Fallujah Gets Loud Silence From World's Muslim Leaders
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Insight on the News - Fair Comment
Issue: 4/27/04Fair Comment
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
As the ghastly pictures from Fallujah flashed across the television screen, one of Salman Rushdie's most famous outbursts in recent years came to mind: "Where's the Muslim outrage?"
Here the world saw an ugly crowd beating the charred bodies of Western civilians with their shoes, and then hanging them on a bridge over the Euphrates River. And all the while the mob howled, "We sacrifice our blood and soul for Islam." One was reminded of Rushdie's words in the New York Times in 2002: "As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?"
To be fair, there were protests, but they came chiefly from Muslims in the West, where the still-fledgling movement striving for a moderate, democratic Islam is located. But in Washington the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned not the murders but only the Fallujah mutilations, which it said "violated both Islamic and international norms." CAIR said a tradition of the Prophet Mohammed "prohibits mutilating bodies (Hadith 654.3)."
"As a Muslim, I wish all Muslims worldwide would condemn what is wrong," CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed told United Press International (UPI). But what about the Muslim sages in the Middle East? She added, somewhat meekly, "In the past, many Muslim countries have condemned 9/11, suicide bombings and terrorist activities."
That is true, some did. But there has never been a unison outcry. There were never high-powered delegations of Muslim notables willing to intercede, for example, when northern Nigerian religious courts sentenced alleged adulteresses to death by stoning.
That task fell to European Union officials and international secular organizations such as Avocats sans Frontières (Lawyers without Borders).
European Muslim scholars interviewed for this column follow what they term the spinelessness of their Middle Eastern counterparts with growing alarm. They observe that some of their most prominent Christian dialogue partners have become extraordinarily blunt when discussing the carnage carried out by Muslim militants.
Take another television image that shocked the international community, the picture of a Palestinian boy wearing a bomb strapped around his waist. The Vatican, the former archbishop of Canterbury and the state-related Protestant Church of Germany - all three often critical of Israel - were unanimous in their dismay.
"First women, now children are being used, more and more often, in these suicidal attacks," thundered L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper. The Evangelical Church in Germany scolded "Palestinian terrorists" for "recruiting children with deceptive promises to commit suicide bombings."
Four prominent moderate U.S. Muslims who were asked to comment on Fallujah did not return UPI's call.
Western Christians were near unanimous in their support for Muslims as they faced bigotry after Sept. 11, 2001; when will these Christians hear comparable expressions of support from Muslim leaders now that they are increasingly under threat from the Islamists?
The Madrid bombings, the Palestinian boy and now Fallujah seem to have caused a paradigm shift in Muslim-Christian relations. The days of naïveté on the Christian side evidently are drawing to a close.
And George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury and one of the biggest players in the international Christian-Muslim dialogue, stunned his Islamic interlocutors with his outburst: "Sadly, apart from a few courageous examples, very few Muslim leaders condemn - clearly and unconditionally - the evil of suicide bombers who kill innocent people." As Carey said, Christians share many values with Muslims - family values, for instance. But, he implied, sympathy must be a two-way street. "The welcome we have given Muslims in the West, with the accompanying freedom to worship ... and build their mosques should be reciprocated in Muslim lands," he declared in a speech at Rome's Gregorian University.
He also attacked "the glaring lack of democracy" in Muslim countries. "Throughout the Middle East and North Africa we find authoritarian regimes," he complained. Then Carey pleaded with moderate Muslims to resist the usurpation of Islam by radicals and to "express strongly, on behalf of the many millions of their coreligionists, their abhorrence of violence done in the name of Allah."
The Muslim League of Britain condemned Carey's statements, saying, "Mainstream Muslims have consistently condemned terrorist attacks of all kinds." But this prompted the kind of commentary that often causes despair among Western Christians perfectly willing to coexist amicably with Islam: "Muslims must not denounce other Muslims," militant Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad told the British Broadcasting Corp. "Cooperation with the authorities against other Muslims, that is an act of apostasy."
Uwe Siemon-Netto is the religious-affairs editor for United Press International in Washington. Contact Siemon-Netto at USiemonNetto@upi.com.Copyright © 1990-2003 News World Communications, Inc.
