Andrew Gerst's Aug. 30, 2006 editorial, "Where are the moderate Muslims?", recycles clichés and myths about the Muslim responses to the atrocities of 9/11. Gerst accuses Muslim moderates of deafening silence as "Islamic clerics, leaders and 'activists' are openly fostering sectarian Shiite-Sunni violence."
Deafening? Muslim silence? Who has Mr. Gerst been listening, or more accurately, not listening to? Muslim communities are engaged in vigorous, self-critical debates about gender, violence, pluralism and exclusivism. What is deafening is not Muslim silence but the refusal of those who purport to speak out of concern for Muslims to listen to the debates and cries of justice in the Muslim community.
On the alleged silence of Muslim moderates, I direct readers to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Charles Kurzman's website about how leading Muslim intellectuals and religious leaders around the world responded to the atrocities of 9/11, http://www.unc.edu/%7Ekurzman/terror.htm.
The website features statements of religious leaders from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iran and of international organizations including Muslim Brotherhood, League of Arab States, Organization of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. In the United States, the terror acts were quickly condemned by the Muslim American Society, Islamic Circle of North America, Council on American Islamic Relations, Muslim Student Association and Islamic Association for Palestine.
Click for related content: Where are the moderate Muslims?
In July 2005, CAIR issued a religious decree (Fatwa) that refuted terrorism by referencing the Qur'an and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. Signed by 344 Muslim Organizations in North America (see http://www.cair-net.org/FatwaJuly2005.pdf).
I could go on, but surely this suffices to refute charges of silence.
What's really driving Gerst's argument? The most cursory of Google searches would have pointed Mr. Gerst to the above information. In parroting the superficial voices of pundits like Tom Friedman, Gerst's opinions are driven by two issues:
1) He equates being a "moderate Muslim" with approving of U.S. foreign policy. The response of the overwhelming majority of American Muslims has been clear: they, like the majority of Americans, reject and condemn the terror of 9/11. Also like the majority of Americans, American Muslims have come to resist the current U.S. administration's triumphalist, militaristic and arrogant actions in the Middle East that have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and thousands of American soldiers and engendered unprecedented hostility toward the United States. If being a "moderate" Muslim means approving whatever disaster the Bush administration has undertaken in Iraq, one-sided support for Israel, neglect of human rights in favor of forming alliances with oil-rich states and support for autocratic Arab regimes, then most Muslims are happy to do without that label.
2) Israel. Make no mistake about it, Gerst's position, like Friedman's, is less about Muslims than about Israel. Gerst's diatribe, complete with a clichéd conclusion linking contemporary Muslims and the Holocaust, is about acquiescence in the face of atrocities of the Israeli regime. In the current Israel-Hezbollah war, Israeli bombing of civilian areas killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, causing over $2 billion worth of damage to the infrastructure of Lebanon. The issue is not whether Muslims want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth; the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not, and that point has been made repeatedly by Muslim states. What Muslims want is a state in which Jews and Arabs have access to equal rights and equal privileges as citizens of a state. Many Americans object to policies of self-styled "Islamic nations" like Iran and Saudi Arabia that offer greater rights to Muslim citizens than to non-Muslims. Why should our response to Israel's policies that grant greater rights to Jewish citizens than to non-Jews be any different?
Today, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live miserable lives deprived of dignity and human rights, without full access to liberty, ownership or education. That is the issue. If being a "moderate Muslim" means signing off on every Israeli atrocity against Palestinians or Lebanese, even those of us who struggle and work for peace and pluralism will gladly do without the label.
The challenge for Muslims is this: how do we create a world where every human life-Muslim and non-Muslim, rich or poor, American and non-American, civilian and military, male and female-is treated with God-given dignity? To those who are working to make that world a reality, we join our Arab friends in saying: ahlan wa sahlan: welcome in, be at home, and let's get to work. To others, may God lead you to beautiful places, but spare us your clichés of Muslim silence in face of terror and the label "moderate."
May God enable those who around the world who long for peace rooted in justice to find one another and work together heal this fractured planet. Amin. Amen.
Omid Safi holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke. He is an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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