Judea Pearl and Akbar Ahmed's Interfaith Dialogues

DATE October 10, 2006 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl,
and Akbar Ahmed who teaches Islamic studies at American University
discuss their collaborating on a series of interfaith dialogues
across the US and abroad
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The reporter Daniel Pearl would have celebrated his 43rd birthday today.
Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic extremists in 2002 while reporting
in Pakistan for The Wall Street Journal. A documentary about his life and
death will be shown tonight on HBO. After his death, his father, Judea Pearl,
wanted to start a series of dialogues with a Muslim partner to exchange ideas
and air grievances in the hopes of reaching common ground. Several people
recommended Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University
in Washington, DC. Since 2003, they've spoken together at forums around the
country and recently received the $100,000 Purpose Prize for fighting
intolerance, conflict and terrorism through dialogue. Pearl and Ahmed are my
guests. Judea Pearl grew up in Israel. He's a professor of computer sciences
at UCLA and founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation to promote cross-cultural
understanding through journalism and music. Akbar Ahmed grew up in Pakistan
and formerly served as Pakistan's ambassador to the UK.

Akbar Ahmed, Judea Pearl, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Judea Pearl, you've said that one of the things you've wanted these interfaith
dialogues with Akbar Ahmed to accomplish was to air the grievances that you
each had. What were the grievances you wanted to bring up in this dialogue?

Mr. JUDEA PEARL: The main grievance that the Jewish community holds against
the Muslim community is that we do not hear the voice of the moderate Muslims
loud and clear against terrorism, specifically against the suicide bombers in
Israel, as well against suicide bombers in Iraq. The other grievance we have
is the anti-Zionist rhetoric that borders on insults in many of the writings
and speeches of Muslim leaders. These are the two main grievances, and I am
sure that Akbar has similar grievances toward our community.

GROSS: Akbar Ahmed, can I ask you, you know, Judea Pearl says that one of his
grievances is where are the voices of the moderate Muslims who oppose suicide
bombers. What do you say? I'm sure people ask you that a lot, so what do you
say?

Mr. AKBAR AHMED: I tell you you're talking to one of them. No, my answer
seriously is that you need to tune up your hearing aid a little bit higher
because there are many, many Muslims talking--I don't call them moderates and
fundamentalists and these words are meaningless, but there are thousands and
thousands of Muslims risking their lives, standing up and talking, defying
tyrannical regimes, sometimes being killed, sometimes being marginalized,
sometimes being chased out. We've all--all of us who've lived in the Muslim
world have suffered for this. I've personally suffered. I've been attacked,
both in writing and print and sometimes physically, and it is a very difficult
exercise.

What we need to do is to be heard. We're just not heard, so what happens is
that the Western media very often picks up the extremist voices who may be
limited in their impact, who may have a very small following, and yet their
importance is exaggerated to the point where people begin to feel that they
represent mainstream society, and the fact of the matter is they simply don't,
and this is confirmed by election after election after election in normal
times. These religious or the fanatical or the extremist groups have never
done well in normal times in any election in the Muslim world.

GROSS: And, Judea Pearl, does that satisfy your...

Mr. PEARL: No, it doesn't.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. PEARL: Even the moderate leaders of the Muslim society, they speak
against the violence associated with terrorism, but they do not speak against
the incitement. Most Muslim leaders play the game of condemning violence and
fueling the anger. You ought to be angry, you have a reason to be angry, but
do not resort to violence is a mixed message that is very dangerous, and we do
not want this to happen.

GROSS: Do you each feel like you've changed your mind about something or
learned about something that you didn't already know or comprehend from
listening to the other speak?

Mr. PEARL: Sure. I learned a lot about the mind-set of Muslim society. I
learned, for instance, that they are extremely devout, religious, that
religious metaphors mean a lot whereas we in the West tend to belittle the
significance of religious terminology or religious metaphors that are taken
very seriously in the Muslim society, and we should be very sensitive to it.
And that works both ways, both sensitive to and able to utilize that language
in order to advance in order to communicate, and this is the reason why I have
been advocating for many months now the use of fatwa. It means for moderate
Muslims to fight terrorism. It is a language understood by a person in the
street. The secular language is totally dismissed.

GROSS: Akbar Ahmed, what do you think of Judea Pearl's idea of Muslim leaders
issuing fatwas against terrorism.

