How do we make sense of the murder of three American Muslims?

Sudden and brutal murders are always troubling but never so much as when they seem inherently mad and senseless. When a young man strides into a school and annihilates little children without even wild and cruel vengeance as a motive, we are all the more confounded by the meaninglessness of the crime: bewildered and numb, as believers, we are forced to confront a nihilistic abyss that greatly challenges our theodicies. For some it even jeopardizes or results in loss of their faith, and for still others simply confirms reasons for their lack of belief altogether. To add insult to injury, we are then subjected to the maddeningly predictable media framings of the tragedies with their asinine questions, such as “How do you feel?” and “Did you ever think this would happen?” posed to survivors of the victims who awkwardly attempt to answer them, often with shell-shocked faces.

The recent murders of three college students at Chapel Hill in North Carolina have an added poignancy for American Muslims, for it is an unusual instance here in the U.S., though all too common abroad, when the victims, not the perpetrators, are Muslim. Stunned by the tragedy, some Muslims have condemned this as “terrorism” aimed at Muslims. A few cooler heads, including Congressman Keith Ellison, Duke University’s Abdullah Antepli, and CAIR’s Nihad Awad, have acknowledged that it may very well be a hate crime but have cautioned people not to rush to judgment. This is good advice because those who want it labeled as “an act of terrorism” are falling into the same trap, making the same mistake the media invariably makes whenever the perpetrator happens to be Muslim.

While hatred of Islam, if not the main motive, appears to be a factor in this crime, the gunman was nevertheless an equal-opportunity hater. Craig Stephen Hicks had loathing and disdain for all theistic religions with equal passion as evidenced by his posts online. At the same time, oddly enough, he advocated for tolerance and even posted that people have a right to practice the religion of their choice, and, in a largely red state, at the risk of losing some friends, he expressed support for the LGBT community. So was this a hate crime precipitated by a disputation over a parking space, or were there other factors at work?

His ex-wife has said that he was obsessed with the 1993 film “Falling Down” and that he “watched it incessantly.” I have not seen the film but, according to the extensive Wikipedia entry, in it Michael Douglas plays an unemployed and divorced man who, in his own mind, is deeply “moral” and finds himself an alienated white man in the midst of modern urban America awash in immigrants, minorities, and a culture lacking “American virtue.” He has a mental breakdown on the highway of life, triggered by his car breaking down on a hot day. That begins his descent into a violent rampage. He soon meets everyday people, such as checkout cashiers with blank bovine stares that mirror the vacuity of their jobs. As the film progresses, he encounters some minorities and reacts violently to affronts both real and imagined. In one scene, he informs a neo-Nazi, who disgusts him with his foulness and racist attitudes, that unlike him, he is an American. The Douglas character threatens, maims, and kills with guns, knives, and baseball bats people who have vexed him in one way or another on his way to his daughter’s birthday before he has a tragic end of his own.

The late film critic Roger Ebert said,

“What is fascinating about the Douglas character, as written and played, is the core of sadness in his soul. Yes, by the time we meet him, he has gone over the edge. But there is no exhilaration in his rampage, no release. He seems weary and confused, and in his actions he unconsciously follows scripts that he may have learned from the movies, or on the news, where other frustrated misfits vent their rage on innocent bystanders.”

This may very well be an accurate description of Hicks’ crime, in which he acts out, subconsciously or not, the Douglas character’s behavior through a scene of his own making. His victims were three decent, well-liked, successful, law-abiding Arab-Americans, with all the things apparently lacking in his own life: religious devotion, college degrees, friendliness, personability, and a positive outlook on life. In the case of Deah, unlike the antisocial Hicks with his grumpy neighbor persona, friends and acquaintances described him as greeting everyone with hugs. Hicks, in my opinion, seems to be a violent version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, envious and seething with Nietzschean ressentiment, contemptuous of society, always on the verge of violence, waiting for a spark to set him on fire, perhaps even something as trivial as a parking dispute.

Some Muslims have seized the moral capital accrued by this event in which the victims were three bright young Muslims and started hashtags such as #MuslimLivesMatter.

