Why They Don't Hate Us

Mark LeVine talks about his new book, which offers a way to change how Muslims, Christians, and Jews think about one another.

BY: Interview by Alice Chasan

Continued from page 3

Culture jamming originally meant intercepting the dominant culture's messages and replacing them with subversive messages. For example, someone would take the Marlboro man's face on a billboard and turn it into a skull and bones. But for me, as a musician, culture jamming means bringing together artists, activists, scholars, religious leaders from around the world to talk and perform and create together. I've done these culture jams in almost a dozen countries; it's the best way to help figure out new ways we can come together to transcend our differences.

This is where religion is so crucial. Not as a metaphor, but as an example. Religions are all based on critique and then on transformation. Similarly, culture jamming is the crucial way to give people a positive vision, a new kind of identity based on what I call empathy, which, for me comes from the great French-Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. His idea of empathy was based on radically recognizing the other, whoever your others are. In other words, getting rid of any suppositions you have, getting rid of any historical relations of power.

Take, for example, the way the French look at their Muslim populations--through the prism of "These are the people we colonized. These people are somehow less than us." [French Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy calls them "subhuman scum." This is very relevant because Sarkozy's not just the interior minister, he's also the religion minister. The minister of religion for France says he's going to sandblast subhuman scum out of existence: This is how the man is talking about the 12-24-year-old who are revolting against decades of discrimination. So this is what we're up against. In the face of such attitudes, we need to be able to create a new, transformative vision.

The Abrahamic faiths have the idea of human beings made in the image of God.

Absolutely. Levinas got his idea of empathy from his deep knowledge of Talmud and Jewish tradition. And his great student Jacques Derrida, an Algerian Jew, also learned much of his activism from his being the absolute other. That forced him to think about how you see through false dichotomies and simplistic descriptions of people.

You're saying both sides seem to be mutually deaf and blind to one another's complexity.

I'll give you one example. I'm doing a project now called Heavy Metal Islam, meeting with and recording, performing, dialoguing with some of the best rock and hip hop artists in the Muslim world. I was with a bunch of them in Lebanon a few weeks ago during Ramadan. These are heavy metal musicians. So on one hand, you think of heavy metal musicians: long hair, crazy, completely libertine, without principles, no morals at all. But the truth is that these are smart guys who see no dichotomy between being religious and deeply spiritual Muslims and also embracing the most quintessentially American popular cultural forms like heavy metal or hip hop.

So why are they invisible to most media?

They don't fit the paradigm we have, the false dichotomies. We think if you're a metal musician, you can't be smart. You certainly can't be a religious Muslim and be progressive. It's too hard to wrap your head around a religiously progressive Muslim heavy metal musician.

It's not too hard for the musicians or their fans. I was playing at a festival in Morocco this summer, where there were 20,000 kids for four nights in a row to see these people. They can be all these things. And that's why we need to be much more willing to search out the people who are still in the shadows, who might have the answers for what kind of alternative identities we need to construct if we're going to really move beyond the war on terror.

Is that what you call for at the end of your book as the hudna, the truce that you want the West to work out with Islam?

Our leaders, on both sides, have decided that violence is the best way to relate to each other. And in our names, huge sums of money and a huge amount of blood is being spilled to pursue this agenda. The only way it's going to stop is just more and more of us say, "You know what? We don't have the answers. We don't necessarily know who's ultimately to blame but we know that this situation is untenable. We want all violence by all sides to stop." On all sides, whether Muslim terrorists, U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Palestinians, or Israelis. People on the grass-roots level have to say, "Enough!"

We need a truce so that we can then move toward real dialogue and real peace and real democracy. America has one standard for allies, another standard for everyone else. We want Iraq to be democratic supposedly, but our biggest allies in the region, like Jordan, or Morocco, or Egypt, or Pakistan, aren't. The hard-core left--which largely sets the agenda of the anti-war and alternative globalization movements--wants to fight against the occupation of Iraq and Palestine, but could care less about the occupation of Tibet, or about the legitimate rights of other peoples, whether it's Jews or others, to have their own national or communal goals. So all of us are operating with double standards. And that allows the status quo to continue.

If everyone adopted one standard, which I try to articulate at the end of the book, then it would be impossible for us to endorse all the things we do because we couldn't by our very own standards.

Where do we start?

The first thing is education. We start by understanding the double standards. If we're talking about Americans, by educating ourselves about the reality of our foreign policy and our history. Because Muslims know the history and the present reality of American foreign policy much better than Americans do. Once we understand the realities, we can then know what we need to change. Second, we need to take on the hard task of being brutally honest with each other. And accepting that, My God, my government, let's say for America, or my religion, if you're a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian, has been used to kill or to oppress many, many people or to engage in terroristic violence against many people and I can't be passive anymore.

Why is there so much hatred toward Jews within Islam?

There's a very confusing relationship toward Jews. On one hand, when Islam emerged, Judaism was the main institutionalized historically powerful religion. Jews were the first real organized group that Muslims had to encounter, especially in Medina. And in Muslim theology, the idea of a Jewish betrayal of Muhammad and of the early Muslims produced a very strong trend of anti-Jewish sentiment within Islam right from the start. Muhammad is coming in saying that, he's completing their book. You know, he is coming to fulfill God's will. Well, they heard that before, didn't they? Someone else said that 622 years earlier. So Jews were quite naturally not going to take kindly to yet another person saying he's completing a process that they thought was completed in their own religion, and then his followers wanting to take all the spiritual and economic and political power into their hands.

So there's certainly clear historical and theological reasons why Islam has a negative view toward Judaism at its very start. But the reality is that as Islam developed, that view was muted by the fact that Jews were able to live in Muslim societies. Certainly there was prejudice and certainly there were attacks and discrimination and even violence against Jews, but compared to Europe during much of the past 1,400 years, Jews have fared better in the Muslim world.

In contemporary politics, you have Israel, a state defining itself as Jewish, which is involved from a Muslim perspective in taking away land from Muslims, especially the third most holy land in Islam, and being aligned to the two most powerful forces in the world in the last century, Britain and America. It's not an excuse for Muslims to be this way. It's just an explanation.

But, of course, we're not living in 628. Or 624. And as Tariq Ramadan and other progressive Muslim leaders have said, we need to talk about today. We need to talk about how we build, from a Muslim perspective, a new umma (peoplehood), or, in Judaism, a new am (people or nation) that encompasses everyone.

If something is good for Islam, but is bad for someone else, then we can no longer see it as being good for Islam. To me that is the perfect statement of how all of us need to be thinking. If something's good for Judaism or Christianity, or Islam, and in so doing, it's bad for someone else, then we can no longer define it as good. And that's where I think the idea of one standard of doing things everyone can embrace.

And that's where your idea of "human nationalism" comes in?

The human nationalism idea was inspired by a Muslim writer who said, "You're trying to impose an inhuman globalism on us. But you haven't even given us the chance to have a human nationalism yet." In other words, we Muslims have never been able to realize the West's great humanistic ideals of liberty, fraternity, equality, and you're trying to take away the state and impose some homogenizing globalization on us that's only going to exclude us and marginalize us even more! This is certainly not something most Muslims, or any of us, would accept if we were in their shoes.

So the question is, what can we work out together? That's really the discussion we need to be having.

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