When the music stops: Extremists Disrupt Muslim HIV/AIDS Conference

By Shanon Shah

Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia): When the music stops, they don’t stop.

The 2nd International Muslim Leaders Consultation on HIV/AIDS, held in Kuala Lumpur from the 19th-23rd of May 2003, was proof enough that religious zealots will stop at nothing to make people submit to their own agendas. Most of the participants at the consultation were shocked when a bunch of extremists stood up and verbally terrorized one of the speakers, Dr. Amina Wadud, after she presented her paper.

In her paper, Dr. Wadud, who is no stranger to controversy, lashed out at Muslims in positions of authority whose only response to preventing HIV/AIDS is quoting the Qur’anic verse that says “La taqrabu 'z-zina” – “Do not approach adultery.” She said that religious platitudes like this were meaningless when spouted at faithful wives who contract HIV/AIDS from their philandering husbands, and at children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. She challenged Muslims to come up with a more effective theological response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

For her views, she was accused of blasphemy, threatened with expulsion from the consultation and labeled an enemy of Islam (despite her being very publicly Muslim). At one point, one of the extremists screamed into one of the microphones that Dr. Wadud was a “devil in a hijab”, threatening to round up a hundred people to shut her up, and accused the rest of the participants of committing apostasy if they chose to remain in the hall before he stormed out. The lone woman among the extremists claimed that Dr. Wadud did not speak for Muslim women, and proclaimed herself the “perfect example” for all women. She also said that when she read Dr. Wadud’s paper, she’d have “expected” this from “a Jew or a Christian, but never a Muslim”. In short, she was the extremists’ Condoleezza Rice.

And they didn’t stop there.

These extremists stormed out of the hall and demanded a press conference to attack Dr. Wadud even further. Such was their wrath towards (and obsession with?) her that Dr. Wadud’s name appeared only in upper case letters in their press statement. When the progressive Muslims in the consultation came up with petitions defending Dr. Wadud’s right to speak without fear of persecution, we found stacks of our petitions mysteriously missing with the same rate of swiftness that the extremists distributed their written attacks on Dr. Wadud. The fanatics also positioned themselves the next day to attack another progressive Muslim scholar, Dr. Riffat Hassan. Dr. Hassan, however, used her space and time as a speaker to address these attacks directly, and received a standing ovation from a number of participants in the hall.

This – of course – didn’t stop the extremists.

The next day, Dr. Wadud decided to withdraw her paper from the consultation. Quite a few participants were dismayed by her decision, but ultimately understood – better for the writer of the paper to exercise her own decision on the paper than to let some group of censors decree what the writer can or cannot say. Nevertheless, the extremists embraced this as their crowning victory.

But did they then stop? (You can probably sense a trend by now.)

On this same day, the organizers of the consultation decided to incorporate a question and answer session after each presentation, as demanded by the extremists. The extremists used this opportunity to hijack the question and answer sessions. Instead of asking questions directly pertaining to the papers, they chose to spit their vitriolic agenda to the entire hall. The hall was suddenly filled with attacks on marginalized groups, especially gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans-gendered people. All in the name of "Allah". As a response of sorts, the younger participants in the conference decided to draw up a more inclusive “youth resolution”, and also decided to speak up in a video that was made for the next day’s “Youth Voices” session.

Which, of course, didn’t stop the extremists. (But you knew that already.)

Their final act of intimidation was to prowl through the hall during the chairperson’s closing speech, taking pictures of all the people who dared speak in opposition to their extremist agenda.

As a volunteer rapporteur during the consultation, I was bewildered by the single-mindedness of their strategies. Coupled with their willingness to shout other people down and hurl verbal threats whenever they could, I was truly paralyzed with fear at the beginning.

However, I soon realized that a lot of the other participants were feeling the same way that I did. From the first day of the commotion, we all got together and started talking, and the novices among us realized that this is exactly how extremists operate. They work on fear and intimidation. Furthermore, we realized that this eruption was far from spontaneous. It is part of a strategy that they use, time and again, to get their way.

