Daily Times

What happened in Paris on Friday is a repeat of the horror of 9/11 and as time passes the odious impact of the events in Paris is going to become an avalanche that may yet become another world war.
The objective of the extremists behind the attack was clear: create an outrageous spectacle, invite backlash and stoke off another clash of civilisations between two imagined monoliths, the west and the Muslim world. In the US, rabid anti-immigrant ideologues like Ann Coulter and Ben Carson have already begun spinning the event as a means to further propagate their anti-Muslim message. In Europe, the far right wing parties will capitalise on this against migrants from Syria and elsewhere. This in turn will fuel the propaganda by anti-west Islamist ideologues in the Muslim world. Between western Islamophobia and Muslim xenophobia, the space for those people who straddle both worlds, either physically or mentally, including most of you who are reading this article, has been shrinking. It is in this space that reason and sanity prevail. Both the west and the Muslim world need to appreciate that neither is a monolith, no matter how much extremists on both sides try to portray the other as one. They must also accept that neither can wish the other away. Here is where people who are part of both worlds in some manner must be strengthened because effective dialogue can only occur in that ever-shrinking space. The shrinking, therefore, must be stemmed. For that to happen narratives must be reclaimed.
The Muslim response by and large indicates that we have failed to learn from the events of the last 15 years. The biggest mistake Muslims make is the mistake of ‘what aboutery’. When confronted with the horror of events like Paris, the knee jerk Muslim reaction is “What about Palestine?” This what aboutery is not unique to Muslims but we have made it our signature. How is what happened in Paris remotely helpful to the Palestinian cause? Regardless of the injustices in Palestine or elsewhere in the Muslim world, it is quite clear to any honest student of the Islamic doctrine that whatever the criticisms and allegations are levelled against it, it does not prescribe the wanton killing of innocent civilians even in times of war. Indeed, it forbids it and calls it Fasad-fil-arz or chaos on earth, which is amongst the worst things you can do as a human being and as a Muslim in Islam. Then why must Muslims resort to such immoral justification for terrorism and give fodder to the critics of Islam? While mindful of the fact that the Islamic doctrine does not prescribe such acts of desperation, we must also recognise that those who commit such outrages do so in the name of Islam itself. This is a problem that Muslims must confront openly and frankly. It is not enough to declare that Islam is a religion of peace but to prove it by actively isolating those fanatical and lunatic fringes that imagine the world in a perpetual and eternal conflict between Islam and the rest.
Now, more than ever, the very idea of Islam as a faith and a civilisation is going to come under microscopic scrutiny. Who determines what Islam prescribes will be the foremost question that is going to be discussed, debated and analysed against the backdrop of terrorism and chaos. Muslim thought leaders, politicians and intellectuals need to make a conscious effort to reclaim the Islamic narrative from extremists. Fundamentally, the problem is one of the legitimacy of narrative. Erosion of traditional religious authority, itself a byproduct of modernity, has given rise to multifarious opinions on the faith. Islam never had a church to begin with but now — as each Muslim becomes his own priest — we must grapple with the uncertainty of which narrative is going to triumph. Is it going to be the narrative of the Muslim rationalists and modernists who interpret Islam as compatible with the modern world or the revivalists and reactionaries who interpret it as the antithesis of modernity and human progress? Reza Aslan, in his book No God but God, rightly called it the era of Islamic reformation. Those familiar with the history of Christian reformation know that it was an unusually bloody event even for a time when humanity had not yet perfected the art of killing. The Islamic reformation is going to play out in a time of terrorism, guns, bombs and fighter jets.
Meanwhile, a war is inevitable but what is still to be determined is the identity of the antagonists. The litmus test is going to be Syria. The US, Russia, Turkey, Syrian government and opposition, the Kurds, Iran, Hezbollah, the Arabs and even Israel have to come together and take the bull of Islamic State (IS) by the horns. Israel especially needs to realise that its survival as a viable state in the Middle East is as much at stake as any of its Arab neighbours. There will always be time to settle nationalist scores as well as sectarian prejudices afterwards. IS is the clear and present danger to all of these parties. Underestimating the enemy or attempting to coopt it for temporary gain is a disastrous policy that will come to haunt any party that attempts it.
No one wins if IS wins this war, not the west and certainly not the Muslims. It will lead to a global age darker than the darkest period of the dark ages. All the progress — material, economic, spiritual and political — that humanity has made since the 1300s will be reversed in a relatively short period spanning a few decades.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com