Musings of a Muslim Fundamentalist: On Problematic Pronunciation and Rhetoric

To start with, let’s do a bit of housekeeping – to allll my English speakers, I’m looking at you. In this article, and quite frankly this entire page, you’re going to see a lot of references to MuSlims and ISlam, so I’d like to clear the air once and for all and effectively save every Muslim from that reflexive eye twitch/barely suppressed cringe or whatever silent habit of complicity we’re all guilty of trying to repress every time we hear references to ‘radical muZlims following izlam’ being drawled out across North America.

PSA: It’s pronounced MUSS-lim, rhymes with ‘Muslin,’ the fabric of Orientalist dreams, as in not trying to make a ‘fuss,’ but I’m tired of being a ‘wuss’ and not responding to this aggravatingly irksome Anglicized passive-aggressive linguistic hegemony and outright refusal, courtesy of the masses, to respectfully pronounce a word that is more than compatible with the North American-English lexicon (*cough cough* looking directly at all my predominantly white high school and university history profs who’d bend over backwards talking about how important it was to properly pronounce the names of a bunch of German and Russian WW1 war generals the way they were intended to be pronounced, then turn around and call Yahia from Lebanon Yay-yeah, “born and raised in Canada and only speaks one freakin language: English”-Ahmed as AK-mid, “Listerene”-Nisreen, and consistently insist on calling Ha-wei “Hawaii,” yeah I’m looking at you 😊).

(and don’t get me started on Western born English speakers attending the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics, situated in get this, PyeongChang(!!), but still refusing to pronounce “Chang” correctly on the grounds of being proud and thus uncompromising American traditionalists (translation: ignorant, racist descendants of colonizers).

Like, we get it, you’ve never heard names like ours before. But can you respect our (façade of) [AA1] diversity enough to at least *try* to pronounce our names correctly?

Like, English may be my first, and believe it or not, only language, but I still can’t for the life of me pronounce “Kirsten” properly. But does that ever stop me form trying? (The answer is heck no.)

On that happy note lets move on to another long overdue subject – Labels.

The first time I heard the term “Muslim Fundamentalist” on the news I remember blanking for the remainder of the story and just confusedly staring at the news anchor – I could not even fathom how a “Muslim Fundamentalist” was any different than just a “Muslim” let alone figure out how the term fit in that particular context (i.e. used synonymously with ‘terrorist’).

Let’s do a quick English lesson, shall we? The word ‘fundamental’ essentially means a basic principle or the core crux of something – hence following this definition, a fundamentalist Muslim is someone who adheres to the, (surprise, surprise) fundamentals of Islam – in other words, the belief in the Oneness of Allah, the 5 pillars of Islam, the Qur’an and Hadith.

Using phrases like “Fundamentalist” and “Extreme Muslim,” which mind you are not only oxymoronic, but also imply that Islam and even religion in general is inherently violent – that when and if followed to either the most basic principles or when followed to the ‘extreme,’ that hateful violence is the only outcome. (In reality the exact opposite it true)

“Extremist”

“Islamist”

“Moderate”

(^completely redundant as the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) himself asserted that Islam is a moderate religion, and Muslims are and always have been moderate. Thus using the term “moderate” as a euphemism for a “Westernized” Muslim is undermining our faith, implying that any who do not follow the Western Liberalist societal model is a radical and establishing that it is the radicals who are the norm – when in actuality it is those who commit heinous acts of violence that are the deviators and the deniers of Muhammad’s revelation of this 1.7 Billion strong moderate religion.

Oh and can’t forget my own personal pet peeve, North Americans trying to compliment me for being such a “Modern Muslim” – in other words completely defying in every possible way the backwards, ‘uncivilized’ Western-Orientalist media’s solidified fallacy of what the average Muslim ought to be/look/act like.

The lexicalisation of phrases like these can not and must not be normalized – mainstream rhetoric and pronunciation are politicized and ingrained in to our collective vernaculars and labels, while they may not seem like much to those who have enough knowledge to look past them, labels are not only used to describe, but to also define – be it consciously or not.

And it’s not just Fox News doing this (let’s be real if it was just them I wouldn’t be dedicating a couple hundred words just to nitpick one of their many stances – it’s literally everyone from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to Al-Jazeera anchors, to your local political science professors and community activists, racing each other to see who denounce the ‘fundamentalists’ first.

This is just one aspect of redefining our collective religious identities as Muslims; reclaiming the labels we allow ourselves to be called and not blindly normalizing offensive and downright dehumanizing political rhetoric in favor of appealing to the delicate sensibilities of our Western Liberalist allies (including Bill-C51/C59, Patriot Act, and surveillance state supporters), all in the name of denouncing terrorism and radicalisation.

“Being moderate, in the expanding witch hunt for Muslim radicals, has never been so bad.” (-Khaled Beydoun, American Professor of Law)