CHARLOTTE, September 14, 2012 — American author Leon Uris was famous for the research that went into his historical novels. His two best-known books were Exodus (1958) and Trinity (1976), but another novel published in 1984, The Haj, had profound insights into the recent violence throughout the Middle East.

Much of what Uris wrote explains and answers in explicit detail many of the fundamental questions about Islam and the Muslim mindset that Americans and media have been seeking to understand for the past several days. 

Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam was born of the desert. It arose in the latter part of the 6^th century when an illiterate orphan named Mohammed had a revelation and began preaching to the downtrodden of Mecca in eastern Arabia. The upper levels of society in that region already had their religious doctrines, but there was little or nothing that spoke to the ignorant, impoverished lower classes.

Uris described it this way in The Haj: “The belt of Islam held some of the planet’s worst land. It was that crushing part of the world where men could not beat the earth. Numbly they embraced Islam and its fatalistic outlook. Islam gave them something to grasp hold of in order to continue the struggle through life. This land bullied everyone who attempted to exist on it. So harsh, so brutalizing were the forces of nature that those people imprisoned upon it were convoluted into forming a society where cruelty was commonplace.”

Initially, Mohammed allied himself with Christians and Jews, but he was humiliated by his fellow Meccans. Even the uncle who raised him believed that Mohammed was insane.

Eventually, when visitors from Medina arrived in Mecca for Ramadan, they offered Mohammed refuge in their city. The prophet accepted and moved with his small band of followers in the year 622. It was called the Hijrah, and this was the beginning of Islam as we know it.

There was one thing Mohammed inherited in Medina that he did not have in Mecca, and that was an army. Following his rebuke in Mecca, Mohammed made Christians and Jews his mortal enemies for the remainder of his life, and he now possessed force to support him.

Once again the words of Uris: “To an Arab, humiliation is the ultimate punishment.”

As time passed, Mohammed’s authority became increasingly appealing for the desert tribes of Arabia.

According to Uris, “For a clan of Bedouin to give up their nomadic ways was akin to giving up their freedom. The Bedouin had been the original driving force behind Islam, for it was their men who had filled the ranks of Mohammed’s first armies and spearheaded the Moslem conquests. The Arabian peninsula, from which he sprang, had remained remote and beyond the grasp of the early conquests of Egypt and Rome. In the punishing desert a cruel culture evolved that matched the brutal dictates of nature. While the world of progress passed him by, the Bedouin survived largely by plundering the vulnerable. Strong sheiks with no more compassion than the blistering sun showed little mercy to the weak. The demands of survival left no room for convocations of Bedouin to debate democratic principles, for the law of the desert was absolute. The Bedouin was thief, assassin, and raider, and hard labor was immoral. Despite his raggedness and destitution, the Bedouin remained the Arab ideal.”

As Islam and Mohammed gained power, so too, did the cruelty of his believers.

One character in the novel is Major-General Orde Wingate, a real-life British Army officer who created special military units in Palestine in the 1930s and World War II. In a scene in The Haj, Orde turns to a central character, Gideon Asch, and says, “every last Arab is a total prisoner of his society. The Arabs will never love you for what good you’ve brought them.  They don’t really know how to love. But hate! Oh God, can they hate! And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you have jolted them from their delusion of grandeur and shown them for what they are – a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition…except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep. You are dealing with a mad society and you better learn how to control it.” 

In a desert society where water was a rarity, it is not difficult to understand why a man might kill an outsider for taking water from his well to quench his thirst or water his camels.

Even with the endless discussions about the Arab spring and the hope it was supposed to bring to the region, the central character of The Haj, Haj Ibrahim, highlights precisely what has taken place in the Middle East since 9/11/2012, when he expresses to a Jewish friend, “During the summer heat my people became frazzled. They are pent up. They must explode. Nothing directs their frustration like Islam. Hatred is holy in this part of the world. It is also eternal. You (Jews) do not know how to deal with us. For years, decades, we may seem to be at peace with you, but always in the back of our minds we keep up the hope of vengeance. No dispute is ever really settled in our world. The Jews give us special reason to continue warring.”

Such concepts are difficult for citizens of the West to grasp, but grasp we must. Without understanding the motivating factors that drive the Islamic societies of the Middle East we can never succeed.

In another statement by another character in the novel, the highly intelligent Dr. Mudhil, elaborates, “We (Arabs) do not have to love one another and we have long ago lost that ability. It was so written twelve hundred years earlier. Hate is our overpowering legacy and we have regenerated ourselves by hatred from decade to decade, generation to generation, century to century. In ten, twenty, thirty years the world of Islam will begin to consume itself in madness. We cannot live with ourselves…we never have. We are incapable of change.”

Mohammed was the product of the desolate region he understood. He spoke to a frustrated, poor, uneducated society. As centuries passed, wars and conquests built the ever-growing Muslim society. Not necessarily because they were believers, but because the alternative was death.

In a span of 14 centuries there are countless Muslims who have embraced the faith without even knowing why. But those who are true believers, the radicals who adhere to the original teachings of Mohammed, are devoted in their cause and they will not be deterred.

Leon Uris got it right nearly three decades ago. 

____________________

Peabod is Bob Taylor, owner of Taylored Media Services in Charlotte, NC. Taylor is founder of The Magellan Travel Club, which creates, and escorts customized tours to Switzerland, France and Italy for groups of 12 or more. Inquiries for groups can be made at Peabod@aol.com Taylored Media has produced marketing videos for British Rail, Rail Europe, Switzerland Tourism, the Swedish Travel & Tourism Council, the Finnish Tourist Board, the Swiss Travel System and Japan Railways Group among others. As author of The Century Club book, Peabod is now attempting to travel to 100 countries or more during his lifetime. To date he has visited 69 countries. Suggest someplace new for Bob to visit; if you want to know where he has been, check his list on Facebook. Bob plans to write a sequel to his book when he reaches his goal of 100 countries. He also played professional baseball for four years and was a sportscaster for 14 years at WBTV, the CBS affiliate in Charlotte.

 

 

---

This article is the copyrighted property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media. REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.