Jihad and Motorcycle Maintenance
The fear over the rise of the Islamic State or ISIS and lone wolf attacks like the one in San Bernadino have elevated tensions for muslims in many countries. How does the average non-muslim understand what it’s like to be the average muslim under these circumstances. Are we no longer able to live alongside each other as the multicultural melting pot that we pride ourselves on as the United States? When does our fear over power our common sense? I took the time to discuss this with Naheed Mustafa, an award-winning independent producer/writer/broadcaster based in Toronto. Naheed has reported extensively from Pakistan and Afghanistan and has a keen interest in looking at the impact of conflict and militancy on the lives of ordinary people. She is currently working on a film that will explore these issues and how they affect young western Muslims and their sense of belonging.
1. You have made a documentary, The Struggle Over Jihad, which explores the term and the multiple definitions behind it. Can you describe the tug-of-war over the term as it stands today?
Historically there have always been several “true” meanings of jihad depending on time and place and context. Today, the term jihad is pulled in several directions. There’s the normative way that an average Muslim may use it simply as part of the language they speak to mean engaging in a struggle. It doesn’t have to be serious. In my documentary I talk about how my uncle told me to “do jihad” when I was a kid and I was struggling to kickstart his motorcycle. It’s a term that can be used in a banal way and I reckon that’s typically how it’s used. But it’s also used for more challenging things like a moral struggle or a struggle to maintain faith in the face of adversity. It’s a jihad to fast in the middle of summer when all you want to do is sit in the AC with a cold beverage. So there are a variety of ways Muslims think about and use the term jihad that has zero connection to fighting.
Of course, there is the fighting context as well. One thing to point out here is there is a gap in how, say, an Islamic scholar would understand the term to refer to religiously-sanctioned fighting versus how it is normatively used by (violent) non-state actors and state actors. So, a scholar may, for example, point out that in classical scholarly discourse jihad comes with a set of rules about how to declare war and that war comes with a set of rules of engagement which includes things like no killing civilians, no targeting clerics, no cutting trees, etc. How “jihad” gets taken up normatively is different. The Taliban say they are doing jihad against both the Pakistan and Afghan governments. Boko Haram also says it’s doing jihad. ISIS claims the same. Let’s not forget al Qaeda. The Pakistan military invokes it and the Afghan government uses the term, so did Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. The Afghan Mujahideen used the term in their fight against the Soviet Union and western governments wholeheartedly endorsed that usage. Ronald Reagan used it to encourage Afghans to fight against Communism. Of course, there are huge differences between these groups, governments, and individuals and huge differences in their objectives and their reasons for using the term. One can’t underestimate the importance of cloaking oneself in religiously-sanctioned legitimacy. If I say my fight is a jihad then I also get to say that the dead from my side aren’t simply dead or collateral damage, they are martyrs. And as martyrs they have a better life in the next life so don’t mourn their deaths because they fight for a greater good loved by God. As to whether any of these groups/people “sincerely” believe they are engaging in a legitimate jihad, who knows.
2. The fear of terrorism in the United States is still palpable this long after the 9/11 attacks by al Qaida. In large part because of the incidents of terrorism, like San Bernadino, that have played out on US soil. Muslims who dress conservatively or practice a more conservative version of their religion are becoming targets for attacks. What can we do or say that will make non-Muslim citizens understand the difference between conservative beliefs and terrorists?
I think we’ve got a fairly entrenched narrative that follows the good ol’ conveyor belt theory about radicalization even though it’s been debunked again and again. Many people (including Muslims, frankly) assume that adopting a conservative Islamic world view is the first step toward mixing explosives in your basement. That simply isn’t true. Conservative Muslims, like any other American citizen, are law-abiding, tax-paying individuals. Their faith, like any other faith, enjoins them to do good, to be positive moral agents in the world. But that’s hard for many to swallow. And it certainly doesn’t help that anti-Muslim sentiment seems to generate huge political dividends for people like Donald Trump. Conflating conservatism with terrorism gets you op-eds and book deals and fame. Why would anyone want to put an end to that?
There’s also the jockeying inside Muslim communities over who gets to the be the official representative of American (or any other western country’s) Islam. You have all kinds of people with all kinds of ideas about what is “right” Islam and what is “wrong” Islam. I will say that both media and government have come to identify visible Muslims — women in hijab and men in beards — as, maybe, more “authentic” Muslims. They are more visible and easier to point to. It simplifies things greatly to cast “Muslim” to mean only a faith background even though many Muslims also use the term to mean a cultural affiliation or even an ethnic identity. But all those definitions complicate the narrative and so “Muslim” has been taken up primarily as a religious identity. Identifiable Muslims have become representative of this perceived monolithic community but it’s a problem. These folks generally come from immigrant communities and while you may occasionally see a white convert among them, you’ll rarely see an African American Muslim who make up about a third of the total Muslim population in the US. All this is problematic. I’m not blaming people who’ve ended up as de facto representatives. They’re the ones the media calls up. But most Muslim women in America (and Canada) don’t wear hijab, for example, and most Muslims are not visibly identifiable as such (though there is obviously a racialized component here). None of that is a comment on people’s personal piety but it is a problem if you end up using as a representative sample people who don’t look like the majority. It’s also not a comment on these de facto representatives’ ability and willingness to articulate issues that are affecting Muslims generally but I know it’s a source of contention. It also belies the diversity you find within Muslim communities.
3. The father of San Bernardino suspect, Syed Rizwan Farook, said that his son took on an overly conservative outlook on Islam and at least once expressed support for ideas promoted by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIL or ISIS.
The father, who appears to be conservative himself, said “I kept telling him always: stay calm, be patient, in two years Israel will no longer exist.” He also said in an interview, “Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China, America too, nobody wants the Jews there.” How do we differentiate between those that will commit acts of violence based on their views? How does overly conservative dogma play a role in inciting violence?
The father sounds like a flake. Seems to be part of the “Jews run the world” crowd. I don’t know what the father meant by “overly conservative.” For a lot of people — Muslim and non-Muslim — politics and religion are like entangled pairs. For them, religion and politics cannot exist or be described independently of each other. They exist as a whole system. Now, critics will say well this is precisely the problem with Islam, that it encourages Muslims to understand the world through a religious prism but that’s a criticism that’s laughable. I mean, the Dalai Lama and the Pope and any rabbi or pandit or evangelical or committed Baha’i would do the same. People gravitate towards extremism for a variety of reasons. It gives them something they’re looking for whether it’s answers to moral dilemmas or a sense of community or a way to organize their lives or to understand the chaos around them. There are plenty of examples of young people who have joined up with ISIS who barely practiced Islam, never mind a conservative type of Islam. Was Farook predisposed to extremist tendencies? Did extremism’s simple binaries of good and evil help him make sense of his politics? Did he have a black and white understanding of his religion that helped shape his political worldview? Did he find violence glorious? All of these things matter to understanding why this person chose this course of action. Dogma of any kind can incite violence, religiously conservative or not. An ardent Trump supporter was just arrested for trying to bomb Muslims. What motivated him?
As far as some kind of test or criteria for who is going to be violent, there’s no way to know. I think law enforcement’s been fairly clear about that.
4. You and I have discussed our shared view that over-analyzing the religious doctrinal position of terrorist groups isn’t the most important factor in terrorism analysis. I would add that isn’t particularly helpful unless your job is working for government intelligence or law enforcement to try and anticipate their next move. Overall, religion plays a role, but each individual may or may not be religious when they join a terrorist group. What questions do you think journalists should be asking or revealing for the average reader?
