Paradise Forever

AUSTIN, Texas - When a man fueled by rage against the U.S. government and its tax code crashes his airplane into a building housing offices of the Internal Revenue Service, is it a criminal act or an act of terrorism?

For police in Austin, it's a question tied to the potential for public alarm: The building set ablaze by Joseph Stack's suicide flight was still burning Thursday afternoon when officials confidently stood before reporters and said the crash wasn't terrorism.

But others, including those in the Muslim community, look at Stack's actions and fail to understand how he differs from foreign perpetrators of political violence who are routinely labeled terrorists.

"The position of many individuals and institutions seems to be that no act of violence can be labeled 'terrorism' unless it is carried out by a Muslim," said Nihad Awad, director of the Washington-based Council on Islamic-American Relations.

The dust from the collapse of the twin towers had hardly settled on 11 September 2001 when the febrile search began for "moderate Muslims", people who would provide answers, who would distance themselves from this outrage and condemn the violent acts of "Muslim extremists", "Islamic fundamentalists" and "Islamists". Two distinct categories of Muslim rapidly emerged: the "good" and the "bad"; the "moderates", "liberals" and "secularists" versus the "fundamentalists", the "extremists" and the "Islamists".

This categorisation was not new. Literature produced during the colonial era, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially by orientalist scholars in Britain and France, depicted Muslims in the same binary manner. "Good" Muslims were those who either collaborated with the colonial enterprise or accepted the values and customs of the dominant power. The rest, the "bad" Muslims, those who "resisted" religiously, culturally or politically, were systematically denigrated, dismissed as the "other" and repressed as a "danger". Times have changed, but the old mindsets and simplistic portrayals continue to cast a shadow over today's intellectual, political and media debate about Islam. One reason why so many Muslim thinkers, activists and reformers today try to avoid the label of "moderate" is the perception of having sold out on their religion to the west and its suffocating terminology.

So what exactly are we discussing? Religious or theological practices? Political positions? Proclivity towards violence? Animosity towards the west? What do we mean when we brand someone a "moderate" Muslim?

'Given my privilege as a woman, I only degrade Myself by trying to be something I'm not--and in all honesty--don't want to be: a man. As women, we will never reach true liberation until we stop trying to mimic men, and value the beauty in our own God-given distinctiveness.'

On March 18, 2005 Amina Wadud led the first female-led Jumuah (Friday) prayer. On that day women took a huge step towards being more like men. But, did we come closer to actualizing our God given liberation? I don't think so.

What we so often forget is that God has honored the woman by giving her value in relation to God not in relation to men. But as western feminism erases God from the scene, there are no standard left but men. As a result the western feminist is forced to find her value in relation to a man. And in so doing she has accepted a faulty assumption. She has accepted that man is the standard, and thus a woman can never be a full human being until she becomes just like a man-the standard.

Even as a Jew in New York, I know what it is like to be Muslim in France. While studying abroad in the French city of Strasbourg in 2007, I decided to grow a bushy beard. Little did I know that in France only traditional Jewish and Muslim men don anything but the most finely trimmed moustache or goatee. Since I did not wear a yarmulke or other head covering, people who saw me on the street assumed that I was Muslim.

I felt that police officers and passersby treated me with suspicion, and even on the crowded rush hour bus few chose to sit next to me if they could avoid it. On one occasion someone followed me home and tried to start a fight, only to discover that I was a bewildered American, not a French Muslim.