History News Network

Breaking News

Departments

Tim Furnish: Occidental Jihadist

Timothy R. Furnish, Ph,D., is a recovering college professor and current writer, researcher and analyst specializing in Islamic history, sects, eschatology, ideology and Mahdism. He learned Arabic at taxpayers' expense while in the U.S. Army and, later, studied Farsi, Turkish and Ottoman while a doctoral student at Ohio State University. His first book was Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden and his second, due out in 2010, is The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? He also maintains a website dedicated to covering Mahdism and Muslim eschatology: mahdiwatch.org.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

The Islamization of American Network TV?!

There are only two current American TV shows I watch regularly: "24" and "Supernatural." Most folks know about the former and its hero Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland); probably far fewer have seen "Supernatural," which is in its fifth season and revolves around two brothers, Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki), who as "hunters" fight witches, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, returned pagan gods and demons. The acting is quite good, the plot lines are riveting and the characterization is top-notch. And the grimmness of the show—in the current season they’re dealing with the upcoming apocalypse, as Lucifer has been loosed on Earth—is regularly broken by some very funny lines (after wasting a demon-possessed sheriff, Sam cracks "but I did not shoot the deputy"). However, as a Christian and a specialist on Islam, I also find the show very troubling in two major respects.
1) The view of the devil is drawn from Islamic sources. In this season's episode "The End," Dean is thrust forward to 2014 where he can see that the world has gone, literally, to hell thanks to a global epidemic that turns people into zombies. Dean discovers that the reason for this is that his brother has allowed Lucifer to possess him, and thus work his diabolical will. Sam finds and confronts Lucifer/Sam who launches into a soliloquy about why he hates humanity so much: because after God created humans he summoned all the angels and ordered them to bow before His new creations, only to have Lucifer refuse because he would not bend the knee to anything but God. This account is found nowhere in the Bible; rather, it is almost verbatim from the pages of the Qur’an: Sura al-`Araf [7]:11ff says “”We bade the angels bow down to Adam, and they bowed down; not so Iblis [Arabic name for Satan]; he refused….[Allah] said: ‘what prevented thee from bowing down when I commanded thee? He said: ‘I am better than he; Thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay.’ [Allah] said: ‘Fall down from here; it is not for thee to be arrogant. Get out, for thou are the the most petty of creatures.’” So “Supernatural” draws upon an Islamic, rather than a Judaeo-Christian, teaching for its view of Satan—but then doesn’t quite get that right either, choosing instead to ennoble Iblis’ intention from simple wounded pride to protection of God’s sole worthiness of worship. And why does the show always refer to the chief of the fallen angels as “Lucifer”—“morning star”—rather than Satan (from Hebrew, ha-shatan, “the accuser”) or “the devil” (from diabolus, “slanderer,” in Greek)?

Posted on Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, December 11, 2009

A Nobel Prize...for Ignorance of Islam?

President’s Obama’s Nobel-acceptance speech yesterday was an impressive oration and a welcome departure from his usual habit of paying penance for every real or perceived sin in the history of American foreign policy. But like the Liberty Bell with its disfiguring crack, or the Sphinx missing a nose, the overall excellence of the speech—by the first sitting U.S. President since Woodrow Wilson to win a Nobel prize—was fatally flawed by his ignorance, willful or not, of Islam.
Obama implicitly, but wisely, conceded to critics by opening his address acknowledging the thinness of the rationale for his receiving the Nobel peace prize—“compared to…Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela, my accomplishments are slight”—and continued by standing up for the employment of American force: “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” Most directly confronting one of the Right’s major charges against him, the President finally managed to say “evil does exist in the world” and that “war is sometimes necessary.” Obama made it clear that Afghanistan was just such a a war and implied just as clearly that Iraq was not. And his “three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace”—truly tough sanctions for regimes that ignore international strictures (read: Iran), a recommitment to human rights and “economic security”—seem to have come straight out of an international relations textbook rather than any really new Obaman thinking on the issue for which he was receiving the world’s highest award.

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Going Rogue, or Going Down Allah’s Path? Ottomans, Ayatollahs and Nidal Malik Hasan

The ranks of those who still argue that Islam had nothing to do with Nidal Malik Hasan’s personal jihad at Ft. Hood are growing increasingly thin (at least among the intellectually honest), especially after news outlets carried the story yesterday about the interview by a Yemeni journalist of Hasan’s overseas clerical mentor, Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki said that "fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today," and that “the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal;” he also added “"I blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq."
The last refuge of those sporting COEXIST bumper stickers on their Volvos—blindly wedded to the canard that all religions are equally peaceful or, alternatively, violent—is that al-Awlaki is representative merely of a marginal, extremist, non-state-sanctioned demographic slice of the world’s Muslims that has arisen promoting violence only in the wake of U.S., Bush/Cheney-led “crusades” against the Islamic world. But facts, especially historical ones, are stubborn things for those that study them and don’t simply turn a blind eye to any that don’t fit their preconceived ideology. Almost a century ago, in 1914, the world’s preeminent Islamic state, the moderate Ottoman Empire, and its chief cleric, the Sheyhülislam (Shaykh al-Islam) in Istanbul, issued a fatwa of jihad upon entering World War I on the side of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. As explicated by Rudolph Peters in his Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, 1996), this fatwa not only called on Muslims to fight on behalf of the Ottoman Islamic state against its enemies, but also mandated that Muslims living in India, Central Asia, North Africa and the Balkans were “obliged to…attack their non-Muslim rulers.” In the typical classical Q & A format, the fatwa said the following:

