J’accuse— On the Violence of Western Civilization
by Hamza Yusuf
A tragic event occurred in France. It was perpetrated by two ignorant Algerian men. For contextualization, I would like to point out though that during my lifetime alone, the French killed over one million Algerians in their own land. And recently, twelve French people were murdered. It was a crime; one that is clearly prohibited in Islam. They were killed unjustly, undeniably, and Muslims everywhere condemn that.
In light of such events, it is interesting to remember some of our own history. In 1859, a man named John Brown was one of the few white abolitionists against the enslavement of African-Americans. His convictions led him to eventually lead a raid on Harpers Ferry, Maryland. Brown believed that the Bible was over any man-made law, and he believed that what was being done to black people in this country was against God’s law. Therefore, he believed, because nobody else was doing anything to stop it, he had to take the law into his own hands. He was a religious fanatic: he took the law into his own hands as a result of religious convictions. Brown tried to take over an armory in order to get armaments to start a rebellion, and some people say that this, in effect, was the spark that led to the Civil War.
Ralph Waldo Emerson praised John Brown. There were people who actually supported him, like the Abolitionists in the United States, who felt that his cause was righteous. Henry David Thoreau wrote a very interesting article, A Plea for John Brown, in which he pointed out the hypocrisy in condemning Brown for killing a handful of people in a cause that he believed was righteous, while at the same time, the government sanctioned wars in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Likewise, in our own lifetime, we have seen this country go to war with a country that had nothing to do with any attack against this country, and we now have over one million Iraqis dead. Where are the millions of people protesting that? Yes, killing twelve people is a crime, but what about a million people? Are they worthless?
Of course, the Ebola outbreak is a tragedy, but only when it started affecting us in the West did many corporations suddenly become interested in finding a cure for it. There are hundreds of thousands of Africans who die from similar diseases every year. There is no sense of urgency for finding a cure for yellow fever, for example. Is it because these people don’t count?
They do indeed count because they are human beings, and this is where we have failed as a species. We are not raising children to become human beings. We are not inculcating in them human values and teaching them that human beings are more than just the material sum of their bodies. All human beings have a divine spark in them, as Almighty God has given all of us life.
God has given us all a miraculous, immaterial consciousness that cannot be identified on any computer; it cannot be touched or felt.
We must call into question what is happening out there. If you look at the Muslim world right now, it is a mess. As Muslims, we have to take ourselves to task for that. But I straddle two worlds: I am from this civilization, and I also converted to Islam. So I have to question what is this all about. I am deeply troubled by how Europeans look at Muslims, people who they colonized. Europeans killed them in large numbers, and then they brought them to their countries because they needed cheap labor to rebuild their societies after they had destroyed their own societies in their “world” wars. Even when they have wars, their ethnocentricity demands that they call them “global wars,” as if their “world” was the world.
They needed laborers from South Asia and other countries, so they brought those people to rebuild their societies, and they put them in the worst places in their countries, gave them the worst housing and the lowest paying jobs, and ghettoized them. Then, triumphant in their racism towards them, they are just amazed and wonder, “Why are these people so bloody barbaric? What is wrong with them?” The same type of sentiment has been felt about African-Americans in this culture for so long: “What is wrong with these people? Why don’t they just lift themselves up by their bootstraps? They even have a black president now. What’s their problem?”
Go into East Oakland right now and talk to people about bootstraps. The schools there have completely failed, and their religion and their families have been decimated. One must wonder: we have satellites that see everything now; they can see ants on rocks in the pitch black of the night, and they don’t see hundreds of thousands of tons of cocaine coming into this country?
We often hear, “What’s wrong with these Muslims? Why are they are so violent?” I ask, “Have you ever been to a Muslim country? Have you ever been inside a Muslim home? Have you ever eaten with a Muslim, spoken with a Muslim?” Personally, I have been all over the Muslim world, and I have rarely felt threatened or unsafe. I have walked through a city in Morocco after midnight, and I felt no sense of danger whatsoever.
Dr. M. Steven Fish, a professor at U.C. Berkeley and a very courageous social scientist, wrote a book called, Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence. He decided to study the violence of Muslims from the perspective of social science. He writes, “In this section, we have looked at whether Muslims are distinctive in terms of murder rates.
“Homicide is markedly rarer in Muslim societies than non-Muslim societies. The proportion of the country that is made up of Muslims is a good predictor of the murder rate, with a larger Muslim population associated with less homicide. This relationship holds when we control for other potentially important determinants of homicide. Accounting for why murder rates are lower amongst Muslims is difficult.”
As Muslims, we don’t find it difficult to account for that. We know why the murder rates are lower: it’s because we believe you go to hell for killing people!
Christians certainly know this, too. Christians know it’s one of the Ten Commandments. True Muslims, like true Christians, still believe in and follow those Commandments. “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” God said. That is not just any law — that is God’s Law. That’s why true believers follow that. They called John Brown dangerous and insane because he killed a handful of people in the raid on Harpers Ferry, but they don’t call heads of state who wage wars in which untold numbers of innocent people are murdered insane. But I do. Of course, that’s not the diplomatic thing to say, but such politicians scare me more than the idea of lone wolves out there.
