Enemies of The Islamic World

The anti-Islamic alliance facing muslims

Subsequent chapters of this book will examine the Islamic world country by country, and will reveal the oppression and cruelty inflicted on Muslims. Before that, however, we need to look at the roots of the attacks directed at the Muslim world.

The area known as the Islamic world consists of those countries which have a majority Muslim population. It stretches from Morocco and Mauritania in the West and as far as Indonesia in the East. The great majority, some 1 billion, of the people living in the region are Muslims. Over the last 200 years, they have come face-to-face with attacks, oppression, and terror and have even been massacred because they are Muslims. That is because many Muslims have been obliged to live under non-Muslim regimes, which look with hatred at Islam.

When we look at the Islamic world today, we can clearly see that there is an effort to crush, oppress and eliminate Muslims in Bosnia, Algeria, Tunisia, Eritrea, Egypt, Afghanistan, East Turkestan, Chechnya, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar and Sudan. At first glance, the Muslims in these different regions may seem to be facing different enemies. The Serbs in Bosnia, the Hindus in Kashmir, the Russians in the Caucasus, and the oppressive regimes in countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Morocco all target Muslims. Yet these anti-Islamic forces, which appear independent from one another, all act with a similar logic, follow similar strategies and employ similar methods. The singular factor they all have in common is that they are anti-religious.

These forces which deny the existence of Allah and see divine religions - particularly Islam, the only uncorrupted religion - as the greatest enemy of their own secular systems and so declare violent war on religion and believers, actually represent atheist ideologies. That is why the true enemy facing Muslims is not the Serbs, Hindus or various oppressive regimes, but the irreligious understanding prevailing in the world. The roots of this war against Islam take nourishment from atheism and go back a very long way.

Colonialism and the Hatred of Islam

The Islamic world was not always in such a position. A few hundred years ago, it was ruled by Muslim empires. At the start of the 1700s almost all of the Islamic world was governed by three great empires. There was the Moghul Empire in India, while the Safavid Empire ruled Iran and its surrounding area. The third and greatest power was the Ottoman Empire, which held sway over the entire Balkan Peninsula as well as Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria), the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa.

However, these three empires gradually disappeared from world maps. The Moghul Empire grew weak, shrank and finally collapsed. The Indian sub-continent then fell into the hands of British colonialism. The area known as Indochina was colonized by the French. The Safavid State in Central Asia came under British and Russian rule. The Ottoman Empire, the third and greatest Muslim empire, was progressively reduced in size beginning in the nineteenth century. Ottoman lands in the West fell into the hands of Russia and the Balkan states encouraged by it. The Middle East, Arabian Peninsula and North Africa were occupied by the British, French and Italians. By the end of the First World War, a large portion of the world's Muslims were ruled by non-Muslim governments.

All of these were colonialist in nature. In the 1920s, Russia and Italy joined the ranks of such traditional colonialists as Britain and France. Each of these countries occupied and colonized a part of the Islamic world. They didn't hesitate to inflict the most ruthless slaughter and torture upon the Muslim populations under their rule. Britain and France "administered" the Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa and the Far East. In other words, they reaped and used the Muslim countries' natural resources for their own interests. Soviet Russia took over all of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and the Muslims in those regions were enslaved under the pressure of the communist regime. Italy occupied Libya in 1911, and then set about a bloody invasion of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) in the 1930s.

One important feature of the Middle East policies of Britain and France was to employ artificial states adapted to serve their own interests. This artificial order in the Middle East was a poisoned seed of never-ending wars. These two colonialist European powers were forced to abandon the region after the Second World War. However, they left behind them a much more ruthless, aggressive and destructive colonialist power in their wake: Israel.

When we look at the picture whose general outline we have just summarized, we can clearly see that the Islamic world has been a target for foreign powers ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Throughout the ensuing 200 years, the world's Muslims have been occupied by these powers, colonized, and subjected to oppression and cruelty. The puppet regimes these powers installed in the Muslim world also greatly oppressed Muslims, and they continue to do so to this very day. Moreover, the outside powers imposed a number of ideologies that were utterly foreign to the Islamic world, such as extreme nationalism, fascism and communism. Then they used those who were duped by these ideologies to work against their own Muslim communities.

