The Roots of Muslim Rage: Islamophobia Constantly Manipulating the Already Flawed Image of What a Muslim Is, Of What Islam Is

By Moin Qazi, New Age Islam 15 September 2022 The Most Effective Way To Destroy People Is To Deny And Obliterate Their Own Understanding Of Their History. –George Orwell A lot of ink, an infinite number of film reels, and a frantic churn of news stories bristling with harsh tones against Islam have fixated Muslims as a monolith. There is a cottage industry of authors who keep burning the midnight to ensure that the flashlights on the so-called bad Muslims keep glowing. These are churned out by a well-oiled Islamophobia machine that is constantly manipulating the already flawed image of what a Muslim is, of what Islam is. They are attacking the identity of Muslims, which is so diverse that it cannot possibly fit into a box. At no stage in modern Indian history have Muslims been put to such a hard test. Every action of theirs was viewed through a suspicious lens and even good work was viewed in a negative light or was deftly airbrushed. The mainstream narrative continues to be orchestrated to pigeonhole the entire community into stereotypical templates – that of fanatical, undisciplined, conspiratorial and unpatriotic Muslims. The right-wing media has already labelled Muslims into two categories: good Muslims and bad Muslims. COVID-19 has helped these religious anthropologists get over even that inconvenient distinction. Now all Muslims are being straight-jacketed into a standard singular identity– that all Muslims are bad. Nobody wants to hear anything good about Muslims. Ears have grown deaf to sentiments that extol Muslims for their good work. The struggle exists because the West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not. The story of that mastery and that failure occupies several centuries of human history, in which one dominant culture, the world of Islam, was displaced by a new culture, that of the West. Islam was a vast empire stretching from western Africa into India. An empire that valued learning, prized scholars, maintained great libraries and preserved the works of many ancient writers. But within three centuries, this greatest civilization on the face of the earth was in retreat, and the West was rising to produce a civilization renowned for its commitment to personal liberty, scientific expertise, political democracy, and free markets. By the time of the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 most of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had united under the banner of Islam, some out of faith, others from expediency. But few people outside Arabia knew who Muslims were or were worried about the threat they might pose. The world of Islam was once the foremost military and economic power of its kind, and the leader in the arts and sciences of civilisation. Christian Europe was seen as barbaric and remote. Then all changed "suddenly." It was downhill from then on, and this is where the Muslim world finds itself. Muslims centred their identity upon the duality of religion and politics embodied in the Ummah (community of believers) until the twilight of the last Islamic caliphate, the Ottoman Empire (1290-1924) The Ummah prided itself on the totality of Islam and its human achievements. It was timeless, representing Muslims’ past and future, and spatially also leaving no boundaries, stretching across the known world. It was neither a government nor a theocracy, but a congregation of faith. From the Crusades of the eleventh century to the Turkish expansion of the fifteenth century to the colonial era in the early twentieth century, Islam and the West have often battled militarily. This tension has existed for hundreds of years, during which, there have been many periods of peace and even harmony. Until the 1950s, for example, Jews and Christians lived peaceably under Muslim rule. Bernard Lewis, the pre-eminent historian of Islam, has argued that for much of history religious minorities did better under Muslim rulers than they did under Christian ones. Muslim scholars insist that nothing in Islam is incompatible with technological advances or industrial development. In the days of the caliphs, Islam led the world in scientific and intellectual discoveries. What Muslims object to are the evils associated with modernization. The breakdown of the family structure, the lowering of moral standards, and the appeal of easy-going secular lifestyles. At the same time, Muslims are demanding the positive best of the West, such as schools, hospitals, income avenues and technology. Several scholars and organizations are trying to articulate proper responses to enable Muslim women to adapt to alien situations without being submerged in the currents of the new civilization. At first, the Muslim response to Western civilization was one of admiration and emulation—immense respect for the achievements of the West, and a desire to imitate and adopt them. This desire arose from a keen and growing awareness of the weakness, poverty, and backwardness of the Islamic world as compared with the advancing West. Muslim writers observed and described the wealth and power of the West, its science and technology and its forms of government. For a time the secret of Western success was seen to lie in two achievements: economic advancement and especially industry; political institutions and especially freedom. Several generations of reformers and modernizers tried to adapt these and introduce them to their own countries, in the hope that they would thereby be able to achieve equality with the West and perhaps restore their lost superiority. In our own time, this mood of admiration and emulation has, among many Muslims, given way to one of hostility and rejection. In part, this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation—a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long-dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors. Through imperialism and war, western modes of thought penetrated Islamic lands, especially the Middle Eastern heartlands. The declining Ottoman empire had imported European cultural, political and military models, and colonised territories began to influence and redraw the mental and intellectual horizons of their new subjects. Western legal traditions that emphasised rules and systemic constructs replaced the discourse of sharia (which had allowed a lot of room for adaptation) as the constitutional backbone of new nation-states. In this new era, the religious and political fluidity around the ummah gave way to codified institutions and territorial boundaries. The introduction of Western