I�m not by any means a "self-hating" Muslim. Nor am I an unpatriotic
"fifth columnist," working secretly to aid America�s enemies, just
because I will not bear arms against them.
To Osama bin Laden�who in a recent videotaped message called
President George W. Bush "the head of the world�s infidels" and said
that "every Muslim should rush to defend his religion"�I say: Your fight
is not in my name, sir.
To my President�who said in his address to a joint session of
Congress Sept. 20, "Every nation in every region now has a decision to
make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists..."�I say:
This may very well be my country, but this is most certainly not my war.
No. As a Muslim American, I find myself, rather conflicted in the
same way that Dr. W.E.B. DuBois described Black Americans nearly a
century ago in "The Souls of Black Folk." "One ever feels his twoness,"
DuBois wrote in 1903, "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
As unforgiving as was the Nation of Islam�s Honorable Elijah Muhammad
toward the sins of America�s "blue-eyed devils" against my enslaved
Black American forefathers, the message I learned from him was that
Allah (God) and Allah alone would bring about that judgement, that
universal peace wherein all people could at last live together.
Mr. Muhammad found his followers in a state of lethargy�mentally
"dead" for all practical purposes. Instead of recruiting young men and
women to die for a cause, he raised them to want to live, so they could
influence for the better their own downtrodden and neglected Black
communities.
Black Americans who were converted to Islam walked away from crime
and drugs and alcohol and death, into energetic lives with only their
wits and the message of Islam� peace, submission to the Will of Allah�as
their weapons.
When civil rights workers and their more militant brethren in
movements like the Black Panther Party were being routinely beaten and
murdered, "Black Muslims" went forward in a hostile America in safety,
with not so much as a penknife in their possession. And Black
America�all of America� is much better off thanks to the presence of
Black Muslims in the last half of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, Americans reviled them as "the hate that hate produced,"
and in the Arab world, orthodox Muslims dismissed them as not being
"real" Muslims.
For myself, I learned during my orientation into the faith that the
most often used word in the Qur�an�the Islamic scriptures �is not
"jihad," which is mistakenly construed to mean "holy war," but rather "raheem,"
which means "mercy." I, for one, am quite content to worship a God more
merciful than warlike.
Jihad is better defined as a striving toward self-purification in the
path of Allah by the individual, and the collective struggle of a
community against all forms of injustice and tyranny. The Arabic word "qitaal"
is the word that means fighting.
I�m not surprised at the anti-American protests throughout the Muslim
world against the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. But where was their
outrage when Muslim killed Muslim during the bloody eight-year war
between Iran and Iraq, in which more than one million believers in Islam
were slaughtered?
As to my opinion about American Muslim participation in the current
hostilities, I say again what I stated in a letter proclaiming my status
as a conscientious objector on May 20, 1969, and what Elijah Muhammad
himself must have said to federal agents when he was arrested in May,
1942: "I believe, as one who has declared himself to be a righteous
Muslim, that I should not participate in any wars which take the lives
of humans. I do not believe that this nation should force me to
participate in such wars."
(Askia Muhammad is The Final Call White House Correspondent
and a former editor of Muhammad Speaks Newspaper.)