Nonviolence and the Struggle for Democracy
in Iraq and at Home

Bismallah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim
In the name of God, most Merciful, most Compassionate

On the 1-year anniversary of September 11th, PBS is showed a documentary, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” that examined how America’s faith has been challenged by the terrorist attacks on our country a year ago. It asked, “Where was God on September 11?”

I find myself with questions of my own. I wonder whether we Americans really believe that we are the only real people on this planet—or whether we just act that way?

I was in New York City on September 11th. I was in Baghdad during last year’s war. And everything I saw, and everything I felt, only reaffirmed my faith. I saw grief everywhere I looked, and I saw courage in the face of that grief. I saw Americans in New York, and Iraqis in Baghdad, suffering under their respective tragedies, come together in their respective communities to try and overcome their terror. I felt a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood, from people who I had feared would look at me, as a Muslim in New York or as an American in Baghdad, as their “enemy.”

The sign at the memorial in New York City’s Union Park after September 11th that stands out in my mind more than any other simply read, “We don’t want this to happen to anyone else ever again.” But it does happen, all the time, all over the world.

The sign in Baghdad, before the war, that stands out in my mind simply read: “Baghdad, where the world comes for peace.” It was meant as stupid propaganda, I’m sure, to flatter Saddam Hussein, but without intending it, it stated a simple truth: that we must be present, even in the midst of violence—especially in the midst of violence—in order to build peace.

War is catastrophe. It is terrorism on a truly massive scale. It is the physical, political and spiritual devastation of entire peoples. War is the imposition of such massive, deadly violence so as to force the political solutions of one nation upon another. War is the antithesis of democracy and freedom. War is the most bloody, undemocratic and violently repressive of all human institutions, and that reality must define our opposition to war and violence.

The war in Iraq is not just a war in Iraq. It’s a war over what the structure of our world will be, and it will neither be won nor lost by either the success or failure of soldiers on bloody battlefields. This is our war, yours and mine. Its ultimate ends belong to us, and we will win or lose it.

I don’t know why God allows atrocities to occur, but then I don’t understand why we commit them in the first place, and I think that should be where the questioning starts. Our security cannot depend on the insecurity of everyone else. If there was a purpose to September 11, we won’t realize it until we start seeing the rest of humanity as we see ourselves, until we realize, deeply realize, that for as long as any of us in this world are unsafe—all of us our unsafe.

That challenge is where faith begins, and in its failure is where faith dies, for the only place we can possibly wage war against inhumanity is in our own hearts.

In a world increasingly embracing collective insanity, what our governments do is almost irrelevant. They will do what governments always do—try to protect their own power to the best of their abilities. It’s what we the peoples of this world do or don’t do that will decide the war, and living that question defines our struggle.

In the days after September 11th, George Bush stood in front of the world and shouted at the world that it was time for everyone to choose sides. It was perhaps the only thing in his presidency that he’s ever been right about. It is time to choose sides—it’s long past time.

Our problem is that George Bush and Osama bin Laden are on the same side: the side that believes in the redemptive power of violence, the side that believes that you can kill your way to peace.

We’re seeing the destructive futility of that vision playing itself out in the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan today. Love is the redemptive force in our lives—violence and killing are simply sins.

Iraq is not a war zone. Iraq is a place of marriage and loves, of children and artistry, of entrepreneurship and creativity. Iraq is a place of human devotions to which war has been brought, and as we struggle against this war, we must all of us journey to Iraq, at the least within our hearts.

Violence can and does solve problems in our world. Violence ended the rule of the Taliban. Violence rid us of the tyrant Saddam. But these are only its superficial consequences. Violence’s most fundamental creation is Diaspora, the destruction of community. Violence in Afghanistan and Iraq has destabilized vast populations of human beings who were already living inside of already unacceptable catastrophes. Violence has built walls between those peoples and ours, enflamed prejudices and injustice, entrenched persecutions and raw greed, and created fears leading to hatreds and depression and despair. This is the central truth that lies at the heart of violence—the brutal severing of human ties and emotions.

Violence disrupts all of our lives:

• economically, through the destruction of workspaces for employment and opportunity;
• culturally, through the destruction of common spaces for art or sports or leisure, common spaces for interaction;
• intellectually, through the destruction of space for education, for debate, for dissent;
• physically, through the physical damage violence does to our bodies, through the physical destruction of life;
• and emotionally, through the sheer weight of all of these losses: loss of life, and the loss of the creative space in which to be human.