Mr. AHMED: Well, that's one of the points that I raised when we first
talked. We had many examples of Muslims that particularly Muslims prominent
in the media here in the West who are so secular that they were completely cut
off from their own community, and therefore no one took them too seriously.
Or they were not able to alter very much in their own communities. so Judea
is absolutely right. `You must fight fire with fire,' so if you need to take
on the extremists, the fanatics, you need to do it in the context within which
that culture works. This is the whole point. That is the whole point to
what's happening in Iraq, what's happening in Afghanistan. This is the point
of understanding that we don't completely comprehend here in the West and
that's why we fail. We are failing in both these countries. If we had been
able to fight this battle in a different way, I think the outcome would have
been very different. So I completely agree that you've got to couch your
terms, your debate, the references within the context of a particular culture.

GROSS: What I'd like to do is spend a little bit of time with each of you
talking individually so, Judea Pearl, if I may talk with you first...

Mr. PEARL: Sure.

GROSS: ...one on one. We're broadcasting this interview on October 10th and
this is the day that would have been your son's birthday. What are some of
the things that you and the foundation you've created in his name are doing to
honor him today?

Mr. PEARL: The main project on that day is a Daniel Pearl World Music day.
We put together hundreds of concerts by thousands of musicians in honor of his
life and in honor of the ideals for which he stood and giving the chance for
musicians to express their commitment to tolerance and humanity.

GROSS: Well, when your son was executed by Islamist extremists, why did you
want dialogue and concert events as opposed to just anger?

Mr. PEARL: Well, I'm an engineer. I'm results-driven, and I would like--I'm
committed to fight the hatred that took my son's life, and I have to do it in
the most effective ways available to me, given the resources in my position,
and I have only one kind of resource, and it is a legacy of a person who
earned respect from both sides of the East-West divide, and there aren't many
such icons. We have one and we have to use it effectively. So what means are
available to me and what ways can I exploit that weapon to get to the end
result, which is reduction of hatred?

GROSS: When your son, Danny Pearl, became the South Asia bureau chief for The
Wall Street Journal and started covering extremism in Pakistan, were you
worried about him? Were you worried specifically about him being Jewish
covering Islamist extremists?

Mr. PEARL: I should say that first Danny never concealed his Jewish origins,
and he spent many years in the Middle East. He had a way of charming his
audiences and making his open-mindedness and his universal posture known and
shine so--and he also--at that time he believed that he had an aura of
protection by being a journalist. You should remember that he was the first
journalist that was abducted and killed under such circumstances. At that
time, we didn't understand that terrorism would get so entrenched in the mores
of our culture. That was after the US decided to bomb Afghanistan, the
demonstrations in Pakistan, but I don't think people understood that that was
going to become part of the normative life as it developed later in Iraq and
elsewhere. In a sense, he was the victim for being the first.

GROSS: Judea Pearl, what were your son's last words before he was beheaded.
This was recorded on tape so that we know what the last words were.

Mr. PEARL: He said, `My name is Daniel Pearl. I'm an American Jewish
journalist from Encino, California. And my father is Jewish, my mother is
Jewish, and I'm Jewish.' And then he added one more sentence, which is still
puzzling to my ears. It is, `Back in the town of Bnei Brak there is a street
named after my great-great-grandfather Chaim Pearl, who was one of the
founders of the town.' And I'm--we are still trying to decipher the reason
that in such a critical moment of a person's life, his mind would stumble on
an anecdotal story in our family lore. We haven't elaborated on that story.
We've probably on that street only once, and for some reason, his mind
stumbled on that story. I can write volumes of interpretations of what he
meant by that, but that will be partly speculation and partly wishful
thinking. And, by the way, this sentence, they could not possibly have forced
him to say, because only our family knew about that street in Bnei Brak, so it
might have been a code for him to tell us, `I'm doing OK and I'm speaking
freely." But, obviously, they had selected and pasted together sentences that
they considered to be incriminating, namely those connected with Judaism.

GROSS: What impact did it have on you to know that it was beheading that
ended your son's life, that that's what he...

Mr. PEARL: Well, obviously, it's a symbolic act that represents defeat. `We
have defeated you.' And this is the ultimate symbol of defeat, cutting
someone's head. To us, it means different. It means you have tried to make
your point and you made a mistake, which means that the mistake that Danny's
murderers made is bringing that camera into the dungeon in Pakistan because by
zooming in on Danny's face, they zoomed world attention onto American
education, the character of American people, their openmindedness, their
friendliness and the character that Danny represented, and that is not exactly
the image of Americans and Jews that the murderers tried to advertise, and
that was their defeat, not ours.

