Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims

By Stephen Sheehi and Mumia Abu-Jamal

Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims examines the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West following the end of the Cold War through GW Bush’s War on Terror to the Age of Obama. Using “Operation Desert Storm-as a watershed moment, Stephen Sheehi examines the increased mainstreaming of Muslim-bating rhetoric and explicitly racist legislation, police surveillance, witch-trials and discriminatory policies towards Muslims in North America and abroad. The book focuses on the various genres and modalities of Islamophobia from the works of rogue academics to the commentary by mainstream journalists, to campaigns by political hacks and special interest groups. Some featured Islamophobes are Bernard Lewis. Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, David Horowitz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their theories and opinions operate on an assumption that Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, suffer from particular cultural lacuna that prevent their cultures from progress, democracy and human rights. While the assertion originated in the colonial era, Sheehi demonstrates that it was refurbished as a viable explanation for Muslim resistance to economic and cultural globalization during the Clinton era. Moreover, the theory was honed into the empirical basis for an interventionist foreign policy and propaganda campaign during the Bush regime and continues to underlie Barack Obama’s new internationalism. If the assertions of media pundits and rogue academics became the basis for White House foreign policy, Sheehi also demonstrates how they were translated into a sustained domestic policy of racial profiling and Muslim-baiting by agencies from Homeland Security to the Department of Justice. Furthermore, Sheehi examines the collusion between non-governmental agencies, activist groups and lobbies and local, state and federal agencies to in suppressing political speech on US campuses critical of racial profiling, US foreign policy in the Middle East and Israel. While much of the direct violence against Muslims on American streets, shops and campuses has subsided, Islamophobia runs throughout the Obama administration. Sheehi, therefore, concludes that Muslim and Arab-hating emanate from all corners of the American political and cultural spectrum, serving poignant ideological functions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clarity Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780932863997

Book preview

ISLAMOPHOBIA

The Ideological Campaign

Against Muslims

STEPHEN SHEEHI

© 2011 Stephen Sheehi

ISBN: 0-932863-67-1

978-0-932863-67-6

In-house editor: Diana G. Collier

Cover design: R. Jordan P. Santos

Cover image: Bobby Plasencia

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sheehi, Stephen, 1967-

Islamophobia : the ideological campaign against Muslims / by Stephen Sheehi.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-932863-67-6

ISBN-10: 0-932863-67-1

1. Muslims--United States--Social conditions. 2. Arab Americans--Social conditions. 3. Muslims--Europe--Social conditions. 4. Arabs--Europe--Social conditions. 5. Islamophobia--United States. 6. Islamophobia--Europe. 7. Rhetoric--Political aspects--Western countries. 8. Ideology--Political aspects--Western countries. 9. United States--Race relations. 10. Europe--Race relations. I. Title.

E184.M88S4 2010

305.6’97073--dc22

Clarity Press, Inc.

Ste. 469, 3277 Roswell Rd. NE

Atlanta, GA. 30305 , USA

http://www.claritypress.com

To My Loved Ones:

The Inspiration and the Reason I Stand Every Morning

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE by MUMIA ABU JAMAL

FOREWORD by WARD CHURCHILL

INTRODUCTION

Bringing Hate Speech into the American Mainstream

Islamophobia as an Ideological Formation of US Empire

Clinton-Bush-Obama: Islamophobia Continuity

Vagaries of Islamophobia: Europe and the United States

Orientalism vs. Islamophobia: Historical Variations

Chapter One

THE ELITE FOREIGN POLICY NETWORKS : HOW ISLAMOPHOBIA IS NOT JUST PREJUDICE

Ideology Is Not a Conspiracy or Party Platform

The Network of a Media Intellectual

Think-Tanks and Policy Institutes

The Pragmatist Center

Strategy Groups and Brain-Trusts

The Institutional Network of Bernard Lewis

The Master’s Discourse and the Students’ Vision

Open Letter to President Clinton

Bush’s War Network

Fouad Ajami as [White] House Arab

Conclusion

Chapter Two

JOURNALISTS, ROGUE ACADEMICS, AND NATIVE INFORMANTS:

