|
MSD Declaration
Contact Us
Activities
Press Release
Debate
Join Now
Feedback
|
International
Herald Tribune - September 8, 2004 | Op-Ed.
Beslan massacre: The anguish of a faithful Muslim
Nassrine Azimi
HIROSHIMA, Japan Many people around the world, Muslims among them,
turned away in shock from their newspapers and televisions, like
me sick to their stomach, as the hostage-taking in Beslan, Russia,
reached its grisly climax.
Even in the litany of terrorist attacks we are now resigned to
expect daily, the premeditated seizure of a school and the
slaughter of innocent children in a sleepy Russian town by
Chechen, Arab and other Muslim terrorists defies imagination. To
think that men and women actually
gathered, maybe months in advance, to plan such evil is
incomprehensible; that it was done in the name of Islam is
crushing.
I, too, am a Muslim. Like many other Muslims (and Christians,
Jews, Buddhists and people of different faiths trying to cope with
our modern age), I try to accept my religious identity on my own
terms and am adamant that there be no place for politicized or
even institutionalized Islam in my spiritual life. Let me promptly
add that this impatience with radicalism in my faith extends
equally to other religions, whether Christianity or Judaism.
My religion actually takes a rather secondary place to my
spirituality. I am primarily concerned, through my faith, to
find answers to those questions that have preoccupied humans from
times immemorial: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where do I go
from here? And, most importantly - how should I conduct a true and
purposeful existence?
Still, I consider myself a Muslim. I grew up with the privilege of
tolerant parents who, while creating a Muslim home for us,
allowed my siblings and me to attend Christian and Jewish schools.
I opted to keep my Islamic identity for at least two reasons.
Firstly, there is much about Islam's rituals that I find elevating
(there is of course also much about it that I simply find
irrelevant to life in general and to my life in particular, like
the segregation of women). I deeply cherish the month of Ramadan,
for example - something holy, truly cleansing, permeates this
period of the year when from dawn to dusk we commit to not eat,
drink, steal, curse or
otherwise misbehave. I also like Islam's sense of community and
self-discipline (before these qualities were debased and deformed
by Al Qaeda and the like).
Secondly, I feel a need to provide some continuity. Let me
explain. Most of my family, including my devout parents,
having observed first hand the brutality, ignorance and corruption
that accompanied Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran, came to
doubt Islam altogether. My father, at one time the most practicing
among us, became so disillusioned with Islam that to his
dying day he never again called himself a Muslim.
I sometimes feel that in a generation or two, the tolerant, humane
and all-embracing Islam I knew will have all but disappeared. In
its place, Osama bin Laden's version of Islam could well win the
day. I feel that having been born a Muslim I should try and uphold
something of the gentler culture I knew. Maybe it is too late.
Cycles of violence are, of course, perpetrated and repeated over
great expanses of time - some of the seeds of Sept. 11, 2001 may
well have been sown in 1953, when the United States and Britain
conspired to topple Mossadegh, the democratically elected
nationalist leader of Iran, thus
paving the way for virulent Islamic movements that later engulfed
Iran and other parts of the Middle East. Seeds for the calamity in
Beslan may have been sown with the invasion of Afghanistan by
Soviet forces in 1979, and by the atrocities committed by Russian
forces in Chechnya.
Most extremisms arise when people don't know where to turn: the
gross vulgarities that pass for freedom in many Western
democracies may have irredeemably frightened many moderate Muslim
societies into the arms of more dogmatic, nonsecular movements.
Still, Muslim countries must start questioning why so many of
their sons and daughters go about claiming an
Islamic inspiration for murderous acts. Who are those who
perpetrated the Beslan tragedy in the name of Islam and where,
pray, are Muslim politicians and commentators to condemn,
unequivocally, their cruelty?
Muslims have already spent too much time blaming others for their
woes. However justified, it is time to stop. Could it be that we
have become more driven to begrudge others their present glories
than to retrieve the glories of our own past? Where, I ask my
fellow Muslims, do we turn when so many atrocities are committed
daily under the banner of our faith?
I continue to believe that at its heart, as in other great faiths,
there is a kernel of timeless beauty and humanity in Islam. To
whoever would listen - there are fewer and fewer of them - I keep
talking of the real Islam: the Islam of the esoteric Sufi
tradition, the Islam of the Golden Age of
knowledge and commerce, from the 8th to the 13th centuries, the
Islam of tolerance, inclusiveness, science and the arts.
Today, watching the dead children of Beslan and the unbearable
suffering of their parents, even to my own ears these claims are
starting to sound hollow.
Nassrine Azimi is director of the Hiroshima Office for Asia and
the Pacific, United Nations Institute for Training and Research.
This is a personal comment.
This site is still under
construction. Please visit again for more updates.
|
