In today’s Post, the editors tackled the important issue of America as seen through the eyes of Islam by including articles written by four “Muslim Scholars.” The theme of the Post collection of articles, “One Islam, Many Circles” was clearly designed to create the impression that the articles by these four scholars would represent distinct differences in ideology and help answer the question every American ponders: “Why do they hate us?” One of the articles actually bore that title, and while that particular piece began in an engaging pro-American manner, it quickly degenerated into another blame America first argument, albeit couched in what to some may seem reasonable logic. After reading each of the four articles by these “scholars,” it was obvious that by the Post’s mathematics, three articles blaming America for Islamic terrorism and one article identifying Islam itself as the problem constitutes fair and balanced coverage of an issue.
The first article I examined was “Why Do They Hate Us?” by the author of the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist
, Mohsin Hamid. Hamid’s piece started out with ample pro-American “feel good” sentimentality, wistfully recounting his early childhood in America and his patriotic American roots. Hamid then returns with his family to his native Pakistan as a nine year old boy, and describes his hometown of Lahore as a fun, peaceful, liberal city, with nightclubs, and other western forms of entertainment. In this nearly-idyllic setting, Hamid’s beloved Lahore quickly degenerated into a city filled with Islamic radicals carrying AK-47s who enforced strict codes of dress and morality and terrorized the city with crime waves and brutality. Who was responsible for this terrible transformation of Pakistan? After listing his pro-American credentials in the article, Hamid answered this question with the inevitable liberal response: America was to blame for Lahore’s demise and Pakistan’s radicalization.Hamid’s description of how America’s role in training and equipping Mujaheddin fighters to
battle with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan painted the portrait of a careless America that never should have interfered with that effort to drive out the Soviets. In Hamid’s version of history, America was only concerned about Afghanistan because of its proximity to Persian Gulf oil, and the flow of guns and heroin from the Mujaheddin training camps forever destroyed the liberal peace and fun of Lahore. This analysis begs the question that Hamid ignored rather conveniently in his description of events as he remembered them: what would have happened to Lahore and for that matter all of Pakistan had Afghanistan fallen permanently to the Soviets? How long does Hamid think that Pakistan would have remained untouched or unconsumed by Soviet expansion had the Mujaheddin, with some U.S. support, not convinced the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan? Perhaps Hamid should have directed his blame for the loss of Lahore’s peaceful condition on those who aggressively invaded Afghanistan and created the need for a Mujaheddin uprising in the first place: the Soviets. Was the U.S. supposed to do nothing when its Cold War communist enemy invaded a neighboring and strategically located nation? Apparently Hamid thinks so.A warning to readers: if you start reading an article by a Muslim “scholar” and the piece opens with a lengthy attempt to establish the author’s pro-American credentials, you can be assured that immediately following that literary ruse you will find that the author’s premise is anything but pro-American. Hamid opens with talk of Star Trek, MASH, and barbeque chicken, but he concludes with warnings that America must educate itself about the foreign policy blunders of its past and that America must stop trying to be a superpower, all while admitting that he no longer lives in America but hopes America will correct its problems. That is what passes as Muslim “scholarship” at the Washington Post. A hint to Post editors: a “Muslim scholar” is not someone who is Muslim, has a PhD or writes novels, and will write opinions that fit your paper’s political bias. A “Muslim scholar” is someone who dedicates his/her educational and professional career to the study of Islam and is willing to challenge its accepted practices.
In fairness, Hamid wrote one very good paragraph during his “pro-America” smokescreen which unintentionally captured what is surely one of the primary reasons why America is hated in many corners of the world:
Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others. It will come his way no matter how kind, generous or humble he may be.
The following paragraph, however, contained the first hint that a transition to “blame America first” was coming:
But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
Hamid then takes the article’s readers to his “sleepy” and peaceful Lahore, Pakistan before, in his opinion, America ruined the region. The troubling truth is that Hamid’s article, of the three “blame America first” Post pieces, was the best presented and most reasoned argument.
The two other Post articles by purported “Muslim scholars” were “As American as You Are,” and “What Went Wrong? Bush Still Doesn’t Get It.” The first of these was an in-your-face “like it or not we’re here to stay and you better get used to it” approach penned by another Muslim novelist (again, novelist and scholar are synonymous only at the Post), and the second is, as its title suggests, a further “blame America first” contribution. These two articles are related to each other in that they both contain misrepresentations of religion. In “As American as You Are,” author Mohja Kahf defends radical Islam (in which she was raised) by trying to put its excesses on an equivalent moral plane with what she considered the extremes of Christianity:
This Muslim squirms whenever secular friends -- tolerant toward believers in Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Native American spirituality -- dismiss Christians with snorts of contempt. "It's because the Christian right wants to take over this country," they protest.
That may be, but it doesn't justify trashing the religion and its spectrum of believers. Christianity has inspired Americans to the politics of abolition and civil rights, as well as to heinous acts. Christian values have motivated the Ku Klux Klan to burn houses, and Jimmy Carter to build them.
