 Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser. (Image source: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons) |
Canlorbe: Dear Dr. Jasser, thank you for joining me. Ilhan
Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the first two Muslim women to serve in
American Congress. Do you think they representative of the mentality of
the majority of Muslims in America?
Jasser: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib
(D-MI) are simply byproducts of the Islamist teams that recruited them
and trained them in the art of ideology and dissimulation. Those teams
include the alphabet soup of Islamist organizations—"Muslim Brotherhood
legacy groups"—that exist in the United States. These include, for
instance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic
Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and
the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Future politicians, media
pundits, or the many demagogic imams, they all rise up from within the
Islamist populist movement in the West by telling insular Islamist
communities what they want to hear while claiming to speak for all
Muslims.
Omar and Tlaib rose up in Democratic politics because they represent
decades of cooperation between the Islamist movements here in the West,
and the far left's progressivism. Since 2011, other Muslim reform
leaders and I were asked by Congress to testify
many times on the Hill on the compromising influence of Islamist
organizations and ideologies, both global and domestic, to our national
security.
The American Islamist groups worked in a coordinated fashion to
attack me, the organization I represent, the American Islamic Forum for
Democracy (AIFD) and the other Muslims in our Muslim Reform Movement. Each time we testified to Congress, their attempts at takfirism
(declaring us not to be "real" Muslims) were often less than subtle and
typically defamatory. They repeatedly attempted to smear us on social
media and never addressed the issues or ideas that we represented in our
testimony. It is always revealing how fearful Islamists are of actually
addressing the connection between their non-violent 'political Islam'
(Islamism) and violent political Islam.
This is the classic method of many Islamists: they tag onto "identity movements" and transform the belief in the ideology of a faith, Islam, into an identity racial
group—which it is not. This distortion stifles any real diversity of
ideas and promotes a culture where the community is perceived to be a
racial monolith. Thus, anyone who speaks out becomes an "Uncle Tom" and
supposedly against the whole tribe.
In 2020, we saw Islamist identity politics fit right into the Black
Lives Matter Movement and its racialization of every issue. It is quite a
cooperation to behold, even though ultimately the Islamists actually
agree with very little of the ideas of the far left—for example when it
comes to implementing extremist Muslims' draconian interpretations of
'shariah law,' such as child marriage, slavery, unequal legal rights for
men and women, death for homosexuals, female genital mutilation, or
beating women, to name a few.
The bottom line is that there is one alliance, progressive, that
exists between AOC and her progressive extremists, and another
different, alliance, Islamic fundamentalist, that exists between, say,
AOC and her following and the Islamist members of Congress and their following.
Those two members of Congress represent the current leading edge, in
identity politics, of political Islam in the West and its emphasis on
group rights rather than individual rights. Both women, however,
represent the trend to stifle dissent and dissidents. They also both
represent the effort to empower domestic and global Islamist
supremacists and their Islamic nation-state ideologies over the
exceptionalism of secular liberal American democracy. They would most
likely deny this, and certainly there are some clear differences between
Omar and Tlaib. For example, Omar's foreign policy has clearly proven
that she formulates her positions by looking first for the interests of
the global political Islamist populist movement, and then all else
follows. She spins it to her benefit in a deceptively American context,
yet you can see—in her unwavering support of Turkey's Erdogan, Qatar,
various permutations of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and even
Iran—that her affinity for Islamists is paramount. As a naval officer,
there is nothing I found more offensive than her fabricated statements,
right before she was elected, that somehow Americans
killed thousands in Somalia, more than the terrorists we were fighting,
and implying that those of us who served in "Operation Restore Hope"
were terrorists.
Canlorbe: You make no mystery of your Syrian origins. How do
you assess Bashar al-Assad's policy? Do you believe that former
President Donald J. Trump had the right attitude towards Bashar when, in
April 2017, he decided on a missile strike in response to the use of
chemical attack?
