From an op-ed by Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. His next book, "How to be a Muslim," will be out in 2017.
...The hundreds of millions of Muslims who reject extremism must start building out real, institutional alternatives to extremism, with serious funding, talent and commitment behind them. We've spent tens of millions of dollars in the United States, for example, and on what? We have some nice mosques. Most of them are empty most of the week, except for a few hours every Friday afternoon. We built some Islamic schools. I guess that's cool. But on the major metric, we've failed. It feels as if we are more unpopular than ever.
Many Americans want us banned from the country. In the battle for hearts and minds, we're losing. Badly. When Muhammad
Ali died, a lot of Muslims I know were despondent precisely because they
wondered if we would ever see such a champion again.
We
need to turn this around. We need to fight back against extremism. We
need to take ownership of the problems, because it's the only way we're
going to take ownership of the solution. If you can't criticize
yourself, you can't better yourself. If you can't lay out a vision of
the future, you're going to live someone else's future.
I'm calling for the chaotic Muslim
middle -- too long unrepresented or underrepresented -- not to stand up
and speak out, but to stand up and build out. We must design, fund,
sustain and expand programs that target the very people extremists are
going after. Young men and young women of all backgrounds. These
programs would realize a positive vision of Islam. They'd make young
people feel like they're doing something. They'd make them feel
valuable. Empowered. Capable. Agents.
As
a friend of mine likes to put it, these programs should help create
protagonists, writers of their own narrative. That becomes the kind of
program that young people all over the world want to be part of. They
should be so well-funded that we can afford to take people regardless of
their personal circumstance. So egalitarian they aim to assist and
uplift people regardless of where they come from, what color their skin
is, what religion they believe in, or what language they speak. That
begin to crowd out the extremist narrative, and extremist ideology.
Imagine
if we could send significant numbers of young Muslims to meet their
co-religionists and offer them aid and assistance, or to meet people
they've never been exposed to, to be taught and to teach. Imagine if we
leveraged our resources and our numbers to fight hate, intolerance and
extremism. Imagine if young people saw they could help their
co-religionists by working with mainstream institutions.
I
am tired of simply saying terrorism is wrong. We should know that
already. We should be known for that. I'd rather build up an
alternative, a Muslim world that doesn't just reject extremism in word,
but defeats it in deed, that does more than acknowledge homophobia, and
intolerance (and the many other ills we see rampant in some Muslim
communities, like anti-Semitism and racism), but actively fights them.
We certainly have the resources among us. We have more reasons to act now than we should...
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