Fight or Flight
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
Western Muslims can be sometimes harshly critical about happenings in the Muslim East. More productive, perhaps, would be if they can strive to be the harshest critics of their own status in the West.
Some hard questions are unavoidable. Why, despite funds, facilities, freedoms, sizeable stay and numbers, the Muslim community in the US has so little visible impact? Does its defensive mentality invite constant denigration of Muslims and Islam? And the slurs which are hurled at Muslims, can they be hurled with equal ease on Jews, blacks, or gays?
There is an over-emphasis on success measured by economic benchmarks. The Arab Establishment is quite rich, but scrutinize its performance on the big occasion. Muslim youth may be technically knowledgeable, but it is their understanding of the big picture that is at issue. Reactions of bewilderment and defeatism just won’t get the job done. Those deemed politically defenseless shall remain a target.
Too many view America as a place to work. Not enough see it as a place to live with dignity and equity. These ambivalent attitudes have had a trickle-down demoralizing effect.
The unavoidable task for the Muslim youth is to make the US political culture curb its blind spots and to make it more respectful to what is sacred to Muslims.
Speech deliberately intended to provoke and incite violent unrest in the Muslim world is, in effect, seditious by posing a global threat to US national security. It is a credible argument now due to the happenings around the world.
Sections of post-9/11 American Muslim youth talk of how they face fear and feel fear, despite being born in the US, and holding US citizenship.
James Meredith – the first black enrolled at the University of Mississippi, with the back-up of US federal forces sent in by President Kennedy in 1962, in an atmosphere of violent racism – recently told the BBC: “if you don’t show fear where you are expected to show fear, the other side would be scared.”
Routine rallies, petitions, and protests are not going to make much of a dent. The best deterrent is to show zero tolerance for one’s own weakness. Good results are not produced without great effort. Vision is not enough. It has to be backed by innovative action.
American Muslims – with Presidential Elections next month – are at the crossroads of choices: the path to self-respect or the path of subjugation. Fight or flight. The time to shift the momentum is now.
Other groups are not subjected to similar pummeling for the simple reason that they may have the deterrence value of politically and legally retaliating more effectively. Respect is earned, not handed over on a platter.
Till now, the community is a loose collection of individual groups, lacking the central theme, gravitas, and team ethic of a motivated unit. The educated people lack the will and the uneducated lack the skill.
European Jewry was jolted after the calamity and carnage of the 1930s-40s. Western Muslims continue to recline and decline. One key question is inescapable: has the existing approach delivered the goods? If not, then it does require an adjustment in approach.