THE SIEGE OF THE ARAB MIND

Introduction

Academic Pretensions of Empire: Bernard Lewis

The Arc of Ideological Scholarship

Post-Modern Mission Civilisatrice

Taxonomy of the Siege: Fareed Zakaria

Ignoring History: Neoliberalism as Modernity

Systemic Failure to Systematic Reform

The Force of a Home-grown Success

Conclusion

Chapter Three

NATIVE INFORMANTS: WOMEN AND THE MORAL PRETEXT FOR WESTERN DOMINATION

The B-List: Native Islamophobes

Enter the A-List Propagandists: The Heroic Victims

Pablum as Fact: The Tabloid Legacy of Lewis and Zakaria

Failure and the Politics of Reversal

Islam’s Submission versus the Capitalist Jihad

Force Against/For Women: Muslim Irresponsibility and Western Responsibility

Co-opting Feminism and Wars of (Women’s) Liberation

Conclusion

Chapter Four

TEACHING AND ACTIVISM IN THE TEETH OF POWER

Controlling Middle Eastern Studies

Coordinating an Atmosphere of Fear

Manuals of Repression

The Mandible of Power

Squadristi, Campus Cops and FBI on Campus

Conclusion

Chapter Five

LIVING IN A STATE OF FEAR

A National Culture of Repression

Hating the Other: Contextualizing Contemporary Hate-Acts

The Psychology of Interment

Techniques of Mainstreaming Cultural Islamophobia

Engendering Fear to Engineer Consent

Anaesthetizing White America

Hyper-Sensitizing White America

Flying While Muslim

Islamophobia as the Ideological Dimension of US Middle East Foreign Policy

Mass Arrests, Deportations, Special Registrations and Watch Lists

The National Security State Emerges

The War on Philanthropy

Entrapment

Living in the Black Holes of a New Normal

Conclusion

Chapter Six

ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

Bush’s Dictionary of War and the Lexicon of Punditry

The Hope and Change of Obama’s Nation

The Lewis-Zakaria Effect

The Nobel War Lecture and the Hard Reality of Soft Power

Paradigm Shifts within Empire Management

The Phoenix Initiative

Hillary Clinton, the National Security Team and the Smartness of Power

Obama the Non-Muslim

It’s Israel, Stupid

Ideology Wags the Dog

Epilogue

THE PARALLAX OF AMERICAN POWER: KEEPING THE UNITED STATES RELEVANT

Muslim and Arab Americans Resist

Political Islam as an Ideological Formation

Ideology over Lobbies and Oil

Islamophobia and Keeping US Empire Relevant

Reality Check

The End of the Beginning

ENDNOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been in the making for many years. Indeed, I wish this were a consequence of the post 9/11 developments in the world or some vulgar propaganda campaign, hatched and launched by a few in the United States to crudely control the world. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As a third generation Arab American growing up in predominantly white suburban communities outside Philadelphia and in central New Jersey, racism and anti-Arab sentiments were a permanent fixture of my youth in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a different political configuration but, even as a youth, I could sense the winds changing in how we, even as Arab Christians, were perceived and portrayed in the United States. In some ways, we understood that the paradigm shift was necessary for pro-Zionist America. Edward Said’s Orientalism dismantled the epistemology of how the West perceives and interacts with the Middle East. On the other hand, the Intifada humanized the plight of the Palestinian people. The dissonance caused by the images of children standing up to tanks and Israeli soldiers breaking arms with rocks led to cracks in the stereotypes of Palestinians as ruthless terrorists. America needed new ways to portray Palestinians and Arabs as terrorists. The fall of the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and the rise of militant Islam allowed this to happen. And we Arab and Muslim Americans in the United States, despite our intuition and our premonitions, interpreted the increase of racist attacks on us, whether rhetorical, legal or physical, only as a continuation of America’s longtime tradition of discomfort with us rather than a new ideological phenomenon.

While I carried this book inside me for many years, dare one say decades, I only began to write it during George W. Bush’s second administration. Many a qualified commentator wrote about GW’s wars, his Freedom Agenda, Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act, the new era of violating Muslims’ civil rights, and the increased suppression of academics, activists and critical speech in the United States. Despite their insights and invaluable contributions, few writers, even few scholars, offered a holistic explanation for the generalized hatred of Muslims and Arabs. My youth in the United States compounded by my own experience as an academic compelled me to begin to critically examine the origins and vagaries of Islamophobia. To prove my assertion that Islamphobia is an ideological phenomenon particular to the era of globalization, I felt it necessary to wait for the post-Bush era to complete the book. Unfortunately, President Obama only proved my assertions and confirmed the fears and knowledge that I have accumulated since my youth, living as a brown man and an Arab in the United States.

Considering the dimensions of this information, this book is personally, politically and intellectually dear to me. I believe that its assertions are important but also I am saddened, if not disgusted, by the fact that it had to be written. Writing the book took considerable time and energy at a time when I was hoping to rebuild the lives of those dearest to me after a painful and inevitable divorce. For this reason, the acknowledgements of this book take on an incredibly personal gravity that far surpasses the traditional courtesy or wajabat.

This said, I would offer my profound thanks to Ward Churchill. Not only has the rigor and force of his scholarship inspired this book but also his example of a critical and ethical scholar remains an example for academics to follow. Understanding the demands of his schedule, I am humbled by his contribution to this publication. Likewise, I need to express my gratitude to Mumia Abu Jamal for writing the Preface at what must be a particularly difficult time of his decades-long unjust incarceration. In addition to my appreciation, I offer him my admiration as his strength has stood as an example that, no matter the onslaught, we brothers and sisters can not only persevere with dignity but also continue the struggle no matter how oppressive powers try to extinguish our voice.

