You Think You Know Me?

Koli Mitra explores the issue of essentialism in how non-Muslims relate to Muslims in a world dominated by perceptions of ‘Islamic’ terrorism.

2003.  The Iraq war had not yet begun. ‘Yellow cake’ was in the news. General Colin Powell threw the considerable weight of his personal credibility behind a British intelligence dossier – “a fine paper” he called it – on which the Bush administration was relying rather heavily to justify an invasion of Iraq. (Nobody knew yet that the Brits had substantially plagiarised the contents– which showed that Saddam Hussein was close to having weapons of mass destruction – from an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi, an American graduate student at Oxford).

Rehan, an average American college kid, spent most of his non-study time with friends, playing hacky sack, watching basketball, drinking beer, downloading music they didn’t pay for, and generally being young. He rarely read the papers and got his ‘news’ primarily from Comedy Central’s satirical program The Daily Show. He wasn’t political.  But after 9/11 Rehan found he was expected to take a position on things.  His girlfriend Ashley, who was from a small town in Southern Virginia, wholeheartedly supported the upcoming invasion of Iraq. It worried Ashley that Rehan was hesitant to support a war. She wondered, if the US ever went to war with ‘his country’, would he go back and fight against hers?

Rehan was shocked. Go back?… Where? He was from Saint Paul! He was a patriotic American! Ashley said he should show his loyalty by “cutting some ties.” She suspected there were probably people in “his mosque” who were plotting things.  “My mosque?” Rehan was outraged. “You mean my parents’ community group that organises only vaguely religious-themed celebrations where everyone dresses up, eats beef curry and dances to music from a mostly Hindu country? Yeah. I seriously doubt anyone there is a jihadi!” Then he counter-accused her hometown church of perhaps harboring Ku Klux Klan members.

Later, they both tried to calm down. She apologised for questioning his patriotism, but then suggested, much to his irritation, that he could join the government’s anti-terrorism efforts by becoming an Arabic translator.  “You kind of have to know Arabic for that!” He snapped. Ashley was confused. Why didn’t Rehan know Arabic? Wasn’t he…, Muslim? Rehan’s next response was pure scorn. “You’re Christian, why don’t you speak Hebrew?” They fought bitterly, but made up the next day. He explained to her that they don’t speak Arabic where he was from (Saint Paul, Minnesota). They don’t even speak it where his parents were from (Pakistan). But things were never the same again.  They broke up a month later.

I have a confession. ‘Ashley’ and ‘Rehan’ are based on a couple I knew who had a similar confrontation and breakup  right before the war, but the content of their fight is a composite of several such encounters that Muslim friends of mine have related to me over the years since 9/11.  Instead of repeating numerous overlapping stories, I synthesised them into one story that I hope captures the truth of those experiences. I did this because I wanted to talk about how the terrorists claiming to act for Islam have affected ordinary people who identify themselves with Islam.  The effects are profound and far-reaching in ways that the rest of us really can’t fathom.

Muslims often find that people lump them together as a monolithic mass.  After the Mumbai bombings of 2008, my Pakistani neighbour Farooq was asked by his best friend Nikhil, an Indian-American, to explain the mindset that lets a person cause such senseless carnage.  Farooq was stunned. “I’m standing right where you are, bro!” he said, but Nikhil was unsatisfied.  It’s not that he suspected Farooq – whom he loved and respected – to be a terrorist sympathiser, but he expected Farooq, as a Muslim, to have some special insight on the matter.

A colleague once told me “I keep hearing about all these supposedly moderate Muslims… where are they? When are they coming out to condemn all the terrorism?”  I was dumbfounded. Where was he looking for these condemnations?  Also, where were all these regular Muslims who had NOT condemned the terrorism?  Then it struck me. When people say “condemn the terrorism” they really mean “condemn the religion” or at the very least “get on board with any retaliation we think of, however irrational, against any Muslims we choose to attack, however unrelated to the violence against which we are claiming to be retaliating.” My colleague was a highly educated man – a partner in a Wall Street law firm, well read and politically active – whom I always found to be a genuinely good, kind, and upright person.  Even someone like him was susceptible to a worldview in which all Muslims – even those who were themselves innocent – had something to account for; the onus was on them to overcome an inference of guilt by association.

The American comedian Dennis Miller (who is remarkably intelligent and even learned, for an entertainer) confessed that he was deeply disturbed by “radical Islam and, increasingly, moderate Islam, and starting to wonder when you guys are going to declare a fatwa on the [expletive]within your own organisation.”  It’s not clear how anyone remains a ‘moderate’ after declaring a ‘fatwa’ …but there it is. All Muslims are in the same ‘organisation’, after all, right? They all get to issue fatwas. Miller then went on to chide a group of Muslim New Yorkers who wanted to build a multi-faith community center near Ground Zero which would have included an Islamic prayer room. He told them it was “bad manners… because of the people who died down there…”  the implication being that simply being Muslim and offering prayers, even extending a hand of interfaith friendship, is somehow offensive to those who died on 9/11.  Again, the message is “there’s no distinction between you and terrorists.”  To top it off, Miller’s immediate next sentence is: “now we’re gonna let Iran get nuclear weapons, Iran? Are you kidding me?”  So, now Iran was to be held accountable for Al Qaeda savagely attacking our city… never mind that they are mortal enemies. It may seem trivial to harp on a comedian’s rant, but he articulated very concisely how many non-Muslims feel about ‘Islamic Terrorism.’ And not all of them are mere comedians. Some are police officers, legislators, national security policy advisors, prosecutors and judges. They make decisions about profiling and no-fly lists and extraordinary renditions and incarcerations without trial.

