When people of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism

Karima Bennoune shares four powerful stories of real people fighting against fundamentalism in their own communities — refusing to allow the faith they love to become a tool for crime, attacks and murder. These personal stories humanize one of the most overlooked human-rights struggles in the world.

Could I protect my father

from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife?

That was the question I faced

one Tuesday morning in June of 1993,

when I was a law student.

I woke up early that morning

in Dad's apartment

on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria,

to an unrelenting pounding on the front door.

It was a season as described by a local paper

when every Tuesday a scholar fell

to the bullets of fundamentalist assassins.

My father's university teaching of Darwin

had already provoked a classroom visit

from the head of the so-called
Islamic Salvation Front,

who denounced Dad as an advocate of biologism

before Dad had ejected the man,

and now whoever was outside

would neither identify himself nor go away.

So my father tried to get the police on the phone,

but perhaps terrified by the rising tide

of armed extremism that had already claimed

the lives of so many Algerian officers,

they didn't even answer.

And that was when I went to the kitchen,

got out a paring knife,

and took up a position inside the entryway.

It was a ridiculous thing to do, really,

but I couldn't think of anything else,

and so there I stood.

When I look back now, I think
that that was the moment

that set me on the path was to writing a book

called "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here:

Untold Stories from the Fight
Against Muslim Fundamentalism."

The title comes from a Pakistani play.

I think it was actually that moment

that sent me on the journey

to interview 300 people of Muslim heritage

from nearly 30 countries,

from Afghanistan to Mali,

to find out how they fought fundamentalism

peacefully like my father did,

and how they coped with the attendant risks.

Luckily, back in June of 1993,

our unidentified visitor went away,

but other families were so much less lucky,

and that was the thought
that motivated my research.

In any case, someone would return

a few months later and leave a note

on Dad's kitchen table,

which simply said, "Consider yourself dead."

Subsequently, Algeria's
fundamentalist armed groups

would murder as many as 200,000 civilians

in what came to be known

as the dark decade of the 1990s,

including every single one

of the women that you see here.

In its harsh counterterrorist response,

the state resorted to torture

and to forced disappearances,

and as terrible as all of these events became,

the international community largely ignored them.

Finally, my father, an Algerian
peasant's son turned professor,

was forced to stop teaching at the university

and to flee his apartment,

but what I will never forget

about Mahfoud Bennoune, my dad,

was that like so many other Algerian intellectuals,

he refused to leave the country

and he continued to publish pointed criticisms,

both of the fundamentalists

and sometimes of the government they battled.

For example, in a November 1994 series

in the newspaper El Watan

entitled "How Fundamentalism

Produced a Terrorism without Precedent,"

he denounced what he called

the terrorists' radical break with the true Islam

as it was lived by our ancestors.

These were words that could get you killed.

My father's country taught me

in that dark decade of the 1990s that

the popular struggle against Muslim fundamentalism

is one of the most important

and overlooked human rights struggles

in the world.

This remains true today, nearly 20 years later.

You see, in every country

where you hear about armed jihadis

targeting civilians,

there are also unarmed people

defying those militants that you don't hear about,

and those people need our support to succeed.

In the West, it's often assumed

that Muslims generally condone terrorism.

Some on the right think this because they view

Muslim culture as inherently violent,

and some on the left imagine this

because they view Muslim violence,

fundamentalist violence,

solely as a product of legitimate grievances.

But both views are dead wrong.

In fact, many people of Muslim heritage

around the world are staunch opponents

both of fundamentalism and of terrorism,

and often for very good reason.

You see, they're much more likely to be victims

of this violence than its perpetrators.

Let me just give you one example.

According to a 2009 survey

of Arabic language media resources,

between 2004 and 2008,

no more than 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims

were Westerners.

That's a terrible toll, but the vast majority

were people of Muslim heritage,

killed by Muslim fundamentalists.

Now I've been talking for the last five minutes

about fundamentalism, and you have a right to know

exactly what I mean.

I cite the definition given by the Algerian sociologist

Marieme Helie Lucas,

and she says that fundamentalisms,

note the "s," so within all of the world's

great religious traditions,

"fundamentalisms are political
movements of the extreme right

which in a context of globalization

manipulate religion in order to achieve

their political aims."

Sadia Abbas has called this the radical politicization

of theology.

Now I want to avoid projecting the notion

that there's sort of a monolith out there

called Muslim fundamentalism
that is the same everywhere,

because these movements
also have their diversities.

Some use and advocate violence.

Some do not, though they're often interrelated.

They take different forms.

Some may be non-governmental organizations,

even here in Britain like Cageprisoners.

Some may become political parties,

like the Muslim Brotherhood,

and some may be openly armed groups

like the Taliban.

But in any case, these are all radical projects.

They're not conservative or traditional approaches.

They're most often about changing
people's relationship with Islam

rather than preserving it.

What I am talking about is the Muslim extreme right,

and the fact that its adherents are

or purport to be Muslim

makes them no less offensive

than the extreme right anywhere else.

