Last Tuesday morning, my godfather, a survivor of the Holocaust, walked out of the subway exit and saw a crowd of people all looking up, up, up straight up to the top of the World Trade Center, and saw one floor on fire. And he said, “Oh, they’ll contain it,” and everyone said, “Yeah, they will contain it. You know, they have had fires before up there.”
     And as they were standing there watching it, before he would go into his office across the street, the top started to crumble. The scene that all of us had seen the video of, he saw literally from underneath, and he started to run. The man -- almost 70 years old -- started to run north, whatever street that is there, along with this huge crowd, and they were enveloped in this sea of dust. He was coated with ash and dust as he kept running for blocks and blocks, trying to avoid the falling building, and they kept trying to figure out, he and the people around him, how -- if it fell sideways -- how far exactly would it fall? Would it reach all the way to Central Park or not? [He was] trying to avoid the dust, which was choking them. And he told me that he tried to avoid the crowd, trying to avoid being stampeded.
     He survived. Thank God, he survived. He walked 90 blocks home, stopping every 30 blocks to find a phone that was working and call his family to tell them that he was okay. He got home and took a shower and watched it on television like the rest of us. But there are millions and millions of people around the country, who have stories of six degrees of separation or less, and their grief and their confusion has to be credited. It just has to, we can’t deny that.
     I’m hoping that the poll numbers that we’ve been hearing about are going to start to come down. I think already a week after the events, people are starting to say, “Yes, I’m angry, but I can deal with my anger in ways that don’t involve the wholesale slaughter of other people.”
     But actually, I am not here to talk about that. I am here because I study Islam, and because the perpetrators of last weeks atrocities are presumed to be Muslim radicals, followers of ‘Usama bin Ladin, supposedly a criminal conspiracy to commit mass murder -- I prefer that language to war. We haven’t seen the evidence really. We’ve snippets, but those snippets have been quite contradictory. There are people who we’re told have been Islamic radicals for a long time, and there is anti-American talk and so on. We’re also told that one of suspects drank vodka for three hours, a week ago Friday, at a bar in Florida, which is hardly the sort of behavior that we would expect from an Islamic militant. I don’t know, maybe willingness to die for one’s faith, you know, means that the small stuff really doesn’t matter that much, and you can violate a few injunctions here and there. I don’t know. All we know is that we have not been shown definitive evidence yet, in any case.
     We can take this opportunity to address the question: Why does Islam seem to so connected to terrorism? I don’t believe it is, and I would like to lay out an argument of why that is so. Let me start with some statements made in the last week by leading Islamic religious scholars.
     Shaykh al-Tantawi, director of the leading seminary in Cairo, the leading seminary in the Sunni Islamic world: “Attacking innocent people is not courageous, it is stupid and will punished on the day of judgment. It is not courageous to attack innocent children, women and civilians. It is courageous to protect freedom. It is courageous to defend oneself and not to attack.”
     Shaykh Fadlallah, spiritual guide of the Shi‘i Muslim radicals in Lebanon, says that he was “horrified by these barbaric crimes, besides the fact that there are forbidden by Islam, these acts to not serve those who carry them out, but rather the victims who will reap the sympathy of the whole world. ... Islamists who live according to the human value of Islam, could not commit such crimes.”
     The Chief Mufti of Saudi Arabia, ‘Abdulaziz bin ‘Abdallah Al-Ashaykh: “Firstly,” he says, “the recent developments including high-jacking planes and terrorizing innocent people and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that can not be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts. Secondly, any Muslim who adheres to the directives of the Holy Qur’an and the Sunna” -- that is, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad -- “will never involve themselves in such acts, because they will invoke the anger of God Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on Earth.”
     Ayatollah Khamene’i, the supreme spiritual leader of Iran, the conservative in Iran: “Killing people of any place, with any kind of weapons, including atomic bombs, long-range missiles, biological and chemical warfare, passenger or war planes, carried by any organization, country or individuals, is condemned. ... It makes no difference whether such massacres happen in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Qana, Sabra, Shatila, Deir Yassin, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq or in New York and Washington.”
     This is just a sampling, of a huge out pouring of statements by religious leaders in Islamic world, condemning these attacks. I want to point out that most of these leaders are radicals. These are the Islamic radicals that we hear so much about. These are the people who favor armed uprisings and armed liberation of Palestine. They are very unhappy, and the comments that I have selected, these quotations show just how unhappy they are with Western imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere. And “President” Bush’s use of the word “crusade,” and his comments this weekend and the singing at the National Cathedral of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” only adds to the unhappiness that going to be felt by these radicals. Yet these radicals, even these radicals, I should say, believe that there are rules of engagement and that terrorist attacks such as this violate those rules.
     Moreover, the radicals in the Islamic world are a tiny minority. Yes, some Muslims celebrated last week’s attacks. It turns out that [these reports] were true, despite some questions about that. I wonder: Do they deserve to die for expressing these beliefs, or does that come under free speech? And yes, some Muslims have committed atrocities.
     But when given a choice, Muslims around the world have overwhelming rejected radicals of that sort. Take the opinion polls that a Palestinian social science organization has been conducting in Palestine, the Occupied Territories, over the last six years, every couple of months, asking people -- with the best social science methodology they can manage -- who they support, and a variety of attitudinal or other attitudinal questions. Support for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other radical groups has never topped 16 percent, and frequently is well below 10 percent.
     When radical Islamic groups have run for office in the Islamic world, they have generally done very poorly, in Pakistan and Indonesia they received less than 10 percent. [Actually, Indonesian Islamist parties have received as much as one quarter of the vote.] In Turkey and in Jordan they peaked at about one third of the electorate and have gone down since then.
     In Iran, when they were finally given a choice, when there a reformist preaching the rule of law [and] international peace rather than isolation, was allowed to run for president in 1997, he received 70 percent of the vote, and the radical Islamic candidates received far less, not even the rest of the total 30 percent. In his re-election campaign, this year, Khatami, the president of Iran, received even more, 80 percent, despite his having been stymied at many turns and being accused of having achieved very little in his first term.
     The only instances where radicals in the Islamic world have enjoyed widespread support are instances where the liberals and peaceniks and moderates have been forced out of the public arena, usually violently. I’m afraid that is what we are witnessing today when we hear hateful, slanderous comments being made, being directed by so-called patriots at Islam and at Muslims.
     If we let the most radical and militant Muslims define for us what Islam is, then we are just playing into their hands. We are also playing into the hands of our own militarists, whose interests always lie, I believe, in the exaggeration of threats, armed responses, and so on. In fact, I would argue that there is a tacit collusion among the militarists of all sides, that they are always providing atrocities that end-up galvanizing their enemies, justifying their own budgets, and undermining the peaceniks in between. Those of us who don’t hate each other and who want to get along end up being caught in the crossfire. I guess I urge us all to stand up; let’s try to get caught in that crossfire.
     Thank you very much.

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Updated December 14, 2001