America and the Muslim World

Zionists have been doing all they can to drive apart the United States and the Muslim world. It has now become urgent to improve our relations with the world’s greatest power, bearing in mind the interests of honesty and independence. The dominant discourses today convey an essentialist perception of the other. Each party regards the other as an adversarial entity comprised of a single, monolithic bloc, denying them the right to pluralism and shutting themselves out. In the East, the words West, Christianity and imperialism are often used in sequence, without any distinction made between them, when we should in fact discriminate and recognize that the West is no longer the Christian world that it was centuries ago. Our friends are Christians, humanists, atheists and believers from all races, cultures and countries. Meanwhile in the West, misinformation is in full swing, feeding the confusion between Muslim and fanatic, even if not all Westerners fall prey to propaganda.

Fighting Misinformation

The imperialist ambitions of the U.S. remain discernible, and divergences between religions, currents of thought and conflicts of interests have not disappeared. We are also witnesses to an upsurge of violence and intolerance. A latent yet brutal state of war is manifest, but it is the duty of every intellectual to vigilantly work at stopping misinformation, to develop friendship while judiciously withstanding the pressures, evading the traps and avoiding all provocations, so as not to bring grist to the mill of warmongers or feed a logic of conflict which harms us all.

In the United States, despite disagreements with some short-sighted aspects of European politics, despite the ethnic and cultural diversity and a context of advanced liberal modernity, Islamophobia remains visible. Islam is misunderstood; it is being targeted and stigmatized. Yet the spirit of the Founding Fathers had nothing to do with extremism and xenophobia — quite the opposite. But the common culture of American citizens on the subject of Islam is weak and caricatural. Most of the images coming from the media and cinema industries present it univocally and erroneously as a religion that is intolerant, violent and incompatible with progress.

Thankfully, we can note a few exceptions. In his memorable book, “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History,” Michael Hart, an American scientist, writes courageously: “My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.” On the other hand, Muslims are incapable of delivering a thoughtful retort or of offering credible and effective communication. We must learn again how to communicate, how to give the example, so that Muhammadian qualities may become apparent in every Muslim and become known to Americans.

Conservative and Zionist intellectuals poison popular opinion and restrict Islam to negative stereotypes. They maintain a lampoonist tone, relentlessly simplistic and reductive, and feed the confusion about Muslim people. While there is no hostility between our two civilizations, they try their hardest to impose the logic of the Clash. They forget to take into account the common roots shared by the great religions and civilizations that have been established as meaningful systems, which are today being brought under question.

The media power of lobbies adverse to Islam is such that they manage to persuade Americans that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East,” when it is a system which kills civilians and humanitarians and pursues policies of apartheid and colonization. Those lobbies deceive international opinion by manipulating and turning the tables. For instance, when they talk about the only Israeli prisoner in Gaza and describe him as a “hostage” in the hands of Hamas, it obscures the reality of the 12,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails. The vast majority of them are political prisoners, convicted for their peaceful struggle for independence. Israel is a regime which can imprison any citizen without a lawyer, trial, motive or time limit. This should bring back to the Western mind the behavior of the Nazi occupier.

We Must Take Responsibility

Paradoxically, in this context of repression, arrogance and declining significance in the world, the Islam that tries to resist is used as a scapegoat. Yet reason would demand from us that we analyze objectively the causes of the sometimes blind reactions of Muslims, that we study the Quran and actual Muslim societies through the multiple experiences, interpretations and cultural practices that they produce, that we take into account historical conditions and that we recognize the capacities of humanization, of civilization and of longing for change and freedom that are omnipresent throughout those societies, without denying their particular values.

We must take responsibility so we can reveal to American citizens that the Palestinian issue is a political one, and Islam is a religion which aims to empower and liberate people and socialize human relationships, on the basis of a specific meaning given to human life and destiny. It is a message revealed that in no way goes against the values of freedom, equality and plurality — far from it. The American Declaration of Independence is a text that any Muslim can relate to, because it evokes the value of freedom, particularly the freedom of conscience. For the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution, freedom of conscience was the very essence of the American doctrine.

As was pointed out by specialized researchers, for George Washington, first president of the United States, America was to welcome “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions,” notably Christians, Jews and Muslims. For centuries the land of Islam, from Cordoba to Baghdad, through Fes, Tlemcen, Bejaia, Constantine, Kairouan and Alexandria, has been the ultimate land of hospitality and refuge for all the oppressed and persecuted, starting with the Jews.

