To borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1926 story “The Rich Boy,” I’d like to say let me tell you about the very Muslim. They are different from you and me…
I’m reflecting on this controversial and politically incendiary thought at a time when the media is working through the reality that an ardent Muslim just killed 12 people and wounding 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas. Identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman was wounded at the scene but was captured alive and was in stable condition as of late Thursday.
Hasan’s faith is hardly mentioned by the pundits at MSNBC, but it was a big deal in his own eyes. A source, for example, tells NPR’s Joseph Shapiro that Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues.
While Hasan was born as a U.S. citizen his parents represent an unusual cultural and religious tradition. They are Palestinians from the West Bank, according to his aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church. True to his family traditions, Hasan, 39, attended the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring and was “very devout,” according to Faizul Khan, a former imam at the center. Khan said Hasan attended prayers at least once a day, seven days a week, often in his Army fatigues.
As a political scientist, I think it is essential to demonstrate how Hasan’s faith shaped his thinking and made some forms of acting out and protesting more attractive than other forms of acting out and protesting. In particular, I think we have an opportunity to ask compelling qustions about the extent to which Hasan’s religious mental framework provided him with the green light to terrorize his fellow soldiers and our nation.
The problem, of course, is that if you read the Koran literally…it makes it perfectly clear that it is okay to kill other people if they don’t adopt your faith. The Koran lacks Christ’s message of self-sacrifice – even to death – as a role model way to life your life. In the Koran, there appears to be little payoff for showing mercy to your enemies or of making peace with them. Instead, there is an unmistakable violent edge in Islam which is consistent with the abbrehent behavior we saw today at Fort Hood.
Without turning all the world’s Muslims into our enemies, we need to have the psychological space and freedom of speech to study what we know about the Muslim religion and factor it in when making security decisions about other people. To assume that everyone follows the value structure and priorities of Christian or Jewish belief can lead to deadly errors. It can also lead to an uninformed tolerance of teachings which – inevitably – lead to undesireable outcomes and further terrorist violence.
In the long-run, it is important to confront the teachings of Islam in the strongest possible sense and to explain their dysfunctional results and the dangers these beliefs hold for followers of other, trully peaceful religions.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award winning scholar who has taught at a number of the nation's most elite schools. He comments regularly through blogs including those at the New York Times. 
