INTERVIEW With Sheik Hamza Yusuf     

   
  Hamza Yusuf was born in Washington State and grew up in Northern California, 
where he lives with his wife and five children. He converted to Islam in 1977 
and spent 10 years studying Islam in the Middle East where he followed a more 
classic interpretation of the religion. After the attacks of 9/11, Yusuf 
emerged as a respected Islamic scholar, advising both the White House and the 
Arab League. In recent years, he has focused his teachings on bridging the 
widening gap between the West and the Muslim world. In this interview, he talks 
about "tyranny" and "incompetence" on both sides and offers his prescription 
for creating more common ground. This is an edited transcript of an interview 
that took place in September 2006.
   
  Q: Linden MacIntyre: What are the roots of Muslim rage?
  A: Hamza Yusuf: If you had one word to describe the root of all this rage, 
it's humiliation. Arabs in particular are extremely proud people. If you look 
at what happened in Lebanon recently, the Arabs kind of raised their head-- 
they think it's a big victory, the fact that their whole country was destroyed 
and over a thousand people were killed, many of them children. Why is it a 
victory? Because they fought back. That's all. "OK, you can crush us into the 
Earth, but you're not going to get us to submit." And I think that's deeply 
rooted in Muslim consciousness, the idea of not submitting to anything other 
than God. "You can abuse me, but you're not going to win me over. But if you 
treat me with respect and dignity, I'm going to fall in love with you. I'm 
going to sing your praises all over the world because you're powerful and you 
treated me with human dignity." 
  Q: Where do they see the proof of the humiliation?
  A: It's everywhere. You don't think it's humiliating to have a foreign force 
come into your land? You see, Muslims don't have this nation state idea. 
There's a tribe called Bani Tamin. It's one of the biggest tribes in Saudi 
Arabia and in Iraq, and they're intermarried. The West doesn't seem to 
understand that. The Moroccans feel the Iraqi pain as their own. It's one pain. 
So when you see some American soldier banging down a door and coming into a 
house with all these women in utter fear who've done nothing, that's 
humiliation, and it's going to enrage people. And what are we doing there? 
There are no weapons of mass destruction. They were never a threat to us. You 
know, Shakespeare wrote a play called Julius Caesar, and it was all about the 
danger of pre-emptive strikes. Brutus is convinced by Cassius to kill Caesar. 
Why? Because Caesar's ambitious, because he might declare himself king. And the 
end of that play, everybody dies; it's just disaster. That's the tragedy of
 pre-emptive strikes.
  Q: What goes through your mind when you hear about all these roundups of 
young Muslims who are supposedly plotting things in London and in Toronto?
  A: We keep being told about these roundups, and in the end, they're more 
aspirational than operational. I'd love to have been in the meeting when they 
thought that one up. It seems to me that they're just a lot of bumbling fools 
out there.
  Q: On which side of the equation?
  A: On both sides. I mean, that's part of the problem. Violence is the last 
refuge of the incompetent, and I think that's really what we're dealing with 
here, incompetence. Both sides have been incredibly ineffective at achieving 
their goals-- at least their stated goals.
  Q: I'm trying to get a measure of just how concerned people should really be 
though.
  A: Listen, hurricanes are a much greater threat to us right now. Katrina did 
much more damage than anything the terrorists could ever put together. Yeah, 
there's nuclear weapons are out there and that certainly is a concern. That's 
the job of these intelligence people to stop that, right? But stop making us 
all live in fear and telling us about orange and red levels. All that nonsense 
just simply has to stop. We need to calm down and think at a deeper level. 
People can't think when their minds are clouded with fear. The fear tactic is a 
tactic that's used by people who want to maintain control, and it's very 
effective. 
  A democracy is predicated on an educated citizenry. You cannot have a 
democracy with people that are more interested in what Nicole Kidman is doing 
or whoever the latest fashion model is. If that's your interest, democracy 
can't survive. You also have corporate interests here. We have an arms industry 
in the West that is our No. 1 industry. It's bigger than anything-- 
automobiles, everything. Now if you don't have reasons to build weapons, where 
do all those contracts go? 
  Q: Your job is to recruit young people into a more constructive project.
  A: Well, I'm not a recruiter ….
  Q: You are definitely an influence.
  A: I've got my own personal projects, like my school and my seminary. But at 
this point in my life, I'm actually just trying to put some balance out there 
because I feel that there's an incredible amount of disequilibrium in the way 
people are acting and the way they're thinking. There are irrational fears. If 
you see a woman wearing a hijab and fear is your first thought, something's 
really wrong. How do you racially profile terrorists when 90percent of the 
world falls into that? Mexicans look like Arabs, for God's sake, and anybody 
can change their name. I mean Abdullah can change his name to Eduardo. It's not 
going to be difficult, if they're clever. So how do you profile people? 
  Q: Six years ago, there were probably the same number of disenchanted young 
people in chat rooms and coffee houses complaining and plotting. But given the 
last five years, what are the chances now that it is going to become a more 
real and a more sinister force?
  A: A major fear for me is that it will get worse with the profiling, with the 
alienation. I think especially for the young people and especially in the more 
underprivileged groups, but don't rule out the privileged as well. In the 
Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always-- Che 
Guevara, people like that-- they were always from the middle class and the 
educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion. If you watch Al Manar 
Television in Lebanon, it's associated with Hezbollah. If you watch that for 
any length of time, you're going to get very angry. It's as simple as that. 
They show babies blown up, they show horrible scenes, and people see that and 
they get angry. There's always going to be a segment of angry people who are 
going to go out and do something. 
  Part of the real crisis of the modern age is that the individual has the 
power to do what pre-modern armies really couldn't even do. In the pre-modern 
world, you just couldn't do a lot of damage. In the modern world, you can. So 
we have real concerns. You have to go to a deeper level. Henry David Thoreau 
said for every thousand people hacking away at the branches of evil, there's 
only one person hacking away at the roots of evil. I really think we need to go 
to a deeper level and look at what the root of this situation is. There are a 
lot of people prevaricating out there, who just don't want to deal with the 
"why" question.
  Q: It's become treasonous to talk about "why." So how do you get around that?
  A: People need to know. It's the responsibility of the fifth estate-- the 
journalists. They need courage. I'm amazed at the courage of the journalists on 
the frontlines in Iraq, but we need intellectual courage in our community. We 
need to get rid of this hegemonic discourse that doesn't allow for any dissent, 
where people's jobs and careers are threatened by asking questions, because we 
have to ask questions.
  Q: Well, let's start now. Why?
  A: Why? We have a thousand years of cold war between the West and Islam. Let 
us not forget that the West in many ways defined itself, Europe defined itself 
vis-à-vis Islam. The Song of Roland is really one of the earliest pieces of 
Western literature, and it's about the antagonism with Muslims. So I think 
Islam has always been this nebulous "other" that we're afraid of, and that is 
part of our consciousness. The Crusades are also part of our consciousness. And 
the colonial period. But ultimately what you have is extremely repressive 
regimes. The reality is, almost all these Muslim governments are persecuting 
active Muslims, not terrorists. When you have very powerful secular tyrants, 
religion poses a very serious threat, and religion is a very powerful force in 
the Muslim world. So the repression of Islam, which has been going on for so 
long, has resulted in certain extreme views that have emerged within the 
religion. But you have to look at the reasons. Now we in the
 West have supported many of these regimes and see them as our interest. I 
personally don't think democracy is viable right now in the Muslim world. You 
need just governments, but you need strong governments. I think you can have 
situations that are not democratic but still are rooted in a concern about the 
people, the welfare of the people.
  Q: How realistic is it to place hope on benevolent dictatorships?
  A: I'm not talking so much about dictators. At this stage, you have to build 
democratic institutions, and in that way, the West can help. Look, we give 
$1billion in aid to Egypt. Do you know how much juice that is on the 
negotiating table, in terms of what you demand of Egypt? Because if you cut off 
that billion dollars, you're cutting off the lifeblood of the Egyptian 
government. America has an immense amount of power, but it doesn't use it in 
any benevolent way. It uses it to maintain a status quo. The same is true for 
almost all these Muslim countries. 
  Q: So what's your biggest challenge?
  A: I have challenges in both worlds. I'm very active in the Muslim world. I 
have very popular television programs in the Muslim world, which have, I think, 
a very positive impact. So I'm working there. I go quite often to the Muslim 
world. And then I have my challenges here. I'm one person.
  Q: But there are people in the Muslim world who think you're a heretic.
  A: I think the majority of Muslims that know about me -- and there are quite 
a few in the Muslim world that do-- generally have a very good opinion of what 
I'm doing. I have rarely met belligerent Muslims. Every once in a while I'll 
come across somebody who's just got an axe to grind. But it's actually quite 
unusual for me. The majority of Muslims I meet, I see smiles on their faces. I 
get hugs. People tell me, "Keep up the good work." I really believe that most 
Muslims are very decent people. I've lived in the Muslim world. I'm always 
struck by their incredible generosity, by their simplicity, by their love of 
some really basic virtues and values that I share and that most Western people 
share. This is my experience as a Western person, a convert to Islam.
  Q: What was your experience after your speech the other night [at the Islamic 
Society of North America conference in Chicago], in which you talked about the 
fundamental humanity of people of the Jewish faith?
  A: The Jewish situation's bad. I have to admit that. There is an immense 
amount of ignorance, particularly in the Muslim world. I think less so here, 
but we have that problem here also. There is an anti-Jewish sentiment. It's far 
more politically driven, and I think Muslims have forgotten, that's all. I 
think they need reminders, and I think when you remind them, they tend to 
respond, and that's been my experience. I was not raised as an anti-Semite. My 
sister converted to Judaism, is married to a Jewish man. I have nephews that 
are Jewish. I was not raised with any prejudice at all. But I was infected when 
I lived in the Muslim world. I lived in the Arab world for over 10 years, and I 
think I did get infected by that virus for a period of time. But I grew out of 
it and realized that not only does it have nothing to do with Islam, but it has 
nothing to do with my core values. And I've rejected that and called others to 
reject it. I think it's something that really needs
 to change in the Muslim community, and I think it will.
  Q: What is your evaluation of the response of the last five years of the 
security apparatus, both as an American and as a Muslim?
  A: Well, I think we've all become much more acutely aware of the state 
apparatus in terms of monitoring. I don't like the feeling that I have to think 
about what I say when I say things. It's not healthy, and I think a lot of 
people feel it now in a way that they've never felt it before, and that 
troubles me deeply about my country. I think that there needs to be a return to 
some real central values about this country. I think Guantanamo Bay is 
absolutely an unacceptable event in American history. It's going to be looked 
at as a really black period in our legal tradition. 
  Q: At what point does this more intense, heavy-handed security become 
counterproductive?
  A: Personally, I think the intensified security has already become 
counterproductive. They need to do their job, but they don't need to do it 
constantly in our face. The intelligence community has a job to protect. The 
first principle of any government is to protect its citizens. But you also 
protect your citizens by being just to other countries and other peoples. You 
endanger your citizens by reckless behavior. You endanger your citizens by 
hubris. You endanger your citizens by the inability to actually apologize or to 
ask forgiveness for your mistakes. And that's something I find the most 
troubling about the whole situation, because I think real security is based on 
having benevolent policies. 
  Q: So what's your prescription?
  A: My prescription is that we need to dismantle the pyramid of domination and 
we need to rebuild a house of mutual respect.
  Q: Give me that in bread-and-butter terms.
  A: In bread-and-butter terms, I truly believe that we need to stop being so 
paternalistic in our attitudes toward Muslims, toward other countries, and 
begin to actually speak to them as if they were human beings, fully 
enfranchised, with the dignity that goes with that. To stop drawing lines in 
the sand, to stop dictating to people as if you have some God-given authority 
to do that, and to really start trying to talk to people and see what you can 
do. I think we need commerce that is mutually beneficial and we need to stop 
all of this hegemonic commercial tyranny that goes on in the Middle East, in 
Central and South America. I mean people forget, you know, the South Americans 
probably hate us more than the Arabs do. 
  Q: How much more difficult has it become to achieve this kind of rationale?
  A: We're at the lowest ebb right now. It's going to be very difficult to get 
back our credibility. In the recent war with Lebanon, it was so one-sided. If 
you watched Arab television and then CNN, it was like two different universes. 
That's really troubling to me because like the Chinese say, "There are three 
truths. There's my truth, your truth and then the truth." If I'm unwilling to 
let go of my truth and you're unwilling to let go of your truth, we cannot see 
objectively this truth that's in the middle, between us. There's good and bad 
in all of us, and I want to get rid of the cartoon scenario of George Bush's 
world and Osama bin Laden's world, and I want to see it nuanced. I want to see 
more intelligence here. 
  Q: We know from history that wars are generally fought by young men. What are 
you saying to these young people to prevent the sudden explosion of this sort 
of negative potential?
  A: You have to give them hope. And there's something attractive about war to 
young men. They need to see war for what it is. If Robert E. Lee in the Civil 
War said war was hell, what would he make of 20th-century and 21st-century 
warfare? I think we have to see war as the despicable creature that it is and 
really work for peace. They say if you don't sweat for peace, then you bleed 
for war.
  Q: But can you pull that off from inside Islam?
  A: Muslims are peace-loving people generally. Among the young, yes, there are 
some militant attitudes. But a lot of it arises out of chivalry-- and don't 
underestimate the chivalrous impulse in men. A lot of these young men see women 
being-- you know-- they see soldiers breaking into houses with Muslim women. 
It's really beyond the pale for the average Muslim man, and something rises up 
in them. And it can turn to deep resentment and rage. But generally I think the 
impulses are actually quite noble. 
  Q: So what do you say to the average person who sees some kind of a sinister 
threat under every hijab and behind every beard?
  A: People have to be exposed to Muslims, just experience Muslims; talk to 
them. Reach out, read about Islam, try to find out about it. There are 20,000 
Muslim physicians in the United States, Americans putting their lives in the 
hands of Muslims every day. You're going under and the anesthesiologist is a 
Muslim, right? He's looking out for you. He doesn't want you to die in that 
operation because you're an infidel. He's doing his job. As is your 
pediatrician who's trying to heal your child. And the mechanic who's fixing 
your car? He's not putting a bomb in your car. It's Abdullah, the guy down at 
the Chevron station, right? I mean it's one-fifth of the world's population for 
God's sake-- one out of five people is a Muslim. 
  Muslims have been an almost entirely benevolent force in the 20th century. 
They did not wreak the havoc the Western powers wreaked on the world. They have 
not come anywhere near to the environmental degradation that we've done to the 
planet. So I think Muslims need to be seen in the proper light. They're mostly 
decent, hardworking people, people with deep family values, and they want to 
live in peace. My experience on this planet, almost 50 years, is that if you 
treat people with respect, they tend to treat you with respect. 


saiyed shahbazi
  www.shahbazcenter.org

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