Five years on, some questions for Muslims

It was a normal morning in Washington DC as I prepared to go to work. The phone rang. My friend Sajan from Kolkata — an avid watcher of international news programmes — was calling to ask whether I had seen the strange spectacle of a jet plane flying headlong into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York.

I hadn’t, so I switched on the TV. Within minutes, a second plane hit the second tower. The rest you all know.

That was five years ago, tomorrow. A war on terror began that day and now looks never-ending. Oh, there was terrorism before that. In the modern world, terrorism as a political weapon began with the anarchists of the 19th century. World War I was triggered by an act of terrorism.

There have been several movements around the world which have used terrorism as a tactical weapon but their activities have been more or less confined to their zones of conflict. September 11, 2001, changed all that.

Terrorism mushroomed into a global cloud, partly because it yanked America into a war with terror, but also because the ideology driving this terrorism was one with a global agenda. Pan-Islamic terrorism was now real.

There were Muslim terrorists before that, as there were Catholic, Protestant, Tamil, Israeli, Palestinian, Basque, Algerian, Peruvian, Kashmiri and other kinds. But Al Qaeda’s terrorism came out of a vaulting ambition that was truly global in scope.

They wanted the end of Western civilisation — or Christian, as they saw it — and aimed to install an Islamic civilisation worldwide under a restored Arab caliphate. In the process, they were ready to wipe out Christians and Jews and Hindus as well as apostates and others among Muslims who did not share their grand vision.

And soon it came to be that the vast majority of Muslims in the world, who do not subscribe to that crazy dream, had a cloud of suspicion hovering over them.

When the bombs went off in Muslim-majority Malegaon on Friday, many people here immediately thought it was the work of Islamic terrorists who wanted to start an inter-communal frenzy. It could well be; but it could equally be the handiwork of Hindu fanatics.

To be fair, the police raised that latter possibility but a lot of people wouldn’t consider it. It must be those Muslims again, they were convinced, for “they’re all like that”.

Mind you, many of the folk who today sound skeptical in private — and sometimes in the open — about Muslim tendencies in general are otherwise fair-minded and tolerant.

They are not bajrang brandishers and have treated people of different communities from theirs with the utmost respect. But, no longer.

It is like what the Sikhs went through in the 1980s in India, when many people looked uneasily at anyone wearing a turban and beard.

The trend is worldwide. TWM, or traveling-while-Muslim, is a blight that everyone with a Muslim-sounding name has to be prepared to endure at airports everywhere. Anti-Muslim tirades, once confined to the fringe of public discourse, are making regular appearances on the weblogs which have become an important source of communication in today’s world, particularly among the young. It is disturbing, certainly for Muslims.
But are sufficient numbers of Muslims sufficiently disturbed? Or are too many of them too timid to resist the extremists from asserting an exclusive claim to represent Islam?
For, it is not just by protesting discrimination or by pointing out unfairness in the world or by smelling vast conspiracies against them everywhere that communities under siege can redeem their plights. In the 80s, it was when the Sikhs themselves began actively to reject terrorists and help the police round them up that the Khalistani movement died out and the Sikh community quickly climbed back to its position at the very top of Indian society as a widely admired people, one of whom is today the nation’s prime minister.
Can Muslims do something similar on a global scale? Surely, an extreme form of Deobandi Islam — such as the Wahabist millenarianism of Osama bin Laden — doesn’t represent anything beyond an impractical, even loony, sect of a religion that once gave the world many of the tools of modern civilisation to say nothing of its contribution to the arts and philosophy. Can Islamic scholars revive ijtihad, that independent reasoning that Islamic scholars practiced when the much of the Western world lived in a dark age?
Some are trying. For they know the Prophet’s warning: “There will be a time when your religion will become a hot piece of coal in your hand. You will not be able to hold it.”

Email: gautam@dnaindia.net