12/24/10, Opinion Editorial, Finger Lakes Times

Conflict Defines Past Decade
By: Sardar Anees Ahmad

Conflict between the West and the Muslim world has largely defined the past decade. Diplomacy is defined in pre and post 9/11 terms, economic intervention is seen as an attempt to subjugate Muslim countries, and dialogue emphasizes cultural clash far more than commonality. Science, and its commitment to objectivity, however, can help make the next decade different than the last.

Science has repeatedly affected conventional thought. The Scientific Revolution shed eleven centuries of Aristotelian influenced philosophy and Adam Smith based his self-correcting market on a Newtonian world where everything is in, or returns to, equilibrium. Al-Haytham pioneered the scientific method and al-Ghazali’s contributions to science elicited praise from the likes of Thomas Aquinas. Today, however, in a standoff between data and dogma, the latter is winning over many Westerners and Muslims.

 

This past decade witnessed an unprecedented rise in Muslim finger pointing towards the West. But how is the West to blame for eleven Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) member nations being amongst the top 20 states most likely to become failed states? Today, Germany’s GDP is greater than the OIC’s (comprised of 57 member nations) despite its grip on oil. Moreover, Muslims have conducted terrorist attacks in every continent except South America … oh and Antarctica.

 

With a combined literacy rate well over 70% and nearly thirty of the OIC’s member nations hosting foreign and international universities, Muslim clergy (Mullah) and pseudo-scholars are primarily responsible for a ‘West vs. Muslim’ dichotomy. Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme religious leader and head of state, censured women’s rights activists who, ignoring established religious jurisprudence, sought to “match international conventions.” Qazi Hussain, former president of Pakistani’s most influential religious party Jamaat Islami, urges isolationism – “all the Muslims who migrate to other non Muslim countries and [America] are non Muslims.” More than sixty Muslim clerics in Kenya's North Eastern Province, where 7% of the population is HIV infected, claimed, “buying condoms [is] buying immorality.” Harun Yahya, a prominent Muslim creationist, argues that evolution is a Western plot to subvert Muslim morality.

 

Dogma has harmed Western thought as well, which oftentimes conflates “Muslim behavior” as “Islamic.” The lack of church bells ringing in Saudi Arabia was among the justifications for Switzerland’s minaret ban. Yet Saudi Arabia is the spokesperson of Saudi Arabia alone. Congressman Tom Tancredo made the same mistake when suggesting a nuclear attack on America should be met with bombing Mecca. Violent Muslim reaction to the Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad was rightly condemned. Furthermore, many noted offensive Muslim depictions of Jews in support of the Danish caricatures. Still, extremists, when drawing caricatures, targeted the followers of faiths, not their prophets’. Labeling suicide terrorism a predominantly Muslim act is also misguided. Chicago University’s Robert Pape, an authority on terrorism, considers the mainly Hindu ‘Tamil Tigers’ the “leading instigator” of suicide terrorism. In his book Dying to Win, Pape notes that Muslims are guilty for less than half of all suicide attacks. Pape argues that nationalism, not religion, usually spurs such behavior: “every suicide terrorist campaign since 1980 has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory that the terrorists’ prize … Absent (foreign occupation), we rarely see suicide terrorism.” Moreover, the FBI reports that from 1980-2005 Muslims have been responsible for 6% of all terrorist activities in America. To put this number into context, consider that Jews, for example, have been guilty of 7% all terrorism in America during the same period.

 

Our age is the age of quantum physics – things are not what they seem. Thus, discourse on Western-Muslim relations today must adopt an attitude of rigorous fact-checking and abandoning of paradigms. We must approach this discourse much like Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman did when cautioning against prematurely assuming one understands quantum mechanics, “If you think you understand [it], you don’t.”