Understanding Jihad in Islam

Understanding Jihad in Islam

Introduction and Welcome

This lecture is organized by Zaytuna Institute in association with the Muslim Students Association at Santa Clara University. We would like to extend our thanks and appreciation for their help and support in putting this lecture together and in providing the support and help at the campus.

About Zaytuna Institute

A brief description about Zaytuna Institute for our guests and for people who have no experience of Zaytuna Institute in the past. Zaytuna Institute and Academy is a non-profit, non-political educational institute and school committed to reviving time-tested methods of educating and transforming human beings. We recognize ignorance as the greatest weapon of the dark forces working in the world and believe that the light of the true knowledge as the only weapon to dispel that darkness. This is our struggle and our efforts are directed at spreading the light and wisdom of prophetic truths everywhere and to all people.

Our aim is to teach the tools individuals need in order to live lives of guidance and adherence to sacred order and to restore broad-based pluralistic and true scholarship to its proper place as a first priority of Muslims. Now, the term Zaytuna refers to the sacred tree in our understanding, which is the olive tree, which both produces for us fruits as well as its oil. Now, the olive tree takes many years for it to produce its fruits. Actually, in some cases, up to 14 years to give its first fruit. So if you're planting an olive tree, you have to be patient for you to wait for the fruit as well as the tree digs down deep roots in the ground, which help the tree survive even in times of drought.

The Topic of Jihad

Our lecture today is about a difficult topic, not from an Islamic understanding, but difficult topic in these days in the Western world. Since the term Jihad has been used and abused and misused by both Muslims and others as well. And essentially, we'd like to have this lecture to have an open discussion about this term, which have created much misunderstandings. And the hope of this discussion is to create further understanding between the Muslim community in the United States, as well as our neighbors, colleagues, and friends. So we welcome you as friends, colleagues, and neighbors into this lecture. And we are building the bridges of understanding.

Introduction of Speaker Hamza Yusuf

Our first speaker will be Hamza Yusuf Hansen. For the Muslims, Hamza Yusuf is a very well known scholar. He was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and raised in Northern California. He began studying religious traditions early in his education, eventually leading to his discovery of Islam, which he embraced in 1977.

After becoming fluent in Arabic, he began to travel extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa, studying traditional Islamic sciences under the tutelage of some of the greatest Muslim scholars of our age. Ten years later, he returned to the United States and took a degree obtaining a BA in religious sciences, in religious studies at San Jose State University. In 1996, he founded the Zaytuna Institute and Academy, a non-profit, non-partisan, non-political organization dedicated to the revival of traditional Islam.

He has translated several classical texts from Arabic, and presently teach at Zaytuna Institute and Academy in Hayward, California. His recorded lectures have sold worldwide and brought him a large and enthusiastic audiences of all ages. Since the events of September 11, his role as a scholar, lecturer, and public speaker has been greatly expanded to include numerous newspaper interviews and appearances on radio and TV in the United States and UK.

I present to you, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.

Opening Remarks and Greetings

(Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, wa salatu wa salamu ala sharaf al-anbiya wa al-mursaleen wa ala alihi wa sahbihi ajma'in wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billahi al-aliyyi al-adheem)

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, I want to welcome everybody, and I also want to welcome our teacher, a very eminent scholar from Yemen, Habib Ali al-Jifri, who has come, he's going around the United States now, and I think it's very unusual for people from the area that he's from to actually do what he's doing.

The Ba'aluwi Tradition

Traditionally, they stayed within the lands of the Muslims, and in East Africa and in Indonesia, the reason that those countries now are Muslim is because of his ancestors, who are a clan from Hadhramaut, known as the Ba'aluwi, and they are direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, they trace their lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), and usually on both sides, on the mother and the father's side, and they have a tradition of scholarship and a tradition of preaching the Islamic tradition and inviting others to it, and probably most of the Indian coastline, and also in East Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, these places became Muslim at their hands.

The Spread of Islam: Two Methods

One of the interesting things about the spread of Islam is that Islam tended to spread by two methods. One was by conquest, and to deny that, I think, would be disingenuous, and to deny something that's historically documented, the Muslims did indeed go and conquer lands.

