As dozens of talking heads descended on CNN and FOX TV to give their opinions on the Fort Hood massacre last week, no one seemed to notice the significance of the attire that suspect Maj. Nidal Hasan was wearing the morning of the killings. It was captured on a store surveillance video as Maj. Hasan bought a coffee.
CNN’s Arab commentator incorrectly reported that the major was wearing “Muslim garb” commonly worn in Jordan, and that it reflected his devoutness as a Muslim. However, to Pakistanis and Afghans watching the clip around the world, his clothing reflected something far more significant and sinister.
Maj. Hasan was wearing the “shalwar-kameez,” the traditional attire worn by Pashtuns on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Had Maj. Hasan been of Pakistani or Afghan ancestry, it would have meant very little, but for an Arab-American to wear this attire was significant.
In the Middle East, over five million Pakistanis and Afghans work and live among the local Arab population. The shalwar-kameez is common on the streets of Dubai and Jeddah, but no Arab male would ever want to be seen wearing this garb. I have lived a decade in the Arab world and not once did I see an Arab wearing the shalwar-kameez.
Having said that there is one particular group of Arabs who did embrace the garb of the Pashtuns. They were the “Afghan Arabs” who went to Afghanistan to wage jihad alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The question that needs to be asked is this: Where did Maj. Nidal Hasan, an American-born Arab, get hold of a shalwar-kameez? Did Hasan visit the Pakistan-Afghan region, or was he in touch with the Arab Afghans in the U.S. and Canada who wear the Pashtun attire as a sign of solidarity with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri?
All of this talk about the killer’s clothing would be inconsequential, had it not been for what else has been reported about the good major.
Col. Terry Lee, a retired officer who worked with Maj. Hasan at the military base in Texas, alleges the suspected mass murderer had angry confrontations with other officers over his views that Muslims should “rise up and attack Americans” in retaliation for the U.S. war in Iraq.
Col. Lee was quoted in the London Telegraph saying, Maj. Hasan was “happy” when in June, a Muslim convert was arrested in the killing of a U.S. soldier in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas. Other army officers claimed Maj. Hasan had said “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves” and go to Times Square in New York.
Lt.-Gen. Robert Cone, the commander of the base, told NBC News that, according to eyewitnesses, Maj. Hasan had shouted the Islamic battle cry “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great) before opening fire.
In addition, U.S. federal law enforcement officials say someone with the same name as Maj. Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats.
However, none of this is relevant for Islamic groups. In statements after the mass murder, they tried to manipulate the media narrative by suggesting it was they who were the victims of this tragedy. Instead of denouncing the rise of Islamism and jihadi doctrines among Muslim youth, Islamist organizations once more came out with banal denunciations of “violence.”
Muslim groups condemned this “cowardly attack” without mentioning Maj. Hasan by name. And there were the usual provisos that “Islam in no way accepts such violence and terror,” and that “Islam is a peaceful religion with great reverence for human life.”
But such statements must include a denunciation of the doctrine of “armed jihad,” which is without doubt the force that gives religious validation to such acts of terror and encourages so many young Muslims toward suicide attacks on non-Muslims.
Unless and until Islamic organizations, imams of mosques and their allies who have penetrated every institution that matters in our public life, say explicitly that there is no room for jihad at a time of the modern nation state, and that the doctrine of holy war is defunct, outdated and needs to be shelved, the rest of North America will not take us Muslims seriously.
If the mosques do not stop spreading the virus of victimhood there will be more Muslim men willing to waste their lives for a jihad that God never asked them to fight.
We have a window of opportunity. Let us acknowledge what Muslim youth living among us are being fed. If a Muslim man, educated and trained at the expense of the American taxpayer to be a doctor and rise to the rank of major, could still feel a victim, and could launch an attempted suicide attack against America, then those who cry Islamophobia every day also share some blame in this atrocity.
Tarek Fatah is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.
