Echoes of London Blast

There is a lot of bad news recently, and inevitably, rumors shoot up everywhere like uncontrollable weeds. It is difficult to resist! You may avoid gossip normally; but suddenly you may turn to your friend and ask, “Was an Israeli leader warned just before the London blasts? Was Fox News somehow aware? Was a Texas based website involved? And what was former Mayor Guiliani doing near the blast? Is it true that reporter Michael Isikoff had reported in Newsweek that FBI agents had stopped taking the London tube? And was Visor Consultants, a 'crisis management' advice company with links to counter terrorism, really running a 1,000 person crisis management training in the London Tube that morning of July 7th?”

Allah knows best. In the Great Game of today’s world, much may be hidden from view. Armchair conspiracy enthusiasts create compelling scenarios. However, we must realize that these are only conjectures. Moreover, so often Muslims have grasped at any possible version of events that places blame elsewhere, away from our community.

Therefore, such writers as Khalid Baig (in IMPACT Magazine, April 2005) will call the 19 Muslim hijackers a “myth”; when evidence is overwhelming. How can we Muslims still say this, after Casablanca, Madrid, and the increasing popularity of suicide bombing as insanely wrong response to occupation? How can we seek to deny we have a problem of nihilistic cults within our midst, perhaps manipulated by unknown puppet masters, but fueled by tribal animosity and megalomaniac Jihadi dreams?

We also see that intelligent Muslim leaders continue to claim that 1) hundreds of Muslims were killed in the World Trade Center, a number that I personally know to be close to 75 (may Allah grant them peace) and 2) that no Jews were killed (which as a New Yorker working in disaster relief, I also know to be false). With the persistence of these rumors, we see a lack of respect for proof. Or more disturbingly, we are being manipulated from within our community. All humans are vulnerable in times of crisis; we may seek certainty in the midst of confusion, even if the certainty is false.

Then we come back to reality, and our responsibility as citizens of a pluralistic society. We remember London bombing victim 20-year-old Shahara Akhter Islam, killed "in the name of the religion that she loved… Born to a devout Muslim family, she attended mosque every Friday, but was also a Westernized young woman who shopped for designer clothes, shoes and handbags," according to The Independent. We remember all the many, diverse victims, in London and everywhere, of all ages, religions and ethnicities, no less uniquely dear.

We note another young woman killed in the bombing, Ganze Gunoral, 24, from Turkey, who lived in Barnet and was on her way to a language college in Hammersmith. She did not live to see the suicide bombing July 17th in her home country, with a Kurdish terror group targeting tourists in Kusadasi. Terror attacks are in fashion; they do get attention, through their incomprehensible cruelty; and state terror does not always seize the imagination in the same way. In any case, are we Muslims doing enough to stop this cycle of violence? Or just feeling sorry for ourselves?

Some others are committed towards escalation of rhetoric and of self-serving utopian struggle. Consequently, both Thomas Friedman and Michael Ignatieff claim to see a death cult arising within Islam. While I certainly disagree with these influential writers, I think some of us have encouraged a culture of negativity too long. It is time to be proud of our deen, to work constructively to live in the here and now.

Our relationship with Allah requires more self-questioning and humility, and more dikhr. Moreover, as Tariq Ramadan has said, we, “must have the courage to denounce what is said and done by certain Muslims in the name of their religion.” As Labour MP Sadiq Khan suggested last week: "The Muslim communities are not reaching those people who they need to engage with and win their hearts and minds. What leads someone to do this? The rewards they are told they will get in the hereafter. It is incumbent on Muslims to tell them that nowhere in Islam does it say this and in fact what you will get is hellfire."