This destruction is the essential definition of Diaspora: the destruction of our human spaces.

Diaspora is not limited to refugee populations fleeing or exiled from their physical homes. Everywhere we look, our world is on fire: violence threatens to consume us. To look at our world today is to stare nakedly at the face of our possible extinction. And we have to say that fear, anger and depression are honest reactions to this reality—justified reactions to this reality. But these honest reactions, these different types of withdrawal, make it that much harder for us to make peace—with ourselves and with our world. And at their heart, these withdrawals, these legacies of violence all call to the shared human struggle against Diaspora. We are all of us in Diaspora, wherever we are, when we are disconnected from what it means to be human, when we are disconnected from the basic joy of the human experience.

People sometimes ask about our “failure”—the failure of the anti-sanctions movement over long years of struggle, the failure of the anti-war movement over short months of protest. But the question is itself a lie.

Nonviolence can and does prevent catastrophe. Nonviolence multiplies opportunities a thousand-fold until seemingly insignificant events converge to tumble the tyranny of fears that violence plants within our hearts. Where violence denies freedom, destroys community, feeds Diaspora—we must be present, cultivating our love, our active love, for our entire family of humanity.

It can be overwhelming to stare, wide-eyed, into the crushing weight of a $400 billion a year killing machine, fed by fear-mongering politicians, headed by a fool, protected by a captive media, only existing to maintain an entrenched corporate-capitalist system that is eating our world alive. But if we would wonder at our inability as yet to fully overcome the death sellers and fear merchants, let us also wonder at how hard they have to work to keep their system running. Out-spent and out-shouted a million to one by the killers and their apologists, we persevere.

This isn’t testament to some special talents or conditions unique to us, it’s testament to the fact that war and killing, despite being with us from our birth, are not the natural state of humankind. Peace work isn’t naïve or ineffective, it’s extremely effective, and it’s informed by the spirit of what it truly means to be human. Its only problem is that not enough people are doing it. Peace is not an abstract ideal—it is a living and tangible reality that takes practice, that must be practiced, to be real.

This is the crux of choosing our sides in this war—understanding what peace is. Pacifism is a radical challenge to every aspect of worldly power, and if it isn’t—it isn’t pacifism. Non-violent action isn’t just protest and persuasion—it’s non-cooperation and direct intervention as well. As long as pacifism is confused with acceptance, or even with simple protest, then regardless of how passionate our rhetoric may be—we’ve failed. And however misguided we may believe violent action or resistance to be, we have to recognize that at the least it is action, it is resistance.

We have to ask the question: Why is it so easy for us to be willing to pick up arms and risk our entire lives, and so difficult for us to put down those same weapons and still risk our lives—in the cause of life?

Answering that question is the struggle, and in that struggle, know that we are not only standing against violence, we are also wiping its effects away from our own lives—through the struggle we are ending our own Diasporas.

Because the challenge of pacifism isn’t just in reaction or resistance toward violence, it lies in continually inculcating, nurturing and recreating the reality of our world as a beloved community.

Our goals for Iraq: peace, freedom, democracy—our goals are the same as George Bush’s stated goals. And the problem isn’t simply that he’s lying—it’s much too easy to say that. I genuinely believe that George Bush, and the common culture he represents, does not understand that peace is not simply a goal, but must be the means toward that goal.

How can peace result from a situation where we are constantly using violence, overt and implied, in our relationship with Iraqis, and demanding that Iraqis either quietly submit to that violence or enthusiastically join us in committing it against any of their countrymen whom we designate as criminal?

We have to heal this dangerously delusional mindset, before it leads us further into disaster. This is the logic of Ariel Sharon’s Israel—the logic that says that even though Israel wants to end the Occupation of the West Bank, or America the Occupation of Iraq, we cannot do it as long as anyone resists those occupations, because if we did we would be “rewarding terror.” What sense is this? Does quitting smoking “reward” lung cancer? Does putting a roof on your house “reward” the rain?

No nation, even ours, can justly rule another peoples. Violent action and violent resistance is the basic logic of Occupation.

If our end goal in Iraq is self-determination, then every decision, every element of the path toward self-determination must be guided by and decided by Iraqis. If our end goal is peace, then every action taken toward that goal must be rooted in peace, must in itself create space for peace rather than for violence. Peace is not a noun. It’s not a thing you can take and put up on a shelf somewhere. Peace is action, living actions.

