Author: Thomas Friedman
Publication: The Times of India
Date: January 28, 2007
Introduction: In fairness, for a Martin Luther
King to emerge requires some free space. But right now many liberals in the
Arab world are in one way or another under house arrest by their regimes.
While Islamists in Egypt have access to thousands of mosques and can meet
their followers five times a day, liberal members of Saad Eddin Ibrahim's
institute can barely move in Cairo, let alone organize a march.
It's hard to know what's more disturbing:
The barbaric sectarian murders by Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq or the deafening
silence with which these mass murders are received in the Muslim world.
How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad
led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against
Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim
world as the weather report? Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King? Where
is the "Million Muslim March" under the banner: "No Shiites,
No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad."
I can logically understand the lack of protest
when Muslims kill Americans in Iraq. We're seen as occupiers by many. But
I can't understand how the mass slaughter of 70 Baghdad college students last
week by Sunni suicide bombers or the blowing up of a Shiite mosque on the
first day of Ramadan in 2005 evoke so little response. Every day it's 100
more.
I raise this question because the only hope
left for Iraq - if there is any - is not in a U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.
That may be necessary, but without a Muslim counternihilism strategy that
delegitimizes the mass murder of Muslims by Muslims, there is no hope for
decent politics there. It takes a village, and right now the Muslim village
is mute. It has no moral voice when it comes to its own.
"The Qur'an describes the Prophet Muhammad
as a Prophet of Mercy," said Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani-born director
of Boston University's Center for International Relations. "Muslims begin
all their acts, including worship, with the words: In the name of God, the
compassionate, the merciful.' The Qur'an also says, 'To you, your faith, and
to me, mine.' But unfortunately, these mercy-focused, peacemaking ideas are
lost (today) in the overall discourse in the Muslim world about reviving lost
glory and setting right the injustice of Western domination.
"For a Muslim Martin Luther King to emerge,
Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on power and glory
and include taking responsibility as a community for our own situation."
In fairness, for a Martin Luther King to emerge
requires free space, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian democracy campaigner,
remarked. But right now many liberals in the Arab world are in one way or
another under house arrest by their regimes. "While Islamists in Egypt
have access to thousands of mosques and can meet with their followers five
times a day," Ibrahim said, liberal members of his own institute "can
barely move in Cairo, let alone organize a march."
The Arab regimes want America to believe that
there are only two choices: Islamists and the regimes, so it will side with
the regimes.
There's a lot at stake. If Iraq is ultimately
unraveled by Muslim suicide-nihilism, it certainly will be a blot on our history
- we opened this Pandora's box. But it will be a plague on the future of the
whole Arab world.
If Arab Muslims can summon the will to protest
only against the insults of "the foreigner" but never the injuries
inflicted by their own on their own, how can they ever generate a modern society
or democracy - which is all about respecting and protecting minority voices
and unorthodox views? And if Sunnis and Shiites can never form a social contract
to rule themselves - and will always require an iron-fisted dictator - decent
government will forever elude them.
The brutally honest Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad
Said, known as Adonis, gave an interview from Paris on march 11, 2006, with
Dubai TV, and warned of what's at stake (translation by Memri):
"The Arab individual is no less smart,
no less a genius, than anyone else in the world. He can excel- but only outside
his society. If I look at the Arabs, with all their resources and great capacities,
and I compare what they have achieved over the past century with what others
have achieved in that we Arabs are in a phase of extinction, in the sense
that we have no creative presence in the world.
"We have the quantity. We have the masses
of people, but a people become extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity,
and the capacity to change its world."
NYT News Service