Viewpoint

Changed forever

Shock, fear, anger, and hope for justice in a world that has suddenly become much smaller

by Dr. Arif Babul

It’s Saturday, Sept. 22. Today, for the first time in nearly two weeks, I feel eerily at peace. Yesterday, tortured and depressed, I attended Friday prayers, seeking solace. Finding none until a gentleman stood up and spoke gently and eloquently about the catastrophe that unfolded before our very eyes on Sept. 11, about the mindless violence that was inflicted not only on the people who died tragically in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, but on all of us. He spoke of the importance of letting out the bottled emotions, of reaching out to each other, to God.

A silent scream exploded from deep within my very being.

I still remember being awoken by a phone call early that Tuesday morning, stumbling downstairs, turning on the TV, and being shattered by the agonizing images that flooded into our home. My wife stood there in shock, crying. Our young children stood beside us, watching the tragedy at the World Trade Center repeat over and over and over again, not completely comprehending what was happening but recognizing that something terrible had taken place.

Before moving to Victoria not too long ago, we lived in Manhattan, south of 14th, in fact, for several years. New York was, in a way, home — a place of warm wonderful memories, the birthplace of our eldest daughter. Even at a distance of four years and 3,000 km, Manhattan remains very much part and parcel of our being. Perhaps Manhattan has seeped into our bones. This was not an attack on someplace over there. It feels like a knife-wound deep in our chests; the pain refuses to go away. My wife, to this day, can’t watch the images on TV without breaking down.

Within minutes, it struck us. Our friends. Our relatives. Most of these people lived downtown or worked in the financial district. Three had offices in the World Trade Center. Most of the next few days passed in great panic, fear and anguish. The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming. The phone lines to Manhattan were down and if it wasn’t for e-mail, I am not sure what we would have done.

Thankfully, all our friends and family members are alright. Of the last two, one had been unable to contact us until Friday morning. Although he had gotten out without injury, he stayed behind to help get his injured friends and colleagues to hospital. Unfortunately, many members of our wider circle are missing. One had called his parents just moments after WTC #2 was hit to say that he was alright. He is missing.

Nearly every night, the first few days, I woke to find my wife sobbing in her sleep, dreaming of buildings collapsing, of searing fireballs, of friends jumping from high windows.

And as I think back, it all seems rather surreal. I recall, in midst of all the turmoil, dropping my five-year-old off at school and instructing her that this was not a good day to tell anyone that she was a Muslim. All this after spending years teaching her to be proud of her heritage. She, an American by birth. The irony of it all. And all this while she was trying to grapple with the calamity of watching her birthplace, a city she had raised to mythic status in her mind, in flames and under attack, knowing that daddy and mummy are worried about Arrianne, her childhood friend, and Uncle Nizar and Rasool, among others.

Am I paranoid? Perhaps. I don’t fear my neighbours and colleagues. For the most part, they have been incredibly concerned and supportive. It is the random acts of violence that I fear. It was not that long ago that I was subjected to shouts of “Paki” as I walked to and from school. It was not that long ago that I was assaulted merely because of my skin colour. And yes, that was right here in Canada.

I remember well the hatred and racism directed towards Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. And yes, I am heartened to hear the media, politicians and community leaders attempt to distinguish between Muslims in general and the crazed monsters who perpetrated this heinous crime supposedly in the name of Islam.

But then I learn of a 15-year-old boy beaten unconscious in Ottawa because he was of Arab descent. I learn of a friend subjected to taunts of “Saddam” right here on the UVic campus. And I learn of a statistics class where the instructor, seeking an example to illustrate a math concept writes on the board “Muslim — many wives.” Most in the class thought it funny. I don’t. I’m sure someone in the class must have squirmed in discomfort. And it is with such insensitivities in mind that I am sure many will perceive The Ring’s glaring oversight in soliciting views from Muslims in their last issue as something more.

These days, I still wake to find my wife thrashing and crying out. Now she dreams of cars running her over, of strangers chasing her.

My colleagues ask if I am okay and I chat to them, mostly wanting to let the heaviness out, to clear my mind of the malaise that had set in. Invariably the talk turns to the identity of the terrorists and though no one prompts me, I find myself strangely compelled to apologize, to defend my faith. Why? Because everywhere I turn, I hear the words “Islamic terrorists” and “Muslim terrorists” and I cringe at the fact that my faith is now being associated with the actions of a criminal minority.

