The U.S. Muslim Honor Brigade Strikes Again

By Asra Q. Nomani

21 April, 2015Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/21/the-u-s-muslim-honor-brigade-strikes-again.html

In Wilmington, Delaware, students at the treasured Cab Calloway School of the Arts can join a club, “Free to Be You,” and they can call a hotline to report bullying. In my anti-bullying stand for free speech, I will host an after-school teach-in tomorrow, not far from the school at a coffee shop called (aptly) Brew HaHa! The dean of the school has cancelled a talk I was scheduled to deliver to students on peace between Pakistan and my native India after a local Pakistani man, Naveed Baqir—the founder of an ultraconservative mosque—smeared me, an Islamic feminist, as “Islamophobic.”

My new lesson to the kids: we must speak up with moral courage for the change we want to see in the world, to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, India’s nonviolence leader.

Sadly, an “honor brigade,” or loose network of academics, activists, bloggers and others, defend the perceived “honor” of “true” Islam by silencing speech and calling reformers, like me, “anti-Muslim,” “House Muslims,” “native informants” and “Uncle Toms.” Last week on Twitter, I was called “Auntie Tom.”

My experience with the Delaware honor brigade emulates the politics, personalities and smears that make it so difficult to have honest conversation in too many Muslim communities around the world. Simple dynamics, like exhaustion and fear of controversy, put open debate at risk.

There are brave ones, whom I will meet tomorrow in Delaware, who stand up to bullying with courage. But, to our peril, with even well-meaning Americans, the casualty is a serious one: censorship.

“While Naveed, and maybe some members of his community, might be opposed to what they perceive you to have written and said, they are alone. They are not the Delaware, Lahore, Delhi Peace Partnership,” says Beverley Baxter, 71, a board member of the group that invited me to speak, and a fellow feminist. “They are not Wilmington. They are not Delaware. We’re ready to welcome you to Wilmington and anxious to hear what you have to share with us.”

Tunde Durosomo, another board member, wrote to his colleagues in the group, “The real victims are the 600+ students that are denied the opportunity to experience something different, to hear a different perspective, a different voice of Islam. How can we expect our youths, leaders of tomorrow, to have a balanced education and become free, critical thinkers when they are shielded from opposite ideas and thoughts that some may perceive as controversial or politically incorrect?

He added: “I am even more troubled by the fact that their schools, the citadels of learning, abdicated their responsibility in this regard by giving in to fear and intimidation.”

The targets of the ‘honor brigade’, on campuses from University of South Dakota to University of Michigan, have included films like Honor Diaries and American Sniper.

Earlier this month, Duke University cancelled a talk of mine after the Duke Muslim Students Association cited a Religion News Service blog, written two years ago by a Duke Islam professor, Omid Safi. The Muslim student group said Safi had “condemned” me for an alleged “alliance with Islamophobic speakers.” Anonymous websites like LoonWatch.com reposted the smear after Religion News Service pulled it. (I don’t have any “alliance.” As a journalist, I talk with everyone.) Duke re-invited me after I asked for evidence, expressing regret at the cancellation. Safi didn’t respond to a request for comment.

My run-in with the ‘honor brigade’ in Delaware began innocently enough three months ago when I accepted an invitation in early February from Kathleen M. Meyer, 72, co-founder and board president of the nonprofit group, the Delaware, Lahore, Delhi Partnership for Peace. A DuPont retiree who had worked in Vietnam for the U.S. government during the war, she gave her heart and soul to the nonprofit, holding board meetings at her home. In 2011, she started the organization with colleagues in Lahore, Pakistan, and Delhi, India. With a goal of promoting people-to-people relations between the three countries, the organization has grown rapidly with programs, projects and overseas delegations that educate Americans about India and Pakistan with programs, such as an annual educational series on the two countries, attended by about 2,300 Delaware high-school students. In this spirit of goodwill, Meyer asked me to talk to about 600 students about India and Pakistan.

