromise with polytheism.
His list of 'sins' is in fact recognition of Mughal inclusiveness, which so perturbed Aurangzeb and which certainly outlasted him.
His resolution for shirq was a physical and cultural 'theory of distance' between believer and infidel, and advocated a line that resonates powerfully in ontemporary below-the-radar discourse: 'Nearer to Arabia, closer to Allah.'
His political contribution was significant. When the Marathas entered Delhi in 1758, he invited Ahmad Shah Abdali to cross the Khyber and save Muslim rule. This is, interestingly, a 'threat' which would be repeated for generations, in the rhetoric of leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad and prominent figures of the Muslim League in the pre-Partition phase.
A new force soon overshadowed such concerns. In 1803, Lord Lake entered Delhi. Shah Aziz, Shah Waliullah's son, responded with a famous fatwa declaring India a Dar ur Harb, or House of War. The British represented, in his view, a threat to Islam. Aziz's disciple, Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi [1786-1831] launched the jihad in the 1820s that would continue under his successors till the 1870s.
Barelvi's manifesto, written in 1818, shows how close the ideologies of Waliullah and Abdul Wahab were, although Barelvi met Wahabis only when he went on Haj between 1822 and 1824. Barelvi attacked Indians who indulged in shrine worship (going to a dargah) and 'obnoxious' behaviour like singing and dancing during weddings.
It is easy to see why the Taliban venerate his shrine at Balakot, despite the injunction against 'shrine worship.'
In Arabia, Wahabis might have withered but for a charismatic disciple, Muhammad ibn Saud, emir of Najd who stunned the Ottomans by conquering Mecca and Medina by 1804. In India, the British began to describe Waliullah's followers as Wahabis, and were forced into bitter battles against the 'Fanatical Host.'
In 1867, a few ulema from the Waliullah school of thought, led by Maulanas Nanotvi and Gangohi, started a seminary that has become an international force, Deoband.
However, Deoband's Maulanas, having experienced 1857, accepted the need for collaboration with Hindus against British. They remained deeply committed, though, to cultural distance, initiating what has not matured into identity politics.
But simultaneously sections of the elite, led by Sir Syed, felt that the British were here to stay and their best interests lay in partnership with the new rulers so that they could regain the administrative and educational ascendancy they had enjoyed in the past.
Shah Waliullah's inheritance, thereby, broke into two directions: Cultural separation through Deoband, and political separation through Sir Syed. The politics of separation led inevitably to separate electorates in 1909 and Partition in 1947.
After Partition, Pakistan's Muslim League leaders staved off cultural Wahabism for a while, but lost the political argument very quickly, when they accepted Pakistan as an Islamic State in the objectives resolution.
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, from the UP landed aristocracy, thought he was conceding nothing more than words; in fact, he was setting the compass towards General Zia-ul Haq's Sharia-compliant Nizarn-e-Mustafa.
Pakistan is the first Islamic Republic in the post-colonial era, and 'Islamism' has changed not only behaviour but history books and polity.
The failure of Islam to keep Pakistan together in 1971 did nothing to weaken its hold on the social and political imagination. While Bangladesh reinvented itself along linguistic ethnicity, a shattered Pakistan reinforced the belief that Islam was the only glue; that is was not Islam which was to blame, but the inability of Muslims to understand their faith.
The conflation of Islam and nationalism has been a guarantee for instability, because religion has never been the basis for political unity anywhere, including in the history of Muslims. Why else would there be 22 Arab nations?
Reality of Caliphs and Imagined History
Internal conflict, which quickly grew into civil war, broke out even in Islam's pristine age, over succession to the Prophet, leading to the Sunni-Shia divide.
Of the first four 'Rightly-Guided' caliphs, only one, Abu Bakr, died in bed. Umar, Usman and Ali were assassinated.
Umar was murdered by a Persian servant in 644; Usman was killed in 656 by Mohammed, son of Abu Bakr, because of factional quarrels; Ali was assassinated in 660 by a rebel. In 657 Ali, who shifted his capital to Kufa, faced Muawiya at Siffin, Syria, in what is known as the Battle of the Camel.
Muawiya, with the Prophet's Aisha as an ally, accused Ali of instigating the murder of Usman. Muawiya seized power after he forced the resignation of Ali's son Hasan, and established the first dynasty, that of Umayyads.
