Author: Ziauddin Sardar
Publication: The Observer, UK
Date: October 21, 2001
URL: http://www.observer.co.uk/islam/story/0,1442,577943,00.html
Muslims everywhere are in a deep
state of denial. From Egypt to Malaysia, there is an aversion to seeing
terrorism as a Muslim problem and a Muslim responsibility.
The meeting last week of the Organisation
of the Islamic Conference in Qatar condemned the 11 September attacks,
but refused to accept any responsibility. Instead of taking the lead in
tackling the problem, once again they are being railroaded into joining
a 'global coalition'.
Terrorism is a Muslim problem for
some very good reasons. To begin with, most of the terrorist incidents
actually occur within the Muslim world. In Pakistan, for example, terrorist
violence is endemic. Marauding groups of fanatics, such as Sepa-e-Shaba
('Soldiers of the Companion of the Prophet') and Sepa-e-Muhammad ('Soldiers
of Muhammad'), have spread terror throughout the country. In Egypt, militants
of Islamic Jihad have killed tourists, and members of the extremist organisation
Gama-e-Islami have made the life of ordinary Muslims a living hell. The
Abu Sayyaf group of the Philippines, far from fighting for 'liberation',
is nothing more than a band of ruthless kidnappers who kill other Muslims
without hesitation.
Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Algeria,
Bangladesh, Lebanon, Iran - there is hardly a Muslim country that is not
plagued by terrorism.
It goes without saying, then, that
the bulk of victims of terrorism are also Muslims, 11 September notwithstanding.
This is particularly so when we consider that violence and brutalisation
has become the norm in unending quests for self-determination in such places
as Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya. Terror and counter-terror forms an
endless cycle that has cost countless Muslim lives.
Thus, terrorism, the horror it provokes
and the consequences it breeds, are more familiar to Muslims than to any
other people.
Yet, while they have been shocked
and sympathise with the victims of the atrocities in the US, Muslims have
stubbornly refused to see terrorism as an internal problem. While the Muslim
world has suffered, they have blamed everyone but themselves. It is always
'the West', or the CIA, or 'the Indians', or 'the Zionists' hatching yet
another conspiracy.
This state of denial means Muslims
are ill-equipped to deal with problems of endemic terrorism. Indiscriminate
violence, terror by governments against their own people, by opposition
groups and between factions, has now become such an integral part of the
political discourse of failed polities that it is taken for granted.
In the US-led coalition against
the Taliban, liberal Muslims have found an ideal substitute for self-examination
and the critical, internal struggle needed to address home-grown problems.
The coalition now waging war against
terrorism in Afghanistan harbours another danger for Muslims. In the indiscriminate
politics of coalition, the first people that the hesitant Muslim states
will turn against are the few voices of sanity in their midst. As Anwar
Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia and a rare lucid
voice, points out, the democratic cause in Muslim countries 'will regress
for a few decades as ruling autocrats use their participation in the global
war against terrorism to terrorise their critics and dissenters'.
Anwar has to know. The article was
written from the prison cell where he is serving a 15-year sentence. His
crime? To stand against the tyranny of Mahathir Muhammad's government.
This is not the time, he says, to
stir up anti-American sentiments, or sermonise over US foreign policy.
It is time to ask 'how, in the twenty-first century, the Muslim world could
have produced a bin Laden'.
The answer has two components. Anwar
hints at the first. There is simply no place in the Muslim world to express
dissent. Autocratic, theocratic, despotic regimes allow no political freedom,
all thought is outlawed, and brute suppression is the norm. In such circumstances,
violence is seen as the only way of expressing dissent.
In his youth, Anwar Ibrahim founded
a dynamic Islamic movement. I also spent my youthful days working for various
Islamic movements; it was how we first met in the borderless internationalism
of the worldwide Muslim community. And it is in the Islamic movements that
we must look for the second reason for the violent state of affairs in
Muslim societies.
In the Sixties and the Seventies,
the Islamic movements, such as Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan and the Muslim
Brotherhood of Egypt, represented hope, the language of justice, the ideal
of self-reliance for the masses languishing in misery. A plethora of Islamic
movements and initiatives made their appearance; and we toiled against
autocracies and despotism in Muslim societies.
But the movements became a mirror
image of what they were fighting. The leadership passed from intellectuals
to semi-literate demagogues. What the Islamic movements have generated
is fanatic militancy, a fundamentalism that is as autocratic, illiberal
and repressive as the established order they seek to dethrone. Instead
of allowing debate, and a rethinking about the contemporary meaning of
Islam, fundamentalist notions became something to die for and finally something
to kill and destroy for in pure hatred.
The failure of Islamic movements
is their inability to come to terms with modernity, to give modernity a
sustainable home-grown expression. Instead of engaging with the abundant
problems that bedevil Muslim lives, the Islamic prescription consists of
blind following of narrow pieties and slavish submission to inept obscurantists.
Instead of engagement with the wider world, they have made Islam into an
ethic of separation, separate under-development, and negation of the rest
of the world.
The struggle against violence in
the Muslim world is much more than a struggle against murdering fanatics
like the Taliban. Or despotic leaders like Saddam Hussein and Mahathir
Muhammad. It is also a struggle against the Islamic movements whose simplistic
and virulent rhetoric often ends up sanctifying the fanatics and demonises
everything else in the absolutist, unquestioning terms of all totalitarian
perspectives.
The answers to the problems of the
Muslim societies are not hard to find - merely difficult to initiate. Political
freedom, open debate, the liberation of society to be civil, plural and
humane - these are obvious remedies. But the Islamic movements have become
a barrier to them.
We need reasoned creativity and
critical awareness. These used to be favourite phrases of Anwar Ibrahim.
But his most frequent prescription was humility. The humility to acknowledge
one's own mistakes and shortcomings.
· Ziauddin Sardar's Introducing
Islam is published by Icon Books, £8.99
