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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia
IN Cairo last week, Arab intellectuals held a conference to discuss what they called the Muslim world's most pressing danger in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The problem? Not how Islam itself has been hijacked by terrorists to justify the attacks, but what they called Islamophobia - a Western fear of Islam.
Since Sept. 11, Muslim leaders have repeatedly said that
extremists like Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network have
distorted religious teachings to justify terrorism. But beyond these
now-familiar declarations that the attacks against the United States
were "not Islam," there has been mostly silence.
The relative timidity of mainstream Islamic authorities in the face
even of mass murder has begun to prompt criticism from some Muslims,
mostly secular liberals and religious moderates, who see themselves
as having been silenced by authoritarian regimes and who wonder why
the extremists have been left unchallenged.
They ask whether this inaction is motivated by fear, internal
politics or even a determination to justify suicide attacks against
Israeli targets as a permissible form of jihad while decrying the
Sept. 11 attacks. And they worry that the political and religious
establishment of Islam seems unwilling or incapable of taking on the
extremists.
"The West needs to rethink its policies towards the region, but it is
Arabs and Muslims also that have to review their attitudes to the
violence in their midst," said Mohammad Sayed Said, who is deputy
director of Egypt's Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, a moderate
government-run organization.
In fact, Islam teaches that violence is not only justified, but
obligatory, in the defense of the faith. Muslim clerics, who see
themselves as the protectors of the umma, or Islamic community, have
often looked tolerantly on those who claim to be using violence
against Islam's foes, or to keep society on the right spiritual
path.
To be sure, a host of prominent Muslim leaders, including Sheik
Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, head of Cairo's Al Azhar, the ancient center
of Sunni Islam scholarship and teaching, have issued opinions
decrying the actions of Sept. 11 as un- Islamic. Political leaders,
most notably King Abdullah of Jordan, who is a descendant of the
Prophet Mohammed, have done the same. With somewhat greater
circumspection, Crown Prince Abdullah, the day-to- day ruler of Saudi
Arabia, summoned the country's leading clerics to warn them against
"exaggeration" in religion.
BUT beyond a handful of on- air and newspaper commentaries, there has
been no sustained and comprehensive rebuttal of the radical theology
put forth by Mr. bin Laden, in his videotaped messages on Al Jazeera,
the Arabic language satellite station. Nor has there been a public
repudiation of those, like Hamoud Shuaebi of Saudi Arabia, who has
called on Muslims to wage war against Americans (in response to what
he has called an American war against Islam), and has warned that
"those who help the infidels are infidels themselves."
"If you invited someone like Shuaebi to debate these issues on
television, and put him up against a real religious scholar, people
would see quickly that his arguments make no sense," said a
businessman in the Saudi city of Jidda. "But no one seems willing to
do that, or to dismantle these lunatic arguments in the newspapers or
in the mosques." Instead, the response from prominent, establishment
clerics like Saudi Arabia's Saleh al- Sheikh, the minister of Islamic
Affairs, has been almost tepid. "The problem of extremism comes when
some people surrender to emotions, but don't use their brain," Mr.
al- Sheikh was quoted recently as saying in the Saudi newspaper
Okaz.
"What is important here is for a centrist approach. If this trend
grows rationally and with an eye to the future, other trends will
become weak," said the cleric, a member of the kingdom's most
prominent clerical family, guardians of the strict Wahhabi
interpretation of Islam. "But this requires time, because people's
convictions can't be changed overnight. I accept responsibility, but
the remedy needs time." Neither he nor any other prominent cleric has
yet spelled out what that remedy might be.
ISLAM, of course, has no Vatican, and its decentralization (like that
of Judaism) has historically been seen as a source of strength,
allowing the religion to thrive in diverse cultures. But the absence
of a single theological authority also allows even the most radical
clerics to claim authority, while encouraging others to compete for
followers, patrons and even survival.
"Do you risk what you have?" said John L. Esposito, a professor and
expert on Islam at Georgetown University, on the timidity of Muslim
leaders. "Do you get involved in this tricky minefield when you've
got to live and function within your society, which often are not
just authoritarian, but depending on where you are, can be
violent?"
The British Muslim leader Diauddin Sirdar put it more bluntly. Last
month, under the headline "Islam Has Become Its Own Worst Enemy," Mr.
Sirdar wrote in the British newspaper The Observer that Muslims were
shirking responsibility for terrorism.
Fear is an important factor in the silence. The killing by Islamic
extremists of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1975, of Anwar al-Sadat
of Egypt in 1981, of Mohammed al- Duhabi, a cleric and former
Egyptian religious affairs minister, in 1977, and the attempted
assassination of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in 1995 are,
together with many other less well-known killings, a part of the
political and religious calculations in the Arab and Islamic world.
The price of standing up to extremism may literally be getting shot
down.
Another factor that few religious leaders discuss openly is their
fear of internal discord. For example, experts said that the bland
objections to terrorism published by Al Azhar, the ancient mosque and
university, can be traced to the power wielded by its more radical
groups, like the Al Ulemaa Front.
"The leaders feel that they have to balance the situation and avoid a split," said Hala Mustafa, an Egyptian expert on Islam. "And second, they don't want to get into a confrontation outside, with the religious groups."
In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations with authoritarian governments, open clashes between clerics affiliated with the government and those linked to radical Islamic groups could ignite a wider debate on the legitimacy of the government itself.
Muslim religious leaders also don't want to do anything that might
threaten their own power. That is one reason they have firmly
resisted Western suggestions that the curriculum of Islamic schools,
or madrasas, many of which preach a radical anti-Western message, be
changed. The clerics and their adherents see the schools as an
important part of their power base.
"None of these hijackers went to Islamic schools," said Mohammed
Salahadeen, a moderate Islamist publisher in the Saudi city of Jidda,
though details of their backgrounds have not yet been made
public.
Islamic clerics are also political figures, with constituencies to
serve and positions to protect that flow from Islam's unique
relationship between clergy and state. Beginning with the Prophet
Mohammed, Muslim leaders have combined political and religious rule,
and the authority of clerics still depends in part on their followers
and patrons.
While clerics jockey for power, they do so cautiously, since an
attack on the credentials of a rival can easily rebound. For an
establishment Saudi cleric to take on a Sheik Shuaebi, for example,
is to risk a counterattack, a worrisome prospect for those who owe
their status to government ties and fear being attacked as official
shills.
"You don't want to limit to a single person the right to issue
fatwas," Prince Bandar bin Khalid, who is a member of Saudi Arabia's
royal family, said in defining what he called a quest for the right
balance. "But how can you make sure that not everyone has the right
to do so?"
At the same time, the louder the West calls for condemnation of the
violence, the more resistance grows, with mainstream leaders
recognizing the danger of their being seen and condemned by radicals
like Sheik Shuaebi as lackeys of the West.
Anywhere in the world, of course, debates on terrorism, are always complicated by questions of definition. When should violence be condemned, and when should it be celebrated? Who is a terrorist, and who is a freedom fighter?
BUT in the Middle East in particular, where many Muslim scholars have taken pains to spell out a theological justification for suicide attacks by Palestinians against Israeli soldiers, the difference between acceptable and intolerable violence may come down to a finer line than some are comfortable defining.
"To speak out against violence and terrorism is something that many clerics want to do," said Dr. Esposito, the Georgetown scholar. "But they also worry that their statements would then be used by others, like the Bush administration, to apply to conflicts in which they see violence as legitimate."