Latif wastes a lot of verbiage saying not much: "So, unless a Muslim believes that Al-Qaeda is indeed fighting for Islam, he or she should speak up against Al-Qaeda."
Fact that he has to say this and that the vast majority of Muslims to not speak up against al-Qaeda proves the point he is trying to deny. Bruce In Defence of The Normal Muslim Asad Latif Muslims are a normal people. That this even needs to be said is a sad reflection, not on Islam, but on an era when Muslims are seen through the distorting lens of terrorism. The world seems to judge Muslims, not by what is normal in their societies, but by what is abnormal or, at least, exceptional: by Osama bin Laden, or the suicide-bomber in Palestine, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or the throat-slitter in Iraq. In the wings of the global stage stand older, diffuse threats such as the mythical Muslim male who has launched a demographic war on the world with his three wives and 23 children, each of whom will no doubt have 23 children. True, the world also judges as criminals non-Muslims such as the Oklahoma City Bomber, the Unabomber or Tokyo's Sarin gas attackers. However, they are viewed, not as representatives of their societies but as an aberrant sub-species which does not disturb the essential normality and civility of those societies. By contrast, at the rate at which things are going, the ordinary Muslim may soon become a sub-species of terror. The eyes and ears of the world, its Islam experts and its area specialists, its spy satellites and its eavesdropping devices, take an almost anthropological delight in mapping and deciphering abnormalities in Muslim societies. Muslims are today the main victim of the hostile "communities of interpretation'' which Professor Edward Said mentions in his book, Covering Islam. These are communities of academics, hacks and others out to prove Islam's incompatibility with reason and modernity. What these hostile commentators ignore is that the overwhelming majority of the world's one billion Muslims are not terrorists or extremists but normal people. Muslims are born, grow up, find work, get married, quarrel over the quality of dinner, make up, and hug each other to sleep. They get up in the middle of the night, check on their children, go back to bed, and wake up to pray. Muslims also think. They read Shakespeare, Dante, Lu Xun, Brecht and Pablo Neruda along with Rumi, Hafiz, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Orhan Pamuk. They take Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Einstein and Sartre seriously, as they do al-Ghazali, Ibn Khaldun and Abdolkarim Soroush. Muslim minds are sharpened by Charlie Chaplin's subversive humour and Habib Tanvir's folk theatre. The Muslim heart is roused by Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D-minor, Raaga Piloo on Ravi Shankar's frenzied sitar in its dialogue with Yehudi Menuhin's violin, the ecstatic Sufi ghazals of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Waleed Tawfic's love songs. These soaring creations of the human mind . and there are many more, of course . are part of the Muslim's intellectual and imaginative world. This is not surprising at all because Muslim realms were once the world's unrivalled intellectual centres of science, medicine, philosophy and education. In Baghdad, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars sought to translate the world's knowledge into Arabic. They took up works by Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Hypocrates, Plutarch, Ptolemy and others. Without these Arabic translations, many classic works of antiquity would simply have been lost. The Islamic intellectual tradition has helped to keep alive Judeao-Christian civilisation. The world's splendours never belong to one religion alone. The world is political as well. When people talk about political Islam, they hardly mention Professor Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani scholar-activist who died in 1999. Born in the Indian state of Bihar in 1932, he was eight when his father, sleeping by his side, was murdered over a land dispute. That shock created an enduring hatred of private property in the child. He left for Pakistan when India was partitioned in 1947. His doctoral years at Princeton University, where he worked on political science and the Middle East, included a visit to Algeria. He joined the Algerian national liberation movement, the FLN, and became an associate of the anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon. His opposition to the Vietnam War brought him close to the great Hebraic humanist, Noam Chomsky, and to pacifists like the Catholic priest Philip Berrigan and the Catholic nun Elizabeth McAlister. A man of many exiles, Professor Ahmad was at home only in the instinctive solidarity that he felt for suffering humanity in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, India, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Vietnam. That was pretty much everywhere in the Third World. Professor Ahmad embodies the Islamic quest for justice that is a common theme in the life of humanity. What is true of him is true of many others as well. But Muslims at the vanguard of a progressive, life-affirming view of man's place in the world hardly appear on the world's ideological radar. To be a Muslim today is to be judged, instead, by what the Osamas say or do not say, by what they do or do not do. In fact, it seems that on the battlefields of the global imagination, there is hardly a thing as an ordinary Muslim: one is either ordinary or one is a Muslim. And if one is a Muslim, there is a lurking danger that one may turn into a terrorist, an extremist, or a demographic jihadist with three wives and 23 squabbling brats. What a pity. I believe that these people are exceptions. And exceptions prove the rule: the rule being that Muslims are normal. Indeed, normality - including the setting of norms - is nothing new to Muslims. At the height of Arab civilisation, its currency was held from Scandinavia to China. A draft order signed against an account in Damascus would be welcomed in Guangdong. And even today, when the Muslim world is in the doldrums, scholars such as Olivier Roy make a compelling case for globalisation as a key factor in the congruence of trends in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. In