The Real Challenge Facing Muslims in North America

By El-Hajj Mauri’ Saalakhan

“O you who believe! Keep your duty to Allah (God) and fear Him, and always speak the truth. He will direct you to do righteous deeds and will forgive you your sins. And whosoever obeys Allah and His Messenger has already attained the highest achievement.” (Qur’an 33: 70-71)

In this writer’s humble opinion, the aforementioned verse from the surah known as Al-Ahzaab (The Confederates), from the last revelation of God to mankind (the Qur’an), goes to the heart of the real challenge confronting Muslims (and other faith communities) in North America and around the world.

In the September 1999 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a series of articles, including this writer’s own commentary, highlighted a serious plague directly impacting the Arab/Muslim community in America: our government’s selective and unconstitutional use of “secret evidence.” Increasingly, there is mounting discussion and debate over the causes of and remedy for this affliction. More often than not both the cause and cure are described in external terms solely; a tendency that is both delusional and dangerous, for it assures that the real cause will go unattended, and the cure perpetually unresolved.

Unquestionably there are external factors. A prominent investigative reporter, Alexander Cockburn, has called the secret evidence cases against Muslims “an ugly affair whose bottom line is whether the Israeli government can reach into U.S. courts...to inhibit the most basic rights of U.S. citizens” (The Link, July-August 1999). No doubt, this is a factor. The voracious appetite of America’s military-industrial complex; the ever-present and sickening Crusader tendencies within certain influential policymaking circles; the ugly anti-Muslim, anti-Islam propaganda disseminated through mainstream and some alternative media; and the anti-immigrant climate in general, are also factors. But do these factors constitute the real cause?

Missing the cause automatically translates into missing the solution. Most advocacy groups addressing this issue are solely focused upon short-term surface solutions, such as the introduction of remedial legislation and increased political empowerment of Arabs and Muslims—via more effective lobbying of elected officials, increased voter registration, deeper involvement in one or both major political parties, and running candidates for political office. While these objectives can arguably have some positive effect, by no stretch of the imagination do they represent the solution to the problem.

“Corruption will come from them and return back to them…”

There is a verse in the Qur’an that reads: “Allah (God) will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in their own hearts.” What is going on within the collective Muslim heart that makes us susceptible to such social and political carnage the world over? This is the question that sincere and committed Muslims in the West must ask themselves.

The Qur’an also says: “O you who believe! Stand firmly for justice as witnesses to Allah (God), even as against yourselves, your parents or your kin, or whether it be against rich or poor, for Allah can best protect both. Do not follow the lusts of your hearts, lest you swerve; and if you distort justice, or decline to do justice, know that Allah is ever mindful of all that you do.” The message is clear, and it is here that we as a faith community have failed; and so doing, opened the door to grief on top of grief.

The first Rashidun Caliph (successor in leadership after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings of God be upon him), Abu Bakr Siddique—following the example of the Messenger of God—set a tone for his administration in his inaugural address which would behoove all leaders to follow. He stated: “O men! Here I have been assigned the job of being a ruler over you, while I am not the best among you. If I do well in my job, help me. If I do wrong, redress me. Truthfulness is fidelity and lying is treason. The weak shall be strong in my eyes until I restore them to their lost rights, and the strong shall be weak in my eyes until I have restored the rights of the weak among them. No people give up fighting for the cause of Allah but Allah inflicts upon them abject subjection; and no people give themselves over to lewdness but Allah envelops them with misery. Obey me as long as I obey Allah and His prophet. But if I disobey Allah’s command, or His prophet’s, then no obedience is incumbent upon you. Rise to your prayer, that Allah may bless you.” What an example of accountability!

How far we have fallen from the actuality of these principles. The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is reported to have said, “A time is soon coming to mankind when their learned people will be the worst people under heaven’s skies; corruption will come from them and return back to them as smoke returns to the hole, and this will be a time when knowledge departs.”

One of his companions asked, “O Messenger of Allah, how can knowledge depart when we recite the Qur’an and teach it to our children; and they will teach it to their children up to the Day of Resurrection? The Prophet responded, O Zaid, I’m astonished at you, I thought you were the most learned man in all Madinah. Do not the Jews and Christians teach their children the Torah and the Injil (Gospel) and yet they know nothing of what it contains?”

We (Muslims) have joined our co-religious offspring of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) in fulfilling this unfortunate prophecy. It is the corruption within the Arab and Muslim world—and our collective refusal to honestly and consistently address this corruption—which has opened the door to the misery which has enveloped us. As the Qur’an says: “Corruption has appeared on the land and on the sea on account of what men’s hands have wrought; that Allah may make them taste a part of what they have done so that they might return.”

Arab and Muslim political prisoners in open-ended detention in the United States based upon “secret evidence”—such as Anwar Haddam, Mazen al-Najjar, and Nasser Ahmed—are stuck in these hellish conditions in large part because of the failure of Muslim and Arab-American organizations and institutions. While there have been some efforts made, in this writer’s opinion the efforts have been largely cosmetic; there has been no real coordinated attempt to bring the full force of our substantial human and material resources to bear on these cases/issues. And what are the reasons? Fear, apathy, twisted loyalties to despotic regimes or failed ideologies. Of the reasons stated, the last is the most insidious of all.

Over the past year, I have seen Muslims in America coming to the defense of a presidency (in moral and political crisis) with massive amounts of Muslim blood on its hands, while support given Muslim political prisoners and their families has paled in comparison; for some it has been totally nonexistent.

There have been whispering campaigns against certain political prisoners to chill the prospect of any meaningful support coming to them from within Arab and Muslim circles. I know this to be the case with Anwar Haddam, and I strongly believe this to also be the case with Nasser Ahmed, Mazen Al-Najjar and other like-minded political detainees. Meanwhile, the efforts to neutralize such persons has been well-funded and well-orchestrated (see John Sugg’s exposé of the campaign against Mazen Al-Najjar in the aforementioned issue of The Link).

In conclusion, if Arabs and Muslims don’t begin to resolve these ugly contradictions, all the presence and ephemeral political power in America won’t mean a thing. As the Qur’an says: “And how bad indeed was that for which they sold their souls, if they but knew!” (S.2:102)

El-Hajj Mauri’ Saalakhan is a Washington, DC-based human rights activist and executive director of the Peace and Justice Foundation.