Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this important issue.
We will recall that in the aftermath of September 11 many Americans and others asked the question, “Why us? Why is it these people hate us?” There was a genuine sense of bewilderment. Why in heaven's name would people fly airplanes into buildings with the avowed purpose of destroying as many innocent people as possible?
On the other side of the equation, Muslims were saying, “Our religion has been hijacked”. They reacted with shame and anger. They were upset that their otherwise peaceful religion was being hijacked by people who had a strange and peculiar version of Islam.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a forum in Taiwan on Asia-Pacific security. The Taiwanese are naturally fairly concerned about 400 missiles pointed at their island by the PRC.
The panellists were asked, what were the root causes of terrorism? I must admit that none of us had a very satisfactory answer. Some would say poverty, but not all poor people are terrorists. Some would say religion, yet there are a lot of religious people in this world and they are by no means terrorists. Some would talk about ethnicity and race, but again those are not very satisfactory answers when trying to come to some of the root causes of terrorism. Possibly in this world we will never arrive at the root causes of terrorism, at least not in this lifetime.
I would like to examine some of the root causes of terrorism in this particular context and look at why I am suggesting that our analysis is in fact fairly deeply flawed.
We as a western society lack an understanding of violence based on religion. We are a secular society and do not understand or comprehend religious people at any level. We mouth shibboleths about freedom of religion and then hope that people go off and do their religion in some private little sphere. We therefore have no context or understanding or dialogue because we have privatized religious expression. When an event like September 11 happens, we tend to castigate Islam instead of going just a little bit deeper.
Stephen Schwartz has written a book called The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror . In it he tries to extricate Islam from the demonizing tendencies of Washington plutocrats, the intellectually lazy media, and Islam's own extremist sects. His thesis states:
The princes of Saudi Arabia share power and the fabulous wealth of their petro-dollars with a hereditary priestly hierarchy overseeing a cultic travesty of Islam known as Wahhabism, after its 18th-century founder. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a poorly educated, narrow-minded, homicidal fanatic whose idiosyncratic, austere and uncharitable vision for his religion flew in the face of its own teachings and those accorded to its Prophet.
al-Wahhab saw himself as an equal to the prophet Muhammad--this, of course, most people in Islam considered to be a heresy.
Not blessed with false modesty, or indeed any modesty at all, he believed that other Muslims who did not agree with him were in fact unbelievers and that other faiths needed to be humiliated or destroyed. He banned books, music, and destroyed the graves of Muslim saints.
This virulent form of Islamic fundamentalism would merely be a band of crazies running around the deserts of Saudi Arabia if it was not for the house of Sa'ud.
Needless to say al-Wahhab did not endear himself either to his neighbours or to the Ottoman Empire at the time. He had to seek refuge with a local set of bandits. The bandits came from the house of Muhammad bin Sa'ud. The two families had an unholy alliance, which was in fact cemented by marriage. The Sa'ud family took care of the political power and the Wahhabi family the religious authority. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement cemented by marriage. If the Wahhabi sect announced that a certain group of Muslims were unbelievers then they were fair game for murder, rape, robbery, et cetera, and the leadership of the al-Sa'ud house enthusiastically pursued that.
Schwartz says this merger of extremist ideology and absolute state was the first example of totalitarianism. It preceded Hitler and Stalin by about 200 years. Who would care except that these murderous crazies struck it—