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The Founding Fathers Weren't Anti-Islam
The Founding Fathers were not nearly as anti-Muslim as many current American Christians.
As Ted Widmer writes at Boston.com:
The
Founders were way ahead of us. They thought hard about how to build a
country of many different faiths. And to advance that vision to the
fullest, they read the Koran, and studied Islam with a calm intelligence
that today’s over-hyped Americans can only begin to imagine. They
knew something that we do not. To a remarkable degree, the Koran is
not alien to American history — but inside it.No book states
the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the
citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known
as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of
John Adams. There is nothing particularly ornate about this humble
book, one of a collection of 2,400 that belonged to the second
president. But it tells an important story, and reminds us how worldly
the Founders were, and how impervious to the fanaticisms that spring up
like dandelions whenever religion and politics are mixed. They, like
we, lived in a complicated and often hostile global environment,
dominated by religious strife, terror, and the bloodsport of competing
empires. Yet better than we, they saw the world as it is, and refused
the temptation to enlarge our enemies into Satanic monsters, or simply
pretend they didn’t exist.Reports of Korans in American
libraries go back at least to 1683, when an early settler of
Germantown, Pa., brought a German version to these shores. Despite its
foreign air, Adams’s Koran had a strong New England pedigree. The first
Koran published in the United States, it was printed in Springfield in
1806.Why would John Adams and a cluster of farmers in the
Connecticut valley have bought copies of the Koran in 1806?
Surprisingly, there was a long tradition of New Englanders reading in
the Islamic scripture. The legendary bluenose Cotton Mather had his
faults, but a lack of curiosity about the world was not one of them.
Mather paid scrupulous attention to the Ottoman Empire in his voracious
reading, and cited the Koran often in passing. True, much of it was in
his pinched voice — as far back as the 17th century, New England
sailors were being kidnapped by North African pirates, a source of
never ending vexation, and Mather denounced the pirates as “Mahometan
Turks, and Moors and Devils.” But he admired Arab and Ottoman learning,
and when Turks in Constantinople and Smyrna succeeded in inoculating
patients against smallpox, he led a public campaign to do the same in
Boston (a campaign for which he was much vilified by those who called
inoculation the “work of the Devil,” merely because of its Islamic
origin). It was one of his finer moments.This theory was
eloquently expressed around the time the Constitution was written. One
of its models was the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which John Adams
had helped to create, and which, in the words of one of its drafters,
Theophilus Parsons, was designed to ensure “the most ample of liberty
of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”As
the Founders deliberated over what types of people would ultimately
populate the strange new country they were creating, they cited Muslims
as an extreme of foreign-ness whom it would be important to protect in
the future. Perhaps, they daydreamed, a Muslim or a Catholic might
even be president someday? Like everything, they debated it. Some
disapproved, but Richard Henry Lee insisted that “true freedom embraces
the Mahometan and Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.”
George Washington went out of his way to praise Muslims on several
occasions, and suggested that he would welcome them at Mount Vernon if
they were willing to work. Benjamin Franklin argued that Muslims should
be able to preach to Christians if we insisted on the right to preach
to them. Near the end of his life, he impersonated a Muslim essayist,
to mock American hypocrisy over slavery.Thomas Jefferson,
especially, had a familiarity with Islam that borders on the
astonishing. Like Adams, he owned a Koran, a 1764 English edition that
he bought while studying law as a young man in Williamsburg, Va. Only
two years ago, that Koran became the center of a controversy, when the
first Muslim ever elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from
Minnesota, asked if he could place his hand on it while taking his oath
of office — a request that elicited tremendous screeches from the talk
radio extremists. Jefferson even tried to learn Arabic, and wrote his
Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom to protect “the Jew and the
Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of
every denomination.”Jefferson and Adams led many of our early
negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into
existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because
the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or “people of the
book,” similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of
Europe’s ornate state religions.
What are Muslims Like?
Some Muslims really are terrorists.
Some Christians are as well.
In
truth, the percentage of Muslim and Christian terrorists is very small
compared to the huge numbers of adherents of those faiths.
Just
like Christians range from abortion doctor killers to mystics, Muslims
range from jihadis to poets like Rumi (Sufism - the mystical branch of
Islam - is peaceful and contemplative).