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:40 AM | Comments (83) | Top

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Major Nidal Malik Hasan: Not An Islamic “Extremist,” But Simply A Good, Literalist Muslim

While the mainstream media outlets continue their politically-correct embrace of one another, rallying around the propaganda point that Hasan’s killing of 13 soldiers and civilians at Ft. Hood had nothing to do with his Islamic beliefs, even the more gimlet-eyed feel compelled to use terms like “extremist” to describe Hasan’s worldview. For example, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), in calling for possible Senate hearings into the murders, said he was doing so because “there had been strong warning signs that Hasan was an ‘Islamic extremist.’”
But was—is—he? The “Washington Post” today is reporting on the Power Point presentation Nidal gave to fellow doctors in 2007, entitled “The Koranic [sic] Worldview As It Relates to Muslims in the US Military.” The “Post” even has copies of the 50 slides he used for this lecture, a number of which detail the Qur’anic-prescribed afterlife rewards for “believers”—Muslims—and punishments for non-Muslims. The slides themselves simply provide the Qur’anic citations for these (and other) Islamic beliefs, and the “Post” story is ambiguous about whether Hasan was reporting dispassionately on these beliefs or advocating them. However, according to a story yesterday in the U.K. “Telegraph,” at that same talk Hasan “had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut,” as well as “be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throat.”
Are such beliefs “extremist” for a Muslim? Actually, no—at least not for a Sunni like Hasan.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:27 AM | Comments (15) | Top

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Transsexual Muhammad?

World-Wide Religion News is reporting, via the BBC (of course), that a play in Glasgow, Scotland, portraying Jesus as a transsexual "queen of heaven" is drawing only desultory protests(http://wwrn.org/article.php?idd=31821). I suppose Christians should be overjoyed that some Scottish believers at least have the guts to actually stand up for historical and theological reality over against the gay lobby. But what strikes me is, rather, how this illustrates one of the pressing and vexing questions of our time: how will we know that an Islamic reformation--or, more accurately, an Islamic "enlightenment"--is taking place? I would submit this answer: when a gay playwright can write and stage "Muhammad: Queen of Arabia" and live to have it reviewed.
And needless to say, we are nowhere near such a tolerant juncture.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 2:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Shi`ite Wasteland?

October 22-24 I was in Washington, D.C.—along with several hundred others—for the second annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). ASMEA was founded to be a less tendentious and cowardly organization than the frequently Islamic-apologist MESA (Midde East Studies Association). My own presentation was on East African Islam and its inherent aspects that seem resistant, if not quite impervious, to hard-core, Wahhabi-style jihadist Islam (about which I will write more in-depth elsewhere). But the highest profile event of the conference, even more so than Ambassador John Bolton’s address on “the UN in the Africa and the Middle East,” was Professor Bernard Lewis’ keynote address on “The Iranian Difference.”

Lewis, who at 93 can still analytically run rings around most experts on the Middle East (certainly anyone at MESA), made a number of interesting points about the Islamic Republic: that unlike many in the Middle East, Iran is a real nation-state to which large numbers of its citizens feel a real patriotism; its 1979 revolution was a globally significant one, on the order of those in France or Russia; and that the current leadership in Tehran and Qom sees its role as promoting the “Shi`ite ascendancy” into leadership of the entire Islamic world. (About that last point, see my article about my trip to Iran in 2008, “The Importance of Being Mahdist, The Weekly Standard, Sep. 8, 2008.) He also had some advice for the BHO administation: start emphasizing that we are not so much against Iran having nuclear weapons, as against the current regime having them—a crucial distinction, and a good one, in my opinion.

Posted on Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 5:02 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Monday, October 19, 2009

An(other) Inconvenient Truth--about Terrorism

Last month the office of the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, published the 18-pp., glossy, maize-and-blue “National Intelligence Strategy of the United States of America.” Even if I weren’t an Ohio State fan, I’d have problems with it. In discussing the “Strategic Environment,” Iran’s missile systems and support for terrorism are mentioned—but not the Islamic Republic’s global da`wah that reaches as far as West Africa and Latin America (and which I heard about first-hand in Iran in 2008). As for non-state threats, the NIS lists “violent extremist groups” and “insurgents”—without bothering to note what ideology motivates the bulk of them: some variant of Islam. This willful ignorance continues into the “Mission Objec tives,” the first of which is to “Combat Violent Extremism” –for remember that according to the Department of Homeland Security these “extremists” could just as well be “Tea Party”-ers, Rush Limbaugh listeners or, perhaps—as Juan Cole has recently opined—those still-warlike Anglo-Saxons. At least in this section the NIS does manage to include al-Qa’ida [sic: correct transliteration is al-Qa`idah] in passing , but again sans any explication of the underlying ideology. The NIS authors’ obtuseness is all the more perplexing—and maddening—considering that under “Mission Objective 3: Provide Strategic Intelligence and Warning,” the U.S. Intelligence Community is encouraged to “build and access deep understanding of the cultural, political, religious, economic, ethnic, and tribal factors in operational theaters.”

Of course, it can be argued, what else might one logically expect from an administration headed by a Commander-in-Chief whose father was Muslim , who rejects “negative stereotypes” of Muslims and whose primary foreign policy directive seems to be “diplomacy is always having to say you’re sorry?” But, to be fair, his predecessor the “Crusader-in-Chief” was also a vocal proponent of the “Muslims are just Quakers with beards” approach. To both of them, and to the other Islamic apologists of the world such as Karen Armstrong, I submit the following problematic data:

Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:16 PM | Comments (6) | Top