August
16, 2002 11:45
a.m. Are
We Owed an Apology?
Muslim
leaders remain mute on 9/11.
he charges
by the Reverend Franklin Graham are not only justified, they are unanswerable.
Time magazine reports that the bowdlerizers at the University of
North Carolina have got out a special edition of the Koran (political
correctness: the Qur'an). The book, handed out to incoming freshmen, is
designed to communicate the teachings of the Prophet. This edition is
exorcised of any sentiments such as might have impelled the knights of
9/11 to plunge themselves and their steeds into live Americans, innocent
of any infidelity to Islam, this side of not adhering to it. By the law
of averages, there were certainly some Islamic victims in the Twin Towers.
Abiders of the faith were not blocked at the door that morning.
Dr. Graham, like
his father, Billy, takes his religion seriously. Doing that is an effrontery
in a Comstockean age. Religions are acceptable only when shorn of anything
that pricks, like hellfire. It is Dr. Graham's point that if we assume,
for the sake of ecumenical bonhomie, that the terrorists were not really
representing Islam, that they were extremists torturing the word of the
Prophet. Okay. Then that is exactly what we should be told by men of Islam
in authority. And that should be easy to do, inasmuch as the high priests
of the Islamic world are also its secular leaders: The Muslim religion does
not condone the separation of church and state.
What Dr. Graham is
being so widely criticized for saying is that the people in charge in
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, and other Muslim countries, should handle
the al-Qaeda problem less detachedly than they have done. There were expressions
of regret, on September 12, from the leaders of the Islamic world, but
none of them repentant. The Pope, a couple of years ago, apologized for
500-year-old distortions of Christianity at the expense of the Jews, and
his words were heeded and appreciated. There weren't any Christians around,
when Pope John Paul spoke, who in the name of the Christian faith were
out there killing non-Christians. Permissible limits of evangelization
had long since been coalesced, in a fast-moving world. The 19th century
— yesterday! — was when slaves were bought and sold, women were
without suffrage, and Catholics and Jews were forbidden in Great Britain,
the august mother of democracy, to vote. But all that is viewed today
as a very long time ago, moral ice ages past.
But are such evolutions
in moral thought universal? The trouble Dr. Graham is pointing to is the
awesomely wide acceptance of the September 11 actors as martyrs. Their
names are hallowed because they professed themselves engaged in acts of
faith. If theirs is held to be the true faith by 19-year-old zealots,
then to whom do we turn to discredit the religious credentials the killers
invoked?
If a band of Americans,
proclaiming their devotion to the faith, assaulted a Muslim center, we
would not need to wait very long for disavowals — by Christian leaders.
When John Brown carried his faith to unreasonable lengths, we hanged him.
What we are waiting for, says Dr. Graham, is an apology from Muslim leaders.
Why shouldn't we have that? An explicit disavowal, as contrary to acceptable
teachings of the Koran — of the acts of the terrorists.
What we have got
is denunciations of Dr. Graham for admitting the hypothetical possibility
that the September 11 actors were credible Muslims. Dr. Faiz Rehman, who
is communications director for the American Muslim Council, says that
Dr. Graham "is sounding like a broken record." But the silence
of the sovereign Muslim community is sounding like unbroken muteness.
If the position of the American Muslim Council is that it is humiliating
even to speculate that the killers had a root in Islam, they should tell
us what it is they plan to do about those in the Muslim world who applaud
the terorrists' acts and their mission.
You and I —
because we are so intelligent (!), and so balanced morally (!) —
know that what happened on September 11 can only be dismissed as a perversion.
A perversion of something. But our concern is that our blissful sophistication
in such matters isn't shared as widely as it ought to be. When we conquered
Hitler, we denied the Germans the right to buy a copy of Mein Kampf.
Should we ask the Muslim leaders to circulate only the University of North
Carolina edition of the Qur'an?
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he charges
by the Reverend Franklin Graham are not only justified, they are unanswerable.
Time magazine reports that the bowdlerizers at the University of
North Carolina have got out a special edition of the Koran (political
correctness: the Qur'an). The book, handed out to incoming freshmen, is
designed to communicate the teachings of the Prophet. This edition is
exorcised of any sentiments such as might have impelled the knights of
9/11 to plunge themselves and their steeds into live Americans, innocent
of any infidelity to Islam, this side of not adhering to it. By the law
of averages, there were certainly some Islamic victims in the Twin Towers.
Abiders of the faith were not blocked at the door that morning.
