Islam is Not Responsible for Terrorism

I watch Bill Maher every weekend. I enjoy the commentary from various people. I like it when multiple brains are involved and therefore multiple perspectives. But a common position that Maher takes is that Islam is an evil. He believes that the religion of Islam is the root cause of terrorism perpetrated by Muslim extremists, and he is certainly not alone in this belief. But one has to remember that Bill Maher believes all religion is dangerous, and to his credit any religion can become so. Any religion can be used to justify abuse, declare war, or justify human rights violations. But to say that Islamic terrorism is an “Islam problem” is a falsehood, and here’s why.

Let’s start with holy books, and not just the Qu’ran. Islam is one of the youngest world religions and is still well over a thousand years old. Have you ever noticed that the Torah depicts slavery under the Egyptians and war with the Hittites, while Christian gospels frequently reference the Romans? We have to remember that a lot of what goes into the recording of these holy books is cultural and influenced by historical events of that time. Why does the Qu’ran even mention war and fighting? Because war occurred between the cities of Yathrib (Medina) and Mecca during Mohammad’s time, just as the Hebrews had to fight for Israel after the Exodus. One would be surprised how much of what is to be taken as religious law was simply influence from the environment at the time of the compilation of these books. My point is this:  if you were to take all holy books literally, the Bible would have you enslaving pagans, beating your wives, stoning sinners, and screwing your brother’s widow when you die. You’d go to hell for getting a new TV just because your neighbor got one or because you ate too much at Golden Corral.

But people do often take their holy books literally. Sometimes it’s harmless, and sometimes it leads to hurting others. It’s one thing to not get a tattoo because you believe it to be a sin. It’s another thing to disown your son for being gay, or worse, subject him to harm because you view him as an abomination. One thing that we should consider is where we might find the vast majority of people who take the Bible literally. In the US, that would be rural areas somewhat isolated from places that gather more diversity thus experience a higher degree of social dynamics. I’m not saying that rural living is bad. I quite enjoyed my rural upbringing. But I can tell you from experience that there is a lot more taking the Bible literally in the country than there is in the cities and suburbs. There, people generally approach their religion thematically. Rather than getting hung up on commandments, deadly sins, and details about who you can love, there is more of an emphasis on general, positive themes like looking out for your neighbor, helping the helpless, loving your family, faith, salvation, and being moral. Never mind the details and scripture quoting. And with most of the people in the US living in those areas, I’d venture to assume that most Americans approach religion this way. I think this keeps Americans somewhat civil about religion. We typically don’t impugn one another over faith.

Now, look at Islam. The Qu’ran actually says that a Muslim is to adopt the laws and customs of the place in which they live. Every Muslim I’ve ever known in the US has done this. Some of the women choose to wear a hijab, which is not required by the Qu’ran, though it is encouraged as a degree of decency. All of them follow the law as closely as any non-Muslim. They seem to approach Islam as thematically and generally as most Christians do with their religion. So why is it that we find Muslims in other parts of the world killing liquor store owners and subjugating women? Why to so many openly advocate for killing someone who strays from the religion? I bring you back to the issue of taking one’s religion literally. The Middle East as a whole has been highly isolated for most of human history, mainly because of the barren, desertous geography. It has not experienced the social changes in real time with the rest of the world. Basically, much of the Middle East still exists in the middle ages, in a time when women were second to men and stoning a person to death was common. Much of their religious book took on the culture of seventh century Arabia, and even now in the twenty-first century, much of these areas still bear those cultural standards. Men still hold control over the status quo, and so do Muslims. Outside influences are shunned. When terrible things happen in the name of Islam, it isn’t because the religion is evil. The religion contains broad themes of helping the impoverished and even the exaltation of women as largely equal to men. But the places where Islam is dominant often bear an ethnic (not religious) culture where women are mistreated, non-Muslims are hated, and extremist groups come to be. This is a result of isolation and literal interpretation of the religion. It stands in resistance of changes in human rights and progressive thinking.

Islam is not more the perpetrator behind atrocities and terrorism than Christianity is the culprit behind hate crimes against gays. Either the religion is misunderstood, perverted, altered by cultural standards, or people are outright using the religion to justify their hateful intentions and actions. It isn't fair to demonize an entire religion, especially when all other religions have had hateful fundamentalists, themselves. And it isn't fair to single out Muslims for their faith and force them to take responsibility for the wrongs of others. 