Jasser: Bashar Assad's policies are in line with the Syrian
Ba'ath party fascism of more than 50 years. The Syrian revolution, which
began in 2011, needs to be understood in the context of the methods
with which the ruling party wields its power. The Syrian Ba'ath Party is
an Arab nationalist socialist party (akin to an Arab Nazism), which
seized power by military coup in 1963. The Alawite—a Shi'ite
offshoot—faction of Ba'ath Party loyalists then took power in another
bloody coup in February 1966. After that Alawite coup, the fascist
Ba'ath transformed its predominantly supremacist political platform to
incorporate a preference for the Alawite Shi'ite sect. Members of Sunni
Muslim leadership were purged from the military. The entire leadership
became comprised of Alawite Ba'athist faithful. The influence of Sunnis,
Christians, Druze and Ismailis was all but eliminated. Non-Alawite
officers who were ousted reported that in the late 1960s and early '70s,
Syria was on the verge of a civil war among all their sects. This
condition was often difficult to ascertain for blind analysts since,
like many Arab tyrants, Hafez Assad ruled in a predominantly secular
fashion rather than theocratic. Now this began to shift as his son,
Bashar, moved Syria into the orbit of Iran and essentially became a
client-state of Iran as well as Russia.
In 1970, however, Hafez al-Assad took the reins from his fellow
Alawites in still another coup. In line with the totalitarian doctrine
of the Ba'athist Party, Assad, ruled Syria with an iron fist for 30
years. He ended the Ba'ath-Alawite in-fighting and his regime cleansed
any non-Alawites in its midst, and obliterated any Sunni protestations.
To quell the religious unrest of other sects, Assad placed a few party
loyalists who were Sunni, Christian, and Druze in mid-level, and a few
higher levels, of political leadership—but not military. Most people
knew they were window dressing and sympathizers. The Syria of Hafez
Assad was much like the Iraq of Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, described by
one expatriate, who used a pseudonym, as "A Republic of Fear":
"a regime of totalitarian rule, institutionalized violence, universal
fear, and unchecked personal dictatorship." Many of our Syrian families,
after suffering for years in and out of prison, and muzzled in every
form of expression, left for American freedom after realizing that a
revolution to topple one of the world's most ruthless military tyrannies
would likely never materialize in their lifetimes.
The Assad regime, using incalculably cruel methods, paralyzed the
humanity of 22 million Syrians for two generations. Brothers, sisters,
families reported on one another to Syrian intelligence (Mukhabarat).
Many vanished, never to be seen again, and anyone who dared to dissent
from the ruling party was systematically tortured and made an example of
by frequent collective punishment. By the twenty-first century, there
were more Syrians living outside Syria than inside, and some analyses
claim that one in nine expatriates living abroad provided steady
information to the Assad regime on expatriate Syrian activities in order
to spare the family. The Syrian Human Rights Committee
has chronicled many of the atrocities committed in the past 45 years by
the Assad regime: the Hama massacres of 1963, 1982, and again in 2011,
Tadmur, and the countless prisoners of conscience were systematically
snuffed out by the regime.
It is upon this background that the Syrian revolution commenced in
March 2011 as part of the greater regional Arab awakening. The Assad
regime calculated that it would be able to slow-walk a genocidal
cleansing operation against the Syrian people who were part of the
revolution. While the first year of the revolution showed significant
diversity—with Sunnis, Alawites, Druze, Christians and others marching
in the streets—Assad did as his party always did. He drove internal
divisions among the sects to rip his country apart, while leaving his
regime alone. He was sustained with heavy foreign help, from Russia and
Iran, in military, financial, and human assets. The Sunni
population was eventually radicalized, with ISIS arising in 2013 in
Syria and Iraq. It was due to a perfect storm of Assad's radicalizing
Sunnis—combined with their ideological influence from Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, and Turkey—at the same time as Iraq's descent into anarchy. The
growth of ISIS provided the Assad regime a convenient cover for
continued military genocidal operations and the use of chemical weapons
against the majority of the population who were unarmed and who had
naively thought that if the world saw it on YouTube, the public would
put enough pressure on Assad to bring it to an end. Sadly, Russia and
Iran were likely the primary reason Assad survived and the civil war did
not evolve organically. Russia and Iran consolidated Assad's grip on
Syria's humanity and systematically exterminated more than 600,000
people and displaced 10,000,000 people out of Syria's 22,000,000. The UN
remained feckless.
This is not to say that the West or anyone should have intervened in
any way close to what happened in Iraq. What use is the UN, however, if
ruthless tyrants can use chemical weapons and eradicate swaths of their
own population with no repercussions? A Bosnian type of response, akin
to President William Jefferson Clinton's and the UN's response to
Serbia's crimes in 1995 might have helped. President Barack Obama,
however, did not just avoid military intervention; his administration
actively supported the Assad regime at the altar of their "nuclear deal"
with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the empowerment of The Iranian
Republican Guard Corps and its Masters in Tehran. The Obama
Administration handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the theocrats
as well as an insurance of security, as well as a future with a nuclear
bomb. These, along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the
terror group Hizballah, gave Iran's leaders a green light to spread
terror into Syria.
