Review: ‘The Other Muslims’

Turkish men read the Quran at a mosque as they wait for Friday prayers during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, in İstanbul.
How have we reached a situation where when an ordinary British citizen, a young man whose parents came to England from Pakistan many years before he was born, gets on to an intercity train with a rucksack, other passengers are loath to sit next to him?
Or the Somalia-born mother waiting for a bus with her two young daughters, all heavily veiled, finds no one is willing to talk to her and help her discover which bus is going to her destination? Fear feeds an unconscious psyche, which results in prejudice: Since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the ongoing conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the 7/7 bombings in London and the Madrid train bombings and daily news of more atrocities in Iraq, the public perception in the West is often that Muslims = terrorists. This equation has spread its roots far and wide into the thinking of ordinary men and women. This is, of course, as ludicrous as the statements we had to disprove in logic lessons at university. All crows are black. Some cows are black. Therefore, some cows are crows. But, even the most liberal-minded citizens would admit to some hesitations about the political and violent intentions of what is generally termed “the Muslim community.” Every time it is reported on the news that a British-born citizen has been apprehended in a Taliban training camp in Afghanistan or that a radical cleric has been preaching hate from a mosque in London, public opinion hardens against Muslim fundamentalism. So often the question then raised is “Why don’t more moderate Muslims speak out or act to curb the excesses of some?” After all, it is they who directly reap the backlash in the form of prejudice and mistrust. In the introduction to a new book that addresses this very issue, Zeyno Baran writes “Many people wonder why moderate Muslims do not speak out and doubt that we even exist. Regularly their voices are drowned out by two camps: the Islamist voice and the totally anti-Islam voice.” “The Other Muslims” is a fascinating collection of Muslim voices from Europe and the US. Some of the contributors can be described as “practicing Muslims,” others as culturally Muslim. They all deal with the issue of how they perceive that the political agenda has been hijacked by Islamists -- those extremist activists who seek to gain political power and reshape Western societies. One of the major accusations of the authors is that the West is creating its own problems by an over-emphasis on tolerance. Following the crisis over the Danish cartoons, many media and arts outlets imposed a form of self-censorship, nervous to use any words or images that may inflame Muslim sensibilities. This is interpreted by moderate Muslims as allowing the radicals to win: “By tolerating intolerance, many in the West make it harder for moderate and reformist Muslims to succeed.” The authors, on the other hand, definitely do not sit on the fence, starting the whole book off with the explosive statement: “The most important ideological struggle in the world today is within Islam.” The articles in the first part of the book are full of repressed anger: anger against those Islamist groups who, funded by oil or opium wealth, spread their doctrines through the world; anger against pseudo-moderates whose material created for public consumption is in stark contrast to what they create for a Muslim audience; anger against Western authorities who cannot tell the difference and who in their eagerness to encourage “non-violent” Muslims engage in dialog with radical groups who renounce terrorism. They conclude that Islamism, which renounces the fact that Islam can be compatible with democracy and that individuals should have freedom of conscience and expression of faith, is a threat both to Islam and to the West. Muslim attorney Hedieh Mirahmadi recognizes that today many Americans are asking how a faith that teaches tolerance could provide the moral impetus for hijackings and suicide bombers. She says they will find the answer when they realize America’s real enemy is not Islam, but a small group working for centuries to subvert Islam and turn it into a weapon of war. Whilst most Western governments define moderate as non-terrorist, Palestinian Yunis Qandil defines it as non-Islamist. He says the “biggest -- but least apparent -- danger is from integrist groups who claim to renounce violence but use the strategy of integration to promote a fundamentalist ideology.” Dutch-Moroccan Fouad Laroui raises the tricky question of satellite broadcasting where Islamists are free to beam their teaching into homes across Europe. “Should we in the name of democracy allow anti-democratic voices to be heard?” he asks. Perhaps the most moving section of this thought-provoking collection of essays is the middle one where a few tell their own stories. These contain many lessons for those trying to understand why young people educated in the West find the message of radical clerics attractive. Cosh Omar, the son of a Turkish Cypriot Sufi hoca, tells how he was radicalized in London. One reason for this is the way he never felt he completely fitted in. “No matter how often my English friend’s parents told me I was English, my parents told me I was Turkish, as did the glare of Atatürk [on the wall in the salon].” At Regents Park Mosque he met Yusuf Islam and then was drawn into the circle of Omar Bakri Muhammad and the Hizb ut-Tahrir organization. Cosh reflects, “There was no concern with the spiritual path to mystical union with God. Theirs was a political rhetoric appealing to young Muslims who felt no connection to their parents’ spiritual interpretations of Islam, and yet felt like political and social aliens in their own country.” As for solutions? Cosh Omar recommends that organizations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir should not be banned: “As by banishing such groups we exclude their ideals from our intellectual debate and lose our ability to scrutinize -- and defeat -- their arguments. They will drive their ideas underground where they will survive unopposed and rot the foundations of any progressive achievements.” Perhaps the clearest solution is proposed by Ghalib Bencheikh: “We should start by evaluating the major problems facing the Muslim community in Europe. We must establish a list of priorities and get down to business. The objectives involve pluralism, secularism, equality, individual autonomy and the desacralization of violence.” Today's Zaman