John Adams, second president of the U.S., declared that the Prophet of Islam was one of the greatest personalities of a humanity concerned with coexistence. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, learned Arabic and claimed that he read the Quran. During his administration, he once organized the iftar to break the Ramadan fast at the White House. The Founding Fathers, with their own spirit of openness toward the world, drew on the values of various universal civilizations, including the Muslim civilization, when they adopted the United States’ political system.

Benjamin Franklin, scientist and philosopher, co-writer and signer of the Declaration of Independence and, as such, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, studied Islam and the great texts of the Islamic culture. To express his respect for Islam and his dedication to coexistence, he invited the Mufti of Istanbul to come and introduce Islam to the Americans.

The Prophet’s Exemplary Tolerance

In 1763, Benjamin Franklin took the Prophet as an example for his humanitarian behavior, particularly towards prisoners. Indeed, that year, Americans who claimed to be Christians had massacred innocent Native Americans; those Westerners, Benjamin Franklin declared, were more savage than the autochthones, adding that the Native Americans would have had their human dignity respected in a Muslim country, because, he specified, Islam shows humanity towards prisoners.

This noble principle was widely applied during the war of resistance of Emir Abd-el-Kader in 19th century Algeria. In Damascus, 150 years ago, the heroic act that allowed him to save thousands of Christians from certain death during a communitarian strife is yet further proof of his exemplary quality, which earned him the founding of a small town in the U.S. that bears his name. Like Emir Abd-el-Kader and Voltaire, who both practiced humanism at their own level and in their own way, Benjamin Franklin was defending the rights to pluralism and freedom of speech. He would often quote this principle: “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another.”

He would praise the sense of tolerance of the Prophet of Islam, who respected the right of all to be different. He spoke his admiration for the Prophet who demanded of his companions that they treat prisoners humanely. Benjamin Franklin told of his admiration for Saladin, the 12th-century Sultan who demonstrated his sense of mercy when he liberated Jerusalem. At a time when racism against Muslims is growing, both because of certain narrow-minded political agendas distracting the public attention from political dead ends and the blind responses from a minority who usurp the name of Islam, the vision of the Founding Fathers of the United States must be recalled.

President Barack Obama, who renewed ties with this spirit of open-mindedness, should know that Muslims do not harbor any hatred toward him and America; on the contrary, they yearn for friendship. But they have the right to be angry when confronted with double-standard policies and in light of so much injustice. The number of foreign soldiers in Islamic lands today is ten times that at the time of the Crusades, and foreign investments, besides those in oil, are three times lower than in any other region of the globe.

Muslims are convinced that words are not enough. Ultimately, it is actions that will make a difference, particularly on the issues of Palestine and the democratization of international relations. Both houses of Congress, in the run up to the November elections, seem to be rivaling to show their friendly entente with the Zionist lobbies. Americans committed to a universal democracy, however, in the best interest of everyone, should impose the creation of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lands.

Admittedly, some archaic Arab and Islamic regimes have financed the terrorism of the weak. But other countries such as Algeria have always fought it. Muslims are beginning to realize that, in order to win over the hearts of the many Americans who are ready to listen to them, to fight for justice and help Obama in his efforts to better the relations between the Arab world and the West, they must drop their victim posture, adjust their situation, resist in a reasonable manner and open up to the world. Otherwise, the American opinion will consider that there is nothing worth dwelling upon in the East.

Over a year after Obama’s Cairo speech, American decision makers should tackle the causes of the problems and not their consequences. They should remind themselves of the American ideal of the Founding Fathers, and of the principles of Islam and what it contributed to civilization, and for which they had the greatest respect. This link has appeared to be under question, not just since 9/11, but more importantly since June 1967 and since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which provided the opportunity for the invention of a new enemy that the lobbies had been polishing for some time.

The America that Muslims respect and admire is the America that the Founding Fathers had set on the track of universalism, not of arbitrary values. The future of the world is being played between the West and the Muslim world. It is time to engage in a real dialogue instead of delivering sermons always made up of the same soothing words, out of touch with reality, which legitimize situations of dominance. There is no alternative but an understanding based on mutual respect regarding this crucial issue of future relations between the United States and the Muslim world.