This is a guest post by Muhammad Al-Hussaini
Following the bloody drama played out on her streets, like London before her, Boston now faces a stark reckoning with the reality of terrorism at the hands of young, home-grown Muslim men. Like the carnage the day after London’s victorious Olympic bid in 2005, the attacks last week juxtapose the backdrop of cultural plurality and fraternity through sport, with terrorist expression of grievances by the murder of children, women and ethnic minorities.
In the multivariate regression analysis of the colluding risk factors behind the motives for the young men, it would appear obvious that entirely to exclude Islamic belief as a partial contributor does not fit the empirical data of similar attacks elsewhere. But what is significant in the aftermath is the scramble by various parties to eliminate their respective constituencies as variables in the equation. These range from the boorish Chechen president’s categorical assertion that “it is necessary to seek the roots of evil in America” and not their birth country, to the Embassy of the Czech Republic’s comic disambiguationof that nation from Chechnya.
Cautious of the backlash against American Muslims, NBC Nightly News and the Today Show are reported not to have made any reference to the men’s Muslim identity. Hassan Shibly, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations is unequivocal that “those who commit acts of terrorism have nothing to do with religion” and neither Islam, nor any misunderstood interpretation thereof are factors, but rather such acts “are due to the individual needing serious mental health counseling”. On the day of the 7/7 bombings, a joint communiqué by the Muslim Council of Britainand Churches Together in Britain and Ireland asserted “The scriptures and the traditions of both the Muslim and Christian communities repudiate the use of such violence,” and this was followed a few days later by a statement by the MCB Secretary General, Sir Iqbal Sacranie at his “anguish, shock and horror” that the terrorists had turned out to be Muslim.
The pained efforts of Muslim and other leaders to disavow any connection of religious belief to such acts will ring hollow for the maimed and bereaved victims of the atrocity. To me, this speaks shamefully of the Interfaith Industry that we have created, which privileges analgesic public relations by religious politicians over the brutal truth that sacred scriptures do, in fact, espouse violence – certainly in the interpretative hands of those who use the texts in this way – and that, through history, both Muslim and Christian clerical authorities have far from repudiated use of such violence for their holy warriors.
In the current context, as I have said before, a significant reality about Muslim-perpetrated terrorism is that analogous contexts of poverty and oppression of Buddhists in Tibet or Christians in East Timor have not spawned suicide bombers and mujahidin in the same way. While the genocidal Israelite conquest of Canaan depicted in Deuteronomy 7 and 20 has been consigned by classical rabbinic commentators like Maimonides and Nahmanides to the dust of history, never to form a template for Jewish treatment of foreign religious minorities, the Quran’s Sword Verse in Quran 9:5 concerning war-making against polytheist unbelievers, remains an active locus of dispute by Muslim ‘ulama as to its live applicability or otherwise.
It is highly unlikely that the Chechen boys were scholars of the Quran, any more than bungling Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American Times Square bomber. As with Lee Boyd Malvo, the junior understudy of the Washington sniper, John Allen Muhammad, the “bunch of guys” male dynamic of dominant older, and weaker younger sibling likely interplay for the Tsarnaev brothers with a complex array of other personal determinants, from familial disaffection to the rage of young men. In security conference contexts where I teach, colleagues at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom andGeorge C Marshall European Center for Security Studies sift and explore the multifaceted underpinnings that led to the internet self-radicalisation of 16 year-old schoolboy, Hamaad Munshi, and the suicide bomb plot by Bristol student, Andrew Ibrahim.
However, the cantus firmus girding the riotous fugue of all these painful and shocking narratives is a common seeking after authenticity, purity and honour – certainties alluringly provided by simple and potent radicalised readings of God’s holy writ. And it is at this locus of challenging and reclaiming the jihadists’ claims to authenticity and truth that a significant part of the ideological struggle against religious extremism must take place.
