The NYT has a piece by Neil MacFarquhar, who has a track-record in these matters, reporting the complaints of Muslim Americans at their annual convention. Nowhere in the piece do we find the slightest hint of self-criticism, nowhere any suggestion that Muslim Americans owe something to the country from whom they demand so much in the way of freedom. Couldn’t we hear just a word or two about how some Muslims in America and around the world are a problem, that prejudice and stereotyping are problems in the Muslim community, and that the Muslims have an enormous contribution they could make to the security of the country they live in by feeling responsible for and policing their own ranks to make sure that groups who talk about infidels as the “enemies of Allah” and plan attacks on American military bases are indeed denounced and stopped.

I guess it’s always easier to make demands on people who won’t knee cap you. (Note that ISNA is under investigations for links to the same Hamas whose sadistic innovations in knee-capping I’ve linked to here.)

September 4, 2007
Abandon Stereotypes, Muslims in America Say

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
ROSEMONT, Ill., Sept 3 — It is time for the United States to stop treating every American Muslim as somehow suspect, leaders of the faith said at their largest annual convention, which ended here on Monday.

Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans should distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, the leaders said.

It would be nice to get some guidance on this. It would be nice if we had “mainstream” Muslims denouncing the radicals more often, and defending them less often.

“Muslim Americans feel an increasing level of tension and scrutiny in contemporary society,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States and the convention organizer.

The image problems were among the topics most discussed by many of the 30,000 attendees. A fresh example cited was an open letter from two Republican House members, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Sue Myrick of North Carolina, that attacked the Justice Department for sending envoys to the convention because, the lawmakers said, the Islamic Society of North America was a group of “radical jihadists.”

Note that, as is his wont, MacFarquhar doesn’t cite any of the evidence to support this position, so it just sounds like crackpot Islamophobia.

The lone Muslim in Congress, Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, the keynote speaker here, dismissed the letter as ill informed and typical of bigoted attacks that other minorities have suffered.

Ellison’s apparently much better at denouncing Islamophobia among outsiders than Judeophobia among his own.

Leaders of American Muslim organizations attribute the growing intolerance to three main factors: global terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, disappointing reports from the Iraq war and the agenda of some supporters of Israel who try taint Islam to undermine the Palestinians.

American Muslims say they expect the attacks to worsen in the presidential election and candidates to criticize Islam in an effort to prove that they are tough on terrorism.

Zaid Shakir, an African-American imam with rock star status among young Muslims, described how on a recent road trip from Michigan to Washington he heard comments on talk radio from people who were “making stuff up about Islam.”

Among the most egregious, he said, was from a person in Kentucky who denounced the traditional short wood stick some Muslims use to clean their teeth, saying, “They are really sharpening up their teeth because they are planning to eat you, yes they are.”

Representatives of at least eight federal departments and agencies attended the convention, their booths sandwiched among hundreds of others from bookstores, travel agencies, perfumeries, clothing designers and real estate developers.

Mark S. Ward, who runs programs in Asia and the Middle East for the Agency for International Development, said Washington had to compete for influence abroad with militant groups that are expert at delivering humanitarian services.

Mr. Ward said he hoped more American Muslim organizations would apply to help distribute overseas aid.

A few people approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation booth to voice dismay at its presence, said a recruiter, David Valle, but most expressed pleasant surprise.

“A lot of folks think we want to hire them to spy on their community, spy on their families,” he said. “We want to dispel any myths they might have about the F.B.I.”

The Justice Department responded to Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Myrick’s letter by noting that broad community contact in areas like voting rights was an important part of its mission.

That theme was echoed by Daniel W. Sutherland, chief officer for civil rights and liberties at the Homeland Security Department. Mr. Sutherland told a luncheon audience that the government needed to dispel prejudice and misconceptions to steer the public discussion about fighting terrorism to “a higher level.”

Sometimes frustration with the government boiled over. At a seminar on charitable giving, Ihsan Haque of Akron, Ohio, asked a Treasury Department representative, Michael Rosen, how to avoid being prosecuted for donating to Muslim charities. When Mr. Rosen said the government did not have the resources to check the million or so charities in the United States, Mr. Haque shouted, “And I do?”

Shouldn’t moderate Muslims have issued a list of genuine charities a long time ago? How well do they even understand the distinction that a civil society wishes to make? How many Islamic “schools” in Palestine are funded by well-meaning Westerners, but that teach a cult of death?

Muslim leaders described the government relationship toward Muslim organizations as contradictory. The government seeks to foster greater civic engagement, because a lack of engagement is widely considered a big cause of Muslim extremism in Europe. A Department of Homeland Security official moderated a panel on aiding engagement.

Muslim groups are often treated as suspect, speakers said. In a trial that started in July in Dallas, federal prosecutors named the Islamic Society of North America as part of an effort to raise money for groups the government considers terrorists, but did not charge it with wrongdoing.

