The light within: Muslims in transition

Bruce Bawer’s article, Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe, was an interesting read, and in many ways perceptive, but also very obviously was written from an outsider’s point of view. And I guess that therein is the problem that Bawer himself is raising: it is hard for an outsider to have a clear view of the various Muslim minority communities in the west. In fact, because of blatantly anti-democratic regimes in power in the areas where Muslims are a majority, it is only a stunted, servile and intolerant form of Islam that has gained ascendancy. The leaders are often populist, often unpopular, and do not have greater standing in a community other than through blind faith in family and tradition.

Interestingly, and hopefully enough, the Islamic community is transforming, more in places such as the United States than in others. And the people who are transforming are not Walter Mourad, the secularised Lebanese–American businessman Bawer referred to. The larger Muslim community sees them more as people to be pitied than emulated. Bawer really misses the point when he equates a higher humanism and secularism (western civilisation) as a cure for the zealots and fundamentalists. Secularism is only a form of disaffection and disengagement. Only those who explicitly call themselves Muslims and are willing to fight the stranglehold of a few old men (with no qualifications except that of agreeing blindly to the ideas written and forged only God knows how long ago) are going to change Islam: Muslim women, the young, and possibly the people who are going to get up and shout that they are Muslim and gay, although if you quote me on this last one my family will be horrified…but I guess that illustrates the point.

For the most part Muslims are not from the rich, Christian west, they are from the poor, colonised non-west, and they have little cause or reason to embrace a culture that they see as having carried out genocide, rape, and unhindered looting in their countries. To a great degree that image is still the predominant one throughout the rest of the world.

Not many people would weep bitter tears for the end of western civilisation, because for more than a millennium it has meant misery. Although this has changed to a great degree, there are more than enough instances of ‘the west is the best and everything else deserves to be wiped out’ syndrome in the air. For example, George W. Bush’s ‘you are either for us, or against us’. Western civilisation will most likely survive and adapt as all civilisations have. But currently it is finding itself on the back foot. The best way to make sure that the best features survive is to make sure that the bright and adventurous among the community of ‘immigrants’ get access to resources, which they can then use to change their own communities.

The change in Muslim communities will happen on the basis of religion, and the arguments will be of a religious nature. The people who will be best able to do this are those who teach their own. I see this in the United States where a generation ago the choices were either to be American or to be Muslim, and today, despite 11 September and all, there is a good and viable choice of being both. This is both because the communities have their own institutions through which they speak to the state, and many of those people speaking have an attitude that allows for more than one point of view to be addressed.

That is what Bawer should be talking about rather than a threat of deluge.

Belden:Could you tell us more about the better choices available to Muslims in the US now? Do you see a younger or more creative leadership that is creating a different emphasis, a different kind of Islam, or a different kind of economy, culture? I am truly ignorant about this.

Ahmad: I wrote the last mail without a clear theme, except that I thought that Bawer’s writing was somewhat confused. He failed to differentiate between strains of Islam, and too often lumped ‘immigrant’, ‘Islam’ and ‘fundamentalist’ together positing all of them opposite secular, western values.

The hope and the dynamic leadership I see in the US is chiefly through institutions such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council for American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) that started out mostly as conservative reactions to the western value system around them, but then are being slowly being taken over by a new generation of leaders. This has been best revealed after 11 September 2001. (This article in Salon is largely solid, although I am unsure of how in context all the quotes are).

Moreover, the one huge factor that Bawer leaves out is the community that has converted (or in Islamic parlance, reverted) to Islam. The current vice-President of ISNA is a white Caucasian woman, Ingrid Mattson.

Possibly the most important person in the American Islamic community is W. Deen Mohammed (see details under Board of Advisors), who made the choice of rejecting anything that his father had allowed or preached that was in contravention with Quranic injunction, thereby bringing the majority of the Black Muslim population in line with Malcolm X’s later teachings and very far from Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Both ISNA and CAIR have a long way to go, they are far from perfect. Yet there are more people emerging, and I see them being accepted. It is of great significance that these organisations function under the spotlight of a democratic system and are not excluded from it.

