Islam Victim in Mideast, Muslims Say : Religion: Hussein and Kadafi are accused of exploiting beliefs for their political ends.

Members of the American Muslim community are complaining that Islam has become a casualty of the Middle East crisis, with Arab leaders subverting the religion for political gain and the Western news media again misinterpreting it.

Dr. Maher Hathout, a cardiologist and spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles, charged that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi are “parasites,” exploiting Islam for their own political ends.

The Saudi royal family is no better, he added, accusing members of the family of “using Islam to justify their hegemony.”

Hathout and others said President Hussein’s suggestion that Muslims might undertake a jihad, or what has been translated as a holy war, against the West for sending troops into Saudi Arabia to counter Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait is a clear misrepresentation of Islam.

“Saddam Hussein is not engaged in any holy war at all,” said Laurence Michalak, vice chairman for Middle Eastern studies at UC Berkeley. “The dominant ideology in Iraq is the Baath Party, which is a form of Arab nationalism. Islam is not a religion of any particular ethnic group. . . . It is a universal religion, and it’s a universal revelation, much like Christianity.”

Actually, Hathout argued, jihad does not mean holy war. He said that in Arabic it means “striving toward betterment.” Salam Marayati, director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council, said the word also can be translated as “struggle against aggression.”

But nowhere in the Koran or in the teachings of the prophet Mohammed, these specialists say, is jihad defined as holy war.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council has asked the news media to use what it regards as the correct usage of the term .

The latest edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary defines jihad as: “1. A war by Muslims against unbelievers or enemies of Islam, carried out as a religious duty; 2. A fanatic campaign for or against an idea, etc.; crusade.”

The quote in question by President Hussein, read by an announcer on Baghdad Radio last Friday, said in part: “ . . . Iraq has insisted on a jihad without hesitation or retreat against the foreign forces until you reach heaven or martyrdom.”

Even when news organizations purport to clarify the complex issues in the Middle East, they can exacerbate the problem, Hathout and Marayati said, citing a recent effort by the Cable News Network to explain jihad. He quoted a CNN reporter as saying that jihad is the “fourth and final step in every Muslim’s duty to spread the faith by waging war against unbelievers and enemies.”

That, Hathout said, is “completely wrong.”

Michalak, who is not a Muslim, praised CNN’s overall coverage of the crisis but said that “there are five obligations in Islam, and jihad is not one of them.” He said the five pillars of Islam are the basic profession of the faith, prayer five times a day, fasting, the giving of alms and the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Hathout said jihad can take many forms, the highest of them being “to control oneself against whims and egos.” There is also “jihad through debate,” he said, through preaching and convincing and by spending money for good causes.

“And there is definitely jihad in terms of liberation theology--people who believe in God and who resent being enslaved to oppressors,” he said. “That form of jihad might take the form of actual confrontation. But the word is definitely more encompassing than just a launching of hostility. This is a miserable, narrow, distorted interpretation of the word.”

Nonetheless, Marayati acknowledged, it is the interpretation seized upon by many, even in the Muslim world.

Marayati, 30, who left Iraq in 1964, said that no one confuses Adolf Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan or the evangelist Jim Bakker with Christianity, even though all three invoked Christianity in advancing their aims.

He said the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s position toward leaders in the Middle East is that “they should keep their bloody hands off of Islam, period, and not exploit Islamic terms for their own benefit.

“When I speak,” he added, “I speak for the Muslim community. I can’t speak for Arabs,” who he said make up only 10% of the Muslim world.

The largest Muslim country is Indonesia, with a population of about 175 million. There also are Muslims from China to Western Africa to Southern Europe to Australia, he noted.