Ingrid Mattson – Face to Face Islamophobia
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AI: Transcript ©
Right.
Well, good afternoon. Nice to see you all
again.
So
when we talk about I'm I'm just still
I'm a little bit speechless
from this
presentation. Thank you so much for that. It's
really
really moving.
In in the United States, Muslims are less
than 2% of the population.
There's just no way we can make any
progress without allies,
without,
you know, people who are
who are going to to speak with us
and and on behalf of us and to
our neighbors.
Connecting with people,
I really believe is the most effective way
of overcoming the fear that people have
of Muslims,
but the numbers are very difficult.
Right? It's just really very difficult, which is
one of the reasons why
we need
allies. We need friends. We need our neighbors
to say, hey. I know a Muslim,
and, they're nothing like, you know, what what
you say.
We live in a time certainly where there
are no naive encounters
between Americans and Muslims.
I don't know if there ever were. I
mean, as adults, we know that we spend
our whole
lives constructing
and then deconstructing what we know.
You know, we it seems like we we
grow up and we learn
and,
we learn so many things and then we
question them and start unlearning them and it's
just this constant process of trying to
make some order of the world
and then realizing that our perspective is limited
or wrong or skewed.
And that's why I
I do agree with,
the Dalai Lama that it's so important that
we understand our minds and we understand the
way
that that
our attention works, why we pay attention to
some
things and not others,
how we make risk assessments,
how it's very easy for us to be
manipulated,
and and the reality is that we will
always remember
traumatic,
upsetting, disturbing images. That's a survival mechanism for
humanity.
We could see,
a 100 pictures
of Muslim teenagers planting trees or Muslim families
sitting and having dinner.
We could even see the women being elected
head of state,
but we're not going to remember those images.
We're gonna remember the images we see of
violence and trauma.
I asked many
audiences
not only
about heads of state, how many, you know,
Muslim women have been heads of state, but
how many how many Muslims have won the
Nobel Peace Prize?
It's a lot
in the last dozen years.
And just,
there have been 3 women
in the last in the last dozen years,
and many
people remember
Malala,
Yousefzeh, and they remember her because she was
the victim of violence.
She's a person who was a victim of
violence, but also, you
know, you
tremendously articulate, charming, you know, advocate for education,
But what about the other 2 women who
weren't victims of violence?
Tawakkad Karaman, who led a non violent
peaceful
political revolution in Yemen, which is one of
the most conservative,
you know, tribal
Arab Muslim societies, and the pictures of her
leading men and women and her husband
at home with the kids and bringing the
kids down to her tent in the middle
of the square where she was leading this
peaceful revolution,
I've yet I've yet to,
be in a general audience
and,
had anyone
say they remember her or know her.
So we have this problem. We have a
knowledge based problem. We have a perception based
problem. That's not counting down. Do I okay.
Alright.
I started public speaking,
probably in the late nineties,
regularly giving talks to,
civic organizations,
churches, synagogues.
And I really did notice the shift
in about the mid 2000s. And it was
during when the Iraq war really got going,
when the occupation of Iraq and all the
violence got going there.
That,
audiences I encountered
no longer had any sense of openness.
Before I would be invited and say, well,
we don't really know that much about Islam.
We don't really know anything about Islam and
Muslims. So, you know, we'd like you to
give a presentation.
After about 2,004, 2005,
everyone in the audience was convinced that they
knew what Islam was and what Muslims believe
and it it was,
I I realized that I couldn't just
give information because it was it was being
filtered away from from a very strong,
conviction that they knew what Islam and Muslims
were. And, and it's even more so now.
Now, now the case is why is that
again? Is it something that
shouldn't just been,
happened,
sort of passively
for many people, for many ordinary Americans? It
is,
it's the water we're swimming in. Right?
And,
it's making people afraid and terrified.
So terrified that when I was in the
the Flint airport a few weeks ago,
and you know when you go to the
airport you have a certain amount of tension
like, oh, I'm gonna get there on time
and the TSA line and, you know, and
then you finally get to the gate and
you relax, you're sitting there, okay.
And as I just got in the gate
area
and I relax and I'm pulled out my
phone and I'm scrolling through my emails
and suddenly
someone just came right in my face. This
woman came in my face
and said,
you're being brainwashed, you're being brainwashed.
You don't have to wear that, you don't
have to wear that. And I was
just so shocked, and she was so frantic,
she was so
upset, she was so nervous.
And I just
after I, you know, I was I was
shocked because I didn't it was really out
of nowhere,
and then I'm trying to say, okay she's
so upset how do I relax her? I
said,
no, you know, what do I say? It's
okay,
so I'm trying to calm her down
and I stood up.
So I could talk to her and she
just started she started running away and I'm
like, wait
don't run.
Check my web site
out. Like I just
ingridmatson.org.
M a t t s. I didn't, you
know, how am I going to
I and and I just I felt so
bad for her
that she's walking around in this
state of
of just fear.
So
it needs a lot of compassion but it
is a very difficult problem
and the question is,
you know, I think the answer is that
that
why it's happening and why it will continue
happening is in those numbers.
You only care about ours. You know it
it is.