Consider the following discoveries that we made.

Firstly, hardly any of these extremists attended any of the workshop sessions during the consultation. The consultation was structured in such a way that speakers would present papers on particular themes during the plenary sessions, and these would be openly discussed during workshop sessions held afterwards. The workshops, really, were opportunities for participants to voice their concerns, suggestions, recommendations, objections, and whatever-else to the topics being discussed. However, these extremists were not interested in participating in such workshops. They were more interested in holding certain plenary presenters hostage. (More on this later.)

Secondly, some of them repeated over and over again that this consultation was turning out to be too much like “Beijing”. The person who repeated this again and again claimed to have been present in Beijing during a UN Conference on Women. Apparently, he was pretty riled up at the frank discussions on women, their sexuality and their rights in Beijing. Also, the lone woman among the extremists has attacked Dr. Wadud publicly more than once before. If all this is true, it could mean that it is not by coincidence that extremists now mobilize themselves to shore up their presence in international conferences that may threaten their ideology.

Thirdly, the extremists appeared to target only the progressive Muslim women speakers in the group. Consider the interesting gender politics and geopolitics. Dr. Amina Wadud is an African American Muslim woman. Dr. Riffat Hassan is a Pakistani woman living and working in the United States of America. The two brilliant progressive Muslim men who spoke – Dr. Ebrahim Moosa and Dr. Farid Esack, both from South Africa – were not subjected even remotely to the same levels of venom reserved for Dr. Wadud and Dr. Hassan. So although none of the rest of us could actually be certain about anything, all of us felt very strongly that these people attended the consultation with the main aim of hammering it to suit their agenda, and disrupting it at all costs were it to take any other direction.

And it doesn’t stop there.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I feel that these people are not interested in engaging the wider public to understand specific issues affecting Muslims in the world, in this case HIV/AIDS. Rather, it is their one and only goal to force their narrow ideology down everyone’s throat. All dissent is to be crushed. I think they cunningly couch their agenda in the language of “multiculturalism”, “religious sensitivity” and “minority rights” when they operate in Western, non-Islamic democracies. But in Malaysia, a country they perceive as Islamic, they just lost themselves. They thought they had complete license to breathe fire on any Muslim who dared to challenge them.

I can’t begin to say how much all of this has affected me. I can’t begin to describe the many times I broke down in tears after listening to their hate speeches and threats. And I saw tears in the eyes of quite a few women participants and male-to-female trans-genders. A few men also admitted crying silently in private after each ordeal. We were struck by their sheer absence of humanity.

But then I realized as well, much later, that though I was vehemently against their bigotry and violence, I was somehow responding from a place of deep hurt and anger. My friends who were not at the consultation sensed this, and told me. I was hurt by their assessments. Were they suggesting that I was the one who had issues to deal with?

Then I received an e-mail on a completely unrelated issue. Some Malaysian Malay was apparently sick and tired of Malays being stereotyped as lazy and stupid. She felt crippled by racial stereotyping and was all out to disprove such stereotyping. But in doing so, she resorted to her own racial stereotypes to illustrate her arguments. She talked about “the Chinese” and “the Indians” and what “they” did differently from the “Malays”. Suddenly things started to make sense to me.

See, chauvinism disgusts me. Be it based on religion, race, sexuality, gender, nationality and what-else-have-you. It frightens me when it is propagated by intimidation and violence. But in opposing it, I realize how easy it is to turn into a reverse chauvinist. This is exactly the kind of thing I must not resort to; otherwise I will turn into the very monster that I am trying so hard not to become.

And then I got stumped. So what do I do with all my good intentions? With my quest for a truly egalitarian and caring society that embraces diversity as dearly as it does familiarity?

I think that I must just keep singing and hope my song can move people. I must learn to love my song because my song is worth loving, not because it is better than the other person’s song. And if I’m willing to love my song, hopefully there will be others who will love it too. Maybe we’re all singing the same song. But we must keep singing. If we stop, we’re in trouble.

We can’t stop.