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Posted on 10/12/2001 9:58:38 AM PDT by Olydawg

WASHINGTON -- It has been a full month since the heinous bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and certain stories taking root on the tragedies are already beginning to take on the lasting forms of myth. They are, for the most part, well-meaning. The nagging question is: Do they also have the advantage of being true?

Take, first, the idea that all Muslim Americans are, first, Americans and that all are horrified by the tragedies that assaulted America. Let us look a bit more critically at that.

Last week youngsters around here were rightly protecting their young Muslim friends from any prejudice or violence. The girls in one high school appeared at school wearing "the veil" to symbolize their solidarity with the Muslim girls.

That same day The New York Times was publishing a story by Susan Sachs called "The Two Worlds of Muslim-American Teenagers." In this story, the students interviewed at the Islamic Al Noor School in Brooklyn said, "Muslims are all one. (Muslims overseas) kind of think of us as just living in America." The students agreed that the Koran, being the "literal word of God," provides the perfect blueprint for their lives and that "their ideal society would follow Islamic law and make no separation between religion and state" (upon which, of course, America is profoundly based).

They did agree in the discussion with the reporter that they would have to accept paying taxes -- in order to become doctors and lawyers trained in America -- but they did not like it because those taxes financed things that were un-Islamic, such as licenses for alcohol. A recent story about Muslim men in The Chicago Tribune reported that they wanted to change the banking system to an Islamic one, where, for instance, interest is forbidden.

But it was in the area of "defending one's country" that the Brooklyn students were most revealing. Most said, for example, that they would "support any leader who they decided was fighting for Islam." And they included the rulers of just about every Arab and Muslim country.

One boy, Fami Fozi, averred that he would support any Muslim whom he determined to be an observant Muslim fighting for an Islamic cause, even if it meant abandoning the United States. None of them believed that Osama bin Laden -- or, indeed, any Muslim -- was behind the bombings.

All felt U.S. society was prejudiced against them, and they were puzzled and amazed to receive countless offers of guidance counseling, support visits from state education officials, and a stream of friendly phone calls.

Let's examine the implications here. President Bush is right to insist that this is not a U.S. war against Islam. His visit to the mosque here and his talks with Muslim leaders were humanely and tactically correct, even gracious in that agreeable Bush-family way.

Nonetheless, although individual Muslim-Americans have grieved, and grieved publicly, those expressions of loyalty to this country at this grave time have not been overwhelming. (Even among my own many Arab and Muslim friends, the response has been more political than patriotic.)

More worrisome is the fact that many of the prominent Muslims that President Bush called in to show solidarity with America after the tragedy were, as Martin Peretz wrote in the New Republic recently, "in some way compromised."

He detailed among them Salam al-Marayati, who had already suggested that Israel was behind the bombings, and Hamza Yusuf, who had prophesied on Sept. 9 that a "great disaster would soon fall on the U.S." Peretz asks the "fearsome thought on just about everybody's mind" but on almost no one's lips: Does the United States have a fifth column?

That question would be easier to answer if our present Muslim-American population were clearer on their perceptions of the division of church and state, and on which they would defend first: America or Islam or even radicalized Islam.

These concerns are not borne of prejudice, which has no place here. They are serious questions that any self-respecting nation-state must ask itself to preserve the health and survival of its own guiding principles.

For the deeper historical problem inside Islam today is its incapacity to deal with modernization. The radical fundamentalists across the Muslim world fear cosmopolitanism. There is a growing hatred of a world of prosperity and progress that has left the once-great "Empire of Islam" far behind. Bin Laden's apocalyptic vision is built on those fears and hatreds. It is the inevitable handmaiden of the envy of the teeming, unassimilable boys of the Muslim world who see the "ungodly" West leaving them in the ashes of history.

For this is a "religious war," although the administration does not want to portray it as such. Islam, like Christianity, indeed all religions, can be a peaceable kingdom -- or a warring one. As Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, has written: "In moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred (the Muslim) dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred."

These are the complex, multihued realities that must not be allowed to fade from view in the rosy light of the myths being created. It is certainly moral for students to step forward to defend their Muslim fellow-students. It is also desirable for those girls to understand that the veil they are symbolically donning here in this free land is the symbol of subservience that progressive Arab and Asian women struggle so incessantly against.

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