August 19, 2016
Speaking Haq
It took one man to stand up and disrobe a charlatan. For too long, it has been instilled in too many American Muslims that the way to get by in US life is to stay quiet, docile, not speak up, and not stand up. A recipe for surviving, but not for thriving. The benchmark here was existing, not living. All it did was present the Muslim community in the US as a convenient punching bag.
The stance of being submissive, not making waves, not rocking the boat, and acting like grateful immigrants can only be judged against results. The results have been an exponential increase in public shoe-beating, most vocally and visibly by Trump.
One man, however, fired by moral indignation and speaking Haq disproved the shallowness of the foregoing strategy. Silence is golden, but sometimes it is just plain yellow.
Khizr Khan simply spoke the truth and demonstrated that the Emperor has no clothes. Muslims have been most devastated by terror.
There was a compelling need for a counter-narrative – to not always be on the back foot, explaining and apologizing for the misdeeds of the few. And not accepting the paradigm of collective guilt by association. By this yardstick, should all Americans be held responsible for the misdeeds of Bush, all Brits for Blair, all Serbs for Milosevic? Should the Vatican be smeared for the Holocaust because Hitler was a Catholic? Should all Japanese be tarnished by the Rape of Nanking? Or all Hindus for the Modi-led Gujarat massacres of 2002? Should all American Jews be put on the dock for Israeli excesses in Occupied Territories?
In some respects, sectors of the US Muslim community are also responsible for their perilous plight in that they fell into the appeasement trap of always pleading for harmony, peace, commonality, and moderation – projecting a subservient attitude of defeatist passivity.
Speaking up showed the veracity of Tipu Sultan’s philosophy: “One day’s life of a lion is preferable to 100 years of a jackal.” A bereaved couple from Lahore did the dual job of shaming many Americans and inspiring many Americans. And, by doing so, they may have changed the trajectory of the US Presidential race.
In the Western heartland of the 1930s, German Jewry was docile and quiescent, imagining that the gathering storm would pass by on its own. It didn’t. The Irish poet Yeats said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
It is an unsavory trait of human nature and of human history that if bad guys are not checked, good guys start behaving badly, just to go with the flow.
To some extent, human beings are mildly racist, predisposed as they are to flock around those with whom they have most in common. But that predisposition, if it is not reined in by common decency and civility, can create blind spots to overlook the flaws within. Left unchecked, this blinding prejudice can prove to be a self-defeating pitfall.
Great leaders, to cite Abraham Lincoln, appeal to “the better angels of our nature” rather than to its base instincts of fear and hatred.
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