Why blame a religion?

TODAY is the seventh anniversary of one of the most heinous acts in the history of human civilisation, perpetrated by some terrorists in the name of the great religion of Islam to promote and gain some politically motivated objectives of their own.
In the aftermath of 9/11 that left nearly 3,000 Americans murdered, including some 50 Muslim Americans, it is the Muslims who have become the major victims of the attacks.
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has subjected 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants to fingerprinting and special registration, 8,000 were interviewed extensively by the FBI, and over 5,000 non-nationals were arrested and detained for as long as a year on technical immigration violations, under the so called patriot acts.
More shocking are the 400 indictments that have been returned against Muslims and Arabs, nearly all of them accompanied by press releases and frequent television appearances, by the attorney general, touting the almost never proven claims of connections to terrorism.
Criticisms were made that Muslim leaders and organisations were not outspoken enough in denouncing acts of terrorism. Muslims are constantly perplexed by this accusation. In fact, virtually all Islamic leaders, organisations, and countries condemned the inhuman attacks of 9/11 in the strongest terms.
The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia summarised: "Hijacking planes, terrorising innocent people and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts."
Any Muslim will not only unequivocally denounce any form of extremism and terrorism but also admit that targeting civilian life and property is haram (forbidden) in Islam according to the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad (SM).
The Fiqh Council of North America issued a statement right after 9/11 saying: "This condemnation of violence is deeply rooted in true Islamic values based on the Qur'anic instructions which consider the unjust killing of a single person equivalent to the killing of all humanity."
Those who are perpetrating this heinous act might have Muslim identities but due to their Muslim identities, this dreadful act cannot be labeled as Islamic terrorism just as it cannot be called Jewish terrorism if the perpetrators are Jewish or Christian terrorism if the perpetrators are Christian.
One of the strangest aspects of the post-9/11 world, is that despite all the talk about Muslim/Islamic terrorism, there is hardly any exploration of the complex causes of Muslim rage. Muslims in general are in a state of crisis but their most daunting problems are not religious, rather there are geo-political, economic, and social problems that have caused widespread Muslim despair and, in some cases, militancy, both of which are expressed in the religious terminology.
Most Muslims live in the developing world, much of it colonised by Western powers. Not all Muslim shortcomings emanate from colonialism and neo-imperialism, but several do.
As part of the spoils of the First World War, Britain and France helped themselves to much of the Ottoman Empire, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and what is now Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.
In recent years, the US has maintained repressive proxy regimes in the Middle East to keep control of oil and maintain a captive market for armaments. Hundreds of millions live in zones of conflict, precisely in the areas of European and American meddling, past and present.
These conflicts, along with the economic sanctions on Iraq, have killed an estimated 1.3 million Muslims in the last 15 years alone. In addition, nearly 400 million Muslims live under authoritarian despots, many of them Western puppets, whose corruption and incompetence have left their people in economic and social shambles. It is against this backdrop that one must look at the current malaise of Muslims and their increasing emotional reliance on their faith.
As a matter of fact, United States and its allies have started fighting terrorism in the name of exporting freedom and democracy in the Muslim world without ferreting out the root causes of the problems that led some people and groups around the globe to wage war against the West.
The conviction that fundamentalism and terrorism emanate from lack of democracy and freedom, and therefore democracy and freedom must be exported to those countries by hook or by crook, has not only failed to reduce terrorism and fundamentalism but exasperated the situation and increased terrorism all around the world.
Benjamin R. Barbar a distinguished fellow at Demos and a professor at University of Maryland has written: "The conviction that Islam cannot accommodate democracy is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of Islam. But it is also true that the conviction that democracy cannot accommodate Islam is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of democracy. It is tied to the false view that there is but one kind of democracy, one road to liberty, one formula for translating the theory of justice into practice. So the Bush-Cheney doctrine of exporting democracy is an absolute illusion. No people have ever been liberated from the outside at the point of gun. An invader can overthrow a tyrant, but cannot create a democracy by doing so. Similarly freedom cannot be given to others; it must be won by those who seek it from inside."
Democracy is distinctive from one society to another and the road to democracy comes not from imitation but from excavation and invention. And for the citizens of a country to establish democracy, it must be constructed bottom up not top down. First educate citizens and do the hard slow work of making a civil society, then build a political infrastructure on top of it. The Americans had a hundred years of experience with municipal liberty and citizen competence before they declared independence.
Democracy takes time. If patience is required and democracy is built bottom up, then elections come last not first. The rush to vote is generally a sign that the ground for democracy has not been prepared and when voting occurs in the absence of educated and competent citizens, the prospects for liberty and justice will be poor.
Supporting repressive regimes and occupying territories without creating opportunities for the people, the frustration, hostility and anger of the masses cannot be solved by exporting democracy at gun-point. The world needs to understand the deeply rooted causes of people's frustrations and anger and help educate citizens, build civic institutions, and construct bottom up political infrastructure that will empower people.

Zahid Zamir teaches at York College, City University of New York and is a Research fellow of IERF.