Into the abyss: Gaza and the crisis of political virtue

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"If he has not virtue, man is the most unholy and the most savage of animals?" Aristotle Enough is being written about the moral and political failings of the Zionist state. Here, I wish to write about something a lot more difficult for Muslims to examine, namely, our own moral and political failures. The emotional outbursts and enraged diatribes of many Muslims in the aftermath of the latest assault on Gaza have served, in some instances, to highlight many of those failures.

Unacceptable levels of anger do not lie in outraged reactions to scenes of dead Palestinian babies and decimated property. Such scenes should elicit anger. Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali explains the meaning of the Prophet's counsel, "Do not become angry," in the following manner: It means you should not act on the demands of anger when it occurs. Rather, you should struggle against your soul to avoid acting out of anger or following its demands.

Hence the danger of being overwhelmed by anger is that it demands actions that are contrary to prophetic teachings and sacred law. As the scenes of carnage and destruction mount in Gaza, the Muslim blogosphere is filling up with angry calls for the indiscriminate murder of Jews: soldiers, civilians, men, women, and children. Such calls for indiscriminate killing have nothing to do with our religion. Our Prophet forbade the killing of women and children in combat. Based on these teachings Muslim scholars outlined strict rules of engagement governing the conduct of war, as it relates to upholding the sanctity of human life.

Currently, there are those who argue an idea unknown in our history, that the prophetic teachings relating to the sanctity of civilian life, as well as those protecting women and children should currently be discarded. As one opinion leader exclaimed: "They have legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine?" Discarding such teachings not only allows Israel to claim a moral equivalency between empty words threatening the death of Jewish children and Israeli actions that actually result in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children, it also leads many Muslims to miss the opportunity to demonstrate the loftiness of the ethical standard our Prophet defined for us.

We are the followers of a merciful Prophet and not the ideological and philosophical children of those who have introduced the idea that the slaughter of an opponent's civilian population is an acceptable stratagem or consequence of warfare. The idea of total war is not an Islamic invention. It is one of the bastard children of the political morality emerging in the post-Enlightenment West. During the Second World War II, it led to both Hitler's atrocities against the civilian populations of Eastern Europe, as well as the Nazi blitzkrieg against London. It also led to the Allied fire-bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As Muslims, we must ask ourselves if we wish do go down this slippery slope. This is a question we must consider now as a community, and as individuals. We must take the high road that warns against killing innocent civilians in the strongest terms. If we chose to tread this high road, as a community, we will be a source of hope for a human family that has grown weary of seeing innocent blood flow in the name of causes deemed lofty or base, and we will invite divine grace and providence into our individual lives and into the life of our community.

These two factors are the only guarantors that we will be able to repulse the assaults of oppressive enemies. On the other hand, if we choose to tread the low road, possibly because we think that we can hasten a victory that God has denied us, or by imitating our enemies, we are sorely mistaken; Victory only comes from God, the Mighty, the Wise (Quran 3:126). Knowing that, we should understand that there will never be a Muslim victory that comes via hands that are stained with the blood of innocent people.

As we move deeper into this new century, we are in the process of defining our faith for generations of Muslims to come. Will we be a community of virtue, or will we be a community of expediency? Our Lord has called us to be a community of virtue; circumstances are calling us to be a community of expediency. Virtue is its own reward in this world, and it is rewarded handsomely in the next. Expediency can bring about short-term gains in this world; however, it has no heavenly reward, and history has shown that in the long-run it leads into the abyss of immorality. Israel has fallen into that abyss. We must ask ourselves if we wish to follow her.

Not equal are good and evil. Repel [evil] with what is best. Unexpectedly, you will find one whom between you and he there was enmity become an intimate friend. (Quran 41:34) Sheikh Zaid Shakir is a board member and Scholar in Residence at the Zaytuna Institute in Berkeley, California. The Islamic studies institute receive partial funding from the UAE. www.zaytuna.org