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Talk
presented Workshop 7: Understanding the Religious Fundamentalism dynamic
- At home and Abroad, at the Now We The People conference, University
of Technology, Sydney, 24.8.03 A
bomb goes off in the world: there are three choice labels: Islamic fundamentalist,
Islamic terrorist, Islamic extremist. Handy and interchangeable labels
which the media and our politicians relish using. Let's
take the term Islamic fundamentalism. It is enveloped in ambiguity and
all too often employed in the same simplistic, emotive fashion as the
term communism once was, failing to capture the reality of complex social
movements. Fundamentalism has been a major element in western policy considerations
ever since the rise of Ayatollah Khomeni's anti-American, Islamic regime
in Iran in 1979. The concern entered a new phase in the 1990s prompted
largely by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the success of the Afghan resistance forces, the emergence of the independent
Muslim Central Asian republics and so on. According
to Amin Saikal, the term fundamentalism has "mainly been used to
delineate the position of two distinct types of forces within the Muslim
world: those who have used Islam merely as a cover for violent anti-Western
actions that cannot find justification within the sources of Islamic law
and doctrine; and those who have deployed Islam as an active ideology
of both resistance and reassertion, and refused to elevate the globalist
interests of the US to the prominence that America claims it must have
as a dominant world power". The
predominant portrayal of Muslims as fundamentalists, extremists and terrorists
transforms differences, be they national, ethnic, or economic, into opposites,
into enemies. Thus, the jingoistic violent US national psyche is denied,
transformed and projected as the protector of the democratic way against
the struggles of oppressed nations to establish their own rights and national
identities. The West is dismally incapable of drawing a clear distinction
between those who constitute terrorists and fundamentalists acting in
the name of Islam, and those who make up revolutionary reformers, upholding
Islam genuinely as an ideological source for social transformation. Failing
to transcend treating Muslims as an undifferentiated mass, Sunni or Shi'ite
sects, for example, are constructed as a monolithic bloc and dealt with
in pejorative terms. The
frequency with which one reads about Islamic fundamentalism in the media
suggests that whenever Muslims appear on the world stage, challenging
an existing situation, they must be fundamentalists. In such a context,
fundamentalist is a synonym for a religious enthusiast who has gone over
the top - a fanatic. But a fanatic is only a fanatic because someone else
has provided the label and has defined the limits. And defining limits
in order to categorise behaviour can occur more out of a desire to contain
such behaviour by invoking widespread disapproval, than out of a desire
to try and appreciate how Islam understands itself in the modern world. The
word is susceptible to a looseness which suggests pejorative overtones
rather than an authentic description of Muslim religious behaviour. The
majority of Muslims are strongly opposed to acts of violence, in any form,
undertaken in the name of religion. Sadly at the moment within the Muslim
world we do have groups that justify violence on the grounds that they
are defending Islam against the tyranny of the west. Zia
Sardar, author of the recent best seller, Why do people hate America,
in a recent radio interview in Melbourne argued that the political constructions
and systems in Muslim countries have prevented the basic Islamic ethics
to come to the fore. Take Saudi Arabia, for example. Its despotic monarchy
is basically maintained by the US. And the kind of puritan interpretation
of Islam that the state forces on the rest of the society, drains the
ethics and morality of Islam away, leaving a mechanical, totalistic state,
totally devoid of humanity. What we want are communities and states where
Islamic humanity can flourish, and where our ethics and humanity can become
part of society. But the political situation in the Muslim world is both
a product of colonial legacy and part of a shortcoming in perceiving Islam
in a very, very narrow way. Former
Indonesian President Abdul Rahman Wahid attributes part of the reason
for a narrow interpretation and application of Islam to the fact that
those who have not been trained in the rich disciplines of Islamic scholarship,
tend to bring to their reflection on the faith the same sort of simple
modeling and formulistic thinking that they may have learned as students
of engineering or other applied sciences. Many end up taking a literal
approach to the textual sources of Islam. Grabbing a few verses out of
context, they seek to find answers to the challenges facing Muslim society
today. The result is that they use these texts in a literal, reductionist
fashion without being able to undertake, or even appreciate, the subtly
nuanced task of interpretation of the Quran and Hadith. As
a Muslim, it appalls me to witness people who dare to profess allegiance
to Islam while committing heinous acts of murder and destruction. However,
we should be loathe to reward them with the privilege of the word 'fundamentalist',
for, if we understand that a fundamentalist is somebody who adheres to
the fundamental tenets of their faith, then the term is misapplied to
those whose actions represent a repudiation and sacrilege to the 'fundamentals'
of Islamic doctrine. I have always resisted the word 'extremist' too as
it suggests somebody has taken a principle or doctrine and stretched it
too far. Like a rubber band stretched so far but which will eventually
bounce back to is original position. As if to suggest that bombing a club
or hotel and killing innocent people is a mere stretch from an originally
legal and valid principle in Islam. In actual fact, such murderous actions
repel the dictates and boundaries of the Islamic faith. No matter the
cause or struggle, to slaughter civilians is not a tribute to Islam, but
a defilement of its teachings, a vile defamation of its image, and an
utter contempt of its message. It seems such easy logic to me. Can a religion
that preaches that the killing of one innocent life is equivalent to the
killing of all of humankind, condone the indiscriminate murder of innocent
civilians? The
rubber band has not been stretched, it has been snapped. I have come to
accept that although atrocities are committed in the name of all religions
around the world, it is Islam alone that will be judged by the actions
of those who purport to be its followers. Muslims do not lay blame for
the behaviour of so-called Christians at the feet of Christ, not because
there is no scripture to rest on, but because we respect the intent of
Christ's words and actions and became we know that even those acting in
his name are misguided. Why is it so difficult for Islam, a religion followed
by 1.3 billion people all of whom cannot be uncivilised, unintelligent,
immoral, unthinking dupes, to be treated with the same respect? Day
by day our politicians, media commentators, talkback radio hosts and news
sources confirm that the "war on terrorism" has become embedded
in a language of stereotyping. I wonder if the failure to transcend treating
Muslims as an undifferentiated mass is because our media and leaders have
exercised little restraint in saturating news and political statements
with terms that use the generic and convenient label "Islamic"
to detail egregious acts of violence. Living
against the perception that one represents a synonym for terrorism and
fundamentalism, one learns quite a bit. One thing I've learned is that
if there is anything which truly commands the power to affect how we connect
with each other as human beings, it is our language. To prefix acts of
murder with "Islamic" is to suggest that those who murder in
the name of Islam somehow represent an unsavoury deviation from the wider
Islamic community. As though they are the black sheep in the flock, the
thorn in our community's side. But this offers the people who committed
such abhorrent crimes a legitimacy they don't deserve, for the black sheep
still belongs, the thorn is still attached. The
point is that these people are aliens to the Islamic faith, and the cumulative
effects of connecting such people to our faith and community has only
ever served to create suspicion, fear and resentment of Muslims. Instead
of restoring our faith in the unity of Australians, and giving us the
courage to resist turning against each other, those with the power to
influence have conjured up Apocalypse Now visions of Islam versus the
West. It's a funny thing about life. If you refuse to see anything but
the worst in people, you very often get it. We are in danger of bringing
the worst out in each other, when the tragedies we are enduring should
propel us to look for the best in humanity. It may be that none of us
are responsible for all the things that happen to us, but we are most
certainly responsible for the way we react to them.
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