Muslim World Reacts: Silence of Islamic Leaders Harmful to Great Religion
[This article originally appeared in the Oct. 14 Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
While many respectable Muslim organizations the world over have condemned the reprehensible carnage of Sept. 11, a growing number of groups and individuals equivocate in their rebuke of violence. In doing so, they become apologists for violence and terror in furtherance of political and religious ends.
Reports from my native country, South Africa, confirm that while some Muslim preachers have sympathized with the victims of terrorism, they have, with equal speed, descended into explanations that America deserved such retaliation as "just deserts" for U.S. foreign policy trespasses. Some Muslim groups in the U.S. have also been criticized for taking a similar position on violence. It is disturbing that intelligent people sit through sermons and speeches where such dehumanizing pseudo-religious drivel is preached without demurral or protest. No human being deserves to die. Our moral sensibilities are tested even in the most conclusive convictions leading to the death penalty, let alone when acts of determined destruction and terror are unleashed on innocents at the New York World Trade Center. No Afghan citizens or Iraqi children deserve to die as a result of war and unyielding sanctions meant to punish draconian political authority. Nor do Palestinians and Israelis deserve to die in spine-chilling slaughter if their respective leaders cannot make peace.
Muslims should condemn acts of terror unequivocally without matching such statements with the algebra of grievances. To venture into such complex levels of sociological commentary without the requisite skill and empathy is to treat human life as dispensable. For Muslims to make such claims is to bring into disrepute the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad, who is fondly recalled in Islamic teachings as a "mercy unto humanity." And surely every Muslim is entitled to retrieve the reputation and integrity of her or his faith from such misrepresentation.
My family and I know firsthand the violence of Islamic extremists. We narrowly escaped death when Muslim militants bombed our house in Cape Town in July 1998.
Eyewitnesses saw leaders of the Islamic Unity Convention publicly rejoice at our misfortune. My only crime was that I opposed their violence, murder and intimidation of others, all acts that they perpetrated in the name of Islam.
What the apologists for all kinds of violence are effectively saying is that human beings are dispensable at the altar of their imagined or real causes. Long before the thousands of people at the World Trade Center became the latest victims, countless thousands of unknown persons died as victims of terror perpetrated by authoritarian states such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and diabolical agendas of war, pre-emptive strikes that are vigorously pursued by religious bigots and agents of vigilantism.
If "just deserts" is claimed to be a universal law, then can one not ask what wrongs 700,000 Rwandans did to deserve death by genocide? What wrongs did tens of thousands of Muslim Bosnians do to suffer massacres? What did millions of Afghans, Palestinians and Iraqis do to deserve such unrelenting suffering? There can be no intelligible answer to such questions. The only antidote to such dehumanizing logic is to erect an absolute barrier between all shades of terror and just causes and to vigilantly guard against their confusion.
Those reticent to condemn violence in the pursuit of political ends, other than in self-defense, risk being tarnished with the same logic propounded by Osama bin Laden, who advocates the indiscriminate murder of his enemies. Paradoxically, one can have more respect for bin Laden's perverse candor compared to the dishonest and hypocritical posture of his apologists who incite jihad from the armchairs of their plush comfort zones. For it is not the poor refugee in Peshawar, nor the dispossessed in Gaza or the malnourished children in Baghdad who necessarily and passionately subscribe to such learned discourses of violence. It is their more self-righteous and well-heeled advocates in the world capitals who do so. In furtherance of their own selfish ends, they do the already wretched of the Earth an even greater disservice without any of hope of alleviating their plight.
For some time now critical voices within the worldwide Muslim community have either been silenced or have been deemed as traitors and sell-outs by vigilantes, authoritarian states and religious orthodoxies alike. At a time when Islam as a civilization stands at risk of being dehumanized from within and brutalized from without, it would be too treacherous a complicity to remain silent any longer. My only regret is that it took so long for us to awaken.
Ebrahim Moosa, from South Africa, is a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University trained as a religious scholar (alim) in the Islamic tradition in India.
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Professor Ebrahim Moosa of the Department of Religion was a guest on "The Connection," on National Public Radio, on Tuesday, Sept. 10. The discussion focused on Islam in the aftermath of 9/11.
Listen. (The program can also be heard locally on WUNC-FM 91.5)
