Words Matter: The Linguistic Damage of “Going Muslim”

By Daniel Martin Varisco
Posted on November 17, 2009, Printed on November 23, 2009
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/2039/

If the media frenzy over the Fort Hood killings is any gauge, the ugly specter of 9/11 has again taken its psychological toll. This time, instead of the “bad Muslim” being a bearded terrorist called bin Laden, there is a US Army psychologist who was trained to be a healer of military personnel. He happens to have an Arabic ancestry and is Muslim.

Prominent American Muslim organizations issued statements right away condemning the murders. Debate in the media is now focused on his motivation. Was he a fifth-columnist wolf in military dress? Did his sympathies for innocent victims in our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan overwhelm his common sense of decency? Should the FBI and security arms of the US military have pounced on him when they uncovered his initial links to a radical imam?

One result that I have noticed among those who study Islam, especially my Muslim colleagues, is a growing fault line over the dubious “good Muslim/bad Muslim” binary. As Mahmood Mamdani has eloquently argued, the choice is not between good and bad individuals or citizens, but about being Muslim. Major Hasan is a man who looked very much like a “good Muslim”: a military officer providing therapy to returning veterans. But, now, it seems that at some tipping point he became the “bad Muslim,” the kind who places mosque above state.

I suspect that were Major Hasan a member of almost any other religion, the issue would be his individual sanity. But in a climate of suspicion in which Islam is tainted with the ideological fervor of Islamism, Major Hasan has become the new “bad Muslim” on the block. The media wants his head, and public opinion follows in lock step.

“Going teenager”? “Going Christian”?

One recent commentary has sparked concern on the Islam e-lists that I follow. Published on November 9 in Forbes Magazine by Tunku Varadarajan, it is disconcertingly entitled “Going Muslim.” As the author, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, explains, he is borrowing directly from the phrase “going postal,” which he notes is “a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker (archetypically a postal worker) ‘snaps’ and guns down his colleagues.” The actions of Major Hasan are said to signal a “new phenomenon of violent rage,” this time from within the United States and, even more disconcertingly, within our military.

Varadarajan does not believe, however, that Major Hasan simply snapped, but offers a more sinister scenario, one of “a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration.” Fearing that the Army succumbed to the dreaded politically correct mentality of liberals, the author issues a call for soldiers to turn in their comrades at the hint of “radical Islamism.”

Reactions have been visceral. A professor in Religious Studies at NYU has called on his university’s president to repudiate the remarks of Dr. Varadarajan, viewing them as incendiary. President Sexton* responded that although he found the remarks in the column offensive, the university remains a forum for freedom of expression. [See also Haroon Moghul’s essay for RD. —Eds.]

The deeper issue here is the politics of blame fueled by fear. Despite several “going postal” episodes in recent years, we still go to our local post offices, and local postal workers have not quit en masse. It sometimes seems like hardly a month goes by without a disgruntled individual going on a shooting spree. To neologize the term “going Muslim” is an insult that would not be tolerated for any other group I know. Were the perpetrators of the Columbine school killings “going teenager”? If a fanatic fundamentalist Christian kills an abortion doctor, is he “going Christian,” or should an Israeli soldier who loses it be considered as “going Jewish”? As much as I hate the term “Islamism,” could Varadanjan not at least have come up with “going Islamist”?

Words matter. In a recently published volume, Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, I offer an essay rejecting the term “Islamism” as a catch-all for political and militant versions of Islam. More than a century ago, the term “Islamism” referred to Islam as such, like Judaism and Buddhism. That usage is now obsolete—but consider the linguistic damage in reserving the -ism for Islam as a marker of violence and intolerance. A Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire is not called Buddhist because of the act; but a Muslim who goes on a suicide mission is called an Islamist precisely because of the violent act. Like the prejudicial term “Mohammedan,” which has now been retired, the term “Islamist” perpetuates a false image of the world’s second largest religion. Why is it that we need one term to link Islam and violence in a way not done for any other religion? As problematic as the term “fundamentalist” is when applied to Muslims, at least it describes a view not specific to one religion.

The same argument holds for “going Muslim.” Instead of “bad Muslim/good Muslim,” which at least admits there can be a good Muslim, the dangerous notion of “going Muslim” inflicts the same linguistic damage to Islam as phrases like “to gyp” (referring to Gypsies) or “to jew” (to cheat). The dictionary still records such etymological ethnic bias, even if political correctness helps make them obsolete.

We may never be able to discover the motivation of Major Hasan, regardless of whether or not he chanted “Allahu Akbar” in the act. There are thousands of Muslims serving in the US military and several million Muslims living in America. If “going Muslim” means losing it and taking lives, then Muslims in America have no place to go. Major Hasan did not “go Muslim” when he took the lives of his fellow soldiers. As in all such crimes, no matter what religious veneer is assumed, he went berserk.

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*As commenter (and RD contributor) Gabriel Mckee notes in comments, the NYU president referred to in the passage is indeed John Sexton. RD regrets the error.

Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at Hofstra University. His most recent book is Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (UWPress, 2007).

ebaadenews.blogspot.com

"Against the Black Box and the Slippery Slope" By Jeremy Walton

http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_003180.php

Against the Black Box and the Slippery Slope
20 November 2009

A response to Tunku Varadarajan's Forbes column, 'Going Muslim'.

By Jeremy Walton

On November 9th, Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, published a piece titled 'Going Muslim' in his regular column for Forbes magazine. In it, he forwarded a deeply troubling analysis of the tragedy at Fort Hood earlier this month, in which Major Nadal Malik Hasan killed thirteen of his fellow soldiers in an unconscionable act of mass murder. Varadarajan’s argument, in essence, was that Muslims, by virtue of their very religious affiliation, identity and practice, are necessarily prone to the type of violence exemplified by Major Hasan’s actions; just as postal workers are liable to snap psychologically and “go postal”, so too are Muslims, in Varadarjan’s unfortunate coinage, candidates for “going Muslim”. While, in Varadarajan’s estimation, this is especially true of those Muslims who fail the imperatives of American multiculturalism, a slippery slope unites even the most seemingly well-integrated, patriotic and pacifist Muslims with the radical bugbears and boogie-men of the al-Qaeda genus that constitute too many Americans’ conception of Islam on the whole.

As a professor of religious and Islamic studies at NYU and a close friend to many Muslims, both domestically and abroad, my first response to Varadarajan’s column was a degree of shock, chagrin, and anger. I had thought—naïvely, it seems—that public discourse in the United States had moved beyond this type of demagogic fear-mongering, in spite of its prevalence immediately following the events of September 11th, 2001. From a professional perspective, Varadarajan’s piece was upsetting for separate reasons—as the instructor of an introductory level course on Islam, I devote significant class time and conversation to disabusing students of the all-too-prevalent ideology that Islam, in Varadarajan’s words, “is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.” While it is not the role of scholars of religion to define the beliefs and practices that they study and teach, it is nevertheless eminently clear to even the most casual student of Islam that such exaggerated, one-sided caricatures of Muslims bear little relationship to the historical and contemporary diversity of the tradition. It is deeply frustrating that a fellow colleague can so glibly undermine the sincere efforts on the part of the many scholars of Islam, both at NYU and elsewhere, committed to the serious study of Islam, and in such a public venue.

Beyond anger, frustration and surprise, however, Varadarajan’s remarks also fascinate me as a scholar of religion and the politics that orient it. Above all, Varadarajan’s argument in 'Going Muslim' exemplifies two of the major approaches though which contemporary secular political culture comprehends Islam in particular, and religion in general. For shorthand, I summarize these cardinal conceptions as “the slippery slope” argument and “the black box” intuition. The first is especially true of public discourse about Islam in the United States, while the second applies to speculation and conversation about religion more broadly.

We have already encountered the slippery slope argument above—its method is to identify certain motivations and actions as definitively Muslim and then to attribute these motivations and actions to all Muslims, regardless of circumstances. With this in mind, it is not difficult to perceive that Varadarajan’s argument amounts to Islamophobic hate speech. He employs two of the classic tactics of racism and chauvinism: the ascription of irresistible, irrational motives to a demonized other and the easy movement from a single event or individual to categorical generalizations about an entire group or identity. Thus, according to Varadarajan, Major Hasan felt and acted, above all, as a Muslim (rather than as a military officer, an American, or a confused and disturbed man). Furthermore, inasmuch as Hasan acted as a Muslim—inasmuch as a religious identity determined his violence—Varadarajan asserts that we, the concerned American public, should worry that other Muslims might also act in this way, might “go Muslim”, and, therefore, should take political steps to prevent this.

Both of Varadarajan’s pernicious presuppositions deserve interrogation. In light of United States’ rich tradition of mass violence, why shouldn’t one ascribe Hasan’s actions to his masculine American-ness, rather than to his status as a Muslim (certainly, this is a position that many a European friend of mine advocates on every occasion of spectacular murder in the United States)? More importantly, why is the ascription of motivations itself so central to the effort to comprehend actions that are, ultimately, incomprehensible? Are we really to believe that we have accounted for Hasan’s actions merely by noting that he was a Muslim (or an American, or a troubled man)?

Here, we touch directly upon the logic of "the black box" of religion. When confronted by actions or motivations that defy explanation, the mouthpieces of secular political culture are content to attribute these actions or motivations to religion and then rush to criticize them as such. While so-called Islamist violence is a particularly frequent object of this type of black box rationality, one also encounters it in less spectacular contexts. Contemporary homophobia in the United States, for example, is typically linked to Evangelical Protestantism and Christianity more generally in public discourse, in spite of the fact that many devout Christians eschew bias based upon sexual orientation and many prominent homophobes have only marginal religious credentials. This is not to deny that some individuals do understand their own violent actions or prejudices as religiously-motivated. However, this fact does not imply that public commentators on religion should take this self-understanding at face value. This is especially the case in politically-charged times, when the attribution of individual causes too easily becomes a blanket description of entire communities and traditions.