GROSS: I'm assuming that you have never watched any of the video of your
son's execution.

Mr. PEARL: I watched the benevolent part, the first part when he recites his
narrative...

GROSS: And then you turned it off before...

Mr. PEARL: Sure.

GROSS: ...getting to the execution.

Mr. PEARL: Sure.

GROSS: Does it upset you knowing that there are videos someplace of that?

Mr. PEARL: It does, but perhaps for a different reason than people think. I
don't think we should be defeated, and being exposed to such scenes, no matter
how much we resist it, it induces a feeling of defeat, and we ain't going to
be defeated. We are going to win this war.

GROSS: And when you say `win this war,' what do you mean by winning?

Mr. PEARL: Eradicating the hatred that took Danny's life. There is a clear
war here between those who boast in the killing of innocent journalists and
those who are abhorred by such actions. It's very clear. If there is
anything that Danny's tragedy has given us, it is the idea that right and
wrong are right and wrong, namely that moral relativism is dead. It died with
Danny in Karachi in 2002. There is right and wrong, and there's no ifs and no
buts. There is right and wrong. Those who killed Danny are simply wrong in
absolute terms.

GROSS: Judea Pearl, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. PEARL: Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Judea Pearl created the Daniel Pearl Foundation in honor of his late
son. A documentary about Daniel Pearl's life and death will be shown tonight
on HBO.

Coming up, we talk more with Judea Pearl's interfaith dialogue partner, Akbar
Ahmed.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American
University in Washington, DC. Since 2003, he's been holding a series of
interfaith dialogues with Judea Pearl, the father of the journalist Daniel
Pearl who was beheaded by Islamic extremists. Ahmed has been involved in
interfaith dialogues for many years. His book "Discovering Islam" was the
basis of a BBC series. His latest book is called "Islam Under Siege." He was
born in India but his parents moved the family to the newly created Muslim
state of Pakistan in 1947. I asked him why his parents wanted to live in a
Muslim state.

Mr. AHMED: I think all of us want to live in freedom. However attractive it
is living in a country which is perpetually ruled or administered by people
who are of a different faith or culture, we do want our own freedoms. The
Americans wanted their own freedom. They could have been very happy under the
British colonial system under the king of England, but they wanted their own
country. Every country--every people want their own country and the Muslims
of India wanted to live as independent people so they fought for their
independence from the British and got the state of Pakistan.

GROSS: Something that seems kind of paradoxical in your life is that after
your parents give up everything to move to the newly created state of
Pakistan, the new Muslim state, they send you to Catholic school.

Mr. AHMED: Not really paradoxical. If you know the traditions of South
Asia, you'll understand that some of the finest schools there are run by
Christian missionaries. They're very popular and they're accepted, and we
grew up in this Muslim country in a school run by Catholic missionaries, and
my wife and my sisters went to parallel schools run by nuns--Catholic nuns,
and these still remain the most popular schools in Pakistan, and a lot of the
well-known names come from these schools. Benazir Bhutto, for example, was at
the convent run by the Catholic nuns, and we really learned as young boys at
this boarding school up in north Pakistan the values that these priests
embodied. And I know they get a terrible press here in the United States but
these were extraordinary human beings. They represented piety, they were
virtuous, they were hard-working and they were always father figures to us, so
we really learned a great deal from them about their faith and about life in
general, and these qualities have stood by and benefited us throughout our
lives.

GROSS: Now, in one of your books, you write about, like, how, you know, a lot
of people in your generation, in South Asia, you grew up with a vision of
being educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Why was that important to you and so
many other people of your generation and why do you think that that has
changed in the sense that now, in Pakistan, there is so much hatred of the
United States and of England, as opposed to--you might want to correct me on
that. Maybe that's not the way you see it, but I know in some circles there
certainly is. So instead of a desire to go there and be educated, there is a
desire on the part of many to attack.

Mr. AHMED: A very good question. When I was growing up in the 1960s after
my schooling at Burn Hall, I was at Foreman Christian College in Lahore a
premier college in Pakistan where President Musharraf studied and very
respected, very popular and run by American missionaries, Protestants, from
the United States. We loved our teachers, and they were wonderful, wonderful
people, wonderful mentors, always welcoming, asking us to come to the United
States for education. But in the '60s, until the '60s, the trend was among
young Pakistanis to come to the United Kingdom to try to get to Oxford or
Cambridge, and we were just coming out of the colonial era and England really
was very much on the horizon as the great country to visit and to be educated
at, and you're right.

