Terror and the usual Muslim response

What makes contemporary political Islam so hard to ignore is not so much the sense that the future of its belief is on trial, subject to a global frenzy of geoplitical power plays and speculations, but that there are suspicions that its worldview inherently inspires violence.

Moreover, current circumstances has made this as much about perception as substance. A media savvy culture has widened the deliberate visibility of recent terror, thus the condemnations too must come fast and strong.

This explains why “moderate” Muslims are rushing to churn out press statements, op-eds, forums, conferences, declarations, petitions tweets and FB statuses stressing that Islam is a beautiful religion, that it promotes love, justice, kindness, that Muhammad was the most perfect man ever and so forth.

Thus while terror is nothing if no one sees it, it's turned out that moderation too must be showcased.

The more we are exposed to the spectacle of Muslim-related violence, the more we hear of some insistence of Islam's innocence in it all. Like it or not, assertions about the goodness of this religion has become a public relations game and the moderates seem serious about catching up.

It's in the rhetoric: The claims that “the extremists, do not speak for us” that “they do not represent Islam” that “Islam is a tolerant and democratic religion”, echo in an electronic and visual age not just as moral positions, but attempts to sway mass perception.

The game is rigged

But it's unfortunate that a most basic premise is rarely questioned in all this, and that is how the curent Western / liberal moral compass would not place the same burden of explanation on any other religion or ideology.

Consider, an example that’s likely more familiar to us than France: America and its unsolved problems of police brutality and the mass incarceration of its minorities. None are ever regarded as urgent reasons to indict the state of Western or secular or Judeo-Christian morality in totality, or to proclaim that there's something essentially problematic about its civilisation and core beliefs.

It can maintain its blemishes as exceptions to the rule, a freedom that Muslims simply do not have despite the obvious logic that only an extremely tiny percentage of the 1.6 billion or so are terrorists. The global gaze on Islam, in other words, is harsher and hastier, and we are left often feeling defensive.

The pressure for, say the average American, to account for something like Guantanamo Bay to the rest of the world is minute, if not non-existent, in comparison to the shame or awkwardness the random average Muslim is expected to feel towards terrorism.

Defensive limits 

With little power to change the terms of the discourse, the true meaning of Islam becomes all the more important to assert.

And there is a practical necessity to it: the protection of an embattled Muslim minority in Europe depends very much on what’s imagined of their religion. Thus a good image can go a long way in assuaging fears.

But one must wonder how continuously reiterating the peaceful core of Islam is at all helpful in understanding the problem to begin with, and that is the persistence of Muslim-associated terror.

The more important question, in other words, is what produces terrorists?

The typical response from the chorus insisting Islam’s peaceful essence is that terrorists are simply ignorant, that if they really get what the religion is all about they would not resort to violence.

But this can no longer hold even as a rhetorical strategy, especially when one considers how rather common it is that privileged, educated and middle-class Muslims do end up turning to terror after all.

Emphasising Islam’s message of love as a solution is also counterproductive. Even if we take that seriously we would’t be wrong to feel uneasy towards the risk that’s clearly evident in misunderstanding Islam. It wouldn’t just lead to traffic jams or sore throats.
Misinterpretations of a religion that we’re continuously told is essentially peaceful has continuously amounted to, of all things, terrorism.

What does terror say?

We can begin at least, with the presumption that there are in fact far more convenient ways to serve God, and this is an option even a Muslim with the most basic knowledge of the religion is aware of, especially if heaven is the point.

Choosing a more strained and precarious path hints not at a deficit in knowledge but the abundance of a point to prove. Breaking teror and violence into the monotony of everday life is an expression of protest, and this harks a certain kind of feeling against the world, rather than some scholastic concern about what the true meaning of Islam is all about. It’s a question of motivations, not misinformation.

And that is where Muslims who seek to address terror must begin, by acknowledging that it is complicated: for what lies at the heart of it is a particular type of choice. Precarity over security; strife over peace.

What terror demonstrates is a longing to be, animated by a certain bond with death. There’s a need to prove something only they know how to feel on their way to redemption.

There’s desperation; there’s anxiety; there’s doggedness. None of this can be easily reduced as lack of knowledge, or ignorance. And we betray the severity of the issue if we believe that insisting on Islam’s message of peace over and over again, year after year, conference upon conference, is sufficient, or even the point.

The flaws in our terrorists

This does not in any way entail a justification of violence. Humanising its perpetrators is about arriving to a proper understanding their flaws (and human beings are full of that). To do so, however, we must first learn to relate, by which their desire for hurt can be better known and treated in the future.

“Relate” might be too strong a verb for the current mood of indignation, but it is expansive enough for a way into the problem. For how much insight would a continuous vilification of terorrists,  as deserving as they may be of it, yield? To render an Other as mute and invisible, as not worthy of human consideration, would be exactly what they want. 

Being able to see the torment underlying the choices would be a more effective way to diffuse direct and simplistic connections between faith and action, as it would reveal other social and psychological dimensions at work, moving and animating fears, hatreds and behaviours.

Our reflections need not be consumed by an endless trumpeting of Islam’s awesomeness, but to also demonstrate how we can feel without fear. That is our task.

It is being able to articulate Islam as a force of healing both the oppressed and the oppressors, and not as a mere resource of do’s and don’ts, and pacifying platitudes,  that the progress of Muslims can be more realized.

When “Islam” (what its main texts say, its history and rich intellectual tradition) is thought of apart from “Muslim” (the everyday lived experience of a believer in the modern world) what we will ultimately get is an abstraction. That is to say, an incresingly idealised picture of what it ought to be, while obscuring what's actually going on.

And while that may bring us to a satisfactory answer of how wonderful Islam is when it's not manipulated by terrorists – as important as that is - the question of why there are terrorists to begin with will continue to elude us. – January 14, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.