EXCLUSIVE: HOW WAHHABI SPIN CONQUERS THE WEST
Stephen Schwartz
Family Security Matters, NJ
Nov 15 2006
"The growing middle class of Saudi Arabia, as well as their aspiring
but impoverished peers in Egypt and Pakistan, are drawn to radical,
violent, paranoid, irrational politics in the same way the ruined
middle class in Germany, after the first world war, was lured into
Nazism." FSM Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz is an expert on
the threat Islamofascism poses to the free world. Read his response
after his attempts to warn the American people were blasted by the
"Wahhabi lobby" and American Muslim groups.
Last week, I published an FSM column titled "How the Wahhabi Lobby
Spins Islam." There I described a media assault on me by Hadia Mubarak,
a former leader of the Saudi-founded Muslim Students Association
of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), present board member, i.e. top-level
representative, of the Saudi-financed Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR), and associate of Georgetown University’s
Saudi-supported Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU).
I protested against Ms. Mubarak’s libelous accusation that I have
"a deep hatred of Islam," since I have been Muslim myself since
1997. I sought to demonstrate how a powerful lobby in the West
aligns with the radical Wahhabi sect that is the state religion in
the Saudi kingdom. The Wahhabi lobby targets as "enemies of Islam"
all Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, who criticize fundamentalism
and other extremist trends in the faith of Muhammad.
In that column I pointed out that from the campus agitation of MSA
to the Wahhabi advocacy of CAIR and thence to respectability at
Georgetown-CMCU is a path worn smooth by young American Islamists.
Such career progress also illustrates why Western mainstream media,
academia, and government "experts" have been so vulnerable to the
argument that Saudi radicalism represents the sole legitimate form of
Sunni Islam. The Wahhabis and their allies have gained a monopoly
on Sunni opinion in the West, and it is natural but abominable
that non-Muslim media, academia, and even government turn to them
for guidance.
But while it is legitimate to question the role of the Saudis in
Western perceptions of Islam, as well as to reply critically to
such questioning, the Wahhabi lobby exposes its totalitarian nature
when it shuns debate and immediately turns to personal abuse. Hadia
Mubarak clearly had no idea that open controversy is a major feature
of Islamic intellectual history – in the classic manner of a Hitlerite
or Stalinist, she interpreted any challenge as an enemy attack.
Yet little did I know how brief a time I had to wait before receiving
fresh and dramatic evidence of the success the Wahhabi lobby has
enjoyed in spinning Islam globally as well as in the U.S. I have
now been honored with a similarly libelous blast from the Parisian
monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, a periodical stratospherically higher
than the internet media and low-circulation Muslim community journals
to which Ms. Mubarak and CAIR most often have recourse.
In its November issue, LMD, as it prefers to be called – perhaps in
imitation of WMD, perhaps out of nostalgia for the drug LSD, which
produced similarly hallucinatory effects – published a long article by
someone named Stefan Durand, identified in the paper as nothing other
than a "researcher." The topic was the concept of "Islamofascism,"
on which I have published extensively. I first used the term in
print only 11 days after September 11, 2001, in referring to the
Saudi-Wahhabi cult that inspires al-Qaida. While a historian of the
Arab world and Islam, Malise Ruthven, had previously employed it 1990,
to describe the dictatorships prevalent from Morocco to Pakistan,
I developed it much further, in my book The Two Faces of Islam.
In my view, "Islamofascism" implies an extensive and serious
sociological and historical theory, concentrating on the political
role of frustrated elites in the Muslim world. The growing middle
class of Saudi Arabia, as well as their aspiring but impoverished
peers in Egypt and Pakistan, are drawn to radical, violent, paranoid,
irrational politics in the same way the ruined middle class in Germany,
after the first world war, was lured into Nazism.
"Islamofascism" is, then, neither one of the many "sound-bite" comments
on the conflict over the future of Islam, nor a political slogan.
French "researcher" Stefan Durand, however, had a different approach
to the matter. The Durand essay was advertised with a garish
red headline on the paper’s front page, "Is Islamism Fascism?" A
mutilated translation was posted on LMD’s English-language website
(but on some servers is only available to the paper’s subscribers.)
In the English version, Stefan Durand’s punch-line appeared at the
top of the long, laborious piece. First, he was mainly exercised at
the use of the term, or a variant thereof, by President George W.
Bush. Second, he claimed to have traced a connection to the White
House, which he painted as sinister.
