Battle for future of Islam

The buildings in Amman, Jordan, are nearly all built from white limestone. It’s by design and building code and is considered a matter of aesthetics. As the sun comes up, the early morning light reflecting off the stone makes it look like a diamond rather than an emerald Oz.

Apart from laundry fluttering on rooftop clotheslines, rooftop gardens of satellite dishes and an occasional American fast-food restaurant sign, the landscape looked to me like a Maxfield Parrish rendering of heaven. When I was there in May, I would never have imagined the halcyon scene broken by bombs blowing buildings apart.

The day after I arrived, I sat in a small, elegant conference room on the grounds of the Royal Hashemite Court, listening to Akel Biltaji, whose title is Advisor to His Majesty the King, explain “what Jordan’s all about.” The country couldn’t find a better apologist than Biltaji, who described the nation as a “melting pot of the Arab world,” with himself as “refugee stock” from the West Bank.

The land is a biblical roadmap, blessed with the presence of God, he said. Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, had come there from Ur. From its soil, the prophet Elijah rode his fiery chariot to heaven (“the first astronaut was a Jordanian,” Biltaji joked) and when John baptized Jesus in its waters, the heavens opened and a voice said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

In a place east of Mount Nebo, where Moses first glimpsed the promised land, a Christian monk observed a boy’s religious zeal and predicted he would one day change the world. That boy, 26 years later, was Islam’s prophet Muhammad. “The prophecy of Islam,” said Biltaji, “was right here in Jordan.”

Today the country is progressive, committed to becoming more democratic, to moving into the 21st century in peace. King Abdullah I, Biltaji said, died a martyr to peace, assassinated by those who feared he would make peace with Israel.

Mentioning the Intifada of 2000 and the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he insisted that terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden are not part of the Muslim society. “They are heretics,” he said, in the very same way that “Milosevic was not a Christian when he went around killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims.”

Biltaji views Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 murder of 29 Muslims as they prayed in a Hebron mosque the same way. “These lunatics should not hijack the most beautiful things in our religions, like mercy, compassion.”

Democracy, though, is not “a pill we can take,” he said. “It’s a process. We need time.” He pointed to our own country’s journey there through a civil war, the fight for civil rights and gender equity.

Biltaji painted the small country large, but my travel there showed me it is even bigger. Its history and its culture are immense. I found its people, like Biltaji, genial and generous. On the long flight home I spent most of the time thinking about how and when I might go back.

In early October, I sat in the Drowsy Parrot, a coffee house in Saline, Mich., talking to a married couple, friends of my sister, about Jordan. I told them about the country’s arid beauty, its hospitality and its wealth of biblical sites. In political temperament, I described it as the Switzerland of the Middle East.

Scarcely a month later, suicide bombers blasted three hotels in Amman.

The next morning, Akel Biltaji told the Los Angeles Times: “This morning, we’re all up, going and determined and steadfast. We have 5.6 million security agents now. Every Jordanian is now going to be a watchdog.”

I sent an e-mail to Christine Moore, the consultant to the Jordan Tourism Board who had organized my travel to the country. “I am so shocked and saddened by yesterday’s bombings,” I wrote. “What a price to pay for being a friend to the U.S.”

That’s when I realized that my analogy comparing Jordan to World War II Switzerland was less than accurate in a highly significant way. As an independent state, Switzerland remained useful in trading and banking with Germany while never aligning itself with the Allies.

Jordan on the other hand, is a friend to Israel and the United States. Shortly after the Amman bombings on Nov. 9, the Washington Post quoted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as saying, “The United States has had no closer ally than Jordan, and Jordan will find no better friend than the United States at this difficult hour.”

That puts the country on the wrong side of those who Biltaji sees not as Muslims but as heretics. They would tell him it’s the other way around.

Sherri Wood Emmons, managing editor of the magazine Disciples World, was in Jordan at the time of the bombings. I read her blog the next day. Her tour guide, Ali Abushakra, also had been my tour guide in Jordan. He had asked the group Emmons was traveling with, “What do they want from us?”

I posed the question to Maria Khani, who lives in Huntington Beach and works for the Council on Islamic Education in Fountain Valley. Friends of hers, Hollywood producer and director Mustapha Akkad and his daughter Rima, were killed in the bombing of the Radisson in Amman.

Here’s what Maria said: “What do they want from us? I am a Muslim-American ... and do you think I know what they want? All I [can] say is that they are trying to ruin the lives of Muslims in the Middle East and in the Western countries.”

Just before the bombings, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin published an article titled “Islam’s Long War Within.” In it, Reza Aslan, a Muslim and author of “No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” argues that the real conflict is “not between Islam and the West, but within Islam itself.” He calls it a fitnah, a civil war, “between the vast majority of moderate Muslims ... and those small groups of extremists and puritans” who choose to revert, “sometimes violently, to the ‘fundamentals’ of their faith.”

On Nov. 16, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed piece, also by Aslan, titled “Battle of the ‘fatwas’” and subtitled, “The real jihadist battle is Muslim against Muslim. Can the clerics mobilize to protect Islam?”

Those clerics, wrote Aslan, “along with most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims ... are far more threatened by the rise of Islamic terrorism than is the West.”

If I had to answer Ali’s question, “What do they want from us?” I’d tell him, “They want you to be just like them.”

My question is, who can and who will rescue Islam from them?

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].

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