In previous posts I mentioned a letter which CAIR National sent out on April 16, and which was updated on May 7, in response to Leila Fadel’s article which NPR published on April 15. As I have noted before, that letter contained blanket denials of misconduct by CAIR leaders and assertions that CAIR insists on the highest standards of conduct.
But the reality at CAIR is not like the letter claims. I begin this post with one example.
In 2016, there were allegations from a Muslim woman of inappropriate relationships by the married director of Florida CAIR, Hassan Shibly. That and subsequent allegations against Shibly comprised a large part of Leila Fadel’s article. Fadel notes that former employees of CAIR said the matter was reported to National CAIR and Florida CAIR officials, but there was little if any follow-up.
Not so, according to the April 16 CAIR letter:
[W]e want to be clear: sexual harassment is immoral, illegal, and absolutely unacceptable to us. After learning about the allegations in the CAIR story, we reviewed our records, interviewed our staff, and confirmed that our office never received any complaints of sexual harassment, inside or outside of the workplace, against CAIR-Florida’s former Director.
Well, CAIR National may not have receive a complaint of “sexual harassment” per se against Shibly. But CAIR was told of Shibly’s sexual misconduct and abuse beginning as early as 2016. Executive Director Nihad Awad sided with Shibly and the woman making the allegations was not so much as interviewed by anyone on the CAIR staff.
When allegations of misconduct by Shibly were taken to the CAIR Florida board of directors, the bearers of bad news were told: “Hassan’s the executive director. He has all the relationships with donors,” as Fadel reported.
Far from being “totally unacceptable” in the minds of CAIR leaders, sexual harassment and worse are things to keep from the light of day, not things to properly investigate, lest the Islamophobes find out and use it to attack CAIR. Indeed, CAIR leaders are quite liberal using the Islamophobe card to try to stifle criticism of its operations.
The other card they use is the Donor card, as the Florida board did to avoid confronting Shibly on the allegations.
With enough donors and lawyers, the top guys at CAIR must suppose they can neutralize truth, make it irrelevant. How else can you explain the discrepancy between official CAIR declarations and the reality?
Now, the other day I went back to Fadel’s article and noticed some items in blue letters in the righthand column. Someone once showed me that if you click on blue words, things can happen. So I clicked on a couple of those, and I think I got more insight into how the American Muslim community deals with, or fails to deal with, allegations of misconduct.
As I noted above, the Islamophobe card is the first resort of anyone trying to stifle an honest accounting of misconduct. Many years ago I was a big supporter of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and one day it dawned on me that maybe they were content to be under attack by the contras and their American backers, as it helped keep a lid on dissent. I did not switch sides, but I began arguing, to the annoyance of many friends who remained more sympathetic to the Sandinistas, that this was one more reason to oppose U.S. military aid to the contras.
Similarly, this fear of Islamophobes exploiting controversy in the Muslim community helps keep gender discrimination and worse entrenched. It helps keep Muslim women, in many situations, second class.
And as all Muslims know, as I have acknowledged but not felt too constrained by, Muslims don’t like to be calling each other out for their transgressions. This advice comes from the Qur’an, of course, and it jives with the broader idea that we should not judge each other much, lest we commit hypocrisy in doing so.
But when there are real victims to transgression, then the “judge not” precept comes into stark tension with the Qur’anic directive to stand against injustice no matter who the perpetrator is. To “stand against” an injustice, is it enough to privately agree with someone that it is wrong?
I think we all know the answer.
Reform CAIR 