Muslims and Liberals

The Daily Star – Lebanon
October 7, 2005

Human rights groups around the world are concerned that the UN resolution calling on governments to punish “incitement to terrorist acts” will further stifle the voices of the oppressed, especially because the world body has failed to define what terrorism is.

This resolution has, says Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, “made it easy for abusive governments to invoke the resolution to target peaceful political opponents, impose censorship and close mosques, churches and schools.”

The draft resolution that sought to define terrorism fell through in the UN General Assembly mainly because the United States and Britain opposed clauses that would permit “resistance against occupation” and call for the examination of the “root causes” of terrorism. America and Britain, representing the European Union, apparently were saying that if you have the guns you can not only invade and occupy countries, but should be able to rewrite political science, too.

I learned in college that terrorism means the use or threatened use of force against “noncombatants” in order to spread fear to cause political change. Governments have called all kinds of violence terrorism, but news media used to be more circumspect. In the 1980s I worked as an editor at American newspapers, and we termed Afghans fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan “mujahideen” (freedom fighters). We used “militants,” “insurgents” and “guerrillas” to describe Kashmiris, Sikhs, Chechens and East Timorese attacking “occupation” troops.

The September 11, 2001, terrorists were Muslim, and the Bush administration triggered a dramatic change in the use of the term when it co-opted into its “global war on terror” (GWOT) governments facing Muslim insurgencies. Today the administration and much of news media use the “terrorist” label for Muslims fighting combatants they consider intruders on their lands. Repressive Muslim regimes also have joined the GWOT and all resistance to their repression is now labeled terrorism. There are no Muslim freedom fighters anymore. All have become terrorists.

Much of the so-called “Islamic terrorism” is committed in the pursuit of Western values of independence and freedom against institutions suppressing those values. Such institutions include the “nation-state.” Before Western colonial powers and Westernized native elites lumped Muslim and other cultural minorities into “nation-states,” these communities lived in empires and princedoms, which collected taxes and solved murders but seldom poked into people’s ethnic and religious life. Artificially created postcolonial nations demanded that these communities adapt their lifestyles to “national” cultures, which represented those of hostile cultural majorities. In response, many minority nationalities are fighting for independence to preserve their cultural autonomy. The bombs of the Palestinian, Kashmiri, Chechen and Tamil “terrorists” echo Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self-determination.

The spread of Western principles of freedom have also spurred Muslim insurgencies against Muslim autocracies. Some of these insurgents target America because they see it supporting regimes that are suppressing those principles. Forty years ago Pakistani and Saudi autocracies repressed their citizens more harshly than they do today, but they didn’t face armed insurgents then because the ideas of freedom were confined to the elites. In Pakistan, my mentor Mahmoud Ali, secretary general of the five-party Pakistan Democratic Movement, used to lament in the late 1960s that our movement hadn’t “hit the street.” And none of the three Pakistani military dictators who preceded President Pervez Musharraf was targeted by assassins. He has been.

In Saudi Arabia the anti-regime movement began as whispers to foreign reporters against the stationing of U.S. troops there after Operation Desert Storm. A political scientist at Jeddah’s King Abdel-Aziz University said it reflected “our increasing exposure to Western winds.” In October 1991 he predicted to me on condition of anonymity: “Ten years from now these [anti-regime] kids may be throwing bombs!” Four years later the Riyadh bombing heralded anti-American and anti- regime violence in Saudi Arabia.

Why have many activist Muslim youths turned violent? One, Mahmoud Ali’s prayer has been answered and many Muslim movements for rights and freedoms have “hit the street,” but I wonder if my leader knew that the street could turn violent. Secondly, many Muslim youths torn from their ethnic communities by modernization are streaming to Islamist groups, some of which espouse anti-American and anti-regime violence. They’re lured to Islamism partly because of the feeble pull of their artificial nationhood. (Iraq is disintegrating, and Pakistan already did, because their citizens, lacking national solidarity, vote and fight along sectarian and ethnic lines.) Finally, by designating all armed struggle against repression as terrorism, America and its allies have legitimized terrorism in the eyes of many Muslims.

The Muslim world is in unprecedented political and religious ferment, and many youths are committing senseless butchery of innocent noncombatants which must be punished and condemned. But Muslims are also struggling against armed forces of suppression, which, as Massachusetts Minutemen knew, calls for armed resistance. America can’t get a handle on its anti-terror campaign unless it recognizes the distinction.