Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (9 page)

I first visited an Islamic country in 1982, when I was eighteen years old. I had traveled with a Dutch friend from Eilat in Israel to the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh. We were two almost penniless backpacking students. We slept on the beaches, which was illegal, and found hospitality with Egyptians, who spontaneously invited us to tea. I clearly recall my first impression of Egypt: I was overwhelmed by the kindness, friendliness, and helpfulness of its people.

I also remember my second strong impression of Egypt: the people were afraid. While we were in Sharm-el-Sheikh, fear suddenly engulfed the town when it was announced that President Mubarak was coming to visit. As Mubarak’s cavalcade of black cars arrived in the resort, I could feel the overwhelming sense of fear like a cold chill on a hot summer day. The strange fear Egyptians felt for their leader must resemble the fear that the seventh-century Arabs felt around Muhammad, whose presence cast “terror into their hearts.”
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From Sharm-el-Sheikh, my friend and I took the bus to Cairo. It was illegal for us to go there; in the Egyptian consulate in Eilat we had bought a cheap visa that only allowed us into the Sinai Peninsula. If we were caught in Cairo without a valid visa, we would have been in serious trouble. But when you’re eighteen years old, such things don’t concern you as much as they should.

Cairo was poor and incredibly dirty. My friend and I were amazed that such a place could be a neighbor of Israel, which was so clean. The Arabs we spoke to explained that they were blameless for their condition, claiming they were victims of a global conspiracy of “imperialists” (meaning America) and “Zionists” (meaning Israel) aimed at oppressing Muslims.

I made a big mistake in Cairo that led to an important revelation. After playing soccer with some local kids, I bought a glass of water from a public water collector. The water gave me terrible diarrhea. Retreating to a hostel where I rented a spot on the floor for two dollars a day, I lay there for several days, a heap of misery in a crowded, stinking room filled with ten other guys. Egypt had once been the most advanced civilization on earth. Why had it failed to progress along with the rest of the world? It was obvious to me that it wasn’t because of any grand conspiracy. The answer was actually pretty simple:
it’s the culture, stupid.

In the late 1890s, Winston Churchill was a young soldier and war correspondent in British India (now Pakistan) and the Sudan. While there, the perceptive Churchill grasped with amazing clarity Islam’s fundamental problems:

Besides the fanatical frenzy ... there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist where the followers of the Prophet rule or live.... The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to a sole man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.... Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities—but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it.
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Churchill concluded, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
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Islam tells Muslims that everything they need to know can be found in their holy book, which provides “signs for true believers.”
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As there can be no understanding apart from the Koran, nothing may contradict these “signs” of eternal truth. Hence, Islam is extremely wary of
bida,
or innovation.

In the second half of the seventh century and the first decades of the eighth century, when illiterate and unschooled Arabs conquered the entire Persian Empire and chopped off large chunks of the Byzantine Empire, they gained access to great swathes of the Persians’ and Greeks’ intellectual property. However, Islam had little consideration for science. In 640, the Arabs sacked the Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria and deliberately burned down its 900-year-old library. Its books were considered dispensable. “They will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous,” the Arab leader, Caliph Omar, said. Books found in Persia were destroyed for the same reason.
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Jewish and Christian scholars, however, continued doing scientific and scholarly work after the Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, north Africa, and Spain. An important Baghdad translator of ancient Greek works into Arabic and Syriac was the Christian physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq, known in the West as Johannitius (809—73). Another famous scholar was the Spanish-born Jewish physician Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Due to Islamic persecution, Maimonides fled Córdoba for Egypt, where he became the court physician of the Sultan. Maimonides had bitter, firsthand experience of Islamic savagery. In letters to fellow Jews, he expressed “profound contempt for Islam.”
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He observed, “The more we suffer and choose to conciliate [the Muslims], the more they choose to act belligerently towards us.”
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World leaders today like to flatter Islam by hailing its glorious contributions to science and learning. President Obama sang in this choir, littering his Cairo speech with references to “civilization’s debt to Islam” and marveling at how Islam “carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.”
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According to the head of NASA, Obama even injected his Islamic outreach campaign into America’s premier space exploration agency, ordering NASA’s administrator to “engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science... and math and engineering.”
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Despite the popularity of these apologetics today, there have been a mere handful of innovative Islamic scholars throughout the entire fourteen centuries of Islamic history. The notable exceptions, such as the Persian Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (c. 980-1037), and the Spanish-born Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes (1126-98), were looked upon with suspicion in the Islamic world. Ibn Sina often had problems with the authorities due to his membership in an Islamic sect, the Ismaili. Averroes, whose work has been more appreciated outside Islam than within it, was banished from the Sultan’s court in Marrakesh on suspicion of heresy.

