Laila Lalami speaks at University of Redlands about life as a Muslim
By Phill Courtney
Redlands Daily Facts
Some 100 people gathered in the Orton Center at the University of Redlands Tuesday night to hear Moroccan-American novelist and essayist, Laila Lalami, deliver a talk titled, “For or Against: My Life as a Muslim in the West’s Gray Zone.” As a person straddling both the world of her Islamic upbringing in Morocco and her life now in the United States, Lalami’s talk focused on the need for a bridge between these cultures, labeled derisively by some in the Muslim world, who oppose that bridge, as the Gray Zone.
Lalami, who’s in the creative writing department at the University of California, Riverside, opened with a frank statement. “I am not an expert on Islam.” Islam, she pointed out, spans a wide range of cultures and countries, making all blanket statements about Islam in general unwise.
“And so, often times,” she said, “when people hear about a particular practice in a particular country, say, for example, Saudi Arabia, people assume that that practice also holds true for the other 56 countries that are part of the Organization of Islamic Conference.”
“Just understand,” she said, that when the word Islam is used, it’s “a very big word,” that can hold many meanings for many people, and that being an “expert on Islam is something a little more complicated. So, I’m not an expert on Islam. I’m not here as an expert on anything really. I’m here as a storyteller.”
Lalami then went on to discuss last November’s terrorist attack in Paris, which killed 130 people who came from many backgrounds, including a California student, and “the cousin of a good friend of mine.”
Of course the attacks, she said, led to worldwide condemnation, but, she reminded her listeners, there was another terrorist attack in Beirut just the day before, “killing 43 people and injuring 249.” However, this attack was just a number for many people. Unlike Paris, “there were no individual stories.” Such attacks, she pointed out, are almost a daily occurrence in the Islamic world.
Attacks such as these, she added, repeating it twice, “also have happened in Syria every single day for the last four years.”
As a footnote, she also pointed out that the Dec. 2 attack in San Bernardino, “was not planned or directed by ISIS. Those were two people, who were inspired, probably, by them, but it was not organized by ISIS and, in fact, the initial reports that the two shooters had pledged allegiance to ISIS were retracted two weeks later by the FBI.”
From there, Lalami went on to explain what ISIS is; the many acronyms used to refer to various groups in the Mid East; and the history of how these groups came about. She urged her listeners to discern the different between the specific religious goals they have, which, she said are there, and their political ones.
She also said that the United States government and its war on Iraq, along with the disbanding of the Iraqi army, was instrumental in the formation of ISIS, when many Sunni Muslim men felt cut loose by Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government, and felt they had nowhere to go but “this group—al-Qaeda in Iraq,” which eventually coalesced as ISIS.
At the same time, she said, the Arab Spring arose across the Mid East, including in Syria, where Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, reacted with brutal oppression.
“By the way,” she said, “I know everybody is talking about ISIS all the time, but 90 percent of the civilian casualties in Syria are through Assad and his bombing. He has killed far more people than ISIS has, and yet pretty much everyone has made a peace with the fact that Assad is staying. All world powers have pretty much accepted that Assad will stay because he scares them far less than ISIS. And that’s because ISIS is threatening them, but Assad isn’t.”
Now, she said, this fringe group, ISIS, “that nobody thought would survive, is still around and controls territory in Iraq and now territory in Syria, as well. Everybody’s denouncing them.”
But, she said she wanted to remind her listeners, “that everything that ISIS has done, Saudi Arabia has done,” including more beheadings than ISIS; the most well-known recently being the mass beheadings earlier this year, which included the execution of a Muslim cleric that enraged many in Islamic countries. Other Saudi Arabian outrages are unknown by many Muslims, she said, because they don’t advertise their oppressions the way ISIS does.
Saudi Arabia, she said, has also been bombing Yemen unmercifully for the past 10 months to “complete indifference” in most of the world, including the United States, which just concluded a massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia.
She concluded by reminding her listeners why all these dynamics, along with questions about ISIS and what to do about them are “complicated,” with no “single explanation for ISIS,” which combines religious, political and financial elements. “Things don’t just happen in a vacuum and we need to stop looking at it as a single problem.”
But, unlike many in our current crop of candidates for president, Lalami is empathic about the idea that one of the ways we can solve this “crisis” is by bombing. We can’t, she said, dismissing calls for “carpet bombing them into oblivion, or ‘bombing until the sand glows in the dark,’ as Ted Cruz so frightfully put it. This is a crisis that’s a little more complicated than that.”
ISIS, she said, must be confronted through appealing to those in the “gray zone,” who are appalled by ISIS and denounce their world view. “For ISIS to win, the gray zone must be eliminated.” Our hope lies in making sure that this doesn’t happen, she said. “We all have to coexist.”
Source: www.redlandsdailyfacts.com