But tragic as this homicidal event is, it is not Ferguson, which was the tip of a 400-year-old iceberg of racial injustice in this country. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, which began in 2013 and gained momentum after Ferguson, is aimed at addressing a long history of police brutality, systemic racism, and the frighteningly high rates of murder among black youth.

While the hashtag is appropriate given that the lives of Muslims do matter, as a community, we need to be more vigilant about bringing attention to other hate crimes in less fortunate communities, such as the one that resulted in the death of 15-year-old Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, a Somali boy who was brutally run over by a man driving an SUV with an anti-Muslim message in the back window. The victim was a devout Muslim boy who was memorizing the Qur’an and used to lead prayers for his community.

In Canada, young Somalis have been killed in alarming numbers for a nation with one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. Mustafa Mattan’s death is unknown to most, but he was a young man remembered for his acts of kindness, such as taking off his winter coat to give it to a homeless man. The day before the Chapel Hill murders, he was shot dead in his home. His death devastated his family. While no arrests have been made, some in the community believe it was a hate crime. His distraught family is struggling to raise $15,000 to cover his funeral expenses.

And while these deaths have occurred in the U.S. and Canada, we should also raise our voices to our government about wrongful drone strikes. For instance, just a few weeks ago, on January 26, a 13-year-old Yemeni boy, Mohammed Tuaiman, whose father and brother had been mistakenly killed by an American drone strike in 2011, was killed by another drone strike. What is particularly poignant about his death is that just months before he was interviewed by The Guardian; he told of the terror he felt living under the “death machines” that filled his sky on a regular basis. With the death of his father and 17 year-old-brother, he was left to tend a family of almost thirty people.

He had said the drones made everyone there live in terror and that the children had frequent nightmares about them. Those of us privileged to live in relative comfort and security should remember, especially at times like these when our security is shaken, that others around the world live in constant terror due to misguided policies supported by our tax dollars.

Lives, whether Muslim or not — especially those of children — should matter everywhere. While this last case is emblematic of flawed policies in Muslim lands, those cases here at home are indicative of something deeper and harder to grasp in the soul of the American psyche: it is our fascination with violence. This culture of violence reflected so blatantly in our media and our popular entertainment is related to both the violence perpetrated here at home and that which is exercised abroad. While hate is a possible motive in these crimes and definitely was in the case of Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, mental illness exacerbated by unrelenting viewing of violent films and games or watching over and over again a movie like “Falling Down” may more likely be the culprit in many of the so-called “lone wolf” attacks, including the one in Chapel Hill. It can also be argued that the irrational hate that these people express is itself mental-spiritual illness.

The second matter that I find troubling in relation to this incident is how the pervasive environment of anti-Muslim sentiment that has arisen in America is affecting all of us. It is the result of a highly orchestrated and well-funded campaign of hatred. The media glare has been unrelenting in showing predominantly negative images of Muslims for the last fifteen years. The constant rhetoric and relentless barrage in the media and the movies of how prone to violence the Muslims are fly in the face of vast evidence proving the opposite, albeit in stable societies. M. Steven Fish’s book, Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence, clearly demonstrates with rigorous social science that Muslim societies have considerably less violence than Western societies. Murder is a rare occurrence in places like Turkey, Malaysia, and Morocco, and almost unheard of in many traditional areas such as Senegal, Mauritania, and Gambia. But here in America, we have a highly violent culture where top-selling video games such as Grand Theft Auto and blockbuster movies like “American Sniper” both reflect and promote the murderous reality on the ground.

I wonder if Hicks had seen “American Sniper,” a film that Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, author, and activist Chris Hedges says is an invitation to kill Muslims. I wonder what type of books, if any, Hicks read, what Internet sites he frequented, what movies besides “Falling Down” he watched, and what video games he played that may have contributed to setting him on a path that ended in a murderous rage last week in the home of innocent neighbors just starting their own paths.

