UK Teacher Not Guilty for Naming Teddy Bear "Muhammad"

Say: "Whether ye hide what is in your hearts or reveal it, Allah knows it all: He knows what is in the heavens, and what is on earth. And Allah has power over all things." (Aal `Imran 3:29)

Guilt is a feeling of culpability for offenses. Ikhlas or purity of intention applies all over Islam, like the Golden Rule. I am referring to the case of the British teacher in Sudan who was arrested (to be prepared for forty lashings) in Sudan for naming a teddy bear 'Muhammad'. But which 'Muhammad' are we talking about? Not the Apostle, but a little boy in her class. The children, not the teacher, voted for the name. The dominant Western media is very accurate and 'objective' in reporting the errors of other parts of the world, which is not necessarily a bad thing, so we know it is true. Where do we move from here? Express outrage, yes. That's a collective obligation on the rest of the world. My purpose is to look at it from a slightly different perspective, while making clear my objection to it.

1. There has been a tendency among some Muslims to completely whitewash the sensibilities of Muslim peoples living in Asia and Africa, something I myself have been guilty of in the past. The Muslim Council of Britain is spot on when it decribes the judgment "completely injustified", but there is no attempt made to change the system that produces those judgments. Words like "ridiculous" and "unfair" flow readily from the lips of Muslims who are educated enough to know better, but they ignore the dignity of the people they are talking about. On scaling the Everest, Hillary said: "I came, I saw, I conquered." With more privileged Muslims in capitalist democracies, it's like: "I came, I saw, I spoke aloud so the crowd could hear [that would make one good Muslim] and I went home feeling smug." Shame on us.
2. Is this the first time this year that a teacher has been subjected to forty lashings? If a strong case can be made against a smokeless barrel [reminds me of the WMD], I'm sure there were plenty of rulings against Sudanese teachers before this. So let's not turn this into a debate about a "British woman". It is a ruling against an innocent lady, and it is incumbent upon the Muslim-majority state to protect her just like it must protect its own citizens.
3. The non-humanitarian, war-mongering, pro-Globalisation Western Right's response on various newspaper columns is symptomatic of a disturbing anti-Muslim war that is being waged for imperial hubris and geopolitics. They care as much about justice and life as a B52 cares about a little boy in Afghanistan before blowing him to shreds. It doesn't make sense when people who articulated the war against Iraq and demonise Muslim immigrants in Europe with fascistic fervour get pro-justice all of a sudden.
4. And the question of ikhlas or the purity of intention. Ask yourself. Most of all, this is something the Sudanese authorities should be asking themselves for imprisoning an innocent lady. Will their ego let go?

Muslim Terrorism

In their brilliant introductory book 'The Vision of Islam' that I advise everyone to read, Murata and Chittick nonetheless commit the same error of generalisation that I commented on in the previous entry by reducing wide-ranging Muslim practices to 'modernist Islam'. But what I agree with is their analysis of Muslim terrorism. I state that the phrases 'Islamic terrorism', 'Islamist terrorism' and 'Islamic rage' are all clever lingual constructions that mostly conceal the actions of the state that is engaged with them, but there indeed is a segment of Muslims that participates in ways which are both ignorant and criminal. Murata and Chittick argue that modernist Islam rejects the intellectual understanding of the tradition. I will not employ their term, because it is deficient in itself. Instead I will use Karen Armstrong's phrase "Qutbian terrorism" in its place.

One is the tremendous stress placed upon tanzih and the almost total eclipse of tashbih, at least among those who speak up vocally for Islamic values [eg. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda], especially those with political agendas. In some cases, the celebration of God's wrath and anger is used to justify methods of warfare - such as mass killing and terrorism - that are explicitly forbidden by the Shariah....Islam does have its own political teachings, but these have always remained peripheral: To place them at the cent[re] is to break with the tradition. Of course, the political ideologies of contemporary Muslim movements are seldom rooted in Islamic teachings; rather, they are reinterpretations of the [Qur']an and the [Ah]adith based on modern presuppositions concerning democracy or other "good" forms of government...[1]

I think this is a really good analysis, and it basically explains in a few words what they don't tell us. They is more than they here. Yes, it is.

