Source: TED
Karima Bennoune shares four powerful stories of real people fighting against fundamentalism in their own communities — refusing to allow the faith they love to become a tool for crime, attacks and murder. These personal stories humanize one of the most overlooked human-rights struggles in the world.Could I protect my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife? That was the question I faced one Tuesday morning in June of 1993, when I was a law student.
I woke up early that morning in Dad's
apartment on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on
the front door. It was a season as described by a local paper when every
Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of fundamentalist assassins. My father's
university teaching of Darwin had already provoked a classroom visit from the
head of the so-called Islamic Salvation Front, who denounced Dad as an advocate
of biologism before Dad had ejected the man, and now whoever was outside would neither
identify himself nor go away. So my father tried to get the police on the
phone, but perhaps terrified by the rising tide of armed extremism that had
already claimed the lives of so many Algerian officers, they didn't even
answer. And that was when I went to the kitchen, got out a paring knife, and
took up a position inside the entryway. It was a ridiculous thing to do,
really, but I couldn't think of anything else, and so there I stood.
When I look back now, I think that that was
the moment that set me on the path was to writing a book called "Your
Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim
Fundamentalism." The title comes from a Pakistani play. I think it was
actually that moment that sent me on the journey to interview 300 people of
Muslim heritage from nearly 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali, to find out
how they fought fundamentalism peacefully like my father did, and how they
coped with the attendant risks.
Luckily, back in June of 1993, our
unidentified visitor went away, but other families were so much less lucky, and
that was the thought that motivated my research. In any case, someone would
return a few months later and leave a note on Dad's kitchen table, which simply
said, "Consider yourself dead." Subsequently, Algeria's
fundamentalist armed groups would murder as many as 200,000 civilians in what
came to be known as the dark decade of the 1990s, including every single one of
the women that you see here. In its harsh counterterrorist response, the state
resorted to torture and to forced disappearances, and as terrible as all of
these events became, the international community largely ignored them. Finally,
my father, an Algerian peasant's son turned professor, was forced to stop
teaching at the university and to flee his apartment, but what I will never
forget about Mahfoud Bennoune, my dad, was that like so many other Algerian
intellectuals, he refused to leave the country and he continued to publish
pointed criticisms, both of the fundamentalists and sometimes of the government
they battled. For example, in a November 1994 series in the newspaper El Watan
entitled "How Fundamentalism Produced a Terrorism without Precedent,"
he denounced what he called the terrorists' radical break with the true Islam
as it was lived by our ancestors. These were words that could get you killed.
My father's country taught me in that dark
decade of the 1990s that the popular struggle against Muslim fundamentalism is
one of the most important and overlooked human rights struggles in the world.
This remains true today, nearly 20 years later. You see, in every country where
you hear about armed jihadis targeting civilians, there are also unarmed people
defying those militants that you don't hear about, and those people need our
support to succeed.
In the West, it's often assumed that
Muslims generally condone terrorism. Some on the right think this because they
view Muslim culture as inherently violent, and some on the left imagine this
because they view Muslim violence, fundamentalist violence, solely as a product
of legitimate grievances. But both views are dead wrong. In fact, many people
of Muslim heritage around the world are staunch opponents both of
fundamentalism and of terrorism, and often for very good reason. You see,
they're much more likely to be victims of this violence than its perpetrators.
Let me just give you one example. According to a 2009 survey of Arabic language
media resources, between 2004 and 2008, no more than 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims
were Westerners. That's a terrible toll, but the vast majority were people of
Muslim heritage, killed by Muslim fundamentalists.
Now I've been talking for the last five
minutes about fundamentalism, and you have a right to know exactly what I mean.
I cite the definition given by the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas,
and she says that fundamentalisms, note the "s," so within all of the
world's great religious traditions, "fundamentalisms are political
movements of the extreme right which in a context of globalization manipulate
religion in order to achieve their political aims." Sadia Abbas has called
this the radical politicization of theology. Now I want to avoid projecting the
notion that there's sort of a monolith out there called Muslim fundamentalism
that is the same everywhere, because these movements also have their
diversities. Some use and advocate violence. Some do not, though they're often
interrelated. They take different forms. Some may be non-governmental
organizations, even here in Britain like Cageprisoners. Some may become
political parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and some may be openly armed
groups like the Taliban. But in any case, these are all radical projects.
