http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=101678&d=25&m=9&y=2007&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Tuesday, 25, September, 2007 (13, Ramadhan, 1428)
Why Are We Muslims So Self-Destructive?
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent
At an iftar (breaking of fast) gathering last week, Rahim, a handsome
young Muslim doctor and I chatted about this and that, and the end of our
world: "Do you think refined and educated Muslims will survive this century? Or
will we become extinct? I feel I don't know who I am any more. My parents, too,
say the same. Barbaric Muslims are stronger than us, more stupid and ignorant,
but stronger, you know."
You hear these outpourings of grief and hopelessness a lot these days.
Ignorance is not bliss, it is oblivion, wrote the American novelist Philip
Wylie. Ill-educated, volatile, easily led, despised by millions, Muslims the
world over are falling into that void - into oblivion. Some are and will be
annihilated by external foes and enemies within, including the demon
cheerleaders inside the heads of suicide bombers, but many more will be
consumed by their own terror of the modern world.
Look today at India and Pakistan, neighbors, twin nations with identical
histories and values. While the former is poised to challenge the economic and
cultural power of the West, the latter is imploding and joins the ever-growing
club of failed Muslim states. India has shameful problems - extreme poverty,
corruption, greed, the caste system, Islamophobia and misogynist cultural
practices - but, unlike Pakistan, it also has a free press and democracy, and
its population understands the importance of education and enlightenment.
Come to our isles and the same stark contrast emerges. British Asians of
Indian background (including Muslims from India) are top of the league tables
in schools, universities, business and the professions. They are mentally
agile, inquisitive, and encouraged to strive by their families. With some
individual exceptions, British Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds
languish at the bottom of all indicator tables. It is heartbreaking.
Some of this failure to catch up is to do with discrimination, no doubt
about that. Some, though, is the result of self-limitation. In the past decade,
there has been a sharp increase in British Muslims entering higher and further
education, but even this good news has a depressing undertow. In nearly all
universities in this country, including the elite establishments, there are
cells of well-organized Muslim obscurantists who entice or bully fellow Muslim
scholars seeking to liberate their minds.
They write to me, bright and ambitious students who feel spied on,
coerced, hounded and tormented because they do not wear a hijab, or are seen
meeting diverse mates in the student union bars, or choose "haram" subjects
such as creative writing, art, drama or even European languages. One young
Muslim woman at the LSE actually had a novel snatched from her hand, and says
she was then held and harangued by her hijabi assailant who left a bruise on
her arm. I pity both. What makes a university undergraduate this appallingly
afraid of fiction? Who got into her head to distort it so?
It wasn't always thus. The fanatics who want to take us into their
version of the holy past don't know and don't care about inconvenient truths.
Allah commands us to seek knowledge and intellectual engagement. The best of
past Muslim civilizations nurtured inquiry, debate, love, desire, words, music,
dance, art, philosophy, science and beauty. The effusive Michael Wood's BBC
program on the Mogul Emperor Akbar last week was a wonderful reminder of that
enlightened period of our history. Today, creative, imaginative, dissenting and
innovative Muslims have to wear virtual body armor, hunker down, just in case
someone decides to get offended (and someone always does), inciting an uproar
on the web, on the media, on the streets bringing out the mobs in Pakistan,
Egypt, Syria, South Africa, Somalia and on and on. Inevitably some die for a
cause they never really understood and the restless army of discontents
shuffles off until the next noisy and bloody march.
I know of talented painters and poets in Pakistan who have just given up
or fled. Arab artists, activists and thinkers unafraid of the truth are in
actual prisons or enclosed behind limitations built by their fearful societies.
Explosive episodes are always gathering round the corner. We witnessed
the organized outrage over the Channel 4 programs exposing some of the vile
imams still controlling some mosques. The film of Khaled Hosseini's novel The
Kite Runner, about a young boy in Afghanistan, is causing much anger. One of
the pivotal scenes involves a homosexual rape of a Shiite boy. They won't have
that, it is a slur, an insult. Muslims don't do such things. The same protests
met Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, in which a young Bangladeshi wife in Tower
Hamlets has an affair. Muslims don't do such things etc, etc. Of course there
is no rape and adultery in our countries, those are bad "Western" behaviors.
The controversy will be reheated when the film of Brick Lane is released in a
few weeks.
Now, I didn't rate the book much; the film, which I have been sent
pre-release, actually moved me more. The more voluble East End Bangladeshis are
not bothered about considered judgments of literary or critical merit. They
will cry foul because the story taints their honor and culture, it reflects
back to them what they would rather not see.
When cultures get this coarse, they can only give rise to the worst, most
unaccountable and violent leaders. This is what we see all through the Muslim
world. In good societies, people build up sense and sensibilities, acquire
communication skills, learn intelligent engagement with written and spoken
words and with diverse views, open their minds to new ideas and images. And the
formally uneducated are as capable of this expansiveness as those with degrees.
The poorest Londoners loved Dickens, and he changed the way they imagined
their lives; peasants were drawn to Gandhi because he helped them break out of
mental bondage.
These men brought political and personal awakening to the rough and
wretched, and enabled them to understand subtleties and nuances and what it is
to be human. Britain and India have strong democracies because their
populations have been acculturated and sensitized over centuries. In Muslim
states and communities, you find the people fast becoming deculturalized and
desensitized; shutting down and withdrawing into paranoia.
I write this not to encourage Islamophobes, but because I care. Ramadan
is a time for sober reflection. It should bring peace, but doesn't. Many of us
tremble with trepidation at the bleak future ahead. The savages are taking over
and, as Rahim says, they are stronger and will drag all the faithful down into
the pits of hell.
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