Islam and Religious Freedom

There is not a history of forcing people into Islam. In fact, in the Islamic tradition, if a person is forced into Islam by the sword, he can actually, he has the right to revert back to his previous tradition. It's prohibited for him to be forced to accept the religion of Islam, and that is something that is evidenced by the fact that churches, synagogues, temples exist all over the Muslim world, and in fact, the Ottoman Empire, during the time when the Jews were persecuted, not only invited the Jews of Spain, the Sephardic Jews, who were being persecuted at the hands of the Catholics, not only invited them to the Ottoman Empire, but also actually built for them synagogues, and there are, to this day, synagogues, in fact, there are some in Sarajevo, that are built by Ottoman architects and by the actual government as a way of helping these people to reestablish their religious roots.

Omar ibn al-Khattab and Jerusalem

Omar ibn al-Khattab, who is known as the conqueror of Jerusalem, when he entered into Jerusalem, the Christians prior to that had prohibited Jews from entering into the holy city of Jerusalem, because at that time, obviously, the Christians considered the Jews to be the killers of Christ, which the Muslims do not believe, and now most Christians, I don't think, believe that anymore, but at that time, it was very common to believe that the Jews were the killers of Christ, and for that reason, they had been often persecuted, not always, under the Christians. There were times, actually, when they were not persecuted, but often they were persecuted. During that time, they were not allowed to enter into Jerusalem.

They had been removed from it, and the Christians did not allow them to come back. Omar ibn al-Khattab, at the conquest of Jerusalem, did two very important things. The first thing he did was he cleaned the Temple Mount. It was being used as a garbage dump by the Christians, which is now where the famous golden dome and the rock and what's known as the furthest mosque, the third most sacred site in Islam, is on that Temple Mount, and it was being used as a garbage dump. It's considered by most Jewish scholars and rabbis to be the site of Solomon's Temple, and so Omar had it cleaned, purified, and one of the first great architectural structures in the history of Islam was built there by a later caliph, which is the famous gold dome, and Omar initially reinstituted the visitation rights of Jews into Jerusalem, but did not permit them to live inside the city, and the reason that he did that is because he did not feel that the Christians living inside the city were ready for the integration, and so it was actually a strategic move to prevent any violence.

What he did, and the proof of this is in one of his descendants, who is Omar ibn Abdulaziz, who is known as the fifth caliph about 60 years later, who becomes the caliph of the Muslims, he allowed not only visitation rights, but allowed Jews to purchase and to live in Jerusalem once again, and this is all well-documented history that anybody can look it up in both Western and Muslim sources.

Conquest Without Forced Conversion

In any case, my point was that Islam did indeed spread by conquest. The Muslims did go into countries, and

they conquered the countries. They did not force people to become Muslim by sword, but in fact made treaties with them, and as they proselytized, and often by simply their example, Islam would naturally spread amongst them.

One of the interesting things is the five great cities of ancient Christianity, all of them eventually became Muslim cities, having almost entirely Muslim populations, none by coercion. So Eastern Christianity, basically both the Arian, what's called the Monophysite traditions, which were considered somewhat heretical by the Orthodox and the Catholic traditions, most of their followers became Muslim, although there is a monophysite tradition still, which is known as the Maronites, who are monophysites, and this has to do with a very obscure argument over the nature of the substance of Jesus. Was he divine in substance or essence, or was he human in his flesh form and infused with the divine? So it's something that theologians argued about for a long time.

But the monophysites, who still exist in Lebanon, eventually were reincorporated into Catholicism. So the Maronites, even though they are a sect, they're still considered within the Catholic tradition. The Arians who were in North Africa, and from the Arian tradition, it was basically a Unitarian tradition and probably a phenomenon in this country, which has its roots in Arianism, is known as the Jehovah's Witness movement. They have their roots in Arianism. Their theology is very similar to Arian theology. Bishop Arian was a famous Christian bishop from Alexandria and was antagonistic to another famous bishop who, in fact, his creed would become the dominant creed of the Orthodox tradition.

These Arians largely became Muslim, and that is why Libya today has a Muslim population, although it was originally Christian. Morocco also. And then the Visigoths, who were Arians in Spain, also adopted Islam as their religion. The Muslims in Spain were not Arabs who invaded Spain. Muslims in Spain were made of several different ethnic groups.

