Faith
Terrorists' faith tainted, experts say

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Muslim population of Hawai'i numbers about 3,000. As relatively small as that is, all eyes have turned to Islam, here and worldwide, as people seek to understand how any religion could be at the heart of a travesty so shattering as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands and thrust America into war.

Some of Hawai'i's 3,000 Muslims pray at a mosque in Manoa. According to a history professor who specializes in the Islamic religion, there is nothing in mainstream Islamic teachings that permits the slaughter of innocent people. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

Many Muslims believe, in fact, that the religious linkage has been corrupted beyond recognition.

Michael Egan shook his head in disbelief while signing in guests Thursday at an ecumenical gathering at the Islamic Center of Hawai'i in Manoa. The Honolulu resident converted to Islam eight years ago and now belongs to the Muslim Association of Hawai'i.

"I don't know how anyone could think they're Muslims," Egan said, referring to the suicide pilots who hijacked the ill-fated airline jets. "They went out drinking the night before, and that's strictly forbidden ... and one of them had a girlfriend. That's also forbidden."

Islam has more than a billion adherents, who follow various schools within that faith, said Elton Daniel, a University of Hawai'i history professor who specializes in the religion.

"It's difficult to generalize, even if you confine yourself to what the Quran teaches," Daniel said.

Still, some things can be stated clearly, and foremost among these is that there is nothing in the central Islamic scripture that permits the slaughter of innocents, certainly not according to any classical interpretation of the texts.

Daniel said even the term "jihad" has been gravely misunderstood.

"A jihad does not necessarily mean war," he said. "In fact, what that primarily means is a struggle to make yourself live in accordance with Islam, to have a society in accordance with Islam ... only in certain circumstances does it mean qital, or 'killing.'"

Islamic ideals — indeed, the ideals of any religion — should not be confused with what imperfect humans sometimes do, said Saleem Ahmed, a Muslim who is teaching a course, "Understanding Islam," through the UH Outreach College.

"There's no passage in the Quran that says, 'Go and kill infidels,' " he said.

Ahmed also is writing a book on Islam. In his manuscript he cites Quran verses that lay out the rules of fighting, including:

"Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for God loves not transgressors ... and fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression and there prevail justice and faith in God; but if they cease (fighting), let there be no hostility except against those who practice oppression."

However, he said, there are some people on the fringes who might interpret the text through political filters. And this might allow them to argue that, especially since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the United States has been an aggressor that has drawn a justifiable, defensive strike from the Islamic world.

"Please make it clear that I don't see it that way," Ahmed said. "But there are some who would."

Osama bin Laden, as well as some fundamentalists, rank two actions atop America's list of offenses, said Yasumasa Kuroda, a UH political science professor whose expertise includes Middle Eastern politics. One is the presence of military forces in Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Islam; the other is the U.S. support of Israel at the expense of Palestinians, who were deprived of a homeland upon the establishment of the Jewish state.

"Anybody who loses their homes and property would be against it— just like Hawaiians who have lost their land," he said. "People can't do anything, and when they can't, they become international terrorists because they have no recourse. They would rather be hated than it be forgotten that they have lost their land."

It's the association between America and this loss that has poisoned U.S.-Islamic relations most abjectly, said Cromwell Crawford, chairman of the UH religion department.

"That is a type of correlation: The friends of our enemies cannot be our friends," Crawford said. "And beyond that, there is the overall threat of Western culture, what it does to the ideals of Muslims in the diaspora" — the dispersal of Islam from its Arabian birthplace to scattered points around the globe.

The classical tradition of the religion is chivalrous, not terroristic, said Crawford, who practices no religion himself but grew up in India among Muslims and has organized academic projects focused on Islam. However, he added, two historic trends have tended to erode that chivalry: the yielding of the Islamic empire to a Western-Christian culture, and the dictators and despots who rose to power within the Islamic countries themselves.

The Western world enjoyed economic progress, and Muslims, he said, "feel disenfranchised because they feel they have been left out of this progress."

"They have to pin the fault somewhere, and Western civilization becomes one of the targets."

America becomes a potent target in particular, Crawford added, because Muslims see the United States as dealing in duplicitous fashion with the Islamic world, according to its own economic interests.

So some Muslims — including intellectuals as well as terroristic radicals — cast about for leadership in their struggles with the West. Some applaud the Taliban as religious "purists," he said, even though the Taliban interpretations of the Quran are more "legalistic, mechanistic and dogmatic" than pure.

Crawford sees various leaders of Islamic countries now recoiling in horror from the magnitude of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"There's a myopic view when it comes to the kind of terroristic action taking place," he said. "This action now has led us to this extreme ... now they're seeing the logical end to which this path has led them."