When we fail to develop an adequately nuanced understanding of people, the fallout is detrimental for ourselves too.  If everybody thought like Dennis Miller – and many do – we could end up doing Al Qaeda a big favour by fighting Iran. The recent Taliban activities in Pakistan and ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria should alert us not to treat Islam as a monolith.

I hasten to add, however, that when I say “adequately nuanced understanding of people” I don’t mean simply learning that Islam is divided into ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’ and then trying to reduce each of them to some kind of easy to digest, internally uniform profile that’s distinct from the other. That’s not nuance. That’s just two separate instances of essentialist stereotyping instead of only one; it’s just two slightly smaller monoliths instead of one big one.

The history of Western intervention in Sunni-Shia conflicts has been a mine field for those who have tried to find strategies to navigate it diplomatically or militarily. During the Cold War, the US aligned itself with whichever side we thought was most manageable, rational, strategically helpful in pushing back communism, etc. But it backfired as we inadvertently – but repeatedly – cultivated despots and terrorists who then promptly turned against us and secular societies everywhere in the most ruthless manner, not the least of which, always, were the civil societies in their own countries. And we promptly reacted by switching sides and taking up with the side that used to be our enemy and telling ourselves those people had matured or mellowed while the side we supported earlier had grown more dangerous. As David Plotz wrote in a Slate article in late 2001, during the immediate aftermath of 9/11, “the two Islamic sects have switched places in the American mind.”  A few years later, we were again arming insurgents – known militants very likely espousing radical theocratic philosophies – against ‘the side’ that happened to be our ‘enemy’ this time.

Why am I using vague words like ‘the side’ and ‘the other side’ instead of just saying ‘Sunni’ or ‘Shia’ for clarity’s sake?  It’s because I am deliberately trying to separate terrorism, insurgency, and war from references to particular religious denominations. Some Sunni and Shia have problems with one another. Not all of them do. Some – not all – of them have problems with the United States or India or Israel or any number of entities. And when they do, their motivations may or may not overlap. From the outside it is easy to reduce ‘Shia’ or ‘Sunni’ – or even ‘Islam’ – to a formula and expect it to meet some criteria we have slapped on it, not even realising how arbitrary these are. And, when the result comes back to haunt us, it’s easy to just say “those people are irrational” rather than admit we never really understood them. Rational and stable alliances and progress toward a democratic world can’t come from short-term strategic partnerships with one side or other in a war among extremists and they certainly can’t come from equating entire religions and ethnicities with bands of warring extremists who claim to speak for them.

This tendency to essentialise people is part and parcel of how we – those of us of Indian origin – tend to deal with Pakistan, whether we realize it or not.  Like all Indians, I’m ethnically related to Pakistan. I even have some family who are Bangladeshi, some of whom, born before 1971, were Pakistanis at some point. Yet ‘Pakistan’ is supposed to feel alien to me. My colleague Nidhi Dugar Kundalia has written an interesting piece about an Indo-Pak wedding, where culturally very similar people, who were enjoying each other’s company  were still straining to find some kind of ‘my country’/‘your country’ fault line to justify their internal tension. One question nagged at me as I groped for ‘more context’: was this, aside from being international, also an interfaith wedding? I didn’t ask Nidhi the question. Part of me doesn’t want to. Part of me resents that the question even arose. “It should make no difference!” that part scolded the rest of me.

But that question does always lurk below the surface, doesn’t it? It’s the primary reason India and Pakistan are two different countries, isn’t it? The tensions Muslim Indians feel with Pakistan are bound to be qualitatively different from those that Hindu Indians feel. That’s the REAL reason I’m bristling at my own question. It should be a perfectly innocent inquiry. But the historical burden of conflict and its consequent valence makes me want to discount the question altogether.

So we try to eradicate the conflict by erasing the difference. The issue has become too fraught. It’s too hard to accommodate ‘difference’ as part of a rich, multifaceted, nuanced existence. Even when we try, we can end up objectifying and essentialising each other based on our perception of each other’s ‘differentness’.  Let’s be honest, those of us who boast of having religiously ‘diverse’ friends have mostly very secular minded friends, whatever their nominal affiliations might be. That’s not ‘different’ enough to be uncomfortable.

Paradoxically, even as communal difference are swept under the rug, Indians and Pakistanis tend to dwell on other kinds of cultural differences. These aren’t weighed down by historical resentment. Sometimes the ‘differences’ are totally artificial, like when we have ‘cultural exchanges’ of the kind we might have with people from Zimbabwe or Finland. I think we do this to feign being unrelated. Because if we dared acknowledge that we are family, we would have to acknowledge that we are a broken family, the product of a painful divorce where the ex-partners have not yet learned to be friends. It’s easier to push that skeleton back into the closet and pretend to be just neighbours.