Islam and Terror

by John Thompson

October 28, 2002

I don’t like Jerry Falwell. I don’t like much of what he has to say, and I don’t like his version of my religion. When Falwell described Mohammed, the founder of Islam as a terrorist, I did not agree with him, but this was just over a couple of details. Mohammed was a violent man and a treacherous warlord. He does not compare at all well to either Buddha or Christ, the principal inspirations in the world’s other two major trans-cultural religions.

Falwell had to back down and apologize for his remarks. Personally, I wouldn’t have. Don’t get me wrong, Islam is a major religion and there are hundreds of millions of perfectly decent, law-abiding, peaceful and good people who practice it daily. While I am a Christian (a Catholic specifically), there have been things done in the name of my faith that make me shudder too. But…

Violence in the history of the Buddhist and Christian religions has been contrary to the teachings and practices of Buddha and Christ. Violence was absolutely and unequivocally central to Mohammed and to the expansion of his religion. Look at the men behind the faiths.

Buddha was a wealthy prince, sheltered from the harsh realities of the world and with every whim answered immediately. He renounced this life and adopted one of impoverished contemplation. He eschewed violence and recommended the same to his followers. While, like Christians, Buddhists have committed large scale acts of violence (and still do), this has been despite the teachings of their religion.

Christ was a little more ambiguous but still clear enough. Born to the family of a poor carpenter who had to immediately flee as a political refugee from an act of mass murder (Herod was staging the Massacre of the Innocents); he grew up as a workman. Once he began preaching, he instructed his followers to be peaceful and decent to other people. He could respect soldiers — not warriors — as his quiet exchange with a Roman centurion indicates, but also told his leading disciple to drop the sword wielded in his defence. He only seems to have lost his temper once, when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple, but he did not use a lethal weapon to do so. He also willingly went to his own execution.

Then we have Mohammed. An orphan raised by his uncle, he married a well-to-do widow (and married many other women later in his life) and engaged in trade before becoming a religious figure in 613 AD. His attempts to impose his will in Mecca lead to his having to flee the town before his relatives and neighbors murdered him. Arriving in Medina, he raised an armed force, fought with Mecca, and used violence on Medina’s Jews -- who had initially sheltered and fed him as a refugee — eventually enslaving their women and children while massacring the men. As a successful warlord, he then started attracting followers and embarked on raids and wars of expansion.

By the time of his death in 632, Mohammed had established a winning formula among the pagan Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula — convert or die. Jews and Christians in the region were given an extra choice: If you don’t convert, you will pay extra taxes and be second-class citizens. These prohibitions remain in place in Islamic law.

The first couple of centuries in the history of any religion are also instructive. This is the time when the life and lessons of the leader are translated into literature, precedents are established and the faith takes on its permanent form. There have also been a lot of religions that have tried to take off in history, only to crash and burn when they failed to survive the death of their founder, or else they failed to translate themselves beyond their initial culture. It should be remembered that only Judaism (partly), Buddhism, Christianity and Islam have managed to become universal religions.

In the first centuries of Buddhism, the faith spread throughout India and into Central Asia and China through the missionary work of Buddha’s disciples. Indeed, missionaries are the only way that this religion has spread. Christianity, alas, has been furthered by coercion on occasion — but this certainly was never the case in its early years. Rather, Christianity had violent repression directed against it, and many disciples were murdered by the authorities.

Many of Mohammed’s disciples died violently too — often at each other’s hands. And in the first century alone after Mohammed’s death, the Islamic faith had been carried through fire and sword from the edge of China to northern Spain.

Falwell was wrong to call Mohammed a terrorist, because he wasn’t. But Mohammed was a violent warlord and the faith he engendered has never been able to shed itself of this bloody legacy. No one can kill in the name of Buddha or Christ without explicitly violating their instructions and legacy; but Islamic Fundamentalists have a wealth of deadly examples to cite as justification for their acts.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca