Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (27 page)

It cannot be denied that there are groups among Muslims who, although representing a minority, have given credibility to negative stereotypes of “Islam” for generating their own vituperative black and white rhetoric against “the West.” Whereas scholars of Islam can and do make a contribution to rectifying stereotypes of the Islamic worlds, the events of September 11 have awakened many Muslims to their own obligation of restoring the image of their faith and traditions by manifesting attitudes and behaviors that are humane, just, and generous and by assertively speaking out against and eschewing all forms of terrorism, violence, and hatred in their midst. For many reasons, most especially feelings of being under siege, the voices of moderate Muslims who recoil from aggression are infrequently heard in the public domain. Now more than ever, however, following the Islamic precept to “command good and forbid evil,” Muslims increasingly recognize that their silence is tantamount to acquiescence and tacit approval of such immoral and futile acts. If, indeed, the purpose of the suicide bombings and terrorist acts was to aid Muslim causes, it is necessary to ask whose lives in the Islamic world were actually improved by the senseless destruction of September 11. Ironically, the tragedy offers a call to the so-called invisible majority of peaceful Muslims to stand up and show itself through deeds reflecting an active social and ethical conscience. Failing to repudiate strident voices of extremism in their midst will simply give credence to the views proliferated by writers such as Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, and Dinesh D’Souza – namely, that to be Muslim means to be wilfully destructive, oppressive, and regressive.
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September 11 has shown that if Muslims do not make serious and concerted efforts to reject hateful speech and violence justified in the name of “Islam,” and if they do not address the concrete social, economic, and political causes at the root of such profound wrongdoing, they risk hurting their own faith and heritage.

Many scholars have documented the fact that suspicion and fear of Muslims and Islam as a monotheistic faith is deeply rooted in the Euro-American imagination about the “other.” This prejudice began long before Muslims appeared on the world stage as conquerors, and culminated with the horrors of the Crusades, which were further perpetuated by waves of European colonization and occupation of Islamic lands.
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Scholars have observed that Christian Europe developed a rhetoric against Islam in order to define itself by demonizing the powerful and illustrious “other” that it was not. Europeans projected their own anxieties on Islam by calling it an inherently violent religion.
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While Europe was being divided by warring feudal lords in the early Middle Ages, Arabs and Persians were immersed in recovering the intellectual heritage of Plato and Aristotle in the libraries of Alexandria, Baghdad, and Asia Minor. They translated this learning and wisdom from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, adding to it with their commentaries. Muslim commentary and expansion of the Greek heritage was eventually shared back with the European world. Thus, at one time Islamic civilization was the yardstick by which Europe

measured itself and, indeed, the European Renaissance owes a great but frequently unacknowledged debt to the Islamic world. Karen Armstrong, among others, speculates that Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages was everything that Christian Europe aspired to be but was not: “Islam was the quintessential foreigner, and people resented Islam in Europe much as people in the Third World resent the U.S. today. One could say that Islam then was the greatest world power, and it remained so up until the early years of the Ottoman empire. Muslims were everywhere in the Middle East, Turkey, Iran, South East Asia, China. Wherever people went, there was Islam, and it was powerful, and people felt it as a threat.”
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It is more likely that European resentment turned Islam into “the quintessential foreigner,” exaggerating the differences between Christians and Muslims, since, in actual fact, the monotheistic and prophetic faith of Islam was part of the Abrahamic traditions. Both for religious/polemical and expansionist/political reasons, Christian Europe experienced Muslims and their empire as a threat. This helps put into context its impetus to deal with Islam as an entity or totality that had to be discredited outright as barbaric and false.