The logic of the black box, then, is a general characteristic of public American understanding of religion today. However, the same cannot be said about the slippery slope argument, at least not to the same degree—its application to Muslims and Islam is far more prevalent and politically acceptable than it is in reference to other religions. To be clear: Islam and Muslims are the objects of political suspicion and insinuation in contemporary America in a manner that is not true of any other religious community (or other collective group). It is this broader political culture that makes Varadarajan’s comments possible and, tragically, popular.

To justify his virulence, Varadarajan claims to be a lone warrior in a battle against "political correctness". We should not be so easily fooled. Political correctness, to the best of my knowledge, does not sanction indifference or malfeasance—the two proximate causes that prevented Major Hasan’s superiors from disciplining him before it was too late. On the other hand, it would be politically incorrect in a more profound sense to refrain from condemning Varadarajaran’s comments for what they are: dangerous, simplistic, and unworthy of the better sentiments of most Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Jeremy Walton is an assistant professor/faculty fellow in New York University's Religious Studies Program.


ebaadenews.blogspot.com

NYT: "Who Created Major Hasan?" by Robert Wright

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22wright.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1258920215-IoxE43qie5XC%20zvtGr6sUQ

November 22, 2009

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Who Created Major Hasan?

By ROBERT WRIGHT

Princeton, N.J.

IN the case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre, the verdict has come in. The liberal news media have been found guilty — by the conservative news media — of coddling Major Hasan’s religion, Islam.

Liberals, according to the columnist Charles Krauthammer, wanted to medicalize Major Hasan’s crime — call it an act of insanity rather than of terrorism. They worked overtime, Mr. Krauthammer said on Fox News, to “avoid any implication that there was any connection between his Islamist beliefs ... and his actions.” The columnist Jonah Goldberg agrees. Admit it, he wrote in The Los Angeles Times, Major Hasan is “a Muslim fanatic, motivated by other Muslim fanatics.”

The good news for Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Goldberg is that there is truth in their indictment. The bad news is that their case against the left-wing news media is the case against right-wing foreign policy. Seeing the Fort Hood shooting as an act of Islamist terrorism is the first step toward seeing how misguided a hawkish approach to fighting terrorism has been.

The American right and left reacted to 9/11 differently. Their respective responses were, to oversimplify a bit: “kill the terrorists” and “kill the terrorism meme.”

Conservatives backed war in Iraq, and they’re now backing an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Liberals (at least, dovish liberals) have warned in both cases that killing terrorists is counterproductive if in the process you create even more terrorists; the object of the game isn’t to wipe out every last Islamist radical but rather to contain the virus of Islamist radicalism.

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.

This calls into question our nearly obsessive focus on Al Qaeda — the deployment of whole armies to uproot the organization and to finally harpoon America’s white whale, Osama bin Laden. If you’re a Muslim teetering toward radicalism and you have a modem, it doesn’t take Mr. bin Laden to push you over the edge. All it takes is selected battlefield footage and a little ad hoc encouragement: a jihadist chat group here, a radical imam there — whether in your local mosque or on a Web site in your local computer.

This, at least, is the view from the left.

Exhibit A in this argument is Nidal Hasan. By all accounts he was pushed over the edge by his perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He also drew inspiration from a radical imam, Anwar al-Awlaki. Notably, it had been eight years since Major Hasan actually saw Mr. Awlaki, who moved from America to Yemen after 9/11. And for most of those years the two men don’t seem to have communicated at all. But as Major Hasan got more radicalized by two American wars and God knows what else, the Internet made it easy to reconnect via e-mail.

The Fort Hood shooting, then, is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism — or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Fort Hood is the biggest data point we have — the most lethal Islamist terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. It’s only one piece of evidence, but it’s a salient piece, and it supports the liberal, not the conservative, war-on-terrorism paradigm.

When the argument is framed like this, don’t be surprised if conservatives, having insisted that we not medicalize Major Hasan’s crime by calling him crazy, start underscoring his craziness. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they’ll note, aren’t wars against Islam or against Muslims; Major Hasan must have been deluded to think that they are! Surely we can’t give veto power over our foreign policy to a crazy ... well, not crazy, but, you know, not-entirely-sane person like Major Hasan.

It’s true that Major Hasan was unbalanced and alienated — and, by my lights, crazy. But what kind of people did conservatives think were susceptible to the terrorism meme? Like all viruses, terrorism infects people with low resistance. And surely Major Hasan isn’t the only American Muslim who, for reasons of personal history, has become unbalanced and thus vulnerable. Any religious or ethnic group includes people like that, and the post-9/11 environment hasn’t made it easier for American Muslims to keep their balance. That’s why the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy — a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims — is so dubious.

Central to the debate over Afghanistan is the question of whether terrorists need a “safe haven” from which to threaten America. If so, it is said, then we must work to keep every acre of Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc.) out of the hands of groups like the Taliban. If not — if terrorists can orchestrate a 9/11 about as easily from apartments in Germany as from camps in Afghanistan — then maybe never-ending war isn’t essential.

However you come out on that argument, the case of Nidal Hasan shows one thing for sure: Homegrown American terrorists don’t need a safe haven. All they need is a place to buy a gun.

