Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
April 18 and 19 were seminal days for our American Republic in 1775. On the 18th, Paul Revere took his ride to alert the Minutemen that the “British are coming” and on the following day the “embattled farmers stood” at the “rude bridge that arched the flood” at Concord, Mass., and “fired the shot heard round the world.”
On April 18 and 19, shots were fired again in Massachusetts, but this time in Watertown as two young murderers sought to escape justice.
I suggest that there are two aspects of the Boston Marathon bombing that apply across America with deep effects.
First our policing.
The police forces seeking to identity and apprehend the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings became heroes of the community. It has been many years since I have seen such spontaneous appreciation of our police in America.
One of the worst consequences of our cultural war, which began in the 1960s and saw many young and generally well-educated baby boomers lead protest movements, was to drive a wedge between the community and the police. Police became “pigs” and were too easily seen as oppressors of those seeking social justice and thus as stooges of a corrupt establishment.
Our feelings about the police were then too much shaped by Southern realities, where the police were white and were used as front line troops enforcing Jim Crow segregation. I remember Bull Connor and his fire hoses in Birmingham. One Movement song we used to sing put it: “Ain’t gonna let Bull Connor turn me ‘round.”
I remember the picture of Sheriff Rainey smirking over the “disappearance” of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi with a wad of chewing tobacco in his right cheek and his black boot showing.
And I remember TV images of the Chicago cops busting yippie heads during the 1968 national convention of the Democratic Party and of CBS newsman Dan Rather being hauled off the convention floor.
At Kent State, armed agents of law enforcement killed innocent protesters.
Last week in Boston brought us back to a better appreciation of the need for good policing, for community policing. In a just society, the police and the people are on the same side, cooperating to seek the common good.
Second is a matter of religion.
There are many opportunities across America for home grown terrorists to strike and kill innocents.
Since the discovery that the Boston Marathon murderers were from Chechnya and had Islamic backgrounds, the contentious issue of a link between Islamic beliefs and terror is back in the news and in our minds. Also provoked by the foreign origins of the two brothers committing wanton murder in Boston is renewed suspicion of immigrants who might bite the hand that welcomed them to our country and gave them opportunities for free self-expression and careers.
We need to talk about this, not simply to cover up the fears and suspicions of non-Muslims under a blanket of alienated withdrawal from all things Muslim.
One approach we have not tried, but could easily do, is to hold public forums for Muslims and non-Muslims on what it means to be an American and how being an American can be an expression of the highest guidance given us by the Quran.
The Quranic interpretation that comes to this conclusion about the goodness of America is straightforward and open to all who will read the scripture. I have made such presentations at the International Islamic Universities in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Islamabad, Pakistan, to appreciative audiences of Muslim scholars who agreed with my textual analysis.
The proposition that Muslims can and should be devoted Americans comes from Quranic teachings that God created each of us to be stewards of justice. According to such teaching, each of us carries within us some part of the spirit of God, including a moral inclination to do good and be compassionate.
The powers that God has given us to be his stewards are held by us in trust on his behalf. We are not to exploit or hurt others; we are not to assume that we can supplant his wisdom and judgment and become as God is; it is not up to us to judge the ultimate fate of others.
Under these Quranic teachings, any government is similarly a trust of stewardship. Most human governments, including most Islamic governments, fall short of this ideal.
America, on the other hand, is a special country expressly founded as no other is on the notion that public office is a public trust. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution align perfectly with Quranic teachings on holding powers in trust for the good of the community.
I argue that of all the nation-states in the world, America is best at providing conditions for faithful living up to Quranic teachings. More so even than Saudi Arabia. The Saudi version of Islam, as I see it, runs the risk of putting human narrow-mindedness and intolerant zeal in the place of God’s plan for humanity as revealed in the Quran. I can refer you to many passages of the Quran and to many sayings of the Prophet Mohammad to support this conclusion.
We in America should not let our justice system be hijacked by those who turn their minds away from compassion. We need especially to reach out to young men, who tend above all others to turn to death and violence to give their lives some meaning but, in doing so, align themselves with the darkest of forces. The line of such men in our country goes back to John Wilkes Booth and comes down through Charles Guiteau, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley and too many others.
Community leadership is needed across America to make the case for a patriotism of all persons and the salvation of the good among us — here, now, in this life.
