Patriotic U.S. Muslim's bid to tackle extremism

A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save His Faith, by M. Zuhdi Jasser (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012). Hardcover/paperback: 304 pages.

A Battle for the Soul of Islam, by American Muslim patriot Dr Zuhdi Jasser, has some serious messages for the general reader, as well as for Muslim communities in the West. The most important of these is the distinction between Islam and Islamism, that is, between Muslims and Islamists.

Closely following is his lament that most U.S. Muslims are peace-loving patriotic Americans like himself, yet are too timid to dispute the many opinions voiced by radical imams and their liberal apologists, which are hostile to the democratic freedoms which they enjoy as citizens of the United States.

Finally, he defends the Muslim religion and the Qur'an especially, with his interpretations of precepts found in the texts.

This work was published in 2012, when the writer felt optimistic about the Arab Spring, showing neither awareness of the survival of Al-Qaeda in the birth of ISIS and the equally deadly al-Nusra forces within the Free Syria movement, nor the realignment of the Middle East in response to the Russian- Iranian axis. Nevertheless, the warnings which the writer gives to his fellow Americans are just as pertinent today.

On his visit to Australia in 2019, his message to liberal modern Muslims was the same: to publicly engage with Islamist ideology. Just go to the internet to find Dr Zuhdi, as active as ever with his American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), defending his country from Islamists within, while advancing his argument that Islam itself is not the problem.

The writer's own history forms a vital part of his credentials. His professional grandfather and father fled the nightmare of the Assad dynasty's reign in Syria in the mid-1960s for the freedom of the United States, where he was born and brought up. In Wisconsin, as an American kid and a devout but moderate Muslim, he attended local schools and college alongside students of other faiths, with no predilection for sharia law or the stunts claiming discrimination used by Islamist groups to exploit U.S. freedoms.

Nevertheless, his father had to struggle to build a local mosque and for voting rights for immigrants. It was only when at college in Milwaukee (1985) that he encountered political Islam in the imam of a nearby mosque, who "hijacked" his minbar (pulpit) to spout his own condemnations of U.S. foreign policy. This incensed this passionate young Reaganite.

His medical studies were completed with a Navy scholarship and internship at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Serving 11 years in the navy involved no conflicts for this young medical officer who refrained from drinking, gambling or womanising.

As he puts it, "What matters most on ship is not what one does ... in one's spare time, but what one does on duty." He insists that it is safe to have a Muslim in any branch of the armed forces, but not an Islamist such as Major Nidal Hasan, who massacred 13 fellow soldiers and injured over 30 more at Fort Hood in 2009.

It was while ashore that Jasser encountered off-shoots of the Muslim Brotherhood at a meeting of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), showing "no ideological loyalty to their adopted country, much less gratitude for the liberty and rights it had given them". He recognised their animus towards Western society as "bound to create a cadre of disaffected youths and disenfranchised communities".

Addressing this meeting in uniform, he spoke out against such sentiments "not only as an American military officer, but as an American Muslim". And all this a few years before the 9/11 attacks!

Dr Jasser made a traditional marriage with a young Muslim woman who shared his values, raised a family, and after his naval service joined his father's medical practice. He continued his efforts to counter the influence of the Islamists within, to stiffen the patriotism of his co-religionists and to alert his fellow Americans to the folly of allowing their pluralism to be used against them. In the course of this book he gives many examples of how he has suffered for his stand, attracting hate speech in the local Muslim press, defamatory cartoons, and false accusations of being "ignorant" and "non-practising".

His sincerity notwithstanding, readers may be sceptical of his attempts to show that the fault with Islamism does not stem from the fundamental teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, but from Arab tribalism. Those of us who are familiar with the work of Christian researchers of the Arabic texts, such as the late Rev. Dr Paul Stenhouse (Catholic) and the Rev. Dr Mark Durie (Anglican), are inclined to believe that what the Qur'an appears to say about the treatment of non-believers and the subordinate position of women is what it means.

For example, Dr Durie's book, The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom (2010), explains that under Islam, an unbeliever is allowed only three options: death, conversion or dhimmitude. This "third choice" means becoming a citizen without rights and being forced to pay a prescribed tax. ISIS enforced this formula to the letter. Nevertheless, as the author points out, the irony is that the proponents of Islamism cite the same texts to justify their behaviour as their critics do to condemn them and Islam as a whole.

With regard to the treatment of women, he renders "admonish them; then leave them alone in bed; then beat them" (Sura 4, Verse 34) as "reason with them, punish them by refusing to have relations with them, and some you may have to get them going on their way". He argues that the Arabic word daraba can mean "get them going on their way" rather than "beat them", just as the English word "strike" can mean hit or go on strike.

With regard to the many incitements to killing found in the Qur'an, which are used to justify acts of terrorism today, he insists that they must be interpreted in context. That is, that they apply only to a particular incident in history and to particular enemies among the idolatrous hostile tribes which then opposed the Prophet.

He makes a not-altogether-convincing distinction between the treatment of non-believers and "People of the Book", that is Jews and Christians. Convinced or not, we cannot doubt that he is sincere in these more benign interpretations of the texts supporting Islam as a religion of peace.

Dr Jasser's book also contains a discussion of Middle Eastern politics, U.S. foreign policy and a long list of foiled plots against U.S. targets from 9/11 to 2011, for which home-grown Islamic terrorism was responsible.

He also provides a lengthy table, juxtaposing elements of Western freedom against political Islam: for example, the rule of law vs. martial law, freedom of choice vs. apostasy laws, and freedom of speech vs. blasphemy laws. It is packed with information, and if it can be faulted it is only in the lack of an index and an overload of details tending to repetition.

Politically correct and naïve Australians have just as much to learn from A Battle for the Soul of Islam as do our American cousins. Reform of many aspects of Islam is to be hoped for, but we have to remember that Islamists believe that it has already occurred, in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabism, which arose in response to a collapse in morale after the fall of the Ottoman Empire — to which the Anzacs contributed so effectively!

John Morrissey is a retired secondary school teacher who has taught in government, independent and Catholic schools. He lives in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.

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