the twenty-first-century uprisings in predominantly Muslim lands across North Africa, through the Central Middle East, and into West and South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) directly and uniquely a result of the religious tradition of Islam?
In many instances what outsiders see Muslims doing in other parts of the world is not very different from what outsiders would do in an instant if they were in Muslims’ shoes. A primary difference, though, is that outsiders regard their own motives as political or economic while assuming that Muslims (outsiders seem unshakably convinced) are motivated by religion. The Afghan rebels have called their struggle against Russian military occupation a jihad, identifying themselves as mujahidin. Indeed the law of jihad does allow for military response to an invasion of one’s territorial sovereignty. Numerous groups of Muslims who use the word “jihad” in their names genuinely believe their actions are justifiable and done precisely in defense, for they consider foreign presence in their part of the world invasive and unwelcome. What is most important to note here is this: on balance, Islamic tradition simply does not encourage, let alone recommend unreservedly, violent solutions to human problems.
Most Americans seem to be convinced that Muslim armies spread Islam largely by executing non-Muslims who refused to convert—is this accurate?
Quite the contrary. Early Muslim armies had established various forms of Islamic government from Spain to what is now Northern India by about one hundred years after Muhammad’s death in 632. Over the next thousand years and more, when power changed hands across those lands and wherever Muslim regimes had been established subsequently, the new authorities battled against Muslim rulers and supporters of their regimes. Transfers of power from one dynasty have rarely (if ever) been orderly and peaceful, and it was mostly Muslims who suffered the consequences. Even accounting for a percentage of non-Muslims dying in Muslim invasions and subsequent periods of overt persecutions, the scores of times over twelve hundered years that Muslim dynasties and regimes supplanted other Muslim political entities would likely have accounted for significantly larger numbers of Muslim casualties than non-Muslim.
Did the Muslims pretty much invent “suicide bombing”?
This is not accurate. Here is some perspective on the unpleasant reality of suicide bombing: A careful study investigated the first forty-one such incidents taking place in the contemporary Middle East. The bombings occurred in Lebanon between 1982 and 1986. Researchers positively identified thirty-eight of the perpetrators and followed up with inquiries into their backgrounds, express motivations, and religious or ideological affiliations. Twenty-eight were avowedly secularist, communist, or members of leftist Arab organizations. Three were Christian, including a young woman who was a primary school teacher. Only seven of the thirty-eight were known to have espoused a distinctly Islamic religious ideology. It is also important that the first suicide bombings in recent times occurred not in the Middle East, but in Sri Lanka, and were perpetrated by members of the revolution Tamil Tigers, who were almost entirely of Hindu religious background.
A widespread belief is that in recent conflicts, non-Muslims have been the principal target of jihadi Muslims? Is this based on factual information?
In more recent times, Muslim extremists have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims and continue to do so. Whether in the nearly ten-year Iran-Iraq war, in which an estimated half million or more died in hostilities, or through multiple counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Sudan’s attempted genocide of the Muslim (but ethnically “non-Arab”) inhabitants of Darfur, or jihadi attempts to establish bases of operation in nations like Mali, or in the bloodbaths attending the revolt against Syrian president Bashar as-Asad, their victims have been almost entirely other Muslims. Even taking into consideration recent violence against Middle Eastern Christians, internal strife associated with the “Arab Spring,” from North Africa to Egypt to Syria, is further evidence of the predominance of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. And in spite of the Prophet’s injunctions against harming fellow believers, these factions have waved off any concern by arguing that their targets have forfeited the right to be called “true” Muslims because of alleged collaboration with the enemy or because they have clearly forsaken the true spirit of Muhammad.
ISLAM AND THE MESSAGE OF PEACE
If there are indeed “moderate” Muslims out there somewhere, why do they not loudly denounce any and all Muslim associations with violence?
As a matter of fact, and a seldom reported record, Muslim leaders have been denouncing and attempting to counteract claims of Islamic legitimacy by countless agitators for violence and supporters of groups like al-Qaeda since immediately after 9/11. Just as the data from international European police reporting have received virtually no press coverage, neither have the outcries of major Muslim groups and individual religious scholars throughout the past ten years simply have not been considered newsworthy because, some would argue, they do not support the dominant narrative about Islam and Muslims. For every fatwa calling for the destruction of “Zionists and Crusaders” (as in Usama bin Ladin’s infamous 1998 declaration), there have been scores (perhaps even hundreds) of counter-fatwas.
Are there any examples of significant immediate Muslim denunciations of those events?
Perhaps more surprising for the vehemence of his denunciation was Shaykh Muham-mad Husayn Fadlallah, spiritual leader of Lebanon’s “islamist/jihadist” Shi’ite organization known as the Party of God (Hizb Allah). Saying that he was “horrified” by these “barbaric and un-Islamic” attacks, the shaykh condemned the misguided notion that any such act can be considered a form of laudable martyrdom. No suicide will be rewarded hereafter, because it is a crime; and no action that disregards the limitations placed on genuine jihad (as the 9/11 events did) is ever acceptable. Furthermore, he insisted that such acts in no way serve their intended purpose, and in fact work against the cause of Palestinians in particular and Muslims in general. “It is a horrible massacre on every level with no positive results for the basic causes of Islam.” Fervent believers in Islam, the shaykh insisted, must adhere to the tradition’s humane values; and though his own organization is opposed to the U.S. government and its policies, it does not blame the American people and cannot countenance the kind of action done on 9/11 for the purpose of retaliating against people who are not at fault for their administration’s foreign policy. Nonetheless, there remains the vexing matter of Hezbollah’s ongoing involvement in Middle Eastern violence.
Are there any distinctively Islamic approaches to the matter of international peace?
The vast majority of Muslims long for a world at peace. They sincerely believe that Islamic values seek to promote the possibility of such a world. Their tradition, they believe, stands not only for the absence of war, but for that positive state of safety, security, and freedom from anxiety that uniquely results from the condition of grateful surrender to God in faith (islam, iman). Those who get their entire picture of Muslims from media coverage of current events need to understand that they are getting a very limited perspective. Any Malaysian or Pakistani television viewer who relied on that medium to convey a sense of American values might very well develop a similarly truncated picture of Americans.
Have there been any modern and/or contemporary Muslim “pacifists”?
Quite a few, actually. Unfortunately news of violence-prone extremists invariably keeps such highly positive and idealistic organizations out of the news. Among earlier modern pacifist Muslim movements, Khuda Khidmatgar’s organization of one hundred thousand Muslim Pathans, led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, espoused a non-violent program of civil resistance and social reform under the British Raj during the twentieth century. In addition, numerous individual Muslim pacifists have contributed notably to non-violent activism. An Azhar-trained Syrian scholar named Jawdat Said is a good example. As early as the