Over the next generation, I saw how the backlash began to build up against
Western culture, against Western education, against Western schooling, so that
a priest, a Christian priest, killed himself, a bishop shot himself a few
years ago in Pakistan. There was such despair in him, and you can imagine a
Christian priest killing himself when he's not allowed to commit suicide,
wanting to express the extent of despair in his community, and I just thought
to myself, my God, in one generation from these figures of authority and
beloved figures that were the priests of my generation to a time when
Christian bishops are killing themselves, what has happened to us as a
society, as Muslims? Have we become so intolerant, have we become so
fanatical, have we closed our minds, and there is a crisis taking place in
Muslim society generally. It is a crisis of education, of politics of
morality, of direction, and it's not being helped by the lack of understanding
in the West about what's happening in the Muslim world.

GROSS: Akbar Ahmed is a professor of Islamic studies at American University.
He's latest book is called "Islam Under Siege." He'll be back in the second
half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

I'm Terry Gross, back with Akbar Ahmed. Since 2003 he's been holding a series
of public interfaith dialogues with Judea Pearl, the father of the journalist
Daniel Pearl who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. Ahmed was born in India
and moved with his parents to the newly created Muslim state of Pakistan in
1947. He studied at Cambridge University and London University and served as
Pakistan's ambassador to the UK. He's now a professor of Islamic studies at
American University. His latest book is called "Islam under Siege."

What were the first signs that you saw of radical Islam?

Mr. AHMED: I think the first signs I saw of this new phenomena called
radical Islam were in 1990s in the United Kingdom. When I talked of dialogue,
I was one of the first--probably the first Muslim to be invited to talk at
this major synogogue in London and then at a chapel in Cambridge to address
the Evensong. These were really firsts taking place in the United Kingdom in
terms of interfaith dialogue, and I was attacked by a lot of radical Muslims
who said that Akbar has sold out and he's gone to a synogogue and a church and
he should be punished and he should be excommunicated and all kinds of violent
things. Now this debate was taking place in the Muslim press. I also had a
lot of supporters, including imams, who said that what Akbar is doing is the
correct thing, that Islam preaches and teaches interfaith dialogue and
understanding and compassion and bridge building.

So, in a sense, when I hear this question, `Where are the moderates,' I simply
reply, `You must look a bit harder and you must listen a bit more carefully.
There are moderates and there have been moderates fighting this battle long
before 9/11. It is your problem that you are not able to see them. You
suddenly discovered this question after 9/11. You should have discovered this
question before 9/11 and maybe 9/11 would not have happened. Maybe the
moderates would have succeeded and the fanatics and the extremists would not
have been able to perpetuate this terrible crime on 9/11 and kill thousands of
innocent people.' But the debate was taking place, and I saw this happening in
the United Kingdom, and I said, `My God, there is a storm coming here because
unless mainstream society understands what is happening, they will all be
involved in it,' and I'm sorry to say no one either understood or bothered.
They all thought that this was a sort of typical community problem dealing
with some esoteric part of some alien exotic community from Asia.

GROSS: One of the people who denounced you for participating in interfaith
dialogues and for speaking at a chapel and at a synogogue was Sheik Omar
Bakri, who later declared himself to be bin Laden's chief agent in the UK.
What was it like to confront him and what was he doing at the time that he
first denounced you? Maybe you could tell us approximately what year this
was.

Mr. AHMED: Sheik Bakri in the mid-90s was a very powerful and a noisy figure
in the United Kingdom, mainly because of the media. He didn't have so much
support in the community, but he was always in the media saying the most
outrageous things, and he saw me as a kind of conceptual opposite to where he
stood. He denounced me as a person who was talking to the Jews and the
Christians and he said, `Akbar is too influenced by Western civilization.' He
called me an Uncle Tom, all kinds of things.

Now when a leader begins to whip up emotion, the danger is that some young,
uneducated, illiterate idiot is so motivated that he may go and do something
violent, and my family was always concerned. My wife was always worried about
this. My neighbor in Cambridge, Sir David Lane, a wonderful, wonderful
statesman from England, a member of Parliament, a former minister in the
cabinet, was very concerned. He said, `Akbar, you should go report this to
the police because you just don't know. There's just so much hatred this man
is spewing against you.' And I said, `No, he knows where I live and everyone
knows where I live and I'm not going to back down. This is a battle that has
to be fought.' And we must be out there fighting this battle, and one of the
hazards is the fact that something violent may happen. Nothing happened and,
of course, I continued my campaign to have dialogue and be committed to
dialogue, and I was able to go to synagogues, churches, even Hindu temples,
and I always found a very warm and very positive response from people of these
faiths as I visited them.

