They want to mold the beliefs and religions of others in its own image
The United States is bending in every way possible to change the Arab world and in particular Islam. They want to change Islamic Sharia Law to replace it with man-made Western laws and traditions. They have spent and are still spending millions and millions of dollars trying to create a new version of Islam that they to refer to as Civil Democratic Islam. They have even gone on to publish Five Pillars of Democracy and How the West Can Promote an Islamic Reformation.
How you may ask? They refer to it as “nation building”, “religion building” as if Islam was incomplete. They call it a battle of the hearts and minds. In reality they are promoting an idea that is very far from Islam. They have even gone to the extent of setting up schools in order to change the way Islam is taught.
In 2003 the RAND Corporation and author of “Civil Democratic Islam” (2003) Cheryl Bernard felt the need to find a compatible version of Islam that will generally adapt to American values. As she put it, in order to avoid a “Clash of civilizations”- read more here.
Bernard has gone to the extent of distinguishing four positions of Muslims as follows:
1- Fundamentalists reject democratic values and contemporary Western culture. They want an authoritarian, puritanical state that will implement their extreme view of Islamic law and morality. They are willing to use innovation and modern technology to achieve that goal.
2- Traditionalists want a conservative society. They are suspicious of modernity, innovation, and change.
3- Modernists want the Islamic world to become part of global modernity. They want to modernize and reform Islam to bring it into line with the age.
4- Secularists want the Islamic world to accept a division of church and state in the manner of Western industrial democracies, with religion relegated to the private sphere
She concludes the following:
The fundamentalists are hostile to the West and to the United States in particular and are intent, to varying degrees, on damaging and destroying democratic modernity. Supporting them is not an option, except for transitory tactical considerations. The traditionalists generally hold more moderate views, but there are significant differences between different groups of traditionalists. Some are close to the fundamentalists. None wholeheartedly embraces modern democracy and the culture and values of modernity and, at best, can only make an uneasy peace with them.
The modernists and secularists are closest to the West in terms of values and policies. However, they are generally in a weaker position than the other groups, lacking powerful backing, financial resources, an effective infrastructure, and a public platform. The secularists, besides sometimes being unacceptable as allies on the basis of their broader ideological affiliation, also have trouble addressing the traditional sector of an Islamic audience.
Now, if you feel avoided and without support then you need to understand why. According to Bernard the only people that will get initial support are what she terms as “modernists”. She writes..
Support the modernists first:
Publish and distribute their works at subsidized cost.
Encourage them to write for mass audiences and for youth.
Introduce their views into the curriculum of Islamic education.
Give them a public platform- we have seen that platform provided before and during the Arab Spring.
Make their opinions and judgments on fundamental questions of religious interpretation available to a mass audience in competition with those of the fundamentalists and traditionalists, who have Web sites, publishing houses, schools, institutes, and many other vehicles for disseminating their views.
Position secularism and modernism as a “counterculture” option for disaffected Islamic youth.
Facilitate and encourage an awareness of their pre- and non-Islamic history and culture, in the media and the curricula of relevant countries.
Assist in the development of independent civic organizations, to promote civic culture and provide a space for ordinary citizens to educate themselves about the political process and to articulate their views.
Her next advice is to support the traditionalists against the fundamentalists as follows…
Publicize traditionalist criticism of fundamentalist violence and extremism; encourage disagreements between traditionalists and fundamentalists.
Discourage alliances between traditionalists and fundamentalists.
Encourage cooperation between modernists and the traditionalists who are closer to the modernist end of the spectrum.
Where appropriate, educate the traditionalists to equip them better for debates against fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are often rhetorically superior, while traditionalists practice a politically inarticulate “folk Islam.” In such places as Central Asia, they may need to be educated and trained in orthodox Islam to be able to stand their ground.
Increase the presence and profile of modernists in traditionalist institutions. Discriminate between different sectors of traditionalism.