Bawer makes the mistake of thinking that there is only one good path to reconciling religion and the state, and he does not realise that he is unconsciously choosing the western and largely Christian tradition. But Christianity’s roots and relations with the state are embedded in a history of being outside the state, or negotiating its position as a state religion within an empire (Christianity and the Holy Roman Empire from the end of the 4th century onwards), or with the pre- and post-Westphalian nation states of Europe with their own state religions. Islam’s relations have been either that of an emerging movement faced with a militarily superior enemy that was also related to it (therefore dialogue had to take place), or as the religion of a ruling elite that needed and depended on a bureaucracy (and often a military) that was made of people of different faiths (and therefore again a need for dialogue), or lastly once again a vehicle for rebellion and self-assertion (whether through the anti-colonial debate, or through people such as Malcolm X).

This tradition is much closer to that of Judaism than it is to Christianity, and I wish that people would realise that. And just as some of the halakha of rabbis in some of the extremist settlements tend to be somewhat silly and often counterproductive, in the same way some of the fatwas of imams in non-democratic societies and situations tend to be dumb, if not downright ugly.

Ugly situations quite often breed ugly products. It might be a cliché, but I’ll go with it.

My problem is that people too often do not try to engage the youth of these communities in either intellectual activity or debate. What makes a difference is the parents’ level of education, and that available to the children. The Economist carried a series recently on which groups make better immigrants. Surprise, surprise, higher-educated, better-salaried people, who can then afford a good education for their children and do not feel alienated from the society at large tend to make better immigrants. Low-wage workers and their succeeding generations don’t.

Karen Armstrong, in an article about a month or so ago in the Washington Post, argued that fundamentalists base their appeals on the statement that their way of life is in danger. By attacking them on their way of life you only validate their fears and arguments, which then become true. The process has to be such that you must bring them into the community while excluding violence and illegality. Get people to make stupid comments on the TV and you’ll see how many condemn them. You’ll also know who to prosecute. Bawer notes the instance of the debate of the fundamentalist and the Muslim woman on TV, but doesn’t seem to realise the lesson. Allow both sides of such communities an open forum and you’ll accord some legitimacy to idiots (a price one pays in a society that values freedom of expression) but you also get to see them make fools of themselves (as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell regularly do) and be blown off by members of their own communities.

Belden: Bawer is describing a particular moment, and extrapolating it into the future, while you are describing a community in process of change. And I’m wondering if the US is in fact a place where that change is happening faster and more hopefully than in Europe. Do you have any sense of this? In your first response when you said ‘the Islamic community is transforming, more in places such as the United States than in others’ did you mean more in the US than in Europe, or more in both the US and Europe than elsewhere?

Ahmad: I am more familiar with the US community because I have more relatives there, and I have been there myself for the last one and a half years. But I think a similar debate and transformation is happening in Germany, as well as small steps taken in France. In France the similarity of Islam being there as a redemptive tool for those coming out of jail is remarkably similar to the African–American experience. There has been a debate on openDemocracy about the situation in Germany.

I have a problem with people taking a particular moment and extrapolating therefrom. Cultures change and transform, or they become static and die out. Western Europe during its Dark Ages is a perfect example, where were we supposed to extrapolate from there? I prefer searching for emerging trends and figures.

There are, though, additional factors when it comes to the US: the very vibrant non-governmental organisation (NGO) culture, the presence of the media (for good or ill), and the Jewish and civil rights experience from which Muslims are learning. Although this is sometimes amusing and frustrating because quite often many of the Muslim organisations tend to be reflexively anti-Israeli and borderline anti-Jewish. Most of them see Israel through the lens of their own experience of being colonised and brown versus white. Few go far back enough in history to see the redemptive and liberating nature of Zionism for the Jewish people. And for some, especially those who have lost family, land or homes, it is next to impossible.

But overall I think that, yes, in both Europe and in the US the Muslim community is maturing more than in others (with the possible exception of Indonesia) because of the protection of minority rights, and a position in a democratic stable set up.

In the Middle East, Muslims have been lied to by their governments for so long that conspiracy theories are a natural cottage industry. Of course, many of them exist in the United States too; but with far less impact, as the truth is more readily accessible. Where there is freedom to speak the truth cultures will adapt and grow; where not, they will stultify and become closed in on themselves.

And it is interesting that the Prophet said, ‘the highest form of jihad is to tell the truth in the face of the tyrant.’ In this, obviously, the Muslim community has itself to blame, because it hasn’t had the courage to confront its own tyrants as it is religiously mandated it should do.