Islamic pacifism

RT

Published: 23 August, 2011, 05:03
The Western media is on a quest to convince our societies that the religion of Islam and terrorism belong to each other. The Foreign Policy Journal puts it like this: “since the collapse of the Soviet Union the general drift of Western concerns has been to portray Islam as the main enemy of the West and the Muslim world as a hotbed of terrorism that threatens Western civilization and its democratic values.” Why does the West always need an enemy?
As a result of the Western media’s “hard work” in this direction, everybody in the whole world knows who Osama Bin Laden was. But how many have heard of Badshah Khan or Jawdat Saeid? Muslim heroes who promote peace and non-violent struggle are somehow just not exciting enough to make it into a news piece.
When we open a newspaper, we are used to seeing something along the line of “three teenagers attacked a schoolboy. One of the attackers was a Muslim”. Meanwhile, two others could have been Christian, Buddhist or atheists, but the paper wants us to know that “one of them was a Muslim,” creating a fear of the Muslim people among the readers.
The history of Islam does contain wars and violence, but I’ve heard the Crusades weren’t a day at the fair either. However, Muslim non-violent movements and their pacifist leaders have rarely (if ever) been noticed by the rest of the world. Western countries and especially the US have been telling the Palestinians that they would have had their state by now if they had adopted Ghandi-style protest. What the US hasn’t noticed is that the Palestinians have long fought peacefully against the Israelis, but how long can you hold peaceful banners when bullets are flying into you? As recently as May this year, the Palestinians marched peacefully towards the Israeli border, but were met with gunfire. Were the violent Israeli actions condemned by the West? No!
No doubt there are forces that use Islam to justify violence. There are extremists in every religion, in every nation, in every country. Why make Islam the most devilish in the whole world? Why does the Western media – usually so quick to boast of immune to interference from their own governments – portray such a biased view of Muslims?
According to the American academics Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, mass media in the West distorts the editorial slant of its reporting to favour government and corporate policies so as not to lose their business and sources of funding. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic, agrees with them, pointing out that the Western mainstream media uses Islam as an instrument to further their corporate interests. He says: "for the general public in America and Europe today, Islam is ‘news’ of a particularly unpleasant sort. The media, the government, the geopolitical strategists … are all in concert: Islam is a threat to Western civilization.”
Press TV, a worldwide English-language Muslim channel, believes that the reason for such negative press coverage of Islam is due to the West’s understanding that the integrity and solidarity of Muslims, who constitute some 25% of the world’s population, will contribute to the formation of a new global order that has the potential to dissolve Western hegemony and supremacy. Therefore, measures are adopted to avert the growth and empowerment of Islam and its rising popularity, and one of the formulas to implement this plan is to stage propaganda campaigns against Islam and Muslims. Media outlets which go in the opposite direction and refuse to take part in this campaign are isolated and deprived of the facilities and resources which are offered to the others.
Another reason is simply ignorance and unawareness. Some Western journalists have long clung to stereotypes and clichés with regard to Islam and Muslims which are essentially untrue and unjustifiably false. The mainstream media in the West have neglected the cultural and social diversity of more than 1.5 billion Muslims who live on our five continents.
So it’s money, power, the will to preserve the status quo plus ignorance that makes up the Western media’s cocktail of Islamophobia. If it goes on like this for much longer, our world will become a much worse place to live. And by far the most pernicious result of this Western policy will be the creation of more nuclear bombs in the Middle East and other Muslim countries (as if there are not enough of them now).
To eliminate the damage caused by the media, a number of measures need to be taken:
- Discrimination against Muslims in the Western press has to stop;
- The media has to differentiate between the religion of Islam and political affairs in Islamic countries;
- And it needs to promote the Islamic non-violence movements.
I cannot do anything about the first two, but I can certainly start contributing to the third one.

Badshah Khan (1890-1988)

The man everybody should know about, who fought non-violently next to Mahatma Gandhi, is the great Pashtun political and spiritual leader, Badshah Khan. A pacifist and devout Muslim, he spent his whole life in non-violent struggle against British rule and later against the new Pakistani Islamic government. In 1929 he established a non-violent movement, KhudaiKhidmatgar. The movement’s purpose was to spearhead the non-violent fight for freedom from the British Empire by the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier province. Badshah Khan said, “Violence needs less courage than non-violence,” and “Violence will always breed hatred, while non-violence breeds love”.

Jawdat Saeid

Jawdat Saeid is a Syrian Muslim Sunni Sheikh and a member of the Cherkess minority – an ethnic group originally from the Caucasus region. In a country that remains partly occupied and has been under a state of emergency for more than 40 years, Jawdat Saeid is possibly the most impressive personification of the struggle for peace and non-violence. A peace movement based on his teachings has been established in Morocco. Jawdat Saeid considers that Europeans have learnt from their sufferings. After they experienced all manner of wars and pain, they united peacefully. He points out that neither Napoleon nor Hitler united Europe.

The Amman Message

In 2004, H.M. King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein of Jordan asked several senior Muslim religious scholars to answer three questions: (1) Who is a Muslim? (2) Is it permissible to declare someone an apostate (takfir)? (3) Who has the right to issue fatwas (legal rulings)? This “questionnaire” became known as the Amman Message that seeks to define what Islam is and what it is not, and what actions represent Islam and what actions do not. As a result of these consultations, the Amman Message specifically recognised the validity of all eight legal schools of Islam and gave a precise definition of a Muslim as being “any person who respects the five pillars of Islam and who recognises one of the eight schools.” Based on this definition it forbids takfir (declaration of apostasy) between Muslims and it sets forth the subjective and objective pre-conditions for the issuing of fatwas (legal rulings). In doing so, the Message rejects the sayings and actions of extremist Muslims who under the criteria of the Amman Message are deemed unauthorised to promulgate a fatwa.
The Amman Message believes that Islam calls on us all to treat others as we ourselves desire to be treated, and that any assault on the life of a human being is, in fact, an assault on the right to life of all human beings. The Amman Message considers that Islam rejects extremism, radicalism and fanaticism, seeing them as ways and forms of injustice. On both religious and moral grounds, the Message denounces the contemporary concept of terrorism, associating it with wrongful practices. The Message condemns these practices and believes that resisting oppression and establishing justice should be undertaken through legitimate means. It calls for the people to take the necessary steps in order to achieve the strength and steadfastness required to build identity and preserve rights. It decries the campaign that portrays Islam as a religion that encourages violence and institutionalises terrorism.
George Yeo, the Foreign Minister of Singapore, declared in the 60th Session of the UN General Assembly about the Amman Message: "Without this clarification, the war against terrorism would be much harder to fight."

Sahar Abou Harb

Non-violent ideas and pacifism have also been promoted by Muslim women. Sahar Abou Harb is a Syrian who strongly believes in non-violence. She has studied and interpreted the Koran to underline its non-violent message. She teaches, gives lectures, and has published three books on this theme to date, and is planning to create a Center for Non-violence in Damascus. She challenges the idea that only male scholars should preach about Koran verses related to women, claiming that women naturally have a better understanding of the issues that affect them (divorce, inheritance, being widowed etc.).
These people and movements are only a drop in the ocean when it comes to pacifism in Islam, and hopefully this information will start a bigger discourse and more of the Islamic pacifists will become known to the West. It is not a coincidence that the word “Islam” comes from “Istislam” (surrender) and “Salam” (peace).