Encourage those with a greater affinity to modernism, such as the Hanafi law school, versus others. Encourage them to issue religious opinions and popularize these to weaken the authority of backward Wahhabi inspired religious rulings. This relates to funding: Wahhabi money goes to the support of the conservative Hanbali school. It also relates to knowledge: More-backward parts of the Muslim world are not aware of advances in the application and interpretation of Islamic law. Encourage the popularity and acceptance of Sufism.
Confront and oppose the fundamentalists:
Challenge their interpretation of Islam and expose inaccuracies.
Reveal their linkages to illegal groups and activities.
Publicize the consequences of their violent acts.
Demonstrate their inability to rule, to achieve positive development of their countries and communities.
Address these messages especially to young people, to pious traditionalist populations, to Muslim minorities in the West, and to women.
Avoid showing respect or admiration for the violent feats of fundamentalist extremists and terrorists. Cast them as disturbed and cowardly, not as evil heroes.
Encourage journalists to investigate issues of corruption, hypocrisy, and immorality in fundamentalist and terrorist circles.
Encourage divisions among fundamentalists.
Selectively support secularists:
Encourage recognition of fundamentalism as a shared enemy, discourage secularist alliance with anti-U.S. forces on such grounds as nationalism and leftist ideology.
Support the idea that religion and the state can be separate in Islam too and that this does not endanger the faith but, in fact, may strengthen it.
Cheryl goes on to state that this must be done with careful deliberation and the risks involved which may endanger or discredit the people they are trying to “help”.
Daniel Pipes also piped in and wrote “The RAND Corporation and Fixing Islam”. However Pipes has a different, yet more absurd, view where he proposes the following:
“Instead of modernists, I propose mainstream secularists as the forward looking Muslims who uniquely can wrench their co-religionists out of their current slough of despair and radicalism. Secularists start with the proven premise of disentangling religion from politics; not only has this served the Western world well, but it has also worked in Turkey, the Muslim success story of our time. Only when Muslims turn to secularism will this terrible era of their history come to an end.”
Funny how non-Muslims want to fix Islam. Strange how many Muslims are silent about this. I wonder how many Muslim scholars voiced their outrage although I do know of some and one was recently droned into silence and the mass media went into play to discredit him. Bernard and the RAND Corporation decided that the only way America can benefit is to basically change Islam according to western practice.
In 2007 RAND went so far to come up with a new document entitled “Building Moderate Muslim Networks”. They have even gone to the extent of publicly announcing proudly “Radical and dogmatic interpretations of Islam have gained ground in recent years in many Muslim societies via extensive Islamist networks spanning the Muslim world and the Muslim diaspora communities of North America and Europe. Although a majority throughout the Muslim world, moderates have not developed similar networks to amplify their message and to provide protection from violence and intimidation. With considerable experience fostering networks of people committed to free and democratic ideas during the Cold War, the United States has a critical role to play in leveling the playing field for Muslim moderates.” read more here.
They also wrote “The struggle underway throughout much of the Muslim world is essentially a war of ideas. Its outcome will determine the future direction of the Muslim world”.
So according to RAND and quite truthfully so, there is a struggle in the Muslim world. There has always been a struggle of ideas throughout history in the Muslim world and there has always been internal discussions, agreements and disagreements. There is a battle of ideas, but those ideas are internal matters for Muslims to discuss. The question here to raise is, who are they to talk about Islam on behalf of Muslims? Who are they to discuss and label? What ever happened to the freedom they preach?Islam is Islam and there is no such thing as radical in Islam or modernist in Islam, that is what their media have fed you. If people would only read the Quran without just picking and choosing lines they would understand the truth that many have tried to hide.
Ibrahim abu ishaq wrote:
There’s a common trend these days among authors, policymakers and so called think tanks, in publishing and advocating strategies that may be adopted by the West in dealing with the Muslim world. One such report titled “Civil Democratic .Islam, Partners Resources and Strategies” by Cheryl Bernard, was released by the US-based RAND Corporation in 2003.
The report was sponsored by the conservative Smith Richardson Foundation, a trust that distributes in excess of $120 million to universities and other research institutions. Ideas such as the ones proposed in this report are increasingly being adopted in the US governments policies towards the Islamic world. A much more detailed and extensive report titled “The Muslim World after 9/11”, was published in December 2004, followed in 2005 by a third report titled “Three Years After: Next Steps in the War on Terror”, a product of a conference sponsored by the RAND Corporation.