A Dangerous Game We're Playing

Thousands roar in support and allegiance as they gaze up and across the crowded space at a spectacle of a stage at the head of the venue. It is a shrine of flags and symbols of propaganda. The audience chants and venerates the speaker at the podium as he addresses them with furious pride and smug rhetoric. He tells them their country will be great again. He tells them they will again be dominant. And to do this, society must be pure. It must be pure of those who would undermine its fabric with their lifestyle—a lifestyle so foreign to the values or the rest of the population that it should be done away with. Those people should be blocked. Their culture should be snuffed out. They are not to be trusted. They should be feared. They are less than us. I could easily be describing an old news reel from the late 1930s—one in German. But no, I’m describing a presidential candidate’s rally. And the political leader? Donald J. Trump.

Donald Trump has come out and full-on supported the notion that our country should block entry of all Muslims into the United States. For the record, I’m not opposed to tightening our borders out of caution, given that recent weeks have seen the execution of terrorist attacks outside of troubled Middle Eastern countries. We should scrutinize those applying for visas or attempting to enter the nation, particularly if they have recently visited ISIS or al-Qaeda-controlled areas of the globe. But barring all people based on a cultural common denominator is something we’ve worked against in the United States in the last several decades. Seventy-odd years ago, we were interning Japanese Americans in camps based on their heritage, and now we commonly recognize the folly in that kind of xenophobia. Fifty years ago, civil rights activists were staging sit-ins at restaurants that wouldn’t serve African Americans. We now see this practice as “un-American”. Or is it? Perhaps that’s perfectly American. Because while we can say, “sure, that’s an awful thing to refuse service to someone based on skin color”, aren’t we recently seeing people do this on the basis of sexual orientation? We have always been prone to discriminate against the minority. We have a very long history of assimilating out the cultural particulars of groups outside of the dominant norms. We make you speak English when you’re in our presence and tell us “Merry Christmas”, though you are a Jew.

So when Trump advocates the barring of everyone who practices a certain religion or when other elected officials publically suggest internment camps for Muslim Americans, it shouldn’t surprise us. That’s what Americans have always done. Just ask the Native Americans. But it is also an echo of a darker time in history when another leader and another society began a dangerous rhetoric about a religious group that they too had a problem with. Germany was already highly anti-Semitic by the rise of the Third Reich. Such anti-Semitism had its roots into the previous century. By the time Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, he didn’t have to push much. Within a few years, strong public mistrust and opinion about Jews had turned to extreme discrimination that eventually saw Jews rounded up into ghettos and then on to camps. There, millions would be systematically exterminated. Am I saying that Trump, as a president, would ever round up Muslims and execute them in death camps? Not even close. This, I would hope, would never happen in today’s America. My point is that we are playing a dangerous game in terms of our legacy and especially for the Muslim Americans who work and live among us. One only needs to look to social media to see the hate and prejudice cultivating in certain US social circles. Memes and hateful overgeneralization feed that bias, and every time two radicalized Muslims carry out an act of violence, it confirms the existing view that none of them should be trusted. Like Nazi Germany, that prejudice exists. And all they needed was a leader to push forward that public opinion. And that’s all we need for Americans to take that next step into discrimination against Muslim Americans. All we need is that charismatic leader and his words that inflame. Let us instead reject the sins of our past in favor of a new America. Come on, folks. We’re smarter than this, right?

Terrorism is Terrorism

I’ll paint the scene as I imagine it. It’s a public place—maybe a mall or a restaurant. People are enjoying each other and living their lives. Not one of them left home expecting it would be the last time they saw it. As they are carrying out their business, a masked man walks in with an AR-15 type weapon (Colt holds the official trademark of that name). He has several clips at his disposal, each with a capacity of about thirty rounds. He can unleash these as quickly as his finger can pull the trigger. He also has a handgun he carries at his side. He opens fire and fills the air with bullets as if it were some aroma that diffuses about the room. There is no escape. People try to hide or run, but who can outrun a bullet? In the end, dozens lose their lives or are severely injured. By the time the police arrive and eventually kill the perpetrator, the news has broken via social media and the local news crews. Panic spreads in the community as people fear that their loved ones may have been there and may be dead. As it graces the headlines at CNN, the country learns of yet another massacre in a US public place, and they mourn. Maybe they fume with anger. And everyone awaits for the identity of this horrible person. He has yet to be unmasked. No one knows his face. No one knows his origin. How do you categorize him?

