Ikhras Shoe Of The Month Award Winner – December 2011

Ikhras is pleased to announce the winner of the Muntadhar Zaidi Shoe of the Month Award for this December, 2011 is Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.  Qaradawi, the President of the International Union for Muslim Scholars is the most prominent Islamic theologian in the Arab world and within the Sunni branch of Islam.  He is best known for his weekly talk show program on Aljazeera, al-Sharia wal hayat (Sharia & life), in which he discusses a myriad of issues and their relationship to Islamic law as he sees it.  He is also the leading figure behind the popular website Islam online and is among the most influential clerics and unofficial leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Over the past years the octogenarian, reactionary cleric has become a tool of Arab oil-Sheiks.  Qaradawi defends the horrific medieval regime in “Saudi Arabia” and regularly heaps praise on the semi-literate Saudi King.  In the same sermon Qaradawi can be found defending the puritanical tyranny of the house of Saud and the other ruling dynasties in US protectorates along the Eastern shores of the Arabian Peninsula that turned their city-states into high-end brothels and slave camps for migrant workers.  Whenever called upon Qaradawi has been prepared to issue religious edicts invoking God in support of the domestic and foreign policies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).  At no time has Qaradawi’s role as the hired cleric in the service of pro-US oil-Sheiks been as clear as it has during the 2011 Arab uprising.

While cynicism and hypocrisy is nothing new in politics there is something particularly vile about political actors (and Qaradawi is at least as much a politician as a cleric) attempting to hide their services to governments behind a shroud of religion or a supreme being.  Although his influence is often overstated, its difficult to exaggerate his sinister role within the Arab and Islamic worlds, and its precisely because he does enjoy significant influence that it becomes critically important his religious garb not immunize him from the same criticisms others would receive had they been wearing a dishdasha (thawb ثوب ) or suit and tie.

During the 2011 Arab uprising Qaradawi’s role as the privatized cleric to oil-Sheiks reached its climax and his reactionary agenda and ugly sectarian streak was fully exposed. He initially supported the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and attempted to give them an Islamic flavor they did not have.  However, his ostensible support for the popular uprisings against repression, corruption, and tyranny was always driven by a narrow, reactionary agenda and tailored to the political considerations of the GCC states.

When the Arab League offered the NATO powers an Arab fig leaf to justify their aggression against Libya, Qaradawi not only supported the war but also issued an edict calling for the extra-judicial assassination of the Arab ruler with which the bitter, spoiled princes of the Saudi family had an ongoing grudge. Given the nature and circumstances surrounding Qadhafi’s death and Qaradawi’s ideological influence on the NATO-backed militias in Libya, the Qatar-based cleric should be held at least partially responsible for that ugly murder. When the protests spread to Bahrain Qaradawi was not so supportive of the Bahraini people’s struggle against tyranny and defended the Saudi forces entry into Bahrain to help their monarchist counterparts violently repress a popular uprising.  Joining the chorus of Arab journalists employed by Saudi-controlled media outlets in the Arab world he openly dismissed the majority of Bahrainis as Iranian stooges, a not so subtle reference to the fact a majority of Bahrain’s citizens happen to belong to the Shia branch of Islam.  None of this was surprising coming from someone that routinely refers to Shia Muslims as “heretics” and warns “their danger comes from their attempt to invade Sunni society.”

Several factors, including the traditionally greater hostility clerics show to “heretics” from their “own group” as opposed to the “outsiders” and the transparent attempts to pose as an advocate of that ridiculous notion of a “dialogue among religions”, have caused Qaradawi to express views on Christians that are only slightly less reprehensible and blatant than his anti-Shia sectarian ranting. This does not mean he hasn’t contributed his fair share to promote anti-Coptic sentiments among his followers in Egypt, and it has not prevented him from denying the Turkish genocide against Armenians during World War I.

When it comes to women Qaradawi believes men hitting women can sometimes be an “effective cure” for misbehavior and that female masturbation is “more dangerous” than male masturbation.  Of course, Qaradawi would consider himself to be a moderate for restricting the severity of the beating a man is entitled to give a woman, and because the danger he attaches to female masturbation, as he has argued, is due to the consequences a woman might endure from society if she tears or breaks her hymen.  The enlightened Qaradawi does concede that a woman’s punishment for losing her virginity is not death, but mere flogging.

Qaradawi’s role as hired cleric in the service of Arab oil-Sheiks came to full light in Syria. Just as he did in Bahrain, Qaradawi viewed events in Syria from his own sectarian prism which dovetailed nicely with the policies of his sponsors in Doha and Riyadh. Unlike his position in Bahrain, in Syria he not only sided with peaceful protesters but also expressed support for a campaign of violence carried out by the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood based on what he views as a Sunni uprising against a regime he considers to be representing another heretical sect, the Alawites.  Earlier this month Qaradawi issued a religious edict sanctioning yet another “foreign intervention”, the agreed upon euphemism for a US/NATO war on an Arab country,  this time on Syria.

At the same time Qaradawi was helping advance the Saudi & Qatari foreign policy objectives by enlisting God into the NATO alliance in support of war on Syria, he was also advocating a moderate policy towards Israel and the Western imperialist powers which he cautioned should be “wise and rational.” It’s no coincidence that the Islamists in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria most influenced by Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood have become a tool in the Saudi-American counter-revolution in the Arab world and have made it clear they’re prepared to adopt friendly Neo-liberal economic policies and appease Israel as long as Western governments would acquiesce to their ascension to power.

The Arab uprising of 2011 was one against both domestic tyranny and foreign domination which were always intrinsically linked in pro-West Arab states such as Egypt and Tunisia.  Moreover, the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain revealed a unified citizenry where oppressed masses, men and women, peasants and workers, young and old, Muslim and Christian, Sunni and Shia stand up and demand their rights as citizens of their own states, not as adherents of a sect or proponents of narrow factional interests. If Qaradawi and his sponsors in the Gulf were to succeed, whatever gains the Arab citizen has realized thus fair, and they have been limited, will be reversed and eclipsed by a reactionary, divisive political program destined to end in an economic, social, and political failure not unlike that which the Arab masses have revolted against.

For the uprisings in the Arab world to truly succeed and reach their full revolutionary potential, they must not only uproot entrenched economic and political structures of domination, but must also bring to an end the hegemony of foreign powers that undergird the ruling economic and political classes in the Arab world.  An authentic revolutionary program, therefore, must also challenge social and cultural norms that perpetuate the domination of the ruling class.  This will necessarily include confronting the unjustified deference many are too willing to show any man (and its always men) that wraps himself, literally and metaphorically, in a religious cloth while serving the same entrenched powers whose overthrow is necessary for the Arab uprisings to develop into authentic revolutions.

So in that spirit and in recognition of his obscurantism, sectarian agitation, service to GCC states, reactionary political and social agenda, moderation towards Zionism and imperialism, and in special tribute to his edict issued earlier this month in which he invoked religion and God to compel acquiescence to a US/NATO war on Syria, Ikhras is pleased to award the prestigious Ikhras shoe of the month for December, 2011 to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.

Every month Ikhras awards the Muntadhar Zaidi “Shoe of the month” to the House Arab or Muslim individual or organization whose behavior that month best exemplifies the behavior of what Malcolm X described, in the language of his own time, as the “house negro” (see video). The award is named in honor of the brave Iraqi journalist Muntadhar Zaidi who threw his shoes at the war criminal George W. Bush at a time House Arabs and Muslims were dining with him at the White House and inviting him to their mosques.  Arab dictators and puppets of the empire are also qualified to enter the shoe of the month competition based on their own subservience to U.S.-led global imperialism.  Contest guidelines prohibit any one individual or organization from winning the award more than 3 times a year. 

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