The Moderate Muslim Voice
It's like an article of faith. We know they're out there, we just don't know where. We know they're speaking, protesting, attempting to talk rational sense into the hotheads, the unthinking mobs. They're there, pointing out how futile, how self-destructive these incendiary protests against a relative trifle are. How they're marring irreparably, their own image, and that of their god. Is anyone listening? Seems those that are, are also pulling the strings of all those puppets of Islam, and they're also marginalizing, targetting, abusing and ultimately silencing those outspoken few.But why so few? Because those many who feel as they do are not quite so brave. Not for them the fear realized in imprisonment, and sometimes worse. So the great silent majority lives in a thinner aura of fear, and a sense of self-abasement, a moral failure. But then there are also bright lights who simply do not care; they understand the absurdity of this world play in manipulation and want no part of it.
In Ramallah, of all places, Khaled Mahameed, founder and curator of the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education, a very elevated nomenclature for what is in reality a tiny single-room structure. It is lined with photographic records of the Holocaust. Mr. Mahameed has borne the curses of fellow Muslims and is viewed as a collaborator. But look, there are Muslims from nearby towns and villages who venture out to look and to educate themselves, to understand for the first time that this was a horrific, singular event in world history. These enlightened thinkers also want their children to see and to understand. They are few, but this is a start, this is a hope for the future of mutual understanding. This is how people will recognize one another as fellow humans, as worthy of their interest and compassion, on either side. It is how, eventually, the Israelis and the Palestinians and by extension the larger Arab world; the world of the Muslims and Jews will come together in tolerance. It can happen, it should happen; we can only wish that it will.
Look here, there are Arab journalists in Jordan, Yemen and in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world who risk condemnation and imprisonment, and certainly a loss of journalistic credibility and livelihood in the world they inhabit, for the sake of truth and justice. They point out that it is the proudly televised image of the jihadist beheading a Westerner, that of the suicide bomber welcoming death in the name of the Prophet which damages Islam in the eyes of the world, not the publishing of cartoons meant to lampoon self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the name of Allah. Eleven journalists in five Muslim countries are currently facing prosecution for printing some of the infamous cartoons in their attempts to talk reason, to make people think instead of react.
An Egyptian judge and author of books on political Islam, Said al-Ashmawy explains that for liberal-minded Muslims to point out the endemic failings of the political system, and the emerging popularity of religious fanaticism is to court personal danger. There is no one, he says, to protect the outspoken, and for that matter, no one willing to publish them either.
Militant Islam, and uneasy Middle East rulers make a potent combination for unrest, each doing their best to rally the faithful to their call. Since the reigning royalty, the quasi-democracies, and the theocracies have consistently failed their people, it seems the fanatics are gaining the upper hand, and woe to the world.
Hope lies in the fact that human beings can absorb just so much intimidation, deprivation and misery and then they begin to turn, to look elsewhere for relief. In that process, we can hope that the large and mostly silent majority will ultimately make some decisions that will impell them toward a solution that will include sensitivity toward the world at large, in a successful search for their own well being in joining the 21st century.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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