Comment at end
24th January, 2009
HIJACKING THE WORD “JIHAD”
Pakistan’s ‘The Nation’ reports that John Kiser, an American intellectual, says that the word ‘jihad’ has been much abused by a tiny, but spectacularly successful minority of angry Muslims, whose success has been to pervert a good and holy word into a bad word, one that is associated in the non-Muslim world with Muslims killing people in God’s name. John Kiser, who is working for inter-faith harmony across the world, is author of two books, “The Monks of Tibhirine” and, “Commander of the faithful: the life and times of Emir Abd el-Kader”.
I’m pleased to see this, even if it has taken some time.
I just wonder how many ears are deaf to it. It’s not as though this is the first time that moderate Muslims have spoken out against Islamicist fundamentalists. For instance on June 1st 2004 Pervez Musharraf himself (Pakistan’s then President) tried to plea for “enlightened moderation”. Three months before that in March 2004 the Madrid train bombings had been visited upon the west, killing almost 200 people and injuring thousands. A year later, on 7th July 2005, we had the London bus and Tube attacks, killing 52 and injuring 700. At the start of recent atrocities, in 2001, there was 9/11.
Unfortunately, even raising this issue, as has Mr Kiser, raises more questions than it answers.
For instance:
Jihad and violence were now widely viewed in the public mind as synonymous with Islam. Such thinking, he believed, fuels Western Islamophobia which, in turn, encourages various forms of aggression-verbal and otherwise-that lends credence to the jihadist argument that the West hates Islam and wants to destroy it. And that is their most potent recruiting tool, he added. “This sense of threat to Muslims’ religious identity can best be understood among secular people if we think of Islam representing what flag and home represent to us,” he observed.
According to John Kiser, “Defending and dying for one’s flag is considered patriotism, and for many Muslims, Islam is flag and home. For those Muslims who have not yet been secularized-faith is a primary source of identity, much as it is for a Trappist monk or Mennonite. But when they fight, especially in a violent manner, Westerners call it fanaticism”.
Bothersome as it is to state as “fact” – it IS a fact that there are few, if any, non-Muslims who think of religion in those “flag & home” terms. We do not use the glue of religious conviction to bind us. WE use the glue of democracy, whether we are religious or not.
Dying (or killing) for one’s country is one thing. Dying and/or killing for a religion – any religion – is something quite different.
Here is another little “fact” Mr Kiser mis-states above. It is NOT the fault of the west, as implied, that we in the west widely view jihad and violence as synonymous with Islam. It is the fault of those who terrorise in the name of Islamic “violent jihad”.
No-one in the west had ever heard of the word “jihad” until Islam/Islamicists told us about it.
Again, as I have done often recently, I advise you to watch this short video. It is a clip of Tony Blair’s last speech to conference, 2006.
“This terrorism isn’t OUR fault … it is not the consequence of foreign policy … it has been decades growing …”
If you, Mr Kiser, and other moderate Muslims wanted to re-claim the word “jihad” for yourselves, you should have done so immediately after 9/11. It is a tad late now to explain that it is not what fundamentalists have told us it is.
DEMOCRACY OR A WORLDWIDE CALIPHATE?
And of course, sadly, this brings us back to the REAL meaning of any sort of Islam.
We still have not been re-assured that Islam is not, at its very essence or even in its purest form, the caliphate brand. The brand which urges brothers in Britain to rise up in support of brothers in the Middle East, because they believe they are instructed by the Koran so to do.
There are many high profile examples of this. Britain’s very own Anjam Choudary, for example, who said he had NO allegiance to Britain, the land where he was born. He insisted in press and TV interviews, after the 7/7 attacks, that he only has “allegiance to his Muslim brothers, wherever they are in the world, as instructed in the Koran.”
He also said that he had no regard for democracy. It was man-made and his allegiance is only to Allah’s word.
I’d love to think that moderates like Mr Kiser had the wherewithal to change hearts and minds on this. To make Islamic peoples democrats first, and followers of Allah second. This is how we in the non-Islamic west operate. This takes cognisance of the fact that many of us have no religious affiliation of any sort. And it takes religious denominational dogma out of the law. Sharia Law does not allow for this.
It is the right position to separate faith from state, in order to preserve them both. To recognise that it is democracy which ties all people in any land together.
So far, I am very doubtful that Mr Kiser will persuade some in Islam, even some who are not particularly devout believers.
Not because Mr Kiser is out of step with ME. But because he may still be out of step with the Koran, and the freedom of interpretation it affords its readers.
WOULD YOU DIE (or KILL) FOR RELIGION’S SAKE?
As for the question posed in my headline – no, personally, I would not.
Not because I do not have a religion, which may or may not be the case. One is free to be irreligious, and yet to be patriotic in democracies. Just as one is permitted to be a secular unbeliever, adhering legally and socially to a religion’s values, without being accused of apostasy.
But I would not die for religion because the question would never arise.
I would die for my country.
Until we come together on the causes worth dying for, the glue that binds us – ALL of us, religious or not – has no potency.