As prominent Christian writer, psychiatrist and former army doctor M. Scott Peck wrote, all humans - no matter what religion might be dominant in their culture - go through 4 stages of development:
1st: Chaos (a heroin addict, for example, who robs to support his habit)
2nd:
Fundamentalism (clinging to dogma in order to fight off chaos;
believing the book - whether Bible, Koran or Bhagavad Gita - is THE
truth, and anyone who disagrees is evil)
3rd: Skepticism and questioning (feeling stable enough to question the dogma of the dominant religion and other institutions)
4th:
Maturity (keeping the skepticism and questioning, but also being open
to life's beauty, love and mystery; using both one's head and heart;
being passionate and dedicated to making the world a better place)
(These
4 steps are not necessarily the full and complete truth, but they
present one possible description which is useful for starting a
discussion on religion).
Ignore the clothes, the skin color and the accent, and what do we see?
A drug addict in Saudi Arabia, America or Israel will look fairly similar. Fundamentalist
Christians, Muslims and Jews all think the other guy is evil, and that
God wants them to wipe the other guy out. Skeptics look the same
everywhere. And people who integrate their head and their heart all are
operating out of the same basic dynamic.
We Helped Radicalize Islam
Moreover - in order to know our history and perhaps become a tad more humble in the process - it is important to recognize that we helped to create "radical Islam".
President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has openly admitted that he created the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. And it continued under President Reagan (here's a picture of President Reagan meeting with some of these folks).
As the Council on Foreign Relations writes:
The 9/11 Commission report (PDF)
released in 2004 said some of Pakistan's religious schools or
madrassas served as "incubators for violent extremism." Since then,
there has been much debate over madrassas and their connection to
militancy.
***
It was Pakistan's leading
role in the anti-Soviet campaign in neighboring Afghanistan during
this time that radicalized some of these madrassas. New madrassas
sprouted, funded and supported by Saudi Arabia and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, where students were encouraged to join the Afghan resistance.
And see this.
And veteran journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes:
For
half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I
call the “Islamic right” as convenient partners in the Cold War.
***
Today
it’s convenient to speak about a Clash of Civilizations. But ... in
the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among
Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for
two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and
because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel
Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.In the 1950s, the United
States had an opportunity to side with the nationalists, and indeed
many U.S. policymakers did suggest exactly that, as my book explains.
But in the end, nationalists in the Third World were seen as wild cards
who couldn’t be counted on to join the global alliance against the
USSR. Instead, by the end of the 1950s,
rather than allying itself with the secular forces of progress in the
Middle East and the Arab world, the United States found itself in
league with Saudi Arabia’s Islamist legions. Choosing Saudi
Arabia over Nasser’s Egypt was probably the single biggest mistake the
United States has ever made in the Middle East.A second big
mistake ... occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War
and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States
either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in
countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the
Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel,
and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against
Syria. And ... Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim
Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of
Hamas.Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam
would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to
America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But ... America’s
alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan
in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned
civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban,
and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.Would the
Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not
a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the
virulence of the movement that we now confront—and which confronts many
of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and
beyond—would have been significantly less had the United States made
other choices during the Cold War.
And the chief of the visa section at the U.S.
consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (J. Michael Springmann, who is now
an attorney in private practice) says
that the CIA insisted that visas be issued to Afghanis so they could
travel to the U.S. to be trained in terrorism in the United States, and
then sent back to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
In other words,
if the U.S. and our allies hadn't backed the radical violent Muslims
instead of more stable, peaceful groups in the Middle East, radical
Islam wouldn't have grown so large.
Stopping the Bad Guys
That's
not to say that we don't need to stop the handful of Muslim terrorists
that are threatening the U.S. (to give you an idea of numbers, there
may be less than 50 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan according to the CIA itself).
But war is not the way to protect America, and defeating Islam is the way to safety. And see this.
Specifically, according to top security analysts, the global war on terror is weakening, rather than strengthening, our national security, and making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks:
For
those who still think that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are
necessary to fight terrorism, remember that a leading advisor to the
U.S. military - the very hawkish and pro-war Rand Corporation -
released a study in 2008 called "How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida".
The report confirms that the war on terror is actually weakening national security.
As a press release about the study states:
"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism."
Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative". And Newsweek has now admitted that the war on terror is wholly unnecessary.
(And no ... 9/11 did not "change everything".)
Beware of False Prophets
The neoconservatives who launched the wars in the Middle East may not even be people of faith themselves.
