Opinion:

To defeat the enemy, you must first identify the enemy

    By Jack Grant

Beth, of She Who Will Be Obeyed!, left a comment to my post below on some voices being raised in the Muslim world against the terrorism:

What I find frightening, Jack, is that some of the examples you point to seem to say that the killings were bad! But.... kidnappings are okay?!!

Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said in general, kidnappings may be justified, but killings are not. He said the school siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war.

"What happened yesterday is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings; it is not about taking them away," Akef told The Associated Press.

To me, until these people denounce jihad altogether and agree to live like civilized human beings who don't kidnap, terrorize, threaten, treat women as belongings or enslave other people, etc., I will not entertain any notion that Islam is a 'religion of peace'.

My response was mainly directed at the last sentence, because it sounds an awful lot like condemning of the whole for the actions of a few:

I find frightening many of the same things that you do. What tempers me from saying "Islam is evil" is that I saw people who were nominally Christian in the South think that lynching people because of their skin color was perfectly acceptable and even to be encouraged. They used Christian religious arguments to justify their actions. Looking a bit farther back in the past, the Christian Holy Bible was used to justify black slavery in the United States. An entire population of millions was brutalized over two centuries by a people who called themselves Christian. This does not mean Christianity is evil.

Is there a difference in terms of the actions taken? Yes, there is, although more people died in slavery and more children were separated forcibly from their families in the United States during the period of slavery than have been killed by Wahabist nihilists even now.

I work with a large number of muslims, and in my discussions with these people, they do not subscribe to what the mullahs in the Middle East or the radical clerics living in non-Arab countries preach, and they are equally horrified at the acts perpetrated supposedly in the name of Islam. Should they be speaking out against these acts? Yes, but this is not the first time people should be speaking out and do not. History is littered with instances where people were condemned to death or other horrors because of the silence of others. It is also far easier to condemn others for not speaking out than it is to speak out yourself. Look at a recent post by Boudicia (I may have mis-spelled it, sorry) where she described a tirade by an alcoholic in Florida towards his wife because he couldn't buy beer. Should someone have spoken out in her defense? Depending on the situation, probably. Did someone do so? Not likely. Again, a matter of degree, but it illustrates my point. Unless we speak out against evil in our own lives, who are we to condemn others for not speaking out?

Fundamentally, my point is that Islam is no more a monolith than Christianity. If we condemn all of Islam based on the actions of a minority, then we should condemn Christianity for many actions taken by the church in the past 2000 years, for actions even more recent that used Christianity as a justification, and even for some of the events of World War II, where the church was found to have assisted Nazi Germany in their "Final Solution".

I prefer to condemn Wahabism, which is why I have a link to John's post on "Wahabism delenda est" prominently displayed on my blog. Wahabism is not all of Islam, just as the radical denominations of Christianity that insist that a wife "submit to and obey her husband in all matters" and force the women to wear dresses, not allowing them to wear slacks, are not all of Christianity. Wahabism is evil. Islam is not evil, and saying Islam is evil diffuses our effort at defeating those who are evil.

Today, Pennywit posted a link to an article in Time on reforms being undertaken in Islam in the United States. It shows that there is change occurring within Islam, but as with every change, especially in religion, it is slow and incremental. Recall how long it took to overcome many of the less desirable aspects of Christianity. I'm posting the entire article below because Time has a bad habit of making things unavailable except to subscribers after a short time.

Shaking Up Islam in America

By ASRA Q. NOMANI

Pundits have long been asking whether Islam is ready for a reform. The answer is that across the U.S., a quiet tide of Islamic reform is very much under way. In Chicago last year, the Downtown Islamic Center made room for four women on its board after they protested the design of a new mosque that would have given women inadequate space in which to pray. Instead, women got access to the main hall when the new mosque opened in July. In Dearborn, Mich., earlier this year, Imam Mohammed Mardini welcomed Christian women who weren't covering their hair, over the protests of men who wanted them barred. In Sacramento, Calif., not long ago, mosque leaders wrote their bylaws with clauses guaranteeing tolerance and gender equity. In New York City an e-magazine, Muslim WakeUp!, organizes monthly gatherings for Muslims who want to make their communities more tolerant.

Over the past year I have found myself on the front lines of the struggle over Islam's future in America. Last November, my mother, niece and I walked through the front door of our hometown mosque in Morgantown, W.Va., and prayed in the main sanctuary. In so doing we defied a policy that women enter through a back door and pray in an isolated balcony. Then, in the spring, my father resigned from the board of the mosque to protest speeches spewed from the pulpit that were hateful to non-Muslims. As a result of our protests, my family was vilified by local Muslims. I even face a secret trial to banish me from the mosque.

But our protests have also helped bring about a transformation. In May the first woman was elected to mosque leadership. In June mosque authorities publicly reversed policy and said women could enter through the front door and pray in the main hall. Since our actions began, more women attend worship services. Last month we won an even bigger victory. A Ph.D. student declared from the pulpit that "one of the most important fundamentals of our religion is to love and be loyal to Islam and the Muslims and to hate and renounce the disbelievers," the "cursed" Jews and Christians. I immediately protested the sermon, as did others. In the past, leaders have looked the other way. This time they called an emergency meeting and did the right thing. They fired the student from his post giving sermons.

Those of us pushing for reforms are not seeking to change Islam. We are questioning defective doctrine from an intellectual and theological position, using the Koran, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and ijtihad, or critical reasoning, as ideological weapons in the war over how Muslim communities define themselves. Islamic scholar Amina Wadud notes that we are emboldened to take public action to reject the way extremists have defined Islam since 9/11. We are in the midst of jihad li tajdid al-ruh al-Islami, a struggle for the soul of Islam.

The dilemma facing most Muslims is that this war pits us against ourselves. For guidance, we need look no further than the lessons from the time of the Prophet Muhammad. In Mecca in the 7th century, the Prophet faced off against his own tribe, the Quraysh, for worshipping false idols. In much the same way, modern Muslims are pitted against people worshipping false idols of hatred, violence and intolerance. After he fled Mecca, the Prophet heard a chapter of the Koran called Al-Nisa (The Women), which said, "O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice as witnesses to God, even if it may be against yourselves, your parents or your kin." With this philosophy, he built a vibrant, inclusive community and returned to Mecca to claim the city that is today the heart of Islam.

The rest of the Muslim world is watching how reform takes hold in the American Muslim community. Throughout the world, Muslims have been forced to explore the meaning of their beliefs. But as Malika Zeghal, a visiting scholar of Islam at the University of Chicago Divinity School, points out, it is in America, with its freedoms, that Muslims can reform not just their souls but also their communities. "In the rest of the world, Muslims are making change in the inner world," she says. "American Muslims also feel empowered to make change externally."

The test is here and now for the building of a new, 21st century Muslim community, based on the principles Islam gave us in the 7th century. Reform is inevitable, but it won't come easy.

Asra Q. Nomani is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming Standing Alone in Mecca, about women's place in Islam

I reiterate, if we insist upon calling Islam the enemy, we dilute our efforts towards millions who do not wish us ill because we are not willing to make the distinction necessary to focus on those who do wish us ill. As John of Argghhh! pointed out, the Wahabist branch of Islam is the twisted origin of much of the nihilistic terrorism that we are dealing with. In order to fight terrorism, destroy both Wahabism AND the conditions that support it and feed it so that it flourishes, do not declare hatred towards the entire faith of Islam, a population of millions of which only hundreds are our true enemies. Declaring hatred of Islam as a whole merely adds fuel to the fires that Wahabism uses to incite the violence towards us.

Posted by Jack Grant at 17:43 on 8 September 2004