Concerns about homegrown terrorism may sound like wild extrapolation from limited data. After all, in the eight years since 9/11, none of America’s several million Muslims had committed violence on this scale.

That’s a reminder that, contrary to right-wing stereotype, Islam isn’t an intrinsically belligerent religion. Still, this sort of stereotyping won’t go away, and it’s among the factors that could make homegrown terrorism a slowly growing epidemic. The more Americans denigrate Islam and view Muslims in the workplace with suspicion, the more likely the virus is to spread — and each appearance of the virus in turn tempts more people to denigrate Islam and view Muslims with suspicion. Whenever you have a positive feedback system like this, an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope.

And the Fort Hood shooting wasn’t the only recent step along that slope. Six months ago a 24-year-old American named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — Carlos Bledsoe before his teenage conversion to Islam — fatally shot a soldier outside a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark. ABC News reported, “It was not known what path Muhammad ... had followed to radicalization.” Well, here’s a clue: After being arrested he started babbling to the police about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them.

Sept. 11, 2001, though a success for Osama bin Laden, was in the scheme of things only a small tactical triumph; his grandiose aspirations go well beyond the killing of a few thousand people and the destruction of some buildings. Maybe he feels that our descent into the carnage of Iraq and Afghanistan has moved him a bit closer to his goal. But if he succeeds in tearing our country apart along religious and ethnic lines, he will truly be able to declare victory.

Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “The Evolution of God” and the editor in chief of the blog The Progressive Realist.

ebaadenews.blogspot.com

Why Two White Kids Are a Senseless Tragedy but an Arab American Is Terrorism by Brian Ross

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-ross/media-racism-why-two-whit_b_353563.html

When a couple of white kids shoot up a school, it is a tragedy, and a search for mental defect. Bring on a shooting at a military base that involves an Arab-American though, and the media does everything that it can to shout "TERRORISM" without really saying it.

Sadly, in our gun-laden, NRA-shielded America, shootings at schools, post offices, hospitals and military installations are all too common. School shootings barely elevate to the national news. You need something new in the tragedy department, like a university, or a military base, and a high enough body count, before the media takes much notice nationally.

That Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was disturbed is without question. He was a psychiatrist, which is in itself a bit more mentally-edgy occupation. He was treating the symptoms of war on a daily basis, and he did not want to go over the edge himself by being sent into combat, so he went over the edge and shot up a processing center at Fort Hood when his greatest personal terror was being realized without any way to stop it.

That is a senseless tragedy, but it is not terrorism. Likewise, the media's handling of shooters who are not white and suburban is racism, not journalism.

Prior to Hasan being named as the suspect, the TV talking heads were LIVE, spinning senseless tragedy and soldiers pushed to the breaking point. Once the FBI dumped a bucket of blood in the media waters that Hasan was an Arab-American who might have blogged something that agreed with Arab terrorists, the feeding frenzy began.

The New York Times even reported:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier became aware of Internet postings by a man calling himself Nidal Hasan, a law enforcement official said. The postings discussed suicide bombings favorably, but the investigators were not clear whether the writer was Major Hasan.

They point to the Website with the blog post. Then they mention again:

"It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Major Hasan."

Of course the posting itself features a paper called "Martyrdom in Islam Versus Suicide Bombing" which actually is a six page paper making the distinction between Islamic martydom and suicide bombings which is AGAINST suicide bombings.

The author states:

"It is only with the proliferation of suicide bombing in our time that the distinction between suicide and martyrdom has become marred as the former is being justified with textual support [in the Koran] for the latter.

The Times writer, James Dao, quoted the juicier passage of the blog item:

"If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory"

Without giving any regard to the conclusion of the Hasan who blogged this piece in response to the six page paper whose link sits right below the commentary:

"So the scholars main point is that "IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE" and Allah (SWT) knows best."

In its entirety this Hasan, whether the Major or not, seems to be agreeing with the author that the taking of life in combat and opposing one's enemies is not the same as walking into a crowded market full of civilians and exploding oneself.

Dao got it wrong when he wrote "The postings discussed suicide bombings favorably" because he did not take the extra ten minutes to read the original document and understand the context of this Hasan's remarks.

There is nothing inconsistent in that thinking from anything that we preach either. We send young men off to kill "enemy combatants" and that is acceptable. We tell them to stop killing when they come home. We make a distinction, in our Armed Forces manuals, between enemy combatants and civilians, even though the distinction in the real world of Iraq or Afghanistan can be so grey that women and children may well be the armed enemy.

He was too busy doing what the FBI apparently hoped to do: Distract a shooting based on a soldier snapping his twig by misdirecting the media down the terrorist trail.

Similarly, the Times article on the Virginia Tech shootings identified:

Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States was finally identified as the shooter in the Virginia Tech campus shooting spree.

Which suggests that he was perhaps a foreign student until you read, many paragraphs down:

Mr. Cho moved to the United States with his family as a grade school student in 1992, government officials in South Korea said.

Cho arrived in the US as an 8-year-old. He spent the majority of his youth living in the suburbs of Virginia, not the streets of Seoul.

