Minority Report: Out with the jihadis and in with the hirabis
There's an interesting little co-authored op-ed in the New York Times about the pitfalls of labelling those people who we tend to call "terrorists" and how we often inadvertently end up playing into our enemy's hands.
One of the terms they point to is "jihadi" or "jihadist". The US State Department recently sent out a memo to all its staff asking them to refrain from using these words when referring to militants or terrorists but the White House, and many others in the media (including myself) continue to use the term.
But PW Slinger, a fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and Elina Noor, an academic in Malaysia, say that by doing so we end up lending far more legitimacy to militants than perhaps we want to.
Their argument is that in Islam "jihad" is thought of as something positive. Far from the violent images it often erroneously conjures in non-Muslim minds, jihad refers to the daily striving or struggle that all Muslims are expected to go through in order to live better lives.
Slinger and Noor quite rightly question, then, whether it is a good idea to refer to people we would generally consider our enemies in such favourable terms. By effectively calling them what they want to be called, they argue, we are doing the equivalent of, say, calling Hitler the "leader of the National Socialist Aryan patriots". In short we're buying into the propaganda of our foe.
It also, they say (and I think this is far more important) "serves to isolate the tens of millions of Muslims who condemn the violence that has been perpetuated in the name of Islam".
The term they suggest we might want to use instead is "muharib" or "hirabi". "Hirabah" in Arabic means barbarism or piracy. By describing militants as hirabis we would essentially be taking the moral or theological high ground away from them. "Unlike jihad which grants honour," they write, "hirabah brings condemnation: it involves unlawful violence and disorder."
Navigating the literal minefield of these topics is never an easy one and no doubt there will always be much disagreement over which terms are suitable and which are not. But regularly questioning the words we do use, particularly those that get picked up and repeated by the media, can only be a good thing, right?
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