Founder of Islamic TV station accused of beheading wifeIf you haven't heard of Muzzammil Hassan, let me give you a little background on the founder of 'Bridges' - a TV network targeted towards American Muslims.
From Deborah Brunswick and LaNeice Collins - CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes has confessed to beheading his wife, authorities said. Full story here.
He founded the television station in order to combat negative portrayals of Muslims in 'traditional' media, news and television - especially following the attacks of 9/11.
You know what negative portrayals we're talking about - that all Muslims are misogynistic, controlling and prone to acts of wild and brutal violence (like, ahem, beheading women who 'disrespect' them.)
His ambition was a fine one - the few Muslims I know in America happen to be wonderful people and it would be great to see them represented more fairly.
However, in doing this - by brutally murdering his wife and then decapitating her - it threw all of Hassan's work into doubt.
Muzzammil Hassan was supposed to represent moderate Muslims - the business-suited, upper middle class citizens we share the subway with on our way to work.
To suddenly see one of the 'acceptable' faces of Islam revealed to be a brutal, grotesque killer is disconcerting, to say the least.
There's something horrific about how Hassan beheaded his wife, rather than just killed her. He deliberately used the same ritualistic methods as the Islamic fundamentalists who murdered reporter Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg in Iraq. His actions connected his crime directly to the murky world of the shadowy fundamentalists we see on grainy videotape footage, pledging 'death to America.'
Following his bizarre and horrific crime, you have to start questioning everything that Hassan claimed he stood for. He said he wanted to protect moderate Muslims from discrimination and unwarranted hostility - yet ended up becoming the very manifestation of everything us 'regular folk' fear about Islam.
3 comments:
I found this very disturbing also. Very.
I do not know all that much about Islam... just the basics. I know the Koran has some pretty violent stuff in it... so does the bible.
As a Christian, I am always very troubled when someone or some group does something under the guise of Christianity that I know most Christians would not agree with. I am pro-life and I don't want abortion to be legal, or at the very least, not publically funded through tax dollars. Would I agree to killing an abortionist or bombing an abortion clinic? No.
I'm sure you've heard of that whacked group out of Kansas that goes around hollering at the funerals of kids who died fighting in Iraq. I sure don't want to be lumped in with them just because they claim Christ.
That being said, given the alarmingly rapid spread of Islam outside Arab countries, you have to wonder about the acceptance of the treatment of the women within that religion. If it is acceptable to mistreat a woman that you supposedly love and who is the mother of your children... or your sister, cousin, or niece... ??? I find that scary.
I sincerely doubt this has anything to do with his religion. It's an extremely unfortunate intersection of circumstance, but ultimately I chalk this one up to a case of one individual's psychosis.
This would not be the first case an unstable person committed gruesome homicide. Trust me, I grew up in a VERY fundy Muslim family and know more Muslims, ranging from near-apostates to pro-Usama sympathizers than most people simply know other people. (I know apostates too, but I can't call them Muslims obviously.)
Fundies may have a lot of really bad ideas and inclinations, but I've seen how they operate- it's a group dynamic because it's founded on an appeal to orthodoxy. You need to be surrounded by other fundies before you're secure enough to act on it. Think of it as an extremist support group. A man like this wouldn't find himself running in these circles. I know the kind of people he's likely surrounded by. They're all goody-goody types who wouldn't hurt a fly if it was twenty feet tall and tried to eat them. They're view of the world can be so saccharine and optimistic that I think I might prefer the company of the fundies.
He went to the police and led them to the body- this is not some demonstration of agency. The Pearl murder was deliberately filmed and published by terrorists with an objective: to terrorize. Theirs was not a selfish act, it was connected to a larger strategy. He killed his wife and beheaded her in a fit of selfish brutal rage.
Fundies don't lament their inability to behead their wives when they step out of line. It's not their thing- if you will. Even they have inter-societal norms, and beheading is not really something that springs from the most extreme literal interpretations of Islam.
I assure people all the time that other people in the Middle East are still human beings prone to evolutionary imperatives and inclinations: They love, they lie, they cheat, they steal, they eat, they laugh, they're adulterous, they're faithful, they are cruel, they are generous, they hate, they kill, they cry, they save each other's lives, they take out the trash, they live and they die. Part of that leaves plenty of room for horrific deviations from the norm. I guarantee you this is not the first time a Muslim man has killed his wife in a gruesome manner. It won't be the last either. A woman left a baby overnight in the dumpster near my grandparent's house in Amman in the middle of winter. While I was living in the Middle East I read in the paper about a man who raped his own seven-year old daughter and left her for dead. I suppose these sorts of thing could never happen with non-Muslims either.
I've always said, portrayals of Muslims in the movies will only ever achieve accuracy when the vast majority of the characters aren't heroes- but normal, with a few abnormals mixed in. Then, and only then do we start throwing in the terrorists. I'll settle for a Law and Order episode where a Muslim kills someone out of greed like everyone else.
Great response Chemist.
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