To whom shall we give Access to Our Water Holes? - Islam and international relations

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Farid Esack

I have little doubt that these Muslims did not act the way they did because they were Muslims, nor did those Christians act the way they did because they were Christians. The point is that -- correct or not -- their prejudices are sustained, for them at least, by their respective religions. Many of us will hasten to say that this has nothing to do with our religions. Perhaps such disclaimers should be a bit less swift. Listen to Sheikh Kishk in Egypt, Ahmad Deedat in South Africa, Jerry Falwell in the USA and the followers of Rabbi Kahane in Jerusalem; see how many of our co-religionists are swayed by them. These people are as much an intrinsic part of our heritage -- they draw as much from our wells -- as you and I. So many times in the last week have I been asked if Osama bin Laden is a Muslim, and I have refused to go for the easy option. Appending a Kafir label to Osama will only allow me to walk away comfortable in my lies that there is nothing in my sacred text that inspires him, that my theology is no t filled with well-documented argument for his terror, and that the vast majority of Muslims in the world do not support him and Al-Qa'idah. I may denounce them, attempt to compensate for their evil, and even pray that they die of piles and infested with the fleas of ten thousand camels; I cannot, however, disown them.

Often our prejudices about the other are a way of holding on to what we perceive as "the known." Many Muslims feel that Deedat's multitude of anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and anti-Hindu videotapes have told us all that there is to be told about the other, and we are comfortable with that. There are times, of course, when questions surface about the importance of correct dogma, about the importance of labels to a God whom we believe sees beyond labels and looks at the hearts of people. Instead of pursuing these questions, we hasten back and seek refuge in "the known." We order another of those Deedat tapes.

"The known" is a powerful shield against what we perceive to be - and indeed often is--a hostile world; it enables us to survive. Or, at least, this is how we feel. Look at the tremors of uncertainty among the neo-Nazis in South Africa, as "the known" is collapsing all around them. They are facing a hostile world and we are grateful for this hostility. Clearly not all forms of accommodating the known are acceptable; neither are all hostilities unacceptable. For people committed to the noblest in our religious heritages, though, the question is not merely one of the survival of our own. Today our survival depends on the survival of the other as much as the survival of the human race depends on the survival of the ecosystem. We have gone beyond "No man is an island unto himself," to "No entity is an island unto itself."

We are all comprised of multiple identities depending on where we come from, what we believe in, where we are, and with whom we are interacting at a particular moment. Often we insist on identity as a fixed and unchanging category. A closer look, though, shows that we -- and the way in which we view ourselves -- are really ever changing. The insistence on viewing identity as stable, static or monolithic is usually reflective of our insecurity, our fear of the unknown parts of ourselves that may emerge when the label is peeled off. So we desperately hold on to the label, although the single certainty about its contents is inescapable uncertainty.