That’s an important question. Without knowing anything about this person, we all agree that he has committed a senseless act of violence. He took dozens of innocent lives—took mothers away from children and sons away from fathers. But an interesting thing will happen once this man is unmasked. The police will approach, finally assured that he is dead and poses no further threat. They will pull the mask from his face and once his identity is revealed, a new label will be attached. If he is a white man, likely Christian, he will be touted as a mass murderer. Maybe a disturbed or disgruntled citizen with mental health problems. He is a US citizen with no previous indication of violent tendencies, though neighbors thought he was quiet and perhaps a little “off”. If it turns out the shooter is Hispanic, rumors begin to spread that he was a cartel member in the country illegally. But what if the shooter is an Arab? He has tan skin and a name like Ahmed or Fareed. Maybe he is a radicalized Muslim, maybe not. Either way, he now receives the label, “terrorist”. My question is this:  why did only the Muslim get that label?

Think about it. With a mask, we knew nothing about this person. We just all agreed that what he did was horrible. We would want answers. We would want justice. We would want our leaders to try to find a way to prevent things like this from happening ever again. But once we know his level of skin pigmentation and his name, we start to think differently about him. If he’s a white Christian, he actually falls in with most mass murderers America has ever had. And it seems that we’re so used to it that it almost comes off as business as usual. We mourn as a country for about five minutes, a handful of people whine about their guns, we tune in to Dancing With the Stars, and wait for the next massacre. But when we unmask a Muslim American who was no more on the radar as a homicidal asshole as the white guy, he’s a terrorist and we have to take action NOW! Facebook fills with hate memes and Fox News-inspired rants about Americans getting their heads out of the sand. People rail against liberal “apologists” and call for the country to do something about the “Muslim threat”. All of a sudden, it’s a priority. Trump even starts talking about deporting all of the Muslims as other lawmakers suggest rounding them up into camps like Japanese Americans circa 1942. Somehow a Muslim extremist killing a dozen people is far worse than and Anglo-American doing the same. And while I can appreciate the fact that the radicalization of Muslims in America is a problem, and stands to threatens lives, this has happened, comparatively, only a handful of times. Most of our mass murders are carried about by white people, yet we don’t call it what it is.

And that is what I’m proposing. Do we have to reserve the “terrorist” label for Ahmed? Or can we call senseless murder and violence for the purpose of striking fear into the hearts of the public the same thing, regardless of who does it? Terrorism is terrorism. Violence is violence. Let’s put a stop to all of it.

Hate ISIS, not Islam

It’s easy to be angry in the aftermath of such a senseless attack on humanity. A handful of extremists perpetrated the wholesale slaughter of so many innocent people. That should make you angry. But who, specifically, are you angry with? Is it possible that emotion overtakes you and as it spills over, you have to find a place and direction for those feelings? Maybe. But the seeds have long been planted. For most of us, it was 9/11. If you’re a bit older, perhaps it started with Beirut in 1983 or with the Iran hostage crisis. Could we even place the beginnings of western views and mistrust with Islam as far back as the Ottomans or the Crusades? Sure. But I want to make an argument for Islam and how it might not have as much to do with ISIS or the attacks in Paris as one may think.

First, let me say that I have known many Muslim Americans at this point. Most of them were students. I’ve known some of their parents. I’ve known others more casually through work or acquaintance. And if I’m being honest, other than the fact that their faith comprises a tiny minority of the overall American aggregate, all of them were quite like anyone else. But Americans unfortunately have a different mental image of Muslims. When most of our citizens conjure images of Muslims, we think of people within a Middle Eastern setting. We think of dust and hollowed-out buildings. We think of a city-wide call to prayer from the nearest mosque and men selling fruits in the market. We think of veiled women herding around their children with their heads hung in subjugation. This might not totally be incorrect in a lot of places in the Middle East. But it’s also not totally accurate. It all depends on where we’re talking about. Yet, we default to the description I just gave because that’s how we always see it in the movies or in TV shows. And those shows are almost always about bad-ass US troops kicking some jihadist ass. Right off the bat, Americans are force-fed a set of images that further push the common, average Muslim into a category that is somehow lesser than ourselves. That they all come from backwardness where evil always seems to loom around the corner. This is despite the fact that your neighbor or coworker who is Muslim isn’t anything close to that. They just go to work, provide for their families, go to school, and live their lives like anyone else. And yet you lump them in with terrorists.

