Fueling hate is not in the preacher's job description

Twenty years ago I went to a pro-life demonstration in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.  Abortion advocates greeted us with jeers from the clinic steps, but some of the pro-life demonstrators chained themselves to the railings anyway. Others sat on the sidewalk before the clinic. Trapped behind a human barricade, the abortion rights people began to push and hit. It was an ugly, scary scene. The police arrived and started carting people away. And from my spot to the side, I saw police pick up a priest I liked and haul him to their van. A priest. Suddenly, I wiggled through the crowd and sat right down in his place. A police officer stared down at me.

“Are you gonna walk or are we gonna have to carry you?” he sighed.

“You’ve gonna have to carry me,” I said.

Because they had arrested my priest.

Sure, youthful heroics were involved. I had friends who had been arrested in many demonstrations, and it seemed cooler to be thrown into the wagon than to walk. But I would not have sat on that contested piece of sidewalk if I had not seen my priest being arrested for it.

My motivation was purely religious. And because my motivation was religious, I have always had a sneaking half-sympathy for religious kids with jihadist fantasies, kids easily exploited by radical preachers. The vast majority of pro-lifers are non-violent, but I am deeply thankful there are no violent, “militant” strains of Catholicism to seduce teenagers. Christians have a Book, and there are some disturbing statements in our Book, but Catholics have a central authority to guide us in our understanding. If anyone wants to know what Catholicism is and is not, they can pick up the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

There is no definitive Catechism of the Islamic Faith. 

There are approximately a billion adherents to Islam, divided by different sects and schools and practices, worldwide. It is wrong to make generalizations about Muslims. It is wrong to make generalizations about their clergy, who range from men keen on interfaith dialogue to men keen on murderous jihad. But I think it fair to say that pious Muslims are influenced by their own favourite imams and try to practise what they preach.

This brings me to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the man accused of shooting 43 people at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13, before he himself was shot and lost consciousness. The media has advanced theories as to why he did it. One is that Hasan, an army psychiatrist who has never seen battle, has secondhand Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Another is that Hasan, a Muslim who alarmed other Muslims, has carried out a one-man jihad against his fellow American soldiers. After days of reading reports, I am inclined to believe the latter.

I move mostly in Catholic circles, and so have met relatively few Muslims in my time. I dated a Muslim man when I was 18, and I knew some Muslim girls when I was in grad school. My boyfriend kept the Koran on the highest shelf of the house and scolded Muslim friends for drinking, but he didn’t pray five times a day. The Muslim girls I knew studied hard, loved parties, squabbled over whose turn it was to clean the bathroom and got along merrily with their Catholic housemates. They didn’t deem it necessary to wear hijab.

So, unlike many a conservative commentator, I believe firmly that there is such a thing as diversity in Islam. There is no reason for a Muslim to follow an imam who advocates murder. But that, it is alleged, is exactly what Hasan, a fan of Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, did.

Anwar al-Awlaki is an American-born imam who lives in Yemen. In 2001, he preached at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, where prayed two of the 9/11 hijackers and Nidal Malik Hasan. One of Hasan’s fellow officers, a Muslim, has reported that Hasan’s eyes “lit up” at Al-Awlaki’s name. And now Al-Awlaki, an advocate of jihadist violence, has praised Hasan as a hero.

 It is an unfortunate fact that there are religious authorities who preach violence. It is an unfortunate fact that there are religious people who have grandiose visions of killing in God’s name. Despite — or because of — our concern for the safety of our Muslim neighbours, we have a duty not to be silent about hate preachers. When Christians shoot abortionists, we decry their crimes without denigrating all Christians. When Muslims advocate violence, we should demand their arrest without denigrating all Muslims. There is a golden mean between cowardice and hatred, just as there is a golden mean between infidelity and fanaticism.