Being Muslim and the danger of a single story

It often starts just like that. For to them, every Muslim is a potential threat, a terrorist. It is extremely awkward, if not annoying, to someone like me who was born and reared in an almost 99 per cent Muslim community. Hitherto I didn’t know that being Muslim means that much and weighs that load; […]

It often starts just like that. For to them, every Muslim is a potential threat, a terrorist. It is extremely awkward, if not annoying, to someone like me who was born and reared in an almost 99 per cent Muslim community. Hitherto I didn’t know that being Muslim means that much and weighs that load; some feel even reluctant to disclose their belief. Muslims living in multi-religious and non-Muslim majority societies today have a lot of stories to tell. The story is sometimes nasty in conservative, religiously touchy and volatile places like India, where I presently reside.  Although home to about 200 million Muslims, it was discovered in a recent survey that some of them have to masquerade as Hindus to sustain their businesses. This happens due to the schism, and sometimes animosity, between them and people of other faiths, particularly the majority Hindus.
But why all the fuss, you may ask. Generally, identity, especially religious one, is highly polemical and extremely abstract. For instance, my ‘Muslimness’ is neither determi-nable by appearance and gait, nor proportional to my humanity. Despite the whopping population of more than 1.5 billion worldwide, hundreds of millions of Muslims live in shambles due to the raging religious stereotype, which results in marginalisation or worse. Needless to say, reports of suicide-bombings and other terror acts allegedly perpetuated by some miscreants calling themselves Muslims is a commonplace today. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram etc. are household names around the world. But this can’t, and shouldn’t, justify the unjust treatment of others who can equally be victims of those murderers.
There is no denying that the threat poses by the ‘bad guys’ among Muslims is alarming, but not as the media would want us to believe. Muslims do not have monopoly on fanaticism. We have Christians in Central African Republic, Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Hindus in India, Jews in Israel etc. but Muslims remain virtually the only culpable faithful. One cannot be a Muslim, a practising one, without someone somewhere overtly or covertly degrades him or calls him an extremist or terrorist.
Extremism has no place in true Islam. Ironically, however, the few who subscribe to it always make the headlines, while others who are paragons of moderation and peace are barely heard of on the mostly western and western-influenced media. The modern world owes much to Muslims as they have a very long history in developing it. Malise Ruthven in his “excellent little book”, Islam: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press, explains this clearly. “No one needs doubt that, at the level of civilization, an unprecedented degree of knowledge, excellence, and sophistication was achieved in Islam several centuries before the Renaissance occurred in Europe, or that, as many scholars have noted, much of the groundwork for the scientific and philosophical thought that would flourish in the West was laid in Muslim lands” (Ruthven 2012:17).
He further notes that Muslims have excelled in virtually all other fields the world today boasts of having—medicine, mathematics, astronomy, optics, architecture, poetry and philosophical thoughts, among others. Going by this alone should have made being Muslim something to be proud of, but the exact opposite is often obtained. Of course, one is allowed to do certain things to protect oneself under threat, but it’s no more than paranoia many a times. Be it as it may, I, for once, wouldn’t subscribe to what I couldn’t perform or display before others. You are still the Muslim unless you renounce your belief and join them, which equates to preferring the terrestrial over the celestial, the temporary over the permanent.
A few days ago, somebody called me a Boko Haram member on Facebook for my being a Nigerian and Muslim in response to my criticism of the Egyptian president, Abdul-Fatah Al-Sisi. Saying a word against Sisi is tantamount to siding with the ousted “Islamist” president, Mohamed Morsi, and his outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. There’s nothing more wrong than that. Unbeknown to him, there’s a world apart from their ideology and mine. In fact, Boko Haram fights everyone and anyone like me, for I study and teach what they try, with all their force and efforts, to prohibit—western education. Yet somebody is here calling me their member. How ignorant of him? How senselessly stereotypical are people nowadays?
I have got two calls: First to my fellow Muslims. Don’t forget who you are. Your undue moderation or apologia cannot purge you of your identity. Don’t join the bandwagon of hundreds of thousands of ‘cultural’ or ‘nominal’ Muslims, to whom the religion is only an identity to distinguish them from others. These people are practically non-observant of Islamic tenets, which is primarily to submit to the One God alone and what He revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW).
The second call is to my non-Muslim readers. Allah says: “Oh humankind! We created you from a single pair of male and female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know each other…” Qur’an (49:13). Therefore, any informed Muslim understands this wisdom of our being created differently; however, the difference is not to divide us but that we may know each other. Let us embrace peace, mutual understanding and respect. Let us not forget that we are individuals with dissimilar, sometimes opposing, views, taste, impulse, desire etc. Psychologists irrefutably say that no two individuals are exactly the same, not even identical twins. Thus, if some ignorant Muslims do something wrong, blame them, not the entire Muslim population, nor their religion.
No doubt Islam is nowadays a subject of mockery, misinterpretations and the like. Three things caused that: 1) misconduct of a few of its followers, 2) sheer ignorance of its content and the earlier context and background, and 3) the exaggerating effect of media, especially those owned by anti-Muslims. But don’t let yourself be carried away by any of these. Don’t just believe in a single story, for that is dangerous.

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim, Department of English and Literary Studies, Bayero University Kano ([email protected])