Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Religion News Service
July 30, 2005
Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi of The Fiqh Council of North America said at a news conference Thursday that those who commit terrorism in the name of Islam are criminals, not martyrs.
"Why haven't Muslim leaders condemned terrorism?"
This is the most common question Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, gets on a daily basis from media and other inquirers.
Nearly four years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Muslim organizations disagree on the best way to battle the perception that they are soft on terrorists who attack in their religion's name.
At issue is the public relations strategy of U.S. Muslim groups. At stake is the way Americans view the world's second-largest religion, with more than 1 billion adherents, as the United States wages a global war on terrorism.
While groups hone their media relations skills and issue immediate statements in the wake of attacks, lingering criticism remains. Frustrated, an increasing number of Muslim leaders say they will focus more on taking concrete actions to eradicate terrorism from their faith communities than on winning the war of words.
In this spirit the Muslim American Society, or MAS, another Washington-based national advocacy organization, this week announced a national initiative composed of seven "action items" intended to eradicate terrorist ideology, extremism and violence from the American Muslim community.
MAS said it planned to partner with the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations, led by Imam Abu Malik-Johari, to ensure that the message did not get stuck in the media stratosphere of published statements but reached local Muslims in their area Islamic centers.
Muslim leaders insist that despite often-repeated claims on talk radio, they have repeatedly denounced terrorism.
In the wake of the July 7 London bombings, a panoply of American Muslim groups responded quickly, with the Muslim Public Affairs Council organizing a press conference within hours, and at least nine major groups, including CAIR and the Heartland Muslim Council, issuing a ream of statements decrying the atrocities.
Nevertheless many Muslim leaders say they fear that their message isn't getting through to the majority of Americans.
"It's really frustrating; sometimes we get the feeling nobody's listening," Hooper said. "We often ask ourselves, what more can we do? Shout from the rooftops? Skywriting?"
Despite public statements, some commentators have questioned the seriousness with which worldwide Muslims are approaching the reality of terrorists in their midst, given that the London attackers appear to have been native Britons.
"It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst," wrote Thomas L. Friedman in the July 8 New York Times. Friedman added that "no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden."
U.S. Muslim groups take exception to Friedman's characterization, arguing that countless U.S. leaders have condemned bin Laden's actions, and that an official fatwa, or Islamic edict, was issued in March 2005 by the Islamic Commission of Spain.
In the wake of the London bombings, other groups of Islamic legal scholars have issued fatwas that decry terrorism.
The Fiqh Council of North America, a Muslim scholarly organization, issued a fatwa on Thursday condemning terrorism on the basis of Islamic religious law. The Council has authority over the nation's Muslim community, which some estimate to number as many as 6 million.
"All acts of terrorism targeting civilians are haram (forbidden) in Islam," the fatwa said. Britain's largest Sunni Muslim organization issued a July 17 fatwa calling terrorism a "perverted ideology" and declaring that the London bombers, if proved to be Muslims, would no longer be allowed to consider themselves part of the faith.
Days earlier, another group of British imams and scholars condemned the London attacks because civilians were killed. However, that group distinguished between those attacks and suicide bombings carried out for Muslims to "defend themselves from occupiers," which they said were sometimes justified.
These different interpretations point to the difficulty of managing an "international message" for Islam.
"Islam is not like the Catholic Church; there is no central authority who can give you one quote. Therefore it is impossible for all Muslims to speak in one voice, just as it is impossible for all Americans to speak in one voice," said Muqtedar Khan, a nonresident fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution who studies international politics.
Some Muslim groups are frustrated with the task that public relations experts refer to as "reputation management."
Mike Paul, a veteran public relations professional in New York, says that religious communities should present a consistent message that offers concrete historical examples to back up their statements.
"People aren't going to believe you if you just say, ‘These people don't represent our faith,' " Paul said, "They're going to say, ‘Show me the truth.' "
Muslim leaders agree that written or spoken statements increasingly feel inadequate against the perception problem facing the community. These leaders say they don't plan on skipping the step of issuing written condemnations after attacks, but neither do they plan to rest on the laurels of words over actions.
"We are past condemnations; that's not the page we're on," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a national civil rights organization that is part of the Muslim American Society.
A consensus has emerged that more needs to be done.
M. Zuhdi Jasser, the founder and chairman of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, is among the most outspoken. He criticizes his fellow American Muslims, saying that with the privilege of belonging to a worldwide Muslim community comes a charge to root out terrorism and extremism from that community.
"If we're going to get the benefits of this community, then a reciprocal responsibility that we have is to say that this community has been hijacked by barbarous criminals," he said.
Jasser, who served 11 years in the Navy, suggests that more Muslims should serve in the armed forces in order to achieve this goal. "Secure the world; this is part of our civic duty," he said.
"Until we clear out and fix the cancer within our faith community, we're going to have no credibility," he added.
Muslim groups criticize the bombings
U.S. Muslim organizations increasingly disagree about the effectiveness of written statements in combating the perception that they are soft on terrorism.
But the flurry of statements that emerged after the July 7 London bombings shows that the groups are not abandoning the technique. Here are excerpts from those statements.
"We, the Heartland Muslim Council, join other Muslim organizations in the United States and around the world in condemning the bombings in London this week. We condemn this act of senseless violence and we call for the swift apprehension and prosecution of the perpetrators. …
"Yesterday, American Muslim leaders met with British Ambassador David Manning in Washington, D.C., to offer condolences for the deaths and injuries suffered in Thursday's bomb attacks in London. He told the Muslim visitors that the bombings targeted every segment of his nation's multicultural population and that the attacks should not be linked to Islam, which he described as a faith of ‘peace, reconciliation and tolerance. …' "
"The Heartland Muslim Council extends our condolences to the families and people in London.
"'Whosoever kills a human being … it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and whosoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind" (Qur'an 5:32).
— Mahnaz Shabbir, Heartland Muslim Council
"We join Americans of all faiths, and all people of conscience worldwide, in condemning these barbaric crimes that can never be justified or excused. American Muslims offer their sincere condolences to the loved ones of those who were killed or injured in today's attacks and call for the swift apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators."
— Council on American-Islamic Relations
