Western ignorance and Muslim mayhem

Achsin el-qudsy, Jakarta

The Western fear of Islam and Muslims was not invented. To Westerners, Islam is a symbol of all terrifying acts of violence and anarchy. The West becomes sensitive and allergic to everything suggestive of Islam. Sadly, the Muslim community seems unaware of it and considers it a mere passing nightmare and an excuse to harass them. Apparently, Muslims turn a blind eye to the negative image of Islam that has spread and affected Western leaders' actions and policies, particularly involving the Muslim world.

In the Western perception, Islam is identical with violence, terrorism, fundamentalism and the proclamation of war on the West. Islam is seen as the only threat to the West and its civilization. Muslims are regarded as harboring ambitions to control the world, annul the achievements of modernity and revert to the backward and ignorant Middle Ages.

If Islam dominates the world, all the advances achieved by the West, including in science, technology and industry, will be threatened by total loss and replacement by irrational mystical practices. In turn, human existence filled with creativity and productivity will shift to become static, rigid and counter- progressive. This is how the Western community has portrayed Islam so far.

The perception of Islam in the West may be due to the lack of adequate knowledge of Islam. It is acknowledged that much of American society is not familiar with this religion.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Western view of Islam appears to be simplistic.

The Islamic image that has developed in the West has certainly been inseparable from Muslims' own actions. We cannot merely blame the West for all the irregularities taking place in the Muslim world, but we should also look at the realities in the Islamic community itself.

Among Muslim movements, there are groups that practice violence and display anti-democratic tendencies in their attempts to achieve political goals. A fairly large number of cases of violence with political motives have involved Islamic circles or Muslim activists, such as U.S. embassy explosions in some Muslim countries, plane hijackings, hostage holding, bombings of Western economic centers and premeditated killings of foreign citizens.

The Middle East as the heart of the Islamic world has various examples of Islamic movements that reflect nuances of violence rather than cultural tones of peace as desired by Islam. In Egypt, for instance, radical actions that justify the use of violence to reach political aims have emerged. In the 1970s, when Egypt was under Sadat, new groups arose as a reincarnation of Ikhwan previously banned by the Nasser government.

Most of the groups were led by former members of Ikhwan al- Muslimin after their release from prison. What they experienced in jail convinced them that the government was anti-Islam and the only choice was to topple it through violent revolution.

The acts of violence they committed, rather than abrupt or coincidental moves, were already outlined as an inherent part of Islamic teachings. Jama'at al-Islamiyah, for example, urged that its members perform their collective duties pursuant to the lines of thought adhered to.

Among the precepts were to defy judges deprived of the law of Allah; to oblige members to wage war on those opposing sharia; and to prohibit members from joining any parliament or political party. Such principles formed the basis of violent acts perpetrated by the militant groups.

In general, the beliefs of these militant movements have the following characteristics.

First: Unifying faith. Militant groups frequently make no distinction between Islam and Islamic understanding, between religion and religious experience. In other words, they cannot distinguish between Islam descending from Allah through the Koran and hadith as its source, and the Islam already understood by Muslims in different periods and perceptions. Consequently, the absolute, genuine teachings of Islam and the relative perceptions of men are not clearly differentiated. Both are mostly considered absolute so that criticism is rejected.

Second: Theocentric faith. To militant groups, all the world's phenomena are realities they take for granted and deem inevitable. All occurrences on earth are merely seen as the absolute will of God, while men have no right to plan and devise anything except to accept the will of God.

Third: Conservative thinking. Militant groups' thought is oriented to the past, with the assumption that the past was the best era, which must be brought back to the present. The past had command of religious authorities. So, any intellectual attempt they made was truth that is beyond review today. It becomes a sacred text that defies criticism or evaluation, let alone replacement by new creative innovations.

Fourth: Exclusive approaches. Militant groups tend to think that their understanding of religion is the religion itself. They consider the rules they conclude as the law of Allah that must be followed and cannot be replaced by other human rules, let alone those imported from heathens.

It is these features of thought that motivate militant groups in Islam. When the ideas arising therefrom are applied to the political sphere, acts of violence and terror are often inevitable.

The fact that in the West Islam is viewed as a threat, future enemy and something standing in opposition to the West can be construed as the outcome of inadequate information on both sides.

At the same time, there are also radical Muslim movements that present Islam as a "scary", rigid, intolerant face, justifying hostile actions to achieving their goals. In the political context, these groups call for the overthrow of power by force and the murder of those considered "allergic" to the formalization of syariah in a state. Moreover, now and again they alienate the Muslim community itself and even deem it heathen for not being the Islam-based society as perceived by the groups.

The best way of understanding what has so far been referred to as a clash between the Western and Muslim communities is a close examination of both sides' conflicting political, socio-economic and cultural interests. Such conflicting interests can actually be bridged by means of selective, well-defined collaboration policies. Likewise, the two parties need to agree on clear and consistent public policies on the rights of all citizens to determine their own future democratically.

The writer is an activist at Muhammadiyah Scholars Network (JIMM) and researcher at the Indonesia Institute Jakarta.