“I consider part of my responsibilities as President to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear,” said President Barack Obama in his address to the Muslim world from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University in 2009.
Looking back, it seems this utterance was as revealing as it was foretelling. Until recently, the Cairo address had nearly receded over the horizon. But as Americans looked to the administration to stay the synchronized upwelling of violence outside of US embassies around the world, supposedly in response to an anti-Islam film, many will no doubt look back with cynicism on this rhetorical keystone of recent American foreign policy.
This is not the first time that Al-Azhar has found itself center stage in the contest between freedom of conscience and Islamic honor. Prior to the death sentence issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 against British author, Salman Rushdie, it was among the first Islamic institutions calling for the ban of the novel
The Satanic Verses. In 2005, when the issue of censorship was raised again, this time centering on the publication of caricatures of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper, Al-Azhar again was among the first to go on record: "This has trespassed all limits of objective criticism into insults and contempt of the religious beliefs of more than one billion Muslims around the world, including thousands in Denmark” (Alison Pargeter, T
he New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe).
Nearly four years have lapsed since Obama’s “CHANGE WE NEED” promise on the election trail, affecting people on all sides of global politics. And as anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Christian protesters took to the streets last week, it seems the fall of the region from an “Arab spring” to an Islamist winter may be the only foreign policy legacy to which the current administration may rightly lay claim.
Although few Americans actually heard the Cairo address, even fewer cared to notice that it was the first time an American politician labeled the defense of religion against bad press a presidential responsibility, an avowal that should have raised more than a few eyebrows on the “liberal” left. And, unfortunately, no one seemed sufficiently literate to discern the chilling resemblance between Obama’s remarks and a piece of Quranic scripture commonly referred to as the “sword verse,” Mohammad’s mandate enjoining on all Muslims the duty to “fight against unbelievers wherever you find them” (Surah 9:5). Whether he knew it or not, Obama had taken on the tones of jihadists, furnishing the notion of blasphemy and Islamic supremacy with the full sheen of respectability that came with his prophetic 2008 campaign and victory.
But similar statements have appeared elsewhere in recent years and reveal the alarming rate at which the tentacles of censorship are now spreading outside the Muslim world, most notably in the recently-overturned Anti-Defamation of Religion Act. The non-binding resolution, proposed by the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and approved annually on the floor of the UN until its defeat in 2010, called upon member nations to enact measures that would make any criticism of religion, and of Islam in particular, an internationally punishable offense.
While blasphemy proposals of this sort have been put forward since 1999 under the politically-correct pretext of combating “Islamophobia” worldwide, especially any remarks highlighting the connection between Islam and terrorism, blasphemy laws have themselves been used as an instrument of repression and terror. In Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and in the growing number of nations that now conform to Islam’s legal and political directives since Obama has taken office, the rights of Islam now supersede the rights of individuals as a legally enforceable fact of daily life.
For example, Hamza Kashgari, poet and former correspondent for a Saudi daily newspaper, has been in prison in Saudi Arabia for months now for publicly questioning the existence of Allah in an online blog. According to the Saudi interpretation of Islamic “shariah” law, crimes of blasphemy and apostasy (formally renouncing the Muslim faith) constitute “line-crossing” offenses, punishable either by public beheading or imprisonment. Hamza’s detention came as the result of recent measures adopted by Saudi lawmakers to extend the policing of individual conscience to the internet. According to estimates provided by Amnesty International, 102 people are believed to have been executed in Saudi Arabia in 2009 alone on blasphemy-related charges.
However, more often the duty to uphold the honor of the religion does not depend on official state action. Speaking of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman still awaiting trial in Pakistan for blaspheming against Mohammad, one cleric offered his opinion: “Anyone in this world that says anything blasphemous against the Holy Prophet has to be killed, and anyone who hears it should kill him on the spot. This is our belief” (Peter Fedynsky, “Critics Say Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws Are Being Abused”).
Of course, Obama isn’t the first American leader to fail to distinguish the oppressor from the oppressed. Almost immediately following the attacks of September 2001, Americans were fed a steady diet of political rhetoric proclaiming that acts of Islamic terrorism represented a consequence of American imperialism. Former President Clinton said as much when he delivered his famous speech after the 9/11 attacks at Georgetown University attributing America’s current woes in the Middle East to the medieval Crusades, an argument that immediately found supporters on the left and among academics. It is little wonder then that the liberal exaltation of jihadist violence occasionally assumes the dimensions of the Robin Hood myth, painting jihadists not as ultra-violent religious supremacists, but as agents of justice and equality - the third world revisiting onto the first world some of its original sins.
The ill-conceived proposition of American culpability for acts of terror, especially vis-à-vis its foreign policy, coupled with the idea that Islamic terrorism has nothing whatever to do with Islam, have become household on the left and a dogma of academia, and a precious few have had the poor taste to question it. But then what are we to make of jihadists like Samantha Lewthwaite, a British citizen of white middle-class origins, currently being hunted for cooperating with Kenya’s Al-Qaeda wing, Al-Shabaas, a group whose professed goal is to institute shariah law and to convert, subjugate or kill all non-Muslims in the region? What are we to make of white, first-world converts to Islam who, not content with waging a campaign of retribution against citizens of wealthy colonial powers, now venture to the third world in order to kill, subjugate and convert impoverished “infidels” of color?
At a time when debate about founding principles has come to the fore, Obama’s pledge to safeguard an ideology’s reputation over the right of individuals to voice their criticism is a human rights scandal and perhaps the most telling sign of how far afield of the Constitution this administration, and the left in general, has paraded over the last several years. Given the events of the past week, it seems the fruits of the Cairo address are finally coming into full view. The time has come to reflect on how this president’s policies and oratory have acted as a Trojan horse for the advancement of the jihadist cause. If Obama can countenance these realities and continue to pay lip service to the religious bullies of the world, he will have forfeited the moral high ground for moral bankruptcy.
Ryan Dreher
PhD Candidate,
Cornell University/Department of Comparative Literature
