Muslims in Denial of Collective Responsibility?

After reading Hasan Suroor in The Hindu dated Jul17, I remembered a laconic fable I read as a kid.

A wolf and a kid are drinking water from the same stream. The wolf upstream, the kid downstream. The wolf wants to savour the kid. So, he goes-

“Hey, why are you making my water dirty?”

“How can I, sir? I am downstream!”

“What! Such impertinence?”

“I did not say anything bad, sir!”

“Okay, you did not, but once your father abused me. You will pay for it.” -says the wolf, and jumps on the kid.

The crux of Suroor’s argument is that Muslims can not deny a collective responsibility for what happened at Glasgow.

I shall show the big holes in his argument.

He says:

Judging from much of the Muslim reaction to the latest Islamist outrage — last month’s attempted bombings in London and Glasgow — the community seems to have talked itself into a default position in relation to violent Muslim extremism.

Raises several questions. How was the Glasgow attempt deemed Islamist? The perpetrators of the crime never mentioned Islam or jihad, to the best of my knowldge. If the mere fact that they were Muslims make it Islamist, then the LTTE suicide bombings are Hindu, or the bombs that drop daily on Afghan civilians are Christian, by the grace of same logic.

Broadly, the Muslim argument is that it is all down to a host of external factors. Top of the list is the western foreign policy, especially with regard to the Palestinian issue, compounded by the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq.

There were obligatory references to social deprivation etc., etc. And as for the three Indian doctors suspected to have been behind the London-Glasgow plot, they were simply “misguided� individuals acting alone.

So they were not misguided individuals. What is the author trying to suggest? That these people were championed by every Muslim in the UK? Championed or abetted by Muslims across the globe?

According to Suroor, I can’t deny responsibility for Glasgow bombing attempt. And what is my guilt? Trying to profess my Islam and trying to convince everybody that suicide terrorism is not the answer? Is that my guilt that my preaching the tents of peace and justice may reach the ears of a would be bomber and refrain him?

With me, the Muslim mama who was waiting for her kid outside school when the bombing took place is also to blame.

All the Islamic theologians I have met in recent times have unequivocally denounced the killing of innocents. They preach peace, timidity and patience. Collective responsibility means they, too, are responsible for what happened at Glasgow.

That’s what collective responsibility means.

There was much hand-wringing when the anchor underlined the fact that Muslims had been behind all recent acts of terrorism.

Should the author atleast not have checked the newspapers before making such a tall claim. I am not asking him to read research articles on terrorism. He should have perused the newspapers- yes, the biased, misinformed and disproportionate newspapers.

Or is it that I have missed when LTTE, ASSU, ULFA, IRA etc. converted to Islam? Well? Huh?

The author is opposed to euphemism. However, he is not, apparently, opposed to passing wrong informations; or could they be lies?

Of course, the community condemned any violence committed in the name of Islam, a peaceful religion. And, indeed, there was need for introspection and discussion.

So what should we do? “I am sorry sir, for the terror I have caused”? Should I apologize for the terror I have caused by condemning terrorism and trying to create an environment of understanding?

At first there were calls from the like of Suroor “where are the silent majority?”. Then the `silent’ majority shouted out so loud that nobody asks that question anymore. However, the blame has to be on the Musims, so the position is slightly shifted to “they can not deny collective responsibility”. In other words- even though they do not like it, even though they are afraid of terrorism themselves, even though the theologians themselves have condemned it and do not support it and is trying to conciliate with the non-Muslim population and to counter the environment of fear and mistrust- they are responsible.

And the truth is that many of their assumptions about the underlying causes of extremism are flawed. Every fresh terrorist attack chips away at the idea that foreign policy and socio-economic factors are the sole drivers of Islamist extremism, making the Muslim default position more untenable.

I am stunned! Every attack rather confirms to the contrary. An overwhelming majority has condemned terrorism and expressed their willingness for friendship with others. In words, and in works.

Daniel Pape has collected data and analyzed the motive and mentality of suicide bombers. He concludes, in his book (Dying to Win- the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism), that the most important motivation behind an act of terror is to force a democracy to withdraw from a land that the terrorists covet as their own. In short, it is nationalism, and not Islam, that drives these terrorists. Sometimes, some Muslim terrorists try to justify their claim in the name of Islam. These interpretations are not accepted in the mainstream.

This in itself may not explain the possible involvement of an Indian in the plot. Here is the explanation- another variant of nationalism is at work here- tribalism. The Muslim identifies with the Muslims in Iraq, and therefore views it as an attack against his nationhood.

Such behaviour is not unique to Muslims. When the Hindu gods were printed on American sandals, Indian Hindus protested.

They did not perpetrate suicide bombing? Okay, start genocide of Hindus in US and watch. You need not go that far. Look at LTTE. Or look at IRA.

Hassan Butt, a reformed British extremist, recalls how “we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.� [...] According to Mr. Butt, though many extremists were enraged by the deaths of fellow Muslims across the world “what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.�

Another incosistency. He starts the passage with the claim that Butt and his allies laughed at the suggestion of foreign policy being the reason, and then at the end of it, says that it was one of the major factors.

In fact, that is the most important factor. There are other factors. But they are not the main cause.

Arguably, defectors are not the most reliable of people and there is, inevitably, an element of exaggeration in what they say about the organisation they have left and of their own role in it.