Added on to this long and complicated history of hostility, caricature, and power struggles which were strengthened by religious dogmatism and imperialism, in more recent times public and media attention in the West has focused on the Islamic world primarily in times of strife and conflict: the Algerian War; the Iranian Revolution; the American hostage crisis; the Iran–Iraq War; the contest over Kashmir; the Gulf War; the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and so on.
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When the framework of inquiry into another culture or faith is locked into questions of violent conflict, national defense and security, access to oil reserves, geopolitical and economic interests, human rights abuses, and so on, even genuine efforts to understand the worlds of Muslims are doomed to failure. Moreover, the capacity to sift what is accurate from what is distorted in different sources is hampered by the lack of rudimentary knowledge of the Islamic world in the American public education system. While this is slowly changing, primary and secondary education in the United States has failed to provide adequate historical knowledge not only of Islamic but of African, Asian, Native American, and other indigenous histories and cultural traditions. Well-researched and informative materials on Muslim cultures and societies in the primary and secondary school curriculum have been virtually non-existent until very recently.
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The few textbooks that do exist are marred by inaccuracies and biases.
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When general knowledge of Islamic histories and cultures is so low, it is possible for instant experts and opinion makers to trade on the public’s ignorance. In addition, it has taken disasters such as the Iran hostage crisis, the Gulf War, and now the September 11 tragedy for departments in the humanities and social sciences to argue for new positions in Islamic studies as an urgent and compelling priority given local and international events, and to galvanize college and university administrations into raising funding to support curricular

enhancements for the study of Muslim histories, cultures, literatures, and institutions so that citizens develop the abilities necessary for a sensitive and informed engagement with Muslims and the Islamic world.

Thus, given this profound level of ignorance about the second largest and fastest-growing religion in the world, the almost total dependency of ordinary American citizens on the press, TV experts, talk shows, conservative Christian groups, and right-wing organizations for “information” on the Islamic world can only be described as flawed at best and dangerous at worst. Add to this the cacophony of voices, the captivating lyrics of songwriters who have expressed a variety of sentiments about September 11 through the powerful medium of popular music.
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It is thus clear that in crisis situations such as September 11, the only times when interest in Islam is kindled, even serious attempts to communicate intelligently are bound to have limited impact. The public’s desire for simple answers “in a nutshell” and the educational necessity for complex analysis “rich in detail” come to loggerheads. In a democracy that depends on the capacity and intelligence of well-informed citizens to vote with their conscience, this issue of the formation of opinion based solely on a diet of news and popular media is relevant not only to the handling of the subject of Islam but also to many other sensitive political, social, economic, and ethical issues that require in-depth information and analysis before judgment is made. It should be noted that the public in this context includes Muslims, who add to the problem of oversimplification when they present “Islam” in a totalizing, homogeneous, ahistorical, and decontextualized manner.
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As educators, scholars of Islam are engaged in the task of helping students develop their intellectual gifts, analytical skills, and knowledge base with the hope that when they assume their roles as citizens and future leaders of society, they will sensitively assume their civic duty of creating a more just and humane society. The events of September 11 have shown that the educational role of scholars of Islam has had to be extended beyond the classroom into public venues to benefit a wider public that for the various reasons already outlined has been deprived of basic factual knowledge about the faith, interpretations, and histories of Muslim societies.

In the aftermath of September 11, scholars of Islam, who are often the sole experts on the religion, culture, and history of Muslims in their respective university campuses, received a deluge of requests for interviews and radio and TV appearances. Many found the experience of communicating about complex issues within the limiting constraints and agendas of the programs taxing and frustrating. Few scholars have the commanding presence, dexterity, and eloquence of an Edward Said or a Hanaan Ashrawi to convey information and critique in the flash of an interview and still make a lasting impression. It takes considerable skill to deal successfully with the media and yet to preserve the integrity of one’s message. Apart from learning how to convey ideas in sound bites, scholars have to contend with the fact that they never know in what context a sentence will be quoted and what spin will be put on it. In addition,

taking on such a public role comes at a huge cost of the scholar’s time and privacy. As Rashid Khalidi points out with reference to Edward Said, “engaging the media is often a most uncongenial task, and always a tiring one, for those who have to do it regularly and who care about the topics they are asked to comment on.”
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Public appearances might also entail provisions for personal security when the views that are being expressed are unpopular, provocative, and perceived as politically incorrect. It is inevitable in such contentious circumstances that some members of the audience will take offense and object to this or that statement depending on their own positions and interpretations. Thus, scholars pressed into service during the September 11 crisis struggled with whether or not they ought to assume such a public role given the costs in energy, time, security, and peace of mind. At the same time, they also had to weigh the fact that not doing so would leave an uninformed but genuinely interested populace open to more distortions, propaganda, and confusion.