Mumia, an outspoken activist and award winning journalist, has long been acknowledged as the United State’s most famous political prisoner on Death Row— though he is certainly not the only one. His capital case for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer was marred by numerous instances of misconduct by the Philadelphia Police, a racist jury, a well-known bigoted judge, Albert Stabo who sentenced 31 defendants to death within 15 years, an unethical prosecuting attorney who suppressed evidence and an inept and careless court-appointed lawyer. We would, however, be remiss to exclusively blame Mumia’s mistrial and tribulations on the Philadelphia police, municipal leadership and the Pennsylvania judiciary’s notorious suppression of black power activists. While the death sentence has been voided by several courts of appeal, the Supreme Court has now ordered the lower court to revisit its decision to void the capital sentence. To date, a petition containing 26,000 signatures, including Nobel laureates Bishop Desmond Tutu, Elfriede Jelinek and Günter Grass, former first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, and Noam Chomsky, is scheduled to be delivered to the President, calling on him to declare a moratorium on the death penalty in the United States. For updated information on the plight of Mumia, see http://www. MumiaLegal.org. In addition to thanking Mumia, I appreciate the help of Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco, who was instrumental in communicating with him.

A special thanks must be offered to Diana Collier at Clarity Press. Her patience, honesty, feedback and guidance allowed me to organize and execute the book in ways that were congruent not only to my scholarly training but also my ethical fabric. Her diligent comments, suggestions and editing undoubtedly have contributed to this book and also made the process pleasant and engaging.

I would like to acknowledge my colleagues and friends in Lebanon and South Carolina, especially in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, for providing me with the environment that allowed me to write a scholarly albeit potentially controversial book. I thank my friends and colleagues for understanding and helping me through the difficulties of balancing the rigors of scholarship, teaching and parental responsibilities. I have missed or have had to reschedule many an appointment, social event, breakfast, dinner and brunch, holiday party and get together because of the demands of navigating the pressures of life. These friends and colleagues have always been understanding and supportive.

Another version of Chapter Four initially appeared as Teaching in a State of Fear: Middle East Studies in the Teeth of Power, in Anthony Nocella, Steve Best, and Peter McClaren’s Academic Repression.

To my mother, father and grandmother, Najibah, they have given me the room to be neglectful in replying to calls and emails, all in return for giving me my identity, passion and conviction. Thank you.

Most important, I need to thank three people. First, I would like to thank Lara Masri. Her caring, affection and patience have always been matched by her intellectual generosity. She has been with this book since its inception, offering keen comments and a precise editing. More important, my friend, comrade, and love, she has been a source of strength and encouragement to me as a scholar, partner and father. Without a doubt, this book would not have been completed without Lara’s presence in my life.

Foremost of all, I thank my sons, Jad and Shadee. The years in which this book were written were not always easy but their inner strength and love have illuminated my life. Their wit and sense of humor, their intelligence and willingness to talk about the ravages of the world suggest to me that they will be among a new generation of Arab Americans who will live an uncompromising life of conviction, love and happiness. They remain the beacon in my life and, one day, I hope that they will see the rays of their love and my unparalleled and eternal commitment to them shining through its pages.

PREFACE

MUMIA ABU JAMAL

One cannot possibly read Islamophobia without feeling the rarely-twinned responses of delight and despair.

Delight in discovery, and in reading how Arab and Muslim Americans are challenging the latest reigning repressive ideology of deeply entrenched Islamophobia, and how this work deepens that analysis.

There is also, if one is honest, despair, for the needless and cruel suffering experienced by millions, both abroad and at home, cannot but evoke such feelings.

For, at its core, this work is a searing critique of empire, and how Islamophobia serves such purposes, in what is but the latest cycle of fear that has washed through the American psyche.

For deep within the American self is a profound Paranoid Imagination (to quote psychological writer Barry Spector’s new book), where the Other has served to idealize and purify the American identity, which reinforces the us/them paradigm into the simplistic dichotomies of good vs. evil. Spector shows us how that way of thinking is malleable, and can be used for diverse purposes:

Whenever we evoke one pole of the archetype of the Other (formerly communism, now terrorism), the other pole (race) automatically constellates. Immigration, not a major issue until well after 9/11, combines both. In 2007, a Republican activist said, Some of these people may be coming in here to get jobs washing dishes, but some of them are coming in here to hijack airplanes … I can’t tell Jose Cuervo from Al Qaeda … He was framing the issue to stress not criminality but otherness. That same year, the state legislature introduced over 1,400 immigration measures, a number that exceeded the total of the previous ten years.¹

As one who lived his youth in the Black Liberation movement, one would think that such a writer would posit the now-infamous (if not forgotten?) COINTELPRO era, for an historical analogue to the present age of intense national, media, political and cultural hatred against Arabs and Muslims in the US, and indeed, around the world.

But I decline to do so.

