[Reader-list] How to become a real Muslim - Kenan Malik

[يا سر ~ ɹısɐʎ]

thanks. this is a good article if read carefully.
I have a feeling it was posted inadvertently  : )
best. y



On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com>wrote:

> http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-04-22-malik-en.html
>
> How to become a real Muslim
>
> A media reliant on scandal has colluded with self-promoting but
> marginal Muslim clerics to create a cycle of self-reinforcing myths
> around the Mohammed cartoons, writes Kenan Malik. The fear of causing
> offence has helped undermine progressive trends in Islam and
> strengthened the hand of religious bigots.
>
> In Ireland seven people are arrested over an alleged plot to kill
> Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who had depicted the Prophet Mohammad
> with the body of a dog in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda. In Aarhus,
> a Somalian axeman tries to hack down Kurt Westergaard, the most
> controversial of the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists. In London, Faisal
> Yamani, a Saudi lawyer, threatens to use Britain's notorious libel
> laws to sue ten Danish newspapers that published the cartoons in the
> name of all 95,000 "descendants of Mohammed".
>
> Cartoon controversy
>
> Free speech is a fundamental human right and a central tenet of
> democracy. Or is it? Reactions to the Danish cartoon controversy
> reveal strong divergences about what the right to free speech entails.
> [ more ]
> Five years after Jyllands-Postenpublished its now-notorious
> caricatures, the reverberations are still being felt. And not just by
> the cartoonists. The threats and violence that continue to surround
> their publication have had a chilling impact upon writers, publishers,
> gallery owners and theatre directors. Two years ago, the American
> publishing giant Random House dropped The Jewel of Medina, a breezy,
> romantic tale about Aisha, the Prophet Mohammad's youngest wife, after
> fears that it might prove offensive. When, last year, Yale University
> Press published The Cartoons that Shook the World, Jytte Klausen's
> scholarly study of the cartoon controversy, it refused, much to her
> disgust, to include any of the cartoons. When the free speech magazine
> Index on Censorship, published aninterview with Klausen about Yale's
> decision, it too refused to show any of the cartoons.
>
> "You would think twice, if you were honest," said Ramin Gray, the
> Associate Director at London's Royal Court Theatre when asked he would
> put on a play critical of Islam. "You'd have to take the play on its
> individual merits, but given the time we're in, it's very hard,
> because you'd worry that if you cause offence then the whole
> enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make
> you tread carefully." In June 2007, the theatre cancelled a new
> adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, set in Muslim heaven, for fear
> of causing offence. Another London theatre, the Barbican, carved
> chunks out of its production ofTamburlaine the Great for the same
> reason, while Berlin's Deutsche Oper cancelled a production of
> Mozart's Idomeneo in 2006 because of its depiction of Mohammed. Three
> years ago, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague removed an exhibition of
> photos by the Iranian artist Sooreh Hera that depicted gay men wearing
> masks of Muhammed. "Certain people in our society might perceive it as
> offensive", said Museum director Wim van Krimpen. De Volkskrant, a
> leftwing Dutch newspaper, praised the museum for its "great
> professionalism" in excising the images. Hera herself received death
> threats. Tim Marlow of London's White Cube art gallery suggested that
> such self-censorship by artists and museums was now common, though
> "very few people have explicitly admitted" it.
>
> For many, all this suggests a fundamental conflict between the values
> of Islam and those of the West. The American writer Christopher
> Caldwell in his controversial book Reflections on the Revolution in
> Europe, published last year, argues that Muslim migration to Europe
> has been akin to a form of colonization. "Since its arrival half a
> century ago", Caldwell observes, "Islam has broken – or required
> adjustments to, or rearguard defences of – a good many of the European
> customs, received ideas and state structures with which it has come in
> contact." Islam "is not enhancing or validating European culture; it
> is supplanting it."
>
> This idea of a "clash of civilizations" was first mooted twenty years
> ago in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair by the historian Bernard
> Lewis and popularized a few years later by the American political
> scientist Samuel Huntingdon. Today, it has become almost common sense.
> "All over again", as the novelist Martin Amis has put it, "the West
> confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system
> which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence."
>
> Yet, even as he goes along with the clash of civilizations thesis,
> Caldwell reveals its inadequacies. "What secular Europeans call
> 'Islam'", he points out, "is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus
> would recognize as theirs". On the other hand, the modern, secular
> rights that now constitute "core European values" would "leave Dante
> and Erasmus bewildered."
>
> In other words, what we now regard as "Western values" – individual
> rights, secularism, freedom of speech – are modern values, distinct
> from those that animated European societies in the past. And it's not
> just medieval Europeans who would reject contemporary European values.
> Many contemporary Europeans do too. The British writer Melanie
> Phillips is militantly hostile to what she sees as the "Islamic
> takeover of the West" and what she calls "the drift towards social
> suicide" that comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is
> deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism,
> which she thinks has created "a debauched and disorderly culture of
> instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children
> and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets." Muslims "have
> concluded that the society that expects them to identify with it is a
> moral cesspit", Phillips argues. "Is it any wonder, therefore, that
> they reject it?" Caldwell, too, thinks that while the West's current
> encounter with Islam may be "painful and violent", it has also been,
> "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist
> intellectual life of the West", for which we need to express our
> "gratitude".
>
> There is, in other words, no single set of European values that
> transcends history in opposition to Islamic values. Nor indeed is
> there a single set of western values today. The very values against
> which radical Islamists rail – the values of secular humanism – are
> the very values that so disgust some of Islam's greatest critics.
>
> If there is no such thing as a set of "European values" that transcend
> time, the same is true of "Islamic values". Islam, like all religions,
> comprises both a set of beliefs and a complex of social institutions,
> traditions and cultures that bind people in a special relationship to
> a particular conception of the sacred. Over the centuries, those
> institutions and cultures have transformed the reading of the Qur'an
> and the practice of Islam. Religions, like all social forms, cannot
> stand still. Islam today can no more be like the Islam of the seventh
> century than Mecca today can look like the city of Mohammed's time.
>
> Islam has been transformed not just through time but across space too.
> The spread of the faith from the Atlantic Coast to the Indonesian
> archipelago and beyond incorporated peoples who fitted into Qur'anic
> scripture many of their old religious and social practices. What
> Pakistani Mirpuris see as traditional Islam is very different from
> that of North African Bedouins. And what British Mirpuris see as
> traditional is different from the traditions of Mirpuris still in
> Mirpur. "The key question", the French sociologist Olivier Roy points
> out, "is not what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the
> Qur'an says." Muslims continually disagree on what the Qur'an says, he
> adds dryly, "while all stressing that the Koran is unambiguous and
> clear-cut."
>
> Even a tradition as seemingly deeply set and unyielding as the one at
> the heart of the controversy over the Danish cartoons – the
> prohibition on the pictorial representation of the Prophet Mohammed –
> is in truth neither deeply set nor unyielding. Far from Islam having
> always forbidden representations of the Prophet, it was common to
> portray him until comparatively recently. The prohibition against such
> depictions only emerged in the 17th century. Even over the past 400
> years, a number of Islamic, especially Shiite, traditions have
> accepted the pictorial representation of Muhammed. The Edinburgh
> University Library in Scotland, the Bibliotheque National in Paris,
> New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Topkapi Palace Museum,
> Istanbul, all contain dozens of Persian, Ottoman and Afghan
> manuscripts depicting the Prophet. His face can be seen in many
> mosques too – even in Iran. A seventeenth-century mural on the Iman
> Zahdah Chah Zaid Mosque in the Iranian town of Isfahan, for instance,
> shows a Mohammed whose facial features are clearly visible.
>
> Even today, few Muslims have a problem in seeing the Prophet's face.
> Shortly after Jyllands Posten published the cartoons, the Egyptian
> newspaper Al Fagrreprinted them. They were accompanied by a critical
> commentary, but Al Fagrdid not think it necessary to blank out
> Mohammad's face, and faced no opprobrium for not doing so. Egypt's
> religious and political authorities, even as they were demanding an
> apology from the Danish Prime Minister, raised no objections to Al
> Fagr's full frontal photos.
>
> So, if there is no universal prohibition to the depiction of Mohammad,
> why were Muslims universally appalled by the caricatures? They
> weren't. And those that were, were driven by political zeal rather
> than theological fervour.
>
> The publications of the cartoons in September 2005 caused no immediate
> reaction, even in Denmark. Only when journalists, disappointed by the
> lack of controversy, contacted a number of imams for their response,
> did Islamists begin to recognize the opportunity provided not just by
> the caricatures themselves but also by the sensitivity of Danish
> society to their publication.
>
> Among the first contacted was the controversial cleric Ahmed Abu
> Laban, infamous for his support for Osama bin Laden and the 9/11
> attacks. He seized upon the cartoons to transform himself into a
> spokesman for Denmark's Muslims. Yet however hard he pushed, he
> initially found it difficult to provoke major outrage in Denmark or
> abroad. It took more than four months of often hysterical campaigning,
> and considerable arm-twisting by Saudi diplomats, to create a major
> controversy. At the end of January 2006, Saudi Arabia recalled its
> ambassador from Denmark and launched a consumer boycott of Danish
> goods. In response a swathe of European newspapers republished the
> cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten.
>
> It was only now that the issue became more than a minor diplomatic
> kerfuffle. There were demonstrations and riots in India, Pakistan,
> Indonesia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, Palestine, Afghanistan
> and elsewhere. Danish embassies in Damascus, Beirut and Teheran were
> torched. But, as Jytte Klausen has observed, these protests "were not
> caused by the cartoons, but were part of conflicts in pre-existing hot
> spots" such as northern Nigeria, where there exists an effective civil
> war between Muslim salafists and Christians. The violence surrounding
> the cartoon conflict, Klausen suggests, has been "misreported" as
> expressions of spontaneous violence from Muslims "confronted with bad
> pictures". That, she insists, "is absolutely not the case". Rather
> "these images have been exploited by political groups in the
> pre-existing conflict over Islam."
>
> Why did journalists contact Abu Laban in the first place? The Danish
> press described him as a "spiritual leader". He was in fact a
> mechanical engineer by trade, and an Islamist by inclination. His
> Islamic Society of Denmark was closely linked to the Muslim
> Brotherhood but had little support among Danish Muslims. Out of a
> population of 180,000 Danish Muslims, fewer than a thousand attended
> the Society's Friday prayers.
>
> Abu Laban was, however, infamous for supporting the attack on the Twin
> Towers. From a journalistic viewpoint, it made sense to get a quote
> from someone so controversial. But politically, too, it made sense.
> For western liberals have come to see figures like Abu Laban as the
> true, authentic voice of Islam. The Danish MP Naser Khader tells of a
> conversation with Tøger Seidenfaden, editor of Politiken, a leftwing
> newspaper highly critical of the caricatures. "He said to me that the
> cartoons insulted all Muslims", Khader recalls. "I said I was not
> insulted. He said, 'But you're not a real Muslim'."
>
> In liberal eyes, in other words, to be a real Muslim is to find the
> cartoons offensive. Once Muslim authenticity is so defined, then only
> a figure such as Abu Laban can be seen as a true Muslim voice. The
> Danish cartoons, as Jytte Klausen observed, "have become not just a
> tool for extremism but also created a soap opera in the West about
> what Muslims 'do' with respect to pictures'. Or, as Naser Khader has
> put it, "What I find really offensive is that journalists and
> politicians see the fundamentalists as the real Muslims." The myths
> about the Danish cartoons – that all Muslims hated the cartoons and
> that it was a theological conflict – helped turn Abu Laban into an
> authentic voice of Islam. At the same time, Abu Laban's views seemed
> to confirm the myths about the Danish cartoons.
>
> The template for this kind of mythmaking was the Salman Rushdie
> affair. More than twenty years on from the fatwa, we have come to
> accept almost as self-evident the idea that the worldwide controversy
> was sparked by the blasphemies in The Satanic Verses, which all
> Muslims found deeply offensive. It is not true.
>
> The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988. For the next five
> months, until the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Valentine's
> Day 1989, most Muslims ignored the book. The campaign against the
> novel was largely confined to the Indian subcontinent and to Britain.
> Aside from the involvement of Saudi Arabia, there was little
> enthusiasm for a campaign in the Arab world or in Turkey, or among
> Muslim communities in France or Germany. When the Saudi authorities
> tried at the end of 1988 to get the novel banned in Muslim countries
> worldwide, few responded except those with large subcontinental
> populations, such as South Africa or Malaysia. Even in Iran the book
> was openly available and was reviewed in many newspapers.
>
> As in the controversy over the Danish cartoons, it was politics, not
> religion, that transformed The Satanic Verses into a worldwide event
> of historic proportions. The novel first became an issue in India
> because the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist group against which Rushdie
> had taken aim in his previous novelShame, tried to use the novel as
> political leverage in a general election campaign. From India, the
> anti-Rushdie campaign spilled into Britain, where the Jamaat had a
> network of organizations, funded by the Saudi government. From the
> 1970s Saudi Arabia had used oil money to fund Salafi organizations and
> mosques worldwide to cement its position as spokesman for the umma.
> Then came the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah and
> established an Islamic republic. Tehran became the capital of Muslim
> radicalism and Ayatollah Khomeini its spiritual leader, posing a
> direct challenge to Riyadh. The Satanic Verses became a weapon in that
> conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Riyadh had made the initial
> running. The fatwa was an attempt by Iran to wrestle back the
> initiative.
>
> The Rushdie affair was a watershed in Western political and cultural
> life. It was through the Rushdie affair that many of the issues that
> now dominate political debate – multiculturalism, free speech, radical
> Islam, terrorism – first came to the surface. It was also through the
> Rushdie affair that our thinking about these issues began to change.
> The controversy over The Satanic Verses was primarily a political, not
> religious, conflict. But having accepted the myths that the
> controversy over The Satanic Verses was driven by theology and that
> all Muslims were offended by the novel, many liberals came to the
> conclusion in the post-Rushdie world both that the Islamists were the
> true voice of Islam and also that in a plural society social harmony
> required greater restraints on free speech.
>
> "Self-censorship", the British Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar
> suggested at the height of the Rushdie affair, "is a meaningful demand
> in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie
> publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone's – not
> least every Muslim's – business."
>
> Increasingly, western liberals have come to agree. Whatever may be
> right in principle, many now argue, in practice one must appease
> religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so
> deeply felt. We live in a world, so the argument runs, in which there
> are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values,
> many of which are incommensurate but all of which are valid in their
> own context. For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we
> need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints.
> Social justice requires not just that individuals are treated as
> political equals, but also that their cultural beliefs are given equal
> recognition and respect. This is the philosophy of multiculturalism.
> And in the multicultural world, the avoidance of cultural pain has
> come to be regarded as more important than what is often seen as an
> abstract right to freedom of expression. As the sociologist Tariq
> Modood has put it, "If people are to occupy the same political space
> without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they
> subject each others' fundamental beliefs to criticism." In the
> post-Rushdie world, liberals have effectively internalized the fatwa.
>
> The consequence of all this has been that liberals have come to
> support the most reactionary figures within the Muslim community.
