What is in a Name?
If you are following the U.S. election, you are probably amazed, just as I am, how apt Americans are in debating almost everything, from emails, walls, to hairstyle and the sizes of one’s fingers. Obviously I am not writing about them. Rather, what I am writing about is a more subtle debate, probably missed by the Indonesian media. It is a debate over whether one should call people who committed terror attacks in the name of Islam “radical Islam” or “radical jihadists.”
The difference may not look obvious, but it is a powerful one. Republicans, including their presidential nominee Donald Trump, consistently use “radical Islam”, “Islamic terrorism”, or “radical Muslims” to refer to such people. They want to emphasize two things. First, that these people claimed to be Muslims; and, second, that they were not ordinary Muslims, but ones who were radicalized. Democrats and liberals, on the other hand, prefer the term “radical jihadists”. The word “radical” is still there, but the “Islam” and “Muslims” are not. In an appearance on ABC, Hillary Clinton says that using “radical Islam” sounds like “declaring war against a religion”. Obama declares choosing between the two terms “a political distraction”. Is it? Which one should we use, or should we choose at all?
To answer the question, let me do a little detour and share my own experience as a Christian studying in the United States. There is this small church congregation called the Westboro Baptist Church. It is fair to say that they are famous not because of their love, but because of their hate. Believing that America is doomed because it has sinned, the Church is grateful for everything bad that happens. At one point, they staged a protest at the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq, displaying signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers.” Can you imagine losing your loved one and see those signs at the funeral?
Let us look at another experience. Between the two major parties, the Republican Party is the more religious one. But, at the same time, many Republicans are less enthusiastic about social justice, curbing gun violence, or providing healthcare to those who cannot afford it, than about building walls, assuming hawkish foreign policy postures, and engaging in racial or religious rhetoric.
Are the Westboro Church and the gun-wielding, walls-oriented, anti-gay, anti-Muslim Republicans Christians? To my eyes they are. They are Christians because they claim to be so. Who am I, and who are we, to deny someone a label he defines himself with? They are Christians, but that does not mean they are Christian, at least not as I believe what “Christian” as an adjective means. Being Christian, to borrow from Pope Francis, means that one is more interested in building bridges that unite than walls that separate. Note the difference here. “Christian” can be a noun or an adjective, just like “Muslim”. “Christian” as a noun refers to the label. As an adjective, it refers to the values, to how the person lives his life.
But how do these two experiences relate to the debate over “radical Islam” and “radical jihadists”? The Westboro Church, far-right Republicans, and perpetrators of terror attacks are all related in the sense that they disturb our belief about what religion should do. We want to believe that our religion is a religion of peace, and thus our impulse is to exclude those who are not peaceful enough. But this impulse presents a very real danger. It blinds us to the reality that even the same religion is lived differently by different people. Some are more passionate than the others to the point of extremity. If we easily disavow this kind of people, we will feel that everything is okay (or that critiques against our religion are driven by ill-will) and that there is little urgency to engage in an introspection of what it is about our faith, both theological and social-cultural, that lead these people to that point.
Going back to the question we have at hand, if we shun the term “radical Islam” and use “radical jihadists” for political correctness or to avoid offending anyone, then I think we are not really contributing to the discourse. The fact is that many of the perpetrators of terror attacks claimed to be Muslims, although they might not be Muslim or Islamic. Similarly, if we use “radical Islam” to convey that most or many Muslims support violence, we will be in an equally wrong, if not more wrong, footing.
How we should label outliers is a perennial controversy—the current debate about Muslims is just a contemporary instance of it. In the end approaching this kind of debate requires the cooperation of two parties. Outsiders need to realize that what they see do not represent all insiders and insiders need to realize that introspection, openness, and reforms, rather than quick disavowal and face-saving, are the way.