That’s because, when reading this text, that is not the era that echoed in my consciousness. This, despite the fact that it is perhaps a matter of historical fact that the first Muslims who arrived on these shores did so in shackles, as part of the vast, enchained Diaspora of West Africans to the Americas.

The experience of African Muslim captive, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo² (captured ca. 1731) is instructive of this hidden history.

The forces set in motion as described in this work are, yes, drawn from the deep wells of American insecurities and racism, yet they virtually mimic the 20th century experience of Japanese-Americans.

People, once seen as exemplary Americans, members of the national polity in every conceivable sense (albeit nonwhite), were demonized by politicians, media voices, and American cultural sources. They were exemplars of the Other, and hence, placed beyond the ‘guarantees’ proclaimed in the US Constitution. They were presumed to be traitors, not because of what they had done, but because of who they were. That feature of the American way may not be much celebrated (and, in fact, is often ignored), but it is there, as certain as was the Mayflower.

In the aftermath of the Japanese attacks on Hawai’i, American media sources initially resisted calls for mistreatment of Japanese-Americans.

That did not last long. As legal scholar Peter Irons notes, it took mere days for more overtly racist voices to echo within the media with calls for what was essentially, collective punishment. But, they did echo. And collective punishment became state practice.

The day after Pearl Harbor, the Los Angeles Times opined that most Japanese were good citizens, born and educated as such. ³

After politicians like L.A. Congressman Leland Ford made the call for "all Japanese, whether citizens or not, " to be placed in inland concentration camps, the L.A. Times changed its tune, for the rigors of war demanded such action.

A widely read columnist, Walter Lipmann, critiqued Washington’s unwillingness to move on mass evacuation and mass internment of Japanese Americans. Columnist Westbrook Pegler sounded like the fanatical Islamophobes and fear mongers of a later era when he wrote: "The Japanese in California should be under guard to the last man and woman right now—and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over." ⁴

Nor did it matter that Japanese Americans committed no acts of sabotage against America, whatsoever. In a cockeyed way of reasoning that would re-emerge in this era, such proof of nonaction was but proof of malicious intent. U.S. General John J DeWitt, in his Final Recommendation sent to Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, went to the trough of racism to find his reasoning:

The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken … The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized’, the racial strains are undiluted.

When speaking before a congressional panel some time later, the general was a bit more precise and colorful in his remarks, arguing, A Jap’s a Jap; it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. I have no confidence in his loyalty whatsoever.⁵

While it may be rare for public officials to speak so openly today, one need not look far to find a general likening the Iraq war to ‘holy war’ against ‘unbelievers’; or to hear U.S. military members referring to Arabs/Muslims as ‘ragheads’, ‘hajjis’, or the Reagan-era colloquialism, ‘sand niggers.’

This analogy isn’t water-tight, however, for the attack of Dec. 7, 1941, was one by a nation-state against another nation. Yet we must recognize that the Supreme Court not only failed to object to this treatment of American citizens, in its Korematsu decision, it legalized it. ⁶

The 9/11 assaults were committed by non-state actors—a small, and heretofore little-known group. In fact, this makes it all the more remarkable precisely in light of this factor, for it shows us how great nations can act in ways that are indistinguishable from madness, once great prejudices and hatred are fed and unleashed.

In England, the junior partner of America in the disaster in Iraq, Members of Parliament have at least spoken openly and honestly (unlike members of the US Congress). Sir Peter Taspell, a Member of the House of Commons from Louth and Horncastle, told his fellow parliamentarians what most politicians knew, but rarely stated: that the US/UK invasion and occupation devastated the one country where al-Qaeda had no presence, and dared not enter; that it was based on lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations, adding:

We are responsible, jointly with America, for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children. We have driven the whole of the middle class out of Iraq. Some 4 million Iraqis have lost their homes. The water supply has gone and the drainage has gone, and the health service, which was the best in the entire Middle East, has been destroyed.⁷

Clearly, then, Islamophobia has its very real and dire consequences, which could be tapped at will by political and elite social forces to do great and lasting damage.

Sir Peter concluded, [T]he attack on Iraq was the greatest strategic mistake that the west has made since our failure to crush the German militarization of the Rhineland in 1938. The consequences of that went on for many years, and the consequences of our attack on Iraq will be felt for decades to come.⁸

When the United States was but a babe and a hope, James Madison, with the assistance of Thomas Jefferson, penned the Religious Freedom Act of Virginia, a precursor of the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. In the 1785 statute, the principle of freedom of religion was espoused, and such belief (or unbelief) could in no way affect their civil capacities.⁹

Years later, Jefferson, writing of Madison’s law, noted it was meant to comprehend within the mantle of protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, [a colonial-era term meaning Muslim] the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.¹⁰

As these words are written, the nation has just averted the latest quasi-controversy because a rightwing evangelical preacher called for the burning of a number of Qur’ans on 9/11/10. The proposed mid-city mosque in Manhattan is evoking large and raucous protests from New Yorkers who, while admitting that Muslims have the ‘right’ to build such a structure, are nonetheless concerned lest it disturb the ‘hallowed ground’ of 9/11.