It's a number but it's also the money
and they always say follow the money.
Why? I just want
to really, we just have to think. Sometimes
it's just common sense. It's just basic common
sense.
Why did Glenn Beck write a book on
Islam?
What does Glenn Beck know
about Islam?
What did he get, you know,
and why are people buying his book on
Islam? Why would they consider him
an authority
on Islam?
So here we've clearly got
some people
who are taking advantage of the situation
for
monetary gain,
they're making a lot of money.
There are people we saw the money that's
being spent spent on the war on terror.
Some of those people I I that probably
doesn't even include the self style experts and
the people if you go on Amazon and
they claim to be experts on Islam and
they're about how selling books about how horrible
Islam is. So there's a lot more money
being made there. Think tanks popping up all
over the place,
strategic this and,
you know, analytic critical this and security this
and
and putting forth packaging people to come and
and further this message that Muslims are scary,
Muslims are terrifying, and they're not telling you
the truth. And this is really the most
insidious part of it.
Because I've been told by audiences
that I don't understand Islam.
Just think about that for a minute
Or
that I'm not telling the truth.
Right?
And
there is a and I'm going to
focus on this because it's really important and
it's going around more and more and it's
something I heard unfortunately from someone,
with a religious education
in a government appointed position
who,
you know, even I've it's I I feel
I always feel like I'm beyond being shocked,
but then something else happens and just shocked
again.
Who said to me,
okay. You've explained these things. You've written a
book on the Quran where you've put put
the verses about war and peace in context,
and you've explained to us certain things about,
for example,
the moral trajectory of the Quran. How most
Muslims
don't want to relive the 7th century, but
we wanna take
the the values,
the principles, of course, our our ritual life
is based on on the teachings of the
prophet Muhammad. May God's peace and blessings be
upon him. But, I mean, for the vast
majority of us, except for those utopian fundamentalists,
we're not interested
in, you know, reproducing, like, some kind of
weird, you know, play
the 7th century.
Right? We we we want to work towards
increasing
liberation of humanity
etcetera
and he said to me well I have
to ask you a question,
how can we trust anything you say when
we know that Muslims
are,
have a religious
what did he call it? Like, a religious
precept
that you're supposed to lie about your faith.
And he said, it's called Taqiyyah.
Masha'Allah.
So they know nothing
except for this thing.
So this taqiyah means dissimilation
or concealing.
And,
so what what he said was the educated
person in government position saying that Muslims are
concealing
the truth about the religion behind this, which
is then if you look at imagery about
Islam and Muslims, it's all about
being hidden.
Right? So I I'm I mean honestly, I'm
so tired of voyeuristic metaphors behind the veil,
beneath the veil, unveiling, lifting the veil, peeking
behind the veil. What's behind, you know, it's
just,
but you but you'll see the the the
images, it'll always be someone with a masked
face.
Right? Someone so we don't really know who
these are, and this is a this is
a very significant,
very old accusation about Muslims.
So,
in the time I have, let me just
tell you what this means.
Muslims,
if they're being tortured,
if they're being
at risk of having their life taken away,
it is allowed for them to say, no,
I'm not a Muslim.
What did this
How do we know this? Where did this
happen?
I mentioned this morning about Ammar, Sumayya and
Yasir.
Ammar and Sumayya, slaves in Mecca who were
were tortured
unto death.
Sumayya being sexually violated,
in the torture before being killed
for being a believer
in Mecca.
Their son, Ammar,
was tortured with them and watched this happen
to his father and to his mother.
And the torturers said to him,
renounce your faith, renounce God,
and we'll let you free.
And the trauma
and the terror
of what was happening to him made him,
at that point, renounce God, and he went
to the Prophet Mohammed crying, weeping.
He said, I've been ruined, absolutely ruined,
and he explained what happened.
And the Prophet Mohammed, may God's peace and
blessings be upon him, said,
if they come to you again,
say the same thing,
because God knows what's in your heart,
and he was not in a state where
he should
lose his life in this horrible way for
this.
So,
you know, I think I think the beginning
of perhaps
a truly
fascist state in the sense of,
well, a totalitarian
state in the modern world. I think the
seeds of it really came in under the
inquisition in Spain.
When it wasn't enough
for the Jews and the Muslims
to under
threat of force and persecution and torture or
being banned when they gave up their faith
and they said we're Christians.
Because the inquisition said, no, they aren't really.
And used, honed all of the instruments of
torture and terror to try to find out
what they really were.
And and is this is how we'll find
out who's a Muslim when we decide to
ban Muslims
from the United States? I don't know,
but
in that context,
there were those both Jews and Muslims who
concealed their faith, hoping that eventually they would
be freed from this tyranny, freed from the
suppression
and one day being free to have their
faith.
And the idea of the perfidious Jew, the
Jew who is lying and sneaky, and the
Muslim
who conceals
his or her faith and doesn't show your
true face became a dominant,
a dominant
trope
in Western
literature
that then continue to characterize
who are these, Semites until today.
So that's the reality of the situation. And
so this idea of don't trust the Muslim
has very deep
insidious
and and very disturbing
roots
in,
our culture
and we have to be
extremely,
careful about it.