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M.M. Alam: Justice and Peace Are Not Always Binary Options
Written by Dr. Mohd, Manzoor Alam, Director, Institute of Objective Studies, India
Monday, January 2, 2006
I would like to make a statement and an appeal: “Might cannot be treated as right, suspicion cannot be treated as proof or evidence, and vanity cannot be accepted as law of peace.”
The media is a powerful weapon, the weapon that is being used with great force, tact and ruthlessness to attack Islam and Muslims. People do believe what media tells them to believe, because a time comes when media, from being a carrier of a message, becomes the message itself. Today this message is that Islam is violence. This is one big fat lie which must be nailed. You must begin to nail it with your great scholarship and erudition.
- Genghis Khan killed far more people in his life than were killed in all wars between Muslims and non-Muslims till then. And Genghis Khan was not a Muslim.
- Far more people died in World War I than in all wars between Muslims and non-Muslims till then. And World War I was not started or fought by Islam.
- Far, far more people died in World War II than in all wars between Muslims and non-Muslims over the entire history of Islam. World War II was not started or fought by Islam and Muslims.
- Fascism, which claimed tens of million of lives, was not the invention of Islam or Muslims.
- Nazism, which devoured millions upon millions of lives, too, was not a creation of Islam. Hitler, who killed millions was not a Muslim, nor was Mussolini.
- Not Stalin either, who killed 30 million people.
- Nor Pol Pot, who decimated several million.
- Nor the great torch-bearer of “civilization,” Columbus, whose “discovery of America” led to the murder of million Red Indians in cold blood and the enslavement of generations of black Africans.
Islam did not do any of these. Please remember all this before being misled by media malevolence.Intellectuals and Muslim leaders have a duty to go deeper into facts of history and analyze present trends with caution, with academic rigor and independence of thinking.
Peace, justice, freedom and equality are mainsprings and cornerstone of modern political society. All these are equally cherished as moral and spiritual values in different religions, especially in Islam. These values create space in political society:
a. Culture space
b. Identity space
c. Religion space for understanding and interaction in different sections of the society.
The dynamic force of Islam is da’wah (inviting people to Islam), and da’wah is a source of reform, sharing in thought and action, creating an environment of justice, peace, freedom, and equality. It leads to tolerance and brotherhood in the society. But in real world conditions, one is perpetually involved in making a choice between conflicting values. Those who exalt “peace” above all else, disregarding the vital value of justice, are either naïve, hipocritcal, or insensitive to injustice because of their own class, national privilege or position.
In the eyes of Islam peace is accorded a fairly high ranking in the hierarchy of values; but not so injustice. The Qur’an, and the life of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as exemplfier of each teaching, enjoins on every righteous person the duty to oppose injustice and oppression to anyone anywhere. In real life, however, the option is not always binary between “justice” and “peace” or between “equality” and “freedom.” There are shades within each category that require discrimination, that is, tolerable inequality reconciled to larger freedom, and tolerable injustice reconciled to pervasive peace, and vice versa.
It is here that civic responsibility demands the Muslim, like any other committed humanist, to engage in a peaceful moral struggle to eradicate injustice from human society, which should involve him in an intellectual and leadership quest of understanding afresh what constitutes injustice, its modalities, and who and what factors are responsible for it. When to use force is again a question of choice to be transparently decided upon depending on the nature and dimension of the issue. When opting for using force, one has to weigh the pros and cons, evaluating whether it can be efficacious in achieving the goal, whether it will be possible to observe the ethical legal norms of no harm to noncombatants, and also whether the result would be worse anarchy and disorder than before.
In conclusion, civic responsibility in political society will never be discharged; it is endless. We Muslims understand the nature of change and the requirements of the global scenario from the Islamic perspective. It is the duty of intellectuals and Muslim leaders to sit together, to think and plan together, and work together to save humanity.
[Source: Islamic Perspectives on Peace. Tarrytown, NY: Universal Peace Federation, 2006.]