Islamophobia is but the latest phobia to rage, like a fever, in the American psyche.

We must believe that this too, will pass.

But its costs, as Sir Peter Tapsell suggests, in human suffering for years and years to come, are beyond our reckoning.

To be sure, works such as this penned by Prof. Sheehi, will likely contribute to its quicker passage into the faded annals of history.

And yet. And yet…

Imagine being a Japanese-American mother, with a son serving in an armed unit during the war. Here, she was interred by her government, in complete and total violation of the Constitution that her son swore allegiance to. Apart from the very real fear that every mother feels for her child, what must she have thought of her country? That it had gone mad?

Things do not change simply because time passes. Social movements and social organizations must push for changes against a stubborn and reluctant status quo.

Few people in the United States know this better than African-Americans.

Sheehi’s work is a step towards that different future, when Islamophobia is seen for what it is, and so recognized, repudiated for the poison that it is.

May it reach many minds and many hearts.

FOREWORD

THE ISLAMOPHOBIC FOUNDATION

OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

WARD CHURCHILL

What do I think of Western civilization?

I think it would be a very good idea.

—Mohandas Gandhi (1931)

In Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Stephen Sheehi has provided an intensive guide to the formation of the most modern—American—sociopolitical constructs evolved by The West in furtherance, both at home and abroad, of its domination of Islamic regions. Formed in the shadow of the Islamic Other, the early relationship of The West to the Islamic world impacted not only the very essence of Western Civilization but also led to the catastrophic socio-pathology of Western imperialism which continues to devastate the non-European peoples of the world, Muslims and non-Muslims alike

Certainly, it is not without a large degree of irony that Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington’s harangues on the clash of civilizations, as Sheehi’s thought-provoking study notes, are the harbinger of a new wave if not new form of Islamophobia. The author’s insightful taxonomy of the civilizational discourse at the heart of Islam and Muslims makes it difficult to decide whether the phenomenon oxymoronically referred to asWestern Civilization might be more aptly characterized as a fraud or as a grim farce. In either case, it has always been a fiction. Even the geographic status of Europe is invented. Far from being a continent in its own right—less still "The Continent," as most eurocentrists have long-since proclaimed it¹—Europe, the territorial locus of The West, is, geographically speaking[,]…simply a large western peninsula of Asia.²

Culturally, the situation is still more contrived. The very term Europe, after all, originated with the Phoenician word ’erub, connoting a place of nether darkness and ignorance.³ It is perhaps self-evident that those inhabiting a domain viewed for well over a millennium as amounting to no more than a benighted cultural backwater, utterly irrelevant to the affairs of civilized societies, might well have come to harbor certain resentments. No less obviously, such resentments were in all likelihood fueled by an ever deepening and more intractable sense of cultural inferiority. While The West would later claim cultural descent from the classical civilization of ancient Greece, concocting from the late-eighteenth century onwards an elaborate evidentiary stew intended to prove the Aryan identity of the Greeks, the reality is that classical Greece and its antecedents were linked far more closely, both culturally and genetically, to Egypt and the Levant than to anything northward.⁴ Moreover, the emergence of The West was separated from its supposed antecedent by a disjuncture lasting several centuries after the fall of Rome, a truly Dark Age during which the Church purposely suppressed classical Greek [i.e., pagan] knowledge.⁵

That the intellectual tradition of classical Greece was not only preserved but extended and refined was exclusively the result of Arab-Islamic scholarship for more than seven hundred years. It was in the great Islamic universities established in Cordova, Toledo, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Fez, Tunis, Isfahan and Khorason, producing such eminent philosophers as al-Farabi (d. 951), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1137) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës, 1126-98), that The West would eventually learn of Aristotle and his peers.⁶ Indeed, the key role played by Islamic thought was evident in the inception of the Western identity itself, a matter which traces to the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 C.E. and the concomitant establishment of his Holy Roman Empire, an entity otherwise known as Western Christendom.⁷

Since the purpose of the exercise was to (re)assert the ascendancy of what would become Roman Catholicism over the orthodoxies of Eastern Christendom (i.e., Byzantium), it was essential that the former distinguish itself from the latter on theological grounds. The requirement was largely met by the appropriation, usually without attribution, of Islamic interpretations of scripture. As the eminent historian Maxime Rodinson stated,

Avicenna [Ibn Sina] gave the Latin West a model of original synthesis [adding] the dimension of religious salvation and creative divinity, both essential to [Roman Catholic] thought. Beyond this, his work suggested an original way of rethinking the connections between God, the world and man by encompassing Aristotle’s theories of epistemology…. [Western] philosopher theologians [merely] adapted Avicenna’s Islamic terminology to Christianity. For example, what Avicenna had said regarding the Muslim imam, Roger Bacon applied to the pope.⁸