Early Globalization in Islam

One of the things about the Islamic tradition, if you look at it historically, is the Muslims were really, in a sense, the first globalists. We like to think and pride ourselves in being these globalists, people that have global economy. We have global concerns, all of these things, and we think it's a very modern idea. The fact is that there were very sophisticated trading systems all throughout the ancient world, and although the Muslims were central to this, there were other groups that were quite significant, like the Chinese.

The Chinese have an immense tradition of global commerce, and the Silk Route, which goes through Afghanistan, Tibet, and into China, this route was a source of massive commerce and trade, and much of the goods made in China will end up actually in Europe through this route. So people forget that the ancient world was not only extraordinarily pluralistic, it was multi-ethnic, it was multi-lingual, it was also multi, it had many religions. And the Muslims, for many centuries, were not only the caretakers of that world, they were also people that helped to shape it and facilitate its growth. Obviously, the decline of Islam is another matter, or rather, the decline of Muslims is another matter.

The Second Method: Commerce and Trade

The second way that Islam spread was not through conquest, but was through commerce. It was through merchants that would go into the lands of non-Muslims, and they would trade with them. And this is the way that Habib Ali's ancestors spread Islam throughout Indonesia and places like this, that nobody ever went there with a sword, nobody ever went there as an invading army. The Indonesians have the largest Muslim population in the world. There are over 120 million Muslims in Indonesia, and Indonesia was never conquered by a Muslim army. Islam spread in Indonesia through commerce and trade by very upright, just people that represented the best of this tradition.

Understanding the Word Jihad

Now, in looking at jihad, jihad is an emotive word. And what I mean by emotive is when we say the word jihad, an effect happens in many, many people, largely in the West, negative. It is seen as a negative term, which is tragic because like crusade in the English language, it's a very similar word. And the reason it's similar is because crusade is a very emotive term to Muslims. Muslims are very troubled when they hear the word crusade.

The Parallel with "Crusade"

And this is why when a Western person uses the word crusade, it's using in a positive light. Western people will say that we need a crusade against drugs. We need a crusade against crime. We need a crusade against this. And that's why when President Bush used the word, which might've been unwittingly, I don't know, I'm not going to, I wasn't reading his heart. And if he said that it was just the first word that came to his mind, I'll take that at face value. I really don't have a problem with that because I've used the word crusade as a Muslim because it's a very nice English word. Although it does have a very horrific history, like many words.

So jihad has a very similar effect on Muslims. It's a very positive word. It does not have a negative meaning at all. It has a very positive meaning. But if you look at the history of the crusades and the history of Islam, you'll find very different stories. And that's another matter.

The Focus of This Discussion

What I would like to talk about is basically two things. I want to talk about violence. And then I want to talk about the present condition that we're in. And then I'm going to hand this over to Habib Ali Al-Jifri.

Violence as a Human Phenomenon

Violence is a very human event in the world. Human beings are violent in many different ways. We can be verbally violent. Verbal abuse can be sometimes as harmful or more so than actual physical abuse. One of the Arab poets said that a sword only cuts the flesh, but the word can cut the heart. And what he's talking about is not the physical heart, but the spiritual heart, that words can be devastating for people.

Domestic Violence as the Root Cause

I personally believe that much of the human condition and the troubles that we see in the world are directly resulted to verbal abuse that occurs in houses, in actual domestic situations. And I think that the domestic violence on the planet against children and also against women is largely the cause of what we're witnessing, the type of disturbances that we see in our world. I think that some of our greatest Western literary geniuses actually focused on this.

One of them was obviously Shakespeare. And King Lear, I believe, is actually about domestic abuse, even though it's about a king. I think that it's at the root of it is about abuse towards his children and what happens to him as a result of that abuse. And one of the interesting remarks that King Lear says is he says, I'm a man more sinned against than sinning. And perpetrators of violence are often people that make that remark. I'm a man more sinned against than sinning. In other words, it's not me that's doing the harm, it's other people that are harming me. I think this is a very common psychological position that the perpetrators of violence on others take, that they're doing it with justification.

