Of selective myopia and jaundiced minds

The recent spate of violence in Paris and San Bernardino, never mind the scandalous short shrift given to the attacks in Beirut and the downing of the Russian civilian airline, spewed the usual reaction against Muslims and Islam by the usual suspects.

The inveterate Islamophobe Daniel Pipes declared superciliously that Islam is the culprit and lamented politicians in the West for “feel[ing] compelled to pretend that Islam has no role in the violence, in part out of concern that to recognise it would cause even more problems”.

Likewise, the incorrigibly anti-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali penned an article, prior to the Paris attack, for Foreign Policy, that was derisively titled ‘Islam is a religion of violence’!

Could one imagine such title for Jews, say after burning a Palestinian family alive by Israeli colonist-extremists — even the thought of such article boggles the mind.

Equally, scholars busy defending Islam from such horrifying misdeeds are succumbing to similar epistemology that reduces Muslims, and indeed Islam’s varied and rich experience to texts. Reductive does not even begin to describe such an approach.

According to an analysis by the late Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, Israeli policies towards Palestinians can be described as “politicide”.

By “politicide”, Kimmerling means “a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity”.

Moreover, “[p]oliticide” is a process that covers a wide range of social, political and military activities whose goal is to destroy the political and national existence of a whole community of people and thus deny it the possibility of self-determination”.

Kimmerling argues farther that politiciding the Palestinian people is the “consequence of the 1967 War and, partially, of the very nature and roots of the Zionist movement”. (pp 3-4).

The Holy Scripture or the sociological observation by Kimmerling also applies to other colonist states from the New World to Southern Africa.

For sure, Jews weren’t violent mostly for the past two millennia, even when violence would’ve been justified, given the horrendous history of European anti-Semitism.

But the imperative of the Zionist colonial project has changed that and created perhaps one of the most militaristic states in the Middle East.

But then, Pipes, in the same article, claims that a majority of violence is connected to Islam. That’s simply a fib.

Fareed Zakaria, in a recent article, referring “to the FBI”, says that “the majority of domestic terrorist attacks are actually committed by white, male Christians . . .”

Farther, FBI statistics show that Jewish extremist terrorism incidents in the United States exceed Muslim extremism by a percentage point since the 1980s.

Historian Juan Cole, a leading expert on the Middle East, disputes vehemently the notion that Muslims are more prone to violence than other religious groups. The 20th century saw about 102 million deaths by political violence.

According to Cole, Christian Europeans are responsible for about 100 million deaths.

Muslims, in comparison, are probably responsible for about two millions deaths — that too largely due to the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and its aftermath.

“It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as ‘nice’ and Muslims as inherently violent, given the 20th century death toll I mentioned above”, Cole concluded.

The point is not to drive a coach and horses through the obloquy directed against Islam or Muslims.

It is an otiose exercise, for such vilification is par for the course in the US, even in polite company, as one can see in the fulminous presidential race.

The point here is, however, to identify and clarify an epistemological issue that no one, much less a whole nation, can be reduced to textual exegesis.

Otherwise how can one explain the variance of behaviour for a long stretch of history with textual protestation to the contrary?

Reading the beautiful book by Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain defies textual reductionism.

What then explains such calumnies against Islam and Muslims? Violence associated with Islam cannot be the reason for there are violent groups such as Buddhists or as Robert Pape has shown that “there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.

In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group.

Jack Shaheen, an authority on the representation of Arabs and Muslims in the US media and popular culture, argues persuasively that three I’s are responsible for such denigration of Arabs and Muslims: Ignorance, Indolence and Israel.

The US public remains largely uninformed about the Middle East or Islam and are led up the garden path so much, so often, that the laziness of the mind makes one succumb to stereotypes and propagators of anti-Islam messages are invariably Israeli firsters.

Muslims are, too, responsible for some house-cleaning.

The UAE’s efforts at such endeavour should be appreciated: It is proactively promoting religious tolerance and has launched institutions such as Muslim Wise Men Council, Hedayah Centre, and recently Sawab to combat extremism and champion the causes of peace, cooperation and mutual respect, which are leaps ahead.

Other nations should follow suit in shunning equally pernicious ideologies like Islamophobia.

Dr AlBadr Alshateri is adjunct professor at the National Defence College.