Even as this process was underway, the empire established by Charlemagne was being consolidated by his Carolingian successors on the pattern of their progenitor’s conquest and forcible conversion of pagan tribes to the west, north, and east of the imperial capital at Aachen (on the extreme west-central boundary of present-day Germany).⁹ Various expedients were attempted to resolve the integral question of how best to concretize an attendant sense of specifically Western identity at the grassroots level. The instrumentality by which such a sweeping galvanization of consciousness might be realized was found when, during the Council of Claremont in 1095, it was decided to launch the first Crusade.¹⁰

The stated purpose of the initial western European invasion of the East was to recover the Christian Holy Land from the Arab Muslims who possessed it.¹¹ Not only the first Crusade but the eight that followed reveal powerful desires on the part of western Europe’s emerging elites both to engage in wholesale plunder and to gain control of such lucrative Levantine trade centers as Tyre, Acre, and Jaffa (the only immediate source of China’s fabled silk, tea, and spices, as well as ivory, jade, aromatics, exotic fruits, and other luxuries).¹² At least three of the Crusades, the fourth (1202-04), fifth (1217-21), and seventh (1248-54), were diverted from the Holy Land altogether, targeting the even richer prizes of Constantinople and Damietta (Egypt) instead.¹³

Equally important from an elite perspective, the campaigns were organized as a means of both amplifying and concretizing the legitimacy/authority inhering in the Roman papacy, and, thereby, that of a hierarchy of nobles endowed with papal sanction to wield more secular forms of power.¹⁴ The same can be said with respect to the Reconquista which, by 1249, had reduced the once extensive Islamic dominion of al-Andulus (Iberia) to the area around Grenada.¹⁵

The entire endeavor, of course, was contingent upon mobilizing relatively massive numbers of common folk to serve as fodder in what amounted to wars of aggression.¹⁶ It was necessary that, to borrow a term from Rodinson, those adhering to the tenets of Islam be diabolized in the popular consciousness, a propaganda function pursued with relentless zeal by the clergy. So virulent was the process of clerical indoctrination that in short order Muslims, as such, were widely perceived as something not simply alien but threatening, an Other than human life-form not so much warranting as quite literally demanding of eradication.¹⁷

Hence, the comportment of Western Christendom’s crusading Warriors of God from the moment they set foot in the Holy Land.¹⁸ As was contemporaneously recounted by the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene (Comnena), for example, upon capturing the city of Maarat an-Numan and massacring its residents in 1098, our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots. They impaled children on spits and ate them grilled.¹⁹ Similar atrocities, albeit somewhat lesser in scale, were registered at Nicaea later the same year and at Antioch early in the next.²⁰ The fall of Jerusalem in July of 1099 was also marked by a general massacre of the Muslim and Christian population in which neither women nor children were spared while the bulk of the city’s Jews were trapped in their synagogue and burned alive.²¹ Such was, in the view of Pope Paschal II, a Holy slaughter.²²

Both the magnitude and the nature of the psychic catharsis embodied in this historical moment are as conspicuous as they are remarkable. Where the collective sense of self essential to the formation of cultural identity had been effectively absent in The West, it abruptly cohered, not as an affirmative signification but as a negative, i.e., as a unified posture of conscious contradistinction to the Islamic Other.²³

In simplest terms, the compulsion of the West to nullify the perceived superiority of the Islamic Other devolved not simply upon negating the Other’s existence, as at Jerusalem in 1099, but on claiming the attributes giving shape to the Other’s superior status, thereby in effect incorporating the attainments of the Other into its own conception of self. This process of internalization was undertaken both in the most literal possible fashion, as when the Crusaders ate the flesh of their Muslim victims at Maarat al-Numan,²⁴ and more figuratively, in the far broader, sustained, and more important assimilation—i.e., ingestion and digestion—of Islamic philosophy, science, and technology.

Although such intellectual pilferage had quietly commenced some three centuries earlier as means of distinguishing Western Christendom from its Byzantine competitor, the theft did not reach the dimension of outright cultural cannibalism until the advent of the Crusades.²⁵ By the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas and other Western thinkers were boldly plagiarizing the work of philosophers like Ibn Rushd while purporting to debunk it.

