[Kabar-indonesia] 'Muslims must compete in the war of technology' [+Islam vs West]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

also: JP Op-Ed: Muslims vs. West: Update on the family quarrel 

The Jakarta Post
Wednesday, June 28, 2006

'Muslims must compete in the war of technology' 

Muslims across the world are currently debating the issue of jihad. Hazeh 
Jamal Al-Banna, a moderate Egyptian theologian and the brother of the founder of 
Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan Al-Banna, gave an interview to The Jakarta Post's 
Santi Tarigan on the issue on the sidelines of the International Conference of 
Islamic Scholars in Jakarta recently. The following are excerpts from the 
interview.

Question: What does jihad mean to you? 

Answer: Jihad in this contemporary era is not about dying for Allah but about 
living together harmoniously in Allah's path. Basically, jihad is different 
from war in the Muslim context. War is only a part of jihad. Jihad in the 
broader sense is the maximum effort to attain glory. When (Prophet) Muhammad 
returned from the Badar war, he told his ummah (people) to continue with a bigger 
war: A war to fight our own desires, to control our own emotions, and to purify 
our hearts. 

People now link Islam with terrorism. Is it true that Islam teaches violence? 

Islam does not allow its ummah to use violence in its missionary endeavors. 
Muhammad went to war because Muslims were not allowed to practice their 
beliefs. If Muslims were allowed to keep their faith, then the war would not have 
happened. The basic principle in Islamic teachings is the fight for the freedom 
to practice the Muslim faith, not to impose the faith. We can learn from 
Muhammad when he wanted to expand Islam to Medina, he did not use arms, instead, he 
chose to teach the Islamic faith inviolately. 

How should Muslims live alongside non-Muslims? 

Islam believes in tolerance. We can read that in the Koran. Allah does not 
prohibit Muslims from living together with non-Muslims as long as they are able 
to live in peace. But Allah permits His people to fight for their faith, 
especially when others threaten that. 

Why have Muslims decided to terrorize non-Muslims? 

Islam was built based on the freedom to believe in one's faith. Many Muslims 
have decided to resort to terrorism because they have experienced injustice. 
For instance, Western Europe decided to invade Muslim-occupied territories in 
the war of the cross or the Crusades for 200 years. After the war finished, the 
West once again attacked the East with colonialism, which also used violence. 
The recent phenomenon of terrorism emerged because of Muslims' disappointment 
with U.S. foreign policy. Terrorism is not just about religion. Terrorism 
occurs more because of injustice. 

Terrorism that occurs within a country is usually a result of the same 
problem. For instance, terrorism in my country started under the administration of 
Gamal Abdul Nasser. He arrested all his opponents until the prisons were full 
of political prisoners. When they got out of prison, they vented their anger by 
terrorizing the government. 

How can Muslims unite? 

In 1981, I suggested that Muslims form organizations based on their 
occupation such as laborers, lawyers, and even students. With such organizations, they 
can interact with other organizations in other countries. This kind of 
connection makes them stronger. They are not only related in one country but also 
related to each other because of, let's say, military and economic powers. 

What should be of concern for Muslims now? 

Now, war is not about using arms but is about how to implement technology. I 
met some figures from contemporary Islamic schools of thought. They have been 
questioning how to disseminate Islamic values if they have to face weapons 
such as missiles. Muslims must compete in the war of technology. We must 
eliminate assumptions that link Muslim countries to poverty or underdevelopment. 

What do you think of (the late) Hasan Al-Banna? 

Hasan Al-Banna was basically a teacher. After he graduated from the 
Department of Darul Ulum of Cairo University, he used to dream about teaching and doing 
activities related to civil society, education and economic movements. 
However, between 1940 and 1948, Hasan Al-Banna saw something that constituted a 
threat for Egypt. The first threat came in 1940 when Zionists intervened in civil 
society and the second occurred when Israel was building its society. At that 
time Egypt was still experiencing colonialism under England. Seeing those two 
threats, Hasan Al-Banna thought of the need for a movement to protect our 
country. He then built a movement for adults to face an attack from Israel and a 
movement for youths to protect the country from colonialism. 

These two movements were not radical as people have thought. The movements 
were initiated to protect the country. But since the existence of Israel in 
1948, there has been contradictory policy-making in Egypt that led to the killing 
of prime minister Al-Nukrasi Bassa. Hasan Al-Banna got shot because of a 
conspiracy between incumbent parties. He was accused of killing the prime minister, 
causing the government to stifle his movement, Ikhwan Al-Muslimin. This 
movement was principally a Tarbiyah movement, or an education-oriented movement, 
not a political movement. 

