Ijtihad versus Jihad: Thoughts on the proposed building of a mosque near Ground Zero

Let me be clear from the off-set, this is an outsider’s article. I am not a Muslim, nor even a particularly religious person. Consequently, this is an article by someone on the outside looking in and making observations. Nevertheless, I do consider myself to be a somewhat informed outsider. I have read extensively on this issue: from journalistic dispatches and essays to critical analysis of the Qur’an to a biography on the Prophet Mohammed. I have travelled in the Muslim world. I have beheld the austere beauty of the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca and have been overwhelmed by the spirit and mystique of the holy city of Moullay Idriss. I hold as one of my dearest principles that we are all human first, before we are Muslim or Christian, homosexual or straight, black or white, etc. I shall try to be as informed and balanced as possible in the following, but am especially open to comments on the issue from Muslims as they provide a perspective I cannot.

The proposed building of a mosque three blocks from the 9/11 site has opened a firestorm of debate. While listening to CBC radio one morning, I heard the voices of some of the protestors against the building. They were the usual ineloquent, hateful and paranoid comments of racists: “They’re [the Muslims] taking over”; “Obama is probably a Muslim”; et cetera ad nauseum. Unfortunately, according to Sheema Khan, one of the guests on that broadcast, the voices of a group of 9/11 firefighters had not been included in the sound bite. They were apparently eloquent and stated that while they respected religious freedoms they believed the building of a mosque to be “too confrontational”. The very fact that there was a protest highlights a disturbing fact: many blame Muslims as a whole for the 9/11 attacks instead of Al-Qaeda terrorists.

The landscape of Islam is as varied as the landscape of most major religions. A Shia man in Tehran may, and most probably will, have a completely different worldview from a Sunni in New York, just as a Baptist Christian in the American South will differ greatly from an Orthodox Christian in Ethiopia or a Druze in Syria. To make Islam and Muslims monolithic and thereby assign blame is like blaming all Christians for the Waco standoff or the abuses of Catholic priests in residential schools. It doesn’t make sense and it shows nothing but ignorance. This is exactly why a mosque should be built near the 9/11 site.

There is of course a more basic argument to be made. It was highlighted by Barak Obama while speaking to a group of young Muslims at the Whitehouse. He stated that the right to build places of worship was part of the American spirit and law. Put simply: it’s not only legal but in keeping with American tradition.

There is a deeper issue that is coming to the forefront as well: the war within Islam. There can be no denying that horrible crimes against humanity have been carried out in the name of Islam. From the 9/11 attacks, to the mutilations and murders of the Taliban, to the repression of women and minorities by Wahabist sect Muslims – the list goes on. Islam, of course, is not alone in this. Most of the world’s religions have been cited as justification for horrible acts all around the world. The vast majority of Muslims oppose these acts and see them as a violation of the true spirit of Islam: a spirit of tolerance and peace.

There is a large and active movement of Islamic reformists who believe that the religion has been, in the words of Sheema Khan, “hijacked by radical Islam”. These reformists face severe dangers in their work from extremists within their own community. Radical Islam and its followers - be they the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt or Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere - believe in overturning secular states where Islam is the dominant religion (e.g. Egypt) and the re-establishment of the Caliphate as an Islamic super state stretching from Morocco to Indonesia that is ruled under Sharia law. The problem is, as Canadian social commentator Gwynne Dyer points out, the Muslim middle-class in these secular states don’t want this and the revolution is failing.

Some thought should be given to why the extremists have gained popularity at all. Many of these secular states are very repressive and very poor. Political repression and economic disenfranchisement leads to resistance. The extremists offer a different path that ends in Paradise and for many it’s a choice they are willing to make. If there’s one point to be made about the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, it’s that they’re genuine. They do believe that God is on their side and they do believe that Jihad, or Holy War, is the one and true path for followers of the faith. What’s remarkable about the extremists is how limited their knowledge of Islam and the Qur’an really is. Like religious extremists of all backgrounds, they read what they want to read and interpret it as they see fit. They believe their holy justification is a command not open to interpretation when their very outlook is based on flawed interpretation.

Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has started ‘Project Ijtihad’. ‘Ijtihad’ is Islam’s own tradition of debate and dissent. Her work highlights human rights abuses in the name of God. In her writing she cites periods of Islamic history in which religious tolerance was the norm as was respect for women. Her goal is to re-open the shut door and breed debate and the possibility of different interpretation and dissent without the threat of a Fatwa hanging over anyone’s head. Support for her movement is growing.

It is time for America to see the true face of Islam – not just the slanted view from the media (most notably Fox news). There is a streak of Islamophobia a mile wide in the United States that can only be fought with exposure and integration. This will be a difficult task fraught with dangers. Sheema Khan actually opposes the building of the mosque as too confrontational and disrespecting of New Yorkers. Without a doubt, there are many raw nerves surrounding the attacks. She made the very valid point that when she asked the mosque builders where their funding was coming from they dodged the question.

If the New York mosque is a closed space of radical preaching it will be a disaster and an insult to every American. If it is an open space, such as the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca, there is the possibility that minds may change. Mainstream Islam can begin to reclaim their faith from the extremists and people of other faiths can see that their beliefs and those of Muslims are really just different sides of the same coin: belief in and active worship of God. So let the mosque be built, but make it a space not just of worship, but of education and true Ijtihad. It stands the chance of being an American version of the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission. Perhaps, with its building, the deep and terrible wounds that were inflicted that September day 9 years ago can begin to heal. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but I am hopeful.

Affecting Change: Fighting the institutions of innequality

Historically, the most popular party in the United States was not the Republicans or the Democrats. In the early years of the 20th Century, the Socialist Party raised astounding grass-roots support countrywide on a policy of addressing social, economic, and political inequalities. They mobilized the poor farmers in the countryside and the industrial workers in cities on a scale never seen before and presented a major threat to the established political elite. They opposed American involvement in World War I and this sealed their fate. The government used new anti-sedition laws to imprison the leadership of the party, dissolve its structure, and essentially erase the party from history. They used a propaganda campaign to whip up fear of a communist revolution on American soil and the Socialist party lost widespread support. Nonetheless, their legacy lives to this day in the form of the major trade unions that were established with their hard work and strife. Large-scale, institutional change was achieved – at a great cost.

Today, in the West, the forces concerned with facing and affecting national and global inequalities have been relegated to the outside. Every time the leaders of the economic status quo meet to establish policy there is widespread grass-roots opposition – in the streets. Since the famed ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, the anti-globalization movement has grown and maintained its presence at these gatherings. They are a force to be reckoned with judging by sheer numbers but have yet to affect top-level institutional change. The story always ends the same way – with anarchist groups causing damage and riot police violently dispersing thousands of individuals and movements that are presented to the public as dangerous radicals.

The question facing the Left is clear – how to become a united force capable of changing government policy instead of simply a fractured force capable of drawing attention to the inequalities of current policies. The movement is trapped on the outside looking in. In spite of over 10 years of fervent activism, the protestors are just that: protestors. This is not to discount progress that has been made. The World Social Forum is a clear example of successful organization to bring together countless social movements to provide an alternative to the status quo of the World Economic Forum. However, the WSF remains locked out by the Western media and relatively unknown to the general public. Effectively they are screaming in the dark. The Left is facing a brick wall: a right-wing behemoth establishment supported and self-justified by corporate media. The Western institutions have money to build a media structure that can simply exclude the Left from coverage. Without exposure to the general public, the Leftist alternative is invisible. The public see no alternative other than what is presented to them in print and on television and come to believe that they have no choices beyond what is shown to them. Apathy and despair turn to anger and scape-goating begins. The conservative movement relies and thrives on anger and fear and never fail to present a list of enemies on which the socioeconomic problems of the common individual can be blamed. Lose your job to outsourcing? Blame immigrants, homosexuals, a Zionist conspiracy, the United Nations, minorities, whoever, it doesn’t have to conform to reason. Just don’t blame those in power. It’s easier to hate the Other and blame him for your problems than investigate the root causes of the issue. The problem is huge and seemingly intractable.

