Thought for the Day - 01/10/01
By accident, I caught it live on TV when the towers came down, and watched with shock, but unfortunately little surprise. I had been voicing my fears about just such an event for some time. With security-free internal flights and that size of a target, it had always seemed too obvious and too easy. Some martyr for a cause was going to go for it one day. It had seemed inevitable – and so it turned out.
After the shock came that sinking feeling in the stomach at the thought of the usual mosque burnings, and a scary time on the streets for a lot of muslims and anyone who might be mistaken for one. If it happened after Oklahoma, what could we expect after the carnage of New York. But the worst of what might have been triggered didn’t happen, and to a large extent that was due to a shift in the language used by public figures over the following weeks. From talk of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and a ‘Crusade’, suddenly almost every politician in sight was trying to find something nice to say about Islam. Very strange.
And someone finally suggested to the media that it is not necessarily a good idea to link the words ‘muslim’ and ‘terrorist’. Hallelujah - at last someone listened. How can terror be part of a faith in which the most commonly used words are Mercy and Compassion. In Islam there may be no distinction between religion and politics, but that doesn’t mean that every political action is Islamic. To accept the Islamic self-definition of the bombers is to legitimise them in their own terms. We need to reclaim the muslim language they usurp and distort.
As for ourselves, we need a new term for this ‘war’ that we are told is unlike any we have fought before, a struggle without end for justice, freedom, and social welfare for humanity, not just in battle, but permeating through a whole life. In fact, the language of Islam already has a word for such a fight for liberty and justice, with combatants forbidden to target innocents. It is ‘Jihad’. I think it is time we reclaimed the term from those who use it to justify their actions, while ignoring the self-restraint of its Islamic definition.