America, as seen through Islamic Eyes

Most Moslems are exceptionally devout religionists – significantly more so than the average Christian. . They share the Old Testament with us and pray to the same God their ancestor, Abraham, did. They do so for up to five times a day. They revere the teachings of Mohammed as expressed in the Koran. Mohammed helped to wash away the shame of Hagar and Ishmael’s deception and restore their pride in self. They see Jesus as a fellow Semite and most study and admire his prophecy and his teaching. Most Moslems fast on Rhamadan. Millions try to make at least one difficult pilgrimage to Mecca before they die. Traditionally Arabian scholarship has always been of a high order. Millions of their youth are expected to memorize whole sections of the Koran by puberty. Their literature is exquisite. Their calligraphy is perhaps the most beautiful in existence. Their mathematics revolutionized the Roman system. At one time they ruled most of the civilized world.

I am personally intimate with Islam. I have traveled and lived in the Middle East. I have bowed my Christian back many a time inside a Mosque and knelt shoulder to shoulder with up to three thousand men inside a single hall and have felt both the brotherhood as well as the surge of spiritual power that comes from taking part in a mass Islamic observance of Almighty God.

For the past twenty years I have been married to a Middle Easterner who was born in Baghdad. She is the mother of four of my children. She is easily as intelligent as any American and I can vouch for her sense of personal honor and integrity. She is also an American citizen. I have insisted that our family honor her ancient culture by having at least one of our children inducted into Islam. He is now 18.

Since 9/11, millions of Americans have come to see Islam as an evil force. Most of us do not understand why Middle Easterners in general, have grown to dislike us, or why so many of then even hate America.

This is why.

Christian hypocrisy.

Moslems traditionally engage in Holy Wars and see no religious hypocrisy in engaging with infidels to the death. At the same time they are well aware that the fundamental tenet of Christian teaching is based on love for one’s neighbor. We trumpet that our God is the one and only God and he is enthroned in heaven as the Prince of Peace. Jesus urged us, even as he suffered on the cross, to forgive trespasses and turn the other cheek. Yet Christian crusades, civil wars, world wars, holocausts, pograms and religious persecutions have killed more than a hundred fold of God’s children in the name of Christ, than all the Islamic Jihads put together. Even our policy in the Middle East is based on war. Thus, in Islam’s eyes, Christians are outright religious hypocrites who pray for peace on Sunday, go to war on Monday and in the execution of those double standards, show no reverence for the teaching of their prophet.

Sodom
The whole of Islam is aware of America’s debate on homo-sexuality and the ever-increasing leniency of our laws towards it. To Islam the Old Testament explicitly forbids sodomy and God destroyed the city of Sodom because of it. It is natural for many to see AIDS as God’s judgment on sodomites

Gomorrah
In Gomorrah the Golden Calf, Baal, is God. Islam sees America prostrate before the almighty dollar. We walk reverently in corporate cathedrals. Almost every American intercourse is underpinned and calculated by the value we place on money. God is forgot in our mighty trade centers. We gamble with stocks and bonds on the temple floor of the Holy Estate. We are robbing them of their oil. Thus, in Islam’s eyes, the incredible sight of the Twin Towers of Gomorrah literally crumbling to dust in front of the whole world’s eyes, was both a biblical as well an Osama Bin Laden prophecy fulfilled.

Revising Middle East Policy

There are over one billion Moslems devoted to Islam sharing this planet with us. They comprise one sixth of the human race. They are a vital and integral part of the global equation, As such, for all of us who believe that mankind can and must learn to live in peace, and steward this planet as a single family estate, their good will is unquestionably essential to all of us.

If we do not like their view of us, what can we do to show them that they have got us wrong?
Send more troops to Iraq?
Nuke Iran and North Korea?
Continue to plunder the planet’s finite natural resources, with short-term profits as the prime objective
Burn away the last reserves of the world’s precious fossil oils?
Scorn the United Nations?
Refuse to sign the Kyoto protocols?
Ignore the World Court?
Deny Global warming?

Or do we take a reversionary attitude to the way we go about social mores, business, politics and religious observances?

Can educators not realize that by incarcerating children inside classrooms for twelve years and more and concentrating almost entirely on left brain analytical development via rote learning, and not investing an equal amount of time in encouraging exercises in right brain intuitive inspiration, they are not evoking the full ethical and creative potential of the human genius?

Can the homo-sexual community not see the ancient spiritual call to monkhood and nunnery, which those who are born with a transcendent desire beyond basic procreation with the opposite sex have traditionally responded to throughout past Ages, and resist the base temptations of the flesh in order to live an exemplary life of service to God and community? Have not ten thousand celibate saints and mystics attested to ecstatic states that come from religiously-practiced spiritual disciplines that far surpass any produced by the flesh?

Can international businessmen not see the severe limitations that the artificial barrier of money imposes on global development in a new era of globalization – and how the goal of short-term profits keeps two thirds of the world under-employed, even starving, when there is so much environmental clean-up to do, as well as vast new planet-management projects to design and under-take in order to accommodate the exponential needs of our expanding global population, in advanced systems of education, indoor agriculture, vertical city construction, and sustainable energy production?

Can America not see that representative government and jealously-guarded national boundaries in a new era of instant travel and communication, while burdened with a antiquated written constitution that has to be administered and enforced by millions of bureaucrats, has become redundant?

Can Christians not finally realize that the brilliant spiritual insight of Jesus, who stated emphatically, that love and peace, not military might, is the only path to God and is the ultimate answer to world-wide social harmony, challenging as it may be.

Can America not go out into the world with a sincere mission to practice what we preach no matter how reactant the resistance?