Muslims address silence on Europe attacks

This is an interesting article picked up by Religion News Blog about Muslim reactions to the idea that they should denounce the acts of terrorism by Islimist radicals. One of the main reasons offered for the quietness that many have felt there has been [not always entirely a fair representation] is this.

Why, many Muslims ask, should they have to speak out against, or apologize for, actions of radicals who do not represent them - people they do not even regard as true Muslims? Many find the very idea of being asked or expected to denounce such acts "extremely offensive and insulting," said Khurshid Drabu, a senior member of the Muslim Council of Britain.

Which is fine and I have a great deal of sympathy with it. Though I do have to say that I think that if there were a group of terrorists making the kind of impact Al Qaida seem to be making in the name of Christian faith which was leading to lots of people misuderstanding badly what I understood to be my faith, I would want to be making it known and to explain just how it is that these people misrepresent my faith and how the inner logics of my belief work actually against it or how they are misusing texts.

The problem is that while ordinary Muslims have been doing this, there has been a paucity of official leadership type statements -including fatwas [of which I think there have only been two and one of those turns out not to be]- which back up this gut reaction. And the difficulty is that the rest of us can't understand how it is that Islam at a more official level 'disarms' the rhetoric of The Base. The difficulty being, further, that according to what we can understand of how Islam works in terms of its texts, hermeneutics and jurisprudence, the inner logics of Islam seem to favour the Islamist positions. Now, it should be said right now that I dearly hope that this is not the case and that the texts that appear to endorse violent responses to non-Muslims and the hermeneutical tools that appear to lead to affirming the continuing validity of those texts are actually potentially dealable with in ways that promote peaceful and harmonious co-exsitence and honest and frank dialogue and argument. At the moment that appears not to be so, on the whole.

So I'm left thinking that actually it's more like what it said earlier in the article.

For some of the more than five dozen Muslims interviewed for this story in Amsterdam, Paris and London, it's a sense of shame, or even guilt, that innocents have been killed in the name of Islam; they say those feelings make them seek to be "invisible." For those lucky enough to have jobs, there is little time to protest or even write letters to newspapers. For others, there is fear of being branded anti-Islam in their communities.

And it is that latter point which is the most worrying.
Islam :: Muslims address silence on Europe attacks: Filed in: Islam, terrorism