I was in Iraq last year during the war, with Voices in the Wilderness. We were there to physically stand against the war, and to accompany our sisters and brothers in Iraq during the war—to share the same risks that they did, and put our entire lives on the line. That was resistance, and it needed doing, but it was not the body of work we did. Nor did the body of our work before the war lay simply in breaking sanctions, in publicly violating an unjust law. The body of our work was in visiting schools, and creating pen-pal programs so Iraqi and American students could directly communicate, in visiting hospitals and doing arts and crafts with the children there, in visiting families and fostering friendships that could stand, and have stood, in the wake of violence and killings. In creating space for peace.

This is often derided as “weak,” or “fuzzy.” But nothing could be further from the truth. Fostering community is a direct and effective challenge to the destruction that violence brings. Violence is the refuge of the incompetent, and the only weakness in meeting it is in failing to resist it. To those who accuse me of weakness for refusing to take arms, I quote my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, when she wrote:

Perhaps you think me stooping
I'm not ashamed of that
Christ—stooped until He touched the Grave
Do those at Sacrament
Commemorate Dishonor…?

There is hope in Iraq. There is nonviolent resistance happening on a daily basis: marches and protests against the violence of both Saddam and the Occupation, in support and remembrance of those disappeared by both Saddam and America, marches and protests against unemployment and against lootings and rapes, against car bombings and against shootings. There are unions that have been formed all across the country, and elections for union leaders. There have been local elections held, mostly spontaneously, all across Iraq for neighborhood and city councils. Communities have banded together to try to provide food and electricity and security for themselves and their neighbors. And when assassinations have occurred over the last year, religious and community leaders have come together, across sects and ethnic divisions, to promote peace and prevent violent escalation. And each of these actions are not only nonviolent, but fundamentally democratic.

This isn’t to underestimate the challenges Iraqis face. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed by Saddam, hundreds of thousands were killed in the war with Iran, tens-of-thousands in the 1991 war with America, hundreds of thousands died as a result of the sanctions, and tens of thousands have died as a direct or indirect result of last year’s war. Indeed, it would be hard for me to overstate or exaggerate the devastation caused by 30 years of brutal dictatorship, 3 catastrophic wars, and 13 years of punishing sanctions. But there is hope.

Iraq is unsafe—for 25 million human beings who cannot leave, but I have never known a people as resourceful, nor as consistently kind, in the face of such extreme violence, as Iraqis. They are my hope.

Democracy is not simply about elections, it is perhaps not even primarily about elections. Democracy is about the right for all people to individually and collectively create their own destiny—the right of each of us to write our own histories. And nonviolent resistance, even if not articulated that way, is the primary means by which Iraqis—as all peoples—are organizing to meet their nation’s challenges. Nonviolence, democracy, civilization—these are all words that describe different aspects of the same essential thing—the work of building community.

Iraq is a civilized country. Iraq is the Cradle of Civilization. The word “urban,” comes from the name of the Iraqi city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham—the father of 3 of this world’s major religions. In Iraq humankind discovered written language, mathematics, the first written code of law. The image many Americans have of Iraqis—as either being terrorists or victims—is much too simple.

Governments will do what they always do—try to protect their power to the best of their ability. That almost doesn’t matter. It’s what we, the common peoples of our world, do—and why we do it—that will matter.

It may seem strange for me, a Muslim, to close by quoting a Christian, or as a pacifist to cite the man who tried to justify war, but St. Augustine once wrote something that I like very much. He said that Hope has two, beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. He said that Hope was the greatest of all virtues, even greater than love. Because Love only tells us what God’s Will is, while Hope tells us that God will work God’s will.

Our world is in trouble, and we have every right to be angry about it. There is much to be angry about. But let it be a hopeful anger, an anger born from the knowledge that Love’s Will will be done. Let it be a courageous anger, that gives us the strength to take risks—the physical risks of standing against violence, the emotional risks of loving those who think they are our enemies.

Connection is the opposite of, and the antidote for, Diaspora. We are all of us connected, and recognizing that reality is the joy of the human experience.

Peace and freedom—true freedom—are concrete and tangible things that we can only build if we decide to stand up and be present. They take struggle. They take risks. In a larger sense—they are the struggle. It begins with the connections we make here with one another, the connections we make with our sisters and brothers outside this room, throughout our nation, throughout all nations.

And it never ends.