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New York: Random House, 2007. 284 pp. $26.95
Also:
New York: Tarcher-Penguin, 2007. 294 pp. $24.95
Washington: The Brookings Institution, 2007. 323 pp. $28.95
Reviewed by Stephen Schwartz
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2009, pp. 85-87 http://www.meforum.org/2422/islam-in-america
These books, published almost simultaneously, provide alarming glimpses into three levels of Muslim life in America. These are: first, the sphere of ideological Islamist leadership, in which the Dearborn-based Shi'i figure Qazwini, born in Iraq to a well-known, originally Iranian lineage, has assumed a prominent role. Second, Gartenstein-Ross describes the little-known but disturbing experience of a Jewish-born convert to Islam who became involved in the Saudi-financed Wahhabi radical network, as exemplified by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which has its American headquarters in Ashland, Ore. The third, a think-tank volume by Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University, is characteristic of recent Beltway briefing manuals in providing a brazen defense of radical Islam to U.S. policymakers.
Although he is not fully credited, Qazwini's book was coauthored—i.e., probably ghostwritten—by Brad Crawford, a freelance author. Not surprisingly, the narrative is nothing if not contradictory. Qazwini first came to the attention of the American public in 2003 when President George W. Bush kissed him on the cheek in front of media photographers. At that point, Qazwini was widely considered among American Shi'i Muslims as one among many enthusiastic supporters of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq.
In this text, however, discussion of the Iraq war comes after digressive disclaimers of broader Muslim responsibility for September 11, vague reminiscences of the Bush campaign of 2000, and complaints about the 2001 Patriot Act, which causes Qazwini to go so far as to compare the Bush administration with the regime of Saddam Hussein. Then, forgetting his intimate embrace of the president and the role of Iraqi-American Shi'a in demanding war in Iraq as a means of liberating the Shi'i shrine of Karbala, Qazwini declares disingenuously, "The war in Iraq was just as messy in my mind as it was on the ground. My Iraqi relatives had real freedom of expression for the first time in their lives—but amid the sort of turmoil where talking is of little use."
Either because of deceit by Qazwini or incompetence by his coauthor, American Crescent is an exemplar of incoherence. While one hesitates to accuse him of deception, it is obvious that Qazwini wishes to affirm the martyrdom of Iraqi Shi'a at the hands of Saddam and his own loyalty to America while at the same time attempting to grant ideological satisfaction to an array of critics of the Iraq war. There is a better term for this than deception: It is ingratitude.
Qazwini's revisionism on the Iraq war and American Shi'i involvement with it overshadows such typically absurd touches, seen in similar books, as the claim that American "Muslims didn't object to [2000 Democratic vice-presidential candidate] Senator [Joseph] Lieberman's Jewishness, but rather to his unconditional support for the pro-Israeli lobby." Qazwini describes himself as speaking to Bush only of removing Saddam, not of invasion. But such a distinction, if meaningful, was too obscure to appear in the public discourse at the time the Iraq intervention began, and a self-serving attempt to recast events, such as that to which Qazwini has here committed himself, will not change that reality. America's most prominent Shi'i cleric, in producing this book, has accomplished little in service of the Shi'i principle of divine justice.
Gartenstein-Ross's story of his involvement with the Al-Haramain Foundation includes an evocation of the Jewish commitment to liberal values and social justice, but the emphasis on the latter is the only element this work has in common with Qazwini's book. A Kenyan-born Muslim friend at college, Al-Husein Madawy, included in the dedications of the book, had journeyed from Ismaili Shi'ism through an unspecified radical form of Sunnism and introduced the young Jewish Oregonian liberal to the mystical Islamic Sufi tradition.
Gartenstein-Ross was drawn to Sufism and made his affirmation of faith, or shahada, while traveling in Italy. When he returned to Ashland, he found a local Islamic congregation, which the author attended for prayers, led by an Iranian, Pete Seda, also known, according to a federal indictment, as Pirouz Sedaghaty and Abu Yunus.[1] <http://www.meforum.org/2422/islam-in-america#_ftn1> This congregation was Wahhabi and hosted a sermon by a Saudi preacher, Hassan Zabady. Madawy, the Sufi mentor of Gartenstein-Ross, tried to debate the Wahhabi imam but without effect.
