A Muslim-American theologian and scholar told a group in Concord on Friday that ill-informed public discourse about Islam feeds into the narrative of the Islamic State.
Celene Ibrahim, who works as a chaplain at Tufts University and is pursuing a doctorate at Brandeis University, cautioned against the American belief which she said shows up in polling that Islam promotes violence against other religions.
“Most people are of the opinion in the U.S. . . . that Islam says the killing of Christians or Islam mandates the killing of Jews and somehow any Muslim that’s not doing that is just not abiding by their principles,” she said. “Actually, the reality is exactly the opposite, when it comes to what Islamic texts and tradition teach.”
Speaking at an annual gathering of the New Hampshire Peace Action Education Fund, Ibrahim, who converted to Islam more than a decade ago, said it’s an “equal opportunity religion” that affirms women’s rights and values religious diversity.
“It’s a religion that recognizes the religious other as valued and protected,” she said.
It’s too often that “one single incident in one single village,” such as the Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a young advocate for girls’ education, then becomes “the meta-narrative for all things Muslim, such that all Muslims apparently are against women’s education,” she said.
She added: “By the way, education is a fundamental duty on all Muslims that was instituted in the early seventh century by the Prophet Muhammed in the Quran.”
When prominent Americans advance Islamophobia using false stereotypes, she said, it “gets piped directly into” ISIS recruitment videos. Ibrahim said she hasn’t seen the tapes herself, but she has friends and colleagues who work for governmental agencies studying extremists.
“You can see it directly, in almost an overnight sort of way. If something is said on the national stage here that is overtly anti-Muslim – these messages about, ‘Go home, you don’t belong, you’re not welcome’ – they show up right away, and they’re mechanisms for recruitment,” she said.
It’s difficult to counteract negative rhetoric against Muslims, she said, because it’s so deep-seated. In many cases the tropes of contemporary political cartoons date back to 12th-century Europe, she said. Even her own grandmother regularly sends her propaganda and asks if it’s true, she said.
“It’s almost a full-time job to be negotiating this intense propaganda campaign,” she said, “and what we have to remember here is it is a well-funded, well-organized Islamophobia network.”
Ibrahim told a girl who asked how to combat Islamophobia that the best thing she could do is educate herself, so she can reply with the truth when confronted with falsehoods.
One of the most enlightening experiences, she said, is when people form relationships across religious divides; although, she acknowledged, that opportunity is limited in New Hampshire.
Nevertheless, she said, residents should hold up diversity as an American virtue.
“We have to preserve this plurality or we lose something of the soul of who we are as a community that is built in diversity, pluralism and inclusion,” she said.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)