Professor Bennoune Comments for Huffington Post, MSNBC on Opposition to Fundamentalism among People of Muslim Heritage
Professor Karima Bennoune commented for media including The Huffington Post and MSNBC on grassroots opposition to Muslim fundamentalism. The topic has been in the news following a much-publicized exchange between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck on the HBO network program "Real Time" in which Maher claimed that people in Muslim-majority countries are failing to speak out against fundamentalist terrorism.
"In fact, many liberals and progressives in Muslim majority contexts are fighting back," Bennoune writes in an op-ed published in The Huffington Post. "While writing my book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, I interviewed nearly 300 of them from 30 countries -- traveling from Pakistan to Mali -- to hear how they continue to resist."
In the op-ed, Bennoune condemned discriminatory portrayals of Muslims, but also criticized some "Western liberals" for their tendency to "downplay the gravity and the scope of the challenge posed to people of Muslim heritage themselves by fundamentalism and jihadis." She argued: "What we need is a principled, anti-racist critique of Muslim fundamentalism that pulls no punches, but that also distinguishes between Islam (the diverse religious tradition) and Islamism (an extreme right wing political ideology.)"
In an October 7 interview on the MSNBC program "All in with Chris Hayes," Bennoune spoke about the need for people and governments in the West to reassess the nature of the threat posed by Muslim fundamentalism. "This is not a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam," she said. "This is a clash within a civilization on the ground in every country where extremism is found. And the people who understand it the best are the people who have been fighting it for decades, while the United States, unfortunately, has been supporting the Gulf governments that have helped to nourish these fundamentalist movements."
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She joined the King Hall faculty from Rutgers School of Law-Newark in 2012. Her book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction.