What the Muslim World Can Teach Us About Nonviolence

Yes, we are good and peaceful, and they (whatever "they" we're focused on today) are ruthless and evil. Institutionally, these values are operationalized every day. Drone attacks, propped-up murderers and dictators, weapons manufacturing and distribution, clandestine death squads, full-on warfare, neglect of starvation and disease, collateral damage, structural adjustments, black holes of torture, targeting civilians - this is the essence of our foreign policy, and to borrow the frank words of Madeleine Albright when asked about the deaths of a half million Iraqis due to imposed sanctions, "we think the price was worth it." Since we operate in the name of democracy and freedom, all is forgiven.

Despite this litany, for many Americans it is undoubtedly the case that "Islamic terrorists" represent the greatest threat on the planet, approaching the status of evil incarnate. Even in the best of cases Westerners will inquire, as Bono recently did in The New York Times, where the Muslim Gandhi or King is to help overcome the "rage and despair" that define the Islamic nations. In these formulations, as historian John Bacher wrote two decades ago, any sense of "nonviolence on the part of Muslims has been too often ignored, while attention has been focused instead on extremist sects of Islam." At the same time, we disregard our own complicity with violence and instead wonder why "the other" won't change their ways and become peace- and freedom-loving people just like us.

These conceptions ignore the deep history of Islamic nonviolence and the myriad ways it is still practiced across the region. In fact, many positive examples of such nonviolent actions already exist throughout the Muslim world, such as the little-known work of La'Onf in Iraq and the almost wholly unreported peacemaking efforts in Palestine and Israel. Undoubtedly, the deployment of nonviolence on a regional scale would dramatically alter the geopolitical landscape by highlighting the brutality of the invading forces and simultaneously calling upon the better instincts among them. In this sense, nonviolence is about both ethics and pragmatics. While many view iconic figures like Gandhi as somehow saintly, rest assured that Mohandas was politically savvy and strategically adept. To be sure, nonviolence contains a moralistic impulse, but more to the point is the realization that it actually works. You can't grow food or find shelter merely on a moral high ground, as useful as that would be to establish - it also takes liberated spaces and action in concert to enable communities to flourish. 

Gandhi knew that the poor people of India could never defeat the mighty British Empire militarily, and that the only force capable of defeating such an oppressor is that held by the oppressors themselves. Gandhi would turn their bullets and batons back on them, metaphorically speaking, by refusing to comply and thus forcing them to experience the unsanitized brutality of their ways. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the South recognized precisely this same truism. Moreover, as in other such instances, a widespread nonviolence movement in the Muslim world would likewise have the further benefit of marginalizing the fanatics and terrorists in these regions who are merely providing war-making fodder for the US and subjecting their own people to the repercussions.