ChicSunTimes

Thatcher riles Islamic scholars

October 5, 2001

BY CATHLEEN FALSANI RELIGION REPORTER

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has angered Muslim leaders in Britain by criticizing them for not speaking out louder against the Sept. 11 attacks.

Scholars of Islam in the United States, where Muslim leaders from a broad spectrum of Islamic organizations by and large have spoken with one voice in condemning the attacks, disagree on whether Thatcher's criticism is founded.

"They must say that it was disgraceful," Thatcher told the Times of London in an interview published Thursday. "I have not heard enough from Muslim priests."

Thatcher has a basic misunderstanding of how the Muslim world operates, evidenced even in her choice of the word "priest" to describe Muslim teachers, said Abdullahi An-Na'im, an Emory University professor of law who specializes in Islamic law and international relations.

"We have to think of an extremely diversified and decentralized Islam," said An-Na'im, a native of Sudan who is Muslim. "There is nothing like the Catholic Church or even a clergy idea." Thatcher and many other Western commentators "are projecting a vision of how Islam is organized."

"The notion of clergy as a spokesperson on behalf of their communities is a Western Christian idea that doesn't pertain to the Islamic world," he said.

Nonetheless, An-Na'im said he heard reports from Muslim communities from Malaysia to North Africa to the Middle East of local imams condemning the attacks.

"They're not going to be in the New York Times or the Washington Post. They will be in local languages and in local forums," he said. The widespread reaction of the Muslim community worldwide to the attacks has been "to reject it and condemn it," he said.

However, any public statement, or lack thereof, from Muslim leaders must be seen in their cultural and, more importantly, political context, An-Na'im said. In most Muslim societies, democratic rights and freedom of speech don't exist.

Charles A. Kimball, chairman of the religion department at Wake Forest University who helped negotiate the release of the American hostages from Iran, concurred.

"For instance, if you are a religious leader in Iraq, you would likely feel fairly constrained by what kind of position was deemed officially acceptable by Saddam Hussein's regime," Kimball said. "There are circumstances . . . that certainly inhibit people from feeling free to speak."

However, Kimball shares some of Thatcher's concern, while he would not have stated it as starkly, he said. "We have in the past had far less visible Muslim voices on a number of issues. I think part of it is complicated by the political dynamic."

Fawaz Gerges, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Sarah Lawrence College outside New York, says it is incumbent on Muslim leaders around the world to send a clearer message condemning the terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam.

"They do not make the case unambiguously, clearly and decisively," said Gerges, who returned Wednesday from a conference in Beirut, Lebanon, where the spectrum of Muslim ideologies was represented.

"Islamists, Arab nationalists, liberals and leftists . . . most of them did condemn what happened with the tragic act in New York. However, instead of saying, 'Listen, we do condemn this terrible, tragic and terroristic act' . . . they [also] say, 'Look at what the United States has been doing in the Arab and the Muslim world,'" said Gerges, a Lebanese Christian who spent the last two years in the Middle East as a MacArthur fellow studying relations between Islam and the West.

When Muslim leaders make those comments, it sounds as if they're saying America reaped what it sowed, he said.

October 5, 2001

-- Anonymous, October 05, 2001