Literary Reflections on Domestic Abuse

Another literary, although he would be considered maybe second tier, he has weight, I think, little melodramatic, but Charles Dickens also deals with the problem of domestic abuse. And one of the books considered probably his greatest, which is David Copperfield, he mentions in there that you have to beware of mistreating children, because in the child's world, a slight injustice is a great injustice. Just as a wooden horse in the child's world is like a great Clydesdale to an adult, that when you abuse children, it might seem very insignificant to you, but in the child's world, it's actually very, very significant and devastating, because everything in the world of the child is magnified in experience.

And another, probably, I think, one of the greatest Western writers recognized by most literary critics as one of the greatest novelists ever, if not the greatest, is Dostoevsky. And his great book, The Brothers Karamazov, is really, I think, at root, a discourse, although it talks about many things, including nihilism and a lot of the problems that we're dealing with today, I think at the root of it, he's really talking about domestic violence and about the results of children that are deeply abused by their parents. And it's very interesting that the murderer, if you've never read the book, I don't wanna tell you who killed him, because that's one of the really wonderful things about that book, is unlike crime and punishment, where you know who killed right from the beginning, in The Brothers Karamazov, you don't find out until almost the end of the book, but the one that killed him was the one that was most abused by his father.

War as Magnified Domestic Violence

So he killed his father, and we can kill our father in many ways in the world. Often, our attacks against authority are, in fact, nothing other than pathological statements that are made by people that were abused by their parents as children. There is a lot of abuse going on in the world. I talked about children, I could go on about women,

but I think, in the end of the day, what wars are, ultimately, is they're often simply domestic violence magnified to an extreme scale.

It brings about the same basic issues. In the end, I think Napoleon was basically just an infant that was allowed to manifest his rage on a very large scale, and Hitler, there's actually an interesting book written by a Jewish scholar showing how the Nazi generation was, in fact, a generation that was rooted in the domestic violence of the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, and the Dr. Spock of that period was a complete fascist in his views and opinions, and felt that the best way to deal with children was to beat them into obedience, which is very interesting. One of the things noted about Saddam Hussein is that he was also somebody who was domestically abused considerably as a child.

Adult Responsibility

Now, on the one hand, I don't think that this justifies adult behavior, and once you become an adult, you become responsible in ways that you are not when you're a child. When people get into an infantile rage, I often feel that I want to say, you know, when a two-year-old does this, I can make an excuse for them, but you're 30 or 40, what's your excuse? It's something that, unfortunately, we tend to suffer the consequences of people's behavior. One of the things that Paul the Christian said, he said, when we were children, we did the things that children do, and now that we are men, let us do the things that men do. In other words, that there should be a demarcation between what is allowable as a child and what is allowable as an adult.

So ultimately, responsibility is something that, when we enter into adulthood, according to the Islamic tradition, two angels begin to write everything that we say and we're held into account. But we are in a very violent world. There is immense violence going on at the domestic level, at the national level, and then at the international level, and there are many, many wars going on right now in various places.

Western Complicity in Global Violence

Unfortunately, one of the things that we in the West like to do is we like to say that we are more sinned against than sinning, and I find it very interesting that the weapons always, and invariably in those pictures that we get from war correspondents, whenever I see the weapons in the hands of whoever happens to be fighting somewhere in what's known as the developing world, they're always made in America, or made in Britain, or made in France, or made in China. None of them are made locally.

They're all made somewhere else, and I'm very interested in who those people are that are bringing those weapons into those countries and spreading them, and then in the hands of people that obviously are not prepared to deal with the power that those weapons enable one to wield, just like we do not allow children to drive cars because a car is a deadly weapon in the hands of somebody that does not know how to drive a car, and so I think that it's very tragic that in the West, the number one industry that we have, including in the United States of America, is the manufacturing and development of weapons of mass destruction.

The Empowerment of Dictators

I find that very interesting, and I find it very interesting that it is the West who enables people like Saddam Hussein, very well documented in a book called The Web of Deceit, somebody who was empowered by the West, given all of these weapons to fight a war by proxy against the Iranians, interestingly enough, and now I'm hearing the same people that enabled him to do that say, and he fought a war against the Iranians and used weapons of mass destruction, and I start feeling that I'm in an Orwellian type of world, that I've gone through the looking glass.

I mean, one of the things about Alice when she was confronted with the Queen's court, the Queen said, off with his head, and she said, but there's been no trial, and the Queen looked at her and said, here, we enact the punishment first, and then we have the trial, and this is the kind of logic of going through the looking glass, and this is what I feel. I feel like I'm in a world where things are literally turned upside down, and unfortunately, sophistry is effective in people that have not been trained in logical analyses.

The Danger of Sophistical Reasoning

If you have never had any training in sophistical reasoning, because there are two types of logic. There's formal and informal logic. One of them deals with the validity of reasoning of the statements themselves, whether that's valid, but the other deals with the conclusion, because you can have a valid system of reasoning, but arrive at a false conclusion, so the conclusion is unsound. If you're not trained in analyzing arguments, and yet you're being given arguments by very sophisticated people who have been trained in those arguments, because what people learn in law school is how to argue. They learn how to reason.

Well, they also learn how to reason fallaciously, and this is something that lawyers learn. They learn to reason with sophistry. They are trained sophists, and what they do is, the ones who sell their souls to the corporation or to whatever cause happens to be paying the most amount of money, what some people term scholars for dollars, that these people are able to use those same tools that they were trained to fight against and identify, because Aristotle called rhetoric the art of telling the truth, and what Socrates was most concerned about in the dialogues was exposing false reasoning.

The Role of Truth-Tellers in Society

This is what, at the root of the Socratic method, is to show people how they can be completely deluded and how they can delude others, because you need that person in a society, and the state in the time of Athens killed Socrates for doing nothing more, and that's what Socrates clearly says in the Apology. The only reason that you're killing me is because I just go around showing that you're all filled with lies, and when he was asked what his punishment should be, because the Athenians were very, they were very civilized people, so they would condemn somebody to death and then allow him, they would condemn him as guilty, but then they would give him the right to suggest a punishment, so the punishment that Socrates suggested was that they give him free meals for the rest of his life, because he felt he was doing such an extraordinary service to the state by

pointing out how dangerous it is to have people out there using fallacious reasoning and causing other people to go astray by that reasoning.

Now, this traditionally is the role of the people of God. This is the role, you see, what we honor, I mean, Martin Luther King, in his time in this country, Martin Luther King was not only fighting state power civilly through civil disobedience, not only was he fighting state power, but if you read his letter from the Birmingham jail, he was also fighting Christian leaders that were very upset with him as a Christian leader to be rocking the boat, to be upsetting the sensibilities of a population that did not want to hear the truths that he happened to be saying.

Now, he was assassinated, and again, that's a moot point, I mean, who knows who did it, there's different speculation, official version, and then other versions are out there, but the point is he was removed, that voice was removed from society. Now, one of the things that society does, and it's very interesting, is they say the only good Indian is a dead Indian, which is a really interesting statement, the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

Heroes and Terrorists in History

In other words, once Geronimo's been removed as a force of resistance for his people, we can honor Geronimo with Hollywood films where he's the hero, but during the time of Geronimo, he was a terrorist. Once Hannibal, you see Hannibal, who fought in the Punic War, Hannibal was considered a complete terrorist by the Roman state, and he was the first person to actually bring the war into the actual Roman state. Now, Hannibal, like most of the warriors at that time, was actually a very brutal character, but now he's lionized in history. Hannibal is seen as a freedom fighter for his own people.

William Wallace, Braveheart, Mel Gibson, William Wallace is a hero. Well, when William Wallace was fighting, William Wallace was seen as an evil threat to the power of Britain inside Scotland, and Scotland was seen simply as a British colony. So history is very interesting. I wish I could be around 500 years from now to see how historians will look at this period and who they will see as the good people and who they will see as the bad people. It's a very interesting thing to reflect on in history and the nature of history.

The Challenge of Speaking Truth

Paul also says in the Gospels, do not conform to this world, because conformists are very dangerous people. It's very easy to go along with the popular opinion. It's very easy to go along with what everybody says is the dominant opinion, you see. That's very easy. There's no threat to oneself, but to speak the truth when nobody else is speaking it, that is a very daunting challenge, a very frightening task for anybody. And the only people, I contest that the only people in our society that can do that are comedians, because they trivialize it.

