Reverting to the Ummah: Who
is the ‘Angry Muslim’ and Why
By Ramzy Baroud
“Brother, brother,” a young man called on me as I hurriedly
left a lecture hall in some community center in Durban, South
Africa. This happened at the height of the Afghanistan and
Iraq wars, when all efforts at stopping the ferocious USwestern military drives against these two countries terribly
failed.
The young man was dressed in traditional Afghani Pashtun
attire, and accompanied by a friend of his. With palpable
nervousness, he asked a question that seemed completely
extraneous to my lecture on the use of people history to
understand protracted historical phenomena using Palestine as
a model.
“Brother, do you believe that there is hope for the Muslim
Ummah?” He inquired about the future of a nation in which he
believed we both indisputably belonged to, and anxiously
awaited as if my answer carried any weight at all, and would
put his evident worries at ease.
Perhaps more startling than his question is that I was not
surprised in the least. His is a intergenerational question
that Muslim youth have been asking even before the decline and
final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the last standing
Caliphate, by the end of the First World War.
Despite major historical tumults, the Caliphate had remained
in consistent existence since the Rashidun Caliphs (the
‘rightly guided’ Caliphs) starting with Abu Bakr in 632 CE,
following the death of Prophet Mohammed.
The young man’s questions summoned so much history and a
multitude of meanings. Few western historians and ‘experts’
(especially those who attempted to understand Islam for the
sake of applying their knowledge for political and military
purposes) can possibly fathom the emotional weight of that
question.
“Ummah” in the young man’s question doesn’t exactly mean
‘nation’ in the relatively modern nationalistic sense. Muslims
are not a race, but come of all races; they don’t share a skin
color, or a life style per se, or a common language even if
Arabic is the original language of the Holy Koran. Ummah is a
‘nation’ that is predicated on a set of ageless moral values,
originated in the Koran, epitomized through the teachings and
legacy (Sunnah) of Prophet Mohammed, and guided by Ijtihad
“diligence” – explained as the independent reasoning – of
Muslim scholars (ulama) based on the Koran and Sunnah.
Naturally, the breakdown of Caliphate created a crisis with
too many dimensions. There was the geographic breakdown of the
Muslim Ummah, which despite the cultural and linguistic
uniqueness of the various groups of that ‘nation’, the Ummah
always possessed overriding value-based political and societal
frameworks. Based on that old, but constantly revived legacy
(thus ‘Ijtihad’), Muslims possessed their own equivalence of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva
Conventions, civil codes and much more starting nearly 14
centuries ago.
What was more consequential than the geographic breakdown of
the Ummah was the collapse of the very fabric of society, the
disintegration of the laws that governed every individual or
collective relationship, every commercial transaction, rules
regarding the environment, charity, the law of war, and so on.
Another dissolution also took place: that of the authentic and
organic moral values which allowed the Ummah to persist as
many empires failed, and flourish while others decayed. The
organic, self-propelled system was replaced by alternatives
that have all deteriorated to the very last one.
And that is where the roots of the ‘angry Muslim’ began.
The Ummah continues to live as an ideal which transcends time
and place. It persists despite the fact that the last century
had taken an incredible toll on all Muslim nations, without
exception. Even the success of many nations to gain their
independence from the very colonial powers that brought the
Caliphate down didn’t in any way tackle the original crisis of
the once predominant, all-encompassing Muslim Ummah. Colonized
Muslim societies eventually adopted the rules and laws of its
former colonizers, and continued to vacillate within their
sphere of influence.
Post-independence Muslim nations were a hideous mix of
tribalism and cronyism, with a self-serving interpretation of
Islam and western laws and civil codes that were all tailored
so very carefully to ensure the survival of an utterly corrupt
status quo; where local rulers ensure supremacy over defeated,
disoriented collectives, and western powers sustain their
interests of by all means necessary.
Expectedly, such a status quo couldn’t possibly be sustained.
A strong and cohesive civil society had no chance of survival
under oppressive regimes, and with the lack of education or
opportunity, or both, generations of Muslims endured in utter
despair.
As an escape from their immediate woes, many Muslims sought
inspiration elsewhere. They saw in Palestine a rally cry, for
the ongoing resistance to foreign occupation there was a
symbolic indication of a collective pulse. The wide support
that Hezbollah (a Shia group) received among Sunni Muslims for
its resistance to Israel was an indication that sectarian
divides dwarfed when compared to the need for the Muslim Ummah
to regroup around principles such as justice, thus reclaiming
even if an iota of its past glory.
But it was the US-led western invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq that drew the battle lines like never before. When
Baghdad fell in April 2003, and as American soldiers so
conceitedly drowned the once capital of the Abbasid Caliphate
with their flags, many Muslims felt that their Ummah had
reached the lowest depths of humiliation. And while Iraqi men
and women were being tortured, raped and filmed dead or naked
by smirking US soldiers in Baghdad’s prisons, a whole new
nation of angry Muslim youth was on the rise.
Western wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not the exclusive
harbinger of Muslim youth anger, humiliation and the current
violence underway in Syria, Iraq, and other Muslim countries.
The wars were the catalyst. Picture a group of ‘foreign
jihadists’ as they are called, sharing a meal between battles
somewhere near northern Iraq and imagine what they possibly
have in common: an Iraq tortured in Bucca, a Lebanese who
fought the Israelis in south Lebanon, a Syrian whose family
had been killed in Aleppo, and so on. But it is not only a
Middle Eastern question. The alienation and constant targeting
of French and British Muslim immigrants, their mosques, their
cultures, languages, their very identity, when coupled with
the plight of Muslims everywhere could too have its own
violent manifestation as well.
British Prime Minister David Cameron is worried about the
threat to the national security of his country as a result of
the ongoing strife in Iraq, instigated by territorial gains of
the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL). He doesn’t seem
to understand or care to understand his country’s role in the
violence.
US President Barack Obama continues to preach from the White
House about violence and the moral responsibility of his
country as if the destructive and leading role played by
Washington in the Middle East is completely removed from the
state of hopelessness and humiliation felt by a generation of
Muslim youth. It is as if war, foreign occupation and the
systematic destruction of an entire civilization – still
referred to by many Muslims as an ‘Ummah’ – will come at no
price, aside from fluctuating oil prices.
Who are these jihadists? Many continue to ask and persistently
attempt to offer answers. CIA agents? Gulf-funded terrorist
groups? Misguided youth ushered in by an Iranian conspiracy to
justify its appetite for regional hegemony? Foreign jihadists
fighting against the Assad regime in Syria? Or perhaps with
the Assad regime against his opposition? Conspiracy theories
thrive in time of great mysteries.
However, the alienated ‘angry’ Muslim youth is hardly a
mystery, but a fully comprehendible historical inevitability.
For many of them, even if they insist otherwise, the Ummah and
Caliphate is more of incorporeal spaces than actual
geographical boundaries. It is an escape to history, from
poverty, alienation, oppression and foreign occupations. To
understand that is to truly tackle the roots of violence.
Ignoring it cannot possibly be an option.
– Ramzy Baroud is a PhD scholar in People’s History at the
University of Exeter. He is the Managing Editor of Middle East
Eye. Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a
media consultant, an author and the founder of
PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a
Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).