Sponsors for these reports include the United States Air Force, and the U.S Department of Defense. Civil Democratic Islam was authored by Cheryl Benard, an American sociologist, who has written a number of works about Muslim women. She is married to Zalmay Khalilzad, who is a Special Assistant to President Bush and the chief National Security Council (NSC) official for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia. Khalilzad is known to be probably the first and only Afghan-American neoconservative. During the 1980s he was able to secure himself a permanent position in the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, working under neoconservative mastermind Paul Wolfowitz.
Zalmay Khalilzad, was appointed US ambassador in Kabul in November 2003, and has played a “hugely influential role in Afghanistan’s transition process” [BBC]. In 2005 the Afghan-American was nominated to replace John Negroponte as US ambassador to Iraq.
Divide and Conquer
The strategy further recommends that the US should “encourage disagreements between traditionalists and fundamentalists”, “discriminate between different sectors of traditionalism”, by encouraging certain schools of law versus others, to “Build up the stature of Sufism”, and encourage “Sufi influence over school curricula, norms, and cultural life”.
The recommendations made in “Civil Democratic Islam”, despite their hostile and seditious nature towards Islam, is but one of a series of policy papers that have been prepared and considered among US policy makers.
Muslim World Outreach
The U.S.News & World Report magazine, recently published a report titled, “Hearts, Minds, and Dollars – In an Unseen Front in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions…To Change the Very Face of Islam”. The magazine’s findings include a classified new strategy approved by the White House, dubbed Muslim World Outreach.
The NSC has been working on preparing the White House’s National Strategyfor Combating Terrorism. “In 2003, officials had released an earlier, public version of the document, but there is a larger, classified edition that includes annexes dealing with key objectives, among them terrorism finance and winning the war of ideas. Staffers rewrote the ideas section with bold, new language and fashioned it into a strategy called Muslim World Outreach. Aimed at strengthening the hand of moderates, the plan acknowledges that America has done poorly in reaching out to them. But it goes one big step further, stating that the United States and its allies have a national security interest not only in what happens in the Islamic world but within Islam itself, according to three sources who have seen the document. ” [USNEWS p6]
Throughout the Muslim world, “ Washington has quietly funded Islamic radio and TV shows, coursework in Muslim schools, Muslim think tanks, political workshops, or other programs that promote moderate Islam”. “The CIA is revitalizing programs of covert action that once helped win the Cold War, targeting Islamic media, religious leaders and political parties.” [USNEWS p2]
The US administration kicked off two major initiatives in foreign broadcasting – Radio Sawa, a pop music-news station in 2002, and Alhurra, a satellite-TV news network, both aimed at Arab audiences. The article mentions that many of the ideas for implementing the strategy is “coming not from the CIA, but from the low-profile U.S. Agency for International Development. In the three years since 9/11, spending by the government’s top purveyor of foreign aid has nearly tripled to over $21 billion, and more than half of that is now destined for the Muslim world.” [USNEWS p8]
In the array of targets the US is aiming at are Islamic schools. The report describes how the U.S. Military is directly competing with Islamic schools, in the Horn of Africa. “Military officers gather intelligence on where militants plan to start religious schools, Marine Maj. Gen. Samuel Helland told U.S. News ; they then target those areas by building up new public schools and the local infrastructure.” [USNEWS p9]
It is strange how the United States administration and its policy makers expect to win the hearts and minds of the Muslims when they choose to adopt such seditious policies towards Islam.
These actions they have opted for are having exactly the opposite effect of what they are supposedly meant to achieve. The least the United States government could do is to be true to its core values that it proclaims, that it doesn’t mess with freedom of religion. Instead they are adopting a path in which they want to mold the beliefs and religions of others in its own image. Read more here.
Wishing Bahrain Views readers a Ramadan Kareem.
الله يفتح قلوبنا ونفوسنا للدفاع عن الإسلام، بإذنه سبحانه وتعالى