Islamic apologists claim Greek philosophy came to the West via the “open” and “tolerant” societies of Islamic Spain and Morocco. However, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (John the Irishman) was already translating Greek works into Latin in the mid-800s.
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In 2008, French professor of medieval history Sylvain Gouguenheim convincingly rejected the thesis that Islam brought Greek thought to Western Europe. Gouguenheim’s book,
Aristote au mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne
(Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: The Greek Roots of Christian Europe),
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shows that Greek philosophy did not reach the West through intermediary Arabic translations. In fact, comprehensive translations of Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers were made at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in Normandy half a century before Arabic versions of the same texts appeared in Islamic-occupied Moorish Spain. The Greek works were directly translated into Latin by clerics such as Jacobus Veneticus (James of Venice), who had lived and worked for some time in Constantinople in the second quarter of the twelfth century. Europe, says Gouguenheim, “became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them [by the Muslims].”
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Gouguenheim explains that his book is a counterpoint to Sigrid Hunke’s arguments about Islam’s medieval relations to the West. Hunke was a Nazi and a member of an SS think tank, the
Germanistischer Wissenschaftseinsatz
(Germanic Sciences Service), during World War II.
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She lived in Morocco in the 1940s and was made an honorary member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs at Cairo’s al-Azhar University. With that background, it’s unsurprising she would claim the West owes its development to “a pioneering, civilizing Islam” that supposedly transmitted Greek philosophy back to Europe.
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Unfortunately, Hunke’s flawed thesis has become widely accepted by Western leaders anxious to pander to Islam’s grandiose pretensions.

Western politicians should be expressing their gratitude to the Byzantines, not to Islam. Islam only retained aspects of Greek philosophy that were deemed compatible with the Koran—which were few. Most Greek works, discoveries, and scientific achievements made their way into Western Europe after the conquest of Constantinople by the Islamic Turks in 1453, when Greek refugees found safety in Europe, particularly in Italy.
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In this sense, Islam did, indeed, “pave the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment”—by wiping away the great city of Byzantium and enabling Europe to salvage a few pieces. Without Constantinople, major works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would not have survived.

The only field in which Islam made a major contribution to science, at least for a time, was astronomy. This stemmed from the Koran’s obligation that Muslims observe the lunar calendar, an unpractical calendar that does not correspond with the seasons. Because the lunar year is eleven days shorter than the solar year (and twelve days shorter during leap years), the two only coincide approximately every thirty-three years. Due to the lunar calendar, Islamic festivals and Islam’s holy month of Ramadan always fall on different dates. The lunar calendar obliged Muslims to watch the night skies to observe the moon, causing them to build sophisticated observatories in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Islam also made a contribution to mathematics. Words such as “algebra” and “algorithm” have Arabic origins.
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Islam for a time was interested in mathematics because it is useful for astronomy and for determining the
Qibla,
the direction toward the
Kaaba
shrine in Mecca, which Muslims must face when they pray. However, its contribution did not include the so-called “Arabic numerals,” which are actually of Hindu origin; the eighth-century Persian mathematicians al-Fazari and Ibn Tariq translated Indian astronomical texts into Arabic and adopted the Hindu numerals.

On the whole, the spread of Islam led to ages of stagnation, if not inverted progress, in the occupied territories of Asia and north Africa. If the Franks had not stopped the Arabs at Tours in 732, the progress of Western civilization would surely have ground to a halt, and the West today would be just another poverty-stricken, underdeveloped colony of Islam.

Although Islam forbids artistic representations of people, beautiful art is found throughout the Islamic world in calligraphy, arabesques, architecture, and other realms. On one of my trips to the Middle East, I became fascinated by the decorative splendor of a copy of the Koran that was for sale. I bought the book, and after I returned home, I found a translation to help me understand the Arabic-language text. I expected to find injunctions to “love thy neighbor” and other commandments similar to those in the Bible, but instead I found the spite of a god who hates.