How to Be an Ideal Muslim the Pete King Way
How to Be an Ideal Muslim the Pete King Way
Feisal G. Mohamed: How to Be an Ideal Muslim the Peter King Way
Many have maligned congressional hearings on the ?Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response? as an exercise in the disgraced practice of assigning collective responsibility. Nonsense! They are an entirely good-natured attempt to teach Muslim Americans how to observe their religion in a way that isn?t so insufferably Muslim. Peter King is valiantly offering his vision of proper religious practice to a world faith that has waited fifteen hundred years for the insights of a blustering politician. The prophet Mohammed himself was a dubiously literate, self-serving, pro-business type. It seems only fitting, then, that a Republican member of Congress should take it upon himself to reform Islam.
The contemplative exercise bringing jurisprudence into conformity with Islamic principles is called ijtihad. Famously open in the first century of the religion, it later settled, as bodies of law tend to do, into established writings and precedents, so that the doors of ijtihad are said with few exceptions to have closed after the high-water mark of the contributions of the philosopher al-Ghazali (1058-1111).
Well the doors are closed no more: King has breathed new life into this tradition with his insight that the ?submission? Islam demands is to the apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security and to fear-mongering conservative media outlets. The true believer must declare Rupert Murdoch to be God and Sean Hannity to be His prophet, must report the activities of his coreligionists to the FBI five times a day, must perform fasts and self-flagellation on regular pilgrimages to Ground Zero, and must make significant donations to the GOP. As with any religious obligation, there can never be a release for the believer from the burden of performance.
In case one failed to perceive that this is King?s true intent, he has generously furnished for Muslim Americans a pattern to follow: M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. This is, King pronounced, an ?ideal? group, as opposed to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he declared on flimsy evidence to be a co-conspirator in terrorism. (Niggling minds might find such pronouncements in a congressional committee hearing to jar somewhat with the spirit of the First Amendment?s establishment clause.) Jasser has repeatedly denounced the depoliticization of Islam in such right-wing fora as the National Review and Fox News. He has expressed this depoliticized view of Islam in resisting the Park51 Islamic Center; in making central principles of his organization ?support [of] our American armed forces? and of ?the consistency of the principles of Islam with economic principles of free markets and capitalism?; and in his erstwhile membership in the right-wing paranoia tank the Committee on the Present Danger. He has been persuasively described as a Muslim neocon, a creature that I never thought I would live to see, and certainly displays the toadying to power that is the central tenet of neoconservatism. As such he and his organization are indeed at odds with CAIR?s noisy clamoring for the respect of civil and human rights.
The philosopher Jacob Taubes observed that contradiction is a constitutive element of the claim to be a prophet, whose ways are a mystery beyond reason; so it is with King, who wears his contradictions on his sleeve. It might strike the unenlightened as hypocrisy that an anti-terrorism czar was himself a staunch supporter of the Irish Republican Army. Or that he seems strongly to despise the group to whom he is so generous in proffering advice, having declared that there are ?too many mosques? in this country, branding Muslims an ?enemy amongst us,? and making the wild claim that 85 percent of American mosques are run by extremists.
In a moment that has come to be described as ?upstaging? the ringleader of this political circus, Congressman Keith Ellison had the temerity to challenge King?s determination of collective responsibility, citing a report by the RAND Corporation that states that the number of American Muslims sympathetic to violent Islamism is statistically insignificant, and a report from the Muslim Public Affairs Council stating that ?information provided by Muslim Americans has helped foil seven of the last eleven domestic terror plots and 40 percent of all plots since 9/11.? He might also have cited the findings of the 2010 report ?Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim American Communities,? by David H. Schanzer and Ebrahim Moosa, which comes to similar conclusions on communities? own efforts to prevent radicalization. All of this demolishes King?s central claim that American Muslims casually accept radicalization and fail to cooperate with law enforcement.
But then a strange thing happened. Ellison had a tearful moment of conversion to something like King?s version of Islam when he recounted the New York Times version of the life and death of 9/11 first responder Mohammed Salman Hamdani:
He was one of those brave first responders who tragically lost their lives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks almost a decade ago. As the New York Times eulogized, ?He wanted to be seen as an all-American kid. He wore No. 79 on the high school football team in Bayside, Queens, where he lived, and he was called Sal by his friends…He became a research assistant at Rockefeller University and drove an ambulance part-time. One Christmas, he sang in Handel?s Messiah in Queens. He saw all the Star Wars movies, and it was well-known that his new Honda was the one with ?Yung Jedi? license plates.?
Who would not be moved to tears by this ham-fisted attempt to squeeze a human life into every worn trope of American conventionality? I?m not much of a Muslim, but I?d also prefer not to go around singing Handel?s ?Messiah.? That doesn?t make me a danger to anybody.
Lost in this telling is the quiet tragedy of the sentence, ?He wanted to be seen as an All-American kid.? I have every respect for first responders and the sacrifices they make, of course. What makes me cringe is the implication that a community is not collectively responsible because it has produced a jock known to his friends by a racially neutral monosyllable. The empirical evidence to which Ellison sensibly pointed suggests that even Muslims of the foreign-looking and conspicuously observant kind are entirely harmless. The emotional appeal with which he closed offers its own gratingly assimilationist image of the ?ideal? Muslim American.
What?s left to do but embrace this alluring image with the weight of officialdom behind it, with its religious sympathies carefully tucked under its NYPD ball cap and varsity football jacket. So farewell, pluralism! Your agons of thoughtful engagement with our fellow human beings are no match for the easy comfort of conformity. To update Allen Ginsberg: Mr. King, I?m putting my Islamic shoulder to the wheel.
Image: Congressman Peter King (Wikimedia Commons/2005)
