What Future for Muslim Identity?

By Munawar A. Anees

The September 11 tragedy has mandated a variegated identity to Muslims. In the global context, the portrayal of Muslim personality spans from being labeled as terrorist and militant Islamist to fundamentalist. This indictment of an entire faith-based civilization and the ensuing cliché are partially the handiwork of a partisan media in cohorts with assorted Islamophobes.

But where is the real face of Muslims in this growing thicket of suspicion? Are they fated to live intimated by fear, bigotry, and hate perpetuated by these images? What they themselves have done to shed the mold they are being cast into?

The unabated spate of suicide bombings hardly serves the Muslim cause or, for that matter, any other human concern. From attacks on the World Trade Center through Istanbul synagogue and the Moscow subway, these senseless acts stand to reinforce the prevalent stereotypes.

Every new image of the ruthless murder of innocent civilians flashing across world television leaves a stigma upon the Muslim psyche. It would be ages before these excesses are forgotten.

The rules of conduct of war against enemy as enunciated by the Prophet in the Constitution of Medina provide unequivocal protection to civilians and civil property. No religious injunction may therefore be invoked to legitimize suicide bombings which bring harm to these people and places.

The act of suicide itself, irrespective of the motivation, is expressly prohibited. Islam considers life as a gift from the Creator. Death too is by the command of the Almighty. To commit suicide is to at once defy the Divine order in a state of ungratefulness. Under any pretext, these acts of desperation are in contraposition to the justified self-defense.

Beyond the blemish of self-destruction, the Muslim world continues to simmer under circumstances where freedom, justice, economic opportunity, and gender equality are stifled. Nearly one-fourth of the human population living in over fifty Muslim countries faces a grim and uncertain future. It is precisely in these countries where the social indices of human condition are found to be at abysmal level.

The absence of democratic governance is perhaps the darkest side of human existence across the Muslim world. It is not difficult to trace the ubiquity of mass illiteracy, poverty, diseases, and civic disorder in these countries to the usurpation of people's right to govern themselves.

One comes across the cacophony of "Islam and democracy" only to face autocrats, dictators, kings, theocrats, and military junta as the only rulers in Muslim lands. The discourse has degenerated into an apology where democratic principles are viewed as something inferior or totally alien to the Islamic ideology. This rigidity of the religious scholars, purported to be an attempt to grab power, is exploited by the corrupt to perpetuate tyranny. In nearly half a century into the postcolonial period, it is baffling that the protocols of Muslim self-governance remain undefined!

Having lost the ability to face the outer world punctuated by concern for human rights, multiculturalism, and tolerance, the Muslim social fabric has seen little beyond sectarian strife, tribal wars, and suppression of women and minorities. Those who habitually put the blame for their ills upon the colonial oppressors need only to be reminded of the intra-Muslim carnage: Witness the emergence of Bangladesh in the wake of military action against fellow Muslims by a country born in the name of Islam; the decade-long Iran-Iraq war; and the abject neglect of the Palestinian refugees by the wider Arab community, to name a few.

The crisis of Muslim political and intellectual identity, accentuated by a nostalgia for the past glory, stands rebutted by the Western military ascendancy on the wings of renewed religious zeal: unceremonious capture of the self-proclaimed Iraqi "Saladin" and capitulation of the fabled Afghan warriors sets the real tone of a clash of civilizations. The eulogy in process for the suicide bomber is then hardly a match for the "just war." Neither can it ever become a winning recipe for a "war of ideas."

The inevitability of a democratically governed Muslim world is an imperative born out of Muslim recognition of their rights and responsibilities in a globalized world. For this mindset to emerge Muslims must learn the magnanimity of critical self-analysis. While the democratic freedom does not germinate out of the barrel of a gun, it is neither obtained by being totally oblivious to self-identity.

A tradition of the Prophet equates self-cognizance with the cognizance of the Almighty. The future of Muslim identity in the 21st century and beyond lies with that vital cognizance and not with confrontation.

Dr. Munawar A. Anees is the Executive Director of Knowledge Management Systems (KnowSys) based in Arizona. A biologist by training, he is widely known as a writer and a cultural critic. He is the author of several books and over 300 articles on religion and science, bioethics, and Islamic studies. One of his works, Islam and Biological Futures: Ethics, Gender and Technology, is considered a classic on Islamic bioethics. Founding and Advisory Editor of many scholarly journals including Journal of Islamic Science, his Periodica Islamica was hailed as a pioneering initiative on current awareness. Advisor to the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, he is an elected member of the Royal Academy of Jordan. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in February 2002.