GROSS: One of the things I don't understand, and I think a lot of people
share this confusion, is why does somebody like Sheik Omar Bakri leave his
country of Syria, go to the United Kingdom, where he's going to have more
freedom to speak, and then turn against the country that has given you that
freedom?

Mr. AHMED: I didn't understand this idea either, and I would constantly tell
my Muslim audiences that they were very privileged, very lucky to be in the
United Kingdom. It's a very tolerant society. And yet you had these emerging
figures talking and practicing hatred.

What was dangerous is the Western media by constantly picking them up and
injecting them into the discourse. They took marginal figures and made them
mainstream. So it did two things. It gave the impression in the Western mind
that all Islam men were these terrorists, fanatical extremists, wild-eyed
characters like Bakri and what it did to the Muslims was convince them that
people like Bakri were the genuine leaders. After all, they may have seen
them on the BBC last night or heard them on the radio that morning, and they
were convinced, `These are our leaders. They speak for us.'

GROSS: Now, you have a great line in one of your books. You say, and I'm
paraphrasing here, that religion is no longer the opiate of the masses. It's
more like speed. So I'm going to--good line--I'm going to ask you to
elaborate on that.

Mr. AHMED: Well, a century ago Nietzsche had said that religion is dead and
Karl Marx, even before that in the 19th century, talked of religion as an
opiate of the masses having dismissed it, so the common belief in the 19th
century was that religion is outdated, that the future is going to be
progressive, socialist, scientific and so on. There would be no room for
religion.

And yet we see today in the 21st century, there is nothing but religion in one
form or another form, so whether it's in the United States, whether it's in
the Muslim world, where it's Hinduism, Buddhism, there is great interest in
religion because human beings essentially want answers. They want to be able
to communicate. They want to be able to relate. They want to be able to
understand what they're doing here in this physical sense on this planet. And
religion in one way or the other helps them, you know, find these answers. It
may not be strictly formal religion. It may be distorted versions of
religion, and we have seen a lot of that in this century, but it is religion
in a very broad sense, and religion really is on speed right now because we're
seeing religion in some of its most crude and brazen forms. So we're not
seeing so much of the compassion and the balance and the beauty of religion.
We're seeing more of this aggressive, hostility of religion.

GROSS: Do you think it's been difficult to convince the followers of radical
Islam that their form of Islam is not the true way?

Mr. AHMED: It is difficult. I have constantly tried to communicate this
message of compassionate Islam to a variety of Muslim audiences, and I talk to
Muslim audiences throughout the world. When I talk to them, they come up with
standard answers. You'll hear them everywhere. They'll give a long list of
complaints of the predicament of the Palestinians, of the Kashmiris, of the
Chechens and the Balkans. They'll talk about Muslim countries like
Afghanistan and Iraq being invaded. They'll talk about the natural resources
being exploited and they'll talk about their own leaders being the simple
puppets of the West set up to exploit their nations, and they'll talk about a
great sense of anger and frustration and despair and all these emotions mixed
up in a very volatile mixture, and I think a very dangerous mixture.

And so it is very difficult for a Muslim to be constantly hammering and taking
one position. I have nonetheless pointed out that it is totally unacceptable
to be using the rhetoric of anti-Semitism, to be practicing and preaching
violence, as in the example of Danny Pearl and this brutal killing of this
young man. It makes an impact. A lot of Muslims do listen. A lot of them
have translated my books and have read them, and I obviously make some kind of
impact on some of them, but it is a debate and this will be the big debate of
the 21st century.

It will only be helped if people like you, Terry, are able to enter the
debate, understand it and push it in a certain direction. Because if you
leave it and assume, like many people in the West unfortunately do assume,
that the Muslim world is a monolith, we then do have a problem because if it
is a monolith, we have a problem because then you're talking about 1.4 billion
people, 57 states, one nuclear for the time being and a mode of anger and
anti-Americanism which I have not seen in my years.