When Muawiya died in 680, Hasan's brother Husain challenged Muawiya's son Yazid, but, heavily outnumbered, was killed at Karbala in 680, a martyrdom that is central to Shia lament.
Blood and confusion travelled together till the comparative stability of the reign of Abdal Malik.
Caliphates became dynasties; 14 Umayyads, 37 Abbasids; and, in the last phase, 26 Ottomans between 1517 and 1924 when Ataturk abolished the institution and turned Turkey towards modernity. In 1517 Selim the First was unsentimental when he wrested the caliphate from Arabs; he claimed the office by the right of the sword.
As in any dynasty, great names mixed with mediocre ones. The best caliphs had open minds. Harun al Rashid (786-809) had Sanskrit texts and Greek philosophers translated for his House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He also partied with his court poet Abu Nawwas, who wrote classical verse.
The Ottoman Caliph Bayezid sent boats to rescue Jews expelled by the Spanish Inquisition.
In 1839 Abdulmecid the First introduced secular law alongside Sharia, gave non-Muslims equal rights, banned slavery and opened taverns.
Abdulhamid, who ruled between 1876 and 1909 and was the last caliph to exercise genuine power, loved music; his daughters played the piano and sons the cello. On Thursday nights he would join Sufis in dhikr, and the next day his imperial orchestra would play Offenbach on the way home after Friday prayers.
Western music was played at imperial banquets. His wife Sehsuvar was painted reclining with Goethe's Faust in her hand -- and not a veil in sight. French was a court language, along with Persian, Armenian and Arabic.
None of them would have been considered 'legitimate' by today's Islamist radicals.
The office of the caliphate has Quranic sanction. It derives from khalf, meaning 'left behind', or inheritor. It might surprise some hardliners to learn that the model caliph in the Quran is King David. Verse 2:30 says: 'Behold, thy Lord said to the angels, I will create a viceregent [khalifah] on earth.'
The first was Adam, the second was David. The great example of faith against odds, and belief in Allah as a prerequisite for victory, is that of David who fought Goliath.
Verse 2:249 says: 'How oft by Allah's will hath a small force vanquished a big one? Allah is with those who steadfastly persevere.'
This verse inspires the conviction that numbers do not matter on a battlefield as long as you have faith. In today's context, therefore, small bands of terrorists believe they can destabilise superpowers, if they are ready to become martyrs.
Since the road to paradise is under the shade of swords, it is a win-win situation for those ready to die for the cause of Allah.
This is jihad fi sabil Allah: War in the cause of Allah [also, incidentally, the official motto of the Pakistan armed forces].
No poet used the phrase, shade of swords, more effectively, or evoked the romance of an Islamic past better that that great poet of loss, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, who is rightly revered in Pakistan as an intellectual architect of the two-nation theory
If the challenge of the 20th century was freedom from colonialism, then the struggle of the 21st is around the content of nationalism.
Will the renaissance come from a modern definition of a nation-State, or from a structure like the doctrinaire caliphate, which despite its flaws in practice still created a historic glory?
The first Muslim leader to answer this question, with astonishing clarity, was Kemal Mustafa Ataturk. He understood the rational causes of Ottoman decline, the loss technological ascendancy, scientific innovation, gender equality and the fact that the caliphate had become defunct as an idea.
On the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman empire had only around 17,000 workers in a population of 25 million: it was still an agricultural economy. Ataturk could ignore the ulema because his credentials as a nationalist who had saved his country from foreign invasion and dismemberment was impeccable. He had the trust of the people.
If we want to understand America's dominations of the 20th century, just list some American inventions from the 19th or 18th: Benjamin Franklin gave us the stove, bifocals and lightning rod; Charles Goodyear, vulcanised rubber, Walter Hunt, the fountain pen, safety pin and breech-loading Winchester; Elias Howe, the sewing machine; Joseph Henry (a professor at Princeton), the telegraph; Graham Bell, the telephone. There were 30,000 miles of railways in America by 1860. How many telephones existed in Istanbul in 1880, when there were 60,000 phone lines in America?
The situation in the Arab world through the 20th century was bleak. Where neo-colonies could not be sustained, the alternative was army-backed dictators or despots who tended to create their own dynasties.
Worse, these armies were repeatedly defeated by the focal regional foe, Israel; the disaster of 1967, despite the advantage of numbers, became an imperishable memory bewildering the citizen and offering opportunity for a Phoenix waiting to arise from the ashes, Islamism.
http://www.rediff.com/news/column/islam ... 160208.htm