So in my view, if we consider ourselves

liberal or left-wing,

human rights-loving or feminist,

we must oppose these movements

and support their grassroots opponents.

Now let me be clear

that I support an effective struggle

against fundamentalism,

but also a struggle that must itself

respect international law,

so nothing I am saying should be taken

as a justification for refusals

to democratize,

and here I send out a shout-out of support

to the pro-democracy movement
in Algeria today, Barakat.

Nor should anything I say be taken

as a justification of violations of human rights,

like the mass death sentences

handed out in Egypt earlier this week.

But what I am saying

is that we must challenge these
Muslim fundamentalist movements

because they threaten human rights

across Muslim-majority contexts,

and they do this in a range of ways,

most obviously with the direct attacks on civilians

by the armed groups that carry those out.

But that violence is just the tip of the iceberg.

These movements as a whole purvey discrimination

against religious minorities and sexual minorities.

They seek to curtail the freedom of religion

of everyone who either practices in a different way

or chooses not to practice.

And most definingly, they lead an all-out war

on the rights of women.

Now, faced with these movements

in recent years, Western discourse

has most often offered

two flawed responses.

The first that one sometimes finds on the right

suggests that most Muslims are fundamentalist

or something about Islam is
inherently fundamentalist,

and this is just offensive and wrong,

but unfortunately on the left
one sometimes encounters

a discourse that is too politically correct

to acknowledge the problem of
Muslim fundamentalism at all

or, even worse, apologizes for it,

and this is unacceptable as well.

So what I'm seeking is a new way

of talking about this all together,

which is grounded in the lived experiences

and the hope of the people on the front lines.

I'm painfully aware that there has been

an increase in discrimination
against Muslims in recent years

in countries like the U.K. and the U.S.,

and that too is a matter of grave concern,

but I firmly believe

that telling these counter-stereotypical stories

of people of Muslim heritage

who have confronted the fundamentalists

and been their primary victims

is also a great way of countering that discrimination.

So now let me introduce you

to four people whose stories

I had the great honor of telling.

Faizan Peerzada and the Rafi Peer Theatre

workshop named for his father

have for years promoted the performing arts

in Pakistan.

With the rise of jihadist violence,

they began to receive threats

to call off their events, which they refused to heed.

And so a bomber struck their 2008

eighth world performing arts festival in Lahore,

producing rain of glass

that fell into the venue

injuring nine people,

and later that same night,

the Peerzadas made a very difficult decision:

they announced that their festival

would continue as planned the next day.

As Faizan said at the time,

if we bow down to the Islamists,

we'll just be sitting in a dark corner.

But they didn't know what would happen.

Would anyone come?

In fact, thousands of people came out the next day

to support the performing arts in Lahore,

and this simultaneously thrilled

and terrified Faizan,

and he ran up to a woman

who had come in with her two small children,

and he said, "You do know there
was a bomb here yesterday,

and you do know there's a threat here today."

And she said, "I know that,

but I came to your festival

with my mother when I was their age,

and I still have those images in my mind.

We have to be here."

With stalwart audiences like this,

the Peerzadas were able to conclude

their festival on schedule.

And then the next year,

they lost all of their sponsors

due to the security risk.

So when I met them in 2010,

they were in the middle of the first subsequent event

that they were able to have in the same venue,

and this was the ninth youth performing arts festival

held in Lahore in a year when that city

had already experienced 44 terror attacks.

This was a time when the Pakistani Taliban

had commenced their systematic targeting

of girls' schools that would culminate

in the attack on Malala Yousafzai.

What did the Peerzadas do in that environment?

They staged girls' school theater.

So I had the privilege of watching "Naang Wal,"

which was a musical in the Punjabi language,

and the girls of Lahore Grammar School

played all the parts.

They sang and danced,

they played the mice and the water buffalo,

and I held my breath, wondering,

would we get to the end

of this amazing show?

And when we did, the whole audience

collectively exhaled,

and a few people actually wept,

and then they filled the auditorium

with the peaceful boom of their applause.

And I remember thinking in that moment

that the bombers made headlines here

two years before

but this night and these people

are as important a story.

Maria Bashir is the first and only

woman chief prosecutor in Afghanistan.

She's been in the post since 2008

and actually opened an office to investigate

cases of violence against women,

which she says is the most important area

in her mandate.

When I meet her in her office in Herat,

she enters surrounded by

four large men with four huge guns.

In fact, she now has 23 bodyguards,

because she has weathered bomb attacks

that nearly killed her kids,

and it took the leg off of one of her guards.

Why does she continue?

She says with a smile that that is the question

that everyone asks—

as she puts it, "Why you risk not living?"

And it is simply that for her,

a better future for all the Maria Bashirs to come

is worth the risk,

and she knows that if people like her

do not take the risk,

there will be no better future.

Later on in our interview,

Prosecutor Bashir tells me how worried she is

about the possible outcome

of government negotiations with the Taliban,

the people who have been trying to kill her.

"If we give them a place in the government,"

she asks, "Who will protect women's rights?"

And she urges the international community

not to forget its promise about women

because now they want peace with Taliban.