The Basis of Ideologies Hostile to Islam

When we analyze the enemies of the Muslim world, we encounter three basic ideas:

1. Western imperialism: For instance, British and French colonialism as described above.

2. Fascism-extreme nationalism: Italian fascism, Israel, and pro-fascist groups that cause civil wars in the Islamic world.

3. Communism: Soviet Russia, China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, communists in Afghanistan and various communist groups in the Middle East.

Close inspection reveals that each of these three is based on ideas that emerged in the nineteenth century, and developed in the twentieth. Extreme nationalism and the fascism that came in its wake are ideologies that emerged entirely in the nineteenth century, and were practiced to the greatest extent in the twentieth century. Communism began with the theory of dialectical materialism proposed by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century, although the first communist regime was not installed until 1917, in Russia.

One can say that only Western colonialism goes back to earlier centuries, although it then consisted of limited economic initiatives and again came to a position of global domination with its philosophy and ideological foundations in the nineteenth century.

This shows us that the enemy of the world of Islam is not this or that nation or civilization (Western civilization, for instance), but the "ideologies" that turned these nations or civilizations into bloody oppressors. These ideologies dominated a great part of the world in the nineteenth century, and brought cruelty and savagery with them wherever they held dominion. It was actually these ideologies that occupied, divided, plundered, enslaved and slaughtered the Muslim world.

When we look at these three ideologies, we see that what lies behind all of them is the West's increasing atheism. Each of them emerged as the Western world moved away from a belief in God and religion and began to take on a materialist worldview.

One important truth confirming this is that each of these three ideologies is based on Darwin's theory of evolution, which was portrayed as the "scientific basis of atheism" and which for the first time allowed atheist philosophy to be put forward as "scientific truth."

The Links Between Darwinism, Colonialism and Fascism

Darwinism is the so-called scientific foundation of colonialism. That is because Darwin placed the various categories of the human race at different levels in his imaginary evolutionary process. He considered the European white race to be the most advanced, and portrayed Asian and African tribes as being almost at the same levels as the apes. Furthermore, he suggested that all of mankind was in a constant state of conflict and a fight for survival, and said that it was a "law of nature" that the West should win this fight and enslave the other races. In his The Origin of Species, he wrote:

Darwin's concept of the struggle for survival was an important source of inspiration for racism, communism and fascism, as well as imperialism.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous (human-like) apes... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.1

Darwin arrived at this interesting conclusion by means of the concept of the struggle for survival. According to this claim, the weak are eliminated in the fight for survival, and the strong and fit go on to survive. Moreover, he maintained that this was necessary for universal development, in other words that the disappearance of some races was a process that would allow man to progress and move forward.

This unscientific idea, known as "Social Darwinism," saw wide acceptance in the primitive scientific conditions of the time and came to be the basic justification for European colonialism. In short, Darwinism is the "scientific" foundation of colonialism.

Social Darwinism is as much the source of extreme nationalism and fascism as it is of imperialism. All of the nineteenth century theoreticians who are regarded as the founders of fascism (Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich von Treitschke, Francis Galton, and Ernst Haeckel, for instance) were strongly influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, and particularly by the concept of the "fight for survival." Mussolini, the Italian dictator who established the first fascist regime, was a convinced Darwinist in his youth and drew attention with his articles in praise of Darwin. It is quite clear from the writings of Hitler and other senior Nazis that they were also inspired by Social Darwinism. (For further details, see Harun Yahya, Fascism: Darwinism's Bloody Ideology, Istanbul, Vural Yayincilik, 2001)

Communist Ideologies' Hatred for Islam

Darwinism also forms the basis of communism. This was clearly stated by its first founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Both were convinced atheists, both saw the elimination of religious beliefs as essential for communism, and both fully understood that the theory of evolution served that end.