In an ideal world I’d like to preface my answer with a 6000-word rant on the state of journalism today. But I’ll restrain myself. The revelatory aspect of breaking news is a problem. We saw that when we watched in collective horror as media invaded the apartment of Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Journalists were searching for meaning in the couple’s tchotchkes and inspecting their child’s toys. The whole thing was unseemly and theatrical. I had a disagreement with some folks who defended a reporter’s shouting out a question to Farook’s relative about whether Farook was religious or not. I had a real issue with that question. Not because it can’t be important to know but, rather, because it typically ends up serving as a short hand for the story: “Muslim commits act of terror.” That’s not helpful in advancing the story and it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to fuel anti-Muslim frenzy. Like, how does it help a reporter to know buddy was religious in the absence of any other information? We also can’t dismiss the ways in which we end up talking about violence: violent White men are loners fuelled by alienation, violent Black men are fuelled by a pathological criminality, violent Brown men are fuelled by religion. If we already decide what the story is before we report it then it’s difficult to turn that ship around and re-visit those early narratives which end up entrenched. This is my problem with the “hot take” obsession — they set the tone and direction of a conversation and we don’t often move past those initial talking points. By the time we’re ready for a bigger conversation, the news has moved on.
To me a more useful question would be what was Farook’s state of mind the last time you saw him? Did he get on well at work? How were his finances? Who was he hanging around with? Does this mean I think his understanding of his religion didn’t play a role? Of course not. But we need to piece together the “why” and not just draw straight lines for motive the second we find out someone was “religious” (whatever that means). There’s a reason why cops make good reporters. They are methodical. Journalists need to be methodical. And even if the answer is overwhelmingly that he was fuelled by a particular extreme understanding of Islam, we still need to ask questions to understand how that unfolded. That is literally our job. Asking facile questions so we can go home early is a stupid waste of time.
5. Angela Merkel recently said, “Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie,’ ” or in other words a sham, so to Merkel it symbolizes the emergence of isolated societies within Germany — and ultimately a failure of assimilating immigrants. The strength in this country is usually our ability to welcome and help immigrants assimilate. I think it’s an important aspect of interaction and integration that helps immigrants establish a life in the US. What has been your observations in Canada within the Muslim communities vs the US or elsewhere when it comes to assimilation?
Canada has generally been successful and Canadian Muslims are, generally, doing well here. Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. There are problems everywhere. When governments (and opportunists) complain about immigrants’ unwillingness/inability to integrate it’s an easy out. It’s a way to deflect blame. You can’t really ask this question about why immigrants are failing to integrate without asking a far more basic question which is what do people mean by integration or assimilation? At what point are immigrants assimilated or integrated? What is the objective criteria and who gets to decide? My parents first came to Canada 50 years ago. Are they assimilated? Integrated? They still call themselves Muslim and visit Pakistan every year and speak Urdu at home. My children were born in Canada but still get asked where they’re from.
I want to ask people who complain of a lack of integration or assimilation, what do you want? Immigrants, like everyone else, are taxpayers and they obey the law. Why does anyone care how they pray or what they wear in the streets? And as citizens, frankly, they have a right to articulate their ideas about what makes a good society or how they want to raise their kids or whatever. I find the complaint is typically code for “not like us” and if that is, in fact, the reality behind Merkel’s handwringing over how well immigrants are adjusting then that’s never going to go away. People worry about ethnic folks congregating in specific neighbourhoods and use the term “ghetto.” I’d like to point out that no one worries so much when white people congregate in their own neighbourhoods. Newcomers are going to live in areas with other people like them. That’s part of the process of settling in. Integration denotes the accumulation of cultural capital. I am integrated once I can navigate my way through the culture and politics and expectations and civic duties of the society I live in. That takes time. It takes a couple of generations at least. I know scores of Canadians who’ve moved to the States or the UK and struggled for years to integrate despite being white and speaking English so the idea that someone moves to America from Nigeria or Spain or Pakistan and should instantly be plugged into the zeitgeist is ridiculous.
Naheed Mustafa is an independent producer/writer/broadcaster and documentary filmmaker based in Toronto.
Nada Bakos is a former CIA analyst, and worked in the Counterterrorism Department. Her book, “The Targeter” is due to be released in 2016.