Given deeply entrenched prejudices and the various interests that maintain them politically through the media, think-tanks, hate groups, and the publishing industry, it seems unlikely that the negative perceptions and attitudes are going to change in the near future. The veritable growth industry of publications which has sprung up in the last few decades bearing eye-catching and alarming titles on Islamic jihad, fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, and so on demonstrates that negative and ideologically motivated views about the Islamic world sell.
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The insulting depictions of Muhammad and distortions of Muslim beliefs articulated by a prominent pastor at a major Southern Baptist Convention in St Louis and echoed in other evangelical contexts may be discounted in polite conversations, but they may well express largely unarticulated sentiments of many people on the street.
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At the very least, the reach of such voices may continue to influence public opinion and maintain stereotypes. Sales of the Qur’an and books on Islam boomed after September 11. This does not mean, however, that readers were necessarily enlightened given the variety of opportunistic and often misleading books that were made available. Many readers simply found in them a confirmation of their pre-existing misconceptions. In a town meeting after September 11 at which the Qur’anic injunction against suicide and arbitrary killing was quoted, a person in the audience proclaimed he had read the Qur’an from cover to cover and found many justifications for engaging in jihad or holy war. Justifications for violence against enemies can be found in virtually any scripture. Unfortunately, Muslims and non-Muslims alike read the Qur’an without any sense of historical perspective, or knowledge of the religious, sociological, and political background of seventh-century Arabia. It is essential to call into question the use of scriptures as self-evident artifacts which stand independent of time and context, and whose meanings can be deduced quite apart from the historical evolution of language and rhetoric, formations of communities of interpretation, and social and political mechanisms for controlling divergent readings.
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In the college classroom, despite encouraging and genuine attempts by students at understanding the complexities underlying the events of September 11, displacing the vivid images of destruction and hate with a more balanced view of the diversity and range of Islamic histories, literatures, and cultures was an almost impossible task. Enrollments in various courses on Islam increased markedly after September 11, but, as with the public, students too had to struggle hard to come to terms with their understandable identification with those who were lost in the attacks and the feelings evoked by watching repeatedly televised images of the destruction of the Twin Towers, pictures of the suicide bombers, and video clips of Osama bin Laden taunting the West. Even after working through and analyzing primary sources on Islam, the history and the diversity of interpretations of concepts such as jihad, and the socio-economic and political dimensions of post-colonial Islamist movements, some students could not see Islam as anything but a monolithic faith permitting and promoting violence. This ambivalence was matched by reactions of Muslim students in the classroom who were justifiably angry and hurt, firstly because they felt an unfair judgment of guilt by association had been passed on all Muslims, and secondly because of the double standard regarding the value of life which they detected in media reports and reactions of American politicians. A Muslim student described his resentment at “being identified as one of
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who is being examined under a microscope like a specimen.” Another argued that while outrage was expressed at the loss of American or Israeli lives, few seemed to care about the loss of lives of innocent civilians in the war in Afghanistan
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or the cumulative loss of Palestinian lives as a result of the Israeli occupation
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or the rape and massacre of Bosnian Muslims when they were supposedly in a safe zone under U.N. protection in 1995. The material and psychological causes for the festering resentment and anger in parts of the Muslim world against America involve specific U.S. capitalist and military interventions which often do not demonstrate a consistent ethical framework. Many of these policies have helped advance the wealth and power of the ruling class to the detriment of the working classes in Muslim countries.