Shortly after the Bondi attack, on the quiet street in Canberra on which I live, an Australian flag appeared in front of one of the houses. Under normal circumstances that would be completely innocuous. But circumstances are not normal. Anyone who has been following happenings elsewhere can surmise what the flag might mean. Perhaps, and hopefully, it’s just an expression of national unity at a fragile time. Perhaps and hopefully. But sentiments online militate against this optimism.
I’m an American Muslim just shy of a year into a life in Australia. I am familiar with the caution and anxiety of Muslims living in the shadow of 9/11. And I never supposed that I’d left that shadow in moving to Australia because the shadow of 9/11 is long: it is a grief globalized, and right next door, in New Zealand, there has been a cautionary tale about just how long the shadow is. But my short experience here made me suppose Australia is (was?) a relatively safe place for Muslims. After the attack, I do not feel at all like that anymore. Everyone I know is on edge about what will happen now: Muslims around me are living under the fear of an imminent retaliatory attack. Everyone feels less safe: after the attack, a WhatsApp group for Muslims at my university sent out a safety message for the women in particular – and Muslim women always bear most of the force of the blowback for their being visibly Muslim: they were advised to travel in pairs, to let people know where they are when they go out, etc. And, of course, the amazing organizing the Muslim community has been doing here for Gaza over the past two years has, overnight, all but been destroyed.
I’ve been here only a while, but it clearly appears to me that there is a sea change happening in the life of the community (that just as Muslims in the US measure their lives pre- and post-9/11, this is the incident) and the terror inflicted on Australia at large by the shooting has also descended (albeit in a distinct form) on the Muslim community. And it’s all our fault.
Muslims all over the world have done far too little to respond to these acts of violence we inflict on others over and over again, even as these acts always come to harm us in the long term. Muslims have a staggeringly bad capacity for taking responsibility and one always sees this incapacity most clearly dramatized immediately after attacks like this one. Our response is always to go on the defensive and disown these attackers, to respond with banalities like “Islam is a religion of peace”, to trot out simplistic statistics about how meagre acts of violence done by Muslims is in comparison with other acts of violence, and more and more to get behind incoherent conspiracy theories. After the attack, one of the silly narratives some Muslims (including some very prominent ones) got behind was a made-up claim that the attackers were former IDF soldiers. That debunked, some Muslims have simply retreated to the more tried-and-tested retort of saying this is a Mossad false-flag operation. This is all a dramatization of a stunning lack of accountability on the part of Muslims.
Several Muslim organizations have already put out statements of condolences to the Jewish community and statements of unity with the larger national community. But these are all banal commiserations. All of these statements simply disown the violence. But it is not enough to do that if, structurally, nothing changes. To leave things at commiseration is to simply wait for the next incident to recycle these materially empty statements.
There was something unusual about the Bondi shooting, of course: Ahmed al-Ahmed. To my mind, the brave involvement of Ahmed is not extenuating, as many Muslims seeking to avoid accountability make it out, but an indication that there is a battle for the soul of Islam currently happening and that we need to actively intervene on the part of the Ahmeds and not the shooters. But we are doing little to nothing to intervene. The shooters are men who come to our mosques for Jumu’ah, come to our iftars, and go (or send their kids) to our schools and Quran classes. If they are going wrong, it is because these institutions – our mosques, our minbars, our schools – are rotten. And unsurprisingly so: the bar for giving the Friday sermon, or becoming an imam, or teaching our children is infernally low. It is time to recognize that it is not enough for someone to be able to recite the Qur’an to teach it if they can’t also impart the mercy at its core to the children they are teaching; it is not enough that someone can cite a story from Ibn Hisham or Ibn Kathir to teach the sirah, if they can’t also understand its complex material and socio-political context. Too much is informal and laissez-faire in how we build our institutions and who we let into power in them. We need to make a thought-out accounting for all of this. And beyond that we need to expend careful thought, careful design, and a lot of intellectual talent and material resources in inoculating our community against its repeated tendency to violence.
And as much as we might not want to hear it, simply having gone to a nizamiyyah or madrasah in the subcontinent, or in West Africa, or the Gulf, or North Africa, is not enough for building our communities. Unless these people we are embedding into our institutions also very rigorously understand the philosophical context of secular modernity, they are not necessarily wise enough to guide Muslims living in the modern world. They are learned for sure, but not necessarily wise enough, because they are out of kilter with the times. I am not calling for “reform”, whatever that means – this is not a matter of the content of our tradition; we know that tradition is more than deep enough to deal with secular modernity and opposed to such senseless violence. Instead this is a call, inter alia, to a recognition that the old credentialism does not work to guarantee fiqh in its original sense: understanding, rather than the donkey-carrying-scripture the Qur’an condemns. And that simply imparting “knowledge” to our young men will not make them reasonable people. There are so many issues tied to this particular problem: one could go on and on about the degradation of our tradition because of a brain drain that has happened because all the intelligent and sensitive people “ought to be” doctors or lawyers or engineers rather than study the tradition, etc. so, on aggregate, the most crude are left to transmit it. We could go on and on about the roots of the problem. But it’s no longer enough to talk and pass off trite banalities about being a religion of peace. We need to build institutions that will ensure that we show rather than tell that fact. We need to take responsibility for the fact that these acts of violence come from our community over and over again.
This does not, of course, excuse the fact that these failures are multiply determined. Of course, imperial adventurism in the so-called Muslim world on the part of all the usual suspects has played a part in fomenting these violent outbursts. Of course, in the Bondi shooting, frustration over Palestine played a part. Of course, of course… But in what way does it forward the cause of Palestinians or Muslims everywhere to kill innocent Jews across the world? On the contrary, does it not harm a flourishing movement that was at least making some progress in shifting the window of discourse on Palestine? Is this not more ammunition for radical Zionist interests? Does this not ostensibly divide Muslims and Jews who had been working together for the Palestinian cause? These arbitrary acts of violence are indeed partly determined by a terrible history to which the Muslim world has been (and continues to be) subjected. But we can take responsibility for our response to these conditions, no matter how anger-provoking they are (we all know the hadith on the subject) while also continuing to work against the imperial apparatus that creates the conditions. It is not a dichotomy. The Palestinian cause has been set back and sullied by the Bondi shooting. It furthers no interest of ours and in fact gives Zionist and allied imperialism a stronger foothold. And in general, every geopolitical concern Muslims have is hamstrung by such arbitrary attacks. 9/11 did not make the Middle East any more free of American interference: it made it worse. Muslims (and especially Muslim women) were made more unsafe because of 9/11 and Australian Muslims are now unsafe because of the Bondi shooting. And all that beside the intrinsic corruption of the senseless attack which Muslims have a sworn religious duty to oppose. If we do not take responsibility for our communities, we will continue to hamstring our own interests wherever we find ourselves and continue to fail at our divinely ordained task of being, “the best community brought about for [the betterment of] humanity, calling out to all that is good, and opposing all that is evil” (Q 3.110) As things stand, there is nothing “better” about us and nothing will change “unless [we] first change [our] own condition.” (Q 13.11)
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