WHERE'S THE MUSLIM MANZANAR?:

Signs of reconciliation
Hostility between the American public and Islam resides in fiction as much as fact (Mustafa El-Feki, al-Ahram Weekly)

I have just spent several weeks in New York, during which time a single question was on my mind: will the wave of anti- Arab and anti-Muslim hostility persist or recede? The US president has just approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, in accordance with which the State Department will be charged with monitoring anti-Semitism around the world and rating countries on their treatment of Jews. I could not help but wonder whether the American mind and heart could ever sufficiently expand to press for the application of that law to other religions and ethnic groups, to Islam and Arabs, targets of a vicious campaign of defamation. The question appears to have been answered by the re-election of the Republican administration for another four years, consolidating the influence of the neo-conservatives on the White House policy and the prospect of more violence in this part of the world in the name of the fight against terrorism and the spread of democracy.

As I contemplated the present situation and its implications for the future during my stay in the US I registered a number of impressions. Above all I would venture to suggest there is no inherent incompatibility between Islam and the US as a state and no real cause for difference between Muslim peoples and Americans. Both have deeply held religious beliefs and cherish their spiritual sensibilities, nothing disturbing in itself. What is disturbing, though, is the gap in mutual confidence and understanding that has developed in the last few years, and the impact this has had on the global political climate and international relations.

It is useful to recall that Americans and Islam sided together against the communist belt that stretched across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and both fought against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. This fact puts paid to the notion that there are profound or deeply rooted contradictions between Islam and the US. Indeed, one still recalls President Dwight Eisenhower's remarks on the occasion of the inauguration of the Islamic Centre in Washington in 1959 in which he underscored the feelings of mutual affection and the aspiration to closer cooperation between the two peoples.

During my stay in the US I observed that the American people are not obsessed with the question of Islam, but they are keen to learn more about what is being depicted as a new adversary in the media and by some centres of power, especially those we perhaps mistakenly term Christian Zionists.

This is just the most terrible sort of nonsense. Nothing more clearly distinguishes the current conflict than the extraordinary regard we've taken for the lives of civilians in the countries we've attacked, for the sensibilities of the Arab and Islamic publics in general, and the assiduousness with which our public officials have sought to protect our own Muslim community from any backlash related to 9-11 and the ensuing wars. That's not to say that there is no Islamophobia (whether justifiable or not) present in any of our public discourse, just that we have been so cautious about protecting against its effects that it is absurd to characterise it as a societal problem of vicious defamation on a par with the truly vile anti-Semitism that plagues much of the Middle East. Even more despicable is to suggest that the re-election of George W. Bush, who has bent over backwards to make it clear that our quarrel is with only an aberrant form of Islam, represents an indifference to some imagined anti-Arab/anti-Muslim campaign.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 24, 2004 5:26 PM