Moderate medium, extreme message

‘‘We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them …

‘‘We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.

‘‘With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

When the European Union — which knows from anti-Semitism — declares a speech is anti-Semitic, you know a line has been crossed. What’s scarier, that Mahathir Mohammad said this or, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, the reaction from the crowd?

‘‘The Indonesian president, Megawati Soekarnoputri, joined a standing ovation for her Malaysian counterpart, Mahathir Mohamad, after he called on Muslims to consider Jews as their enemy, it has been revealed. All 57 leaders … applauded the comments … Among them were several key figures in the post-September 11 world, including Ms Megawati; the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai; President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.’’

Al Jazeera’s coverage of the reaction to the speech had more bon mots: ‘‘ ‘I don’t think they (the remarks) are anti-Semitic at all. I think he was stating the facts’.’’

This is how Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar tried to explain the comments to Voice of America: ‘‘The prime minister’s statement is a statement calling for moderation, calling not to utilise violence to achieve our objective, start to think, look at the example of what the Jewish community achieved.’’

The best moderate political Islam has to offer?

The scary and pathetic thing is, Hamid Albar is correct — relative to a lot of Muslim leaders, Mahathir’s position is moderate.

To his credit, Mahathir was at the helm as his country industrialised. He was smart enough to appreciate the importance of rule of law and of markets in economic growth.

He bucked the IMF’s advice and imposed capital controls during the Asian financial crisis and lived to tell the tale. He pursued a number of policies designed to ameliorate ethnic tensions between the poorer but more numerous Malays and the wealthier ethnic Chinese.

These feats are not easy for a developing country leader to pull off. And yet, this man, the best that moderate political Islam has to offer, is rotten with flaws.

Mahathir subverted his country’s democratic traditions to suit his political purposes. He jailed his anointed successor for having the temerity to question whether the IMF might actually be correct.

And the anti-Semitism is hardly new. He blamed Jews, specifically George Soros, for the Asian financial crisis.

The other parts of the speech spelt out very clearly what Mahathir believes should be appropriated from the West: ‘‘The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practising their own religion of Islam.

‘‘As a result the Muslims were able to develop and extract wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to strengthen their defences, protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as prescribed by Islam.

‘‘At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilisation, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression …

‘‘But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilisation came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine etc was discouraged …

‘‘We are enjoined by our religion to prepare for the defence of the ummah. Unfortunately we stress not defence but the weapons of the time of the Prophet. Those weapons and horses cannot help to defend us any more. We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence.

“But because we discouraged the learning of science and mathematics etc as giving no merit for the akhirat, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defence. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies.

‘‘This is what comes from the superficial interpretation of the Quran, stressing not the substance of the Prophet’s sunnah and the Quran’s injunctions but rather the form, the manner and the means used in the first century of the Hijrah.

‘‘And it is the same with the other teachings of Islam. We are more concerned with the forms rather than the substance of the words of Allah and the literal interpretation of the traditions of the Prophet.’’

There is actually a powerful critique of Islamic fundamentalism in this passage — but the critique is exclusively over means and not ends. Mahathir explicitly denounces the use of wanton violence to exterminate the state of Israel. He’s advocating the use of brainpower — to exterminate the state of Israel.

What Mahathir wants is for Islamic countries to embrace modernisation without westernisation and its tacky ‘‘Jewish’’ traits of human rights and democracy.

However, it’s no coincidence that the peak of Islam’s power and influence came at a time when the religion was tolerant to scientific and religious views outside of the Quran.

Although scholars Samuel Huntington and Benjamin Barber disagree, I side with the writer Jonathan Rauch in believing that it’s impossible to embrace modern science without embracing the tolerance for free thought that is at the core of Western liberal thought.

I could very well be wrong, however. This is the trillion-dollar bet for the West for the next century — hope that the Islamic world, in embracing modern science and technology, learns to tolerate views outside the ummah. Or suffer the consequences of a modernised but rigidly theocratic Islam.

(The author is assistant professor of political science, University of Chicago, the United States)