Why A Peaceful Religion Wages A Jihad

Islam is a peaceful religion, but how do Muslims rationalize committing terrorist acts in the name of their faith?

CBS News Sunday Morning Correspondent Martha Teichner examines how violent factions have emerged from an otherwise nonviolent religion.

The word Islam means surrender or submission.

Five times a day, nearly a billion and a half Muslims across the globe surrender themselves to god, to Allah.

In his revelations to the prophet Muhammed, Allah demanded that his followers be just, compassionate, and tolerant.

So how do we reconcile this ideal of faith with the terror in the name of faith attacks on Sept. 11? How could followers of Islam create great works of art and beauty like the Bamiyan Statues in the name of God -- only to destroy the 2,000-year-old works, again, in the name of God?

The apparent contradictions of Islam are what baffle us and, rightly or wrongly, shape our views of one of the great religions of the world.

Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis, says, "Is Osama bin Laden something Islamic? Yes, certainly he arose from within Islamic civilization…in the same way that Hitler and the Nazis rose within Christian Europe."

In his bestseller, "What Went Wrong?" Lewis explores how Islam has repeatedly produced extremist figures like Osama bin Laden, "They see this as an ongoing struggle between two world religions. There are only two world religions… All the others are local… There are two religions which are convinced they are the sole custodians of God's final message to mankind, which it is their duty to bring to everyone else."

The armed struggle between Islam and Christianity had its origins in Mecca, part of modern-day Saudi Arabia here in the year 612 AD, Muhammed is said to have begun preaching the words of Allah.

Almost immediately, the battles began. At first, Muhammed fought strictly to make the neighborhood safe for his little community of converts to Islam. But by the time of his death, 20 years later, Muslims were well on their way to conquering the world much of which was Christian.

"If you visit Jerusalem, you will go to the dome of the rock, the earliest Muslim religious building outside Arabia. In the dome of the rock, there are inscriptions and there are verses which say 'he is God. He is one. He has no companion. He does not beget. He is not begotten.' I mean ,this is clearly anti-Christian polemic… What they were saying in effect...to the Christian world, 'Our time is over...now we have come,' and the struggle went on for 14 centuries."

For Muslims, there has never been a distinction between politics and religion. God and government go together.

At its peak, Muslim rule extended right across Europe and the Middle East, throughout Central Asia and all the way to China.

The art of war served the glory of God.

Daniel Walker, curator of the Islamic collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, explains Arabic written on a helmet in the collection, "It would be a passage from the Koran that alludes to or extols the virtue of embarking in holy combat, and the results that would accrue to the participant, and what would supposedly...happen to a holy warrior."

One 17th-century helmet would have been ceremonial, but the elegance of it is a clue to how advanced and how wealthy the civilization that produced it was.

"The level of culture was extraordinary many of the things we take for granted in the west are things that were either developed within or at least transmitted by great scholars in the Islamic world," Walker explains.

In the arts, in science and commerce, Muslim culture led the world.

Christian Europe, by comparison, was a primitive backwater playing catch-up, until the end of the 17th century when things started to go wrong for Muslims.

"They had long despised the peoples of Europe as uncouth barbarians. For a long time, they were right, but they ceased to be right, and a time came when the Europeans first drew equal and then surpassed the level of achievement in the Muslim countries," says Lewis.

One factor, according to Lewis, was the continuing subordination of women in Muslim society, "The Koran doesn't give women equality. The Koran says a man can have up to 4 wives plus concubines. The Koran also says quite emphatically that if your wives disobey you, beat them."

While European culture wasn't exactly enlightened, in Lewis's opinion, western women did better than Muslim women and it had an impact.

"Remember we're talking about half the population, who are also the mothers of the other half."

The long slow decline of Muslim culture culminated in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Muslims have been debating how to set things right for 300 years.

Lewis says, "On the one hand, you have those who say there is now a modern civilization and the only way forward is to become part of this modern civilization. Now the other answer is those who say, 'No, where we went wrong is in abandoning our true heritage. And therefore the remedy is a return to authentic Islam, getting rid of the unbeliever and his evil ways.'"