Take a concrete goal of the anti-globalization movement: the overturning of the Washington Consensus. This consensus, born out of the 1980s of Reaganism and Thatcherism, holds that the pillars of privatization, market deregulation, and fiscal austerity should be enforced on developing countries through the loan-lending auspices of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Developing countries are forced to open their markets to cheap Western imports that undermine their home-grown businesses while the West maintains trade barriers to prevent imports from these countries thus protecting their domestic industry. The consensus has lead to record profits of the formation of multinational corporations whose profits dwarf the GDPs of these countries. It has also led to social unrest, corruption, and widespread poverty throughout the developing World. It is institutionally enforced inequality.

Anti-globalization protestors can draw attention to these inequalities and organize to create grass-roots alternatives (such as ‘Fair Trade’) but can they affect large-scale institutional change? The proponents of the Washington consensus have their economic well-being at stake and endless resources to combat resistance and quash alternatives (such as media blackouts of such alternatives). They have everything to lose and will not go without a fight.

The answer may not lie in the West at all. Explosive economic growth in other regions of the world has brought the fight right to the West’s front door. After nearly 30 years of suffering under the Washington consensus, other countries have organized their domestic markets to compete with the West instead of being enslaved to them. China, India, Brazil and others have shown that regulation, smart investment, and financial saving have lead to economic prosperity. American-based multinationals are now having to compete with pressure from new multinationals based out of the Third World. These countries have organized into powerful trading blocs that are organizing relations with each other instead of with the West. China established trade links with Mercosur (a trade federation including Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uraguay), replacing the Americans – who had been their previous trading partner. China also established major links in Africa and came to an agreement with the powerful economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). India, while exploding in growth, is establishing links with the subcontinent and members of ASEAN. Instead of enjoying total, hegemonic control of trade relations and rules, American multinationals are being forced to compete to survive.

Some of these trading blocs, having suffered previously under the control of the IMF, understand the importance of protecting their workers and their workers’ well-beings. Nowhere is this more true than in the miraculous shift to the Left in Latin America. When Evo Morales, a relatively uneducated, indigenous, cocoa farmer was elected in Bolivia he began sweeping changes in a country overrun with corruption and elitism. Hugo Chavez, though becoming more and more dictatorial in his ruling, has done a great amount for the poor in Venezuela. Lula da Silva’s, of the Worker’s Party, was elected in Brazil, and brought fighting social inequality to the forefront. What is even more impressive is that the people and governments of South America have sent a clear message to the US that they will no longer tolerate interventionism on their part. When American-backed right-wing groups began social unrest in Bolivia, Chavez and da Silva sent a clear message to Washington. When Chavez was ousted in a military coup, the people of Venezuela took to the streets demanding he be reinstated. The coup failed. Now there is talk amongst the leaders of a completely unified South America on economic and trade issues and Lula da Silva has proposed a trans-South American worker’s union.

Morales, Chavez, and da Silva organized grassroots support for their elections and have overturned institutional inequality and initiated a future less dark for the poor, disposessed, and disenfranchised of their nations. The question remains in the West, can we do the same? We may be aided by the fact that the economic shift in which US hegemony has been replaced with competing trade blocs will force compromise and a new consensus that is more representative of social concerns instead of just economic ones; one that reflects the needs of the citizens of the World instead of just the shareholders of American multinationals. This change from the outside, with the slant of corporate right-wing media, will be met with fear and hostility on many fronts. The anti-globalization movement and the Left in general are presented with the question of how to deal with this backlash. At the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit one of the main issues of debate was the establishment or larger educational and lobbying groups that could serve to liaise with the institutions of Western power instead of simply protesting them.

Big changes are coming whether we like it or not. The Third-World power solution has great potential for good but also for corruption and the suspension of human rights in favor of economic cooperation. As we speak, India, Thailand and others are buying huge interest in Burmese oil, bolstering the brutal regime there. Perhaps the challenge for the left can be read in the slogan for the USSF: “Another World is Possible, Another US is necessary”. We have to offer hope and viable alternatives that will keep food on people’s tables in the face of institutions that offer fear and scape-goating. It’s not an easy task but it is essential. The psyche of the West needs to change before its institutions will. It is perhaps changing the psyche and worldviews of the average citizens that the social justice movement will affect large-scale institutional change.