> Rushdie's critics no more spoke for the Muslim community than Rushdie
> himself did. Both represented different strands of opinion within
> Muslim communities, just as Naser Khader and Abu Laban do. Rushdie
> gave voice to a radical, secular sentiment that in the 1980s was
> deeply entrenched. Rushdie's critics spoke for some of the most
> conservative strands. Their campaign against The Satanic Verses was
> not to protect Muslim communities from unconscionable attack from
> anti-Muslim bigots but to protect their own privileged position within
> those communities from political attack from radical critics, to
> assert their right to be the true voice of Islam by denying legitimacy
> to such critics. And they succeeded at least in part because secular
> liberals embraced them as the "authentic" voice of the Muslim
> community.
>
> The United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA), the
> principal anti-Rushdie campaign in Britain, was comprised largely of
> organizations inspired by radical Islamism. These groups came to form
> the core of the Muslim Council of Britain, which was set up in 1977
> and quickly became accepted by policy makers and journalists as the
> voice of British Islam.
>
> "The overwhelming number of organizations that the [British]
> government talks to", says sociologist Chetan Bhatt, an expert on
> religious extremism, "are influenced by, dominated by or front
> organizations of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. Their
> agenda is strictly based on the politics of the Islamic radical right,
> it doesn't represent the politics or aspirations of the majority of
> Muslims in this country."
>
> Indeed it doesn't. Polls have consistently found that only around 5
> per cent think that the MCB represented them. But the official support
> given to such organizations in the post-Rushdie era has distorted
> perceptions of Muslims communities in Britain and to a certain degree,
> Muslim self-perceptions too. And not just in Britain. There has been,
> Naser Khader suggests, a similar process in Denmark. "Just months
> before the cartoon controversy, the Prime Minister had invited Abu
> Laban to a conference on terrorism. People like me kept saying, 'They
> only represent a few people'. But nobody listened. The government
> thought if they talked to someone who looked like a Muslim, then they
> were talking to real Muslims. I don't look like what they think a
> Muslim should look like – I don't have a beard, I wear a suit, I drink
> – so I'm not a real Muslim. But the majority of Muslims in Denmark are
> more like me than they are like Abu Laban."
>
> When I was growing up in the 1980s, the concept of a "radical" in a
> Muslim context meant someone who was a militant secularist, someone
> who challenged not just racism but the power of the mosques too.
> Someone like me. Today, of course, it means almost the opposite – a
> "radical" is a religious fundamentalist. Why the shift? Largely
> because of disenchantment with the secular left, on the one hand, and
> the institutionalization of multicultural policies, on the other.
> Disenchantment with secular politics, the disintegration of the Left,
> and the abandonment by the Left of the politics of universalism in
> favour of ethnic particularism, has helped push many young, secular
> Asians towards Islamism as an alternative worldview. At the same time,
> the emergence of multiculturalism, and of identity politics, has
> helped create more tribal societies and eroded aspirations to a
> universal set of values.
>
> Within Muslim communities these developments have helped undermine
> progressive trends and strengthened the hand of religious bigots.
> Secular Muslims have come to be regarded as betraying their culture,
> while radical Islam has become not just more acceptable but, to many,
> more authentic. As the secular tradition has been squeezed out, the
> only place offering shelter to disaffected youth has been militant
> Islam.
>
> Liberal multicultural policies have not created radical Islam, but
> they have helped create a space for it in western societies that
> previously had not existed. They have also provided a spurious moral
> legitimacy to Islamist arguments. Every time a politician denounces an
> "offensive" work, every time a newspaper apologizes for causing
> offence, every time a journalist tells someone like Naser Khader that
> he's not a "real" Muslim, they strengthen the moral claims of the
> Islamists. There will always be extremists who attempt to murder
> cartoonists or firebomb newspaper offices. There is little we can do
> about them. What we can do is refuse to create a culture that
> emboldens such people by accepting their voices as somehow legitimate.
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