We, as Muslims, Need to Take Ourselves to Task
If we want people to respect our religion, we have to first look at our own countries. Look at the denigration of Jewish people in Muslim newspapers; look at the racist cartoons that they draw of Jews. We have to condemn that, and it has to be real and genuine. We have to eradicate this in our communities and cultures because we can’t have a double standard. We have to be real and authentic about what we believe and what our Prophet ﷺ taught us, and we have to practice it. The Qur’an commands us to “Speak well to people.” As a result, we have to take ourselves to task and look at ourselves critically.
In studying Muslim societies, Dr. Fish found that in most things there wasn’t a difference between Muslim societies and others. In some things, Muslims were better than their counterparts in Western societies and in others, worse. Among those areas where he finds that Muslims did worse was in gender equity and attitudes towards women. (I wouldn’t, however, make a blanket statement about this, but it is certainly true in some countries.) I was once called to task by somebody I respect greatly, who is an American Christian expert on Islam, who, when I was once speaking about how much safer Muslim countries are, came up to me afterwards and said, “That’s true for the men, but not for women.” That really troubled me; it broke my heart because our Prophet ﷺ said:
“Noble men treat women nobly; and contemptible men treat them contemptibly.”
From the Ethics of Nouns and Adjectives to the Ethics of Verbs and Adverbs
I read a very intriguing book recently called The War Against Grammar by David Mulroy. His book argues that we have lost the ability to communicate well because we have lost grammar. The Muslim civilization was a civilization deeply invested in the study of grammar. If you want to define the Islamic civilization with an adjective, you could say it was a grammatical civilization; it was an Ummah Nahwiyya. Naḥu نحو (grammar) was the fundamental science of the Muslims. This is because the first revelation in our tradition was “Read in the Name of your Lord.” You have to know grammar to read properly and without mistakes, and so the Muslims were obsessed with grammar.
Grammar also has Metaphysical Implications.
In the 1920s, a lot of Black autoworkers were brought in because the corporations wanted cheap labor. This caused many white autoworkers, whose jobs were taken, to get very upset. In this setting, a Black man named Henry Sweet bought a house in a White neighborhood. One day, an angry White mob gathered outside of his house and were threatening him. The confrontation actually became violent. Henry Sweet had a gun and fired upon one of them, killing him. That dispersed the mob, and the police came. His entire family, all eleven members, were put on trial for murder. Fortunately, they had a defense attorney named Clarence Darrow. Darrow argued that the only reason the Sweets were even in court was because this man and his family were Black. Darrow argued that if this were a White man and a Black mob had done the same to him and his family, we wouldn’t even have an indictment; there would have been no grand jury; they would have seen it as self-defense, case closed.
Darrow asked an all-White jury to look into their hearts and ask themselves if there was anything other then racial prejudice that was motivating them. If that was the case, then they should be true to the law of this country and acquit Henry Sweet.
Darrow gave a brilliant defense, and Sweet was acquitted. That is because he took them from the ethics of nouns and adjectives to the ethics of verbs and adverbs, and this, I would argue, is the single most important thing that we as human beings must do if we are going to survive as a species. That is because when you are in the ethics of adjectives and nouns, this is how it works: in France, two Algerians killed twelve Frenchmen (because those two French men who were of Algerian background are not considered French in the eyes of the white French).
Ahmed Merabet is not considered French because he doesn’t have a name like “Pierre.” You may speak French, but you’re not considered French if you have a name like Syeed al-Jazari. You’re not really French because our morality is one based on nouns and adjectives, and that’s what defines you, not verbs and adverbs. If you say “A killed B,” the operative word there should be “killed”; that should determine how you feel about it. But if you say, “A Palestinian killed a Jew in Israel,” the focus is not on verbs here: the focus is on the nouns and adjectives, and that’s your morality. With this morality, the Palestinian concludes, “Oh, it must have been justified; the Jew must have been the wrong one.” And the Israeli concludes, “The Jew must have been killed unjustifiably because the killer is Palestinian, so of course it couldn’t have been self-defense.” In this line of thinking, whoever killed those Israelis who were part of that racist soccer club — automatically, ipso facto, it has to be, “the Palestinians are wrong because they are Palestinians.” It’s as simple as that.
But when you move into a view of morality based in verbs and adverbs, “killed” is the operative word. That action is what is wrong, not who is doing it; it is what was done that is wrong. The verb may then be qualified by an adverb. Such as: he killed them in self-defense; he killed them justifiably; he killed them unjustly. Those are the things that we need to focus on and not who it was, not who did something to whom.
This isn’t about Muslims and non-Muslims; this is about right and wrong. Right and wrong are not determined by nouns and adjectives. Morality is determined by verbs and adverbs, and this is why we have to learn to communicate better and understand what’s really happening on this planet. Who is really suffering and what actions are the cause of that?
What are the consequences of European economic policies in Africa with all the banks that are in Switzerland and Brussels, milking these countries of their livelihoods? What kind of suffering is going on? That’s what we have to ask. So I would call to task my civilization; as a member of it, I call it to task: J’accuse!
This is an edited transcript of a section of a speech delivered by Hamza Yusuf on January 11, 2015 in Santa Clara, California: courtesy of Feraidoon Mojadedi.
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