Indeed, the Islamophobes that Sheehi deconstructs in this present book willfully neglect or guilefully explain away the Islamic heritage of Western civilization even though indebtedness of the latter to the former is widely acknowledged in almost every discipline of the sciences and social sciences. Most of the mathematical, scientific, architectural and engineering knowledge, which gave rise to The West’s so-called Renaissance (rebirth), was similarly cannibalized from Islam. While Western historians have routinely attributed inventing the algebraic method to the third-century Greek mathematician Diophantus, it was actually conceived in its modern form by Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi around 820 C.E.²⁶ Over the next four hundred years it underwent such development by Ibn al-Khwarizmi’s successors that, even as late as the nineteenth century, many of the brilliant new conceptions credited to Western mathematicians—e.g., the Viète’s Laws and the Ruffini-Homer Method—were simply rehashes of techniques perfected by Islamic scholars.²⁷

Islamic understandings of calculus, trigonometry, astronomy and non-Euclidean geometry were swallowed whole by The West and thereafter pronounced to have been its own discoveries.²⁸ Even in such sophisticated areas as numbers theory, Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) employed by 1000 C.E. what is now referred to as Wilson’s Theorem after the Englishman John Wilson who purportedly discovered it in 1770.²⁹ The decimal system of fractionation was first conceived by Persian mathematician Abu al-Hasan al-Uqlidisi during the late tenth century and transmitted to The West by his successor, Jamshid al-Kashi, a little more than four centuries later, while the modern symbolic notation for fractions—i.e., separating the numerator and denominator with a horizontal line—was developed by Moroccan mathematician Abu Bakr al-Hassar during the twelfth century.³⁰

Islamic astronomy was particularly advanced, with Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi not only demonstrating the errors of Ptolemy’s methods and resulting computations but, in 1247, advancing a theorem now known as Tusi’s Double virtually identical to that published by Nicholas Copernicus in 1543.³¹ In fact, the scientist Willy Hartner discovered that Copernicus’ mathematical proof of the proposition was ultimately provided by Ibn al-Tusi in 1261 and that there is a clear appearance that the former simply copied the latter (without attribution).³²

One reason Islamic mathematics was so far ahead of that in The West was the ghubar, a set of Arabic numerals—including the zero, a concept unknown in Europe until the eleventh century and not commonly employed there until the sixteenth—facilitating computational complexities impossible to attain via its Roman counterpart.³³ Without the predication of Islam’s scientific revolution, the Western tradition of science would have been impossible in many other ways.³⁴ Indeed, the so-called scientific method itself may be seen to have originated in procedures for verification by replicable experimentation developed by Ibn al-Haytham and Ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes), circa 1000 C.E.³⁵ By then, the process of peer review—the veritable sine qua non of contemporary Western scholarship—had already been introduced by Syrian scholar Ishaq bin Ali al-Rahwi in his Ethics of the Physician and was widely practiced by Islamic scholars.³⁶

Muslim scientists and physicians were responsible for the discovery of infectious diseases, with Ibn Sina clearly identifying tuberculosis as prominent among them and introducing the method of quarantine to combat its spread during the eleventh century.³⁷ From there, he extrapolated the concept of epidemiology, including risk factor analysis and the idea of the syndrome for diagnostic purposes.³⁸ So comprehensive and advanced was Ibn Sina’s fourteen-volume al-Qanun fil-Tibb (Canon of Medicine), completed in 1025, that it remained a mainstay of medical instruction in Western universities until well into the nineteenth century, while many of the practices he advocated therein—clinical trials, randomized controlled trials, and efficacy tests, as examples—are still adhered to today.³⁹

From Southwest Asia and North Africa came not only many of The West’s key medical concepts, including the theory of microbes,⁴⁰ but its medical institutions as well. The first public hospital (bimaristan) was established by Harun al-Razi in Baghdad in 805 C.E., and such hospitals thereafter proliferated rapidly throughout the Islamic world. So, too, pharmacies were first established in Baghdad during the early tenth century where formal training and licensing of both physicians and pharmacists were required as of 931 C.E. in order to provide ready access to the approximately 760 clinically-tested medicinal plants and derivative drugs, including surgical anesthetics, eventually catalogued by Ibn Sina in his Canon.⁴¹

Given the availability of general anesthesia in Islamic medicine, surgical practice—including forms of neurosurgery—and understandings of human anatomy were far more advanced than anything possible in The West.⁴² Techniques described by the Andalusian physician Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi in his early-eleventh-century treatise On Surgery and Instruments, for example, were not fully replicable in Europe for nearly six hundred years.⁴³ Since Muslim pharmacological advances were contingent upon intimate familiarity with both botany and chemistry, moreover, appropriation of Islamic medical knowledge established the basis upon which Western science was consolidated in these areas as well.⁴⁴

Even in physics, ostensibly the most Western of all sciences, Islamic thought prefigured that of The West by centuries. By the eighth century, Medinaborn polymath Ja‘far ibn al-Sadiq had not only refuted Aristotle’s notion of the four elements, but may well have advanced a rudimentary particle theory of matter.⁴⁵ In the ninth, astronomer Ja’far ibn Musa ibn Shakir clearly foreshadowed Newton’s law of universal gravitation with a theory refined by Ibn al-Haytham during the eleventh century and unified by polymath Abu al-Fath Khazini during the twelfth.⁴⁶ Newton’s laws of motion, first enunciated in 1687, were also presaged in the work of Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, the Andalusian polymath Ibn Bajjah (Avempace), and the twelfth century Arab-Jewish scholar Abu Hamza al-Baghdadi.⁴⁷ It seems worth noting that, notwithstanding Newton, Ibn Sina’s general concept of momentum is still applied in physics.⁴⁸