This is exactly the position of Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers.

"They are very much aware of this historical struggle and Osama bin Laden speaks frequently of the crusades. He speaks of, with regret, of how the Muslims lost Spain, which for many centuries was part of the Islamic world," and though that happened in 1492, "That's only yesterday. There is this awareness of past greatness and present humiliation," explains Lewis.

This humiliation translates into rage with the United States, because American troops dared to set foot in Saudi Arabia, Islam's holiest land.

"The first enemy was the Byzantine emperor and now the United States is the latest in this sequence of the rulers of Christendom. The heads of the lands of the unbelievers and therefore the principal adversary," says Lewis.

But bin Laden and his followers would also like to bring down the Saudi royal family, because they invited the Americans in. The irony is that the Saudis consider themselves keepers of the Islamic faith. They've spent vast sums of their oil money suppporting all the religious schools, called madrassahs that have, in recent years, become the breeding grounds for the virulent form of fundamentalism, incubated in Afganistan. They have provided militant Muslims a vehicle for venting the rage they feel, a lot of it justified.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid says, "Where did the rage come from? All one can say is the awfulness of the regimes that ruled these countries…poverty, joblessness, at the collapse of the whole service system that they knew under Communism. The education, the health system…was very important."

Rashid, a Muslim himself, has written two best-selling books about this recipe for radicalism. "The regimes have created such an atmosphere of underdevelopment, of no freedoms, of political repression, religious repression that really if you are a pious Muslim, you can do nothing else except rebel against such a regime."

When the United States enters into the equation and cozies up to the very people the militants blame for their misery, it should come as no surprise that they blame us too.

Just look at our friend, Egypt, recipient of roughly $2 billion a year in U.S. foreign aid. Only one country, Israel, gets more. The U.S. State Department acknowledges that President Hosni Mubarak has jailed more than 15,000 political prisoners, most of them Muslim fundamentalists.

Then there is Pakistan, our partner in the war on terrorism. Eight out of ten Pakistanis live on less than $2 a day. General Pervez Musharraf, whose regime is fragile at best, has dealt with his own Islamic militant problem by assuming dictatorial powers.

Add to that, the belief among Muslims that the United States overwhelmingly supports the Israelis over the Palestinians in the Middle East and, according to Rashid, it creates the likelihood that Muslims will hate us even more.

If President Bush does take on Iraq, Rashid says, "I think what is coming out with this show of might at the moment is, you know, the ugly American. You know, let's bomb our enemies because bombing is much easier than trying to negotiate or have a dialogue or you know, bring international pressure to bear. Iraq certainly is a rogue state. Saddam Hussein needs to go, but I don't think at this present juncture in the Middle East with the violence that's already on between Israel and the Palestinians, that the U.S. can take on right now another target in the middle east such as Saddam Hussein."

Lewis concurs, "Seeming to be hesitant and indecisive and weak and even frightened, that is just asking for trouble."

Action in Iraq may be controversial, but Lewis believes force is the language Muslim militants understand, even Saddam Hussein, "Let me put it the other way round. I think if Saddam Hussein stays where he is, he will become increasingly dangerous. Here is a man with a score to pay off."

We have the United States facing off, on the one hand, against Saddam Hussein, a man it regards as a Middle Eastern thug who happens to be Muslim. On the other, Osama bin Laden and his followers, Islamic puritans out to avenge the decline of Muslim culture on Americans. For the Muslim world, taking sides is a matter of struggling with its own identity.

"I don't think, at the end of the day, historically speaking, we're going to see this as a clash of civilizations, or as a major confrontation between Christianity and, far more east and west, as a Muslim. What I hope this will lead to is a reformation inside the Islamic world, changes within the Islamic world, changes in the way regimes view their own people and the way people view their regimes...and a much greater openness and commitment to democratic values by these regimes to economic reform, to a free press," says Rashid.

The acts of a few may have distorted our vision of many. Perhaps it is useful to remember that each day when they pray, nearly a billion and a half Muslims submit themselves to the will of Allah who commands them to be just, compassionate and tolerant.