Born in India, I have family in Pakistan, and I rode the “peace bus” in 2000 from Delhi to Lahore, with my dadi, or paternal grandmother. I accepted the invite and sent a clunky title, “Riding the Peace Bus: How to Find Healing—Personal and Political—for the People of India and Pakistan and their Diaspora,” but it was meaningful to me. Thirteen years earlier, in early 2002, my Wall Street Journal colleague and friend, Danny Pearl, had been kidnapped after he left a house I had rented in Karachi. He was later brutally murdered, and I had learned I had to find personal healing from the grief of Danny’s murder before I could imagine peace.

In mid-March, I saw a draft invitation. When I sent in my bio, I had mentioned my essay about the “honor brigade,” and I got a query back from the board president: “…explain the HONOR BRIGADE. It is not clear what it is. What your connection to it is, etc.”

The connection soon became evident. I was a target. On March 19, the board president sent out a message: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have cancelled our educational series program and luncheon….”

The “unforeseen circumstances” were the protests of a board member: Baqir, an IT specialist who had, ironically, voted for my original invitation and designed the invite. He had resigned the day before, battling the weary board president over me. She told members at the time that he threatened to picket the talk. He denies it. But it’s clear that board members who loved the Cab Calloway dean and wished her no harm were afraid she’d be dragged into a mess.

Baqir’s complaint was that he had read the Daily Beast columns I’d written on the difficult topic of “profiling,” my participation in Rep. Peter King’s hearings on Islamic radicalization, and my support of NYPD monitoring programs. He concluded that I was “Islamophobic.”

In an email, he tells me that my writing “puts myself, my family, my children and millions of other American minorities at risk of the after effects of profiling due to their racial, ethnic and religious background. Thats [sic] why I changed my mind, resigned from DLD board leadership in protest and am planed [sic] on issuing a statement.”

I am not “Islamophobic,” nor am I “anti-Muslim.” My father is Muslim. My mother is Muslim, and I am Muslim. But I also don’t live with my head buried in the sand. I am for honest threat assessments, public conversations and law enforcement strategies. And I am for critical conversations, not saving face, on the issue of Islamic extremism.

In my 2010 Daily Beast column, I chronicled how I had participated in an Intelligence Squared debate on “profiling” with a former CIA agent, Bob Baer, and an African-American columnist, Deroy Murdoch, on my team. We argued that race and religion are legitimate elements of threat assessments, like if police rule out African-Americans as suspects in a cross burning at an African-American family’s house and focus on potential white suspects.

I was emphatically clear: “profiling” shouldn’t be discriminatory, harassing or illegal.

We won the debate.

I wondered: What led this former board member to turn on me?

Born in Pakistan, Baqir earned a graduate degree in computer science from the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, started by the government of Saudi Arabia in 1980, as it brought its Wahhabi Islam to the subcontinent during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Islamization of Pakistan. He came to the United States, earning a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2009, according to his resume published online (PDF). The next year his wife, Amna Latif, and he started a school in Newark, Delaware, advertised on the web as Tarbiyah Islamic School of Delaware, where first-grade girls cover their hair with hijabs. Baqir says the school is “nondenominational,” and he asked that it not be named, for fears it would be targeted in some way. “I am requesting that you do not refer to Tarbiyah School in anyway,” he wrote to me. “Please do not make these children the target of your frustration.”

On the homepage of its website, a photo of teachers and staff shows five of 21 scarved women peering out from behind full-face black veils, only their eyes visible, over the shroud of a dark gown. Latif covers her face with a veil. The most puritanical interpretations of Islam require veils. The Deobandi school of thought, the driving ideology of the Taliban, militant groups and strict orthodoxy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, requires full-face veils for women, as does the Wahhabi and Salafi schools of thought exported to the world from Saudi Arabia. My mother’s family required she wear the face veil as a woman.