The only truth I've ever seen in the newspapers is in the comic section, because it's trivialized. Those are the people that can get up and speak the truth. There's another group that can do it also, and traditionally they were killed often because of the power that they wielded, but those were the poets. The poets can also tell the truth. I was in an audience after 9-11, and a woman recited a poem against the policies of George Bush, and everybody

applauded her. And I realized, had I said the same thing in prose as a speech, they would have tar and feathered me. But because it was artistic, because it was non-threatening, somehow it was more palatable. And this is something very interesting about human nature.

Debunking the Myth of Islamic Violence

So I personally believe that one of the greatest myths about Islam is that Islam is a violent religion. I think that this is an insidious myth, and I think that historians, when they look back at this age, they will see the Muslims as probably the most non-violent people during this time. And I'm not saying that as some kind of opinion that I've arrived at because I would like it to be true. I'm talking about very real facts.

Western Violence in Establishing Democracy

Americans and Europeans, we like to pride ourselves on our democratic republicanism. We like to pride ourselves that we elect our representatives. We forget about the reign of terror in France. We forget about all of those people that were taken to the guillotine. We forget about Britain's wars in order to achieve a type of parliamentarian government, about what Cromwell did to the Irish, let alone to the Catholics. We forget about regicidal tradition in the West. We forget about the Mexican Revolution.

You see, the modern Mexican government, you can't understand that without understanding Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata. And look at what Pancho Villa did. He was a terrorist. Really, he's lionized now, but if you actually study the actual history and look at what Pancho Villa did to civilians, to American merchants that were working in Mexico, eventually assassinated after he'd already retired and been given a nice villa by the Mexican government.

So when we look at the West, we have been through massive violent upheaval in order to bring about what we're now enjoying. We forget about all the dead people. We forget about the American Revolution. We forget about the Civil War, which was really an extension of the American Revolution. The Civil War is an extension of unfinished business. And read Lincoln's second inaugural address. We forget what we've been through.

Comparing Historical Violence

If you look at the Muslim world, the Muslim world has not been through these type of events. The violence in the Muslim world historically is much less. If you look at the 20th century alone, look at the period between 1958 and 1962 in China, in which it's estimated around 20 million Chinese are killed. Look at Stalin's reign in Russia. We're talking about liberal estimates. Conservative estimates say that it's at least 20 million. More liberal estimates go up to 50 million. That were killed at the hands of Stalin. Look at Nazi Germany.

We tend to forget that Nazi Germany is a Western country. The Germans are Western people. They're Protestants. They're Christians. Adolf Hitler and all of his people went to Protestant churches. And there's been debates in the historical community. How much did Protestant antisemitism in Germany have to do with the rise and creation of the Nazis? I mean, we forget that the Protestants in Germany, and all you have to do is read

Luther, Martin Luther, and read his opinions about the Jews and what he says about the Jews and the deep antisemitism that existed.

Look at the history of violence against the Jewish community in Europe. I mean, people forget how much violence has been done to the Jews, the pogroms. All in Russia, it's very interesting that the pogroms are across the board. You find them in Russia, in Germany, in France. You find them in Great Britain. The Jews are expelled from Great Britain. It was Cromwell that brought them back. So you have all of this interesting, horrific history of violence.

The Muslim World's Record

And then when you move to the Muslim world, it's very interesting. The Muslim world has no tradition of genocide. And even the Armenians who have constantly talked about the Armenian pogroms that occurred at the hands of the Turks. If you look at that, it's very interesting that the Armenians, even if we grant, although there are many historians that believe there were gross exaggerations about that, and I don't wanna go into that, with all respect to the Armenians and to their suffering. I don't wanna go into that.

But there are British who believe that it was actually, in fact, a lot of propaganda in the West in order to create anti-Ottoman sentiment because the Ottomans were aligned at that time with Germany and there was obviously that aspect. So the Armenian, this is very late. The Armenians achieved levels. They were ministers in the history of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians had extraordinary percocets in just being citizens of the Ottoman state.

