Mahmood Sanglay of muslimviews.co.za probes Professor Ebrahim Moosa’s recent work, “[. . .] How did the figure of the “Muslim” become available as a metaphor for submission, lifelessness and diminished humanity? He traces this question through elements of European intellectual history, including the writings of thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, who constructed Islam as a religion of passive obedience rather than moral autonomy. The significance for Gaza is profound. Moosa argues that dehumanisation does not begin with bombs. It begins with language and imagination. Once hospitals can be described primarily as ‘military infrastructure’, universities as security threats and entire neighbourhoods as legitimate targets, the vocabulary itself helps transform human beings into objects of military calculation. This is why language matters. Before a population can be destroyed physically, it can be made morally expendable. Moosa is careful not to equate Gaza with Auschwitz. He explicitly rejects simplistic historical analogies. His point is instead about continuity in the way human beings can be represented as lives whose destruction somehow does not count in the same moral universe as other lives.
The most distinctly Islamic dimension of Moosa’s argument comes through his reflection on Karbala. If the European caricature of the Muslim imagines submission as passive resignation, Moosa turns to Imam Hussain as its opposite. Imam Hussain’s refusal to submit to unjust political authority demonstrates that Islam — submission to God — does not mean submission to human tyranny. This is a powerful theological distinction. For Moosa, Islam’s political ethic does not begin with the question, Who has sovereignty? It begins with the question, Who is accountable? That shifts the emphasis from power to responsibility. The Quranic command to uphold justice, together with the Islamic concept of zulm — injustice or wrongdoing — means that neutrality in the face of oppression is not necessarily morally neutral. Moosa draws on al-Ghazali and other Muslim thinkers to argue that those with the ability to intervene bear responsibility for doing so [. . .]
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