As a young British Muslim woman, watching the events of the past two weeks has been a depressing experience. One minute, we were subject to outrageously insulting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), a man who is beloved and central to the core of my faith; the next, the hooliganism of a small minority of Muslim protesters took center stage. These anarchists have walked right into the hands of those who believe Muslims have nothing to offer. They have burned down embassies, pillaged public property and threatened social order — all in the name of a Prophet who is a mercy to mankind, the same man who was known to welcome and respect ambassadors.
As a result, the standard-bearers for Western civilization are now a bunch of untalented, ignorant and previously unknown Danish cartoonists. The editors at Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten did what they did simply because they could. Little attention was paid to the value of these images or the impact their publication would have. It was the worst kind of arrogance. The revelation that the same newspaper rejected cartoons lampooning Jesus three years ago on the grounds that they would offend their readers made their protestations of free speech seem cynical.
Freedom of speech is not absolute. It has to be in service of something, like peace or social justice. How have these cartoons, and the hypocritical defense of them, served these ideals?
That the future of liberal democracy rests on defending the publication of these insulting caricatures is as ridiculous a claim as that Muslims can defend the honor of their Prophet by unrestrained violence and rioting.
Dressing up as a suicide bomber, waving placards calling on Muslims to butcher those who insult Islam and shouting “7/7 on its way” — the inhumanity of it all is so utterly shameful. Clearly, it’s not just Danish cartoonists and their apologists who are ignorant of the Prophet. I wonder what the parents of the child wearing the “I love Al-Qaeda” cap would say had their son been on the No. 30 bus that terrible day.
I am not alone in my outrage. Muslims across Britain have organized events celebrating the Prophet’s life to counter the violent protests of last week. Countless press releases condemning the violence, from Muslim organizations big and small, mainstream and marginal, have flooded my inbox. At a public meeting at Friends House in London on Tuesday, a packed hall of mostly young British Muslims came looking for answers to difficult questions. Why does Europe treat us with such disdain? Why is the “I can, therefore I will” approach to free speech more important than building trust between communities? Why have some Muslims reacted so irresponsibly? How do we make faith and the message of Muhammad relevant to our citizenship? They paid a tenner a head to hear three important and popular Islamic scholars — Abdullah ibn Bayyah, Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir. They came demanding options. Is there a Britain for Muslims beyond the noise of Nick Griffin and Abu Hamza? They got answers to that and more.
“We must stop thinking of ourselves as ‘the tribe of Islam,’” declared Imam Zaid Shakir, an African-American scholar and civil-rights activist. “Until we start to think of ourselves as the children of Adam, concerned about the welfare of all our fellow-human beings, we are missing the point of being faithful. These are days when there is a lot of talk about defending the honor of the Prophet. What would it do for the honor of the Prophet if Muslims mobilized their tremendous resources to eradicate hunger from this planet? What would it say to the world if Muslims mobilized to end the conflict in the Congo or to make generic AIDS drugs available where they are not?” The crowd burst into enthusiastic applause.
This meeting revealed a growing realization among many British Muslims that the behavior of some of their “brothers and sisters” has done as much, if not more, damage to the name and honor of the Prophet than the caricatures themselves.
When a scholar like Abdullah ibn Bayyah, one of Islam’s greatest living jurists, told London Muslims that the cartoons were an act of aggression that warranted a response, he was emphatic that the right to respond did not give Muslims the license to behave without the dignity and intelligence that are worthy of us as human beings, let alone as followers of the Prophet.
The good news is that Muslim communities in Britain and beyond are maturing dramatically. We are more comfortable in our own skin and we are openly critical of fellow-Muslims when we think their actions are out of order. We care less about hiding dirty laundry and more with engaging in vigorous debate.
In the aftermath of the London bombings, many have realized we have to stop hiding behind a false sense of unity and call a spade a spade. We need to get serious about tackling the real problems affecting us, some of which are due to the failure of the society we live in, others of which are entirely of our own making. And, just as we are coming to terms with our diversity and our divisions, Britain must come to terms with us. Lecturing us about free speech and democracy is futile.
We are among the most politicized and engaged communities in Britain. We belong here. How many times do we have to say this before society cuts us some slack and lets us get on with it?
The example of the Prophet Muhammad has been the moral compass in the lives of Muslims for 1,400 years, despite the modern secular fundamentalists’ insistence that progress and modernity are brought about only by nonreligiosity. Many of those who so violently took to the streets claiming their love for the Prophet belong to the same heterodox, literalist school of thought that criticizes traditional Muslims for venerating the Prophet “too much”.
The volatility of Muslims today is not because there is too much Islam in our hearts but because there is too little. The Prophet Muhammad I see in those distasteful cartoons is not the Prophet I know and love. Much of my aspiration to be a contributing member of this nation, nay, this human family, comes from what I have learned from his life. Scholars like Abdullah ibn Bayyah, Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir are the most effective antidotes to extremism because our young people honor traditional Islamic scholarship.
They won’t listen to you or me, but they will listen to someone who has legitimacy, having spent decades mastering the Islamic sciences. Hamza Yusuf, arguably Western Islam’s most eloquent spokesman, quoted Sir Edwin Arnold, who edited the Telegraph in the late 19th century, who wrote: “For Islam must be conciliated; it cannot be thrust scornfully inside or rooted out. It shares the task of the education of the world with its sister religions.”
For British Muslims, religion matters. Religion can be a powerful tool for social cohesion and good citizenship. The trouble is that many Muslims have treated Islam as something inward, exclusive and proprietary. The principles on which the Prophet stood are much more generous than that. If religion is to have relevance, it must strive toward a higher moral ground where provocative insult and retaliatory violence are unacceptable.
— Fareena Alam is editor of London-based Q-News magazine.
