Pleasantly Surprised by “Three Ex-Terrorists” Event

Adnan Majid

I had known well about the positions concerning Islam and Muslims to be presented by each of the three speakers at the April 16th “Three Ex-Terrorists” event. As a member of the Muslim community of Stanford, I saw many a Muslim student troubled by the ideology of the speakers in the days leading up to the event. Some wanted to respectfully protest, a course of action we eventually decided against. I attended the event fully expecting my religion to be reviled, as it was. Oddly however, I left pleasantly surprised and confident that the Stanford community would see through the speakers’ black and white claims.

Actually, a friend and I had a hard time suppressing our laughter when Zak Anani described his exemplary Muslim upbringing, one in which he would fail to pray but faithfully kept hold of the core Islamic belief of fighting the infidel. Maybe I had fooled myself into thinking that prayer, five times a day, was a pillar of Islam.
The next time I bike over to the campus mosque at 6:00 a.m. for daily morning prayers, I’ll be sure to ask my friend, “What are we doing here, not sleeping? Didn’t you know we’re more obligated to fight? So stop wasting your time with Darfur activism or advocacy for the homeless.”

He’d look at me puzzled, so I’d bring out my Qur’an pointing out the verse – “And slay them wherever you find them” (2.191).  But he’d ask me to read the very verse preceding it, “Fight in the way of God those who fight you and do not commit aggression – God loves not aggressors” (2.190). Are we then talking about defensive war?
Stumped repeatedly by my friend’s knowledge of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad in my attempts to convert him to Anani’s True Islam, I guess I’d have to buy one of the speakers’ books to actually learn why I want to kill you.

Despite the pain felt by many Muslim students who had attended the event, the Stanford community can stand to benefit greatly from it. Whether they were at the event or not, the students here are certainly well-educated and keen on independently investigating any claim for its veracity.

If you wonder about the speakers’ claims of yearning to bring the severed heads of infidels before the feet of Allah, ask your Muslim dorm mate how she views Islam’s stance against anthropomorphic representations of God. Seek to understand how Muslims interpret the oft-cited verse of wife-beating in light of the Prophet Muhammad’s own reproval of the practice. Seek out individuals or organizations such as the Islamic Society at Stanford University (ISSU) to discuss such interpretations. Ask the university administration for Islamic resources if they are not available. Read the Qur’an, making your own interpretations of how to balance verses of peace with verses of fighting.

Falsehood springs from overgeneralizations, such as when one implies that the life-experiences relayed by the Muslim questioners at the event are atypical. The interfaith work of the father of one questioner is no surprise in Muslim America. But the speakers were keen to condemn even the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a key civil rights organization and one of the many Muslim groups that repeatedly condemn terrorism.

Forget about conservative or “moderate” Muslims, does anyone who witnessed the event truly think that even liberal Muslims would like to hold hands with Walid Shoebat, Zak Anani, and Kamal Saleem with their open stance against Islam? It is no surprise that only fifty of the “eight million” (possibly distrustful) American Muslims would show up to their rally in Washington DC. Does CAIR’s refusal to attend constitute as clear proof in its sympathy for terrorists? (By the way, check out their great Islamofascist website at http://www.cair.com.)

Or maybe I’m just lying to your face, using taqiyyah, an understandable Shi’a position to conceal one’s beliefs in the face of persecution but which Kamal Saleem just taught me was actually an obligatory tool for all Muslims to destroy infidels. His message is clear: Distrust your Muslim neighbor.

But as I had said, our community at Stanford can easily reject such fear – we’ve been trained to investigate what we don’t know rather than to take a speaker’s statements on faith. We can far too easily dismiss the first two speakers, Zak Anani and Kamal Saleem, for offering us nothing but that fear.

I was impressed, however, with Walid Shoebat’s argumentative style, his ability to anticipate the responses of his opponents to absolve himself of the accusations leveled against him. He complains, “we are being looked at as Islamophobes, racists, hate-mongers, you name it.” He further complains that at each event, he hears a barrage of voices: ‘I was born in… I grew up in… I experienced Palestine, Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan and disagree with your account.’ Because of his complaints, are we then to simply dismiss the claims that he may truly be a hate-monger or that his distant account of his youth may truly diverge from the everyday experiences of natives of foreign lands?

And at the end, I was amused that Shoebat chided Israeli peace activists for being too willing to engage with Palestinians rather than wholeheartedly supporting Israeli occupation – all this while the event flyer claimed he was now a “peace activist.” For some reason, it doesn’t really taste like peace.
But maybe peace does taste like carrion.

Adnan Majid
Class of ’07, Stanford University
VP, Islamic Society of Stanford University

Please note: this is a modified and clarified version of an earlier Op-Ed published in the Stanford Daily on April 18, 2007. The original version can be found at http://daily/article/2007/4/18/opedPleasantlySurprisedByThreeExterroristsEvent

The event in question can be watched in its entirety with complements to CBS 5 News at http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_107012302.html