Friday’s failed attempt to bomb Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square has inspired plenty of malice on local blogs and in commentary, inflaming hatred and vilifying Islam. Anger, fear and misinformation have grown exponentially since 9/11, watered by the 24-7 news cycle and instant internet judgments. Suddenly, Oregon’s not such a civil place anymore: Somebody tried to set off an explosion in our living room; somebody set fire to a mosque in Corvallis.
Looking for balance, we turned to two Muslim leaders and a scholar about how the words of the Quran, the sacred text of Islam, are often quoted out of context to justify violence. After all, the word “Islam” shares a root with the Hebrew word “shalom” and means -- no matter what you hear or read -- “peace attained by submission to God.”
“There’s no part of the Quran that says killing people is okay,” says Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, professor of Islam at Reed College in Southeast Portland. But it’s also not that simple.
“The Quran gives permission to fight to those who have been wronged or persecuted, to those who have been driven unjustly from their homes,” he says. “It allows killing – if it is justified –and imposes limits.”
In fact, the Quran instructs Muslims to live peacefully as long as their enemies are “inclined to peace.” And the prophetic tradition of Islam forbids killing innocents – women, children or any living thing.
The suggestion that Islam is a violent religion bent on the death of unbelievers casts a narrow, politicized view over mainstream Muslims, says Omar B. Shabbazz, a leader of the Muslim Community Center of Portland. He says he is happy to explain when people have the courage to ask him directly about Islam and violence. “I see it as a teachable moment,” he says. He points to himself and his mosque in Northeast Portland, which has its roots in the African American community. “I tell them, ‘This is the face of Islam in America.’”
But recent events have overshadowed Americans’ pre-9/11 experience with worries that many Muslims are terrorists-in-waiting. Every religion has its zealots. Throughout history Islamic fanatics have ignored the moral principles of the Quran to seize and keep power, Shabbazz says.
“Jihad” is another often-politicized word from the Quran, contributing to the stereotype of Muslims who wage a holy war and accept human collateral damage without remorse. Jihad means “to struggle in the path of God.” But it can refer to an outright war -- or to a spiritual struggle.
“The bigger meaning of jihad is the struggle within yourself, between obedience and disobedience,” Shabbazz says. “To trust someone completely, you let go completely. That is the jihad state, to become the hand, the eyes, the feet that Allah uses.” To ignore the inner jihad and proclaim that warfare is the only struggle misses the meaning of the sacred text, he says.
References in the Quran to “unbelievers” often spark heated arguments, but the word itself does not refer to non-Muslims. The Quran acknowledges the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as viable –though superseded -- scriptural traditions, says GhaneaBassiri of Reed. “Islam accepts Jews and Christians as ‘people of the Book.’ Unbelievers, as it is used in the Quran, means, literally, ‘those who deny God.’”
“There is no verse in the Quran that condones fighting any peaceful non-Muslim on the sole ground that he or she is a non-Muslim,” says Wajdi Said, president and cofounder of the Muslim Educational Trust. If that were true, he adds, “what would explain the fact that religious minorities through 1,400 years of Muslim history not only survived, but also thrived and found freedom to practice their faiths under Muslim rule?”
The notion that all Muslims are radicals -- or could be easy prey for those who would radicalize them – is an exaggeration, GhaneaBassiri says. “The easiest way to counter this is to point to Muslims who live in the United States and throughout the world. The overwhelming majority are neither violent nor radicalized.”
He doesn’t think that Mohamed Mohamud, indicted Monday on a charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction in Portland, based his actions on a serious study of the Quran.
“A 19-year-old angry teenager has become international news. He seems to have withdrawn from his family, his community. I read that he’d stopped going to the mosque in Corvallis. If he’d tried to develop his plan from within the Muslim community -- and not just through the FBI -- someone may have convinced him to abandon his plan.”