GROSS: Now, you're a professor of Islamic studies at American University in
Washington, and you've written that you think that a generation of scholars
has basically been eliminated in some Muslim countries, like Algeria and like
Afghanistan. What's been responsible for that and what impact do you think
that's had on Muslim scholarship and the way Islam is practiced?

Mr. AHMED: Thank you for asking this very important question, Terry. This
question is not asked in the Western media, unfortunately. We must understand
what's going on in Muslim society when scholars who speak up, who talk about
the truth, who tell the truth as it is, and they're not liked by their rulers,
who are very often dictators. Look at the Muslim world. Fifty-seven states,
mostly run by dictators of one kind or another. So no dictator likes people
to stand up and say, `We don't approve of what you're doing' or `What you're
doing is wrong.' And very often scholars are beaten up or killed or chased out
of the country, and very often they end up here in the USA or the United
Kingdom. So there has been a devastating exodus of scholars from the Muslim
world, and I believe that the Muslim world is really, in a sense, paying for
that and will continue to pay for that, so when you look at the quality of
education available in the Muslim world--in my youth in the 1960s, when we
were undergraduates, we really looked to a very bright future in the Muslim
world. We were hoping for a society that would be taking off, which would
become part of the world community of nations which should be able to compete
and contribute, and what we see today is these societies in the Muslim world
falling back. When you look at the educational figures, the health figures,
the figures for all kinds of other statistics, the UNDP report, published by
the United Nations, you see that we do have major problems, and one of the
basic problems is the treatment of the scholars in the Muslim world.

GROSS: My guest is Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at American
University. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American
University. He's participated in interfaith dialogues for many years,
including a continuing series of public dialogues with Judea Pearl, the father
of the journalist Daniel Pearl who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2003.

One of the reasons you've offered to explain why it's been difficult to
counter radical Islam is that you say the role of the clerics, the mullahs and
the sheiks, isn't as--it's not as big a role as, say, as the rabbis in Judaism
or the priests in Christianity. And yet, it seems like, you know, sheiks and
mullahs have so much power now. Look at Iran in which the, you know, the
clerics seem to, you know, run a good deal of the country. So can you explain
that why you say that, you know, clerics in Islam don't have as much power as
their counterparts in...

Mr. AHMED: There's...

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. AHMED: ...some simple rules to understand this very important question.
Iran is a Shia country. In Shia social structure, clerics do have a great
deal of authority and power historically for all kinds of reasons which I
won't go into. As distinct from the Shia are the Sunni. The Sunni are the
majority of the Muslim world, which is about 90 percent. Now among the
Sunnis, the clerics do not have that status or authority as they do have among
the Shia, except in times of emergency or except in times of the emergence of
a charismatic religious figure. So you may have a figure who emerges and
people rally around him and say what a wonderful representative he is. In
normal times, you'd see all the great movements in the last century in the
Muslim world were led again and again by mainstream figures, not by religious
leaders. Jinnah of Pakistan, the founding father; Ataturk in Turkey; in
Morocco, the king, King Mohammed Hassan. All these are normal, ordinary,
everyday figures, not religious figures. This is a very important
distinction.

What you're seeing now, after 9/11, is that the Western media somehow focuses
on religious figures and inflates them to the point of only seeing them and
constantly saying, `Where are the moderates? Where are the other figures?'
They just don't see them. The other figures are there. They're very much in
play, and they're very much back in their corner.

GROSS: But even you ask in one of your books, what happened to
Islam--actually, this is in an Op-Ed piece you wrote, `What happened to
Islam's gentle voices?' So even you're asking that question.

Mr. AHMED: No, I'm asking a different question. I'm asking about the gentle
voices, because even the moderates--and this is what is frightening,
Terry--even the moderates now are exasperated, and they are no longer speaking
in a gentle voice, and that reason is because of the direct relationship,
which is again missed in Western analysis, between what is happening here in
the United States and its impact over there in the Muslim world. So every
time someone attacks the prophet of Islam or the god of Islam or the religion
of Islam or desecrates the Quran or supposed to have desecrated the Quran, it
has an immediate impact in the Muslim world because Muslims are traditionally
a religious people. They have great reverence for their own religion and
their customs and their traditions, and therefore, what that does is it
reinforces, it elevates religious authority in that society so--and that also
encourages an irrational anger, a response which is not reasoned or
compassionate, and that marginalizes those people who are speaking of love or
compassion, which is the mainstream tradition.