After 9/11, the American people, by and large, displayed extraordinary and exemplary outreach to Muslims in America. Mosques were flooded with flowers. My own mosque received countless calls in the immediate aftermath, and for each expression of animosity, well nigh a hundred voiced sincere concerns as to the safety and wellbeing of Muslims in our community. However, as time has passed, a virulent and viciously hateful campaign has succeeded in defining Muslims to the greater public as extreme, violent, not to be trusted fifth columnists who need to be watched constantly by our intelligence community. Some, like the arsonist in Houston, have chosen to take the law into their own hands, given, from their perspective, the “pussyfooting” of government about the matter. On a daily basis, pundits and politicians express with impunity vitriolic statements about Muslims, and we can easily imagine the moral outrage that would ensue if the word “Muslims” were replaced with “Christians” or “Jews.” But the campaign has been profoundly successful, and a pervasive hatred towards all things Muslim has now infected many segments of American society.

This is no doubt aided and abetted by the barrage of beheadings at the hands of those practicing perversions of Islam that are graphically highlighted on the news and social media. Never mind the fact that beheadings go on all the time just south of our borders at the hands of monsters empowered by the immense wealth that comes from our own country’s insatiable appetite for drugs. The brutally violent drug wars are a relatively minor story rarely highlighted in the news. Moreover, the Muslim children killed by drones in places such as Northern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen are never shown to the American public, but any perusal of mainstream Arab media let alone alternative Islamist media will result in a sickening feeling overcoming anyone with a heart who can stomach the graphic images of American collateral damage.

Muslims and others have every right to protest the embarrassingly evident double standards in the media. When a white male who had lost his wealth to the IRS and flew his plane into an IRS building leaving behind a political screed that countless “anti-tax patriots” could relate to, he was simply labeled a demented man. Even Bill Maher admitted that if his name were Muhammad it would have been labeled terrorism. But we must also question the double standards within our own community.

The danger in immediately labeling violent acts as terrorism is the politicizing of what often may be an act that resulted from mental illness, whether clothed in political rhetoric or not. In September 2014, 30-year-old Alton Nolen, an African American, was fired from his job at a food processing plant in Oklahoma; he immediately went home, grabbed a knife, went to the company’s office, and beheaded a white woman who worked there. Nolen was clearly mentally unstable, having a record of cocaine convictions, a prison sentence, and anger management issues. Yet that murder was presented in the media as an act of terrorism because Nolen was a convert to Islam. His violent crime was linked to his being Muslim even though local mosques had asked him to leave their premises due to his bizarre behavior.

Mental illness knows no boundaries, but America has an especially serious mental illness problem. As mentioned earlier, this wasteland of violent entertainment goes largely unaddressed, and that it is clearly contributing to mental illness or exacerbating already existing pathology is, in my estimation, undisputable. The philosopher, Karl Popper, the doyen of defenders of a free and open society, advocated in one of his last interviews the increasing need for censorship of the levels of violence on television and in films — video games were not yet on the radar during his time. This is the man who wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies. He stated,

Some years ago, I was asked by the Social Democratic Party in the House of Lords to give them a lecture on the problem. My thesis was that we are educating our children to violence by way of television and other such means. And I said that, very unfortunately, we do need censorship…. The rule of law demands non-violence, and if we forget about this then the law will have to interfere more in areas like publication and television. It is a very simple principle which is always the same: to maximize the freedom of each within the limits imposed by the freedom of others. But if we go on as we do now, we shall soon be living in a society where murder is our daily bread.

It is now projected that a school shooting will occur about every two months. In their important book, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence, authors Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano show cogently that people who grow up watching violence in films, television, and video games become desensitized to real violence, and thresholds of graphic violence rise as people become accustomed to it. One would hope that like the Hays Code of the 1930s, which established self-imposed moral guidelines for motion picture producers, censorship today would be self-imposed based upon violence on the screen and its clear correlation to violent behavior in real life — despite the cries of statisticians to the contrary. One needs only to observe 10-year-old boys after they have just watched a kung fu movie kicking each other for the next hour to know the truth of this statement. Mirror neurons and the effects of violence on them are well known.

Muslims have increasingly been the targets of much violence across the world.