President Donald Trump's Administration's response to the Assad's
repeated use of chemical weapons in April 2018, while minimal in the
scheme of what had happened in Syria to that point, did send a message
that reverberated within the Assad regime, not to mention Russia and
Iran, that red lines do mean something for that administration. It did
have some deterrent effect, as limited as it was.
Canlorbe: At Trump's request, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords,
promising to make peace with Israel. They also promised to stop
financing and hosting terrorist organizations. Do you believe those
regimes can be trusted? How will they behave under a Biden presidency?
Jasser: In President Ronald Reagan's words, "trust but
verify". But first, it is important to reflect on the failed "Arab
Awakening". While it was not a Spring—except for Tunisia where a culture
of democracy and some liberalism is actually beginning to take hold—a
complete reset in the Arab world against tyranny was certainly very
appealing to those of us from families that have been fighting against
these dictators, autocratic monarchs, and otherwise Islamist theocrats
for more than two generations. After a decade of failed
revolutions—between the 20th century's tyrannies and the chaos after 2011—was there a better path forward?
Some may appropriately say that no real democracies evolved quickly
in the "Arab Awakening," after centuries of tyranny. In fact, there may
be a need for multiple revolutions before democracy can take hold.
Perhaps, though, there can be a more methodical transition towards
modernity with steady benchmarks of reform and liberalization, as we
have seen done so successfully with the 2020 Middle East agreements?
The challenge, as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow
to the point of fiction—which has been "Plan A" for the tyrants across
the Middle East since World War II. They lie to the West about reforms
in order to placate each new administration with a five- or ten-year
plan while transitions in power in the West along with our short-term,
societal "attention deficit disorder" give them a pass. Remember, the
changes in 2011 created vacuums facilitating the re-emergence of tyranny
and radical Islamists, but sometimes, like treating cancer, the patient
has first to get more ill before returning to health.
Essentially, a model of reform that I see possible—perhaps remotely,
but possible—for liberalism and freedom, may be an evolution towards
constitutional monarchies (much as I disagree with "genetic
supremacism"). Some of them have been building civil society
institutions that begin to modernize Islamic thought, end the concept of
an Islamic state and its jihad, and instead are looking at their state
and citizens through the prism of universal human rights. What we have
been seeing in the UAE gives hope, as do Bahrain, Sudan, with, one
hopes, more to come. So far, I have less optimism for Saudi Arabia
relinquishing the dominance of the ideas of salafi-jihadism and
its draconian interpretation of Islam even as the Saudis openly condemn
and declare war on 'political Islam'. Their track record is just so
abysmal. But as we see them outlaw child marriage and make other
changes, the principle of "trust but verify" may be appropriate to push
them forward?
This is likely confusing to many non-Muslims, if we try to say, that
the Saudis are now anti-Islamist despite decades of supporting Muslim
Brotherhood groups across the planet? Please understand, though, that
the concept of an Islamic Republic, with an Islamic flag and an Islamic
jurisprudence (sharia) in which the Qur'an is the source, not just a source of law, is in fact certainly still a form of political Islam,
just more of a top-down, corporate, theocracy no matter which way you
cut it. However, even the Islamist populist movements, such as the
Muslim Brotherhood, are not much better. They are simply bottom-up,
grass roots theocracies founded in sharia ideologies. Regardless of
whether a state's approach is top-down or bottom-up one, if its raison
d'être is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than on
individual rights and the protection of minorities, as in secular
liberal democracies, it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.
We will have to watch very closely if there will be new
interpretations from the pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca, or
mosques in Medina and across the country. The fact that we heard this
coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and Bahrain is what made the
Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.
For the first time I do also see peace between Israel and Saudi
Arabia as not only a short-term possibility but even a long-term one.
The combination of the populist Islamist movement threat to the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia and its radical offshoots of ISIS and al Qaeda combined
with the threat of Shia Islamism of Khomeinism has shaken the
foundations of the Saudi state establishment and forced them to reckon
with monsters they helped create—such as the Muslim Brotherhood and
their mosques—while also pushing them to forge more meaningful
acknowledgement of the state of Israel and the West. Let us not also
underestimate the role of the Trump administration and the Pompeo State
Department in making this happen. This early reform however will only be
real when it is met with a genuine reinterpretation of the antisemitic
translations and interpretations of the Qur'an and Hadith (the Prophet's
deeds and sayings) that the government of Saudi Arabia pushes. Not
until their imams begin to marginalize the anti-Semitic bigotry of so
many of those interpretations and begin to present new interpretations
will that change be in fact durable.
