Looking for honesty in the Muslim world

Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief

I saw something in the newspaper today that, if I were a Muslim, would make me incredibly angry. It was a picture of a turbaned protester carrying a sign that read “Behead those who insult Islam.”

Who would depict Islam in such a fashion, as a religion whose followers are bloodthirsty and intolerant? What kind of cartoonist.…

Oh, wait. It wasn’t a cartoon. It was an actual Associated Press photograph of a London man protesting the anti-Muslim cartoons in a Danish newspaper.

The man’s sign sums up all the madness, the recklessness — okay, the blasphemy — surrounding the latest eruption of anger in the Muslim world. A cartoonist draws a caricature of Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. The Muslim street responds by rioting, looting, and threatening to kill the creator and publisher of the cartoons.

The usual chin scratchers are all having a field day with this one. The press is holding a lively “should they publish or not” debate. The usual experts are explaining what this means about the integration of Europe’s growing Muslim community. Mideast experts point out that the cartoons originally appeared in September, and those “spontaneous” protests seem more like affairs orchestrated by self-interested imams and dictators in Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Israel’s supporters, meanwhile, feel vindicated, with a chance to demonstrate yet again to the world the kind of enemy we are dealing with, and to ask how a Danish cartoon of a villainous prophet differs from an Egyptian cartoon of a hook-nosed Jew.

Perhaps the most confounding reaction comes from various Muslim spokesmen and apologists, who insist that the riots are an aberration and that Islam is a “religion of peace.” You know what? It’s not. Islam is not a religion of peace. Right now it’s a religion of conflict, and conquest, and the violent suppression of individual rights in the name of God.

How do I know this? Because Judaism is not a religion of peace either. Neither is Christianity, or Hinduism, or Zoroastrianism. All of these great faiths are rich, complex, and ancient, and each speaks in a multitude of voices. Some of those voices, I admit, are more peaceful than others. Sometimes they honor God as one who makes peace and seeks harmony among all humanity. Sometimes that same God is in a less peaceful mood and seeks absolute victory over those who would deny Him. Or Her. Or Them. Sometimes the voices prescribe civil disobedience in the face of tyranny. And sometimes they glorify violent revolution for the glory of the One True God.

And that just accounts for the roiling contradictions within the various holy books. Even a religion of pure peace, if such a thing exists, is subject to the people who actually practice it. Unfortunately, you could have a religion founded by Mister Rogers, and end up having it led by the kind of bearded thought police who head Iran.

You can’t separate a religion from its track record. From everything I have learned about Jesus, he sounds like a perfectly nice and peaceful fellow who truly believed humankind could create heaven on earth by entering into a deep relationship with God. As for too many of his followers — well, not so much. The history of Christianity is blood-stained. It spread across the world at the tip of a conqueror’s sword. There are always dissenters — true believers, if you will — who take Jesus at his word about the meek inheriting the earth. Unfortunately, the meek don’t lead armies.

Neither Christianity nor Islam has a monopoly on militarism or militancy. Zen Buddhism may be your particular cup of green tea, with its focus on blissful meditation and higher consciousness. But historians like Brian Victoria have uncovered strong links between Zen asceticism and the brutal expansionism of the Japanese military before and during World War II. Just weeks after 9/11, leaders of one of Japan’s main Zen sects apologized for its complicity during the war and for helping to inspire the invasions and occupations that led to the deaths of perhaps 20 million people.
If practice is the true judge of a religion’s claim on peace, then Judaism is doing pretty well. Between the stories we tell about our warrior heroes of the past and the warriors who established the State of Israel, there were a few thousand years in which we took plenty more violence than we doled out. Credit the rabbis, Jewish mothers, or the fact that Judaism never became a mass movement, but Judaism emerged from the past two millennia with clean hands. The establishment of the State of Israel is testing that notion. And yet, while Israel is not perfect, the Jewish state has resisted the corrupting forces that reduce idealism to barbarity.

No doubt Islam has a message of peace, but it does not appear to be the message being heard among the recruiting ranks of Hamas, in the madrassas of Saudi Arabia, and at mosques in London or Paris. I have only sympathy for the truly peace-loving Muslims who are made to answer for the words and actions of the militants and terrorists. But to deny that the murderers are “true Muslims” is to allow the religion’s far-flung leaders to abdicate responsibility for their actions.

What “true Islam” needs are more leaders willing to ask a few simple questions. What is the greater blasphemy: A Danish drawing making fun of suicide bombers, or the suicide bomber who kills schoolchildren in an Israeli cafe? What would Mohammed consider a worse desecration — a cartoon mocking his name, or a slaughter of innocents carried out in his name?

The world awaits a Muslim enlightenment, when the right answers to those questions go forth from the mosques and palaces, and Islam can again deserve to be called a religion of peace.

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