No Contradiction Here

Commenting on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Michael Rubin over at National Review got it exactly right :

While it’s fashionable to argue that terrorists in Mumbai do not act out of religion, but are simply misguided, the fact of the matter is that they justify their actions in Islam. For the purposes of policy and security, religion should be what its practitioners believe it to be rather than what academics or outside commentators say it is. It is much more important to determine how terrorists are brainwashed in madrasas , then passing judgment on whether what they believe conforms to what academics believe Muslims should believe.

Brooke-Sidney Gavins writing for The Scoop , a journal on the media and religion at the University of Southern California thinks otherwise. She thinks ” Rubin and the rest of the American media tend to argue that our focus should be on how terrorists describe their beliefs and not on whether their supposed fellow travelers recognize those beliefs as their own.”

Rubin’s comments betray a contradiction at the heart of our attitudes toward religion generally and Islam in particular. Millions of Islamic practitioners are telling us that the terrorists aren’t Muslims, but outside commentators like Rubin are telling us (and people like Aamir Khan and Idris Ali) that they are. This contradiction points toward a fundamental misunderstanding of how religious movements work. At best, this means that writers like Rubin will continue to offer commentary that doesn’t reflect the greater religious and political implications of identifying Islam with terrorism. At worst, it means that the curse of mutual incomprehension between America and the Muslim world will persist for some time to come.

But there is no contradiction here . For one thing Gallup tells us that somewhere between 35 to 40 percent of Muslims in the Arab-Islamic world, think that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were in some sense “justified,” so evidently they have no reason not to believe that the 9/11 terrorists aren’t Muslims. It would be nice to have a poll on just how many of the remaining 60 to 65 percent of Muslims would be willing to declare that the perpetrators of 9/11 were not really Muslims. I don’t suspect that there would be a lot.

In any case, there hasn’t exactly been a rush to declare Islamic terrorists to be Kafir . Quite the opposite. Muslims been extremely reluctant to declare even the most egregious Islamic terrorists to be Kafir , the term, derogatory to be sure, to describe an unbeliever, or apostate from Islam.

Until leaders in the Islamic world unite in denouncing these terrorists as Kufir, or at least unite in denouncing Islamic terrorism and other acts of violence in the same way that they have rallied to denounce, say, Salman Rushdie, Michael Rubin and the rest of us will continue to point out the obvious. Islamic terrorists justify their actions with religious arguments for Islamic sources. They do not appeal to Hindu or Buddhist texts, they do not justify their actions by appealing to Catholic encyclicals and papal pronouncements, they do not appeal to Protestant confessional creeds or to Jewish literature. They justify their resort to terrorist violence, rightly or wrongly, with Islamic canonical sources in the Koran and the Hadith.

The point is so obvious that you have to be a professional academic to miss it.