JEDDAH, 30 September 2004 — Two leaders from the Muslim world, known for their advocacy of what is becoming known as “enlightened moderation”, have recently spoken of an iron curtain falling between the West and the Muslim world. Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan have hinted that the unresolved Palestinian issue and the illegal invasion of Iraq are the main causes of the growing schism between the Muslim world and the West. They are right: There can now hardly be any doubt that the trenches on both sides are being dug, the barbed wire strung out.
Yet much as we Muslims are ever ready to protest that the vast majority among us have nothing to do with terrorism, that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, so the oppression of the Palestinians and the invasion of Iraq have nothing to do with the great majority of people in the West, or even in the United States and Britain. There are tens of thousands of Americans and Britons who are uneasy about their countries’ dominance of all the military, economic, political and cultural dimensions of power.
They are writing letters to editors of their newspapers, they are writing articles, they are drawing caricatures lampooning their political leaders, they are signing petitions addressed to their political representatives, they are organizing peace rallies, some on a massive scale. They are raising their voices against the injustices being perpetrated against Muslims everywhere.
Meanwhile in the Muslim world we focus obsessively — and with almost masochistic relish — on the extremist elements in those countries. Too much attention is being paid to Fox Television and its mostly rabid anti-Arab and anti-Muslim anchors and to the frankly Zionist propaganda of The Wall Street Journal. Yet America is neither Fox TV nor The Wall Street Journal; it is a country where these two media outlets represent but one part of a vast spectrum of opinion.
There are many people in the United States and Britain who are in sympathy with and even profess to love Muslims, for all that Muslims have given them very little reason to love them. There are many others who take up their pens to defend Muslims even if, and particularly if, they have no truck with Islam or for that matter any other religion.
Of course in times of such terrible anarchy, when we see nothing but US fighter jets over Fallujah and Israeli jets pounding Palestinian refugee camps, it is easy to lose all sense of proportion. In public, therefore, Muslims are railing against the Western media and the American television channels and making out that they are somehow “against us”. That is a travesty of the truth.
When the worst treatment was being meted out to detainees in Abu Ghraib, it was American journalists who were uncovering the crimes being committed in the name of freedom and human rights. It was the painstaking investigation of a Jewish-American journalist, Seymour Hersh, in a bastion of the American intellectual establishment, The New Yorker, who uncovered these abuses — and it was from the same Seymour Hersh that Muslims learned about the true nature of the neocons. It was not Al-Jazeera, far less Al-Arabiya, that brought these facts to our attention. And it was the BBC, for all its much-reviled caution and bias, whose documentaries told the complex story of the killings of young protesters by Israeli forces in the Occupied Territories.
Those media are doing their job of enlightening their people. Where, meanwhile, are the Muslim journalists patiently detailing the excesses and financial entanglements of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and his ilk, which are giving US extremists all the ammunition they need to justify to the world their continuing abuses?
It was, finally, an American general of Filipino origin, Antonio M. Taguba — not an Arab, not a Muslim — who documented the gruesome methods of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib for his superiors. Gen. Taguba too is part of the American military we so often revile in the worst possible terms.
There are extremists in all societies, and perhaps Muslim societies have more than their fair share of them. By virtue of their shrill tones, the extremists will always stand out. If we know that about our own societies, why can we not see that the same is true in the West? Empty cans, they say, make the loudest noise, and that is true on both sides of the new iron curtain.
Ordinary Americans and ordinary Britons — to say nothing of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Brazilians, and the ordinary citizens of the Marshall Islands, all of whom we must somehow include if we speak of “the West” — are capable of growing wise to the folly of their political leaders. They have an electoral process and the capacity to take corrective action. They do not shy away from accepting mistakes.
We in the Muslim world think that America became a superpower because of its nuclear bombs and fighter jets. No. It became a superpower because it made giant strides in science and technology, in journalism, in computing. Without the West, Al-Qaeda would have no websites to publish their gruesome videos on and no video cameras with which to shoot them.
We have a legitimate gripe against the American and British leadership. But that should not be confused with the people of those two nations. They have taken corrective measures in the course of their history, and there is every reason to believe that they will take action against their erring leaders and bring them to their senses. By not distinguishing between the actions of the government and the people, we fall into the trap of the extremists.
Just as there is deep revulsion in the Muslim world against suicide bombings and head-cutters, so the people of leading Western nations are disgusted with the arrogance of their leadership. We must lower the temperature of our rhetoric or else its heat will incinerate all of us.