Strange Bedfellows - Thoughts on the G20 Summit and the Anti-Globalisation movement

Extremists at opposite poles need each other much more than apparent animosity would indicate. Hezbollah needs the apartheid laws and bombings of the right wingers in the Israeli parliament to justify their attacks just as the parliament needs the rocket attacks to justify their policies and bombings. Islamic terrorists need the zeal of Christian fundamentalists and vice versa. And as much as they would hate to admit it, the violent anarchist minority (such as the Black Bloc) that show up at World trade meetings to smash windows and burn cars desperately rely on the exclusionist policies of the economic status quo.

In a world described in images and thirty-second sound bites it is the phenomenon of the spectacle that decides global public opinion. A recent cover of Maclean’s magazine shows a picture of a burning police car with a Black Bloc activist jumping in front; the headline – “Lock them up”. The anti-globalization movement is losing the battle of the spectacle, and thus global public opinion, thanks to the mindless violence of a tiny minority in their ranks. When people look back at the G20 meeting in Toronto, they won’t remember the policies decided upon by the World leaders, or the alternatives and valid arguments presented by the protestors – they’ll remember that burning police car.

Make no mistake, during the summit there was limited coverage of police violence against peaceful protestors. Brief shots of citizens being tasered, beaten, and tear-gassed were shown on the airwaves. However, two factors rendered these images moot. For one, the mainstream populace is always more accepting of ordered institutional violence than its chaotic, anarchistic opponent. People want to see the police maintaining order by whatever means necessary rather than balaclava-wearing goons smashing clothing stores, banks, and whatever they take to be their enemies. Secondly, the images of police violence played side-by-side with images of the Black Bloc. By visual association the protestors are found guilty. The media companies thrive on spectacle – it’s their bread and butter. Add to this the fact that the companies are owned by large corporations with vested interests in the global meetings. A media bias is at work. Need proof? Every year there is coverage of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the big economic players decided the rules for the next year. Every year there is no media coverage of the World Social Forum, where activist groups meet and propose alternatives.

In my opinion, the cause of the anti-globalisation movement is just. The very name of the movement affects their cause. It suggests that they oppose inevitable global economic trade. This makes them appear irrational in their goals. Many members have adopted the ‘Global Social Justice Movement’ in replacement, but it hasn’t caught on – even with the activists themselves. The aims of the movement are clear – these economic meetings are completely exclusionary. They exclude representatives from the poorer nations on whose backs they ride; workers’ movements; indigenous movements; environmental movements; women’s’ movements; and a host of others. The summits decided the economic destiny and livelihoods of millions without asking for the opinions, or, God forbid, the participation of representatives of these millions. The protestors are there to make a stand and demand that their voices are heard. If the destinies of millions are being decided by a few, the voices of resistance will be heard.

The problem is, they aren’t heard. The movement is denied access to mainstream media and we are left with a violent spectacle. The movement is presumed irrational and public opinion turns against them. The movement relies of guerilla media, the internet, and hot-spots of liberalism like university campuses, to communicate. It gets the word out surprisingly effectively to a few, but still keeps them marginalized to the mainstream middle-class.

As Canadians, citizens of a democracy, it is not just our right but our solemn duty to question authority. The summit organizers rely on public apathy to pass their decrees and send the police out into the streets. It is our duty, each and every one of us, to see past the media slurs and the violent spectacle to get at the heart of the matter. We must investigate and leave no stone unturned in our quest for the truth of these summits. Global inequality of all kinds is perpetuated by the malice of a few and the apathy of millions. This investigation will expose us to things we don’t want to see. It is a road to psychic discomfort and perhaps the realization that we are all at fault in our accepting ignorance of World affairs. In the final say it is up to us to force real change and give a voice to the silent millions suffering under global economic policy. At the same time, it is up to the movement to make a stand against elements within their own ranks and completely disown the Black Bloc and other violent anarchistic segments. All they accomplish is the swaying of public opinion away from true socioeconomic justice and the justification of police violence. And the G20, among others, rely on them more than anyone else to help railroad their policies. We are already seeing the effects of these policies in Western nations. In the end, it’s up to us to speak – not to be spoken for.