Vision with Action
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
The recent ruling of a US federal judge, to allow anti-Muslim ads to be displayed on public buses in Philadelphia, once again reconfirms that anti-Islam postures continue to remain intellectually respectable in the US. The pictorial ad connects Muslims with Hitler and urges ending all aid to Muslim countries.
Ralph Peters, a former US army officer and the author of "The War in 2020," comments in a note to his book: "But what about the issue of Islamic fundamentalism? It is a ‘barracks religion’ ... I see the future of these people as condemned to eternal mediocrity.”
The time to project a counter narrative may have come.
Muslim think-tanks need to be set up to serve as a clearing house for ideas and a platform to visibly project views on the national stage. Misperceptions about Islam flow from ignorance as well as from deliberate distortions. The hurdles are both intellectual and moral.
Fourteen centuries ago, Hazrat Ali warned Muslims to be aware of three kinds of people: the greedy, the timid, and the miserly. His admonitions apply to some well-heeled Muslims in America. Their material acquisitions may have made them into economic elephants, yet their diffidence and lack of sophisticated know-how consign them to the lower tiers.
Silence, it is said, is golden – but, sometimes, it is just plain yellow. For years, Muslims have been content to ride as mere passengers in a train hurtling towards an uncertain destination. En route, they have absorbed punches and held back despite brazen provocations.
Ahead loom tasks that may appear big yet are solvable, but not without self-assertion.
Still, in the Muslim world, there is little enthusiasm for setting up a counter-balancing intellectual infrastructure to project on the global stage an authentic Muslim ethos that can courageously and persuasively articulate core aspirations. Muslims, therefore, are reduced to pleading for recognition of rights from those who stand to benefit the most from the calculated disparagement of their faith.
It leaves ample space for ‘approved’ Muslims who cruise along without making waves, which can rock the boat of vested interests. Talk of peace and reconciliation in the Mideast has been left teetering with Bibi Netanyahu slamming the door on a future Palestinian state and winning electoral endorsement.
Capitulation never brings salvation. The bigger the challenge, the smaller has been the response.
Given this background, it is no wonder that some demoralized Muslims should think of emulating American Jewry and Hindu Americans as their role models of success in the United States.
Assimilation or rejection has been the two principal responses of US Muslim groups. Neither has delivered. It has meant the presenting of Muslims as easy targets.
The submissive sense that problems shall somehow sort themselves out with the passage of time, without having to incur effort and expense, is almost culturally entrenched. It doesn’t work that way. It lends itself to a defeatist mindset.
Incoherence has made the Muslim community and its legitimate causes vulnerable to malicious exploitation. Individual flair is no substitute for solid teamwork. Vision is, indeed, good.
But what is vision without action?
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