No One “Hijacked” Islam – Part 3

You know it’s serious when I write a trilogy.

I wanted to write this piece around the time Osama bin Laden was found and killed by US special ops forces last month in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  When the news was announced by President Obama, I remember seeing my Facebook news feed flooded with updates about Osama bin Laden being dead.  Some friends were jubilant,  some were claiming “victory,” some uploaded pictures of Obama as their profile picture, while others, like myself, were outraged by the excitement.  Amidst the “U-S-A” chants, the flag-waving, and the “God Bless America” demonstrations outside of the White House, people seemed to forget about the millions of Iraqi and Afghan bodies murdered by US wars after 9/11.  Oh, and the 900+ Pakistanis killed by the Obama administration’s drone raids.

Over a million deaths later, the US war machine finally killed the one man they claimed to be hunting for and now there are doves flying everywhere, carrying “world peace” banners?  At least, that’s how the joy made it sound.  It was as if the murders of all the Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghans, and Pakistanis were magically erased.  People were celebrating as if it was the end of war itself.  Some Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians were adding their voices to the choir, as if Islamophobia and racism was suddenly going to disappear.

President Obama’s speech was insulting enough, with ridiculous claims like:

On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.

As I mentioned in a recent post, there was no “color-blind” unity after 9/11.  The “one American family” 9/11 narrative that Obama and others love to romanticize about completely eliminates the reality of Islamophobia.  No mention is made about the Muslim-Americans, Arab-Americans, Sikh-Americans, South Asian-Americans, and those perceived to be Muslim who had and continue to endure traumatizing experiences with racism, discrimination, vandalism, harassment, and hate crimes. In her article, “Bin Laden’s Death: Why I Can’t Celebrate,” Valerie Kaur writes:

Even if I wanted to celebrate, I’m too busy worrying.  Today, many Sikh, Muslim, and Arab American families, brace for violence, concerned that Americans will target those who “look like” the Osama bin Laden we just destroyed. We didn’t bring Osama bin Laden to trial, after all.  We killed him before we captured his body.  So why would vigilante Americans wait for the law to take care of the “terrorists” in their midst.

The last time a sudden burst of nationalism rallied us against America’s turbaned and bearded enemy, an epidemic of hate crimes swept the country.  In the yearlong aftermath of 9/11, the FBI reported a 1700 percent increase in anti-Muslim violence. At least 19 people were killed in hate murders. In the last decade, we have seen resurgences of hate violence whenever anti-Muslim rhetoric reaches a fever pitch, as it has since the firestorm around the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” last election season confirmed to politicians that they can use anti-Muslim sentiment to win political points.

On September 15th, 2001, just four days after 9/11, three men, a Muslim, a Sikh, and an Egyptian Coptic Christian were murdered by white racist Islamophobes. The names of the victims: Waqar Hasan, Balbir Singh Sodhi, and Adel Karas, respectively. Mark Stroman, the murderer of Hasan, also shot Rais Bhuyian, a Bangladeshi, in the face and then murdered Vasudev Patel a few days later. Hate crimes against Muslim-Americans skyrocketed to 481 reports after 9/11 and the number of discriminatory acts and hate crimes have been annually increasing since then (for more detailed accounts, statistics, and sources, read this older post).

I appreciated some of the commentaries I read about the death of bin Laden and how it wouldn’t mark the end of war.  But then came that dreaded phrase again, from both Muslim and non-Muslim alike.  “Terrorists hijacked Islam.”

A Yahoo News article, Muslim Americans still find acceptance elusive in the wake of bin Laden’s death, highlighted on some of the experiences with Islamophobia, but some Muslims claimed Osama bin Laden “hijacked our identity.”  In another article, Osama bin Laden is considered responsible for Islamophobia.  I am still coming across blog posts and articles that make the same assertion.