In India, they’ve been targeted by Hindu fanatics, in Burma by Buddhist bigots, in Central Africa by Christian militias, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve suffered the consequences of an American invasion that led to countless deaths but numbered (officially) in the hundreds of thousands and clearly led to the rise of the insane conditions that have bred the worse forms of extremism. In the ongoing crisis in Palestine, they have borne the brunt of a decades-long occupation. When they choose to resist subjugation and state violence, they are labeled as terrorists as more violence against them ensues. Witness the killing of Muslims with impunity by Chris Kyle, the “American Sniper,” who repeatedly referred to the Muslims in Iraq as “savages” and boasted the highest number of kills without any guilt or remorse. This attitude of his I find particularly ironic considering that if the Iraqis had invaded America, he would have surely used his sniper skills to fight them tooth and nail. Yet, he, who was part of an invading army, seemed unaware that international law gives people the right to defend their lands from foreign invasion. But this simple principle seems to be lost on so many Americans who believe that when they invade a country people must welcome them with flowers because Americans always have good intentions and want only to help them, of course. Hence, if those invaded don’t welcome them, they must be terrorists.

Three young people with hopes, aspirations, and immense talents were mercilessly slaughtered by a deranged man who, according to his ex-wife, was not only obsessed with the film “Falling Down,” but more to the point, “had no compassion at all.”

Hicks was a misfit in the midst of a divorce, stuck in junior college at the age of 46 trying to acquire skills to enable him to work for lawyers. Years of exposure to violence on the screen and in real life combined with failure, frustration, and the seductive pull of atheism — all of this exploded in a violent rampage targeting his American Muslim neighbors. His young victims were just beginning lives on the path to success, service, and gratitude to a country that provided them opportunities so desperately lacking in Palestine, Syria, and Jordan, their respective lands of origin. They met a darker America: the America that plays Grand Theft Auto, that mocks religion, and that lines up to see films like “American Sniper.”

Let us hope and pray that the tragic loss of these three innocent Muslims as well as other Muslim victims of violence, whether by drones, SUVs, or otherwise, can inspire us all to help this nation better understand what the world religion of Islam that comprises one-fourth of humanity actually is and how it instills in countless Muslims, like the Chapel Hill victims, a desire to dedicate their lives to public service and charity. Let us also help this nation to address the current culture of media-generated animus towards our faith that increasingly erupts in scourges of ignorance and violence.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is the co-founder and President of Zaytuna College. More of his lectures and writings can be found at Sandala.org

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Falling Down — and Taking Innocents With You was originally published in The Center for Global Muslim Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Hamza Yusuf

A tragic event occurred in France. It was perpetrated by two ignorant Algerian men. For contextualization, I would like to point out though that during my lifetime alone, the French killed over one million Algerians in their own land. And recently, twelve French people were murdered. It was a crime; one that is clearly prohibited in Islam. They were killed unjustly, undeniably, and Muslims everywhere condemn that.

In light of such events, it is interesting to remember some of our own history. In 1859, a man named John Brown was one of the few white abolitionists against the enslavement of African-Americans. His convictions led him to eventually lead a raid on Harpers Ferry, Maryland. Brown believed that the Bible was over any man-made law, and he believed that what was being done to black people in this country was against God’s law. Therefore, he believed, because nobody else was doing anything to stop it, he had to take the law into his own hands. He was a religious fanatic: he took the law into his own hands as a result of religious convictions. Brown tried to take over an armory in order to get armaments to start a rebellion, and some people say that this, in effect, was the spark that led to the Civil War.

Ralph Waldo Emerson praised John Brown. There were people who actually supported him, like the Abolitionists in the United States, who felt that his cause was righteous. Henry David Thoreau wrote a very interesting article, A Plea for John Brown, in which he pointed out the hypocrisy in condemning Brown for killing a handful of people in a cause that he believed was righteous, while at the same time, the government sanctioned wars in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Likewise, in our own lifetime, we have seen this country go to war with a country that had nothing to do with any attack against this country, and we now have over one million Iraqis dead. Where are the millions of people protesting that? Yes, killing twelve people is a crime, but what about a million people? Are they worthless?

Of course, the Ebola outbreak is a tragedy, but only when it started affecting us in the West did many corporations suddenly become interested in finding a cure for it. There are hundreds of thousands of Africans who die from similar diseases every year. There is no sense of urgency for finding a cure for yellow fever, for example. Is it because these people don’t count?

They do indeed count because they are human beings, and this is where we have failed as a species. We are not raising children to become human beings. We are not inculcating in them human values and teaching them that human beings are more than just the material sum of their bodies. All human beings have a divine spark in them, as Almighty God has given all of us life.