If you read ‘The Islamist’, carefully, everybody else in the terror organization that the author joined are to be blamed, except he himself. He `fell’ for them. So much for honesty. How can we trust such a guy that he is telling us the truth?

Mr. Butt, Mr. Maher and Mr. Husain are darlings of the Western governments and the Islamophobes now. Because they say just what the Islamophobes and the western government want to hear- that terrorism is inherent in a certain version in Islam, and foreign policy has nothing to do with it.

Instead listen to what the active terrorists say. In Kashmir- “Our people are being held captive by the Indian government. We are fighting for them in the name of Islam.” Reason they are fighting is that they think Kashmir is being held by India. This attitude makes it quite clear that they are fighting not because of Islam, but in pretext of Islam. To think that they are justified in their methods, they name Islam. Just as Bush called his War for Oil (oops! War on Terror) a ‘Crusade’- to make him seemingly the force for good in the eyes and ears of Catholic in the US.

Ed Husain, another ex-Islamist, has written a whole book (The Islamist) warning against complacency.

Another incosistency. At first he says the Muslim community “is irritated that every time a Muslim does something silly it is expected to stand up and apologise.” Then he mentions complacency!

First and foremost, Muslims must acknowledge what Ziauddin Sardar, one of Europe’s most prominent Muslim scholars, calls the “Islamic nature of the problem.� Islamist extremism has not descended from another planet or been imposed on the community from outside. It breeds within the community and is the product of a certain kind of interpretation of Islam. And, in the words, of Mr. Sardar, terrorists are a “product of a specific mindset that has deep roots in Islamic history.�

I agree here. There has always been an element of violence and injstice deep rooted inside Islam’s history. Pray tell- which history is free from it? Which one?

Hasn’t Islam’s history given us one of the best examples of coherent coexistence, not just tolerance, in Al-Andaluz? The condulensia? In Palestine? Why do we forget the history that might benefit us and present examples to follow, and emphasize the history that only evokes anger and misunderstanding?

Claiming that violence is inherent in Islam is the best possible deal for the governments that claim to be ‘victims of terrorism’. If the acts of terror can be made into action itself, and not reaction to their government policy, or other socio-economic-political reasons, then they can not be held responsible for their indirect hand in the terrorist acts. We don’t, then, need to explain the reasons behind violence in Kashmir or Manipur- because the people living there are `inherently violent’. (Three cheers for Arundhati Roy).

Nay, it is not the government- it is we, the common people, regardless of religion, that are the victims of terrorism.

In a seminal essay, “The Struggle for Islam’s Soul� (New Statesman, July 18, 2005), Mr. Sardar argued that Islamists were “nourished by an Islamic tradition that is intrinsically inhuman and violent in its rh etoric, thought and practice� and this placed a unique burden on Muslims as they tried to make sense of what their co-religionists were doing in the name of Islam. “To deny that they are a product of Islamic history and tradition is more than complacency. It is a denial of responsibility, a denial of what is happening in our communities. It is a refusal to live in the real world,� he wrote.

Let’s face it; there are verses in the Koran that justify violence. The “hard truth that Islam does permit the use of violence,� as Mr. Butt points out, must be recognised by Muslims. When Islam was in its infancy and battling against non-believers violence was deemed legitimate to put them down.

It is not hard truth. It a good truth that Islam allows violence in self defense. No verses in the Qur’an, however, asks believers to kill innocents. Qur’an deems it a crime against humanity to kill innocents- “if someone kills an innocent, it is as if he killed the whole of humanity”, says the Qur’an.

[...] jihadi groups, pursuing their madcap scheme of establishing Dar-ul-Islam (the Land of Islam), are using these passages to incite impressionable Muslim youths.

How utterly stupid claim! They want to create Land of Islam through suicide bombing! Let us for a moment forget the fact that Islam does not allow suicide- under any circumstance- and attack on civilians (forget civilians, chopping down a tree without a reason is not allowed in Islam). Given that, how is one going to bring down a government with one suicide bombing every three years?

It is not hard to see the desperation in these attacks. It not hard to see that it is not a revolution that these fanatics seek. If you are willing to look, that is.

The pattern of suicide bombing by an isloated individual without an organisation just does not fit a revolutionary mentality. If there is no organisation, who is going to rule the new ‘Islamic republic’ after our martyrs are dead?

Is it so hard to see that they seek revenge?

Yet there is no sign of a debate in the community beyond easy platitudes, and it remains in denial.

And yes, I am in ‘denial‘ just as I defend the common UK citizen’s right to deny his innocence of the war crimes being committed in Iraq or Afghanistan. I think he and I are both justified in our ‘denial’.

And by the way, instead of discussing a failed terrorist attempt in such excruciating detail, why aren’t we discussing Mali, Iraq, north Ireland, Assam, Kashmir and India’s North-East? Does it have something to do with different price tags attached to Occidental and Oriental lives?

I have seen few such reasonable sounding yet ill informed and ill thought articles as this one. Such articles will create misunderstanding of the causes behind terrorism, thereby making terrorism more difficult to handle. It will also make the work of the reformist Muslims, who seek to reach out and create understanding by dialogue with non-Muslims, difficult.

Honestly I did not expect such an ill-informed article that makes claims like “all terrorism are due to Musilms” show up on the edit page of The Hindu. This was a big let-down, Mr. Editor.