If you look at the great poetry and the literature in Muslim society that is
Rumi...(unintelligible)...my part of the world...(unintelligible)...they're
all talking about love, of compassion. If you look at the rhetoric today, it
is all about violence and hatred and blowing up people and blowing themselves
up, and I am seeing a dramatic shift taking place in society. And one of the
reasons is exactly this. That there is the world of the international media.
You have CNN, BBC, Fox, being seen all over the world. You see what's
happening here in these images and these words and sometimes very spiteful and
hateful are being flashed across the Muslim world, and that is feeding into
the anger and the emotion, and therefore the voices of compassion, dialogue,
discussion are simply being drowned out.

GROSS: I understand what you're saying, not that I'd know but I'm not sure
it's completely fair to blame the media for the anger and for the power that
radical voices in the Islam world have now.

Mr. AHMED: You can't find blame in one single monocausal factor. As a
social scientist, you look for different strands in the society. One of the
strands is the media. One of the strands is the impact of what is being seen
in the global media. There is no doubt about it. I have just come back from
the Muslim world. I had a group of wonderful young American students with me
and we conducted questionnaires, interviews, and again and again what came up
was what they are seeing in the Western media and what they were seeing in the
Western media was literally they were seeing Islam under attack. So they'd
constantly say, `Why are you attacking us? Why do you hate us? Why are you
enemies of Islam?' And I would have to answer that question to audiences of
500, 600 people in mosques, in madrasahs, and then I'd ask my American
students, I'd say, `Look, if we were your enemies, would I have these
wonderful American kids with me?' And I'd ask them, I'd say, `Look, please
stand up and speak to them.' And I'd say, `These American students have come
all the way to the Muslim world. They're sitting with you in a mosque, taking
this huge risk, knowing what terrible things you're capable of doing, and
trusting your hospitality and fairness,' and they'd respond. They'd
respond...(unintelligible)...very, very positively. They would say, `You're
the first Americans we've talked to,' and these students would then talk about
the need to understand, about the respect and so on.

GROSS: But isn't the Arab media partly responsible for anger being whipped
up? You know, the new Arab cable stations from--the little I know about
them--seem to be very fiery in their anti-Western rhetoric.

Mr. AHMED: Yes, certainly, the local media's always fiery. They always
reflect a certain position of the government. Their aim is always to stir up
things so the more people would see their channel or hear their channel. It's
the same thing as media anywhere in the world. These are the universal rules
of the media anywhere. It's what ratings are all about. It's what sales are
all about, and that is my point. There is a great deal of irresponsibility I
find in the media. Why I have high expectations of the Western media is
because I hoped that Western media would understand its huge importance in the
world today and assume that responsibility and not play this particular game.
It's a game that can be played by anyone, and it is being played, as you point
out, by other people, so what it is doing, you take the ordinary individual
Muslim young man in Cairo or Karachi or Kabul, and all he's seeing is local
media and international media, and his emotions are constantly being whipped
up. They're like a tornado, they're like a cyclone, and then if someone comes
along and says, `Blow yourself up,' he may be tempted to do so. If I came
along as I've been doing and came and said, `Talk about compassion and
dialogue,' he'd say, `Who the hell are you? What are you talking about? I'm
being abused. I'm being attack. My religion is being attacked. My prophet
is being attacked. I am mad with anger.' And therefore we have to understand
these connections and try to connect the dots.

GROSS: Well, what kind of compromise would you like to see?

Mr. AHMED: I would like to see more respect for people's traditions and
cultures. I would like to see more sensitivity and greater sensitivity in the
United States. We talk about freedom of expression. We are very sensitive
about certain words regarding the African-American people rightly. We are
very sensitive about the Jewish people very rightly. We need to be sensitive
about other cultures, other people. We don't say certain things that other
people may be saying outside the United States. Why can't we be sensitive
about the Muslims? Why are Muslims suddenly a community that you can kick
around and boot around and humiliate and all of a sudden you talk about this
strange community, which is not capable of understanding the age we are living
in when we are all so sensitive about everyone else?

GROSS: But everybody else is the subject of satire. Everybody else is the
subject of cartoons and plays...

Mr. AHMED: I'm not--I'm sorry, Terry. I disagree, Terry. You cannot say
the N-word, for example. Let's be very clear about this. You can't say this
on your show because you're not sensitive enough--you're very sensitive about
it. You don't want to risk offending people and rightly. You cannot go on
offending people. You cannot simply show contempt for an entire race of
people, and you're sensitive to it and therefore you don't do it. Then why
are you not sensitive about other people, like the Muslims? Aren't they
citizens of the United states? Don't you have seven million Muslims living
here? Don't you have millions of Muslims who are allies of the United States?
You have countries in the world today who are close allies of the United
States, or don't you care? Don't you care for them at all? Do you simply
care for your own people here in the United States?

