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Moderate Muslims speak
up
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - If investigators confirm the charges
by the US and Indonesian governments that Saturday
night's carnage in Bali was the work of Muslim
militants, the "Islam encourages violence" debate
sparked by last year's September 11 attacks is sure to
intensify and put pressure on moderate Muslims.
Sensing this possibility, some of the leading
voices championing moderate Islam in Southeast Asia have
been quick to speak up and raise issues about these acts
of terror and separating them from Islam.
Having
condemned the car bomb attack on the Indonesian resort
island of Bali, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad said on Tuesday that such attacks will continue
"as long as people harbor hatred".
Mahathir said
that terrorist attacks were "not a good way to fight for
any cause, as it was not planned for ultimate victory
but to exact revenge and retaliation", reported the
English-language daily The Star.
In Indonesia,
where officials in Bali are intensively questioning two
Indonesians in connection with the attack killed at
least 182 people and injured more than 300, Muslim
lawyers have chided the country's defense minister for
blaming the al-Qaeda network for the attack without
citing evidence.
"That was a reckless statement
under the present circumstances; unfounded allegations
might provoke a bigger problem," Mahendratta,
coordinator of a group of Muslim lawyers, was quoted as
saying by Antara, the Indonesian state news agency, on
Tuesday.
Likewise, the agency quoted Bali's
police chief, Brigadier-General Budi Setyawan, as
saying: "There is no clue [whether or not al-Qaeda was
behind the bombings]. An international network could
have masterminded it." Earlier, Indonesian Defense
Minister Matori Abdul Djalil went on record saying that
the Bali attacks are "linked to al-Qaeda with
cooperation of local terrorists".
On Monday, the
leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization,
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), also cautioned against pointing
fingers at Islam for encouraging such acts of terror.
The Bali bombing "was an act against humanity
and no religion can justify it. The authorities must
solve the case and bring the perpetrators to justice,
but must do so according to facts, not analysis," Hasyim
Muzadi of NU was quoted as saying.
The "Islam
encourages violence" or "Islam equals terrorism" debate
picked up after last year's attacks in the United
States, which killed nearly 3,000 civilians. Those who
linked Islam and violence pointed to the 19 hijackers
involved in the September 11 attacks, all of whom were
Muslims.
Among those who have raged against
Islam have been leading religious figures in the United
States. The past 12 months have seen people such as US
television evangelist Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham
link Islam with the "forces of darkness", writes Chris
McGillion in Tuesday's edition of the Sydney Morning
Herald.
Falwell has said that the followers of
Islam's Prophet Muhammad are "bent on destroying all
non-Muslims", adds McGillion, the paper's
religious-affairs columnist. Falwell has since
apologized for his remarks. But similar views about
Islam held by neo-conservative writers in the United
States have also fed this debate.
In early
August, the US media reported that some neo-conservative
writers and thinkers close to the administration of
President George W Bush were turning the pressure on
Saudi Arabia for the conservative strand of Islam it
practices, Wahhabism, which traces its roots to the 18th
century. Wahhabism, they implied, has an anti-US streak,
highlighted by the fact that the majority of the
hijackers in the US attacks - and bin Laden, the man
Washington accuses of planning them - were Wahhabis,
whose idea of an ideal Islamic state was the Taliban's
Afghanistan.
But Muslim moderates in Southeast
Asia have been at pains since the September 11 tragedy
to counter those who accuse Islam of encouraging
violence, by offering the region's tolerant face of the
faith as evidence that it is not so.
Indonesia,
in fact, has been held up as a prime example of Islam's
moderate face. It is the largest Muslim country in the
world, with 170.3 million of its 220 million people
adherents of Islam. The Nahdlatul Ulama, with a
membership of 40 million Muslims, encourages the
country's faithful to take a moderate path.
Yet
in the eyes of many, this image has suffered because of
Saturday's massive bomb, and will place this region's
Muslims in a further predicament if investigators link
militant Muslims to the bloodshed.
At the same
time, statements from some religious leaders accused of
holding extremist views are not helping create space for
moderates.
For instance, the line of argument
used by Abu Bakar Baasyir, an Indonesian Muslim cleric
whom intelligence officials in the region have linked to
planned attacks, will not help deflect charges that
Islam encourages violence. Baasyir told journalists at a
news conference that the Bali attack was the work of
foreigners, "most probably the United States", to give
the impression that Islamic extremists are present in
Indonesia. The authorities will look to accuse Muslims -
including himself - for the attack, he added.
In
a commentary in Tuesday's Arab News, Abdul Qader Tash
says a hostile approach that "presents Islam as
aggressive and antagonistic towards the West" is not the
way to go.
"Our efforts will be wasted," he
writes, if Islam is seen as trying to destroy the West
and "build an Islamic civilization on its ruins".
In the wake of attacks, such as the Bali blasts,
Southeast Asia's Muslims face the challenge of
convincing others that Islam does not encourage
violence, by looking into the community and launching a
debate about what has gone wrong with the way some
Muslims interpret their faith and use the religion for
political purposes.
(Inter Press
Service)
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