As for Qatar, we should begin closing our base there and finding
other options for our regional security. Their state propaganda arm of Al Jazeera—in
addition to their relationship with Iran, Turkey and global Islamist
movements of the Muslim Brotherhood—has rendered them no longer an ally,
let alone even a "frenemy". This should not surprise anyone. The
Al-Thani family went all in the Muslim Brotherhood since 1961 when they
gave safe haven to the spiritual guide of the Ikhwani movement—Sheikh
Yusuf Qaradawi. He has since been a close partner of the royal family
aligned ideologically and strategically with a global reach of at least
tens of millions of Islamists. We have long followed and dissected
Qaradawi's English and Arabic work and there is little doubt that he and
his followers are the central cancer of the Sunni Islamist global
movement against the west and our way of life. The Qatari government's
fealty for Islamists has brought them economically and ideologically
closer to Iran's Khomeinists in addition to the Taliban. My position has
always been that Qatar sees itself as the global center for Islamists,
meaning "The Caliphate". Their extreme wealth makes for a toxic global
brew for most of our Islamist enemies.
I see no inkling of reform or change on the programming of Al Jazeera or any of their imams or clerics. In fact, only months ago we saw systematic Holocaust denial on the programming of Al Jazeera
as they attempted quickly to erase history of that. They are too deeply
embedded at heart and economically with Iran, Turkey and other Islamist
supremacists across the planet to have any hope at reform unless their
regime falls. We can only pray.
There is little doubt that the Biden administration will simply be
Obama 3.0. It may even be worse than the Obama administration because it
is going to trip over itself in such an exaggerated fashion trying to
undo the progress against the Islamists—domestically and abroad—that we
have made since 2016, that the pendulum will swing back further than
even the Obama administration in defense of Islamists.
We are already seeing this in the Islamist that was selected to be a
senior White House staffer for legislative affairs—Reema Dodin. She is
notably not only historically an operative with Muslim Brotherhood
legacy groups such as CAIR in DC but she also stated as a student at
UC-Berkley, "Palestinian suicide bombings
are the last resort of a desperate people". With her likes running
interference with the Hill for the White House, we may see an even more
radicalized policy in favor of not only Iranian appeasement but overt
support of Islamist interests domestically and abroad. What is
certain—based on how Dodin while at Senator Durbin's office with her
allies at Muslim Advocates beat the drum of Muslim American
victimization against our testimony on the Hill—it will only get worse.
As for Biden's foreign policy, he is already signaling that the
Pentagon will focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So, the
Pentagon is a branch of the State Department? If that is not "leading
from behind 3.0", I don't know what is. Sources say he wants to
"de-emphasize the military" and lift up diplomacy. If that vision is by
openly weakening our defense programming, that will signal a green light
actually to usher in more war, not less. Peace through weakness doesn't
work against thugs like Khamenei and Assad across the planet. We are
thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing
of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden's apparent
appeasement strategy. Now more than ever, our private work needs to push
for anti-Islamist reformers against the likely ascendant Islamist
threats.
Canlorbe: Putin is an ally of the mullahs and sits at the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In Russia, Muslims represent 10% of
the total population, and Islam is the second most widely professed
religion. Is the Russian regime a trustworthy ally in promoting
enlightened Islam and fighting against terrorist, political Islam?
Jasser: Domestically, as Michael Weiss pointed out in 2017, the Russians have long played a double game
with radical Islamist terror, in fact helping fuel ISIS with recruits
from Chechnya to give Assad cover and allow Russia to ship out the
jihadists it creates. Regionally, Putin's regime has empowered our
greatest enemies—Iran's terror regime from its Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corp (IRGC) to Hizballah, and Assad. Its state propaganda—RT is
finally listed under FARA and is an unwavering part of the
Assad/Khameinist media arm state-sponsored media. They have worked with
our nominal ally, Turkey (selling them missiles) and giving them the
green light against our Kurdish allies in Syria. Part of their longtime
interest in Syria is their only Mediterranean port and base at Tartus.
Chechnya's tyrant, Ramzan Kadyrov, portrays himself as a devout Muslim
but he is a two-bit radical tyrant and Putin tool who has systematically
radicalized his population while violating the human rights of every
minority group from the gay community to dissidents.