GROSS: My guest is Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American
University. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American
University. He's participated in interfaith dialogues for many years,
including a continuing series of public dialogues with Judea Pearl, the father
of the late journalist Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2003.

Would you explain why visual depictions, artistic depictions of the prophet
Muhammad are seen as blasphemy and why Muslims or at least some Muslims are so
sensitive, so offended by it?

Mr. AHMED: That's a very good question, and I wish it were asked more often
in the Western media here. The prophet is the embodiment of the Quran, which
Muslims believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Quran is the word of God. The
prophet translates that word and therefore he holds a very high status in
Islam itself. To attack the prophet is to attack the base, the foundations of
faith itself. That's how important the prophet is in Islam. And our question
is, on these travels that we conducted recently with these American students
of mine, every Muslim you talk to, rich or poor, man or woman, secular or
traditional, for all of them, the greatest role model was invariably the
prophet of Islam. Now if that is the case, Terry, you ask yourself, if 1.4
billion people are saying, `To us this is the greatest role model,' and you
come along and start calling him a pedophile and a terrorist and a fanatic and
an extremist and make remarks about him along these lines, and then you expect
to win hearts and minds and say, `It's important that we win your hearts and
minds, here are a couple of dollars,' do you really think it would make any
impact? That's the question you have to ask yourself. If you say on the
other hand, `Fine, we don't care for the Muslim world, we don't want to make
friends with them, we don't want to win hearts and minds.' Then, fine, then
let's continue on this line. Let's continue to mock the prophet and God and
religion and everything about the Muslims and then let's prepare to have this
rather chaotic century that we are rambling and shambling into.

GROSS: Let me give you the kind of typical argument that you hear made, you
know, like, `Well, it's OK for Muslims to be very anti-Semitic in parts of the
Arab world.' They have no problem with that. A lot of, you know, Muslims in
parts of the Arab world have no problem with suicide bombing and beheading,
but a satirical cartoon about the prophet Muhammad, and there's riots all
around the world.

Mr. AHMED: I think that's a ridiculous argument. If you're able to condemn,
as I have done, the rioting, the anti-Semitism, in public, again and again, we
should also be appealing to other people to understand Muslim sensitivity.
This argument that Muslims want to be sensitive but they're killing people and
they're beheading people, if some Muslims are doing it, I've said there are
1.4 billion people. If a few individuals are behaving in a very unacceptable
manner or a violent manner, how are they to be held up as representing 1.4
billion people? If the 19 terrorists on September 11th behaved in that way
and killed 3,000 innocent people, how can you hold up a whole civilization for
that? It's just ridiculous. It's almost like the terrorist argument.

The terrorists behead Americans because they said this individual American
represents the United States of America and all Americans. These arguments
which are not only palpably ridiculous but are very dangerous, and they're
setting us up for a constant cycle of confrontation. My concern is to pull
back from that cycle and begin a genuine process of understanding and dialogue
which leads to some compassion, some love between these civilizations.

GROSS: Have you become any more or less devout in the past few years as
you've seen radical Islam spread and as you've tried to be a force for
interfaith dialogue and for comprehension?

Mr. AHMED: I've been--Terry, it's a very interesting question because as a
young man I was much more of a nationalist in the sense I believed in Jinnah
and his ideas of a modern Muslim state around the notion of Pakistan, and as
I've grown older, I've realized that when you start drawing these boundaries
around ourselves, whether they're national boundaries, whether they're
religious boundaries, we really are excluding a lot of people. And I've
really become much more Sufistic, much more mystical in my own interpretation
of Islam itself, and some of the finest and some of the most enduring and
endearing strands of Islam are the Sufistic forms of Islam, which go straight
back to the prophet again. Here's Rumi, one of the most popular poets in the
United States, Rumi, a great Sufi mystic poet of Islam from the 13th century
who talks about going to the synagogue, to the church, to the mosque and
seeing the same altar and the same spirit. Now that is, for me, the essence
of faith itself. And that is where I've moved to over the last few years.

GROSS: Akbar Ahmed, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. AHMED: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Akbar Ahmed is a professor of Islamic studies at American University.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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