Here's a muslim taking a shot. Make sure you get through the first couple of paragraphs. Becomes very interesting. Hope I catch the sequel.
Muslims and the West
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
America has exacted blood revenge for the Twin Towers. A million Afghans have
fled US bombs into the cold wastelands and face starvation. B-52s have blown
the Taliban to bits and changed Mullah Omar's roar of defiance into a pitiful
squeak for surrender. Osama bin Laden is on the run (he may be dead by the
time this article reaches the reader). But even as the champagne pops in the
White House, America remains fearful - for good reason.
Subsequent to September 11 we have all begun to live in a different, more
dangerous world. Now is the time to ask why. Like clinical pathologists, we need
to scientifically examine the sickness of human behaviour impelling terrorists to
fly airliners filled with passengers into skyscrapers. We also need to understand
why millions celebrate as others die.
In the absence of such an understanding there remains only the medieval therapy
of exorcism; for the strong to literally beat the devil out of the weak. Indeed, the
Grand Exorcist - disdainful of international law and the growing nervousness of
even its close allies - prepares a new hit list of other Muslim countries needing
therapy: Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. We shall kill at will, is the message.
This will not work. Terrorism does not have a military solution. Soon - I fear
perhaps very soon - there will be still stronger, more dramatic proof. In the
modern age, technological possibilities to wreak enormous destruction are
limitless. Anger, when intense enough, makes small stateless groups, and even
individuals, extremely dangerous.
Anger is ubiquitous in the Islamic world today. Allow me to share a small
personal experience. On September 12 I had a seminar scheduled at the
department of physics in my university in Islamabad, part of a weekly seminar
for physics students on topics outside of physics. Though traumatized by events,
I could not cancel the seminar because sixty people had already arrived, so I
said, "We will have our seminar today on a new subject: on yesterday's terrorist
attacks".
The response was negative, some were mindlessly rejoicing the attacks. One
student said, "You can't call this terrorism." Another said, "Are you only worried
because it is Americans who have died?" It took two hours of sustained,
impassioned, argumentation to convince the students that the brutal killing of
ordinary people, who had nothing to do with the policies of the United States,
was an atrocity. I suppose that millions of Muslim students the world over felt as
mine did, but probably heard no counter-arguments.
If the world is to be spared what future historians may call the "Century of
Terror", we will have to chart the perilous course between the Scylla of American
imperial arrogance and the Charybdis of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through
these waters, we must steer by a distant star towards a careful, reasoned,
democratic, humanistic, and secular future. Else, shipwreck is certain.
"Why do they hate us?", asks George W. Bush. This rhetorical question betrays
the pathetic ignorance of most Americans about the world around them.
Moreover, its claim to an injured innocence cannot withstand even the most
cursory examination of US history. For almost forty years, this "naiveti and
self-righteousness" has been challenged most determinedly by Noam Chomsky.
As early as 1967, he pointed that the idea that "our" motives are pure and "our"
actions benign is "nothing new in American intellectual history - or, for that
matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia".
Muslim leaders have mirrored America's claim and have asked the same question
of the West. They have had little to say about September 11 that makes sense to
people outside their communities. Although they speak endlessly on rules of
personal hygiene and "halal" or "haram", they cannot even tell us whether or not
the suicide bombers violated Islamic laws. According to the Virginia-based (and
largely Saudi-funded) Fiqh Council's chairman, Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani, "this
kind of question needs a lot of research and we don't have that in our budget."
Fearful of backlash, most leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, and
Europe have responded in predictable ways to the Twin Towers atrocity. This has
essentially two parts: first, that Islam is a religion of peace; and second, that
Islam was hijacked by fanatics on September 11, 2001. They are wrong on both
counts.
First, Islam - like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion - is not
about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute belief in its
own superiority and the divine right to impose itself upon others. In medieval
times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in blood. Today, Christian
fundamentalists attack abortion clinics in the US and kill doctors; Muslim
fundamentalists wage their sectarian wars against each other; Jewish settlers
holding the Old Testament in one hand, and Uzis in the other, burn olive
orchards and drive Palestinians off their ancestral land; Hindus in India demolish
ancient mosques and burn down churches; Sri Lankan Buddhists slaughter Tamil
separatists.
The second assertion is even further off the mark. Even if Islam had, in some
metaphorical sense, been hijacked, that event did not occur on September 11,
2001. It happened around the 13th century. A quick look around us readily
shows Islam has yet to recover from the trauma of those times.
Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not ask about Islam; Islam is an
abstraction. Moulana Abdus Sattar Edhi and Mullah Omar are both followers of
Islam, but the former is overdue for a Nobel peace prize while the other is a
medieval, ignorant, cruel fiend. Edward Said, among others, has insistently
pointed out, Islam carries very different meaning to different people. It is as
heterogeneous as those who believe and practise it. There is no "true Islam".
Therefore it only makes sense to speak of people who claim that faith.
Today Muslims number one billion, spread over 48 Muslim countries. None of
these has yet evolved a stable democratic political system. In fact, all Muslim
countries are dominated by self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance
their personal interests and steal resources from their people. No Muslim country
has a viable educational system or a university of international stature.
Reason too has been waylaid. To take some examples from my own experience.
You will seldom encounter a Muslim name as you flip through scientific journals,
and if you do the chances are that this person lives in the West. There are a few
exceptions: Abdus Salam, together with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow,
won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for the unification of the weak and
electromagnetic forces.
I got to know Salam reasonably well - we even wrote a book preface together.
He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and his religion. And
yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by his country and excommunicated from
Islam by an act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today the Ahmadi sect, to
which Salam belonged, is considered heretical and harshly persecuted. (My
next-door neighbour, an Ahmadi, was shot in the neck and hurt and died in my
car as I drove him to the hospital. His only fault was to have been born in the
wrong sect.)
Today's sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of yesterday. Between the
9th and the 13th centuries - the Golden Age of Islam - the only people doing
decent science, philosophy, or medicine were Muslims. For five straight centuries
they alone kept the light of learning ablaze. Muslims not only preserved ancient
learning, they also made substantial innovations and extensions. The loss of this
tradition has proved tragic for Muslim peoples.
Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because there was within Islam a
strong rationalist tradition, carried on by a group of Muslim thinkers known as
the Mutazilites. This tradition stressed human free will, strongly opposing the
predestinarians who taught that everything was foreordained and that humans
have no option but surrender everything to Allah. While the Mutazilites held
political power, knowledge grew.
But in the twelfth century Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the
cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason,
predestination over free will. He refuted the possibility of relating cause to effect,
teaching that man cannot know or predict what will happen; God alone can. He
damned mathematics as against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened
faith.
Held in the vice-like grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No longer, as during the
reign of the dynamic caliph Al-Mamun and the great Haroon Al-Rashid, would
Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars gather and work together in the royal
courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world.
The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th
century.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance brought an
explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This owed much to Arab translations
and other Muslim contributions, but it was to matter little. Mercantile capitalism
and technological progress drove western countries to rapidly colonize the
Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco. Always brutal, at times genocidal, it
changed the shape of the world. It soon became clear, at least to a part of the
Muslim elites, that they were paying a heavy price for not possessing the
analytical tools of modern science and the social and political values of modern
culture - the real source of power of their colonizers.
To be concluded
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