We need to heed this advice. Also, it would be better for our leaders and our publications to show more than the Muslim community under attack around the world. That is not the whole story. We need to stop seeing ourselves as eternal victims. As Tony Blair declared last week, “In the end, it is by the power of argument, debate, true religious faith and true legitimate politics that we will defeat this threat. That means not just arguing against their terrorism but their politics.” I suggest that as Muslims we must distance ourselves from those who promote tribalism nihilism, and negativity. Be positive; take positive action. In the midst of suffering, we must offer a hand to others. And faced with challenges, insults and fear, joy will sustain us, if you remember Allah, and his boundless mercy towards all humanity.

The Spectacle and Image of Disaster

The Spectacle and Image of Disaster

Thousands of shocked and injured people streaming out of the underground stations; thousands of cars jammed on their way out of the cities. Living in a media saturated world, in recent days we have been haunted by images of disaster, both natural and man-made. If there were not widespread self-censorship in the news, we would see much worse from the war in Iraq, and elsewhere.

Such images of terror become tools for propaganda, manipulated by terrorist, hostage taker, and politician. They replace reform, and real solutions to real problems. As orientalist scholar Oliver Roy observed last weekend in the Financial Times, the planners of terrorism, “don’t care about the Iraqi people, they make use of such conflicts. They want to do something spectacular that could be immediately understood by the masses.” The same is often true of the US government and its tabloid friends, sometimes for specific reasons of policy and profit, but often simply to feed the people’s fast food appetite for alarm, the deepening American addiction to anxiety and violence.

On Friday, we viewed the horrific images of the terror bombings in London. On Saturday, as Hurricane Dennis headed towards the US mainland, Cuban state authorities said hundreds of houses around Cuba's southeastern coast had been destroyed or heavily damaged, and civil defense officials said more than 1.5 million people had fled their homes. At least 100 people were missing in Haiti following floods, mudslides and the collapse of a bridge. And with considerably more noise and commentary, Americans also packed up and fled the gulf coast for higher ground.

What did I do in response? Maybe not the smartest thing! I went to the movies, to see War of the Worlds, a disaster movie about that other clash of civilizations— not Pakistanis and Palestinians, but Martians! The director Steven Spielberg cleverly and effectively manipulates the iconography of terrorism, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters to make such disaster seem very familiar and possible. The posters for missing friends and families; the ominous clouds; the aliens exploding out of the underground and creating an amazing and spectacular path of destruction through the cities. It is frightening, though the characters are rather simple. Indeed, one critic describes the story as, “millions die so that Tom Cruise can grown up.”

Insha’Allah millions will not have to die for Americans to grow up, for humanity to wake up— but I am pessimistic. We should not ignore the prospect of more violence. Accepting the inevitable with a tiny sigh and a shrug would be excessively fatalistic, and already the American image of Muslims is that we do not speak out in solidarity for all humanity. That discussion must wait for another time. But I do think that with cultural confusion and a perceived loss of control, that some of us hold on to traditions in the form of ideology, and may take wrong and extreme actions that will continue to escalate for the near future. Not only the aliens are alienated, after all.

We all have felt like strangers at times when we are no longer able to read the signs and messages of culture around us. The philosopher Wittgenstein observed that “one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with strange traditions…we do not understand the people. We cannot even find out feet with them.” Expanding on this, the Anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes this alienation as, “an inability, for lack of usable models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities in which one finds oneself located.” With reason and through religious practice, one may find ones’ way; insha’Allah. However, political and religion-based ideologies can also become projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for political struggle, and sustain irrational images of utopia and magic solutions to the problems around us. They can mislead.

And we are misled. What Geertz calls, “The Dramaturgical state” plays out its ritual entertainments with Hollywood help. At the same time, around the world terror cells plan their own special effects. Graven images and idol worships proliferate in new media and in cyberspace. Capitalism has us counting calories and counting cell phone minutes; youth is wired, with cell phones in every ear—the Donnie Brasco generation. The streets are under surveillance. The Televisions everywhere flicker with images of the G-8 summit; a mix of utopian hopes and false promises, with President Bush again spoiling the results.

And here we are trapped in the light, disoriented like a moth indoors, seeking freedom outside, through window glass.