As I wrote in Part 2 of this series, the claim that Islam was “hijacked” by terrorists implies that violent extremists speak for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  It not only serves to justify demonization of Islam, but also glosses over serious racist double-standards that exist in our society, such as never asking white Christians to answer for atrocities carried out by other white Christians, but always demanding Muslims to do so.  Unlike white non-Muslims, Muslims are treated as spokespersons for the estimated 1.5 worldwide Muslim population, as well as the diverse cultures that make up the community, and must “prove” to western societies that they are “domesticated,” or rather the dominant culture’s definition of a “good Muslim,” i.e. uncritical of US policies, hostile towards Muslim-American civil rights groups like CAIR, committed to fighting religious extremism to “protect Americans,” and never making a peep about Islamophobia and racism in American society. If Muslims do not pass the “good Muslim” test, they get categorized as “bad Muslims,” or “radical,” “suspicious,” “militant,” “anti-west,” etc.

Mahmood Mamdani, author of “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” describes this dichotomy:

When I read of Islam in the papers these days, I often feel I am reading of museumized peoples. I feel I am reading of people who are said not to make culture, except at the beginning of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic, act. After that, it seems they just conform to culture. Their culture seems to have no history, no politics, and no debates. It seems just to have petrified into a lifeless custom.

Even more, these people seem incapable of transforming their culture, the way they seem incapable of growing their own food. The implication is that their only salvation lies, as always, in philanthropy, in being saved from the outside.

When I read this, or something like this, I wonder if this world of ours is after all divided into two: on the one hand, savages who must be saved before they destroy us all and, on the other, the civilized whose burden it is to save all?

Diversity within Islam and Muslim communities is not recognized (in fact, it is non-existent) when the good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy is employed through the “terrorists hijacked Islam” narrative.  It becomes the Muslim’s responsibility to fight the religious extremists and take back Islam – only then, we are told, will Islamophobia and terrorism end.  Essentially, the burden is on Muslims to become superheroes overnight and save the world.  Yeah.

Anyway.

Arguing that Osama bin Laden is “responsible” for Islampohobia is awfully problematic because it implies Islamophobia didn’t exist prior to 9/11 and that racists cannot be blamed for their Islamophobia.  This argument caters to the flawed logic that people are responsible for their own oppression. That is, one shouldn’t blame Islamophobes for hating Islam or demonizing Muslims in mainstream media, for example, but instead, one should blame Muslims who are “giving Islam and other Muslims a bad name!”  This basically says people’s prejudices and racism is not of their own doing, but rather of the “otherized” group (in this case, Muslims) that they are targeting.  Islamophobes simply “don’t know any better” because the vast majority of Muslims aren’t “setting a good example,” therefore they’re absolved of being held accountable for their Orientalist stereotypes!

If Osama bin Laden caused Islamophobia, then why did Islamophobia and Orientalism exist prior to 9/11?  Mainstream European and American discourse on Islam was tainted by racist, Orientalist stereotypes – everything from “Islam was spread by the sword” history lessons to images of veiled Muslim women to charges that the Qur’an advocates war against Christians, Jews, and every other non-Muslim on the planet.  Jack Shaheen’s book, “Reel Bad Arabs,” covers over 900 Hollywood films that demonized Arabs, Muslims, and Iranians, and all of these films were made well before 9/11.  Some films that come to my mind are “True Lies,” “Not Without My Daughter,” “Executive Decision,” “The Delta Force,” and the atrocious “Rules of Engagement,” which is one of the most racist films I have ever seen.  Who “hijacked” Islam when these films were made?  Is the Muslim community to blame for the way white Hollywood filmmakers demonized them?  Who “hijacked” Islam when Dante Alighieri, the 14th century Italian poet, condemned Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali (peace be upon them both) to Hell and eternal, gruesome punishment in his acclaimed “Inferno”?  Were Muslims to blame when many medieval Christian leaders and writers believed Islam was the “Devil’s tool” to “destroy” Christianity?