God has given us all a miraculous, immaterial consciousness that cannot be identified on any computer; it cannot be touched or felt.

We must call into question what is happening out there. If you look at the Muslim world right now, it is a mess. As Muslims, we have to take ourselves to task for that. But I straddle two worlds: I am from this civilization, and I also converted to Islam. So I have to question what is this all about. I am deeply troubled by how Europeans look at Muslims, people who they colonized. Europeans killed them in large numbers, and then they brought them to their countries because they needed cheap labor to rebuild their societies after they had destroyed their own societies in their “world” wars. Even when they have wars, their ethnocentricity demands that they call them “global wars,” as if their “world” was the world.

They needed laborers from South Asia and other countries, so they brought those people to rebuild their societies, and they put them in the worst places in their countries, gave them the worst housing and the lowest paying jobs, and ghettoized them. Then, triumphant in their racism towards them, they are just amazed and wonder, “Why are these people so bloody barbaric? What is wrong with them?” The same type of sentiment has been felt about African-Americans in this culture for so long: “What is wrong with these people? Why don’t they just lift themselves up by their bootstraps? They even have a black president now. What’s their problem?”

Go into East Oakland right now and talk to people about bootstraps. The schools there have completely failed, and their religion and their families have been decimated. One must wonder: we have satellites that see everything now; they can see ants on rocks in the pitch black of the night, and they don’t see hundreds of thousands of tons of cocaine coming into this country?

We often hear, “What’s wrong with these Muslims? Why are they are so violent?” I ask, “Have you ever been to a Muslim country? Have you ever been inside a Muslim home? Have you ever eaten with a Muslim, spoken with a Muslim?” Personally, I have been all over the Muslim world, and I have rarely felt threatened or unsafe. I have walked through a city in Morocco after midnight, and I felt no sense of danger whatsoever.

Dr. M. Steven Fish, a professor at U.C. Berkeley and a very courageous social scientist, wrote a book called, Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence. He decided to study the violence of Muslims from the perspective of social science. He writes, “In this section, we have looked at whether Muslims are distinctive in terms of murder rates.

“Homicide is markedly rarer in Muslim societies than non-Muslim societies. The proportion of the country that is made up of Muslims is a good predictor of the murder rate, with a larger Muslim population associated with less homicide. This relationship holds when we control for other potentially important determinants of homicide. Accounting for why murder rates are lower amongst Muslims is difficult.”

As Muslims, we don’t find it difficult to account for that. We know why the murder rates are lower: it’s because we believe you go to hell for killing people!

Christians certainly know this, too. Christians know it’s one of the Ten Commandments. True Muslims, like true Christians, still believe in and follow those Commandments. “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” God said. That is not just any law — that is God’s Law. That’s why true believers follow that. They called John Brown dangerous and insane because he killed a handful of people in the raid on Harpers Ferry, but they don’t call heads of state who wage wars in which untold numbers of innocent people are murdered insane. But I do. Of course, that’s not the diplomatic thing to say, but such politicians scare me more than the idea of lone wolves out there.

We, as Muslims, Need to Take Ourselves to Task

If we want people to respect our religion, we have to first look at our own countries. Look at the denigration of Jewish people in Muslim newspapers; look at the racist cartoons that they draw of Jews. We have to condemn that, and it has to be real and genuine. We have to eradicate this in our communities and cultures because we can’t have a double standard. We have to be real and authentic about what we believe and what our Prophet ﷺ taught us, and we have to practice it. The Qur’an commands us to “Speak well to people.” As a result, we have to take ourselves to task and look at ourselves critically.

In studying Muslim societies, Dr. Fish found that in most things there wasn’t a difference between Muslim societies and others. In some things, Muslims were better than their counterparts in Western societies and in others, worse. Among those areas where he finds that Muslims did worse was in gender equity and attitudes towards women. (I wouldn’t, however, make a blanket statement about this, but it is certainly true in some countries.) I was once called to task by somebody I respect greatly, who is an American Christian expert on Islam, who, when I was once speaking about how much safer Muslim countries are, came up to me afterwards and said, “That’s true for the men, but not for women.” That really troubled me; it broke my heart because our Prophet ﷺ said:

“Noble men treat women nobly; and contemptible men treat them contemptibly.”