saying that most Muslims are normal, I am not implying that they are creatures of purely earthly events, trends and possibilities, including globalisation. On the contrary, and I cannot emphasise this strongly enough, Muslims live at the intersection of the here and the hereafter, the profane and the sacred - like members of other faiths. In that simultaneous existence lies their higher normality. Why is it higher? It is higher because the globalisation of religion is far more resilient than the globalisation of economics, for example. Let is not forget that economic superpowers at the forefront of globalisation at their time have not lasted all that long as leaders: Venice in the 16th century, the Netherlands in the 17th century, France in the 18th century, and Britain in the 19th century . with the American ascendancy of the 20th century now facing China, India, outsourcing and the future. By contrast, Islam is 1,500 years old, Christianity 2,000 years old, and Judaism 4,000 years old, if we consider even just the Semitic faiths. Many other world religions are much older. Religions do survive. Their survival underscores the interface of two domains: the here and the hereafter. Every day, Muslims live out the praxis of deen, religion, and duniya, worldly existence. Their challenge is to establish deen in duniya. This they cannot do without a sense of the divine impulse in human history. Muslims locate themselves in a form of salvation history. Believing that God is present in history, they grapple with issues of piety, equity, peace, power, realpolitik and war through an interplay between their sense of a divine purpose and their experience of lived reality. What is normal about Muslims is that their angst is true of other religions as well. What, then, is the problem? The problem with using salvation history as the basis of action is that salvation history is as much history as it is salvation. In other words, human motives, especially the interests of manipulative politicians or influential elites, make the road to the hereafter slippery. The transcendental eternities of religion get commandeered for passing political ends. The very future is at stake. Let there be no illusions. There is a war on. This war is not between a Judeo-Christian West and an Islamic East, but it is a war in which the cardinal principles by which Jews, Christians, Muslims and many others live will be tested. Cease-fires will be temporary; death and destruction will be the permanent theme -- unless humans can find a way to coexist in nuclear peace. For co-existence to occur, Muslims and non-Muslims must find their way to being on the same side of history. It is in that context that I wrote a commentary some time ago urging peaceful Muslims to speak up against terrorism carried out by violent Muslims. This speaking up, I said, was in the interests of Islam itself. My comments elicited a rather stern response which argued, in effect, that there was no reason why Muslims should speak up against terrorism when they are not required to speak up against attacks on Muslims. This argument is a familiar one, and it goes with arguments such as that there is no need to be apologetic about terrorism by Muslims when other faith communities have not cried themselves hoarse over terrorist attacks carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or the Tamil Tigers, for example. Let me respond to this argument. It is true that the IRA's religious profile is Catholic; however, it was not fighting for Catholicism but for Irish nationalism. Likewise, the Hindu Tamil Tigers are not fighting for a Hindu state carved out of Sri Lanka but for Tamil nationalism. By contrast, Al-Qaeda claims to be fighting for Islam. So, unless a Muslim believes that Al-Qaeda is indeed fighting for Islam, he or she should speak up against Al-Qaeda. The other argument against speaking up has to do with root causes. Nobody is born a terrorist, and terrorism does not grow in a vacuum, it is argued. True enough. You cannot revile Palestinian terrorism without denouncing Israeli atrocities in Palestine. True. But the question is this: Will a fair resolution of the Palestinian issue remove terrorism from the landscape of the Middle East and the wider Muslim world? Will self-rule in Iraq and further normalisation in Afghanistan help? I am not certain, although I am all for Iraq for Iraqis and Afghanistan for Afghans. Why am I not certain? Take the American and other foreigners who are helping Saudi Arabia pump up oil. What atrocities have those foreigners committed that militants should attack them in Riyadh? What are the root causes there? And which root causes explain attacks by extremist Sunnis and Shias on each other in Pakistan? If the answer is that the roots of conflict there are political and not religious, should not the same argument be extended to Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Mindanao? Should we not think that political factors are at play there, and that Islam is merely being used to rationalise violence? And if this is the case, should not the exploitation of Islam for political ends cease? There are root causes, and there is terrorism. What I am saying is that Islam should not be used to link the two. ========================= Asad Latif is a Senior Correspondent with The Straits Times. This is an excerpt from a talk which he gave in a personal capacity at Darul Arqam Singapore on January 15, 2005. This article was published in the latest issue of 'The Muslim Reader', Singapore. Ours is a tri-annual magazine that provides invaluable insights into the socio-economic and political issues surrounding Muslim communities in Singapore and the wider Asian region. The magazine targets policymakers and members of the intelligentsia group vying to understand Muslim societies in light of contemporary concerns like terrorism/extremism, environmentalism, and social issues like the casino and improving conditions for former prisoners. For more information, or if you want to subscribe to the magazine or write for it, contact Nazry Bahrawi (Editor} on [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do also have a look at our website on www.darul-arqam.org.sg ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. 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