Islam’s Moderate Voice

Good deeds usually do not attract much attention. Horror stories do. Last month, papers worldwide reported that a local authority in northern Nigeria had issued a call on Muslims to kill a young woman journalist. She had written what some considered a blasphemous comment on the prophet Muhammad, words that sparked riots in which hundreds of people died.

Less known were the immediate rejection of the murderous fatwa by Nigeria’s Supreme Islamic Council, a group that includes a number of leading Muslim clerics and scholars from across Nigeria, and the statements of the secular Nigerian government, which dismissed the fatwa as “null and void” and unconstitutional.

In the aftermath of 9/11, moderate Muslims have had trouble finding their voice. The reaction to the plight of journalist Isioma Daniel is heartening.

The story began one day in November when the organizers of the Miss World beauty pageant arrived in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. This pageant, the organizers said, would “show the world that Nigeria is safe for tourists and investments.”

Addressing fundamentalist Muslim leaders who had questioned the morality of the contest and the money spent to organize it, Daniel wrote in a newspaper that the participants were so pretty that even Muhammad “would have probably chosen a wife from one of them.”

Tensions between Muslims in Nigeria’s northern states and Christians in the south have been high for years, and the ensuing riots, in which the newspaper’s building was torched, were no surprise to Nigerians. Just two years ago, more than 2,000 people died in ethnic and religious clashes in Kaduna state. Daniel has left Nigeria and is said to be in the United States.

Muslim organizations in the United States and elsewhere condemned the incidents in Nigeria. Some, like the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, also complained that the media have not always been receptive to messages from the peaceful side of the Muslim communities.

“We condemned the ‘death sentence’ issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini against writer Salman Rushdie in 1989,” says Salam Al-Marayati, the council’s executive director. “Every Muslim organization in America condemned 9/11 but the myth that we haven’t done either persists.”

Well, maybe not every organization, but he has a point. Muslim moderates, in the U.S. and elsewhere, need to work harder to be heard and to stimulate internal debate. Americans, in the media and elsewhere, need to keep their ears--and minds -- open.