Extreme acts of violence like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon test the mettle and moral depth of societies — the society that is targeted by the violence and the society that generated it.
As Americans, we ought to reflect upon the ways that our own Middle East policies and the arrogance with which we deal with dark-skinned people we refer to collectively as “the Arabs” contribute to the radicalization and polarization of Muslims. On the other hand, Muslims, both within America and without, should reflect upon the ways that their own discourses and symbolisms contribute to a belligerent and morally irresponsible attitude toward Western countries.
There is no doubt that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists and will never take part in acts of violence or hate. And there is also little doubt that Muslim and Arab organizations have every reason to be genuinely concerned in the wake of these horrendous acts by Islamophobics and the kind of frenzied atmosphere of hate that they are capable of generating. Nevertheless, as a Muslim scholar, I feel that the horror of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and the subsequent anthrax attacks through the mail, though not definitively linked to the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 atrocities, demand a serious, conscientious pause — a reflective stand upon the prevailing moral and ethical structure of contemporary Islam. There is little doubt that terrorism and hate crimes — make no mistake about it, terrorism is, first and foremost, a hate crime — are most often an aberration. Terrorism, however, is often an extreme manifestation of underlying mainstream social and ideological currents prevalent in a particular culture. Terrorism is not a virus that suddenly infects the brain of a person; rather, it takes long-standing and cumulative cultural and rhetorical dynamics to produce a terrorist.
The classical culture of Islamic law is uncompromisingly hostile to all acts of terrorism. Terrorism, known as hirabah in Islamic law, is considered cowardly, predatory and a grand sin punishable by death. In fact, the Muslim juristic tradition equated terrorism with the Quranic concept of fitnah (betrayal and oppression), which the Quran describes as a crime against humanity. Consequently, classical Muslim jurists considered crimes of terror to be “acts of corruption on the earth” — the most heinous and reprehensible type of crime committed against humanity at large. More specifically, classical Islamic law explicitly prohibits the taking or slaying of hostages or diplomats, even in retaliation against unlawful acts by the enemy. In addition, it prohibits stealth or indiscriminate attacks against enemies, Muslim or non-Muslim, and prohibits the use of weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction, such as fire or the poisoning of water wells.
It would be disingenuous, however, to propose that this classical attitude is predominant, or even that familiar, especially in modern Arab-Muslim culture. To put it simply and bluntly, I, like many other Muslims, grew up with an unhealthy dose of highly opportunistic, anti-Western and belligerent rhetoric, delivered not only through the official media but also through popular religious/cultural venues such as local mosques. Even in the United States, it is not unusual to hear such remarkably irresponsible and unethical rhetoric repeated in local Islamic centers or at meetings of university Muslim-student organizations.
All of this raises the question: What happened to the Islamic civilization that produced such tolerance, knowledge and beauty throughout its history? A lot has happened. The Islamic civilization has been wiped out by an aggressive and racist European civilization; colonialism happened; the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands happened. Furthermore, virulently despotic and exploitative regimes have taken control in nearly every Muslim country and, like most Third World countries, Muslim nation-states remain underdeveloped and continue to suffer from chronic economic and political problems.
But most importantly, a dogmatic, puritan and ethically oblivious form of Islam has continued to develop and predominate since the 1970s. This puritan brand of contemporary Islam is well-represented today in several Muslim regimes and mass-based Islamic movements. This brand of Islamic theology is largely dismissive of the classical juristic tradition, and is also dismissive of any notions of universal and innate moral or ethical values. This orientation insists that only the mechanics and technicalities of Islamic law define morality — there are no moral considerations that can be found outside the technical law. Paradoxically, however, it also rejects the classical juristic tradition as an historical aberration and insists on a de novo and literal reinterpretation of all Islamic texts. But the de novo reinterpretation of Islam is not forward-looking; rather, it claims to bring Islam back to its pristine and authentic self.
According to puritan theology, there was an Islamic Golden Age — a period of absolute utopia that lasted some 40 years, from the time of the Prophet until the death of the fourth Rightly Guided Caliph Ali b. Abi Talib in 661 C.E. Under the tenets of this theology, if Muslims purify their religion from all corruptions and external influences, they can bring back this Golden Age, with all its glory and power.
As part of this paradigm, this puritanism tends to be distinctly anti-intellectual. Intellectualism or social thinking that attempts to have a critical approach to hermeneutics, or that introduces nuances of meaning to the text, or that attempts to integrate sociohistorical insights into the understanding of the doctrines of the Islamic law, is considered to be pure sophistry and a corruption of the purity of the Divine message.
Fundamentally, however, this puritan theology projects its own frustrations and aspirations upon the text. In fact, one notes that it responds to the feelings of powerlessness and defeat with uncompromising symbolic displays of power, not only against non-Muslims, but also against Muslim women. It is not accidental that this puritan orientation is the most virulent in flexing its muscles against women, and that it is also plagued by erotic fantasies of virgins in heaven submissively catering to the whims and desires of men.
This contemporary orientation is anchored in profound feelings of defeatism, alienation and frustration. It is a theology that is alienated not only from the institutions of power of the modern world, but also from its own Islamic heritage and tradition. Importantly, this puritan trend compensates for those feelings of defeatism and alienation with a distinct sense of self-righteous arrogance vis-à-vis the nondescript “other” — whether the other is the West, nonbelievers in general or even Muslim women.
It is certainly true that the extreme and violent form of puritan Islam does not represent the vast majority of Muslims today. But there are two ways in which contemporary Muslim culture, Arab or non-Arab, inadvertently contributes to, and feeds, these extreme trends. First, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the onslaught of colonialism, Islamic intellectuals have busied themselves with the task of “defending Islam” by rampant apologetics. This produced a culture that eschews self-critical and introspective insight and embraces projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and arrogance. Second, confronted by the challenges of modernity, many Muslim intellectuals and activists tended to give precedence to the logic of pragmatism over any other competing normative requirements. Invoking the logic of necessity or public interest to justify a variety of courses of action, at the expense of normative moral imperatives, became common practice. Effectively, Muslims got into the habit of paying homage to the presumed superiority of the Islamic tradition, but marginalized this idealistic image in everyday life.
The reality of contemporary Muslims is unfortunate. Easy oil money, easy apologetics, easy puritanism and easy appeals to the logic of necessity have all but obliterated the incentive for introspection and critical insight. Arab and Muslim organizations in the United States are right to worry about hate crimes and stereotypical projections of Muslims and the Islamic religion. The problem, however, is that Muslims themselves responded to the challenge of modernity by stereotyping and then completely ignoring their own rich moral tradition. It is not surprising that some extremists have taken this tendency to its logical and heinous extreme.
Nonetheless, there are several ways in which the United States contributed to the emergence of these same extreme trends. We ourselves have tended to throw around the rhetoric of moral imperatives and commitments, but our foreign policy fell far short of our rhetoric. Our foreign policy toward Muslim nations remained guided by considerations of realpolitik and pure self-interest. In this vein, we supported, and continue to support, very repressive and corrupt governments with abysmal human-rights records. While touting the cause of freedom and democracy, we consistently referred to these repressive governments as our friends and allies. Even more, we arrogantly claimed to be the leader of the free world — whatever that means — but did not prove to be a very benevolent or principled leader.