Hundreds of years of technological advancements within the Islamic world infused a new rationalism to The West. The Western Renaissance would have been impossible without the foundation laid by Islam in the applied sciences of architecture and engineering. The ogival arches, as well as the methods of ribbed and pitched vaulting, essential to Gothic architecture and its Baroque successor, were lifted directly from Islamic templates in the Levant, Anatolia, Sicily, and Iberia.⁴⁹ By the same token, Muslim engineering techniques, especially those pertaining to water transfer, pumping, storage, and irrigation, were, in combination with various crop types developed by Islamic botanists, responsible for such agricultural advancement as was made in The West prior to the sixteenth century.⁵⁰

Finally, there is the matter of technology. Public clocks, for instance, could be found in Baghdad as early as 750 C.E., while eyeglasses would have been impossible without the highly refined understanding of optics provided by centuries of Islamic research.⁵¹ Paned glass, and stained glass as well, were widely-used in Muslim domains long before they made their first appearance in western Europe.⁵² Paper was invented by Ts’ai Lun in China, circa 100 C.E., and was already being milled in large quantities in Baghdad in 830. Likewise, the printing press made its first appearance in China circa 600 C.E, while moveable type was invented by the printer Pi Sheng in 1041, not the German printer Johannes Gutenberg.⁵³ These inventions were absorbed and developed by the Muslim world from which The West acquired them.

Much the same history pertains to guns and the gunpowder without which guns would have been quite pointless. Although The West did its best to credit Roger Bacon with inventing gunpowder during the thirteenth century, the substance actually originated in China five hundred years earlier and Islam acquired knowledge of it by 1240.⁵⁴ Predictably, given this chronology, the Chinese may also have invented guns, the earliest surviving example—a cannon—of which dates to 1288.⁵⁵ Muslim armies and inventors possibly developed such weapons even earlier; the Bishop of Léon reported their use by Muslim forces at Seville in 1248, as did Ibn al-Hassan during the battle of `Ayn Jalut in 1260.⁵⁶ The first known picture of a gun in The West did not appear until 1326, and the first known use of a cannon was in 1346, at the battle of Crécy.⁵⁷ Most likely, the first Western cannon was purchased from an Islamic source.⁵⁸

The increased potency and durability that derived from the development of ‘corned’ gunpowder from the 1420s gave The West a decisive advantage over its opponents.⁵⁹ The fact remains, however, that absent a technique for purifying saltpeter long-since discovered by Muslim chemists, there would have been no high-grade powder to corn.⁶⁰ In any case, whatever advantages The West obtained from the corning of gunpowder and attendant advances in weaponry were plainly insufficient to allow it to surmount the Ottoman power that blocked direct access to the goods and profits of Cathay (China) and Hindustan (India). This remained the case even after the Mongol onslaughts of the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries—with which western Christendom allied itself—repeatedly laid waste to Baghdad and other easterly centers of Islamic civilization.⁶¹

Ottoman power was temporarily able to forestall the menacing desire of European powers to further penetrate Asia. The West was therefore compelled to redirect its efforts. During the early fifteenth century, Portugal attempted to circumvent the Islamic Barrier by sailing southward along the coast of Africa, then eastward across the Indian Ocean.⁶² It was not until 1498 that Vasco da Gama would finally reach Calcutta via the Cape Route, however, and by then another Iberian seafarer, Cristóbal Colón (Columbus), had opened up a whole New World while attempting to reach the Far East by sailing west.⁶³ Both ventures created venues for the Western mode of intraspecies predation on a previously unimaginable scale.⁶⁴ Not only was the territory of two entire continents—three, counting Africa—suddenly available for the taking, but, more important in the moment, the resources therein: human, mineral, and agricultural.⁶⁵

The effects were genuinely transformative. The flow of precious metals into Iberia from the Americas as the hemisphere discovered by Colón was named by The West, was by 1600 in itself sufficient to underwrite Europe’s subsequent industrial revolution.⁶⁶ No less can be said of the profits accruing to England and France from the trade in slaves and sugar, and subsequently in cotton, by the end of the eighteenth century. Here, we see the origin of capitalism, in the modern sense of the term.⁶⁷ As well, the basis upon which The West would rapidly evolve and mass produce certain technologies—especially in the areas of weaponry, transportation, and communications—that empowered a mere handful of countries in western Europe to extend their imperial domains during the nineteenth century to the point that, by the early twentieth, they and their settler offspring in North America would claim possessory rights over the great bulk of the Earth’s surface.⁶⁸

In substance, the entire trajectory of Western expansion begun during the early fifteenth century reflected a ripening of the fundamental pathology from whence the identity of The West had arisen, to the point that an identically dehumanizing perception was projected to encompass