Progressive Christians Uniting

Standing With Our Muslim Neighbors Now

On June 21 it was my privilege to take part in a post-screening discussion of the amazing new Michael Winterbotham film, “A Mighty Heart.” The film was shown at Paramount Studios in Hollywood as part of an event organized by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and co-sponored by PCU. By now everyone knows that the film stars Angelina Jolie and that it deals with the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. What no one who hasn’t actually seen the film can know is how movingly Jolie portrays Mariane Pearl, Daniel Pearl’s wife and then widow.

In the film, as in real life, Mariane Pearl is a figure of great courage and dignity. During the terrible days when Daniel’s fate was unknown, she didn’t collapse and she never flinched from the possibility of the worst possible outcome. That worst outcome ensued: her husband–the father of her unborn child–was brutally murdered. She could have hated all Muslims and all Pakistanis, but she refused to demonize anyone on account of faith or nationality and remained ever-mindful of the fact that the people who took her husband from her were, first and foremost, criminals. 

During the discussion on June 21, CAIR executive director Hussam Alyoush used the opportunity to suggest that the great challenge facing Americans today is to avoid “clash of civilizations” thinking and bear in mind that terrorists are, first and foremost, criminals. As such they are enemies of Islam and its core values; they are outlaws according to all civilized value systems.

This shouldn’t be too hard to understand. If American leaders had understood it clearly following that attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders would most likely have been brought to justice long ago–brought to justice without the catastrophic wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and without the horrible blowback our actions have unleashed around the globe, most recently in London and Glasgow.

On a public radio newscast this week I heard the Conservative Party’s shadow cabinet minister for security rise in Parliament to suggest that perhaps it’s now time to monitor every single Muslim or Arab or East Asian medical professional residing in the British Isles on a 24-7 basis.

And remember that the British keep a stiff upper lip in relation to their American cousins. Any new terrorist attack on American soil that can in any way be blamed on Muslims will bring an immediate and horrendous clamor for mass detention, deportation, and/or intensified surveillance of all Muslim, Arab, and East Asian persons residing in the U.S., whether or not they have citizenship and roots here stretching back generations.

At the “Might Heart” screening I said that in an overwhelmingly Christian country like ours, it’s up to Christians to stand strong for solidarity and the rule of law–especially the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Otherwise we could well find ourselves in the role of “good Germans”–complicit through our silence–as Muslim neighbors are rounded up and persecuted. It interests me that views like mine are routinely condemned as “extreme” and “hysterical,” whereas there’s never anything extreme or hysterical about actual state suppression and fear-filled vigilantism when these occur.

Already the groundwork for mass persecution is being laid. On America’s Independence Day, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman had this to say:

“Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor. This cancer is erasing basic norms of civilization….If Muslim leaders don’t remove this cancer–and only they can–it will spread, tainting innocent Muslims and poisoning their relations with each other and the world.”

If I parse this correctly, Friedman is tapping his foot and looking at his stopwatch, giving Muslim leaders only so much time to take care of things before those most imperiled by this cancer–presumably non-Muslims–have the right to remove the tumor themselves.

My response is “Physician, heal thyself!” Friedman conveniently forgets that non-Muslims headed by George W. Bush have already taken action against the so-called tumor, and look where it’s gotten them. Friedman seems similarly oblivious to the huge efforts enlightened Muslim leaders everywhere already are making to challenge hatred and fanaticism. Innocents like Bush and Friedman make their job infinitely harder, however, not just by imagining that armed might–and by extension the horrors of Guantanamo–can quell anti-Western resentment but also by maintaining, against all evidence, that just one faith tradition suffers from a cancerous death cult at its core.

As a member of the original “convert or die” faith tradition, I know differently. And that’s the other thing American Christians need to do if anything resembling an open society is to remain here: We need to own up to our own propensity to violence and domination–what Harry Emerson Fosdick, in his great hymn, called our “warring madness.” Only due humility and a re-awakened conscience among those who claim to follow Christ can release the solidarity and genuine friendship we need to be showing our Muslim neighbors as things get uglier in the months and years to come.

                                                                           - Peter Laarman

Posted under: Director's Cut, Happening in the World