Will Islam Ever Merit ‘PC’ Protection? : Tolerance: A sophisticated, assimilated Muslim wonders about his fate in a world of hostility, ridicule and ignorance.

The face is smiling and the tone of voice is vaguely surprised: I am told how intelligent I am, how civilized--for a Muslim. The speaker is startled that I, a Pakistani citizen, know something about literature, philosophy and classical music, that I share interests so-called Westerners think of as theirs. They’re relieved to learn that I’m not a fundamentalist, nor a terrorist, male chauvinist, Farrakhanist anti-Semite or some other sort of undesirable alien.

These encounters began when I attended the United Nations International School on Manhattan’s East Side. I thought myself fortunate to be in the most sophisticated educational atmosphere in the most sophisticated part of the most sophisticated city in the country. I soon realized, however, that even here, a world religion with close to a billion adherents had almost no intellectual presence. If you came from a non-Western culture, you kept quiet about it and tried not to activate the stereotypes that already defined you. If you were light-skinned, you tried to pass as European.

Only once was I beaten up by racist thugs. They wore large crosses. They called me a barbarian and shouted “Get out of the country!” The police said that I could press charges, but my assailants would be released in a few hours and nothing could be done to protect me. Was I sure the attack was racially motivated? The kids were Irish American, the police were Irish American. I was so different from them.

As time went by, reality continued to be impressed upon me: The Western world whose culture I loved so much had no interest in me or my heritage. Worse, in devaluing my culture, my adopted country had, in the process, devalued me.

I see the Western response to the genocidal horrors of Bosnia, where Muslims symbolized a cultural commonality among Islam, Judaism and Christianity. In many ways they were “pre-Crusade” Muslims who thought of themselves as Western because, in fact, their religion is Western. The foundation of Islam is Judaism and Christianity. Yet we in America (and Europe) sit idly by and watch the genocide in Bosnia unfold on television, from the obliteration of whole towns right down to images of skeletal men behind barbed wire in concentration camps. What happened to “never again?” Does it only apply to the Jews? After the Holocaust, the state of Israel was born. But Bosnia, the homeland of Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Serbs and Croats, is being dismembered by religious fanatics among the Catholics (Croats) and Orthodox Christians (Serbs), with Western assistance in the form of indifference, inaction and bumbling.

Even the most sophisticated, assimilated Muslim in the West must wonder: Can this happen to me?

Headlines in American print media reflect an almost universal ignorance and hostility with regard to Islam. When a Christian fanatic like David Koresh commits an act of terrorism, only the man himself is held to blame. When the same type of act occurs in the Islamic world, the perpetrator’s religion is automatically reported as if it were an accomplice. Even better if the “terrorist” is an “Islamic fundamentalist.”

In Europe and America, “fundamentalism” has come to mean--often subliminally rather than explicitly--an ugly, intolerant and violent religious fanaticism associated with Islam. Yet fundamentalism cannot be assigned solely to Muslims. It is very much a part of Judeo-Christian culture. Ultra-orthodox Judaism and born-again Christianity are fertile grounds for intolerance and violence invoking the name of God.

Partially in response to this attitude, a shift is taking place in Muslim societies toward the affirmation of an “Islamic” identity. We are seeing a backlash against the Western concepts of modernity propagated in Islamic lands from the 1950s to the 1970s. This “progress” was frequently the work of Western-supported dictators swimming in corruption and nepotism. The effect on the population naturally led to the rejection of the “modern” way of life as sterile, oppressive and unjust, particularly for the poor. With political opposition forbidden or paralyzed, what emerged was a discontented populace turning inward, searching for an identity and grasping at some form of super-Islam to be a refuge in a pervasively hostile environment.

To be a Muslim now is to exist in a permanent “Catch-22”: Either you embrace the West to such an extent that you denounce your heritage and thus your identity, or you embrace Islam to such an extent that you forget what the religion really is. Either way, you distort Islam.

It is easy to see a downward spiral of Muslim demoralization since the time of the Crusades. The humiliation of defeat by Christian armies was a prelude to European imperialism. That the Arabs and other Muslims have had to ask the European Christians for their independence, and have then had to endure dictators who were educated in or beholden to the West, cannot but cause resentment, dismay and an insidious combination of illusion and disillusionment.

Outside the Islamic world, the “new order” marginalizes and alienates Muslim minorities, both culturally and politically, be it in the election of extreme nationalists and fascists to Europe’s parliaments, or annual Crusades festivals in Greece, Italy and Spain, or the xenophobia and scapegoating of “foreigners” that is leading to severe restriction of immigration throughout the Continent. In many countries, Muslims now occupy the place formerly reserved for Jews as alien, repugnant and undesirable. Such a social climate has brought us witch hunts, lynchings and shamelessly incendiary statements by public leaders, such as NATO chief Willy Claes’ assertion that “radical Islam” has taken communism’s place as the biggest threat to the West.

In this, my chosen country, well-intentioned people who would be appalled at being identified as racist are routinely taken aback by the information that I, a civilized man who shares their civilized interests, am a Muslim. As the list grows daily of those who are welcomed under the “PC umbrella,” Muslims continue to wait, impatiently, in a gathering storm of hostility and ridicule.