Again the times did in-depth reporting on the family history of the shooter. His poor family that subsisted off a used bookstore in South Korea who moved here for opportunity but shunned the Korean community and kept to themselves. The silent boy who was obedient for whom the mother prayed.

As if any of this explains how a "quiet" young man suddenly bursts into a gun-toting maniac.

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up the school in Colombine, it was a senseless tragedy, but no one profiled Harris or Klebold's ethnicity, or their religious views, or lack thereof.

If you check on the Colombine pages of the New York Times, you will find extensive literature from the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics on the psychological profiles of Harris and Klebold. Their homes and home life get fractional mention, days after the dust settled from the shooting. Most of what was covered, was their mental state and what mental defect drives kids from white suburbia to shoot their fellow students. This would also be true of the majority of the media that covered that event at the time.

White shooters get psych profiles. Non-white shooters get family backgrounds, and, in the case of Maj. Hasan, stretches to link to terrorism.

Apparently you cannot just be mentally disturbed and Arab-American or South Korean. There has to be something in your origins that explains the sudden violence and the seemingly mindless rage.

I selected the Times to illustrate a point because the more incendiary news or news-ish outlets like Fox are a bit too oversimplified. It is too easy to listen to Wolf Blitzer do everything that he can to keep seeding the notion of terrorism into the discussion without using the word. The media in the United States has always been very adept at turning the non-white into bogeymen.

The Times has stood as one of the great bellwethers of American journalism standards. So it is especially troubling when you see the NYT engage in this more veiled form of racism.

It is sad when it takes a week, and several smaller, Internet-based publications to start catching up with the inconsistencies.

Hasan did many of the things that Cho and Harris and Klebold did. He showed signs. He was giving away things. He exhibited serious personality shifts.

The problem is that we are not attuned to picking up those warning signs, in part because they could be a hundred-thousand other, less lethal things. We do not know why someone at the post office finally goes "postal." We do not track gun purchases and mental health histories well enough to set off alarm bells when someone is arming themselves who shouldn't be in the possession of a firearm because NRA lobbyists connect any form of monitoring with the inalienable right for Bubba in Biloxi to hold on to his rifle and six pack in a duck blind on a cold November morning.

It is too easy to lay off a tragedy with labels that are comfortable to us. I checked in with my avid Fox News junkie at the gym. Hasan is a "terrorist" and he "wrote about supporting terrorism." That is the final word from Average Joe, burned into his brain because the media served up a Twinkie story, misdirecting the public, and giving them a simple verdict that catered to their fears.

The Times should have verified the blog as belonging to Hasan instead of reporting the sensational quote and back-pedaling away from it with "It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Major Hasan."

During the Virginia Tech shootings, the more adept NYT team covering that story at least managed to achieve some balance when they ended their background on Cho with:

The single deadliest shooting in the United States came in October 1991, when George Jo Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the window of a Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., then shot 22 people dead and wounded at least 20 others. He shot himself in the head."

Why is Hennard not as infamous as Hasan, Cho, Harris or Klebold? Because the folks at Luby's in Kileen watching the news and eating their macaroni and cheese might find that a whole lot harder to swallow than a crazed Arab terrorist shooting up their military base.

White people do not like seeing themselves as being able to be that deranged, that awful, even though, by simple population dynamics alone, more often than not, Caucasians are the shooter, the mass murderer, the teen killer.

Perhaps it is time to revisit our treatment of these tragedies and find some balance in the coverage. Maybe we need to stop, and vet even the word of the FBI before we rush to beat the next guy to the story.

The truth is out there. It is just getting lost in the rush to be first.

ebaadenews.blogspot.com

Responding to the Fort Hood Tragedy By Imam Zaid Shakir

http://www.newislamicdirections.com/nid/articles/responding_to_the_fort_hood_tragedy/

on 12 November 2009

This is my response to the Fort Hood tragedy and events both associated with it and ensuing from it. I begin by expressing my deepest condolences to the families of all of the dead and wounded. There is no legitimate reason for their deaths, just as I firmly believe there is no legitimate reason for the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have perished as a result of those two conflicts. Even though I disagree with the continued prosecution of those wars, and even though I believe that the US war machine is the single greatest threat to world peace, I must commend the top military brass at Fort Hood, and President Obama for encouraging restraint and for refusing to attribute the crime allegedly perpetrated by Major Nidal Malik Hasan to Islam. We pray that God bless us to see peace and sanity prevail during these tense times.

Introduction

One of the greatest foundations of Islam is truth. One of the ninety-nine names of God is al-Haqq (the Truth) It is unfair to distort the truth, to present falsehood as fact, or to present half-truths as definitive declarations. Truth, along with Goodness and Beauty are the three great transcendental realities that Islam and all other religions strive to aid us towards both realizing and actualizing in our lives. In the Arabic/Islamic lexicon these are known as al-Haqq (the Truth), al-Ihsan (Goodness), and al-Jamaal (Beauty).

