The Saudi government has been pumping money in a quiet kind of revolution to shape Islam in its own images since 1973, [with] oil price rises. It wasn't a noisy revolution like the Iranian revolution was. It didn't have so much hubbub and noise associated with it and all. But it was quietly done [with] Saudi influence, using money, and the building of [madrassas] -- that is, religious schools and mosques all across the world. ... The very particular kind of Islam associated with Saudi Arabia ... is an upstart. It was created in the 18th century. It was constrained and confined entirely to the Arabian Peninsula right through to the late 1960s. All of a sudden, this [Wahhabi] Islam -- which is espoused by these young men, which considers even a Muslim like myself, because of my Shiite background, to be dirty or not a real Muslim ... [is] probably the dominant form [of Islam] in the United States. It spreads from one end of the world to the next. It's been a quiet, silent revolution that's been happening, and suddenly exploded on the scene with Sept. 11.
Iraqi-American academic and orientalist (born 1949)
Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-American academic and a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University.
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What makes people enter into cults? I think that kind of certainty about something is not necessarily just religious. It was seen in secular organizations, secular ideologues, ideological organizations of one kind or another. I've experienced it among people I used to know in the 1960s and 1970s. It's a terrifying thing when you see it at work.
Freedom is a heady thing. To an Iraqi, it is like being awakened from a 30-year nightmare by a blinding blaze of bright white light. When a young man steals a television set from the Ministry of Education, he thinks he is striking a blow against the Ba'ath Party. He has not yet become aware that he is in fact stealing it from a building that now belongs to him and is about to start serving his needs, and not those of his tormentors.
Bin Laden's real audience is the Middle East, his other Muslims. I think he thought that, by this act, he would win large numbers of converts to his cause ... [to] bring Arab regimes down. He would perhaps even take power in this or that country, preferably Saudi Arabia. That is where he is looking to; that is who is the audience. That is who his symbols are directed towards. So this is unlike anything else in the history of Islam. Early Muslims, when they left the Arabian Peninsula and entered the [Fertile Crescent], were conquerors. They converted peoples, and they gave them time to convert. So they didn't force them sometimes, and they were perfectly happy ruling over them. They were setting up a state, and then people converted over time. Syria remained Christian for hundreds of years after the Muslim conquest. So something different is going on here. The obvious sense in which the United States is evil is in the cultural icons that are seen everywhere. They are seemingly trivial things, the influence of the America culture, which is everywhere: TV, how women dress, the lack of importance of religion. So these are the senses in which they are rejecting the United States. But you're right; they don't see Americans as people. ... They block that out. They only see as people the Muslims they want to convert to their side, and that's terrifying.
Washington is right to be chastened after its scathing experience in Iraq this past decade. But it also ought to be motivated by that earlier disaster in Iraq, in which so many innocent Iraqis perished while the United States stood by and watched. Syria in 2012 is another Iraq of 1991 just waiting to happen. No one can say he did not know.
The defensiveness of Islam is its crucial feature today. It's what, by the way, is in such contrast to the most interesting period of Islamic history, when Islam was an open, absorbing religion, constantly taking in outside influences, as opposed to its current hedgehog-like posture, prickly to the outside ... always looking backward. This is not how it was in the creative moment, in the first four, six, eight centuries of Islam, where it was constantly seeking out and absorbing.
Millions upon millions of words have been written about the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages in order to bring about the creation of the Israeli state. And rightly so. Yet many of the very intellectuals who wrote those words chose silence when it came to the elimination of thousands of Kurdish villages by an Arab state.
The Muslim idea of God is, in many ways, more abstract, more remote and less human, certainly, than the Christian and the God of the Old Testament, who has passions and has angers and often behaves very much like a human being in the various stories. The Muslim is more remote, aloof, distant, and has to be obeyed. He has many, many different facets.
One cannot liberate a people -- much less facilitate the emergence of a democracy -- without empowering the people being liberated. It is much easier for an Iraqi soldier to join other Iraqis in rebellion than it is to surrender his arms in humiliation to a foreigner who is unable even to communicate with him. And the more that Iraqis help, the less that coalition soldiers will have to engage in house-to-house fighting in cities. It is both morally right and politically liberating for Iraqis to participate and share in their own liberation. They are willing to give their lives for this cause. Their participation is indispensable as it will add legitimacy -- and therefore stability -- to an Iraqi interim authority that otherwise, no matter how you look at it, would be chosen by American officials.