From prayer in a backroom mosque in Ashland, Gartenstein-Ross went on to employment at Al-Haramain, an ambitious expansion of which was enabled by a significant influx of Saudi financing. Seda and his associates established the young convert's hometown as the first American headquarters of the powerful charity, which has acted as a cover for Wahhabi outreach and terrorist recruitment worldwide.[2] <http://www.meforum.org/2422/islam-in-america#_ftn2> For a year Gartenstein-Ross served Al-Haramain. But as his commitment to the charity increased, he was exposed to repellent Wahhabi teachings, such as those in favor of female genital mutilation and opposed to music. In a Wahhabi environment, the author succumbed, if only for a brief time, to the allure of purity.
The value of Gartenstein-Ross's book resides mainly in its description of ways in which Wahhabism has penetrated every aspect of American Muslim life, from prayer in rural communities to widespread missionary activity in the prison system. In perhaps the most dissonant of many incidents in this account, Gartenstein-Ross describes how Al-Haramain and Seda offered to support Serbia in its 1999 attacks on the Albanians of Kosovo, a majority of whom are Muslim, on the grounds that America, supporting the Kosovars by bombing Serbia, was the real culprit. Because of such details, even more than for its insights into the vulnerabilities of Americans who become Muslims, the book is indispensable.
Ahmed's volume, Journey into Islam, is likewise replete with details, but most are unoriginal if not banal and questionable. This book purports to introduce the complexities of the Islamic world to ignorant Westerners, based on an effort Ahmed conducted with a group of five American youth, grandly titled the "Islam in the Age of Globalization" research team. To those acquainted with the faith of Muhammad and the realities of politics in Muslim societies, there is little new or noteworthy in this compendium. In a pedestrian manner, using biased questionnaires, the volume recycles media clichés about the alleged social background of Islamist extremism with special pleading for Deobandism, the Islamic interpretation that produced the Afghan Taliban.
Ahmed, unfortunately, was induced to appoint as his "officially designated research assistant" one Hadia Mubarak, a notorious female hatemonger who has worked for the Wahhabi lobby's activist cadre, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and who today has moved on to the tutelage of America's outstanding apologist for Saudi Wahhabism, John Esposito of Georgetown University. Ahmed's book is thus a rather typical Beltway product: a waste of Brookings' resources, with dishonest subtextual elements, hawking the dangerous message that radical Islam is mainstream and moderate.
A key, summary claim is this: "President Bush reacted to the tragedy on September 11 in anger rather than with compassion or understanding." In the topsy-turvy world of American Islam, nothing, unfortunately, appears impossible today.
Stephen Schwartz is a principal investigator at the Center for Islamic
Pluralism
[1] <http://www.meforum.org/2422/islam-in-america#_ftnref1> "U.S. Branch of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation <http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/or/PressReleases/20050217_al_haramain.htm> and Two Officers Indicted for Conspiring to Defraud U.S. Government," United States Attorney's Office, District of Oregon, Feb. 17, 2005.
[2] <http://www.meforum.org/2422/islam-in-america#_ftnref2> "U.S.-Saudi Arabia Terrorist Financing <http://www.treasury.gov/press/releases/po1086.htm> Designations," U.S. Department of the Treasury, news release, Mar. 11, 2002; Office of Foreign Assets Control, U.S. Department of the Treasury, news release, Sept. 9, 2004 <http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/actions/20040909.shtml>
I may be caricaturing myself by recommending a summer book that is a) hard to find, and b) obscure in subject matter. Nevertheless: I recommend a search for a book called The Zohar in Muslim and Christian Spain, by Ariel Bension. It can be encountered in the odd Judaica store or online at www.abebooks.com.
This volume is unique: the only extended commentary by a 20th century Kabbalist on the relationship between Kabbalah and Sufism, i.e. Islamic spirituality, with especially interesting remarks on the greatest of all the Sufis, Muhyid’din Ibn ul-Arabi. R. Bension goes further than either Gershom Scholem (who cited him), Moshe Idel, or any other modern Jewish scholar in this direction. His book also illuminates the links between both Kabbalah and Sufism and Spanish Catholic mysticism.
