The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Muslim
Every other day, you hear about an act of terror―in London, or Boston,
or somewhere else. You fear that the perpetrators are Muslims, acting ‘as
Muslims’, in the name of Islam. In your name. You hope against hope that that
is not the case, but indeed it is. The perpetrators are Muslims and they,
rather proudly, declare that they have murdered and maimed innocent people for
your sake. And then you feel an unbearable heaviness engulf your being, brought
upon not just by the confirmation of your fear but also by the knowledge, the
certainty, that it will happen again.
By Saif Shahin, New Age
Islam
27 May 2013
In ‘The Unbearable
Lightness of Being’, Czech novelist Milan Kundera suggests that life, and everything
in it, transpires just once and never again. This constitutes a ‘lightness’ of
being―as opposed to philosopher Nietzsche’s proposition that everything in the
universe keeps recurring, imposing a weight or ‘heaviness’ on human beings who
have the knowledge that they are condemned to repeat the cycle of life forever.
Being a Muslim these days certainly
conforms to the Nietzschean paradigm. Every other day, you hear about an act of
terror―in London, or Boston, or somewhere else. You fear that the perpetrators
are Muslims, acting ‘as Muslims’, in the name of Islam. In your name. You hope
against hope that that is not the case, but indeed it is. The perpetrators are
Muslims and they, rather proudly, declare that they have murdered and maimed innocent
people for your sake. And then you feel an unbearable heaviness engulf your
being, brought upon not just by the confirmation of your fear but also by the
knowledge, the certainty, that it will happen again.
The latest act of this never-ending
tragedy unfolded last week on the streets of London. Two young British Muslims of
Nigerian origin beheaded and disembowelled a young British soldier with a meat
cleaver, and one of them proceeded to announce to stunned passers by that as
long as the British army kept killing Muslims abroad, they would never be safe.
Weeks earlier, two young American Muslims of Chechnyan origin had bombed the
Boston marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 200. Theirs, too, was
avowedly an act of retribution for the deaths of Muslims in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
This madness has been
going on for years now. From Bali to Bangalore, from Madrid to Manhattan. No
matter where they were born, no matter where they now live, young Muslims all
around the world seem to be seized of an indescribable bloodlust, to kill and
be killed. Of course, such Muslims are a minuscule minority. Of course, for
every Michael Adebolajo and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, there are hundreds of thousands
of other young Muslims who feel as victims rather than as victors after such
acts, who suffer the unbearable heaviness of being Muslim, who try to unburden
themselves by telling their friends and colleagues that this isn’t really Islam,
this isn’t really them. But that doesn’t matter: in a few days yet another
Tsarnaev or Adebolajo springs out from among them, as surely as the last one
did. And the cycle repeats itself.
‘Being Muslim’
What motors this vicious cycle?
What is it that propels this never-ending mayhem? How can so many people, born to
different families in different corners of the world, brought up in drastically
different societies and cultures, suffer from the same existential angst and
behave in the exact same way. If it is not Islam itself, then what is it? Perhaps
it is, once again, the heaviness of being Muslim.
“Being” is not just
something metaphysical that lies dormant inside us. “Being” is the activity of
our existence. “Being” is what we do―encompassing thinking, feeling, and
behaving within it. And what we do derives from who we consider ourselves to
“be”―in other words how we define ourselves―and the meaning that “being” this
or that carries for us. Now, all of us can “be” a lot of different things: son,
student, man, a Rajasthan Royals fan, Indian, Asian, or Muslim. Indeed, we are each
of these things in different social contexts, acting in accordance with the relevant
identity in each context.
The word “acting” is
significant, implying not just the fact of action but also the playing of a
role, as in a drama. In the “acting” of our identities, it is simultaneously
correct in both senses. Just as characters in a drama play their parts out of pre-written
scripts, so we play our roles in the theatre of life based on identity-scripts,
or our understanding of what “being” this or that means. Being a “man”, hence,
makes a person want and try to be physically strong, dress in shirts and
trousers, avoid crying when he gets hurt, be the earning member of the family,
bring the wife to his home rather than go to hers, and so forth. If he fails to
do any of these things, he is told by friends and family to “act like a man”.
