Through a Glass Darkly
On the Misunderstanding of Islam and America and 9/11


"For [its]. . . acts of aggression and injustice, we have declared jihad against the U.S. because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad so that God's word is the one exalted to the heights and so that we drive the Americans away from all Muslim countries."

The words come from a 1997 CNN interview with the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. A year later he helped found the International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders, which issued an edict proclaiming, "We—with God's help—call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."

Religion of Benevolence
Bin Laden's bone-chilling reading of the deity's imperative is not the same message revealed to and conveyed by the prophet Muhammad, according to Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet. "Islam is a religion that preaches benevolence and forgiveness. The five pillars of Islam—profession of faith, prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage to Mecca—focus on spirituality and community, not war."

Kashani-Sabet is an assistant professor of history whose scholarship delves into the modern Middle East, especially Iran, where she was born and grew up. She is also a Muslim. "I'm culturally Muslim," she maintains, "but I don't uphold every aspect of my religion. I'm reformed—secular—I kind of pick and chose the things that I do."

Kashani-Sabet is also an American citizen and has lived in the U.S. for over half her life. She speaks English without a Middle Eastern accent and Persian without an American accent. "I have strong ties to the country of my birth," she says. "It is the land where my father is buried. But I also love the kind of freedom and the exceptional educational opportunities this country gives me. . . . The laid-backness of American culture is something I wholeheartedly embrace."

Kashani-Sabet likes to joke that her cross-cultural background will be the source of a lifelong identity crisis. "At one time I speak as an American," she says, "at another time I speak as a Middle Easterner." But as a scholar and a Muslim, she is certain about one thing: "The Muslims who committed the [September 11] atrocity were acting against the basic precepts of Islam and humanity."

At her first class following September 11, she distributed copies of Abu Bakr's ten rules of war, which are published in A Middle East Mosaic, edited by Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis. "Do not practice treachery or mutilation," Abu Bakr taught. "Do not kill a young child, an old man, or a woman." Abu Bakr was the first caliph or leader of the Islamic community after the death of Muhammad. The Prophet himself has declared, "Whoever kills himself in any way will be tormented in that way in Hell."

The Qur'an, the Muslim holy book, does permit war against the opponents of God, Kashani-Sabet concedes, and to some degree the propagation of Islam was aided by armed struggle—as was the spread of Christianity. As with any text, the Qur'an can be quoted and interpreted to support almost any cause, but the intent of the Muslim scripture, she points out, is that violence should be a legitimate instrument only as a final option and only if it is used to create a just society.

There are fundamentalist expressions and small extremist factions in all religions, she notes, but the mainstream Islamic community, both in the U.S. and abroad, has spoken out vehemently against the terrorist attack. "The injunction of jihad," she explains further, "refers primarily to a striving or struggle of faith and is not one of the five pillars of Islam. . . . Osama bin Laden is not a religious scholar and thus cannot technically claim leadership of the Islamic community at large."

Pasture of Stupidity
With deep roots in both the West and the Middle East, Kashani-Sabet understands more than most the role of education in overcoming the stereotypes and simplified impressions held by both sides.

American scholars and policymakers, she says, had their early understanding of Islam and the Middle Eastern peoples handed to them by the European colonial masters, who viewed their subjects as inferior, ignorant, and uncivilized. Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth century British historian, called Muslims "coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals," writes scholar Edward Said in Orientalism. Historian Robert Allison points out that one of the first Western biographies of Muhammad went by the title The History of the Life of the Great Imposter Mahomet (see "Postscript: Americans and the Muslim World—First Encounters" in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Assessment).

In the modern era, Americans developed a more informed view of Islam and the Middle East, but Kashani-Sabet argues that "what understanding did come was often very superficial and tied to a larger diplomatic agenda without a true understanding of the cultural context of what was really happening in the region." Historian William Cleveland called that agenda the "three pillars of U.S. cold war policy": supporting Israel, containing the Soviet Union, and securing access to oil. Kashani-Sabet contends that preoccupation with these objectives blinded policymakers to the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism and the distinction between Islam and Islamic radicals. Diplomats also failed to perceive the strong regional sentiment in favor of bin Laden's claims against the U.S.: the defiling presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's holiest cities, and the absence of a viable Palestinian state.

"Criticizing the U.S. role in the Middle East should in no way put [historians] in a position of being apologists for terrorists," stresses Kashani-Sabet. "It behooves every state to understand why its enemies hate it. . . . But the U.S. government has repeatedly failed to seek the advice of those who are genuinely familiar with the history, cultures, and languages of the Middle East."

Islam too has failed, she argues further. Islamic legal scholars have not been forceful enough in dismantling the claims of those who use the religion to recruit militants and justify murder. "They must better educate their own populations on the true teachings of Islam, even if it brings them under attack." Scholars from the Middle East must also do more to present a nuanced image of the "selfish and soulless" Americans and write more balanced histories of the U.S. and its policies in the region.

"Professional historians are often taught not to take sides and to let the sources speak for themselves," she says. "But today the world demands more from us."

The more that's being demanded of historians—and from the rest of us as well—is a redoubled vigilance against the quick presumptions and easy prejudices and ill-informed opinions we bring to our struggle to understand the historical facets that went into the events of September 11.

"As educators," she says, "we have to play a very important role in teaching the public, teaching our students, about Islam, about American history, about the interaction among Islam and the United States and the Islamic world without ever serving as an apologist for any group. That's the task historians face in this particular dilemma."

She likes to quote the great medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, who wrote: "The pasture of stupidity is unwholesome for mankind." He knew that giant swaths of confusion and ignorance cut across our knowledge of the world and of each other. He called history "an attempt to get at the truth . . . [a] subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and a deep knowledge of the hows and whys of events."

The landscape of our understanding is often a checkerboard of truth and green pastures, and it is in that countryside that disasters begin to take shape. "My hope," offers Kashani-Sabet, "is that we as scholars can work hard to get at this truth in order to find peace."