Sources:

Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, The Vision of Islam (New York, USA: Paragon House, 1994), pp. 333-334.

The Cheshire Cat Syndrome

From the imprudent appraisal of bloody-minded, apathetic politicians like Blair and Bush in modelling of harmless dog breeds, we arrive at the less pleasant topic of cats. A fictional cat rather. The Cheshire Cat. For those unfamiliar, here’s a literary background.

I was tuned into the radio some weeks ago, when the programme on faith and intercultural debate began. It wasn’t a debate at all, for the moderator was a crude partisan hack. The two sides were one really; Christian and Jewish commentators upset with multiculturalism and Muslims and Islam. The woman, whose Jewish identity was frequently underlined by the moderator, didn’t stop informing the public how it was all right to be against multiculturalism. Her message was nothing short of racism, and it maligned the early Jewish immigrants, which of course led me to question whether she was one of those white drop-ins who unaware of the national Jewish history seek to demonise Muslims, playing a part in the new anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. The Christian man, who polemically sided with the woman, proclaimed his Catholic passions of the despicable era still venerated as the Crusades. I was kind of shocked as the so-called debate progressed. They said that there was no such thing as moderate Muslims and the Qur’an was preaching violence. I realised at that point that this anti-Muslim temperament was in fact mainstream. That journalism as John Pilger regards is indeed an extension of the government or priggish power. Ethics in media is an academic study, not a practical one. The programme got most insane when they glorified the totalitarian, fascist Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, comprising of Iranian communists, whose stated aim is to rid the world of Islam. At one point, the moderator even gave some air play to the rabble-rousing Islamophobe Maryam Namazie.

What did I learn from the programme? I’m not going to tout myself as a moderate or progressive Muslim for the entertainment of Islamophobes. I don’t care a fig if they charge me of radicalism and extremism for the crime of criticising this or that war-mongering, psychopathic government. If I’m combining my criticism of Uncle Sam and Thatcher-esque liberalism with that of Afghan warlords and Al Qaeda, I can go to bed in peace every night, unlike those who content themselves with the plea to make Muslims apologise for every atrocity committed by a person with a Muslim name. I call to witness the apologists of the Anglo-American empire that is responsible for massive terror campaigns against the peoples of Iraq, Palestine, Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and countries in Latin America to nominate a few.

The post-9/11 Muslim reaction to compliantly separate themselves as moderates has been gradually disavowed, thanks to the efforts of people like Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes. Their manufactured hate, easy to believe because of its simplistic comfort, has seeped into the hearts of many people looking not for an explanation but any explanation that won’t impinge on their own sense of worth in their country, religion or race. A law-abiding Muslim unspoken on his or her government policies became a moderate, but that privilege has also been erased. The claim of Robert Spencer is that it isn’t the fault of bin Laden’s but he is acting true to the spirit of Islam. This spurious falsehood has been propagated by other Islamophobes. This also implies that all Muslims are evil, a method by which Jihad Watch is spreading direct hate and propaganda against the Muslim neighbours and countrymen of Jihad Watch subscribers. A Muslim was first categorised into moderate and extremist. Rather than defining Islam as “the peaceful worship of and submission to One God”, Muslim spokesmen started the “Islam means peace” PR drive. This, too, was met with ridicule. LGF’s racist loonies facetiously refer to Islam as a religion of peace. Islam doesn’t mean “peace” per se. Salaam as in the greeting salaam alaikum means peace. Is Islam a religion of peace? Like all religions it is a religion of peace. But that’s half the truth. Islam, perhaps more importantly, means surrender to One God. This is a voluntary submission with “no compulsion”. It forms a complete realisation of an individual toward the universe and other forms of creation and the humankind, to live in peace with them, in balance. There is nothing like a moderate Muslim and an extremist Muslim. An extremist is defined in freedom movements as someone who uses force or violence if necessary. If a Muslim can be categorised as an extreme example of his faith, American and Israeli military personnel must be defined as such as well. An American soldier must be called an extremist American because he has the stars and stripes on his breast. He is fighting for a cause with violence. To selectively apply labels to a group of people is disingenuous and against basic human rights. But with the erosion of the personal identity of a Muslim, a Muslim previously upheld for his or her compliance with the state, has been assimilated into the pool of ‘Islamofascists’, portrayed as a bearded barbarian; or a veiled Oriental waiting to be rescued by her snobbish French mate who’ll leap down from a chopper, single-handedly kill the score of hooded abductors and hold her in his arms, and a patriotic yob will be flying the flag behind them.