They're not conservative or traditional approaches. They're most often about
changing people's relationship with Islam rather than preserving it. What I am
talking about is the Muslim extreme right, and the fact that its adherents are
or purport to be Muslim makes them no less offensive than the extreme right
anywhere else. So in my view, if we consider ourselves liberal or left-wing,
human rights-loving or feminist, we must oppose these movements and support
their grassroots opponents. Now let me be clear that I support an effective
struggle against fundamentalism, but also a struggle that must itself respect
international law, so nothing I am saying should be taken as a justification
for refusals to democratize, and here I send out a shout-out of support to the
pro-democracy movement in Algeria today, Barakat. Nor should anything I say be
taken as a justification of violations of human rights, like the mass death
sentences handed out in Egypt earlier this week. But what I am saying is that
we must challenge these Muslim fundamentalist movements because they threaten
human rights across Muslim-majority contexts, and they do this in a range of
ways, most obviously with the direct attacks on civilians by the armed groups
that carry those out. But that violence is just the tip of the iceberg. These
movements as a whole purvey discrimination against religious minorities and
sexual minorities. They seek to curtail the freedom of religion of everyone who
either practices in a different way or chooses not to practice. And most
definingly, they lead an all-out war on the rights of women.
Now, faced with these movements in recent
years, Western discourse has most often offered two flawed responses. The first
that one sometimes finds on the right suggests that most Muslims are
fundamentalist or something about Islam is inherently fundamentalist, and this
is just offensive and wrong, but unfortunately on the left one sometimes
encounters a discourse that is too politically correct to acknowledge the
problem of Muslim fundamentalism at all or, even worse, apologizes for it, and
this is unacceptable as well. So what I'm seeking is a new way of talking about
this all together, which is grounded in the lived experiences and the hope of
the people on the front lines. I'm painfully aware that there has been an
increase in discrimination against Muslims in recent years in countries like
the U.K. and the U.S., and that too is a matter of grave concern, but I firmly
believe that telling these counter-stereotypical stories of people of Muslim
heritage who have confronted the fundamentalists and been their primary victims
is also a great way of countering that discrimination. So now let me introduce
you to four people whose stories I had the great honor of telling.
Faizan Peerzada and the Rafi Peer Theatre
workshop named for his father have for years promoted the performing arts in
Pakistan. With the rise of jihadist violence, they began to receive threats to
call off their events, which they refused to heed. And so a bomber struck their
2008 eighth world performing arts festival in Lahore, producing rain of glass
that fell into the venue injuring nine people, and later that same night, the
Peerzadas made a very difficult decision: they announced that their festival
would continue as planned the next day. As Faizan said at the time, if we bow
down to the Islamists, we'll just be sitting in a dark corner. But they didn't
know what would happen. Would anyone come? In fact, thousands of people came
out the next day to support the performing arts in Lahore, and this
simultaneously thrilled and terrified Faizan, and he ran up to a woman who had
come in with her two small children, and he said, "You do know there was a
bomb here yesterday, and you do know there's a threat here today." And she
said, "I know that, but I came to your festival with my mother when I was
their age, and I still have those images in my mind. We have to be here."
With stalwart audiences like this, the Peerzadas were able to conclude their
festival on schedule.
And then the next year, they lost all of
their sponsors due to the security risk. So when I met them in 2010, they were
in the middle of the first subsequent event that they were able to have in the
same venue, and this was the ninth youth performing arts festival held in
Lahore in a year when that city had already experienced 44 terror attacks. This
was a time when the Pakistani Taliban had commenced their systematic targeting
of girls' schools that would culminate in the attack on Malala Yousafzai. What
did the Peerzadas do in that environment? They staged girls' school theater. So
I had the privilege of watching "Naang Wal," which was a musical in
the Punjabi language, and the girls of Lahore Grammar School played all the
parts. They sang and danced, they played the mice and the water buffalo, and I
held my breath, wondering, would we get to the end of this amazing show? And
when we did, the whole audience collectively exhaled, and a few people actually
wept, and then they filled the auditorium with the peaceful boom of their
applause. And I remember thinking in that moment that the bombers made
headlines here two years before but this night and these people are as
important a story.
Maria Bashir is the first and only woman
chief prosecutor in Afghanistan. She's been in the post since 2008 and actually
opened an office to investigate cases of violence against women, which she says
is the most important area in her mandate. When I meet her in her office in
Herat, she enters surrounded by four large men with four huge guns. In fact,
she now has 23 bodyguards, because she has weathered bomb attacks that nearly
killed her kids, and it took the leg off of one of her guards.
Why does she continue? She says with a
smile that that is the question that everyone asks— as she puts it, "Why
you risk not living?" And it is simply that for her, a better future for
all the Maria Bashirs to come is worth the risk, and she knows that if people
like her do not take the risk, there will be no better future. Later on in our
interview, Prosecutor Bashir tells me how worried she is about the possible
outcome of government negotiations with the Taliban, the people who have been
trying to kill her. "If we give them a place in the government," she
asks, "Who will protect women's rights?" And she urges the international
community not to forget its promise about women because now they want peace
with Taliban. A few weeks after I leave Afghanistan, I see a headline on the
Internet. An Afghan prosecutor has been assassinated. I google desperately, and
thankfully that day I find out that Maria was not the victim, though sadly,
another Afghan prosecutor was gunned down on his way to work. And when I hear
headlines like that now, I think that as international troops leave Afghanistan
this year and beyond, we must continue to care about what happens to people
there, to all of the Maria Bashirs. Sometimes I still hear her voice in my head
saying, with no bravado whatsoever, "The situation of the women of
Afghanistan will be better someday. We should prepare the ground for this, even
if we are killed."
