Islam is not the enemy," declared the San Francisco Chronicle in an Oct. 14, 2005 staff editorial. "Islam is not America's enemy in terror war," wrote the Daily Herald, a Provo, Utah newspaper, when headlining an Aug. 20 column by Charles Haynes, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va.
The peace-loving, tolerant nature of the vast majority of Muslims has become a tenet of post-9/11 American thought--and for good reason, because by the numbers, it is true.
But if millions of Muslims do not support terrorism actively, their silence may be doing so passively. At a time when hundreds of Islamic clerics, leaders and "activists" are openly fostering sectarian Shiite-Sunni violence, offering financial incentives for the families of suicide bombers, and even calling for the annihilation of Israel--all in the name of their faith--there has been no commensurate response from the Muslim moderates. The silence is deafening.
"They are afraid of the terrorists themselves-those who threaten and harass open-minded secular people," said Abdul Sattar Jawad, visiting scholar at the John Hope Franklin Center. "There are religious militia hiding behind who will kill people who criticize and attack them."
Jawad, who describes himself as a secular liberal, taught literature in Iraq for almost 40 years and edited two newspapers, the Baghdad Mirror, a publication in English and Al-Siyada, which ran in Arabic. He came to the U.S. after his newspaper offices were bombed.
Jawad says international media have not focused enough on the non-violent Muslim community. He adds, however, that newspapers alone are not responsible for the dearth of material.
"Muslims themselves were unsuccessful to present this issue," he said. "They should be playing a very active role defending the image of Islam.. The media should give a hand to moderate Muslims, let them take the lead in their own community. It's time now to advocate peace, tolerance, faith and good relations among all religions in the U.S."
In polite society, and especially a "politically correct" one, membership in any group offers greater--perhaps even the only--authority to criticize it. This is the unspoken problem plaguing America today: non-Muslims simply lack the political capital Muslims have to criticize militant Islam on a fundamental, doctrinal level. That is to say, when individuals and organizations representing other religions speak out against fundamentalist Islam, the public may write off these comments as mere self-interest, ignorance or hate. Observant Muslims alone, in theory, have the experiential knowledge-from their lives-and moral clout--from the very fact of their observance--to condemn radical Islam in a profoundly meaningful way. And in practice, not nearly enough are doing so.
Many well-intentioned people seem to perceive the demand for everyday Muslims' dissemination of a peaceful Islam as a McCarthyist witch hunt for terrorists. On the contrary: it is in fact the audience of this message, rather than its speakers, who matter most. Thousands of impressionable, college-aged Muslims are caught in a labyrinth of radical clerics' terror propaganda. "There is no other way for the youth of this nation other than suicide operations," wrote Kamal Al-Said Habib in the February 2003 edition of British-based journal Al-Sunnah. The Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist group, publishes in London Risalat al-Ikhwan, a publication which declared recently, "Muqaawamah [active resistance] to the occupation [of Iraq] and the use of any available means to resist it are a religious Moslem duty, a national duty, and a natural right anchored in both international law and the United Nations Charter."
Politicians may try to put these men in jail and ban their publications. But to truly win the war on terror we must convince their followers that they are wrong. It is this fortress of lies and hate that we must break. And with an audience so deeply programmed to despise non-Muslims, it is, sadly, only with Muslim-to-Muslim discussions of faith-through opinion pieces, advertisements, panel discussions and the like-that the West has a prayer.
So where is the moderate Muslim response? The slim handful of public intellectuals who fall in this category--people like Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran; Kamal Nawash, president of the Free Muslims Coalition; and Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America--are virtually unknown. This approach is inadequate.
A unified and well-publicized moderate Muslim condemnation of terror has become even more urgent, as support and sympathy for Islamic terrorists have in fact entered our own nation. At a number of U.S. summer demonstrations in support of Hezbollah-a group whose 1985 founding manifesto cites "the necessity of the destruction of Israel"-protesters have held signs with the Nazi swastika beside the Star of David. This juxtaposition is not an isolated incident; rather, it has become a relatively common, incendiary propaganda to equate explicitly Israelis, and often implicitly Jews, with the very force that nearly exterminated them.
If one must phrase things in terms of the Holocaust, then an analogue far closer to the truth lies between the moderate Muslims of today and the moderate Germans of 1938. Hitler rose to power on the backs of a people who turned away, some in fear, some in apathy. Today militant Islam, threatens to do the same, hijacking a religion whose mainstream adherents do not speak out.
Andrew Gerst graduated from Trinity College in 2006. He is a former managing editor of Towerview. He now lives and works in Washington, D.C.
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