A Personal Story from the Ottoman Empire

And in fact, Dr. Bazayan, I mean, there's many Palestinians and Lebanese and people of Armenian descent that became Muslim. And I treated a woman in her late 90s in the hospital for congestive heart failure who had lived in the Ottoman Empire in Iraq and she spoke Arabic. And I speak Arabic and I was working in a critical care unit and I started talking with her in Arabic. She was so happy that I knew Arabic. And she asked me, can I bring in my cups? They do something called cupping in Chinese and Arabic medicine.

So she asked, she said, it really helps me. And she said, (ده حكمة عربية، ما بيفهمها هدول الغربيين - dee hikmah arabia, ma biafhamaha hadoli algharbiyeen). She said, this is like a, this is an Arabic wisdom that these Western people, they don't understand. This lady was a Christian Armenian. And when I asked her, she migrated from the Ottoman Empire in 1920 and she was born at the turn of the century. This was in the early 90s.

She migrated in the 1920s. She remembered Sultan Rashad. And she said that, they used to say سلطان رشاد هو اللي خرب البلاد - Sultan Rashad huwa li kharrab al bilad). Sultan Rashad, he's the one that ruined everything. It rhymes in Arabic. It's like a political slogan.

So I asked her, can I ask you a question? What was it like being a Christian in Iraq? And I swear, and God is my witness. She said to me, we had no problems until the British came. She said, we were Christian. Our neighbors were Muslim. We had Jewish neighbors. People had been living like that for centuries.

But when they came, they said, you're different from them. You're like us. You believe in Jesus. They don't believe in Jesus. And she said, my father said to me, it's time to leave. And he migrated to Canada.

Colonial Divide and Conquer

So it's very interesting because this is divida et impera, divide and conquer. It's an ancient method of colonization. And the Latins knew it very well. And certainly the British knew it very well also. So we don't like to think about the history of what's happened in the Muslim world. If you really want to understand the Muslim world, and I know that the Muslims have to take responsibility. And that's part of the Quranic worldview is that Muslims need to take responsibility for what happens to them.

Understanding All Facets of a Situation

But it's also important to understand all of the facets of any proposition, any situation, any question. The Arabs say, the people of logic in Arabic say الحكم على الشيء فرع عن تصوره - al-hukumu ala shaytan far'un an tasawwurihi). Before you can judge something accurately, you must understand it and conceptualize it in all of its facets. And so I would recommend reading the book, A Peace to End All Peace by David Frumpkin السلام لينهي كل السلام - As-salam liyunhi kullu as-salam). The Peace to End All Peace, which is a history written by a very well-respected British historian, footnoted through and through 480 some odd pages, I think. And he documents how the entire colonial situation was designed to ensure continual war in the Middle East.

A Hypothetical Scenario

Now, I would like to ask all of you, as people that have probably a reasonable education of our history and geography, this is a very educated area. I would like to ask you, how do you think the Scottish would feel if the Germans came in and they said, we're gonna back you in freeing yourselves from the British? We're gonna give you weapons. We'll even help you with military advisors. And once you get free, we'll help you set up your state.

And the Scottish say, that sounds great. So then the Germans do that, and the Scottish actually win and defeat the British. But unbeknown to the Scottish, the Germans already made a deal with the French that once the Scottish did the job, they would come in and they would divide up Scotland and Germany between them. And to add insult to injury, give Ireland to all the wandering gypsies of Europe and make it gypsy land. So how do you think the Irish would feel about that taboo? And then put the Irish on little reservations, and when the IRA get their act together and start blowing up the gypsies, they're told, you're the evil ones.

The Reality of Racism and Double Standards

I think this really gets down to some basic things. Brown people are somehow much easier to look on with contempt in the world. And the West. You see, because nobody's dropping bombs on Ireland, nobody's talking

about stopping Irish terrorism. What about Basque terrorism? What's the difference? I mean, it's very interesting. The Arabs say, بعضكم تجر وبعضنا لا تجر - ba'ukum tajurru wa ba'una la tajurru). Your preposition can take an object, but my preposition can't take an object. In other words, the rules of grammar apply to you, but they don't apply to me.