Concerning the truth, our Prophet, peace and blessings upon him, taught us to pray, Allahumma Arinal Haqqa Haqqan wa Zurqnat Tiba’ahu, “O God! Show us the truth as truth and bless us to follow it.” The Qur’an presents the truth as a powerful, self-evident reality that is distinguishable from falsehood without any need for extraneous clarification (2:256). The mere presence of the truth is enough to dispel the clouds of darkness and falsehood (17:81). Therefore, a great objective of our religion is discovering and then following the truth.

One of the unfortunate consequences of tragic and highly emotive events like the shootings that recently occurred at Fort Hood, Texas, is that such events are used to advance agendas that by their very nature make a mockery of the truth. This event is no exception. There are those who seek to use this event to portray the Muslim community in this country as an inherent menace whose very existence has to be challenged. Traveling the length and breath of this country in the service of that community, I know this is not the truth. The Muslim community in this country is a peace-loving, law-abiding community that has in ways great and small advanced the general welfare of this nation and its citizenry. To present it otherwise is a blatant lie.

Like any other community that has a fairly large percentage of immigrants among it members, the Muslim community does have those elements, especially older members or those newly arrived from the Muslim world whose strongest sentiments, emotional and cultural attachments may be towards the lands they have come from than to the country they find themselves in. This is true for many members of most immigrant populations. However, generally speaking, such attachments are not found among Muslims born and raised here, nor do they translate into animosity towards or a desire to do harm to this country.

Saying that is not to deny the existence of Muslims who may be agitated by the injustices and inequities they find in American foreign policy, or the increasingly prejudicial or even racist attitudes being advanced by some parties towards America’s Muslims. Among them is a small minority whose anger and frustration may render them vulnerable to the appeal of demagogues who would attempt to exploit their emotions to advance a nefarious agenda, or a number of factors may converge in their lives pushing them towards acts of violence against their fellow citizens. This might prove to be the case for Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who has been identified as the shooter at Fort Hood, and a few other random individuals. However, it is not and never will be anything that can even begin to approach the norm in our community.

What is unequivocally true is that such violent outbursts that involve attacks against the lives or property of American citizens in this country have nothing to do with Islam. There are no teachings from the normative corpus of Muslim political writings that allow a Muslim to violate the security of the public square, to endanger the lives of the general public, to attack non-combatant civilians, even in a battlefield situation, or to aggress against soldiers who are not in a battlefield. This is especially true where Muslims have entered into an explicit or implicit covenant of protection from non-Muslim political authorities and constitute a distinct minority in a particular land.

Much of the balance of this article will be dedicated to presenting Islamic teachings that substantiate what I have mentioned above concerning the duties of Muslims to protect the public square in a non-Muslim land they may find themselves in, and those teachings that warn against foolhardy, ill-conceived attacks that only bring harm and hardship to innocent, unsuspecting people, Muslims among them.

My argument is a direct refutation of Muslims who seek to distort Islamic teachings to motivate ignorant Muslims to undertake ill-advised and unsanctioned actions against the citizenry of this country. It also restates my position on this issue. [1]

No Room for Vigilante Treachery in the Divine Law

In his expansive work, al-Jihad wa’l Qital fi al-Siyasa al-Shar’iyya (Sanctioned Warfare and Fighting in the Divine Law) Muhammad Khayr Haykal mentions, concerning the implications accruing from an oath of protection: [2]

The cessation of hostilities that is mentioned here might be a consequence of an oath of protection given by non-Muslims to Muslims, or a consequence of an oath of protection given by Muslims to non-Muslims. In both cases, it obligates a cessation of hostilities against the members of the opposing community who might technically be at war with the Muslims. [This is so] whether the Muslims have granted the oath of protection or it has been granted to them. [3]

Haykal continues:

It is not permissible for Muslims who have been granted an oath of protection from members of other communities to launch into fighting them, because this is treachery. [4]

Two concepts are critical in what Haykal mentions here, one is the idea of treachery, and the other is the idea of reciprocity. Islam is predicated on honorable behavior. It is the height of dishonor to violate the trust that is extended to a person given the right to move about freely in a particular land based on the assumption that that person has accepted the responsibility to protect and preserve public order in that land and the lives and property of its people.

In his commentary on al-Mughni, one of the definitive compendiums of Islamic law according to the Hanbali rite, Imam al-Maqdisi mentions in this regard, “If an oath of protection is given to a non-Muslim population, it is forbidden to fight them, usurp their wealth, or to expose them to any harm.” [5] Imam al-Shafi’i clarifies that this includes Muslims who have entered into a non-Muslim land. He states, “If a group of Muslims enter the land of non-Muslims with an oath of protection, the others are safe from them […] they [the Muslims] have no right to oppress or betray them.” [6]

It should be clear that a Muslim is not allowed to transgress against non-Muslims as long as he or she resides in their lands under their protection. Any aggression from their quarter is unsanctioned treachery. If they feel they can no longer accept the perceived or real abuses or injustices of the host people then they are obliged to leave that land if remaining there would push them into acts of violence or aggression against the host community.

The idea of reciprocity is critical in this particular area of inquiry. All of our major legal texts discuss this idea. It is the idea that the responsibilities expected of non-Muslims minorities in Muslim lands are incumbent on Muslims in non-Muslim lands. Hence, just as it would be unacceptable for a non-Muslim residing in a Muslim land to attack the people of that land, civilian or military, it is unacceptable for a Muslim residing in a non-Muslim land to engage in similar acts. This is an undeniable principle in our law. Hence, respecting it is not a stratagem or a convenient contingency; it is upholding an inviolable principle.

