[Reader-list] Debate or denial: the Muslim dilemma

[MRSG]

Debate or denial: the Muslim dilemma

Hasan Suroor
THE HINDU 17-July-2007
http://www.thehindu.com/2007/07/17/stories/2007071755660800.htm

More Muslims need to realise that Islamist terrorists are not simply
'misguided' individuals acting on a whim but that they are people who
know what they are doing and they are doing it deliberately in the name
of Islam.

Judging from much of the Muslim reaction to the latest Islamist
outrage - last month's attempted bombings in London and Glasgow - the
community seems to have talked itself into a default position in
relation to violent Muslim extremism. The same old arguments are being
flogged again betraying an unwillingness to acknowledge either the scale
of the problem or its nature. The fear of making the community or Islam
look bad has created a strange silence aroun d issues that lie at the
heart of the Islamism debate.

Broadly, the Muslim argument is that it is all down to a host of
external factors. Top of the list is the western foreign policy,
especially with regard to the Palestinian issue, compounded by the
invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. Then there are social and
economic reasons such as lack of education and high rate of unemployment
in the Muslim community - again attributed to external causes such as
racial or religious discrimination.

In other words: don?t blame us; it is all other people?s doing. We are
only the victims. As someone who feels the same pressures as other
Muslims, I wish this was true. But it isn?t. It not all other people's
doing. We are not just the victims.

I used the term default position? as an euphemism. There is a more
robustly appropriate term, which is being increasingly used to describe
the Muslim position: denial. The view that Muslims are in denial of the
extent of the problem and their own responsibility in dealing with it is
no longer confined to right-wing Muslim-bashers. Even liberal opinion
has started to shift.

Appearing on an /NDTV/ panel discussion last week, I was struck by how
closely my two distinguished co-panellists - one in New Delhi and the
other in Bangalore - stuck to the default position. They kept refer
ring to 'looming images' from Iraq and Palestine; and to the frustration
and 'anger' bred by American and British foreign policy. There were
obligatory references to social deprivation etc., etc. And as for the
three Indian doctors suspected to have been behind the London-Glasgow
plot, they were simply misguided? individuals acting alone.

There was much hand-wringing when the anchor underlined the fact that
Muslims had been behind all recent acts of terrorism. Yes, it was
worrying. Of course, the community condemned any violence committed in
the name of Islam, a peaceful religion. And, indeed, there was need for
introspection and discussion. But all this was hedged in with so many
'ifs' and 'buts' that the whole debate seemed like a huge exercise in
denial. At least up to the point where I was cut off because the
satellite time ran out.

It is the response of a community that sees itself under siege and is
irritated that every time a Muslim does something silly it is expected
to stand up and apologise. Add to this the prevailing Islamophobia (it
is pretty widespread, make no mistake about it), and it is not difficult
to understand why Muslims are in this defensive mood. But how long will
they continue to shy away from facing the truth? And the truth is that
many of their assumptions about the underlying causes of extremism are
flawed. Every fresh terrorist attack chips away at the idea that foreign
policy and socio-economic factors are the sole drivers of Islamist
extremism, making the Muslim default position more untenable.

Hassan Butt, a reformed British extremist, recalls how 'we used to laugh
in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for
Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was
Western foreign policy.' Writing in 'The Observer', he said if he was
still stuck in his old ways, he would be 'laughing once again' at
suggestions that the June 29-30 failed attacks were motivated by anger
over British foreign policy.

Mr. Butt criticised Muslims and liberal non-Muslim intellectuals and
politicians for failing to recognise the 'role of Islamist ideology in
terrorism' - an ideology that, according to another lapsed extremist
Shiraz Maher, preaches a 'separatist message of Islamic supremacy' And
seeks to establish a 'puritanical caliphate.' Mr. Maher knew Kafeel
Ahmed, the Indian who tried to blow up Glasgow airport and is now
fighting for his life in a hospital in Scotland.

Both Mr. Butt and Mr. Maher were activists of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, one of
Britain's most controversial radical groups with a long and notorious
history of recruiting potential jihadis in mosques and on university
campuses. Mohammed Siddique Khan, who masterminded the 7/7 bombings, was
a member of Hizb at the same time as Mr. Butt. The July 7 attacks were
widely attributed to the invasion of Iraq and other west-inspired
?atrocities? against Muslims. According to Mr. Butt, though many
extremists were enraged by the deaths of fellow Muslims across the world
?what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror
within Britain, our homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were
fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually
bring Islamic justice to the world.?

Arguably, defectors are not the most reliable of people and there is,
inevitably, an element of exaggeration in what they say about the
organisation they have left and of their own role in it. Yet, so long as
we are careful to remember where they are coming from and don?t allow
ourselves to be mesmerised by their insiders? account, they remain our
best guide to understanding the world they have left behind. It is only
an ex-extremist who can help us get a glimpse of what goes on inside an
extremist organisation and sometime that can change our perceptions of
an issue in a fundamental way. So, when people like Mr. Butt and
Mr.Maher debunk some of the most widely held assumptions about the
nature of Muslim extremism it is important to pay heed. And they are not
theonly ones. Ed Husain, another ex-Islamist, has written a whole book
(/The Islamist/) warning against complacency. First and foremost,
Muslims must acknowledge what Ziauddin Sardar, one of Europe?s most
prominent Muslim scholars, calls the ?Islamic nature of the problem.?
Islamist extremism has not descended from another planet or been imposed
on the community from outside. It breeds within the community and is the
product of a certain kind of interpretation of Islam. And, in the words,
of Mr. Sardar, terrorists are a ?product of a pecific mindset that has
deep roots in Islamic history.?

In a seminal essay, The Struggle for Islam's Soul (/New Statesman/,
July 18, 2005), Mr. Sardar argued that Islamists were nourished by an
Islamic tradition that is intrinsically inhuman and violent in its
rhetoric, thought and practice and this placed a unique burden on
Muslims as they tried to make sense of what their co-religionists were
doing in the name of Islam. To deny that they are a product of Islamic
history and tradition is more than complacency. It is a denial of
responsibility, a denial of what is happening in our communities. It is
a refusal to live in the real world, he wrote.

Mr. Sardars views are significant. He is a practising Muslim with deep
grounding in Islamic theology. He was deeply upset by Salman Rushdie?s
/Satanic Verses/ and is often involved in verbal duels with Islamophobic
commen tators. But as he points out because he is a Muslim and it is in
the name of his religion that terrorists are acting, he believes it is
his responsibility critically to examine the tradition that sustains
them.

More Muslims need to realise that Islamist terrorists are not simply
misguided individuals acting on a whim but that they are people who
know what they are doing and they are doing it deliberately in the name
of Islam. However perverted their interpretation it remains an
interpretation of Islam and it is not enough to condemn their actions or
accuse them of hijacking Islam without doing anything about it.

Let's face it; there are verses in the /Koran/ that justify violence.
The hard truth that Islam does permit the use of violence,? as Mr. Butt
points out, must be recognised by Muslims. When Islam was in its infancy
and battling against non-believers violence was deemed legitimate to put
them down. Today, when it is the world's second largest religion with
more than one billion followers around the world and still growing that
context has lost its relevance. Yet, jihadi groups, pursuing their
madcap scheme of establishing Dar-ul-Islam (the Land of Islam), are
using these passages to incite impressionable Muslim youths. Yet there
is no sign of a debate in the community beyond easy platitudes, and it
remains in denial.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070718/185dd498/attachment.html