I believe this is an incredibly important point because if we blame Osama bin Laden for Islamophobia and “hijacking” our identities, we are telling non-Muslims, as well as ourselves, that Islamophobia generated from within our community. The reality is, Islamophobia does not exist because of Osama bin Laden. Islamophobia exists because of white supremacy. One needs to understand how racial hierarchies operate within systems of oppression to get this point.  So many times, in general conversation, I will hear people say, “You know, I was in the store and the man behind the counter was asking this black lady what she wanted to order…” or “My friend got into a fight with this guy on my baseball team and he was from Puerto Rico; he had the accent and everything…” or “Yeah, a cashier at another store keeps telling me about all these Asian women who come in with envelopes filled with coupons.”  We hear people of color being racialized and politicized all the time. Notice how none of the expressions I shared tell us about the race of the “man behind the counter,” “the friend” on the baseball team, or the “cashier.”  We assume they are white because white represents the “default race.”  White people are seen as complex, diverse, and multi-dimensional people, which is why generalizations are made about “Asian women with envelopes filled with coupons,” while nothing is said about the white people who also shop with envelopes full of coupons. No one says, “Oh man, look at these white people with all their coupons.”   Their race isn’t a factor, they’re just seen as being “weird.”

While Muslims represent a religious community and not a race, white supremacy has created a racialized profile for Muslims: dark-skinned/brown, turban, bearded, Arab.  Here is an example of how this racialization works: If a white guy robs a store, it’s “oh, did you hear about the guy who robbed the bank this morning?” If he was Muslim, it would be, “some Muslim guy robbed the bank!”  The “Muslim” will be imagined as brown, bearded, shouting in Arabic, and wearing a keffiyeh around his face.  As the aforementioned hate crime incidents show, non-Muslim folks of color (like turban-wearing Sikhs or brown-skinned Hindus or Arabic-named Egyptian Christians) are targets of Islamophobic, anti-Muslim hate.  If you are Arab, you are perceived to be Muslim, even if you are not, and if you are Muslim, you are perceived to Arab, even if you are not.  If your name is Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or South Asian, you are perceived to having a “Muslim name.”  If you are a brown Hindu man with a goatee and at the airport, you will be perceived as being Muslim.  This is how the logic of Orientalism works and, in the words of Andrea Smith, “marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and deems them to be a constant threat to the well-being of empire.”  She elaborates:

These peoples are still seen as “civilisations”—they are not property or the “disappeared”. However, they are imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movements in the United States that target immigrants of colour. It does not matter how long immigrants of colour reside in the United States, they generally become targeted as foreign threats, particularly during war-time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies. Orientalism allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide as these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars. What becomes clear, then, is what Sora Han declares: the United States is not at war; the United States is war.  For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war.

This is why Islamophobia exists – because of Orientalism, white supremacy, racism, war, hate.  We don’t blame Jews for anti-Semitism, do we?  We don’t blame African-Americans for anti-black racism, do we?  To reiterate and re-emphasize from Part 2: What of Timothy McVeigh, the Crusader language of Blackwater, and even the religious justification George W. Bush used to invade Iraq?  When was the last time you heard someone say “Christianity was hijacked”?  Or, what about the JDL (Jewish Defense League) former Chairman, Irv Rubin, and group member, Earl Krugel, who were arrested 3 months after 9/11 for planning bomb attacks on a Mosque in California and on the office of Arab-American US representative Darrell Issa?  Did anyone say “Judaism was hijacked” by these extremists?

If others do not say “Christianity was hijacked,” or “Judaism was hijacked” or “Hinduism was hijacked,” then why are we, the 1.5 billion Muslims, expected to say that about our religion?  Like any religious group, Muslims need to challenge the problems within their community, but it doesn’t mean we have to conform to how others, particularly the dominant culture, label us (and I argue that the phrase, “Islam was hijacked,” is one that we have internalized).  It doesn’t mean that we should ignore the double-standards of white supremacy and never speak out against the demonization of Islam and Muslims.