commercial, financial, and industrial methods did indeed bring great wealth, but it accrued to transplanted Westerners and members of Westernized minorities, and only a few among the mainstream Muslim population. In time these few became numerous, but they remained isolated from the masses, differing from them even in their dress and style of life. Inevitably they were seen as agents of and collaborators with what was once again regarded as a hostile world. For vast numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style economic methods brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought tyranny, and even Western-style warfare brought defeat. It is hardly surprising that so many were willing to listen to voices telling them that the old Islamic ways were the best and that their only salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the reformers and return to the true path that God had prescribed for his people. These Islamists see western practices and views regarding women as part of a Western cultural offensive, which accompanies political and economic offensives. For many believers, western gender practices are seen more as aggression than as liberation, and Islamic women can find some genuine advantages for themselves in their new interpretations of Islam. The sense of inferiority that the Muslim world suffered has magnified the importance of America and the West in its history. Islam -and the Ottoman Empire in particular - was plunged into a deep crisis from which it has never really recovered following the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. For a long time, the Muslim world had become isolated and inward-looking and had had little contact with the outside world. The new epoch of European supremacy was trauma and injury to its psyche. Significantly this crisis in the middle of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the emergence of deep divisions in the Islamic world itself over how best to reassert its values. Freedom of conscience has made a difference. In an old-world where the knowledge came from libraries, and scientific experiments were rare, freedom would not be so important. But in the new world, knowledge and all that it can produce come from the sharp challenge of competing ideas tested by standards of objective evidence. In Istanbul, Muslims printed no book until 1729, and thereafter only occasionally. By contrast, the West became a world in which books were published starting three centuries earlier. The revolution in printing technology revolutionized the world and information and knowledge flowed into homes and libraries like a deluge. The lack of spread of achievement in the Islamic world has also weakened the Islamic world's control. The distorted images of Islam stem partly from a lack of understanding of Islam among non-Muslims and partly from the failure of Muslims to explain themselves. The results are predictable— hatred feeds on hatred. Muslims have had a bad deal ever since the early eighteenth century. Of course, the decline of the Muslim hegemony of Europe began in the fifteenth century when they were thrown out of Spain. But at least the Ottoman Empire on the borders of Europe and Asia and the Mughal Empire in South and Central Asia gave Muslims something to be proud of between the sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries. The Mughals began their decline in the early eighteenth century and the Ottomans began to fall behind the European Renaissance by the same time. It is this decline of political fortunes, which coloured Muslim consciousness. The pluralistic world created by the diffusion of the knowledge and logic behind the fundamental tenets of the world’s major faith traditions has made religion a vital resource in the task of building a good society, a world where all can live freely and pursue visions of the highest values. We face a constant struggle with the moral, material, social, cultural and political complexities and oddities of an ever-rapidly changing society. Spiritualism is truly a way of setting out and travelling the paths of the heart, mind and the imaginary. During its geographical expansion Islam’s interaction with a vast diversity of new cultures led in some regions and also in different periods to a flowering of new religious cultures. There was an equally healthy stimulation of intellectual synergisation among a series of brilliant philosophers in medieval Europe. The Mutazilites subjected the texts of religion to Greek rationalism while the Sufis brought in an element of mysticism and ecstasy, with their own cult of saints. The rapid spread of Islam over a huge area broke down a number of the social ideals of the early Muslim community. The spirit of Islam became weak and porous and several other cultural strains seeped in; multiple marriages became a problem and easy divorce an evil, while the social equality of early Islam gave way to the customs of the conquered despotic empires. The central problem facing all Muslims today is how to find a new way of life—Islamic in character—which will be halfway between the East and the West and which will provide the internal stability necessary to enable Muslims to face their problems independently. The different spiritual paths lead to the same human heart. The vast spiritual heritage is the common treasure of all of mankind. Our civilization’s spiritual prism provides a kaleidoscopic canvas of shimmering stars of wisdom. The blazing radiance exuded by this constellation is what keeps the darkness of carnal impulses from overwhelming us. The spiritual quest is an internal journey; it is a psychic path. Very often, priests, rabbis, imams, and shamans are just as consumed by worldly ambition as regular seekers of material possessions. But all this is generally seen as an abuse of a sacred ideal. These power struggles are not what religion is really about, but an unworthy distraction from the life of the spirit, which is conducted far from the madding crowd, unseen, silent and unobtrusive. Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics and economic and ecological crises. At this scale, our response must be as one. Harmony among the major faiths is an essential ingredient for peaceful coexistence. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers. It matters for the welfare of the entire humanity. ------ Moin Qazi is the author of the bestselling book, Village Diary of a Heretic Banker. He has worked in the development finance sector for almost four decades. URL: https://newageislam.com/muslims-islamophobia/muslim-rage-islamophobia-islam-/d/127949 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism