.
What is challenging here to keep in mind & heart is that this act of senseless slaughter does not arise
from Islam. Islam does not sanction the taking of inocent life & doing so is, in fact, a sacrilege to the faith.
This was an act of illness.
.
Major Hasan's Hidden Militancy
by
Asra Q. Nomani
Info
RSS
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of
Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the
Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women’s rights at her mosque in West Virginia is the subject of a PBS documentary,
The Mosque in Morgantown. She can be found on Facebook, and reached at
asra@asranomani.com
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AP Photo The alleged Fort Hood gunman had revealed a hard-line Islamist streak to acquaintances in the Muslim Community Center that he made his mosque. The Daily Beast's Asra Q. Nomani reports.
Not long ago, inside the quiet library of the Muslim Community Center here in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., Golam Akhter, a local Bangladeshi-American civil engineer, 67, got into a fierce debate with a young Muslim doctor over how to interpret the concept of “jihad” within Islam. Akhter argued, “Jihad means an inner struggle, fighting against corruption and injustice.”
The young doctor responded. “That’s not a correct interpretation. Jihad means holy war. When your religion isn’t safe, you have to fight for it. If someone attacks you, you must fight them. That is jihad. You can kill someone who is harming you.”
A closer look reveals a complex picture of a young first-generation American Muslim man living a life of dissonance between his identity as an American and his ideology as a Muslim who had accepted a literal, rigid interpretation of Islam.
The conversation would be just another theological debate, interesting but irrelevant, except that the doctor was Maj. Nidal Hasan, 39, the gunman in the tragic Fort Hood rampage. After being posted to Walter Reed Hospital as a psychiatrist, Hasan called the Muslim Community Center his local mosque. It’s just a short drive away from Walter Reed.
In interviews with the media, leaders of the Muslim Community Center have painted a portrait of Hasan as a quiet, unassuming Muslim more interested in finding a wife than debating world politics. They express shock at his killing spree and, appropriately, condemn it. But a closer look behind the doors of the mosque and inside the conversations between the engineer and the doctor reveal a more complex picture of a young first-generation American Muslim man living a life of dissonance between his identity as an American and his ideology as a Muslim who had accepted a literal, rigid interpretation of Islam, akin to the puritanical Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam that define the theology of militancy inside the Muslim world today, according to community members who knew Hasan.
“So many time I talked with him,” said Akhter, a community leader who is sort of like a mosque gadfly, challenging congregants to reject literal, rigid interpretations of Islam. “I was trying to modernize him. I tried my best. He used to hate America as a whole. He was more anti-American than American.”
Despite all the conversations, Akther said, “I couldn’t get through to him. He was a typical fundamentalist Muslim.”
It wasn’t a label assigned lightly. Rather, it emerged after many one-on-one conservations between the engineer and the doctor in quiet spots from the library to the lobby to the prayer hall, discussing issues of interpretation like jihad, polygamy, assimilation, foreign policy, and the cutting of hands for theft. Other members of the community confirm this portrait of Hasan.
The story of Hasan at his local mosque is a cautionary tale to all Muslim communities about the consequences when we fail to win the war of ideas in the Muslim world with moderate interpretation of Islam over rigid, literal interpretations. Part of the problem is that many Muslims are clinging to the notion of an “ummah,” or “community,” with a capital “U,” a view that inhibits dissent and encourages blind loyalty to a global Islam.
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