It is also well-known amongst Muslim scholars that it is prohibited to undertake any acts that will result in widespread harm returning to Muslims. This is based on the prophetic Hadith, “There is no initiating or reciprocating harm.” [7] This Hadith has given rise to the legal maxim, “Harm is to be removed.” Hence, any action that is likely to result in widespread harm to Muslims is unsanctioned and necessarily removed.

In the current political climate in America where the demonizing of Muslims has evolved into an industry, where rules of civility and the rejection of any meaningful anti-defamation statutes allow for indiscriminate calls to murder Muslims on public airwaves; where Mosques and other Muslim organizations are infiltrated by agent provocateurs who are encouraging Muslims to engage in acts that could potentially unleash waves of anti-Muslim venom, it is clear to anyone with a modicum of intellect that attacks such as the one occurring at Fort Hood have no Islamic sanction, neither in principle nor from a tactical point of view.

Such attacks only give credence to those foul elements who desire to justify ongoing wars against Muslim populations. There are those in the Muslim world who think that by calling for such attacks they can draw America into deeper involvements in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan which will then become America’s Vietnam. Little do they realize that there are fanatical elements in these western lands that use such attacks to argue for a full-blown assault on Muslim lands as opposed to the current limited engagement. Some of those calls are for nuclear attacks, and their advocates would not be bothered seeing the number of dead Iraqis resulting from our involvement in that country growing from the currently lamentable number of over one million to five or six million.

Little do those Muslims realize that they are encouraging elements that would bomb Afghan towns and villages with the same insane impunity that was visited upon places like Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg of Berlin during World War II; for they are arguing that Islam, like fascism, poses an existentialist threat to America and western civilization. One of the things giving any credence to their perverse arguments and turning a hesitate public towards their camp are belligerent actions they hope can be attributed to Muslims. We should neither contribute to such actions in deed nor should we applaud them.

Ibn Juzayy mentions in Qawanin al-Ahkam al-Shar’iyya:

If the Muslims know that they will be slaughtered in wholesale fashion it is fitting that they abandon fighting. If they know that they will be slaughtered and that their losses will do little to alter the strategic balance vis-à-vis the enemy forces, it is absolutely obligatory that they abandon any encounter. [8]

Any Muslim who thinks that an unsanctioned act of violence he may undertake in this country is going to alter the strategic balance is grandly deluded or inexcusably ignorant. His undertaking any violent act in this country is additionally forbidden because he is likely going to be killed, gravely injured, or captured in the encounter. Imam al-Shawkani mentions in al-Sayl al-Jarrar, “It is well-known legal reasoning that one who strikes out [against an enemy] knowing beforehand that he will be killed, captured or vanquished, has hurled himself to destruction.” [9] Imam al-Shawkani goes on to explain that such an act is forbidden based on the Qur’anic verse, Do not hurl yourself to destruction with your own hands. (2:195) [10] The discouragement of foolhardy acts of desperation based on this verse, is also made by Ibn ‘Abideen in his commentary on al-Durr al-Mukhtar. [11]

There is another salient point that we must mention in this context. No one, even in a Muslim land, has the right to undertake violent acts, even against a recognized enemy when the political authorities of that land determine that those acts will incur harm to Muslims [or other innocent people]. Dr. Haykal elaborates on this point at length:

The lawful authorities in a land possess the right, and this right is similarly conferred by valid legislative principles, to absolutely prevent any method, or any organization whose very nature would result in consequences that would expose the Muslims to grave danger and harm. Therefore, when the legislative authorities perceive that something that may originally be permissible has consequences that involve any degree of harm, it is their responsibility to prevent that harm. Rather, it is incumbent on them to prevent it. This is accomplished by preventing individuals from arming themselves and preventing them from forming armed militias that are independent of the standing army. Indeed, the divine law has given the authorities a number of legislative principles to use in order to cut off any path where the winds of harm may blow from. [12]

If this is the case for a Muslim country, what is the permissibility for vigilante acts and underground militias in a non-Muslim land where Muslims are forbidden to threaten public order or to independently implement any Islamic teachings related to strategic affairs?

Finally, as implied above, Muslim leaders have the responsibility to protect the faithful from foolhardy acts that will lead to unnecessary lose of life, and to warn them again individuals who would lead them towards such acts. For this reason, ‘Umar bin al-Khattab, warned against reckless commanders who would expose the faithful to unnecessary hardship. This led to him advising his governors, “Do not appoint al-Bara’ ibn Malik over any Muslim army.” [13]

This warning was issued owing to al-Bara’s known recklessness and his ill-consideration of the consequences of his actions for his troops. It is a shame that there are Muslims who have no connection with this country yet are recklessly and insensitively endorsing actions that endanger innocent Muslims and non-Muslims alike. They are not on the ground in this country and are therefore not attuned to the nature of the struggles and vulnerabilities of our community.