The author was a Sephardi born in Jerusalem, and the first Sephardi from the Holy Land to study in modern European universities. He was a rabbi in Manastir, one of the Sephardic and Sufi centers in the Balkans, where Jews frequented the Sufi assemblies of their Albanian and Turkish Muslim neighbors. The book is extremely readable, and a good introduction to the Zohar.
A significant consequence of the rise of Islamism in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and other regions of the world is the rapid growth of a starkly repressive version of Islamic shari'a law, often fueled by funds and support from Saudi Arabia. Despite its importance, this worldwide growth of extreme shari'a is under-documented and little understood. Through a detailed comparative analysis of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the contributors to this timely book document its terrible effects on human rights—especially the status of women and religious freedom—of Muslims as well as religious minorities, and of democracy itself. This book also makes a compelling argument that such laws are a direct threat to the Western interest of advancing democracy and human rights. Democratic nations and international human rights groups lack any meaningful policy for dealing with the spread of extreme shari'a. Radical Islam's Rules concludes with policy recommendations for the United States regarding specific countries confronting extreme shari'a.
Excerpt: This book outlines the nature and spread in recent decades of this extreme version of Islamic shari'a law and details its effects, particularly on religious freedom, the status of women, legal procedure, and democracy. It does not try to give an overview of the nature and history of shari'a as such in all its schools and complexity. It is not a treatise on Islamic history or law or theology. These are matters on which the authors may well disagree. Instead, many of the chapters are written by human rights specialists who have long documented the current effects of such laws in destroying religious freedom, re-pressing women, subverting legal safeguards, and undercutting other human rights and the possibility of democracy itself. Two of them, Mehrangis Kar and Hamouda Bella, have themselves fallen afoul of such laws. It is an attempt to illuminate the current agenda of radical Islam and to expose the consequences for the people who fall under its rule.
To illustrate the spread, effects, and dangers of extreme shari'a, we have selected seven countries. They were chosen to give a geographical spread and also to show different stages of the effects of shari'a. Stephen Schwartz's and Mehrangis Kar's chapters on Saudi Arabia and Iran describe two countries where the implementation of extreme shari'a has gone the furthest, countries that make major efforts to export their ideology and fund its promoters throughout the world. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as described by Maarten Barends, Pakistan's legal system gradually incorporated more features of shari'a, including blasphemy laws that can carry the death penalty. Hamouda Bella's chapter details events in Sudan, which adopted extreme shari'a in 1983, precipitating a draconian rule and wars that have taken over two million lives. My own chapter, on Nigeria, describes how, beginning in 1999, twelve states in the north adopted shari'a laws, with results similar to Sudan and Pakistan. Finally, to conclude the survey, Peter Riddell surveys Malaysia and Indonesia, both democracies, if flawed ones, that have resisted the implementation of extreme shari'a and where, during 2004, Islamists suffered major electoral setbacks. How-ever, both countries still face pressure from radical groups, and in Indonesia extremists are implementing shari'a at a local level.
To conclude the book, we have reprinted a report from the Rand Corporation that was written with Afghanistan in mind, giving suggestions on how a constitution can be written that recognizes the role of Islam in a country but does not open the door to extreme shari'a. Regrettably, recommendations of the type given in the report were not followed in Afghanistan, but, more hopefully, the Iraqi interim constitution adopted in February 2004 follows many of its guidelines. Of course, constitutions by themselves will not stop Islamization, as the example of Pakistan shows, but the report continues to give useful guidance on the relation of Islam and the state. Finally, Nina Shea surveys how American policymakers have failed to comprehend the nature and dangers of extreme shari'a and illustrates the problems this failure has caused. She ends with advice on how, politically, we can and should confront extreme shari'a. After learning of the depredations caused by such laws in the countries where they have been imposed, the reader will find this advice well worth taking.