This is a major issue, which MacFarquhar characteristically tells us almost nothing about. He also doesn’t tell us that ISNA is Wahhabi.

An Israeli journalist (former student I’m proud to say) told me that what she had the hardest time doing — every day — was struggling between her loyalty to her sources and her loyalty to her public. MacFarquhar strikes me as the kind of person who does not want to offend his sources.

The Justice Department has to decide on its law enforcement side what it considers a target, said Khurrum Wahid, a prominent Muslim defense lawyer.

“Are they going to continue to say that the higher degree of religiosity you have the higher likelihood that you are a threat, because that’s the message they’ve sent,” Mr. Wahid said.

That is, unfortunately, a reasonable presumption these days. Maybe not 20 years ago, maybe not in 20 years. But any Muslim who will deny that the more zealous a Muslim gets, the more susceptible he or she is to a discourse of Muslim supremicism that all too easily spills over into violence, is a demopath. That there are zealous and passionately tolerant Muslims, I’m ready to believe. That such groups have high profiles in the Muslim world today, that they draw the large number of new converts or newly observant Muslims, would surprise me considerably. If I’m not mistaken, it’s to this aspect of Sufism that Steven Schwartz converted.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, denounced by name Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, as well as Dennis Prager, a well-known radio host who is Jewish.

“The time has come to stand up to the opportunists, the media figures, the religious leaders and politicians who demonize Muslims and bash Islam, exploiting the fears of their fellow citizens for their own purposes,” Rabbi Yoffie told the opening session.

He actually targeted the media as a key element in the demonizing. His remarks, as reported in Ha-Aretz are an interesting case of modified cognitive egocentrism:

As a Jew I know that our sacred texts, including the Hebrew Bible, are filled with contradictory propositions, and these include passages that appear to promote violence and thus offend our ethical sensibilities. Such texts are to be found in all religions, including Christianity and Islam”, Yoffie admits. However, he says, “the overwhelming majority of Jews reject violence by interpreting these texts in a constructive way“.
He believes that similar dynamics work in all religions, but falls short of a full-fledged comparison. In the Jewish faith, he says, there is “a tiny, extremist minority”. For Islam he chooses somewhat broader definition: “as we know from the headlines, you have what I know must be for you as well as for us an alarming number of extremists of your own.”

Delicately phrased. I wonder how it went over with the crowd. Remember that Wahhabism’s response to the most violent passages in the Quran is not to feel offended ethically, or to interpret these texts in a “constructive way,” but rather to exult in them, and interpret them as newly relevant commands to violent Jihad. There are few branches of Islam more explicitly and ruthlessly imperialistic than Wahhabism.

The Koran tells Muslims to abstain from drinking alcohol and to lower their gaze in modesty when meeting a member of the opposite sex, but some college-age Muslim men and women at the convention stayed up late into the night drinking, talking and getting to know one another.

“If you keep your gaze lowered all the time, you might just walk into a wall,” said Hazem Talha, a high school senior from Atlanta who said he was here for the religious lectures.

Sounds like the American Muslims may resemble the American Catholics — a problematically libertine branch of the Umma…. unless, of course, we regress to the pre-modern world where the religious police get to work these kids over “for the sake of public morality.”

But my sense is, this was not a gathering where genuine pluralists were welcome. Stephen Schwartz, for sure not. But how often at this convention did the attending Muslims hear words like this from a fellow Muslim:

Muslims often drone on and on about “Shari’ah”—Muslim Law. But the fact is, there is no Shari’ah. You will find no book, no tome, no historical text called “Shari’ah.” Rather, you will find shari’ahs—plural—because what Muslims call Muslim Law is nothing more than one type of interpretation of the Qur’an, and there are a lot of different types, and vast possibilities for even more. Its not just Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam, and it most certainly is not just “Islam.” This is true in spite of the fact that Muslims themselves, out of a misunderstanding of “unity” (and a bit of self-delusion), often seem to pretend otherwise, and often give that impression to non-Muslims. A result of that misunderstanding and bit of delusion is that Muslims tend to “close ranks” in a manner that can make them complicit with evil– our own version of the clearly unethical statement “my country: right or wrong.”

Okay, so he shouldn’t have used the word “drone on,” it’s insulting. But my sense of the tenor of this man’s thought and tone is that he represents the voice of a genuine pluralist, ready to do the work of modernizing Islam, in that sense, in the same ballpark as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Our problem is not with those who wish to transform Islam into a tolerant religion that can live in equality with others, a form of Islam that might/could happen — and if I understand correctly, at least some Muslims believe that would be a step in a more genuinely Muslim direction. Our problem is with those Muslims who view such modern demands, such civic heroism, as a mortal assault on the essence of Islam and an emasculation of Muslim men, but who nonetheless insist that we infidels not stereotype them, that we respect their civil rights to privacy. In a word, the demopaths.