As I noted last year:
The godfather of the Neoconservative movement - Leo Strauss - taught
that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve
the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not
believe in religion.As I have previously written:
Leo
Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including
many leaders of the current administration. Indeed, some of the main
neocon players were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago,
where he taught for many years. Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli.Strauss believed that "A
political order can be stable only if it is united by an external
threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external
threat exists then one has to be manufactured" (quote is by one of Strauss' main biographers).Therefore, it is unknown whether the [Neocons] who [launched the wars in the Middle East] actually believed that the brown-skinned people they wished to [destroy] were Satan-worshippers who needed either to be converted or destroyed.
More
likely, they just followed the old Straussian playbook in creating a
threat which didn't exist - Satanic Muslims who wanted to take over
the world - and using religion to rally the mid- and lower-level
participants in the ... program to carry out their orders.
Atheists Versus People of Faith
I want to address one more divisive issue related to religion, which I think disempowers those of us working for a better world.
Many
atheists believe that all religious people are pedophiles, idiots,
crackpots or charlatans, and many people of faith think that all
atheists are selfish, rootless, valueless and crude.
But let's look at the facts.
Initially, about two-thirds of American scientists believe in God if you count the social sciences. About 40%
of physical scientists believe in God, and that number has stayed
constant for almost 100 years. So atheists shouldn't assume that all
people of faith are idiots.
And the Bible says that you shall know them by their fruits, not by what they say. So believers shouldn't assume that all people who say they are Christians are good guys.
Some Christians are pedophiles, murderers and con men. But others are fighting hard for justice, truth and social justice.
Some
atheists are selfless, valueless hedonists. But others are tireless in
their struggle for liberty, have a passion for freedom which they are
willing to sacrifice their lives for, are selfless in their service and
their love for the smallest of us.
Making the other side the "bad guys" only adds to the ability of the powers-that-be to divide and conquer us.
The
left-right split is false, and hundreds of millions of Americans are
waking up to the fact that the whole Republicans-Versus-Democrats
things is a dog-and-pony show. They are waking up to the fact that
both parties serve the big banks, big pharma, military-industrial
complex, and the whole oligarchy.
These
Americans realize that it doesn't matter whether a politician wears a
red tie or a blue one: he or she either serves the big money boys or
the American people, and that the "team" he's on doesn't matter.
We also have to wake up to the false dichotomy about faith.
Just
as it is urgent that we recognize the left-versus-right split for the
game it is, we atheists have to tolerate religious folks ... and we
people of faith have to tolerate non-believers.I am lucky to call
some incredible atheists and some amazing believers my friends and
colleagues in the struggle for a better world. We may not see
everything exactly the same ... but it is a big tent.
Postscript: Granted,
there have always been some radical factions in Islam, just as there
have always been radical factions in Christianity and Judaism. But -
contrary to what fundamentalists would tell you - Muslims claim that
the Quran does not promote going out and killing non-Muslims.
While
there might be some stage 2 (using M. Scott Peck's system) Muslims
who believe the Quran commands them to kill the "other guys", just
as some stage 2 Christians or stage 2 Jews think that the Bible
commands them to kill Muslims (the Crusades, for example) or atheists or abortion doctors or others. And remember, governments often use tactics to make the other guy seem more violent.
But again, the problem isn't any
particular religion, it is the immaturity of a small handful of its
followers, and the misuse of religion by the powers-that-be to divide
and conquer us.
- advertisements -
it's as if... these guys remember that many of the europeans who landed here were fleeing religious persecution.
The revered bootlegger's bible (http://www.amazon.com/Alaskan-Bootleggers-Bible-Leon-Kania/dp/0967452406...) has a good amount of info taken from roughnecks working in muslim countries. They were pretty sophisticated in their ability to make moonshine out of everything this side of shoe leather.
Well stated.
George, yours is a pathetically weak post.
Are you saying that Adams, Jefferson and other founders did not have an interest in Islam and did not wish to see it protected like other faiths? Do you believe that the information and quotations supporting that position are common knowledge in the United States? Are you saying that this article doesn't give one an opportunity to reflect on the nature of current US- Islamic relations?
The article was not weak in the least. Your ineffectual refutation of it is chickenshit weak.
yes, crockett, but they used cuss words and everyone knows that adds to authority (and tolerance)
God damned right.
yours or mine?
It would have to be yours. I live alone.
Mine. Wanna fight about it?
I see no reason why imaginary friends should be mutually exclusive. But that's probably just me.
George, you ignorant slut.
