Targeting Malala: The latest Taleban outrage
IF the Taleban say one more word — just one more — to explain away this new outrage of theirs, let’s zap them with a cattle rod to shock them out of their mental torpor.
The new outrage is this: A 14-year-old-girl from the Swat Valley in Pakistan is singled out on a school bus by Taleban hit men, who shoot her twice in the head because she advocated the right of children to education and because, according to the group’s spokesman, she was a “symbol of the infidels.” But first a preamble.
We have resented over the years, not altogether unjustifiably, the West’s ignorance of Islam and puzzled over, again not without cause, its incoherent babble about our culture, babble amply demonstrated in the past by the intellectual effusions of its Orientalists and equally amply codified in its middlebrow public debate. How long, we wondered, is this medieval hangover going to last before the West looked into our soul — into that soul’s inward preoccupations — and saw its own humanity reflected there?
Valid posture for Arabs and other Muslims to take, no?
Yet, explain, please, why our condemnation of Muslims who have subverted Islam in recent years — in recent days for that matter, in Benghazi and Mingora — has been oddly shy. Explain why we have not taken those groups to task who have used Islam as a vehicle to pursue a hallucinated vision of the place that our faith should occupy in the global dialogue of cultures. Look at them in Mali and Yemen, in Libya and Afghanistan, look at them in the town of Mingora, in the Swat Valley, as they targeted that 14-year-old school girl called Malala Yousufzai who spoke out for the right to literacy in her homeland for children barred by the Taleban from attending school.
It should be clear to any Muslim that there is a boundless chasm between Islam, as true Muslims understand it, and Taleban theology, if theology it is. Truth be told, as these folks go about interpreting their faith, they evince the intelligence of a head of cabbage.
Consider this: Not only is Islam decidedly on the side of the pedagogical enterprise, but it urges its adherents to pursue it passionately. Lest we forget, the first heavenly word transmitted by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is “read.” The very ethos of our civilization, with Islam as its pivot, is suffused with the drive to learn, to discover, to explore ideas, as evidenced by the command to the faithful to go and “seek knowledge though located as far away as China.” In the heyday of the Islamic commonweath of nations, scholars borrowed freely wherever their eyes roamed, from Greece and India, Persia and Byzantium. Then after they mastered what they had borrowed, in maths and science, literature and philosophy, astronomy and the alphabet of music (the latter a term appropriated from the Greek lexicon), they transformed it to their own measure with the proud intent of surpassing what had gone before.
And when throughout their history, across centuries and cultures, they encountered folks who embraced other religions -- People of the Book -- that encounter was embodied in this edict: “Say: O, unbelievers! I do not worship that you worship, and you do not worship That I worship. I do not worship that you worship, and you do not worship That I worship. You have a faith [religion] of your own, and I have mine!” (Qur’an, 109).
This is a theological paradigm marked not only by tolerance for the beliefs of others but by a genuine celebration of the plurality of human nature and conduct. Rogue Muslims like the Taleban and others, roaming the Swat Valley and elsewhere today, deny that plurality, as they eschew the true teachings, the liberating adventure, as it were, of being a Muslim.
When the Taleban were still in power in March, 2001, for example, they really blew it, both figuratively and literally, as they began to destroy all statues in the country, including the world’s tallest Buddha in Bamian, hewn from a rock cliff 1,600 years before.
Soon after they had made their intention to destroy the statues known, the Taleban faced worldwide condemnation, as well as appeals by many Islamic nations, including Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan to rescind the destruction order. The pleas fell on deaf ears. That’s the imprint of a rigid mind.
All of which takes us back to Malala, who as of this writing remains in critical condition. The adjectives used to describe the Taleban’s assault (which resulted in injury to two other teenage girls on that school bus) have ranged from ‘barbaric’ (state Department) to ‘vile’ (Washington Post). The epithets used privately to describe it cannot be printed in a family newspaper. Malala’s tale is all the more poignant and inspiring because the kid — who was just a kid, for crying out loud — was no ideologue, carrying the obscure heaviness and fury of blood associated with a revolutionary. She fell victim to a group of people, with a mindset unyielding to reason, who saw a threat from the mere presence in their midst of a child possessed of a vision.
It is the kind of act that, I say, destroys what there is of man in man, and restores in him what there is of beast.
Meanwhile, denying girls, who will one day become women, the right to read, to learn, to grow, will not only in time harden the arteries of the cultural spirit, as in those of the flesh, but deplete the reserves of a community’s social capital.
Islam stands aloof from those who, like the Taleban, seek to subvert it and uproot its universalistic and compassionate tenets.