The idea that a small group of people can take control of our religion is absurd and completely denies the voice that we as a majority have.  Osama bin Laden doesn’t represent the majority of Muslims. We are an immensely diverse community, there is debate going on, and there is a lot of work to do, but we don’t need to give in to Orientalist intervention. We don’t need Orientalist racism, war, or imperialism to “rescue” or “define us.”  We are constantly defining ourselves.

It’s Time to Get Real: Obama is Wrong

Anyone who knows me is aware that I’ve been cautiously optimistic about President Obama for a long time.  Like many, I was devastated by the Israeli attacks on Gaza last winter and I was also extremely disappointed with Obama for not holding the Israeli government accountable.  “He’s not the president yet,” many would say, including some Muslim friends of mine.  I wanted to believe they were right, so I kept my frustration sidelined.  I’ll wait and see what happens after his inauguration, I told myself.  After 8 years of war, profiling of Muslims and Arabs, and rising Islamophobia, who wouldn’t like to believe there is hope for our nation?

After Obama swore into office, I was pleased when I heard his proposal to shut down Guantanamo bay.  I admit it was nice to see an American president reaching out to Muslim-Americans, Muslim majority countries, giving a speech in Turkey, in Cairo, and addressing Iran, all whilst demonstrating an appreciative understanding of Islam.  He cited the Qur’an, the Persian poet Sa’di, and a Turkish proverb that says, “You cannot put out fire with flames.”  He revealed that he had Muslims in his family and then wished Muslims worldwide a blessed Ramadan.  Although I did not fully support Obama at this point since I was still skeptical and, at times, very critical (especially for not highlighting the war crimes in Gaza), I was privately hoping that my uncertainty was wrong.  Maybe this is for real, I thought.  Maybe real change is on the horizon.

But my hopes quickly changed when Obama ordered drone attacks in Pakistan.  As I wrote in my previous post, the senseless drone attacks during Obama’s first 99 days in office amounted to well over 150 deaths.   Drone attacks have continued to the current month of December, claiming the lives of many innocent civilians.  In fact, as Pakistani author and political commentator Tariq Ali points out, on the very day that an Iranian woman, Neda Soltani, was murdered during the election protests in Iran, a U.S. drone killed 60 people in Pakistan, mostly women and children.  The death of Soltani drew international attention and became an iconic image of resistance against Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, while nothing was mentioned about Pakistan.

The loss of one human life is one too many, but based on this contrast of media attention, it reveals a remarkably cruel prejudice that, seemingly, victims in Muslim majority countries are only worth reporting when they are killed by their own people.  Informing people about American atrocities sends the “wrong message” about the Obama administration’s agenda.  Similar to how Bush convinced citizens to support his war in Iraq, Obama cannot win support for advancing his war in Afghanistan if Americans know that innocent people are being killed by U.S. attacks.

When Obama officially announced escalating American troops in Afghanistan, I could not, for the life of me, understand why some liberals, democrats, and my fellow Muslims were still supporting him.  If George W. Bush was giving the same speech and deploying another tide of soldiers into the region, all of us would be flipping out.  It’s different this time, though.  Obama is not Bush, and he has reached out to Muslims in a way that no other American president has.  The majority of Muslim-Americans voted for him and a lot even campaigned for his presidency.  Perhaps people don’t want to admit they’re wrong, or perhaps they don’t want to criticize his policies because, quite simply, they like him.  I know there are a lot of Muslims and non-Muslims alike who are just as conflicted as I was and want to believe Obama is doing the right thing

But let’s get real: his foreign policy is terribly flawed and only calling for disaster.  You don’t “sweet talk” other Muslim majority countries, cite Qur’anic verses, quote Persian poets and Turkish proverbs, and then advocate for war/military occupation in another Muslim majority country.  You don’t exclude the word “terrorism” in a speech addressed to Cairo, but then use it again in the U.S. to reinforce the alarmist and manipulative rhetoric that “terrorism” can only be carried out by militants or extremists who self-identify as Muslim.  This duplicity is designed to simultaneously win the allegiance of Muslims (especially in Arab countries) and many Republicans who want the President to show some backbone in the war against “Islamic terrorism.”

