For more than two weeks now, the San Bernardino mass shooting by a Muslim couple once again brought to the fore the question of what motivated the duo to carry out such a shooting spree. The knee jerk response was one of holding Islamic scriptures responsible for providing grounds for Muslim violence against non-Muslims. The most important question is: does Islam espouse violence against non-Muslims? This article resists the temptation of equating and/or associating Islam with violence too readily not only because of the unresolved question of who speaks for Islam but also because the interventionist policies of the west in the Muslim world play a crucial role in radicalising Muslims. In fact, Islam is not the source of conflict but the means used by militant Islamists to popularise their political agenda.
Any Muslim who kills fellow human beings should not be linked to Islamic ideology regardless of whether the killer associates himself with Islam or not. The association of a Muslim killer with Islam is problematic on multiple grounds. For one, the question is: who speaks for Islam? Obviously, although there are 56 Muslim majority states, there is no single Islamic state — a state where the Quran and sunnah are the law of the land — on the world map. In the case of Islamic State (IS), although the entity has all the hallmarks of a de-facto state, ranging from population to territory to government and sovereignty, it does not enjoy recognition from any state. Even if for the sake of an argument IS is recognised as a state then its claim to Islam is contesting on the ground that a tiny state short of recognition of its Islamic credentials from other Muslim majority states cannot speak for the whole community of Muslims or Islam for that reason. Seen this way, a Muslim couple cannot represent more than a billion and a half Muslims around the globe no matter whether the pair formally associate themselves with Islam or not.
In fact, and ideally, only the holy Prophet (PBUH), in his capacity as the prophet of Allah, spoke for Islam. It should not, however, suggest that no one can speak for Islam after the Prophet (PBUH) of Islam. Under the current conditions, only an Islamic state of all or at least majority Muslims run according to the holy Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet (PBUH) with democratically elected rulers may represent Islam. Since such an entity does not exist, a self-professed Islamic state cannot claim to represent Islam. This begs the question about whether Islam enshrines the use of force or not. In fact, the holy Prophet (PBUH) did go to war against non-Muslim enemies much like democracies have been waging wars against non-democratic states. In a similar way, like a democratic polity, Islam does have a coercive apparatus — soldiers and weaponry — and the paraphernalia of a state ranging from administrative machinery to judicial arbitration to legislature. The question is not whether Islam enshrines the use of force or not (which it does) but who is entitled to use it. Like in democracy, in Islam, it is a democratically elected government that is entitled to use force as required by the holy Quran and sunnah of the Prophet (PBUH). The question is: how to diagnose individualistic terrorist incidents the like of Sans Bernardino?
Treating the Sans Bernardino incident as a criminal case without associating it with Islam does not mean that it did not have some real reasons behind its occurrence. Right wing literature in the Muslim world holds the west responsible for Muslim woes. Many among conservative Muslims believe that the 9/11 terror attacks were an American ploy to dismantle the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Similarly, the unabating violence in Iraq is attributed to the US invasion of the country in March 2003 so as to exploit the oil resources of that country. Among the most conservative Sunni Muslims, the west’s bombing of IS in Iraq and Syria is seen as a western conspiracy to prevent the rise of an Islamic state, which the west is fearful of as the Islamic notion of justice and fair play are a threat to vested interests in the west. This is what Sunni radicals contend. Whether the west is guilty of stirring trouble in the Muslim world or not is another matter but the fact remains that many conservative Muslims accuse it for their enduring problems, which have radicalised them to the point of violence. Nevertheless, this should not mean that ideology is not involved.
Here comes the role of one of the strands of interpreting holy scriptures. This literalistic reading of the holy texts is rooted in the belief that every Muslim has a sacred duty to stand against injustice even if it requires committing atrocities against innocent fellow human beings. As a matter of fact, this intolerant worldview cannot explain Islamist violence until it interacts with more important factors of the real or perceived grievances of Muslims against the west. Absolving the west, especially the US, from its intervening policies in the Muslim world will not help manage Muslims’ grievances against the west. After all, western involvement — especially that of the US — in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria has been an important factor in engendering the power vacuum to provide an enabling environment for non-state actors to rise at the cost of governmental authority.
In order to diffuse the situation, western countries should avoid intervening in the Muslim world. In practical terms, this would entail disengaging from Syria while conducting national elections under the UN’s auspices there. In Iraq, US disengagement should accompany the strengthening of the central government along with resolving the genuine grievances of the Sunni minority in the country. In the context of the Palestinian issue, the west, especially the US, should at least restrain Israel from committing atrocities against civilians for the near future. Moreover, the dire need is one of engagement through dialogue among religious scholars of different religions with the objective of minimising the widening gap among diverse religions.
The author is a researcher and political analyst based in Quetta. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @mughtian