He himself feels ashamed if he is unable to perform any aspect of his role as a
man―sometimes so much so that he may consider his life worthless and contemplate
giving it up. “Being” for him becomes meaningless if he cannot be a “man” and
act out the meaning attached to that identity.
The meaning of every
identity is not quite so absolute or universally accepted. Being “Muslim” is
still a contested identity, meaning many different things to different people. But
it is a contest alright, with people like Omar Bakri Muhammad, the radical
cleric who once mentored Adebolajo, trying to define it in their own ways (it
is reportedly he who preaches beheading enemy soldiers wherever they may be
found). The meaning of being a Muslim that they espouse include having a sense
of spiritual superiority over followers of other faiths, considering oneself to
be a victim of the oppressions of Western imperialism on behalf of all Muslims,
killing non-Muslims as well as those Muslims who are not “true Muslims” in all
kinds of ways, dying the process if need be and ascending to heaven.
Once “being Muslim” comes
to be defined in these terms, extremist violence no longer remains the preserve
of people brainwashed in madrasas or trained in terrorist camps. One after the
other, Muslims will emerge out of the backwaters of Africa or the backstreets
of America and play out their role in life as a “Muslim” by perpetrating what
others consider terror but for them is simply being who they are. They would feel
no moral compunction in massacring infidels by the dozen or beheading another
human being. In fact, such an “act” would be so normal to them that they might hang
around in the streets and chat with passersby―as Adebolajo did. After all, they
would simply be doing what being a Muslim means to them, what Muslims are
supposed to do.
Thus, just as being a
Muslim carries a heaviness for me, so it does for Adebolajos and Tsarnaevs. They
do what they do as other “true Muslims” have done before them, and more “true
Muslims” would do after them. And so the Nietzschean cycle continues.
Being More Than Muslim
Can this cycle be
disrupted? Can the burden of being Muslim be made a little lighter? Two ways
suggest themselves to me. The first is to put together a coherent and complete definition
of “being Muslim” that can rival the definition of Bakri Muhammad and his ilk. It
is not enough to throw out discrete passages from the Quran and argue that
Islam doesn’t preach violence, because Muslims aren’t radicalised by reading a
few disingenuously contextualized Quranic verses to begin with, as is sometimes
assumed. Bakri Muhammad offers radicals a complete narrative: a way of life,
death, and afterlife that coheres with selected episodes of Islamic history as
well as global politics of today. Muslims believe that narrative because it is
coherent and complete. The alternative, thus, must be a fully developed
narrative as well, weaving a pluralist and peaceful interpretation of Islam into
a meaningful way of life, if not also death and afterlife.
The second way is to
reduce the salience that “being Muslim” carries for Muslims today. If we all
have multiple identities, then any one of them, or a meaningful combination of
several identities, can constitute the narrative unity of our lives. But one of
Bakri Muhammad and his ilk’s biggest successes is that they have made “being
Muslim” the most salient identity for Muslims. Radical Muslims see themselves
primarily, or even only, as Muslims and little else―and not also as British,
American, Indian, black, white, rich, poor, and so forth. This singularity of
perspective is inherent to their radicalisation, an example of what the
existentialist philosopher Sartre has called “bad faith”. But this can be
changed if only Muslims are made to realise the other identities that they
already possess, which come with alternative sets of perspectives on life and moral
values, and integrate these identities into their “being”.
This, in fact, is who so-called
“moderate” or “mainstream” Muslims are: people who are Muslims but view
themselves in broader terms, as members of mixed societies, as citizens of
multicultural nations, or simply as human beings. It is realising and being at
peace with the plurality within them that will make radical Muslims take a
peaceful and pluralist view of the world outside.
Saif Shahin, a regular columnist for
New Age Islam, is a doctoral research scholar in political communication at the
University of Texas at Austin, U.S
URL: