-
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,
-
[?].
-
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 the
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 pervade 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 Nang 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 26th, 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 the 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 watched 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)