There are no words adequate to denounce the
al Shabaab terrorists who attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on the same day
as a children's cooking competition in September of 2013. They killed 67,
including poets and pregnant women. Far away in the American Midwest, I had the
good fortune of meeting Somali-Americans who were working to counter the
efforts of al Shabaab to recruit a small number of young people from their city
of Minneapolis to take part in atrocities like Westgate. Abdirizak Bihi's
studious 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan was recruited here in 2008, spirited
to Somalia, and then killed when he tried to come home. Since that time, Mr.
Bihi, who directs the no-budget Somali Education and Advocacy Center, has been
vocally denouncing the recruitment and the failures of government and
Somali-American institutions like the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center where
he believes his nephew was radicalized during a youth program. But he doesn't
just criticize the mosque. He also takes on the government for its failure to
do more to prevent poverty in his community. Given his own lack of financial
resources, Mr. Bihi has had to be creative. To counter the efforts of al
Shabaab to sway more disaffected youth, in the wake of the group's 2010 attack
on World Cup viewers in Uganda, he organized a Ramadan basketball tournament in
Minneapolis in response. Scores of Somali-American kids came out to embrace
sport despite the fatwa against it. They played basketball as Burhan Hassan
never would again. For his efforts, Mr. Bihi has been ostracized by the
leadership of the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, with which he used to
have good relations. He told me, "One day we saw the imam on TV calling us
infidels and saying, 'These families are trying to destroy the mosque.'"
This is at complete odds with how Abdirizak Bihi understands what he is trying
to do by exposing al Shabaab recruitment, which is to save the religion I love
from a small number of extremists.
Now I want to tell one last story, that of
a 22-year-old law student in Algeria named Amel Zenoune-Zouani who had the same
dreams of a legal career that I did back in the '90s. She refused to give up
her studies, despite the fact that the fundamentalists battling the Algerian
state back then threatened all who continued their education. On January 26,
1997, Amel boarded the bus in Algiers where she was studying to go home and
spend a Ramadan evening with her family, and would never finish law school.
When the bus reached the outskirts of her hometown, it was stopped at a
checkpoint manned by men from the Armed Islamic Group. Carrying her schoolbag,
Amel was taken off the bus and killed in the street. The men who cut her throat
then told everyone else, "If you go to university, the day will come when
we will kill all of you just like this."
Amel died at exactly 5:17 p.m., which we
know because when she fell in the street, her watch broke. Her mother showed me
the watch with the second hand still aimed optimistically upward towards a 5:18
that would never come. Shortly before her death, Amel had said to her mother of
herself and her sisters, "Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah, God
willing, but if something happens, you must know that we are dead for knowledge.
You and father must keep your heads held high."
The loss of such a young woman is
unfathomable, and so as I did my research I found myself searching for Amel's
hope again and her name even means "hope" in Arabic. I think I found
it in two places. The first is in the strength of her family and all the other
families to continue telling their stories and to go on with their lives
despite the terrorism. In fact, Amel's sister Lamia overcame her grief, went to
law school, and practices as a lawyer in Algiers today, something which is only
possible because the armed fundamentalists were largely defeated in the
country. And the second place I found Amel's hope was everywhere that women and
men continue to defy the jihadis. We must support all of those in honor of Amel
who continue this human rights struggle today, like the Network of Women Living
Under Muslim Laws. It is not enough, as the victims rights advocate Cherifa
Kheddar told me in Algiers, it is not enough just to battle terrorism. We must
also challenge fundamentalism, because fundamentalism is the ideology that
makes the bed of this terrorism.
Why is it that people like her, like all of
them are not more well known? Why is it that everyone knows who Osama bin Laden
was and so few know of all of those standing up to the bin Ladens in their own
contexts. We must change that, and so I ask you to please help share these
stories through your networks. Look again at Amel Zenoune's watch, forever
frozen, and now please look at your own watch and decide this is the moment
that you commit to supporting people like Amel. We don't have the right to be
silent about them because it is easier or because Western policy is flawed as
well, because 5:17 is still coming to too many Amel Zenounes in places like
northern Nigeria, where jihadis still kill students. The time to speak up in
support of all of those who peacefully challenge fundamentalism and terrorism
in their own communities is now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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