對美國知名穆斯林的批判
Last
week, Muslims of the World (MOTW) - a platform describing itself as
"designed to give a voice to Muslims around the world" - launched an
Instagram contest offering a free trip to New Zealand. It claimed the
winner would meet families of Christchurch shooting victims and visit the
mosques with the platform's founder, Sajjad Shah, Imam Suhaib Webb, and author
Khaled Beydoun - all US-based.
The announcement swiftly provoked a
backlash, including from
Maha Elmadani, the daughter of one of the victims, who wrote, "I don't
know who you think you are but you and your idiot friends are not welcome to
come here and look at us like animals in a zoo."
The contest has since been cancelled and Muslims of the World issued
an apology, and so did Beydoun - who deleted his Twitter after the
controversy - and Webb. It is tempting to see all this as a
one-time, isolated occurrence - an individual mistake - but it is not. This type of social media-related opportunism has many
manifestations and is very much rooted in Muslim celebrity culture and trauma tourism inspired by Orientalist attitudes.
The trend of Muslim
figures rising to almost untouchable celebrity status has been
noted in closed circles for some time, but many have been reluctant to speak
out about it on a public platform.
Part of this is due to
fear of being ostracised and harassed. Black Muslim women, for
example, have often discussed on private forums how some celebrity Muslim
figures take from their scholarship and silence them when they speak up.
Muslim celebrity culture very much illustrates problematic power
dynamics of gender and race within the Muslim community that are rarely
addressed. It is not lost on anyone that primarily cis/het, non-black Muslim
men acquire celebrity status at the expense of others and often assume the
position of official commentators on Islam and all Muslims, regardless of
whether they have the expertise or not.
The aftermath of the Christchurch massacre demonstrated this
perfectly. As details of the horrific attack started surfacing, US-based
Muslim celebrities were quick to take centre-stage, drowning out Muslim voices
from New Zealand. This was not only
disrespectful to the Muslim community there, but it also shifted the focus away
from important discussions about the local context in which the shooting took
place.
Many local Muslims, for
example, were pushing back against the narrative that the
government was unaware of white nationalist extremism and threats against them. Members of
the Maori community were also challenging Prime
Minister Jacinda Arden's claim that "this is not New Zealand," pointing to the country's bloody colonial
history.
In their eagerness to
dominate the online discussions after the attack, some Muslim celebrities went
as far inadvertently propagating misinformation. Under the guise of
"humanising the victims", for example, Beydoun posted effusively on
social media, using what some have
claimed to be either wrong or plagiarised information.
It was celebrity
Muslim culture that allowed outside voices like Beydoun to position themselves
as owners of the Christchurch narrative, even when some New Zealand Muslims
protested. And it was this same culture that made him, Shah and Webb feel
entitled enough to put their faces on a poster and advertise a "free
trip" to New Zealand.
Their attempt to
transform a site of suffering and death into an exciting destination for a
visit is nothing new. Plenty of other US celebrity activists engage in trauma
tourism on a regular basis by making a career out of travelling to sites of
trauma and speaking about it with self-proclaimed authority when they come
back.
While promoting the event
on Instagram, Beydoun
said, "We will be doing work with the community inshallah"; yet it is
unclear whether the Christchurch community actually knew such work was going to
be done. An executive member of Al Noor mosque told the New Zealand
Herald that nobody had approached them
about the competition.
Although the giveaway
didn't mention money, the condition for entering the draw was: "Must tag
three people in the comments below and follow @suhaib.webb @khaledbeydoun and
@sajjad12345." It is hard not to wonder whether there was really no
mercantile motive behind the giveaway, given that we live in a digital era, in
which social media can be a powerful tool.
The attacker himself
chose to livestream his attack on social media, hoping to amplify its impact
beyond the borders of New Zealand and succeeding. When social media has such a potential to
influence, clout becomes currency and getting more followers - a necessity.
Trauma tourism is also a
very obvious extension of voluntourism - the idea of travelling to
"exotic" destination to "do good" - practised mostly, but
not exclusively, by white Westerners. In rationalising the
trip, MOTW borrowed directly from the voluntourism rhetoric of "doing
work" and "being agents of healing", seemingly ignorant of where
these ideas come from.
Imperialism, Orientalism
and their derivative, the white saviour complex, postulate that the Western
civilisation is superior to all others and its
representatives can and should spread its superior thought and ways to try to
uplift the inferior, dejected cultures of the "Orient". Unfortunately,
some Muslims in the West seem to have unwittingly adopted these attitudes and
have come to believe that they are the only ones capable of helping another
Muslim community heal.
It is indeed quite
troubling to see members of the Muslim community lean on these capitalistic and
predatory models of engaging with communities, especially when black Muslims - like Malcolm X -
have led the way in fostering meaningful transatlantic ties. There is a
blueprint to follow, but there is also an apparent refusal to engage with it.
These issues are largely driven by the pervasive lack of critical engagement with Islamophobia. Hate and hateful
acts against Muslims tend to be exceptionalised and isolated from the larger
context in which they occur. Discussions are often limited and stop short of
exploring Islamophobia as
a phenomenon rooted in white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism.
As a result, the
response to it is often superficial activism (limited to social media posts and
inconsequential speaking events), rather than a deep and methodical
interrogation of existing systems of oppression and the development of a
sophisticated strategy to challenge and dismantle them. Forging connections at
home and abroad within the Muslim umma and with other oppressed communities has
to be an integral part of that process.
Celebrity Muslims are
among the least qualified to lead these efforts, because their platforms are
always elevated at the expense of the more marginalised voices. In fact, their
pursuit of self-promotion is counterproductive and even damaging.
The MOTW giveaway may
now be gone and will probably be forgotten soon, but the ideas that gave it
life remain, and they must be urgently addressed and countered.
沒有留言:
張貼留言