Islam was radicalized from the outset. Behold a truncated timeline of events:
c. 570 CE Birth of Muhammad. c. 610 CE Muhammad receives first vision in a cave near Mecca. c. 610-22 CE Muhammad preaches in Mecca. 622 CE Hijira - Muhammad and followers flee to Medina.
Islamic calendar (AH, Anno Hegirae) begins. 624 CE Muslims successfully attack Meccan caravans at Badr. 625 Muslims are defeated by Meccans at Uhud. 630 Muslims capture Mecca. Ka'ba is cleansed, pilgrimage rites are Islamicized, tribes of Arabia vow allegiance to Muhammad 632 Death of Muhammad. Abu Bakr chosen as caliph. 632-33 Wars of ridda (apostasy) restore allegiance to Islam 633 Muslim conquests (Futuhat) begin. 633-42 Muslim armies take the Fertile Crescent (Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia), North African coast, parts of Persian and Byzantine Empires c. 650
Caliph Uthman has the Qur'an written down.
This fantastic format won't let me edit my original post. Meant to write, Ted, you ignorant slut.
It's a propagandist lie to assert that U.S. policy radicalized Islam. Utterly false. Islam was radicalized a thousand years before the inception of the United States.
The world has had to beat Islam militarism into submission repeatedly throughout history. In fact, Spain's efforts to contain Islamic aggression outside Spain's borders ended the dominance of the Spanish empire. The excuse for going out extra-territorially against Islam was that it would be better to fight them outside Spain than at home. Spain went broke doing so.
Any lesson for the U.S. to learn from Spain's experience?
Right. Fighting Islamic aggression in the Middle East will contribute to the end of the U.S. reign as world super power.
Exterminate Muslims? No.
Contain and end Islamic aggression. Absolutely yes.
How many Western nations are currently occupied by Muslim armies? How many Muslim nations are occupied or under attack by the United States?
Muslims don't scare me. People who want me to pay for the killing of Muslims who have done me no harm piss me off. Chickenshit moochers.
Man weren't the Taliban the fucking best when they were killing the Soviet soldiers with the latest and greatest weapons we would send them - oops.
Crockett's on fucking fire! And not his pants either!
I guess that you never heard this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vankaSlfSr0
oh WORD!
Spot on Crockett. Too easily we forget that Obama has/is using predator drones to assassinate people in Pakistan. This equals blood on my hands, and on your hands, and everyone else who pays taxes in this country. These targets didn't get their day in court. We're kind of losing our souls here. It's great if you don't care about this stuff or if you think they had it coming, but don't insist on dragging myself, and those of us who don't want a forever war on terror, down with you.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100920/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan
They didn't have 747's or skyscrapers either in those days...
you can be sure there were people on the inside (church goers no doubt) who helped organize that spectacle.
GW gets it. The issue is polarization: right vs left, rich vs. poor, one religeon vs another. Polarization is a method of control and a way to create a power base ... and should be nothing more.
As people wake up and mature they understand that there is no reason to hate anyone and anyone who tells you otherwise is doing so for their own selfish pursuits. Maybe hate/polarization has propelled human kind forward ... maybe is has simply held us back. The test tube of the world does not give a definitive answer, although Bob Galvin's warring tribes philosophy almost sank Motorola. The much more internally cooperative Nokia kicked their ass... back in the day.
You never had the feeling that some engage into what you call polarization tactics because they feel at ease with them, because they think they can benefit from it? It does have to come from above, from people interesting in control.
Or Dick Cheney
or Richard Pearl
or Paul Wolfowitz
or Donald Rumsfeld
or James Wolsey
or Robery Zoellick
or Bill Kristol
or John Bolton
or any of a thousand other NeoCons directly or indirectly involved with a false flag attack on their own country (the "Pearl Harbor" called for by the Project for the New American Century) in order to further the MIC and Zionist agenda.
The Global Banking cartel has one card left to play:
http://ampedstatus.com/the-road-to-world-war-iii-the-global-banking-cartel-has-one-card-left-to-play
None are so hopelessly enslaved then those who falsely believe they are free.
In America, you can piss on the flag and spit on the cross.
Not free?
I dare you to go to a muslim country and piss on the Koran and spit on their flag.
After that, if you're still alive you can tell us what freedom looks like.
Try doing that on the Israeli flag or practice your "free speech" against zionists and see what happens. Good luck.
You have freedom so long as you don't threaten the PTB...
And the media will pounce and destroy you
Look what happened to Mel gibson [Not that I like him]
The hoopla over what he said to some Afro American
If you watch the telly, that word will be heard at least a 1000 times in a day including by fellow afro-americans
Dangerously biased!!!
+100
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aA3-jMOVjs
Or LearJet renditions, drones with buggy software, computerized hive-mind armies, 24x7x365 propaganda or a farcist government.
85% of my country folk are voting for a political party that wants the Muslims out or at least stop them from getting in our country.
If you would ever be in Europe, I'd like to show you some cities where Muslims are a majority. Police doesn't patrol there anymore.
In Paris, they raided the cities with the army without success. These days they are doing something new. Ambush the police. Call them, and once they arrive, they attack the police car with 50 to 100. They all carry DIY tools like saws, hammers, wrenches... all "legal".
Here in Europe, we call these cities "The Little Chicago's", up to you to guess where that comes from.
You don't know any Muslims! That or you are one! SCUM OF THE EARTH! These people are living a medieval retarted religion!
I wonder what percentage of the muslim people want and have wanted us out of their countries. too bad oil makes their "democratic" vote irrelevant
My SUV runs Great on muz-lim oil, Pilgrim.
You are apparently living one of those egalitarian EuroZone Socially Democratic utopias that idiot progressives here point to as "shining cities on the hill".
Those of us living in the United States, don't really give a shit what you do with your money, or your oppressive collectivist caste systems and how they result in such lawless behavior. We should however, give a shit that our military might, and research subsidizies help pay for that socialist grab-ass.
The concept in the US is to allow the broadest application of individual liberty, including religion. We are a Republic, because it allows for competing ideas, and for the cream of those ideas to rise to the top. If somebody steps out of line, they get hammered.
Extremist tactics are simillar regardless of ideology, or time frame. Consider the inquisition, the conquistadors, witch trials, jesuit missionaries. Now it's, "Don't worry about those Caterpillar dump trucks leveling your sacred mountain, or the orange water. Accept Jebus as your savior and he will make it better."
Per your earlier comment, 747's are an excuse. Technology changes, human nature does not.
LOL
Uuuh, I think it curdled.
"SCUM OF THE EARTH! These people are living a medieval retarted religion!"
without taking into account your spelling error, which occurred at the most inopportune time (I love the sense of humor displayed by the universe), I think it is safe to say you are presenting yourself as a myopic ignoramus
There is a country in the West that can claim to get 85pc of enfranchised people (which is less than 85 pc of national people) voting for a party?
I would like to see that.
Usually, politicians in the West are elected by 20 to 35pc of the enfranchised population, due to spread over various factions, people not bothering to vote etc...
The only country I could think of this situation to be credible is Belgium where voting is mandatory.
I believe the poster has stated in other threads he is in Belgium. I may be mistaken however.
Land of Dear Leader. Hmmmm.
Actually, I do - middle eastern, eastern europe, central and eastern asia. And if I were, I guarantee you'd not be able to pick me out in a room full of anglo-saxons.
Heh.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-already-knows-everything-he-needs-t...
GW at it again. Will he ever learn?
Islam is a side story. Who cares what the founding fathers think of this or that? Their ideas have not been adopted by the US citizens more than 200 years after start.
Freedom of religion, pluralism are nothing more than a mask to hide a monolithic composition of society.
I wonder what is needed for GW to get it and stop with his articles.
I laughed out when I heard that Obama's answer about the muslim church building and what it is to be an American. Because that was a A+ six grader answer and got the girl singing Obama to come to mind.
An A+ answer but still a six grade level. Everyone got it. Still, later, through polls, sixty pc people rejected it. You might discuss the place of secularization in the US. You cant discuss pluralism. And this story was not about pluralism, but about freedom of religion which can even less be discussed.
So what? Muslims are nothing but a minor threat to the socalled western values. The only threat is Westerners themselves who do not want those values to be enacted. They were good stories to access to power. Now people are sitting on the throne of power, those stories appear for what they are, stories to justify an ascension to power.
So who cares what the Founding Fathers thought of this or that? People in the US dont share their values and they dont want them to be enacted.
Time to watch the reality right into the eyes.
GW's idea is supported by a antique book I once saw. It was a Kansas primary school book from the 1870's. The book contained arithmetic, writing and a cornucopia of literature; sections of the old and new testaments, Shakespeare, The Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence. I was surprised that it also contained 30-40 pages of the Koran.
Interesting. Talk about being conservative and following the old ways, ha?