What's right about Islam?
By Bradley Burston
This is, we are told over-often, the Information Age.
So how did it happen that we know nothing of Islam?
Nothing good, at any rate. At this point, we in Israel and the West can recite chapter and verse the excesses of those who speak in the name of Islam, bomb in the name of Islam, burn churches in the name of Islam, kill a nun in the name of Islam.
We smile our thin, knowing smile when we learn that a previously unknown Muslim group calling itself "The Army of Guidance" vows to attack Christian sites in Gaza in retaliation for the remarks of "the accursed infidel the Vatican." We smirk inside when the "Lions of Monotheism" denounce the "dogs of Rome."
We cluck our disapproval of restrictions placed on women in the Islamic world. We squirm with dismay at the remarks of a Shi'ite extremist who says we are doomed because we adore life, while he and his colleagues adore death. We see Islam in every ugly form a religion could take.
But we know nothing.
Certainly, we in the news media are guiltier than most of spreading the image of the Muslim as terrorist, of Islam as the enemy.
We take prurient pleasure in reproducing the hideous masks, the chilling threats, the pre-suicide tapes, the pre-beheading tapes. We trumpet the every declaration of Ahmadinejad if it insults the West, offends the Jews, denies the Holocaust, predicts the end of America, recommends the end of Israel.
The Pope has stated that he does not share the view that the Prophet Mohammed brought "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." But many of us, in the superficiality of our knowledge of Islam, clearly do share precisely that view.
We are thoroughly schooled in what's wrong with Islam.
What we need to know, though, is what is right with it.
Specifically, we need to hear from Muslims why it is that they love their religion as they do. What it gives them. What they feel spiritually.
We need to hear them as fellow humans, describing their faith in their own words. Not political declarations. Real emotions. We need to hear them, in order to begin to see beyond the surface, to hear from the person behind the media veil we have placed over them.
Our lack of initiative in seeking balanced knowledge of Islam, has been accompanied by a failure on the part of the Muslims in our midst to initiate outreach, to spread the wisdom of Islam with the same fervor with which its extremists have preached a doctrine of hatred.
Perhaps it makes a certain cracked sense that, of late, it is a prominent internal critic of Islam who has given us some of the more positive glimpses into a believing Muslim's faith.
In a brief but powerful examination of the controversy surrounding the Pope's quotation of the Byzantine emperor, writer Irshad Manji delivered a commentary on CBS this week that was as much about the positive aspects of Islam than it was about the dispute.
Manji, noting that she was a faithful Muslim, said that rather than resorting to violence for perceived insults to Islam, "thinking is what the Quran encourages. It asks Muslims to reflect far more than to retaliate. Even if someone mocks your religion, the Koran says, walk away. Later, engage in dialogue. Wasn't that the Pope's point?
"We Muslims should remember that God told the Prophet Mohammed to 'read.' My advice to fellow Muslims: Read the Pope's speech in its entirety and you'll see that his message of reason, reconciliation, and conversation would make him a better Muslim than most of us."
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