Real Muslims & false Muslims
by George Jonas
National Post
July 11, 2005
The interviewer was asking about the terrorists. "They aren't Muslims," replied the distraught man, clutching a photograph. Behind him, an older man nodded. "They aren't even human."
The two men in the NBC news clip wore traditional Bangladeshi clothes. A caption identified one as Shamsul. They were being interviewed in a Muslim-populated area of London, near the station where one of the bombs went off. Both looked unprepossessing, but the snapshot one held up to the camera showed a young woman of surprising beauty. "Daughter," the man identified as Shamsul said. Apparently she was still missing, 36 hours after the explosion.
The older man was the woman's grandfather. "I used to hold her, like this," he explained, as if an accurate demonstration of how he held his granddaughter 20 years ago might aid in her recovery. The father was still responding to the earlier question. "They can say, who did this, that they're Muslims," he repeated, "but they're not."
The camera lingered on his face as he desperately waited for confirmation from someone, anyone, that the terrorists didn't share his faith. There was none forthcoming. In his white tunic, wearing a fez-shaped headgear, Shamsul looked like a person in denial. Or like someone who had just suffered a devastating triple loss, robbed in an instant of his daughter, his religion, and his reputation.
Shamsul seemed to anticipate that the people who "did this" in London will call themselves Muslim, just as the people who did Madrid on March 11, 2004, or the people who did New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, called themselves Muslim. When he said "they aren't Muslim" he meant that terrorists who blow up trains or fly passenger jets into office towers may claim, or even think, they're acting for Islam, but they aren't. People who act for Islam are like Shamsul. They work hard, raise sturdy sons and beautiful daughters, and believe that God is merciful and killing is wrong. Real Muslims blow up nothing. On the contrary. Real Muslims, or their beautiful children, risk getting blown up themselves when they travel in planes, trains, or buses targeted by false Muslims.
It's impossible not to sympathize with a man who, in the space of a few minutes on an ordinary Thursday morning, not only loses a precious child to a savage band of barbarians, but his religion as well. After claiming the life of his daughter, the feral assassins claim Shamsul's spiritual life by reducing his Islam, a complex and compassionate faith of mercy and tolerance, to a primitive and brutal creed of fanaticism, malice, and mayhem. And then, adding a final insult to injury, his neighbours in the heart of Europe, instead of recognizing a fellow victim, may look at him with fear, loathing, and suspicion because he shares, even if only nominally, the religion of his daughter's murderers, possibly along with their garb, voice, appearance, and gestures.
It would be comforting to agree with the distraught Shamsul that he alone is the real Muslim, and the terrorists aren't. But the unhappy truth is that they're both real. In the House of Islam there are many rooms. Pretending that those who blow up things aren't real Muslims may postpone waking up to harsh reality, but sleeping through a war isn't a viable option. And we are at war: At war with a branch of Islam.
We're not at war with "terrorism." Terrorism is a weapon, not an opponent. We've been at war with militant, fundamentalist Islam, that uses terrorism as a weapon.
Of course, militant Islam has been at war with Shamsul's moderate Islam as well. Shamsul's is the bigger war. Muslim victims of Muslim violence dwarf non-Muslim victims. The first number in the millions (counting Bangladesh, Saddam's depredations against Kurds and Shiites, the Iran-Iraqi war, etc.) Non-Muslim fatalities barely add up to twenty thousand, even after decades of low-grade global terrorism, Kashmir, Chechnya, two Gulf wars, and 9/11.
There have been three main strands of violence running through the Arab/Muslim world since World War II, two secular and one religious. One was quasi-Marxist and resulted in such terrorist organizations as George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded in 1967. The PFLP engaged in some spectacular hijacking operations throughout the 1970's. The other secular strand was Arab national-socialistic, spawning such Nasserite and Baathist regimes as Col. Gaddafy's in Libya, the al-Assad-family's in Syria, and Saddam Hussein's in Iraq. As for Yasser Arafat's PLO, it straddled -- some say, bridged -- the Marxist and national-socialistic shores of the pan-Arab stream, alternately quarreling with, and borrowing from, both sides.
Terrorism was part of Marxist and pan-Arab nationalism, but the worst violence emerged from Islam's religious revival. Initially encouraged by the West to counteract Marxist influence, militant Islam grew in the hothouses of Wahabbi oil-sheiks, the madrases of Pakistan, the CIA-sponsored training camps of Afghanistan, and the revolutionary councils of theocratic Iran. Eventually it resulted in al-Qaeda, as mobile, intangible, and destructive as fire.
The malevolent flame followed Shamsul to London. He needs our help to put it out. We need Shamsul's.