In my book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriots' fight to Save his Faith,
I recount how my father told me that our family's deep seeded
anti-communism and anti-Islamism is what drove them to become enamored
of West and learn about the exceptionalism of secular democracy and
especially about Americanism. Russia's Putin and its kleptocrats would
never promote an enlightened anything, let alone defeat a theocracy.
They still have a state-sponsored church; the other faiths, whether
within Christianity or outside, have lesser to no rights. There is a
reason their entire economy is oil, and produce no products of any kind
competing in the free markets. The Putin regime is against individual
creativity and battles of ideology. In order for reformists to emerge,
we need a public platform of critical thinking and modern civil
institutions that protect universal human rights.
Canlorbe: Both Maimonides and Averroes endeavored to
conciliate religion and philosophy. How do you assess the legacy of
Averroes in Islam and that of Maimonides in Judaism?
Jasser: As a physician dedicated to treating the ill, your
question resonates with me more than you would ever know. My chosen
profession is as a doctor and it was the inspiration of clear
broad-minded thinkers and doctors like Maimonides and Averroes who
influenced so much of my idealism about medicine and medical ethics.
Their confidence in weighing in on philosophy, theology, legalisms, and
politics are an example of what I have always aspired to be and do in my
own life even if their ideas are from almost 1000 years ago. It was not
necessarily the specifics of their ideas, but the courage of their
inquiry. Scholars have often pointed out the strong resemblance between
Maimonides' "understanding of God's manifestness in the order of nature"
and Averroes' "conception of God and providence which focuses heavily
on God's essential preservation of all species, and his role as the
cause of being and unity in all hylomorphic substances." Averroes, for
example, saw God in every element of nature's diversity. Averroes's gift
or legacy to Islamic thought was much like that of Maimonides; he took
human feelings and sensations, like 'heat', 'intellect', 'mind',
'wisdom', and 'creativity' and used them to broaden our human
understanding of God. To most Salafists, even the suggestion of
imparting human-like attributes to God is blasphemy whether or not it is
intended just to understand and relate better to our understanding of
God. Giving philosophical descriptions of God using human metaphors and
nature provided Averroes, like Maimonides, a flexibility of thought
about God which in the right era of boundless human creativity and
inquiry can become the foundation of real enlightenment and liberalism.
Similar to Maimonides, Averroes sought to bring to Islamic thought a
"blending of God as pure unity and God as intellect" a very Hellenic
thought process seen throughout Arabic discourse, as seen in, for
example, the Theology of Aristotle.
Contrary to essentially every extremist or literalist movement in Islam today, Averroes' legacy was about taking God's unity (tawhid)
and giving Muslims a way of looking at that unity, consistency, and
omnipresence in a way that does not conflict and actually explains the
infinite diversity of the human condition, our nature, and our laws.
This is actually also the essence of our Muslim Reform Movement—an attempt to bring back such a deep understanding of diversity of thought and interpretations of Islamic law (shariah)
in a way that allows us to live in harmony with modernity and secular
liberal democracy through a separation of "history and religion"—or more
allegory and less literalism. Averroes may not have explicitly gone so
far as real liberalism. But then again there were no liberal democracies
upon which to reflect for these thinkers at the time. But the
foundations of his thought, similar to what Maimonides was to Judaism,
gave metaphysical nuggets of what God is and what God is not, along with
the infinite possibilities for human nature brought about by God.
Averroes, like Maimonides, looked at scripture, the Qur'an for Averroes,
as allegory. This courage to go beyond literalism is part of his legacy
and similarities to Maimonides.
Sadly, while both Maimonides and Averroes did their amazingly open-minded and deep work during the 12th
century, both in Muslim majority nation states, Averroes' legacy has so
far been very difficult to find in the "Islamic world" if not lost to
hundreds and hundreds of years of intellectual and philosophical
stagnation and reactionary movements that ultimately dominated and
decimated most free Islamic academic and civil institutions since his
life.
It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what
the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform
towards a Western model of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought
and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights,
rather than the oppressive collective and the proverbial Islamic state.
M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American
Islamic forum for Democracy. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant
Commander. He is a former Vice-Chair and commissioner on the U.S.
Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) appointed by Sen.
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from 2012-2016. He is also a physician in
private practice specializing in internal medicine, primary care, and
medical ethics in Phoenix, Arizona. You can find him on Twitter
@DrZuhdiJasser
