I Will Never Forget…
I will never forget the look on my English professor’s face when he started class on 9/13/2001. On 9/11, his class was in session when the attacks occurred, and none of us found out until the next period, when it was announced that classes had been canceled for the rest of the day (and the next day too). Class resumed on Thursday.
My English professor was an Iranian Muslim.
The look on his face that morning was a profoundly moving combination of fear and shame. He sat up at the front of the class of around 20 students and dazedly stared at a fixed point on his desk until it was time to begin class. He slowly rose to his feet, and raised his head. He eventually spoke, slowly and quietly. “I am sorry, for what has happened,” he said. “I hope that all your friends and families are safe.”
He said this while facing the class, and looking at the class, but without making eye contact with any one person in the room. He was not a traditional Muslim by any means. He dressed in Western clothes and subscribed to a mildly socialist, Western enlightenment political view. Two of our readings dealt with the issue of equality for women. He had no reason to think that we regarded him as a subscriber to the extremist views of the 9/11 terrorists.
Still, there was that look in his eyes. I saw in that expression shame… shame that people had committed such atrocities in the name of his religion. I also saw fear… fear that we would not be able, or not be willing to distinguish extremist Muslims from moderate Muslims. When he said that he was sorry for what had happened, it didn’t seem as if he was empathizing with us, but rather apologizing on behalf of someone else. I remember that I very much wanted to tell him that I didn’t blame him in the least, but it didn’t seem appropriate. He hadn’t explicitly said what he communicated to us, and I didn’t want to detract from his message’s humble subtlety.
Part of the semester’s assignment was a series of open topic short essays. He stressed that they should be informal… merely a stream of consciousness taken down on paper. My first essay dealt with the distinction between Muslim extremists and ordinary Muslims. He did not return our essays, as they were not a graded on their content. Still, I think he got the message.
And my first question would have been “Do you accept permanent Israeli sovereignty?” If there was equivocation, I would know that his apology was empty, a hudna stalling for time while he was in the minority here in the tolerant USA.
Until Muslims have a civil war to eradicate the notions of dhimmi, fatwa, honor killing, jihad, dar al-harb, there is no evidence. If the “moderates” so outnumber the “extremists” the latter should be about as visible as the KKK is today in the USA, which is less than marginal. David Duke has done less harm than the progroms initiated by Al Sharpton. Instead, the vast majority of today’s world conflicts have millions, tens of millions, of intolerant Muslims attacking their neighbors, destroying shrines like the Afghan buddhas and this week claiming that the Taj Mahal is Muslim!
You don’t get Arab culture. Of COURSE stealing is wrong in theory, but in practice the only thing that is ACTUALLY WRONG is getting caught.
Where are the David Kazcynski’s among American Muslims???
From my Clippings
So what are the bloggers talkin’ about these days? Here’s some interesting thoughts from the blogs I read: Mark remembers his English teacher, an Iranian Muslim, on the infamous day of 9/11. Abu Sinan blogs about London’s mayer statement…
He’s in America, teaching Western post-enlightenment literature. I hardly think that underneath he is burning with a desire to shove Israel into the Mediterranean. And in America, I think the moderate Muslims do outnumber the extremists.
Sorry, but the heavily publicized “Muslims Against Terror” march on May 14 had hardly 3 score attendees.
Over 14,000 websites on Google mentioned it
http://www.freemuslims.org/march/
More coverage of the statistically insignificant rally:
http://www.keshertalk.com/archives/2005/05/fifty_muslims_a.html
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2005/05/sad-day-for-american-muslims.html
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/006178.php
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20050514-112609-7748r.htm
Michael Moore gets more MoveOn kooks in his livingroom.
I’ve had a Palestinian professor and what is said in public versus what is said in private are VERY different.
Find your teacher, introduce him to blogging under his real name, mention his mosque and his imam… and see how long his moderate public stance lasts.
Only Muslim apostates have a chance of living nicely among us.
In his doctoral thesis, Toward a General Economy of Travel: Identity, Memory and Death, he talks about the diasporic Jew as an “archivist of the revealed” and having been chosen by God. He talks about how the Jews were “forcibly expelled from their homeland.” He talks about Jewish pride, and how it enables diasporic Jews to gain a source of inner stability, especially in inhospitable surroundings.
Either your stereotype has failed, or he has put years worth of effort into building a facade.
With regard to apostasy, I cannot say, except to note that there can be degrees of apostasy. If you regard radical Islam as the one true Islamic faith, then a great many Muslims are apostates, and the same would go for Christians and Jews. I think it would be very hard for anyone to live in America without straying from hardline theocracy. The freedom we enjoy here is very much dependent on a liberal view on religion’s role in governing people. Extremist Muslims reject democracy altogether as an evil doctrine.