As soon as Darwin's book was published, Engels wrote to Marx as follows: "Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is splendid." 2 On December 19, 1860, Marx replied, "This is the book that contains the basis in natural history for our view." 3 In a letter to another socialist friend, Lassalle, dated January 16, 1861, Marx wrote, "Darwin's work is important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle," 4 thus revealing the importance of the theory of evolution for communism.

Dictators such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung made their own comments about communism, stating and demonstrating its ideological links to Darwin. The theory of evolution came to be the basis of education and even agricultural policy in communist regimes. All communist movements found the ideological foundation and justification they were looking for in Darwinism.

For communist ideology, so greatly influenced by Darwinism, society is just "a herd of animals." Man is a soulless, dull creature, a "man-animal machine," and quite worthless. The logic of "There are many in the herd, so it doesn't matter if one is lost" rules the day. The handicapped and those unable to work are cast out of the herd and left to die. They are seen as sick and harmful. There are no feelings of compassion, mercy or loyalty. Since they believe that life stops at death, they cling to life with all their power. Since everyone is seen as an enemy and rival in the fight for survival, everything is held against them, and hatred prevails.

It is natural that communist ideology, which creates a society with no human or spiritual values or morality, should also be inimical to religion. Virtues such as morality, love, affection, compassion, self-sacrifice, cooperation and forgiveness have no place in the model aimed at by communism. When one looks at the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and other communist ideologues, one can see this stated quite clearly. Marx described religion as "the opium of the people" and a culture formed by the ruling class to keep the poor asleep. Moreover, he suggested that religious beliefs would have to be eliminated if communism was to be achieved.

In Lenin's article "Socialism and Religion," published in 1905 in the Russian magazine Novaya Zhizn, he described religion as a "fog" that needed to be dispersed, and set out the atheist propaganda that communists needed to set in motion. In his "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion," published in the magazine Proletary in 1909 as leader of the Russian Social Democratic Party (later the Communist Party), Lenin wrote:

The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. "Religion is the opium of the people." This dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. 5

Those words express Marx's enmity towards religion, and also reveal his ignorance of it. These statements do not reflect the truth. Allah commands people to think and inquire. It is communism and other atheist ideologies that encourage people not to think, and to do what they are told without question. It is clear that people who do not think will also never come anywhere near the truth, and will thus lead lives rife with deception and error. By thinking, man can understand the reason for the creation of the world, and the reason for his own existence. This truth is revealed in the Qur'an thus:

We did not create the heavens and the earth and everything between them as a game. We did not create them except with truth but most of them do not know it. (Qur'an, 4: 38-39)

For this reason, every individual must ponder the reason for first of all his own creation, and then that of every being or object he sees in the universe and will encounter throughout his life. Someone who fails to think will only understand the truth after he is dead, in the presence of Allah, but by then it will be far too late. Thinking while we have the chance in this life, and then drawing conclusions, will be of great benefit to us in the life of the hereafter. That is why Allah calls on all people, by means of his messengers and books, to consider their own creation and that of the whole universe:

Have they not reflected within themselves? Allah did not create the heavens and the earth and everything between them except with truth and for a fixed term. Yet many people reject the meeting with their Lord. (Qur'an, 30: 8)

Enemies of religion, however, like communist leaders, make all sorts of unfounded allegations to turn people away from religion, even going so far as to claim that religion prevents people from thinking. As we have seen, though, on the contrary, religion actually commands people to think.

Conclusion

In short, it is evident that the three ideologies hostile to the Islamic world all stem from the atheist culture that took over the Western world in the nineteenth century.

This demonstrates once again the importance of the intellectual struggle that needs to be waged against atheism, which is not just a force that tries to ruin people's lives in the hereafter by destroying their religious beliefs. Rather it also, at the same time, aims to ruin the world, turning it into a wasteland of chaos and war, and it views Muslims as its most important target.

That is why waging an intellectual struggle for the good is both a service to true belief and also a great "moral war" against the "corruption" pervading the earth. The existence of large numbers of Muslims who are still being crushed by atheist systems all over the world reminds us how important this struggle really is. Every ideological victory over atheism (and over philosophies, ideologies and so-called scientific theories such as Darwinism that lie at its foundations) is also a moral victory which helps oppressed Muslims all over the world.