Why? Is it not obvious that terrorist acts are committed by individuals and groups for reasons that often draw upon a complex mix of cultural, religious, nationalist, economic, social and psychological motives? When anti-abortion activists bomb clinics and murder doctors, nobody describes them as Christian terrorists. And in the terrible heyday of Irish sectarian strife, I don’t recall those who exploded car bombs in streets filled with innocent people being described as Protestant or Roman Catholic terrorists. And though declared to be terrorists by Israel, I don’t recall followers of the radical, racist Meir Kahane being referred to as Jewish terrorists.

“Muslim terrorists.” Day in and day out, the phrase is repeated in print, on the television and on the radio. Is it any wonder that there is an increase in abuse directed towards Muslims?

I will, however, apologize to my children. For we Muslims have stood silent for far too long while extremists hijack our faith, perpetrate barbaric violence in its name, and seek to extinguish our cherished birthrights through coercion and violence. And by birthrights, I don’t mean the civil liberties that we enjoy in the West, but rather the established historic right of individual Muslims to their interpretation of the faith. We have failed to stand firm and uphold the Quranic edict that there shall be no compulsion in religion.

Perhaps we Muslims in the West felt insulated. After all, living here with all our freedoms, there wasn’t much cause for concern about what was happening over there. The Sept. 11 tragedy ought to serve as a wake-up call. Perhaps it is time for us to collectively assert that the imposition of a particular faith or an interpretation of faith on an unwilling individual or population is unacceptable, no matter where in the world it occurs. Such an imposition causes degradation of all civilized standards of human behaviour. And that we too cannot escape becoming its victims. I now worry how long it will be before my daughters can proudly assert their heritage in public.

Shock gives way to anger. The dead — 6,000 innocent individuals of every race and religion: Muslims, Christians, Jews and Hindus; British, Canadians, Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Kenyans, Ethiopians, Japanese — must have justice. Justice? My mind echoes with the anguish of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis being turned away from our shores, the tortured gasoline-induced fits of Native Canadian children dispossessed of their culture, heritage, and identity, the screams of 500,000 innocent Iraqi mothers weeping as their babies face certain death due to the punitive sanctions imposed on them by us in the West.

I hear the screams of more than a 100,000 Tutsis being hacked to death while we stood silently aside, the dying gasps of helpless Palestinians being slaughtered at Deir Yasine, and in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. And I hear the screams of Bosnian Muslim women watching their sons and husbands being dragged off to sure death, and they themselves being savagely raped as we in the West hemmed and hawed.

Justice? Yes. But justice for all, I hope. For the world has suddenly grown much smaller. And we will never again sleep easy, knowing that we are within easy reach of the anger of the disgruntled.

Dr. Arif Babul is a faculty member in UVic’s department of physics and astronomy.

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The grief, the choices, the future

This crisis is a wake-up call for the whole world to take a long, hard look in the mirror

by Farouk Mitha

How should we respond to the tragic events of September 11?

Any attempt at this question opens up yet further agonizing questions. Can there ever be any single response that is adequate in the face of this horrendous tragedy? Are there different ways to speak about this, or is there only one morally correct way?

I am raising these questions not because I want to intellectualize (or worse, relativize) the nature and magnitude of this moral catastrophe. The events were nothing short of a crime against humanity. To different degrees we each stand as Job did in the face of unbearable calamity, with a kindred sense of loss, pain, rage, confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty.

As a Canadian citizen, as a Muslim, and as someone who lost an acquaintance through this act of terror, I am ripped apart by all the above emotions. The human and political dilemmas that are now irrevocably with us will continue to be our shared burden for many years to come, and it will take just as many years to heal the wounds that now mark all of us.

As I write this piece, barely two weeks have passed. Wisdom would dictate that it is still too early to make any meaningful analysis, especially since the situation is still up in the air, unfolding moment by moment. Most of us are spectators, waiting and watching as bodies at “ground zero” continue to be excavated. As American armed forces mobilize around President Bush’s clarion call “Be prepared!” As Afghanistan explodes into yet another bloody civil war, while a majority of the Afghan people become brutalized further into dispossession, starvation, and hopelessness.

For a brief moment I want to step outside this unpredictable course of events and focus on what has emerged as the self-righteous attitude and language of entitlement that we heard in George Bush’s speech to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20. It is an attitude that is now gradually becoming the dominant message of mainstream American media.