Conclusion

So what are the Muslims of this country to do in the aftermath of the tragedy at Fort Hood? We have to do the good things we were doing before it occurred. Indeed, we need to increase that good. Our civil rights can be assailed, we can be denied equal protection under the law, our lawful and law-abiding organizations can be closed down, but no one can take our dignity from us, no one can prevent us from being decent neighbors, honest workers, dedicated students, faithful citizens, and pious believers. Furthermore, no one can prevent us from engaging in a heroic struggle to secure our God-given and constitutionally-mandated rights, and from working for the creation of the kinds of policies that will prevent the current bloodletting that is occurring in some Muslim lands with the active complicity of our country’s military and security apparatuses.

Certainly, the heightened levels of hate speech, the whispers of a coming backlash, and the elected officials who have gone on record promising to do nothing to mitigate such a backlash are all unsettling. However, if we preserve and remain ever mindful of the wise commandments that are available to guide our steps, we should rest assured that God will not abandon us. He states in the Qur’an, You will surely be tested in your property and your persons. And you will hear from [some of] those given the Scripture before you, and from the idolaters much abuse. If you patiently persevere, and remain mindful of God, surely this is a manifestation of prophetic resolution. (3:186)

So brothers and sisters, at this time when very powerful and well-financed interests are rallying against us; at this time when we can entertain no real hope of meaningful support from any Muslim country, we have to redouble our dependence on God; we have to live for Him and seek our strength through him. Whoever remains mindful of Allah, He makes for him a way out, He bestows His sustenance upon him from directions he could never imagine, and one who places his trust in God finds that He suffices him… (65:2-3) This is the way of the Prophets, peace upon them. Let it be our way.

Imam Zaid Shakir 11/11/09

Notes:

[1] My position on a number of controversial issues has been stated at length, among other places in my book, Scattered Pictures: Reflections of an American Muslim, published in 2005 by the Zaytuna Institute, and a 4-CD set entitled, Looking Back to Look Ahead, produced by Zaytuna Institute in 2006.
[2] In the modern context, such an oath of protection may result from the acceptance of citizenship, residency permits, visas issued for tourism, study or work, and other well-known means.
[3] Muhammad Khayr Haykal, al-Jihad wa’l Qital fi al-Siyasa al-Shar’iyya (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 1417/1996), 3:1499
[4] Haykal, 3:1502
[5] Imam Ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Qudamah al-Maqdisi, al-Sharh al-Kabir ‘ala Matn al-Muqni’ (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1372/1972), 10:555
[6] Imam Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i, Kitab al-Umm (Beirut: Dar al-Ma’rifa, nd), 4:248
[7] Ibn Majah, no. 2341
[8] Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, Qawanin al-Ahkam al-Shar’iyya (Beirut: Dar al-‘Ilm li’l Malayin, 1374/1974), p. 165
[9] Imam Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Shawkani, al-Sayl al-Jarrar (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1405/1985), 4:519
[10]There are those who argue that the correct interpretation of this verse is the opposite of what is implied here. Namely, it was encouraging those who stayed away from a battle in order to mind their crops and cattle to go forth to the fray lest they be destroyed by the advancing enemy forces. However, Imam al-Shawkani and others argue that the meaning is contingent on the situation. While that meaning may be the one applicable to the occasion of the verse’s revelation, to argue that the verse is discouraging involvement in foolhardy acts of desperation is also operative. This is so based on the interpretive principle, العبرة لعموم اللفظ لا لخصوص السبب al-‘Ibra li ‘Umum al-Lafdh, la li Khusus al-Sabab (The applicability of a verse is based on the generality of its wording not the specificity of its revelation).
[11] See Imam Ibn ‘Abideen, Radd al-Muhtar ‘ala al-Durr al-Mukhtar (Cairo: Matba’ Khidaywi Isma’il, 1286), 3:337
[12] Haykal, 2:1008
[13] Imam Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Sarkhasi, Sharh al-Siyar al-Kabir (Cairo: Jami’ al-Makhtutat Jami’ al-Duwal al-‘Arabiyya, 1372/1972), 1:62

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MANA Condemns Fort Hood Shooting

Lexington, KY (11/06/09) - The Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA) is saddened by the Fort Hood incident in which 13 people were killed and others injured. We extend our condolences to the families who were impacted by this tragedy and we join other Muslim groups to condemn the unconscionable violence that took place.

The act committed at Fort Hood was a criminal act and should not be associated with the religion of Islam, nor should it serve as another excuse for the castigation or demonization of Islam and Muslims. Islam does not condone such killings. We pray for justice. It is disheartening and perplexing that a psychiatrist who was trained to provide counseling to troubled soldiers was himself very troubled. Perhaps this is yet another indication of the far-reaching tragedy of war and the horrific toll it takes on the lives of all who are affected by it.

In a recent statement, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, "the protracted military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq - and the repeated deployments of much of America's ground forces - have brought a new focus to the signature wounds of these wars and on the psychological health of the force and their families."

For the Fort Hood families, we mourn their losses and the loss of many innocent lives lost at home and abroad.

http://mana-net.org/

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