http://www.observer.co.uk/islam/story/0,1442,577943,00.html
Islam has become its own enemy
Ziauddin Sardar
Sunday October 21, 2001
The Observer
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