There is a distinct difference between the American Muslim and perhaps the Muslim who lives in somewhere like Yemen or Saudi Arabia. While some of this has to do with religion, I think the think we often overlook is the influence of culture. Western culture is overwhelmingly Christian. If you really want to compare the holy books of Christians and Muslims, you’re going to get a lot of similarities. They come from the same basic region and over the span of history, aren’t really separated by much time. They each reflect popular culture of ancient times, along with punishments for breaking social norms. You can find that stoning someone to death is okay according to both the Qu’ran and the Bible. But we don’t stone people in the west. We have disregarded that ideology while clinging to the more positive core beliefs of our religions. Of course, I’m mostly talking about Christianity. But if you look closely, you’ll find this also in most Muslim Americans. I especially see it among my students who were born here. A lot of the girls aren’t even required to wear the hijab (head scarf) by their parents and are allowed to go to school where they congregate with boys. Their parents know that this is the cultural standard here. In this, American culture has shaped the practice of their religion without diluting the positive aspects of it. I’ve never had a student have to step out of class to pray in the middle of the day. They do it when they get home. Again, our culture shapes the way they practice. We have to understand that the Middle East is different. They have had very limited exposure to western culture before a few decades ago, and it’s largely limited even today. Slowly, western standards have seeped in, and this is part of why groups like al-Qaeda have a problem with Westerners. But even within the Middle East, you’ll find different cultural standards that regard women, marriage, etc., depending on what country or what region you visit. The fact that Jordanian women have far more freedoms than Saudi women tells me that this isn’t so much about Islam as it is about cultural standards.

You see, every religion in the world has, at some point in time, been used to control others. Slavery in the southern US was a cultural and economic standard. Yet, to justify the obvious evil in owning another human being, many southern Christians turned to the Bible. They twisted and contorted what the scripture actually said to fit their needs, justify their actions, and keep their slaves subservient. Spanish Catholics during the Renaissance were intolerant of Jews. The justification for torturing or expelling them was religion. Medieval Christians wanted to regain control over the Palestine. Religion became the excuse and catalyst to attack in that region. People go to war to control a territory and its resources. They go to war for selfish reasons. They just need an excuse.

And this brings us to ISIS. Leadership in ISIS wants to consolidate all Muslims in the world under one caliphate. This isn’t dissimilar from Nazi ideology in consolidating all Germanic territories and people. They want to establish an “Islamic State”. This is political in nature. Islam ends up being an excuse to do so and a method of recruitment. Reports from people who have defected or escaped from ISIS overwhelmingly testify that ISIS leadership is highly hypocritical. They don’t at all practice what they preach. They are bent on domination and territorial gain. But they recruit on a basis of jihadism. They prey upon a young, impressionable Muslim man—one who may have lost family in a drone strike; who may be upset with Americans. And all the recruiter has to tell that kid is that this is the kind of attack on his faith and way of life that the Qu’ran speaks of, and that it’s his duty to defend it (even though most Muslims know better than this). And just like that, you have a radicalized ISIS fighter. What you’re left with is an ISIS leadership with a political goal and a fighting force who believe they are fighting a holy war. Sounds a lot like the Crusdades, actually. You want to take over a territory, and all the Pope has to do is tell the peasants that they can go directly to Heaven if they die for God, and you have a religiously-charged army fighting for a self-serving political entity.

But in the end, it has little to do with Islam. Islam isn’t the problem. Islam is the excuse. It’s a manipulation tool. People can be bad. Be upset with the people. Be upset with ISIS. Be upset with terrorists and their tactics. But this does not provide free license to hate everyone who practices the religion. That’s wrong. And do not tolerate it.