The cat has vanished and all that’s left is the grin. Any attempt to respect the dignity of practising Muslims has been lost in categorising, collaring and finally discarding the lot of them, as part of the scheme in their collective evil.

Islam and its Discontents

What is jihad? What is the status of non-Muslims under Islamic leadership? Is Islam compatible with democracy? Is the world divided into two zones: belief and disbelief/non-belief, and if so, do Muslims have a holy mission to convert us? These are some of the serious questions that crop up in the minds of non-Muslims in the present political climate. The public is driven to form opinions based on the availability of popular discourse: that of an Al Qaeda spokesman holed up in a cave with the hottest technology or anti-Muslim commentators. There is seldom a middle ground, as reactionaries on both sides are gratified by the deception. Let me give you an example. In Islam, there is no concept of holy war. But several Muslims and non-Muslims will tell you otherwise. I was debating with an apparently sophisticated poster on a forum, and he countered by providing a link to an unheard of Muslim website that explicitly defined jihad as holy war. Fair enough. Better yet, why not establish that Islam is evil by lending your ears to some other outrageous Muslims like the merry men of the Taliban? It is not unusual, hence, to be charged by some non-Muslims “for sugar-coating Islam”, and by Muslims for being a Muslim apologist. Muhammad Asad fits the bill perfectly for earning the wrath of some Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and Bernard Lewis the fondness. Let’s think it over. There are some non-Muslim individuals who are aware that jihad doesn’t mean holy war. Nevertheless, the Muslim who tells them so is sugar-coating Islam and someone bending of knowledge and tradition is honest. A Muslim who tells you that Islam is here to conquer is a candid spokesman to the oft-discussed, however a first-rate myth, dangers of Islam, and a Muslim who tells you that Islam is a religion of submission to One God and peace is an idiot. Because, you see, conceited people…and I mean those who try to invalidate Islam by believing that Islam is evil anyhow i.e. those who make their personal belief and civilisation look superior, not by irrelative, unannounced intellectual jihad (struggle), but positioning the favourite fruits of their belief with those of the distorted teachings of another. Take up ‘race’. Since infancy, we have been fed the myths that white man is superior. This has not been achieved by science, assumed staple of the European Enlightenment, but a reductionist and colonial exposition. Indeed, even science as religion claims that all of us are equal, that the Palestinian/Iraqi victim of American/Israeli state terrorism is as worthy a victim as a New Yorker or a Tel Aviv club-hopper.

What is my point exactly? I think we have an immediate need to question the contemporary discourse of Islam both among Muslims and non-Muslims. Fourteen centuries ago, God said in His speech, the Qur’an, to come to “common terms”. This doesn’t mean twisting the verses in religious texts out of context like it is the habit of armchair bombers who are hostile to Islam, often parading as sophisticated enlightened free spirits. You might say “liberal”. And nor like an Al Qaeda terrorist who wants to kill innocents, not because he understands the message in the Qur’an, which he clearly doesn’t as mainstream Muslim scholars have affirmed in their writings, but that he believes there is no hope. Of course, this may also lead us to question words like “civilisation”, “democracy” and “liberty” which are callously tossed about by terrorists, apartheid appeasers and stooges of Western triumphalism we never read or hear about.