A few weeks after I leave Afghanistan,

I see a headline on the Internet.

An Afghan prosecutor has been assassinated.

I google desperately,

and thankfully that day I find out

that Maria was not the victim,

though sadly, another Afghan prosecutor

was gunned down on his way to work.

And when I hear headlines like that now,

I think that as international troops

leave Afghanistan this year and beyond,

we must continue to care

about what happens to people there,

to all of the Maria Bashirs.

Sometimes I still hear her voice in my head

saying, with no bravado whatsoever,

"The situation of the women of Afghanistan

will be better someday.

We should prepare the ground for this,

even if we are killed."

There are no words adequate

to denounce the al Shabaab terrorists

who attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi

on the same day as a children's cooking competition

in September of 2013.

They killed 67, including poets and pregnant women.

Far away in the American Midwest,

I had the good fortune of meeting Somali-Americans

who were working to counter
the efforts of al Shabaab

to recruit a small number of young people

from their city of Minneapolis

to take part in atrocities like Westgate.

Abdirizak Bihi's studious

17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan

was recruited here in 2008,

spirited to Somalia,

and then killed when he tried to come home.

Since that time, Mr. Bihi,

who directs the no-budget Somali
Education and Advocacy Center,

has been vocally denouncing the recruitment

and the failures of government

and Somali-American institutions

like the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center

where he believes his nephew was radicalized

during a youth program.

But he doesn't just criticize the mosque.

He also takes on the government

for its failure to do more

to prevent poverty in his community.

Given his own lack of financial resources,

Mr. Bihi has had to be creative.

To counter the efforts of al Shabaab

to sway more disaffected youth,

in the wake of the group's 2010 attack

on World Cup viewers in Uganda,

he organized a Ramadan basketball tournament

in Minneapolis in response.

Scores of Somali-American kids came out

to embrace sport

despite the fatwa against it.

They played basketball

as Burhan Hassan never would again.

For his efforts, Mr. Bihi has been ostracized

by the leadership of the Abubakar
As-Saddique Islamic Center,

with which he used to have good relations.

He told me, "One day we saw the imam on TV

calling us infidels and saying,

'These families are trying to destroy the mosque.'"

This is at complete odds

with how Abdirizak Bihi understands

what he is trying to do

by exposing al Shabaab recruitment,

which is to save the religion I love

from a small number of extremists.

Now I want to tell one last story,

that of a 22-year-old law student in Algeria

named Amel Zenoune-Zouani

who had the same dreams of a legal career

that I did back in the '90s.

She refused to give up her studies,

despite the fact that the fundamentalists

battling the Algerian state back then

threatened all who continued their education.

On January 26, 1997, Amel boarded the bus

in Algiers where she was studying

to go home and spend a Ramadan evening

with her family,

and would never finish law school.

When the bus reached the outskirts

of her hometown, it was stopped

at a checkpoint manned by men

from the Armed Islamic Group.

Carrying her schoolbag,

Amel was taken off the bus

and killed in the street.

The men who cut her throat

then told everyone else,

"If you go to university,

the day will come when we will kill all of you

just like this."

Amel died at exactly 5:17 p.m.,

which we know because when she fell in the street,

her watch broke.

Her mother showed me the watch

with the second hand still aimed

optimistically upward

towards a 5:18 that would never come.

Shortly before her death,

Amel had said to her mother of herself

and her sisters,

"Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah, God willing,

but if something happens,

you must know that we are dead for knowledge.

You and father must keep your heads held high."

The loss of such a young woman is unfathomable,

and so as I did my research

I found myself searching for Amel's hope again

and her name even means "hope" in Arabic.

I think I found it in two places.

The first is in the strength of her family

and all the other families to
continue telling their stories

and to go on with their lives despite the terrorism.

In fact, Amel's sister Lamia overcame her grief,

went to law school,

and practices as a lawyer in Algiers today,

something which is only possible

because the armed fundamentalists

were largely defeated in the country.

And the second place I found Amel's hope

was everywhere that women and men

continue to defy the jihadis.

We must support all of those in honor of Amel

who continue this human rights struggle today,

like the Network of Women
Living Under Muslim Laws.

It is not enough, as the victims rights advocate

Cherifa Kheddar told me in Algiers,

it is not enough just to battle terrorism.

We must also challenge fundamentalism,

because fundamentalism is the ideology

that makes the bed of this terrorism.

Why is it that people like her, like all of them

are not more well known?

Why is it that everyone knows
who Osama bin Laden was

and so few know of all of those

standing up to the bin Ladens in their own contexts.

We must change that, and so I ask you

to please help share these stories

through your networks.

Look again at Amel Zenoune's watch,

forever frozen,

and now please look at your own watch

and decide this is the moment that you commit

to supporting people like Amel.

We don't have the right to be silent about them

because it is easier

or because Western policy is flawed as well,

because 5:17 is still coming

to too many Amel Zenounes

in places like northern Nigeria,

where jihadis still kill students.

The time to speak up in support of all of those

who peacefully challenge fundamentalism

and terrorism in their own communities

is now.

Thank you.

(Applause)