This is not a new argument, but it ignores a profound truth that invalidates this type of moral equivalency defense: when believers of any faith murder under the guise of religion, regardless of self-declared righteous motives, they have moved beyond the tenets of faith and are engaging in pure evil not compatible with belief in any form of higher power. Thus it is error to ascribe even warped Christian values to the KKK or to associate extreme Muslim values with al Qaeda. Both groups are engaged in evil, not in religious fervor.
Kahf also put forth a disingenuous argument that America is too demanding of Muslims in its expectations for assimilation. In her words:
Assimilation is overrated. And it's not what minority religions do in the United States. Did Irish Catholics stop being Catholic when they arrived generations ago? People once believed that devout Catholics and Orthodox Jews could never be "true Americans." Today, I receive e-mails with solemn lists of why Muslims, "according to their own faith," can't possibly be "loyal Americans." The work of nut jobs. Yet purportedly sane people in Washington seem to think it's a valid question.
Rational Americans don’t expect Muslim immigrants to stop being Muslim during their naturalization process, and Kahf was misleading in her analogies with the assimilation of Catholic or Jewish immigrants. What Americans do expect, however, is that Muslims cooperate with law enforcement and purge the extremists among them who are engaged in treasonous activity. That is what Americans consider assimilation: loyalty to and preservation of America and its governmental system.
The related article, “What Went Wrong,” by Akbar Ahmed, the only actual Muslim scholar of the three authors, contained the typical anti-Bush talking points: U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “poured gallons of fuel on a worldwide fire”; anti-Muslim rhetoric from the administration
convince Muslims that they are under attack; the American media attacks on Islam. I guess Ahmed missed Hollywood’s intentional rewrite of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears
, which replaced the terrorists who detonated a nuclear device at the Super Bowl, originally written by Clancy as Islamists, with white South African nationals in order to avoid casting Muslims in a bad light. Despite these less than scholarly liberal talking points, Ahmed did provide an interesting research conclusion about Islam. According to Ahmed, the Bush administration has erroneously stereotyped Islam as violent. Ahmed’s own studies actually indicated that Islam consists of more than just moderates or extremists:...In fact, we discovered three broad categories of Muslim responses to the modern world: the mystics, the modernists and the literalists.
The mystics are the most tolerant and the least political, defined by a universalist worldview that embraces difference rather than resisting it. Muslims in this group look to sages such as the great Sufi poet Rumi for inspiration. "I go to a synagogue, church and a mosque, and I see the same spirit and the same altar," Rumi once said. You'll find today's mystics in such places as Iran, Morocco and Turkey.
That paragraph is a fascinating statement of Islamic scholarship. Ahmed wrote that “mystics” are the “most tolerant and the least political” division of Islam, yet when he listed the nations in which “mystics” are predominant, Iran is front and center. If Iran’s mullahs and President Ahmadinejad represent the most tolerant division of worldwide Islam, then a war against
terrorism will see horrific escalations in the future. The government that has vowed to annihilate Israel in an atomic fireball, is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorist groups, and is ignoring UN sanctions to develop nuclear weapon capabilities is the “most tolerant.” I wonder if Ahmed has considered what Iran would be like if it were not so “tolerant.” Ahmed surely did not intend to do so, but his own research merely served to validate the Bush administration’s stance: Islamic extremism is the single greatest danger to America and its allies.Ahmed showed his liberal political stripes throughout his article, but beyond political ideology, he also revealed a profoundly pro-radical agenda in his caricature of Pakistani President Musharraf. Musharraf, as I have previously reported, last week declared war on Islamic extremists within Pakistan, openly pitting moderate and radical Islam against each other in what could be a battle royal for Islam’s future as a world faith. Musharraf declared himself with the moderates, yet Ahmed claimed Musharraf does not represent Pakistanis and the U.S. should work for his ouster from power. Either Ahmed wants to see radical Islam put in its place by more moderate elements or he does not, and if he does not, one must question his reasoning.
The fourth article, “Losing My Jihadism,” the only one of the four that offered any actual Muslim introspection, was authored by Mansour al-Nogaidan, a writer for a Bahraini newspaper. This author had the audacity to suggest that the problem of Islamists twisting doctrines to justify suicide bombings and attacks on innocent civilians was actually an internal problem solvable only within Islam. He called for an Islamic version of Marin Luther to lead Islam into a period of reform in which its extremes could be purged. Nowhere in this article was there any hint of the “blame America for terrorism” arguments so prominently featured in the other three, and in that light it was refreshing reading.
It would have been all the more refreshing had it been accompanied by a companion article by a Muslim scholar self-critical of Islam’s reluctance to rise up and quench its internal fires of extremism. Unfortunately in the mathematics of the Washington Post, one out of four constitutes journalistic balance.
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Islam, Mujaheddin, Terrorism, Pakistan, Musharraf, Lahore, Afghanistan, Mohsin Hamid, Mohja Kahf, Akbar Ahmed, Mansour al-Nogaidan, Islamic Reform