For over a year the Jamestown Foundation has published objective, fact-driven analyses of terrorist organizations and their operations, through its Terrorism Monitor publication. As the only periodical in circulation devoted to examining the war on terror and the struggle against al Qaeda, the newsletter offers a unique perspective comprising some of the world’s leading experts on international terrorism. Unmasking Terror is a compilation of articles from the first year of Terrorism Monitor.
Through the lively and understandable articles in Unmasking Terror, readers can quickly gain an appreciation for the complexities of the various terrorist groups, their motives, aims, and sources of support. The book is an excellent resource for private sector experts, policymakers and intelligence officials, and anyone seeking a greater understanding of the many challenges of combating terrorism.
In the early 1990s, the ideology of political Islam and Islamist organizations started to become an important factor in Central Asian political life. Until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, Islamism in Central Asia had received scant attention abroad. That has since changed, and it is now difficult even to discuss Central Asia in the West without reference to Islamist mobilization in the region. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the phenomenon comparatively, to place it in the context of Islamist movements elsewhere.
This volume presents case studies of three key Islamic political organizations in Central Asia: the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Hizb at-Tahrir al-Islami, or the Party of Islamic Liberation (HTI), and the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT).
This volume represents a comparative study of these three Islamic organizations, including the history, the ideology, and the organizational structure; the methods of political, military, and other types of activities; the power bases; the local and transnational links; the influence of external and internal factors; and the dynamics of transformation. This study can help us understand why Islamic political groups, including militant ones, have been able to garner support in moderate Islamic societies such as those of Central Asia. The author nurses an apprehension regarding the method of research that has to be employed for a successful analysis of this topic is based on the necessity not to confine it to a narrow regional scope but to put it into the context of broader Islamic intellectual-religious strands of thought and to examine how they were transmitted and absorbed in the specific conditions of Central Asia. Naumkin’s previous works on the history of Arab nationalism and Arab national/liberation movements helped to understand how their political, organizational, and military skills had been effectively used by modern radical Islamic movements, who have also benefited from the human and organizational resources of both nationalist and Marxist organizations? Naumkin paid special attention to the role of individual actors, which the author considers, if not central, at least equal to that of institutions.
Since its formation in 1932, Saudi Arabia has been ruled by two interdependent families. The Al Sa’uds control politics and the descendants of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab impose Wahhabism—a violent, fanatical perversion of the pluralistic Islam practiced by most Muslims. Stephen Schwartz argues that Wahhabism, vigorously exported with the help of Saudi oil money, is what incites Palestinian suicide bombers, Osama bin Laden, and other Islamic terrorists throughout the world.
Schwartz reveals the hypocrisy of the Saudi regime, whose moderate facade conceals state-sponsored repression and terrorism. He also raises troubling questions about Wahhabi infiltration of America’s Islamic community and about U.S. oil companies sanitizing Saudi Arabia’s image for the West. This sharp analysis and eye-opening expose illuminates the background to the September 11th terrorist attacks and offers new approaches for U.S. policy toward its closest ally in the Middle East.
The new Bosnian-language edition of Two Faces of Islam (DVA LICA ISLAMA) is available from CIP.
Tracing the movements of the Sephardic Jews to the Balkans - following their expulsion from Spain during the Inquisition - Schwartz draws on place names, historical chronicles, epitaphs, folk ballads, banned books, and the media. He explores the travails, and remarkable cultural achievements of these communities who, hundreds of years after the trauma of forced exile, were almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust.
The richness of the literature, poetry, myth, and printing, and the intermingling of Orthodox, Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim communities in the Balkans is explored - from Sabbatai Zvi, who declared himself the Messiah in the 17th century, and who, under pain of death chose conversion to Islam; the rare and wondrous scripts of Aramaic languages known almost from the beginning of human history; the evolution of the Jewish mercantile industry; to the 'Renaissance Jewish Traveller' Abraham Kohen Herrera, a convert under duress during the Inquisition who later discovered his Jewish heritage through mysticism, and who may have been the model for Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.
This is not only an historical analysis, but also a personal journey. The author's poignant descriptions of attempted pilgrimages to Jewish cemeteries and synagogues throughout the Balkans are testament to his yearning for historical pride and proof of existence.
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