But what happened to our anti-war stance?  “You cannot put out fire with flames,” goes the Turkish proverb Obama cited, so how does increasing violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan result in peace?  What’s astonishing to me is how so many people (who identified as “anti-war”) are now advocating for war in Afghanistan and Pakistan in a disturbingly similar way supporters of the previous administration did!  Remember when you would argue with the pro-Bush crowd about Iraq and they would simply say, “Well, we’re protecting America from terrorists”?  The same argument is being made about Afghanistan by liberals, democrats, and Muslims alike.  It just shocks me at how oblivious many people are about this.

The sad part is that the “terrorism” argument is used as simplistic justification for their support of the Afghan war because, frankly, they tend to know very little to nothing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Let’s start off by saying the majority of Afghans and Pakistanis are anti-Taliban, anti-extremism, and anti-Western military occupation.  However, lies such as “Afghans/Pakistanis prefer the Taliban” are being perpetuated in a familiar alarmist fashion.  Where does this information come from and why is it being used to cover up real atrocities committed by the Obama administration?  Last week, about a hundred Afghans protested against Obama’s policies when U.S. special forces killed 12 people in the village.  In May of 2009, an American airstrike mistakenly attacked the village of Bala Baluk and killed over 147 people and resulted in even more anti-American sentiments from Afghan civilians.  How many more of these “mistakes” can the U.S. afford to make?  Why do we behave as if there won’t be any retaliation from the civilians, especially those who lost their family members and Loved ones?  Doesn’t common sense tell us that people don’t forget about these horrible war crimes?

Malalai Joya, an Afghan politician and activist who is often called “the bravest woman in Afghanistan,” is a vehemently outspoken critic of Afghan warlords and the presence of NATO troops in her country.  She highlights on the lies spread about Afghanistan, as well as the major flaws in Obama’s new strategy:

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s… The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the “democracy” backed by Nato troops.

Furthermore, she adds that Obama’s war in Afghanistan and expansion into Pakistan is simply adding more fuel to the fire and is no different from Bush’s policies.  Afghan victims of abuse and rape find no justice when the people in power are corrupt themselves, but don’t count on the Obama administration to acknowledge this problem.  After all, the Afghan government allows NATO troops to occupy the country and the U.S. wants to maintain that kind of alliance.

Despite this information, I’ve seen many, including fellow Muslims, speak so insensitively about Afghanistan and Pakistan, as if the people there are complicit and responsible for the turmoil they’re in!  This is insulting and essentially transforms the victim into the perpetrator.  Pakistan, for instance, is accused of being “the most dangerous country in the world,” which only creates the image of a nation rampant with terrorism.  However, very little is said that the majority of Pakistanis hate the Taliban.  Polls and surveys have consistently found that the majority of Pakistanis consider the U.S. the greatest threat to their country.  This statistic is rarely reported and no one seems to care.

Tariq Ali asserts another significant point:  The situation in Pakistan today is directly linked to the war in Afghanistan.  Speaking as a Pakistani, I don’t ever remember a time when my family was frightened about visiting Pakistan or worried about their Loved ones because of bomb blasts and attacks.  Even after 9/11, my family and I would visit Pakistan and did not have to worry about our safety in the way people do now.  I have relatives who were only five blocks away from a bomb blast in Lahore and I once stayed at the Marriott hotel that was bombed in Islamabad last September.  Many, including some of my Pakistani acquaintances, simply utter profanities about these extremists, which is perfectly appropriate, but I’ve noticed that people overlook the root cause of this problem.  After 9/11, Pakistan was forced into military cooperation, not only because Bush gave Pakistan the “you’re either with us or against us” ultimatum, but also because Richard Armitage, the former U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened to “blow Pakistan back to the stone age.” No doubt the Pakistani military is not without blame, but its operations against the Taliban and other militant groups only make the Pakistani government look complicit with U.S. war crimes.  Similar to the Afghan government, the Pakistani government is reeking with corruption and its unpopular president, Asif Zardari, permits the U.S. drone attacks.  All of this is causing the war in Afghanistan to spill into Pakistan.

When we simply say “they’re terrorists,” we become desensitized to the deaths of Afghans and Pakistanis.  Associating the majority of Afghans and Pakistanis with the extremist groups or the corrupt officials in the government does a great injustice to their struggles.  In March, the Pakistani people marched in the streets and organized rallies in protest to the government’s sacking of their chief justice.  The government eventually caved in and conceded with the people’s demand to reinstate the chief justice.  This was a victory not only for the Pakistani people, but also for everyone who seeks social justice.  Yet why wasn’t this reported widely in the mainstream western media?  Perhaps because it is contradictory to the image that the media wants to promote, i.e. “the most dangerous country in the world” or a “boiling pot” of “terrorism.”

In several debates with fellow Muslims, I’ve been told that the Afghan and Pakistani people “aren’t taking a stand,” so Obama’s military intervention is “justified.”  Again, this does a great disservice to the efforts of Afghans and Pakistanis who are risking their lives in combating violent extremism.  But it does not help when you’re being attacked by both sides:  The Taliban on one hand, and the U.S. military occupation/drone attacks on the other.  If the people of America could not impeach a president for 8 years of his term, then how can we expect the Afghans and Pakistanis to easily overthrow their leaders?  And why do people expect a miraculous change from Obama’s surge?  Tariq Ali cites the previous head of CIA station in Kabul, Graham Fuller, who made the following points about the Afghan war:

1.  It is impossible to police the Afghan-Pakistan border because it extends over thousands of miles and consists of mountainous territory, which makes it impossible to even construct a wall.  I get the feeling that if we could ask Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan why they couldn’t conquer the region, they would say something about the mountains.

2.  People on either side of the border “often belong to the same tribes, often related, speak the same language, and inter-marriage is common.”  When people suffer on one side, allies from the other side cross the border to help out.

3.  “The presence of the U.S. is part of the problem, not the solution.”

Just by examining these points, one gets a glimpse of how complex the conflict is.  Too often, I’ve noticed that people speak about this war as if Afghans and Pakistanis are not suffering.  As Thomas Houlahan reports:  “Pakistan has lost more civilians in the war on terror than the United States; Pakistan has lost more troops killed in fighting insurgents than every foreign contingent in Afghanistan combined. These facts fly in the face of the misinformation bandied about that Pakistan is soft on terror.”

If people truly and genuinely care about the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, I believe they should listen to the citizens of those countries instead of arrogantly behaving as if they can speak for them or “know” what’s best for them.  There needs to be a better exit strategy and a stronger effort for diplomacy.  The Angus Reid Global Monitor found that 68% of Afghans think the government should hold talks with the Taliban.  If Obama supports diplomacy with Iraq, Iran, and Palestine, why isn’t the same policy extended in Afghanistan?

I can no longer hold back on my criticism of president Obama and, honestly, I am fed up with people making excuses for him.  Muslims worked so hard to campaign for him and a lot of us put so much faith in him, but we cannot overlook the fact that his policies are only going to tarnish relations with Muslim majority countries even further.  I will not be a fool anymore and listen to the false hope that “over time, Obama will change things” or “after he does such and such, he will take a stand for Palestine and Muslims.”  I do not understand how Obama can get away with advancing war while citing historical figures who symbolize non-violence and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Just like Iraq and Palestine, people do not like being occupied by a foreign invader.  Military intervention and more drone attacks will make matters worse, endanger the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims in many parts of the world, and it will create more enemies.  I don’t need a crystal ball to figure that out.  Recent history (i.e. the last 8 years) says it all.