From the Ethics of Nouns and Adjectives to the Ethics of Verbs and Adverbs

I read a very intriguing book recently called The War Against Grammar by David Mulroy. His book argues that we have lost the ability to communicate well because we have lost grammar. The Muslim civilization was a civilization deeply invested in the study of grammar. If you want to define the Islamic civilization with an adjective, you could say it was a grammatical civilization; it was an Ummah Nahwiyya. Naḥu نحو (grammar) was the fundamental science of the Muslims. This is because the first revelation in our tradition was “Read in the Name of your Lord.” You have to know grammar to read properly and without mistakes, and so the Muslims were obsessed with grammar.

Grammar also has Metaphysical Implications.

In the 1920s, a lot of Black autoworkers were brought in because the corporations wanted cheap labor. This caused many white autoworkers, whose jobs were taken, to get very upset. In this setting, a Black man named Henry Sweet bought a house in a White neighborhood. One day, an angry White mob gathered outside of his house and were threatening him. The confrontation actually became violent. Henry Sweet had a gun and fired upon one of them, killing him. That dispersed the mob, and the police came. His entire family, all eleven members, were put on trial for murder. Fortunately, they had a defense attorney named Clarence Darrow. Darrow argued that the only reason the Sweets were even in court was because this man and his family were Black. Darrow argued that if this were a White man and a Black mob had done the same to him and his family, we wouldn’t even have an indictment; there would have been no grand jury; they would have seen it as self-defense, case closed.

Darrow asked an all-White jury to look into their hearts and ask themselves if there was anything other then racial prejudice that was motivating them. If that was the case, then they should be true to the law of this country and acquit Henry Sweet.

Darrow gave a brilliant defense, and Sweet was acquitted. That is because he took them from the ethics of nouns and adjectives to the ethics of verbs and adverbs, and this, I would argue, is the single most important thing that we as human beings must do if we are going to survive as a species. That is because when you are in the ethics of adjectives and nouns, this is how it works: in France, two Algerians killed twelve Frenchmen (because those two French men who were of Algerian background are not considered French in the eyes of the white French).

Ahmed Merabet is not considered French because he doesn’t have a name like “Pierre.” You may speak French, but you’re not considered French if you have a name like Syeed al-Jazari. You’re not really French because our morality is one based on nouns and adjectives, and that’s what defines you, not verbs and adverbs. If you say “A killed B,” the operative word there should be “killed”; that should determine how you feel about it. But if you say, “A Palestinian killed a Jew in Israel,” the focus is not on verbs here: the focus is on the nouns and adjectives, and that’s your morality. With this morality, the Palestinian concludes, “Oh, it must have been justified; the Jew must have been the wrong one.” And the Israeli concludes, “The Jew must have been killed unjustifiably because the killer is Palestinian, so of course it couldn’t have been self-defense.” In this line of thinking, whoever killed those Israelis who were part of that racist soccer club — automatically, ipso facto, it has to be, “the Palestinians are wrong because they are Palestinians.” It’s as simple as that.

But when you move into a view of morality based in verbs and adverbs, “killed” is the operative word. That action is what is wrong, not who is doing it; it is what was done that is wrong. The verb may then be qualified by an adverb. Such as: he killed them in self-defense; he killed them justifiably; he killed them unjustly. Those are the things that we need to focus on and not who it was, not who did something to whom.

This isn’t about Muslims and non-Muslims; this is about right and wrong. Right and wrong are not determined by nouns and adjectives. Morality is determined by verbs and adverbs, and this is why we have to learn to communicate better and understand what’s really happening on this planet. Who is really suffering and what actions are the cause of that?

What are the consequences of European economic policies in Africa with all the banks that are in Switzerland and Brussels, milking these countries of their livelihoods? What kind of suffering is going on? That’s what we have to ask. So I would call to task my civilization; as a member of it, I call it to task: J’accuse!

This is an edited transcript of a section of a speech delivered by Hamza Yusuf on January 11, 2015 in Santa Clara, California: courtesy of Feraidoon Mojadedi.

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J’accuse — On the Violence of Western Civilization was originally published in The Center for Global Muslim Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.