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Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim
www.muhsin.in
muhsin234 (Twitter)
“What is your name?” Muhammad. And all eyes would turn
around.
It often starts just like that, for to them, every Muslim is a
potential threat, a terrorist. It is extremely awkward, if not
annoying, to someone like me who was born and reared in
an almost 99% Muslims community. Hitherto I didn’t know
that being Muslim means that much and weighs that loads;
some feel even reluctant to disclose their belief. Muslims
living in multi-religious and non-Muslims majority societies
today have a lot of stories to tell. The story is sometimes
nasty in conservative, religiously touchy and volatile places
like India, where I presently reside. Although home to about
200 million Muslims, it was discovered in a recent survey
that some of them have to masquerade as Hindus to sustain
their businesses. This happens due to the schism, and
sometimes animosity, between them and other faithful,
particularly the majority Hindus.
But why all the fuss and the buzz, you may ask. Generally
identity, especially religious one, is highly polemical and
extremely abstract. For instance, my ‘Muslimness’ is neither
determinable based on my appearance and gait, nor
proportional to my humanity and humane. Despite the
whopping population of more than 1.5 billions worldwide,
hundreds of millions of Muslims live in shambles due to the
raging religious stereotype, which results to marginalisation
and sometimes worse, as aforesaid. Needless to say, the
reports of suicide bombs and other terror acts allegedly
perpetuated by some miscreants calling themselves Muslims
is a commonplace today. Al Qaeda, IS/ISIS, Boko Haram, etc
are household names around the world. But this can’t and
shouldn’t, nonetheless, justify the unjust treatment of others
who can equally be victims of those murderers.
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Wait and ask yourself: how many Muslims are engaged in
such dastardly activities? The aforementioned figure is just
tentative, for the population of Muslims is, against many
odds, rapidly growing. So, obviously, had the larger
population of them been involved in “terrorism”, no part of
the world might have been in peace, for nearly 1 in 4 people
worldwide is Muslim. There is no denying that the threat
poses by the ‘bad guys’ among them is alarming, but not as
the media would want us to believe. Muslims do not have
monopoly on fanaticism. We have Christians in C.A.R,
Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Hindus in India, Jews
in Israel, etc. but Muslims remain virtually the only culpable
faithful. One cannot be a Muslim, a practicing one, until
somewhere, someone overtly or covertly degrades him, or
calls him an extremist or terrorist. What is wrong with the
choice of being? I am Muslim, so let me be. Don’t infringe
my individual rights. I will not do yours, either.
Do you know that extremism has no place in true Islam?
Ironically however, the few who subscribed to it always
make the news headlines, while others who are paragons of
moderation and peace loving lots are barely heard of on the
mostly western and western-influenced media. This modern
world owes much to Muslims as they have a very long
history in developing it. Malise Ruthven in his “excellent little
book”, Islam: A Very Short Introduction published by Oxford
University Press explains that:
“No one need doubt that, at the level of civilization, an
unprecedented degree of knowledge, excellence, and
sophistication was achieved in Islam several centuries
before the Renaissance occurred in Europe, or that, as
many scholars have noted, much of the groundwork for
the scientific and philosophical thought that would flourish
in the West was laid in Muslim lands” (Ruthven 2012:17).
He further notes that Muslims have excelled in virtually all
other fields the world today boasts having—medicine,
mathematics, astronomy, optics, architecture, poetry and
philosophical thoughts, among others. Going by this alone
should have made being Muslim something to be so much
proud of, but the exact opposite is often obtained. Of
course, one is allowed to do certain things to protect oneself
under threat, but it’s no more than paranoia many a times.
Be it as it may, I, for once, wouldn’t subscribe to what I
couldn’t perform or display before others. You are still "the"
Muslim unless you renounce your belief and join them,
which equates to preferring the terrestrial over the Celestial,
the temporary over the permanent.
A few days ago, somebody called me a Boko Haram (BH)
member on Facebook for my being a Nigeria and Muslim in
response to my criticism of the Egyptian president, Abdul-
Fatah Al-Sisi. Saying a word against Sisi is tantamount to
siding with the ousted “Islamist” president, Morsi and his
outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. There’s nothing more wrong
than that. Unbeknown to him, there’s a world apart from
their ideology and mine. In fact, BH fights everyone, and
anybody like me, for I study and teach what they try, with all
their force and efforts, to prohibit—Western Education. Yet
somebody is here calling me their member. How ignorant of
him? How senselessly stereotypical are people nowadays?
I have got two calls: First to my fellow Muslims. Don’t forget
who you are. Your undue moderation or apologia cannot
purge you away from your identity. Don’t join the
bandwagon of hundreds of thousands of ‘cultural’ or
‘nominal’ Muslims, to whom the religion is only an identity
to distinguish them from others. These people are
practically non-observant of Islamic tenets, which is
primarily to submit to the One God alone and what He
revealed to Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W). You can, however,
choose to do what you want. Allah says: “There’s no
compulsion in religion, for the right way is clearly from
the wrong way…” (Qur’an, 2:256).
The second call is to my non-Muslims readers. Allah says:
“Oh humankind! We created you from a single pair of
male and female and made you into nations and tribes
that you may know each other…” Qur’an (49:13).
Therefore, any informed Muslim understands this wisdom of
our being created differently; however the difference is not
to divide us but that we may know each other. Let us
embrace peace, mutual understanding and respect. Let us
not forget that we are individuals with dissimilar, sometimes
opposing, views, taste, impulse, desire, etc. Psychologists
irrefutably say that no two individuals are exactly the same,
not even identical twins. Thus, if some ignorant Muslims do
something wrong, blame them, not the entire Muslims
population, nor their religion.
No doubt Islam is nowadays a subject of mockery,
misinterpretations, and the like. Three things caused that: 1)
misconduct of a few of its followers, 2) sheer ignorance of its
content and the earlier context and background, and 3) the
exaggerating effect of media, especially those owned by anti
(not “non-“) Muslims. BUT don’t let yourself be carried away
by any of these. Don’t just believe in a single story, for that is
dangerous.
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