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The Jakarta Post
June 27, 2006

Op-Ed

Muslims vs. West: Update on the family quarrel 

Gwynne Dyer, London

The past year has been one of the worst in recent history for relations 
between Muslims and "the West" (as the part of the world formerly called 
"Christendom" is now known). According to the Pew Global Attitude Project for 2006, an 
opinion survey conducted in thirteen mainly Christian or Muslim countries by 
the Pew Research Center in Washington, the majorities who saw relations between 
the West and Islam as "generally bad" ranged from 53 percent in Russia and 
Indonesia (the lowest) to highs of 70 percent in Germany and 84 percent in Turkey.

There were purely local causes for some of the extreme reactions, like 
resentment among Turks at being seen as problem candidates for European Union 
membership simply because they are Muslims. The violent uproar in January over 
Danish newspaper cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad doubtless influenced the 
answers of many respondents, both Muslim and Western, in a poll conducted only 
months later. But military confrontations that killed a lot of people were 
the core of the problem. 

Western armies fought local insurgents in two occupied Muslim countries, Iraq 
and Afghanistan. Suicide bomb attacks by young British Muslims killed 52 
people in London, and the nightmare images of 9/11 were never far from the surface 
in the United States. And the Arab-Israeli fight over the land between the 
Jordan river and the sea entered its seventieth bloody year. 

Seventy years give or take a few, depending on whether you date that long 
conflict from the great Palestinian revolt against Jewish immigration in 1936 or 
from some other clash of that period. Without that open sore, however, the 
deep resentment of Muslims at having been conquered by European empires (as they 
all were, apart from the Turks) would probably have mostly died down by now. 
It is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has kept it alive for generations of 
Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. 

The US and British invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake that confirmed 
existing suspicions in the Muslim world: its declared motives were so 
transparently false that Muslims everywhere were driven to look for ulterior, undeclared 
motives -- like a Western crusade against Islam. On the other hand, Muslims 
have remained in denial about how their own internal conflicts have spilled over 
into anti-Western terrorism. Majorities in most of the Muslim countries polled 
still refuse to believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United 
States, taking refuge in fantasies about Zionist or Central Intelligence 
Agency plots. 

Descend from high politics to cultural stereotypes, and it starts to look 
like a classic family quarrel. A majority of Muslims see Westerners as violent 
and immoral, while the view from the reverse perspective is that Muslims are 
violent and fanatical. 

Majorities in every Western country polled see Muslims as disrespectful of 
women, and majorities in every Muslim country polled except Turkey see 
Westerners as disrespectful of women. But then, it IS a family quarrel. 

You cannot have a "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and "Westerners" 
(Christians and Jews, by belief or at least by cultural descent) because they 
are members of the same civilization. They are the twin descendants of the old 
classical civilization of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. That 
world was divided almost fourteen centuries ago between competing but clearly 
related religions -- the Christians of seventh-century Syria and Egypt who were 
the first to face Muslim armies surging out of Arabia saw Islam as a new 
Christian heresy -- but it remains a single civilization whose fundamental cultural 
values are largely shared. 

The surviving half of the formerly Christian world subsequently spread its 
faith and its genes across the Americas and Australia, while Islam conquered 
much of southern Asia (and the two religions divided Africa between them). 
Together, they account today for more than half of the world's population, so the 
old family quarrel affects a lot of people. 

Muslim-Western disputes are so emotional precisely because they are between 
family members: neither of the estranged twin cultures brings the same amount 
of reproach and resentment to its occasional disputes with peoples who belong 
to entirely different traditions. But the fact that they do share so much 
history and so many values -- they are all, as Muslims put it, "peoples of the 
Book" -- means that the possibility of reconciliation is also ever present. 

The most interesting statistics in the Pew survey are those about Muslim 
minorities living in the West, who were interviewed as a separate group for the 
first time this year. Muslims elsewhere may see Westerners as disrespectful of 
women, but Muslims who actually live among Westerners overwhelmingly say the 
opposite -- by a 73 percent majority in Germany, a 77 percent majority in 
France, an 82 percent majority in Spain. Even in Britain, despite the police 
harassment that has alienated so many Muslims since last July's bombs in London, a 
narrow majority agrees. 

The same phenomenon is evident across a broad range of issues -- and the huge 
non-Muslim majorities in Britain, France and the United States also have 
largely positive views of the Muslims in their midst despite all the old history 
and all the recent clashes and controversies. To know them may not be to love 
them, exactly, but it does seem to breed tolerance, and maybe even solidarity. 

The writer is a London-based independent journalist. 

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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