Siege Prompts Self-Criticism
Maggie Michael
Associated Press
CAIRO, Egypt — A prominent Arab writer and television executive wrote this Saturday that the painful, humiliating truth is that Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism. This comes as Middle East media outlets and officials expressed sheer horror regarding the bloody rebel siege of a Russian school.
After the hostage crisis wrapped up, there was some surprisingly blunt self-reflection going on. People were warning that these kinds of attacks actually do more to wreck the reputation of Islam than any of its enemies ever could. Arab leaders and Muslim clerics condemned the seizure of the school as completely unjustifiable and shared their sympathy for those affected.
Russian commandos stormed the school Friday in Beslan, Russia; it had been taken over by rebels demanding independence for Chechnya. Russian officials said Saturday that the death toll was at least 250, with twice as many wounded. Many of the casualties were children.
Footage of terrified young survivors being carried away from the site played on loop across Arab TV stations. On Saturday, pictures of dead and wounded children dominated the front pages of Arab newspapers.
"Holy warriors" from the Middle East have provided support to fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya for quite some time, and Russian officials noted that nine or ten Arabs were among the militants killed.
"Our terrorist sons are the inevitable result of our own corrupt culture," wrote Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya television, in his daily column for the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. He published it under the headline, "The Painful Truth: All the world's terrorists are Muslims!"Al-Rashed provided a rundown of recent strikes carried out by Islamic extremist groups across Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. A significant number of these attacks are fueled by the ideology of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of the al-Qaida terror network.
"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools, and residential buildings around the world for the last decade have been Muslims," he noted. He argued that the community won't be able to fix its reputation unless there's an honest admission of these "scandalous facts," instead of just relying on endless condemnations or excuses.
"It’s a picture that feels both humiliating and incredibly painful for everyone involved," al-Rashed wrote.
People who write for Islamic websites notorious for extremist views didn't exactly agree on how to feel about the hostage crisis. Some went as far as to praise the separatists. On the other hand, others suggested we ought to hold off on blaming Arabs for the whole drama until the militants are actually identified.
Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column for Egypt's top pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that the hostage-takers in Russia and Iraq are actually doing nothing but harming Islam.
"If all the enemies of Islam actually teamed up to go after it... they still wouldn't have done as much damage to its reputation as the sons of Islam themselves. Honestly, between the sheer stupidity, the massive miscalculations, and just totally failing to grasp how the modern world works, they've done more harm than any outside force ever could," Bahgat wrote.
The horrifying images of the dead and wounded Russian students showed Muslims as monsters.An editorial in the Saudi-based, English-language Arab News suggested that Putin’s refusal to back down was driven by a need to protect his "tough-man" reputation. However, the piece also noted that by choosing such horrific targets, the Chechens essentially ensured there would be no sympathy when the hammer finally dropped. They hit rock bottom when they started using toddlers as pawns in their negotiations.
On Friday, heads of state from Egypt, Lebanon, and Kuwait reached out to offer their sympathies to officials in Russia and to the families devastated by the hostage crisis. A well-known Muslim cleric also spoke out, condemning the entire situation.
"What did those kids do to deserve this? Why should they pay the price for your fight with the government?" That’s how Egypt's leading Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, put it during a Friday sermon in Banha, just about 30 miles north of Cairo.
"You're just using Islam as a smokescreen, and it’s a dishonest one. The people behind these kidnappings are nothing more than criminals, not Muslims," stated Tantawi, the head of Al-Azhar University—the ultimate authority in the Sunni Islamic world—according to a report by Egypt's Middle East News agency.
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