Trump In Saudi Arabia

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY

President Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia on May 21 is worth revisiting. It was an honest and thoughtful speech. Upon being received, and after an exchange of greetings among the officials present, Trump said, addressing King Salman, “I stand before you as a representative of the American people to deliver a message of friendship and hope.”
He went on to express America’s interest in the peace, security, and prosperity in the region and in the world. “Our goal is a coalition of nations who share the same aim of stamping out extremism and providing our children with a hopeful future that does honor to God.”
Trump noted that later in the day he would participate in the opening of a new Center for combating extremist ideology and expressed the hope that the work of that center following this summit will put an end to the spread of the “vile extremist creed.” For neither the United States nor Arabia itself has been spared the consequences of terrorism.
Speaking of the Middle East, Trump said, “This region rich in natural beauty, vibrant cultures, and massive amounts of historic treasures should increasingly become one of the great global centers of commerce and opportunity.” The entire region is at the nexus of key shipping lanes.
“The economic potential of this region has never been greater. But this untapped potential is held at bay by bloodshed and terror. The region should not be a place from which refugees flee, but to which newcomers flock.”
There can be no coexistence with this violence, the president declared, no accepting it, and no ignoring it. If we do not act against it, terror will spread. “If we do not stand in uniform condemnation of this killing, we will be judged not only by our own people, we will be judged by history, and we will be judged by God.”
“Terrorism has spread across the world but the path to peace begins right here on this ancient soil, in this sacred land. Drive them out of your places of worship, of your communities, of your holy land, out of this earth….For centuries the Middle East has been home to Christians, Muslims, and Jews living side by side. Once again, we must practice tolerance and respect for each other — and make this region a place where every man or woman, no matter their faith or ethnicity, can enjoy a life of dignity and hope.”
Upon concluding his visit to Riyadh, Trump indicated he would be visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the Vatican, the holiest places of the three Abrahamic faiths.
One may quarrel with Trump on several historical points without diminishing respect for his speech. Yes, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together, but Jews and Christians lived in a state of dhimmitude under Muslim rule. For payment of a tax, Christians and Jews enjoyed limited freedom with respect to the practice of their faith.
As to the reference to “three Abrahamic religions,” this is a misnomer as Remi Brague has shown in his study Eccentric Culture.
“There is a danger inherent in the use of the term,” Brague says, “for it masks real differences underneath surface harmony.” Concerning the reference to Abraham: “While a person with this name occurs in the scriptures of these three religions, the figure is really a source of disagreement rather than of concord,” continues Brague, “because he is interpreted in widely different ways.” For one thing, neither Judaism nor Islam worships a Triune God.

Islam Is Its History

Trump, in the Riyadh address, in effect called upon Islam to reform itself. One may ask, is such possible? Ali Al Allawi addresses the issue in his book The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Writing in part from personal experience in Iraq, he observed that modernity in his youth was flooding in everywhere.
“People seemed to want more of it, cinemas and snack bars, cabarets and country clubs, freely flowing alcohol and mixed parties. Baghdad was turning into Babylon, its hedonistic predecessor of yore.”
Slowly in the 1960s the cultural climate began to change. Almost imperceptibly there began a re-spiritualization of Islam.
Allawi remembers that the 1950s in Iraq was a period in which the ruling class and the intellectual and cultural elites had distanced themselves from an overt identification with Islam.
“Islam,” Allawi writes, “was not noticeable in daily life. Religion was a mandatory course in school, [but] nobody taught us the rules of prayer or expected us to fast in Ramadan. Women, not only in my own family, but throughout the urban middle class wore only Western clothes.”
The only connection with a premodern past, he notes, was that his grandfather always wore the distinguishing and dignified robes and turban of an old-line merchant. “I don’t recall,” Allawi says, “ever coming across the word ‘jihad’ in any contemporary context. The prevailing rhetoric had more to do with Arab identity and anti [Western] imperialism.”
By the end of the 1970s, some say, and certainly by the 1990s, spiritual Islam was seen as an antidote to Western decadence. Given that common perception, a resurgent militant, political, and violent Islam emerged without much internal resistance.
Unfortunately, as Allawi understands it, “[t]he murderous violence unleashed by the Wahhabi-inspired Islamists was accompanied by laborious jurisprudential ‘justifications.’ These were accepted by a large number of Muslims worldwide and they legitimized the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians.”
The jihadists for their part can find ample justification for their activity in the Koran and in the sutra. Islam is its history, a history of conquest and subjugation of the defeated. Today the West is confronted not only from without but by an anti-Christian left oblivious to the threat Islam poses for Christianity and Western culture.
One of few scholars to predict the future is Efraim Karsh, author of A History of Islamic Imperialism.
In a passage that reinforces the remarks of President Trump, he writes, “Only when the political elites of the Middle East and the Muslim world reconcile themselves to state nationalism, forswear pan-Arabic and pan-Islamic dreams and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of political ambition will the inhabitants of these regions at least look forward to a better future free of would-be Saladins.” (The reference here is to the twelfth-century sultan of Egypt and Syria.)
That may be true, but it is also true that with the retreat of Christianity and the threatened loss of cultural and national identity among the member states of the European Union, Saladin’s dream of conquering the continent may yet be accomplished, but through population growth favorable to Islam.