SEEK FIRST TO UNDERSTAND

Steven Covey, author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, identifies Habit 5 thus: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Today more than ever, this is much needed advice and for this reason alone, all Americans, including Muslim Americans, should welcome the Peter King hearings.
Representative King’s past public speculations on mosques and Muslims, coupled with his record of support for the IRA in Northern Ireland, do not make him a particularly worthy sponsor of the hearings.  But America needs to get through something here if we can get past the usual posturing in which political leaders are apt to indulge. These hearings represent an important opportunity for us all.
Some advice for all my fellow Muslim Americans. Let’s acknowledge the concern that much of the non-Muslim American public internalizes. We may feel it’s overblown. We may feel ourselves singled out. But whatever we feel, the process of achieving better understanding can only begin with an acknowledgement of the other side’s negative reality.
Radicalization is real. We might disagree about its scale, or as to whether it’s a “Muslim-only” or a broader issue. But if we fail to acknowledge its existence, we’ll be talking past each other and more dangerously, ill-informed decisions and laws will result. Against this backdrop, here’s some advice for Representative King and his colleagues.
First Congressman King, we should expect to learn about root causes of radicalization and how to detect, deter and intercept it. If laws are needed, we will be Constitution-bound to write them generically, not just for Muslims. So we trust that absurdities resembling the Swiss ban on minarets will be avoided.
Second, since you are set upon qualifying the problem specifically as Muslim radicalization, then show how it emerges from the way Islam is promoted, interpreted or practiced instead of from socio-psychological factors that might lead any troubled individual to become radicalized, Muslim or not. It’s a hypothesis and maybe it’s accurate and maybe it isn’t. Let the hearings unearth some truths about it.
Third, avoid the temptation to play to our human weakness for the compelling tangibility of anecdotes over dull but accurate revelations from hard comprehensive statistics. If all we are fed by the hearings are example after example of failures of Muslim organizations to unearth instances of radicalization then your hearings will have been politically cynical and dangerous. So, instead of negative anecdotes versus yawn-inspiring positive statistics, I propose you focus on those incidents that have been successful in unearthing radicalization tendencies.
Bring forward witnesses of interventions that thwarted radicalization (and I don't mean FBI stings which border on entrapment), and programs aimed at dissuading first steps toward radicalization. From such examples will come the best practices which we can spread around constructively to other communities.
Lastly, demonstrate the objectivity of these hearings by examining how to adapt the most effective of the Muslim American community practices to say, avert such other disasters as the Columbines, Virginia Techs, and Tuscons of this country's social landscape.
Muslims as a community have no desire to be objectified, gazed upon and examined as if they represent a tumor within the body politick. We are an integral part of American society and need therefore to be a part of any solution.