According to the French researcher, my argument about Islamofascism was
communicated to the chief executive of our country by Bernard Lewis,
the Princeton historian of Islam. In the world of LMD, Lewis is an
"orientalist" – a term employed as an insult in the impenetrable
and contemptible scratchings in ink by the late Arab author Edward
Said. And LMD reveals that Professor Lewis is an "advisor to the White
House." Further, our intrepid Frenchman reports, I, Stephen Schwartz,
consider myself a disciple of Lewis. In the words of the ridiculous
Durand, Bernard Lewis and I share "great hostility toward Islam."
Whoops, there it is… again! An analyst of "Islamofascism" must be
hostile to Islam, according to the prestigious LMD! The content of
the theory of Islamofascism is ignored; neither Durand nor any of
the other drive-by polemicists who have assailed it (in such leftist
tabloids and pulp magazines as In These Times and The Nation) have
pretended to address it..
Stefan Durand is not, one must admit, much of a researcher. His
research did not disclose to him that I am a Muslim, and therefore
should not be accused of hostility to my faith. Nor did it impart
to him that Bernard Lewis is controversial in France because of his
defense of the Turkish authorities against a charge of deliberate
genocide in the massacres of Armenians at the end of the first
world war. Lewis’s view of the Turkish-Armenian tragedy is hardly
a position characteristic of those hostile to Islam. I cannot blame
researcher Durand for not anticipating that I would have published
an article in The Weekly Standard (issue dated November 20, 2006)
criticizing the record of Turkey in dealing with Muslim as well as
non-Muslim minorities, which might be construed as opposed to the
stance of Bernard Lewis. For the French researcher, it suffices to
condemn The Weekly Standard because it is edited by William Kristol.
I do not deny, however, being a disciple of Bernard Lewis, as well as
of William Kristol. Professor Lewis is the dean of historians of Islam
in the West, and notwithstanding the cheap insults directed against him
in the past by Edward Said, all who write on Islamic history today owe
him a debt. Professor Lewis is even quoted by intellectuals in Iran,
although they disagree with him on numerous issues.
All that counts to the protectors and apologists for Islamofascism
is that Schwartz be personally discredited, and the line of attack
is automatic and obvious: I am yet another foe of Islam. And thus it
is that the schoolyard tactics of Hadia Mubarak, MSA, CAIR, and the
Georgetown pro-Wahhabi crowd ascend to the journalistic heights of Le
Monde Diplomatique! The success of the Wahhabi lobby in misrepresenting
Islam to the West has seldom been better illustrated.
I have no need of insisting that I am no enemy of Islam. I
have just returned from the Balkans, where I work closely with
anti-radical Sunni Muslims targeted (literally) by gunfire from
Wahhabi infiltrators. Recently a Bosnian Muslim cleric, Mustafa
Susic, protested that nobody invited the Wahhabis to the Balkans,
and the same may be said of Saudi-Islamist agents in Western Europe
and North America. No Muslims asked these Saudi religious colonialists
to subvert American Islam. Mustafa Susic had simple advice for young
Muslims anxious to improve their study of religion: "do not go to
Saudi Arabia!" Susic went on forthrightly, "Al-Qaida started from the
[Wahhabi] movement – I do not see any other movement in the Islamic
world that could produce such a thing."
I know for certain that neither Wahhabi lobby functionaries like
Hadia Mubarak nor French researchers like Stefan Durand – neither
the lurkers in the abyss nor the imagined astronauts of journalism –
will pay attention, as I do, to the anti-extremist struggle of a Muslim
cleric in a distant, poor, and tormented land, like Mustafa Susic. I am
a friend and peer of those Muslims, who, to apply in a new context the
words of a California ethnic journalist of the past century, Katayama
Sen, are "mute… silent from despair… stammering… grumbling,
murmuring… so degraded by suffering and ignorance that they have
no strength to speak out."
I will be a voice for those Muslims. To further paraphrase, I will
be the bleeding mouth from which the Wahhabi gag has been snatched. I
will say everything.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz is
Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
© 2003-2006 FamilySecurityMatters.org All Rights Reserved
If you are a reporter or producer who is interested in receiving
more information about this writer or this article, please email your
request to [email protected].
Note — The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy
of Family Security Matters.
bal.php?id=416756
–Boundary_(ID_sMQ/vGBqDtRC0Yjd 8IPdYw)–