Solidarity of Mankind

In yesterday's issue of Le Monde, Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen wrote about his reactions to Islamic extremism. Like most Muslims, he is frustrated - not just with those who have masked their violence with the name of his religion, but also - I sense - with the fact that all Muslims are now tasked with assuring everyone they don't prescribe to these "perverted ideologies." Worldwide, Muslims are standing up for the true meaning of their faith. In the US, this conversation is nudging its way to the front of a boisterous crowd. As anti-Islamic rhetoric bubbles to the surface of the Melting Pot, and the loose cannon spewing this hateful rhetoric (his name won't be mentioned here) still leads in Republican polls, and mosques are subjects of vandalism, and everyday Muslim citizens are vulnerable to harassment, American Muslims are in a precarious position. It is not the same position as the privileged American, who has the luxury of saying, "I am what I am, and this is a free country, so deal with it." Rather, they are put in the position of defending themselves over something that has about as much to do with them as Timothy McVeigh has to do with me (you know, he was from Buffalo too, and white, too, and came from a Catholic background, too, like me). It is a travesty that the air has to be cleared on that front.

There are two powerful quotes I want to point out from Gülen's op-ed. For one: "Our civilization will not progress until we treat the suffering of humans regardless of their religious or ethnic identity as equally tragic in our empathy and respond with the same determination." This is a thought I have been toiling with since San Bernardino, though he puts it more eloquently than I ever could. I can't find a way to express the sorrow of what happened in San Bernardino without being cliche. How can evil like that exist? Yet when I mourn for this, I'm slapped with a bitter realization that this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the U.S., we selectively grieve. After the Paris attacks, people changed their Facebook profile pictures to the French flag to show solidarity. Forget Beirut the day before and the thousands who have died in Iraq and Syria. This year alone, do you know there have been hundreds of lives lost to attacks in Tunisia, Nigeria, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Niger, Somalia...?

​What about solidarity of mankind? People talk about mourning tragedy and in the same breath say our government shouldn't let refugees resettle here. I say it is time to start acknowledging the pain of mankind, as it is our own. While most Americans don't directly experience the same carnage as other places in the world, we are not separate from it. We're all breathing the same air. We are all closer than we acknowledge. 

Next quote:

In the aftermath of the recent events I am witnessing, with chagrin, the revival of the thesis of the clash of civilizations. I do not know whether those who first put out such a hypothesis did so out of vision or desire. What is certain is that today, the revival of this rhetoric simply serves the recruitment efforts of the terrorist networks. I want to state clearly that what we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations but rather the clash of humanity with barbarity in our common civilization.

We believe in the dichotomous narrative. That is, the narrative of "East versus West." For ease of discussion, I do use these terms of Western/Eastern, as there are cultural tenets and attitudes that have distinctly sprung from each region, but I don't believe in the separateness. It is imaginary. We are not in a separate world, creating a separate history. We are in fact very involved in other governments and conflicts, not as mediators but as participants, and have been for a long time. It is brutally insightful how Gulen points out that this hypothesis could have come from "vision or desire." Some people stand to benefit from this "clash," this idea of separateness. That is enough for me to bridge into a concluding question: Does your perspective contribute to disruption or peace?