Nobody can deny that America is entitled to justice. Yet does this entitlement entail going to war as the only option? And with whom is it going to wage war? “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Judging from this declaration by President Bush, one can only conclude that he is prepared to wage war with any nation (or anybody) that dares to disagree with him. Is there not an echo of terrorism in this sort of blanket declaration?

“This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.” Again one can only conclude that Bush is using these words rhetorically, since no attempt has been made by America to bring their declaration of war to the United Nations for support, let alone debate.
There has not been a single nation that has condoned this crime against humanity. What then prevents America from taking this matter to the International Court of Justice? Would it not be to America’s advantage to procure a unanimously ratified arrest warrant for the actual terrorists and the organizations that they represent?

These questions fall on deaf ears, because America has unilaterally made up its mind. It is a mind-set resembling that of a vigilante who has simply taken the law into his own hands. America wants justice served on its own terms with what comes across as utter contempt for the rule of law. If Bush thinks that the UN is completely impotent, he should declare this publicly. We could then at least save ourselves the delusions, the rhetoric and the money that we invest in maintaining the UN.

At the university, and especially in our classrooms, we need to interrogate and complicate this language of entitlement (of us versus them). It is a language that can only lead to further divisions and senseless violence in an already fragmented world. Over six thousand lives have already been taken away from us and nothing will be achieved by taking yet more innocent lives.

One can clearly see the lethal consequences that come with this self-anointed attitude. Over the last two weeks, several American citizens have taken the law into their own hands and attacked indiscriminately their fellow American citizens, who happen to be Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, and Hindus. Entitlement of the Bush variety leads to indiscriminate terrorism, which is infused with clearly expressed racist motives.

On Sept. 15 in Mesa, Arizona, a man armed with a gun drove into a Chevron station and shot to death the Sikh owner. He then fired on a Christian Lebanese clerk at a nearby Mobil station. When finally arrested this is what he said: “I’m a patriot…I am a damn American all the way.” This is merely a cruder and perhaps a more honest version of what Bush meant when he said: “The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud.”
American culture, its economy and military power are today a planetary phenomenon. The irony is that a majority of Americans are unaware of this because their own privileged location is taken for granted, it is literally invisible. But on the other side of the fence — for 75 per cent of the world’s population who have to scramble over 25 per cent of the world’s resources — the visibility of American (and G8) hegemony is an irrefutable fact of life. When discussing the predicaments and challenges facing Muslim societies, what is quite often ignored is that an overwhelming majority of them are part of the developing world. The facts of poverty, illiteracy, overpopulation, political instability and even war are inescapable constraints shaping the daily existence of Muslim men, women and children.

Just as self-righteous entitlement on the part of America can be simplistic and morally blind, the mirror image of this attitude in many Muslim societies is the promotion of blanket anti-Americanism. In the eyes of the developing world, America is quite categorically perceived as an imperial power with self-serving interests, which function in ways that are both insidious and coercive. Granted, this perception can all too easily become a case of scapegoating America for what are in effect endemically rooted ills in Muslim societies, such as dictatorships, political corruption, human rights violations, and religious dogmatism.

Nonetheless, this crisis is a wake-up call for the whole world to begin looking at itself in the mirror. America can no longer postpone taking responsibility for the ways in which its policies and actions have been complicit in perpetuating the shameful disparities in the world today; and also the ways in which it employs double standards. The case of Afghanistan and Iraq are well documented examples of how American policies—i.e. first supplying arms, then covert or direct military campaigns, followed by devastating economic sanctions— how all of these have been centrally culpable in decimating and starving the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The university is a privileged space. It should be a space where we honour the freedom and power of critical thought. We cannot afford to be blind to the responsibilities that come with inhabiting this privileged space. The role of critical interrogation today (as in all periods of crisis) carries with it an urgency — the sense of a moral force that can make the difference between life and death, peace and war, and not least of all, hope and despair.

There is no greater burden than to be utterly clear-eyed and self-conscious about the nature and source of one’s privileges. There is perhaps no greater sickness than to be utterly blind and indifferent to the nature and source of one’s privileges. And there is no greater cause of humiliation than to have one’s exclusion acknowledged and yet feel utterly powerless to resist, to change or to break free from this destiny of exclusion.

Farouk Mitha is a doctoral candidate and sessional instructor in the faculty of education, where he’s conducting research on the teaching of Shakespeare in secondary schools. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic studies from McGill University.

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