Activist details Islamic peace tradition

Social justice news
May 2002

Activist details Islamic peace tradition
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Activist details Islamic peace tradition
While terrorism and the war against it have reinforced the stereotype—even among otherwise open-minded Westerners—that Islam is inherently violent, it has become especially valuable not only to recall the existence of vast numbers of peaceable Muslims but also to shed light on a little-noted aspect of recent Islamic history: nonviolent resistance.

A recent article by political scientist Stephen Zunes in The Nonviolent Activist, the journal of the War Resisters League in New York, describes examples of nonviolent action in the Middle East, Africa, and other predominantly Islamic lands. While noting that the term nonviolent action is not highly regarded among unarmed Islamic resistance movements because of its connotations in Arabic, these movements nonetheless display the characteristics of nonviolent resistance to oppression.

While many on the West find it difficult to think of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in a positive way, he nonetheless led what was essentially a nonviolent revolution against the repressive and murderous regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, though the new Islamic regime itself became violent after assuming power. Beginning with his call in 1977 for strikes, boycotts, tax resistance, and other noncooperation with the regime, and extending through more strikes in 1978 and massive public demonstrations, despite brutal government reprisals, Khomeini mobilized mass resistance, largely through the circulation of tapes of his speeches. "Tape cassettes," noted a Iranian official, "are stronger than fighter planes."

When Israel invaded the Golan Heights in 1967, most of the population fled. But the inhabitants of five villages populated by Druze, an ethnic Islamic sect, resisted coerced acceptance of Israeli citizenship. In the face of a violent Israeli occupation, the Druze, through a nonviolent campaign utilizing a general strike, demonstrations, curfew violations, and other forms of civil disobedience, compelled the Israelis to withdraw their citizenship requirements and interference in Druze economic relations with Syria and Druze civil, water, and land rights.

Such success inspired some Palestinians to adopt nonviolent methods in the two Palestinian uprisings, or intifadas, in the late 1980s and early 2000s. While both these struggles in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip involved, and continue to involve, major violence, a notable element of both was nonviolent. By means of peaceful demonstrations, tax resistance, occupations, blockades, and the creation of alternative institutions, Palestinians won favorable public opinion in the Arab world, pressured some Arab governments to recognize the Palestinian situation, and persuaded the Palestine Liberation Organization to move in more diplomatic directions.

A third example comes from the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara, a nationalist movement engaged in armed struggle with the Moroccan government since the 1970s. While the Polisario's social and economic networks have been praised by international agencies, many of the hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi people ruled by the Polisario felt excluded from the power centers of the movement, despite its purported egalitarian and democratic values. A series of work stoppages and protests in 1988 produced a liberalization and democratization in the Polisario's political leadership.

Other examples of nonviolent resistance in the Islamic world in the last hundred years can also be drawn from Egypt, West Africa, resistance to Nimeiry regime in the Sudan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Kosovo. Many of the these countries have been consumed in violent conflict, but in the swirl of armed struggle it is important to glimpse the nonviolent eye of the storm, and to support it.

"Solidarity with Muslim peoples," Stephen Zunes writes, "will help them resist the temptation to resort to violence and will free all of us from the threats of terrorism, fundamentalism, repression, militarism, and imperialism."

For more inforamtion:
The War Resistor's League

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