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

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Farid Esack

Until then I had the privilege of leading the two evening prayers. I had, however, broken ranks and was immediately transformed into a religious leper. After the prayers, the Muslims rushed into some corner to discuss my "treacherous behavior," and I was left to receive some hollow pats on the back for "courage" from the Christian participants. When I asked another imam who was also present about the Muslim response to my intervention, he replied, "You are correct in your argument, but you should not have presented it in front of these (non-Muslim) people."

For the first time it occurred to me that many a Muslim may actually be committing "shirk" (heresy/associationism) by elevating the community above his/her commitment to be a witness-bearer to justice for Allah -- though this may be against themselves (Q. 4:135). The injunctions of Allah to "not conceal evidence, for whosoever does this has a sinful heart" (Q. 2:142) and not to "cover the truth with falsehood while you know" (Q. 2:283) are often of little consequence.

The underlying assumption in this defensive posturing is that the other is the enemy and that we are here to, firstly, defend ourselves and, secondly, perhaps also to win some over to our side.

It is, of course, not difficult to perceive of the other as the enemy. We are not mere individuals but carry our community histories with us, as I said in the beginning. Muslims are still living through centuries of misrepresentation of Islam, the collusion between colonialism and so-called objective scholarship to reduce Islam and the Qur'an to a figment of a sensuous pretender's imagination. There is also our own experience as part of the colonized world that has been exploited by the West, by a power that regards its culture as normative and all else as an aberration, as kinky.

For Muslims this experience of colonialism and all its underlying assumptions of the superiority of Western cultural and religious norms are not mere baggage of history. Today so many in the West object to Muslim women wearing scarves in their schools, while it never occurred to these Westerners to wear loin cloths when they came to Africa.

It is, however, the fear of Islam of ordinary men and women that troubles me. Their prejudices and fears, too, are usually based on the unknown. When it is based on the known, then it is a known processed by their mass media, which is owned and controlled by the powerful.

While the dispossessed have their own fears and prejudices, the powerful in the West have the economic and military power to transform fear and prejudice into potent weapons for destruction and "defense." This remains a significant issue and should not be obscured as we examine the question of prejudice and examine ways of overcoming it.

The Muslims Are Coming!

I have no desire to jump on the "blame-it-all-on-the-media" bandwagon. The truth is that there are numerous ordinary, sensitive, and intensely humane people--Muslims and non-Muslims--who are deeply troubled by much of what is happening in the world of Islam. We may accuse the West of distorting Muslim events but we certainly supply those events. We do burn books, we do denounce democracy, we do threaten authors, we do deny women the right to drive their own cars (forget about their own lives), and we do deny people the right to drink from our wells. Certainly, not all of us, but how loud are we to denounce these events or utterings when they occur and how frequently do we not choose silence in order not to supply even more food for "our enemies"?