Is Islam a "Problem"?

There's been a lot of stuff happening on the listserv. First, there was a war on multiculturalism (how strange that sounds) which started with one assertion that multiculturalism would never work because strong cultures trump the weak, ergo the values of post-Enlightenment Christendom could never co-exist with the umma. Predictably this sparked a lot of outraged posting, at which point I referred to Naomi Klein's latest article in the Nation - Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool. Klein's argument is that extremism is prompted not by Muslims, but by Western reactions to Muslims, which results in a fomenting of religious hatred in reaction to racism. Klein takes two test cases - Hussain Osman and Sayyid Qutb - to show that merely being Muslim was not what made them take to terror, the perceived (in Osman's case) and real (in Qutub's) mistreatment of fellow Muslims is also responsible for pushing people into extremism. In sum, Klein believes that the problem is "not too much multiculturalism but too little".

This led to an email which critiqued Klein's argument on the ground that Islam per se was the problem, not the treatment of Muslims by non-Muslims, and in order to prevent extremism, Islam necessarily had to change. There were two strands of responses to this -

a. American high-handedness, not some "problem" with Islam, was responsible for extremism (following from Arundati Roy's Come September article). I personally feel this goes too far, Roy does not offer a single word in condemnation of the violence adopted by Islamic extremists, she seems to believe that it's a perfectly natural consequence of Western treatment of the East. A corollary of this argument was that Indian Muslims did not commit acts of extremism in the West because Indian Muslims were not mistreated in a similar way as those who do commit acts of extremism.
b. A more moderate strand, the essence of which was that the problem is not with Islam per se, but with certain forms of Islam, and with some Muslims, not all of them. This is my response, which falls into the second category -

(Note - in a prior email, I argued that in order to say that Islam as a whole was a problem, one would need to show that there is something fundamental to Islam - i.e. in the Qu'ran or the Haadith-which could uncontroversially be regarded as promoting extremism. Where this was not demonstrated, one could not argue that all of Islam was extremist and fundamentalist. The counter was that in order to criticise a religion, how it was practised is all that mattered, not what the religious text said. A comparison was drawn between British Hindus and British Muslims to buttress the point that only Muslims take to extremism as a response measure, not others. I've tried to respond to this as well in what follows)

1. From what I gather, the Klein's point is that the reason some Muslims turn to terrorism is because of factors other than their religion, and its conflict with our supposed tolerance for persons of different faiths and cultures. The counterpoint appears to be that this is not so, because there are problems inherent in the way Islam is practised today which make it easy for terrorism to flourish in Islamic contexts.

2. Here is my first problem with the simplistic assessment in the counter-Klein position. Islam is not the world's first religion which has been used for extremism in its name. Much as we may like not to think about it, Hindus have had a pretty pathetic record of tolerance in the last half century (and even before that). British and American Hindus are large funders of Hindu extremist organisations, whose target is admittedly not the countries of the West, but fellow Indian citizens. Assuming that terrorists are not only Muslims who kill non-Muslims, and that financial and moral support for extremism is also extremism, Hindus have much to account for. Further, there is a large amount of support for Hindu extremist reactions to the perceived "Muslim problem" among Hindus (in India and elsewhere), and as Thariel points out, Lakshman Kadirgamar was assassinated by suspected Hindu extremists. Does this mean that Hinduism is a problem? Of course not, because any interpretation of Hindu texts and values which could be used to justify extremism would be an unquestioned perversion. A religion's significance cannot be separated from its core texts, though the texts of a religion may be misinterpreted by those hostile to the religion to criticise it. So it's perfectly valid to say there is a problem with "some Muslims", or with "extremist forms of Islam", but how can one say there is a problem with "Islam" without detailing what the problematic aspects of the Qu'ran and/or hadit are? Are peaceful Muslims followers of the Church of Scientology? Or is a secular Muslim a bad Muslim?

3. I would disagree with the assertion that no Indian muslim has carried out suicide bombings, or with the broader argument that Islamic extremism in India is absent, yet would use this to further Klein's argument. Most Indian muslims and the majority of Indian Muslim scholars, priests and leaders (like Muslims in Britain and America) condemn acts of terror committed by extremists in the name of Islam. Those who do take to extremism (or organised crime) in India are by and large socio-economically underprivileged youth for whom terrorism/crime is a real option of gaining things they would never else have access to. Political power-players (Hindus and Muslims) also provide tacit support to extremist elements and stand to gain by pulling out the terror card at the elections. Hence, the problem of extremism in India is not a problem of Islam, but a political problem. And given that India has more serious incidents of terrorism a year than Israel and Iraq combined, nowhere is the flaw with the "Islam as a problem" argument proved better.

4. A consequentialist point - even if one were to accept that those who argue that there exists a problem with Islam do not apply the same yardstick to all Muslims (I'm not even going into the legal fictions involved here because it would keep me awake for the next year), this lumping of Islam with genuine ideologies of terror(such as Fascism-an abhorrent analogy if I ever saw one) can be abused by others without such pure motives as a mask for Islamophobia (even perhaps racism). By giving currency to a spurious claim (i.e that all forms of Islam are problematic), we run the risk of validating several other evils in the name of confronting the aforesaid (false) problem.

The long and short of it was that in order to prove that most Muslims are potential extremists, or that all forms of Islam facilitate extremism, one would have to show that there was something fundamental to Islam, or something common to most Muslims. This was not done on the listserv, can it ever be done?

Prithvi.

PS. Robert Pape, Professor of Politics at Chicago University, argues here that the Al Qaeda's acts of extremism are "less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries."

PPS. This pretty much blew away the blissful apolitical euphoria I've been feeling for the past couple of weeks. All good things must end, I suppose...