So we're in a very strange situation. And unfortunately, like Goring said at the Nuremberg trials, when he refused to defend himself, he said, this isn't about defense. He said, this is about power. He said, we had power. We did what we want. Now you have power. You do what you want.

The Melian Dialogue: Justice and Power

If you know history, though, there's a beautiful story in the history of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. And it's the great dialogue between the Athenian ambassadors and the Greek, the Melians, who were of the island of Milos. The Melians were like Switzerland. They were very small, no power, didn't want, maybe not make chocolate, but they wanted to make baklava or something like that. Maybe not clocks, but sundials.

The Athenians won a brilliant victory against the Persians. And they were feeling really powerful. And they decided, let's take over the whole place. Let's just take over Greece. Well, the Spartans didn't like it, so they went to war. This is the Peloponnesian War. The Greeks sent ambassadors to the Melians, and they said to the Melians, you have to come in with us and help us fight this war. The Melians said, we want to stay neutral.

The Greek ambassador, according to Thucydides, said, because we have power, we do what we will. And because you have no power, you do what you must. I mean, the beauty of the ancient peoples, they were very honest. They didn't have all these United Nations with rubber stamp resolutions and things like that and have to be hypocritical. I like people that are honest. I know what I'm dealing with. The Arabs say, I'll take a scorpion on a rock over a scorpion under a rock any day. Because you know what you're doing. You know the danger that's right in front of you.

The Divine Justice

So the Melian says a very interesting thing. He said, you should beware because you have power now, but it might not always be like this. And they said, why is that? And the Melians answered, because the gods are just. The gods are just. And the Athenians say, we worship the same gods that you worship. And the Melians said, but they are just. In other words, the gods actually pick sides and the side that they pick is the side of the righteous. It's the side of truth.

Well, Thucydides ends that history with the Spartans coming in and massacring the Athenians. And they reestablished the Melians on their island after the Melians were massacred by the Athenians. And this is, we say it in modern American vernacular, what goes around comes around. What goes around comes around. The beautiful law of karma. Use what you sow, so shall you reap. The Quran says the same thing. The Bible says the same thing. The Buddhists say the same thing. The Hindus, everybody believes in that law.

Grace Meeting Karma

But there's a beautiful thing, and I actually heard Bono, the musician, at the World Economic Forum, who, again, musicians who are the poets of our age are the only people that can say the truth. And he was the only person that actually said anything of any real weight at that place, even though he's a rock star. But he said, he talked about karma. And when he finished, he said, but what happens when grace meets karma? And I really like that idea, the idea of grace intervening. In other words, preempting what you have coming to you, because you make tauba, you make teshuvah, you make metanoia. These are concepts in all of our religious traditions.

We actually turn back. We actually ask forgiveness. We ask forgiveness for what we've done. The Roman historian Tacitus said, it's human nature to hate those whom you have hurt. It's human nature to hate those whom you have hurt. And I think if people are honest and look at history as a Western person, not as, I'm a Western person, I'm from here. This is my land, this is the land of my ancestors. They came here many generations ago on three of my family's, my direct grandparents, many, many generations ago, fought in the different wars of this country, including the Civil War. So this is where my roots are, and the American people are my people.

A Warning Out of Love

And I don't want to see harm come to these people. I don't want to see harm come to my family. And that's why the voice of the warner is a voice that when it warns its people, it doesn't warn its people out of desire that harm comes to them, but out of a desire that harm is averted, that harm is prevented. And I did say that this country has a tribulation coming to it. And I didn't regret the statement, I regretted the way I said it. What I would rather say is, we deserve a great tribulation, but that can be averted.

And it can be averted by metanoia in the New Testament language, changing your mind, changing your understanding, changing your attitude. And this is what we have to do as a people. We have to change our mind.

We have to reject armaments as an acceptable economic policy in this country. We have to reject the idea of flooding the world with weapons of mass destruction, and then destroying those who misuse them. We really have to do some serious thinking as a people.

Faith in the American People

And I think that we're capable of it. This is a great country. And one of the things that I love about this country is that I believe that the majority of people in this country are fair-minded people. And when all of the facts are at hand, they will make the right decision. And what needs to happen is the facts need to get to the right people.