August 8, 2005 VOL. 43, NO. 14Oakland, CA

Muslim groups condemn terrorism,
struggle to be heard

By Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Religion News Service

“Why haven’t Muslim leaders condemned terrorism?”

This is the most common question that Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), gets on a daily basis from media and other inquirers.

Nearly four years after September 11, 2001, Muslim organizations disagree on the best way to battle the perception that they are soft on terrorists who attack in their religion’s name.

At issue is the public relations strategy of U.S. Muslim groups. At stake is the way Americans view the world’s second largest religion, with more than 1 billion adherents, as the U.S. wages a global war on terrorism.

While groups hone their media relations skills and issue immediate statements in the wake of attacks, lingering criticism remains. Frustrated, Muslim leaders have stepped up the denunciations in recent days. Others say they will focus more on taking concrete actions than on winning the war of words.

In this spirit, the Muslim American Society (MAS), another Washington-based national advocacy organization, announced Monday (July 25) a national initiative comprising seven “action items” intended to eradicate terrorist ideology, extremism and violence from the American Muslim community.

The MAS said it planned to partner with the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations, led by Imam Abu Malik-Johari, to ensure that the message did not get stuck in the media stratosphere of published statements, but reached local Muslims in their area Islamic centers.
Muslim leaders insist that despite often-repeated claims on talk radio, they have repeatedly denounced terrorism.

In the wake of the July 7 London bombings, a panoply of American Muslim groups responded quickly, with the Muslim Public Affairs Council organizing a press conference within hours, and at least nine major groups, including CAIR, issuing a ream of statements decrying the atrocities.

Nevertheless, many Muslim leaders fear their message isn’t getting through to the majority of Americans.

“It’s really frustrating, sometimes we get the feeling nobody’s listening,” Hooper said. “We often ask ourselves, what more can we do? Shout from the rooftops? Skywriting?”

Despite public statements, some commentators have questioned the seriousness with which worldwide Muslims are approaching the reality of terrorists in their midst, given that the London attackers appear to have been native Britons.
“It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman in the July 8 New York Times. Friedman added that “no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.”

U.S. Muslim groups take exception to Friedman’s characterization, arguing that countless U.S. leaders have condemned bin Laden’s actions, and that an official fatwa, or Islamic edict, was issued against bin Laden in March 2005 by the Islamic Commission of Spain.

In the wake of the London bombings, other groups of Islamic legal scholars have issued fatwas that decry terrorism.

The Fiqh Council of North America, a Muslim scholarly organization, issued a fatwa July 28 condemning terrorism on the basis of Islamic religious law. The Council has authority over the nation’s Muslim community, which some estimate to number as many as 6 million.

“All acts of terrorism targeting civilians are haram (forbidden) in Islam,” the fatwa said.
Britain’s largest Sunni Muslim organization issued a July 17 fatwa calling terrorism a “perverted ideology” and declaring that the London bombers, if proved to be Muslims, would no longer be allowed to consider themselves part of the faith.

Days earlier, another group of British imams and scholars condemned the London attacks because civilians were killed. However, that group distinguished between those attacks and suicide bombings carried out for Muslims to “defend themselves from occupiers,” which they said were sometimes justified.

These different interpretations point to the difficulty of managing an “international message” for Islam.
“Islam is not like the Catholic Church, there is no central authority who can give you one quote.
Therefore it is impossible for all Muslims to speak in one voice, just as it is impossible for all Americans to speak in one voice,” said Muqtedar Khan, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, who studies international politics.

Some Muslim groups are frustrated with the task that public relations experts refer to as “reputation management.”

Mike Paul, a veteran public relations professional in New York City, says religious communities should present a consistent message that offers concrete historical examples to back up their statements.

“People aren’t going to believe you if you just say, ‘These people don’t represent our faith,” Paul said. “They’re going to say, ‘Show me the truth.’”
Muslim leaders agree that written or spoken statements increasingly feel inadequate against the perception problem facing the community. These leaders say they won’t skip the step of issuing written condemnations after attacks, but neither do they plan to rest on the laurels of words over actions.

“We are past condemnations; that’s not the page we’re on,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a national civil rights organization that is part of the Muslim American Society (MAS).

MAS did issue a statement of condemnation following the London bombing, but Bray said that his group is far more focused on concrete actions aimed at protecting young American Muslims from being “misguided in Islam.”

The group has opened eight youth centers nationwide, including locations in Minneapolis, Cleveland, Dallas, San Diego and Brooklyn, N.Y. They plan to open even more in the future, including centers in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Washington, Kansas City, Detroit, Seattle, Chicago, and Raleigh, N.C.;. The centers provide “wholesome and good” after-school youth programs and summer camps, and are based on the model that is used to combat gang violence in inner cities, Bray said.

Additionally, Bray’s organization is providing media training in local Muslim communities, urging each American mosque to have a trained spokesperson to approach the media without “waiting for a crisis” to strike.

“We don’t want to do symbolic gestures,” he said, “We want to do things that really affect the policies for our safety.”

A consensus has emerged that more needs to be done.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, the founder and chairman of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, is among the most outspoken. He criticizes his fellow American Muslims, saying that with the privilege of belonging to a worldwide Muslim community comes a charge to root out terrorism and extremism from that community.

“If we’re going to get the benefits of this community, then a reciprocal responsibility that we have is to say that this community has been hijacked by barbarous criminals,” he said.

Jasser, who served 11 years in the Navy, suggests that more Muslims should serve in the armed forces in order to achieve this goal. “Secure the world—this is part of our civic duty,” he said.

“Until we clear out and fix the cancer within our faith community, we’re going to have no credibility,” he added.

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