Quick! Hide the nonviolent Muslims!

Whether we look at the FBI's Most Wanted (virtually all Muslims) or to congressional hearings on Islam (e.g. Peter King's Salemic pursual of any Muslim not content with the US military's invasion and occupation of Muslim lands) or just about any pleasant evening on Frequently Overtly Xenophobic (Fox) News, we find the overwhelming evidence that Islam is a religion of bloody murder and hate. Unlike the Christian US Marines who shot white phosphorus into Fallujah immediately after Christian ceremonies. Unlike the pilots of the Enola Gay and Bocks Car, blessed by Roman Catholic priest George Zebelka (pictured, who later converted to peace) before taking off from Tinian Island to drop WMD on cities full of civilians in Japan.



Turns out there have been many nonviolent campaigns and leaders in the Muslim world. Shh! What if word gets out?

Stephen Zunes, et al., (1999) chronicled several such movements, Maria Stephan (2009) edited a book about such struggles, and many have written volumes about Badshah Khan, the great Islamic Pashtun leader whose campaigns were founded in Quranic teachings and whose 100,000 Servants of God were sworn to nonviolence. Michael Shank (2011) writes about several Islamic nonviolent movements and notes this about Khan in particular:

Khan was intentional about sourcing his nonviolent teachings and inspiration in the Koran, a practice his grandson Asfandyar Wali Khan continues to this day as head of the Awami National Party in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (recently renamed Khyber- Pakhtunkwa). The preamble to the party’s platform, in fact, is an unequivocal commitment to the principles of nonviolence, the teachings of Khan and the cause of the Khidmatgars.

Why is it so imperative to keep these Muslims marginalized? Several related reasons:
1. It is confusing to the American people, since our tax dollars largely go to making war on Muslims these days, and our cooperation at some level is required.
2. The most grotesquely profitable industry is the conflict industry, which is reliant upon the enemy image of Islam.
3. If it bleeds, it leads. Peaceful Muslims are boring. Fanatical fundies with suicidal mania are great press.
4. Much of the world's oil is inconveniently under Muslim countries and we cannot be soft and sympathetic toward people whose resources we need to exploit and extract, with or without their consent.

So, when we grow up as a culture, we can get past all these reasons and think a bit more critically. But, like the daily reports from DoD on the young US members of the armed forces who are killed in these wars, civilizations who make poor choices about what they are willing to do can fail to survive. Our immaturity about all this is literally an existential threat. Will we address it in time?

References

Shank, M. (2011). Islam's Nonviolent Tradition. Nation, 292(20), 24-25. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Stephan, Maria J. (Ed.) (2009). Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Zunes, Stephen, Kurtz, Lester R., & Asher Sarah B. (1999). Nonviolent social movements: A geographical perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Khan flicked

Can Muslims ever possibly develop a disciplined notion of mass nonviolence?

Within days after September 11, 2001, the place where I teach, Portland State University, had organized and conducted a talking heads panel of professors wise in all things Central Asian for our enlightenment. I learned quite a bit but there were some missing pieces, I felt, that might offer us a way forward that didn't include armed attack. Most salient to me was the legacy of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as Badshah Khan, a close ally of Gandhi's as the huge area known as India struggled for independence from Britain. British law and occupation was odious. Mohammad Raqib (2005, p. 114) notes conditions:

The Frontier Crimes Regulation, a set of laws widely seen as repressive and unfair, was adopted to fight anti-government activities in the settled districts. The police were given the authority to destroy buildings that were used by anti-British elements. Authority to inflict collective punishment was also given to police to punish families, villages, or even whole communities for the acts of one person.

Khan was a giant both physically and morally, a devout Pashtun Muslim, and the honorific Badshah Khan--"Khan of Khans"--was bestowed on him by all the other Khans. He decided that Pashtuns should resist British rule using a Muslim variant of Gandhian nonviolence, involving a special nonviolent fighting force called the Khudai Khidmatgar, the "Servants of God." These Muslims took a pledge of nonviolence to the death, the kind of commitment from a warrior culture that was sincerely, totally committed. Khan had the same devotion that Osama bin Laden would garner from his suicide squads on 8.11.01, but these estimated 100,000 nonviolent warriors were nonviolent.

So, to answer the original question, yes. When a Muslim group decides to only use nonviolence and when they make that pledge in the name of their faith, they are as devoted to nonviolence as the Hindu Gandhi or the Catholic Cesar Chavez. If a Muslim leader demonstrates the kind of leadership the world witnessed in Abdul Ghaffar Khan we might see an end to the seemingly endless occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine with far less bloodshed. While nonviolence is apparently counterintuitive to so many, it has worked and may work again. The insurgents in Tunisia deposed Ben Ali with almost no violence--certainly no organized violence--and Palestinians are giving nonviolence more chances.

Badshah Khan is dead--long live Badshah Khan!

References
Raqib, Mohammad (2005). The Muslim Pashtun movement of the North-West Frontier of India—1930-1934. In Sharp, Gene. Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential. Boston: Extending Horizon Books.