Root Causes: A Canadian Muslim gets it right

Judeoscope.ca - Québec,Canada - from the Globe and Mail
Thursday, 15 June, 2006

Emran Qureshi, a Canadian fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, in an article titled A debasement of Islam, brushes aside the usual victimology so many Islamic leaders resort to and addresses candidly the source of Islamic extremism.

The news that a group of Toronto-area Muslim radical misfits allegedly planned to commit terrorist attacks against Canada is evidence that the war within Islam has lapped up on our shores. Most Canadian Muslims are shocked at the news. Sadly, they should not be.

The argument that this has nothing to do with Islam is false. The young Muslim adults who learned to hate our generous and tolerant Canadian society learned it not from pimps or drug dealers, but from Islamic fundamentalists who preyed on them within Canadian mosques.

The fashionable idea that this is politics, not religion, is partly false and partly true. It is true that these jihadis wishing to wage war against Canada have a politicized understanding of Islam, but this misses the big picture that there are those within the Canadian Muslim community (and globally) who preach hatred and, worse, an understanding of Islam that makes it morally permissible to use violence.

Until recently, Islam as understood by most Muslims was largely humanistic and inclusive with Sufi readings particularly popular. Canadian Muslims effortlessly adapted into the broader society with new and old Canadian heritages fusing and blending together. This has been, for the most part, the picture of Canadian Islam.

Over the 1980s and 1990s, however, more fundamentalist, legalistic interpretations became popularized globally. Islam as a spiritual and religious system was reduced to a series of arid do’s and don’ts.

One particularly virulent form of Sunni fundamentalism that became popular was Salafism (better known in the West as Wahhabism) — an attempt to "return" to a purer, unsullied and, for the most part, imaginary past. There is nothing wrong with returning to tradition. But these interpreters put forth a fundamentally radical and intolerant understanding of Salafi Islam (one that incidentally also views Shia theology and Sufi mysticism as "innovations" and thus a heresy). Radical here is not a synonym for bad or wicked, but meaning a radical break from tradition.

That coupled with a 20th-century politicized understanding of Islam that has at its core an Occidentalist world view — a hatred directed at a stereotyped view of the West, the idea that Western values and traditions are alien, inimical and antithetical to Islam. This was an ideological construction on the part of Islamist intellectuals such as Abul Ala Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. (The irony is that these leading interpreters of Islam leavened their understanding with illiberal Western ideas borrowed liberally.)

(...)

Some Canadian Muslim leaders have responded by denial, alleging "root causes": Canadian foreign policy in the Middle East, or our troops in Afghanistan. They should, instead, reflect on the poison that is being disseminated, the ruined young lives, and the resultant prejudice engendered toward Muslims within the broader
society.

Other Muslims argue that the real issue is Islamophobia and prejudicial attitudes and nothing more. This is a facile and borderline apologetic response.

Canadian Muslims have rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship. Canadian Muslim leaders should not continue to evade the seriousness of recent events and their responsibilities in cleaning up this mess, and Canadian Muslims who participate in and donate to Canadian Islamic charities and institutions should insist on moral and ethical accountability.